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COS I WHITE CHAPTER ONE: THE GREYHOUND'S GHOST The Greyhound bus coughed and sputtered as it lurched to a halt at the edge of Willow Creek, Mississippi, its ancient engine rattling like a dying man's last breath. The winter of 1952 had descended upon the South with a vengeance, turning the red clay roads into frozen ruts and coating the bare branches of the pine trees with a thin, glittering layer of ice. The sky was the color of old pewter, heavy and low, threatening snow that never quite came, only a bitter, bone-deep cold that seemed to seep through the walls of every building and the layers of every coat. Inside the bus, the air was thick with the smells of diesel, sweat, and the faint, sour odor of too many bodies crowded into too small a space. The passengers were a motley collection of humanity — black sharecroppers heading south to visit relatives they hadn't seen in years, a white traveling salesman with a cheap suitcase full of fabric samples and a mouth full of cheap jokes, an elderly woman clutching a worn Bible to her chest, and a young mother with haunted eyes and a small boy clinging to her hand like she was the only anchor in a storm-tossed sea. The mother was thin, painfully so, her cheekbones sharp beneath skin that had the pallor of someone who hadn't seen proper sunlight or proper food in far too long. Her coat was a thin, threadbare thing, patched in several places, wholly inadequate for the bitter cold that had settled over the region. Her hands, when she wasn't clutching her son's, trembled constantly — whether from the cold or from something else, the boy couldn't tell. She wore no wedding ring, and her eyes, when they weren't scanning the windows for some unseen threat, were filled with a deep, abiding sadness that seemed to have taken up permanent residence behind her gaze. The boy was perhaps seven years old, though he was small for his age, stunted by years of hunger and the kind of neglect that comes not from malice but from sheer, grinding poverty. His hair was the color of pale straw, matted and unkempt beneath a woolen cap that had been knitted by a grandmother he barely remembered. His clothes were clean but worn, patched and mended so many times that the original fabric was almost invisible beneath the layers of thread. His shoes, thin-soled and cracked, had holes in the toes that his mother had tried to stuff with newspaper. But it was his eyes that made people pause. They were the color of a winter sky just before dawn, a pale, piercing blue that seemed far too old for such a young face. Those eyes had seen things no child should ever see — hunger, violence, the casual cruelty of a world that had no use for people like him and his mother. They had seen motel rooms and bus stations and the back seats of cars that served as temporary homes. They had seen the backs of too many people who had turned away, unwilling or unable to help. And now, as the bus shuddered to a stop at the Willow Creek depot, those eyes were fixed on his mother's face, watching her every expression, trying to read the fear that flickered behind her eyes like a candle in a high wind. "Mama?" he whispered, his voice hoarse from disuse and the dry, recirculated air of the bus. "Where are we?" His mother didn't answer at first. She was staring out