“Daddy?” Annie jumps to her feet.

“I’m okay, Boo.”

My phone pings again as I pull her against my side.

2:07 p.m. Shad just recalled Cora Revels.

A few seconds pass, then Rusty types: Fuck this shit. My fingers about 2 fall off. I’m just going to open the line & take my chances.

“Annie, we’re going to have to turn off the TV,” I say in a taut voice.

“Why?” she asks, but before I can answer, her eyes widen with prescient knowledge. “Mr. Rusty’s calling from court!”

I nod, and she clicks off the TV with the remote.

“Can I listen?” she asks. “I won’t make a sound, I promise.”

“You can’t, baby. This is grown-up stuff, as grown-up as it gets. I need my earpiece from my desk in the basement. It might be in—”

“I know where it is!”

Annie races into the hall, and I hear her feet banging down the narrow steps to my office. In less than a minute she’s back carrying my wired earpiece.

“All right,” I concede, thankfully plugging in the jack. “You can stay in here with me, but don’t even breathe loud, okay?”

She grins. “Okay.”

Chapter 28

When the cell phone rings in my hand, I press the button to answer, then press mute on the microphone on my earpiece cord so that nothing can be transmitted from our end. Then I lie back on the sofa and close my eyes, my ear tuned to the distant human voices reverberating through a thick mist of low frequency.

“When Lincoln was born,” says an elderly female voice I’ve never heard before, “Vee told me that his father was a black man she’d met when she first got to Chicago, when she was homesick something terrible. She said she’d gone with him just once, and got pregnant. I didn’t really believe her. Viola had never been easy like that, and Lincoln was born only eight and a half months after she got to Chicago. He was a big baby, too. Wasn’t no preemie.”

Shad Johnson’s more educated voice cuts through the hiss of the phone. “Who did you think the father was?”

“Somebody from Natchez. Had to be.”

“Did you have someone in mind?”

“I had several,” Cora says in a snippy voice.

“More than one?” Shad asks with feigned amazement, and I know then that Cora Revels has been coached, and closely. “I thought you said your sister was not a woman of easy morals.”

“She weren’t.”

“I don’t understand, Miss Cora.”

“You will. About two weeks before Viola left for Chicago, she was raped by some Ku Klux Klansmen. Several at one time.”

A sudden roar comes through the phone.

“Did you witness that attack?”

“No, sir. Nobody did but them dirty men.”