Natchez Burning (Penn Cage) Read online

  “Dr. Cage is right,” Viola said. “Jimmy, please talk some sense into Luther. If ya’ll stay in Natchez, you’re going to die. That Frank Knox is bad all the way through. He’s a killer.”

  “She’s right,” Tom concurred, straightening up and surveying his handiwork. “I know the breed. This time, discretion is the better part of valor.”

  “Freewoods,” Jimmy said thoughtfully. “We’ll go to Freewoods till things cool down.”

  “What’s Freewoods?” Tom asked.

  “Nothing,” snapped Luther. “Nowhere. He talkin’ crazy.”

  As Tom washed the blood from his hands and forearms, he noticed Jimmy Revels staring at him. “What is it, Jimmy?”

  “You don’t mind getting black blood on your skin?”

  Tom laughed. “I learned one thing fast as a combat medic: we all bleed the same color.”

  Jimmy smiled. “You didn’t learn that being a medic. You learned that from your parents.”

  Tom stared back at the serious young man and shook his head. “You’re wrong about that.” Opening a cabinet, he took out some antibiotics a drug rep had left him and handed them to Luther. “This will keep your wounds from getting infected. Viola can tell you about dosage. Now, you guys get out of here.”

  “I’ll get the car,” Viola said. “I’ll pull into the garage, then you both get down in the backseat.”

  “Backseat, my ass,” said Luther. “We gettin’ in the trunk.”

  Tom waited in a darkest corner of the freezing garage while Viola carried out her plan. He watched the two men fold themselves into the trunk of the Pontiac, quite a feat considering Luther’s bulk. After Viola slammed the lid shut, she didn’t walk around to the driver’s seat, but into the corner where Tom stood. She was only a dark shape in the shadows, but he knew her scent as well as any on earth. She stepped close and took his hand.

  “I don’t have words,” she murmured. “You saved my brother’s life.”

  “Viola,” he whispered. “This isn’t just dangerous. This could get you killed. All of us.”

  “I know. And you shouldn’t be any part of it.”

  “What’s Freewoods?”

  “A place where people don’t care what color you are. White, black, Redbone, it doesn’t matter. It’s safe. Not even klukkers go back up in there.”

  “Then get those boys there tonight.”

  He sensed more than saw her nod in the dark.

  “Will you be all right?” she asked, squeezing his left hand.

  “I’m fine. You’re the one at risk. You—”

  Before he could continue, her arms slipped around him in a hug so fierce that it stole his breath. Unlike the embrace after he’d gotten Gavin Edwards fired, this was no simple act of gratitude. This time Viola’s body molded against his from neck to knee. A dizzying rush swept through him, triggering delayed shock from the ordeal they’d just endured. He felt his balance going, and then a wave of desire so powerful that he pulled Viola against him as though trying to merge their bodies through their clothes.

  A muffled bang froze them in place—then Viola jerked back as if a spark of static electricity had arced between them. Jimmy and Luther were hammering on the inner lid of the trunk.

  “Be careful,” Tom said to the darkness. “If a cop stops you, tell him you’re making a house call to a Negro place for me. If he gives you trouble, tell him to call me at home.”

  “I will,” Viola assured him. “I’ll be all right. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  As she walked to the driver’s door, fear blasted through Tom like Dexedrine. What if I never see her again?

  “You’d better be here, damn it,” he said.

  Seven hours later, she was, as perfectly dressed and coiffed as always. Tom, on the other hand, hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a stretch all night. In the span of one hour, by a simple act of decency, he had placed himself beyond the pale of his own tribe and put his job, his life, and his family at risk. Worse, after years of repressing his feelings for Viola, he’d felt something change deep within him, a tectonic shift that could never be undone. By the standards of their ongoing mutual denial, that few seconds’ embrace in the garage had been a consummation of sorts, an admission that they shared something so powerful that they lived in constant fear of it, something that could sweep their present lives away.

  “Dr. Cage, is that you?” asked a muted voice.

  Tom blinked in confusion. Then he realized that someone was rapping on the window of his car. A man of about fifty stood on the other side of the glass, waiting for Tom to roll down his window.

  “I thought that was you!” the man exulted as Tom pressed the power window button.

  The last wisps of Viola’s memory were snatched away by the wind that blew into the car when the glass sank into the door frame.

  “What you doing down in this part of town, Doc?” asked the man, as though he’d caught Tom in the midst of having an affair. “I’ll bet you’re thinking about old times, aren’t you?”

  Could his thoughts be that transparent?

  “You don’t recognize me, do you?” asked the man.

  “Ah . . .”

  “Jim Bateman! You used to be my doctor. I grew up around the corner, right over there. Your lab lady used to make me milk shakes sometimes, with that barium drink mixer.”

  “Oh,” Tom said, vaguely recalling a chubby boy who used to hammer at the rear door until someone let him in. “Jim. Of course I remember you.”

  “I’m right, huh? You were thinking about your old office here. Weren’t you?”

  “I was,” Tom said softly.

  “It’s just a regular house now,” Bateman lamented. “Don’t seem right to me. When you were here, this place was full of people. The whole block always felt so alive. Now it’s just a sleepy old house.”

  “It is a little disorienting.”

  Bateman looked at the paint peeling off the old clinic. “You know who I think about sometimes?”

  “Who?”

  “That black nurse you had. Miss Viola. She was so nice. All these years, and I’ve never forgotten her.”

  Tom nodded in amazement.

  “Whatever happened to her?”

  “She moved to Chicago.”

  “That right?”

  He nodded dully.

  “Well, you lost a good one there. You ever hear from her after that?”

  Tom swallowed and tried to keep his composure. “She died, Jim.”

  “Aw . . . don’t tell me that. When was this?”

  “This morning.” For the first time the full weight of Viola’s death crashed down upon Tom. Not until this moment had he realized all that had passed from the world with her.

  “What?” asked Bateman, clearly confused. “In Chicago you mean?”

  “No.” Tom looked up at last, into the man’s dazed eyes. “Right here in Natchez. She was very ill. She came home to die.”

  Bateman shook his head in wonder. “I’ll be dogged. That just . . . it makes me hurt inside. Kind of like when Hoss died on Bonanza. You know?”

  “I know.”

  “No wonder you’re out here.” Bateman patted him on the shoulder. “I’m sorry I bothered you, Doc. I’ll let you be. I talk too damn much. My wife tells me all the time.”

  “No, I’m glad you stopped. It’s good to know Viola’s remembered. You take care.”

  Bateman waved and slowly walked north up Monroe Street, looking from side to side like a man seeing where he lives for the first time.

  Tom reached down and put the BMW in drive, then let his crooked fingers fall as he pulled away from the curb, steering with his left hand. For the first time in many years, he began to cry.

  CHAPTER 6

  HENRY SEXTON WAS sitting at his desk at the Concordia Beacon in Ferriday, Louisiana, when the receptionist transferred a call to him and yelled from the front desk that it was important.

  “Who is it?” he shouted at the open door of the newsroom.


  “The Natchez district attorney!” Lou Ann Whittington shouted back.

  Henry frowned and laid his hand on the phone but did not pick it up. In two hours, he was scheduled to do the most important interview of his life. He didn’t want to risk anyone sidetracking him, particularly Shadrach Johnson, who never called unless he wanted something—usually publicity.

  “Have you got it?” Lou Ann called.

  Henry cursed and picked up the phone. “Henry Sexton.”

  Without preamble, Shad Johnson said, “Mr. Sexton, it’s come to my attention that you recently interviewed a woman named Viola Turner. Is that correct?”

  Henry blinked in surprise, then looked over at the sports editor, who was making a face at him. “That’s right. I spoke to her twice.”

  “Could you tell me the nature of your questions?”

  “I was questioning her in conjunction with a story I’m working on.”

  “What’s that story about?”

  Henry felt blood rising into his cheeks. “Without knowing more, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you there, Mr. Johnson.”

  “You need to come to my office. Consider that a formal request.”

  Henry’s chest tightened. “I’m a Louisiana resident, Mr. Johnson. You’re a Mississippi DA. Why don’t you tell me what this is about?”

  “Viola Turner is dead. She was killed early this morning.”

  “Killed?” Henry felt the dizzying disorientation that had grown more familiar as he aged; it came with hearing that someone you’d spoken to only a day or two earlier had died. “Are you sure? She was terminally ill.”

  “I take the coroner’s word for that kind of thing, Mr. Sexton. She’s on her way to Jackson right now, for the autopsy. This isn’t for publication, but it looks like murder.”

  A bone-deep chill made Henry shudder.

  “I’d like you to be here in forty-five minutes, Mr. Sexton. I’ll be with the sheriff until then. But I must speak to you. Good-bye.”

  “Wait! That timing’s a problem for me. I’ve got a critical meeting in two hours. Surely we can talk later this afternoon? I can’t see how I can possibly help you, anyway.”

  “Sheriff’s detectives discovered a camcorder at the murder scene, Mr. Sexton. It’s marked ‘Property of the Concordia Beacon.’ Did you leave that in Mrs. Turner’s sickroom?”

  “Uh . . . yes, sir.”

  “That’s one of several things we need to speak about. Should there have been a tape in that camcorder?”

  “I would think so, yes.”

  “Well, there wasn’t. Nor anywhere else in the house. The camcorder was lying on the floor, and someone had knocked over the tripod. The remote control was found in the dead woman’s bed, however.”

  Henry looked at his watch. Natchez was twelve miles away, just over the Mississippi River. “How long will I need to be there?”

  “We should be able to finish in half an hour.”

  Henry blew out a rush of air and rubbed his graying goatee. “Okay. I’ll be there in forty-five minutes. But I’m leaving a half hour after that. That’s nonnegotiable.”

  “Don’t be late. And don’t speak to anyone about this. It’s a very sensitive case.”

  Henry cursed and hung up, wishing he’d never answered in the first place. Why today, of all days? In two hours, the first Double Eagle in history to grant an interview to a reporter was going to go on the record about the group’s crimes. It had taken Henry weeks to set up the conversation, which would be held in secret. He couldn’t risk losing this chance. If Viola Turner had indeed been murdered, then today’s interview was even more critical than before.

  “What’s the matter, Henry?” asked Dwayne Dillard, the sports editor. “You look like you saw a ghost.”

  “It’s nothing,” he lied, his mind only half under conscious direction.

  Glancing around the small newsroom, Henry stood, grabbed his coat off the back of his chair, then hurried out to his Ford Explorer. He couldn’t possibly sit waiting in this building for half an hour with so much happening. Having no idea where he was going, he backed into First Street, then headed into Ferriday proper. Little Walter was blowing blues harp on the CD player, wailing with a passion born just fifty miles from Ferriday, in Rapides Parish. Henry sang a couple of lines with the song. He wasn’t even thinking, really, just following the half-shuttered streets of his decaying town.

  One way or another, Henry had been hunting the Double Eagle group for more than thirty years. His ex-wife claimed that his obsession had cost him their marriage, and she was probably right, yet Henry had refused to abandon his quest. For the past five years, in the pages of the little weekly newspaper he’d once delivered from a bicycle as a boy, he had been publishing stories about the group he considered the deadliest domestic terror cell in American history. And people were starting to pay attention. Henry’s successes had embarrassed certain government agencies—the FBI, for example—and they had let him know it. Along with Jerry Mitchell of the Jackson Clarion-Ledger, Henry had pushed the Bureau into belatedly forming a cold case squad to revisit unsolved murders from the civil rights era. But though the FBI had infinitely more investigative resources than he, Henry always seemed to stay ahead of them.

  The Double Eagle group was a textbook example. Founded in 1964, the Eagles were an ultrasecret splinter cell of the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. By Henry’s reckoning, they had murdered more than a dozen people, yet they’d evaded capture by the Justice Department at a time when the FBI had saturated the entire Mississippi Klan structure with informants. In forty-one years, only a few members’ names had been discovered, and none had been confirmed. No Double Eagle had ever been convicted of a race-related crime, and some had even worked as law enforcement officers. Henry had repeatedly tried to interview reputed members, but they’d always answered with silence or defiance. When he doggedly persisted in his investigations, Henry found himself ostracized by all kinds of people—some racists, others regular citizens who resented him “stirring up the past for no good reason.”

  One burly redneck had sucker-punched him in the local Winn-Dixie and had to be pulled off Henry by a brave stock boy. But now—after years of painstaking work to separate truth from legend—Henry had finally done the impossible: he had persuaded a Double Eagle to go on the record. At eleven o’clock this morning, he would meet a seventy-seven-year-old man named Glenn Morehouse. And if Morehouse lived up to his promise—made in the shadow of terminal cancer—he would become the first Double Eagle to break his vow of silence and confess to hate crimes that included assault, arson, rape, kidnapping, torture, and murder.

  Like most of his violent brethren, Glenn Morehouse had been raised in a hellfire-and-brimstone Baptist church. Branded on his heart was the certainty that when you died, your soul either flew up to heaven or sank into hell. And by that reckoning, no man could get into heaven without first confessing his sins and honestly repenting them. Henry didn’t care what had prompted Morehouse to open up; he only wanted to be there when the truth poured out. For if a Double Eagle ever really told the truth, a dozen murders might be solved in a single hour, a dozen families granted peace after decades of misery.

  Since confirming the secret interview at dawn, Henry had been unable to contain himself. Sitting at his desk this morning, the slightest noise in the newspaper office had made him jump. The shocking call about Viola Turner had been the last straw. Before he could even begin to grasp the implications of the old nurse’s death, Henry found himself parking before an empty lot that was the barren touchstone of his past, and also of the Albert Norris case.

  The weed-choked lot lay between two abandoned buildings on Third Street. Forty-one years ago, Norris’s Music Emporium had stood on this hallowed piece of dirt, beating like the secret heart of Henry’s hometown. Now empty bottles, paper cups, used condoms, and cigarette packs lay among the dying johnsongrass that covered the mud where Albert Norris’s “pickin’ porch” had once stood.

 
; As a boy, Henry had first gone into Albert’s shop because his mother played a little piano, enough to perform at church or for the Christmas show at the grade school where she taught. Henry’s father was a traveling salesman, and rarely home. When he was, he seemed angry, as though he couldn’t wait to leave again. He finally died in a car crash in Lawton, Oklahoma, when Henry was seventeen, but by then he was little more than a bad memory. Throughout Henry’s boyhood, though, his father had always been out there, like a storm that might blow through town at any time. Albert Norris’s store became an escape from all that, and more. It was a magic portal into the mysteries of the universe—not made-up mysteries like the ones his friends read about in books or watched at the Arcade theater, but real ones. Secrets so potent that they changed your life irrevocably the moment you were initiated into them.

  A month ago, Henry had dug up an old photograph that showed the store during its heyday. He’d been stunned by how small it looked in comparison to the image in his mind. Held off the ground by pyramid-shaped concrete blocks, the Emporium was actually a converted residence built of unpainted cypress and weathered by decades of sun. Albert had cut a big display window into the front wall to show off the pianos and organs he kept in stock.

  One of the store’s secrets was that it wasn’t merely a building, but a musical instrument in its own right, a sound chamber tuned by an accident of construction and played by whoever happened to be jamming inside it: sometimes a leathery old blues shouter thrashing a twangy imitation Stratocaster, other times a first-class pickup band—four or five gifted guys shaking the building with a transformative beat that boomed across the road and out into the little town amid the cotton fields. Often those pickup bands had included Jimmy Revels, Luther Davis, Pooky Wilson, and other local masters of their craft. But the music that people most remembered was Albert himself alone at the piano, playing after hours. That sound was so mournful and exquisitely pure that everyone who lived or worked within earshot—white or black—had asked Albert to leave his doors and windows open when he played. That was Henry’s first encounter with the paradox of how music that sounded so sad could lift the soul like nothing else in the world.