While her heartbeat returned to normal, she put a pot of water on her cooking ring, knowing that tea would steady her nerves. As the water heated, she picked up Henry’s most recent journal. The feel of its charred leather cover gave her a thrill of anticipation. She opened the Moleskine and flipped through the dense handwritten notes and finely detailed sketches.
After decades of patient investigation, Henry had spent the last month of his life rushing from revelation to revelation. The death of Pooky Wilson’s mother, the appearance of a mysterious witness to the Norris bombing, and finally the confessions of Glenn Morehouse had given Henry potential keys to some of the most heinous unsolved murders in American history. Last night’s events had brought partial closure to some of those cases, but many mysteries remained.
As footsteps passed back and forth beyond her door, she dropped a bag of green tea into her mug and settled in behind her desk. Then she took out the sheet labeled ELAM KNOX and began to read Henry’s notes. The writing on this sheet was much clearer, which told her Henry must have written this shortly after seeing Kaiser, before the sniper’s bullet grazed his head.
I always knew that Abbott’s redacted 302 contained something important, but I never could have imagined what it was. According to John Kaiser, Jason Abbott told a lot of lies about Forrest Knox in his effort to incriminate him, but Kaiser believes that some of what he said was true. Abbott told his FBI interviewers that in 1966, Frank and Snake Knox murdered their father, Elam, at the Bone Tree. Abbott said Elam had died a particularly brutal death, even by the standards of the Double Eagles. As for the motive, all he knew was that Elam had been killed for betraying his family. But Elam Knox’s death was held up as an example of how far the Knoxes would go to avenge treason. According to Abbott, the old man’s bones were left among all the others at the Bone Tree, as a perpetual warning to would-be traitors.
Kaiser believes that Elam Knox was murdered by his sons, but he’s not convinced that he died at the Bone Tree. Like Dwight Stone, Kaiser doubts that the Bone Tree exists. He thinks it more likely that the term refers to a man-made cross or torture post in the Lusahatcha Swamp, or even a “torture house” that many FBI agents were told about in the 1960s. Kaiser told me that anecdotal evidence suggests Elam Knox was not only a violently abusive man, but also a sexual predator. He was the kind of itinerant preacher who seduced women in every town where he ever set up his revival tent. Many of his paramours were underage, and if rumor could be believed, not all were female. Both his sons were often in trouble for violent offenses, some sexual in nature. Kaiser theorized that Elam might have crossed some sexual or moral line that Frank would not tolerate and was punished for it. But I’m not so quick to believe this. I always heard that Elam was a bad-tempered drunk, and it might be that he simply passed on information that ended up hurting the family or the Double Eagles.
Kaiser also believes that a cache of “trophies” of Double Eagle violence exists somewhere, such as the military tattoos cut from Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis. After hearing my summary of Morehouse’s revelations, he thinks that cache might be at Valhalla, in Lusahatcha County. Of course, I told Kaiser nothing about Morehouse verifying the existence of the Bone Tree, or his assertion that some sensational historical artifact might be hidden there. On balance, I believe the Bone Tree exists. At the very least, the bones of Jimmy and Pooky and Joe Louis Lewis probably lie there. As for Frank Knox’s “insurance” against Carlos Marcello, I won’t know that until I find the tree myself. I asked Morehouse about Elam on the phone Monday afternoon, but he refused to say anything. I could tell he was holding something back, and I suppose now I know why. The truth would have opened Snake Knox to a murder charge, and not for just any murder, but patricide.
Caitlin licked her lips and set the stationery to one side. Then she picked up Henry’s Bone Tree journal and opened it with almost reverent care. Reading these Moleskines was like being given the key to a hidden library, one in which the secret histories of Natchez and Concordia Parish had been recorded by a monk working in fanatical solitude. And out of all the tales Henry had meticulously documented, none had lodged in her mind like that of the huge, hollow, centuries-old cypress hidden in a swamp near Athens Point, Mississippi.