Turning Angel

Chapter 42

Three weeks later, on a beautiful evening in May, I mounted a stage set up at the center of the St. Stephen’s football field and took a seat beside Jan Chancellor. Much had happened in the three weeks following Marko’s death, and thanks to Caitlin, most of it happened in public view. As a result of that publicity, Senator Brent Few, the speaker scheduled to appear at St. Stephen’s graduation, begged off, pleading health problems. The senior class asked if I would be willing to speak in his place. I told them I would be proud to do so.

Three hundred chairs have been set up before the stage, and all but a few are filled. This is impressive, as the senior class numbers only twenty-one souls. When I graduated, we had thirty-two, but Natchez was larger then. I know most of the faces in the crowd, students and their families mainly. Two special chairs stand empty in the seniors’ section, symbolic places for Kate Townsend and Chris Vogel. They’ve almost disappeared under the bouquets of flowers left there.

No chair was left empty for Marko Bakic. For the senior class, Marko is like John Lennon’s assassin: He Who Must Not Be Named.

Of the bright faces shining between the royal blue caps and gowns, one shines brighter than the rest for me: Mia Burke. Just after my commencement address, Mia will give the valedictory speech. She was scheduled to speak before me, but I asked Jan to give Mia the last word tonight. On the night we learned that Kate had been murdered, Mia told me she had some things to say to her class and to the parents. Tonight I look forward to hearing them.

Annie is sitting with my parents in the third row. She’s with my parents because Caitlin is not here tonight. Last week, she flew north again, not to Boston this time but to her father’s house in Wilmington, North Carolina. We decided that she’s not ready for the obligations that would come with marrying me. Our parting was difficult, but mostly because of Annie. Caitlin wanted a private conversation with Annie to break the news, but I decided we should speak to her together. I still love Caitlin, and I trust her motives. But I would not take the slightest risk that something might be said which would leave Annie blaming herself for Caitlin’s disappearance from our lives.

As Jan Chancellor begins her welcome remarks, I scan the football field and surrounding bowl. It seems impossible that Drew and I chased Marko across this field on a four-wheeler just a few weeks ago. But much of what happened after that night is hard for me to believe, yet happen it did. And the consequences of those events are still unfolding.

At two this afternoon, a secret meeting was held in the district attorney’s office. Present were Shad Johnson, myself, and Quentin Avery. The atmosphere was tense, for Shad had not behaved gracefully after Judge Minor overturned Drew’s conviction. In fact, Shad made a personal crusade of trying to convict Drew of sexual battery, which could have resulted in a sentence of forty years. For two weeks I sweated blood trying to think of a way to thwart Shad’s mission. I couldn’t do it. Drew’s medical license had already been suspended by the state authorities, but word had leaked down from the board chairman in Jackson that Drew’s future medical career would depend on the disposition of his legal case.

It was during this seemingly hopeless period that Quentin Avery earned his enormous fee. Through the tangled grapevine of the local black community, Quentin somehow learned exactly how Shad had discovered Ellen Elliot’s drug addiction, and also Kate’s part in it. Shad had not done this by brilliant deductive reasoning, or even by lucky accident. Three days after my kidnapping, he had received an express mail package containing the leather portfolio stolen with my car on the night of the attack at the Eola Hotel. The portfolio-which still contained Kate’s flash drives, Marko’s hair, and Kate’s diary-had almost certainly been sent to Shad by the leader of the Asian gang in Biloxi. The gang leader had probably been prompted by Marko to send the package, in an attempt to cement Drew’s conviction for Kate’s murder.

Regardless of who sent the portfolio, the materials inside it gave Shad enough leads to discover not only Kate’s drug activities on Ellen’s behalf but also Cyrus White’s obsession with Kate. Yet Shad never informed Quentin that he had any of this in his possession. Just as Quentin had predicted at the outset of the case, Shad had broken the rules-and the law-in his effort to ensure victory at trial. To withhold such evidence constituted felony obstruction of justice-grounds for disbarment-and Quentin was ready to go to war to accomplish that end. With some considerable anxiety, I sat Quentin down and explained my view of the situation: that Shad’s greed had given us a magic bullet that could keep Drew out of jail. But Quentin did not lightly abandon his persecution of Shad Johnson. It took a campaign of attrition by me and my father to persuade Quentin that serving Drew Elliott to the best of his ability was a higher moral duty than ridding the city of Shadrach Johnson. In the end, Quentin relented.

When I left Shad’s office this afternoon, I was in a state close to shock. Quentin had stripped more than the proverbial pound of flesh from the district attorney’s backside. He had verbally flayed Shad, shaming him to a degree I thought impossible. Quentin also extracted from Shad a written promise not to seek the office of mayor in the special election. This seemed a little much, and I wondered if Quentin had done this because he was considering a run for mayor himself. But when I asked about this after the meeting, the civil rights legend just laughed.

”This town needs an idealist,“ he said, ”not a cranky old pragmatist like me.“

As I sit watching the graduation crowd, Jan Chancellor introduces Melissa Andrews, the salutatorian. A tall girl with long red hair, Melissa reads from her text without once looking up, but she speaks with genuine emotion about the pain of leaving the cocoon of her class, and her anxiety about entering a world where friends and parents will not be there to prop her up. My gaze roams over the attentive faces, then wanders to the surrounding forest. Spring has truly arrived, and with it a desperately needed air of renewal. The evening breeze blows cool and steady, and the trees encircling the stadium are alive with the pale green leaves of new growth. If Natchez were like this year- round, people would move here by the thousands.

Suddenly, Jan Chancellor’s voice breaks into my reverie. ”…a distinguished attorney who switched careers in midlife to become a bestselling author, but to the people in this town he will always be the tight end on St. Stephen’s championship football team. Ladies and gentlemen, Penn Cage.“

I stand and hug Jan as I walk to the podium. She showed some courage over the past month, unlike some board members I could name.

Lawyers are notorious for being addicted to the sound of their own voices, but as I look out over the crowd, I recall my basic mantra of public speaking: Be sincere, be brief, be seated. Using a few notes scrawled on a legal pad this afternoon, I tell the seniors the things one usually tells graduates in a commencement speech: that their time has come; that the road out of this bowl no longer leads to Natchez, but to the wider world; that the world is theirs for the taking, if they but have the courage to reach out for it. I also tell them some harsher truths: that the world they will find beyond the borders of Mississippi looks very different from the one that nurtured them to this point; that the whites among them might soon find themselves the targets of prejudice for a change; that in the real world, it is often who rather than what they know that will gain them advancement. I’m candid about the fact that their education has not been as thorough as it might have been, but I also promise them that the emotional grounding provided by their multigenerational families will more than compensate for this. Though it’s not in my notes, I also pass along one lesson that has served me well in both careers:

”As a Southerner, you will constantly be underestimated by the people you deal with, and this tendency can work to your advantage. Learn how to use it.“

Having departed from my notes, I pause for a moment and look down at Mia in the first row. She’s watching me as though she expects something profound to fall from my lips, some inspiring conclusion to my thus-far-generic speech. But I don’t have any pearls of great wisdom. What I do have is a sudden realization that leaves me profoundly shaken. These kids are not coming back. Not the best of them, anyway. As I told Caitlin over dinner at the Castle, the parents in this beautiful and unique city are raising their children to live elsewhere. Somehow, we have let Natchez slip into such a state that we cannot offer our brightest students jobs to return to, even when they want them. And that is unacceptable. I will not raise my daughter in a town that offers her no future. With this simple realization comes certainty.

I’m running for mayor.

I leave the podium after an unremarkable conclusion, but as I walk to my seat, a new energy is building inside me. I know where I’m going now.

Jan walks to the podium again and introduces a girl whom she refers to as one of the brightest individuals she has ever had the privilege to know.

Mia Burke.