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than me.”
    Luke reached inside his suit jacket and withdrew a crumpled envelope. “Your mama left this with me when they took her off to the hospital in Lake Village. She said I was to give it to you in case you didn’t make it home in time.”
    Skinner tucked the envelope into his pocket. “Luke—did she ever talk about my daddy? About what happened?”
    A muscle in Luke’s cheek jerked. “Only once. And what she said didn’t make no sense because she was in pain and full of pills. We better head on back to the house. Mrs. Cake bread’s making sure the guests get seen to, but I reckon we ought to be there all the same.”
    As after-funeral buffets go, Edna Cade Blackwell’s was one of the better ones Choctaw County saw that year. There was a smoked ham, a plate of fried chicken, a nice side of roast beef, three Jell-O molds, and a respectable selection of pies and cakes prepared by the Methodist Women’s Prayer Circle.
    Mrs. Cakebread, the preacher’s wife, bustled about the kitchen, tending to the percolator and making sure every one had coffee. Where Reverend Cakebread was a tall man with a vague, somewhat distracted air about him, his better half was a short, squat woman composed of equal parts hair spray and nervous energy.
    â€œWhen’s the last time either one of y’all ate?” Mrs. Cakebread said in way of greeting the moment Luke and Skinner stepped inside the house.
    When neither Skinner nor his stepfather could answer the question with any certainty the minister’s wife clucked her tongue and hurried them out of their raincoats, shoving plates heaped with potato salad, deviled eggs and thick slices of ham into their hands.
    â€œY’all got to keep up your strength! You’re doing Edna no service by starving!”
    Skinner stared at the deviled eggs on his plate and felt his stomach barrel roll. Luckily, Mrs. Cakebread’s attention was diverted by the percolator. If it’s one thing Methodists do after service gatherings its drink coffee.
    Skinner wandered into the parlor, still clutching his unwanted repast, and stood beside the fireplace. He felt every bit as wooden as the mantelpiece, if not as useful.
    An old man came up and squinted at him through his thick bifocals as if trying to classify a strange type of insect. “Yer Edna’s boy, ain’t that right?”
    Skinner felt his stomach cinch even tighter as he belatedly recognized the decrepit figure standing in front of him. It was Enos Stackpole, their former next-door neighbor, back when they had the farm. The intervening years had been far from kind to the old coot. Enos wore an ill-fitting three piece powder blue polyester leisure suit that sagged at the shoulders and crotch and badly worn cowboy boots with cracked heels. His long, white hair was swept back from his bulging brow and slicked with enough pomade to grease a Buick. His long, bony fingers looked even larger now that the rest of his body had fallen into decay and there were liver spots the size of silver dollars on the back of his hands.
    Enos had a reputation as something of an eccentric, which is to say he was the town loon. But his family had once been powerful—if not omnipotent—in the years before the Civil War, and some of that glamour still clung to its debased heir. He lived alone in the rotting remains of his great-grandfather’s old plantation house on the outskirts of town, his only company a collection of rabbits he kept as both pets and food in ramshackle hutches. When he was a boy the half-mad hermit had held a strange fascination for Skinner. Enos rarely bathed, never brushed his teeth and had allowed his ancestral home to fall into such a state of disrepair that the only things holding the walls together were the weeds growing up through the floorboards and the termites holding hands. Perhaps what intrigued Skinner the most about the old coot was the fact he