Leaning back in my chair, I close my eyes and let the picture fall on my lap. Before a half-dozen breaths fill my lungs, I sit bolt upright, my heart pounding. Snatching up the picture, I study Viola once more, my heartbeat still accelerating. As soon as I stopped trying to figure out what I was missing in the photograph, an epiphany flashed through me. What I’ve been searching for isn’t visible in the picture. Nor was it ever visible in Viola’s presence.

It was her smell.

Even now, I remember it with startling clarity. When Viola sat me down to prick my finger or to give me a tetanus shot, then reached into the glass jar to give me a peppermint, her scent teased my nose in a way I’ve never forgotten. There was perfume in it, one whose name I’ll probably never know. But there was something else beneath that fragrance, something as clean as fresh-turned earth or newly mown grass. The perfumed fraction of that complex scent smells expensive in my memory, something a nurse would not likely have been able to afford. But whether I’m right or wrong about this, one thing I know with certainty: The night my father picked me up so late from the hospital, and told me he’d been on a house call, his imported cigar wasn’t the smell that struck me as I climbed into the car.

It was the tantalizing scent of Viola Turner.

CHAPTER 46

BILLY KNOX SAT at the oak desk in the study of the lodge at Fort Knox, a Walther pistol before him. Two of the three young men who had attacked Henry Sexton stood across from him, their eyes pinned as though flying high on speed. Fear had done that: raw, gut-churning fear. Their wounded friend—the one the old lady had plugged in the belly—lay on a bench against the wall opposite the desk, a tarp folded under him to stop him bleeding onto the upholstery. His name was Casey Whelan. Sonny had injected him with something that was supposed to stop the pain, and Snake had wrapped two turns of camouflage-pattern duct tape around his mouth. Though the tape had slipped a bit, the screaming had finally subsided, but Whelan was still moaning.

Snake Knox stood behind Billy like an older ghost of his son. Beside Snake crouched the seven-hundred-pound razorback Forrest had killed with a spear, the shaft of which still jutted from the hog’s back. And near the hog, concealed behind a partly open door, stood Forrest Knox himself.

“Why do you think Brody chose you guys to kill Henry?” Billy asked.