His jaw tightens and flexes. If there’s such a thing as an offended silence, that’s what I’m listening to now. “I’m not going to discuss that,” he says. “Viola’s gone, and she’s finally out of pain. That’s all that matters now.”

I lean forward, my eyes accusing. “Is it? A lot more people who survived that era need peace just as badly as she, and preferably while they’re still alive. Many of the men who committed those crimes are still walking around. They’re still hurting people. Do you think men who gang-raped Viola twice deserve to live out their days in peace?”

Dad looks up sharply, his face pale. Then he closes his eyes, and his head sags forward. I start to go on, but he raises a hand to stop me. “Don’t say any more. I’ll answer your three questions. Then I want you to drop all this.”

“I can’t promise that.”

He sighs heavily. “Leland Robb was a good man. He was a good physician, too, and he died badly. Aircraft fires are always terrible. They called me to identify his body. I had to use X-rays.”

“I don’t think Henry knows that.”

“A month before that crash, Leland came to see me. He was upset and needed to get something off his chest. He mentioned Frank Knox being at Albert Norris’s store on the afternoon Norris died, but Frank had been dead over a year by this time. Leland wanted to tell me about another man who’d been there, but I stopped him. Something in his manner told me how explosive that information was.” Dad shakes his head and picks up his cigar. “I wish now that I’d responded differently, but at the time … Leland was truly terrified. I urged him to confide in someone who could actually do something about what he knew—the FBI, or a moderate politician—but he didn’t. After he died, I wondered whether there might have been some sort of foul play involved, but the FAA didn’t find anything suspicious about the crash. What could I do?”

The tone in my father’s voice is both alien and familiar; it’s the voice of witnesses who stood by while someone else was being robbed, beaten, or killed. “You could have told the FBI about Frank Knox threatening Albert Norris. You could have told them that the man who collided with Dr. Robb’s plane had probably murdered Norris along with his brother!”

Dad’s unblinking gaze silences me. “If I’d done that,” he says softly, “you and I might not be sitting here now. Your mother might be a widow. You don’t know what those men were capable of. It’s not very honorable, I know, but that’s the choice I made.”