I try to keep my face immobile.
“Uh-huh. What do you think I’m doing out in this dump? I can afford to eat at the Castle if I want to. But I can’t show my face in Natchez until Tom Cage is in jail. Even then, I can’t be sure I’m safe. He’s got plenty of redneck patients who’d be happy to do him a favor by making me disappear.”
I shove my chair back from the table. “You’re crazy. What do you really hope to get out of this?”
“Justice. Plain and simple.”
I have a practiced eye at reading deception, and there’s something more than sincerity in Lincoln Turner’s eyes. He radiates the cool certainty of a con artist rather than the sincerity of a wronged child. For an instant I feel I’m on the verge of a revelation, but the insight fades. Instead of trying to recapture it, I voice a question that’s been nagging me since Shad called Monday morning with the news of Viola’s death.
“Why were you thirty minutes north of Natchez on the morning your mother died? Why haven’t you been here for the past month, while she was dying? You’re about to be disbarred in Illinois. And you just told me you have enough money to stay at a nice hotel. Why weren’t you down here easing her last weeks on earth? Why were you sitting up in Chicago while your mother suffered at death’s door?”
He has no ready answer for this, and the anger in his eyes deepens appreciably.
“I think I know why you want to punish my father,” I say softly. “Viola knew she couldn’t rely on you for the hard duties of being a son. That’s why she came back here to die. My father had the guts and the patience and the love to sit with her while she wasted away, but you couldn’t. And you want him to pay for that. You want to blame somebody for your own shortcomings, and your mother’s lack of faith in you.”
Lincoln’s dark face darkens still more with blood. Then he speaks with unsettling conviction. “When a child finds out his parents have been lying to him for his whole life—not about some little thing, but about who he is, and who they are—it doesn’t exactly predispose him toward feelings of charity. Do you feel me, bro?” Lincoln tilts his head toward mine. “Yeah, you do. The next time you look dear old Daddy in the eye, you’re gonna feel like puking. ’Cause there’s nothing worse than a self-serving lie to a child.”
“Is that what you believe? That your mother lied to you out of self-interest?”
“No. Her motive was worse than that. She didn’t lie to protect herself. That would have made sense, at least. No, she lied to protect him.” Unalloyed rage enters Lincoln’s voice. “My mother thought more of Tom Cage’s happiness than she did her own. Or mine. Isn’t that pathetic? She and I paid the price for your family’s shiny little life.”
I feel my hands shaking as my heart rebels against this twisted view of my personal history, but Lincoln goes on relentlessly.
“You ever read that story, ‘The Secret Sharer’? Well, I’m your dark twin, Mayor. The shadow you never knew you had, leading you to your destiny. We’re like two parallel lines that finally converge, against all odds. We were conceived in the same town, from the same pair of balls, the same pool of protoplasm, the same strands of DNA. But we were born and lived our lives seven hundred miles apart.”
My face has grown hot with blood. “If that’s true … will you agree to take a DNA test?”
Lincoln smiles. “Any time, so long as it’s not in Natchez, Mississippi.You won’t hear Tom Cage make that promise.”
Nothing could have stunned me more than this offer to subject his claim to scientific testing. Clearly, Lincoln believes what he’s saying.
He drains his beer glass, and the waitress moves toward the table, but I wave her away.
“She’s out of pain now,” Lincoln says. “There’s nothing left to worry me now but earthly justice. Before long, Tom Cage is gonna be standing in the dock in handcuffs, just like any old nigger brought there by the sheriff. He’ll stand there while all his lies are stripped away and his soul is laid bare before the town he’s been worshipped in so long. It’s taken a lot of years, but the truth he tried so long to bury has finally found its way up to the light.”
The specter Lincoln has conjured sends a shiver down to my bones. To see Dad publicly shamed as a liar might be worse than hearing he’s been shot by a cop somewhere. I know he would rather die than be seen to have betrayed the code he tried to live by all his life.
“What you thinking?” Lincoln asks, a strange gleam in his eyes. “You thinking life would be a lot simpler if my truck ran off the road halfway back to town?”
“No.”
He laughs softly. “You sure, Mayor? Aren’t I just like some girl you fucked and hoped never to see again, come back to tell you I’m pregnant? You want me to disappear. That hope is smoldering deep in that overheated brain of yours, even if you don’t know it yet. And the fact that it’s there ought to prove something to you.”
I lay my hands on the table and push my chair back. “I think we’re done here, Mr. Turner.”
“Sure. Go home to your little girl and pull the covers over your head. You won’t forget one word of what I’ve said. This is exactly what you hunted me down to hear.”
I reach for my wallet, but Lincoln waves his hand to stop me. “My treat, brother.”
This time when he laughs, it comes from deep within his chest, like the laugh of the voodoo master in Live and Let Die.
“What the hell’s goin’ on here?” drawls a redneck voice. “Family reunion?”
Somehow Sheriff Billy Byrd has materialized beside our table, his potbelly straining against his starred brown shirt, and his red-tinged cheeks shadowed by the brim of his Stetson hat. His high-pitched cackle merges with and then drowns out the resonant laugh of Lincoln Turner, but it’s the pistol jutting from his gun belt that holds my attention.