“Ten weeks before she died, when she called my office and told me that she was dying, and that she intended to come home to do it.”

Quentin gives the jury time to digest this. “You’re saying that thirty-seven years passed without any direct contact between the two of you?”

“That’s right. Just the checks. A couple of times I put a note in with my check, asking if she was well, that kind of thing. But Viola never responded.”

“I see.” Quentin rotates his wheelchair to face the jury. “So in the eyes of Snake Knox, Viola had not only returned to Natchez—an act for which the Double Eagles had vowed to kill her—but was also talking to Henry Sexton, a reporter actively investigating unsolved murders committed by the Double Eagle group.”

“That’s correct.”

“And you believe Snake Knox had some suspicion that Mrs. Turner had killed his brother Frank back in 1968?”

“I can’t be sure of that. I believe he did.”

Quentin nods slowly. “Dr. Cage, after you left Cora Revels’s house, did you see or hear anything that led you to believe that the Double Eagles might have been involved in Viola’s death?”

“Yes. As I drove away that night, down Pine Ridge Road, I saw a pickup truck parked on the shoulder near the turn to Cora’s house. In the trees, the way you see trucks parked when people are hunting deer. But I didn’t see any people inside it.”

“Was there anything remarkable about this truck?”

“There was a sticker on the back windshield. A big yellow ‘D.’”

“And what does that sticker stand for?”

Almost everyone in this room knows that sticker is the emblem of Darlington Academy, a predominantly white school founded the year that the federal courts began enforcing desegregation in our area.

“Darlington Academy,” Dad says. “Later on, after I’d been charged with Viola’s murder, Walt Garrity and I tracked down that truck. I hoped the owner would turn out to be Snake Knox, but it belonged to Will Devine.”

“The Double Eagle murdered in this court yesterday.”

“Yes. Devine lived less than a mile away from Knox, and I believe Knox took his truck that night to threaten or kill Viola.”

Shad doesn’t bother to object. Dad has already convicted himself of murder—or accessory after the fact, in any case. Which makes me wonder what in God’s name Quentin thinks he’s doing. I half expected Dad to destroy himself on the stand, but not this. Quentin is helping him do it.

Quentin rolls closer to the witness box. “You’ve given us a lot to process, Doctor. But let’s return to the rather astonishing statement you made a few minutes ago. That Viola Turner wanted Knox and Thornfield to murder her.”

“All right.”

“Did you mean that literally?”