The Army loved paperwork. She filled in every form as Muffin Morgan, skipping the name Christaphine altogether. If anybody were to ask, she planned to giggle and say, ‘Oh, I forgot because I never use that name,’ but nobody did. At some point, when they were stationed in the United States, she legally changed her first name to Muffin.

  She and John Tee called their little son Robert, and later they had another child, Mary. John Tee stayed in the Army and they lived all over the world and the States, and never had a house of their own, and Muffin didn’t care. She’d had a house of her own once, and it hadn’t ended well.

  Muffin cut off her story. There were memories best not shared, especially with a saint-type person like Helen. But how sharp and painful these unspoken memories were.

  A few decades after she fled that oak tree, Martin Luther King Day was established. Muffin was watching a parade on the news and had an awful thought: Would I would have made that crazy drive down that awful lane and ended my marriage to save a colored man?

  No.

  Never.

  It had been such brutal, sobering knowledge of her soul.

  She buried it. Now she’d have to bury it again. She had a brief, awful vision of Gale, her only Black acquaintance, seeing into her heart and learning what kind of woman Muffin really was. Then she got a grip on herself and breezed through the rest of her bio for Helen’s sake, since Helen was so invested, tearful at every turn.

  So fast it was like her flight from Tommy, Robert grew up and he too joined the Army. He married another Army brat he met when the family was stationed in Guam, and he and Dinah also lived all over the country and the world. They decided against children because they were having too much fun as a couple. When Robert retired from the Army, he and Dinah chose Southern California because of its glorious beaches and perfect weather.

  Mary became a math teacher, married another math teacher, and lived way out on Long Island. They too decided against having children, since they had them all day long in school.

  And then John Tee had a heart attack and Muffin was alone, her children thousands of miles apart and no grandchildren.

  One day, she drove south to see what a Sun City was like, and what it was like was perfect and Muffin bought her first home. She loved her little villa, which shared a wall with a matching villa. She loved her neighbors and her activities and her new friends. She tried several churches, but they were too big or too small, too liberal or too conservative, played too much music or played it badly. She decided to try one more: the church Helen liked. Trinity Hill. And there, she explained to Helen, sat her past, one aisle and a few pews away.

  NINE

  Clemmie was light-headed from the tragic parallel between her life and Muffin’s. “So this morning, in church,” she said, trying to wrap up, trying to get Muffin out the door, “you believe you saw Haven.”

  “It was definitely Haven.”

  “Have you seen him in the last half century?”

  “No. But when I was in Ferris, he came home from his freshman year at college on weekends and now and then he hung out with Tommy. There’s no doubt in my mind. It was Haven.”

  Clemmie had never been to one of her own college reunions, because she had faked her college graduation. She never went to a high school reunion because Clementine Lakefield no longer existed. But she had helped organize reunions at schools where she taught. Without name tags and photographs, nobody could recognize anybody.

  Oh, they claimed otherwise. “You look exactly the same!” they chorused.

  But no one did. Balding heads or dyed hair, glasses or contacts, double chins and wrinkles and brown spots changed people radically. The real punch was weight gain. Add fifty or seventy-five pounds, which many did, and the girl who had once been so flirty and cute or the cool boy most likely to succeed was gone.

  If the man in the black SUV or his passenger at that fender bender had raced out of church to look for Muffin, they’d have seen Clemmie instead, with her Snow White looks and bee-stung lips. She could not be confused with bony, angular Christaphine.

  True, Clemmie had been wearing the same indigo jacket that Muffin had had on. Perhaps that had registered. If indeed it was Haven. If he had seen Muffin at all. If he even noticed clothing, which the men of her acquaintance did not.

  “Even if you’re right,” she said, unable to stifle a yawn, “and even if he knew you, resurrecting the lynching is the last thing Haven would want. He surely knows you aren’t going to talk to MacBurton Ward. Why did we have to run out of the church?”

  “I might be seeking the spotlight,” snapped Muffin. “I might want to go on a talk show. I might want to reveal Tommy and his family and friends as the awful people they were then.”

  As a teacher, Clemmie had watched the metamorphosis of many a young jerk. Part of youth was that you were stupid and unthinking. Most boys and girls grew up to understand themselves and the world better, and they behaved better. But the decision to lynch someone was off any chart Clemmie knew. “Were they really awful people?” she asked. “Or were they average people at an awful time? Maybe they look back with gratitude because Christaphine saved them from an irrevocable crime. Maybe they’ve spent their lives trying to atone for even thinking the things they thought.”

  Muffin nodded. “It’s what I’ve told myself over the years. If I ever thought about it. Which I didn’t. But there’s another problem, Helen. All of those men have children and grandchildren. They would never want their sons or daughters or grandchildren to know about their beliefs and actions in the sixties. They would never want their colleagues and people who respect them and people in their church to know.”

  “Muffin, how would anybody know? If you’re not going to tell and Haven’s not going to tell, and surely Tommy won’t tell, it’ll stay secret.”

  “Tommy’s dead. I looked him up online. The old Ferris paper folded ages ago but the obituaries are still available. Tommy had a heart attack on the golf course twenty years ago. It’s sickening, but I felt kind of triumphant that I outlived him. I couldn’t find Haven, I can’t remember Webb’s last name, and Daniel I think was a Smith and there are too many Smiths to try.”

  “What about your in-laws?”

  “Tommy Senior lived into the late nineteen eighties, so he saw every single thing he dreaded come true. There’s no way to tell how he behaved but he kept being chair of this and president of that. Eleanor stepped up, though. She started ESL tutoring in Ferris; she arranged Black History weeks. This from a woman who talked about stoning children as if it was no different from deadheading flowers. Anyway, she died in the eighties too.”

  “Did Tommy remarry?”

  “Yes. They had four children. The obituary listed them. They’re married and have children of their own. They shouldn’t have to learn that Tommy was one of those four killers. I owe that to Tommy. I took his firstborn son away from him. I have to protect Tommy’s other children from the truth.”

  Clemmie had never once considered the possibility that she owed her rapist a thing. It was her dear son she owed; she had owed him the safety of good parents who could give him a good shot at a good life. And to ensure that, she too had resolved to protect her child from knowledge.

  “MacBurton Ward is searching,” said Muffin. “If Haven can find me, so can Ward. Ferris was a small town. Everybody knew everybody. They were all intertwined through church and Rotary and Chamber of Commerce and Garden Club. Anybody could deduce that the beautiful young woman with long, dark hair was the wife of Tommy Nearing. Especially since I was never seen again.”

  Just because people lived in small towns didn’t mean they knew each other at all, let alone intimately. They went to different churches, or weren’t members of Rotary, or didn’t garden. Clemmie didn’t believe that decades later, anybody would remember which wife left which marriage in the summer of 1964.

  Tommy wouldn’t have made a public announcement. News of his failed marriage would have oozed out eventually, but after all these years, twenty of which Tommy himself had been dead, who would remember that he’d had a first marriage, let alone what year?

  It was ludicrous and narcissistic to think that people in Ferris had been sitting around for decades waiting to identify Christaphine.

  “Think of having to be on talk shows!” cried Muffin, yanking her ponytail in and out of its scrunchie.

  Clemmie’s patience ebbed. “Enough drama, Muffin. Nobody has to be on a talk show. What you are is an elderly retired woman, and that makes you invisible.”

  “I’m not invisible. Haven found me. And don’t use the word ‘elderly.’ I hate it.”

  “He didn’t find you. He noticed you. He probably wanted to talk about the old days. You were friends.”

  Muffin looked from one corner of the little living room to the other as if Haven or Webb or Tommy or Daniel were listening in. She lowered her voice. “Helen, I think they would kill me to keep me from talking.”

  How absurd this is, thought Clemmie. Two old ladies cosseted in a gated community, one of them predicting her own murder over an event from fifty years ago that didn’t happen.

  MONDAY

  TEN

  Muffin slept poorly. She was awake before dawn. Sunrise wasn’t for another hour, but there was sufficient light from the streetlamps for running. Muffin’s problems were usually minor and running gave her ease. She reminded herself that people like Susie Kennett with that druggie daughter and the psycho boyfriend had real problems.

  It was only forty-eight degrees out. She was tired of cold weather. April in South Carolina should be warm. Or hot. Some years, South Carolina had no spring at all but rushed straight into a blazing, oppressive summer. She put on a long-sleeved tee and zipped up her favorite L.L.Bean jacket.

  The sidewalk had tilts and cracks so she usually ran in the golf-cart lane on the smooth asphalt, facing traffic. If a golf cart appeared at this hour—very unlikely—she could shift onto the grass.

  Once upon a time, she really had run five or six miles a day, but now she was satisfied with three, and one of those would be a walk. The other two would be more of a slow jog.

  Few people in Sun City had reason to get up early, although exercise die-hards would be standing at the doors waiting for the fitness center to open. She had the road to herself.

  Helen, who had been so understanding at first, had turned skeptical. But this morning, Muffin couldn’t believe her own story either. How could that reporter have gotten her car door open and managed to get in and close it behind him, all while she was slewing around and bumping over ruts and accelerating in the dust? Why hadn’t the boys just grabbed him before he reached the car? Why hadn’t she crashed in that wild drive at that ridiculous speed? Why hadn’t she called her husband when she found herself at the interstate?

  Had she exaggerated the truth, or even fabricated parts of it, to match the reporter’s narrative?

  And why was she so fearful of exposure? Well, of course, she knew why. But that was too awful to think about even in the deepest recesses of her mind.

  A large, dark car appeared down the road, coming her way. Helen had described just such a vehicle pausing at the accident Muffin had not even seen, because she’d been lying down in the back seat of Helen’s car. She’d been furious at Helen for getting involved, terrified because Haven Nearing had trespassed in her world.

  Now she thought, Helen’s right. I trespassed in his world. It’s his church. I was the visitor.

  The black car was coming very fast. She knew perfectly well that with nobody else on the road, the driver was simply not bothering with the annoying 25 mile-an-hour speed limit. This was not Haven Nearing driving around Sun City before dawn on the off chance he’d spot the former Christaphine Nearing.

  Still. It spooked her.

  She left the road and ran down a golf-cart path, although it was risky in the dark. This path dipped and wandered, crossing tiny brooks on slatted wooden bridges. She took off her baseball cap, shook her long hair violently, yanked it tight, thrust it through the hole in the back of the cap, and settled the cap back down on her head. Ponytail play was a nervous habit she probably ought to break, but why, exactly? Who cared?

  She thought of Tommy and Haven, Daniel and Webb.

  The decades never really vanish, she thought. They wait, bulging with our mistakes and misdeeds.

  Clemmie opened the glass slider to her little screened porch. The birds were not yet at the feeder. It was just Clemmie and the silent trees. Monday lay soft and empty for her to fill or ignore while she read and dawdled and watched the birds.

  Last week, she and her students had held their Latin banquet. The boys wore white sheets for their togas and the principal, taken aback, murmured to her, “Just be sure they don’t look like the KKK. Maybe wear laurels or something so nobody gets the wrong idea. Videos these days can twist anything.”

  How dreadful if she and her dear students were to end up at the center of some hate investigation. It was perhaps what Muffin feared, and Clemmie had not backed her up.

  She went inside, not proud of herself, and saw that Muffin had left her Bible behind. It lay on the coffee table, the little leather suitcase blending into the stacks of books. She would take it over to Muffin later.

  Clemmie poured herself coffee. When had the change come from cup and saucer to mug? It was like so many mysterious changes. When did men stop wearing hats? Whatever happened to girdles? Why did you still call it a cup even though it was a mug?

  She pondered Muffin’s story.

  In nineteen sixty-four, when women’s lib had yet to launch, a wife really did promise to obey. Did Clemmie believe that a very young bride would abandon her marriage so dramatically and catastrophically? Especially when she was about to have a child? When she had virtually no money?

  Clemmie could imagine some difficult phone calls after Christaphine’s destruction of the lynching plans, but given the baby, wouldn’t Tommy have to shrug and let it go? Of course, they’d have been in a different marriage then—the “obey” section would be off the table. But Muffin had not made that choice. She had leaped into another marriage and left the country.

  Clemmie believed in second chances, in forgiveness. If the day ever came when she faced her real family, she certainly hoped they would forgive her.

  But a man willing to hang a stranger by the neck because the stranger published difficult statements on difficult topics—could such a man ever be dealt with? Wouldn’t he always pose a danger to his wife and to others?

  Then again, Christaphine’s initial guess had been that her husband and his buddies just wanted to scare MacBurton Ward. In that case, the almost lynching would have been cruel and twisted, but not murder. Except that pumped-up young men, goaded and, in fact, ordered to kill… Would they have been able to back off?

  Clemmie needed something less grotesque to think about. She tapped the Charlotte Observer icon on her phone to check the local (usually comfortingly dull) headlines.

  MacBurton Ward was a feature story because a source had stepped forward. The unnamed individual and Ward would appear this morning on a local TV talk show.

  Who could the source be? A family member? What family member of what generation of which family would ever open that particular door?

  Her landline rang. Clemmie gave that to people who needed her number—the plumber, the pharmacy—but who were basically strangers.

  It was Wendy Harroll, chair of the funeral committee at Trinity Hill. They put on receptions during calling hours or after a funeral service, providing pimiento cheese sandwiches cut in triangles, ham biscuits, cookies, crackers and cheese, and sweet or unsweet tea. Clemmie loved working side by side with the other volunteers in the big church kitchen. “Hello, Wendy,” she said. She remembered when caller ID was first invented, when you and the caller were both so startled that the other person knew who you were.

  “Hi, Helen. We’ve had a death, an elderly man who was quite a mover and shaker in this area years ago. His bio is amazing, there’s nothing he didn’t do, so there’ll be a lot of people at calling hours, which the family announced would be in Fellowship Hall from four to six today and didn’t even ask us first. I’m a little frantic. I found people to set up the tables, put on the tablecloths, and bring out the vase collection. I’m bringing flowers from my garden, so we’ll have nice centerpieces. I need somebody to make sandwiches.”

  “Of course. And I can also work the reception.” Clemmie had meant to do nothing much all day, but now she wanted the hustle and bustle, the pleasure of doing something nice for strangers, the chattering with the other church ladies.

  “Thank you so much! Can you be there at three thirty? And will you also make the cookie calls? I’ll email you the list of women who have made their cookies already and have them in the freezer.”

  It was tempting to say that making sandwiches was enough, and Wendy should assign cookie calls to somebody else, but Wendy was the chair, and Clemmie’s rule in life was, Never be the chair, with its corollary, Never complain or you might end up as the chair after all. “I will,” she said, taking bread out of the freezer.

  She filled a large pot with cold water, added eggs, and turned up the heat.

  Wendy’s email arrived. Clemmie didn’t know a single woman on the cookie list. It was a little early to call, but given the time crunch, she couldn’t wait long.

  Clemmie browsed on her laptop. In what was probably a betrayal of friendship, she wanted verification of Muffin’s story.

  First she located the obituaries for Tommy’s father, Tommy Nearing Senior, and his uncle, Haven’s father Ev, who turned out to be Everett. The Nearing brothers were portrayed as outstanding citizens who joined everything, ran everything, and got their pictures in the paper for everything. There were long paragraphs about fundraising for the new hospital wing, being president of Rotary, serving on the school board. She was glad because it meant that they, like most of the South, had bitten the bullet and proceeded to do their best for their towns instead of their worst. On the other hand, perhaps they owned the paper and dictated their public faces.