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him… it’s eatin’ at me, day and night.”
     
         “It’ll pass,” Mom said. “That’s what you tell me whenever I want to worry the warts off a frog. Hang on, you tell me. It’ll pass.”
     
         “Maybe it will. I hope to God it will. But for right now, it’s in my head and I can’t shake it loose for the life of me. And this is the worst thing, Rebecca; this is what’s grindin’ inside of me. Whoever did it had to be a local. Had to be. Whoever did it knew how deep the lake is. He knew when that car went in there, the body was gone. Rebecca… whoever did this thing might be somebody I deliver milk to. It might be somebody who sits on our pew at church. Somebody we buy groceries or clothes from. Somebody we’ve known all our lives… or thought we knew. That scares me like I’ve never been scared before. You know why?” He was silent for a moment, and I could imagine the way the pulse throbbed at his temple. “Because if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world.” His voice cracked a little on the last word. I was glad I wasn’t in that room, and that I couldn’t see his face.
     
         Two or three minutes passed. I think my father was just lying there, letting Mom rub his back. “Do you think you can sleep now?” she finally asked him, and he said, “I’ll try.”
     
         The springs spoke a few times. I heard my mother murmur something close to his ear. He said, “I hope so,” and then they were silent. Sometimes my dad snored; tonight he did not. I wondered if he lay awake after Mom had drifted off, and if he saw the corpse in the car reaching for him to drag him under. What he’d said haunted me: if it’s not safe here, it’s not safe anywhere in this world . This thing had hurt my father, in a place deeper than the bottom of Saxon’s Lake. Maybe it was the suddenness of what had happened, or the violence, or the cold-bloodedness of it. Maybe it was the knowledge that there were terrible secrets behind closed doors, even in the kindest of towns.
     
         I think my father had always believed all people were good, even in their secret souls. This thing had cracked his foundations, and it occurred to me that the murderer had handcuffed my father to that awful moment in time just as the victim had been handcuffed to the wheel. I closed my eyes and prayed for Dad, that he could find his way up out of the dark.
     
         March went out like a lamb, but the murderer’s work was unfinished.
     

     
     
     
    3
The Invader
     
     
     
     
     
    THINGS SETTLED DOWN, AS THINGS WILL.
     
         On the first Saturday afternoon in April, with the trees budding and flowers pushing up from the warming earth, I sat between Ben Sears and Johnny Wilson surrounded by the screaming hordes as Tarzan—Gordon Scott, the best Tarzan there ever was—plunged his knife into a crocodile’s belly and blood spurted in scarlet Eastman color.
     
          “Did you see that? Did you see that?” Ben kept saying, elbowing me in the ribs. Of course I saw it. I had eyes, didn’t I? My ribs weren’t going to last until the Three Stooges short between the double features, that was for certain.
     
         The Lyric was the only movie theater in Zephyr. It had been built in 1945, after the Second World War, when Zephyr’s sons marched or limped back home and they wanted entertainment to chase away the nightmares of swastika and rising sun. Some fine town father dug into his pockets and bought a construction man from Birmingham who drew a blueprint and marked off squares on a vacant lot where a tobacco barn used to be. I wasn’t there at the time, of course, but Mr. Dollar could tell you the whole story. Up went a palace of stucco angels, and on Saturday afternoons we devils of the common clay hunkered down in those seats with our popcorn, candy, and Yoo-Hoos and for a few hours our parents had breathing space again.
     
         Anyway, my two buddies and