“That’s good enough for me.” Setting down the guitar and taking a set of keys from his desk drawer, he leads me down a narrow hallway to a metal door at the back of the building. He opens two locks, then pushes the door open with a screech and flips on a fluorescent light.
Following him inside, I find a ten-by-twelve room whose walls are plastered with maps, photographs, a bulletin board, a whiteboard, and pushpins connecting various names, photos, and locations on the walls. Three worktables form a U with its open end facing the door, and the lower half of each wall seems to be braced with banker’s boxes spilling files. The room instantly hurls me back to the days when I was prosecuting capital murder cases in Houston. Our workrooms were larger than this, but the atmosphere was the same.
“The nerve center of your investigations?”
“Yep. Almost totally analog, I’m embarrassed to say.”
“Nothing wrong with analog, buddy.”
“An intern I had from Syracuse called this my war room. I call it the cooler, because it holds the cold cases from the last forty years. I’m working twelve unsolved murders from the 1960s alone, and those are just the ones I’m sure were murder. The FBI would kill to see inside this room.”
The first thing that really catches my eye is a poster advertising a Ku Klux Klan rally to be held at Liberty Park in Natchez, which was less than a mile from the house I grew up in.
“As far as the paternity issue,” Henry says, “less than a week before Viola fled Natchez, she was gang-raped by several members of the Double Eagle group. I don’t know the etiquette of gang rape, but I’m guessing none of those bastards wore condoms. And if I had to guess who was there, I’d pick Frank and Snake Knox, Sonny Thornfield, and the guy I interviewed this morning. I have pictures of all those men.”
He takes my elbow and leads me to a rogues’ gallery tacked to the wall opposite us. “Here,” he says, tapping the black-and-white snaps with his right forefinger. “These four sterling citizens here. Tell me what you see.”
My mind is too consumed by fear to make much of the faces. I see a blur of pale-skinned, hollow-eyed men of the kind you see in Civil War photographs. Except … one. One man is darker than his comrades—much darker—almost as though he has a deep tan or sunburn. But when I look closer, I see that the color is part of his biology, perhaps a sign of Creole or even Indian blood, like a Louisiana Redbone.
“Who’s this?” I ask, touching the photo.
“Walter Stillson ‘Sonny’ Thornfield. And in my opinion, Lincoln Turner’s father.”
Despite the horror implied in this statement—for Viola, and for Lincoln, if he knows the truth—I feel a flood of relief. “Do you think Lincoln knows about his mother’s rape?”
“I hope not. But even if he does, what bastard child doesn’t pray that he’s the son of the lord of the manor, and not a lowly peasant?”
“So Lincoln may believe that my father is his father, even if he’s not.”
“Yes. And that would certainly explain his level of anger, given the situation. I doubt any African-American mother would want to tell her son that he was fathered by a white-trash ex-Klansman who’d raped her. Much less, one of many. Especially since Viola got married soon after she arrived in Chicago—in the time-honored tradition of so many girls ‘in trouble’ during that era. Viola probably told Lincoln he was the son of her husband. At least for most of his life.”
I remember my dad telling me about Viola marrying a con man in Chicago. “Well, somebody needs to tell Lincoln the truth, before he pushes this thing any further.”
“Shad Johnson is the man pushing the murder investigation. Lincoln is just his excuse. It’s no secret Shad hates you, and your father has given him a golden opportunity for revenge.”
Without warning, my view of the entire case makes a tectonic shift. “Holy Christ, Henry. Shad thinks Lincoln is my father’s son. If Lincoln told him that, Shad might easily believe Dad would kill Viola to keep it secret.”
This realization stops Henry cold. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“I’ve got to talk to Shad.”
Henry holds up a warning hand. “Think hard before you do that. Come back over here and let me show you something.”
He leads me back around the table to the poster advertising the Ku Klux Klan rally near my childhood home.
“That was the biggest Klan rally ever held in the South,” he informs me. “Thirty-seven hundred people attended—men, women, and children.” He turns to his worktable, fishes through a stack of photographs, chooses two, and steps back toward me. “I was looking at these before I called you.”
The photo on top is in color. It shows my father, aged about thirty-five, standing in front of a single-engine airplane in bright sunlight with a man a little older than he. Both men sport the long sideburns fashionable in the seventies.
“Who’s that?” I ask. “He looks familiar.”
“Dr. Leland Robb. He treated Albert Norris for the four days that he lay dying from his burns in 1964. He and your father were friends.”
“I don’t really remember him.”
“You were only nine years old when he died in a midair collision a few miles from here.”
“Wait a minute! I remember that. I went out on a couple of dates with the daughter of the pilot who died in that crash. She never really got over that.”
Henry nods soberly. “I’m not surprised. I believe Dr. Robb was murdered, Penn.”
“What?”
“Bear with me.” He slides the photo under the one beneath it. The second shot is black-and-white, and as soon as I comprehend what I’m seeing, the hair on my neck stands up. A rush of scents and images fills my brain: the smell of horses and barbecue and burning kerosene; clouds of pink cotton candy; wild-eyed men standing in the beds of pickup trucks, yelling about God’s wrath while women sell embroidered sheets from card tables nearby. In this photograph, my father is standing amid some Ku Klux Klansmen wearing white robes and hoods. Dad’s wearing street clothes, as is another man beside him, but everyone else in the photo, except the children, is dressed in full Klan regalia.