A HALF MILE down the shore of Lake Concordia from Brody Royal’s palatial home, his daughter, Katy, sat gazing blankly into her Hollywood-style vanity mirror, which was surrounded by lightbulbs. Her husband stood in the shower a few feet away. Staring into the mirror, Katy saw nothing but fear. In the days since her interview with Henry Sexton, her entire being had been taken over by a steadily encroaching terror, a force that was slowly devouring her, like a lethal infection. She was helpless against this attack, for there was precious little of her left to fight anything external. Katy had lived with fear for as long as she could remember, though she’d never understood its source. Trying to recall her childhood was like dipping her bucket into a well and coming up with India ink. Whenever she’d summoned the courage to dip her hands into that bucket, she’d felt slimy, shapeless things under the surface, things she couldn’t catch hold of long enough to lift into the light and identify. At the frayed end of depression, she’d learned, the mind began to lose its grasp on even the most familiar things. Of course, she hadn’t done her brain any favors over the years, what with the booze and the drugs. But without those anesthetics, she’d have killed herself long before now.
She picked up a jar of Estée Lauder foundation and unscrewed the lid, then let it sit open. A copy of the Natchez Examiner lay on the marble counter, its bottom half faceup. A photograph showed a middle-aged black man standing with his arms folded in front of a music store, several young black men standing proudly beside him. Beside this image, another photo showed the same piece of ground a week later. All that remained were two partially burned pianos standing in a mass of charred wreckage.
Katy heard her husband turn off the water. In her peripheral vision, Randall Regan grabbed a towel from a peg, then stepped out and began drying his hair. With his vision obscured, she stole a glance at the monster who had guarded her since she was a girl. Even at fifty-eight, Randall remained a dense mass of muscle and sinew and anger, stronger than most men twenty years his junior. And when angered, he could be cruel beyond all imagining.
“The fuck you lookin’ at?” he asked, noticing her attention. He dropped the towel from his waist. “I know you don’t want any of this.”
Katy whipped her face forward.
“What the hell’s wrong with you this week?” He bent to dry his hairy legs. “You walk around like you’re in a fog, which ain’t far from normal, but this week it’s like a damned Alzheimer’s ward. You don’t even wash yourself. You stink. Why don’t you take a bath?”
How could she answer that? If she told the truth, Randall or her father would have her committed again—or worse. Neither man had any qualms about killing, and as depressed as Katy was, she didn’t want to die yet. She glanced over at the Examiner. The side that lay facedown displayed two portraits of Henry Sexton. One showed the reporter as a college intern, questioning an elderly black preacher in Gilbert, Louisiana. The other showed paramedics loading Sexton into an ambulance in front of the Concordia Beacon, which had been gutted by fire last night.
Ever since Henry visited this house last week, sparks had been firing through the blank spaces in Katy’s brain. Images flashed out of nowhere, like the visions she’d had after alcoholic blackouts, pictures she wasn’t sure had ever been real. Henry had asked her about a colored boy, one he’d claimed she once loved. Pooky Wilson. The name had scarcely moved her when he’d first said it, like a stone dropped into a deep lake that sank endlessly into darkness. But later that night, as she drifted into uneasy sleep, that stone had finally hit bottom. And when it hit, it jarred something loose.
Over the next few days, painful memories began bubbling to the surface, and each bubble contained its own discrete nightmare. In one of the first, she saw herself as a young girl, peering into her mother’s bathroom. Her father sat on the edge of the bathtub, talking to his wife. All Katy could see was her father’s broad back. He had never sat in there like that—in fact, Brody Royal hardly spoke to his wife at all. But on that day, he’d spoken steadily, and in such a low, cruel voice that Katy had quickly retreated. An hour later, her father called an ambulance and told them his drunken wife had drowned in the bathtub. Ever since remembering this, Katy been unable to get into the bathtub.
“You want to kill me,” she said to her husband, voicing her terror for the first time. “Don’t you?”
Randall stopped drying himself and looked at her mirror, his actor’s mask almost making him appear human. But he must have sensed her state of mind, because suddenly his mask fell away. Forty years of unalloyed hatred blazed out of his eyes like deadly radiation.
“Go on,” she goaded, knowing she would pay for her defiance. “Admit it. You want to kill me.”
“I ought to,” he said. “I’ve been chained to your pathetic ass for forty years, and you’ve been trying to kill yourself the whole time. You nearly drank yourself to death in the seventies. You all but blew your heart out with coke in the eighties, and you’ve been eating tranqs and happy pills ever since. You were hardly alive that whole time. What was the point?”
“You tell me,” Katy said quietly. “Why didn’t you just put me out of my misery?” Like Daddy did Mama, she thought.
Randall shook his head with exasperation, but he didn’t answer.
“I know you’ve wanted to,” Katy went on, trying to push him to—to what? “I can see it in your eyes. Right now. You’d like to choke the life out of me, watch my face turn blue. You almost did it a couple of times. That night at Gulf Shores. And the time in Las Vegas, after the dog show.”