“That’s right.” Henry paused before going on, trying to understand the surreal turn the conversation had taken.

Morehouse was staring in disbelief. “She was warned never to come back here!”

“Warned by whom, Glenn?”

“Who do you think? Us. If Viola ever came back, she’d be killed. That was the deal. Like a postponed death sentence. Commuted, or whatever.”

At some level, Henry realized, he hadn’t taken the force of the old death threat seriously enough. He recalled how quickly Shad Johnson had dismissed the idea of Double Eagle involvement in Viola’s death, and he felt guilty. “Considering her cancer, Viola probably didn’t much care about forty-year-old threats.”

“Then she’s lost her mind,” Morehouse said, plainly speaking in the present tense. “I’ve got cancer myself, but I ain’t crazy.”

Henry kept silent, afraid of saying the wrong thing. Morehouse seemed to have no idea Viola was dead. Before Henry revealed that fact, he would draw out what information he could. “Why was Viola threatened, Glenn? Did she know who killed her brother?”

But Morehouse seemed to have sunk into himself again.

“If she’d known who killed Jimmy,” Henry reasoned aloud, “she wouldn’t have made it out of Natchez alive. Would she?”

“She damn near didn’t,” the old man muttered. “If it hadn’t been for Ray Presley and Dr. Cage, she wouldn’t have.”

Henry raced through his mental files: Ray Presley had been a dirty cop in both Natchez and New Orleans. He had strong ties to the Marcello mob and was feared by everyone on both sides of the law. Stranger still, he’d been killed during Penn Cage’s effort to solve Natchez’s most famous civil rights murder, which had also happened in 1968.

“What did Ray Presley and Dr. Cage have to do with saving Viola?”

The old man touched a knuckle to his forehead as though to ward off some evil spirit. “Ray’s dead, Henry. Best to pass over that bastard in silence.” A strange urgency came into his eyes. “Are you going to talk to Viola again?”

Henry thought of the emaciated corpse from the video. “I don’t know. Why?”

“If you do … you tell her I’m sorry. Okay? Tell her I didn’t mean her no harm.”

Morehouse had to be thinking about the rape. “What did you do to her, Glenn?”

Seeing dread in the old man’s eyes, Henry decided to press ahead. “Did you rape her?”

Morehouse winced.

“On March twenty-seventh of sixty-eight,” Henry said, “a rumor spread that Viola had been gang-raped by the Klan. I think you guys knew Jimmy and Luther wouldn’t be able to keep hiding if they thought Viola was suffering in their place. Was that just a story, Glenn? Or did you guys really rape her?”

Morehouse struck out with one arm, as though to ward off a blow.