“What?”
“The sons are lazy. They’re from his second marriage. The daughter was his hope, I think. Katy was a pretty thing, and all the local beaux chased her. But something happened after her mother’s death. Katy disappeared, and everyone assumed she’d gotten pregnant. Back in those days, they sent girls to relatives to have the babies. But it turned out that Brody had committed her to an asylum in Texas. A private sanatorium—very tony, but still. A year later, Katy came back without any baby. If there ever was one, I suppose it was given up for adoption.”
“What about abortion?”
“Very difficult in those days, dear. Anyway, Brody married Katy to one of his workmen, an awful Black Irishman. A jumped-up roughneck, basically.” Pithy shook her head with poignant sadness. “I don’t know what they did to that girl in Texas, but all her spark was gone. And with that chapter closed, Brody turned his hand to making money again.”
“Until he married Dr. Robb’s wife in 1970.”
The old woman gives me a sharp look. “Something tells me that for once, you know more than I do about something.”
“I’m pretty sure Brody arranged for that plane to go down.”
“Because he wanted to marry Sue Robb?”
“That was probably half the reason,” I tell her. “But Dr. Robb also knew about earlier murders Brody had committed.”
Pithy taps her fingers on the coverlet, trying to absorb this. “You don’t think Brody killed all these people himself, surely?”
“No. Some ex-Klansmen helped him. Knoxes from across the river.”
Pithy twists her lips so angrily that I think she’s about to spit. “I curse the day the city brought in outsiders to work at those factories after the war. Most were decent working people trying to better themselves, of course. But others … that’s where the Klan recruited their rank and file. They were trash. Low, unadulterated white trash. Backshooters and bombers.”
Decades ago, David L. Cohn, a well-known Mississippi intellectual, made this case in the pages of the New Yorker (echoing Goethe from a century earlier). For all I know, Cohn used Pithy as his source. “Did you ever have any contact with the Knoxes and their cronies?”
“Why, they accosted me right on Main Street! Outside the H. F. Byrne shoe store. Some workers from that battery plant told me I was ‘messin’ in nigra business.’ Said I’d better keep in line or else there’d be trouble. I said, ‘Jody McNeely, if Major Nolan wasn’t lying at the bottom of the Pacific, he’d knock you to the curb this instant. I can’t do that, but if I see you dragging one of those timber crosses onto my property, I’ll shoot you down and sort it out with the sheriff afterwards.’” Pithy lowers her head, cold fire in her eyes. “And don’t think I wouldn’t have done it. I shot my first deer when I was ten.”
“How did they take that?”
She laughed softly. “It plumb stumped them! The ringleader nearly swallowed his Adam’s apple. Their kind always was easily intimidated. They’re peasants in their bones, and they jump at the crack of a whip.”
“Brody Royal won’t.”
Her smile vanishes. “No, he won’t.”
“What about his attorney, Claude Devereux?”
Pithy makes a sour face. “Comparing that shyster to a snake would be a slander to the serpent.” While I try to think of how to segue into the question of my father’s past, maternal concern flows from the old woman’s eyes. “Penn, you’re your father’s son, and I love you for it. You’re a knight in shining armor, and most of the time, that’s a fine thing. But fights with men like this aren’t won in court. Snakes as old as Brody and Claude have already been trampled by most beasts of the field, and lived to tell the tale.”
I lay my hand over her cool, dry fingers and squeeze gently. “I’ve been in darker places than you know, Pithy. I can handle myself.”
She gazes back at me with unnerving intensity. “So has your father, dear. Tom was in combat, the same as my husband, and no man comes through that unscathed.”
“Pithy … do you think there’s any chance that Dad could have been friends with Brody Royal? Even a long time ago?”
She draws back her head, her opinion clear. “Absolutely not. The only man I even remember being close to Brody was Leo Marston, and Leo hated Tom. You know that.”
I remember Henry saying something about Brody and Judge Marston being partners. Leo was one of the cruelest sons of bitches I knew among the parents of kids I grew up with, and if he and Royal were friends, then I can’t imagine my father spending any time at all with Brody—which squares with what Dad told me.
Pithy’s face tightens with sudden urgency. “Why aren’t the two of you working together on this? Where is Tom? Is he hurt? Has someone kidnapped him?”
“No, no,” I reassure her. “He’s fine.”
But Pithy isn’t fooled. With oracular vision, she sees right through me, all the way down to my deepest fears. “Poor darling. Every son and daughter learns a heartbreaking truth someday. I only hope that in this case it’s something you can live with.”
“Since you were Dad’s first patient, you must have known Viola Turner.”
The old woman takes a deeper breath than she has up to now, then lets it out very slowly. “Of course I did. But don’t ask me anything you don’t want the answer to.”
Her warning chills me, but this is half the reason I’ve come. “Did Viola and Dad have an affair, Pithy?”
“I can’t speak to that. But your father loved that girl—that I do know.”