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Show 8 it on the dresser beside my bed. "It was a gift of love," I say. I put out my hand to reclaim the rings, but Tate keeps his fist closed around them. "They were a gift of love," I say again. "No," Tate begins, but then I notice his daughter is there: darkhaired, careful, shrewd. She puts her smooth hand across her father's fist, so that he opens it. She takes one of the rings, holds it admiringly up to the light, presents it to me. I occurs to me that she would probably be its heir. "How nice," she says in a deliberately artificial tone, "for Grandmama to have had a friend." * * * A day later, after the funeral was over and Sadie's small body had been lowered into the ground, this daughter had appeared at my door. "My name is Luel," she had said, but now the artificiality is controlled. She says she wants to know more about her grandmother's recent life. I look at her: this woman is young, but not so young as to be naive. Perhaps she, unlike her father, can understand. She wants to come in. "What, exactly, would you like to know?" She enters my living room now, lets her long, slim legs cross in front of her as she sits on the couch. "How she lived." She hesitates; there is more. "How she died." Some challenges I cannot resist. I have an acute sense of danger, but sometimes choose to ignore it when it comes. I begin with the part that may |