“You wish I was,” Snake says. “You had no idea, did you?” His eyes watch mine with almost sexual pleasure. “Thought you wanted the truth, huh? The truth is, your mama killed the woman your daddy used to screw back in the day. Maybe out of anger, maybe out of trying to keep things secret. Or maybe just out of shame.”

“Tell me he’s lying,” Lincoln says.

“He is. My mother was there that night, all right, but he’s only telling part of the story.”

“She what?” Lincoln asks, unbelieving.

“I just found out today. Dad didn’t want to go through with the suicide pact. To fool your mother, he injected a diluted solution of morphine into a deep vein, to give himself time to process everything she’d told him. About you, especially. But Mom had followed him there that night. She’d followed him a few nights earlier, too, and discovered he was seeing your mother again. That second time, Mom went into the house after he left, to find out exactly what was going on. Viola woke up while she was in there. They talked, and your mother begged mine to do what Dad had been unable to do.”

“Bullshit,” Snake says.

Hot anger rises in my gullet. “It’s the truth! Mom tried to do what Viola wanted, but she screwed up. She was the one who botched that morphine injection. She didn’t have the skill to hit in the vein.”

“So she injected adrenaline instead,” Snake says. “However you slice it, she killed the nurse.” The wily old bastard fixes Lincoln in his gaze. “You see? I didn’t kill your mama, boy.”

“Yes, you did,” I insist, wondering if there could be any truth to what he’s saying. “My mother left thinking she’d succeeded. But Dad came back, just as he’d planned to do when he left. He found Viola still sedated, and he found the tape in the camera. He saw on the tape that Mom had been there, what she’d tried to do, and that ended up being the thing that drove everything that happened afterward—his desire to protect his wife from a potential murder charge.”

“Who told you that fairy tale?” Snake asks in a taunting voice. “Your daddy, I’ll bet.”

“They both told me—separately.”

“Because they finally got their story straight. They had months to work on it before that trial, didn’t they? How many people died to protect your mama, Mayor? The mistress of the plantation couldn’t go to jail for killin’ an old used-up slave, could she? Even if that slave kept the master’s bed warm all those years ago—”

“Shut up,” Lincoln mutters.

Black glee fills Snake’s laugh. Our suffering is like liquor to him. “I never killed your mama, boy. And now you know it.”