“Lincoln … you wish history was something less terrible than it was for your mother. I wish the same thing. But you shouldn’t try to punish my father for pain inflicted by someone else. My father loved your mother. He proved that in the last month of her life. Why can’t you leave it at that?”

Lincoln lays a twenty-dollar bill on the table and prepares to go.

“You talk about sin like you’ve never committed any yourself,” I observe.

His eyes blaze with sudden passion. “Whatever evil I’ve done goes on Tom Cage’s account. You hear me? I am his sin, alive in the world.”

Lincoln’s ominously resonant voice makes my skin prickle. “If that’s true, then what am I?”

He looks back at me for several silent seconds. “You’re what he could have been.”

Lincoln turns toward the door and walks out without looking back.

Before I follow, the bartender calls: “Don’t come back here no more, Mayor. I don’t want that sheriff up in here again.”

I acknowledge his order with a wave, then walk out of the juke in the footsteps of a man who just might be my brother.

CHAPTER 73

A MILE DOWN the road from CC’s Rhythm Club, something breaks in my mind, like a steel restraining pin giving way inside some complex machine. For the past two and a half days, my father’s behavior has stumped me. Nothing about it has made sense from the moment Shad Johnson called to tell me that Viola was dead and Lincoln wanted my father charged with murder.

But if I simply accept Lincoln Turner’s assertion to be true—that my father is also his father—then logic leads me to a sequence of deductions that can’t be refuted. One: If Lincoln is my father’s son, then he’s family in my father’s eyes. Two: If Lincoln is family, then he deserves my father’s protection as much as I or my sister would. My heart clenches as the next question forms in my mind: In what circumstance would my father risk his life to protect Lincoln Turner?

Lincoln’s life must be at risk.

How could Lincoln’s life be at risk?

He’s either been threatened, or he’s guilty of a serious crime.

Who might have threatened him?

No way to know.

Of what crime could Lincoln be guilty?

“Killing his mother,” I say aloud. Killing his mother …

My heart flexes like a straining biceps, but still my mind races down the interrogatory chain. “How could Lincoln kill his mother if he was thirty miles outside Natchez?”

He couldn’t.

The next question flares in my mind like a bottle rocket in a black sky: What if Lincoln was in Natchez when Viola died?