“Why?” she asks, but before I can answer, her eyes widen with prescient knowledge. “Mr. Rusty’s calling from court!”
I nod, and she clicks off the TV with the remote.
“Can I listen?” she asks. “I won’t make a sound, I promise.”
“You can’t, baby. This is grown-up stuff, as grown-up as it gets. I need my earpiece from my desk in the basement. It might be in—”
“I know where it is!”
Annie races into the hall, and I hear her feet banging down the narrow steps to my office. In less than a minute she’s back carrying my wired earpiece.
“All right,” I concede, thankfully plugging in the jack. “You can stay in here with me, but don’t even breathe loud, okay?”
She grins. “Okay.”
Chapter 28
When the cell phone rings in my hand, I press the button to answer, then press mute on the microphone on my earpiece cord so that nothing can be transmitted from our end. Then I lie back on the sofa and close my eyes, my ear tuned to the distant human voices reverberating through a thick mist of low frequency.
“When Lincoln was born,” says an elderly female voice I’ve never heard before, “Vee told me that his father was a black man she’d met when she first got to Chicago, when she was homesick something terrible. She said she’d gone with him just once, and got pregnant. I didn’t really believe her. Viola had never been easy like that, and Lincoln was born only eight and a half months after she got to Chicago. He was a big baby, too. Wasn’t no preemie.”
Shad Johnson’s more educated voice cuts through the hiss of the phone. “Who did you think the father was?”
“Somebody from Natchez. Had to be.”
“Did you have someone in mind?”
“I had several,” Cora says in a snippy voice.
“More than one?” Shad asks with feigned amazement, and I know then that Cora Revels has been coached, and closely. “I thought you said your sister was not a woman of easy morals.”
“She weren’t.”
“I don’t understand, Miss Cora.”
“You will. About two weeks before Viola left for Chicago, she was raped by some Ku Klux Klansmen. Several at one time.”
A sudden roar comes through the phone.
“Did you witness that attack?”
“No, sir. Nobody did but them dirty men.”
Objection! shouts a voice in my head. Hearsay! My heart is pounding so hard I feel loopy, but Quentin’s voice is not to be heard.
“Did Viola tell you what happened to her?” Shad presses.
This time when Quentin fails to object, I know Rusty is right: Quentin Avery, the legal legend, has lost it. He’s got to go. I only hope that Dad’s fate isn’t sealed before the end of Cora’s testimony.
“Not at first,” says Cora. “First a rumor went around town. I think them men was bragging about what they done. Anyway, I asked Vee about it, and she finally broke down and told me it was true. I know now they done it to her to get our brother, Jimmy, to come out of hiding, where they could take him and kill him. Jimmy was hiding down in Freewoods, but when he heard what happened to Viola, he come looking for them that done it.”
As Cora Revels’s voice breaks, I wonder why Shad has led her to reveal this long-buried event. Surely by doing so he risks the jury realizing how deep the hatred must have been between Viola and the Double Eagles, even to the day she died.
“So you believed Viola’s child was a result of this rape?” Shad continues.
Leading the witness! I want to scream, but Quentin says nothing.
“Yes, sir.”
“How long did you believe that?”
“Twenty-eight years.”
There’s a pause during which I suspect Shad is making a show of calculating Lincoln’s age by the elapsed time. “So, from 1968 until 1996 you believed that Lincoln had been fathered by Klan rapists?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did you tell anyone else about your suspicion?”
“No.”
“Did you ever tell Viola’s second husband, the man whose legal name is Junius Jelks, about your suspicion?”
“Not before thirty-some-odd years passed. Viola wanted me to lie about how Lincoln was fathered. She didn’t want her new husband in Chicago, Mr. Jelks, thinking that boy was fathered by klukkers from Mississippi. She told him Lincoln’s father was her first husband, James Turner. A dead war hero.”
An audible murmur of many voices comes through the earpiece.
“Did you support her story?”
“I did. It troubled me, and I confessed it to the priest, but I stuck to that story for a long time. A mighty long time.”
“When did you stop?”
“In 1996, when our mother died. Vee had came down to help take care of Mama for the last month—being a nurse, you know—and Mr. Jelks came with her.”
“Where was Lincoln at this time?”
“Lincoln had just got out of law school the year before, so he was working in Chicago.”
“How old was he then?”
“Twenty-eight. He got a late start in law school.”
“All right, Miss Cora. Why did you stop telling the lie about Lincoln’s birth?”
“Well . . . the day Mama died, Vee and me was settin’ with her body, and Vee just started talking. About things, you know. The future, what was gonna happen to the family, like that. And she told me then that Dr. Tom Cage was Lincoln’s true father.”
A low murmur swells, like hornets waking in the ground.
“How did you feel about that?”
“Oh, believed it the second I heard it. I was shocked, because I’d never suspected they were going together at the time. But I knew she was telling the truth. I knew she’d loved and admired Dr. Cage. I just didn’t think they would ever have crossed that line. Neither of them.”
“Did your sister tell you anything else that day?”
“She begged me not to tell her husband about Dr. Tom.”
“You mean Junius Jelks?”
“Yes, sir. Junius had a bad temper, and he was drinking pretty heavy at that time. He’d been in and out of prison, so he could be a hard man. Sweet, sometimes, but I knew why Vee was scared.”
“Do you think Viola was afraid that Junius Jelks would hurt Lincoln, who was a full-grown man by then?”
“Not physically. But he might say something to hurt him. Junius knew just how to hurt people with words. No, I think Vee was more afraid that Junius—or even Lincoln, if he found out about his real father—would do something to mess up Dr. Cage’s life back here. That was the last thing Viola wanted. She knew she’d sinned, having that affair. And even though Dr. Cage was the one married, Viola felt the guilt for it. She couldn’t have lived with destroying a family.”
“I see. Well, on that day your mother died, did Viola also tell you whether or not Dr. Cage knew he was Lincoln’s father?”
All this is patent hearsay, of course—not even admissible under exceptions—but without Quentin objecting, Cora’s story seems to carry the weight of a deathbed confession. After a seemingly endless pause, Shad says, “Miss Cora?”
“Yes, sir. On that day, Viola told me that Dr. Cage had been sending her money every month since she left Natchez.”
“Are you saying that Tom Cage had been sending your sister money for twenty-eight years?” Shad asks as though astounded.