“I wouldn’t play games about something like this, Penn. This guy isn’t a random citizen. He’s an attorney from Chicago. And he means business.”

Chicago? “Who’s Dad supposed to have killed?”

“A sixty-five-year-old woman named Viola Turner. Do you know that name?”

Viola Turner. “I don’t think so.”

“Take a minute.”

After a disjointed moment of confusion, a Proustian rush of scents and images flashes though my brain. With the tang of rubbing alcohol in my nose, I see a tall, dark-skinned woman who looks very much like Diahann Carroll playing Julia on TV in the late 1960s, her white nurse’s cap fitted perfectly into diligently straightened black hair, her bright, intelligent eyes set in a café au lait face. Nurse Viola. I never saw Viola Turner after I was eight years old, yet this image remains startlingly true. Viola administered my tetanus and penicillin shots when I was a boy, and held my hand while my father stitched up my knees after I ripped them open on the street. During these stressful episodes, I almost never cried, and now I remember why. While Dad hooked that curved needle through my torn skin, Viola would chant or sing softly to me in a language I had never heard. My father later told me this was Creole French, which only confused me. I’d taken French in elementary school, but Nurse Viola’s songs resembled nothing I had heard within the walls of St. Stephen’s Prep. Only now do I realize that Viola’s gift for empathy and her exotic voice must have imprinted her indelibly in my young mind.

“I don’t understand,” I say softly. “I thought she lived far off somewhere. L.A. or—”

“Chicago,” Shad finishes. “For the past thirty-seven years.”

A rush of dread overpowers my initial skepticism. “Shad, what the hell’s going on?”

“As far as I understand it, several months ago, Mrs. Turner was diagnosed with lung cancer. Terminal. Her treatment didn’t go well. A few weeks ago, she decided to come home to Natchez to die.”

“After thirty-seven years?”

“Happens all the time, brother. Black folk might have run from the South as fast as they could when they were young, but they miss it when they get old. Don’t you know that?”

Shad’s down-home soul brother voice is an act; a Mississippi-born African-American, he lost his drawl a month after his parents moved him north to Chicago to attend prep school.