The Quiet Game by Greg Iles Page B

you’d have a story that would take all the gift you have to tell it.”
    Her words are like salt on my soul. “I truly wish I could help you. But I can’t. If some new evidence were to come to light, the district attorney would be the proper man to see.” I look at my father. “Is Austin Mackey still the D.A. here?”
    He nods warily.
    â€œI went to school with Mr. Mackey. He’s a good man. I could—”
    â€œHe nothing but a politician!” scoffs Georgia Payton.
    The old woman gets slowly to her feet, using her huge handbag as a counterweight. “He don’t care none. We come here ’cause we thought you did. But maybe you don’t. Maybe you was talking free in the paper ’cause you been gone so long you ain’t worried ’bout what people thinks around here. I told Althea, you must be like your daddy, a hardworking man with a good heart. But maybe I told her wrong.”
    I flush again, suddenly certain that the men of the Payton family are intimately familiar with the guilt trip as a motivational tool.
    Althea stands more slowly than her mother-in-law, as though lifting the weight of thirty years of grief. This time when she speaks, she looks only at the floor.
    â€œI loved my husband,” she says softly. “After he was killed, I never remarried. I never even went with another man. I raised my boy the best I could and tried to go on. I don’t say it was hard, because everybody got it hard, some way. You know that, Dr. Cage. The world’s full of misery. But my Del got took before his time.” Her lower lip is quivering; she bites it to keep her composure. “He wanted us to wait to have children. So we’d be able to give them the things they needed. Del said our people hurt themselves by having too many children too quick. We just had one before he died. Del was a good boy who grew into a good man, and he never got to see his own baby grow up.”
    The mournful undertone in her voice pierces my heart. All I can see is Sarah lying in her casket at age thirty-seven, her future ripped away like a cruel mirage. Althea Payton breaks the image by reaching into her purse andtaking out a folded piece of paper, which she hands to me. I have little choice but to unfold it.
    It’s a death certificate.
    â€œWhen the ambulance men got to Del, he was already burned up. But they couldn’t get him out of the seat. The springs from the seat had blown up through his thighs and pinned him there. That’s why he couldn’t get out, even though he was still alive after that bomb went off.”
    I stare at the brittle yellowed paper, a simple form dated 5-14-68.
    â€œLook in the middle,” Althea says. “Under cause of death.”
    I push down a hot wave of nausea. Thirty years ago, on the line beside the printed words CAUSE OF DEATH, some callous or easily cowed bureaucrat had scrawled the word Accidental .
    â€œAs long as I live and breathe,” Althea whispers, “I’ll do what I can to find out the truth.”
    I want to speak, to try to communicate the empathy I feel, but I don’t. Sarah’s death taught me this. In the face of grief, words have no power.
    I watch the Payton women follow my mother into the hall. I hear Georgia repeat her compliment about the fine house my mother keeps, then the soft shutting of the front door. I sit on the sofa where Althea sat. The cushion is still warm. My mother’s slippers hiss across the slate floor of the foyer, the sound like a nun moving through a convent.
    â€œThe neighbors are standing out in their yards,” she says.
    Wondering at the sight of black people who aren’t yard men or maids, I reflect. And tomorrow the maids and the yard men will return, while the two Mrs. Paytons sit or work in silent grief, mourning a man whose murder caused no more ripples than a stone dropped into a pond.
    â€œI know that was hard,” my father says, laying a