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“Okay, okay,” he said, and told us what he’d seen.

Boog said he’d gotten up to pee before dawn and went out under the tarp. The rain started to let up, and he saw the car on the road. When he climbed down to get a better look at it, a flash of lightning revealed the shape of someone sitting upright in the front seat.

“I went nearer, trying to see inside the Audi, and I smelled something like gas but different, you know? Then there was a big, like, double flash of lightning and I saw blood on the window and I thought I saw… oh, I don’t know. But then I definitely saw a little flare, and then fire came like a snake from over near the brush.”

Sampson said, “You mean a flare like an emergency-flare thing?”

“No, no, just like, I don’t know, one of those mini-blowtorch cigarette lighters they sell in gas stations? The kind with, like, a big blue flame. Anyway, like I said, the fire, like, ran up in a line and kept on right through the mud and water to the Audi, then the flame went whoosh and, like, swallowed the car whole, and it exploded.”

I said, “Let’s go back a little bit. When there was that double flash of lightning, what was it that you thought you saw? It sounded like you might’ve seen something, but now you’re not sure. Is that right, Boog?”

The kid lowered his eyes and nodded.

“What do you think you saw?”

“I don’t really know,” he said.

“Close your eyes a moment,” I said, and waited until he did. “Now go back to early this morning. What did you think you saw in that second lightning flash?”

The kid licked his lips. “A collar.” He opened his eyes and nodded. “The guy in the car was wearing a collar.”

Sampson grimaced. “You mean like a pet collar?”

Boog looked at John as if he were an alien.

“Nah,” he said. “Like a white collar with a black shirt. Like a reverend would wear.”

8

SO FAR, REGINA CROSS’S day had gone just as she’d imagined it would that morning: smooth and productive, flowing easily. After Alex left for the soup kitchen, Nana Mama made breakfast for Ali and Bree, then Alex’s youngest child went off to middle school, and his wife went off to give a deposition at the security firm where she worked in Northern Virginia.

The old woman sat quietly after they’d gone, drinking her coffee and reading two newspapers. These days she read the news on her iPad, mainly because of how easy it was to enlarge the font. Then she padded over to her room to change into proper leaving-the-house clothes.

A little before ten a.m., an Uber picked her up and brought her to her gerontologist. The doctor seemed happy with her latest round of tests and decided not to change any medications. Another Uber took her to the grocery store, and a third brought her home with the ingredients for that night’s dinner of chicken, sweet potatoes, and onions in a simple wine sauce.

After putting away her groceries, Nana Mama ate a small lunch, then took a nap.

Refreshed and back on her feet twenty minutes later, Nana Mama donned gardening gloves and a broad-brimmed straw hat, went through the back door into the high-walled yard, and spent an hour with a hand trowel turning over the soil in four waist-high beds that John Sampson had built for her.

Gardening gave Nana Mama a chance to return to a slower rhythm of life, which seemed to move faster and faster with each passing decade. The pace of things today felt like a whirlwind accelerating around her.

As the nonagenarian got ready to add manure and compost materials to the raised garden, she began to feel a bit lightheaded. She considered going over to sit on a bench in the shade but then realized the problem was likely dehydration. She had not had enough water that morning.

Leaving her gloves and hat on the railing above the back steps, Nana Mama went inside, telling herself she’d drink two full glasses before returning to her gardening work. She felt better after drinking the water at her kitchen table, but when she looked at the thermometer, she saw that the temperature was pushing eighty. She’d wait to go back outside until the sun had lost some of its sting. In the meantime, she decided to work on her next YouTube video.

The videos had become a surprise hit in the waning days of the pandemic, and she’d become energized by the idea of giving interesting lectures to an audience that was vast by most classroom standards. Last month, Regina Cross’s Book Talk had garnered more than one hundred thousand views.

Her upcoming talk would be about the late Ernest J. Gaines’s 1971 masterpiece The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, the saga of a girl freed from slavery who’d left one plantation only to work on another as an impoverished sharecropper; she lived to the age of one hundred and ten and bore witness to every change in the South from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s, from emancipation to reconstruction to Jim Crow to the early days of the civil rights movement.

Nana Mama had always loved the book, not only for its historical accuracy but for the way Gaines brought Jane’s story to life. Whenever she opened the novel, she felt transported to another time, another place, watching Jane’s life unfold amid remarkable circumstances.

Nana Mama already had the outline of her talk, which would first focus on the language Gaines used to describe Jane as she aged. Today she planned to organize her thoughts about the author himself and his own background—how he’d grown up on the remains of a plantation, living in former enslaved people’s quarters similar to Jane’s.

The plantation of Gaines’s own impoverished childhood and his remarkable research were a constant inspiration in his creation of Jane’s complex world, she wrote on a legal pad at the kitchen table. Not only would his personal memories do great service to the…

She stopped and frowned. What word am I looking for?

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