Carla stood and went to the stove where she stirred the sauce and turned on the burner to boil the water.

“I’m sorry,” Portia said softly. “Didn’t mean to bring up an unpleasant subject.”

“It’s okay,” Jake said. “Tell us about Italy. We’ve never been there.”

Over dinner, she talked about her travels throughout Italy, Germany, France, and the rest of Europe. As a high school student, she had made the decision to see the world, and to get as far away from Mississippi as possible. The Army gave her the chance, and she took full advantage of it. After boot camp, her top three choices were Germany, Australia, and Japan. While stationed at Ansbach, she spent her money on railway passes and student hostels, often traveling alone as she saw every country from Sweden to Greece. She was stationed on Guam for a year, but missed the history and culture, and especially the food and wines, of Europe, and managed a transfer.

Jake had been to Mexico and Carla had been to London. For their fifth anniversary, they saved and scraped together enough money for a low-budget trip to Paris, one they still talked about. Beyond those trips, they had been homebound. If they were lucky, they sprang for a week at the beach at Destin in the summer. Listening to Portia trot the globe made them envious. Hanna was mesmerized. “You’ve seen the pyramids?” she asked at one point.

Indeed she had; in fact, it seemed as though Portia had seen everything. The bottle was empty after the salads, and they needed more wine. Instead, Carla poured iced tea and they managed to finish the meal. After Hanna was in bed, they sipped decaf coffee, ate cookies, and talked about worldly matters.

Of Lettie and the will and its related issues, not one word was uttered.

20

Ancil Hubbard was no longer Ancil Hubbard. The old name and self had been discarded in a hurry years earlier when a pregnant woman found him and made allegations and demands. She wasn’t the first to cause him trouble, or a name change. There was an abandoned wife in Thailand, some jealous husbands here and there, the IRS, some type of police in at least three countries, and a cranky drug dealer in Costa Rica. And these were just the most memorable highlights of a chaotic and sloppily lived life, one he would have happily traded long ago for something more traditional. But traditional was not in the cards for Ancil Hubbard.

He was working in a bar in Juneau, Alaska, in a seedy section of town where sailors and deckhands and roustabouts gathered to drink and shoot dice and blow off steam. A couple of ferocious bouncers kept the peace, but it was always fragile. He went by Lonny, a name he’d noticed in an obituary in a newspaper in Tacoma two years earlier. Lonny Clark. Lonny knew how to game the system, and if Lonny had so chosen he could have obtained a Social Security number, a driver’s license in any state he wanted, even a passport. But Lonny was playing it safe, and there were no records of his existence in any government file or computer. He did not exist, though he had some fake papers in the event he got cornered. He worked in bars because he was paid in cash. He rented a room in a flophouse down the street and paid cash. He rode bikes and buses, and if he needed to vanish, which was always a possibility, he would pay cash for a Greyhound ticket and flash a fake driver’s license. Or hitchhike, something he’d done for a million miles.

He worked behind the bar and studied every person who came and went. Thirty years on the run and you learn how to watch, to look, to catch the prolonged glance, to spot someone who doesn’t fit. Because his misdeeds involved no bodily harm to others, nor did they, regretfully, involve huge sums of money, there was a good chance he wasn’t being chased at all. Lonny was a small-time operator whose principal weakness was an attraction to flawed women. No real crime there. There were some crimes—petty drug dealing, pettier gunrunning—but, hell, a man’s gotta make a living somehow. Perhaps a couple of his crimes were more serious. Nonetheless, after a lifetime of drifting, he had become accustomed to looking over his shoulder.

The crimes were now behind him, as were the women, for the most part. At sixty-six, Lonny was accepting the fact that a fading libido might just be a good thing after all. It kept him out of trouble, kept him focused on other things. He dreamed of buying a fishing boat, though it would be impossible to save enough from his meager earnings. Because of his nature and habits, he often thought of pulling one last drug deal, one grand slam that would net him a bundle and set him free. Prison, though, terrified him. At his age, and caught with the quantity he was dreaming about, he would die behind bars. And, he hated to admit, his previous drug deals had not gone well.

No thanks. He was happy tending bar, chatting up sailors and hookers and dispensing well-earned advice. He closed the bar each morning at 2:00 and walked, half-sober, to his cramped room where he lay on a dirty bed and recalled with great nostalgia his days on the open seas, first in the Navy and later on cruise ships, yachts, even tankers. When you have no future, you live in the past, and Lonny would be stuck there forever.

He never thought about Mississippi, or his childhood there. As soon as he left, he somehow trained his mind to instantly negate any thoughts of the place. Like the click of a camera, he changed scenery and images effortlessly, and after decades he had convinced himself that he had never lived there at all. His life began when he was sixteen; nothing happened before then.

Nothing at all.

Early on his second morning of captivity, and not long after a breakfast of cold scrambled eggs and even colder white toast, Booker Sistrunk was fetched from his cell and led, without restraints, over to the office of the high sheriff. He went inside while a deputy waited at the door. Ozzie greeted him warmly and asked if he would like fresh coffee. Indeed he did. Ozzie also offered fresh doughnuts, and Sistrunk dove right in.

“You can be out in two hours if you want to,” Ozzie said. Sistrunk listened. “All’s you gotta do is walk into court and apologize to Judge Atlee. You’ll be in Memphis long before lunch.”

“I kinda like it here,” Sistrunk said with a mouth full.

“No, Booker, what you like is this.” Ozzie slid across the Memphis paper. Front page, Metro, beneath the fold, a stock photo under a headline that read, SISTRUNK DENIED FEDERAL HABEAS RELIEF; REMAINS BEHIND BARS IN CLANTON. He read it slowly as he chomped on another doughnut. Ozzie noticed a slight grin.

“Another day, another headline, huh Booker? Is that all you’re after here?”

“I’m fighting for my client, Sheriff. Good versus evil. I’m surprised you can’t see that.”

“I see everything, Booker, and this is what’s obvious. You’re not gonna handle this case in front of Judge Atlee. Period. You’ve ripped it with him and he’s tired of you and your foolishness. Your name’s on his shit list and it’s not comin’ off.”

“No problem, Sheriff. I’m taking it to federal court.”

“Sure, you can file some bullshit civil rights crap in federal court, but it won’t stick. I’ve talked to some lawyers, some guys who do federal work, and they say you’re full of shit. Look, Booker, you can’t bully these judges down here the way you can in Memphis. We got three federal judges here in the Northern District. One’s a former Chancellor, like Atlee. One’s an ex–district attorney, and one used to be a federal prosecutor. All white. All fairly conservative. And you think you can walk into federal court down here and start slingin’ all your racist shit, and somebody’s gonna buy it. You’re a fool.”