it could be dangerous. And Bree . . . listen.” I sat up and took her other hand. “Everything else aside, someone needs to call him to account for what he’s done.”
She lifted my hands to her mouth, where she kissed first one and then the other. “But should that someone be you, honey? After all, you were one of his successes.”
“I think that’s why. Also, Charlie and I . . . we go back. We go way back.”
• • •
I didn’t see her off at Denver International—that was her mother’s job—but she called me when she landed, frothing with a combination of nerves and excitement. Looking forward, not back. I was glad for her. When my phone rang twenty minutes later, I thought it would be her again. It wasn’t. It was her mother. Georgia asked if we could talk. Maybe over lunch.
Uh-oh, I thought.
We ate at McGee’s—a pleasant meal, with pleasant conversation, mostly about the music business. When we had said no to dessert and yes to coffee, Georgia leaned her considerable bosom on the table and got down to business. “So, Jamie. Are you two done with each other?”
“I . . . um . . . Georgia . . .”
“Goodness, don’t mumble and stumble. You know perfectly well what I mean, and I’m not going to bite your head off. If I had a mind to do that, I would have done it last year, when she first hopped in the sack with you.” She saw my expression and smiled. “Nah, she didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. Didn’t need to. I can read her like a book. I bet she even told you I got up to some of the same doins with Hugh, back in the day. True?”
I made a zipping motion across my lips. It turned her smile into a laugh.
“Oh, that’s good. I like that. And I like you, Jamie. I did almost from the first, when you were skinny as a rail and still getting over whatever junk you were putting into your system. You looked like Billy Idol, only dragged through the gutter. I don’t have anything against mixed-race sweeties, either. Or the age thing. Do you know what my father gave me when I got old enough for a driver’s license?”
I shook my head.
“A 1960 Plymouth with half the grille gone, bald tires, rusty rocker panels, and an engine that gobbled recycled oil by the quart. He called it a field-bomber. Said every new driver should have an old wreck to start with, before he or she stepped up to a car that would actually take an inspection sticker. Are you getting my point?”
I absolutely was. Bree wasn’t a nun, she’d had her share of sexual adventures before I came along, but I had been her first long-term relationship. In New York, she would move up—if not to a man of her own race, then certainly to one a little closer to her own age.
“I just wanted that out front before I said what I really came here to say.” She leaned forward even more, the rolling tide of her bosom endangering her coffee cup and water glass. “She wouldn’t tell me much about the research she’s been doing for you, but I know it scared her, and the one time I tried to ask Hugh, he about bit my head off.”
Ants, I thought. To him, the whole congregation looked like ants.
“It’s about that preacherman. I know that much.”
I kept quiet.
“Cat got your tongue?”
“You could say so, I guess.”
She nodded and sat back. “That’s all right. That’s fine. Just from now on, I want you to leave Brianna out of it. Will you do that? If only because I never suggested that you’d have done better to keep your elderly prick away from my daughter’s underpants?”
“She’s out of it. We agreed on that.”
She gave a businesslike nod. Then: “Hugh says you’re taking a vacation.”
“Yes.”
“Going to see the preacherman?”
I kept quiet. Which was the same as saying yes, and she knew it.
“Be careful.” She reached across the table and interlaced her fingers in mine, as her daughter had been wont to do. “Whatever it was you and Bree were looking into, it upset her terribly.”
• • •
I flew into Stewart Airport in Newburgh on a day in early October. The trees were turning color, and the ride to the town of Latchmore was beautiful. By the time I got there, the afternoon was waning and I checked into the local