Chapters (42)
- Cover Page
- EARLY BIRD BOOKS
- Praise for the Writing of Richard North Patterson
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- One
- Two
- Three
- Four
- Five
- Six
- Seven
- Eight
- Nine
- Ten
- Eleven
- Twelve
- Thirteen
- Fourteen
- Fifteen
- Sixteen
- Seventeen
- Eighteen
- Nineteen
- Twenty
- Twenty-one
- Twenty-two
- Twenty-three
- Twenty-four
- Twenty-five
- Twenty-six
- Twenty-seven
- Twenty-eight
- Twenty-nine
- Thirty
- Thirty-one
- Thirty-two
- Thirty-three
- Thirty-four
- Thirty-five
- About the Author
I could see why, though, looking at the shady grounds and flowers in orderly plots, its air of perfect unreality seemed to match Lydia’s. “You’ve kept it up nicely,” I said.
“Someone had to. Is that what you came to say?”
“No. I wanted to ask about one of the defendants. Moses McCarroll.”
His voice, rough and old and hollow, held a note of malice. “What about him?”
“I wanted to know about the trial, and what happened to his family afterwards.”
“Don’t know much about the last.” He crossed one leg in a seeming act of will. “You find that strange?”
“I’m trying to imagine myself in your position.”
“Understand something, then.” He coughed, phlegm rattling in his throat. “The two nigras weren’t the issue.”
“I suppose that depends on your point of view.”
He held a handkerchief close to his mouth and spat into it. “Where you from?”
“Cleveland.”
“And raised very right-minded, I’m sure. The one thing more certain than that you didn’t know any southerners is that you didn’t know any blacks.”
“I’m not arguing. I came to ask you things, not tell you.”
“All right.” He looked at me sharply. “Driving through here, did you look around?”
“Some.”
“Look very wealthy to you?”
“Just this place.”
He ignored that. “Forty-odd years ago it was worse. The soil had gone from bad to farmed-out. When the Depression hit, Grangeville was so poor that for a while you hardly noticed. Then the L & N shut down the railroad yard. Three hundred men lost their jobs. Stores shut, just flat closed. People starved. They’d sweated and prayed and had nothing to show for it except rain that washed away the topsoil. One farmer hanged himself in his barn. Lucy Vines—the one with those two nigras—turned whore because of it.
“I’d been at law school and came back young and full of ambition, looking to lawyer awhile and then run for state senate. What I found was a town full of angry people and half the legal work in foreclosures where people hated your guts. So I got on at the prosecutor’s and started going to meetings, just listening and being seen. And what I heard was anger.