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second-story window and see the cars parked down at the bottom of the hill, and Jimmy would lean out the window and tell me about every person who was walking up the driveway. Jimmy was at that awkward age of thirteen. I guess I had always loved my kid brother, but I was immensely grateful that we went to different schools so he didn’t embarrass me in front of my friends. He had gotten Mama’s blond hair and fine features and Daddy’s dark brown eyes, which meant, all and all, he was a pretty good-looking kid. But, of course, since he drove me practically insane, I would never admit it. He had collections of rocks and baseball cards, and he liked to take the tops off of soda bottles and make weird art out of them, so that Mama had sometimes called him Jimmy Picasso.
    But being there, just the two of us without Daddy, at the worst time in our lives, kind of drew us together. Daddy called twice a day just to hear our voices and explained that the French authorities needed him to help with the investigation. And I guess he was a big support to the mayor because they knew each other well.
    Neither Jimmy nor I wanted to see all the people coming by. We’d hide upstairs and listen to the voices when the doorbell rang, looking down the staircase to see who was there, or we’d tiptoe down the back stairs and through the kitchen and peek through those doors. It became our twisted game, our way of simply surviving those first few days. When the doorbell rang, Jimmy would go tearing down the back stairs and through the kitchen, and I would peep around the corner of the upstairs. As soon as we discovered who the caller was, we’d race back to the bedroom. The first one there with the right answer won. And so the game continued for hours and hours as if we were preschoolers instead of teenagers. We clung to that game tenaciously, and I loved my brother all the more for the passion with which he played it.
    It was after another lunch that Ella Mae fixed and no one ate that Papy and Mamie McKenzie, Mama’s parents, arrived. They lived on a big cotton plantation in South Georgia and were in their late sixties. Papy looked as Scottish as his roots from the Borders, and he could imitate his father’s brogue perfectly, even though he’d spent the last forty-five years in Georgia. He was a giant of a man with reddish hair that curled all over his head and piercing green eyes, and he loved to call me Lassie. At Christmas he would put on his family’s McKenzie kilt and bring out his bagpipes and delight us with that haunting music and the jigs that he danced with Mamie.
    Mamie was one hundred percent French and spoke English with an accent that I thought was beautiful and intriguing. Papy had met her while serving in France during the First World War and had fallen in love with her. I guess I could understand why, because, from what I could tell from the photographs, Mamie had been stunning. She’d had really dark hair, maybe black, and clear brown eyes with thick dark lashes, and she was skinny as a rail except for where it mattered most. But I think their love story had been a big scandal back in Scotland, because Mamie was from what they called “a different social class.” But Papy had convinced her to marry him. Soon after, to the shock of his whole family, Papy bought a cotton plantation in South Georgia, and he and Mamie moved across the ocean. His family, Papy liked to say, had made their fortune in Scottish wool, and now he wanted to try his hand at spinning cotton. It had worked, I guess, because Papy certainly seemed to have loads of money.
    I don’t think Mamie ever really adjusted to life in the American South. She was always complaining about the lack of real cheese and the faible vin , and she insisted that Jimmy and I call her Mamie, which was the French equivalent of Grandmom. So my grandfather went along with her game, and that’s why we called him Papy.
    Mamie always