Brody Royal’s last accusation against my father echoes in my mind. “Is it worth lying at this point?”
She turns to me, her survivor’s will burning through the shock and exhaustion in her eyes. “I hate to say it, but we may have to. We’d better decide fast.”
Dreading contact with the larger world, we walk back to wait beside the body of Sleepy Johnston. A low thump makes the ground shudder, and then a tower of flame rises from the burning lake house.
“The flamethrower?” Caitlin asks.
“Probably.”
As the orange and blue geyser rises into the night sky, I realize I’m witnessing the cremation of a man who three days ago meant little more to me than a byline under a newspaper article. But without him, Caitlin and I would now be charred flesh and ligaments over scorched bone. In this moment, it comes to me that my father is somewhere out in this same darkness, lost in a maze of his own making. Yet he’s never seemed farther from me in my life. The question of who really killed Viola Turner seems like some mystery from another age, like the death of Amelia Earhart.
What happened tonight? Caitlin asked me.
For my part, only this: to save my father, I tried to make a deal with the devil, and I almost lost everything because of it. My father is going to have to save himself.
And the rest of it? What was the point? For most of his life, Henry Sexton fought to gain justice for nameless victims and for families who had no voice. Did he accomplish that? Will anyone care? I don’t know. But Henry did something that police detectives, FBI agents, and attorneys with a lot more training and resources than he possessed had failed to do for forty years.
Henry got his man.
AFTERWORD
WHILE THIS NOVEL is entirely fictional, many of the background cases were inspired by unsolved race murders that occurred in Concordia Parish, Louisiana, and southwest Mississippi during the 1960s. To date, only one conviction has resulted from these horrific crimes. Stanley Nelson of the Concordia Sentinel has been working to solve those cases for many years, and he’s made remarkable progress. This is an often thankless job that angers many, but with limited resources Stanley has persisted in the face of both apathy and obstruction. In some cases he has solved murders, but the killers were already dead. In others, the outcome has yet to be decided.
Despite the FBI’s cold cases initiative, which began in 2007, the behavior of the FBI and the Justice Department regarding these cases is puzzling and sometimes inexplicable. Where official progress has been made, it has been due to the commitment of dedicated family members, reporters, and individual prosecutors or U.S. attorneys, rather than the sustained efforts of the FBI and the Justice Department. Today’s FBI agents are as dedicated as those of the 1960s, but they have been given neither the time nor the resources required to mount an effort comparable to that of their fellow agents from the earlier era.
The solutions to my fictional cases are different from what I believe happened in the actual cases that inspired them, but the emotional realities are true. In creating the characters of some of my fictional victims, I used theories and rumors that circulated during the early phases of the investigations. Many of those I no longer believe to be founded in reality. The primary example is Frank Morris, the shoe repairman, who I believe was guilty of nothing more than serving both white and black patrons and refusing to mend a corrupt white deputy’s boots for free. Morris was a fine man, and not involved in bootlegging or prostitution, as was suggested by rumor and by evidence likely planted at the site of his burned-out shop. The same holds true for the terrible plane crash at Concordia Airport in 1970. That was almost surely an accident, though had justice been done in an earlier murder case, one pilot would have been incarcerated, and the subsequent collision could not have happened. Life is often more prosaic (and tragic) than the stuff of good fiction.
If you would like to learn more about the actual crimes that form the backdrop of Natchez Burning, please visit the Web page of the Concordia Sentinel and read Stanley Nelson’s articles. You will also find a link on my website. Stanley expects to have his own book published soon, so watch for that as well.
I cannot possibly thank everyone who assisted me with this novel. However, I must include the following:
Dr. Jerry Iles, gone but never forgotten.
Betty Iles, for everything.
Uncle Joe Iles, for standing in for his big brother when it mattered most.
Madeline Iles, Mark Iles, Geoff Iles, and Colin Kemp.
Caroline Hungerford, for too many reasons to count.
Dan Conaway and Simon Lipskar, for vision.
David Highfill, Liate Stehlik, and the whole team at William Morrow/HarperCollins, for putting their full faith into this epic endeavor.
Courtney Aldridge and Rod Givens, M.D.: wise friends; Jim Easterling and James Schuchs, southern philosophers; Billy Ray Farmer, who’s got the instincts.
Stanley Nelson, the journalist/detective; Rusty Fortenberry, for great stories about law in Mississippi; Mimi Miller, the memory of Natchez (and still young!).
Ed Stackler, for riding shotgun ever since I put Rudolf Hess back into the cockpit of his Messerschmitt.
Jerry Mitchell of the Clarion-Ledger; John M. Barry, author of Rising Tide; Kevin Cooper and Ben Hillyer of the Natchez Democrat.
Tony Byrne; Charles Evers; Sheriff Chuck Mayfield; Darryl Grennell; D. P. Lyle, M.D.; Nancy Hungerford; Kevin Colbert; Keith Benoist; John White, M.D.; Brent Bourland; Mark Brockway; Mark Coffey; Grayson Lewis; and Brooke Moore.
Judge George Ward (John, Win, Stan, and Ann, too!).
Jane Hargrove, who worked faithfully beside me through many novels.
Bruce Kuehnle and Alan J. Kaufman, lawyers who helped when it counted.