I met him at a cocktail party in Baton Rouge. The celebrated southern author of those heavily nuanced gothic novels of lust, decadence, old family decay, and the hint of the occult and vampires. I'd never been able to finish one of his novels; they were much too dense and overrich in description for me. But Philippe Controu himself I found to be a surprise. He was younger than I had thought he'd be—and much more handsome and well turned out. I had expected shaded, dark-rimmed eyes that darted about, a sour disposition, and a body ruined by too much wine and old-money inbreeding. But he had turned out to be tall, built like a bodybuilder, and with open, smiling eyes that danced as he told me how much he'd enjoyed my piano concert that evening, that he'd returned from New York to Baton Rouge specifically because he'd heard I was playing there. The two blonde models hanging onto his arms claimed to have been equally entranced with my piano keyboarding, and, as he invited me to his family's plantation on the Mississippi some thirty miles north of the city for the weekend with a broad smile and a wink of his eye, I caught a hint of some promised frolicking with the blondes.

It wasn't my usual style, but I could swing that way on occasion, and my agent had already told me I was overdue for a rest and rejuvenation. I saw no reason why this weekend I couldn't rejuvenate by dipping into finding out if one of these sweeties was a genuine blonde.

On Saturday afternoon, I was met at my hotel entrance by a hulking jet-black man in a chauffeur's uniform that barely contained his bulging muscles. He opened the rear passenger door of an aging ebony Cadillac limousine and gave me a big pearly smile as I climbed in with my overnight bag. Thirty miles up the river road later, as I was driven up the long, oak-lined packed-earth drive to Controu's Release, the main residence of Philippe's family for generations past, I couldn't help but feel I was entering the set for the movie version of one of Controu's novels. The Spanish moss hanging off the gnarled trees would be an invitation to terror on a moon-encrusted night, and as we approached the house itself, guarded by eight thick columns rimming a deep, two-story porch, holding up a sagging roof that had seen better days, I got the feeling of ruin and decay.

The chauffeur ushered me into a wide front hall, running the full depth of the house and adorned only with an ancient Oriental carpet and a cherry side table of ancient visage, straddled by two Chippendale side chairs of equal age. A broad staircase, with a notched-wooden balustrade running up two flights toward a dusty, clouded skylight overhead, yawned before me. The heavily detailed cherry wood walls were bare, although I could see by the changes in finish where the many paintings—most likely family portraits going back to the ages—had once hung.

The chauffeur briefly guided me into the room immediately to the right of the double-doored entry and told me that this was the music room and that, after he'd shown me where I was to sleep that night, I was welcome to come here and practice. I was pleased that Philippe had remembered that I'd told him I had to practice at least three hours every day. The only pieces of furniture left in the music room now were a Steinway grand piano and the