The ghosts of my ancestors did not visit me. The ghost of another man did. His name was L.Q. Navarro. In life he was the most handsome man I ever knew, with jet black hair and wide shoulders and skin as brown and smooth as newly dyed leather. When he appeared to me he wore the clothes he had died in, a dark pinstriped suit and dusty boots, a floppy gray Stetson, a white shirt that glowed like electrified snow. His hand-tooled gunbelt and holstered revolver hung on his thigh like a silly afterthought. Through the top buttonhole of his shirt he had inserted the stem of a scarlet rose.

Sometimes he disappeared into sunlight, his form breaking into millions of golden particles. At other times I did pro bono work on hopeless defenses, and my spectral visitor declared a temporary amnesty and waited patiently each night by himself among the mesquite trees and blackjack oaks on a distant hillside.

The phone rang at 10 a.m. on a Sunday morning in April.

'They got my boy in the jailhouse. I want him out,' the voice said.

'Is that you, Vernon?'

'No, it's the nigger in the woodpile.'

Vernon Smothers, the worst business mistake in my life. He farmed seventy acres of my land on shares, and I had reached a point where I was almost willing to pay him not to come to work.

'What's he charged with?' I asked.

I could hear Vernon chewing on something-a piece of hard candy, perhaps. I could almost see the knotted thoughts in his eyes as he looked for the trap he always found in other people's words.

'Vernon?'

'He was drunk again. Down by the river.'

'Call a bondsman.'

'They made up some lies… They're saying he raped a girl down there.'

'Where's the girl?'