A month ago, the retired nurse had appeared to Henry like an angel, returning from Chicago after decades away, knowing death was close and struggling with some secret she’d held inside since she left. Henry’s most precious hope was that Viola knew the fates of her brother, Jimmy Revels, and Luther Davis. He’d interviewed her twice, and though she hadn’t yet built up enough trust in him to speak with complete candor, he’d sensed that Viola was approaching a major revelation. That was why he’d left a voice recorder with her after his first visit, and a camcorder on a tripod after the second. If the mood to talk struck her at 4 A.M., Henry wanted whatever Viola said preserved for the record. Now she was dead, and if the tape from that camcorder was missing, then he had to wonder whether the old nurse had actually used the machine and paid for that act with her life. A wave of nausea hit Henry as he realized that meeting with him might have caused Viola’s death.

Her sudden passing was like a replay of another death just five days ago. The two murder cases that most obsessed Henry were those of Albert Norris, the music store owner, and Pooky Wilson, a young musician who’d worked for Albert. Henry had always believed Pooky was murdered for sleeping with the daughter of one of the richest men in Louisiana, a white girl named Katy Royal. Albert had almost certainly died for trying to protect his young employee. Quite a few people in the know had accepted this scenario, even at the time, but Henry had never been able to prove it.

Then seven days ago, Pooky’s aged mother had sent word for Henry to come to her hospital bed. Barely able to speak, the desperately ill woman had told him that, after forty-one years of frightened silence, one of her son’s boyhood friends had appeared at her bedside and revealed something he’d kept locked in his heart since he was sixteen. Pooky had not only been sleeping with Katy Royal, this friend confirmed, but he had been hiding in Albert’s store on the afternoon that Brody Royal and Frank Knox came in and threatened the shop owner’s life. Later that night, drawn by the sound of an explosion, this same friend had seen three men leap from the window of Norris’s burning store. Two had joined another man, then jumped into a pickup and fled the scene. But the third man had calmly walked to a shiny new car driven by a man the boy recognized as Randall Regan, a brutal roughneck who worked for Brody Royal. At that moment the boy had realized that the third man was Brody Royal himself.