His eyes blaze with sudden passion. “Whatever evil I’ve done goes on Tom Cage’s account. You hear me? I am his sin, alive in the world.”
Lincoln’s ominously resonant voice makes my skin prickle. “If that’s true, then what am I?”
He looks back at me for several silent seconds. “You’re what he could have been.”
Lincoln turns toward the door and walks out without looking back.
Before I follow, the bartender calls: “Don’t come back here no more, Mayor. I don’t want that sheriff up in here again.”
I acknowledge his order with a wave, then walk out of the juke in the footsteps of a man who just might be my brother.
CHAPTER 73
A MILE DOWN the road from CC’s Rhythm Club, something breaks in my mind, like a steel restraining pin giving way inside some complex machine. For the past two and a half days, my father’s behavior has stumped me. Nothing about it has made sense from the moment Shad Johnson called to tell me that Viola was dead and Lincoln wanted my father charged with murder.
But if I simply accept Lincoln Turner’s assertion to be true—that my father is also his father—then logic leads me to a sequence of deductions that can’t be refuted. One: If Lincoln is my father’s son, then he’s family in my father’s eyes. Two: If Lincoln is family, then he deserves my father’s protection as much as I or my sister would. My heart clenches as the next question forms in my mind: In what circumstance would my father risk his life to protect Lincoln Turner?
Lincoln’s life must be at risk.
How could Lincoln’s life be at risk?
He’s either been threatened, or he’s guilty of a serious crime.
Who might have threatened him?
No way to know.
Of what crime could Lincoln be guilty?
“Killing his mother,” I say aloud. Killing his mother …
My heart flexes like a straining biceps, but still my mind races down the interrogatory chain. “How could Lincoln kill his mother if he was thirty miles outside Natchez?”
He couldn’t.
The next question flares in my mind like a bottle rocket in a black sky: What if Lincoln was in Natchez when Viola died?
In some process infinitely faster than conscious thought, a new relationship between the principals in this deadly drama forms in my mind. If Lincoln was in Natchez when Viola died, then he would surely have agreed to help her end her life—especially if my father had already refused. If my mother were dying of a terminal illness, wracked with pain and with no hope of recovery, I’d do whatever she asked without question. Would the man I just spoke to in CC’s Rhythm Club do less? No. But if Lincoln euthanized his mother in the wee hours of Monday morning … then my father did not.
Unless they did it together, whispers a voice in my head.
“No,” I say softly, my mind racing. “No way.”
Yet once I accept the possibility that both Lincoln and Dad could have been in that house at the same time—or even within minutes of each other—a dozen new scenarios become possible.
Lincoln could have botched the morphine injection, causing Dad to try desperately to revive Viola. (Only Dad wouldn’t have given an adrenaline overdose under those circumstances.) Lincoln could have botched the morphine injection, panicked, then tried to revive Viola himself. A son overcome by guilt might easily do that. If something like that did happen—after Dad had left the house with Viola alive—then Dad may have deduced that Lincoln probably killed his mother. He might even know that for a fact. Cora Revels might have told him. Or he might have returned to the scene and found Lincoln grieving over Viola’s body. I saw dozens of crazier death scenes as a prosecutor.
If any of these scenarios occurred, then Dad knows he’s innocent of Viola’s murder. But knowing him as I do, that awareness—in those circumstances—would probably cause him to behave just as he has since he learned of his potential prosecution for murder. For if Dad really believes that Lincoln is his son, then his guilt over failing that son for four decades would make him all too willing to take the fall for Lincoln, regardless of the cost to himself.
But …
There would be no fall to take, had not Lincoln pushed Shad Johnson to press murder charges. And if Lincoln actually killed his mother, why would he risk pressing the DA to punish my father?
“Oh, no,” I whisper, certain I’ve found the truth at last. “Because he’ll risk almost anything to punish his father.”
I can’t imagine a purer, more righteous anger than that of a son who helped his mother to die after a life ruined by a man who’d refused to marry her or acknowledge him. The situation must have been tempting for a lawyer. If Lincoln knew Dad had been in Cora’s house before him, he would have instantly seen how easily Dad could be framed for his mother’s death. The necessary props for the deception were ready to hand: the syringe with Dad’s fingerprints, the vial of morphine prescribed by the man Lincoln longed to punish. And Cora Revels probably told Lincoln about the euthanasia pact between Dad and Viola. If fate handed Lincoln a chance like that—a chance to make “his father” pay for a lifetime of neglect—would he refuse? I doubt it.
This scenario easily explains Lincoln’s behavior. But does it explain Dad’s? His refusal to say what happened in Cora’s house that night? Holding his silence in the face of deputies handcuffing him and leading him to court? Silence in the face of indictment for murder? Yes, yes, and yes. In the mind of a guilt-ridden father, all these acts must have seemed noble efforts to protect the son he’d failed throughout his life.