The Devil and the River (19 page)

“Now, where d’you go and hear such a thing?” Gaines asked, knowing full well that Victor Powell would have told his wife, who would then have told her friends, and before lunchtime half the folks of Whytesburg would have been fully apprised of the situation.

“Honestly,” Gaines went on, “I don’t know that there are two more advised and responsible people in this town, and I’d have thought that such a responsibility, you with your police experience, Ed, and you, Nate, being so legally educated and wise, would feel nothing less than the full burden of care in such a matter.”

Neither Holland nor Ross said a word. They looked at each other, then back at Gaines.

Gaines leaned closer, the confidant, acknowledging both Holland and Ross as equals, if not superiors.

“If I can’t rely on you guys to manage this business with confidentiality and discretion, then who can I rely on? Place like this, Whytesburg, depends upon its elders to keep order, to make sure that rumor doesn’t find its way where it shouldn’t.”

Once again, Holland looked at Ross, and Ross looked back at Holland.

“Now, I know you weren’t deputy when this Denton girl went missing, Ed, and you, Nate . . . well, you were up at your practice in Hattiesburg, far as I know. You are probably not aware of the original circumstances of her disappearance, and Don Bicklow and George Austin are both long gone. So that leaves me to ask questions of those who
were
here and those who
were
involved. So, unless you were here, or unless you were involved, then I don’t know that I can ask anything of you but the exercising of your sense of duty in setting a good example around and about. I will be speaking to you both, because I believe that you may know some things of value to this case, but we’re not doing that tonight. So, as far as the here and now is concerned, I have matters to attend to with some urgency. I know that you both appreciate the situation I am dealing with far better than anyone else here, maybe even better than me. I am the sheriff, and I gotta deal with this thing, but I want to know that I can count on you for assistance and advice if I should so need it.”

“Of course, Sheriff,” Holland blurted, taken aback perhaps by the level of confidence that was being expressed in his abilities and position.

“Without question,” Ross added. “Without any question at all.”

“Well, that makes me feel a great deal better,” Gaines said, and he shook their hands. “Now, I really do need to impress upon you the need to maintain some sense of order on this thing, gentlemen. I know all too well how many folks around here value your opinion, and I want you to use that opinion as wisely as you can. Let’s keep this thing localized, shall we? Let’s keep this problem a Whytesburg problem, and with both of you on my side, I’m sure we can deal with it quite capably ourselves. We wouldn’t want the whole county coming on down here to have a lynching party, now, would we?”

Gaines didn’t wait for a response. He gripped Ross’s shoulder, squeezed it assuredly, and then left the building.

When he looked back, they were still standing there—looked like they didn’t know Tuesday from Sunday, nor any of the days in between—and Gaines smiled to himself.

Sometimes the only way to deal with Ross and Holland was to grant them the importance they so earnestly believed they deserved. Truth was, he was perhaps granting them no more importance than they
did
deserve. They were good people, people used to working hard and getting things done, and retirement didn’t suit such folks.

Hagen joined Gaines. He had loaded the trunk with everything Gaines had asked for.

“Where we going?” Hagen asked.

“Back to where we found her body and then a little way off.”

“What’re we looking for?”

“Her heart, Richard. We’re looking for her heart.”

Hagen just looked at Gaines.

“Seems I’m gonna spend this week looking at the faces of folks who don’t believe what I’m saying to them.”

Hagen—wide-eyed—just nodded. He opened the driver’s-side door and climbed in.

Gaines got in the passenger side, the car pulled away, and neither of them spoke for a good ten minutes.

“You get him to sign that release document?” Hagen asked.

“Oh hell, I forgot,” Gaines said. He reached into his pocket and found the paper that Hagen had given him.

“He needs to sign it, John.”

“Soon as I get back,” Gaines replied.

Silence filled the car again.

Gaines did not know if finding Nancy Denton’s heart—whatever might remain of it—would be worse than discovering nothing at all. Finding that poor girl’s heart precisely four yards east and twelve yards north of the point where they had wrestled her frail and broken body from the black filth of the riverbank would merely confirm that they were dealing with something far darker than Gaines had feared.

The things you witnessed in war tied your nerves in knots, tied and twisted them so damned tight they would never unravel, not with a hundred, not with a thousand years of living. And if the living brought you such things as this—things that were equal to the horrors Gaines had seen, things that were carried from the very heart of war itself into an unsuspecting, fragile small-town America—then what hope did he have of becoming fully human again? Scant hope at best, and perhaps it was this of which Gaines was most afraid.

S
ometimes Gaines liked to drink a glass of whiskey, but it gave him an upset liver and a bad stomach, and thus the bad outweighed the good. That night he drank as if it was the final hour of R & R, that he—the GI round eye—was heading back to the front come daybreak.

When he was at war, he knew it was the worst place he had ever been, the worst place he would
ever
be. Such an awareness did something to the mind, the emotions, the very spirit of a man. It blunted him, rendered him insensate, as if the upper and lower registers of his humanness had been cauterized. Just as he would now no longer experience any real depth of fear, so he would be immune to joy, to elation, to the sometimes giddy rush of pleasure that came from simple things. A child would smile, and he would see an eight-year-old facedown in a pool of muddy, stinking water, the back of its head blown away. A bright bouquet of flowers, and he would see not only the bursting hearts and lingering tails of magnesium flares but the zip and crash of tracers, and in his ears would be the thump and rumble of mortar fire. Like the devil’s firework show. The sounds of 105s and 155s were relentless, as if they were counting off the seconds. It was deafening, interminable, but—back then—hearing that sound at least meant you were still alive.

And there was the smell. The smell of things burning. The unmistakable stench of chemical fires in wet vegetation. And bodies. Like scorched hair and rotted pork. Gaines knew the mind did not pick favorites, did not prefer one recollection over another. Some days he could recall the warm aroma of fresh popcorn, the ghost of some long-forgotten and too-brief childhood. But that was always fleeting—there, and then gone. The darker sense memories lingered for hours, and it was at such times that he began to worry for the stability of his own mind. He too was fragile, and he wondered how long it would be before the seams began their inevitable and irreparable divide.

And afterward, after he had returned home, luck became important, fate even, because there was no logical reason for having survived the war. Why had one man died and another lived?

There was no delineation or marker identifying those who would see home and those who would not. Did not matter where you had come from, whether you were born army, a volunteer, or a draftee. When it came, it came. It did not matter if you were loved or despised, whether you attended church for faith or simply to steal from the charity box, whether you worshipped your mother or cursed her blind, whether you lied and swindled, blasphemed, whether you reveled in each and every one of the seven deadly sins or adhered to the letter of each commandment as a point of personal law. War possessed no prejudice, no predetermination, no preference. War would take you as you were, no questions asked.

Why? How were such matters decided? And who did the deciding?

It was such questions that invaded the normalcy and routine of his life. It was such questions that he tried not to ask himself.

But then there were moments: moments of self-doubt, moments when he questioned his own humanity, moments when he questioned the human race itself, the things of which men were made, the things that drove them, their purposes, their aspirations, their rationale. Surely war was invented by man, and if man could invent war, then was there no level to which he could not stoop?

Gaines did not believe Webster, not for a moment. He could see the man with his hands around Nancy Denton’s throat. He could see the man choking the life out of the poor, defenseless, beautiful teenager. Perhaps Webster had earned a taste for killing in Guadalcanal, and he had needed to satiate that taste any way he could. Gaines did not believe that Webster had found a dead girl in a shack by the side of the road. He had taken her there, and he had taken her there to kill her.

They found the heart. The girl’s heart. Or they found what Gaines could only assume had once been her heart. Four yards east, twelve yards north, just as Webster had told them. It looked like a small, dark knot of something, like a fragment of wood, a chunk of dried leather, and even as they opened the metal box within which it had been contained, there was a certainty that it would stand no physical contact. It was nothing more than dust, in truth, and whatever cloth it might have been wrapped in was gossamer-thin, again little more than a memory of what it had once been, and the box itself, once sturdy, once capable of carrying nails and bolts and screws and suchlike, was rusted and frail, and it came apart in pieces as Gaines and Hagen tried to rescue it from the earth.

The simple truth was that they had followed Webster’s directions, and they had found something that could have been a sixteen-year-old girl’s heart in a metal box. Irrespective of the fact that it was no longer a heart at all, it
was
something, and it was where Webster had said it would be. That was all that Gaines had needed to confirm his worst fears and his most assured suspicions.

Standing there, his breath coming hard and fast, not only from the physical exertion of digging, but also the mental stress of what was happening, Gaines believed that the only mind he possessed was broken. Sometimes his certainty of this was intense, and it burned with the luminescence, the intensity, the smell of a heat tab beneath a makeshift stove.

Other times he believed he was the only who’d returned sane.

When he closed his eyes, he could still see the dead. He could see the pieces of the dead. He could see heaps of blood-soaked fatigues and flak jackets outside the makeshift triage tent. Almost as if to say,
Hey boys, if the NVA don’t get getcha, we’ll finish the job pronto right here and now!

Only at such times could people look at one another and say all that needed to be said without uttering a single word.

Gaines possessed that same feeling then—right there in Whytesburg—as he and Hagen dug into the wet ground. They did not speak as they worked, and they did not speak when they found what they’d hoped they would not find.

The earth had given up Nancy Denton, and now it had given up her heart. The earth was a living thing, a thing with memory, with history, and releasing its secrets would perhaps permit the escape of other things, other darknesses, other memories that would have been best left buried.

What were they doing here? Were they bringing out the dead, and alongside them, the very madness that killed them in the first place?

And what would happen if they took Nancy Denton right now, carried her back to the river, and returned her to the grave that Webster had given her? Would the world return to how it had been before they found her? Was it better to hide what had happened all those years before? Was it better to let the dead go on being dead, to let the truth die with Michael Webster, to release Whytesburg from the ghosts it never knew it had?

Gaines was disturbed. He was cold, distracted, upset. Nevertheless, he went on with the business in front of him. He directed Hagen to put sawhorses around the scene. Together they roped it and taped it. Hagen took a dozen or more photographs from every angle, and each time the flash popped, Gaines started. Even when he knew the flash was coming, he still started. They took what they could of the box, the cloth within, the memory of a young girl’s heart, and they bagged it as carefully as they could. Hagen sat in the passenger seat with this strange cargo in his lap. He looked straight ahead, almost as if to look at the remnants directly was to somehow be cursed.

Hagen closed his eyes when the engine started, and he did not open them again until he and Gaines had reached the office.

Gaines and Hagen filled out paperwork, and then Gaines called Victor Powell. Powell told Gaines to meet him at the Coroner’s Office, to bring everything he had found. When Powell took these things from him, thanked Gaines, and put them in the same room as Nancy Denton’s body, it was late. Gaines looked exhausted, and Powell told him so.

“Go home now,” he said. “You need to rest, my friend, before you collapse.”

Gaines nodded. Powell was right. He went home. He looked in on his mother. She was out for the count. He closed her door silently, returned to the kitchen, and then he took the bottle of whiskey from the cupboard and he started drinking.

For an hour he tried to feel something other than the horror, and then for an hour he tried to feel nothing at all.

And then he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

Gaines knows he is dreaming, but he cannot bring himself awake. He stands in a secluded area, somehow clear of vegetation, yet around him and over him is the shroud and the canopy and the wilderness of impenetrable jungle. A thin and insubstantial light seeps into the fug as a misty, malodorous haze. He is not alone. Of this much he is certain. He is being watched, and whoever is watching him is as patient as Job. Gaines knows he has been there for some time—hours, perhaps days—and yet whoever is stalking him has made no attempt to challenge him. And yet Gaines knows this is what they wish to do. What they
need
to do. This is war, and if you are not an ally, a comrade, a friend, then you are an enemy. There is no middle ground.