GREG ILES
The Quiet Game

Copyright

This is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

Published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

Copyright © Greg Iles 1999

Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2013

Cover photographs © Hayden Verry / Arcangel Images (cemetery), Henry Steadman (figure)

Greg Iles asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007545704

Ebook Edition © DECEMBER 2013 ISBN: 9780007545728

Version: 2017-10-01

For

Madeline and Mark

Who will always be my best work.

And

Anna Flowers

Who taught me about class in every sense.

Be not deceived; God is not mocked:

For whatsoever a man soweth,

that shall he also reap.

—GALATIANS 6:7

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading

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About the Author

Books by Greg Iles

About the Publisher

ONE

I am standing in line for Walt Disney’s It’s a Small World ride, holding my four-year-old daughter in my arms, trying to entertain her as the serpentine line of parents and children moves slowly toward the flat-bottomed boats emerging from the grotto to the music of an endless audio loop. Suddenly Annie jerks taut in my arms and points into the crowd.

“Daddy! I saw Mama! Hurry!”

I do not look. I don’t ask where. I don’t because Annie’s mother died seven months ago. I stand motionless in the line, looking just like everyone else except for the hot tears that have begun to sting my eyes.

Annie keeps pointing into the crowd, becoming more and more agitated. Even in Disney World, where periodic meltdowns are common, her fit draws stares. Clutching her struggling body against mine, I work my way back through the line, which sends her into outright panic. The green metal chutes double back upon themselves to create the illusion of a short queue for prospective riders. I push past countless staring families, finally reaching the relative openness between the Carousel and Dumbo.

Holding Annie tighter, I rock and turn in slow circles as I did to calm her when she was an infant. A streaming mass of teenagers breaks around us like a river around a rock and pays us about as much attention. A claustrophobic sense of futility envelops me, a feeling I never experienced prior to my wife’s illness but which now dogs me like a malignant shadow. If I could summon a helicopter to whisk us back to the Polynesian Resort, I would pay ten thousand dollars to do it. But there is no helicopter. Only us. Or the less-than-us that we’ve been since Sarah died.

The vacation is over. And when the vacation is over, you go home. But where is home? Technically Houston, the suburb of Tanglewood. But Houston doesn’t feel like home anymore. The Houston house has a hole in it now. A hole that moves from room to room.

The thought of Penn Cage helpless would shock most people who know me. At thirty-eight years old, I have sent sixteen men and women to death row. I watched seven of them die. I’ve killed in defense of my family. I’ve given up one successful career and made a greater success of another. I am admired by my friends, feared by my enemies, loved by those who matter. But in the face of my child’s grief, I am powerless.

Taking a deep breath, I hitch Annie a little higher and begin the long trek back to the monorail. We came to Disney World because Sarah and I brought Annie here a year ago—before the diagnosis—and it turned out to be the best vacation of our lives. I hoped a return trip might give Annie some peace. But the opposite has happened. She rises in the middle of the night and pads into the bathroom in search of Sarah; she walks the theme parks with darting eyes, always alert for the vanished maternal profile. In the magical world of Disney, Annie believes Sarah might step around the next corner as easily as Cinderella. When I patiently explained that this could not happen, she reminded me that Snow White rose from the dead just like Jesus, which in her four-year-old brain is indisputable fact. All we have to do is find Mama, so that Daddy can kiss her and make her wake up.

I collapse onto a seat in the monorail with a half dozen Japanese tourists, Annie sobbing softly into my shoulder. The silver train accelerates to cruising speed, rushing through Tomorrowland, a grand anachronism replete with Jetsons-style rocket ships and Art Deco restaurants. A 1950s incarnation of man’s glittering destiny, Tomorrowland was outstripped by reality more rapidly than old Walt could have imagined, transformed into a kitschy parody of the dreams of the Eisenhower era. It stands as mute but eloquent testimony to man’s inability to predict what lies ahead.

I do not need to be reminded of this.

As the monorail swallows a long curve, I spy the crossed roof beams of the Polynesian Resort. Soon we will be back inside our suite, alone with the emptiness that haunts us every day. And all at once that is not good enough anymore. With shocking clarity a voice speaks in my mind. It is Sarah’s voice.

You can’t do this alone, she says.

I look down at Annie’s face, angelic now in sleep.

“We need help,” I say aloud, drawing odd glances from the Japanese tourists. Before the monorail hisses to a stop at the hotel, I know what I am going to do.

I call Delta Airlines first and book an afternoon flight to Baton Rouge—not our final destination, but the closest major airport to it. Simply making the call sets something thrumming in my chest. Annie awakens as I arrange for a rental car, perhaps even in sleep sensing the utter resolution in her father’s voice. She sits quietly beside me on the bed, her left hand on my thigh, reassuring herself that I can go nowhere without her.

“Are we going on the airplane again, Daddy?”

“That’s right, punkin,” I answer, dialing a Houston number.

“Back home?”

“No, we’re going to see Gram and Papa.”

Her eyes widen with joyous expectation. “Gram and Papa? Now?”

“I hope so. Just a minute.” My assistant, Cilla Daniels, is speaking in my ear. She obviously saw the name of the hotel on the caller-ID unit and started talking the moment she picked up. I break in before she can get rolling. “Listen to me, Cil. I want you to call a storage company and lease enough space for everything in the house.”

“The house?” she echoes. “Your house? You mean ‘everything’ as in furniture?”

“Yes. I’m selling the house.”

“Selling the house. Penn, what’s happened? What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I’ve come to my senses, that’s all. Annie’s never going to get better in that house. And Sarah’s parents are still grieving so deeply that they’re making things worse. I’m moving back home for a while.”

“Home?”

“To Natchez.”

“Natchez.”

“Mississippi. Where I lived before I married Sarah? Where I grew up?”

“I know that, but—”

“Don’t worry about your salary. I’ll need you now more than ever.”

“I’m not worried about my salary. I’m worried about you. Have you talked to your parents? Your mother called yesterday and asked for your number down there. She sounded upset.”

“I’m about to call them. After you get the storage space, call some movers and arrange transport. Let Sarah’s parents have anything they want out of the house. Then call Jim Noble and tell him to sell the place. And I don’t mean list it, I mean sell it.”

“The housing market’s pretty soft right now. Especially in your bracket.”

“I don’t care if I eat half the equity. Move it.”

There’s an odd silence. Then Cilla says, “Could I make you an offer on it? I won’t if you never want to be reminded of the place.”

“No … it’s fine. You need to get out of that condo. Can you come anywhere close to a realistic price?”

“I’ve got quite a bit left from my divorce settlement. You know me.”

“Don’t make me an offer. I’ll make you one. Get the house appraised, then knock off twenty percent. No realtor fees, no down payment, nothing. Work out a payment schedule over twenty years at, say … six percent interest. That way we have an excuse to stay in touch.”

“Oh, God, Penn, I can’t take advantage like that.”

“It’s a done deal.” I take a deep breath, feeling the invisible bands that have bound me loosening. “Well … that’s it.”

“Hold on. The world doesn’t stop because you run off to Disney World.”

“Do I want to hear this?”

“I’ve got bad news and news that could go either way.”

“Give me the bad.”

“Arthur Lee Hanratty’s last request for a stay was just denied by the Supreme Court. It’s leading on CNN every half hour. The execution is scheduled for midnight on Saturday. Five days from now.”

“That’s good news, as far as I’m concerned.”

Cilla sighs in a way that tells me I’m wrong. “Mr. Givens called a few minutes ago.” Mr. Givens and his wife are the closest relatives of the black family slaughtered by Hanratty and his psychotic brothers. “And Mr. Givens doesn’t ever want to see Hanratty in person again. He and his wife want you to attend in their place. A witness they can trust. You know the drill.”

“Too well.” Lethal injection at the Texas State Prison at Huntsville, better known as the Walls. Seventy miles north of Houston, the seventh circle of Hell. “I really don’t want to see this one, Cil.”

“I know. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“What’s this other news?”

“I just got off the phone with Peter.” Peter Highsmith is my editor, a gentleman and scholar, but not the person I want to talk to just now. “He would never say anything, but I think the house is getting anxious about Nothing But the Truth. You’re nearly a year past your deadline. Peter is more worried about you than about the book. He just wants to know you’re okay.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That you’ve had a tough time, but you’re finally waking back up to life. You’re nearly finished with the book, and it’s by far the best you’ve ever written.”

I laugh out loud.

“How close are you? You were only half done the last time I got up the nerve to ask you about it.”

I start to lie, but there’s no point. “I haven’t written a decent page since Sarah died.”

Cilla is silent.

“And I burned the first half of the manuscript the night before we left Houston.”

She gasps. “You didn’t!”

“Look in the fireplace.”

“Penn … I think you need some help. I’m speaking as your friend. There are some good people here in town. Discreet.”

“I don’t need a shrink. I need to take care of my daughter.”

“Well … whatever you do, be careful, okay?”

“A lot of good that does. Sarah was the most careful person I ever knew.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“I know. Look, I don’t want a single journalist finding out where I am. I want no part of that deathwatch circus. It’s Joe’s problem now.” Joe Cantor is the district attorney of Harris County, and my old boss. “As far as you know, I’m on vacation until the moment of the execution.”

“Consider yourself incommunicado.”

“I’ve got to run. We’ll talk soon.”

“Make sure we do.”

When I hang up, Annie rises to her knees beside me, her eyes bright. “Are we really going to Gram and Papa’s?”

“We’ll know in a minute.”

I dial the telephone number I memorized as a four-year-old and listen to it ring. The call is answered by a woman with a cigarette-parched Southern drawl no film producer would ever use, for fear that the audience would be unable to decode the words. She works for an answering service.

“Dr. Cage’s residence.”

“This is Penn Cage, his son. Can you ring through for me?”

“We sure can, honey. You hang on.”

After five rings, I hear a click. Then a deep male voice speaks two words that somehow convey more emotional subtext than most men could in two paragraphs: reassurance, gravitas, a knowledge of ultimate things.

“Doctor Cage,” it says.

My father’s voice instantly steadies my heart. This voice has comforted thousands of people over the years, and told many others that their days on earth numbered far less than they’d hoped. “Dad, what are you doing home this time of day?”

“Penn? Is that you?”

“Yes.”

“What’s up, son?”

“I’m bringing Annie home to see you.”

“Great. Are you coming straight from Florida?”

“You could say that. We’re coming today.”

“Today? Is she sick?”

“No. Not physically, anyway. Dad, I’m selling the house in Houston and moving back home for a while. What comes after that, I’ll figure out later. Have you got room for us?”

“God almighty, son. Let me call your mother.”

I hear my father shout, then the clicking of heels followed by my mother’s voice. “Penn? Are you really coming home?”

“We’ll be there tonight.”

“Thank God. We’ll pick you up at the airport.”

“No, don’t. I’ll rent a car.”

“Oh … all right. I just … I can’t tell you how glad I am.”

Something in my mother’s voice triggers an alarm. I can’t say what it is, because it’s in the spaces, not the words, the way you hear things in families. Whatever it is, it’s serious. Peggy Cage does not worry about little things.

“Mom? What’s the matter?”

“Nothing. I’m just glad you’re coming home.”

There is no more inept liar than someone who has spent a lifetime telling the truth. “Mom, don’t try to—”

“We’ll talk when you get here. You just bring that little girl where she belongs.”

I recall Cilla’s opinion that my mother was upset when she called yesterday. But there’s no point in forcing the issue on the phone. I’ll be face to face with her in a few hours. “We’ll be there tonight. Bye.”

My hand shakes as I set the receiver in its cradle. For a prodigal son, a journey home after eighteen years is a sacred one. I’ve been home for a few Christmases and Thanksgivings, but this is different. Looking down at Annie, I get one of the thousand-volt shocks of recognition that has hit me so many times since the funeral. Sometimes Sarah’s face peers out from Annie’s as surely as if her spirit has temporarily possessed the child. But if this is a possession, it is a benign one. Annie’s hazel eyes transfix mine with a look that gave me much peace when it shone from Sarah’s face: This is the right thing, it says.

“I love you, Daddy,” she says softly.

“I love you more,” I reply, completing our ritual. Then I catch her under the arms and lift her high into the air. “Let’s pack! We’ve got a plane to catch!”

TWO

One of the nice things about first-class air travel is immediate beverage service. Even before our connecting flight lifts out of Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, a tumbler of single-malt Scotch sits half-empty on the tray before me. I never drink liquor in front of Annie, but she is conveniently asleep on the adjacent seat. Her little arm hangs over the padded divider, her hand touching my thigh, an early-warning system that operates even in sleep. What part of her brain keeps that hand in place? Did Neanderthal children sleep this way? I sip my whisky and stroke her hair, cautiously looking around the cabin.

One of the bad things about first-class air travel is being recognized. You get a lot of readers in first class. A lot of lawyers too. Today the cabin is virtually empty, but sitting across the aisle from us is a woman in her late twenties, wearing a lawyerly blue suit and reading a Penn Cage novel. It’s just a matter of time before she recognizes me. Or maybe not, if my luck holds. I take another sip of Scotch, recline my seat, and close my eyes.

The first image that floats into my mind is the face of Arthur Lee Hanratty. I spent four months convicting that bastard, and I consider it time well spent. But even in Texas, where we are serious about the death penalty, it takes time to exhaust all avenues of appeal. Now, eight years after his conviction, it seems possible that he might actually die at the hands of the state.

I know prosecutors who will drive all day with smiles on their faces to see the execution of a man they convicted, avidly anticipating the political capital they will reap from the event. Others will not attend an execution even if asked. I always felt a responsibility to witness the punishment I had requested in the name of society. Also, in capital cases, I shepherded the victims’ families through the long ordeal of trial. In every case family members asked me to witness the execution on their behalf. After the legislature changed the law, allowing victims’ families to witness executions, I was asked to accompany them in the viewing room, and I was glad to be able to comfort them.

This time it’s different. My relationship to death has fundamentally changed. I witnessed my wife’s death from a much closer perspective than from the viewing room at the Walls, and as painful as it was, her passing was a sacred experience. I have no desire to taint that memory by watching yet another execution carried out with the institutional efficiency of a veterinarian putting down a rabid dog.

I drink off the remainder of my Scotch, savoring the peaty burn in my throat. As always, remembering Sarah’s death makes me think of my father. Hearing his voice on the telephone earlier only intensifies the images. As the 727 ascends to cruising altitude, the whisky opens a neural switch in my brain, and memory begins overpowering thought like a salt tide flooding into an estuary. I know from experience that it is useless to resist. I close my eyes and let it come.

Sarah lies in the M.D. Anderson hospital in Houston, her bones turned to burning paper by a disease whose name she no longer speaks aloud. She is not superstitious, but to name the sickness seems to grant it more power than it deserves. Her doctors are puzzled. The end should have come long ago. The diagnosis was a late one, the prognosis poor. Sarah weighs only eighty-one pounds now, but she fights for life with a young mother’s tenacity. It is a pitched battle, fought minute by minute against physical agony and emotional despair. Sometimes she speaks of suicide. It is a comfort on the worst nights.

Like many doctors, her oncologists are too wary of lawsuits and the DEA to adequately treat pain. In desperation I call my father, who advises me to check Sarah out of the hospital and go home. Six hours later, he arrives at our door, trailing the smell of cigars and a black bag containing enough Schedule Two narcotics to euthanize a grizzly bear. For two weeks he lives across the hall from Sarah, tending her like a nurse, shaming into silence any physician who questions his actions. He helps Sarah to sleep when she needs it, frees her from the demon long enough to smile at Annie when she feels strong enough for me to bring her in.

Then the drugs begin to fail. The fine line between consciousness and agony disappears. One evening Sarah asks everyone to leave, saying she sleeps better alone. Near midnight she calls me into the bedroom where we once lay with Annie between us, dreaming of the future. She can barely speak. I take her hand. For a moment the clouds in her eyes part, revealing a startling clarity. “You made me happy,” she whispers. I believe I have no tears left, but they come now. “Take care of my baby,” she says. I vow with absolute conviction to do so, but I am not sure she hears me. Then she surprises me by asking for my father. I cross the hall and wake him, then sit down on the warm covers from which he rose.

When I wake, Sarah is gone. She died in her sleep. Peacefully, my father says. He volunteers no more, and I do not ask. When Sarah’s parents wake, he tells them she is dead. Each in turn goes to him and hugs him, their eyes wet with tears of gratitude and absolution. “She was a trooper,” my father says in a cracked voice. This is the highest tribute my wife will ever receive.

“Excuse me, are you Penn Cage? The writer?”

I blink and rub my eyes against the light, then turn to my right. The young woman across the aisle is looking at me, a slight blush coloring her cheeks.

“I didn’t want to bother you, but I saw you take a drink and realized you must be awake. I was reading this book and … well, you look just like the picture on the back.”

She is speaking softly so as not to wake Annie. Part of my mind is still with Sarah and my father, chasing a strand of meaning down a dark spiral, but I force myself to concentrate as the woman introduces herself as Kate. She is quite striking, with fine black hair pulled up from her neck, fair skin, and sea green eyes, an unusual combination. Her navy suit looks tailored, and the pulled-back hair gives the impression that Kate is several years older than she probably is, a common affectation among young female attorneys. I smile awkwardly and confirm that I am indeed myself, then ask if she is a lawyer.

She smiles. “Am I that obvious?”

“To other members of the breed.”

Another smile, this one different, as though at a private joke. “I’m a First Amendment specialist,” she offers.

Her accent is an alloy of Ivy League Boston and something softer. A Brahmin who graduated Radcliffe but spent her summers far away. “That sounds interesting,” I tell her.

“Sometimes. Not as interesting as what you do.”

“I’m sure you’re wrong about that.”

“I doubt it. I just saw you on CNN in the airport. They were talking about the Hanratty execution. About you killing his brother.”

So, the circus has started. “That’s not exactly my daily routine. Not anymore, at least.”

“It sounded like there were some unanswered questions about the shooting.” Kate blushes again. “I’m sure you’re sick of people asking about it, right?”

Yes, I am. “Maybe the execution will finally put it to rest.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.”

“Sure you did.” On any other day I would brush her off. But she is reading one of my novels, and even thinking about Texas v. Hanratty is better than what I was thinking about when she disturbed me. “It’s okay. We all want to know the inside of things.”

“They said on Burden of Proof that the Hanratty case is often cited as an example of jurisdictional disputes between federal and state authorities.”

I nod but say nothing. “Disputes” is a rather mild word. Arthur Lee Hanratty was a white supremacist who testified against several former cronies in exchange for immunity and a plum spot in the Federal Witness Protection Program. Three months after he entered the program, he shot a black man in Compton over a traffic dispute. He fled Los Angeles, joined his two psychotic brothers, and wound up in Houston, where they murdered an entire black family. As they were being apprehended, Arthur Lee shot and killed a female cop, giving his brothers time to escape. None of this looked good on the resume of John Portman, the U.S. attorney who had granted Hanratty immunity, and Portman vowed to convict his former star witness in federal court in Los Angeles. My boss and I (with the help of then president and erstwhile Texas native George Bush) kept Hanratty in Texas, where he stood a real chance of dying for his crimes. Our jurisdictional victory deprived Portman of his revenge, but his career skyrocketed nevertheless, first into a federal judgeship and finally into the directorship of the FBI, where he now presides.

“I remember when it happened,” Kate says. “The Compton shooting. I mean. I was working in Los Angeles for the summer, and it got a lot of play there. Half the media made you out to be a hero, the other half a monster. They said you—well, you know.”

“What?” I ask, testing her nerve.

She hesitates, then takes the plunge. “They said you shot him and then used your baby to justify killing him.”

I’ve come to understand the combat veteran’s frustration with this kind of curiosity, and I usually meet it with a stony stare, if not outright hostility. But today is different. Today I am in transition. The impending execution has resurrected old ghosts, and I find myself willing to talk, not to satisfy this woman’s curiosity but to remind myself that I got through it. That I did the right thing. The only thing, I assure myself, looking down at Annie sleeping beside me. I drink the last of my Scotch and let myself remember it, this thing that always seems to have happened to someone else, a celebrity among lawyers, hailed by the right wing and excoriated by the left.

“Arthur Lee Hanratty vowed to kill me after his arrest. He said it a dozen times on television. I took his threats the way I took them all, cum grano salis. But Hanratty meant it. Four years later, the night the Supreme Court affirmed his death sentence, my wife and I were lying in bed watching the late news. She was dozing. I was going over my opening statement for another murder trial. My boss had put a deputy outside because of the Supreme Court ruling, but I didn’t think there was any danger. When I heard the first noise, I thought it was nothing. The house settling. Then I heard something else. I asked Sarah if she’d heard it. She hadn’t. She told me to turn out the light and go to sleep. And I almost did. That’s how close it was. That’s where my nightmares come from.”

“What made you get up?”

As the flight attendant passes, I signal for another Scotch. “I don’t know. Something had registered wrong, deep down. I took my thirty-eight down from the closet shelf and switched off my reading light. Then I opened the bedroom door and moved up the hall toward our daughter’s room. Annie was only six months old, but she always slept through the night. When I pushed open her door, I didn’t hear breathing, but that didn’t worry me. Sometimes you have to get right down over them, you know? I walked to the crib and leaned over to listen.”

Kate is spellbound, leaning across the aisle. I take my Scotch from the flight attendant’s hand and gulp a swallow. “The crib was empty.”

“Sweet Jesus.”

“The deputy was out front, so I ran to the French doors at the back of the house. When I got there, I saw nothing but the empty patio. I felt like I was falling off a cliff. Then something made me turn to my left. There was a man standing by the French doors in the dining room. Twenty feet away. He had a tiny bundle in his arms, like a loaf of bread in a blanket. He looked at me as he reached for the door handle. I saw his teeth in the dark, and I knew he was smiling. I pointed my pistol at his head. He started backing through the door, using Annie as a shield. Holding her at centre mass. In the dark, with shaking hands, every rational thought told me not to fire. But I had to.”

I take another gulp of Scotch. The whites of Kate’s eyes are completely visible around the green irises, giving her a hyperthyroid look. I reach down and lay a hand on Annie’s shoulder. Parts of this story I still cannot voice. When I saw those teeth, I sensed the giddy superiority the kidnapper felt over me, the triumph of the predator. Nothing in my life ever hit me the way that fear did.

“He was halfway through the door when I pulled the trigger. The bullet knocked him onto the patio. When I got outside, Annie was lying on the cement, covered in blood. I snatched her up even before I looked at the guy, held her up in the moonlight and ripped off her pajamas, looking for a bullet wound. She didn’t make a sound. Then she screamed like a banshee. An anger scream, you know? Not pain. I knew then that she was probably okay. Hanratty … the bullet had hit him in the eye. He was dying. And I didn’t do a goddamn thing to help him.”

Kate finally blinks, a series of rapid-fire clicks, like someone coming out of a trance. She points down at Annie. “She’s that baby? She’s Annie?”

“Yes.”

“God.” She taps the book in her lap. “I see why you quit.”

“There’s still one out there.”

“What do you mean?”

“We never caught the third brother. I get postcards from him now and then. He says he’s looking forward to spending some time with our family.”

She shakes her head. “How do you live with that?”

I shrug and return to my drink.

“Your wife isn’t traveling with you?” Kate asks.

They always have to ask. “No. She passed away recently.”

Kate’s face begins the subtle sequence of expressions I’ve seen a thousand times in the last seven months. Shock, embarrassment, sympathy, and just the slightest satisfaction that a seemingly perfect life is not so perfect after all.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “The wedding ring. I just assumed—”

“It’s okay. You couldn’t know.”

She looks down and takes a sip of her soft drink. When she looks up, her face is composed again. She asks what my next book is about, and I give her the usual fluff, but she isn’t listening. I know this reaction too. The response of most women to a young widower, particularly one who is clearly solvent and not appallingly ugly, is as natural and predictable as the rising of the sun. The subtle glow of flirtation emanates from Kate like a medieval spell, but it is a spell to which I am presently immune.

Annie awakens as we talk, and Kate immediately brings her into the conversation, developing a surprising rapport. Time passes quickly, and before long we are shaking hands at the gate in Baton Rouge. Annie and I bump into her again at the baggage carousel, and as Kate squeaks outside in her sensible Reeboks to hail a taxi, I notice Annie’s eyes solemnly tracking her. My daughter’s attraction to young adult women is painful to see.

I scoop her up with forced merriment and trot to the Hertz counter, where I have to hassle with a clerk about why the car I reserved isn’t available (although for ten dollars extra per day I can upgrade to a model that is) and how long I’ll have to wait for a child-safety seat. I’m escalating from irritation to anger when a tall man with white hair and a neatly trimmed white beard walks through the glass doors through which Kate just departed.

“Papa!” Annie squeals. “Daddy! Papa’s here!”

“Dad? What are you doing here?”

He laughs and veers toward us. “You think your mother’s going to have her son renting a car to drive eighty miles to get home? God forbid.” He catches Annie under the arms, lifts her high, and hugs her to his chest. “Hello, tadpole! What’s shakin’ down in Disney World?”

“I saw Ariel! And Snow White hugged me!”

“Of course she did! Who wouldn’t want to hug an angel like you?” He looks over her shoulder at me. For a few uncomfortable moments I endure the penetrating gaze of a man who for forty years has searched for illness in reticent people. His perception is like the heat from a lamp. I nod slowly, hoping to communicate, I’m okay, Dad, at the same time searching his face for clues to the anxiety I heard in my mother’s voice on the phone this morning. But he’s too good at concealing his emotions. Another habit of the medical profession.

“Is Mom with you?” I ask.

“No, she’s home cooking a supper you’ll have to see to believe.” He reaches out and squeezes my hand. “It’s good to see you, son.” For an instant I catch a glimpse of something unsettling behind his eyes, but it vanishes as he grins mischievously at Annie. “Let’s move out, tadpole! We’re burning daylight!”

THREE

My father served as an army doctor in West Germany in the 1960s, and it was there he acquired a taste for dark beer and high-performance automobiles. He has been driving BMWs ever since he could afford them, and he drives fast. In four minutes we are away from the airport and roaring north on Highway 61. Annie sits in the middle of the backseat, lashed into a safety seat, marveling at the TV-sized computer display built into the dashboard while Dad runs through its functions again and again, delighting in every giggle that bursts from her lips.

Coronary problems severely reduced my father’s income a few years ago, so last year—on his sixty-sixth birthday—I bought him a black BMW 740i with the royalties from my third novel. I felt a little like Elvis Presley when I wrote that check, and it was a good feeling. My parents started life with nothing, and in a single generation, through hard work and sacrifice, lived what was once unapologetically called the American Dream. They deserve some perks.

The flat brown fields of Louisiana quickly give way to green wooded hills, and somewhere to our left, beyond the lush forest, rolls the great brown river. I cannot smell it yet, but I feel it, a subtle disturbance in the earth’s magnetic field, a fluid force that shapes the surrounding land and souls. I roll down the window and suck in the life smell of hardwood forest, creek water, kudzu, bush-hogged wildflowers, and baking earth. The competing aromas blend into a heady gestalt you couldn’t find in Houston if you grid-searched every inch of it on your hands and knees.

“We’re losing the air conditioning,” Dad complains.

“Sorry.” I roll up the window. “It’s been a long time since I smelled this place.”

“Too damn long.”

“Papa said a bad word!” Annie cries, bursting into giggles.

Dad laughs, then reaches back between the seats and slaps her knee.

The old landmarks hurtle by like location shots from a film. St. Francisville, where John James Audubon painted his birds, now home to a nuclear station; the turnoff to Angola Penitentiary; and finally the state line, marked by a big blue billboard: WELCOME TO MISSISSIPPI! THE MAGNOLIA STATE.

“What’s happening in Natchez these days?” I ask.

Dad whips into the left lane and zooms past a log truck loaded from bumper to red flag with pulpwood. “A lot, for a change. Looks like we’ve got a new factory coming in. Which is good, because the battery plant is about dead.”

“What kind of factory?”

“Chemical plant. They want to put it in the new industrial park by the river. South of the paper mill.”

“Is it a done deal?”

“I’ll say it’s done when I see smoke coming from the stacks. Till then, it’s all talk. It’s like the casino boats. Every other month a new company talks about bringing another boat in, but there’s still just the one.”

“What else is happening?”

“Big election coming up.”

“What kind?”

“Mayoral. For the first time in history there’s a black candidate with a real chance to win.”

“You’re kidding. Who is it?”

“Shad Johnson. He’s about your age. His parents are patients of mine. You never heard of him because they sent him north to prep school when he was a kid. After that he went to Harvard University. Another damn lawyer, just like you.”

“And he wants to be mayor of Natchez?”

“Badly. He moved down here just to run. And he may win.”

“What’s the black-white split now?”

“Registered voters? Fifty-one to forty-nine, in favor of whites. The blacks usually have a low turnout, but this election may be different. In any case, the key for Johnson is white votes, and he might actually get some. He’s been invited to join the Rotary Club.”

“The Natchez Rotary Club?”

“Times are changing. And Shad Johnson’s smart enough to exploit that. I’m sure you’ll meet him soon. The election’s only five weeks away. Hell, he’ll probably want an endorsement from you, seeing how you’re a celebrity now.”

“Papa said another bad word!” Annie chimes in. “But not too bad.”

“What did I say?”

“H-E-L-L. You’re supposed to say heck.”

Dad laughs and slaps her on the knee again.

“I want to stay low-profile,” I say quietly. “This trip is strictly R-and-R.”

“Not much chance of that. Somebody already called the house asking for you. Right before I left.”

“Was it Cilla, my assistant?”

“No. A man. He asked if you’d got in yet. When I asked who was calling, he hung up. The caller-ID box said ‘out of area.’”

“Probably a reporter. They’re going to turn the South upside down trying to find me because of the Hanratty execution.”

“We’ll do what we can to keep you incognito, but the new newspaper publisher has called four times asking about getting an interview with you. Now that you’re here, you won’t be able to avoid things like that. Not without people saying you’ve gone Hollywood on us.”

I sit back and assimilate this. Finding sanctuary in my old hometown might not be as easy as I thought. But it will still be better than Houston.

Natchez is unlike any place in America, existing almost outside time, which is exactly what Annie and I need. In some ways it isn’t part of Mississippi at all. There’s no town square with a lone Confederate soldier presiding over it, no flat, limitless Delta horizon or provincial blue laws. The oldest city on the Mississippi River, Natchez stands white and pristine atop a two-hundred-foot loess bluff, the jewel in the crown of nineteenth-century steamboat ports. For as long as I can remember, the population has been twenty-five thousand, but after being ruled in turn by Indians, French, British, Spanish, Confederates, and Americans, her character is more cosmopolitan than cities ten times her size. Parts of New Orleans remind me of Natchez, but only parts. Modern life long ago came to the Crescent City and changed it forever. Two hundred miles upriver, Natchez exists in a ripple of time that somehow eludes the homogenizing influences of the present.

In 1850 Natchez boasted more millionaires than any city in the United States save New York and Philadelphia. Their fortunes were made on the cotton that poured like white gold out of the district and into the mills of England. The plantations stretched for miles on both sides of the Mississippi River, and the planters who administered them built mansions that made Margaret Mitchell’s Tara look like modest accommodations. While their slaves toiled in the fields, the princes of this new aristocracy sent their sons to Harvard and their daughters to the royal courts of Europe. Atop the bluff they held cotillions, opened libraries, and developed new strains of cotton; two hundred feet below, in the notorious Under the Hill district, they raced horses, traded slaves, drank, whored, and gambled, firmly establishing a tradition of libertinism that survives to the present, and cementing the city’s black-sheep status in a state known for its dry counties.

By an accident of topography, the Civil War left Natchez untouched. Her bluff commanded a straightaway of the river rather than a bend, so Vicksburg became the critical naval choke point, dooming that city to siege and destruction while undefended Natchez made the best of Union occupation. In this way she joined a charmed historical trinity with Savannah and Charleston, the quintessentially Southern cities that survived the war with their beauty intact.

It took the boll weevil to accomplish what war could not, sending the city into depression after the turn of the century. She sat preserved like a city in amber, her mansions slowly deteriorating, until the 1930s, when her society ladies began opening their once great houses to the public in an annual ritual called the Pilgrimage. The money that poured in allowed them to restore the mansions to their antebellum splendor, and soon Yankees and Europeans traveled by thousands to this living museum of the Old South.

In 1948 oil was discovered practically beneath the city, and a second boom was on. Black gold replaced white, and overnight millionaires again walked the azalea-lined streets, as delirious with prosperity as if they had stepped from the pages of Scott Fitzgerald. I grew up in the midst of this boom, and benefited from the affluence it generated. But by the time I graduated law school, the oil industry was collapsing, leaving Natchez to survive on the revenues of tourism and federal welfare money. It was a hard adjustment for proud people who had never had to chase Northern factories or kowtow to the state of which they were nominally a part.

“What’s that?” I ask, pointing at an upscale residential development far south of where I remember any homes.

“White flight,” Dad replies. “Everything’s moving south. Subdivisions, the country club. Look, there’s another one.”

Another grouping of homes materializes behind a thin screen of oak and pine, looking more like suburban Houston than the romantic town I remember. Then I catch sight of Mammy’s Cupboard, and I feel a reassuring wave of familiarity in my chest. Mammy’s is a restaurant built in the shape of a Negro mammy in a red hoop skirt and bandanna, painted to match Hattie McDaniel from Gone with the Wind. She stands atop her hill like a giant sculptured doll, beckoning travelers to dine in the cozy space beneath her domed skirts. Anyone who has never seen the place inevitably slows to gape; it makes the Brown Derby in L.A. look prosaic.

The car crests a high ridge and seems to teeter upon it as an ocean of treetops spreads out before us, stretching west to infinity. Beyond the river, the great alluvial plain of Louisiana lies so far below the high ground of Natchez that only the smoke plume from the paper mill betrays the presence of man in that direction. The car tips over on the long descent into town, passing St. Stephens, the all-white prep school I attended, and a dozen businesses that look just as they did twenty years ago. At the junction of Highways 61 and 84 stands the Jefferson Davis Memorial Hospital, now officially known by a more politically correct name, but for all time “the Jeff” to the doctors of my father’s generation, and to the hundreds of other people, both black and white, who worked or were born there.

“It all looks the same,” I murmur.

“It is and it isn’t,” Dad replies.

“What do you mean?”

“You’ll see.”

My parents still live in the house in which they raised me. While other young professionals moved on to newer subdivisions, restored Victorian gingerbreads, or even antebellum palaces downtown, my father clung stubbornly to the ash-paneled library he’d appended to the suburban tract house he bought in 1963. Whenever my mother got the urge to move to more stately mansions, he added to the existing structure, giving her the space she claimed we needed and a decorating project on which to expend her fitful energies.

As the BMW pulls up to the house, I imagine my mother waiting inside. She always wanted me to succeed in the larger world, but it broke her heart when Sarah and I settled in Houston. Seven hours is too far to drive on a regular basis, and Mom dislikes flying. Still, the tie between us is such that distance means little. When I was a boy, people always told me I was like my father, that I’d “got my father’s brain.” But it is my mother who has the rare combination of quantitative aptitude and intuitive imagination that I was lucky enough to inherit.

Dad shuts off the engine and unstraps Annie from her safety seat. As I unload our luggage from the trunk, I see a shadow standing motionless against the closed curtain of the dining room. My mother. Then another shadow moves behind the curtain. Who else would be here? It can’t be my sister. Jenny is a visiting professor at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland.

“Who else is here?”

“Wait and see,” Dad says cryptically.

I carry the two suitcases to the porch, then go back for Annie’s bag. The second time I reach the porch, my mother is standing in the open door. All I see before she rises on tiptoe and pulls me into her arms is that she has stopped coloring her hair, and the gray is a bit of a shock.

“Welcome home,” she whispers in my ear. She pulls back, her hands gripping my upper arms, and looks hard at me. “You’re still not eating. Are you all right?”

“I don’t know. Annie can’t seem to get past what happened. And I don’t know how to help her.”

She squeezes my arms with a strength I have never seen fail. “That’s what grandmothers are for. Everything’s going to be all right. Starting right this minute.”

At sixty-three my mother is still beautiful, but not with the delicate comeliness that fills so many musket-and-magnolia romances. Beneath the tanned skin and Donna Karan dress are the bone and sinew and humor of a girl who made the social journey from the 4-H Club to the Garden Club without forgetting her roots. She could take tea with royalty and commit no faux pas, yet just as easily twist the head off a banty hen, boil the bristles off a hog, or kill an angry copper-head with a hoe blade. It’s that toughness that worries me now.

“Mom, what’s wrong? On the phone—”

“Shh. We’ll talk later.” She blinks back tears, then pushes me into the house and takes Annie from Dad’s arms. “Here’s my angel! Let’s get some supper. And no yucky broccoli!”

Annie squeals with excitement.

“There’s somebody waiting to see you, Penn,” Mom says.

I pull the suitcases inside. A wide doorway in the foyer leads to the dining room, and I stop dead when I see who is there. Standing beside the long table is a black woman as tall as I and fifty years older. Her mouth is set in a tight smile, and her eyes twinkle with joy.

“Ruby!” I cry, setting the bags on the floor and walking toward her. “What in the world …?”

“Today’s her day off,” Mom explains from behind me. “I called to check on her, and when she heard you were coming, she demanded that Tom come get her so she could see you.”

“And that grandbaby,” Ruby says, pointing at Annie in Peggy’s arms.

I hug the old woman gently. It’s like hugging a bundle of sticks. Ruby Flowers came to work for us in 1963 and, except for one life-threatening illness, never missed a single workday until arthritis forced her to slow down thirty years later. Even then she begged my father to give her steroid injections to allow her to keep doing her “heavy work”—the ironing and scrubbing—but he refused. Instead he kept her on at full pay but limited her to sorting socks, washing the odd load of clothes, and watching the soaps on television.

“I’m sorry about your wife,” Ruby says, “’Cept for losing a child, that the hardest thing.”

I give her an extra squeeze.

“Now, let me see that baby. Come here, child!”

I wonder if Annie will remember Ruby, or be frightened by the old woman even if she does. I should have known better. Ruby Flowers radiates nothing to frighten a small child. She is like a benevolent witch from an African folk tale, and Annie goes to her without the slightest hesitation.

“I cooked your daddy his favorite dinner,” Ruby says, hugging Annie tight. “And after tonight, it’s gonna be your favorite too!”

At the center of the table sits a plate heaped with chicken shallow-fried to a peppered gold. I’ve watched Ruby make that chicken a thousand times and never once use more than salt, pepper, flour, and Crisco. With those four ingredients she creates a flavor and texture that Harland Sanders couldn’t touch with his best pressure cooker. I snatch up a wing and take a bite of white meat. Crispy outside and moist within, it bursts in my mouth with intoxicating familiarity.

“Go slap your daddy’s hand!” Ruby cries, and Annie quickly obeys. “Ya’ll sit down and eat proper. I’ll get the iced tea.”

“I’ll get the tea,” Mom says, heading for the kitchen before Ruby can start. “Make your plate, Ruby. Tonight you’re a guest.”

Our family says grace only at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and then almost as a formality. But with Ruby present, no one dares reach for a fork.

“Would you like to return thanks, Ruby?” Dad asks.

The old woman shakes her head, her eyes shining with mischief. “I wish you’d do it, Dr. Cage. You give a fine blessing.”

Thirty-eight years of practicing medicine has stripped my father of the stern religious carapace grafted onto him in the Baptist churches of his youth. But when pressed, he can deliver a blessing that vies with the longest-winded of deacons for flowery language and detail. He seems about to deliver one of these, with tongue-in-cheek overtones added for my benefit, but my mother halts him with a touch of her hand. She bows her head, and everyone at the table follows suit.

“Father,” she says, “it’s been far too long since we’ve given thanks to you in this house. Tonight we thank you for the return of our son, who has been away too long. We give thanks for Anna Louise Cage, our beautiful grandchild, and pray that we may bring her as much happiness as she brings to us each day.” She pauses, a brief caesura that focuses everyone’s concentration. “We also commend the soul of Sarah Louise Cage to your care, and pray that she abides in thy grace forever.”

I take Annie’s hand under the table and squeeze it.

“We don’t pretend to understand death here,” Mom continues softly. “We ask only that you let this young family heal, and be reconciled to their loss. This is a house of love, and we humbly ask grace in thy name’s sake. Amen.”

As we echo the “amen,” Dad and I look at each other across the table, moved by my mother’s passion but not its object. In matters religious I am my father’s son, having no faith in a just God, or any god at all if you shake me awake at four a.m. and put the question to me. There have been times I would have given anything for such faith, for the belief that divine justice exists somewhere in the universe. Facing Sarah’s death without it was an existential baptism of fire. The comfort that belief in an afterlife can provide was obvious in the hospital waiting rooms and chemo wards, where patients or family members often asked outright if I was saved. I always smiled and nodded so as to avoid a philosophical argument that would benefit no one, and wondered if the question was an eccentricity of Southern hospitals. In the Pacific Northwest they probably offer you crystals or lists of alternative healers. I have no regrets about letting Sarah raise Annie in a church, though. Sometimes the image of her mother in heaven is all that keeps my daughter from despair.

As Dad passes around the mustard greens and cheese grits and beer biscuits, another memory rises unbidden. One cold hour before dawn, sitting beside Sarah’s hospital bed, I fell to my knees and begged God to save her. The words formed in my mind without volition, strung together with strangely baroque formality: I who have not believed since I was a child, who have not crossed a church threshold to worship since I was thirteen, who since the age of reason have admitted nothing greater than man or nature, ask in all humility that you spare the life of this woman. I ask not for myself, but for the child I am not qualified to raise alone. As soon as I realized what I was thinking, I stopped and got to my feet. Who was I talking to? Faith is something you have or you don’t, and to pretend you do in the hope of gaining some last-minute dispensation from a being whose existence you have denied all your life goes against everything I am. I have never placed myself above God. I simply cannot find within myself the capacity for belief.

Yet when Sarah finally died, a dark seed took root in my mind. As irrational as it is, a profoundly disturbing idea haunts me: that on the night that prayer blinked to life in my tortured mind, a chance beyond the realm of the temporal was granted me, and I did not take it. That I was tested and found wanting. My rational mind tells me I held true to myself and endured the pain as all pain must be endured—alone. But my heart says otherwise. Since that day I have been troubled by a primitive suspicion that in some cosmic account book, in some dusty ledger of karmic debits and credits, Sarah’s life has been charged against my account.

“What’s the matter, Daddy?” Annie asks.

“Nothing, punkin.”

“You’re crying.”

“Penn?” my mother says, half rising from her chair.

“I’m all right,” I assure her, wiping my eyes. “I’m just glad to be here, that’s all.”

Ruby reaches out and closes an arthritic hand over mine. “You should have come back months ago. You know where home is.”

I nod and busy myself with my knife and fork.

“You think too much to be left alone,” Ruby adds. “You always did.”

“Amen,” Dad agrees. “Now let’s eat, before my beeper goes off.”

“That beeper ain’t gonna ring during this meal,” Ruby says with quiet certainty. “Don’t worry ’bout that none.”

“Did you take out the batteries?” Dad asks, checking the pager.

“I just know,” Ruby replies. “I just know.”

I believe her.

My mother and I sit facing each other across the kitchen counter, drinking wine and listening for my father’s car in the driveway. He left after dinner to take Ruby home to the black section north of town, but putting Annie to bed took up most of the time I expected him to be away.

“Mom, I sensed something on the phone. You’ve got to tell me what’s wrong.”

She looks at me over the rim of her glass. “I’m worried about your father.”

A sliver of ice works its way into my heart. “Not more blockage in his coronary vessels?”

“No. I think Tom is being blackmailed.”

I am dumbfounded. Nothing she could have said would have surprised me more. My father is a man of such integrity that the idea seems utterly ridiculous. Tom Cage is a modern-day Atticus Finch, or as close as a man can get to that Southern ideal in the dog days of the twentieth century.

“What has he done? I mean, that someone could blackmail him over?”

“He hasn’t told me.”

“Then how do you know that’s what it is?”

She disposes of my question with a glance. Peggy Cage knows more about her husband and children than we know ourselves.

“Well, who’s blackmailing him?”

“I think it might be Ray Presley. Do you remember him?”

The skin on my forearms tingles. Ray Presley was a patient of my father for years, and a more disturbing character I have never met, not even in the criminal courts of Houston. Born in Sullivan’s Hollow, one of the toughest areas of Mississippi, Presley migrated to South Louisiana, where he reputedly worked as hired muscle for New Orleans crime boss Carlos Marcello. He later hired on as a police officer in Natchez and quickly put his old skills to use. Brutal and clever, his specialty was “vigorous interrogation.” Off-duty, he haunted the fringes of Natchez’s business community, doing favors of dubious legality for wealthy men around town, helping them deal with business or family troubles when conventional measures proved inadequate. When I was in grade school, Presley was busted for corruption and served time in Parchman prison, which to everyone’s surprise he survived. Upon his release he focused exclusively on “private security work,” and it was generally known that he had murdered at least three men for money, all out-of-town jobs.

“What could Ray Presley have on Dad?”

Mom looks away. “I’m not sure.”

“You must have some idea.”

“My suspicions have more to do with me than with your father. I think that’s why Tom won’t just tell Presley to go to hell. I think it involves my family.”

My mother’s parents both died years ago, and her sister—after two tempestuous marriages—recently married a wealthy surgeon in Florida. “What could Presley possibly know about your family?”

“I’m not sure. Even if I knew, Tom would have to be the one to tell you. If he won’t—”

“How can I help if I don’t know what’s happening?”

“Your father has a lot of pride. You know that.”

“How much is pride worth?”

“Over a hundred thousand dollars, apparently.”

My stomach rolls like I’m falling through the dark. “Tell me you’re kidding.”

“I wish I were. Clearly, Tom would rather go broke than let us know what’s going on.”

“Mom, this is crazy. Why do you think it’s Presley?”

“Tom talks in his sleep now. About five months ago he started eating less, losing weight. Then I got a call from Bill Hiatt at the bank. He hemmed and hawed, but he finally told me Tom had been making large withdrawals. Cashing in CDs and absorbing penalties.”

“Well, it’s going to stop. I don’t care what he did, I’ll get him out of it. And I’ll get Presley thrown under a jail for extortion.”

She laughs, her voice riding an undercurrent of hysteria.

“What is it?”

“Ray Presley doesn’t care about jail. He’s dying of cancer.”

The word is like a cockroach crawling over my bare foot.

“Which is almost convenient,” Mom goes on, “but not quite. He’s taking his sweet time about it. I’ve seen him on the street, and he doesn’t even look sick. Except for the hair. He’s bald now. But he still looks like he could ride a bull ragged.”

I jump at the sound of the garage door. Mom gives me a little wave, then crosses the kitchen as silently as if she were floating on a magic carpet and disappears down the hall. Moments later, my father walks through the kitchen door, his face drawn and tired.

“I figured you’d be waiting for me.”

“Dad, we’ve got to talk.”

Dread seems to seep from the pores in his face. “Let me get a drink. I’ll meet you in the library.”

FOUR

All my life, whenever problems of great import required discussion—health, family, money, marriage—the library was the place it was done. Yet my positive feelings about the room far outweigh my anxieties. The ash-paneled library is so much a part of my father’s identity that he carries its scent wherever he goes—an aroma of fine wood, cigar smoke, aging leather, and whiskey. Born to working-class parents, he spent the first real money he made to build this room and fill it with books: Aristotle to Zoroaster and everything in between, with a special emphasis on the military campaigns of the Civil War. I feel more at home here than anywhere in the world. In this room I educated myself, discovered my gift for language, learned that the larger world lay not across oceans but within the human mind and heart. Years spent in this room made law school relatively simple and becoming a writer possible, even necessary.

Dad enters through a different door, carrying a bourbon-and-water brown enough to worry me. We each take one of the leather recliners, which are arranged in the classic bourgeois style: side by side facing the television. He clips the end of a Partagas, licks the end so that it won’t peel, and lights it with a wooden match. A cloud of blue smoke wafts toward the beamed ceiling.

“Dad, I—”

“Let me start,” he says, staring across the room at his biographies, most of them first editions. “Son, there comes a time in every man’s life when he realizes that the people who raised him from infancy now require the favor to be returned, whether they know it or not.” He stops to puff on the Partagas. “This is something you do not yet have to worry about.”

“Dad—”

“I am kindly telling you to mind your own business. You and Annie are welcome here for the next fifty years if you want to stay, but you’re not invited to pry into my private affairs.”

I lean back in the recliner and consider whether I can honor my father’s request. Given what my mother told me, I don’t think so. “What’s Ray Presley holding over you, Dad?”

“Your mother talks too much.”

“You know that’s not true. She thinks you’re in trouble. And I can help you. Tell me what Presley has on you.”

He picks up his drink and takes a long pull, closing his eyes against the anesthetic fire of the bourbon. “I won’t have this,” he says quietly.

I don’t want to ask the next question—I’d hoped never to raise the subject again—but I must. “Is it something like what you did for Sarah? Helping somebody at the end?”

He sighs like a man who has lived a thousand years. “That’s a rare situation. And when things reach that point, the family’s so desperate to have the horror and pain removed from the patient’s last hours that they look at you like an instrument of God.”

He drinks and stares at his books, lost in contemplation of something I cannot guess at. He has aged a lot in the eighteen years since I left home. His beard is no longer salt-and-pepper but silver white. His skin is pale and dotted by dermatitis, his joints eroded and swollen by psoriatic arthritis. He is sixteen years past his triple bypass (and counting) and he recently survived the implantation of two stents to keep his cardiac vessels open. All this—physical maladies more severe than those of most of his patients—he bears with the resignation of Job. The wound that aged him most, the one that has never quite healed, was a wound to the soul. And it came at the hands of another man.

When I was a freshman at Ole Miss, my father was sued for malpractice. The plaintiff had no case; his father had died unexpectedly while under the care of my father and five specialists. It was one of those inexplicable deaths that proved for the billionth time that medicine is an inexact science. Dad was as stunned as the rest of the medical community when “Judge” Leo Marston, the most prominent lawyer in town and a former state attorney general, took the man’s case and pressed it to the limit. But no one was more shocked than I. Leo Marston was the father of a girl I had loved in high school, and whom I still think about more than is good for me. Why he should viciously attack my father was beyond my understanding, but attack he did. In a marathon of legal maneuvering that dragged on for fourteen months, Marston hounded my father through the legal system with a vengeance that appalled the town. In the end Dad was unanimously exonerated by a jury, but by then the damage had been done.

For a physician of the old school, medical practice is not a profession or even an art, but the abiding passion of existence. A brilliant boy is born to poor parents during the Depression. From childhood he works to put food on the table. He witnesses privation and sickness not at a remove, but face to face. He earns a scholarship to college but must work additional jobs to cover his expenses. He contracts with the army to pay for his medical education in exchange for years of military service. After completing medical school with an exemplary record, he does not ask himself the question every medical student today asks himself: what do I wish to specialize in? He is ready to go to work. To begin treating patients. To begin living.

For twenty years he practices medicine as though his patients are members of his family. He makes small mistakes; he is human. But in twenty years of practice not one complaint is made to the state medical board, or any legal claim made against him. He is loved by his community, and that love is his life’s bread. To be accused of criminal negligence in the death of a patient stuns him, like a war hero being charged with cowardice. Rumor runs through the community like a plague, and truth is the first casualty. His confidence in the rightness of his actions is absolute, but after months of endlessly repeated allegations, doubt begins to assail him. A lifetime of good works seems to weigh as nothing compared to one unsubstantiated charge. Smiles on the street appear forced to him, the greetings of neighbors cool. Stress works steadily and ruthlessly upon him, finally culminating in a myocardial infarction, which he barely survives.

Six weeks later the trial begins, and it’s like stepping into the eye of a hurricane. Control rests in the hands of lawyers, men with murky motives and despicable tactics. Expert witnesses second-guess every medical decision. He sits alone in the witness box, condemned before family, friends, and community, cross-examined as though he were a child murderer. When the jury finds in his favor, he feels no joy. He feels like a man who has just lost both legs being told he is lucky to be alive.

Could the present-day blackmail somehow be tied to that calamitous case? I have never understood the reason for Leo Marston’s attack, and I’ve always felt that my father—against his nature—must have been keeping the truth from me. My mother believes Ray Presley is behind the blackmail, and I recall that Judge Marston often hired Presley to do “security work” when I was in high school. This translated into acting as unofficial baby-sitter for Marston’s teenage daughter, Olivia, who was also my lover. I remember nights when Presley’s truck would swing by whatever hangout the kids happened to be frequenting, its hatchet-faced driver glaring from the window, making sure Livy didn’t get into any serious trouble. One night Presley actually pulled up behind my car in the woods and rapped on the fogged windows, terrifying Livy and me. I still remember his face peering into the clear circle I rubbed on the window to look out, his eyes bright and ferretlike, searching the backseat for a sight of Livy unclothed. The hunger in those eyes …

“Does this have anything to do with Leo Marston?” I ask softly.

Dad flinches from his reverie. Even now the judge’s name has the power to harm. “Marston?” he echoes, still staring at his books. “What makes you say that?”

“It’s one of the only things I’ve never understood about your life. Why Marston went after you.”

He shakes his head. “I’ve never known why he did it. I’d done nothing wrong. Any physician could see that. The jury saw it too, thank God.”

“You’ve never heard anything since? About why he took the case or pressed it so hard?”

“To tell you the truth, son, I always had the feeling it had something to do with you. You and Olivia.”

He turns to me, his eyes not accusatory but plainly questioning. I am too shocked to speak for a moment. “That … that’s impossible,” I stammer. “I mean, nothing really bad ever happened between Livy and me. It was the trial that drove the last nail into our relationship.”

“Maybe that was Marston’s goal all along. To drive you two apart.”

This thought occurred to me nineteen years ago, but I discounted it. Livy abandoned me long before her father took on that malpractice case.

Dad shrugs as if it were all meaningless now. “Who knows why people do anything?”

“I’m going to go see Presley,” I tell him. “If that’s what I have to do to—”

“You stay away from that son of a bitch! Any problems I have, I’ll deal with my own way.” He downs the remainder of his bourbon. “One way or another.”

“What does that mean?”

His eyes are blurry with fatigue and alcohol, yet somehow sly beneath all that. “Don’t worry about it.”

I am suddenly afraid that my father is contemplating suicide. His death would nullify any leverage Presley has over him and also provide my mother with a generous life insurance settlement. To a desperate man, this might well seem like an elegant solution. “Dad—”

“Go to bed, son. Take care of your little girl. That’s what being a father’s all about. Sparing your kids what hell you can for as long as you can. And Annie’s already endured her share.”

We turn to the door at the same moment, each sensing a new presence in the room. A tiny shadow stands there. Annie. She seems conjured into existence by the mention of her name.

“I woke up by myself,” she says, her voice tiny and fearful. “Why did you leave, Daddy?”

I go to the door and sweep her into my arms. She feels so light sometimes that it frightens me. Hollow-boned, like a bird. “I needed to talk to Papa, punkin. Everything’s fine.”

“Hello, sweet pea,” Dad says from his chair. “You make Daddy take you to bed.”

I linger in the doorway, hoping somehow to draw out a confidence, but he gives me nothing. I leave the library with Annie in my arms, knowing I will not sleep, but knowing also that until my father opens up to me, there is little I can do to help him.

FIVE

My father’s prediction about media attention proves prescient. Within forty-eight hours of my arrival, calls about interviews join the ceaseless ringing of patients calling my father. My mother has taken messages from the local newspaper publisher, radio talk-show hosts, even a TV station in Jackson, the state capital, two hours away. I decide to grant an interview to Caitlin Masters, the publisher of the Natchez Examiner, on two conditions: that she not ask questions about Arthur Lee Hanratty’s execution, and that she print that I will be vacationing in New Orleans until after the execution has taken place. Leaving Annie with my mother—which delights them both—I drive Mom’s Nissan downtown in search of Biscuits and Blues, a new restaurant owned by a friend of mine but which I have never seen.

It was once said of American cities that you could judge their character by their tallest buildings: were they offices or churches? At a mere seven stories, the Eola Hotel is the tallest commercial structure in Natchez. Its verdigris-encrusted roof peaks well below the graceful, copper-clad spire of St. Mary Minor Basilica. Natchez’s “skyline” barely rises out of a green canopy of oak leaves: the silver dome of the synagogue, the steeple of the Presbyterian church, the roofs of antebellum mansions and stately public buildings. Below the canopy, a soft and filtered sunlight gives the sense of an enormous glassed-in garden.

Biscuits and Blues is a three-story building on Main, with a large second-floor balcony overlooking the street. A young woman stands talking on a cell phone just inside the door—where Caitlin Masters promised to meet me—but I don’t think she’s the newspaper publisher. She looks more like a French tourist. She’s wearing a tailored black suit, cream silk blouse, and black sandals, and she is clearly on the sunny side of thirty. But as I check my watch, she turns face on to me and I spot a hardcover copy of False Witness cradled in her left arm. I also see that she’s wearing nothing under the blouse, which is distractingly sheer. She smiles and signals that she’ll be off the phone in a second, her eyes flashing with quick intelligence.

I acknowledge her wave and wait beside the door. I’m accustomed to young executives in book publishing, but I expected something a little more conventional in the newspaper business, especially in the South. Caitlin Masters stands with her head cocked slightly, her eyes focused in the middle distance, the edge of her lower lip pinned by a pointed canine. Her skin is as white as bone china and without blemish, shockingly white against her hair, which is black as her silk suit and lies against her neck like a gleaming veil. Her face is a study in planes and angles: high cheekbones, strong jawline, arched brows, and a straight nose, all uniting with almost architectural precision, yet somehow escaping hardness. She wears no makeup that I can see, but her green eyes provide all the accent she needs. They seem incongruous in a face that almost cries out for blue ones, making her striking and memorable rather than merely beautiful.

As she ends her call, she speaks three or four consecutive sentences, and a strange chill runs through me. Ivy League Boston alloyed with something softer, a Brahmin who spent her summers far away. On the telephone this morning I didn’t catch it, but coupled with her face, that voice transforms my suspicion to certainty. Caitlin Masters is the woman I spoke to on the flight to Baton Rouge. Kate … Caitlin.

She holds out her hand to shake mine, and I step back. “You’re the woman from the plane. Kate.”

Her smile disappears, replaced by embarrassment. “I’m surprised you recognize me, dressed like I was that day.”

“You lied to me. You told me you were a lawyer. Was that some kind of setup or what?”

“I didn’t tell you I was a lawyer. You assumed I was. I told you I was a First Amendment specialist, and I am.”

“You knew what I thought, and you let me think it. You lied, Ms. Masters. This interview is over.”

As I turn to go, she takes hold of my arm. “Our meeting on that plane was a complete accident. I want an interview with you, but it wouldn’t be worth that kind of trouble. I was flying from Atlanta to Baton Rouge, and I happened to be sitting across the aisle from you. End of story.”

“And you happened to be reading one of my novels?”

“No. I’ve been trying to get your number from your parents for a couple of months. A lot of people in Mississippi are interested in you. When the Hanratty story broke, I picked up one of your books in the airport. It’s that simple.”

I step away from the door to let a pair of middle-aged women through. “Then why not tell me who you were?”

“Because when I was waiting to board, I was sitting by the pay phones. I heard you tell someone you didn’t want to talk to reporters for any reason. I knew if I told you I was a newspaper publisher, you wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Well, I guess you got your inside scoop on how I killed Hanratty’s brother.”

She draws herself erect, offended now. “I haven’t printed a word of what you told me, and I don’t plan to. Despite appearances to the contrary, my journalistic ethics are beyond reproach.”

“Why were you dressed so differently on the plane?”

She actually laughs at this. “I’d just given a seminar to a group of editors in Atlanta. My father was there, and I try to be a bit more conventional when he’s around.”

I can see her point. Not many fathers would approve of the blouse she’s wearing today.

“Look,” she says, “I could have had that story on the wire an hour after you told it to me. I didn’t tell a soul. What better proof of trustworthiness could anyone give you?”

“Maybe you’re saving it for one big article.”

“You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to. In fact, we could just eat lunch, and you can decide if you want to do the interview another time or not.”

Her candid manner strikes a chord in me. Perhaps she’s manipulating me, but I don’t think so. “We came to do an interview. Let’s do it. The airplane thing threw me, that’s all.”

“Me too,” she says with a smile. “I liked Annie, by the way.”

“Thanks. She liked you too.”

As we step into the main dining space of the restaurant, a smattering of applause starts, then fills the room. I look around to see whose birthday it is, then realize that the applause is for me. A little celebrity goes a long way in Mississippi. I recognize familiar faces in the crowd. Some belong to guys I went to school with, now carrying twenty or thirty extra pounds—as I did until Sarah’s illness—others to friends of my parents or simply well-wishers. I smile awkwardly and give a little wave to cover the room.

“I told you,” says Caitlin. “There’s a lot of interest.”

“It’ll wear off. As soon as they realize I’m the same guy who left, they’ll be yawning in my face.”

When we arrive at our table, she stands stiffly behind her chair, her eyes twinkling with humor. “You’re not going to pull my chair out for me?”

“You didn’t look the type.”

She laughs and takes her seat. “I wasn’t before I got here. Pampering corrupts you fast.”

While we study the menus, a collection of classic Cajun dishes, I try to fathom how Caitlin Masters wound up in the job she has. The Examiner has always been a conservative paper, owned when I was a boy by a family which printed nothing that reflected negatively upon city worthies. Later it was sold to a family-owned newspaper chain which continued the tradition of offending as few citizens as possible, especially those who bought advertising space. In Natchez the gossip mills have always been a lot more accurate than anything you could find in the Examiner. Caitlin seems an improbable match, to say the least.

She closes her menu and smiles engagingly. “I’m younger than you thought I’d be, aren’t I?”

“A little,” I reply, trying not to look at her chest. In Mississippi, wearing a blouse that sheer without a bra is practically a request to be arrested.

“My father owns the chain. I’m doing a tour of duty down here to learn the ropes.”

“Ah.” One mystery cleared up.

“Okay if we go on the record now?”

“You have a tape recorder?”

“I never use them.”

I take out a Sony microcassette recorder borrowed from my father. “The bitter fruit of experience.”

Our waitress appears and takes our orders (crawfish beignets and iced tea for us both), then stands awkwardly beside the table as though waiting for something. She looks about twenty and, though not quite in Caitlin Masters’s league, is quite lovely. Where Masters is angles and light, the waitress is round and brown and sultry, with the guarded look of the Cajun in her eyes.

“Yes?” Caitlin says, looking up at her.

“Um, I was wondering if Mr. Cage would sign a book for me.”

“Sure,” I tell her. “Do you have one with you?”

“Well—I live over the restaurant.” Her voice is hesitant and terribly self-conscious. “Just temporarily, you know. I have all your books up there.”

“Really? I’d be glad to sign them for you.”

“Thanks a lot. Um, I’ll get your iced tea now.”

As she walks away, Caitlin gives me a wry smile. “What does a few years of that do for your ego?”

“Water off a duck’s back. Let’s start.”

She gives me a look that says, Yeah, right, then picks up her notebook. “So, are you here for a visit, or is this something more permanent?”

“I honestly have no idea. Call it a visit.”

“You’ve obviously been living a life of emotional extremes this past year. Your last book riding high on the best-seller list, your wife dying. How—”

“That subject’s off limits,” I say curtly, feeling a door slam somewhere in my soul.

“I’m sorry.” Her eyes narrow like those of a surgeon judging the pain of a probe. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Wait a minute. You asked on the plane if my wife was traveling with me. Did you know then that she was dead?”

Caitlin looks at the table. “I knew your wife had died. I didn’t know how recently. I saw the ring …” She folds her hands on the table, then looks up, her eyes vulnerable. “I didn’t ask that question as a reporter. I asked it as a woman. If that makes me a terrible person, I apologize.”

I find myself more intrigued than angered by this confession. This woman asked about my wife to try to read how badly I miss her by my reaction. And I believe she asked out of her own curiosity, not for a story. “I’m not sure what that makes you. Are you going to focus on that sort of thing in your article?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Let’s go on, then.”

“What made you stop practicing law and take up writing novels? The Hanratty case?”

I navigate this part of the interview on autopilot, probably learning more about Caitlin Masters than she learns about me. I guessed right about her education: Radcliffe as an undergrad, Columbia School of Journalism for her master’s. Top of the line, all the way. She is well read and articulate, but her questions reveal that she knows next to nothing about the modern South. Like most transplants to Natchez, she is an outsider and always will be. It’s a shame she holds a job that needs an insider’s perspective. The lunch crowd thins as we talk, and our waitress gives such excellent service that our concentration never wavers. By the time we finish our crawfish, the restaurant is nearly empty and a busboy is setting the tables for dinner.

“Where did you get your ideas about the South?” I ask gently.

At last Caitlin adjusts the lapels of her black silk jacket, covering the shadowy edge of aureole that has been visible throughout lunch. “I was born in Virginia,” she says with a hint of defensiveness. “My parents divorced when I was five, though. Mother got custody and spirited me back to Massachusetts. For the next twelve years, all I heard about the South was her trashing it.”

“So the first chance you got, you headed south to see for yourself whether we were the cloven-hoofed, misogynistic degenerates your mother warned you about.”

“Something like that.”

“And?”

“I’m reserving my judgment.”

“That’s kind of you. Do you like Natchez?”

“I do. It’s not sterilized or Disneyfied like Williamsburg. It’s still funky. Gossip, sex, whiskey, and eccentricity, all behind a gossamer veil of Southern gentility.”

I chuckle. “A woman I grew up with decided to move back here after working ten years as a film producer in Los Angeles. When I asked why, she told me she was worried that she was losing her mind, and knew that if she did it in Natchez, no one would notice.”

Caitlin laughs. “That’s exactly it! What about you? Do you like it?”

“That’s like asking someone if they like their mother. I’ve been away for years, but no one who grows up here ever really leaves this town behind.”

She makes a note on her pad. “I was surprised it’s such a haven for gays. But the contrasts are disturbing. You’ve got a real race problem here.”

“So does Los Angeles.”

“But this is a purely white-black race problem.”

“And your paper contributes to it.”

She reddens. “Would you care to elaborate on that?”

“Sure. The Examiner has never dug beneath the surface, never urged people toward their better natures. It was always too afraid to upset the white elite.”

“You think I don’t know that?”

“You talk like you don’t.”

“Trust me, I do. Let me ask you something. I’ve been following local politics pretty closely, and there’s something funny going on.”

“Like?”

“You’d think Shad Johnson, the black candidate, would be making race a major issue, trying to mobilize every black vote.”

“How’s he playing it?”

“He’s not even mentioning race. He’s in the former money capital of the slaveholding South, thirty percent of the black population receives some form of public assistance, and he acts like he’s running for mayor of Utopia. Everything is New South, Brotherhood of Man. He’s running as a Republican, for Christ’s sake.”

“Sounds like a shrewd guy.”

“Will African Americans vote for him if he sucks up to the white vote like that?”

I can’t help but laugh. “If Johnson is the only black man in the race, local blacks will vote for him if he buggers a mule at high noon on the courthouse lawn.”

Two pink moons appear high on Caitlin’s cheeks. “I can’t believe you said that. And I can’t believe Johnson would stand for the way things are. The things I hear around here … sitting in restaurants, riding in cars with people. I’ve heard the N-word a thousand times since I’ve been here.”

“You’d hear it in Manhattan if you rode in the right cars. Look, I’d really rather not get into this. I spent eight years in the Houston courts listening to more bullshit about race than I ever want to hear.”

She shakes her head with apparent disgust. “That’s such a cop-out. Racism is the most important problem in America today.”

“Caitlin, you are a very rich, very white girl preaching about black problems. You’re not the first. Sometimes you have to let people save themselves.”

“And you’re a very white guy putting black men on death row for state-sanctioned murder.”

“Only when they kill people.”

“Only when they kill white people, you mean.”

A surge of anger runs through me, but I force myself to stay silent. There’s nothing to be gained by pointing out that Arthur Lee Hanratty is a white supremacist, or that I once freed a black man who had been mistakenly put on death row by a colleague of mine. You can’t win an argument like this. We stare at each other like two fighters after a flurry of punches, deciding whether to wade in again or rest on the ropes.

“Hanratty’s an exception,” Caitlin says, as though reading my mind.

This lady is dangerous. It may be a cliché, but her anger has brought color to her cheeks and fire into her eyes, and I am suddenly sure that a string of broken hearts lie in the wake of this self-assured young woman.

“I want to understand this, Penn,” she says with utter sincerity. “I need to. I’ve read a hundred books by Southern writers, Southern journalists, everything. And I still don’t get it.”

“That’s because it’s not a Southern problem.”

“Don’t you think the answer must be wrapped up in the South somehow?”

“No. Not the way you think, anyway. It’s been thirty years since the last vestiges of segregation were remedied under the law. And there’s a growing feeling that blacks have done damn little to take advantage of that. That they’ve been given special breaks and blown it every time. That they don’t want an even playing field but their turn on top. White America looks at the Vietnamese, the Irish, the Jews, and they say, ‘What’s the problem with the blacks?’ The resentment you hear around this town is based on that, not on old ideas of superiority.”

“Do you feel that way?”

“I used to. I don’t anymore.”

“Why not?”

“The Indians.”

“Indians? You mean Native Americans?”

“Think about it. Indians are the only minority that’s had as much trouble as blacks. Why? Both races had their cultures shattered by the white man. All the other groups—Irish, Italians, Vietnamese, whatever—may have come here destitute, but they brought one thing with them. Their national identities. Their sense of self. They congregated together in the cities and on the plains, like with like. They maintained their cultural identities—religions, customs, names—until they were secure enough to assimilate. Blacks had no chance to do that. They were stolen from their country, brought here in chains, sold as property. Their families were split, their religion beaten out of them, their names changed. Nothing was left. No identity. And they’ve never recovered.”

“And you parallel that with Native Americans?”

“It’s the same experience, only in reverse. The Indians weren’t stolen from their land, their land was stolen from them. And their culture was systematically destroyed. They’ve never recovered either, despite a host of government programs to help them.”

Caitlin stops writing. “That’s an interesting analogy.”

“If you don’t know who you are, you can’t find your way. There are exceptions, of course. Bright spots. But my point is that whites don’t look at blacks with the right perspective. We look at them like an immigrant group that can’t get its shit together.”

She takes a sip of tea as she processes this perspective. “Does Shad Johnson have the right idea, then? Should Natchez simply sweep its past under the rug and push ahead?”

“For Johnson, it’s the smart line to take. For the town … I don’t know.”

“Please try to answer. I think it’s important.”

“If I do, we go off the record.”

She doesn’t look happy, but she wants her answer. “Okay.”

“Faulkner thought the land itself had been cursed by slavery. I don’t agree.” I pause, feeling the writer’s special frustration at trying to embody moral complexities in words. “Have you ever read Karl Jung?”

“A little, in college. Synchronicity, all that?”

“Jung didn’t try to separate good and evil. He knew that both exist in every human heart. He called the propensity to evil the Shadow. And he believed that trying to deny or repress the Shadow is dangerous. Because it can’t be done. He believed you have to recognize your Shadow, come to grips with it, accept it, and integrate it.”

“Make friends with the evil in yourself?”

“Basically. And the South has never done that. We’ve never truly acknowledged the crime of slavery—not in our collective soul. It’s a bit like Germany and the Holocaust, only slavery is much further in the past. Modern generations feel no guilt over it, and it’s easy to see why. There’s no tangible connection. Slave owners were a tiny minority, and most Southerners see no larger complicity.”

“How does the white South acknowledge the crime?”

“It’ll never happen. That’s what’s scary about what Shad Johnson is doing. Because the day of reckoning always comes, when everything you’ve tried to repress rears up in the road to meet you. Whatever you bury deepest is always waiting for the moment of greatest stress to explode to the surface.”

“You’re the only white person in this town who’s said anything like this to me. How did you turn out so different?”

“That’s a story for another day. But I want you to be clear that I think the North is as guilty as the South when it comes to blacks.”

“You don’t really believe that.”

“You’re damn right I do. I may criticize the South when I’m in it, but when I’m in the North, I defend Mississippi to the point of blows. Prejudice in the North isn’t as open, but it’s just as destructive. Most Yankees have no concept of living in a town—I mean in a town—that is fifty percent black. No idea of the warmth that can exist between black and white on a daily basis, and has here for years.”

“Oh, come on.”

“What happened in Boston when they tried busing?”

“That’s a different issue.”

“Watts. Detroit. Skokie. Rodney King. O.J.”

She sighs. “Are we going to refight the Civil War here?”

“How long have you lived here, Caitlin?”

“Sixteen months.”

“You could live here sixteen years and you’d still be on the outside. And you can’t understand this place until you see it from the inside.”

“You’re talking about the social cliques?”

“Not exactly. Society is different here. It’s not just tiers of wealth. Old money may run out, but the power lingers. Blood still means something down here. Not to me, but to a lot of people.”

“Sounds like Boston.”

“I imagine it is. The structure is concentric circles, and as you move toward the center, the levels of knowledge increase.”

“Were your parents born here?”

“No, but my father’s a doctor, and doctors get a backstage pass. Probably because their profession puts them in a position to learn secrets anyway. And there are a thousand secrets in this town.”

“Name one.”

“Well … what about the Del Payton case?”

“Who’s Del Payton?”

“Delano Payton was a black factory worker who got blown up in his car outside the Triton Battery plant in 1968. It was a race murder, like a dozen others in Mississippi, only it was never solved. I’m not sure anybody really tried to solve it. Payton was a decorated combat veteran of the Korean War. And I’ll bet you a thousand dollars we’re sitting within five miles of his murderers right now.”

Excitement and awe fill her eyes. “Are you serious? Did the Examiner cover the murder?”

“I don’t know. I was eight years old then. I do know Dan Rather came down with a half dozen network correspondents. The FBI was up in arms, and two of their agents were shot at on the road between here and Jackson.”

“Why was Payton murdered?”

“He was about to be hired for a job that until then had been held exclusively by whites.”

“The police must have had some idea who did it.”

“Everybody knew who did it. Racist cowards motivated by the tacit encouragement of white leaders who knew better. A year before, they bombed another black guy at the same plant, but he survived. My father treated him. This guy was on the hospital phone with Bobby Kennedy every day, had guards all around his room, the works.”

“This is great stuff. My aunt went to school with Bobby.”

Her self-centered dilettantism finally puts me over the edge. “Caitlin, you’re so transparent. You want to hear the same thing every other Northern journalist wants to hear: that the Klan is alive and well, that the South is as Gothic and demonic as it ever was. Terrible things did happen here in the sixties, and people who knew better turned a blind eye. As a boy I watched the Klan march robed on horseback right out there on Main Street. City police directed traffic for them. But that has nothing to do with Natchez as it is today.”

“How can you say that?”

“You want to assign guilt? The Examiner printed the time of that Klan march but refused to print the time or location of a single civil rights meeting. Is the Examiner the same newspaper it was then?”

She ignores the question. “Why haven’t I heard people talking about the Payton case before? Even the African Americans don’t talk about it.”

“Because if you live here, you want to make the best life you can. Stirring up the past doesn’t help anybody.”

“But cases like this are being reopened every day, right here in Mississippi. The Byron de la Beckwith case. The retrial of Sam Bowers, the Klan Wizard from Laurel. You must know that the state recently opened the secret files of the Mississippi Sovereignty Commission?”

“So?”

“The Sovereignty Commission was like a racist KGB. They kept files not only on African Americans but on hundreds of whites suspected of liberal sympathies.”

“So?”

Caitlin looks at me in bewilderment. “So? Newsweek just ran a big piece on it, and Peter Jennings’s people have been calling around the state, trolling for stories. The Payton case could be reopened at any time.”

“Glad to hear it. Justice should be better served than it was in Natchez in 1968, but this isn’t some old trial with an all-white hung jury. This is an unsolved murder. A capital murder. No defendant. No suspects, as far as I know. No crime scene. Old or dead witnesses—”

“Nobody said winning a Pulitzer is easy.”

A light clicks on in my head. “Ah. That’s the plan? Winning a Pulitzer before you’re thirty?”

She gives me a sly smile. “Before I’m twenty-nine. That’s the plan.”

“God help this town.”

Her laugh is full and throaty, one I’d expect from an older woman. “Did you know that some of the Sovereignty Commission files are going to remain sealed?”

“No.”

“Forty-two of them. Some of them on major politicians. I heard Trent Lott’s was one of them, but that turned out to be wrong.”

“That’s no surprise. A lot of the most sensitive files were destroyed years ago.”

“Why haven’t you explored any of this in your novels?”

“A sense of loyalty to the place that bore me, I suppose. A lot of people would have to die before I could write a book like that.”

“So, until then you write fluff and take the easy money?”

“I don’t write fluff.”

She holds up her hands in contrition. “I know. I did a Nexis search on you. Publishers Weekly named False Witness the fourth-best legal thriller ever written.”

“After what?”

“Anatomy of a Murder, The Caine Mutiny, and Presumed Innocent.”

“That’s pretty good company,” I murmur, painfully aware that False Witness was four books ago.

“Yes, but it just seems so obvious that you should be writing about all this. Write what you know! You know?”

Caitlin picks up the check and walks over to the cash register, her movements fluid and graceful despite the phenomenal energy that animates her. The restaurant is empty now but for the cashier and our waitress, who chooses this moment to come forward with her copy of False Witness. I take the book, open it to the flyleaf, and accept the pen she offers.

“Would you like me to personalize it?”

“Wow, that would be great. Um, to Jenny. That’s me.”

“No last name?”

“Just Jenny would be cool.”

I write: Jenny, I enjoyed meeting you. Penn Cage.

She blushes as she takes back the book, then glances at Caitlin, who stands waiting for me. “I’d love to talk to you sometime,” she says in a quavering voice. “Ask you some questions, maybe.”

I recognize the nervous tones of an aspiring writer. “I’ll be in again. A friend of mine owns the place.”

“Wow, okay. Thanks.”

I join Caitlin as she walks out onto the brightly lit street.

“Did you get enough for your piece?”

“More than enough.” She tucks her copy of False Witness under one arm and buttons her jacket. “AP will probably pick it up, and it’ll be reprinted all over the South. They like fluff as much as anybody.”

I sigh wearily.

“I’m joking, Penn. God, take it easy, would you?”

“I guess I’m a little tense.”

“A little?” She takes False Witness in both hands, then bends at the waist and touches the book flat against the sidewalk, displaying a limberness that makes my back hurt and draws looks from several passersby. “Mmm, I needed that.”

“If I tried that, they’d hear tendons popping across the river.”

She smiles. “Not if you practiced. We should do this again. You can be deep background on Southern crime and psychology.”

I start to decline, then surprise myself by saying, “I might be able to help you with that.”

Her eyes sparkle with pleasure. “I’ll call you. And I’m sorry again about the airplane. Tell Annie I said hello.”

She holds out her hand and I take it, not thinking anything of it and so being all the more surprised by the shock I feel. When our eyes meet, we recognize something in each other that neither expects and both quickly look away from.

“The story will probably run Wednesday in the Southern Life section,” she says in a flustered voice, and awkwardly releases my hand. “I’ll mail some copies to your parents. I’m sure your mom still clips everything about you.”

“Absolutely.”

Caitlin Masters looks at me once more, then turns and walks quickly to a green Miata parked across the street with its top down. I am acutely aware of her physical presence, even across the street, and inexplicably glad that she suggested another lunch. With that gladness comes a rush of guilt so strong that it nauseates me. Seven months ago I was standing at my wife’s deathbed, then her coffin. Seven seconds ago I felt something for another woman. This small and natural response causes me more guilt than sleeping with a woman out of physical necessity—which I have not yet done. Because what I felt was more than physical. A glacier consumes whole forests by inches. As small as it was, that glimmer of feeling is absolute proof that someone else will one day occupy the place Sarah held in my life.

I feel like a traitor.

SIX

My father wakes me by slapping a newspaper against my forehead. After I rub the sleep from my eyes, I see my own face staring up from the front page of the Natchez Examiner, above the fold. They’ve scanned my most recent author photo and blown it up to “this man assassinated the president” size. The headline reads: PRODIGAL SON RETURNS HOME.

“The goddamn phone hasn’t stopped ringing,” Dad growls. “Everybody wants to know why my son is disparaging his hometown.”

Beneath the author photo is a montage of smaller shots, like a family album: me as a lanky kid with Dad’s arm around my shoulders, printed in a Father’s Day issue in 1968; as a high school baseball player; as the flag runner in the annual Confederate pageant; my Ole Miss graduation photo. I quickly scan the columns, recognizing most of what I said yesterday, laid out in surprisingly faithful prose.

“I don’t get it,” I say. “What’s wrong with this?”

“Have you been in Houston so long you’ve forgotten how things are here? Bill Humphreys said you set back thirty years of good race relations.”

“I didn’t say anything you haven’t said a hundred times in our kitchen.”

“The newspaper isn’t our kitchen!”

“Come on, Dad. This is nothing.”

He shakes his head in amazement. “Turn the page, hotshot. You’ll see something.”

When I turn the page, my breath catches in my throat.

The banner headline reads: 30 YEARS LATER “RACIST COWARDS” STILL WALK STREETS. My stomach flips over. Underneath the headline is a photo of a scorched Ford Fairlane with a blackened corpse seated behind the wheel. That picture never ran in the Natchez Examiner in 1968. Caitlin Masters must have dug up an old crime-scene photo somewhere.

“Jesus,” I whisper.

“Harvey Byrd at the Chamber of Commerce thinks you may have single-handedly sabotaged the chemical-plant deal.”

“Let me read the thing, okay?”

Dad plants himself in the corner, his arms folded.

The story opens like a true-crime novel.

On May 14, 1968, Frank Jones, a scheduling clerk at the Triton Battery plant, walked out to his car in the middle of the third shift to run an errand. Before he could start his engine, he heard a boom “like an artillery piece,” and a blackwall tire slammed into his windshield. Thirty yards away, a black man named Delano Payton sat burning to death. Jones was the sole eyewitness to the worst race crime in the history of this city, in which a combat veteran of the Korean War was murdered to prevent his being promoted to a “white-only” job. No one was ever arrested for the crime, and many in the black community believe that law enforcement officials of the period gave less than their full efforts to the case. Best-selling author and Natchez native Penn Cage characterized the killers of Delano Payton as “racist cowards,” and stated that justice should be better served than it was in Natchez in 1968.

Former police chief Hiram Wilkes contended that leads were nonexistent at the time, and said that despite exhaustive efforts by law enforcement, and a $15,000 reward offered by Payton’s national labor union, no suspects were turned up. The FBI was called in to work the case but had no more success than local police. Former Natchez police officer Ray Presley, who assisted on the case in the spring of 1968, stated, “It was a tough murder case, and the FBI got in the way more than they helped, which was par for them in those days—”

I reread the last sentence, my heartbeat accelerating. I had no idea Ray Presley was involved in the Payton case. I want to ask my father about him, but with the blackmail issue—and my mother’s suspicions about Presley—hanging like a cloud between us, I don’t.

“You’ve been dealing with the media for twelve years,” Dad grumbles. “That publisher must have shown you a little leg and puréed your brain. I’ve seen her around town. Face like a model, tits like two puppies in a sack. I know what happened. It took her about five seconds to get Penn Cage at his most sanctimonious.” He grabs the newspaper out of my hands and wads it into a ball. “Did you have to dredge up the goddamn Payton case?”

“I just mentioned it, for God’s sake. I thought we were off the record.”

“She obviously didn’t.”

I try to remember the point at which I asked to go off the record. I can check my tape, of course, but I already know what Caitlin Masters will say: she thought I wanted the Jungian analysis and the comparison between Germany and the South off the record, but not the Del Payton remarks, which were an extension of our earlier conversation on racism. At least she honored my request not to mention the Hanratty execution.

“What about that Klan rally stuff?” Dad mutters.

“You took me to that rally!”

“I know, I know … damn it. I just wanted you to see that wasn’t any way to be. But you didn’t have to drag it all back up now, did you?”

“I made it clear that stuff was all in the past. And she printed my qualifications, I’ll give her that.”

“God almighty, what a mess. Do you think—”

The front doorbell rings, cutting him off.

“Who the hell could that be?” he asks. “It’s only eight-thirty.”

He walks out of the bedroom, taking the wadded-up newspapers with him.

My thoughts return to Caitlin Masters. Despite her assurances, I was foolish to say anything to her that I didn’t want printed. Maybe she did show me a little leg and lull my usually vigilant defenses. Am I that easy to manipulate?

“Get some clothes on,” my father says from the door, his face grave. “You’ve got visitors.”

“Who? You look almost scared.”

He nods slowly. “I think I am.”

Uncertain what to expect, I hover in the hall outside my mother’s living room. The hushed sibilance of gracious women making polite conversation drifts from the wide doorway. I walk through the door and stop in my tracks. Two black women sit primly on the sofa, delicate Wedgwood cups steaming before them on the coffee table. One is in her eighties, if not older, and dressed in an ensemble the like of which I have not seen since the Sundays I drove past black churches as a teenager. The skirt is purple, the blouse green, the shoes a gleaming patent black. Her hat is a flowered concoction of black straw and varicolored silk. Beneath the hat is a shining black wig, beneath the wig a raisin of a face with watery eyes that glisten amid the wrinkles.

The woman beside her looks thirty years younger and wears a much more subdued outfit, a pleated navy skirt with a periwinkle blouse. She looks up, and her gaze disconcerts me. Most black people I grew up with rarely made direct eye contact, locking their feelings behind a veneer of humility. But this woman’s gaze is unveiled, direct, and self-confident.

“You keep a fine house, Mrs. Cage,” the older woman says in a cracked voice. “A fine house.”

“You’re so kind to say so,” my mother replies from a wing chair on the other side of the coffee table. She wears a house-coat and no makeup, yet even in this state radiates a quiet, stately beauty. She turns to me and smiles.

“Son, this is Mrs. Payton.” She gestures toward the elderly woman, then nods at her younger companion. “And this is Mrs. Payton also. They’ve come to thank you for what you said in this morning’s paper.”

I flush from my neck to the crown of my head. I can only be looking at the widow and mother of Delano Payton, the man bombed and burned to death in 1968. Barefoot and unshaven, I make a vain attempt to straighten my hair, then advance into the living room. Without rising, the elder Mrs. Payton enfolds my right hand in both of hers like a dowager empress. Her palms feel like fine sandpaper. The younger Mrs. Payton stands and shakes my hand with exaggerated formality. Her hand is moist and warm. Up close, she looks older than I first guessed, perhaps sixty-five. Because she has not gone to fat, she projects an aura of youth that her eyes cannot match.

“Althea works in the nursery at St. Catherine’s Hospital,” Dad informs me from the door. “I see her all the time. And I’ve treated Miss Georgia for thirty-five years now.”

“Yo’ daddy a good doctor,” the elder Mrs. Payton says from the sofa, pointing a bony finger at me. “A good doctor.”

My father has heard this ten thousand times, but he smiles graciously. “Thank you, Miss Georgia.”

“I remember you makin’ house calls late at night,” Georgia Payton goes on, her voice reedy and difficult to follow as it jumps up and down the scale. “Givin’ shots and deliverin’ babies. Had you a spotlight back then to see the house numbers.”

“And a pistol in my black bag,” Dad adds, chuckling.

“Sho’ did. I seen it once. You ever have to use it?”

“No, ma’am, thank God.”

“Might have to one of these days, with all this crack in the streets. I told the pastor last Sunday, you want to find Satan, just pull up to one of them crack houses. Sheriff ought to burn ever’ one to the ground.”

We all nod with enthusiasm, doing our best to foster a casual atmosphere. Blacks visiting socially in white homes—and vice versa—is still as rare as snowfall in Natchez, but this is not the reason for the general discomfort.

“Mr. Cage,” Althea says, focusing her liquid brown eyes on me, “we really appreciate you speaking out like you did in the paper.”

“Please call me Penn,” I implore her, embarrassed by thanks for a few lines tossed off without any real feeling for the victims of the crime.

“Mr. Penn,” says Georgia Payton, “ain’t no white man in thirty years said what you said in the paper today. My boy was kilt outside his job in nineteen hundred and sixty-eight, and all the po-lices did was sweep it under the rug.”

Her statement hangs suspended in crystalline silence. I sense my father’s reflexive desire to answer her charge, to try to mitigate the behavior of the law enforcement figures of the period. But the murder remains unsolved, and he has no idea what efforts were made to solve it, if any, or how sincere they might have been. Althea Payton looks momentarily disconcerted by her mother-in-law’s frankness, but then her eyes fill with calm resolution.

“Are you still a lawyer, Mr. Cage?” she asks. “I mean, I know you’re a writer now. Can you still practice law?”

I incline my head. “I’m still a member of the bar.”

“What that mean?” asks Georgia.

“I can still practice law, ma’am.”

“Then we wants to hire you.”

“For what?”

“I think I know,” Dad says.

“To find out who murdered my baby,” the old woman says, “The po-lice don’t want to do it. FBI don’t want to. The county lawyer neither.”

“The district attorney,” Althea corrects her.

“You’ve spoken to the district attorney about this?”

Althea nods. “Several times. He has no interest in the case.”

Dad emits a sigh easily interpreted as, Big surprise.

“We hired us a detective too,” Georgia says. “I even wrote to that man on Unsolved Mysteries, that good-looking white man from that old gangster TV show.”

“Robert Stack?” asks my mother.

“Yes,” Althea confirms. “We got back one letter from the show’s producer expressing interest, but after that nothing.”

“What about this detective?” I ask. “What happened with him?”

“We hired a man from Jackson first. He poked around downtown for an afternoon, then told us there was nothing to find.”

“White man,” Georgia barks. “A no-good.”

“Then we hired a detective from Chicago,” Althea says in a tense voice. “He flew down and spent a week in the Eola Hotel—”

“Colored man,” the old woman cuts in. “A no-count no-good. He stole all our money and went back to Chicago.”

“He was very expensive,” Althea concedes. “And he said the same thing the first detective told us. The pertinent records had been destroyed and there was nothing to find.”

“NAACP say the same thing,” Georgia adds with venom. “They don’t care about my baby none. He wasn’t a big enough name. They cry about Martin and Medgar every year, got white folks makin’ movies about Medgar. But my baby Del in the ground and nobody care. Nobody.”

“Except you,” Althea says quietly. “When I walked out in my driveway this morning and picked up that paper—when I read what you said—I cried. I cried like I haven’t cried in thirty years.”

Dad raises his eyebrows and sends me one of his telepathic messages: You opened your damn mouth. See what it’s got you.

“I still gots some money, Mr. Penn,” Georgia says, clutching at a black vinyl handbag the size of a small suitcase.

I envision a tidal wave of one-dollar bills spilling out of the purse, like money at a crack bust, but Mrs. Payton has clutched the bag only to emphasize her statement. I cannot let this go any further.

“Ladies, I appreciate your thanks, but I don’t deserve them. As I said in the paper, I’m here for a vacation. I’m no longer involved in any criminal matters. What happened to your husband and son was a terrible tragedy, but I suspect that what the detectives told you is true. This crime happened thirty years ago. Nowadays, if the police don’t solve a homicide in the first forty-eight hours, they know they probably never will.”

“But sometimes they do,” Althea says doggedly. “I’ve read about murder cases that were solved years after the fact.”

“That’s true, but it’s rare. In all my years with the Houston D.A.’s office, we only had a couple of cases like that.”

“But you had them.”

“Yes. But what we had more of—a hundred times more of—was distraught relatives pleading with us to reopen old cases. Murder is a terrible thing, and no one knows that better than you. The repercussions reverberate through generations.”

“But there’s no statue of limitations on murder. Is there?”

Statue of limitations. I see no point in correcting her grammar; I’ve heard attorneys make the same mistake. Like congressmen referring to nucular war. “Everything hinges on evidence,” I explain. “Has any new evidence come to light?”

Her desolate look is answer enough.

“That’s what we were hoping you could do.” Althea says. “Look back over what the police did. Maybe they missed something. Maybe they buried something. I read in a book that sixty percent of the Natchez police force was Klan back then. God knows what they did or didn’t do. You might even get a book out of it. There’s a lot nobody knows about those times. About what Del was doing for his people.”

I fight the urge to glance at my parents for assistance. “I’m actually in the middle of a book now, and I’m behind. I—”

“I’ve read your books,” Althea breaks in. “All of them. In paperback, of course. I read them on the late shift, when the babies are resting well.”

I never know what to say in these moments. If you say, Did you like them? you’re putting the person on the spot. But what else can you say?

“I liked the first one the best,” Althea offers. “I liked the others too, but I couldn’t help feeling …”

“Be honest,” I urge her, dreading what will follow.

“I always felt that your gift was bigger than the stories you were telling. I don’t mean to be critical. But that first book was so real. I just think if you really understood what happened to Del, you’d have a story that would take all the gift you have to tell it.”

Her words are like salt on my soul. “I truly wish I could help you. But I can’t. If some new evidence were to come to light, the district attorney would be the proper man to see.” I look at my father. “Is Austin Mackey still the D.A. here?”

He nods warily.

“I went to school with Mr. Mackey. He’s a good man. I could—”

“He nothing but a politician!” scoffs Georgia Payton.

The old woman gets slowly to her feet, using her huge handbag as a counterweight. “He don’t care none. We come here ’cause we thought you did. But maybe you don’t. Maybe you was talking free in the paper ’cause you been gone so long you ain’t worried ’bout what people thinks around here. I told Althea, you must be like your daddy, a hardworking man with a good heart. But maybe I told her wrong.”

I flush again, suddenly certain that the men of the Payton family are intimately familiar with the guilt trip as a motivational tool.

Althea stands more slowly than her mother-in-law, as though lifting the weight of thirty years of grief. This time when she speaks, she looks only at the floor.

“I loved my husband,” she says softly. “After he was killed, I never remarried. I never even went with another man. I raised my boy the best I could and tried to go on. I don’t say it was hard, because everybody got it hard, some way. You know that, Dr. Cage. The world’s full of misery. But my Del got took before his time.” Her lower lip is quivering; she bites it to keep her composure. “He wanted us to wait to have children. So we’d be able to give them the things they needed. Del said our people hurt themselves by having too many children too quick. We just had one before he died. Del was a good boy who grew into a good man, and he never got to see his own baby grow up.”

The mournful undertone in her voice pierces my heart. All I can see is Sarah lying in her casket at age thirty-seven, her future ripped away like a cruel mirage. Althea Payton breaks the image by reaching into her purse and taking out a folded piece of paper, which she hands to me. I have little choice but to unfold it.

It’s a death certificate.

“When the ambulance men got to Del, he was already burned up. But they couldn’t get him out of the seat. The springs from the seat had blown up through his thighs and pinned him there. That’s why he couldn’t get out, even though he was still alive after that bomb went off.”

I stare at the brittle yellowed paper, a simple form dated 5-14-68.

“Look in the middle,” Althea says. “Under cause of death.”

I push down a hot wave of nausea. Thirty years ago, on the line beside the printed words CAUSE OF DEATH, some callous or easily cowed bureaucrat had scrawled the word Accidental.

“As long as I live and breathe,” Althea whispers, “I’ll do what I can to find out the truth.”

I want to speak, to try to communicate the empathy I feel, but I don’t. Sarah’s death taught me this. In the face of grief, words have no power.

I watch the Payton women follow my mother into the hall. I hear Georgia repeat her compliment about the fine house my mother keeps, then the soft shutting of the front door. I sit on the sofa where Althea sat. The cushion is still warm. My mother’s slippers hiss across the slate floor of the foyer, the sound like a nun moving through a convent.

“The neighbours are standing out in their yards,” she says.

Wondering at the sight of black people who aren’t yard men or maids, I reflect. And tomorrow the maids and the yard men will return, while the two Mrs. Paytons sit or work in silent grief, mourning a man whose murder caused no more ripples than a stone dropped into a pond.

“I know that was hard,” my father says, laying a hand on my shoulder. “But you did the right thing.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know.”

“That boy’s long dead and gone. Nothing anybody can do will help him now. But it could hurt a lot of people. Those two poor women. The town. Your mother. You and Annie most of all. You did the right thing, son.”

I look up at my father, searching for the man Georgia Payton said he is.

“You did,” my mother insists. “Don’t dwell on it. Go wake Annie up. I’m going to make French toast.”

SEVEN

The couch in my father’s medical office has heard many terrible truths: revelations by the doctor (you’re sick; you’re dying; they couldn’t get it all), confessions by the patient (my husband beats me; my father raped me; I want to die), but always—always—truths about the patient.

Today the truth about the doctor will be told.

I can imagine no other reason for the sudden summons to his office. It requires a conscious effort to control my anxiety as I sit on that worn leather couch, waiting for him to finish with his last patient of the day.

After the Payton women left our house this morning, Dad took his old pickup truck to work so that Annie and I would have the BMW. Having no desire to endure the glares of the local citizenry, I spent the morning in the pool with Annie, marveling at how well she moved in the water and fighting a losing battle to keep her skin covered with sun block. Mom and I had tuna sandwiches for lunch, Annie a bowl of SpaghettiOs. When the two of them drove downtown to buy Annie new shoes, I retired to the library and read T. Harry Williams’s Huey Long on the sofa until I fell asleep.

The telephone woke me at four-thirty p.m. I hated to chance answering it myself, but I thought it might be my mother.

“Penn?” said my father. “Can you drop by my office about five? Alone?”

“Sure. What’s up?”

“I think it’s time we had a talk.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to sound casual. “I’ll see you at five.”

I went to the bathroom and showered off the chlorine from the pool, then dressed in chinos and a polo shirt. Dad’s office is only a couple of miles from the house, so I read another twenty minutes in Huey Long. When I fell asleep, the Grand Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, speaking from the “imperial klonvocation” in Atlanta, had just announced that he was going to Louisiana to campaign against Huey because of his pro-Negro policies. The Kingfish stormed into the press gallery of the state senate while the legislature was in session and announced that if that “Imperial bastard” crossed the Louisiana state line, he would shortly depart “with his toes turned up.” The Klan leader wisely elected not to test the Kingfish’s sincerity. As humorous as it seemed in retrospect, Long could all too easily have backed up his threat. I could see how dictatorial power might be an asset in solving sticky problems like racism. Of course, that road also leads to the crematorium ovens.

When I got to my father’s office building, I used his private door. I’d known Anna, his chief nurse—an attractive black woman—for most of my life, but I was too curious to spend even ten minutes reminiscing about old times. I sat on the couch opposite his desk and waited in the lingering haze of cigar smoke.

During his first fifteen years in Natchez, Dad practiced in a sprawling downtown house. This was the era of separate waiting rooms for “colored” and white, but his only nod to this convention was a flimsy wooden partition set up in the middle of the room. On any day you could find whole families—white and black—camped out in that great room, kids playing on the floor, parents eating from bag lunches and waiting to see the doctor on a first-come, first-served basis. His new office, convenient to both hospitals and sterile as a hypodermic needle, runs like any other doctor’s—almost. He has rigidly scheduled appointments, a gleaming laboratory, and modern X-ray facilities, but he still routinely brings everything to a standstill by spending whatever time he feels a patient needs for examination, commiseration, or just plain conversation.

At last his strong baritone filters around the door. The volume tells me he is bidding farewell to a geriatric patient. Old people comprise the bulk of his practice now, as his “patient base” has aged with him. Anna leans in and gives me a smile, then closes the door behind Dad. He squeezes my shoulder as he walks past and sits in the big chair behind his desk.

This is how I picture him in memory: white lab coat, stethoscope hanging loosely around his neck, ensconced behind mountains of incomplete medical records, drug samples, and junk mail. He reaches into a small refrigerator behind his desk and takes out a Dr Pepper, which he offers to me. When I decline, he pops the top and takes a long pull from it, his eyes watering from the sudden shot of carbonation.

“I’m in a bad spot, Penn,” he says in a frank voice. “I apologize for being an ass the other night. It’s not easy for a father to admit weakness to his son.”

I nod awkwardly, imagining a future when I am certain to fall short of Annie’s idealized image of me. “Dad, there’s nothing you can tell me that will change my opinion of you. Just tell me what’s going on so we can deal with it.”

He clearly doubts my statement, but he’s made up his mind to talk. “Twenty-five years ago,” he says, “your Aunt Ellen got into some trouble.”

My mind is spinning. When he said “twenty-five years ago,” I thought he was going to start talking about Del Payton. But Payton was killed thirty years ago. The shift to my mother’s younger sister, Ellen, throws me completely.

“She was divorced and living in Mobile, Alabama. Ellen was about your age now, I guess. Dating a guy there. He was a year or two younger than she was. Name was Hillman. Don Hillman. Your mother and I didn’t know it at the time—at least I didn’t—but Hillman was abusing Ellen. Beating her, controlling every word and action. Your mother finally convinced her that the relationship was going to end badly no matter what she did, and Ellen tried to break it off. Hillman didn’t take it well. I advised Ellen to go to the police. Then I found out Hillman was the brother of a cop over in Mobile. A detective. This was 1973. Nobody’d heard of stalking laws.”

“I hope you brought her here.”

“Of course. She stayed with us for a summer. You remember, don’t you?”

I do. For most of one summer our hall bathroom became an exotic world of hanging stockings, lacy underwear, cut-glass perfume bottles, and blue Noxema jars.

“Hillman called the house a few times after the breakup. Late, drunk out of his mind and railing, or else hanging up. One night when he didn’t hang up, I told him if he came to Natchez making trouble, he’d be a long time getting back to Mobile. The calls stopped. After a while Ellen wanted her own place, so I rented her an apartment at the Windsor Arms and got her a job at the Jeff Davis.”

He takes another slug of Dr Pepper. “As soon as she got her own place, strange things started happening. Slashed tires, eggs on her door, more juvenile crap. One morning she found her cat at her door with its throat cut. I called the Natchez police, but they couldn’t find Hillman anywhere in town.” He closed his eyes and sighs. “Then he raped her.”

A shudder of horror accompanies my amazement. Families are mazes of secrets, and none of us ever knows them all.

“Hillman was waiting inside her apartment when she got home from a date. He beat the hell out of her, raped her, sodomized her. Then he disappeared. Ellen was too shaken up to swear out charges. I had to sedate her. I got the Natchez D.A. to call the Mobile D.A. and make a lot of noise, but Ellen would have been a shaky witness at best, even if I could have gotten her to press charges. And Hillman’s brother was a cop, remember? The Mobile D.A. didn’t sound excited about making trouble for him.”

I nod in sympathy. The old-timers in Houston told me a thousand times how tough it was to get rape convictions before feminists changed public perception of the crime. And the cop angle was a serious complication. Nothing is more incestuous than Southern law enforcement. Everything is personal relationships.

“Needless to say, things were pretty bad at home,” Dad goes on. “We tried to keep it from you and your sister, but your mother and Ellen were at the end of their rope. Peggy was driving her to Jackson every three days to see a psychiatrist.”

I remember this too. Mom taking Aunt Ellen to the doctor all the time. “We thought it was her ovaries or something.”

“That’s what we told you. Anyway, two weeks after the rape, Hillman started calling again.” Dad is clenching and unclenching his right fist on the desk. “I never felt so goddamn impotent in my life.”

I don’t know what’s coming, but the hair on my forearms is standing up.

“About this time, Ray Presley happened to come to see me about his blood pressure. You know how I get to talking to patients, and Presley always had a good story. He saw that I wasn’t myself. He asked what was bothering me, and I told him. He’d been a cop, after all. I thought he might have a suggestion.”

He’d also done a hitch in Parchman prison, I think, but now does not seem the best time to bring that up.

“Ray heard me out, and he didn’t say much. Grunted a couple of times in the right places. You never know what he’s thinking. So we’re both just sitting there, saying nothing. After a while he says, ‘So what’s this shitbird’s name, Doc?’ I didn’t say anything for a minute. Then I told him. We shot the bull for a few more minutes, and Ray left. Three weeks later, the Natchez D.A. called and told me Hillman was dead. Somebody’d shot him in the head and taken his wallet outside a topless bar in Mobile.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“At first I was relieved. But somewhere in the back of my mind I was worried about Ray. He’d always appreciated me taking care of his mother, and some part of me wondered if he hadn’t taken it into his head to get rid of my problem for me.”

“Oh, man.”

“A month later he came back in to get his pressure checked. I told the girls I was too busy to talk, but he slipped into my office and waited for me. When I went in, I asked him point blank if he knew anything about Hillman’s death.”

“And?”

“He told me right out he’d killed the guy.”

“Shit.”

Dad shakes his head. “Just like saying, ‘I fixed that flat for you. Doc.’ He gave me this funny smile and told me not to give it another thought. Said I didn’t owe him anything. Just get back to doctoring and living. Those were his exact words.”

“Tell me you reported this to the police.”

“I didn’t.”

Having watched my father make moral choices that cost him money and friendships for years, I am stunned by this answer. “That’s accessory after the fact, Dad. Five years in the pen.”

“I realize that. But the situation was more complicated than you know.”

“You hadn’t committed any crime until you kept Presley’s confession from the police.”

“Listen, damn it! Ray must have seen how he upset me. Because twenty minutes after he walked out, he came back and handed me a zipper pouch. Inside it was a pistol I’d lent him about six months before, a forty-five.”

My heart slaps against my chest wall. “He killed Hillman with that pistol?”

“No. But he was always borrowing things from me back then. Guns, books, my Nikon for a stakeout, that kind of thing. You know I can’t say no to anybody. Anyhow, I’d lent him another pistol about a year before, a little feather-weight thirty-eight. So, when he handed me the forty-five, I asked about the thirty-eight.” Dad takes a deep breath and exhales slowly. “He told me it had been stolen.”

I close my eyes as though to shield myself from what is coming.

“He told me not to worry about it, that he’d get me another thirty-eight. But he was really telling me that reporting the murder wasn’t an option. He’d killed Hillman with my thirty-eight, and he still had the gun. If I tried to report him, he could tell the police that I’d asked him to commit the crime and had given him the gun to do it.”

“How soon did he start blackmailing you?”

“He didn’t mention it again for twenty-five years.”

“What?”

“He had no intention of blackmailing me, Penn. Ray Presley idolized me back then. Still does, I think. But last year he got prostate cancer, and he doesn’t have health insurance. He needed money, so he started getting it wherever he could. For all I know, he’s blackmailing ten other people besides me. The point is, he had me over a barrel. I couldn’t see any option but to pay him.”

“Why didn’t you call me when he first came to you?”

“Do you really have to ask? I was ashamed. Because of me, a man was murdered.”

“You had nothing to do with that! You didn’t solicit the thing, for God’s sake. You couldn’t know Presley would kill the guy.”

Dad dismisses this rationalization with a wave of his hand. “Do you remember Becket?”

“The movie or the historical archbishop?”

“The movie. After Becket makes his moral stand against King Henry, the king is alone in the palace with his nobles. These so-called nobles are a nasty bunch, greedy, violent, and drunk. And though King Henry loves Becket, he says out loud: ‘Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?’ And of course they do. They go to Canterbury and murder him with swords.”

Sometimes I wish my father had less rigorous moral standards.

“Henry knew what he was saying, Penn. He knew the company he was in. And that made him guilty of murder. That’s why he submitted to the lashing by Becket’s monks.”

“You’re not a king. You couldn’t know what Presley would do.”

Dad is too wracked by guilt for me to get through to him. “I’ve spent years thinking about this. I didn’t know Presley would kill the man, but when he asked for the name, I knew he might do something. I’d treated his parents for free, and he felt indebted to me. He’d just gotten out of prison. From the moment I told Presley that name, Hillman was bound to get hurt, maybe killed. There’s no getting around that.”

I know what it has cost my father to admit this. He may even be right. But that’s not my primary concern at this point. “That’s not how the law would see it. Technically, your only crime was accessory after the fact. And the statute of limitations ran out on that in 1975.”

“What about the gun?”

“That’s another story. If Presley will lie to the D.A. and say you asked him to kill Hillman, and that you gave him the gun—and if he still has the gun—that adds up to capital murder. It puts you in line for what I’ve got to witness in two days. Lethal injection.”

“That’s what I thought.”

“Why did you decide to tell me this today?”

“You want to find out who killed Del Payton. I know you do, and you’re right. Maybe you even have an obligation to do it. But the road to Payton’s killers runs right through Ray Presley, because he worked on the case. I knew you’d eventually go see him, and if you did, you’d probably find out about this. He might even hit you up for money. I wanted you to hear the truth from me.”

“The hell with Del Payton. There’s only one thing to do.”

“What?”

“Go to the D.A. before Presley can. Tomorrow morning we’re going to walk in there, tell the whole story, and demand that Presley be arrested for murder and extortion.”

Dad raises both hands like a supplicant. “I’ve thought of doing that a hundred times. But why should the D.A. believe me?”

I think of Austin Mackey, district attorney and former schoolmate of mine. Not my first choice for a sympathetic confessor, but we go back a lot of years. “The D.A. has a lot of discretion in a case like this. And it’s possible we could sting Presley. Wire you before meeting with him. Videotape a blackmail payment.”

“You’re underestimating Ray. Since he started this, he’s talked and acted as though we were partners from the beginning.”

“Damn.”

“Mackey would probably insist that you drop the Payton business, Penn.”

“I dropped it the second you told me about this. We don’t have any options. We’ve got to come clean, and Mackey’s the man we have to see.”

Dad seems to sag behind his desk. “If that’s what you think, I’m prepared to do it. It’ll be a relief, no matter what happens. But even if Mackey decided not to prosecute, wouldn’t I still be subject to prosecution in Alabama?”

He has a point. “Yes. Anywhere that an element of the crime took place. But I can get Mackey to talk to the Mobile D.A. for us.”

“Hillman’s brother still lives in Mobile. The cop. I checked two months ago.”

Wonderful. Even if Mackey does his best to convince the Mobile D.A. to lay off, my father’s life will be in the hands of the Alabama authorities. And that comes pretty close to unacceptable risk. That’s why Dad has not come forward before now.

“Presley has cancer,” I say, thinking aloud. “How long does he have to live?”

Dad shrugs. “His oncologist thought he’d be dead before now. But he’s still ambulatory. Ray is one tough son of a bitch. One of those I always say is too damn stubborn to die. He could live another year.”

“A year isn’t so long. We could keep paying him till he dies. Pay his medical bills.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing so far. It’s getting damned expensive.”

“How much have you paid him?”

“A hundred and sixteen thousand dollars to date.”

I shake my head, still unable to believe the situation. “Over how long?”

“Seven or eight months. But he wants more. He’s talking about needing to provide for his kids now.”

“That’s the way it is with blackmail. It never stops. There’s no guarantee it would stop with his death. He could give the gun to one of his kids. He could leave documentary evidence. A videotape, for example. A dying declaration. You know, ‘I’ve got cancer, and I’ve got something to get off my chest before I stand before my maker.’ That kind of thing is taken very seriously by the courts.”

My father has turned pale. “Good God.”

“That leaves us only one option.”

Something in my voice must have sounded more sinister than I intended, because Dad’s eyes are wide with shock. “You don’t mean kill him?”

“God, no. I just told you his death wasn’t necessarily a solution.”

Relief washes over his face.

“Everything depends on that gun.”

“What are you suggesting? That we steal it?”

“No. We buy it.”

Dad shakes his head. “Ray will never sell it.”

“Everybody has a price. And we know Presley needs money.”

“You just said it could be a meal ticket for his kids for years.”

“Presley knows me. By reputation at least. I’m a nationally known prosecutor, a famous author. If I stand for anything, it’s integrity. Same as you. I’ll show Presley a carrot and a stick. He can sell me the gun, or he can watch me go to the D.A. and stake my reputation on convincing the authorities that you’re innocent. I have contacts from Houston to Washington. You and I are pillars of our communities. Ray Presley’s a convicted felon. At various times he’s probably been suspected of several murders. He’ll sell me the gun.”

A spark of hope has entered Dad’s eyes, but fear still masks it, dull and gray and alien to my image of him. “Buying evidence with intent to … to destroy it,” he says. “What kind of crime is that?”

“It’s a felony. Major-league.”

“You can’t do it, Penn.”

His hands are shaking. This thing has been eating at him every day for twenty-five years. Long before Presley’s blackmail began. God, how he must have sweated during the malpractice trial, worrying that Leo Marston would learn about Hillman’s murder from Presley, his paid lackey. I saw this situation a hundred times as a prosecutor. A man lives morally all his life, then in one weak moment commits an act that damns him in his own eyes and threatens his liberty, even his life. Seeing my father in this trap unnerves me. And yet, to get him out of it, I am contemplating committing a felony myself.

“You’re right,” I tell him. “We’ve got to take the high road.”

“Talk to Mackey?”

“Yes. But I want to feel him out first. I’ll call him tonight. Maybe stop by his house.”

“He won’t be home. There’s a party tonight, a fund-raiser for Wiley Warren.” Riley Warren—nickname “Wiley”—is the incumbent mayor. “Your mother and I were invited, but we weren’t going to go.”

“Mackey will be there?”

“He’s a big supporter of Warren’s. You’re invited, by the way.”

“By you?”

“No. By Don Perry, the surgeon hosting the party. He stopped me at the hospital after lunch and asked me to bring you along.”

“Why would he do that? Especially after the story in the paper?”

“Why do you think? It’s a fund-raising party, and he thinks you’re loaded.”

“That’s it, then. I’ll talk to Mackey there. If he sounds amenable, I’ll set up a formal meeting, and we’ll figure a way to sting Presley.”

Dad lays his hands on his desk to steady them. “I can’t believe it. After all this time … to finally do something about it.”

“We’ve got to do something about it. Life’s too short to live like this.”

He closes his eyes, then opens them and stands up. “I feel bad about the Paytons. I feel like we’re buying me out of trouble by burying the truth about Del.”

This is true enough. But weighed against my father’s freedom, Del Payton means nothing to me. Blood is a hell of a lot thicker than sympathy. “You can’t carry that around on your shoulders.”

“Back during the sixties,” he says, hanging his stethoscope on a coat rack, “I was tempted to ask some of those Northern college kids over to the house. Give them some decent food, a little encouragement. But I never did. I knew what the risks were, and I was afraid to take them.”

“You had a wife and two kids. Don’t beat yourself up over it.”

“I don’t. But Del Payton had a wife and child too.”

“Mom told me you patched up two civil rights workers from Homewood after the doctor over there refused to do it. They were beaten half to death, she said.”

He looks disgusted. “I did take the Hippocratic oath, goddamn it.”

“I guess that Homewood doctor forgot it.”

Anger and shame fill his eyes. “It wasn’t enough. What I did was not enough.”

I stand and take my keys out of my pocket. “Nobody white did enough. Payton’s killers will pay sooner or later. It just won’t be me who makes them do it.”

Dad takes off his lab coat and hangs it on the rack. “If you don’t, Penn, I don’t think anybody else will.”

“So be it.”

EIGHT

Dad and I are dressing for the Perry party—me in a sport jacket borrowed from his closet—when the phone rings beside his bed. He reaches for it without looking, the movement as automatic as scratching an itch.

“Dr. Cage,” he says, waiting for a description of symptoms or a plea for narcotics. His face goes slack, and he presses the phone against his undershirt. “It’s Shad Johnson.”

“Who’s that?”

“The black candidate for mayor.”

“What does he want?”

“You. Want me to say you’re not here?”

I reach for the receiver. “This is Penn Cage.”

“Well, well,” says a precise male voice in the middle register, a voice more white than black. “The prodigal son himself.”

I don’t know how to respond. Then a fragment of Dad’s thumbnail sketch of local politics comes to me: Shad Johnson moved home to Natchez from Chicago specifically to run for mayor. “I hear the same could be said of you, Mr. Johnson.”

He laughs. “Call me Shad.”

“How can I help you, Shad?”

“I’d like you to come see me for a few minutes. I’d come to you, but you might not want the neighbors thinking we’re any closer than we are. News travels fast in this town. Like those Payton women coming to see you this morning.”

A wave of heat rolls up the back of my neck. “I have no intention of getting involved in local politics, Mr. Johnson.”

“You got involved the second you talked to the newspaper about Del Payton.”

“Consider me uninvolved.”

“I’d like nothing better. But we still need to talk.”

“We’re talking now.”

“Face to face. I’m over at my campaign headquarters. You’re not afraid to come to the north side of town, are you?”

“No.” My father is straining hard to hear both sides of the conversation. “But I’ve got to be somewhere in an hour.”

“Not that fund-raiser for Wiley Warren, I hope?”

Shad Johnson obviously has the town wired. I’m about to beg off when he says, “You and your family are in danger.”

I fight the impulse to overreact. “What are you talking about?”

“I’ll tell you when you get here.”

“Give me your address.”

“Martin Luther King Drive. It’s a storefront setup, in a little strip mall.”

“Where’s Martin Luther King Drive?”

“Pine Street,” Dad says, looking concerned.

“That old shopping center by the Brick House?” I ask, recalling a shadowy cinder-block bar I went to once with two black guys I spent a summer laying sewer pipe with.

“That’s right. But it’s not the Brick House anymore, just like it’s not Pine Street anymore. Times change, counselor. You on your way?”

“Give me fifteen minutes.”

“What the hell did he want?” Dad asks, taking the phone from me and hanging it up.

“He said our family’s in danger.”

“What?”

I tie my tie and walk to the bedroom door. “Don’t worry. I’ll be back in forty-five minutes. We’ll make the party in plenty of time.”

He gives me his trademark stern-father look. “You’d better take a pistol with you.”

The north side looks nicer than it did when I was a boy. Back then it was a warren of shotgun shacks and dilapidated houses separated by vacant lots and condemned buildings, their walls patched with tin or even cardboard. Juke clubs operated out of private houses surrounded by men drinking from paper bags, and paint-and-body shops sagged amid herds of junk cars, looking like sets for The Road Warrior. Now there are rows of well-kept houses, a sparkling video store, a state-of-the-art Texaco station, good streetlights, smooth roads.

I swing into the parking lot of the strip mall and scan the storefronts: a styling salon, a fish market, an NAACP voter-registration center, a Sno-Cone stand thronged by black kids, and one newly painted front hung with a bright banner that reads, SHAD JOHNSON—THE FUTURE IS NOW.

An open-air barbecue pit built from a sawn-in-half fifty-five-gallon drum smokes like a barn fire outside the NAACP center, sending the aroma of chicken and pork ribs into the air. A knot of middle-aged black men stands around the pit drinking Colt .45 from quart bottles. They fall silent and watch with sullen suspicion as I get out of the BMW and approach Johnson’s building. I nod to them and go inside.

A skinny young man wearing a three-piece suit that must be smothering him sits behind a metal desk, talking on a telephone. Behind the desk stands a wall-to-wall partition of whitewashed plywood with a closed door set in it. The young man looks up and motions me toward a battered church pew. I nod but remain standing, studying the partition, which is plastered with posters exhorting the public to vote for Shad Johnson. Half show him wearing a dark suit and sitting behind a large desk, a model of conservatism and rectitude; the other half show a much younger-looking Johnson sporting a Malcolm X-style goatee and handing out pamphlets to teenagers on an urban playground. It isn’t hard to guess which posters hang in which parts of town.

A voice rises over the partition. It has anger in it, but anger communicated with the perfect diction of a BBC news reader. As I try to get a fix on the words, the young assistant hangs up and disappears through the door. He returns almost instantly and signals me to follow him.

My first impression of Shad Johnson is of a man in motion. Before I can adequately focus on the figure sitting behind the desk, he is rising and coming around it, right hand extended. A few inches shorter than I, Johnson carries himself with the brash assurance of a personal-injury lawyer. He is light-skinned—not to a degree that would hurt him with the majority of black voters, but light enough that certain whites can reassure themselves about his achievements and aspirations by noting the presence of Caucasian blood. He shakes my hand with a natural politician’s grip, firm and confident and augmented by a megawatt of eye contact.

“I’m glad you came,” he says in a measured tenor. “Take a seat.”

He leads me to a folding chair across from his spartan metal desk, then sits atop the desk like a college professor and smiles. “This is a long way from my office at Goldstein, Henry in Chicago.”

“Up or down?”

He laughs. “Up, if I win.”

“And if you lose? Back to white-shoe law in Chicago?”

His smile slips for a nanosecond.

“You said my family is in danger, Mr. Johnson.”

“Shad, please. Short for Shadrach.”

“All right, Shad. Why is my family in danger?”

“Because of your sudden interest in a thirty-year-old murder.”

“I have no interest in the murder of Del Payton. And I intend to make a public statement to that effect as soon as possible.”

“I’m relieved to hear you say that. I must have taken fifty calls today asking what I’m doing to help you get to the bottom of it.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That I’m in the process of putting together the facts.”

“You didn’t know the facts already?”

Johnson examines his fingernails, which look professionally manicured. “I was born here, Mr. Cage, but I was sent north to prep school when I was eleven. Let’s focus on the present, shall we? The Payton case is a sleeping dog. Best to let it lie.”

The situation is quickly clarifying itself. “What if new evidence were to come to light that pointed to Payton’s killer? Or killers?”

“That would be unfortunate.”

His candor surprises me. “For local politicians, maybe. What about justice?”

“That kind of justice doesn’t help my people.”

“And the Payton family? They’re not your people?”

Johnson sighs like a man trying to hold an intelligent conversation with a two-year-old. “If this case were to be dragged through the newspapers, it would whip white resentment in this town to a fever pitch. Black people can’t afford that. Race relations isn’t about laws and courts anymore. It’s about attitudes. Perceptions. A lot of whites in Mississippi want to do the right thing. They felt the same way in the sixties. But every group has the instinct to protect its own. Liberals keep silent and protect rednecks for the same reason good doctors protect bad ones. It’s a tribal reaction. You’ve got to let those whites find their way to the good place. Suddenly Del Payton is the biggest obstacle I can see to that.”

“I suppose whites get to that good place by voting for Shad Johnson?”

“You think Wiley Warren’s helping anybody but himself?”

“I’m not Warren’s biggest fan, but I’ve heard some good things about his tenure.”

“You hear he’s a drunk? That he can’t keep his dick in his pants? That he’s in the pocket of the casino companies?”

“You have evidence?”

“It’s tough to get evidence when he controls the police.”

“There are plenty of black cops on the force.”

Johnson’s phone buzzes. He frowns, then hits a button and picks up the receiver. “Shad Johnson,” he says in his clipped Northern accent. Five seconds later he cries “My brother!” and begins chattering in the frenetic musical patois of a Pine Street juke, half words and grunts and wild bursts of laughter. Noticing my stare, he winks as if to say: Look how smoothly I handle these fools.

As he hangs up, his assistant sticks his head in the door. “Line two.”

“No more calls, Henry.”

“It’s Julian Bond.”

Johnson sniffs and shoots his cuffs. “I’ve got to take this.”

Now he’s the urbane attorney again, sanguine and self-effacing. He and Bond discuss the coordination of black celebrity appearances during the final weeks of Johnson’s mayoral campaign. Stratospheric names are shuffled like charms on a bracelet. Jesse. Denzel. Whitney. General Powell. Kweisi Mfume. When the candidate hangs up, I shake my head.

“You’re obviously a man of many talents. And faces.”

“I’m a chameleon,” Johnson admits. “I’ve got to be. You know you have to play to your jury, counselor, and I’ve got a pretty damn diverse one here.”

“I guess running for office in this town is like fighting a two-front war.”

“Two-front war? Man, this town has more factions than the Knesset. Redneck Baptists, rich liberals, yellow dog Democrats, middle-class blacks, young fire eaters, Uncle Toms, and bone-dumb bluegums working the bottomland north of town. It’s like conducting a symphony with musicians who hate each other.”

“I’m a little surprised by your language. You sound like winning is a lot more important to you than helping your people.”

“Who can I help if I lose?”

“How long do you figure on sticking around city hall if you win?”

A bemused smile touches Johnson’s lips. “Off the record? Just long enough to build a statewide base for the gubernatorial race.”

“You want to be governor?”

“I want to be president. But governor is a start. When a nigger sits in the governor’s mansion in Jackson, Mississippi, the Civil War will truly have been won. The sacrifices of the Movement will have been validated. Those bubbas in the legislature won’t know whether to shit or go blind. This whole country will shake on its foundations!”

Johnson’s opportunistic style puts me off, but I see the logic in it. “I suppose the black man who could turn Mississippi around would be a natural presidential candidate.”

“You can thank Bill Clinton for pointing the way. Arkansas? Shit. Mississippi is fiftieth in education, fiftieth in economic output, highest in illegitimate births, second highest in welfare payments, the list is endless. Hell, we’re fifty-first in some things—behind Puerto Rico! I turn that around—just a little—I could whip Colin Powell hands down.”

“How can you turn this town around? Much less the state?”

“Factories! Industry! A four-year college. Four-lane highways linking us to Jackson and Baton Rouge.”

“Everybody wants that. What makes you think you can get it?”

Johnson laughs like I’m the original sucker. “You think the white elite that runs this town wants industry? The money here likes things just the way they are. They’ve got their private golf course, segregated neighborhoods, private schools, no traffic problem, black maids and yard men working minimum wage, and just one smokestack dirtying up their sunset. This place is on its way to being a retirement community. The Boca Raton of Mississippi.”

“Boca Raton is a rich city.”

“Well, this is a mostly poor one. One factory closed down and two working half capacity. Oil business all but dead, and every well in the county drilled by a white man. Tourism doesn’t help my people. Rich whites or segregated garden clubs own the antebellum mansions. That tableau they have every year, where the little white kids dance around in hoop skirts for the Yankees? You got a couple of old mammies selling pralines outside and black cops directing traffic. You see any people of color at the balls they have afterward? The biggest social events in town, and not a single black face except the bartenders.”

“Most whites aren’t invited to those balls either.”

“Don’t think I’m not pointing that out in the appropriate quarters.”

“Mayor Warren doesn’t pursue industry?”

“Wiley Warren thinks riverboat gambling is our salvation. The city takes in just over a million dollars from that steamboat under the hill, while the boat drains away thirty million to Las Vegas. With that kind of prosperity, this town will be dead in five years.”

I glance at my watch. “I thought you brought me here to warn me.”

“I’m trying to. For the first time in fifty years we’ve got a major corporation ready to locate a world-class factory here. And you’re trying to flush that deal right down the toilet.”

“What I said in the paper won’t stop any company serious about locating here.”

“You’re wrong. BASF is a German company. They may be racists themselves, but they’re very sensitive to racial issues in foreign countries.”

“And?”

“They have concerns about the school system here.”

“The school system?”

“The public school is eighty percent black. The population’s only fifty percent black. BASF’s management won’t put their employees into a situation where they have to send their kids to expensive and segregated private schools for a decent education. They have to be convinced that the public schools are safe and of excellent quality.”

“And is that the case?”

“They’re safe enough, but the quality’s not the best. We’ve established a fragile consensus and convinced BASF that the public school is viable. We’ve developed all sorts of pilot programs. Those Germans are damn near committed to build here. But if the Payton case explodes in the media, BASF will crawfish so fast we’ll finally hear that giant sucking sound Ross Perot always whined about.”

I hold up my hands. “I have no interest in the case. I made a couple of comments and attracted the attention of Payton’s family. End of story.”

As Johnson smiles with satisfaction, my defensive tone suddenly disgusts me. “But I’ll tell you this. The harder people try to push me away from something, the more I feel like maybe I ought to take a look at it.”

He leans back and eyes me with cold detachment. “I’d think long and hard before I did that. Your little girl has already lost one parent.”

The words hit me like a slap. “Why do I get the feeling you might be the danger you warned me about?”

He gives me a taut smile. “I’m just trying to do you a favor, brother. This town looks placid, but it’s a powder keg. Drop by McDonald’s or the Wal-Mart deli and watch the black workers serve blacks before whites who got there first. Blacks are angry here, but they don’t know how to channel their frustration. What you’ve got here are blacks descended from those who were too dumb to head north after the Civil War or the world wars. No self-awareness. They take things out on whitey however they can. A while back, some black kids started shooting at white people’s cars. Killed a father of three. There’s a white backlash coming, and when it comes, there’s enough resentment among black teenagers to start a war. That’s what you’re playing with. Not to mention whoever killed Del Payton. You know those cracker bastards are still out there somewhere.”

“Sounds to me like Del Payton died in vain.”

“Payton was a paving stone in the road to freedom. No more, no less. And right now he’s best honored by leaving him lie.”

I stand, my face hot. “I’ve got to be somewhere.”

“When you get to your party, tell Wiley Warren I’m going to whip his lily-white ass.”

I pause at the door and look back. Johnson already has the phone in his hand.

“I think you’re underestimating blacks in this town,” I tell him. “They’re smarter than you give them credit for. They see more than you think.”

“Such as?”

“They can see you’re not one of them.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Cage. I’m Moses, cast onto the waters as a child and raised by the enemy. I prospered among the mighty and now return to show my people the way!”

In an instant the candidate’s voice has taken on the Old Testament cadence and power of a young Martin Luther King.

As I gape, he adds in his mincing lawyer’s voice: “Next time come over to campaign headquarters south. It’s on Main Street. The atmosphere’s more your style. Genteel and Republican, the way the old white ladies like it. Over there I’m a house nigger made good.”

Johnson is still laughing when I leave the building.

The sky is deep purple, the warm night falling to a sound-track of kicked cans, honking horns, shouting children, and squealing tires. The smell of chicken sizzling on the open pit pulls my head in that direction. Two black teenagers on banana bikes whizz toward me as I stand beside the BMW. I’m about to wave when one spits on the hood of my car and zips past, disappearing into a cloud of dark laughter. I start to yell after them, then think better of it. I did not bring the pistol my father advised me to, and I don’t need to start the riot Shad Johnson just warned me about. I get into the BMW, start it, and head south toward the white section of town.

I’ve hardly begun to reflect on Johnson’s words when I notice the silhouette of a police car behind me. Blinding headlights obscure its driver, but the light bar on the roof leaves no doubt that it’s a cop. As he pulls within fifteen yards of my rear bumper and hangs there, it hits me. I’m driving a seventy-five-thousand-dollar car in the black section of town. Some eager white cop is probably running my father’s plate right now, checking to see whether the BMW has been reported stolen. As we pass in tandem under a street lamp, I notice that the vehicle is not a police car but a sheriff’s cruiser. A sickening wave of adrenaline pulses through me as I wait for the flare of red lights, the scream of a siren.

Somewhere along here, this road becomes Linda Lee Mead Drive, named for Natchez’s Miss America. As I top the hill leading down to the junction with Highway 61, the cruiser pulls out and roars past me. I glance to my left, hoping to get a look at the driver.

The man behind the wheel is black.

He is fifty yards past me when both front windows of the BMW explode out of their frames, shattering into a thousand pieces. I whip my head to the right, trying to shield my eyes. My eardrums throb from sudden depressurization, and I instinctively slam on the brakes. As the back end of the car skids around, something hammers my door, sending a shock wave up my left thigh. The car comes to rest facing the right shoulder, blocking both lanes of the road. In the silence of the dead engine, the reality of my situation hits me.

Someone is shooting at me.

Frantically cranking the car, I notice the brake lights of the sheriff’s cruiser glowing red at the bottom of the hill, a hundred yards away.

It’s just sitting there.

As my engine catches, two bullets smash through the rear windshield, turning it to starred chaos. I throw the BMW into gear, stomp the accelerator, whip around, and start down the hill. Before I’ve gone thirty yards, the sheriff’s cruiser pulls onto the highway and races off toward town.

“Stop!” I shout, honking my horn. “Stop, goddamn it!”

But he doesn’t stop. The rifle must have made a tremendous noise, though I don’t remember hearing it. Maybe the exploding glass distracted me. But the black deputy in the cruiser must have heard it. Unless the weapon was silenced. This thought is too chilling to dwell on for long, since silenced weapons are much rarer in life than in movies, and indicate a high level of determination on the part of the shooter. But if the deputy didn’t hear the shots, why did he stop so long? There was no traffic at the intersection. For a moment I wonder if he could have fired the shots himself, but physics rules that out. The first bullet came through the driver’s window, while the deputy was fifty yards in front of me. The last two smashed the back windshield after the skid exposed it to the same side of the road.

My heart still tripping like an air hammer, I turn onto Highway 61, grab the cell phone, and dial 911. Before the first ring fades, I click End. Anything I say on a cell phone could be all over town within hours. The odds of catching the shooter are zero by now, and my father’s blackmail situation makes me more than a little reluctant to bring the police into our lives at this point.

Shad Johnson’s words echo in my head like a prophecy: A while back, some black kids started shooting at white people’s cars. Killed a father of three. But this shooting was not random. This morning’s newspaper article upset a lot of people—white people exclusively, I would have thought, until Shad Johnson disabused me of that notion. What the hell is going on? Johnson warns me that my family is in danger but gives no specifics, and ten minutes later I’m shot at on the highway? After being followed by a black deputy who doesn’t stop to check out the shooting?

Whoever was behind that rifle meant to kill me. But I can do nothing about it now. I’m less than a mile from my parents’ house, and my priority is clear: within an hour I will be talking to the district attorney about my father’s involvement in a murder case, and deciding how best to sting Ray Presley, a known killer.

NINE

“Tom Cage, you dog! I can’t believe you came!”

In small towns the most beautiful women are married, and Lucy Perry proves the rule. Ten years younger than her husband—the surgeon hosting the party—Lucy has large brown eyes and a high-maintenance muscularity shown to perfection in a black silk dress that drapes just below her shapely knees. She also has suspiciously high cleavage for a forty-year-old mother of three, which I know she is, having been given a social update by my father on the way over to the party. Lucy uses the sorority squeal mode of greeting, which is always a danger in Mississippi. She flashes one of the brightest smiles I’ve seen off a magazine cover and throws her arm around my father.

“I’m here for the free liquor,” Dad says. “Not for Wiley Warren to pick my pocket.”

Lucy has a contagious laugh, and Dad has drawn it out. He’s one of the few people honest enough to use the mayor’s nickname within earshot of the man himself. Now Lucy looks at me as though she’s just set eyes on me.

“So this is the famous author.”

I offer my hand. “Pleased to meet you, Mrs. Perry.”

“Mrs. Perry? For God’s sake, Lucy.” She steps inside my proffered hand and draws me to her in a one-armed hug that lasts long enough for me to learn that she’s been drinking gin without much tonic and that her breasts are not original architecture. “I’ve forbidden anyone to mention that awful newspaper story. No one believes anything they read in the Examiner anyway.”

The house is full of people, and it’s some house. Though not one of Natchez’s premier mansions, it would easily fetch nine or ten million dollars in Los Angeles. A brass plaque announces that it is on the National Register of Historic Places. The interior has been meticulously restored at a cost of countless gall bladders and appendices. A wide hallway bisects the ground floor, with arched doorways leading to capacious rooms on both sides. Of the fifty or so faces in the hallway I recognize about a quarter. People I went to school with, friends of my parents, a half dozen doctors I know. I give a broad wave to cover the group. Many nod or smile in acknowledgment, but no one approaches. Caitlin Masters’s article has done its work. I stick close to Dad as we work our way toward the bar table at the end of the hall.

As Shad Johnson predicted, the only black faces in the house belong to white-jacketed bartenders and maids, who circulate with heaping platters of hors d’oeuvres.

“Bourbon and water, Roosevelt,” Dad tells the bartender. “Easy on the water. Penn?”

“Gin and tonic.”

The bartender grins. “Good to see you, Dr. Cage.”

Dad and I jump as a boom rattles the windowpanes behind the bar table. Terror grips me until a trombone, trumpet, and double bass join the thundering drum kit and reorient me to normalcy. A black Dixieland jazz band is performing on the patio. There are no dancers. It’s too damned hot to dance on a patio. It’s too damned hot to be playing music out there too, but Lucy and her hubby aren’t worried about the musicians.

Dad squeezes my arm and leans toward me. “Think they were gunning for you again?”

I try to laugh it off, but both of us are nervous as cats. He agreed with my decision not to report the shooting to the police, but he insisted on bringing a pistol to the party. He’s wearing it in an ankle holster.

I turn and pan the hall again. At the far end, beyond the talking heads, Lucy Perry opens the front door and pulls a young woman inside. I feel a little jolt when I recognize Caitlin Masters. She’s wearing a strapless jade dress with sandals, and her black hair is swept up from her neck. As she steps aside for Lucy to close the door, I spy the rebellious flash of a gold anklet above one sandal. How do I feel about her? Angry that she printed something I considered off the record. But I can’t help admiring her for shaking up our complacent town a little.

A blustering male voice pulls my attention to the staircase, where Wiley Warren stands dispensing political wisdom to seven or eight smiling listeners. Warren is a natural bullshitter, an ex-jock with enough brains to indulge his prodigious appetites within a younger group that admires his excesses and keeps his secrets like JFK’s press corps. Dad says he’s done a fairly good job as mayor, but nothing he’s accomplished thus far would compare to getting the BASF plant, a deal which would secure his political future.

“The reason Shad Johnson isn’t making race an issue,” Warren crows, “is that he’s damn near white as I am.”

This is vintage Wiley. The crowd chuckles encouragement.

“Ol’ Shadrach went off to prep school with the Yankees when he was eleven, and didn’t come back till he was forty and ready to run for mayor. He’s no more a representative of his people than Bryant Gumbel!”

“Who does he represent?” someone calls.

“Himself, of course.”

“So he’s just like you,” says a gastroenterologist whose name I can’t recall.

Warren laughs louder than anyone, tacitly admitting the self-interest that drives all politicians and which Southern voters prefer to see in the open rather than cloaked in hypo-crisy. Brutal honesty in such matters is part of the mayor’s charm.

I am about to go in search of Austin Mackey, the district attorney, when I spot him at the edge of the group listening to the mayor. He motions for me to follow him to some chairs in an empty corner. Mackey was a year ahead of me in school from kindergarten through college. A perennial middle-of-the-class kid, he managed to make most athletic teams but never the first string. His grades were unremarkable, and I’m pretty sure he chose Ole Miss Law School so he wouldn’t have to pass the bar exam in order to practice in Mississippi, a rule they changed the year after he went into practice.

“Any particular reason you came home and shat in our little sandbox?” he asks as we sit.

This is not a fortuitous beginning. “Good to see you again, Austin.”

“Skip the sentiment, Cage.” He keeps his eyes on the mayor.

Watching Austin Mackey play the tough throws me a little. But Natchez is his legal fiefdom now, and if he chooses to behave like George Raft in a bad film noir, he can.

“Look, Austin, about that article. Caitlin Masters didn’t exactly—”

“Earth to Cage, give me a fucking break. By now every jig in this town is bitching about how Austin Mackey never lifted a finger to help Mrs. Payton find out who killed her poor baby.”

I don’t know how to segue from this to warm reminiscences of our shared history. Mackey seems to have forgotten we have one. “I just mentioned the Payton case as an example of a local mystery. Because it was an unsolved murder.”

Mackey’s eyes glint with superiority. “Don’t be so sure about that.”

“What do you mean?”

“The FBI worked the Payton case. You think they tanked it? Just because no one went to jail for that particular crime doesn’t mean the perp didn’t go down for something.”

“If that’s the case, why not tell the family? Give them some peace.”

“I can’t tell them what I don’t know for sure. Listen, when I ran for D.A., I knew the blacks might ask me about past civil rights cases. So I asked the Bureau for their files on the Payton murder. I was assistant D.A. then, and I requisitioned them in the name of the office.”

“And?”

“They said that unless we’d developed a suspect and had new evidence, they wouldn’t be showing our office any files.”

“Why would they say that?”

“Can I read the mind of J. Edgar Hoover?”

“Hoover? He’s been dead twenty-five years.”

“Well, his spirit’s alive and well. Hoover made the final decisions on the disposition of those civil rights cases. And he worked them hard, especially the murders up in Neshoba County. But it’s no secret that his personal agenda had nothing to do with advancing civil rights. He hated Martin Luther King and the Kennedys. Cases like Payton’s were nothing to him but chips in a political game.”

“What about your office file?”

“There isn’t one. No one was ever charged with the crime.”

“Have you looked?”

“I don’t need to.” He finally meets my eyes. “Let’s get this straight right now. Unless you’re the attorney of record for a member of the Payton family, you’ll receive zero assistance from my office. And since you’re not licensed in this state, that pretty much settles things.”

Actually, I am licensed to practice in Mississippi, but I see no reason to point this out now. And though my combative instincts urge me to tell Mackey that a single phone call could secure my position as attorney for the Payton family, concern for my father stops me.

“You really get to me, Cage,” Mackey goes on before I can change the subject. “Mr. St. Stephens, law review at Texas, big-time author. You’ve got nothing better to do than come back here and make your old schoolmates look like assholes?”

Bitterness and envy literally crackle off the man. I am so surprised that I can do little but apologize. “That wasn’t my intention, Austin.”

“I’d hate to see what would happen if you really meant some harm.”

“What would you say if I told you I was shot at by a sniper less than an hour ago?”

His head snaps up. “Were you?”

“Yes.”

“Did you report it?”

“Not yet.”

His eyes are like signs reading, Thank God for small favors. “Where did this happen?”

“The black section, Linda Lee Drive.”

“What the hell were you doing over there?”

“Shad Johnson wanted to talk to me.”

“Jesus.” The muscles in Mackey’s jaw tighten. “What did he say?”

“He warned me off the Payton case.”

An ironic smile. “Shad’s no fool. The election’s five weeks off, and the polls have him and Warren neck and neck.”

“That’s all you have to say about an attempt on my life?”

“You’re back in Mississippi, bubba. You piss people off, they’re going to hit back. Anyway, it’s pretty obvious which side you’re on.”

I sip my drink. Melting ice has drowned the gin. “I’m not on any side.”

“Then you’ve forgotten the primary political reality of your home state.”

“Which is?”

“There’s no middle ground. Whatever’s there gets crushed to powder by the sides. I’d pick one quick if I were you.”

Mackey stands abruptly and drifts back into watchful orbit around his candidate. The conversation couldn’t have gone any worse if I’d set out to make him hate my guts. This is the man upon whose mercy I advised my father to throw himself?

I stand and walk into the hallway, half looking for Dad and half aiming for the bar. I’m almost to the alcohol when a powerful hand closes on my shoulder and a voice whispers in my ear: “Don’t move, you outside agitatin’ son of a bitch.”

I whirl, ready for anything, only to find the laughing bearded face of Sam Jacobs, whom I’ve known since we were five years old.

“A little nervous, are we?” Sam wiggles his black eyebrows up and down. “Wishing we’d been a little less candid with the fourth estate?”

I punch him in the chest, then hug him hard.

When Sam and I were tenth-graders at St. Stephens, an assistant football coach invited the varsity football team to establish a chapter of the Brotherhood of Christian Athletes at the school. While the rest of the team lined up to get the necessary applications, two boys remained in the otherwise empty bleachers: Penn Cage and Sam Jacobs. As a Jew, Sam was barred from membership. And I—ever since walking out of Episcopal communion at age thirteen—was a devout agnostic. Under the suspicious gaze of teammates and coaches, Sam and I left that meeting joined in a way that had more to do with manhood than football ever would. Now a petroleum geologist, Jacobs is one of only three non-family members who flew to Houston for Sarah’s funeral.

“It’s great to see you, Sam. What are you doing at this tight-ass function?”

He grins. “I’ve sold Don Perry enough Wilcox production to qualify him as a certified oil maggot.”

“So, that’s how he paid for this palace. You must be doing well.”

“I ain’t complaining. When the bottom dropped out of the drilling business, I slid over into production. Bought up old wells, worked them over, got them running full bore, and sold out at an obscene profit. It’s getting harder to find wells, though. Everybody’s into it now.”

“I’m sure whatever happens, you’ll be the guy sitting on top of the pile.”

“The last guy clinging to the limb, more like.” Sam sips his drink. “How does it feel?”

“What?”

“Having everybody in the place stare at you.”

“I’m pretty used to the fishbowl lifestyle now.”

“Natchez is a lot smaller bowl than Houston. Even small waves seem big here.”

“Come off it. A week from now, who’ll give a damn about that article?”

“Everybody, ace. How much do you know about the BASF deal?”

I shrug. “A little.”

“That chemical plant means salvation to a lot of people. Not just blue-collar either. These doctors need patients with private insurance to keep the gravy train running. Everybody’s on their best behaviour, trying to sell Natchez as a Southern utopia. We’re pushing our opera festival, the literary celebration, the hot-air balloon race. And this morning you tossed a toad right into the punch bowl.”

I glance around the room and instantly find what I’m looking for: Caitlin Masters, deep in conversation with two older men. “You see that girl?”

Sam cranes his neck. “Caitlin Masters?”

“You know her?”

“I know she’s fine as wine and worth a few million bucks.”

“She printed a little more than I intended her to.”

“Fess up, man. You were just being you. At your pompous best.”

“That’s what Dad said.”

“Speaking of your old man, I’m surprised he came.”

Before I can ask what Sam means, someone taps me on the shoulder. Sam hides a smile behind his drink. I turn and look into the luminous green eyes of Caitlin Masters.

“Are you going to slug me?” she asks.

“If you were male, I might consider it.”

“I know I angled that story in a way you didn’t expect.”

“Angled it? Try sensationalized it. Remember the words ‘off-the-record’?”

Her lips part slightly in surprise. “I honoured that request.”

“About the Hanratty execution. But as for Del Payton—” I force myself to shut up, not wanting to argue the point in front of a crowd.

“Why don’t we have lunch tomorrow?” she suggests. “I’d like to help you understand why I did what I did.”

I want to say no, but just as yesterday, something about Caitlin Masters makes me want to see her again. The jade dress is linen, and it lies against her skin like powder. She is a study in elegance and self-possession.

“Is that a no?” she asks.

“Once burned, twice shy,” Sam chimes in.

“I like Wilde’s quote better,” Caitlin rejoins.

“What’s that?” I ask.

“The burnt child loves the fire.”

She winks at me, then turns on her heel and walks away, ignoring the gazes of half the people in the room, who have watched our exchange with intense interest.

“You sure know how to liven up a town,” Sam says, his eyes glued to Caitlin’s retreating form. “And she knows how to fill out a dress. A shiksa from dreamland, that one.”

I step hard on his toe. “You already married one of those, remember? What were you saying about my dad?”

“I’m surprised he came, is all.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m pretty sure Judge Marston is on the guest list.”

I feel a sliding sensation in my stomach. A quick survey of the room yields no sign of either Marston or my father. Squeezing Sam’s shoulder, I push off through the crowd. Natchez is a funny town. People involved in running feuds frequently socialize together. Men who’ve gutted each other in business disputes leave their rancor at the doors of certain seasonal soirées, and it’s not unheard of to see a woman who has caught her husband in bed with someone else pouring punch for that woman—or man—at a party.

Leo Marston and Tom Cage are different. The judge once made it his mission to try to ruin my father’s medical career, and Dad hates him with a fury that will brook no false bonhomie. He behaves, in fact, as though the judge were dead. Since Dad rarely goes anywhere other than his office or the hospitals, he rarely crosses paths with Marston, making that illusion easy to maintain. But if Sam Jacobs is correct, that might change tonight. Dad has already drunk one bourbon, probably two by now. If Marston provokes him, Dad is capable of swinging on him. With that thought my blood pressure plummets, because with it comes the memory that my father is carrying a gun tonight.

Catching sight of a silver head a few inches taller than the others near the bar, I move quickly forward, take Dad’s arm, and pull him into the kitchen. It’s empty save for a black maid, who smiles and nods when she sees us.

“What’s going on?” He takes a sip of his bourbon and water sans water.

“Judge Marston’s on the guest list. He may already be here.”

Dad blinks. Then his cheeks turn red. “Where is he?”

“Dad, this isn’t the time or the place.”

“Why not? I’ve avoided that SOB too many years already.” His breathing is shallow, and his motions have a jerky quality that might be the result of anger or alcohol.

“That’s the whiskey talking. You’re a hundred percent right about Marston, but if you talk to him now, you’re going to hit him.” Or shoot him. “And I’ll have to spend all my time at home defending you on a battery charge. That’s after I bail you out.”

“What do you want me to do? Leave?”

“Considering what we have to do in the next few days, I think you should.”

That brutal reminder of the blackmail situation gets his attention.

“What about talking to Mackey?” he asks.

“I already did. And this isn’t the place to discuss it.”

His eyes flit back and forth; then he dashes his plastic cup against the stainless steel sink. “Goddamn it. Let’s go.”

“Stay close to me.”

I take his forearm, lead him into the hallway, and freeze. Twenty yards away, in the open front door, stand Judge Marston and his wife, Maude. The odds of getting through that door without anyone making a smart remark are zero. I drag Dad back toward the kitchen.

“Where the hell are we going now?”

“The back door’s closer to where I parked.”

“You saw Marston, didn’t you?”

He tries to pull free. I tighten my grip and hustle him toward the back door, knowing that if he really tries to resist me, I won’t be able to stop him.

“Goddamn it, I’m not running!”

“That’s right, you’re not. You’re taking the advice of your lawyer.”

“You’re not licensed in this state.”

“Actually, I took the Mississippi bar exam when I graduated, and I’ve paid the licensing fee every year.”

He is so distracted by this information that he allows himself to be pulled through a side garden to the street.

“Here’s the car.” I unlock my mother’s Maxima—the damaged BMW having been consigned to the garage—and practically push him into the driver’s seat.

He looks up at me, eyes anxious. “You felt Mackey out?”

“Yes. It was like feeling out a porcupine. We’re going to have to go the other way.”

“What other way?”

“We’re going to have to buy the gun.”

He blinks in disbelief. “Christ. Are you sure?”

“It’s the only way. I want you to call Ray Presley at ten in the morning. Tell him I’ll be at his place at ten-thirty. That doesn’t give him enough time to get the police involved.”

Dad looks down at the steering wheel. “Goddamn it, if anyone has to do this, it should be me.”

“You’ve been under Presley’s thumb too long. He’d never buy your bluff. Do you have a hundred thousand dollars liquid?”

He looks up, helpless with rage. “It’ll cost a fortune in penalties, but I can get it. And I won’t have a damn cent to pay the IRS in January.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll pay you back. But there’s no point in creating a paper trail to me yet. Have the money at your office as early as you can. I’ll pick it up. I may not offer Presley the whole hundred grand, but I need to be able to go up to that.”

He looks too dazed to keep track of this. “Well … get in. We’ll get it all figured out.”

“I’m not coming, Dad.”

“What?”

“I want to talk to Sam Jacobs about Presley. Sam knows everything that goes on in this town. Have you got everything straight?”

He takes a deep breath and nods slowly. “I’ll have the money waiting. Ray too.”

“Good. Now, go home and get some sleep. And don’t speed. The last thing you need tonight is a DWI.”

He gives me a somber salute, then shuts the door, starts the engine, and pulls slowly away. I stand at the curb and watch the taillights wink out as he hooks around the block to get headed home on the downtown streets, which are all one-way.

After years of putting men into prison—even into their graves—for committing crimes, I am about to cross the legal line myself. Tomorrow morning I am going to risk prison, forced separation from my child, to try to spare my father the same fate. That knowledge simmers in my stomach like a bad meal, acid and portentous. Is it the right thing to do? Is it stupid? Ultimately, it does not matter.

It’s the only thing I can do.

TEN

As I pass through the wrought-iron gate of the Perry garden, I see a figure standing at the foot of the steps leading to the side door of the mansion, and the orange eye of a cigarette burning in the dark.

The shrubs and trees in the garden are lighted with white Christmas lights, like little stars. Nearing the steps, I realize that the figure is Caitlin Masters. She’s rocking slightly to the rhythm of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore” wafting from the back of the house. I stop a few feet from her.

“I didn’t know you smoked.”

She blows a stream of smoke away from me. “I don’t. You’re hallucinating. Is your father okay?”

“He had an emergency call. So, you only smoke at parties?”

“Only when I’m bored.”

She doesn’t look bored. She looks like she’s been waiting for me. “Are there many people in town your age?”

She cuts her eyes at me. “You mean men?”

“I guess I did.”

“Nada. It’s a desert.” She stubs out the cigarette with her sandal and takes a sip of her drink. It looks like white wine, but it’s not in a wineglass, and in the dim light has a tinge of green.

“Is that Mountain Dew?”

“God, no. It’s a gimlet. Gin and Rose’s lime juice. Raymond Chandler turned me on to them.”

The Chandler reference surprises me. I’m starting to suspect that Caitlin Masters is full of surprises.

“You know the book?” she asks.

“The Long Goodbye.”

“Very good. For that, I’ll tell you a little secret I learned today. Interested?”

“Sure.”

“Remember I told you about the Sovereignty Commission files? How forty-two of them are sealed for security reasons?”

“Yes.”

“One of my reporters requested a Sovereignty Commission file today, and I was more than a little surprised to learn that it was one of the forty-two.”

I think for a minute. “Not Del Payton?”

She nods. “I thought you’d be interested.”

“Surprised, anyway.”

“I saw you talking to the D.A. inside. Anything I should know about?”

“He’s just an old school friend.”

“He didn’t look too friendly.”

Caitlin Masters doesn’t miss anything. I wonder what she would do if she knew her story had got me shot at tonight. Probably tear into the story like a bulldog.

“You’re dangerous, aren’t you?”

She laughs softly and pulls a loose thread of linen from the front of her strapless dress. Her shoulders are lean and ghostly white in the shadows, accenting the long, graceful lines of her neck.

“I try to be. You’re sure you won’t reconsider lunch tomorrow? I promise to show a little remorse about the articles.”

Her tone is casual enough, but there is more in it than hunger for a story. Her steady gaze has nothing to do with the words she spoke. Whatever I felt when we touched after the interview yesterday, she felt too. Between us floats a curious longing to feel that shock again, that aliveness. Without preamble she reaches out with her free hand and takes my right, her eyes unwavering. Her hand is cool, but a rush of warmth runs up my arm.

She smiles. “Feels good, doesn’t it?”

It’s only her hand, but the intimacy of her touch is undeniable. It’s been so long since I’ve had any physical contact with a woman that it almost paralyzes me. Sarah’s illness made it impossible at the end, and in the months since her death I’ve felt no response at all to the flirtations of the women I’ve met. It’s as though the sexual component of my personality, once dominant, has been wrapped in so many layers of guilt and grief that the prospect of having to work through them with someone new discourages me from even trying. But with one simple gesture Caitlin Masters has cut through all of that.

“I suppose I’m being forward,” she says. “By Southern standards anyway.”

The urge to kiss her is a living thing inside my chest, and with it returns the guilt I felt yesterday, magnified a hundred-fold. I close my eyes and squeeze her hand, fighting and savoring the pleasure at the same time. As though bidden by my thoughts, her lips brush mine.

When I open my eyes, hers are only inches away, green and wide, full of curiosity. She closes them, rises on tiptoe, and presses her lips to mine, sending another thrill of heat through me. From the first moment it is a knowing kiss, not the timid tasting of strangers, but the self-assured encounter of lovers who recognize each other. Her tongue is warm against mine, her lips cool. My senses read every curve and valley beneath the linen, and my arousal is immediate. Immediate and obvious. I slip my hand into the small of her back and for a moment kiss her as I truly want to, and the passion of her response explodes the boundaries I had perceived around us. As she kisses me, I feel something shift deep in my soul, a heavy door, and whatever stirs behind that door is too powerful to set free here, in this place. I break the kiss.

“Well,” she says with a laugh, “I guess that answers that question.”

“Which question?”

“Did we really feel something yesterday.”

Her cheeks are flushed, and part of her hair has fallen around her neck. She points at the edge of the flower bed beside us, where her gimlet glass lies in the monkey grass. “I dropped my drink.”

“I’m sorry, Caitlin.”

“I can get another one.”

“I mean for getting so … you know.”

She shakes her head. “I liked it. Hey, you didn’t break any laws here. You look like you saw a ghost.” Her smile vanishes. “You did see a ghost. God, I’m such an ass sometimes.”

“It’s all right.”

She takes my hand again. “This just happened, okay? Nobody’s fault. We’ll just be friends, if you want.”

“This is unfamiliar territory for me.”

“We’re the only ones out here, Penn. Everything’s fine.” She reaches behind her neck to pin her hair back up. “Do you need a ride home?”

“No. I need to talk to Sam Jacobs. He’ll give me a ride. Thanks, though.”

She releases my hand and gives me the kind of encouraging smile you give a sick friend, then walks up the steps ahead of me. As she turns the doorknob, I reach out and touch her elbow. “I do think that lunch would be nice, though.”

She turns and smiles. “Same place?”

“Works for me. Twelve?”

“I’ll meet you there.”

She opens the veneered door and goes inside, and I follow, watching her wend her way through the crowd in the hall, drawing looks from most of the women and all of the men. A woman that beautiful and perceptive hasn’t been seen in these precincts for quite some time. Not since Livy Marston came back from the University of Virginia to serve as Queen of the Confederate Pageant.

As Caitlin disappears into one of the great rooms, I detour out of the hallway to search for Sam. The first room I enter is relatively empty, but the arched proscenium leading to the next is completely blocked by a semicircle of men and women. I move closer to the line of backs, then freeze.

The focus of their attention is Judge Leo Marston.

The mere sight of him raises my temperature a couple of degrees, from anger mostly, but also—though I hate to admit it—from a residue of fear. Most of the men I knew as a boy I outgrew during high school, and they seem small to me now. Leo Marston still has three inches on me, and age has not diminished his physical presence. He must be nearly seventy by now, but he looks as though he could outfight any man here. With bulk in proportion to his height, he dwarfs the men standing in his audience. He masks his raw-boned body in bespoke suits shipped to him once a year from London, but his outsized hands betray the power beneath. Like my father, Marston has kept his hair through the years, and he wears it in a steel-gray brush cut reminiscent of the leading men of the 1950s. When I was younger, I thought of him as an oversized Lee Marvin with a patina of Southern refinement. But no amount of refinement can conceal the animal alertness of his eyes. The irises are ice blue with gray rims, giving him a wolfish aspect, and they never settle anywhere for long. In moments they will pick me from the crowd.

I step behind a tall man to my right, removing myself from Leo’s line of sight. Still, his mellifluous basso carries to me without losing any volume to distance. It’s one of his most formidable weapons as an attorney, second only to his intellect. The timbre of that voice is graven forever in the circuits of my brain. Twenty years ago I listened to it accuse my father of negligence bordering on murder, first indirectly, as Marston tried to draw out testimony from reluctant nurses and technicians, then directly, like an inquisitor, as he cross-examined Dad on the stand. I took two weeks off from college to attend the trial, and by the second Friday I was ready to confront Marston on his way home from court and put a bullet through his heart.

“My point,” Marston is saying, “is that the Germans are either at your feet or at your throat. We have to let BASF know that while we want them to locate here, we won’t grovel.”

“But we will,” someone says. “And they know it.”

Everyone laughs, then stops abruptly when they see that Marston does not share their humour.

“It all comes down to dollars,” he says in a cold voice. “That’s when you find out who needs whom. And that remains to be settled.”

He continues in this line, tantalizing the men with his inside knowledge and the women with his references to money. When people speak of “old Natchez families,” they mean the Marstons. Leo’s great-great grandfather, Albert Marston, owned a massive cotton plantation in Louisiana, which he administered from an Italianate mansion in Natchez called Tuscany. During the Civil War, Albert paid lip service to the Confederate cause while lavishly entertaining the Union officers occupying the city. He was the first Natchez planter to sign the loyalty oath to the Union, which enabled him to maintain his assets and continue to do business while prouder men lost everything. Many called Marston a traitor, but he laughed all the way to the bank.

People say Leo is the reincarnation of Albert, and they’re right. I often saw the grim ancestral portrait in the hall at Tuscany when I picked up Olivia in high school, a canvas enshrining a virtual twin of the man who warned me without subtlety to have “his angel” home by eleven “or else.” By the time Leo graduated law school nearly a century after Albert’s death, the family appetites for power and profit had expressed themselves as forcefully as the genes for those chilling blue eyes. Leo Marston knew the secret and immutable laws of Mississippi politics the way a farmer knows his fields. The state’s eighty-two counties function more or less as feudal domains, each with its closed circle of power, and Leo was born into one of the richest. Yet despite the relative wealth of Adams County, its elected officials cannot help but be swayed by admiration, envy, or outright fear of men like Leo Marston. Add to these the appointees whose hirings Marston has assured, and the result is a local political network that allows the judge to grant or quash things like building permits and zoning variances with a single phone call.

And Marston’s power is not limited to the city. During his judicial career—first as a circuit judge, then a justice of the state supreme court—he did so many favors for so many people that his capital reserves of influence are impossible to estimate. Nor did he idly spend his time as state attorney general or chairman of the agriculture board. He has like-minded friends in every corner of Mississippi, and owns financial stakes in business all over the state, including the two biggest banks. He can sway the trials of friends and enemies from Tupelo to Biloxi, and put fear into newspaper editors as far away as Memphis and New Orleans. He is a vindictive son of a bitch, and everybody knows it.

On the other hand, he is easy to like. A man doesn’t attain that kind of power without being able to play the social game with flair. Marston can discuss the finer points of obscure wines with vintners vacationing in Natchez, and an hour later put a crew of roughnecks on the floor of an oil rig with jokes that would make a sailor blush. In the company of women he becomes whatever the mood and situation require. With a priggish society wife he fancies, he tells off-color stories in a quiet, bourbon-laced voice, flustering her with the idea that a man in the judge’s exalted position could be so down-to-earth. With a buxom barmaid he plays the cultured Southern aristocrat for all he is worth. I’ve seen Leo Marston play so many roles that I’m not sure anything lies at the center of the man other than a burning compulsion to increase his dominion over people, land, and money.

As I contemplate him, his words begin to lose their rhythm, then falter altogether. He has spotted me. The blue-gray eyes hold mine, unblinking, searching, revealing nothing. A few heads in the audience turn to me, wondering who could possibly have upset the equilibrium of the judge. Noticing this, Leo resumes speaking, though without the ease he earlier displayed.

He focuses on the women in his audience, lingering upon the prettiest. That his weakness was women I discovered in high school, when his sexual escapades almost destroyed his family. Leo’s wife found a way to live with his flagrant infidelities, but his youngest daughter could not. When Olivia Marston learned at sixteen that her father had left a wake of brokenhearted and pregnant women behind him (which clarified the mystery of her mother’s chronic alcoholism), she turned the strength she’d inherited from Leo against him, shaming and threatening him into changing his ways. It worked for a while, but appetites on that scale can’t be suppressed long. What I found fascinating—and Livy disgusting—was that she was the only woman who ever challenged him. Not one of Leo’s cast-off paramours ever tried to bring him down. The single ones he paid off with abortion money and more, frequently enough to send them back to college or get them started in a new town. The married ones nursed their broken hearts in silence, or, if they confessed to their husbands, were surprised by the nonviolence of the reaction. Such male passivity was unheard of in the South, but by virtue of his power, Leo Marston enjoyed a sort of modern-day droit du seigneur, and he used it. As far as I know, he’s paid only one price for his sexual adventures. Though his name has been floated more than once as a potential candidate for governor, each time party officials quietly let the suggestion die. No one feels confident about exposing Leo Marston’s past to the scrutiny of a modern election.

“You’re not carrying a gun, are you?”

Startled from my reverie, I find Sam Jacobs standing beside me. He looks as though he’s only half joking.

“Am I that obvious?”

“You look like you’re ready to tear Leo a new one.”

“I can dream, can’t I? Look, I need to talk to you. Can you give me a ride home?”

“I’m ready now. Let’s hit the bar before we go. Don’s got a bottle of Laphroaig over there.”

Sam leads the way. I shake hands with several people as we move through the crowd, accepting compliments on my books and answering polite questions about Annie. The alcohol has loosened everybody up, though thankfully not too much. As Lucy Perry promised, no one mentions the newspaper article. When I catch up to Sam at the bar, he’s chatting with two other men waiting for drinks.

“Hell’s bells!” cries a gravelly female voice behind me. “If it ain’t the Houston representative of the N-Double-A-See-P.”

Dread fills me as I turn, certain that I’m about to endure a public dressing-down for my comments in the paper. The speaker is Maude Marston. Leo’s wife is obviously drunk, as she has been for as long as I can remember. In response to the judge’s amorous adventures, Maude developed a sort of battleship manner, charging through her daily social round with prow thrust forward and guns primed for combat. Anyone who whispers malicious comments within her hearing risks a withering broadside salvo or, worse, depth charges dropped with stealth and unerring aim, that detonate days or weeks later, leaving the offender shattered and forever outside the inner social circle. I hate to guess what she has in store for me.

“Whassa matter, hotshot?” she drawls. “Cat got your tongue?”

I force myself to smile. “Good evening, Maude. It’s nice to see you.”

She stares with blank rage, as though the synapses behind her eyes have stopped firing. Maude was once a great beauty, but her two daughters are the only remaining testament to that fact. Her hair should be gray, but it has been bleached and hennaed and sprayed so often that it has acquired a sort of lacquered-armor look. The cumulative effect of that hair, the gin-glazed eyes, combative stance, and scowling avian face stretched taut by various plastic surgeries is enough to send any but the most stalwart running for the exits.

She pokes a grossly bejeweled finger into my chest. “I’m talking to you.”

“You’re drunk,” I say quietly.

She blanches, then pokes me again, harder.

“That’s assault.”

“You gonna have me arrested, hotshot?”

Over Maude’s shoulder I see Caitlin watching from the hall, her eyes flickering with curiosity. “No. I’m going to ask your husband to take you home.”

A harsh cackle bursts from Maude’s lips, and she wobbles on her feet. “You appointed yourself special protector of the nigras in this town or what?”

Sam Jacobs reaches between us and takes hold of my forearm. “Got the drinks! Let’s roll! Great to see you, Maude!”

As Sam pulls me away, Maude speaks softly but with a venom that makes me pause. “You ruined my daughter’s life, you bastard.”

Then she throws her drink in my face.

A collective gasp goes up from the nearby guests. The drink is mostly ice. It’s Maude’s words that have stunned me. I have no idea what she’s talking about. It has to be Livy, but that makes no sense at all. Before I can gather my thoughts for a question, Lucy Perry appears and gentles Maude away from the bar the way a trainer gentles a wild mare.

“Let’s blow this joint before somebody gets killed,” Sam whispers.

As we depart, Caitlin leans toward me. “I can’t wait to hear the story behind that.”

Perfect.

ELEVEN

Sam Jacobs drives a royal blue Hummer, the civilian version of the military Humvee. He claims it’s the only way to travel in the oil fields. I cling to the window frame as the huge vehicle rumbles like a tank down State Street.

“Talk about a babe magnet!” he says, trying to hold his drink steady with his left hand. “More women come on to me in this thing than when I had my Mercedes.”

I nod absently. Maude Marston has popped the cork on a dark vintage of memory.

“Did you give Caitlin Masters a tour of the garden?” Sam asks, giving me a bemused smile. “You two had that couple look when you came in.”

“Did you hear what Maude said before she threw the drink in my face?”

“About ruining her daughter’s life?”

“Yes. She had to be talking about Olivia, right?”

“Had to be.”

“When did Livy’s life get ruined? Isn’t she still married to that sports lawyer in Atlanta?”

“Definitely fartin’ through silk, on the money side.”

I laugh, wondering whether the Jewish crowd in Manhattan would believe the Southern accent coming from Sam Jacobs’s mouth.

“However,” Sam adds, cutting his eyes at me. “My wife’s sister was in Atlanta last month for some kind of Tri-Delt alumni ball, and Livy showed up without her husband.”

“So?”

“The gossip of the party was trouble in paradise.”

“Not exactly a reliable source. Do they have any kids?”

“Don’t think so.” He glances at me again. “It would be pretty strange, the two of you being available at the same time. It’s like fate. Maybe history’s reversing itself.”

Not wanting to continue in this line, I stick my head out of the window as the Hummer roars up the bypass toward my parents’ neighborhood. The wind is warm and wet in my hair. The downtown bars and riverboat casino will still be going great guns, but this part of town looks like Mayberry, R.F.D.

“Have you seen anybody?” Sam asks. “You know … since Sarah died?”

I pull my head back inside and look him in the eye. “Lunch with Caitlin Masters tomorrow is my first date since the funeral. If you call that a date.”

“Shit. I know it’s tough, Penn. I joke about fooling around, but if I ever lost Jenny, I wouldn’t know what to do.”

I take his cup from his hand and gulp a sweat-inducing shot of Laphroaig.

“That’s the ticket,” he says, slapping me on the knee.

The Hummer jerks as Sam hits the brakes, then lets off slowly. “Would you fucking look at this?”

“What?”

“A cop. Looks like a sheriff’s deputy.”

I turn slowly. A sheriff’s department cruiser just like the one that tailed me from Shad Johnson’s headquarters has settled in twenty yards behind the Hummer. The sight throws me back to the shooting, glass exploding inches from my face.

“Sam, what do you know about Ray Presley?”

“Ray Presley? He’s sick, I heard. Bad sick.”

“What’s he been up to the last few years?”

“Same thing he was always up to. Being a sleazy coonass who’ll do anything for money.”

“Presley’s no coonass. He’s from Smith County. Who did he work for?”

“Old Natchez people, mostly.” Sam’s eyes keep flicking to the rearview mirror. “He did some things for a driller I know. Strong-arm stuff. I think Marston kept him on his payroll as a security consultant, if you believe that.” Sam accelerates, as if daring the deputy to pull him over. “You know what? I’ll bet the BASF deal is what set Maude off on you.”

“What does Maude Marston care about a chemical plant? She has more money than God.”

“But does she have enough? That chemical plant means more to the Marstons than anybody. Short term, anyway.”

“Why?”

“The industrial park isn’t big enough for the projected facility. You want to guess who owns the land contiguous to the park site?”

“Leo?”

“Yep. He’ll squeeze blood out of BASF for every square foot of land, or kill them on usage and access fees.”

“But that’s got nothing to do with Livy.”

Sam nods, then turns and looks hard at me. “Caitlin Masters’s article said Ray Presley worked the Payton murder when he was a cop. Is that what this is about?”

“It’s nothing to do with that.”

Sam slams his hand against the Hummer’s steering wheel. “Look at this asshole! I hate it when they follow you like that.” He cranes his neck around and looks through the back windscreen. “You gonna stop me or what!”

“I don’t think he is. I think it’s the same guy who followed me from Shad Johnson’s headquarters earlier tonight.”

“Shad Johnson’s headquarters?” Sam shakes his head. “I’m riding with a crazy man.”

“Ten seconds after he passed me, somebody shot up my car with a rifle.”

“What?”

“I’m just saying that if this guy passes us, watch him close.”

Sam reaches under the seat, pulls out a holstered Colt .45 and sets it in my lap. “He’s fucking with the wrong vehicle if that’s his plan. This Hummer will drive right over that Crown Vic he’s in.”

“Take it easy. He’s just tailing us.”

“Why the sudden interest in Ray Presley?”

“I’ll tell you in a couple of days. Do you think we could find anybody who could testify that Presley has committed murder for money?”

“A lot of people could. Would is another question.”

Sam turns into my parents’ neighborhood, watching his rearview mirror through the turn. “There goes our shadow. Bye, bye.”

A minute later he pulls the Hummer into our driveway and leaves it idling. “I feel bad about mentioning Sarah. I guess time is the only thing that can get you past something like that.”

I swallow the last of the Scotch. “I’ll never get past it, Sam. I’m a different person now. Part of me is lying in that grave in Houston.”

“Yeah, well. Most of you is sitting right here. And your daughter needs that part.”

“I know. I keep thinking about Del Payton’s widow. Race doesn’t even come into it for me. For thirty years part of her has been buried wherever her husband is. We’re both wounded the same way. You know?”

Sam shuts off the engine. “Listen to me, Penn. Whoever blew up Del Payton was in their twenties then, thirties max. Kluckers full of piss and vinegar. Those guys have got wives and grown kids now. And if you think they’re gonna let some hotshit, nigger-lovin’ writer take all that away, you’re nuts. That’s who shot at you tonight. And if you keep pushing, they’ll kill you.”

Sam has the Jew’s special fear of fanatics. During the civil rights era this anxiety caused many Mississippi Jews to keep as low a profile as possible. Some gave heroic support to the Movement; others, primarily in the Delta, actually joined the White Citizens’ Councils, for fear of the consequences if they didn’t. Sam’s parents chose the difficult middle ground.

“Don’t worry, Sam. Caitlin Masters has given everybody the idea I’m a crusading liberal, ready to drag the town through the mud. Nothing could be further from the truth.”

“Bullshit. I know you when you sound like this. You’ll pull down the temple to find the truth.”

“I remember you sounding like this once. That time in junior high, when your dad hired us to clean out his attic?”

Sam gives no sign that he’s heard, but I know he has.

“Going through all those boxes,” I remind him. “We found that list. Two hundred names, all handwritten.”

He reaches out and toys with the Hummer’s ignition key. The papers we found had listed most members of Natchez’s Ku Klux Klan and White Citizens’ Council. The Jewish community had maintained the list as a security measure, and more than a few names on it belonged to fathers of kids we went to school with.

“You remember how you felt when you saw those names?”

He picks up the drink cup and nervously shakes the ice. “Scared.”

“Me too. But it pissed me off more. I wanted to expose those assholes for what they were. So did you. Have you ever done business with anybody on that list?”

He looks up, his eyes hard as agates. “Not a fucking one. And I spiked them where I could.”

A side spill of headlights washes across my parents’ house.

“Would you look at this?” Sam mutters, looking over his shoulder. “It’s the same car.”

The sheriff’s cruiser sits idling in the street, fifteen yards behind us.

Bolstered by the confidence of being on my father’s property, I set the .45 in Sam’s lap, climb out of the Hummer, and walk toward the car. The passenger window whirs down into the door frame. It’s the black deputy who followed me before. I put my hands on the door and lean into the window.

“Can I help you?”

The deputy says nothing. He has a bald, bullet-shaped head dominated by black eyes set in yellow sclera shot with blood. He’s at least fifty, but he fills out his brown uniform like an NFL cornerback. Even at rest he radiates coiled energy.

“You were following me earlier tonight, right?”

The black eyes burn into mine with unsettling intensity. “Could have been,” he said in a gravelly voice.

“Ten seconds after you passed me, somebody shot up my car. You stopped. Why didn’t you help me?”

“I didn’t hear no shots. I saw you stop. I waited to make sure you started again. Why didn’t you report it if you was shot at?”

“What the hell is this about, Deputy? Why are you following me?”

He purses his lips and taps the steering wheel. “Get rid of your friend. Tell him I warned you off the Payton case, then go inside. After he leaves, meet me back out here.”

“Look, if this is about Del Payton—”

“This is about you, Penn Cage.” He spears me with a chilling stare. “And unfinished business.”

Unfinished business? A needle of fear pushes through my gut. Could he be talking about Ray Presley? Could he know something about what happened in Mobile in 1973? “Do you know a man named Ray Presley, Deputy?”

His jaw muscles flex into knots. “I know that motherfucker.”

“Does this have anything to do with him?”

“It might. You just be out here when I get back.”

He presses the accelerator, spinning me away from the car. After regaining my balance, I watch the cruiser disappear, then walk back to the driver’s window of the Hummer.

“What the hell was that about?” Sam asks.

“How many black sheriff’s deputies are there?”

“Nine or ten, I think. That was one of them?”

“Yeah. Fiftyish, but tough. Bald-headed.”

“Had to be Ike Ransom. You know him.”

“I do?”

“Ike the Spike. Remember?”

I do remember. Ike “the Spike” Ransom was a legendary football star at Thompson, the black high school, in the mid-sixties. He was so good that his exploits were trumpeted in the pages of the Examiner despite his skin color, and the records he set had held until Sam and I played ball ten years later.

“What the hell did Ike Ransom want here?” Sam asks.

“Same as everybody else. Warned me off the Payton case. I can’t believe Ike the Spike is a deputy. I figured he played pro football or something.”

Sam shrugs. “He was a cop first. After he put in his twenty there, he went to the sheriff’s department. He’s a bad son of a bitch, Penn. Even the blacks don’t like him.”

“What do you mean? He was a hero.”

“Ransom was one of the first black cops. I heard those guys had to prove they’d be tough on their own people to keep their jobs. Some people say Ransom was worse than white cops.”

“Great.”

Sam cranks the Hummer. “Forget Del Payton. Take care of your own. And if somebody fucks with you, give me a call. I can still pull your slack if you need me.”

I squeeze his shoulder. “Sounds like a plan. Thanks.”

He backs out of the driveway and roars away, the echoes reverberating off the houses on the silent street.

I walk into the garage and lean against the trunk of my mother’s Maxima. The high whistling cheeep of crickets rises to a manic drone, overpowering the buzz of the streetlight overhead and giving me a strange sense of peace. Our street looks almost exactly as it did thirty-five years ago, when we moved in. A few houses have changed color, some trees have disappeared, others have grown. But for the most part it’s the same.

In the corner of our yard stands a huge oak. When I was a boy, a wisteria vine grew around its trunk, spiraling around and around until it reached the high branches. My friends and I used to splay our bare feet on that vine, spread our arms wide around the trunk, and see how high we could work our way up and around the tree before we fell. I never won those contests; I had too much imagination to successfully block out my fear. Back then the vine was the thickness of a boy’s wrist. Now it’s thicker than my thigh and looks as though it will soon strangle the old oak like a boa constrictor.

The drone of an engine cuts through the hot night air. As promised, Ike the Spike’s cruiser turns the corner and rolls to a stop at the end of our driveway.

I push off the Maxima and walk toward the street.

TWELVE

The inside of the cruiser smells like a black man sweating. I know the odor from summer jobs digging ditches and riding in trucks with men who gave off a different scent than I did—no worse but harder somehow, distinctive enough for me to know it forever. I pull the door shut, closing myself into an oppressive square completed by the dashboard, a wire mesh screen, and Deputy Ike Ransom.

“Let’s take a ride,” he says.

“How about you tell me what I’m doing here?”

“You want the neighbors asking everybody what the sheriff’s department was doing at your folks’ house?”

I look up the street. There are still lights in a few windows. “How do I know you’re not in with whoever shot at me tonight?”

“If I wanted you dead, your mama would be at the funeral home right now.”

This is easy enough to believe. “Okay. Ride.”

Ike Ransom drives up to the bypass and heads south. Most of the traffic is eighteen-wheelers bound north for the interstate junction sixty miles away, or west for the bridge over the Mississippi.

“What’s this about, Ike?”

He glances at me. “You know me?”

“My friend did. What’s the big secret?”

“It’s about Del Payton.”

“I told you I didn’t want to hear about that.”

“It’s about you and Del both.”

“Me and Del? I was only eight years old when the guy died.”

He looks at me again, the yellow sclera of his eyes washed white by oncoming headlights. “He didn’t die, college boy. He was murdered. There’s a difference. You and him tied together, though. Ain’t no doubt about that.”

“How do you figure that?”

“First tell me why you said what you said in the paper.”

“I was talking through my hat. I wasn’t thinking.”

“That newspaper bitch didn’t pick Del’s name out of the blue.”

“I mentioned him.”

“There you go.”

I sigh in frustration. “I’m lost, Ike.”

“That’s for damn sure. Can’t you see? Del died thirty years ago and nobody paid for it. His soul ain’t never been at rest. It’s been wandering ’round here all this time, looking for peace. But it can’t get no peace. Not while his killers walk free.”

Maybe Ike the Spike is some kind of religious nut.

“Now, here you come, thirty years later, and in one day you got more people talking about Del’s killing than they was the day he died.”

“That wasn’t my intent.”

“That don’t matter. Don’t you see? What goes around comes around! You just an instrument. An instrument of a higher power.”

“I’m a guy with a big mouth. I’m not an instrument of anything.”

Ransom shakes his head and laughs with eerie certainty. “You just sit tight. You gonna understand everything in a minute. You gonna thank old Ike for this one.”

He turns right at the Ford dealership and crosses Lower Woodville Road near the paper mill, which glows fluorescent in the dark like a small city, churning white smoke into the night sky.

“Where are we going? The river?”

“Battery plant.”

“The battery plant? What for?”

“Privacy. They closed right now. Asian market’s down. They crank back up in thirty-six hours.”

There are few lights on this road. Beneath the sulfurous odor of the paper mill drifts the thick, ripe smell of kudzu, sweetened by a breath of honeysuckle. The river is only six hundred yards away, and just a few feet below our present elevation.

The dark skeleton of the Triton Battery plant materializes to our right as Ike turns onto Gate Street, then right again into a parking lot lightened by the pink glow of mercury vapor. The Triton Battery Company came to Natchez in 1936 to build batteries for Pullman rail cars. In 1940 they retooled the line to manufacture batteries for diesel submarines. After the war it was truck batteries, marine batteries, whatever fit the changing market. The last I heard, Triton was using its ancient equipment to produce motorcycle batteries for European manufacturers.

Ike stops the cruiser on the far side of the parking lot. We’re sitting on an acre of gravel packed into dirt by years of hard use, bordered on three sides by trees and unkempt grass. The west side faces the main gate of the battery plant, with Gate Street running between. I used to bring girls out here in high school.

“Is this where Del Payton died?”

“This is it,” Ransom says. “Come on.”

“Where?”

He laughs harshly. “You a nervous son of a bitch, ain’t you? Come on.”

I get out of the cruiser and follow him across the gravel. A massive old pecan tree grows out of a clump of grass at the center of the lot. The spaces in its shade are probably coveted by everyone who uses the lot.

Ransom stops ten yards short of the tree, his back to me.

“Thirty years,” he says. “Thirty years ago Del Payton parked his Fairlane right in this spot. When he came out of the plant, the bomb was in his car.” He half turns to me and spits on the gravel. “I seen car bombs go off, man. It’s a motherfucker. That fire burned forty minutes before they got it out. Del was sitting behind the wheel all that time.”

I stand silent in the buzzing of the lights, wondering where Ike Ransom has seen car bombs go off. He squats on his haunches and picks up a piece of gravel.

“A man’s soul left this earth right here.”

I walk a few steps closer. “Look, Ike … I know what happened that night. And I’m damn sorry it did. But I don’t see any connection to me.”

He stands and points at me, his black eyes smoldering. “I’m gonna say two words, college boy. After that you gonna be in this thing up to your neck.”

“Okay.”

“Leo Marston.”

He watches me as though waiting for me to guess a riddle.

“Leo Marston? I don’t get it. What—”

“Judge … Leo … Marston.”

My palms tingle. “Are you saying Marston was somehow involved in the Payton murder?”

“Involved?” Ike the Spike laughs quietly in the dark. “Oh, yeah.”

“That’s impossible. What could Leo Marston possibly have had to do with Del Payton?”

“He was D.A. back then, wasn’t he?”

My head is swimming. “Leo Marston was district attorney in 1968?”

“You didn’t know that? It was in the article this morning.”

I see my father jerking the paper from my hands and wadding it up. “I didn’t read the whole thing.”

“That wasn’t too smart, was it?”

“You’re saying Marston covered something up? Buried evidence while he was D.A.?”

Ike fires his rock across the street like a major league outfielder. It flies over the cyclone fence bordering the plant and strikes something metal, silencing the crickets for a few seconds. “I’m saying all these years that motherfucker been handing out jail time and making millions, he should have been rotting at Parchman Farm.”

A dark thrill ripples through my chest. “You’re saying Marston was involved in the actual crime?”

“I done said all I got to say.”

“You can’t drop a bomb like that and then shut up! How do you know any of this?”

“You a cop in this town for twenty years, even a black cop, you get to know some things.”

The hair on my arms is standing erect. I cannot interpret my emotions. Fear? Excitement? I walk the ten yards to the pecan tree, unzip my pants, and urinate on its trunk as I try to get my mind around what Ransom has told me.

“Shook you up, huh?” he says, laughing.

I zip up and turn back to him. “You’ve known for thirty years that Leo Marston was guilty of a felony and you’ve done nothing about it?”

“Who says I knew for thirty years? I wasn’t on the job thirty years ago. What I’m gonna do anyway, man? A nigger cop on the bottle gonna go up against the judge? That’s why you here, man. Takes somebody like you to do it.”

“Like me?”

“You’re white, famous, and you make your money someplace else. They can’t hurt you much here.”

“Who’s they?”

“That’s what you got to find out.”

“Christ. Just tell me what you know. I’ll take it and run with it.”

Ike gives me a knowing smile. “You want Marston’s ass bad, don’t you?”

“Tell me, goddamn it!”

“That don’t play, college boy. You gotta work your way to it. Then you’ll understand.”

“Why tell me this, Ike?”

“Why me, Ike?” he mocks in a woman’s voice. “Don’t play that shit with me! Everybody knows the judge went after your old man. Damn near got him too.”

This stings me to the quick. “That’s bullshit. My father was unanimously exonerated by a jury.”

“I ain’t talking ’bout that. I’m talking about damage. Doc Cage had a heart attack while he was waiting for that trial, didn’t he?”

I nod slowly.

“Hey, I love your daddy, man. He took care of me when I was a kid. Took care of my mama till she died. That’s why I’m telling you this. It’s what the hippies used to call karma. What goes around comes around. That’s what brought you back here. You the chicken coming home to roost. Right on Marston’s ass.”

“So give me what I need to nail him.”

Ike shakes his head. “Gimme, gimme, gimme. I told you, it don’t play that way. I can point you in the right direction. But that’s it.”

“I don’t like playing games.”

Ransom snickers. “That’s what they do here, college boy. You ain’t been gone so long you forgot that yet. Right now they playing their favorite game of all.”

“What’s that?”

“The quiet game.”

“The quiet game?” Memories of Sarah flood into my brain, of her trying to trick Annie into being silent long enough for us to eat dinner in peace, by seeing who could go the longest without talking. “Who’s playing the quiet game, Ike?”

“Everybody, man. White and black both. Everybody keeping quiet, making like things is sweet and easy, trying to fish that new plant in here. Nobody wants nobody digging into Del’s killing. Nobody ’cept you. You got a reason.”

“What about you? What’s your reason?”

His grin vanishes as though it never existed. Hatred comes off him like steam. He extends his forefinger and taps his powerful chest with it. “That’s between me and me. Del’s killers is playing the quiet game too. They been playing it thirty years. Not even sweatin’. You got to make people nervous to win the quiet game. And I got a feeling you pretty good at that.”

Something is coiling within my chest, something I have not felt for years. It’s the hunter’s tension, wrapped like the armature of an electric motor, tight and copper-cored, charged with current and aching for resolution, for the frantic discharge of retribution.

“A lot of people think poking into this case would be damned dangerous,” I tell him.

Ike the Spike closes the distance between us and squeezes my right shoulder, his grip like the claw of a wild animal, like he could close his hand a little tighter and snap the bone.

“That’s where I come in. Boy, you lookin’ at dangerous. Ask anybody.”

We do not speak as Ransom drives back towards my parents’ house. I watch the dark streets drift by, lost in memory. I think mostly of the malpractice trial, of Marston’s savage cross-examination of my father just five weeks after his triple coronary bypass surgery. It required a supreme concentration of will on my part not to jump up in the courtroom and attack the man. In all my years as a prosecutor, I never stooped to the tactics Marston used that day.

“You got any FBI contacts?” Ike asks.

“A few. Why?”

“You might not want to use them on this.”

“Why not?”

“Free advice. Take it or leave it.”

“You know Ray Presley worked the Payton case, don’t you?”

Ike glances away from the road long enough to give me a warning look. “Presley was dirty from the day he was born. That motherfucker crazy as a wall-eyed bull and mean as a snake. You don’t talk to him unless I’m somewhere close.”

This does not bode well for my meeting tomorrow morning.

The radio chatters over a low background of static. There’s a domestic-violence call in the southern part of the county, followed by a disturbance at the gangplank of the riverboat casino. As we roll into my parents’ neighborhood, I glance over at Ransom. The man is too old to be doing the job he has.

“Can I ask you a question, Ike?”

He takes a Kool Menthol from his shirt pocket, lights up, and blows a stream of smoke at the windshield.

“How’d you wind up a cop?”

“That’s what college boys ask whores. How’d a girl like you end up here?”

“I remember the stories about you playing ball. Ike the Spike. You were a hero around here.”

He sniffs and takes another drag. “Like the man said, that was my fifteen minutes.”

“You must have played college ball.”

“Oh, yeah, I was the BNOC.”

“What’s that?”

“The Big Nigger On Campus.” His voice is laced with bitterness. “I got a full scholarship to Ohio State, but I went to Jackson State instead. First quarter of the first game, a guy took out my shoulder. Back then doctors couldn’t do shit for that.”

“You lost your scholarship?”

“They gave me my walking papers before I even caught my breath. I was good enough for the army, though. I’d been drafted in early sixty-six, but I had a college deferment. When I lost my scholarship, I couldn’t afford to stay in school. Next thing I knew, I was landing at Tan Son Nhut air base in DaNang.”

I am starting to perceive the twisted road that led Ike Ransom to this job. “I’d like to hear about it sometime.”

Another drag on the Kool. “You one of them war junkies?”

“No.”

“You get off on other people’s pain, though. That’s what writers do, ain’t it? Sell other people’s pain?”

“Some do, I guess.”

“Well, this is your big chance. There’s a heap of fucking pain at the bottom of this story.”

I try to gauge Ransom’s temper, but it’s impossible. “Sam says you’ve got a bad rep. Even with black people.”

He stubs out his cigarette and flips it out the window. “I was the third black cop on the Natchez P.D. Back then a lot of the force was Klan. I didn’t take that job to make no civil rights statement. I’d been an M.P. in Saigon, and that was the only thing I knew how to do. The first time I got called to a black juke, I had to go alone. When I walked in the door, everybody thought it was a big joke. Patting me on the back and laughing, handing me beer. But this big field nigger named Moon had a machete in there. He’d already cut the guy who was dicking his old lady, plus the first nigger who said something about it. He was sitting by hisself at a corner table. I’d seen lots of guys lose it overseas, and this guy was like that. Gone. I told him he had to give up the blade. He wouldn’t do it. When I held out my hand, he jumped up and charged me. I shot him through the throat.”

“Jesus.”

“I didn’t want to waste that brother. But I didn’t have no backup. And that pretty much set the tone for the next twenty years. I had the white department on one side, watching me like a hawk, making sure I was tough enough, and my people on the other, always fucking up, always begging for a break. I cut slack where I could, but goddamn, it seemed like they never learned. It got where I hated to pull a nigger over, knowing he’d be drunk or high. Hated to answer a domestic call. Couple of years of that, I was an outsider. It fucked with me, man. That’s what got me on the bottle.”

“Why didn’t you resign?”

Ransom rolls down his window, hawks and spits. “I didn’t come here to give you no Jerry Springer show.” He pulls something out of his shirt and hands it to me. It’s a card. On it are printed Ransom’s name and rank, and the phone numbers of the sheriff’s department. “My cell phone’s on the back. When you call, don’t use names. I’ll know you, and I’ll pick a place for a meet.”

“You’re the only person not named Payton who seems to want the truth told.”

The radio crackles again, this time about a theft of guns from a hunting camp in Anna’s Bottom. Ike picks up the transmitter and says he’ll respond to the call.

“You gonna do this thing?” he asks, putting the transmitter back in its cradle.

I think of my father and his trouble, of Ray Presley and the gun I hope to have in my possession by tomorrow. “I don’t know yet.”

His eyes flash with dark knowledge. “You know you lying. Get out of my fucking car.”

Before I can close the door, the cruiser screeches off into the night.

My father is waiting in the kitchen with a bowl of melted ice cream in front of him, smoking the last of a cigar in his boxer shorts and a tank T-shirt. Beside the ice cream lies the pistol he wore to the party, a 9mm Beretta.

“Everything okay?” I ask.

“Are you sure you want to try to buy that gun from Ray? I’d rather throw myself on the mercy of the court than get you involved in this.”

I shake my head. “It’s the only way. You just call Presley in the morning and set up the meeting.”

“You’ll have to go to his trailer. He lives out toward Church Hill, past the Indian mound. It won’t be pretty. He’s a bitter son of a bitch.”

“You say he gets around okay?”

“Yeah. The home-health people see him a good bit. And I hear he’s got a private nurse now. I’ve made a couple of house calls to give him shots for pain. Trailer calls, I should say.”

“Fifteen-mile house calls for Ray Presley?”

“I’ve treated the man for thirty years, Penn. He doesn’t call unless he’s hurting bad. And if Ray says it’s bad, it’s bad.”

This is vintage Tom Cage, making house calls on a man who is blackmailing him, not out of fear but because he feels he should.

“Prostate cancer was about the worst thing for Ray to get,” he reflects. “He’s got the biggest dick I ever saw on a white man, and he likes to brag about it. I think the surgery probably made him impotent. He says no, but he’s twice as surly as he ever was. More dangerous, if anything.”

“Worrying won’t help. Come on. We both need some sleep.”

He stubs out his cigar, then stands looking at me, his eyes unreadable. I long to tell him what Ike Ransom said about Leo Marston, but this isn’t the time. Get the gun first. Without quite meaning to, I step forward and put my arms around him. The embrace surprises him, and he stiffens. Age has changed the shape of him, this body that once lifted me as though I weighed nothing.

“Dad, tomorrow you’re going to find out what being born again really means.”

He pulls back and looks me in the eye. “I’ll let you go see Ray. But by God, you’re going armed.” He picks up the Beretta. “And if he gets squirrelly, you shoot first and ask questions after, okay?”

“Okay.”

My mother is curled up in bed beside the smaller lump of Annie in my old room. My old baseball trophies gleam in the dark on the shelves above them, like little watchmen. I creep in and touch Mom on the shoulder, and she stirs in the shadows.

“Tom?”

“It’s Penn, Mom. Go on to bed. I’ll sleep with her.”

She rubs her eyes. “All right, honey.”

I reach out and stroke Annie’s hair. Mom is already asleep again. I gently push her leg with my knee. “Mom?”

She opens her eyes again and smiles blankly, then gets up and sleepwalks toward the hall.

I quickly brush my teeth, strip to my shorts, and climb into bed beside Annie, who is already stirring. In seconds her hand finds my shoulder, reestablishing her early-warning system.

As I lie in the dark, her shallow breathing troubles rather than soothes my heart. Sleeping with Annie always brings memories of Sarah. After the funeral I had to move Annie’s bed into my room because she couldn’t fall asleep alone, and still she wound up in my bed most nights. The pulse of her life so near always stirs my dreams. I dream of Sarah before the diagnosis, before fear entered our lives and took away the most precious gift, which is not hope but youth. Immortality. The sense of unlimited possibility. It’s an illusion, of course, the most precious illusion of life.

Sometimes my dreams are linear, like movies, other times disconnected, like fragments of film snatched at random from an editing room floor. As Annie breathes steadily beside me, fatigue deadens the signals flashing through my brain, the anxiety about meeting Presley, the delicious prospect of revenge on Leo Marston. Consciousness tries to hold me with the terrifying jerk of a perceived fall, but I catch myself. Soon the darkness above me tunnels into light, and I see the silver surface of a pool surrounded by lush ferns and massive cypress trees. The wind-rippled surface slowly stills to glass, opening the water to my gaze. There are plants below the surface, green fronds reaching up from unknown depths, gently waving in an invisible current. Among the fronds something moves, pale against the green. A person. A woman. She turns lazily, gracefully among the water plants, like a swimmer synchronized to unheard music. Her hair floats around her head in a bright corona, obscuring what must be extraordinary beauty. Ceasing her languid motion, she lifts her arms and pulls toward the surface. I recall the Lady of the Lake, who gave Excalibur to Arthur. This woman is like that. She has something to give me. But even as she fights her way to the surface, she somehow recedes, like reality rewinding. I reach down to help her, but I am far too high. Slowly the storm of hair parts and reveals her face, and she opens her mouth to speak. I cannot hear her words, but her face nearly stops my heart. Something pure and cold courses through me as the translucent eyes seek mine in mute desperation. That face once haunted me like an inner shadow, a secret sharer watching, judging, holding me in thrall until at last the light of Sarah and Annie shone into the hidden chambers of my heart, and it receded into memory. Receded but did not die. Once, long ago, that face taught me what it was to be alive.

That face …

Olivia Marston.

THIRTEEN

Driving through rural Mississippi with a hundred thousand dollars cash in your trunk can make you nervous. Ray Presley’s trailer is fourteen miles north of town, situated between Emerald Mound and the tiny rural community of Church Hill. The second-highest ceremonial mound in North America, Emerald Mound rises from the forest like a Maya temple of earth. When I was a boy, we sledded down its great slope on pizza pans, on those biannual occasions when Natchez got its inch of snow. As teenagers we gathered there to watch the sun rise while we drank beer and cheap wine and howled over the treetops in the ecstatic tongues of adolescence.

The wooded road between Emerald Mound and Church Hill is dotted with trailers and small houses, but as I near the two-hundred-year-old Episcopal church that marks the settlement, the woods recede, and the landscaped grounds of splendid plantations stretch away from both sides of the road. Beyond moss-hung cedar trees and white fences, swans glide majestically across ponds that might be in England. But the only cathedrals near these estates are cathedrals of kudzu, arsenical green spires and buttresses which construct themselves at a terrifying rate, using oaks and pecans and elms as scaffolding, encroaching upon the old cotton fields with the stealth of new jungle.

The history here is not all antebellum. Andrew Jackson married Rachel Robards at the end of this road in 1791, but of late the neighborhood has entertained more eccentric visitors. When I was in high school, the actor George Hamilton purchased one of these homes and lived there for a while in opulent planter style. The fall of the Marcos regime in the Philippines brought to light the strange revelation that the “Hamilton” house was actually owned by Imelda Marcos. It then passed for a time into the hands of Hare Krishnas, a separatist faction which morphed into the Southern Vedic Life Association, stirring up the county with fears of brainwashing. Even in rural Mississippi nothing is what it seems.

Ray Presley’s trailer is set a little way back from the highway, beneath a stand of pine trees, and beside an algae-covered pond that might be an oil sump. The trailer has seen better years, but there’s a gleaming new satellite dish hammered onto the southwest eave, like a ribbon on a pig’s ear. A shining Ford pickup and a rusted Chevy Vega sit out front.

I pull my mother’s Maxima beside the Vega, set the burglar alarm, and walk up to the door, leaving the Wal-Mart briefcase holding the extortion money in the trunk. Before I can press the bell, the door is opened by a thin young woman I assume is Presley’s nurse, though she is wearing a denim work shirt, not a uniform. Blonde and lank-haired, she could be twenty-five or thirty-five. She has the indeterminate look of hill people everywhere: sallow skin and hard angles, though she is pretty in the way waitresses at the Waffle House can be pretty at four a.m. She doesn’t speak but leads me into the den of the trailer, which is a time capsule of blue shag carpet and dark, seventies-era paneling.

Presley himself sits on a sofa opposite a large color television tuned to a soap opera, a TV tray before him and a stainless steel intravenous drug caddy standing beside. He looks surprisingly fit for a fifty-six-year-old man with metastatic carcinoma. He has the stringy toughness of a laborer, the long, ropy muscles you see on men working shirtless on highways, shrimp boats, and oil rigs. He wears blue cotton pajama pants and a white tank T-shirt. A grease-stained John Deere cap covers his head, which has been burned bald by chemotherapy, the green bill shading browless eyes that smolder in their sockets.

I glance around the room so that he won’t feel I’m staring. The walls are decorated with plaques and photos commemorating a career in law enforcement: certificates from various police societies, a couple of trophies sporting a man aiming a pistol. There’s also the usual complement of stuffed deer heads and mounted largemouth bass, along with a fearsome compound bow hanging from a hook. Sliding glass doors open onto a small deck behind the sofa, where a gas grill and a smoker sit rusting in the sun.

“So you’re Doc Cage’s boy,” Presley says. His voice is deep and rough as a wood rasp. “I recognize you from the paper. Excuse me if I don’t get up.”

“Please don’t.” It’s odd how we revert to the basic courtesies, even when talking to killers, especially if they are ill. My seating choices are a cracked Naugahyde recliner and a pillowy velour monstrosity that looks like a Kmart special.

“Take the La-Z-boy,” Presley advises.

I sit on the edge of the chair so that I can keep my forward attitude. With men like Ray Presley, the critical subtext of any conversation is animal. Even in the silences, everything is territory and dominance, a battle for advantage.

“So you’re the one shot his mouth off about Del Payton in the paper,” he says, a half-humorous light in his eyes.

“That’s right.”

“You looking to make a name for yourself?”

“I already have that.”

He leans back and regards me with disdain. “I guess you do. But you’d have to go a long way to outdo your daddy.” He reaches down and eats a crust of toast from the egg-stained plate on the TV tray. “How come you didn’t go to medical school? Grades not good enough?”

This is the ultimate baiting question for any doctor’s son who didn’t follow his father into the profession. “They were too good. The medical school thought I’d be bored there.”

I let Presley chew on this a minute, and it takes him about that to finally decide I am joking. His primitive instincts are finely honed, but his grasp of the larger world is limited.

“I remember you in high school,” he says. “You was porking Livy Marston.”

I keep my face impassive.

“That was one fine bitch,” he goes on, watching my reaction. “Had too much of everything, that was her trouble.”

The skin of my face seems to stretch and burn, but I say nothing, unwilling to be drawn into this game. After an interminable wait, he ways, “You here to ask me about Del Payton?”

“I’m here because I heard you had a gun for sale.”

He picks up a remote control and flips through several channels, finally settling on a fishing program. “You heard wrong.”

“I don’t think so.”

“What kind of gun did you hear it was?” His eyes remain on the screen. “This gun you’re talking about, I mean.”

“A featherweight thirty-eight. Smith and Wesson.”

“That’s a damn good piece. Good for close work. How much would you be looking to spend on a gun like that?”

I take a piece of paper from my wallet, write 50,000 on it, then lean forward and pass it to him.

He studies it for a few seconds. “That’s a piece of money.”

“Cash.”

He hands the paper back to me. “Too bad I don’t have what you’re looking for. I could use a piece of money like that.”

“I think you need some air. Why don’t we step outside?”

“I don’t get around so good anymore.”

“I didn’t realize you’d lost so much strength.”

His pride thus goaded, Presley puts down the remote and stands almost as easily as he must have at age twenty. He walks to the double glass doors, slides one open, and steps onto the little square redwood deck.

I follow.

Presley stops at the rail, surveying the modest lot left him in life: a few weed-choked rows of exposed earth where a garden once grew; a small barn stripped of its walls, rotted, and collapsed inward, leaving a modernist sculpture of rafters and tin. The wall boards were probably bought by some itinerant New England artist. Beyond the barn the land falls abruptly into the woods.

“Take your shirt off,” Presley says in a peremptory tone he probably used with prisoners in the days before he was one himself.

Had he not demanded this ritual, I would have, but it irks me that he beat me to it. “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.”

He actually grins at this. We pull off our shirts and turn in a circle. My body is lean but smooth as a lamb’s, the legacy of my generation, which was never shipped overseas to do battle and has done less manual labor than any generation before it. Presley’s torso is marked by multiple knife scars, at least two bullet wounds, and what might be the scar of a central veinous line for chemotherapy.

“Pants too,” I tell him.

We both strip our pants halfway down our thighs. Like me Presley still wears jockey briefs, and my father’s comment about his anatomy is readily borne out. Satisfied that neither of us is wired, we button and zip back up.

“I don’t like bullshit,” I tell him. “So I’ll get right to it. You killed a man named Don Hillman in 1973 in Mobile, Alabama. You did that on your own hook, no matter what you thought. I’m prepared to offer you a substantial price for the pistol used in that crime, but it’s a one-time offer. An outright purchase. You can take what I’m offering, or we can go to Plan B.”

“You fixing to threaten me, sonny?” Presley sounds more amused than angry.

“If we don’t come to terms over this, I’m going to go straight to the district attorney—whom I went to school with—and use every bit of influence at my disposal to have you indicted for capital murder and extortion. That’s a risk for my father, but it’s one he’s prepared to take. He’s been more than generous with you, and he’s tired of living in fear.”

Presley looks off into the trees.

“He deserves better. And you know it.”

“I can’t help the way things turned out,” Presley says bitterly. “Fact is, Doc has money and I don’t. And I need some.”

“My father treated your family free for years, just like he did a lot of others. What he’s got now is patients who think he’s a saint and not much else. He’s in bad health himself. He deserves to retire in peace.”

Presley scratches his ratty pajamas. “The way I figure, that gun’s worth a lot more than fifty thousand.”

“Or nothing. It could simply be evidence sitting in the D.A.’s office.”

“A hundred grand. Cash money.”

Relief trickles through my veins like cool water. “You’ve committed other murders in the past. I suspect you’re blackmailing other people as we speak. Right now I haven’t the slightest bit of interest in those crimes. But that could change. You could spend what little time you have left in jail. And you know what that’s like, Ray.” I spit off the deck. “Sixty-five thousand.”

He doesn’t like me using his first name. And though he hasn’t moved, something changed in him at the mention of prison. “Eighty,” he says in a taut voice.

“Is the gun here?”

“Could be.”

“If you get it now, I’ll go seventy-five. That’s all I brought with me.”

Presley’s facial muscles flex. He’s grinding his teeth. He wants that money. But as badly as he does, he hates to give up the gun. He’s like a miser sitting on his last nickel. His eyes burn beneath the bill of the cap, hating me for who I am, for the life I’ve had. He rolls his tongue around his inner cheek, wanting to tell me to fuck myself. But at last he breaks eye contact and walks toward the glass doors of the trailer. His growl floats back to me on the humid air.

“Get your money, boy.”

I hurry down the dry-rotted stairs of the deck and around the trailer to the Maxima. I parked so that I could open the briefcase in the trunk without being seen from the trailer. Popping the trunk, I move the sack of quick-setting cement behind which I concealed the case and count out twenty-five thousand dollars, which I stuff into the spare tire well. Then I snap the case and shut the trunk.

Before going back to the trailer, I get in the car. Inside the glove box is Dad’s 9mm Beretta. I slip the automatic into my waistband at the small of my back, tuck my shirt over it, and head up the front steps.

Presley is waiting for me on the sofa. The sallow blonde is attaching a plastic saline bag to the IV stand, and her back is to me. Her motions are quick and efficient. Presley points at the TV set. Lying atop it in a Ziploc bag is a small .38-caliber revolver, Smith & Wesson. I take a card from my wallet. On it is written the serial number of the pistol my father has not seen for twenty-five years. I remove the .38 from the Ziploc and compare its serial number to the one on the card.

They match.

Resealing the pistol in the bag, I slide it into my trouser pocket and toss the case containing the money onto the sofa. Presley tugs it onto his lap, unsnaps it, and counts the packets with methodical care. As the blonde waits, she glances over her shoulder at me, her eyes vaguely accusatory. Presley finally snaps the case shut, drops it on the floor, leans back on the sofa, and extends his right wrist toward the blonde woman, dorsal side up.

“Time for my poison,” he says, the corners of his mouth turned up with black humor.

The girl removes a heparin-lock catheter from its packaging, swabs Presley’s wrist with Betadine, and pops it through the skin in the time it would take most lab techs to locate a vein. As she tears off some white tape and fixes the catheter in place, Presley leans up and slaps her on the rump with the familiarity of a lover. The blonde does not complain or make any move to stop him. She doesn’t even look embarrassed.

“You’d best get going, sonny,” he says. “Crystal’s gonna take the edge off the nausea for me.”

The girl half turns to me, a resentful gleam in her eye. The top three buttons of her work shirt are unbuttoned, revealing the clasp of a black bra beneath. She’s at least twenty years Presley’s junior—probably thirty—and for some reason this offends me. My Puritan morals, I suppose, I’m not one to deny a dying man what pleasure he can get, but something about this arrangement seems wrong. The woman doesn’t strike me as a hooker, but Presley is paying her in some way. Probably not much, either. When you’re poor, a little money looks like a lot. Or maybe he’s not paying her. Maybe she’s here because she wants to be here—or needs to be. That bothers me even more.

“I didn’t know nurses could administer chemotherapy at home.”

Presley laughs darkly. “This is my Mexican cocktail. They UPS it up here from Tijuana. My New Orleans cancer doc says it’ll kill me, but I’ve outlived that bastard’s prediction by a year already.”

Bootleg chemotherapy. Is that what’s keeping him alive? Or is it just brute redneck stubbornness?

“They cut out my damn prostate,” he mutters, “but I made ’em leave the nerves in. I can still go like a Brahma bull.”

The blonde sits on the floor at his feet, waiting for me to leave.

“Just remember something, Ray. You’ve got all you’re going to get from this particular well.”

“Nice doing business with you, son. Let me give you a piece of advice before you go.”

“What’s that?”

“Leave Del Payton in the ground. You start messing with business that old—especially nigger-business—it makes a lot of people nervous.”

“I figured that out already.”

“You’re a smart boy, ain’t you?”

The blonde checks Presley’s IV line for bubbles, then leans back against his legs.

I walk to the door, but something makes me turn. “Let me ask you something, Ray. How did Judge Marston get involved in Payton’s murder?”

Presley goes as still as a snake poised to strike, his eyes locked on mine. “Maybe you ain’t so smart after all.”

“There’s a lot of guys on death row who think different.”

I shut the door, leaving him to his bootleg chemo and his blonde. My stomach is fluttering like the wings of a hummingbird, but the Smith & Wesson is a hard bulge in my left front pocket. I have the gun. I have the gun. Seventy-five thousand dollars is a small price to pay to have a spike removed from your heart.

FOURTEEN

As soon as I hit the highway, I dial my father’s office and wait for him to come to the phone.

“Dr. Cage,” he says finally.

“It’s me.”

“What happened?”

“I have the package.”

A long exhalation. An expression of relief I can only guess at. He’s been waiting with the same anxiety his patients suffer through when awaiting a call from him about test results. “Jesus,” he breathes. “Son, you don’t know—”

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