"He called here collect about a year ago."

"Did you accept the charges?" Sheba asks.

Niles nods. "Of course I accepted the charges. It was Trevor. But he was so drunk I couldn't make out what he was saying, so I put Fraser on the phone."

Fraser says, "It was mostly liquor talk. You know the kind: 'I love you' slurred in a hundred different ways. 'I miss all of you' slurred in a hundred others. Classic Trevor. If he'd been born straight, he'd have married me or Molly. If he'd been born a girl, he'd've married Leo. It was drunk talk sure enough, but pure Trevor. I tried to call him the next day at his flat on Union Street, but his phone was disconnected. I wrote him a letter, but it came back with address unknown. So I figured he'd moved."

Sheba says, "He was evicted for not paying rent."

"Why didn't he call us?" Betty asks.

"The question is this," Sheba says: "Why didn't he call his famous sister?"

"Can you answer that?" I ask her. "We can't."

"Trevor's hated me for a long time," she says. "Remember my first gig in Las Vegas? I had to beg him to come and play the piano for that. The only reason he came was because of the chance to see all of you. He wrote me off his list of favorites a long time ago."

"But why, Sheba?" Fraser asks. "You were so close. I've never seen a brother and sister as close as you two. Maybe Niles and Starla at one time. Chad always acted like I was created in Frankenstein's lab. But you and Trevor were devoted."

"Trevor resented me for lots of reasons. Start with my success, go to my self-destructive behavior. He said he couldn't stand to watch me slowly killing myself. And I wasn't very nice to Trevor. Or anyone else, even you guys. The one thing I can do well is be a perfect shit. Trevor got on my nerves when I was strung out on coke. I said some things I shouldn't have said. One of my husbands beat him up and almost killed him."

"Blair Upton?" Betty guesses.

"Yep, that guy. I knew he was the most famous actor I was ever going to get to meet me at the altar, and I wasn't going to give him up for my fairy princess of a brother."

I said, "Trevor called me a year ago; he sounded scared. Of course, then he told me if I'd been gay, he'd never have needed another boyfriend. I would've satisfied his most lascivious needs. I haven't heard from him since."

"Where did you send the check?" Sheba asks.

"It was a money order. A P.O. box on Polk Street."

"I put a private eye on the case," she says. "I heard some bad rumors: Trevor's dying of AIDS."

"Have you called his friends?" I ask. "They'll help us find him."

Now it is time for Sheba to fish around in her commodious purse. Some tubes of lipstick and jars of cosmetics spill out, as does a sandwich bag full of marijuana.

"Oregano," she says to the officers of the law. "I've developed a passion for Italian food." Ike shuts his eyes and Betty rolls hers and motions to Niles to refill her glass.

Finally, Sheba pulls a photograph out of a side pocket and hands it to me. In a picture taken in 1980, there I stand in Trevor's dining room with my arm flung around him and his lover at the time, Tom Ball. Twelve other gay men mug for the camera, and I remember that ecstatic evening as one of the best in my life. I flew into the city with enough shrimp, fish, crabs, tomatoes, and corn to feed all the true believers and the hangers-on at the Sermon on the Mount, and Trevor and I fixed a Low Country feast for all of his best friends in San Francisco. Trevor was at his magical best that night, and the conversation was brilliant, hilarious, and over the top. After dinner, Trevor played the piano for hours. Every man there had a passable singing voice except me, and some had the loveliest voices in that part of the world.

"I'll start calling those guys tomorrow," I say. "I bet they don't even know that Trevor's in trouble."

"I've tried to call all of them," Sheba tells me.

"Had they heard from him? Any of them?" Ike asks.

"Worse than that, Ike: every one of them is dead. Every single one of them."

"Where do you think Trevor is, Sheba?" Niles asks, walking over and sitting on the arm of her chair.

"I think he's like a sick cat and has gone off to the woods to die. I don't know what else to think. A producer I know is lending me his house in Pacific Heights. I'm here to ask you all something I've no right to ask. I'd love it if one or two of you would help me find him."

"I'm due some time off," I say. "But I can't go till after the Fourth of July weekend."

"We were going to take the kids to Disney World," Ike says to Betty.

She suggests, "Your parents would love to take them. They actually like Disney World."

"Niles, we can do it, can't we, baby?" Fraser asks. "We can do that for Trevor."

"Couldn't come at a better time for me," Niles says. He's the athletic director for Porter-Gaud, and the school year will have just ended. "I'll get tickets tomorrow."

"We can find Trevor and bring him home. Bring him to Charleston," I say.

"We can be around him when he dies," Fraser says. "We can help him die."

"I've got a plane," Sheba says. "A Learjet. Another gift from the producer."

"Just what're you doing for this producer?" Betty asks.

"Enough to get a house in Pacific Heights," Sheba says. "Enough to have a Learjet waiting for us at the Charleston airport."

"The first weekend after July Fourth," I say. "Does that work for everybody?"

"Yeah," everyone agrees. When our words rise in the air like white papal smoke, Sheba bursts into tears again. Fraser hugs her from one side, Niles takes care of the other, and Sheba rocks forward as she weeps.

Ike says, "Why're you crying, girl?"

"Because I knew that all of you would say yes," Sheba says. "I just knew it. And I've been a perfect shit to every one of you."

I walk over to the Battery instead of going straight home. Whenever I want to think hard, I need a river to help me lighten the load. The return of Sheba has set something loose inside me, and I have to fight through the barricades and impasses and dead ends I've erected as defenses to the overwhelming solitude I accept as an orderly way of life. As I walk south along the Battery's wall, I notice the crescent moon, sparking the trellises of a nervous tide. As a Charlestonian, I am a connoisseur of tides, and can almost tell you how high or low the seawalls of the harbor are at any given moment. The deep heat of the day has surrendered to a cooling wind from the Atlantic. The air gives off the scents of honeysuckle, turmeric, and salt. My head clears and I make an attempt to figure out what all the events of the night signify. I also take an honest inventory of my own life, and do not like the results. walk over to the Battery instead of going straight home. Whenever I want to think hard, I need a river to help me lighten the load. The return of Sheba has set something loose inside me, and I have to fight through the barricades and impasses and dead ends I've erected as defenses to the overwhelming solitude I accept as an orderly way of life. As I walk south along the Battery's wall, I notice the crescent moon, sparking the trellises of a nervous tide. As a Charlestonian, I am a connoisseur of tides, and can almost tell you how high or low the seawalls of the harbor are at any given moment. The deep heat of the day has surrendered to a cooling wind from the Atlantic. The air gives off the scents of honeysuckle, turmeric, and salt. My head clears and I make an attempt to figure out what all the events of the night signify. I also take an honest inventory of my own life, and do not like the results.

My marriage to Starla Whitehead has been both a joke and a hoax from the very beginning. Going into that hasty and ill-planned marriage, I knew everything about Starla's fragility and volatile nature. What I misjudged was the extent of her madness and the strength of those interior demons that made her nighttimes sleepless and the daylight hours a time of exhaustion and despair. When I am honest with myself-and I can be honest with the Cooper River surging back toward the sea to my left and the governess-like serenity of the mansions along East Bay Street on my right-the thoughts come out true and hot to the touch. I once thought I married Starla for love, but now I am looking at it with a harsher lens, and consider that love came to me in a diffused and scattershot form: I had trouble with the whole concept because I never fully learned the art of loving myself. For most of my life, the way I loved was another form that awkwardness took in me. My attraction to women has always depended on the amount of damage I could detect on the surface, how much scar tissue I could uncover when I started to finger my way through the ruins. I mistook Starla's instability as the most fascinating aspect of her personality. Her madness I translated into a kind of genius. Though I heard my friends lament the fact that they had found out too late that they had married carbon copies of their mothers or fathers, I was even more fearful that I had married my childhood, the one that found me in straitjackets during the years following my brother's suicide. That was also my darkest fear about Starla-that I had married my brother, Steve, because I could never condone my appalling failure to give my parents a reasonable facsimile of their lost son when I knew they wanted that from me more than anything. When I became aware of Starla's great lassitude of spirit, and the flimsiness of her hold on sanity, my greatest fear became that she would take her own life and send me staggering off into the infernal country where I once earned citizenship after Steve's funeral. But the river is beside me and saltwater has always fed my soul like a truth serum. I can say to myself, with the river's full acquiescence and support, that I would love to live with a wife who loved me, who shared my house and bed with me, who would look at me the way Fraser looks at Niles, who would treasure my company and our house together the way Ike and Betty do with such ease. And yes, I'd love to have a child-a boy, a girl-one of them or five of them; I want to be a father and take out photos of my kids and pass them around the office the way the other daddies do at the paper. I turn and look out toward Fort Sumter, Mount Pleasant, and James Island. The air comes to me in drafts of hothouse roses, and the harbor is trafficless, the stars as pale as moths.

The walk has helped me straighten things out, and I head home without thinking. I rejoice in the prodigal charm of my palm-haunted city. Though I've written love letters to Charleston hundreds of times in my columns over the years, I don't think I've ever come close to touching on the city's uncaptured mysteries. Walking back north along the Battery wall, I realize words are never enough; they stutter and cleave to the roof of my mouth when I need them to blaze, to surge out of my mouth like an avenging hive of hunter wasps. As I go back to my house, I let no sensation pass without my appreciation-on this night, this amazing night that brought forth imaginary cheerleaders, fight songs, screaming, bloodshed, a quest, a gathering of our own aristocracy of the elect and the chosen. It has been a rich and satisfying night, and I am bursting with something I have to describe as joy.

Tradd Street is a European street, not an American one. The houses push their stuccoed facades up against the sidewalks. If not for the street-lamps, darkness would give the night a sinister and claustrophobic cast. The outside light at my house on the south side of Tradd is lit, but I don't remember flicking the switch on my way out. Such inattention to detail is not common to me. I unlock the privacy door that leads onto my first-floor veranda and see a light on in the living room that I never use. I hear music coming from my third-story study.

"Yoo-hoo!" I call out. "I hope you're a friendly burglar and not a Charles Manson type."

I hear Molly's clear, unmistakable laughter, and it relieves me that she can still laugh. I walk upstairs and find her sitting in one of the leather chairs that look out over the rooftops of the city. Because I have a clear view of the steeples of both St. Michael's and St. Philip's, I consider myself a lucky man.

"Could I change into something more comfortable?" I ask. I see Molly's pretty feet propped up on a footstool.

"Sure. It's your house." She smiles.

"If I get in my birthday suit, would that be bad form?"

"Yes, it would. But it might make the evening more interesting," she says, and again, the good Molly laughter, not the sorrowing kind that can break your heart in an instant.

"You helped yourself to the wine, I hope."

"Emptied the open bottle, got a head start on a second."

"Why do we drink so much in Charleston?" I pour myself a splash of Hennessy.

"Because we're human," she says. "Like everyone else. And the older we get, the more human we get. The more human we get, the more painful everything becomes. That was a bad scene today, wasn't it?"

"It was memorable."

"What happened after I left? I'm terrified to know the answer. But I need to know."

"Chad bled to death in his sister's arms. Fraser was like the Virgin Mary, holding Chad in the pieta style. Before he succumbed, he looked at me and said, 'Leo, thou has a very small peter. And upon this rock I shall build my church.' Ike and Betty are patrolling the streets hunting down the murderess. Bloodhounds are roaming South of Broad."

"Why'd I ask you a serious question?"

I take a seat in the chair beside her. Both of us stare out the Palladian window at the rooftops that run together until the steeple of St. Michael's interrupts their irregular march.

"Your punch was a good one. At first we thought Chad's nose was broken. As you might expect, he did not handle public humiliation well. He denied that he was having an affair. Claimed you were crazy. But the good news is he's having you tested next week, and you'll soon be getting shock treatments and living in a padded cell."

"He said that?"

"No, but those were the implications."

"Did he go to the hospital?"

"Don't know. But he went somewhere. In a big hurry."

"He went to see that Brazilian bitch, didn't he?"

"He didn't leave a forwarding address."

"How long've you known?" Molly asks, still not looking at me.

"Unfair question. I'm a columnist. I hear every rumor, true or not. If Mayor Riley wears a dress to a city council meeting. If the head of the NAACP has a sex-change operation. If your father turns his house into a whorehouse. I hear it all."

"Sarah Ellen Jenkins saw you going into Chad's office yesterday," she says, looking at me with enough fury to put me on fair notice that I need to change my tactics. "Did you discuss his affair?"

"I told him the rumors that I'd been hearing."

"Why didn't you come to me? Our friendship's a lot stronger than yours and Chad's has ever been. Tell me that's a lie."

"That's the Lord's truth."

"You've never liked Chad," she says.

"That's not true," I defend myself. "I had to get accustomed to him."

"Which part?"

"The asshole factor. It's a strong genetic trait that runs in all males in the family. He denied having the affair, by the way."

"Did you meet the Brazilian girl?" Molly asks.

I flinch when I nod my head.

"Was she beautiful?"

"She had the loveliest mustache. It covered her harelip quite nicely. She could use a better-fitting set of dentures. Her breath smelled like a bag of shrimp left out in the heat for a month."

"That pretty, huh?"

"Made me wish I'd been born in Brazil."

She slaps my hand hard, and we both laugh. We look out again at the white steeple and hear the bells of St. Michael's tolling the midnight hour. In her chair, she shifts to the left and props her bare feet on my ankles. The shock of her flesh on mine sends a jolt right through me.

"Do you remember our dance Friday night?"

"No," I lie.

"Do you remember how we kissed once we got free from the others?"

"No," I say again.

"Sheba saw it," Molly says. "She thinks we kiss pretty good."

"I was drunk. I don't remember a thing."

"Let me tell you about it, then, Leo. You kissed me like you meant it. Like I was the only woman in the world you cared anything about. You kissed me like you wanted my mouth around yours forever. You're only the second man I've ever kissed. I liked it a lot. Now you say something."

"I'm glad you liked it." I rise to pour a little more Cognac. "It was one of the great moments of my life. I've dreamed about kissing you since we met. Never thought it would happen. But we're both married. Both of us. Me in name only, but you're really married, and I happen to know you still love Chad. I know something else that you probably can't even imagine now: he still loves you, and he always will. He's a guy, Molly. He's got a dick. It makes us all act nuts."

With surprising grace and speed, Molly rises from her chair and sits in my lap. She sets her wineglass down, wraps her arms around my neck, and puts her face close to mine. Her eyes are clear and pale and determined. The whole scene feels dangerous and wonderful, like a prayer I threw at God in high school has finally arrived in his range of hearing.

"Do you think Starla is ever coming back to you, Leo?" she says. "A year is a long time to be gone. She used to run off for a month or two. It's gotten serious, and I know it bothers you."

"She calls me every week, Molly. No, that's not true now. It was true at first. Now she calls me once a month, sometimes two months. Cries a lot. Feels guilty. Asks me to wait for her. I say, 'You're my wife. I'll always wait for you.' Which makes her mad for some reason. As though that was the last answer she was waiting for. Lots of times, she'll start screaming. Tells me the number of men she's sleeping with. Tells me their names. Their professions. Their wives' names. Then she catches herself. She comes back to herself. The real Starla. Cries again. Feels guilty. And on it goes into the night. It always ends the same way. She passes out."

"Leo." Molly kisses my nose. "What a darling, foolish man. No, let me change that. Let me be a little more accurate: what a stupid, stupid, stupid stupid man." man."

"I knew what I was getting into," I say, then think better about it. "Or I was foolish enough to think I did."

"I need you to answer a question," Molly says. "I'd like a serious answer."

"Go ahead."

"Are you in love with me?"