I give Henry a searching look. “And maybe more than that?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“But you’ve been thinking it. I have, too, ever since this morning.”

Henry sighs and taps the shining metal face of the National. “Was Dr. Cage the straying kind?”

“Not that I know of. But God knows every man’s capable of it, if the right temptation comes along.”

“Granted. But even if he and Viola were lovers, I don’t see how it would alter cases. I think your father cared about Viola and wanted to protect her, whether he’d slept with her or not.”

I can no longer keep my darkest fear buried in my brain. “It might alter cases quite a bit if it turns out that Dad fathered Viola’s child. That Lincoln Turner is his son. That might be a secret worth going to prison to keep hidden. In my father’s mind, anyway.”

Henry sits as still as a stone Buddha, watching me cautiously. “Maybe,” he concedes finally. “But I’ve already gone down that road, and I don’t believe it. I do believe Lincoln Turner is the son of a white man—but not your father. I checked Lincoln’s age, and he was surely conceived around the time Viola left Natchez.”

I’m actually trembling. “And?”

“I staked out Shad Johnson’s office for a while this afternoon, and I got a good look at the man himself. Lincoln, I mean.”

“Lincoln was at Shad’s office again?”

“Yes. And he’s a very dark-skinned fellow. About three times as dark as Shad Johnson, I’d say, and twice as dark as his mother. Your father is Scots-English, a very light-skinned man.”

“Is that scientific proof?”

Henry looks at the floor, then seems to take some silent decision. “I want to show you something, Penn.” He looks up, his face vulnerable. “But before I do, I need one promise. I’ve worked too long and too hard on these cases to hand it all over to other people now.”

“I know you have, Henry. Nothing you tell me will leave this building. And I expect the same discretion from you.”

“That’s good enough for me.” Setting down the guitar and taking a set of keys from his desk drawer, he leads me down a narrow hallway to a metal door at the back of the building. He opens two locks, then pushes the door open with a screech and flips on a fluorescent light.