The Ridgehorn kitchen was a mouth-watering shrine.

The island counter, made of polished oak and topped with 1950’s Formica, the kind you couldn’t chip with a hatchet, was piled high with the fruits of condolence: a sweet potato pie, with pecan halves floating face-down in its burnt-orange sea; glazed ham, ringed with pineapple slices and brown sugar; green bean casserole, though beans were out of season so they must have come from some basement-stashed Mason jar; gallons of sweetened tea and diet Coke and banana pudding and gravy.

Roby Snow looked around and made sure no one was watching. Not that anyone would care. At all the death sittings and watch-overs and grievings and gatherings he’d ever attended, food was usually the last thing on the minds of the bereaved but the first act of sympathy by acquaintances. He dipped a pinkie in the gravy, brought it to his mouth, licked the turkey drippings from his lips, and smiled.

The marshmallows that dotted the sweet potato pie caught his fancy, and he plucked two, popped them in his mouth, then rearranged the remaining four so that no one would notice the gap in the pattern. The ham was growing cold, and gray-white grease congealed in the bottom of its tin foil container. Roby crossed the room to the cabinets, opened them.

Crystal. Nice stuff, the kind that would hum if you put water in the glasses and rubbed your fingers around the rim. He’d seen a man on TV once who’d played a whole row of them at the same time, the glasses filled to varying depths, the performer wetting and wiping his fingers, raising a series of full notes that hung in the air like the blowing of lost whales. Crystal symphony, the man had called it.

"Mr. Snow?"

Roby looked away from the crystal. Anna Beth had entered the kitchen. She was the youngest of the Ridgehorn clan, and the prettiest. Years had a way of stealing beauty. Of stealing everything.