Light of the World by James Lee Burke Page B

invasive curiosity about others that bordered on disdain. I had to remind myself of the loss the Younger family had just suffered.
    I introduced myself and Clete and offered our condolences, thinking that she was about to invite us in. Instead, she looked behind her, then back at us. “Who did you say you were?” she asked.
    “I spoke earlier with Love Younger. He asked me to come here,” I said. “This is his house, isn’t it?”
    “Tell them to come in, Felicity,” a voice called from the hallway.
    A slight man walked toward us, a vague smile on his face. He did not offer to shake hands. He was unshaved and wearing slippers and a dress shirt open at the collar. “I’m Caspian,” he said. “You’re a police officer?”
    “Not here. In Louisiana,” I said.
    “You know something about Angel’s death?” he said.
    “Not directly, but I have some information that I feel I should share with you. I think someone tried to kill my daughter. We’ve also had a stalker at the place where we’re staying. Can we sit down?”
    “Wait here, please,” he said.
    “Like Dave says, we were invited here,” Clete said. “I don’t think that’s getting across somehow.”
    “Excuse me?” Caspian said.
    “We have no obligation to be here,” Clete said. “We were trying to do you a favor.”
    “I see,” said Caspian. “I know my father will be happy to see you.”
    The man and the woman went to the rear of the house. Clete and I waited on a leather couch by a huge fireplace filled with ash and crumpled logs that gave no heat. The windows reached almost to the ceiling and were hung with velvet curtains, the walls with oil paintings of individuals in nineteenth-century dress. The carpets were Iranian, the furniture antique, the beams in the cathedral ceiling recovered from a teardown, the wood rust-marked by iron spikes and bolts. In a side hallway, I could see a long glass-covered cabinet lined with flintlock and cap-and-ball rifles.
    Clete glanced at his watch. “Do you believe these fucking people?” he said.
    “Take it easy.”
    “They’re all the same.”
    “I know it. You can’t change them. So don’t try.”
    I knew that the Younger family and their ingrained rudeness were not the source of Clete’s discontent.
    “Gretchen’s never slept with a piece,” he said. “She’s never been afraid of anything. She stayed in the shower so long that she ran all the hot water out of the tank. I saw a bruise on her neck. She saidshe slipped while she was hiking up the hill behind the house.” He leaned forward, hands cupped on his knees. “I don’t like being here, Dave. These are the same people who used to treat us like their garbage collectors.”
    “We’ll leave in a few minutes. I promise.”
    “The guy was a guest at the White House. He says he’s into wind energy. Does anybody buy crap like that? I say screw this.”
    I believed I understood Clete’s resentment toward the world in which he grew up, and I didn’t want to argue with him. The most telling story about his background was one he told me when he was drunk. As a boy, during the summer, he sometimes went on the milk-delivery route with his father, a brutal and childlike man who loved his children and yet was often cruel to every one of them. One day a wealthy woman in the Garden District saw Clete sitting by himself on the rear bumper of the milk truck, barefoot and wearing jeans split at the knees and eating a peanut-butter sandwich. The woman stroked his head, her eyes filling with the lights of pity and love. “You’re such a beautiful little boy,” she said. “Come back here at one P.M. Saturday and have ice cream and cake with me.”
    He put on his white suit an uncle had bought him for his confirmation and went to the woman’s house one block from Audubon Park. When he knocked at the front door, a black butler answered and told him to go around to the rear. Clete walked along the flagstone path through the side yard and under