“Your mother is Betty, isn’t she?” Catherine asked, as he rolled typing paper into the machine.

“Yes, Ma’am,” he said reluctantly, and Catherine felt a pit-of-the-stomach dismay.

Betty Eakins had been the Lintons’ maid for years, until she had grown too old and arthritic to work any more.

Catherine had never called their maid anything but “Betty”; and she had decided, after a year away in college, that that was a shameful thing. Catherine had not even known Betty’s last name for the first years of the woman’s employment. Catherine’s visits home had been more and more awkward as her awareness of what lay around her became acute, to the point that Catherine was secretly glad when Betty grew too infirm to iron the Lintons’ sheets. Catherine’s parents had died before they could replace Betty with another maid.

“How is she?” asked Catherine. She had to say something, she felt.

“Mama’s fine,” he said curtly. Percy Eakins’s face rivaled Catherine’s for blankness.

“She’s a very old woman now,” he said more gently-whether out of fear of being rude to a white woman or because he sensed Catherine’s misery, she couldn’t tell. She chose to regard his softened tone as absolution for the sin of having offended racially.

“I’ll tell her I saw you. She talks about you all the time,” he said finally.

And their personal conversation was closed.

He took her statement in a meticulous professional manner, in question-and-answer form.

“Your full name?”

“Catherine Scott Linton.”

“Your age?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Place of employment and position?”

“The Lowfield Gazette. I’m the society editor.”

“Your present place of residence?”

“Corner of Mayhew and Linton.”

No one in Lowfield had ever felt a need for house numbers. The street her house faced had been named for her great-grandfather, when the town was bustling and the river was close. Now the river was two miles away, held in check by the levee, and Lowfield’s population had not fluctuated appreciably in her father’s lifetime.