“Lord, I’m losing my breath.” Viola takes a drink of water. “I told Tom our affair was over that day. But that didn’t spare us any pain. The next night Knox’s gang grabbed me out of my house about two in the morning. They took me to a machine shop out in the county. A place they used to question people. They had special equipment out there, for hurting people. You could see old blood on it. They had knives and chains and iron bars and torches. I . . . don’t want to talk about that.

“Anyway, that’s where Jimmy and Luther were being held. They were both in bad shape by the time I got there, but the Klansmen never let up on them. Thornfield kept at them about them running guns, and something about Black Muslims, but I don’t think Jimmy or Luther knew anything about that. If they had, they would have talked, bad as those men were hurting them. Snake Knox skinned off Jimmy’s navy tattoo with a knife. The others raped me some more, right in front of Jimmy. It was like the old nuns used to describe hell in my grade school. Like those forbidden paintings from the Middle Ages. I don’t even know how long I was in that place. Maybe that’s why they say hell is eternal.

“But then a man sneaked in there with a big pistol and took me out. He was Ray Presley, a man so mean that even the Klan was scared of him. He’d been a dirty cop down in New Orleans, and he knew everybody on both sides of the law. Presley had something he held over Dr. Cage, but he liked him, too. Presley saved me as a favor to Tom.”

With a quivering hand, Viola takes another tiny sip of water. “But Presley didn’t save Jimmy. Luther, neither. Something broke inside me that night, when Presley dragged me out of there screaming. I knew those men were going to kill my brother. Presley knew it, too. He told me nothing could change that, not even President Johnson. It was just the way things were. And I guess he was right.

“There’s not much to tell after that. I don’t have any firsthand knowledge of how Jimmy died or where they hid his body. I didn’t see those men kill Jimmy or Luther, though they shot Luther in the arm with a pistol while I was there. The bullet broke the bone. They were both still alive when Presley took me out of there, but my opinion as a nurse is that without medical attention, they would have died from their wounds, or from shock.