As I reflect on this possibility, the obvious implication of my earlier deduction hits me like a stitch in the side. If Dad is lying about his relationship with Viola … then everything Lincoln Turner contends could be true. And Shad Johnson could be prosecuting Dad in the legitimate belief that he killed Viola to silence her about Lincoln’s paternity.
Despite Quentin’s injunction against bothering Dad, I feel an almost irresistible compulsion to do just that. The old lawyer might be content to let matters proceed at a glacial pace, but I can’t do that while Henry’s life hangs in the balance. For while the attack on the reporter might have been triggered by his interviews with Viola and Morehouse, it might just as easily have been caused by his meeting with me, or the visit we made to Sheriff Dennis’s office. And none of those contacts would ever have occurred had my father come clean about Viola’s death from the beginning.
Holding my compulsion in check, I walk down to my basement office and take a manila folder from the bookshelf. It contains dozens of snapshots and mementoes I used to make a short video for Dad’s seventy-second birthday. Shuffling through the photos, I find the image I’m looking for: Christmas Eve at Dr. Wendell Lucas’s office, December 1963. John F. Kennedy has been dead just about a month. Dad and Mom have just moved Jenny and me to Natchez, in the midst of a harrowing blizzard.
Why have I come for this photograph? What can it tell me?
Dr. Lucas’s waiting room has been decorated with red poinsettias, and four bottles of champagne stand open on a coffee table. The clerical staff are big-bosomed country girls with bouffant hairdos. Dr. Lucas and my father stand center stage, their white coats open to reveal the suits and ties they wore to work every day. To their right stand two elderly white nurses I remember vaguely, and beside them the dark-skinned Esther Ford, whose kind eyes remain indelibly alive in my memory. Behind these three women—taller, younger, and so strikingly beautiful that, once your eye falls upon her, she dominates the entire photograph—stands Viola Turner.
Most of the women are grinning and toasting the camera, and even Esther’s smile is wider than usual. Viola’s expression is more remote, her wide brown eyes alert as those of a doe in an open field, her perfect teeth not showing at all. Her beauty is simultaneously earthy and ethereal. It’s also a special pass, of sorts. Viola stands easily among these mostly white people, as Esther does, but she is not of them. She’s an interloper, a silent scout for an army that would soon be fighting a bloody war for equality. Less than a year after this picture was taken, the first skirmishes would break out on both sides of the river, and Albert Norris would die. Pooky Wilson, too.
As I try to decipher the reality behind Viola’s fa?ade, a sudden association tugs deep in my brain. What is it? Maybe the longer I study her face, the more powerful my childhood memories become, like embers in a breeze being fanned into flame. Yet the harder I focus on her, the more whatever I’m trying to remember recedes. I shouldn’t be surprised. This photograph is only a frozen slice of the past: two-dimensional, opaque, easily deceptive. My visit with Pithy was more penetrating, like a medical history, facts enhanced by a temporal context and by Pithy’s insight—yet still insufficient. What I need now is the psychological equivalent of an MRI, a three-dimensional scan of the relationships between these characters I’m only just coming to know: Viola Turner, Brody Royal, the Knox family, even Lincoln Turner. For only with the deepest knowledge can one diagnose that most elusive of conditions: the truth.
Touching my fingertip to Viola’s face, I realize that one question must be answered before all others: How far did Dad go with you?
Walking to my desk, I lift the phone and dial my parents’ house again. I’d rather speak to Dad in person, and away from my mother, but the only way I could pull that off would be to take Annie with me to distract Mom, and Mom would instantly see through my ploy.
“Penn?” says my mother, her voice surprisingly alert. “Has something happened? Did Henry die?”
“No.” I’d expected the reassuring “Dr. Cage” that usually greets night callers. “I was hoping to talk to Dad, remember?”
A shuffling sound comes through the phone. “He’s still asleep.”
This surprises me. Despite the emotional toll that today’s events must have taken on him, my father is a night owl, and always has been. Almost nothing can force him to sleep during what most people consider reasonable hours. Maybe being arrested and handcuffed in his own yard pushed even Dad past his limit. “I really need to talk to him, Mom.”
“You don’t want me to wake him, up, do you? Not after today.”
Yes, I do. And then I want you to go into the other room and watch television while we talk. “I guess not. But I must speak to him before nine tomorrow morning.”
“Do you think that attack on Henry Sexton had anything to do with your father? Henry’s been writing about the bad old days for years now, and he’s never hesitated to name names. That’s courting disaster if I ever saw it. He probably just pushed somebody too far in his last article.”
“Mom, I think …” I falter, searching for some nonthreatening way to explain my concern. “Dad is somehow caught up in this old Double Eagle mess. He used to treat all those guys from Triton Battery, and he’s refusing to talk about it to the police.”
This time her answer is longer in coming. “Your father’s no fool, Penn. He knows what he’s doing.”
“You didn’t look so sure of that in court this morning.”
“Well, that was upsetting, naturally. But Judge Noyes did the right thing in the end.”
“The situation has changed now. Dad’s bail could be revoked at any time.”
“Oh, no.”
“Don’t panic, Mom. But I need to ask you a simple question.”
“Oh, Penn … I don’t like this.”
“I’ve never known you to lie, and I need to know the answer to this.”
Silence.
Before anxiety can stop me, I ask what I’ve withheld up to now because of my reluctance to upset my mother. “I need to know what time Dad got home on the night Viola died.”