“Why don’t you sit down? You’re exhausted.”

“Dad knows what happened, all right. Earlier today Walt and I were working together. He was glad to take my calls. But now . . . he won’t answer. That tells me he’s hooked up with Dad again.”

“I hope that’s true! I just pray they’re not dead in a ditch somewhere.”

A snort of laughter came from Penn’s nose. “No chance of that,” he slurred. “If those two get killed in this mess, they’ll be the last to die. No . . . he and Walt are sitting pretty somewhere . . . playing whatever game they’ve been playing from the start. Unless Walt doesn’t know the game either. He might be just like the rest of them, acting out of blind loyalty to a man who doesn’t exist . . . who never really did. Like Drew, Melba, even Caitlin. And . . .”

“And what?”

Penn shook his head. “I forgot what I was saying. I was thinking about the bone creek.”

“You mean the Bone Tree?”

“That’s what I said.”

Penn looked at the floor and shook his head like some despairing drunk. “I had to call her father,” he said, wavering on his feet. “Did I tell you that? I called the estimable Mr. John Masters to tell him his daughter had been murdered.”

“I know that was hard.”

Penn’s glassy eyes found hers again. “Do you know what he said to me? What the great John Masters said to me . . . after I told him I’d let his favorite daughter get killed?”

Peggy shook her head.

Penn opened his mouth but no sound emerged. She was about to slide Annie’s head from her lap when he turned in place and fell across the club chair beside his desk.

He was out.

As carefully as she could, Peggy reached into her pocket, took out her cell phone, and dialed Drew Elliott’s home number.

After three rings, a reassuring voice said, “Dr. Elliott.”

“Drew, this is Peggy Cage.”

“Oh, Peggy. I’m so sorry about Caitlin. Is everything all right over there? Can I do anything to help?”

“Actually . . . you can. Penn isn’t handling Caitlin’s passing very well. I slipped him three of my sleeping pills and got him down, but it’s going to take more than that to keep him asleep until morning. I’m worried he’s going to wake up in the middle of the night and go hunting for someone.”

“Okay. I’ll be right over.”

“Thank you, Drew. We’re in the basement.”

“Have you had any word from Tom?”

“No. Have you?”

“I’m afraid not. But sit tight. I’m on my way.”

“Bring something strong, Drew. Penn’s just like his father. It’s not easy to get him angry, but once he is, there’s no stopping him.”

CHAPTER 77

WALT GARRITY SAT half-conscious in the backseat of a massive silver Bentley, Tom’s head cradled in his lap. The only light came from the dashboard, but the muscular shoulders of the young man called Xerxes looked a yard wide in the passenger seat ahead. To Xerxes’s left, his more conventionally sized father, Darius, gently steered the vehicle through the night without benefit of headlights.

It had taken Tom’s last conscious effort to guide Walt to the front gate of Corinth, which was one of the most magnificent plantations Walt had ever seen. Eighty-eight acres of virgin land right in the middle of Natchez, fenced from prying eyes and owned by a woman who had loved Tom for more than forty years. No better sanctuary existed in the world for the two fugitives, and they’d been lucky to reach it at all. Only moments after the great iron gate came in sight, Tom had finally collapsed from exhaustion.

As Darius and Xerxes carried Tom from Drew’s pickup truck to the gleaming Bentley, Walt had felt lost in a dream. Once inside the car, he’d nearly fallen asleep himself. Now, after what he judged to be a slow ride of about a minute, the heavy Bentley came to a gentle stop like a boat settling against a dock.

Walt leaned over to make sure that Tom was still breathing, then looked between the shoulders of the two men in front and saw a pair of white columns as thick as oak trees beyond the car’s winged hood ornament.

“Home safe,” Darius announced from behind the wheel. “Tell Doc hang on jes’ half a minute.”

Walt felt a cold rush of air as both back doors opened and Tom was slid off his lap. Tom groaned but did not wake. Walt clambered out of the luxurious backseat and trudged up the steps of a Gone with the Wind–era palace. As Darius and Xerxes approached a great walnut door with Tom in their arms, the door receded before them as if by magic.

Walt followed the men into some sort of entry hall, where they laid Tom out on a worn red sofa. Thirty seconds later, a door at one end of the hall slowly opened, revealing an old woman seated in a motorized wheelchair. Behind her stood a black woman who had clearly once been beautiful, but now looked as stern as any general’s batman. The wheelchair whirred forward, and in the dim light Walt gradually made out its occupant’s features. The woman was at least ten years older than he, but age had not stolen the refinement from her face. Her paper-thin skin was the color of bone china, and Walt could see that it had once been soft as cream. The eyes beneath her high brow held many things, but most of all intelligence. They settled upon Walt and seemed to take in the whole of his being at a glance. Then her gaze moved to Tom.

“Can he survive without a hospital?” she asked.

“For a while,” Walt replied. “If his heart doesn’t give out. He needs medicine, though. Insulin, antibiotics, nitro—God knows what else. And it sure wouldn’t hurt to get his partner here to look at him. I was a medic in Korea, but that was a long time ago.”

The woman looked back at him, her eyes filled with something he couldn’t quite make out. “Was it? To me that was yesterday.”

Before Walt could analyze this, she said, “Take Dr. Cage upstairs, Darius. My old chamber, if you please.”

The two men moved as one to obey.

“He’ll get all he needs here, Captain Garrity,” the woman said. “I’ll see to that. You need rest now. Can you make it up the stairs? Or do you need to use my elevator?”

Walt was now certain he’d fallen into a dream, or maybe a hallucination. He blinked several times, waiting to awaken in a gully off Highway 61.

“Who are you?” he asked dully, but What are you? was the question that ran through his mind.

“I’m Pythia Nolan. You may call me Pithy.”

“Pithy,” Walt repeated. “Yes, ma’am.”

The spectral woman reached into a bag attached to the arm of her chair and brought out some sort of mask, which the stern maid fitted over her face with an elastic strap. Then she pointed up the hallway like a military officer ordering a charge.

Walt followed blindly, glad to be only an infantryman once again.

WALT AWAKENED SOME TIME later in the half darkness of a guest room on an upper floor of Pithy Nolan’s great mansion. Darius and Xerxes had installed Tom in a hospital bed just up the hall from Pithy’s bedroom. When Walt found him, his first thought was that he was watching his old friend die.

It had been fifty years since he’d done any real medicine, and back then most of his patients had been soldiers in their twenties with various holes in their bodies. Treating a wounded seventy-three-year-old man with a multitude of co-morbid conditions was far beyond his abilities. Drew Elliott had done a good job with Tom’s shoulder wound on Tuesday, but Tom belonged in an ICU now, not on the second floor of a decaying antebellum mansion.

Still, you worked with what you had. Afraid to risk calling Dr. Elliott yet again, Walt dispatched Xerxes on a dangerous mission to Tom’s clinic to retrieve a list of medicines and equipment. After the young man succeeded, Walt caught Tom up on his cardiac and diabetic drugs, then hung an IV “banana bag” by duct-taping it to the four-poster bed. But what really worried him were the rales he’d heard when he put a stethoscope to Tom’s chest. Wet rales could be signs of pulmonary edema secondary to congestive heart failure, which Tom had experienced long before the crisis of the past few days. Walt had little choice but to pray that the diuretic he’d administered would drain some of the fluid off Tom’s heart.