“But you didn’t call Cora’s house and talk to your mother?”

“No, sir.”

“Why not?”

“Part of me was afraid he would be there. Dr. Cage. Another part wanted him to be there when I got there.”

“Is that the only reason you didn’t call your mother?”

“No, sir. You don’t say the kind of things I needed to say to her over the telephone. Not to your mama. You need to hold somebody’s hand to say that.”

Several women in the jury nod, both black and white.

“Do you wish now that you had called her that night?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“What would you have said?”

Lincoln Turner swallows hard and looks toward the ceiling. “Hold on just a little longer, Mama. I’m coming home.”

Three women in the jury box take handkerchiefs from their purses and wipe their eyes. The rest are looking daggers at my father. The men don’t look too happy with him, either.

“Wouldn’t have done no good, though,” Lincoln says in despair. “He’d given her the morphine by then, and Cora was passed out at the neighbor’s house.”

Shad bows his head again, as though gathering himself after being wrung out emotionally. “Let’s clarify something. Junius Jelks, your mother’s husband and widower, never knew who your real father was. Is that correct?”

“That’s right.”

“All right. Now . . . what did you find when you arrived at Cora Revels’s house in the wee hours of December twelfth?”

“By then, Auntie had come back home, and I told her to call 911. The paramedics were there.”

“Did your aunt mention Dr. Cage to you?”

“Not at first. But within an hour, she told me about the assisted-suicide pact.”

“Yesterday Cora Revels testified that, at that point, she believed that what had taken place was an assisted suicide.”

“She told me the same thing.”

“But you didn’t believe her?”

“The scene looked chaotic to me. It didn’t look like the scene of an assisted suicide.”

“Do you have enough experience to make that judgment?”

“I’m no expert. But it didn’t look as though Mama had died peacefully. I didn’t know the Mississippi law on assisted suicide, but I knew that if Dr. Cage had given her the injection himself, he was guilty of murder.”

“I see.” Shad starts to walk back to his table, but then he turns back to the witness. “Tell me this, Lincoln. Did you hope that Dr. Cage had given her the injection? That he was guilty of murder?”

“At that time? Yes, sir. I did.”

The silence that follows this statement is absolute.

“And now?”

“Now . . . I just want to know the truth.”

“Thank you.” Shad gives Lincoln a sympathetic smile, then walks to his chair and sits down. He doesn’t look at Quentin when he says, “Your witness.”