“I been thinking about all we said today. About Viola, mostly. It pains me something fierce to look back on all that. I know you don’t understand, but … things was just different then.”

“I know,” Henry said, thinking Morehouse sounded different than he had face-to-face, smaller and less imposing. He wondered if the old Klansman had taken a pill himself.

“You asked me about the bodies,” Morehouse said. “Where they might be.”

“Do you know?”

“Them places you mentioned? The Jericho Hole and the Bone Tree? You won’t go far wrong if you check them out.”

Henry’s pulse picked up. “Are you saying the Bone Tree really exists?”

“I wish it didn’t.” Morehouse wheezed, then burped. He sounded drunk. “But it does. At least it did about fifteen years ago. That was the last time I saw it.”

The hair rose on Henry’s neck and forearms. “Can you tell me how to get there?”

“Naw. The times I went there it was night, and I was in a boat. I ain’t never been good at directions like that. Everything looks the same in the swamp. Frank or Snake always took me out there. Sonny might remember the way.”

“Sonny Thornfield?”

“Shit, Henry. You got me talking too much.”

“You’re doing the right thing, brother. You know it. Surely you can tell me something about where that tree is.”

“Lusahatcha Swamp. But tellin’ you to hunt for a cypress tree back in there is like telling you to go outside on my five acres and find one blade of grass that has my initials wrote on it.”

“Not quite. Death leaves traces, Glenn. Skeletal remains. Corpses put out gases caused by decay, other things.”

Morehouse gave a hollow laugh. “Even if they dumped a corpse in there yesterday, you wouldn’t have a prayer. That swamp bubbles out methane twenty-four hours a day. All manner of creatures been killin’ and dyin’ in there every minute for a million years. And forty-year-old bones have either rotted or been shit out by hogs and alligators. Can’t nobody show you that tree except somebody who’s been there. And anybody who’s been there who would have showed it to you … they died there.”

“Does anyone besides the Double Eagles know where it is?”

“Some of the nigras down in Lusahatcha County, supposedly, but they wouldn’t go there for a million bucks. If you go down there a-lookin’, watch yourself. Because they’ll know. Nothing moves down there that those boys don’t know about.”

“I went down there once with a guide, but I didn’t find anything.”

“Then you were lucky. If you go back, take the National Guard with you.”

“What about the Jericho Hole? Over the years, I’ve heard rumors that ten different bodies were dumped in there.”

“Might have been. That’s a deep old hole.”

“Were Luther and Jimmy buried together?”