Her mouth fell open in a kind of horror and she covered it with one cupping hand and sat back down on the swing and began to weep, convulsively.

It wasn’t a nice thing to say, and was of course a lie; but it got her attention.

“He isn’t a nice man, your Mr. Thomas.”

“Neither… neither… neither are you.”

“That’s true. But I’m not here to fuck you.”

“Do you… have to use language like that?”

“I know some of my words aren’t pretty. Neither is the world, sometimes. Neither was the sight of your aunt at the bottom of those steps with her neck broken, I’d imagine.”

“Oh, please… please stop.”

I sat on the swing by her. I reached out to touch her shoulder, then thought better of it. I tried to put the intent of that gesture into the sound of my voice.

“I want you to tell me what happened this morning,” I said. “Something happened between you, your aunt and Mr. Thomas. Tell me what it is.”

She looked at me with big, beautiful wet blue eyes. They grabbed at me somewhere, in the back of my throat or in my stomach or somewhere, where I didn’t know I could be reached anymore, and held me and I had this crazy urge to reach out to her, to hold her, and not for any reason remotely sexual, but then the urge passed, and I was glad it did.

“How did you know?” she said.

“I didn’t,” I said. “Not for sure. Until you confirmed it just now.”

“Please… please don’t play any more of these games with me.”

“No games. I had a good idea something happened. It might have happened just between your aunt and Mr. Thomas, without you around. But when I saw you, here, on the swing, I could tell. I could tell you were there.”

“I wasn’t there when it happened. I didn’t know my aunt had… fallen… until I saw her, when Charley and I, we found her, this morning. But I was there, earlier, when…” And she shuddered.