Mississippi Blood

  “What do you mean?”

  “She told me that she’d stayed away all those years, even though she was miserable a lot of the time, and now she needed my help.”

  My heart flutters. “What did she want?”

  Mom’s eyes harden. “She wanted me to do what your father couldn’t.”

  “You didn’t inject her with adrenaline—”

  “No. Morphine. There was a nearly full bottle there, just out of her reach. Tom had given her enough to sedate her, but he’d diluted it with saline.”

  “On the stand he said Viola would have caught him if he tried that.”

  Mom shakes her head. “He was just trying to protect me when he said that. He injected her in a deep vein, in the inner thigh. She couldn’t see down there. Her muscular control was very poor by then. That’s why she couldn’t inject herself.”

  “I thought it was because she was a devout Catholic.”

  “Well . . . that, too, I suppose. Are you ashamed of me? For doing that?”

  “I’m just surprised. I don’t know why, though.”

  “Penn, if you had been there . . .” With great effort, Mom lifts her left hand and touches my cheek. “Do you remember when Sarah was suffering like that?”

  If I truly open myself to that period of my life, horror and pain flood in like a black tide. “I remember.”

  “Viola’s physical pain wasn’t as bad as Sarah’s, but her emotional state was worse. Far worse. Sarah was taken from a happy life, a beautiful family. But Viola died believing she had failed her only child. That’s almost unendurable for a mother.”

  Mom is in the grip of confession now, willing herself forward. “That’s why I agreed to do it. Your father loved her too much, but I could put myself in her place. I realized how lucky I’d been to have the life I’d had with you and Jenny, and I owed all that to Viola’s sacrifice. We all owed her, Penn.” My mother’s eyes shine with unshakable conviction. “Because she could have taken your father from us, if she’d wanted to.”

  “Mom, you’re wrong.”

  She forces a smile and nods, making a show of believing me, but the truth is in her eyes.

  “So, it was you who botched the morphine at her antecubital vein?”

  “Of course it was. Viola’s veins were in terrible shape, especially the big one at the elbow, which was the only one I had any chance of hitting. I pushed straight through the vessel. But I didn’t know that at the time. I have no medical experience. I left that house believing I had euthanized her.”

  “Was that the only injection you gave her?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you drew the morphine out of the bottle yourself?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long after that did you leave the house?”

  “As soon as Viola fell unconscious. I felt I should stay with her, but she’d told me I should leave. And once she was asleep, I felt so alone. Alone and afraid. I didn’t think there was any chance she would wake up.”

  “And you never realized there was a tape in the camera?”

  “God, no. I never even considered that.”

  I blink in disbelief as the sequence of events comes clear in my mind. “So you couldn’t have killed her.”

  My mother swallows audibly. “No. Sometimes I wake up wondering if the pharmacy somehow mislabeled the bottle, but Tom assured me they didn’t. The murder investigation would have uncovered that.”

  “He’s right. Plus, if you’d injected that adrenaline, you would have known instantly. It would have hit Viola’s system before you got out of the room. She’d never have passed out. No, someone injected that adrenaline after you left.”

  Relief fills her eyes, lessens some of the tightness in her face.

  “The question is, who?”

  “You don’t think it was Cora, do you?” she asks. “Or Lincoln? After all that business about the will? My God, it’s too horrible to think about.”

  “I don’t think Cora could do that. Lincoln . . . I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “I don’t believe he did it,” she says. “It had to be Snake Knox. And he’s still out there somewhere. That’s the hell of all this. The absurdity. Tom is in jail, and that monster is walking free, still killing people—”

  “Take it easy, now.” I suddenly have the feeling she’s trying to distract me from something. “Mom, look at me. And answer one question. Did Dad go back to Cora’s house after you left?”

  Her eyes widen, but her mouth remains still.

  My pulse is picking up, and my face feels hot. “Did Dad do it, Mom? Did he inject that adrenaline?”

  “No, Penn. He told me he didn’t.”

  “What did he say happened?”

  My mother looks like a trapped animal; I’ve seen thousands of witnesses and defendants look that way.

  “Did you and Dad talk on the morning Viola died?”

  “Penn, I don’t want to keep anything from you. But if you want to know more, you’re going to have to speak to your father. I don’t want to say or do the wrong thing. And I don’t ever want to put you in a position where you’d have to lie. During this whole trial, I’ve been terrified that Shad Johnson would call me to the stand. Spousal privilege isn’t absolute, you know. I didn’t know that until I started researching it, but it’s true. I’ve been close to breaking every day of this accursed business.”

  “Mom, Dad’s not going to tell me any of this. I doubt he’ll even admit what you’ve already told me. And to stand even a chance of getting that plea revoked, I need the whole truth.”

  She refuses to meet my eyes. “I don’t know what to do. You need to go see your father. All I can tell you now is this: I wanted to tell the truth from the beginning. It wasn’t to protect myself that I let Tom take the risk. It was for Annie, and for Jenny’s children.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your father nearly died five months ago. We’ll be lucky if he lives another year. And given that . . . I’ve had to face the fact that Tom is right. I have a duty to stay free, in case anything should happen to you. After all, you don’t live the safest life in the world. Annie’s only eleven. Somebody has to be there for her. Jenny’s kids, too. They’re older than Annie, but they’re no more independent than your sister was at their age.”

  “Mom, come on—”

  “What have I always told you?” she asks, gripping my arm with surprising force and shaking it. “Family. Family is all that matters in this world.”

  Verbena is going to open the door again any second. As I try to think of a way to persuade Mom to tell me more, another thought strikes me, one I can scarcely credit. “Did Quentin know about this? About your part in what happened?”

  “Not as far as I know. When your father said no one could know about something, he meant no one.”

  Like his war years, I think bitterly. When my dad shuts the door on something, it stays shut.

  “Are you going to tell Jenny this?” Mom asks, the worry in her voice making her sound more like her old self than anything she’s said since I came in. “There’s really nothing to be gained by making her think about any of it.”

  In my mind I see my sister shivering in the waiting room. I don’t know whether Mom is right or wrong, but I don’t want her to worry about it now. “I’m going to tell Jenny you slept through her calls. That you took a Lorcet Plus.”

  Mom nods slowly, her eyes filled with gratitude. At least in Jenny’s eyes, she thinks, her image as a perfect mother will remain intact. “I’m sorry you had to go through this in the dark,” she says. “But you always were the strong one.”

  “My mother’s son, right?”

  A faint, proud smile touches her lips. She never was very quick at picking up irony. “Where are you going now?” she asks. “Are you going to see your father?”

  “I don’t see that I have a choice.”

  “Good.” A bell dings out in the hall. “Remember what I said. Family. It’s all that matters.”

&n
bsp; I kiss her forehead, then leave her bedside. But at the door I turn back. “Mom, you asked me why Dad changed his plea. Now I’m asking you. Is he still trying to protect you? Because I think you’re safe now.”

  She looks at me over the little hump of her sheet-covered feet. “None of us is safe so long as Snake Knox is free. But that’s not why Tom pleaded guilty.”

  “Then why did he do it? Guilt over Caitlin? Walt? Henry?”

  “Tom did it because he chose us over Viola. He lived up to his vows and fulfilled his duty. He did what good men do. Good fathers. But Viola paid the price for his honor. A terrible price. And . . . he couldn’t live with that anymore. That’s why he put himself in prison.”

  I can’t look long at the pain now revealed in my mother’s eyes.

  “I’ll be back to see you later,” I tell her. “Try to get some sleep. There’ll be a guard covering you at all times.”

  “Don’t be too hard on your father, Penn.”

  “I’ll see you later. Try to sleep.”

  And then I go.

  Chapter 73

  After leaving my mother’s room, I told some white lies to Jenny, then texted Rusty and asked him to pick me up at the old west entrance to the hospital in fifteen minutes. I wanted some time to gather my thoughts before heading to the jail to see Dad, and I didn’t want a bodyguard dogging my every step. After a tense conversation with Joe Russell, I managed to free myself from my own shadow.

  I’m standing inside the old doctors’ entrance of St. Catherine’s Hospital, which after decades of neglect is undergoing a massive remodel. This entrance is the site of one of my clearest childhood memories, the first occasion that I realized my father was “important.” Here, just inside the big green double doors, a panel was mounted that held a hundred rectangular push buttons. Each button had a white label affixed to it, and most of the labels had names typed on them. After every name were the letters M.D. Whenever a doctor entered the hospital, he would press his personal button, and a yellow light would go on behind it, like a light in a fighter plane or a Gemini spacecraft. And somewhere upstairs, a central operator would know that specific doctor was in the hospital and available to handle patients.

  I was only five years old the first time Dad took me to this hospital with him, the first time I saw that light go on at the end of his straight, strong forefinger. And my little chest filled with a pride I’ve hardly experienced since. I knew then that people needed my dad—depended on him—and because of that, he mattered. And if he mattered, then I mattered.

  When I grew up, I wanted to matter just as much as he did.

  That old panel is still set in the wall, but most of the labels peeled off the buttons long ago, and a harness of loose wires hangs beneath the aluminum frame. Even with all the millions spent on renovations over the years, no one ever removed this device. Since the public never sees this entrance, the bean counters probably figured the expense wasn’t justified. Now the quaint relic sits lifelessly in the wall, as outdated as an orphaned pay phone.

  When that panel blinked with light, the building wasn’t called St. Catherine’s, but the Jefferson Davis Memorial Hospital, after the president of the Confederacy. Back then, there were eighty doctors in Natchez, and the city thrummed with life. But as times changed, the name of the hospital changed, too. Sometime in the 1980s, when I was practicing law in Houston, it became St. Catherine’s, named for the nearby creek that the Natchez Indians lived along before they were slaughtered by the French who settled here. Today there are less than forty doctors in Natchez, thanks to bad tort laws, medical turf wars, and a moribund oil industry. And I am the mayor of what remains.

  Bending at the waist, I squint at the faded letters on the few labels that remain. To my amazement, near the bottom left corner, I see Thomas Cage, M.D.

  As I made my journey from the ER to this exit door, every few steps carried me past a portrait of a chief of staff gone by. The most recent twenty or so hang in the lobby, but my father was chief back in 1972, so his portrait resides in this forgotten corridor. I wonder if the other visages I passed concealed secrets like my father’s behind their dignified masks. Some did, perhaps. But most of those faces probably hid the usual small-town sins shared by men across America, regardless of race, religion, or section of the country.

  My father was different. He couldn’t live blindly amid the ruins of a gilded empire where the lost children of Africa worked with false smiles among their former masters. So he thrust himself into the troubled borderland between black and white, and in his passion to do good, he did also what other passionate men had done who trod this deep soil made rich by sweat and blood. He strayed from his own kind, mingled his blood with the blood of Africa. That was common on this dark bend of the river, as it was across the South before Thomas Jefferson ever became a founding father. But my father’s offense was that he cared for the woman he bedded, and for her people, and in this atavistic corner of the New World he learned that the fearful, clannish Anglo-Saxons who’d settled it always exacted a price for such betrayal.

  And blood and death followed.

  I’m still staring at the old call panel when my phone pings with a text message. Rusty is waiting for me outside in his car. As I raise my arm to press the wide steel bar on the exit door, time slips, and I see my father walking through ahead of me, leaning into the steel to keep his frail body erect while he forces it open. When I was five years old, he could throw out one hand and swat this door open as though it were made of cardboard. Now . . .

  Of course, Dad will never open this door again. At this moment, he is sitting in a jail cell, waiting to be transferred to a state prison in the Mississippi Delta that I’m told is close to hell on earth.

  And he’s chosen to go there.

  The visiting cubicle of the Adams County jail is no luxury accommodation, and I’ve occupied it as both visitor and prisoner. But never did I imagine that I would enter it to speak to a man who put himself here on purpose. Dad is supposedly being escorted to this depressing box, but I’ve been waiting ten minutes already.

  I’d hoped to make my way here without crossing Sheriff Billy Byrd’s path, but word quickly spread of my arrival at the ACSO, and he made sure he was standing at the duty desk when I logged myself in. Byrd tried as hard as he could to bait me, but I refused to be goaded, and I left his gloating face behind me with the laughter of his deputies.

  “Don’t pay ’em no mind, Mayor,” said the big black deputy who escorted me to the visiting room. “They don’t know nothin’ ’bout nothin’.”

  “Thank you, Deputy . . . ?”

  “McQuarters. Larry McQuarters. I been looking out for your daddy for Mr. Quentin.”

  “I appreciate it, Larry. My whole family does.”

  “I’ll have Doc in there soon as I can.”

  The door beyond the metal screen opens, and my father edges into the cubicle with Larry McQuarters behind him. His hands are cuffed, his wrists bright red, but after he sits, his knees creaking in protest, Larry bends and unlocks the cuffs.

  “You be good now, Doc. Sheriff Byrd be on my ass if he finds out I took these off.”

  “Don’t worry, Larry,” Dad says with gratitude. “Thank you.”

  The crappy fluorescent lights in this place don’t do the complexion any favors, and Dad’s prison pallor, which was masked by good clothes and light in the courtroom, is painfully obvious here. He looks through the metal screen without any obvious emotion I can read, except perhaps a dread of being asked things he would prefer not to speak about. If I’m going to get him to tell me about the night Viola died, I need to establish some kind of rapport with him.

  “I’ve just come from the hospital.”

  “How’s your mother doing?”

  “Drew’s still evaluating her. He thinks she’s had a stroke.”

  Dad must have heard this already, but he bows his head and murmurs something I can’t make out. Then he says, “Ask Drew to let me know as soon as he knows for su
re.”

  “You know he will. But I’ll remind him.”

  “Thank you.”

  Before the silence can swell into a suffocating blanket, I say, “When I left the hospital, I passed through that wing they’re redoing. They still have the old call panel on the wall. Disconnected, of course.”

  He looks surprised by my choice of topic. “Is my name still on it? I can’t lean down there to read it anymore.”

  “It’s still there. Do you remember your call number?”

  “I was sixty-two for a long time. Not anymore, of course.”

  He waves a hand like this doesn’t matter, and I notice the once-straight finger now curled with arthritis, its nail pitted and opaque.

  “I still think of that place as ‘the Jeff,’” he says, a wistful look in his eyes. “You know? It’s a good thing they changed the name, of course. Though a lot of my patients don’t even know who Jefferson Davis was.”

  This makes me think of our maid, who died in St. Catherine’s Hospital seven years ago. “Ruby didn’t know who Colin Powell was, the year he considered running for president.”

  “Christ. I can’t bear to think of that.”

  This time the silence stretches out, and Dad looks as though he’s afraid I’m going to start berating him about his plea decision.

  “I’m not here to talk about your plea.”

  Once more his eyes register surprise. “Thank you.”

  “I’m here as your lawyer, to give you legal counsel.”

  My formal tone takes him aback, but I need to establish that fact before mentioning anything that could be used against either of us.

  “I’m here because I know Mom was in Cora’s house on the night Viola died. I know she injected her with morphine.”

  His face loses what little color it had. “Jesus, Penn.” He looks around as though someone is listening. “Can this room be bugged?”

  “In theory? Yes. In practice, no. Now they couldn’t use what they recorded anyway. Because I’m your attorney, this is a privileged conversation.”