We got back to Natchez a lot faster than we’d expected to. John Masters offered us a ride in his plane, which was a first for Annie. The nearest commercial airport to Natchez is ninety miles away, so having the Masters Media jet drop us only ten miles from our house was a real treat. As soon as I got Annie settled at home, I climbed into my Audi and headed through the night toward St. Catherine’s Hospital.

When I asked the duty nurse if Lincoln Turner was still in the same room, she frowned and told me he’d checked out against the advice of his physician, about four hours earlier. I stood there blinking, trying to divine what impulse would have compelled Lincoln to do that.

“He left you a note, Mayor,” the nurse said, and then she retrieved a sealed envelope from a drawer.

My name was scrawled across the front. I ripped the end off the envelope, pulled out the folded paper, and read the brief letter with a dazed feeling.

I’m going back to Chicago. I need to think. I’m sorry for all the trouble. I’m glad we did what we did, and that the right people got killed, for the most part. Don’t try to find me. You don’t owe me anything. Maybe we’ll cross paths again someday. L

I stared at the note for a long time, a missive from a man without a living mother or a father he will accept. I studied the words so long that I was stunned when the elevator dinged behind me. When the door opened, an older doctor I recognized smiled and said hello. I nodded and walked past him, then took the stairs down to the silent lobby and into the parking lot.

The night air is cool, the parking lot mostly empty. Instead of going to my car, I walk out toward the Highway 61 bypass. Not far from the tar-stinking frontage road stands the same little flower bed and the light pole where I waited for my father when I was a boy of eight. The night he left me alone for hours while he made love with Viola on the colored side of town. The flower bed is now filled with pea gravel and ornamental rocks, as though this were New Mexico, but the relentless weeds of Mississippi are already sprouting through this façade. I stand under the humming streetlight and watch the cars go by, just as I did almost forty years ago, fighting the tears of a little boy abandoned. Now, though, I realize that I endured only a few hours of the sadness and anxiety that ran through Lincoln’s life like an undertow, always pulling him away from the light, into darkness.