"Yes."
"One of my reporters requested a Sovereignty Commission file today, and I was more than a little surprised to learn that it was one of the forty-two."
I think for a minute. "Not Del Payton?"
She nods. "I thought you'd be interested."
"Surprised, anyway."
"I saw you talking to the D.A. inside. Anything I should know about?"
"He's just an old school friend."
"He didn't look too friendly."
Caitlin Masters doesn't miss anything. I wonder what she would do if she knew her story had got me shot at tonight. Probably tear into the story like a bulldog.
"You're dangerous, aren't you?"
She laughs softly and pulls a loose thread of linen from the front of her strapless dress. Her shoulders are lean and ghostly white in the shadows, accenting the long, graceful lines of her neck.
"I try to be. You're sure you won't reconsider lunch tomorrow? I promise to show a little remorse about the articles."
Her tone is casual enough, but there is more in it than hunger for a story. Her steady gaze has nothing to do with the words she spoke. Whatever I felt when we touched after the interview yesterday, she felt too. Between us floats a curious longing to feel that shock again, that aliveness. Without preamble she reaches out with her free hand and takes my right, her eyes unwavering. Her hand is cool, but a rush of warmth runs up my arm.
She smiles. "Feels good, doesn't it?"
It's only her hand, but the intimacy of her touch is undeniable. It's been so long since I've had any physical contact with a woman that it almost paralyzes me. Sarah's illness made it impossible at the end, and in the months since her death I've felt no response at all to the flirtations of the women I've met. It's as though the sexual component of my personality, once dominant, has been wrapped in so many layers of guilt and grief that the prospect of having to work through them with someone new discourages me from even trying. But with one simple gesture Caitlin Masters has cut through all of that.
"I suppose I'm being forward," she says. "By Southern standards anyway."
The urge to kiss her is a living thing inside my chest, and with it returns the guilt I felt yesterday, magnified a hundredfold. I close my eyes and squeeze her hand, fighting and savoring the pleasure at the same time. As though bidden by my thoughts, her lips brush mine.
When I open my eyes, hers are only inches away, green and wide, full of curiosity. She closes them, rises on tiptoe, and presses her lips to mine, sending another thrill of heat through me. From the first moment it is a knowing kiss, not the timid tasting of strangers, but the self-assured encounter of lovers who recognize each other. Her tongue is warm against mine, her lips cool. My senses read every curve and valley beneath the linen, and my arousal is immediate. Immediate and obvious. I slip my hand into the small of her back and for a moment kiss her as I truly want to, and the passion of her response explodes the boundaries I had perceived around us. As she kisses me, I feel something shift deep in my soul, a heavy door, and whatever stirs behind that door is too powerful to set free here, in this place. I break the kiss.
"Well," she says with a laugh, "I guess that answers that question."
"Which question?"
"Did we really feel something yesterday."
Her cheeks are flushed, and part of her hair has fallen around her neck. She points at the edge of the flower bed beside us, where her gimlet glass lies in the monkey grass. "I dropped my drink."
"I'm sorry, Caitlin."
"I can get another one."
"I meant for getting so… you know."
She shakes her head. "I liked it. Hey, you didn't break any laws here. You look like you saw a ghost." Her smile vanishes. "You did see a ghost. God, I'm such an ass sometimes."
"It's all right."
She takes my hand again. "This just happened, okay? Nobody's fault. We'll just be friends, if you want."
"This is unfamiliar territory for me."
"We're the only ones out here, Penn. Everything's fine." She reaches behind her neck to pin her hair back up. "Do you need a ride home?"
"No. I need to talk to Sam Jacobs. He'll give me a ride. Thanks, though."
She releases my hand and gives me the kind of encouraging smile you give a sick friend, then walks up the steps ahead of me. As she turns the doorknob, I reach out and touch her elbow. "I do think that lunch would be nice, though."
She turns and smiles. "Same place?"
"Works for me. Twelve?"
"I'll meet you there."
She opens the veneered door and goes inside, and I follow, watching her wend her way through the crowd in the hall, drawing looks from most of the women and all of the men. A woman that beautiful and perceptive hasn't been seen in these precincts for quite some time. Not since Livy Marston came back from the University of Virginia to serve as Queen of the Confederate Pageant.
As Caitlin disappears into one of the great rooms, I detour out of the hallway to search for Sam. The first room I enter is relatively empty, but the arched proscenium leading to the next is completely blocked by a semicircle of men and women. I move closer to the line of backs, then freeze.
The focus of their attention is Judge Leo Marston.
The mere sight of him raises my temperature a couple of degrees, from anger mostly, but also-though I hate to admit it-from a residue of fear. Most of the men I knew as a boy I outgrew during high school, and they seem small to me now. Leo Marston still has three inches on me, and age has not diminished his physical presence. He must be nearly seventy by now, but he looks as though he could outfight any man here. With bulk in proportion to his height, he dwarfs the men standing in his audience. He masks his rawboned body in bespoke suits shipped to him once a year from London, but his out-sized hands betray the power beneath. Like my father, Marston has kept his hair through the years, and he wears it in a steel-gray brush cut reminiscent of the leading men of the 1950s. When I was younger, I thought of him as an oversized Lee Marvin with a patina of Southern refinement. But no amount of refinement can conceal the animal alertness of his eyes. The irises are ice blue with gray rims, giving him a wolfish aspect, and they never settle anywhere for long. In moments they will pick me from the crowd.
I step behind a tall man to my right, removing myself from Leo's line of sight. Still, his mellifluous basso carries to me without losing any volume to distance. It's one of his most formidable weapons as an attorney, second only to his intellect. The timbre of that voice is graven forever in the circuits of my brain. Twenty years ago I listened to it accuse my father of negligence bordering on murder, first indirectly, as Marston tried to draw out testimony from reluctant nurses and technicians, then directly, like an inquisitor, as he cross-examined Dad on the stand. I took two weeks off from college to attend the trial, and by the second Friday I was ready to confront Marston on his way home from court and put a bullet through his heart.
"My point," Marston is saying, "is that the Germans are either at your feet or at your throat. We have to let BASF know that while we want them to locate here, we won't grovel."
"But we will," someone says. "And they know it."
Everyone laughs, then stops abruptly when they see that Marston does not share their humor.
"It all comes down to dollars," he says in a cold voice. "That's when you find out who needs whom. And that remains to be settled."
He continues in this line, tantalizing the men with his inside knowledge and the women with his references to money. When people speak of "old Natchez families," they mean the Marstons. Leo's great-great grandfather,
Albert Marston, owned a massive cotton plantation in Louisiana, which he administered from an Italianate mansion in Natchez called Tuscany. During the Civil War, Albert paid lip service to the Confederate cause while lavishly entertaining the Union officers occupying the city. He was the first Natchez planter to sign the loyalty oath to the Union, which enabled him to maintain his assets and continue to do business while prouder men lost everything. Many called Marston a traitor, but he laughed all the way to the bank.