She comes around the desk carrying a big purse and a cake box. “I sure like your books, Mayor Cage. My husband does too. And he don’t hardly read nothing anymore, so that’s saying something.”

“I appreciate it, Mrs …?”

“Whittington,” she says. “I used to be a Smithdale, ages ago. I only say that ’cause Dr. Cage treated me when I was a teenager. They don’t make ’em like Dr. Cage anymore.”

I give the obligatory smile I always do in these situations.

As Mrs. Whittington passes me, I feel her hand close on my wrist, and she looks into my eyes with the disarming sincerity of country people. “I mean it,” she says earnestly. “You take care of your daddy.”

I promise that I will, realizing as I do that the rumors must already be spreading outward through landlines and the cellular airwaves like vibrations through a spiderweb.

“We’ll be praying for you,” Mrs. Whittington says, and then she’s gone.

I hear the glass door being locked as I pass through the doorway into a larger room containing several small desks, a photocopier, and tall shelves holding big bound volumes filled with back issues of the Beacon. Seated behind one of the desks, playing an old National guitar with a shining silver resonator, is Henry Sexton, the lanky, unassuming baby boomer who has stirred up more trouble for ex-Klansmen than almost any reporter in the South. Henry nods when he sees me, but he keeps on playing, using a gold cigarette lighter as a slide, filling the room with crystalline wails that soar over droning low notes that ebb and flow like the moaning of a grieving man. With his graying mustache and goatee, he looks more like an old musician than a journalist.

“Come on in and sit down,” he says, scrunching up his mouth as he plays a particularly difficult passage; then he tosses out a flurry of blue notes that vanish into a shimmering harmonic at the twelfth fret.

“Sounds good,” I say, as he lays the National flat in his lap.

“I try to keep my hand in. Calms me down when I’m stressed out. Playing this guitar always makes me think of Albert Norris.”

As Henry takes his hands from the strings, I notice his hands are shaking. “Did you know him personally?” I ask, quickly looking up at his eyes.