(At the beginning of The Body of Summer, Dr. Kendall Grant, a professor of English at the University of Virginia, answers the phone to hear her ex-husband, a local contractor, ask her to find a lawyer for him. He has been taken into the police department overnight to be questioned because he was the last person seen with a woman whose body was found floating in the river.)

After Colin hung up, I watched the morning news while Patrick, having successfully bolted, played in the backyard with the dog. The anchor reported the bare bones, so to speak, of the murder: Charlottesville woman found dead in Palmyra, identification withheld pending notification of family.

I got dressed in my tan suit and pumps, put my hair up, and made plans mechanically, hoping that whatever had happened would either go away or be cleared up so quickly as to be the same thing. Colin always said I lacked optimism, but that wasn’t true—if denial counted as a form of optimism. I thought of the fall conference on poststructuralist feminism where I’d be the keynote speaker, the article for it still there under the frozen natural landscapes of the screen saver in my study. It was the spring of the year I’d been working for. The next fall I was finally up for tenure. It was possible, wasn’t it, that Colin’s current troubles wouldn’t completely mess that up?

When proper business hours started, I called the family attorney and then dropped Patrick off at my father’s house near the University. I didn’t tell Pop where I was going. I wasn’t ready to talk about it. Maybe Colin’s luck would hold. Maybe it would be one of the times something involving Colin didn’t turn out horribly.

I went to the lawyer’s office on Court Square where our regular attorney introduced me to a young man who was starting out in criminal law. Richard Harte walked with me to the city police station on Market Street.

I’d seen a lot of law students in my day and Richard was prototypical. He was sturdy, sandy-haired, dressed in a good gray suit, Oxford shirt with a tiny blue pinstripe, and black shoes. He looked competent and earnest and his handshake was solid.

I was reassured by him, but not by the weather. At ten in the morning in downtown Charlottesville, you could tell summer had already sat down on the city and wouldn’t get up again until October.

The police station was new, but the light was dim, as if bulbs had already burnt out.

We came into the big open room where police were interviewing, typing, and drinking coffee. There seemed to be way too many people being interviewed than could possibly have been involved in crimes in the night. People in Charlottesville didn’t like to think bad things could happen here. I thought about the illusion of safety I’d slept in, while cars were wrecked, houses robbed, women raped, men shot and stabbed. And one woman, at least, strangled.

Richard took my elbow and steered me toward the opening in the low railing between the hall and the desks.

“He should be in here somewhere, if he still hasn’t been charged,” he told me. A policeman got up from his desk and opened the gate for us.

“I see him. He’s back there,” I said. In pointing, I dropped my purse.

“Near the door to the cells?” Richard said as he bent down to pick up my purse. Colin was sitting on a bench, a darker shadow in the most poorly lit section of the room near the elevators. To be accurate, he slumped. Only ten in the morning and Colin was already spent. I’d seen it before, of course, and, to be fair, this had been a particularly bad night.

The policeman waved us into the compound.

Not very many men look like Colin. I could tell Richard was a little nonplused by his new client who slumped—reclined decorously in his own mind, I was sure—on the police bench. A medium-sized black bear of a man, with a strong and primitive build, covered in the dark hair of the bear, with the beginning of an inclination toward fat, like the caged bear. His thick black hair and beard were untrimmed, and he had on extremely worn, spotted Levi’s, broken-down brown leather boots, an open-necked, dirty blue workshirt. A red bandanna draped out of his back pocket and over the back of the bench.

A working man, a contractor—now one of the best and highest-priced in town. Leaving me had coincided with a sharp upturn in his career. His success hadn’t interfered with his drinking. He hadn’t had any more impulses toward intellectual self-improvement, to my knowledge, though he probably still habitually read the New York Times and recited Kipling and Shakespeare in the drunk tank. And, if his body was that of a bear, it also had the natural grace of Nature’s close children. My good-looking, smart, funny, hard-working, charismatic ruin of an ex-husband.

“Richard Harte, Colin McLarty. Mr. Harte has agreed to take your case, Colin.”

“Which we’re hoping won’t turn into a case,” Richard said. He meant this as encouragement but could see from Colin’s glare that he needed nothing so delicate from him.

Colin, as usual, would do nothing to build bridges. He stood and grunted. He looked not so much violent as uncontrollable, someone whose geniality, even civilization, was only skin-deep. I checked Richard, who appeared to be wondering why he’d gone into criminal law.

A detective came out from the recesses of the building.

“This your lawyer, Colin?”

Colin grunted.

“Just as well you’re here,” the detective said to Richard. “We want Colin here to i.d. the woman, see if she’s the same one he was with.”

Moving surprisingly fast as he turned toward me, Colin said, “Come with me.”

“Good lord,” I said. I felt sick instantly. I’d never seen a dead person—Episcopalians in Charlottesville didn’t do open caskets. Did my first corpse have to be someone my ex-husband had spent an evening trying to fuck? But his appeal to me was so new, the situation so dire, what could I say? I got a good grip on my pocketbook, nodded.

Richard and the detective walked ahead of us, showing us the way to the morgue. Colin and I were side by side, both of us wooden. They must have thought we were still married.

It wasn’t actually cold in the morgue, but my expectation that it would be made me hug my arms around me. The detective pushed the door open to the room with the refrigerator. An attendant sat at the desk, an Egg McMuffin in his hand. He took the detective’s request and consulted a list. He moved in the silence of clean air to the refrigerator.

I stood next to Colin, Richard and the detective down from us. The technician opened the big clamped door. He checked the list again and put his hand on the handle of a metal drawer. He heaved the drawer open, metal scraping against metal resoundingly. The detective moved to the other side of the body.

She was nude—not even a paper sheet to cover her. She didn’t look asleep. She looked dead. I’d always wondered how anyone would know for sure, but when I finally saw a dead body, I understood. Her skin had a sheen, greenish underneath a kind of marbling, no longer animated. She was a big woman—the bones of shoulders and hips substantial. Even the hair was dead. It was brown, slicked back, but I could still see the evenness of a good and expensive cut. I made myself look at her face. Her eyes were bugged open, the whites red and the centers cloudy. They would divulge nothing beyond a sickening death, nothing about who had strangled her. Around her neck was an indented circlet of bruised flesh—blue and purple with tiny light blue flakes of chalk dust, the most vivid part of her.

I heard Colin’s boot leather creak. I looked up, not at him but at the detective. He was watching Colin and I knew then why a photograph identification wouldn’t have done. The detective wanted to see Colin’s reaction to his alleged night’s handiwork. The detective looked gratified.

I looked at Colin then. He was gazing at her, not turning away, not looking longingly. He was taking her in, honoring her in his way, with a deep last look.

He was sorrowing. I’d seen it before—the intensification of a look he and his mother both took on whenever they thought no one was watching. I looked back at the detective. Could he discern better than I if Colin regretted killing the woman or regretted mortality itself?

“Has this man been charged?” Richard asked the detective.

“No, he’s free. Just don’t be going anywhere distant, Colin. You hear?”