Mississippi Blood (Penn Cage #6)
Greg Iles
Dedication
For Betty and Jerry Iles,
who came out of tiny southern towns and climbed books like stairs to rise.
Thank you for everything.
Epigraph
For the truth is a terrible thing. You dabble your foot in it and it is nothing. But you walk a little farther and you feel it pull you like an undertow or a whirlpool. First there is the slow pull so steady and gradual you scarcely notice it, then the acceleration, then the dizzy whirl and plunge into darkness. For there is a blackness of truth, too. They say it is a terrible thing to fall into the Grace of God. I am prepared to believe that.
—Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men
Prologue
Grief is the most solitary emotion; it makes islands of us all.
I’ve spent a lot of time visiting graves over the past few weeks. Sometimes with Annie, but mostly alone. The people who see me there give me a wide berth. I’m not sure why. For thirty miles around, almost everyone knows me. Penn Cage, the mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. When they avoid me—waving from a distance, if at all, then hurrying on their way—I sometimes wonder if I have taken on the mantle of death. Jewel Washington, the county coroner and a true friend, pulled me aside in City Hall last week and told me I look like living proof that ghosts exist. Maybe they do. Since Caitlin died, I have felt like nothing more than the ghost of myself.
Perhaps that’s why I spend so much time visiting graves.
Henry Sexton is buried in a small churchyard in Ferriday, his tilted stone exposed to the cold wind that blasts over the Louisiana Delta fields. The simple marker displays the usual census information. Below this is his chosen epitaph, discovered in one of his journals:
Wish I didn’t know now what I didn’t know then.
Typical of Henry to choose a line from a Bob Seger song.
Underneath this lament for lost innocence are six words chiseled by the black folks who attend this saltbox church, and who keep the grave of this white journalist trimmed to perfection.
Wasn’t that a man?
—Muddy Waters
Enough said.
Caitlin’s grave stands in the Natchez City Cemetery, in the flat square below Jewish Hill, not far from the Turning Angel. Her stone is white Alabama marble, tall and thin and strong, just as she was. Her mother wanted her buried up north, but her father persuaded the family that since Caitlin had intended to marry and raise her family in Mississippi, then here she should remain.
I chose her epitaph, a line she often quoted and attributed to Ayn Rand.
The question isn’t who’s going to let me; it’s who’s going to stop me.
Rand never actually said that; the line seems to be a paraphrase from a conversation Howard Roark had in The Fountainhead. Nevertheless, it sums up Caitlin’s approach to life and work about as well as anything could. A few people have asked me if that epitaph is appropriate, given that Caitlin was murdered as a consequence of her reckless pursuit of a gang of killers. I tell them I was never a fan of Ayn Rand, but the old hypocrite got that one right. And if there was a moral or lesson in Caitlin’s death, I’m too thick to see it. If you want to make sense of this world, don’t come to me for answers.
I’m fresh out.
I stand on the high bluff over the river most every day, trying and failing to piece my life back together as winter changes to spring and my father’s murder trial approaches. Dad’s being held in protective custody in Louisiana by the FBI. He wasn’t allowed to cross into Mississippi to attend Caitlin’s funeral. I’m told he beat his arthritic hands against the bars of his cell when he got word that Sheriff Billy Byrd would jail him in Natchez if he crossed the river—beat them until he broke some bones in his right wrist. I don’t know for sure.
I haven’t spoken to him since Caitlin died.
Forrest Knox is buried on family land, the former Valhalla hunting camp. Last week I parked my car on the shoulder of Highway 61 and hiked in alone, my pistol in my right hand, and searched among deep tire ruts and FBI evidence markers until I found the gravestone. Forrest’s marker bore a chiseled Confederate battle flag, which was a desecration of that banner, and also the words Unflagging devotion. I stood there a while, sick deep in my guts, only then realizing that I’d been hoping to cross paths with Forrest’s uncle—Snake.
After a while I kicked over the stone, dropped to my knees, and used the butt of my gun to smash the chiseled flag as best I could. All I managed to do was chip a few stars off it. Heaving for breath, I got to my feet and fired five bullets against the granite slab, which did the job. Then I pissed on the grave—a good long piss that steamed in the cold and muddied the earth—and walked back out to the highway.
Yeah, well. If you don’t want the whole truth, stop reading now.
If you go on, don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Chapter 1
For the past few weeks I’ve been writing as a strategy for staying sane. Strange to admit, but there it is. Since Caitlin’s death, I’ve been having trouble with some of the basic principles of existence, like time. Chronology. To be frank, I don’t have it in me to describe the events that constitute the immediate fallout of her death, or of my father’s arrest for murder. You should probably read a couple of articles from the Natchez Examiner, Caitlin’s old newspaper. Caitlin’s older sister, Miriam—a corporate financial officer from New York—has been running the paper since Caitlin died, and she has vowed to stay on until the last of the Knoxes has been jailed and the Double Eagles smashed for all time. I’m not sure Miriam Masters realizes how long that could be.
The two articles below were written by Keisha Harvin, a twenty-five-year-old black reporter from Alabama who’s been hounding the Double Eagles like a Fury incarnate. Caitlin hired Keisha from another Masters paper only two days before she was killed. Fittingly, for the past eight weeks, Keisha has been living across the street from Annie and me, in Caitlin’s old house. I don’t think she sleeps much, nor does she pull any punches, no matter who she’s writing about. My father has suffered in her stories—as he should—and through Keisha’s writing the Knox family has become a national symbol of the most atavistic and depraved instincts in the American character.
More than once I’ve tried to persuade Keisha to pull back a little and think about her safety, but like Caitlin she believes that her work means more than her life. I’m not sure a twenty-five-year-old is qualified to make that decision, but I do know this: where good people stand against evil, sooner or later fate demands a reckoning. When that day comes, I hope I’m close enough to Keisha Harvin to do some good.
NATCHEZ EXAMINER
December 30, 2005
Trial Date Set for Dr. Tom Cage
by Keisha Harvin