"You have no sympathy for him?"
"Occasionally. If I'm having a good day and the sun is shining, then I might think of him and remember a small pleasant event from my childhood. But those moments are very rare, Adam. He has caused much misery in my life and in the lives of those around him. He taught us to hate everybody. He was mean to our mother. His whole damned family is mean."
"So let's just kill him then."
"I didn't say that, Adam, and you're being unfair. I think about him all the time. I pray for him every day. I've asked these walls a million times why and how my father became such a horrible person. Why can't he be some nice old man right now sitting on the front porch with a pipe and a cane, maybe a little bourbon in a glass, for his stomach, of course? Why did my father have to be a Klansman who killed innocent children and ruined his own family?"
"Maybe he didn't intend to kill them."
"They're dead, aren't they? The jury said he did it. They were blown to bits and buried side by side in the same neat little grave. Who cares if he intended to kill them? He was there, Adam."
"It could be very important."
Lee jumped to her feet and grabbed his hand. "Come here," she insisted. They stepped a few feet to the edge of the patio. She pointed to the Memphis skyline several blocks away. "You see that flat building facing the river there. The nearest to us. Just over there, three or four blocks away."
"Yes," he answered slowly.
"The top floor is the fifteenth, okay. Now, from the right, count down six levels. Do you follow?"
"Yes," Adam nodded and counted obediently. The building was a showy high-rise.
"Now, count four windows to the left. There's a light on. Do you see it?"
"Yes."
"Guess who lives there."
"How would I know?"
"Ruth Kramer."
"Ruth Kramer! The mother?"
"That's her."
"Do you know her?"
"We met once, by accident. She knew I was Lee Booth, wife of the infamous Phelps Booth, but that was all. It was a glitzy fundraiser for the ballet or something. I've always avoided her if possible."
"This must be a small town."
"It can be tiny. If you could ask her about Sam, what would she say?"
Adam stared at the lights in the distance. "I don't know. I've read that she's still bitter."
"Bitter? She lost her entire family. She's never remarried. Do you think she cares if my father intended to kill her children? Of course not. She just knows they're dead, Adam, dead for twentythree years now. She knows they were killed by a bomb planted by my father, and if he'd been home with his family instead of riding around at night with his idiot buddies, little josh and John would not be dead. They instead would be twenty-eight years old, probably very well educated and married with perhaps a baby or two for Ruth and Marvin to play with. She doesn't care who the bomb was intended for, Adam, only that it was placed there and it exploded. Her babies are dead. That's all that matters."
Lee stepped backward and sat in her rocker. She rattled her ice again and took a drink. "Don't get me wrong, Adam. I'm opposed to the death penalty. I'm probably the only fifty-year-old white woman in the country whose father is on death row. It's barbaric, immoral, discriminatory, cruel, uncivilized - I subscribe to all the above. But don't forget the victims, okay. They have the right to want retribution. They've earned it."
"Does Ruth Kramer want retribution?"
"By all accounts, yes. She doesn't say much to the press anymore, but she's active with victims groups. Years ago she was quoted as saying she would be in the witness room when Sam Cayhall was executed."
"Not exactly a forgiving spirit."
"I don't recall my father asking for forgiveness."
Adam turned and sat on the ledge with his back to the river. He glanced at the buildings downtown, then studied his feet. Lee took another long drink.
"Well, Aunt Lee, what are we going to do?"
"Please drop the Aunt."
"Okay, Lee. I'm here. I'm not leaving. I'll visit Sam tomorrow, and when I leave I intend to be his lawyer."
"Do you intend to keep it quiet?"
"The fact that I'm really a Cayhall? I don't plan to tell anyone, but I'll be surprised if it's a secret much longer. When it comes to death row inmates, Sam's a famous one. The press will start some serious digging pretty soon."
Lee folded her feet under her and stared at the river. "Will it harm you?" she asked softly.
"Of course not. I'm a lawyer. Lawyers defend child molesters and assassins and drug dealers and rapists and terrorists. We are not popular people. How can I be harmed by the fact that he's my grandfather?"
"Your firm knows?"
"I told them yesterday. They were not exactly delighted, but they came around. I hid it from them, actually, when they hired me, and I was wrong to do so. But I think things are okay."
"What if he says no?"
"Then we'll be safe, won't we? No one will ever know, and you'll be protected. I'll go back to Chicago and wait for CNN to cover the carnival of the execution. And I'm sure I'll drive down one cool day in the fall and put some flowers on his grave, probably look at the tombstone and ask myself again why he did it and how he became such a lowlife and why was I born into such a wretched family, you know, the questions we've been asking for many years. I'll invite you to come with me. It'll be sort of a little family reunion, you know, just us Cayhalls slithering through the cemetery with a cheapo bouquet of flowers and thick sunglasses so no one will discover us."
"Stop it," she said, and Adam saw the tears. They were flowing and were almost to her chin when she wiped them with her fingers.
"I'm sorry," he said, then turned to watch another barge inch north through the shadows of the river. "I'm sorry, Lee."
Chapter 8
SO after twenty-three years, he was finally returning to the state of his birth. He didn't particularly feel welcome, and though he wasn't particularly afraid of anything he drove a cautious fifty-five and refused to pass anyone. The road narrowed and sunk onto the flat plain of the Mississippi Delta, and for a mile Adam watched as a levee snaked its way to the right and finally disappeared. He eased through the hamlet of Walls, the first town of any size along 61, and followed the traffic south.
Through his considerable research, he knew that this highway had for decades served as the principal conduit for hundreds of thousands of poor Delta blacks journeying north to Memphis and St. Louis and Chicago and Detroit, places where they sought jobs and decent housing. It was in these towns and farms, these ramshackle shotgun houses and dusty country stores and colorful juke joints along Highway 61 where the blues was born and spread northward. The music found a home in Memphis where it was blended with gospel and country, and together they spawned rock and roll. He listened to an old Muddy Waters cassette as he entered the infamous county of Tunica, said to be the poorest in the nation.
The music did little to calm him. He had refused breakfast at Lee's, said he wasn't hungry but in fact had a knot in his stomach. The knot grew with each mile.
Just north of the town of Tunica, the fields grew vast and ran to the horizon in all directions. The soybeans and cotton were knee high. A small army of green and red tractors with plows behind them crisscrossed the endless neat rows of leafy foliage. Though it was not yet nine o'clock, the weather was already hot and sticky. The ground was dry, and clouds of dust smoldered behind each plow. An occasional crop duster dropped from nowhere and acrobatically skimmed the tops of the fields, then soared upward. Traffic was heavy and slow, and sometimes forced almost to a standstill as a monstrous John Deere of some variety inched along as if the highway were deserted.