“The woman you told me about whose husband got killed in the Lusahatcha Swamp back in the sixties. Her name was Booker then. Dolores Booker. She was raped, and her husband killed. She can testify against Snake over those crimes.”

Dad blinks in confusion. “But . . . I thought she killed herself.”

“Her family told that story to make the Double Eagles forget about her.”

Quentin says, “Where is she now?”

“She was living in New Orleans. I found her and brought her up here. But she’s under FBI protection now. I don’t know where she is.”

“Snake thinks you do,” Dad says. “He needs to silence that woman—to kill her—and he doesn’t know where to find her. He figures you can find out for him. And threatening Annie is the only conceivable way he could make you do that.”

This explanation closes a circuit in my brain, and I collapse against the wall of the cubicle, one hand on the left handle of Quentin’s wheelchair.

“You all right?” Quentin asks.

“Penn, listen,” Dad says, his eyes filled with urgency. “You’ve got to get Annie away from Natchez. Far away. Peggy, too, if she’ll go.”

“You know she won’t. But I’ll get Annie and Mia to some kind of safe house. Kaiser will help me.”

“Good, good.”

“Dad . . . why was Walt following us? Did you tell him to do that?”

He doesn’t answer immediately. Then he says, “Do you remember when you visited me at the Pollock prison?”

I nod.

“I told you then that so long as Snake Knox walked the earth, my acquittal would accomplish nothing. You saw that proved a few minutes ago.”

“Did you ask Walt to kill Snake? To hunt him down?”

My father focuses on some indeterminate point between himself and Quentin. “The morning of Henry Sexton’s funeral, I told Walt that Snake needed to die. That was the only way to stop the killing. Walt agreed, but he wasn’t willing to take the risk. He was happy with his wife, and he didn’t want to make her a widow.”

And now she is. Quentin and I share a look. Dad is talking like he’s in some kind of trance, and perhaps he is. A trance of grief.

“What changed?” I ask him.

Dad bites his bottom lip, trying to work it out himself. “Not too long after Forrest’s death, Walt came to me at Pollock and told me he’d realized that the Knoxes were our cross to bear. Our generation’s evil, our blight to remove from the world. He’d decided to kill Snake.”

Quentin cradles his forehead in his left palm.

“The problem,” Dad goes on, “was finding him.”

“Is that why you put me on the trail of Will Devine and the other Eagles? You were using me as bait?”