I can’t imagine a purer, more righteous anger than that of a son who helped his mother to die after a life ruined by a man who’d refused to marry her or acknowledge him. The situation must have been tempting for a lawyer. If Lincoln knew Dad had been in Cora’s house before him, he would have instantly seen how easily Dad could be framed for his mother’s death. The necessary props for the deception were ready to hand: the syringe with Dad’s fingerprints, the vial of morphine prescribed by the man Lincoln longed to punish. And Cora Revels probably told Lincoln about the euthanasia pact between Dad and Viola. If fate handed Lincoln a chance like that—a chance to make “his father” pay for a lifetime of neglect—would he refuse? I doubt it.

This scenario easily explains Lincoln’s behavior. But does it explain Dad’s? His refusal to say what happened in Cora’s house that night? Holding his silence in the face of deputies handcuffing him and leading him to court? Silence in the face of indictment for murder? Yes, yes, and yes. In the mind of a guilt-ridden father, all these acts must have seemed noble efforts to protect the son he’d failed throughout his life.

But jumping bail?

This takes me a little longer, but at last the answer comes. So long as Dad remained silent while awaiting trial—and so long as I and others protested his innocence—people might continue to investigate Viola’s death. Friends like Jewel Washington might have gone back over the crime scene, or probed more deeply into Lincoln’s whereabouts on the night of her death. They might have asked, as I did, why Lincoln hadn’t been in Natchez for the past month while his mother slipped inexorably toward death. But by jumping bail, Dad swept all those possibilities off the table. From the moment his flight became public, every cop, lawyer, and average citizen would view him as a killer trying to escape punishment.

I can’t begin to guess what Dad was doing with Sonny Thornfield last night at the Ferriday hospital. Maybe he wasn’t there with Thornfield at all. Maybe he had coronary symptoms himself, and stopped to get a nurse or doc he knew to provide him some meds or do an EKG. Hell, maybe he was meeting Drew there. Whatever his reason, it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that every cop in Mississippi and Louisiana is chasing the wrong man. And now I know who the right man is. There’s just one little problem—

Proof.