“I’ve been thinking back to the day of your last heart attack. I was on the river with Caitlin, spreading that waitress’s ashes. When Mom called me, she said you were in terrible pain, but you were asking to see me, that you were desperate to tell me something very important.”
He stares at his cigar like a primitive tribesman entranced by fire.
“Mom said you were afraid you would die before you could tell me whatever it was. Then, when I got to the hospital, you acted like you had no memory of that.”
“Wasn’t I unconscious when you got to the hospital?”
“Pretty much.”
“You asked me about this last month. My answer is the same. When I woke up, I had no memory of what you’re talking about.”
“But Mom confirmed that you said those things.”
He shrugs. “I was out of my head. Obtunded, we say in medicine.”
“Uh-huh. Or maybe once you woke up, you realized you were going to survive, so you didn’t feel compelled to confess whatever it was.”
He suddenly looks too exhausted to argue further. If Mom were here, she would tell me to stop warting him. But I can’t. He’s risking his life by forcing Shad to proceed with an arrest. The last time Dad was involved in a trial was during my senior year in high school—a malpractice case. That stress caused his first heart attack, and he was only forty-six. Tonight he’s thirty years and several surgeries down the road.
“Let’s back up a second,” I say. “When you were telling me about Viola, you skimmed over why she left town.”
He shrugs. “That’s no mystery. The KKK had kidnapped and murdered her brother. Also a friend of his. The bodies were never found, but I never had any doubt that the Klan killed those boys. How could Viola stay here after that?”
“Which Klan guys? Do you have any idea?”
“Probably the same bastards behind the rest of the killings around here. The rednecks who worked out at Triton and Armstrong and IP. Or those Double Eagles that Henry Sexton writes about.”
I don’t want to reveal my contact with Henry yet. “Do you know that for sure?”
“Who else could it have been? Everybody knew who’d done it, in a general way. But nobody knew exactly. That’s how it was all over the South. That’s why the violence continued. Nobody was willing to look too deeply into it, for fear of being targeted themselves.”
Dad takes another pull on his cigar, then sets it in the ashtray. “Did you ever hear about the Heffner family in McComb?”
“No.” McComb, Mississippi, is only sixty miles east of Natchez.
“Red Heffner was an insurance man. Ex–air force. He invited a northern civil rights worker and a liberal preacher to his house for dinner. Next thing you know, the men in his neighborhood formed a vigilante association and started terrorizing his family. Red had to move them out of town. And his wife’s daughter by her first husband—who’d been killed in the Battle of the Bulge—had been elected Miss Mississippi that year. Can you imagine? Miss Mississippi was like royalty back then. Compared to the Heffners, we were nobody, in the social scheme of things. I wish I’d had his moral courage, the courage to get involved, but I was fresh out the army, and you were only four years old.”
I sense that Dad is leading me away from the central subject—cleverly, but doing it all the same. My patience has almost evaporated when my cell phone rings in my pocket. The screen reads HENRY SEXTON.
“I need to take this, Dad. Hello?”
“Penn, it’s Henry. We need to talk.” The reporter’s voice quavers with fear. “I’ve learned a lot since this morning. You need to know about it, and the sooner the better.”
My pulse picks up. “What is it?”
“Not on a cell phone. It’s too easy to eavesdrop on these things, or so my FBI friends tell me.”
“Where are you?”
“At the Beacon office. Is there any way you can drive over here? I wouldn’t ask if I didn’t think it could help your father.”
My heart thuds in my chest. “My father?”
Dad looks up with interest.
“That’s all I can say on the phone. I know Dr. Cage is in trouble, and this can help him. But you’ve got to come here to hear it.”
I look at my watch. Annie has a basketball game in half an hour. If I drive to Ferriday, I’ll miss it. But what choice do I have? At least her grandmother will make the game. “I’m on my way, Henry. Give me twenty minutes.”
“Call my cell when you get here. The door’s locked.”
“Was that Henry Sexton?” Dad asks as I pocket my phone.