Caitlin’s heart skipped when four black-and-white photographs dropped out of the back of the journal in her hand. The first showed an African-American girl of extraordinary beauty sitting on a piano bench, her back to a Baldwin piano. She couldn’t have been more than seventeen, but her eyes held the self-possession of a woman ten years older. There was an ethereal quality about her, yet Caitlin could see from the shape of her neck and collarbones that she was no delicate flower. Turning over the photo, Caitlin read: Swan, 1964, written lightly in pencil.

The second photo showed the same girl standing next to a skinny white boy with a nervous grin on his pimpled face, hands locked in front of him as though he were afraid of what he might do with them if they got loose. Henry, Caitlin thought with a pang of guilt. Henry at fourteen. My God. And now he’s lying over in that hospital, stabbed and beaten half to death.

A heartbreaking passage in one notebook had described a Saturday afternoon when Henry had walked into Albert’s store and found Swan and Jimmy Revels making love in the back room. Though Henry desperately loved Swan, she had loved the heroic and gifted young leader whom Henry himself had looked up to as a kind of demigod. On that terrible day, Henry had sprinted all the way home, his youth pouring out of him in the tears he shed along the way.

Still thinking about Penn’s call, Caitlin picked up the third photo from her desk. It showed Albert Norris leaning against a pickup truck with a piano loaded in its bed. He was a strong, dignified-looking man with a smile of greeting on his face, though Caitlin thought his eyes seemed slightly veiled, like those of a sage accustomed to concealing his wisdom.

“You poor man,” she murmured, recalling that Norris had served as a cook in the navy during World War II. “Why didn’t you go north after the war?”

The man in the snapshot didn’t answer. History remained unalterable: Albert Norris had stayed in the South and done about as well as a black man could in the town where he was born—until the night he was burned alive. Caitlin’s black hair fell across the photograph. She brushed it back, then slid the photo aside.