Snake rocked back and forth in the small cockpit, fighting a compulsion to throw the phone out of the plane. He felt like his brain was on fire. His beloved brother had not died in an accident; Frank had been murdered. Using all the skill he had, Snake lifted the AT-501 to its operational ceiling and then beyond it. The flat land of Louisiana drifted beneath him like a slow-motion film, unrolling endlessly. Snake never looked down, only forward. He was watching for the most familiar landmark of his flying career, the great brown serpent of the Mississippi River. The only fluid that could quench the fire in his head waited on the far bank of that river, pulsing with ignorant hope.

The blood of the Cage family.

Chapter 33

It’s night, and Annie is watching our DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird, searching for clues to the legal system and ideas on how to defend her grandfather. She has long known that Atticus Finch inspired me to become an attorney—as he did thousands of other lawyers—and that in many ways, To Kill a Mockingbird inspired me to write my first novel. The irony is that, for most of my life, I believed I was raised by a father who was as close as you could come to Atticus Finch in the real world. Dad might have been a doctor rather than a lawyer, but people still looked at him the way they looked at Gregory Peck in that film, and the way most citizens of Maycomb looked at Atticus in the novel: as a paragon of honor, courage, and rectitude.

More to the point, the black people of my little Mississippi town seemed to honor my father with the same respect shown to Atticus, as when the old preacher says: “Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.” But tonight, all I can think about as Annie watches the old black-and-white classic is what Scout would have thought if, at age forty-five, she’d learned that she had a half brother fathered by Atticus on Calpurnia, their maid. Such things seem unimaginable in the idealized world of the film, but in Lee’s novel, Mr. Dolphus Raymond married a black woman and fathered interracial children, thus earning social exile for himself, his morphine-addicted wife, and his children.