As he quotes the Bible, I sense a malevolent urge within him, something darker and more primitive than anything he’s voiced today.
“Lincoln … you wish history was something less terrible than it was for your mother. I wish the same thing. But you shouldn’t try to punish my father for pain inflicted by someone else. My father loved your mother. He proved that in the last month of her life. Why can’t you leave it at that?”
Lincoln lays a twenty-dollar bill on the table and prepares to go.
“You talk about sin like you’ve never committed any yourself,” I observe.
His eyes blaze with sudden passion. “Whatever evil I’ve done goes on Tom Cage’s account. You hear me? I am his sin, alive in the world.”
Lincoln’s ominously resonant voice makes my skin prickle. “If that’s true, then what am I?”
He looks back at me for several silent seconds. “You’re what he could have been.”
Lincoln turns toward the door and walks out without looking back.
Before I follow, the bartender calls: “Don’t come back here no more, Mayor. I don’t want that sheriff up in here again.”
I acknowledge his order with a wave, then walk out of the juke in the footsteps of a man who just might be my brother.
CHAPTER 73
A MILE DOWN the road from CC’s Rhythm Club, something breaks in my mind, like a steel restraining pin giving way inside some complex machine. For the past two and a half days, my father’s behavior has stumped me. Nothing about it has made sense from the moment Shad Johnson called to tell me that Viola was dead and Lincoln wanted my father charged with murder.
But if I simply accept Lincoln Turner’s assertion to be true—that my father is also his father—then logic leads me to a sequence of deductions that can’t be refuted. One: If Lincoln is my father’s son, then he’s family in my father’s eyes. Two: If Lincoln is family, then he deserves my father’s protection as much as I or my sister would. My heart clenches as the next question forms in my mind: In what circumstance would my father risk his life to protect Lincoln Turner?
Lincoln’s life must be at risk.
How could Lincoln’s life be at risk?
He’s either been threatened, or he’s guilty of a serious crime.
Who might have threatened him?
No way to know.
Of what crime could Lincoln be guilty?
“Killing his mother,” I say aloud. Killing his mother …
My heart flexes like a straining biceps, but still my mind races down the interrogatory chain. “How could Lincoln kill his mother if he was thirty miles outside Natchez?”
He couldn’t.
The next question flares in my mind like a bottle rocket in a black sky: What if Lincoln was in Natchez when Viola died?
In some process infinitely faster than conscious thought, a new relationship between the principals in this deadly drama forms in my mind. If Lincoln was in Natchez when Viola died, then he would surely have agreed to help her end her life—especially if my father had already refused. If my mother were dying of a terminal illness, wracked with pain and with no hope of recovery, I’d do whatever she asked without question. Would the man I just spoke to in CC’s Rhythm Club do less? No. But if Lincoln euthanized his mother in the wee hours of Monday morning … then my father did not.
Unless they did it together, whispers a voice in my head.
“No,” I say softly, my mind racing. “No way.”
Yet once I accept the possibility that both Lincoln and Dad could have been in that house at the same time—or even within minutes of each other—a dozen new scenarios become possible.
Lincoln could have botched the morphine injection, causing Dad to try desperately to revive Viola. (Only Dad wouldn’t have given an adrenaline overdose under those circumstances.) Lincoln could have botched the morphine injection, panicked, then tried to revive Viola himself. A son overcome by guilt might easily do that. If something like that did happen—after Dad had left the house with Viola alive—then Dad may have deduced that Lincoln probably killed his mother. He might even know that for a fact. Cora Revels might have told him. Or he might have returned to the scene and found Lincoln grieving over Viola’s body. I saw dozens of crazier death scenes as a prosecutor.
If any of these scenarios occurred, then Dad knows he’s innocent of Viola’s murder. But knowing him as I do, that awareness—in those circumstances—would probably cause him to behave just as he has since he learned of his potential prosecution for murder. For if Dad really believes that Lincoln is his son, then his guilt over failing that son for four decades would make him all too willing to take the fall for Lincoln, regardless of the cost to himself.