Dead Letters and Pecan Pie: The Quilting Circle Confesses

The sheriff's office conference room had not been designed for interrogation. Deputy Carla Jessup noted this as she arranged four folding chairs in a loose semicircle around a card table that had been pressed into service as an interview station. The legs of the table sat unevenly on the warped oak floor, and one corner dipped low enough that any paperwork set upon it would slide inevitably toward Velma Tatum's seat. Velma, who had already arrived with a plate of sausage biscuits and a thermos of coffee, settled herself into the chair at the table's high corner, where the sliding would terminate in her lap.

"Set those on the credenza, would you, Carla," Velma said, gesturing toward a mound of manila folders. "And fetch the other two cups. I made enough coffee to float a pontoon boat."

Carla obeyed, sliding the folders to the credenza with one hand and reaching for the cups with the other. The coffee smelled of burnt chicory and a cinnamon that had steeped too long, a Velma trademark. The sausage biscuits released their own perfume into the room, buttery and peppered, the kind of aroma that would have made Carla's mouth water under any other circumstance. Today it turned her stomach.

Through the single window, she could see the length of Main Street, the hardware store and the pharmacy and, two blocks down, the green awning of the Crick family pie shop. Eugenia Crick would be at her counter now, sorting the morning's mail. Carla had been present the previous afternoon when Sheriff Tatum had informed Eugenia, with all the gentle firmness he could muster, that she was not to participate in the official interviews. Eugenia had accepted the prohibition with a serene nod and a smile that contained, in Carla's professional opinion, the seeds of civil disobedience.

The bell above the street door jangled. Reba Smiley swept into the conference room as if entering a cocktail lounge rather than a place of inquiry, her perfume arriving a full three seconds before she did. It smelled of gardenias and something muskier underneath, and it lingered in the doorway after she passed through.

"Isn't this just the most peculiar morning," Reba announced, and though the words were declarative, her voice carried the musical lift of a question. She wore a coral blouse and a silk scarf knotted at her throat, and her hair, freshly set the previous afternoon, had been touched up again this morning with hot rollers and what appeared to be a light misting of hairspray sufficient to withstand a category three hurricane. She surveyed the card table, the folding chairs, the sausage biscuits, and pronounced her verdict with a tilt of her chin. "Carla, honey, you are a dear for setting all this up. Sheriff Tatum, I declare, you really should think about a proper interrogation room. The one over at the foundry has better lighting."

Sheriff Dale Tatum entered behind Reba, his hat already in his hand, his reading glasses pushed up onto his forehead. He moved to the head of the table and lowered himself into the wooden swivel chair, the one piece of permanent furniture in the room. It creaked beneath him in greeting.

"We work with what we have, Reba," he said. "Coffee?"

"Black, with two of those little pink sweetener packets if you've got them." Reba settled herself into the chair nearest the coffee thermos, arranged the fall of her scarf, and accepted the cup Velma poured for her. She raised it in a small toast. "To whatever this is."

"To the truth," Velma said, and drank.

Carla took her own position at the credenza, her notebook open on top of the manila folders, a pen uncapped and ready. The room held the particular quiet of a space preparing to absorb important words. Outside, a mockingbird ran through its catalog of stolen songs on a wire somewhere above the courthouse steps. The sound filtered through the window glass and made Carla's teeth ache with its sweetness.

Sheriff Tatum waited until Reba had taken her first sip, then set his own cup down with a small ceramic click that Reba recognized as his signal for the floor. He cleared his throat.

"Reba, I'm going to ask you some questions this morning, and I need you to tell me what you know. Not what you heard from somebody else, not what you guessed, not what you figured out by putting two and two together to make whatever number you wanted. What you actually know."

Reba lowered her cup. The theatrical lift in her voice dropped a register, and what remained was a woman who had buried two husbands and outlived three best friends and seen more human folly than the Methodist circuit preacher.

"Dale Tatum," she said quietly, "when have I ever done anything else."

The mockingbird outside switched from a cardinal's whistle to a car alarm, then abandoned the imitation mid-note. Sheriff Tatum opened the first manila folder. On its cover, in his own blocky handwriting, he had written: QUILTING CIRCLE ALIBI CROSS-REFERENCE. Below that, in smaller letters: (EU. NOT PRESENT).

Carla had been the one to suggest that notation, during the previous evening's strategy session in the Tatum kitchen. Sheriff Tatum had accepted it without comment, which she had taken as approval. Now she watched him turn the folder open and lay it flat on the table, smoothing the pages with both palms. Reba leaned forward, her coral sleeve brushing the edge of a biscuit plate, to read what he had written.

"Before I ask," the sheriff said, "I want to be clear. This is voluntary. You can stop talking to me at any time, and you can leave this room at any time, and nothing bad will happen to you because of it. Understood?"

"Crystal," Reba said.

"Fern Applewhite is on her way over from the nursery," he continued. "Gertie June Boggs will be here at ten, if I have to drive out to her place and fetch her myself. I want to talk to each of you separately about the night Birdie Lou Pemberton died. We're going to start with the hours between four in the afternoon, when Eugenia Crick says she left the post office, and midnight, when Eugenia came back to find the body on Dunmore Lane. I'm going to ask where you were, who you were with, and what you saw. I'm going to ask you about Birdie Lou specifically, and about her relationship with Eugenia, and about anything you might have heard about the letter that Mrs. Cornelia Doss claims to have seen. Are you ready?"

"Lord, Dale, you've been practicing that speech in the mirror, haven't you," Reba said. The theatrical note crept back into her voice, but only a little. "Yes, I'm ready. Ask."

Sheriff Tatum glanced at Carla, who picked up her pen. The pen felt heavier than usual, or maybe her hand felt lighter. She wrote the date at the top of the notebook page, then the time, then: REBA SMILEY, INTERVIEW, VOLUNTARY.

The sheriff began.

Two blocks south and four degrees warmer, Eugenia Crick sorted the morning's mail with the unhurried grace of a woman who had recently been told she was not allowed to do something and had decided, with characteristic civility, to do it anyway. The post office occupied the front room of the pie shop, separated from the bakery by a swinging door and a stretch of hallway that always smelled of cooling crust. Eugenia stood behind the counter, her hands moving through the stack of letters with the practiced economy of a woman who had been doing this work for thirty-one years.

The mail had arrived at seven-fifteen on the brown county truck. Mr. Pruitt, who drove the route, had asked after her health and whether the rumors about Birdie Lou were true and whether she was holding up, all in the same breath, and Eugenia had answered each question with a measured truth that committed her to nothing. Now the letters lay in alphabetical order on the counter, tied with cotton string, waiting for the women who would come to collect them.

Eugenia was not in a hurry.

She was, in fact, proceeding at a pace so deliberate that the morning's first customer, Mrs. Ainsley from the Baptist church, had stared at her in mild confusion when Eugenia took nearly three full minutes to retrieve a single L.L. Bean catalogue from beneath a stack of circulars.

"Slow morning," Mrs. Ainsley had offered.

"Lord, yes," Eugenia had agreed, and then she had smiled, and the smile had said everything the words could not.

The bell above the door jingled. It was a small brass bell with a clear, sweet tone, and Eugenia had been told by more than one person that it had belonged to her late husband's grandmother, though in fact Eugenia had bought it herself at an estate sale in 1987 and had invented the lineage to discourage questions. The bell was hers, and the post office was hers, and the day's work was hers, and she intended to conduct that work in a manner consistent with her own conscience.

"Miss Eugenia," said the woman in the doorway. She was slight and stooped and carried a canvas bag over one shoulder, the kind of bag that had once been a feed sack and had been washed so many times it had softened into something close to silk. Gertie June Boggs had arrived for her mail, which was the reason Eugenia had arranged the morning's slow choreography. Gertie June collected her mail on Tuesdays, normally between eight-fifteen and eight-thirty, and the women who delivered it on her behalf had learned to expect her at the door like clockwork.

"Morning, Miss Gertie," Eugenia said. "Come in out of the heat. You're just in time. I was about to set your letters aside and have a cry about it, but now you've saved us both."

Gertie June crossed the threshold on cloth-soled shoes that made no sound on the wooden floor. Her eyes, which had the bright, wary alertness of a sparrow's, swept the empty shop and came to rest on Eugenia's face.

"Sheriff's looking for me," Gertie June said. It was not a question.

"He is," Eugenia said. She did not dissemble. Gertie June would have known if she tried. "He's been looking for all of us, one way or another. But he said ten o'clock, and right now it's not even nine, and you've got your mail, and I've got the time to deliver it proper. Sit down here by the fan, and let me get it for you."

Gertie June did not sit. She stood at the counter, both hands flat on the worn wood, and studied Eugenia with the particular attention of a woman who had survived by reading people more than by reading books.

"What do they think I done," she said.

Eugenia lifted a tied bundle of letters from the alphabetized stack and set it on the counter between them. Gertie June's name had been written on the wrapper in Eugenia's careful hand, with a small flourish under the G that she gave to no other name.

"Nobody thinks you've done anything, honey," Eugenia said. "Dale Tatum is doing his job, and his job right now is asking questions, and that's all it is. You go over there at ten, you answer what you know, and you come on back. I'll save you a slice of the buttermilk pie."

"I don't like buttermilk pie," Gertie June said. "It's too sweet."

"Then I'll save you a slice of the chess pie."

Gertie June's hands did not move from the counter. She stared at the bundle of letters as though it contained something more than the usual assortment of bills, junk circulars, and the occasional piece of good news from a faraway relative. Her lips moved silently, counting something or perhaps praying, and Eugenia waited without pressing.

"Birdie Lou," Gertie June said finally, "Birdie Lou Pemberton was a mean woman, Miss Eugenia, and I am not the only one who knew it. I am not the only one who is glad she's gone. But I did not kill her, and I will tell Dale Tatum that to his face, and I will tell him what I told you, which is that I saw her that night. I saw her on Dunmore Lane. I saw her walking toward the foundry. I saw her at quarter past six, and I was on my way to the recycling drop, and I had no reason to be there, and no reason to lie about it, and I have told you this before, and I have told the sheriff's deputy this before, and I will tell it again until somebody believes me."

Eugenia set her hands flat on the counter too, mirroring Gertie June's posture, and the two women regarded each other across the small wooden distance.

"Miss Gertie," Eugenia said, "I believed you the first time you told me, and I believe you now. The question is not whether I believe you. The question is what you saw that you haven't told me yet, and whether you're going to tell it to Dale, or whether you're going to make him drag it out of you piecemeal, which won't help either of you."

Gertie June's eyes narrowed. The bright wariness in them sharpened into something that was almost calculation, and Eugenia, who knew that expression, recognized it as the face Gertie June wore when she was deciding whether to trust.

Outside, the mockingbird had moved to a different wire, and through the open shop door its borrowed songs came in clear, one after another: a wren, a killdeer, then something that was not a bird at all but a child laughing somewhere down the block. The morning pressed in, warm and patient, and Eugenia kept her hands where they were and her face where it was and waited, because she had learned, in her thirty-one years behind this counter, that the fastest way to hear a thing was to be still.

The confession came not from Gertie June but from Reba Smiley, who arrived at the pie shop that afternoon with her permanent wave slightly less permanent than usual and her theatrical bearing intact.

She swept through the door as if she had been swept herself, a woman of a certain age in a coral blouse and too much jewelry, and she made straight for the stool at the counter where Eugenia had been sitting only that morning. The stool Reba Smiley chose was, by longstanding custom, the one nearest the window, because Reba Smiley believed that to be seen was a kind of nourishment.

She set her purse on the counter with the deliberate care of a woman arranging a centerpiece, and she looked at Eugenia with the expression she reserved for matters of grave personal import, which was to say she looked at Eugenia as if Eugenia were about to faint and Reba was not entirely certain she should catch her.

"Lord have mercy," Reba said, sliding onto the stool. "But I have not slept a wink, Eugenia Crick, not one single solitary wink, and I have come to make a clean breast of things because I have carried this weight for three days now and my shoulders cannot bear it."

Eugenia reached beneath the counter for the good teacups, the ones without chips, the ones her mother-in-law had never approved of because they were not the wedding china. She set one before Reba and poured without asking, because Reba Smiley's relationship with tea was a constant, and the pouring of it was a form of welcome that required no negotiation.

Reba wrapped both hands around the cup. The coral of her sleeves made her hands look older than they were.

"I am going to tell you something," she said, "and I am going to tell it to you once, and I am not going to repeat it, and afterward you must decide what is to be done with it, because I have no earthly idea, and the Lord knows I have prayed on it until my knees ache."

Eugenia sat down across from her. The afternoon light lay across the counter in a long, slow slab, and somewhere outside a dog was barking at nothing in particular, and the smell of cooling peach pie sweetened the back room.

"It was the quilting circle," Reba said, and her voice dropped half a register, the way a singer's does when the song turns serious. "Last Thursday, the regular meeting, the one we keep at the church fellowship hall because Miss Cornelia insists, even though the chairs are terrible for my back and the light is so bad I can hardly see to thread a needle."

She paused, and Eugenia, who knew the choreography of Reba's confessions, did not interrupt. The tea cooled. The dog barked. The pie smell deepened into something almost like syrup, and the clock above the sugar bin marked the seconds with a faint plastic tick.

"Birdie Lou was in rare form," Reba said. "You know how Birdie Lou gets when she has been sitting on something. She gets that look, the one that says she is about to give a gift that is also a small bomb. She had been mighty quiet all day, helping with the wedding-ring pattern, and I had noticed because I notice everything, Eugenia, do not tell me I do not notice everything, I will not have it."

"I would never tell you such a thing," Eugenia said.

"You would be the first," Reba said, mollified. "Well. Near the end, when Miss Cornelia had gone to the little girls' room and Fern had stepped out to take her phone call, because her daughter calls at the same time every Thursday from Atlanta like a train schedule, Birdie Lou put her hand on my arm. Right here." Reba touched the inside of her wrist, where the veins showed blue beneath the powder. "And she leaned in, and she smelled like that rosewater she uses, the one from the catalog, and she said, 'Reba, I have found something out, and it is going to turn this town on its ear, and I do not know whether to laugh or to weep, and I cannot tell you now but I will tell you next Thursday at meeting, and you must be there.'"

Reba took a long, careful sip of tea.

"Next Thursday," she repeated. "That was the Tuesday before she died. Three days, Eugenia. Three days I have been turning it over in my mind, trying to decide what on earth she could have meant, and what family she could have meant, because Birdie Lou was a great one for naming names when she chose, but she was also a great one for building to it."

Eugenia turned her own cup in its saucer. The china made a small, porcelain sound, and she was aware, distantly, of the bell above the shop door and the hum of the refrigerator case in the back and the weight of the hour pressing against the windows.

"Did she give you any hint at all," Eugenia said, "of what she had found, or who it concerned?"

Reba set the cup down with the careful precision of a woman who had once been a hairdresser and so understood the importance of placement. She folded her hands on the counter. The bracelets on her wrists made a small clicking sound, like the settling of dice.

"She did not name a name," Reba said. "But she said the word prominent, Eugenia. She said it twice, and the second time she said it, she raised her eyebrows, the way she does when she is about to deliver something she has been saving. And she said scandalous. And she said it would change how we saw a certain family in this town, a family we have known all our lives, a family whose name I will not speak in this shop because the walls have ears and the floorboards are thinner than they look."

"She did not say which family."

"She did not say which family. But I have lain awake, Eugenia, I have lain awake and I have run the list. The Pembertons are her own people. The Applewhites are Fern's, and Birdie Lou would not have looked so gleeful about Fern. The Tatum family is the sheriff's, and Birdie Lou was sweet on the sheriff's late mother, God rest her, but scandalous is not the word for what could touch Dale Tatum, the man is so clean he squeaks when he walks. The Doss family is Miss Cornelia's, and Birdie Lou would not have troubled herself, Miss Cornelia is scandal enough for two counties. The Smiley family is mine, and I will tell you now, Eugenia, I have nothing to hide that the Lord and my late husband do not already know about."

She paused, and the pause had the quality of a held breath, and then she said, very quietly, with the theatrical instinct for emphasis that had made her a successful hairdresser and a tolerable friend:

"It has to be the Cricks, Eugenia."

The clock ticked. The dog, having exhausted his quarrel with the universe, fell silent. The peach pie smell deepened in the back room, and Eugenia, behind her counter, in her shop, in the town she had been running in one form or another since she was a girl, felt the floor of her certainties shift a quarter inch beneath her feet.

"The Cricks," Eugenia said.

"The Cricks." Reba nodded, with the slow, satisfied air of a woman who has at last delivered the line she has been rehearsing. "The pie shop. The post office. The family that has been at the heart of this town since before there was a town. The family that has held itself up as the very model of respectability since your husband's grandfather built this counter with his own hands, or so the story goes."

She lifted her cup. The tea had gone cold, but she sipped it anyway, with the forlorn dignity of a woman who would not waste good china.

"I do not know what it was," Reba said. "I do not know what Birdie Lou had found, or where she had found it, or how she had come by it, though knowing Birdie Lou, it was some piece of paper in some old ledger, or some photograph in some old album, or some overheard conversation at the beauty parlor that she should have had the good sense to forget. I only know that she had found it, and that she meant to tell us, and that she did not get to tell us, and now here we are, sitting in the middle of it, with the sheriff poking around and Velma Tatum asking questions and poor Birdie Lou lying up at the church under a spray of grocery-store carnations."

She set the cup down again.

"I thought you ought to know," Reba said, "because if there is something to be found, Eugenia, something in the Crick ledgers, something in the Crick photographs, something in the Crick attic that ought to see daylight, I would rather you be the one to bring it out than have the sheriff come digging. And I would rather you know what Birdie Lou was about, so that you can decide, with your own heart and your own conscience, what is to be done. I have no judgment in it. I am only the messenger. I have carried this message for three days, and I am setting it down."

The afternoon light had moved across the counter by a full hand's breadth. The shadow of the sugar bin had reached the second napkin dispenser. Outside, a child passed on a bicycle, the chain clicking like a small mechanical heart.

Eugenia sat very still. She did not reach for the teapot. She did not reach for a cloth to wipe the counter, though there was nothing to wipe. She did not reach for the book in which she kept the shop accounts, or the pen she kept in the pocket of her apron, or the small framed photograph of her late husband that she kept beside the register and that her mother-in-law had once tried to move to the back room and that Eugenia had moved back the next morning without comment, as one moves a piece on a board.

She sat still because Reba Smiley had just told her, with great kindness and great care, that there was a thing in her family, and that the thing had a name, and that the name was Crick, and that a dead woman had known it and had meant to speak it and had been stopped.

Outside, the mockingbird had returned to its wire. It sang a few notes, then a few more, then a long silence, and then it began again, and the song it was singing was a song that belonged to no bird at all but to a child laughing somewhere down the block, and the laughing went on for a long time, and then it stopped, and the afternoon, in the pie shop, in Hollow Creek, went on with it.

The back door of the pie shop opened, and the bell above it gave its small, tin announcement, and Deputy Carla Jessup came in with the afternoon on her boots and a folded paper in her hand. She stopped just inside the door. She had learned, in her years of walking into rooms that did not expect her, to read the shape of a room before she read the words in it, and the shape of this one was wrong. The counter was wiped clean. The teapot sat at an angle that Eugenia would not have allowed. Reba Smiley sat at the counter with her hands folded over her purse as if she had been summoned for a portrait. And Eugenia, behind the register, had the look of a woman who has been standing very still for a long time and has only just noticed that her feet hurt.

"Mrs. Crick," Carla said. "Reba."

Reba turned on the stool. The color she had been wearing was a deep, almost ecclesiastical red, and against the white of the pie shop it looked like a wound that had been dressed. "Deputy Jessup," she said, and her voice was the same voice she had used the night she had come to the salon to tell Carla about the candles, only flatter now, only tired. "I have been sitting here for forty-five minutes thinking I should not have said what I said, and then thinking I should have said it sooner, and I have not yet arrived at a conclusion."

"Mm," Carla said. She did not sit. She set the folded paper on the counter and left her hand on it, the way a person leaves a hand on a Bible. "I have been at the courthouse most of the day. There is a ledger, and a key, and a woman in the next county who would like to have a conversation with Birdie Lou Pemberton. I will get to that. But first I would like to know why Eugenia looks like she has been turned to salt, and why you are sitting in here at three in the afternoon on a Tuesday when you have a chair to fill at three-thirty."

Reba opened her mouth. She closed it. She opened it again. In the salon, when the women of Hollow Creek gathered to confess small sins and larger worries, Reba was the priestess. Here, in the pie shop, under the eyes of a deputy who had once found a stolen riding lawn mower by following a trail of grass clippings to the mayor's garage, she was a witness.

"I told her," Reba said. "I told her what Birdie Lou wrote. I told her what the paper means, or what I believe it means. I told her that I had been carrying it for three days and that I could not carry it anymore."

Carla looked at Eugenia. Eugenia looked at the register. The register looked back at her with the blank, brass patience of a thing that does not care what is true.

"Mrs. Crick," Carla said, softer. "Did Reba tell you what was on the paper?"

Eugenia's hand moved, at last, and it moved to the teapot, and she poured a cup for Carla, and one for Reba, and one for herself, and the pouring was very slow and very careful, and the cup she set in front of Carla was the blue one with the chip on the rim, which was the cup she kept for the sheriff and which she had never, in Carla's memory, used for anyone else.

"She told me," Eugenia said, "that my husband's name was on a piece of paper in a dead woman's hand. She told me that the dead woman knew something about my family, and that she meant to tell it, and that someone made sure she did not. She told me that the name was not hers to keep, and that she was giving it to me, and that I could do with it what I wanted. I have not yet decided what that is."

Carla sat down. The stool Reba had been sitting on was still warm, or perhaps she only imagined it was. She picked up the teacup and held it in both hands, and the warmth of it came through the ceramic and into her palms and up into the bones of her wrists, and she thought of her mother's kitchen, and of the way her mother had always said that a body could think better with a warm thing in its hands, and how her mother had been right about most things and wrong about that one, because a body can think quite well without warmth, but with warmth it can think without fear.

"Tell me about Birdie Lou's roses," Carla said.

Eugenia looked up. The look was the look of a woman who has been bracing for a blow and has been offered, instead, a hand. "How did you know about the roses?"

"Because," Carla said, "a woman does not write what Birdie Lou wrote on the back of a photograph unless she has been thinking about it for a long time, and a woman who has been thinking about a thing for a long time does not think about it in a vacuum. She thinks about it because of something she saw, or something she heard, or something she noticed that did not add up. I have spent the day at the courthouse. I have spent the day at the nursery. I have spent the day in a truck with Sheriff Tatum, and the sheriff has a way of asking a question that makes a person answer it even when the person did not mean to. What I have not yet done," she said, and she looked at Reba, "is hear from the women who were closest to her."

Reba set her teacup down. The saucer rattled. "I am not closest to her," she said. "I am the one who knew her in this life, but the one who knew her in the next was your witness, and your witness is a woman named Fern Applewhite, and if you want to know about the roses you had better send for her, because I have already said my piece and my piece was a hard one, and I would like to drink my tea and be quiet for a while."

Carla looked at the door. She looked at Eugenia. Eugenia reached for the small notebook she kept by the register, the one with the pencil on a string, and she wrote Fern Applewhite's name on it in her careful, pie-shop hand, and she tore the page out and folded it and held it out to Carla.

"Velma is in the back," Eugenia said. "She has been in the back since before Reba sat down. She will go for you. She has been wanting to go all afternoon."

Carla took the paper. She went to the back. Velma was sitting at the little table where the pie shop's books were kept, with her hands folded and a cup of cold coffee in front of her, and she looked up when Carla came in, and the look on her face was the look of a woman who has been holding a door shut with her shoulder for a long time and has heard, at last, the footsteps on the other side go away.

"Velma," Carla said. "I need you to go to Fern Applewhite's. I need you to bring her here. I need you to tell her that the deputy would like to speak with her about Birdie Lou's roses, and that she is not in any trouble, and that her name is not on any paper that I have found, and that I would still very much like to hear what she knows."

Velma stood. The chair scraped the floor. "I have been listening through the door," Velma said. "I will not pretend I have not. I have been listening through the door, and I have heard Reba say a hard thing, and I have heard Eugenia take it like a woman takes a thing that was always coming, and I have been ready to go for an hour. I will bring her. I will bring her in twenty minutes, and I will bring her clean, because she will not want to come and she will need persuading, and the persuading will be in the form of a cool glass of water and a straight story."

She went out through the back. The bell did not ring for her. Carla stood alone in the back room, in the smell of flour and cinnamon and the faint, sweet ghost of peaches from the morning's baking, and she thought about the dead woman in the salon chair, and about the candle that had been left burning, and about the photograph that had been tucked into a book, and about a family that had a thing in it, and about a woman in the front room who had just been told, by a friend, that the thing had a name.

She went back out. Reba was drinking her tea. Eugenia was wiping the counter she had already wiped. The two women were not speaking. The silence between them was not the silence of strangers. It was the silence of two people who had just passed through a door together and were catching their breath on the other side.

"Sit with her," Carla said to Reba. "Drink your tea. When Fern comes, I will need you to be here, because Fern will not want to say what she has to say, and she will say it sooner if you are in the room."

Reba nodded. She did not ask how Carla knew that. In Hollow Creek, the women had been saying things to each other in rooms for so long that the walls had learned the habit, and a deputy who had grown up here had learned to read the walls.

Carla went to the front window. She looked out at the square. The flag at the courthouse had gone still. The boy on the bicycle had come around again, and this time he had a friend on the handlebars, and the two of them were arguing about something with the grave intensity of children who have not yet learned that most arguments are not about what they are about. The mother at the bench had gone. In her place sat a man in a straw hat, reading a newspaper, and the paper rose and fell with his breath, and the breath was slow, and the afternoon was slow, and the town was doing what the town always did, which was to go on being a town while the women inside it figured out what had been done to one of them.

When Velma came back, she was not alone. She had Fern Applewhite with her, and Fern was wearing the green work coat she wore at the nursery, and there was dirt on the cuffs, and her hands were the hands of a woman who had been in the soil that morning and would be in it again the next morning, because the soil was the thing that asked the least of her and gave the most back. Velma had a glass of water in her hand, and she set it on the counter in front of Fern, and Fern drank half of it in one long pull, and the water was cool, and the glass was sweating, and the sweat ran down the side and pooled on the counter in a small, clear circle.

"Sit down, Fern," Carla said.

Fern sat. She looked at Reba. Reba looked at her. Eugenia poured her a cup of tea without being asked, and the cup was the plain white one with no chip and no story, and the tea was the color of a good autumn, and the saucer did not rattle when she set it down, because Eugenia had learned, in a long life behind a counter, to set a saucer down so that it did not rattle, and she had taught her hands to do it without her head having to think about it.

"Mrs. Applewhite," Carla said. "I am going to ask you a question, and I would like you to answer it, and I would like you to answer it the way you would answer it if I were not in the room. Can you do that?"

Fern's hands were wrapped around the cup. The knuckles were brown from the sun and the work, and there was a callus on the right index finger from the pruners, and the skin of her throat moved when she swallowed.

"I can try," she said. "I have been trying for three days, and the trying has not got any easier, and I do not expect it will."

Carla nodded. "Birdie Lou Pemberton," she said. "Tell me about her roses."

Fern looked at the cup. She looked at the window. She looked at Reba, who gave her a small, almost imperceptible nod, the nod of a woman who has already said the hard thing and is telling another woman that the hard thing is survivable.

"Birdie Lou's roses had been failing," Fern said. "Failing for two years, maybe three. She came to me in the spring of the first year and said the blooms were coming in small, and the leaves were yellowing at the edges, and the soil smelled wrong, she said, sour where it should have been sweet. I went out to her place. I walked the beds. I tested the pH. I amended the soil. I told her to water at the base, not the top, and to mulch with the cedar I sold her, and to prune the dead canes back to the second set of leaves. She did all of it. The roses did not improve."

She took a breath. The breath was slow, and it was the breath of a woman who is about to say a thing that she has been holding in her chest for a long time and that she is going to set down on the counter of a pie shop in a small town in front of a deputy and a hair dresser and a woman whose family has just been named on a piece of paper.

"The second year," Fern said, "she came back. The same thing, only worse. The blooms were coming in deformed. The petals were fused at the edges, like they had been pinched while they were still wet. The leaves had a stippling on them that I had not seen before, a fine, silver stippling, like someone had taken a very small brush and painted a thousand tiny dots on every leaf. I went back out. I pulled a sample. I sent it to the extension office. The man there said it looked like a herbicide injury, a drift from a neighbor's application, but I knew Birdie Lou's neighbors, and I knew what they sprayed, and none of them sprayed what would do that. I did not say so. I told her to dig out the affected beds and start fresh, and to bag the clippings, and to wash her tools in a bucket of soap before she put them away. She did all of it. The new beds did no better."

The cup was still in her hands. She had not drunk from it. The tea was cooling, and a faint skin had formed on the surface, and the skin was the color of a tarnished penny.