Carl laughed. “That’s Mose Tyler. He’s a local fisherman. A little like your man Toby Rambin. I think we surprised Mose setting out a treble-hook trotline, which is illegal in these waters. He probably thinks we’re game and fish wardens. He doesn’t see so good anymore.”
Danny ascended a hundred feet and left the fisherman in peace. Caitlin was about to ask Carl about Valhalla—and the Knox family—when Carl said, “I asked my daddy about that story you told me last night. About a black woman from Athens Point who got raped out in the swamp. He’d heard a little about it, but he knew another preacher who knew the details.”
“What’s this about?” Jordan asked. “You didn’t tell me this, did you?”
Caitlin shook her head.
“A brother from down here married a colored girl from Chicago back in the early sixties,” Carl said. “She was real light-skinned—so light that some folks around here thought she was white. Well, for a while it wasn’t nothing but dirty looks and such. But in 1963, the Klan took notice. One night they kidnapped the couple from their house. They blindfolded them and put them in boats and took them out to this cypress that the old-timers call the Bone Tree.”
Caitlin felt as though her body temperature had dropped twenty degrees. Why had Carl mentioned the Bone Tree? Was he simply passing on a shocking story that his father had learned last night, confident that McDavitt wouldn’t suspect any connection to their present search? Or had Carl already told the pilot what they were really after?
“They tied the husband to the tree and started beating him with bean poles,” Carl went on. “They beat him bad, and while it was going on they started hollering things. Well, the wife finally figured out they were beating her man for marrying a white woman! She started yelling that they were making a mistake, but the Klan boys wouldn’t listen. Finally she’s trying to tear them off her husband, screaming, ‘He ain’t done nothing wrong! I’m a nigger, too! I’m a nigger, too!’”
“Jesus,” Jordan breathed. “That really happened?”
“Not five miles from where we are, if this map is right. And after they tired of beating the husband, they raped the wife. All of ’em. The husband ended up dying. And believe it or not, they dumped the woman on the road. They’d beat her too, and she had no idea where she’d been. And of course the sheriff at that time had no interest in pursuing that crime. Since it turned out that the woman was black, the law didn’t even see it as a crime. Not the unwritten law, anyway, which was the only one that mattered back then.”
Caitlin suddenly felt dislocated from her surroundings. “Does your father know where we can find this woman?”
Carl’s helmet shook back and forth. “I don’t think he’ll tell you.”
“Why not?”
“The woman’s pastor says she has no idea who attacked her, and more important, no idea where that tree was.”
“Caitlin?” Jordan asked over the headset. “Are you okay?”
“I’m sorry if I was too coarse,” Carl said. “I forgot about . . . well . . .”
Caitlin held up her hand to reassure the deputy, but she knew the gesture wouldn’t help Carl. Deputy Sims had been guarding her when she was kidnapped only months ago. And though Caitlin hadn’t been raped herself, she had been forced to listen while a woman separated from her by only a thin partition had been repeatedly violated.
Caitlin took out her Treo. It showed one bar. She’d received eight text messages since leaving Natchez, but all were from employees of the Examiner. None from Walt Garrity, and none from Penn, either. A wave of guilt made her face flush. Should she try to call him? If she did, what could she say? That last night she’d had the power to send Penn to his father’s side, but now it was too late and Tom might well be dead. No . . .
Looking across the chopper’s deck, she saw Jordan studying her with deep concern. The photographer’s eyebrows went up in a silent question: Are you okay?
Caitlin shoved the Treo back into her pocket and looked out the chopper’s window again. There was a lot more water than earth beneath them now, and McDavitt seemed to have slowed their forward speed quite a bit. After a few seconds, Caitlin realized he was following a game fence that zigzagged between the trees. Somewhere not far away, she realized, stood the tree where Jimmy Revels and numberless others had died, where a woman she did not know had watched her husband beaten to death, and where Frank Knox might have hidden the key to the assassination of a president.
The Bone Tree.
EXCHANGING THE MUSTY OLD city sedan for my Audi S4 was like climbing into a speedboat after poling a raft for two days. As I drove west toward the Mississippi River bridge, my mind downshifted into the automatic mode I learned first as a law student and then a prosecutor. While I don’t have a photographic memory, I do have an uncanny ability to retain blocks of text, particularly when presented in the form of cases or reports.
The assessment of the Knoxes John Kaiser e-mailed me last night is a perfect example. Because it was filled with detail that might be useful in today’s interrogations, my brain recorded it as accurately as a tape recorder, despite my fatigue. Kaiser didn’t write in the sterile, jargon-heavy prose of an FBI report, but the language of a personal journal. I suspect he developed this habit during his stint in the Investigative Support Unit, which focuses heavily on human psychology and cares little about the formality of the rules-based bureaucracy of which it’s nominally a part.