“Not right away. I was very upset. I’m not sure how long I waited to go down there, but it was still dark. When I knocked, no one answered. The doorknob turned when I tried it, so I went in. I heard soft moaning. I called out to see if anyone was home, but Viola seemed to be alone in that sickroom. I couldn’t understand why she was alone. Now, of course, I know her sister had fallen asleep at the neighbor’s house.”

“What did you do, Mom?”

A shadow passes through my mother’s eyes. She works her mouth around, then licks her lips. “I wet a dishrag and wiped Viola’s face with it, and she woke up. She was groggy but lucid enough. I guess she’d built up a very high tolerance for morphine.”

“Did she recognize you?”

“Oh, yes. She said I’d hardly changed, which was a lie, of course. But she did know me. But Penn . . . she had changed beyond recognition. When she left Natchez, she was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever seen, just as her son said on the stand. But when I talked to her that night, she looked ninety years old. She was sixty-five. But only her eyes held any trace of the woman I remembered.”

I push out all thoughts of the terrible life Viola endured in Chicago. “What else passed between you?”

“She asked where Tom was. I told her I’d seen him leave. She told me then that he’d tricked her. That she’d expected to die, but that Tom must not have had the heart to go through with it.”

“And? What happened then?”

“She cried a little. She asked about our family. Whether I’d been happy. She told me a little about her life in Chicago. She was terribly sad when she talked about her son.”

“Did you know Dad was Lincoln’s father at that point?”

“No. No one had ever told me that. But I’d always feared it, of course, down deep. That’s why . . .”

“What?”

“Tom wasn’t the only one who sent Viola money all those years.”

“Tell me, Mom.”

“Didn’t you wonder where all that money they kept talking about came from? The money in Viola’s will? If you listened early on, you know that Junius Jelks spent everything she earned. But then all of a sudden she had seventy-two thousand dollars to leave to Henry Sexton and her family?”

“You sent that?”