A Century of Great Suspense Stories

Red Clay Michael Malone

Dingley Falls, Handling Sin, Uncivil Seasons, and Time’s Witness are novels that endure in popularity and acclaim. Author Michael Malone has demonstrated that literary fiction can both appeal to its basic audience and find favor with readers of popular novels as well, including those most often found in the mystery sections of bookstores. The story reprinted here, winner of the 1996 Edgar award for short fiction, is a sample of Malone’s writing at its finest.

Up on its short slope the columned front of our courthouse was wavy in the August sun, like a courthouse in lake water. The leaves hung from maples, and the flag of North Carolina wilted flat against its metal pole. Heat sat sodden over Devereux County week by relentless week; they called the weather “dog days,” after the star, Sirius, but none of us knew that. We thought they meant no dog would leave shade for street on such days — no dog except a mad one. I was ten that late August in 1959; I remembered the summer because of the long heat wave, and because of Stella Doyle.

When they pushed open the doors, the policemen and lawyers flung their arms up to their faces to block the sun and stopped there in the doorway as if the hot light were shoving them back inside. Stella Doyle came out last, a deputy on either side to walk her down to where the patrol car, orange as Halloween candles, waited to take her away until the jury could make up its mind about what had happened two months earlier out at Red Hills. It was the only house in the county big enough to have a name. It was where Stella Doyle had, maybe, shot her husband, Hugh Doyle, to death.

Excitement over Doyle’s murder had swarmed through the town and stung us alive. No thrill would replace it until the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Outside the courthouse, sidewalk heat steaming up through our shoes, we stood patiently waiting to hear Mrs. Doyle found guilty. The news stood waiting, too, for she was, after all, not merely the murderer of the wealthiest man we knew; she was Stella Doyle. She was the movie star.

Papa’s hand squeezed down on my shoulder and there was a tight line to his mouth as he pulled me into the crowd and said, “Listen now, Buddy, if anybody ever asks you, when you’re grown, ‘Did you ever see the most beautiful woman God made in your lifetime,’ son, you say ‘Yes, I had that luck, and her name was Stella Dora Doyle.’ ” His voice got louder, right there in the crowd for everybody to hear. “You tell them how her beauty was so bright, it burned back the shame they tried to heap on her head, burned it right on back to scorch their faces.”

Papa spoke these strange words looking up the steps at the almost plump woman in black the deputies were holding. His arms were folded over his seersucker vest, his fingers tight on the sleeves of his shirt. People around us had turned to stare and somebody snickered.

Embarrassed for him, I whispered, “Oh, Papa, she’s nothing but an old murderer. Everybody knows how she got drunk and killed Mr. Doyle. She shot him right through the head with a gun.”

Papa frowned. “You don’t know that.”

I kept on. “Everybody says she was so bad and drunk all the time, she wouldn’t let his folks even live in the same house with her. She made him throw out his own mama and papa.”

Papa shook his head at me. “I don’t like to hear ugly gossip coming out of your mouth, all right, Buddy?”

“Yes, sir.”

“She didn’t kill Hugh Doyle.”

“Yes, sir.”

His frown scared me; it was so rare. I stepped closer and took his hand, took his stand against the rest. I had no loyalty to this woman Papa thought so beautiful. I just could never bear to be cut loose from the safety of his good opinion. I suppose that from that moment on, I felt toward Stella Doyle something of what my father felt, though in the end perhaps she meant less to me, and stood for more. Papa never had my habit of symbolizing.

The courthouse steps were wide, uneven stone slabs. As Mrs. Doyle came down, the buzzing of the crowd hushed. All together, like trained dancers, people stepped back to clear a half-circle around the orange patrol car. Newsmen shoved their cameras to the front. She was rushed down so fast that her shoe caught in the crumbling stone and she fell against one of the deputies.

“She’s drunk!” hooted a woman near me, a country woman in a flowered dress belted with a strip of painted rope. She and the child she jiggled against her shoulder were puffy with the fat of poverty. “Look’it her” — the woman pointed — “look at that dress. She thinks she’s still out there in Hollywood.” The woman beside her nodded, squinting out from under the visor of the kind of hat pier fishermen wear. “I went and killed my husband, wouldn’t no rich lawyers come running to weasel me out of the law.” She slapped at a fly’s buzz.

Then they were quiet and everybody else was quiet and our circle of sun-stunned eyes fixed on the woman in black, stared at the wonder of one as high as Mrs. Doyle about to be brought so low.

Holding to the stiff, tan arm of the young deputy, Mrs. Doyle reached down to check the heel of her shoe. Black shoes, black suit and purse, wide black hat — they all sinned against us by their fashionableness, blazing wealth as well as death. She stood there, arrested a moment in the hot immobility of the air, then she hurried down, rushing the two big deputies down with her, to the open door of the orange patrol car. Papa stepped forward so quickly that the gap filled with people before I could follow him. I squeezed through, fighting with my elbows, and I saw that he was holding his straw hat in one hand, and offering the other hand out to the murderer. “Stella, how are you? Clayton Hayes.”

As she turned, I saw the strawberry gold hair beneath the hat; then her hand, bright with a big diamond, took away the dark glasses. I saw what Papa meant. She was beautiful. Her eyes were the color of lilacs, but darker than lilacs. And her skin held the light like the inside of a shell. She was not like other pretty women, because the difference was not one of degree. I have never seen anyone else of her kind.

“Why, Clayton! God Almighty, it’s been years.”

“Well, yes, a long time now, I guess,” he said, and shook her hand.

She took the hand in both of hers. “You look the same as ever. Is this your boy?” she said. The violet eyes turned to me.

“Yes, this is Buddy. Ada and I have six so far, three of each.”

“Six? Are we that old, Clayton?” She smiled. “They said you’d married Ada Hackney.”

A deputy cleared his throat. “Sorry, Clayton, we’re going to have to get going.”

“Just a minute, Lonnie. Listen, Stella, I just wanted you to know I’m sorry as I can be about your losing Hugh.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “He did it himself, Clayton,” she said.

“I know that. I know you didn’t do this.” Papa nodded slowly again and again, the way he did when he was listening. “I know that. Good luck to you.”

She swatted tears away. “Thank you.”

“I’m telling everybody I’m sure of that.”

“Clayton, thank you.”

Papa nodded again, then tilted his head back to give her his slow, peaceful smile. “You call Ada and me if there’s ever something we can do to help you, you hear?” She kissed his cheek and he stepped back with me into the crowd of hostile, avid faces as she entered the police car. It moved slow as the sun through the sightseers. Cameras pushed against its windows.

A sallow man biting a pipe skipped down the steps to join some other reporters next to us. “Jury sent out for food,” he told them. “No telling with these yokels. Could go either way.” He pulled off his jacket and balled it under his arm. “Jesus, it’s hot.”

A younger reporter with thin, wet hair disagreed. “They all think Hollywood’s Babylon and she’s the whore. Hugh Doyle was the local prince, his daddy kept the mills open in the bad times, quote unquote half the rednecks in the county. They’ll fry her. For that hat if nothing else.”

“Could go either way,” grinned the man with the pipe. “She was born in a shack six miles from here. Hat or no hat, that makes her one of them. So what if she did shoot the guy, he was dying of cancer anyhow, for Christ’s sake. Well, she never could act worth the price of a bag of popcorn, but Jesus damn she was something to look at!”

Now that Stella Doyle was gone, people felt the heat again and went back to where they could sit still in the shade until the evening breeze and wait for the jury’s decision. Papa and I walked back down Main Street to our furniture store. Papa owned a butcher shop, too, but he didn’t like the meat business and wasn’t very good at it, so my oldest brother ran it while Papa sat among the mahogany bedroom suites and red maple dining-room sets in a big rocking chair and read, or talked to friends who dropped by. The rocker was actually for sale, but he had sat in it for so long now that it was just Papa’s chair. Three ceiling fans stirred against the quiet, shady air while he answered my questions about Stella Doyle.

He said that she grew up Stella Dora Hibble on Route 19, in a three-room, tin-roofed little house propped off the red clay by concrete blocks — the kind of saggy-porched, pinewood house whose owners leave on display in their dirt yard, like sculptures, the broken artifacts of their aspirations and the debris of their unmendable lives: the doorless refrigerator and the rusting car, the pyre of metal and plastic that tells drivers along the highway, “Dreams don’t last.”

Stella’s mother, Dora Hibble, had believed in dreams anyhow. Dora had been a pretty girl who’d married a farmer and worked harder than she had the health for, because hard work was necessary just to keep from going under. But in the evenings Mrs. Hibble had looked at movie magazines. She had believed the romance was out there and she wanted it, if not for her, for her children. At twenty-seven, Dora Hibble died during her fifth labor. Stella was eight when she watched from the door of the bedroom as they covered her mother’s face with a thin blanket. When Stella was fourteen, her father died when a machine jammed at Doyle Mills. When Stella was sixteen, Hugh Doyle, Jr., who was her age, my father’s age, fell in love with her.

“Did you love her, too, Papa?”

“Oh, yes. All us boys in town were crazy about Stella Dora, one time or another. I had my attack of it, same as the rest. We were sweethearts in seventh grade. I bought a big-size Whitman’s Sampler on Valentine’s. I remember it cost every cent I had.”

“Why were y’all crazy about her?”

“I guess you’d have to worry you’d missed out on being alive if you didn’t feel that way about Stella, one time or another.”

I was feeling a terrible emotion I later defined as jealousy. “But didn’t you love Mama?”

“Well, now, this was before it was my luck to meet your mama.”

“And you met her coming to town along the railroad track and you told your friends ‘That’s the girl for me and I’m going to marry her,’ didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir, and I was right on both counts.” Papa rocked back in the big chair, his hands peaceful on the armrests.

“Was Stella Dora still crazy about you after you met Mama?”

His face crinkled into the lines of his ready laughter. “No, sir, she wasn’t. She loved Hugh Doyle, minute she laid eyes on him, and he felt the same. But Stella had this notion about going off to get to be somebody in the movies. And Hugh couldn’t hold her back, and I guess she couldn’t get him to see what it was made her want to go off so bad either.”

“What was it made her want to go?”

Papa smiled at me. “Well. I don’t know, son. What makes you want to go off so bad? You’re always saying you’re going here, and there, ’cross the world, up to the moon. I reckon you’re more like Stella than I am.”

“Do you think she was wrong to want to go be in the movies?”

“No.”

“You don’t think she killed him?”

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“Somebody killed him.”

“Well, Buddy, sometimes people lose hope and heart, and feel like they can’t go on living.”

“Yeah, I know. Suicide.”

Papa’s shoes tapped the floor as the rocker creaked back and forth. “That’s right. Now you tell me, why’re you sitting in here? Why don’t you ride your bike on over to the ballpark and see who’s there?”

“I want to hear about Stella Doyle.”

“You want to hear. Well. Let’s go get us a Coca-Cola, then. I don’t guess somebody’s planning to show up in this heat to buy a chest of drawers they got to haul home.”

“You ought to sell air conditioners, Papa. People would buy air conditioners.”

“I guess so.”

So Papa told me the story. Or at least his version of it. He said Hugh and Stella were meant for each other. From the beginning it seemed to the whole town a fact as natural as harvest that so much money and so much beauty belonged together, and only Hugh Doyle with his long, free, easy stride was rich enough to match the looks of Stella Dora. But even Hugh Doyle couldn’t hold her. He was only halfway through the state university, where his father had told him he’d have to go before he married Stella, if he wanted a home to bring her to, when she quit her job at Coldsteam’s beauty parlor and took the bus to California. She was out there for six years before Hugh broke down and went after her.

By then every girl in the county was cutting Stella’s pictures out of the movie magazines and reading how she got her lucky break, how she married a big director, and divorced him, and married a big star, and how that marriage broke up even quicker. Photographers traveled all the way to Thermopylae to take pictures of where she was born. People tried to tell them her house was gone, had fallen down and been used for firewood, but they just took photographs of Reverend Ballister’s house instead and said Stella had grown up in it. Before long, even local girls would go stand in front of the Ballister house like a shrine, sometimes they’d steal flowers out of the yard. The year that Fever, her best movie, came to the Grand Theater on Main Street, Hugh Doyle flew out to Los Angeles and won her back. He took her down to Mexico to divorce the baseball player she’d married after the big star. Then Hugh married her himself and put her on an ocean liner and took her all over the world. For a whole two years, they didn’t come home to Thermopylae. Everybody in the county talked about this two-year honeymoon, and Hugh’s father confessed to some friends that he was disgusted by his son’s way of life.

But when the couple did come home, Hugh walked right into the mills and turned a profit. His father confessed to the same friends that he was flabbergasted Hugh had it in him. But after the father died Hugh started drinking and Stella joined him. The parties got a little wild. The fights got loud. People talked. They said he had other women. They said Stella’d been locked up in a sanatorium. They said the Doyles were breaking up.

And then one June day a maid at Red Hills, walking to work before the morning heat, fell over something that lay across a path to the stables. And it was Hugh Doyle in riding clothes with a hole torn in the side of his head. Not far from his gloved hand, the police found Stella’s pistol, already too hot from the sun to touch. The cook testified that the Doyles had been fighting like cats and dogs all night long the night before, and Hugh’s mother testified that he wanted to divorce Stella but she wouldn’t let him, and so Stella was arrested. She said she was innocent, but it was her gun, she was his heir, and she had no alibi. Her trial lasted almost as long as that August heat wave.

A neighbor strolled past the porch, where we sat out the evening heat, waiting for the air to lift. “Jury’s still out,” he said. Mama waved her hand at him. She pushed herself and me in the big green wood swing that hung from two chains to the porch roof, and answered my questions about Stella Doyle. She said. “Oh, yes, they all said Stella was ’specially pretty. I never knew her to talk to myself.”

“But if Papa liked her so much, why didn’t y’all get invited out to their house and everything?”

“Her and your papa just went to school together, that’s all. That was a long time back. The Doyles wouldn’t ask folks like us over to Red Hills.”

“Why not? Papa’s family used to have a whole lot of money. That’s what you said. And Papa went right up to Mrs. Doyle at the courthouse today, right in front of everybody. He told her. You let us know if there’s anything we can do.”

Mama chuckled the way she always did about Papa, a low ripple like a pigeon nesting, a little exasperated at having to sit still so long. “You know your papa’d offer to help out anybody he figured might be in trouble, white or black. That’s just him; that’s not any Stella Dora Doyle. Your papa’s just a good man. You remember that, Buddy.”

Goodness was Papa’s stock-in-trade; it was what he had instead of money or ambition, and Mama often reminded us of it. In him she kept safe all the kindness she had never felt she could afford for herself. She, who could neither read nor write, who had stood all day in a cigarette factory from the age of nine until the morning Papa married her, was a fighter. She wanted her children to go farther than Papa had. Still, for years after he died, she would carry-down from the attic the yellow mildewed ledgers where his value was recorded in more than $75,000 of out-of-date bills he had been unwilling to force people in trouble to pay. Running her sun-spotted finger down the brown wisps of names and the money they’d owed, she would sigh that proud, exasperated ripple, and shake her head over foolish, generous Papa.

Through the front parlor window I could hear my sisters practicing the theme from The Apartment on the piano. Someone across the street turned on a light. Then we heard the sound of Papa’s shoes coming a little faster than usual down the sidewalk. He turned at the hedge, carrying the package of shiny butcher’s paper in which he brought meat home every evening. “Verdict just came in!” he called out happily. “Not guilty! Jury came back about forty minutes ago. They already took her home.”

Mama took the package and sat Papa down in the swing next to her. “Well, well,” she said. “They let her off.”

“Never ought to have come up for trial in the first place, Ada, like I told everybody all along. It’s like her lawyers showed. Hugh went down to Atlanta, saw that doctor, found out he had cancer, and he took his own life. Stella never even knew he was sick.”

Mama patted his knee. “Not guilty; well, well.”

Papa made a noise of disgust. “Can you believe some folks out on Main Street tonight are all fired up because Stella got off! Adele Simpson acted downright indignant!”

Mama said, “And you’re surprised?” And she shook her head with me at Papa’s innocence.

Talking of the trial, my parents made one shadow along the wood floor of the porch, while inside my sisters played endless variations of “Chopsticks,” the notes handed down by ghostly creators long passed away.

A few weeks later, Papa was invited to Red Hills, and he let me come along; we brought a basket of sausage biscuits Mama had made for Mrs. Doyle.

As soon as Papa drove past the wide white gate, I learned how money could change even weather. It was cooler at Red Hills, and the grass was the greenest grass in the county. A black man in a black suit let us into the house, then led us down a wide hallway of pale yellow wood into a big room shuttered against the heat. She was there in an armchair almost the color of her eyes. She wore loose-legged pants and was pouring whiskey from a bottle into a glass.

“Clayton, thanks for coming. Hello there, little Buddy. Look, I hope I didn’t drag you from business.”

Papa laughed. “Stella, I could stay gone a week and never miss a customer.” It embarrassed me to hear him admit such failure to her.

She said she could tell I liked books, so maybe I wouldn’t mind if they left me there to read while she borrowed my daddy for a little bit. There were white shelves in the room, full of books. I said I didn’t mind, but I did; I wanted to keep on seeing her. Even with the loose shirt soiled and rumpled over a waist she tried to hide, even with her face swollen from heat and drink and grief, she was something you wanted to look at as long as possible.

They left me alone. On the white piano were dozens of photographs of Stella Doyle in silver frames. From a big painting over the mantelpiece her remarkable eyes followed me around the room. I looked at that painting as sun deepened across it, until finally she and Papa came back. She had a tissue to her nose, a new drink in her hand. “I’m sorry, honey,” she said to me. “Your daddy’s been sweet letting me run on. I just needed somebody to talk to for a while about what happened to me.” She kissed the top of my head and I could feel her warm lips at the part in my hair.

We followed her down the wide hall out onto the porch. “Clayton, you’ll forgive a fat old souse talking your ear off and bawling like a jackass.”

“No such thing, Stella.”

“And you never thought I killed him, even when you first heard. My God, thank you.”

Papa took her hand again. “You take care now,” he said.

Then suddenly she was hugging herself, rocking from side to side. Words burst from her like a door flung open by wind. “I could kick him in the ass, that bastard! Why didn’t he tell me? To quit, to quit, and use my gun, and just about get me strapped in the gas chamber, that goddamn bastard, and never say a word!” Her profanity must have shocked Papa as much as it did me. He never used it, much less ever heard it from a woman.

But he nodded and said, “Well, good-bye, I guess, Stella. Probably won’t be seeing you again.”

“Oh, Lord, Clayton, I’ll be back. The world’s so goddamn little.”

She stood at the top of the porch, tears wet in those violet eyes that the movie magazines had loved to talk about. On her cheek a mosquito bite flamed like a slap. Holding to the big white column, she waved as we drove off into the dusty heat. Ice flew from the glass in her hand like diamonds.

Papa was right; they never met again. Papa lost his legs from diabetes, but he’d never gone much of anywhere even before that. And afterward, he was one of two places — home or the store. He’d sit in his big wood wheelchair in the furniture store, with his hands peaceful on the armrests, talking with whoever came by.

I did see Stella Doyle again; the first time in Belgium, twelve years later. I went farther than Papa.

In Bruges there are small restaurants that lean like elegant elbows on the canals and glance down at passing pleasure boats. Stella Doyle was sitting, one evening, at a table in the crook of the elbow of one of them, against an iron railing that curved its reflection in the water. She was alone there when I saw her. She stood, leaned over the rail, and slipped the ice cubes from her glass into the canal. I was in a motor launch full of tourists passing below. She waved with a smile at us and we waved back. It had been a lot of years since her last picture, but probably she waved out of habit. For the tourists motoring past, Stella in white against the dark restaurant was another snapshot of Bruges. For me, she was home and memory. I craned to look back as long as I could, and leapt from the boat at the next possible stop.

When I found the restaurant, she was yelling at a well-dressed young man who was leaning across the table, trying to soothe her in French. They appeared to be quarreling over his late arrival. All at once she hit him, her diamond flashing into his face. He filled the air with angry gestures, then turned and left, a white napkin to his cheek. I was made very shy by what I’d seen — the young man was scarcely older than I was. I stood unable to speak until her staring at me jarred me forward. I said, “Mrs. Doyle? I’m Buddy Hayes. I came out to see you at Red Hills with my father Clayton Hayes one time. You let me look at your books.”

She sat back down and poured herself a glass of wine. “You’re that little boy? God Almighty, how old am I? Am I a hundred yet?” Her laugh had been loosened by the wine. “Well, a Red Clay rambler, like me. How ’bout that. Sit down. What are you doing over here?”

I told her, as nonchalantly as I could manage, that I was traveling on college prize money, a journalism award. I wrote a prize essay about a murder trial.

“Mine?” she asked, and laughed.

A waiter, plump and flushed in his neat black suit, trotted to her side. He shook his head at the untouched plates of food. “Madame, your friend has left, then?”

Stella said, “Mister, I helped him along. And turns out, he was no friend.”

The waiter then turned his eyes, sad and reproachful, to the trout on the plate.

“How about another bottle of that wine and a great big bucket of ice?” Stella asked.

The waiter kept flapping his fat quick hands around his head, entreating us to come inside. “Les moustiques, madame!”

“I just let them bite,” she said. He went away grieved.

She was slender now, and elegantly dressed. And while her hands and throat were older, the eyes hadn’t changed, nor the red-gold hair. She was still the most beautiful woman God had made in my lifetime, the woman of whom my father had said that any man who had not desired her had missed out on being alive, the one for whose honor my father had turned his back on the whole town of Thermopylae. Because of Papa, I had entered my adolescence daydreaming about fighting for Stella Doyle’s honor; we had starred together in a dozen of her movies: I dazzled her jury; I cured Hugh Doyle while hiding my own noble love for his wife. And now here I sat drinking wine with her on a veranda in Bruges; me, the first Hayes ever to win a college prize, ever to get to college. Here I sat with a movie star.

She finished her cigarette, dropped it spinning down into the black canal. “You look like him,” she said. “Your papa. I’m sorry to hear that about the diabetes.”

“I look like him, but I don’t think like him,” I told her.

She tipped the wine bottle upside down in the bucket. “You want the world,” she said. “Go get it, honey.”

“That’s what my father doesn’t understand.”

“He’s a good man,” she answered. She stood up slowly. “And I think Clayton would want me to get you to your hotel.”

All the fenders of her Mercedes were crushed. She said, “When I’ve had a few drinks, I need a strong car between me and the rest of the cockeyed world.”

The big car bounced over the moon-white street. “You know what, Buddy? Hugh Doyle gave me my first Mercedes, one morning in Paris. At breakfast. He held the keys out in his hand like a damn daffodil he’d picked in the yard. He gave me this goddamn thing.” She waved her finger with its huge diamond. “This damn thing was tied to my big toe one Christmas morning!” And she smiled up at the stars as if Hugh Doyle were up there tying diamonds on them. “He had a beautiful grin, Buddy, but he was a son of a bitch.”

The car bumped to a stop on the curb outside my little hotel. “Don’t miss your train tomorrow,” she said. “And you listen to me, don’t go back home; go on to Rome.”

“I’m not sure I have time.”

She looked at me. “Take time. Just take it. Don’t get scared, honey.”

Then she put her hand in my jacket pocket and the moon came around her hair, and my heart panicked crazily, thudding against my shirt, thinking she might kiss me. But her hand went away, and all she said was, “Say hi to Clayton when you get home, all right? Even losing his legs and all, your daddy’s lucky, you know that?”

I said, “I don’t see how.”

“Oh, I didn’t either till I was a lot older than you. And had my damn in-laws trying to throw me into the gas chamber. Go to bed. So long, Red Clay.”

Her silver car floated away. In my pocket, I found a large wad of French money, enough to take me to Rome, and a little ribboned box, clearly a gift she had decided not to give the angry young man in the beautiful suit who’d arrived too late. On black velvet lay a man’s wristwatch, reddish gold.

It’s an extremely handsome watch, and it still tells me the time.

I only went home to Thermopylae for the funerals. It was the worst of the August dog days when Papa died in the hospital bed they’d set up next to his and Mama’s big four-poster in their bedroom. At his grave, the clots of red clay had already dried to a dusty dull color by the time we shoveled them down upon him, friend after friend taking a turn at the shovel. The petals that fell from roses fell limp to the red earth, wilted like the crowd who stood by the grave while Reverend Ballister told us that Clayton Hayes was “a good man.” Behind a cluster of Mama’s family, I saw a woman in black turn away and walk down the grassy incline to a car, a Mercedes.

After the services I went driving, but I couldn’t out-travel Papa in Devereux County. The man at the gas pump listed Papa’s virtues as he cleaned my windshield. The woman who sold me the bottle of bourbon said she’d owed Papa $215.00 since 1944, and when she’d paid him back in 1966 he’d forgotten all about it. I drove along the highway where the foundations of tin-roofed shacks were covered now by the parking lots of mini-malls; beneath the asphalt, somewhere, was Stella Doyle’s birthplace. Stella Dora Hibble, Papa’s first love.

Past the white gates, the Red Hills lawn was as parched as the rest of the county. Paint blistered and peeled on the big white columns. I waited a long time before the elderly black man I’d met twenty years before opened the door irritably.

I heard her voice from the shadowy hall yelling, “Jonas! Let him in.”

On the white shelves the books were the same. The photos on the piano as young as ever. She frowned so strangely when I came into the room, I thought she must have been expecting someone else and didn’t recognize me.

“I’m Buddy Hayes, Clayton’s—”

“I know who you are.”

“I saw you leaving the cemetery...”

“I know you did.”

I held out the bottle.

Together we finished the bourbon in memory of Papa, while shutters beat back the sun, hid some of the dirty glasses scattered on the floor, hid Stella Doyle in her lilac armchair. Cigarette burns scarred the armrests, left their marks on the oak floor. Behind her the big portrait showed Time up for the heartless bastard he is. Her hair was cropped short, and gray. Only the color of her eyes had stayed the same; they looked as remarkable as ever in the swollen face.

“I came out here to bring you something.”

“What?”

I gave her the thin, cheap, yellowed envelope I’d found in Papa’s desk with his special letters and papers. It was addressed in neat, cursive pencil to “Clayton.” Inside was a silly Valentine card. Betty Boop popping bonbons in her pouty lips, exclaiming “Ooooh, I’m sweet on you.” It was childish and lascivious at the same time, and it was signed with a lipstick blot, now brown with age, and with the name “Stella,” surrounded by a heart.

I said, “He must have kept this since the seventh grade.”

She nodded. “Clayton was a good man.” Her cigarette fell from her ashtray onto the floor. When I came over to pick it up, she said, “Goodness is luck; like money, like looks. Clayton was lucky that way.” She went to the piano and took more ice from the bucket there; one piece she rubbed around the back of her neck, then dropped into her glass. She turned, the eyes wet, like lilac stars. “You know, in Hollywood, they said, ‘Hibble?! What kind of hick name is that, we can’t use that!’ So I said, ‘Use Doyle, then.’ I mean, I took Hugh’s name six years before he ever came out to get me. Because I knew he’d come. The day I left Thermopylae he kept yelling at me, ‘You can’t have both!’ He kept yelling it while the bus was pulling out. ‘You can’t have me and it both!’ He wanted to rip my heart out for leaving, for wanting to go.” Stella moved along the curve of the white piano to a photograph of Hugh Doyle in a white open shirt, grinning straight out at the sun. She said, “But I could have both. There were only two things I had to have in this little world, and one was the lead in a movie called Fever, and the other one was Hugh Doyle.” She put the photograph down carefully. “I didn’t know about the cancer till my lawyers found out he’d been to see that doctor in Atlanta. Then it was easy to get the jury to go for suicide.” She smiled at me. “Well, not easy. But we turned them around. I think your papa was the only man in town who never thought I was guilty.”

It took me a while to take it in. “Well, he sure convinced me,” I said.

“I expect he convinced a lot of people. Everybody thought so much of Clayton.”

“You killed your husband.”

We looked at each other. I shook my head. “Why?”

She shrugged. “We had a fight. We were drunk. He was sleeping with my fucking maid. I was crazy. Lots of reasons, no reason. I sure didn’t plan it.”

“You sure didn’t confess it either.”

“What good would that have done? Hugh was dead. I wasn’t about to let his snooty-assed mother shove me in the gas chamber and pocket the money.”

I shook my head. “Jesus. And you’ve never felt a day’s guilt, have you?”

Her head tilted back, smoothing her throat. The shuttered sun had fallen down the room onto the floor, and evening light did a movie fade and turned Stella Doyle into the star in the painting behind her. “Ah, baby, don’t believe it,” she said. The room stayed quiet.

I stood up and dropped the empty bottle in the wastebasket. I said, “Papa told me how he was in love with you.”

Her laugh came warmly through the shuttered dusk. “Yes, and I guess I was sweet on him, too, boop boop dedoo.”

“Yeah, Papa said no man could say he’d been alive if he’d seen you and not felt that way. I just wanted to tell you I know what he meant.” I raised my hand to wave good-bye.

“Come over here,” she said, and I went to her chair and she reached up and brought my head down to her and kissed me full and long on the mouth. “So long, Buddy.” Slowly her hand moved down my face, the huge diamond radiant.

News came over the wire. The tabloids played with it for a few days on back pages. They had some pictures. They dug up the Hugh Doyle trial photos to put beside the old studio glossies. The dramatic death of an old movie star was worth sending a news camera down to Thermopylae, North Carolina, to get a shot of the charred ruin that had once been Red Hills. A shot of the funeral parlor and the flowers on the casket.

My sister phoned me that there was even a crowd at the coroner’s inquest at the courthouse. They said Stella Doyle had died in her sleep after a cigarette set fire to her mattress. But rumors started that her body had been found at the foot of the stairs, as if she’d been trying to escape the fire, but had fallen. They said she was drunk. They buried her beside Hugh Doyle in the family plot, the fanciest tomb in the Methodist cemetery, not far from where my parents were buried. Not long after she died, one of the cable networks did a night of her movies. I stayed up to watch Fever again.

My wife said, “Buddy, I’m sorry, but this is the biggest bunch of sentimental slop I ever saw. The whore’ll sell her jewels and get the medicine and they’ll beat the epidemic but she’ll die to pay for her past and then the town’ll see she was really a saint. Am I right?”

“You’re right.”

She sat down to watch awhile. “You know, I can’t decide if she’s a really lousy actress or a really good one. It’s weird.”

I said, “Actually, I think she was a much better actress than anyone gave her credit for.”

My wife went to bed, but I watched through the night. I sat in Papa’s old rocking chair that I’d brought north with me after his death. Finally at dawn I turned off the set, and Stella’s face disappeared into a star, and went out. The reception was awful and the screen too small. Besides, the last movie was in black-and-white; I couldn’t see her eyes as well as I could remember the shock of their color, when she first turned toward me at the foot of the courthouse steps, that hot August day when I was ten, when my father stepped forward out of the crowd to take her hand, when her eyes were lilacs turned up to his face, and his straw hat in the summer sun was shining like a knight’s helmet.