She ignores this remark. “I was thinking about this place. The town. The fact that it is a place, with a unique identity. Atlanta is so sterile that I literally can’t stand being in it sometimes.”

“I’ve felt the same thing in Houston.”

Looking up from the bridge, I see Natchez as the tourist sees it: the high bluff where sun-worshiping Natchez Indians massacred the French soldiers of Fort Rosalie in 1729; where Aaron Burr was arrested as a traitor and set free to the cheers of crowds; where an African prince labored twenty years as a slave; where Jefferson Davis wedded Varina Howell in the halcyon days before the Civil War. But I see so much more. I see the city Livy Marston captivated with a beauty and poise not seen since P. T. Barnum brought Jenny Lind down the river in 1851. I see the thin edge of a universe of vibrant life and mysterious death, of shadowy secrets and bright facades, and of races inextricably bound by blood and tears, geography and religion, and above all, time.

“This is a good place to be from,” I murmur.

“Could you ever live here again?” Livy asks in a strange voice.

I sense a deeper question beneath the one she’s asked. “I don’t know. Could you?”

She doesn’t take her eyes from the bluff. From this place she left to conquer the world. How does it look to her now?

“Not while my parents are alive,” she says, so softly that I’m not sure she knows she spoke aloud.

Before I can ponder what she meant, she turns to me, her eyes languid, and says, “Let’s go to the Cold Hole.”

The tingling in my hand spreads up my arm and across my neck and shoulders. The Cold Hole. One mile from the spot where my father and I sank the pistol I bought from Ray Presley—in the midst of that slimy, sulfurous swamp—a cold spring bubbles up through the green water, creating a pool as clear as Arctic snowmelt. It is the pool from my dream, the one I had the night Ike Ransom first told me about Leo Marston’s involvement in the Payton murder. The woman in my dream was Livy Marston, and she sits beside me now, asking me to take her to that pool. Only in the dream she had something to tell me. Today she says the past is off limits.