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  “This house belongs to Connie Lou Parks, my aunt, who let me in and who rents it to her daughter, my cousin Karen, and, I would guess, to your friend Pete,” I said. “I used to live here when I was a kid, and by the way, I’m a cop too.”

  “Sure you are,” said the older one.

  “Can I show you my creds?”

  “Careful,” he said.

  I reached to push back my jacket, revealing the shoulder holster.

  “Gun!” the African American officer shouted, and he and his partner dropped into a combat crouch.

  I thought for sure they were going to shoot me if I tried to get my ID, so I eased my hand away, saying, “Of course I’ve got a gun. I am a homicide detective with the Washington, DC, police department. And in fact, I have two guns on me. In addition to the Glock forty, I have a small nine-millimeter Ruger LC9 strapped to my right ankle.”

  “Name?” the older cop demanded.

  “Alex Cross. You?”

  “Detectives Frost and Carmichael. I’m Frost,” he said as he and his partner straightened up. “So here’s what you are going to do, Alex Cross. Strip the jacket, right sleeve first, and toss it here.”

  There was no sense in arguing, so I did as he asked and threw my light sports jacket down the hallway.

  “Cover me, Carmichael,” the older cop said, and he crouched so his partner could keep me squarely in his field of fire.

  They were conducting themselves by the book. They didn’t know me from Adam, and they were handling the situation the way any veteran cop back in DC, including me, would have handled it.

  When Frost got to my jacket, I said, “Left breast pocket.”

  He squinted at me as he backed up a few feet, still in that crouch, and fished out the folder with my badge and ID.

  “Drop your gun, Lou,” Frost said. “He’s who he says he is. Dr. Alex Cross, DC homicide.”

  Carmichael hesitated, then lowered his weapon slightly and demanded, “You have a license to carry concealed in the state of North Carolina, Dr. Cross?”

  “I have a federal carry license,” I said. “I used to be FBI. It’s in there, behind the ID.”

  Frost found it and nodded to his partner.

  Carmichael looked irritated, but he holstered his weapon. Frost did the same, then picked up my jacket, dusted it off, and handed it to me, along with my credentials.

  “Mind telling us what you’re doing here?” Carmichael asked.

  “I’m looking into Stefan Tate’s case. He’s my cousin.”

  Carmichael went stony. Frost looked like some bitterness had crawled up the back of his throat.

  Frost said, “Starksville may not be the big city, Detective Cross, but we are well-trained professionals. Your cousin Stefan Tate? That sonofabitch is as guilty as they come.”

  Chapter

  7

  As I walked across the cul-de-sac on Loupe Street to the third bungalow, I was mindful of the unmarked police cruiser pulling out behind me, and I wondered about the strength of the case against my young cousin. I’d have to get Naomi to show me the evidence, and—

  Aunt Connie’s animated voice came through the screen door, followed by the sound of women cackling and men braying over something she’d said. The breeze shifted and carried the mysterious and wonderful odors from the kitchen of my aunt Hattie Parks Tate, my late mother’s younger sister. I hadn’t smelled those scents in thirty-five years, but they made me flash on boyhood memories: climbing these same front steps, smelling these same smells, and reaching for the screen door, eager to be inside.

  This house had been one of my refuges, I thought, remembering how peaceful and orderly it was compared to the routine chaos across the street. Nothing had changed about that, I decided after peering in through the screen and seeing my family sitting around Hattie’s spotless house with plates piled high with her remarkable food, contentment on all their faces.

  “Knock, knock,” I said as I opened the door and stepped in.

  “Dad!” Ali shouted from a wicker couch, waving a bone at me. “You gotta try Aunt Hattie’s fried rabbit!”

  “And her potato salad,” Jannie said, rolling her eyes with pleasure.

  Hattie Tate bustled out of her kitchen, wiping her hands on her apron and beaming from ear to ear. “Land sakes, Alex, what took you so long to come see me?”

  I hadn’t seen my mother’s sister in nearly ten years, but Aunt Hattie hadn’t aged a day. In her early sixties, she was still slender and tall with a beautiful oval face and wide almond-shaped eyes. I’d forgotten how much she looked like my mom. Long-buried grief swirled through me again.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Hattie,” I said. “I…”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she said, tearing up. She rushed over and threw her arms around me. “You’ve given me hope just being here.”

  “We’ll do everything we can for Stefan,” I promised.

  Hattie beamed through her tears, said, “I knew you’d come. Stefan knew too.”

  “How is he?”

  Before my aunt could answer, a man in his midseventies shuffled into the room with a walker. He was dressed in slippers, brown sweatpants, and a baggy white T-shirt, and he looked around, puzzled, then became agitated.

  “Hattie!” he cried. “There’s strangers in the house!”

  My aunt was off across the room like a shot, saying soothingly, “It’s okay, Cliff. It’s just family. Alex’s family.”

  “Alex?” he said.

  “It’s me, Uncle Cliff,” I said, going to him. “Alex Cross.”

  My uncle stared at me blankly for several moments while Hattie held his elbow, rubbed his back, and said, “Alex, Christina and Jason’s boy. You remember, don’t you?”

  Uncle Cliff blinked as if spotting something bright in the deepest recesses of his failing mind. “Nah,” he said. “That Alex just a scared little boy.”

  I smiled weakly at him, said, “That boy grew up.”

  Uncle Cliff licked his lips, studied me some more, and said, “You tall like her. But you got his face. Where he got to now, your daddy?”

  Hattie’s expression tightened painfully. “Jason died a long time ago, Cliff.”

  “He did?” Cliff said, his eyes watering.

  Hattie rested her face against his arm and said, “Cliff loved your father, Alex. Your father was his best friend, isn’t that right? Cliff?”

  “When he die? Jason?”

  “Thirty-five years ago,” I said.

  My uncle frowned, said, “No, that’s…oh…Christina’s next to Brock, but Jason, he’s…”

  My aunt cocked her head. “Cliff?”

  Her husband turned puzzled again. “Man, Jason, he liked blues.”

  “And jazz,” Nana Mama said.

  “He like blues most,” Cliff insisted. “I show you?”

  Hattie softened. “You want your guitar, honey?”

  “Six-string,” he said, and he shuffled on his own to a chair, acting as if no one else were with him.

  Aunt Hattie disappeared and soon came back carrying a six-string steel guitar that I vaguely remembered from my childhood. When my uncle took the guitar, fused it to his chest, and began to play some old blues tune by heart and soul, it was as if time had rolled in reverse, and I saw myself as a five- or six-year-old sitting in my dad’s lap, listening to Clifford play that same raucous tune.

  My mother was in that memory too. She had a drink in her hand and sat with my brothers, hooting and cheering Clifford on. That memory was so real that for a second I could have sworn I smelled both my parents there in the room with me.

  My uncle played the entire song, finishing with a flourish that showed just how good he’d once been. When he stopped, everyone clapped. His face lit up at that, and he said, “You like that, you come to the show tonight, hear?”

  “What show?” Ali asked.

  “Cliff and the Midnights,” my uncle said as if Ali should have known. “We’re playing down to the…”

  His voice trail
ed off, and that confusion returned. He looked around for his wife, said, “Hattie? Where my gig tonight? You know I can’t be late.”

  “You won’t be,” she said, taking the guitar from him. “I’ll make sure.”

  My uncle chewed on that a bit before saying, “All aboard now, Hattie.”

  “All aboard now, Cliff,” she said, setting the guitar aside. “Lunch serving in the dining car. You hungry, Cliff?”

  “My shift over?” he asked, surprised.

  My aunt glanced at me, said, “You have a break coming to you, dear. I’ll get you a plate, bring it to you in the dining car. Connie? Can you take him?”

  “Where’s Pinkie?” Cliff said as Connie Lou bustled over to him.

  “You know he’s down in Florida,” she said. “C’mon, now. And use your walker. Train’s an awful place to fall.”

  “Humph,” Cliff said, getting to his feet. “I worked this train twenty-five years and I ain’t fallen yet.”

  “Just the same,” Aunt Connie said and followed him as he shuffled back down the hallway.

  “I’m sorry about that,” Aunt Hattie said to everyone.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” Nana Mama said.

  Aunt Hattie wrung her hands and nodded emotionally, and then turned and went off to the kitchen. I stood there feeling guilty that I’d not come back and seen my uncle in better times.

  “Alex, you go get some food so Ali and I can have seconds,” Bree said.

  “Leave some for me,” Jannie said.

  I followed Aunt Hattie into her kitchen. She was standing at the sink with her hand over her mouth, looking like she was fighting not to break down.

  But then she saw me and put on a brave smile. “Help yourself, Alex.”

  I picked up a plate on the kitchen table and began to load it with fried rabbit, potato salad, a green-bean-and-mushroom dish, and thick slices of homemade bread, the source of one of those delicious odors I’d smelled.

  “How long since you knew?” I asked.

  “That Cliff was suffering from dementia?” Hattie asked. “Five years since the diagnosis, but more like nine since he started forgetting things.”

  “You his sole caregiver?”

  “Connie Lou helps,” she said. “And Stefan, this last year or so he’s been home.”

  “How’re you getting by?”

  “Cliff’s railway pension and the Social Security.”

  “Enough?”

  “We make do.”

  “Hard on you, though.”

  “Very,” she said, and pushed back at her hair. “And now all this with Stefan…” Hattie stopped, threw up her hands, and choked out, “He’s my miracle baby. How could my miracle baby…”

  I remembered Nana Mama telling me that the doctors said Hattie and Cliff would never have children, and then, in her thirties, she’d suddenly gotten pregnant with Stefan.

  I put my plate down and was about to go over to console her when Ali ran in, said, “Dad! I swear to God, there’s like a gazillion lightning bugs outside!”

  Chapter

  8

  When I stepped out onto the front porch, it was long past dark, and through the screen I could see fireflies everywhere, thousands of them, like I hadn’t seen since I was a boy. I flashed on images of Uncle Clifford teaching me and my brothers how to catch them with glass jars, remembered how amazed I’d been to see just how much light two or three of them could generate.

  As if reading my mind, Aunt Hattie said, “You want me to get him a jar, Alex?”

  “That would be fine.”

  “Got a big Skippy jar in the recycling,” she said, and she turned to fetch it.

  We all went outside into Aunt Hattie’s yard and watched the fireflies dance and blink like so many distant stars. I felt warm seeing Ali learn how to catch them, grounded by something I’d thought I’d lost all those years ago.

  Bree hooked her arm through mine, said, “What are you smiling about?”

  “Good memories,” I said, and I gestured at the fireflies. “They were always here in the summer. It’s…I don’t know.”

  “Comforting?” Nana Mama asked.

  “More like eternal,” I said.

  Before my wife could respond, the shouting began down the street.

  “You fuck with us, that’s what you’ll get!”

  I turned to a searing image that locked me up tight.

  Well down the block, beneath one of the few streetlights on Loupe Street, two African American boys in their teens struggled against wrist bonds that led to a rope line controlled by three older boys dressed hip-hop. The two at the front were white. The one at the back was black. All three seemed to be taking sadistic pleasure in dragging the two younger boys along, taunting them and telling them to move if they knew what was good for them. It smacked of a chain gang and that galled me.

  I glanced at Bree, who looked as wronged as I felt.

  “Don’t you go sticking your nose in there now, Alex,” Aunt Connie warned. “That’s a hornet’s nest, that’s what that is. Just ask Stefan.”

  My instinct was to ignore her, to run down there and stop the barbarism.

  “Listen to her,” Aunt Hattie said. “They’re some kind of local gang, and those younger boys are just getting initiated.”

  They’d taken a left on Dogwood Road and disappeared by then.

  “But they had those boys tied to a rope, Dad,” Jannie complained. “Isn’t that illegal?”

  That was the way I saw it. Those boys could not have been the age of consent. But I swallowed at the acid taste in my mouth and forced myself to stay in my aunt’s front yard, surrounded by fireflies and the North Carolina night sounds, the tree frogs, the cicadas, and the hoot owls, all so strangely familiar and menacing.

  “You said ask Stefan about the gang,” Bree said.

  Aunt Connie glanced at Aunt Hattie, who said, “Don’t know the particulars, but I think he had some troubles with them over to the school. So did Patty.”

  “Who’s Patty?” Bree asked.

  “Stefan’s fiancée,” Aunt Hattie said. “And another gym teacher at the school.”

  “What kind of troubles did Stefan have at the school?” I asked Naomi.

  My niece yawned, said, “You’ll want to hear it from him in the morning.”

  Ali was yawning now too. And Nana Mama looked ready to snooze.

  “Okay, let’s call it a night,” I said. “Get moved in.”

  I hugged Aunt Connie and turned to do the same to Aunt Hattie, who seemed nervous. In a low voice she said, “I want you to be careful, Alex.”

  I smiled, said, “I’m a big boy now. Even got a badge and a gun.”

  “I know,” she said. “But you’ve been away an awful long time, and you may have tried to forget, but this town can be a cruel place.”

  I was aware of old emotions stirring deep in me, like lava starting to swell in a long-dormant volcano.

  “I haven’t forgotten,” I said, and I kissed her cheek. “How could I?”

  Aunt Connie and Naomi stayed behind to help Aunt Hattie clean up. I led my family back across the cul-de-sac toward our bungalow and heartache.

  “They’re nice,” Bree said. “Sweet.”

  “They are that,” Nana Mama allowed. “My, isn’t the air cool here, though?”

  We all agreed the Starksville weather was a far cry from a DC summer.

  “Sad about your uncle,” Jannie said. “I guess I’ve never seen someone, you know, not like Nana.”

  “Not like me?” my grandmother said.

  “Sharp, Nana,” Jannie said. “You know.”

  “Still in possession of my faculties?” Nana Mama said. “That can be a blessing and a curse.”

  “Why a curse?” Ali asked when we reached the car.

  “There are some things in a long life that are best put aside, young man, especially at night,” she said softly. “Right now, this old, old lady needs a bed.”

  Jannie took her into the house
and I started unloading the car. My daughter came back out to help me while Bree got Ali to sleep.

  “Dad, what causes someone to age one way and someone else another?” she asked.

  “Lots of things,” I said. “Genetics, certainly. And your diet. And whether you’re active, physically and mentally.”

  “Nana is,” Jannie said. “She’s always reading or doing something to help out, and she takes all those long walks.”

  “Probably why she’ll live to a hundred,” I said.

  “You think?”

  “I’m betting on her,” I said, pulling the last heavy bag out of the trunk.

  “Then I am too,” Jannie said, and she followed me through the screen door onto the porch. “Dad?”

  “Yeah?” I said, stopping to look back at her.

  “I’m sorry for being such a bitch on the ride down,” she said.

  “You weren’t a bitch. Just a little testy.”

  She laughed. “You’re kind.”

  “I try,” I said.

  “What’s it like? You know, coming back here after so long?”

  I set the suitcase down and looked through the porch screen at the fireflies and the lit windows of my aunts’ homes, and I sniffed at some sweet smell in the air.

  “In some ways it seems remarkably unchanged, as if I left yesterday,” I said. “And in others, it’s like there’s a whole other life here now, and my memories don’t apply at all, like they happened to someone else.”

  Chapter

  9

  Despite the drone of the ceiling fan over our bed, I stirred every hour or so as trains rumbled through Starksville. Shortly after dawn, I woke for good to the sound of blue jays scolding in the pine trees behind the bungalow.

  Lying there by Bree, listening to those shrill calls, I flashed hard on myself when I was very young, no more than four or five. I’d been lying in bed, blankets over my head but awake, while my brothers were sleeping. I remembered the window had been open, and there were birds chattering. I also remembered being scared by the birds, as if their calling was what had made me want to hide beneath those covers.