women, too. I got broke in by my uncle when I wasn’t but twelve. He wouldn’t let me alone. If he hadn’t had to go to jail for a while, I’d have wound up pregnant or worse. So when I got a chance to get off the island, I took it.”
From somewhere in my mind, a new image rises. A small black girl walks along a gravel road. Out of the shimmering heat an orange pickup truck appears, and then the man who pays her father and mother offers her a ride…
“Ivy never told you any stories?” I ask. “Nothing that made you suspicious? Even I’ve heard things about the kids there being scared to walk the roads alone.”
Pearlie folds her hand on the table. “Baby, a man with a taste for that kind of thing don’t stop doing it. He takes what he needs whenever he can get it. I’ll tell you something else. I think the women down there know about it. That’s why they tell spook stories to keep their children off the roads. But they don’t tell their husbands nothing, you can bank on that. They don’t want them going to the death house at Angola for killing the boss man.”
“Do you know that, Pearlie? Or just suspect it?”
She shrugs. “Does it make a difference?”
“In a court of law, it makes all the difference in the world.”
She spits out air in a rush of scorn. “You ain’t getting Dr. Kirkland in no courtroom. He too smart and too rich. Men like him don’t go to jail. You got to know that by now, girl.”
“Times have changed since you were young, Pearlie.”
A parched laugh escapes her lips. “You believe that?”
“Yes.”
“Then you ain’t smart as I thought you was.”
Pearlie’s cynicism pisses me off. If all women were like this, we’d still be chattels and not citizens. On the other hand…I grew up in a much more privileged world than she did.
“You never answered my question, Pearlie. Why did you go to the island yesterday?”
The bow of her shoulders sags. “A couple of years ago, a family moved off the island real quick. I heard about it later. They had one child, a four-year-old girl. They just packed up and left without a word. I wanted to find out if that was because of Dr. Kirkland.”
“Did you?”
She inhales from her cigarette as though drinking the nectar of the gods, then holds the smoke in her lungs for as long as possible before letting it out in a long blue stream. “No,” she says finally. “Nobody would talk about it. They all scared.”
“Was that the only reason you went down there?”
She turns her dark gaze onto me, and at last I feel the full power of her instinctive intelligence. All her life Pearlie has hidden her quick understanding; that’s what she was raised to do. But the death of my aunt-one of “her babies”-has caused a tectonic shift in the old woman’s soul, and Pearlie Washington is never going to be the same.
“I don’t think Mrs. Catherine died by accident,” she says in a whisper. “I never did.”
This statement shocks me to the core. “Are you saying Grandmama Catherine was murdered? She couldn’t have been. People saw her fall into the water.”
“Did they?” Pearlie’s eyes glint in the dark. “She was standing off by herself when she went in. But did she fall? Did that sandbar really cave in? Mrs. Catherine practically grew up on DeSalle Island. You think she’d stand on a weak sandbar like some city fool and not know it? No, child. No more than Mr. Luke would let somebody sneak up on him after he was in the war. I think Mrs. Catherine finally found out something so bad that she couldn’t live with it. If she’d gone to the police, she’d have ruined her family name forever. Her children were already full grown…I think she just couldn’t see what else to do but die. I think she drowned herself in that river, baby.”
The old woman’s shoulders drop even lower. “A few years ago, when I was cleaning Dr. Kirkland’s study, I found some pictures.”
My breath catches in my throat. “What kind of pictures?”
“The kind you don’t have to take to the drugstore to get developed.”
“Polaroids?”
She nods.
“What were they of?”
“You and Miss Ann.”
My face is burning. “Doing what?”
“Swimming in your birthday suits.”
“Together?”
“No. They must have been took twenty-five years apart. Neither of you was more than three in the pictures, and nekkid as the day you was born. Both in a swimming pool somewhere. If those pictures had been mixed up with a bunch of others, I wouldn’t have thought nothing of it.” Pearlie holds up a bony finger, the nail painted with red polish. “But just those two…and took so far apart. It gave me a cold feeling. Like the devil walking over my grave.”
“You think Grandmama found those pictures?”
“She found something. The month before she died, Mrs. Catherine wouldn’t hardly say a word to nobody. Had a far-off look in her eyes. Hopeless.”
“Pearlie, I found some pictures of naked children hidden in the barn-in Daddy’s things.”
She looks stunned. “Mr. Luke had pictures like that?”
“Yes. But knowing what I know now, I think he did exactly what
“I been looking for more pictures like that,” Pearlie says, “but I ain’t found none yet. Lord, the misery that man done caused. He’s sick, that’s what he is.”
I get up and pull the curtains away from the kitchen window. Malmaison stands majestic and silent as a royal sepulchre. “He’s not going to hurt any more children,” I say softly. “That stops today.”
“How you gonna stop him? Even the po-lice afraid of Dr. Kirkland. Lord, this place cost more than all the houses of every cop in this town put together. The mayor’s house, too. Dr. Kirkland got friends all the way up to Washington, D.C.”
“Don’t worry about it. You just promise me that if you have to get up in front of a jury, you’ll tell the truth about what you know.”
“They make you swear on the Bible, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I’m too old to lie with my right hand on a Bible. But you be careful. Dr. Kirkland ain’t the only sick man around here. That Billy Neal be just as bad, and he’s a lot younger and stronger.”
“Younger, maybe. Not stronger. If you turned those two loose in the woods and only one could come out alive, Grandpapa would eat Billy’s liver for supper.”
Pearlie stands unsteadily and walks to me, then hugs me the way she used to when I was a little girl. The way my mother never quite could. “You remember when I told you I quit smoking?”
I think for a minute. “Twenty-three years ago, you said. That’s when Daddy died.”
She nods, her chin digging into my shoulder. “You know why I quit that year?”
“Why?”
“Because I knew cigarettes was poison. And after Mr. Luke died, I knew you was gonna need me around to look after you. I’m just sorry I didn’t do more, baby. Sorry I couldn’t save you from all the pain you been through.” She pulls back and looks into my eyes. “You’re the strongest of all my girls. I always said that. Dr. Kirkland think you got that strength from him, but I know better. Mr. Luke was a good man, and tough when he had to be. Old Mr. DeSalle, too. Maybe…oh, I don’t know. I’m just gonna pray for you, whatever prayers is worth. Maybe with the Lord’s help, you can come through all right.”
I kiss her gently on the cheek, then unlock the door and walk out into the sunlight.
My grandfather’s Lincoln is still parked beside Pearlie’s Cadillac. As I stare at the two cars, I sense someone
