Walt gave an obligatory chuckle. Then his voice dropped, and he said, “I know you don’t like lying to your boy.”

“It’s better this way,” Tom said, trying to believe it. “Penn’s got too much weighing on him already. And I don’t want him worrying Quentin to death.”

“Does that old lawyer know how to keep his mouth shut?”

Tom nodded. “When Quentin Avery goes to his grave, a lot of people will rest easier.”

“From what you said, it doesn’t sound like that’ll be a very long trip.”

Tom looked out at what remained of the little town of Washington, which had been the capital of the Mississippi Territory until 1802. “None of us knows the length of that trip, do we?”

Walt slowed and began a careful U-turn near the entrance to Jefferson Military College, where John James Audubon had once taught as a professor. “Some are closer than others. A grunt walking through a minefield is likely to buy it a lot sooner than a Remington Raider.”

“Remington Raider” was what they’d called rear-echelon typists in Korea. Tom tapped the window absently, his mind on other things. He’d missed a house call earlier that day, on one of his favorite patients, an elderly woman dying of emphysema. “Brother, at this age we’re all in the minefield.”

“Speak for yourself. I intend to be keeping Carmelita just as happy ten years from now as I am today.”

Tom watched his breath fog the window glass. He hoped his friend would be that lucky. He’d watched so many friends and patients die over the past ten years that life seemed the most fragile and tenuous state imaginable. Korea had taught him that lesson early, but somehow he’d blinded himself to it in the intervening years. You basically had to, to function in the world. But the steadily lengthening list of the dead—Viola’s only the latest name to be added—had forced him to confront the fact that he had little time left himself. That was tough enough from an existential perspective; but to have his perception of his whole history shattered, and with it his legacy, as had happened in the past two days, had pushed him into uncharted territory. Tom had never felt so alone and isolated.