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Perkins. “Not too many young men want to come to Lowfield.”
    His bleak tone made Catherine raise her eyebrows. She didn’t like Jerry Selforth much as a man, but the town had desperately needed him as a doctor. What had Jerry done to offend her neighbor?
    Just then the ambulance started up, and the people by the cars had to step between them to let it edge by.
    Catherine’s thoughts flew back to Leona Gaites, and she scarcely noticed Carl Perkin’s farewell nod as he went down the road to his Lincoln, in the wake of the ambulance.
    The narrow dirt road became busy with flying dust and confusion as the accumulated vehicles reversed to point back to the highway. The cars formed a train like a funeral procession behind the hearse of the orange and white ambulance.
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    The black deputy was detailed to take Catherine’s statement.
    â€œThen head on over to Leona Gaites’s house,” Sheriff Galton added when he was halfway out the door. “Bring the camera.”
    The young black man nodded briskly and turned to Catherine, who was huddled in a corner hoping she was out of the way.
    â€œMiss Catherine, would you come over here, please?” he said, indicating a straight-backed chair by a scarred desk.
    Catherine could tell from the set of Mary Jane Cory’s back that she disapproved of this black policeman. The unnatural brightness of Mrs. Cory’s voice as she spoke to him contrasted sharply with the natural tone in which she spoke to a couple of blacks who entered the station as supplicants.
    Catherine was beyond caring who took down her statement; but she was less comfortable with blacks in her own town than she was with blacks anywhere else. Upon taking up her life in Lowfield after her parents’ death, she had found sadly that the old attitudes caught at her and strangled her attempts to be easy in an uneasy situation.
    The deputy’s name tag read “Eakins,” Catherine noticed for the first time. Now she could place the familiarity of the man’s face.
    â€œYour mother is Betty, isn’t she?” Catherine asked, as he rolled typing paper into the machine.
    â€œYes, Ma’am,” he said reluctantly, and Catherine felt a pit-of-the-stomach dismay.
    Betty Eakins had been the Lintons’ maid for years, until she had grown too old and arthritic to work any more.
    Catherine had never called their maid anything but “Betty”; and she had decided, after a year away in college, that that was a shameful thing. Catherine had not even known Betty’s last name for the first years of the woman’s employment. Catherine’s visits home had been more and more awkward as her awareness of what lay around her became acute, to the point that Catherine was secretly glad when Betty grew too infirm to iron the Lintons’ sheets. Catherine’s parents had died before they could replace Betty with another maid.
    â€œHow is she?” asked Catherine. She had to say something, she felt.
    â€œMama’s fine,” he said curtly. Percy Eakins’s face rivaled Catherine’s for blankness.
    â€œShe’s a very old woman now,” he said more gently—whether out of fear of being rude to a white woman or because he sensed Catherine’s misery, she couldn’t tell. She chose to regard his softened tone as absolution for the sin of having offended racially.
    â€œI’ll tell her I saw you. She talks about you all the time,” he said finally.
    And their personal conversation was closed.
    He took her statement in a meticulous professional manner, in question-and-answer form.
    â€œYour full name?”
    â€œCatherine Scott Linton.”
    â€œYour age?”
    â€œTwenty-three.”
    â€œPlace of employment and position?”
    â€œThe Lowfield Gazette. I’m the society editor.”
    â€œYour present place of residence?”
    â€œCorner of Mayhew and Linton.”
    No one in Lowfield had ever felt a