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you looked at these?’ I asked her.
    She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. I try not to dwell in the past. It’s too painful. A long time, I’d think. A very long time.’
    She turned the page to reveal pictures of a honeymoon with a bride and a faceless groom. More pages, a mother holding a baby, and a faceless father standing with his arm around the woman. It was that way throughout the album. Miss Hutchins threw the book to the floor and grabbed the one sitting by her side. Again, all the male faces had been defaced. If there were two men, they were both faceless; four men, the same.
    ‘Uncle Herbert has been scratched out, too,’ Miss Hutchins said.
    ‘Uncle Herbert?’ I asked.
    ‘My father’s brother. He was the only family member left when my mother died, and he came to live with me. He died about five years ago.’ She thought for a moment, then said: ‘There were three of them – three brothers. Herbert was 4F so didn’t go to war, but both Daddy and his other brother, who I believe was the youngest one – Edgar, I think his name was – did. Daddy was in Europe, but Edgar died in the Pacific. Mama didn’t tell me what happened to him, so I guess it must have been pretty bad. Mama liked to gossip, and she would have told me if it was something I could hear about.’
    ‘Should we check the other photo albums?’ I asked her.
    ‘I’m almost afraid to,’ she said, dropping the second book on to the floor with the first.
    I went to the bookcase and brought back three more albums. The third had no pictures scratched out, mainly because there were no men depicted. ‘These were taken after Daddy left for the war,’ Miss Hutchins said. ‘This next one,’ she said, ‘should be too.’ And it was. Those two books went to her other side, while she picked up the third. ‘I think this book is after Mama died. There probably aren’t a lot of pictures.’ And there weren’t. But there were some of a man – his face intact. ‘That’s Uncle Herbert,’ she said.
    The pictures of Miss Hutchins were those of a pre-teen to a late teenager, and the man in the picture looked heavy and bloated. Neither he nor Miss Hutchins were smiling in any of the pictures. ‘Uncle Herbert drank a lot,’ Miss Hutchins said. ‘I think I watched over him much more than he ever watched over me. I always had to put out his cigarettes and move his whiskey bottles after he passed out on the sofa. Then I’d cover him up with the afghan my mother knitted so many years before. But then, one year I wasn’t fast enough and he dropped a lit cigarette on the afghan and burned a huge hole in it.’ Her lips were pursed again and you could tell she was still hurt and angry about the loss of this possession made by her mother.
    She began to cry softly. ‘I don’t understand!’ she said. ‘Why would he do that? Scratch out his own face? And his brothers’ faces! Why would Daddy do that?’
    I was pretty sure ‘Daddy’ had nothing to do with the defacing of the pictures. And I told Willis that while we partook of baked brie and white wine in Bourne.
    Willis shook his head. ‘I don’t understand why
anyone
would do it.’
    I agreed. Something was going on in Peaceful and I was bound and determined to find out what.
    BACK HOME
    It was a fairly typical Texas steakhouse: dead animals adorning the walls (deer heads, boar heads, whole raccoons, a bobcat sitting on a bare branch affixed to the wall), rock walls, a big fireplace going strong, hardwood tables with glossy finishes, and wait staff wearing black pants, white shirts, bolo ties and cowboy boots – both males and females.
    There was a girl at the reception stand they knew from high school. ‘Hey, y’all,’ she said, greeting them with a big smile. ‘How many?’
    ‘Hey, Tiffany. Just the three of us,’ Megan said.
    ‘Come right this way,’ the girl said, and strode out in front of them.
    The place wasn’t all that crowded for a Friday night, which did not bode well for