Slipping the straight razor into my inside coat pocket, I descend the grand staircase and walk out into the filtered light of the setting sun. As I take out my cell phone to call Drew’s office about the cortisone, an adamantine certainty settles in my heart. I was right to come here. Though Pithy Nolan didn’t know one fact about how Viola died, she’s convinced me that Brody Royal and the Double Eagles murdered the dying nurse. Whatever else my father may be guilty of, he’s held his silence only to protect our family from those men. The only mysteries are how to prove this, and how to do it without getting killed.

CHAPTER 43

DARKNESS FELL FAST over Ferriday, sweeping across the delta as the sun fled westward, covering the empty fields and farm roads with shadow, then darkness. The ragged parade of dilapidated businesses along Highway 84 turned into a twinkling line of lights, like a convoy of ships sailing between the islands of Ferriday and Vidalia. That string of lights stretched all the way across the twin bridges linking Vidalia to Natchez on its high bluff, but the proud old city was a world away from Henry Sexton, who sat before his computer in the offices of the Beacon, on the dark northern edge of Ferriday.

All afternoon he’d been moving boxes of files into his Explorer, preparing to transport them to his girlfriend’s house, which was much closer to Natchez. If he was going to be working for Caitlin Masters (his publisher had graciously given him permission a few hours earlier), then he needed his files closer than twelve miles away. He didn’t trust Masters enough to store his files in her building—not yet anyway—but he was excited, and nervous, too. Filing stories for a media group with more than twenty newspapers was a foreign concept to him after all his years at the Beacon. But Penn was right: the murders of Viola Turner and Glenn Morehouse would require that, as would the bones coming up out of the Jericho Hole.

Henry hadn’t yet told Caitlin that he’d decided to work for her. She’d called his cell phone four times in the past two hours, but his pride demanded that he leave her in suspense a bit longer. Maybe tomorrow morning, he thought. What could it hurt? Besides, he had a few more leads he wanted to run down before he was working on Caitlin Masters’s dime.