“Like I said, no need to go into all that.”

“I won’t. All I’m saying is this: If you do what I ask, then one of two things will happen. Either someone will agree to testify against Snake, or Snake himself will raise his head.”

“And then what?”

“If we’re lucky, somebody will stomp on him.”

“Who? Kaiser?”

“Maybe.”

“One of my guards?”

Dad turns up his palms. “There’s no way to know. You killed a man last night. An hour before it happened, you couldn’t have conceived of doing that, could you?”

He’s right, but this only makes me angrier. “How many men have you killed, Dad?”

After a long silence, he says, “More than I like to remember.”

“Where?” My father has never told me a single war story about Korea. “In the war?”

“Yes.”

“But you were a medic.”

“That’s right.”

I wait, but he doesn’t elaborate. “Jesus . . . okay. I’m going to think about what you’ve told me. Or asked me, I guess.”

“Are you going to be coming back? Next time Peggy and Annie visit, maybe?”

“I don’t know.”

“I understand.”

“Listen, Mom’s terrified that something will happen to you once you’re transferred to the Adams County jail.”

Dad dismisses this with a wave of his crooked hand. “Billy Byrd won’t murder me in his jail, or even have me killed by an inmate. He wants to see me convicted. He wants a public downfall and he’s sure it’s coming. He and his deputies gathered the evidence themselves. To Billy, it’s an open-and-shut case.”

“It looks that way to me, too, honestly. How the hell can you get any semblance of a fair trial with those guys in charge of the evidence?”

“A fair trial?” Dad smiles strangely. “I never expected one. Any evidence that might even have muddied the water disappeared that first day. Probably never even reached the evidence room. But it doesn’t matter.”

“Why the hell not?”

Dad looks at me as he would a slow child. “Because I’m guilty, son.”

I must have misheard him. “What?”

“I killed Viola.”

His simple, declarative confirmation knocks the breath out of me. I search his eyes for some clue to a deeper message, but I see none. It takes a moment to get my voice working. “Are you speaking literally? Or . . . in some larger moral sense?”

A sad smile touches his mouth. “This isn’t a philosophy symposium, Penn. I killed Viola. The why is nobody’s business. That’s between her, me, and God.”

I am gobsmacked, as the Brits say. And utterly bewildered by the casual tone of his confession. “Dad, I’m feeling a little lost here.”

“Because you’re overthinking things. I worked in a movie house in the late forties, when I was a teenager. Do you remember me telling you that?”

I cannot find words to answer.