The two-lane blacktop follows an ancient Indian path, winding north through Adams County, past Jefferson College, Emerald Mound, Loess Bluff, and a hundred other landmarks before it leaves the state following the old flatboatmen’s route back to Nashville, Tennessee. The northwest corner of Adams County is mostly old plantation land, thickly wooded, nearly impenetrable in some places, and it’s there that Lincoln leaves the Trace and steers his big pickup deeper into the forest.

For the first few miles, lights are sparse, cars few. Then both disappear altogether. Somewhere out to the west of us, the Mississippi River is flowing. To the north lie Alcorn State University, the river city of Bienville, and the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station. But from where we are, you’d never know it. I feel like we’re following a narrow stream through a primeval forest. The hills get steeper, the gullies off the shoulders deeper, but the trees never relent.

“You guessed where we’re going yet?” Lincoln asks.

The only settlement that I know about up this way is Church Hill, to the west, but I’m pretty sure we’ve already passed it. As I ponder what I remember of this region, a vision of dark Corinthian columns against a night sky comes to me, the only survivors of a once-great plantation house that burned in the 1800s—and one of Caitlin’s favorite places.

“Windsor Ruins?” I ask.

Lincoln laughs softly. “Close, but no. That’s in the next county up.”

“Aren’t we almost out of Adams County by now?”

“No.”

“What’s left? Who lives up here?”

“Nobody, baby. We’re going to a dead place.”

“What does that mean? A cemetery?”

“Might as well be.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Those Double Eagle bastards, the few that are left . . . what are they, really? Devils who outlived their time. They’re ghosts. You know what I’m saying?”

“Sure. But I still don’t get it.”

“Where do ghosts feel safe?”

“I don’t know. A church?”

“Close again.”

“For God’s sake, Lincoln.”

“A ghost town!”

It takes a couple of seconds, but then I get it. Just south of the Claiborne County line lie the remnants of Rodney, a once-prosperous town abandoned by the Mississippi River in the 1800s. My father took me there when I was a boy, because the place had been the site of a small but famous Civil War action. All I remember of Rodney is a two-story brick church with a Yankee cannonball embedded high in its front wall, and a lot of sand and dust.

“You got it now?” Lincoln asks.

“What the hell is Snake doing in Rodney?”

“You just answered your own question.”

“Does anybody still live up there? The river left it high and dry a hundred years ago.”

“There’s probably forty people spread through the woods up there. Maybe fifty. There’s a big hunting camp, though. Sound familiar?”