Alex Cross's Trial (Alex Cross 15)

She nodded.

Now that I was close to the dangling bodies, I saw the welts left by whips, the bloody wounds covering almost every part of their bodies. The older man’s arm hung down from his shoulder by a few bloody tendons. As the younger man slowly twisted, I saw that his testicles had been severed from his body.

My voice finally came out choked. “Oh, I am so sorry.”

I noticed a pink, rubbery thing in her hand, something she kept stroking with her finger as she wept.

She saw me looking. “You want to know what it is? It’s my Nathan’s tongue. They done cut his tongue out of his head. Stop him from sassin’ them.”

I looked up. Blood was thickly caked around the older man’s mouth.

“Oh, Jesus!”

“Ain’t no Jesus,” she said. “There ain’t no Jesus for me.”

She wept so terribly I could not hold myself back. I knelt by her in the clearing.

For a moment all was quiet, but for her sobbing.

Then a noise. A rustling in the underbrush, a crackling of twigs. I saw birds fly up in alarm.

Someone was there.

No doubt about it.

Someone was watching us.

And then out came several people, some men but also women, black people from the Quarters come to cut down the father and son who had been murdered.

Part Three

&nbs

p; SOUTHERN FUNERAL FAVORITES

Chapter 44

COULD ANYONE POSSIBLY PEDAL a bicycle as slowly as I did going back to Eudora?

I looked all around me. Although my little town still looked much as it had when I was a boy, now it was stained and tattered almost beyond recognition.

Now the whole place was poisoned by torture and murder. The proof was still swinging from that oak tree out by the banks of Frog Creek. I thought about going to the police, but what good would it do? And besides, it would raise the question of why I had gone out to the scene of the lynchings.

“You all soakin’ wet,” Maybelle said as I trudged up onto her porch. “Set here with me and have a lemonade.”

I put myself in a porch rocker and prepared to be disappointed, but the lemonade was cold, sweet, delicious.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” Maybelle said. “You had a visitor while you were gone. Senator Nottingham’s wife.”

“Elizabeth? Did she leave any message?”

“No, she said she would stop by again. But that reminds me, I know how much stock you put in getting the mail, and you did get some today. I put it in the front hall.”

On the hall table was a square, cream-colored envelope with my name written in Meg’s delicate hand.

I took the stairs two at a time. Inside my room, I removed my jacket and settled into the chair at the window for a good read.

Dear Ben,