Characters in Dedication

This book is dedicated to my mother, ALTHEA DIXMONT JEFFERIES, the finest woman I have ever known. And below that, Jefferies had written in black fountain-pen ink that was now fading, “For Martha Rosewall, who cleans up my clutter and never complains.”

“Then I went down to the room-service kitchen and talked with Bedelia Aaronson—you must remember Bedelia—and asked her if she’d seen anyone out of the ordinary around that morning. Bedelia asked who I meant and I said I didn’t really know. She said ‘Why you asking, Marty?’

“There was a fella worked at the hotel back then named Billy Beck, a nice young man who was majoring in English at Fordham when he wasn’t on the door. He and I used to talk sometimes—” “Was he a brother?” “God, no!” Martha laughed again.

The geek’d bite the head off it. Once my oldest brother—Bradford, who died in a car accident in Biloxi—said he wanted to go and see the geek. My dad said he was sorry to hear it, but he didn’t outright forbid Brad, because Brad was nineteen and almost a man.

My older sister, Cassandra (we always called her Kissy), went that one better. She sent me a Greyhound bus ticket with two words written on the envelope in pink lipstick—GO NOW, it said.” Martha took another small sip of her champagne. “Well, I didn’t.

This door now opened and Darcy Sagamore appeared, wrapped in a fluffy Le Palais bathrobe and a plume of warm steam. She took one look at Martha’s bright face and came to her with her arms out, laughing. “It came, didn’t it?” she cried. “You got it!

He brought it out. Johnny Rosewall was packing a nickel-plated .32 he’d gotten God knew where. He pointed it at the proprietor, pulled the trigger, and the pistol blew up. One of the fragments of the barrel entered his brain by way of his right eye, killing him instantly.

“There was a spooky old woman who lived at the Station Park end of Stanton Street back then—folks called her Mama Delorme and lots of them swore she was a bruja woman.

Martha Rosewall approached it one morning at a quarter of seven, her plain blue canvas tote-bag in one hand and a smile on her face. The tote was usual, the smile much more rarely seen.

• • • “Mr. Buckley was on the desk that day and I told him Mr. Jefferies was thinking of extending his stay. Mr. Buckley said he didn’t think that would present a problem even though Mr. Jefferies had been planning to check out that very afternoon.

“Mrs. Parker heard me and came to the door and asked if I was all right. That helped me get hold of myself a little, and by the time Johnny came in that night, I was over the worst of it. He was drunk, spoiling for a fight.

When Noah got hit and killed by a taxi-cab near the end of Blaze of Heaven, just a month after his part of the war was over, I did cry.

I didn’t believe in anything like that myself, and once I asked Octavia Kinsolving, who lived in the same building as me and Johnny, how people could go on believing such trash in a day when space satellites went whizzing around the earth and there was a cure for just …

His name was Peter Jefferies, and he was just as white as I am black, just as tall as I am short, just as educated as I am ignorant.

And below the picture was this: A Novel by Peter Rosewall. “All right, that’s good, wonderful, but now show me the other!” Darcy spoke in the tones of a woman who wants to dispense with the merely interesting and go directly to the heart of the matter.

Darcy got her friend comfortably situated in one of the booths, and left her there with a bowl of Goldfish crackers while she spoke briefly to Ray, who was tending bar that afternoon.

You’re a good little worker and you can have your job back later on if you want it, Roberta Proulx told her, but for right now you get yourself gone, girl.

He didn’t like the maids around when he was working, you see, and so I figured he might not want housekeeping service until Yvonne came on at three. “I said, ‘I’ll come back later, Mr. Jefferies.’ “ ‘Do it now,’ he said. ‘Just keep quiet while you do.