"Oh. I have no idea. With her father, I guess."

Caitlin obviously wants to say more, but she's unwilling to do so in front of Kelly. "I've got to get going, guys."

"Wait. Go with her, Kelly."

Kelly looks at Caitlin, then back at me. "I think you're the one who needs protection, boss."

"I'll have a photographer with me," she protests. "I'll be fine."

"Kelly's worth ten photographers. I'll be here for at least two hours, then I'm going straight back to the motel. He can tell you how he saved my life on the way."

Caitlin is wavering.

Kelly bends over, lifts a cuff of his jeans, and pulls out a small automatic, which he passes to me. "Safety's on."

I slip the gun into my pocket and look at Caitlin. "Satisfied?"

"Okay, I'll take him. But you go straight to the motel from here. No side trips."

"I need a computer. And coffee. Lots of coffee."

"We've got plenty of both."

Kelly and Caitlin still haven't returned when I leave for the motel. While typing my discovery requests, I overheard enough newsroom conversation to follow the situation unfolding at the Concord Apartments. The two teenagers who allegedly shot Billy Earl Whitestone had holed up in the apartment of their grandmother. Somehow, Caitlin managed to get them on the telephone, and during that conversation one of the boys admitted to the shooting. He claimed he'd shot Whitestone because Ruby Flowers's death had so upset his grandmother that he had to do something. He chose Whitestone as his victim because he'd often heard an uncle talk about how Whitestone had run the Klan during the "bad times." An hour after this confession, the grandmother talked the boys into giving themselves up, on the condition that Caitlin be allowed to accompany them to the police station to ensure their safety. I assume Caitlin is still at the station now, running the police crazy and keeping Kelly jumping.

Kelly's pistol is on my lap as I drive toward the motel. There's no traffic on the streets, or even the highway. Fear has worked its way into the fabric of the town.

A police car screams out of the empty darkness, siren blaring, going in the opposite direction. Halfway to the motel, a jacked-up pickup filled with white teenagers roars alongside me, pauses as its occupants peer in at me, then roars off again. Night riders looking for a fight? Or kids trying to figure out what all the excitement's about? I won't know until I read tomorrow's paper.

The single-story buildings of the Prentiss Motel remind me of the motor courts of my childhood vacations. But viewed without the kaleidoscopic lens of wonder, they are a mean and depressing sight. The thought of my parents forced to live here because of my actions is hard to bear. Yet they have not uttered one word of complaint since the fire, not even my mother, who urged me to avoid the Payton case from the beginning. Now that events have proved her right, what is she doing? Making the best of things. I feel like dragging some realtor out of bed and buying her the biggest goddamn house in the city.

Orienting myself by the greenish glow of the swimming pool, I park and start walking toward our rooms with Kelly's gun held along my leg. Halfway there, I feel a sudden chill.

There's someone sitting in one of the pool chairs. Fifty feet away, a dark silhouette against the wavering light of the water. As I walk down the long row of doors, the figure rises from the chair. I put my finger on the trigger of the pistol and quicken my steps.

"Penn?"

The voice stops me cold. It's Livy.

I slip Kelly's gun into my waistband and jog toward the pool fence. Livy opens the gate and waits just beyond it. She's wearing a strapless white evening dress that looks strangely formal beside the deserted swimming pool. The moonlight falls lustrous upon her shoulders but is somehow lost in her eyes, which look more gray than blue tonight.

"What are you doing here? What's the matter?"

"I wanted to see you," she says. "That's all. I had to see you."

"Is everything all right?"

"That depends on what you mean by all right. Things are a bit tense at our house. More than a bit, really. But I'm sure your house was like that when my father went after yours."

She has no idea how bad things got at our house during the year leading up to that trial. But soon she might. Before she can say anything else, I ask what I've been wanting to ask since I saw her at the airport in Baton Rouge.

"Livy, a few nights ago, at a party . . . your mother threw a drink in my face."

"She what?"

"She told me I'd ruined your life."

Livy's expression does not change. She holds her eyes on mine, attentive as a spectator at the opera. But I sense that she's expending tremendous effort to maintain this illusion of normalcy.

"What was she talking about?" I ask.

"I have no idea." She looks away from me. "Mom probably doesn't either. She's a hairbreadth from the DTs by five o'clock every day. Daddy's talking about sending her to Betty Ford."

"She was referring to something specific. I saw her eyes."

Livy turns and peers into the cloudy water. "My divorce has upset her quite a bit. Divorce isn't part of the fairy tale. If it were, she'd have left my father long ago."

"I thought you were only separated."

"Pending divorce, then. It's just semantics." She looks at me over her bare shoulder, an injured look in her eyes. "You think I'd ask you to make love to me if there was a chance my husband and I would get back together?"

This is one of those moments where we make a heaven or hell of the future, by choosing honesty or deception. "I don't know. You weren't that discriminating in the past."

She flinches, but she can endure much worse than this. "The past, the past," she says. "The damned sacred past. Can't we try living in the present for once?"

"Yesterday was the only free ride we're going to get."

She looks back into the depths of the pool. "I have a room," she says in a deliberate voice. "It's two doors down from yours. Why don't we talk there?"

A room. Part of me wants to slap her for assuming so much. I move sideways so that I can see her face. "Will you really talk?"

She pulls her hair back into a thick ponytail, as though to feel the breeze on her neck. Her collarbones are sculpted ivory, creating shadowy hollows at the base of her throat.

"About what?"

"About what? Everything. Why you did what you did twenty years ago."

"What do you mean?"

This is Kafkaesque. Can she really have edited the past so completely that she no longer remembers how badly she betrayed our dreams? "Why you disappeared for a year. Where you went. Why you ran off to Virginia. Why you treated me like a stranger when I flew up to ask you to get your father to drop the suit."

She turns to me and lets her hair fall, and whatever mask she was maintaining falls with it. She looks more vulnerable than I have ever seen her, and when she speaks, her voice is stripped of all affect. "Penn, I can't do it."

"Livy, if I understood some of those things, I might .. . well-things might not have to happen the way they are."

"What do you mean? If I answer your questions, you'll withdraw the charges you made against my father?"

I don't know what I mean. I started into the Del Payton case to destroy Leo Marston, but compared to understanding the mysteries that shaped my life, revenge seems meaningless. Of course, there is still Del Payton. And Althea. And the small matter of justice- "I can't pull out of the Payton case now. It's too late for that. But I can pursue it a different way. If your father's part was only-"

"Stop," she says, shaking her head. "I can't talk about twenty years ago. Not even to make things easier on my father."

She takes a step toward me. I want her to stay back, because the closer she gets, the more I want to go to her room with her. She is achingly beautiful in the moonlight.

"How did I ruin your life?" I ask.

She shakes her head, absolving me of any possible sin. "You didn't." Another step. "But you can save it."

"Livy, listen-"

"Come with me," she pleads. "Right now."

If she had kissed me then, I would have walked away. But she didn't. She picked up her purse from the pool chair, took my hand, and led me across the parking lot toward the motel, a purposeful urgency in her stride.

The deja vu of walking beside the numbered doors is powerful enough to dislocate time. If I were to close my eyes and open them again, I would see the eighteen-thousand-dollar gown flowing behind her like a trail of mist. The lifetimes of water that have passed under the bridge since that night have all flowed back in a span of moments.

When she opens the door and closes us inside, I pull her to me and kiss her with the thirst of a binge drinker returning to the bottle. My questions fade to dying sparks, made irrelevant by the absolute connection of our lips and hands. I don't even know I am backing her toward the door until she collides with it, the unyielding wooden face holding her as I continue forward, pressing against her, my hands groping at her dress, searching for the hem.

"That's right," she says hoarsely. "That's right. . . that's-"

The moment my hand finds her sex, she is breathing like a sprinter in the last few yards of a race. She kisses me with almost desperate passion, then pushes down the front of the strapless dress and pulls my mouth to a breast. In seconds both her arms are outstretched, fingers splayed and quivering, discharging the frantic energy pouring from her core. Touching her this way is rapture, at once within her and without, needing no other thing, no friend, no thought- The knock at the door reverberates through our bodies, stunning us from our trance. Yet still Livy presses herself down against my hand, unwilling to let the world back in. I jerk her away from the door and onto the bed, fearing someone might shoot through the thin metal.

The knocking comes again. This time, with the distance to the bed and with half my faculties restored, it sounds reasonably discreet.

"Who is it?" I call, digging in my pocket for Kelly's gun, hating the ragged edge of fear in my voice.

"Kelly."

Relief cascades through me. I turn to tell Livy everything's all right and find her standing with both hands pointed rigidly at the door, a pistol clenched between them. She must have taken it from her purse.

"Whoa!" I say, holding up my hands. "I know this guy. He's with me."

She lowers the gun slowly, as though unsure whether to trust my judgment. I turn back to the door and open it a crack.

Daniel Kelly's sandy blond head leans toward mine.

"I saw you go in here as I pulled up. I just wanted you to know I'm back."

I nod. "I heard about what happened at the apartments. You must be tired. You can go ahead and get some sleep."

"I'm fine. Wired, really."

I hesitate to ask the next question, but I want to know. "Is Caitlin with you?"

An ironic smile, there and gone. "She's back at the paper, writing the story. She's a tough lady, man."

Coming from Daniel Kelly, this is high praise indeed. "Thanks for looking out for her. And thanks again for the levee thing."

He nods, but there's a curious hesitancy in his face.

"What is it, Kelly?"

"Well, I thought maybe you and Caitlin were . . . you know." He looks past me, through the crack in the door. "I guess not, huh?"

"I guess not," I reply, feeling a strange hollowness in my chest.

He makes a clicking sound with his tongue. "I'm gonna get some eggs over at Shoney's. One of the other guys'll be watching this door."

"Thanks."

"Oh, and your little girl is fine. No worries."

His words hit me like a blow. Maybe he meant for them to. My cheeks burn with self-disgust.

" 'Night, boss," he says, and disappears from the crack.

I shut the door and bolt it.

Livy is sitting on the bed, her face composed, the gun nowhere in evidence. Only her tousled hair hints at our brief encounter at the door.

"Why are you carrying a gun?"

She shrugs. "The town's gone crazy, hasn't it? And Daddy insisted."

Leo would.

Livy's shoes, hose, and panties lie on the floor beside her bare feet. She looks at me like she can't understand why I'm still standing where I am. Like what happened against the door was the opening movement of a symphony.

I glance at my watch. Twelve-twenty. Annie is almost certainly asleep, but Kelly's words have left me with a guilty longing, like an unresolved chord. I need to see my daughter sleeping.

"I need to check on Annie."

Livy stands and takes my hand, pulls me toward her. "I know."

"I mean it."

"I know." She puts her arms around my waist and pulls me against her.

"Livy-"

She kisses my nipple through my shirt. The sharp edges of her teeth pull at flesh and wet cloth, sending a delicious current of pain through me.

"It'll only take a minute," I tell her. "I'll be right-"

With three or four quick movements she unbuckles my pants and pushes them far enough down to free me, then entwines her fingers behind my neck. When I try to speak, she takes my right hand and lifts it to my mouth, cutting off my words. Her scent on my fingers is overpowering.

"Me first," she whispers.

Even as I despise myself for it, in one violent motion I reach beneath her dress, lift her into the air, and set her down upon me.