Rumors linking the Double Eagle group to the 1963 assassination of John F. Kennedy remain unverified. All efforts to identify the evidence being carried from Vidalia to the Washington crime lab on the downed Bureau plane have been stymied by the FBI. The Bureau has said only that this evidence pertained to its recent investigation into the Double Eagle murders that occurred in the Natchez-Vidalia area in the 1960s. The aircraft involved was a Cessna Citation II, and it burned before fire and rescue personnel could reach it. The Bureau has not disclosed whether all or part of the evidence on board survived the crash.
Thirty-six years ago, a different small plane crashed at the Concordia Parish Airport after supposedly colliding with another aircraft flown by Snake Knox. Four people died in that incident, but Knox, an experienced crop duster, walked away unharmed. This alleged midair collision occurred while Concordia was still an unattended airfield and was witnessed only by the young nephew, now deceased, of Snake Knox. The diaries of Henry Sexton have cast doubt on the FAA report made at the time, but unless Knox is apprehended and alters his original story, this earlier crash will remain a closed investigation.
As for the downing of the FBI jet, a local Vidalia man who requested anonymity said: “Nobody in this area knows more about small planes than Snake Knox. Nobody knows more about bombs, either. But that’s all I’ve got to say about that. Snake Knox ain’t somebody you want to get on the wrong side of, even if he has run off to Costa Rica or wherever. Sooner or later, he’ll be back. You watch and see.”
Chapter 2
I’m blasting across the Louisiana Delta at eighty-five miles an hour, primeval darkness covering the land like a shroud. My xenon high beams bore a tunnel through the night, triggering a riot of eyeshine from startled deer, possums, foxes, raccoons, and the occasional cow resting close to a fence. Our bodyguard’s armored Yukon tracks us from 150 yards back, far enough to spare me a migraine during the hundred-mile drive home from the prison that holds my father, but close enough for Tim Weathers to play Seventh Cavalry should that become necessary. Every now and then there’s a juddering thump as I round a curve and smash over the broken armor of a dead armadillo, yet my daughter, Annie, sleeps on beside me, one hand resting lightly on my forearm, which I’ve left on the console to reassure her.
Another angelic face floats in the rearview mirror. Through the blur of fatigue I see it as Caitlin’s, but it belongs to Mia Burke, Annie’s twenty-year-old caretaker. Mia’s eyes are closed, her mouth slightly open, and susurrant snores pass through her parted lips. Exhaustion keeps both girls sedated through potholes and roadkill, exhaustion plus the drone of the engine and whine of our tires, topped off by the voice of Levon Helm and the Band singing “The Weight,” the live version from The Last Waltz.
As Pops and Mavis Staples begin singing harmony like dark angels floating down from heaven, some semblance of peace washes over me. How much soul and conviction must a white man have to sing lead in front of angels like that? Levon is an Arkansas country boy as rail-thin and tough as the bastards who killed Caitlin, yet he somehow sings with the wounded humanity of a man without a tribe, a man who has known both love and grief and understands that one is the price of the other.
I wish I believed in God, so that I could blame Him for Caitlin’s murder. But as a man without faith, I’m left to blame my father. My mother believes Caitlin brought about her own death and would have done even had my father not turned all our lives upside down. I haven’t the strength to argue the case. Mom simply wants me to forgive Dad enough to visit him in prison. But I can’t bring myself to do that. So I sit outside in the car, or else down the street in a Wendy’s restaurant, while Mom and Annie go through their ritual at the prison, Mia tending to Annie while Mom spends time alone with Dad.
More times than not, I set aside the perpetual pile of crap that comes with being a mayor and sit pondering the chain of events that brought me to this pass. It’s true that Caitlin let her ambition drive her to a cursed place she should never have gone alone, and she died for it. But had my father not hidden the truth of what transpired on the night Viola Turner died, Caitlin would never have become obsessed with Henry Sexton’s quest, or picked up his torch after he martyred himself to save us, or followed a bloody trail to the abomination called the Bone Tree.
She would be alive.
We would be living with Annie in Edelweiss, our dream house overlooking the river, and well on our way to giving Annie a brother. That thought haunts me, probably more than it should. The night before Caitlin was killed, we made love in that house for the first and last time: a desperate attempt on her part to calm me down after a standoff with a corrupt sheriff. I had no idea then that Caitlin was pregnant. Forrest Knox told me later, as a torment, and the autopsy confirmed his revelation. Had I foreseen the doom we were racing toward on that last night, I would have locked the door of Edelweiss and held her inside until . . . what? It’s pointless to speculate. Somehow, I sense, no matter what I did that night, Caitlin would still have died, and Annie and I would still have wound up here. Which is . . . where?
Lost.
When someone you love is murdered, you learn things about yourself you’d give a great deal not to know. If you kill the person who robbed you of that life, you discover that vengeance can’t begin to fill the fulminating void that murder leaves behind. Nothing can, except years of living, and then only if you’re lucky. Annie and I learned that the first time, when cancer took her mother.
Caitlin was our luck.
Nine weeks ago, our luck ran out. Caitlin’s murder hit us like an artillery shell from a clear blue sky. And the first thing blown apart by that kind of shell is time. Day and night lose their meaning. The passage of moments and hours wobbles out of kilter. Clock faces trigger confusion, even panic. In the demi-world of mourning, one’s sense of selfhood begins to unravel. The strong find ways to re-orient themselves to the superimposed temporal structure observed by the rest of the world, but no matter how hard I’ve tried, I haven’t been able to do that.
My work has suffered so badly that everyone at City Hall is engaged in a conspiracy to pretend I’m functional. That’s hard to admit, but if I’m honest, something isn’t quite right with me. My hold on reality is more tenuous than it should be. My sense of control has eroded to the point that I’ve questioned my sanity. But given all I’ve been through . . . perhaps that’s a sane response. Perhaps the only one. Because my family has imploded.
My mother lives in a motel near the Federal Correctional Institution at Pollock, Louisiana, where my father is being held by the FBI (thirty miles behind us now, and thankfully fading farther every minute). I had to withdraw Annie from middle school, and only Mia Burke’s altruistic intervention has prevented her from becoming paralyzed by grief and terror. Mia’s done a lot to hold my head above water also, which isn’t fair to her, but she volunteered, and frankly there’s no one else to lean on.
My cell phone pings beneath the music. It’s lying sideways beside the Audi’s central handbrake. Pinning the steering wheel in position with my left knee, I reach across my lap with my left hand to check the phone without disturbing Annie.