“I’ve been thinking back to the day of your last heart attack. I was on the river with Caitlin, spreading that waitress’s ashes. When Mom called me, she said you were in terrible pain, but you were asking to see me, that you were desperate to tell me something very important.”

He stares at his cigar like a primitive tribesman entranced by fire.

“Mom said you were afraid you would die before you could tell me whatever it was. Then, when I got to the hospital, you acted like you had no memory of that.”

“Wasn’t I unconscious when you got to the hospital?”

“Pretty much.”

“You asked me about this last month. My answer is the same. When I woke up, I had no memory of what you’re talking about.”

“But Mom confirmed that you said those things.”

He shrugs. “I was out of my head. Obtunded, we say in medicine.”

“Uh-huh. Or maybe once you woke up, you realized you were going to survive, so you didn’t feel compelled to confess whatever it was.”

He suddenly looks too exhausted to argue further. If Mom were here, she would tell me to stop warting him. But I can’t. He’s risking his life by forcing Shad to proceed with an arrest. The last time Dad was involved in a trial was during my senior year in high school—a malpractice case. That stress caused his first heart attack, and he was only forty-six. Tonight he’s thirty years and several surgeries down the road.

“Let’s back up a second,” I say. “When you were telling me about Viola, you skimmed over why she left town.”

He shrugs. “That’s no mystery. The KKK had kidnapped and murdered her brother. Also a friend of his. The bodies were never found, but I never had any doubt that the Klan killed those boys. How could Viola stay here after that?”

“Which Klan guys? Do you have any idea?”

“Probably the same bastards behind the rest of the killings around here. The rednecks who worked out at Triton and Armstrong and IP. Or those Double Eagles that Henry Sexton writes about.”

I don’t want to reveal my contact with Henry yet. “Do you know that for sure?”

“Who else could it have been? Everybody knew who’d done it, in a general way. But nobody knew exactly. That’s how it was all over the South. That’s why the violence continued. Nobody was willing to look too deeply into it, for fear of being targeted themselves.”

Dad takes another pull on his cigar, then sets it in the ashtray. “Did you ever hear about the Heffner family in McComb?”

“No.” McComb, Mississippi, is only sixty miles east of Natchez.