“Nobody knows. It was a blank spot in her life, and she refused to fill it during our interviews. The FBI worked Jimmy’s and Luther’s disappearances pretty hard, but on April fourth Martin Luther King was assassinated in Memphis. Then on May fourteenth—”

“Del Payton was murdered with a truck bomb,” I finish. “And that consumed whatever local FBI resources were still in town.”

“Exactly. What would become your most famous case thirty years later grabbed all the headlines. After that, Jimmy and Luther were virtually forgotten. No one found any bodies, and the Bureau only located Viola much later.”

“What about the plan to lure Kennedy down here?”

“I think Brody Royal scrapped it after Frank died. He didn’t trust Snake to carry out an operation of that magnitude, or keep his mouth shut if he did. Brody ordered Snake to kill Jimmy, Luther, and Viola, and make sure their bodies would never be found, no matter how hard the FBI might search for them.”

“Then how the hell did Viola survive?”

“According to my Eagle source, Ray Presley and your father saved her.”

My frustration is compounding every minute. “How the hell could they have done that?”

“I don’t know. Remember the machine shop? Snake went nuts when his brother died. He started torturing those boys out of grief. At some point they kidnapped Viola again and brought her out there, and she was brutalized some more. I’m afraid even Jimmy might have been molested. But that was probably trivial compared to his ultimate fate.”

“How the hell could Viola escape? You think Ray got her out?”

“My source didn’t give me the details of that. We got cut off. And since Ray is dead, probably no one but your father and the Double Eagles know the answer.”

I take another drink of bourbon, but I can hardly taste it. My mind is well and truly blown. “Two things I don’t understand. One, if all this happened the way you said, then Viola knew enough to send serious criminals to the gas chamber. Why would she keep her mouth shut, after they’d killed her brother? The Bureau had agents in Natchez in 1968. Why didn’t she talk to them?”

Henry sighs. “That’s like asking why a Sioux squaw didn’t go the U.S. Cavalry for help in 1880, after white settlers had terrorized her and killed her family. Viola knew exactly what Snake Knox and his buddies were capable of, and she knew the FBI couldn’t protect her from them.”

“They killed her brother, Henry. They gang-raped her. Do you really believe she would have kept quiet about that?”