“Don’t do that!” Caitlin snapped. “Don’t put that on me.”

“That’s where we are,” Tom said sadly.

“Because of you!”

“Absolutely. The guilt is mine, inescapably and forever.”

He said this with such desolation that guilt knifed through her own heart. “Tom—”

“Melba must be frozen solid by now,” he said, getting to his feet and walking toward the kitchen.

“Wait.” Caitlin darted after him and grabbed his arm. “What will you do if I won’t help you?”

Tom shrugged, refusing to meet her gaze.

A paralyzing fear had bloomed in her belly. “Tell me you won’t just wait here for them to find and kill you. Promise me that right now, or I’m calling Penn.”

Tom took hold of her hands. “No. That’s not it.”

Caitlin realized she had tears in her eyes. “Don’t lie to me. Please. Do you think that if you’re shot while on the run, the investigation into Viola’s death will end and everybody else will be safe?”

Tom sighed heavily. “Last night that thought actually crossed my mind. When those gunmen showed up at Drew’s place . . . I thought about simply letting them finish me.” He squeezed her hands tight again. “Then I got your text message about being pregnant. And it was like a switch being thrown in my chest. I knew I had to survive, Cait, for as long as I could, anyway. For that child, for you and Penn . . . for Peggy. Less than a minute later, I killed a man because I wanted to live so badly. So, don’t worry that I’m going to throw my life away.”

As Caitlin wiped tears from her eyes, Tom smiled through his white beard and gripped her shoulders with surprising strength. “I’m glad you’re pregnant.”

“Without benefit of clergy?”

He laughed deep in his chest. “I won’t have it said I’m a man of hidebound morals.”

Caitlin wanted to laugh, but she felt tears running down her face. “Goddamn it, Tom. Can’t we just call Penn? If something happens to you out here, he’ll never forgive me for it. Never.”

“I’m sorry to put you in that position,” he said. “But I’ve got to remain free until Walt gets back. And there’s no way Penn would allow me to do that. All he sees is his father in danger. Walt’s who I need now.”

“What do you really think Walt can do? I’ve told you Mackiever can’t even save himself.”

“It’s not just Walt,” Tom said soothingly. “Think about where you are. It’s Quentin, too. That’s a lot of legal firepower, Cait.”

“Quentin thinks you’re doing the right thing?”

Tom nodded, his eyes as steady as she’d ever seen them.

“Jesus, you make life hard. How long do you expect me to keep this from Penn?”

“Twenty-four hours. If I can’t do what I need to by then, I’ll go to the FBI and tell them I killed John Kennedy, if that’s what it takes to get protection.”

A hysterical laugh escaped Caitlin’s throat. She knew she shouldn’t agree to be complicit in his deception, but after refusing his request to hold off on covering the Knoxes in the Examiner while covertly helping the FBI, she couldn’t bring herself to deny him this. “You swear?”

Tom grinned. “Cross my heart.”

“God.” She shook her head and broke eye contact with him. Tom Cage had to be the most persuasive man she had ever met. “Let’s get Melba back in here.”

“Wait,” he said sharply. “What are you going to be doing for the next twenty-four hours? I know you won’t be content just sitting on the sidelines, writing stories based on Henry’s work.”

“No. I have a line on the place where Pooky Wilson’s body may have been dumped. And maybe Frank and Snake Knox’s father’s as well.”

All the levity went out of Tom’s face. “Elam Knox? Where’s that?”

She thought about holding her silence, but Tom couldn’t betray her secret to anyone. “Have you ever heard of something called the Bone Tree? Before reading my newspaper story, I mean?”

Tom focused somewhere in the space between them, like an old man looking deep into the past. “Ray Presley once told me he’d heard that story about the Wilson boy being crucified out there.”

Caitlin wasn’t surprised. “Did he know where the tree was?”

“No. But he spoke of it like a real place.”

“Is that all you know?”

Tom sat on a bar stool and drank some of the tea she and Melba had made. “It’s gone cold.”

“Tom . . . come on.”

He set down the cup and looked steadily at her. “I once treated a young woman from Athens Point, Mississippi. That’s Lusahatcha County. She looked white, but she was African-American. Her mother-in-law brought her in. The woman had some female trouble, but her real problem was psychiatric. She refused to see a psychiatrist, but I managed to get a few things out of her.”

“Such as?”

“Her husband had been murdered by the Ku Klux Klan down that way. And she’d been assaulted the same night. Just as Viola had—a gang rape. Her recollections weren’t very coherent. She and her husband were taken to the crime scene by boat.” Tom closed his eyes as if to see the past more clearly. “But she did describe a tree. A cypress tree with chains hanging from it. And either she or her mother-in-law used the term ‘Bone Tree.’”

“Was that crime ever reported to the police?”

“I’m pretty sure they told the FBI about it. But they never found the husband’s body. The tree, either. The local police down there took the position that it was all a lie made up to cover the fact that the husband had run off with another woman.”

“Christ.”

“That’s the way it was back then, Cait. I wish I had more details, but I don’t.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “Well, I’m going down there tomorrow. Maybe I’ll see if I can find that woman.”

Tom’s expression made plain what he thought of this idea.

“Do you remember her name?”

“No. And I don’t have records of it, either. This was thirty-five years ago.” Tom looked over his shoulder at the patio door. “Let’s get Melba. She’s gone far beyond the call of duty tonight.”

Caitlin nodded, but she didn’t go to the door. She looked up at Tom and said, “You are loved by more people than you’ll ever know. By me, by your family, by thousands of patients you’ve taken care of. Can’t you trust us to take care of you this time?”

Tom’s knees creaked like horsehair ropes as he slid off the bar stool and stood erect. When he took Caitlin in his arms, the familiar smell of cigars seemed to come from his pores. “They can’t help me now,” he said. “I told you how you could, but you can’t go against your nature, any more than I can go against mine.”

She tried to pull away, but he held her tight.

“The past is always with us, darling,” Tom went on. “Sometimes we carry it lightly, but other times it’s like dragging a wounded brother behind you. I’ve got a debt to pay, and nobody can pay it but me.”

Caitlin’s throat ached like it had when she was a little girl and her father told her he was moving out of their house.

“Forget what I asked you to do,” Tom said. “Print anything you want, except that you found me. Just give me time to do what I must for our family.”

She thought about Penn’s desperate worry for his father. Keeping Tom’s location from him seemed unthinkable, and yet both Drew and Melba had done it. Their actions—and her own quandary—were testament to how much belief Tom inspired in people. She thought of Jamie and Keisha and all the reporters working practically around the clock to find the truth at the bottom of the Double Eagle murders. If she granted Tom’s request, she would be betraying both their faith and their work. But after weighing all in the balance, she realized she had no choice.

“Twenty-four hours?” she asked into his chest.

“Yes.”

“One minute longer and I’m calling in the Marines.”

Tom squeezed her once more, then kissed her forehead, walked to the patio door, and rapped on its glass.

Three seconds later, Melba slid open the door and walked in shivering.