"You don't understand, Boots," I said, and sat up on the edge of the bed.
"Understand what?" She put her hand on my bare back. "Dave, your muscles are tight as iron. What's the matter?"
"Just a minute."
I didn't want to fall prey to superstition or my own imaginings or Elrod Sykes's manipulations. But I did. I clicked on the table lamp and pulled my old footlocker out of the closet. Inside a half-dozen shoe boxes at the bottom were the memorabilia of my childhood years with my father back in the 1940s: my collections of baseball cards, Indian banner stones and quartz arrow points, and the minié balls that we used to find in a freshly plowed sugarcane field right after the first rain.
I took out a crushed shoe box that was tied with kite twine and sat back down on the bed with it. I slipped off the twine, removed the top of the box, and set it on the nightstand.
"This was the best gift my father ever gave me," I said. "On my brother's and my birthday he'd always fix cush-cush and sausage for our breakfast, and we'd always find an unusual present waiting for us by our plate. On my twelfth birthday I got this."
I lifted the heavy revolver out of the box and unwrapped the blackened oil rag from it.
"He had been laid off in the oil field and he took a job tearing down some old slave quarters on a sugar plantation about ten miles down the bayou. There was one cabin separate from the others, with a brick foundation, and he figured it must have belonged to the overseer. Anyway, when he started tearing the boards out of the walls he found some flattened minié' balls in the wood, and he knew there had probably been a skirmish between some federals and Confederates around there. Then he tore out what was left of the floor, and in a crawl space, stuck back in the bricks, was this Remington .44 revolver."
It had been painted with rust and cobweb when my father had found it, the cylinder and hammer frozen against the frame, the wood grips eaten away by mold and insects, but I had soaked it for a week in gasoline and rubbed the steel smooth with emery paper and rags until it had the dull sheen of an old nickel.
"It's just an antique pistol your father gave you, Dave," she said. "Maybe you said something about it to Elrod. Then he got drunk and mixed it up with some kind of fantasy he has."
"No, he said the officer's name." I opened the nightstand drawer and took out a small magnifying glass. "He said it had belonged to a Major Moss."
"So what?"
"Boots, there's a name cut into the trigger guard. I haven't thought about it in years. I couldn't have mentioned i
t to him."
I rested the revolver across my thighs and looked through the magnifying glass at the soft glow of light off the brass housing around the trigger. The steel felt cold and slick with oil against my thighs.
"Take a look," I said, and handed her the glass and the revolver.
She folded her legs under her and squinted one eye through the glass. "It says 'CSA,' " she said.
"Wrong place. Right at the back of the guard."
She held the pistol closer to the glass. Then she looked up at me and there were white spots in her cheeks.
"J. Moss." Her voice was dry when she said it. Then she said the name again. "It says J. Moss."
"It sure does."
She wrapped the blackened oil cloth around the pistol and replaced it in the shoe box. She put her hand in mine and squeezed it.
"Dave?"
"Yes?"
"I think Elrod Sykes is a nice man, but we mustn't have him here again."
She turned out the light, lay back on the pillow, and looked out at the moonlight in the pecan trees, her face caught with a private, troubled thought like the silent beating of a bird's wings inside a cage.
Chapter 5
Early the next morning the sheriff stopped me in the corridor as I was on my way to my office.
"Special. Agent Gomez is here," he said. A smile worked at the corner of his mouth.
"Where?"