Free Natchez Burning by Greg Iles

now that I do, I see one obvious possibility. Since more than half my father’s patients are black, perhaps he feels that black nurses make those patients more comfortable in clinical situations. Or maybe he just likes black women.
    “Melba, this is Penn.”
    “Lord, Penn, have you seen your daddy this morning?”
    “No, but I need to.”
    “He’s not here, and I haven’t seen him. Nobody has.”
    “He didn’t leave word where he’d be?”
    “No. But some of the things on his desk have been moved. I’ve wondered if he came in last night and worked on his records like he does sometimes.”
    Since Melba occupies the position that Viola herself once did, I wonder if she shares the confidence my father placed in Viola. “Melba, I’m calling about a patient. A special patient. I know about the HIPAA rules and all that, but this has to do with Dad’s personal welfare. Do you know if he’s been treating a woman named Viola Turner? She has lung cancer.”
    I hear a short inspiration, then a long sigh. “I wish I could help you, Penn. But that’s your daddy’s business. I can’t get mixed up in that. I’m not sure you should, either.”
    Oh, boy
. “I don’t want to, Melba. But I don’t have any choice. Viola’s dead, and there may be legal repercussions because of it. Problems involving Dad. Do you understand?”
    “You need to talk to your father. Have you tried his cell phone?”
    “He never answers his cell, you know that.”
    “Try it anyway. He answers it sometimes.”
    I thank Melba and hang up, then dial Dad’s cell phone, a number I use so rarely I can barely remember it. The phone kicks me straight to voice mail, which hasn’t even been set up to accept messages.
    Man plans, God laughs,
reads a framed cross-stitch on my wall, in both English and Yiddish. My first literary agent sent it to me. Placed around this proverb are framed advertisements from my mayoral campaign against Shadrach Johnson.
If you want a mayor for black people, vote for the other fellow. If you want a mayor for white people, vote for the other fellow. If you want a mayor for all the people, vote Penn Cage.
And this one:
Historic Change for a Historic Town.
Then my personal favorite:
I don’t owe anybody in Natchez a favor. I owe everybody.
    I wrote those slogans myself, but two years after being elected mayor of my hometown by a wide margin, I have inescapably failed to deliver the changes I promised. The reasons are legion, but at bottom I blame myself. Two months ago (after two years of beating my head against a wall of indifference), I decided to resign the office and return to writing novels. Then God laughed, and a series of shattering events suggested I might not have the moral right to abdicate the responsibility I’d so blithely taken on. My parents, my daughter, a good friend, and my fiancée reinforced fate’s suggestion, and my father’s heart attack finally crystallized my resolve to serve out my term.
    In the weeks since, I have worked like a man possessed, dividing my time between cleaning up the fallout from the near sinking of a riverboat casino below the Natchez bluff and remaking our local government by forming improbable alliances, calling in favors, and raising money from the unlikeliest of sources. Working at my shoulder throughout this period has been my fiancée, Caitlin Masters, publisher of the
Natchez Examiner
. And pulsing beneath all this activity have been the preparations for our wedding, scheduled to take place twelve days from now, on Christmas Eve. Ever since the district attorney’s call, an itch of intuition has told me that whatever my father did last night is ultimately going to require the postponement of my wedding. I shudder to think of how my fiancée and my daughter would react to this eventuality.
    “Mr. Mayor,” says Rose, “I’ve got your father on line one.”
    Relief surges through me. “Thanks.” I press the button on the phone base. “Hello?”
    “Penn?” In a