Blood Memory

offense. The steel rope around his neck rises in a perfect line that terminates in a hook, which would allow it to be hung from almost anything.

“I’ve never seen that before. I thought I’d seen everything he ever did.”

No, says a voice in my head. You’d never seen the pieces in Louise’s house either.

“That’s different,” I say.

Is it? Apparently, your father did a lot of things you never knew about. Or never remembered…

“Cat?” says Michael. “Are you talking to me?”

“What?”

“Come on. That scream was loud.”

He drags me toward the door, but my eyes remain locked on the hanged man.

Chapter 49

As Michael pulls me through the trees toward Brookwood, I keep thinking of my father walking on water in my dream. When I woke, I felt certain that he was trying to tell me something. To help me. To send me the secret truth of his life and mine. But maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he was trying to apologize for something. Not literally, of course. I know he’s not communicating to me from the dead or anything like that. It’s my subconscious creating these images. And yet…

“I’m sorry I flipped out,” I say. “You don’t have to stay with me.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Michael. “You have no business being alone right now.”

We’re never going to reach Brookwood. My legs feel full of sand, and the humidity hanging in the air makes it difficult to extract oxygen from it. “I need to talk to my mother.”

“Why?”

“She’s my father’s next of kin. I can’t see getting any kind of exhumation permit without her support.”

“Cat, you just looked at three Polaroids and a sculpture and you freaked out. Now you’re talking about looking at your father’s corpse? After it’s been decomposing for over twenty years?”

I shudder. “That will be easier to look at than those pictures.”

“Cat-”

“What else can I do, Michael? I have to keep digging until I uncover the truth. If I don’t, I’ll go mad.”

He stares at me with eyes full of pity and compassion. “I think you should talk to Tom Cage before you do anything else.”

“Dr. Cage?”

“Yes. Remember what he told me? Your dad confided in him quite a bit about the war. And Tom seemed to think a great deal of Luke. I think you need to hear what Tom has to say.”

“Nobody’s going to confess to their family doctor that they molested their own daughter.”

“Don’t be so sure. In the old days, the family doctor was like a priest. Especially in the South. He was the only person some people could legitimately unburden themselves to.”

I stop walking and sag against the gray trunk of an oak tree.

“What’s the matter?” Michael asks.

“Can you bring the car?”

He studies me for several moments. I see the doctor’s brain behind his eyes, searching me for signs of… what?

“Do you promise to stay here until I get here?”

“Of course. What are you worried about?”

“I’m worried that all this stress will trigger a manic state. If it does, you won’t know what you’re doing. And I think you’ll kill yourself one way or another.”

I slide down the tree trunk and settle onto the soft ground. The pain of the bark scraping my back is strangely welcome. “Please, Michael.”

“I’ll be back in two minutes.”

As soon as he disappears, I dump the contents of my father’s bag on the ground in front of me. The Playboy, the maps, the letters, the prunes, the sniper patch, the sketchbook, the spiral album of snapshots. I hold my breath as I open the album, with its photos tucked into plastic sleeves for posterity. I’ve never been more afraid to look at something in my life. If I find more photographs of children, I’ll simply keep holding my breath until I pass out. I’ve failed at that before, but today…

The first photograph shows a white-tailed deer in low light, a buck with ten antler points. Relief almost makes me exhale, but I don’t. Every photo in this book is a potential horror.

The next picture shows a black bear cub. The one after, a cottonmouth moccasin coiled around a cypress tree.

My heart stutters in my chest.

The next photo shows a naked brown body. But it’s not a child. Not a prepubescent one, anyway. It’s Louise Butler, thirty years younger than when I talked to her in her little house on the island. She can’t possibly be eighteen in this picture. She’s standing on the edge of the river at sunset, facing the camera without a trace of shame. The grace and power of her nude body make Lola Falana on the pages of Playboy seem common.

I flip the page.

Louise again, at river’s edge, this time sitting in profile against the sunset in what looks like the lotus position.

My mouth goes dry at the next image. In it, my father stands with one arm around Louise’s waist. She’s naked, but he’s wearing an old pair of denim cutoffs and nothing else. Bronzed by the sun, he looks as fit and happy as I ever saw him in life. The image is slightly off-kilter, as though he had set the camera on a log and shot the photo with a timer. I never saw him look that happy when he was with my mother.

The next photo shows several black children playing in a dusty road, but they’re all wearing clothes. As I flip through the little binder, the images blend into a montage of life on the island. Not the privileged life I knew as the granddaughter of Dr. and Mrs. Kirkland, but the daily life of the blacks who lived there year-round. One photo shows Daddy with a young black man-Jesse Billups with a ’fro? — sitting on a porch playing box guitars. Bottles of cheap wine stand on the porch rail, and a heavy black woman with pendulous breasts dances barefoot on the ground. Luke has a glass bottleneck on the third finger of his left hand. I can almost hear the cutting wail of the notes as he draws the slide quivering along the strings.

The last photograph is of me.

I’m sitting on the floor of the barn with my legs crossed, much like Louise in her lotus photo. My elbows are on my knees, my chin in my hands, and I’m staring into the lens with big round eyes that look exactly like my father’s. I look more at peace in that picture than I’ve ever felt in my life.

I look about two years old.

What happened to me after that? What took away the peace in those eyes? Who took it away? The person who shot this picture?

With a long exhalation of relief, I drop the album. It falls beside the rotten prunes on the wire. There’s something revolting about keeping food stuffed in a bag beneath a floor. The prunes have an especially nasty look, as though they were being saved for some reason beyond the ken of normal human beings. A necklace, maybe, like something a peasant would use to ward off vampires.

“Miss Catherine? That you over there?”

A black man in grease-stained khaki work clothes has appeared among the trees. It’s Mose, the yardman. After so many years at Malmaison, he moves among these trees like a ghost. He and Daddy must have run into each other many times on their solitary forays under the canopy of oaks.

“It’s me, Mose.”

“You all right? You fall down or something?”