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hated my mother. But I still had the same suspicions. Can you imagine that?”
    With that, she spun around, and headed for the door.
    Almost as if moved by the hard waves of an aftershock, Kinley and Serena followed her, watching out the front window as she strode to her car, got in and drove away.
    “She’s one of those women,” Serena said quietly.
    “Those women?”
    “The kind who never expect anything but hurt,” Serena said. “Victims.”
    Kinley watched as Lois’s car headed down the narrow, tree-lined street. He could see her head in silhouette above the driver’s seat, a small, dark shape whose look reminded him so much of Maria Spinola that he wondered if some backwoods version of Fenton Norwood was already stalking her, perhaps toying with the lock on her back door.
    By mid-afternoon the house was crowded with Ray’s neighbors and associates. At first Ray’s sister Millie was the only one he’d recognized. But as the hours of the wake passed, he found himself recognizing others, some of them from high school, a smattering of teachers and students, along with other local personalities whose faces he could recall, town figures of one sort of another, grocers, barbers. He could tell that quite a few of them had recognized him, as well. But that was not surprising, since the local paper had plastered his face on the front page every time a new book had been published.
    By early evening the house was empty again, and Kinley and Serena walked out on the front porch and sat down in the swing. It was a cool evening, and Serena wrapped herself loosely in one of Ray’s old sweaters.
    “You didn’t really have to stay in the house the whole day,” she said.
    “I wanted to,” Kinley told her.
    She smiled delicately. “He would have liked that. He believed in loyalty.” She tucked her arm beneath his and let her head drift lazily onto his shoulder. “We used to sit out here when I was a little girl. Just like this. In the night. All snuggled up.” She pulled away from him abruptly. “I can’t believe he’s gone.”
    “When it happens suddenly like that,” Kinley told her, “it always takes some time to adjust.”
    Serena nodded. She seemed more composed than she’d been earlier in the day.
    “When are you going back?” she asked casually.
    “The day after tomorrow.”
    “You can stay here until then,” Serena told him. “And I’ll go to my mother’s place.”
    “No, that’s all right. Like I said, I have a room at the hotel.”
    “No, stay here,” Serena insisted. “Daddy would have wanted you to.”
    He decided to do as she asked, and later that night he found himself alone in Ray’s living room, his eyes watching the casket as it rested in its deep nest of swirling flowers. For a long time, his mind struck him as uncharacteristically blank, as if a kind of numbness had overtaken it, blocking out whatever pain he might otherwise have felt.
    He stood up, walked out onto the porch and took in the cool night air. The night was closest to him, and he’d always felt more at home in dark places, the lightless horse stall in which Colin Bright had stacked the bodies of the murdered Comstocks, the small cramped smokehouse, where Mildred Haskell had performed her last experiment on little Billy Flynn, the damp cavern where her husband Edgar had later deposited those tiny, torn remains. Kinley had been in all those places and felt more at ease in them than any of the bright fields he’d flown over in his travels, or the green pastures he’d wandered in, his eyes roaming the grasses in search of that particular place where the earth had been turned up, the body finally uncovered and pulled up from its hidden vault. There was even something in the phrase “brought to light” that had always made him feel ill at ease, as if it were destined finally to drive back the vampire darkness in which he breathed far more comfortably.
    After a time, he walked back into the house, and down the short