Jayleen and Jamie were horrified and furious. “We didn’t say you could do that!” cried Jayleen. She actually stomped her foot.

  If a teenage boy had been watching, he would fallen madly in love. Jayleen was adorable.

  “Thank you, ma’am,” said the telephone voice. “A trooper will be there soon. Is everybody safely out of the vehicle?”

  “Yes.”

  Both girls were now frowning at their cell phones, as though surprised that the devices had not come to the rescue; that there was no app for a truck in a ditch. Well, actually, there probably was. “Do you have Triple A?” Clemmie asked.

  Jayleen looked at her, like, How would I know? That’s stuff you old people do.

  A vehicle was approaching from the same turn off Shirley Road that Jayleen had missed. It was a big, shiny black SUV, high up off the road, all its windows shaded. It pulled up next to them and stopped.

  Clemmie suddenly remembered Danger Man. Could he really exist? Had Clemmie even once glanced in her rearview mirror to see if anybody was following?

  But the driver who rolled his window down was not even fifty. He sported sunglasses, a bow tie, and a white button-down shirt. He could very well have come from the eleven o’clock service at Trinity Hill, which was traditional in spirit, liturgy, and clothing, as opposed to the earlier service where you wore and sang any old thing. But if he was chasing down indigo jackets, he would see that this particular indigo-jacket woman was a foot shorter than Muffin, much curvier, and wearing red lipstick and a black wig with tight curls, like an aged Betty Boop. Completely unlike long, lean, elegant Muffin. “You okay?” he called.

  The girls glared.

  “Thank you, yes,” said Clemmie. “Nobody’s hurt.”

  He looked around, obviously puzzled. “Where’s your car?” he asked.

  This was unsettling. Why did he care? Why would he not assume that Clemmie had also been in the truck? But the little gray truck was a two-person vehicle. Besides, she was wearing church clothes, while what little fabric the girls had chosen was ragged and silly in the way of today’s adolescent fashions. They and Clemmie were not a match. She ignored his question because she had spent her life sidestepping questions and said, “A trooper is on the way.”

  “I’ll just wait with you,” he said. “You need flashers or there’ll be another accident.” He maneuvered his big car rather impressively, placed himself between the tilted truck and the intersection and put on his hazard lights. Only now did Clemmie see a silhouette at his side. He had a passenger. Could that be Danger Man? Not that Clemmie believed in Danger Man, let alone his possible decision to bolt early from church, leap into his car, and race after a departing Avalon.

  The man got out of his vehicle, walked back, and chatted with the girls. “You go to high school around here?”

  Clemmie didn’t like that; nothing about these girls was his business except their safety, so she interrupted and asked him, “What church do you go to?” In the South, this was a courteous and constant question, not the least intrusive.

  He too sidestepped. “I’m from Charlotte,” he said, as if referring to some distant place like Nova Scotia, instead of a city a dozen miles away. “Where do y’all live?”

  “She lives in Sun City, I bet,” said Jaymie, giving Clemmie a snarky look. “You can get there from here and she’s old.”

  Clemmie had to laugh. “Good deduction,” she said. “Not necessarily true. Old people can live anywhere.”

  Jaymie began complex line-dance steps, easing herself down the road and away from questions. Clemmie admired her poise, but wished the dance wasn’t right down the center of the road. She looked at her watch. She wanted to be done with this fender bender and get Muffin home. Perhaps Good Samaritans were always left with such a problem: how long did you have to manage somebody else’s disaster?

  “You were the driver?” the man asked Jayleen.

  She nodded.

  “How did it happen?”

  “Um. Well. The steering wheel. It sort of locked.”

  The man didn’t hide his skepticism. “How could you tell?”

  “None of your business,” snapped Jayleen, and that exchange might have gone anywhere, except that the trooper pulled up. Lights twirling, but no siren, he parked without falling into the ditch, and now the pickup was protected at both ends by other people’s vehicles. Jayleen and Jaymie looked at each other apprehensively. They both had such startling eyes.

  “You’re quick,” Clemmie said to the officer.

  He was not into small talk. “Is it your truck?” he asked.

  “No. I was coming home after church and saw the accident happen. I called it in. Neither of the girls is hurt.”

  “And your car?”

  She gestured. “I pulled into that driveway.”

  He nodded and said to the driver of the SUV, “Sir?”

  “Another stranger driving by after church.”

  The trooper nodded a second time, dismissing them both. “I’ll handle it now.”

  Clemmie didn’t expect teenage girls to be grateful, but the officer could have said thank you. Slightly miffed, she turned to walk away and was surprised when the man from the SUV said courteously, “I’ll just walk you to your car.” He stepped alongside and she thought, Hmmm. It’s broad daylight, there’s a policeman here, and this man thinks I need an escort?

  What if this really was the man from whom Muffin was fleeing? Perhaps Clemmie had made an incorrect assumption that Danger Man was also in his seventies. Perhaps he actually did want to see Clemmie’s car. That had, after all, been his second question.

  But he wouldn’t care about her car. He’d care about her passenger.

  The trooper was now questioning the girls. Their high nervous voices were like flutes, wavering and trembling.

  Clemmie and the man from the SUV walked another few steps and Clemmie paused. She took a posture that said she was going no farther. “Thank you for stopping to help,” she said, looking up at him. In her next life, Clemmie planned to be tall.

  His sunglasses prevented her from looking into his eyes. If they crossed paths again, she would not recognize him.

  “I just wanted you to know,” he said softly, “that those girls are completely wasted. You did the right thing stopping, but you should just have called 911 and driven on. Teenagers as high as that—who knows how they might act? And you are a very small woman. Anything could have happened.”

  THREE

  No wonder the girls hadn’t wanted parents or cops. Clemmie had thought their silliness was panic about their parents’ reaction, that the wide, fluttering eyes were some sisterly match. “Thank you,” she said. “You’re very kind.” She waited. After a few beats, he wished her a pleasant day and walked back. When he had passed the officer and the girls and was almost at his own car, she crossed the road and hurried down the drive, mindful of every little stone on which she could turn an ankle. She should have recognized the drug factor, but Latin students were always the best kids. She rarely had problems with them, and they in turn rarely had problems like drugs. She was less aware than other high school teachers would be.

  She was startled to find her car door locked. She’d almost forgotten Muffin, let alone that she was terrified and in hiding. Muffin clicked the locks open.

  “Stay down, Muffin.”

  “I am staying down. I’ve been staying down for hours. What took you so long?”

  “I’m so sorry. We had to wait for the trooper. Actually, he was very fast. He must have been in the area already.”

  Clemmie backed onto the grass and headed slowly out the driveway. She was still partly concealed by the heavy shrubbery when the black SUV drove slowly past. Whether the driver or passenger glanced her way, she could not tell because of its tinted windows. Just in case, she went the other direction, carefully edging past the police car and the girls, who glared at her. She retraced a mile to take a different way home.

  “A man driving what I think was a Suburban also stopped to help,” she told Muffin. “He came from the same direction as Trinity Hill and he was dressed for church. But he was young, Muffin. I don’t think he could have been fifty. He did have a passenger, but I couldn’t see that person.”

  “The person who frightened me would be a year or so younger than I am.”

  “In any event, the SUV went on up Patterson Church, but I’ve taken the other way and we’re headed toward Harris Road. There’s nobody behind us. You can sit up.”

  Muffin straightened, tugging at her clothes. She yanked on her long hair, ran her fingers through it, yanked again, and fastened it in a messy but fashionable knot. Clemmie had always yearned for long, straight hair she could do cool things with. One of those dreams never to be realized, like becoming an adorable airline stewardess with whom pilots fell madly in love.

  “You probably want an explanation,” said Muffin.

  But Clemmie had a difficult afternoon ahead. Her neighbor Bonnie, who had taken a spill in pickleball and snapped her ankle, was home in great pain, using a walker, and in such a bad mood that nobody liked visiting her. Clemmie had promised to provide lunch for Bonnie, which itself promised to be awful, because she was also bringing Gale. Gale’s perfectly ordinary cataract surgery had resulted in such serious floaters that reading, driving, and everything else were now difficult. After lunch, Clemmie was taking another neighbor, Chip, to Memory Care to visit his beloved wife, whose Alzheimer’s he had dealt with easily until he hurt his back and could no longer care for her at home. Since the bad back meant that he also couldn’t drive, neighbors were hauling Chip back and forth for daily visits.

  Life in your seventies and eighties was lived on the edge whether you wanted to be there or not.

  “It’s about my first husband,” said Muffin.

  Clemmie restrained herself from saying, “Ah, the old first husband story,” and instead explained about having to fix lunch for Bonnie and Gale. “I need to drop you off and rush on, Muffin. I’m so glad everything worked out well today,” she finished, although she didn’t know what everything was, let alone whether it had worked out well.

  Tomorrow was Monday, and there was school, but Clemmie had no classes to teach. Her high school had instituted block scheduling: odd, chunky rotating hours that might or might not be best for learning, but which did give her a three-day teaching week. Unfortunately, class days also rotated, so she was constantly checking the calendar to be sure she didn’t confuse her on and off days. Having already completed her Tuesday teaching preparation, she could do whatever she chose on Monday.

  She dropped Muffin in front of her little villa, drove two more blocks, hurried into her own small villa—Sun City’s word for attached houses—and changed out of her church clothes. She didn’t feel the usual peace from church, perhaps because she hadn’t been there for the closing prayers. She fixed BLTs using that wonderful new product, precooked bacon, placed the sandwiches and the pineapple upside-down cake she had baked yesterday in a tote, threw in a bag of Fritos, drove one cul-de-sac over to get Gale, and drove to Bonnie’s cul-de-sac.

  Bonnie and Gale had met in water aerobics and discovered that they were both retired schoolteachers, widows, and nonstop talkers. Their favorite game was Rummikub, which Clemmie also played now and then, but they always slaughtered her.

  Bonnie had the television on and the volume high.

  If there was one thing that tired Clemmie out, it was the news. Just as so many women in Sun City had decided that five or six decades of cooking was enough and had informed their husbands that from now on, they went to restaurants or bought takeout, Clemmie felt that six decades of news were enough. She had never had any effect upon the news—world, national, or local—and instead of becoming used to it, it hit her harder. In her younger years, she had subscribed to newspapers and weekly newsmagazines and kept up with everything. Now she knew that everything didn’t care whether she kept up. She had retreated happily into the cocoon that was a retirement village. The news she cared about was who would be at cards and with whom she would carpool for ladies’ lunch out.

  Clemmie had neglected to school Bonnie in this outlook, and Bonnie was full of outrage, which in Bonnie took very little. Her outrage was widespread and covered pretty much the universe. “That ridiculous reporter! That lynching guy! I’m already sick of his nonsense,” she sputtered, taking the plate of sandwiches Clemmie had brought. She frowned. “White bread, Helen? Really? You haven’t moved on to whole wheat?”

  Clemmie had had a chance to get rid of her other two names not long ago and she had dithered, because if outrage was Bonnie’s middle name, dither was Clemmie’s, and now it was too late. She would die here as Helen Stephens, and she would die in another state as Clementine Lakefield and in yet another as Clementine Murray. Oh well. Some other person would have to clean up that debris. Or not. Her various persona might float indefinitely, like plastic in the ocean.

  “I couldn’t agree more about that reporter,” said Gale. “The idea that that lily-white, lily-livered, so-called reporter was lynched is pathetic, not to mention insulting to real victims. It’s a fiction to draw attention to himself and sell more books. Setting his lies in 1964 keeps him safe. How can anybody prove or disprove it now?”

  “He isn’t claiming he was lynched,” said Bonnie, “because then he would be dead. It’s stupider. He’s claiming he was almost lynched.”

  With the television on so loud, they were shouting. Clemmie didn’t get up to lower the volume, because she assumed that among all her other problems, Bonnie was deaf, refusing to admit it, and not about to get hearing aids. Bonnie and Gale were alike in so many ways, except skin color, that Clemmie thought Gale was probably deaf too.

  “He says he escaped,” said Bonnie.

  “No, he doesn’t. He says he was saved by a beautiful young girl with long, dark hair.”

  They all giggled. Of course she was young and beautiful. Who wanted to be saved by some overweight middle-aged woman in sweatpants?

  “Eat faster,” Clemmie said to Gale. “Very soon I’m driving Chip to Memory Care.”

  “That man is using you, Helen,” said Bonnie. “He’s using the whole pod. He keeps calling people to drive him up there and hang out while he feeds his wife a meal. How long does he expect to do this? The neighborhood is not responsible. Millie doesn’t even know he’s there.”

  “I love that Chip keeps visiting Millie,” said Gale. “I’d drive him every day if I could see well enough to drive. I have floaters, you know, because of that worthless ophthalmologist, and it’s unforgivable but it turns out I can’t even sue him because I signed a paper ahead of the surgery acknowledging that it has a degree of risk. And speaking of risk, did you hear about Susie Kennett? She is so worn out by her druggie daughter, I mean, it’s been years, maybe even decades, and now the daughter’s boyfriend and his whole criminal family are mooching off Susie. Anyway, she locked up her house and fled to some unknown location.”

  Clemmie had never met Susie Kennett, who lived in another pod (Sun City’s slightly creepy word for neighborhood), but stories about the daughter’s squalid existence circulated constantly. “Chip is expecting me in ten minutes, Gale. I’m wrapping up your sandwich for you.”

  “You can let me finish chewing, Helen. Chip isn’t an emergency.”

  “The point is,” said Bonnie, “that that reporter is lying, and furthermore, it’s a pitiful second-rate lie, just to sell more books.”

  “What else is new?” asked Gale. “Everybody who writes a tell-all book tells lies to sell more of them.” She began listing politicians whose books were full of lies. This was a fruitful topic and could last for hours, so Clemmie stood.

  “The reporter got absolutely roasted on television last night,” said Bonnie.

  “I know, I watched,” said Gale. “His story is full of holes. All that nonsense about four killers he couldn’t identify fifty years ago and can’t identify now. Furthermore, they aren’t killers because he’s alive. And even more furthermore than that, he’s white. When was a white man ever in danger of being lynched? There’s people who want to lynch him now because he’s trying to take over lynching.”

  Gale had graduated from a segregated high school somewhere local, and Clemmie would have liked an insider’s view of desegregation in the Carolinas, but she didn’t want it now. “I’m lea–ving,” she said singsong.

  “What’s his name, anyway?” asked Bonnie. “I forget.”

  “Wait, Helen,” said Gale. “What dessert did you bring?”

  “Pineapple upside-down cake. If you want it, you have to stay here and then walk home.”

  “I better stay. Pineapple upside-down cake is bound to be fortifying.”

  “MacBurton Ward!” remembered Bonnie.

  “You cheated. You Googled him,” said Gale.

  Clemmie hurried out of Bonnie’s, drove around the corner, and pulled up at Chip’s. The poor man was standing in his door, waiting. It was touching. There had never been a man in Clemmie’s life who yearned so much for her company that he would drive to her side every day and hold her hand when she no longer recognized him. Clemmie blinked back tears, amazed that she could still be reduced to longing after all these years, and helped Chip into the front seat.

  “That reporter was on yet another talk show,” said Chip. “TV loves that guy. They get to sneer at him and undermine his story but also prove their journalistic value by showing these appalling black-and-white photographs of real 1920s and ’30s lynchings. This morning they had a historian who pointed out that the last verified lynching in South Carolina was in 1947. Therefore nobody tried to lynch MacBurton Ward in 1964, and furthermore, he’s white as Elmer’s Glue.”