The old dowager shakes her head, her eyes wide in terror.
Flora looks as shaken as I am by Pithy’s sudden fervor. “Settle down, now,” she says, but this does no good. Pithy is staring beyond me as though at some spectral presence, but there’s only wallpaper there. “Remember what Aristotle said!” she cries. “Undeservedly you will atone for the sins of your fathers. And Horace!”
Horace? “What did Horace say, Pithy?”
“Mothers are fonder than fathers of their children, because they’re more certain they are their own.”
This sends a shock through me. I feel a strange dread, perhaps even a presentiment of some approaching calamity. Suddenly the old woman grabs my hand, looks wildly into my eyes, and cries, “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised!”
Flora takes hold of Pithy’s shoulders and gently forces her down onto the pillows. “You’d better go, Mayor.”
“No!” Pithy insists, still wide-eyed. “Something’s burning!”
Flora sniffs the air. “No, Miss Pithy. Ain’t nothing burnin’.”
“Don’t lie to me! The fires of hell are God’s love, scalding torture to the sinner.” The old woman’s head bobs up and down for emphasis, and then she sags back into the covers.
Flora turns to me, stricken with grief.
“Does this happen often?” I whisper.
The maid shakes her head and crosses herself. “You go on. We’ll be all right.”
I lean over the bed and look down at Pithy’s half-closed eyes. “What do you see, Pithy?”
The old woman squints like a sailor staring into a storm, then collapses as though drained of all energy.
Flora takes my hand and pulls me away from the bed. “I’ll take care of her, Penn.”
“I think Drew should examine her.”
“She’ll be all right. This, too, shall pass.”
Honoring Flora’s request, I back slowly out of the room. When I reach the door, the maid turns from the bed and looks at me. “Don’t pay her no mind. I think when you asked about her son, it upset her. That’s all it was. Miss Pithy’s strong, but she never got over her husband being killed like that, while she was with child. That’s why she never remarried.”
“Thank you, Flora.”
“Go take care of your daddy. The Lord has more work for him to do yet.”
Slipping the straight razor into my inside coat pocket, I descend the grand staircase and walk out into the filtered light of the setting sun. As I take out my cell phone to call Drew’s office about the cortisone, an adamantine certainty settles in my heart. I was right to come here. Though Pithy Nolan didn’t know one fact about how Viola died, she’s convinced me that Brody Royal and the Double Eagles murdered the dying nurse. Whatever else my father may be guilty of, he’s held his silence only to protect our family from those men. The only mysteries are how to prove this, and how to do it without getting killed.
CHAPTER 43
DARKNESS FELL FAST over Ferriday, sweeping across the delta as the sun fled westward, covering the empty fields and farm roads with shadow, then darkness. The ragged parade of dilapidated businesses along Highway 84 turned into a twinkling line of lights, like a convoy of ships sailing between the islands of Ferriday and Vidalia. That string of lights stretched all the way across the twin bridges linking Vidalia to Natchez on its high bluff, but the proud old city was a world away from Henry Sexton, who sat before his computer in the offices of the Beacon, on the dark northern edge of Ferriday.
All afternoon he’d been moving boxes of files into his Explorer, preparing to transport them to his girlfriend’s house, which was much closer to Natchez. If he was going to be working for Caitlin Masters (his publisher had graciously given him permission a few hours earlier), then he needed his files closer than twelve miles away. He didn’t trust Masters enough to store his files in her building—not yet anyway—but he was excited, and nervous, too. Filing stories for a media group with more than twenty newspapers was a foreign concept to him after all his years at the Beacon. But Penn was right: the murders of Viola Turner and Glenn Morehouse would require that, as would the bones coming up out of the Jericho Hole.
Henry hadn’t yet told Caitlin that he’d decided to work for her. She’d called his cell phone four times in the past two hours, but his pride demanded that he leave her in suspense a bit longer. Maybe tomorrow morning, he thought. What could it hurt? Besides, he had a few more leads he wanted to run down before he was working on Caitlin Masters’s dime.