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pulled her from a crashed and submerged plane out on the salt, one piloted by a Lafayette priest who was transporting illegal refugees from El Salvador, her lungs had been filled with water, her eyes dilated with terror as we rose in a rush of bubbles toward the Gulf’s surface, her little bones as thin and frail as a bird’s.
    Tripod thumped out on the dock, rattling his chain across the board planks behind him.
    â€œDave, you left the bag of rabbit food on top of the hutch. Tripod threw it all over the yard,” Alafair said. Her face was beaming.
    â€œYou think that’s funny, little guy?” I said.
    â€œYeah,” she said, and grinned again.
    â€œBatist says you brought Tripod down to the bait shop yesterday and he got into the hard-boiled eggs.”
    Her face became vague and quizzical.
    â€œTripod did that?” she said.
    â€œDo you know anyone else who would wash a hard-boiled egg in the bait tank?”
    She looked across the bayou speculatively, as though the answer to a profound mystery lay among the branches of the cypress trees. Tripod zigzagged back and forth on his chain, sniffing the smell of fish in the dock.
    I rubbed the top of Alafair’s head. Her hair was already warm from the sunlight.
    â€œHow about a fried pie, little guy?” I said, and winked at her. “But you and Tripod show some discretion with Batist.”
    â€œShow what?”
    â€œKeep that coon away from Batist.”
    I brought a tray of seasoned and oiled chickens out of the shop and began laying them on the barbecue grill. The hickory wood I used for fuel had burned into hot, white coal, and the oil from the chickens dripped into the ash and steamed away in the wind. I could feel Alafair’s eyes on the side of my face.
    â€œDave?”
    â€œWhat is it, Alf?”
    â€œBootsie told me not to tell you something.”
    â€œMaybe you’d better not tell me, then.” I turned my head to smile at her, but her dark eyes were veiled and troubled.
    â€œBootsie dropped a fork on the floor,” she said. “When she picked it up her face got all white and she sat down real hard in a chair.”
    â€œWas that this morning?”
    â€œYesterday, when I came home from school. She started to cry, then she saw me looking at her. She made me say I wouldn’t tell.”
    â€œIt’s not bad to tell those kinds of things, Alf.”
    â€œIs Bootsie sick again, Dave?”
    â€œI think maybe we need to change her medicine again. That’s all.”
    â€œThat’s all?”
    â€œIt’s going to be all right, little guy. Let me finish up here, and we’ll get Boots and go to Mulate’s for crawfish.”
    She nodded her head silently. I hoisted her up on my hip. Tripod ran in circles at our feet, his chain clanking on the wood.
    â€œHey, let’s buy you some new Baby Squanto books today,” I said.
    â€œI’m too old to read Baby Squanto.”
    I pressed her against me and looked over the top of her head at the shadowed front of my house and thought I could feel my pulse beating in my throat with the urgency of a damaged watch that was about to run out of time.
    I WASN ’ T ABLE to keep our weekend entirely free of the Sonniers after all. That afternoon, after we drove back from Mulate’s in a rain shower, the phone was ringing as we ran from the truck through the pecan trees onto the gallery. I picked up the receiver in the kitchen and blotted the rainwater out of my eyes with the back of my wrist.
    â€œI thought I’d check in with you before we left town,” the voice said.
    â€œWeldon?”
    â€œYeah. Bama and I are going to visit her mother in Baton Rouge. We’ll probably be gone a week or so. I thought I should tell you.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œWhat do you mean ‘why’? That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re part of a case, aren’t you? Check in with the authorities,