Following him inside, I find a ten-by-twelve room whose walls are plastered with maps, photographs, a bulletin board, a whiteboard, and pushpins connecting various names, photos, and locations on the walls. Three worktables form a U with its open end facing the door, and the lower half of each wall seems to be braced with banker’s boxes spilling files. The room instantly hurls me back to the days when I was prosecuting capital murder cases in Houston. Our workrooms were larger than this, but the atmosphere was the same.

“The nerve center of your investigations?”

“Yep. Almost totally analog, I’m embarrassed to say.”

“Nothing wrong with analog, buddy.”

“An intern I had from Syracuse called this my war room. I call it the cooler, because it holds the cold cases from the last forty years. I’m working twelve unsolved murders from the 1960s alone, and those are just the ones I’m sure were murder. The FBI would kill to see inside this room.”

The first thing that really catches my eye is a poster advertising a Ku Klux Klan rally to be held at Liberty Park in Natchez, which was less than a mile from the house I grew up in.

“As far as the paternity issue,” Henry says, “less than a week before Viola fled Natchez, she was gang-raped by several members of the Double Eagle group. I don’t know the etiquette of gang rape, but I’m guessing none of those bastards wore condoms. And if I had to guess who was there, I’d pick Frank and Snake Knox, Sonny Thornfield, and the guy I interviewed this morning. I have pictures of all those men.”

He takes my elbow and leads me to a rogues’ gallery tacked to the wall opposite us. “Here,” he says, tapping the black-and-white snaps with his right forefinger. “These four sterling citizens here. Tell me what you see.”

My mind is too consumed by fear to make much of the faces. I see a blur of pale-skinned, hollow-eyed men of the kind you see in Civil War photographs. Except … one. One man is darker than his comrades—much darker—almost as though he has a deep tan or sunburn. But when I look closer, I see that the color is part of his biology, perhaps a sign of Creole or even Indian blood, like a Louisiana Redbone.

“Who’s this?” I ask, touching the photo.

“Walter Stillson ‘Sonny’ Thornfield. And in my opinion, Lincoln Turner’s father.”

Despite the horror implied in this statement—for Viola, and for Lincoln, if he knows the truth—I feel a flood of relief. “Do you think Lincoln knows about his mother’s rape?”

“I hope not. But even if he does, what bastard child doesn’t pray that he’s the son of the lord of the manor, and not a lowly peasant?”

“So Lincoln may believe that my father is his father, even if he’s not.”