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By Root 420 0

flare. The photograph was taken, presumably, by the woman lying dead in the bedroom. She’s not in it, at any rate, though her husband is. It shows a table in the sidewalk area of the Columbia Restaurant on St. Armands Circle. The cloth is strewn with plates of half-eaten food and jugs of half-drunk sangria. Candles and lamps are lit—it’s midevening, middinner. Phil Wilkins is in the center, next to a young-looking Warner, with another two women and two men, most of whom Hunter half recognizes. They look happy and full to the brim with confidence and joie de wealth and circumstance, their shared grins, teeth, and tans impregnable as a fortress: except the couple in the middle, whose smiles look a little forced, as if there’s something on their minds.

Behind and to one side of the table, at the edge of the range of the camera’s flash, is another man. He’s looking down as he locks the battered car he’s just arrived in. He’s totally unaware of the Kodak moment twenty feet away. The man is John Hunter.

At the moment the picture was taken, they didn’t even know he was there. He remembers the night, however. About thirty seconds after this picture was snapped, he noticed Phil Wilkins at the table, and Phil stood up and—in retrospect—took care to come over to Hunter rather than let it happen the other way around.

They had a brief conversation. Though Hunter knew a couple of the others by sight—and had met Warner a couple of times—none appeared to pay him any attention. His mind had been on other things in any event. He was keen to go meet his woman. He waved vaguely at the table and hurried away. He arrived at a much cheaper restaurant on the other side of the Circle to find that his date hadn’t arrived yet, and was relieved.

He was less relieved when, an hour later, she still hadn’t shown up. He eventually left alone.

Yes, he remembers this night. It was his last as a free man. It was the night before the cops found the mangled body of the only woman he’d ever really loved, and blamed her murder on him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I woke with a cricked neck and a head that felt very terrible. I was sprawled on the floor, face pressed into the rug, forcing my head at a right angle to the direction it usually faced. My neck had clearly been unhappy about this for a while, and got straight onto announcing the fact now that I was awake. Opening my eyes made everything much worse immediately. The room was full of morning light streaming from the glass door onto the balcony. It smelled of ash and wine.

I blinked and focused and saw my phone lying on the floor near my head. The screen said 7:35. The panic this induced had me sitting upright, very suddenly.

Cassandra’s bedroom door was shut.

I had time to feel a beat of relief that I hadn’t made a total fool of myself by trying to follow her in there in the dead of night.

Then I noticed that the bathroom door was closed, too, and that there was now a word on it. The word was scrawled in letters that had dripped and run like spilled red wine.

The word was modified.

Someone was banging on the front door.

I scrambled to my feet, pushing myself upward via the sofa, meanwhile stepping on the saucer Cassandra had been using for an ashtray, flipping it over, and spreading ash and lipsticked butts everywhere.

I grabbed my phone. I lurched over to the bathroom door. The letters there had not been written in wine, of course. Wine would have simply run, leaving nothing but a faint residue. These letters had dripped more slowly, viscously. The red was browner, matte where it had dried. It was blood. It had to be blood.

I pushed the door open. “Cass?”

Just the bathroom. The shower cubicle. Water dripped from the fixture slowly. No one there.

More banging on the front door. I turned toward the bedroom. My head was pounding and I could feel sweat popping out all over my body and scalp.

I pushed the bedroom door. It opened six inches, showing me a strip of the far wall.

“Cass? You in here?”

There was no response, so I said it again, fighting against the climbing volume of the hammering