The Devil and the River (36 page)

“No decisions until tomorrow,” Gaines said.

“Well, anything I can do, just let me know.”

Gaines thanked Powell, watched as he drove away, and stood there looking at the hole where they had found Webster’s head.

He could not help but be reminded of the pictures he had seen in Dennis Young’s office in St. Mary Parish, the shallow graves where Anna-Louise Mayhew and Dorothy McCormick had been found.

The crime and the circumstances were very different, but the feeling was very much the same.

Or perhaps it was simply a case of wanting it to be Matthias Wade because there was no one else.

“You gonna be okay?” Hagen asked. “You want me to stay?”

“No, you go on home,” Gaines said. “I’m not very good company right now.”

“Hey, if you want me to stay—”

“I’ll be better alone,” Gaines said. “Seriously.”

“Well, my door’s open, and if you want somewhere else to sleep, you know?”

“Thanks, Richard. I’ll be fine.”

Hagen hesitated for a moment, and then he nodded. He turned and walked to the car, started it up, and drove away.

After a minute or so, there was nothing—no light but a slim rind of moon above the trees, no sound but for cicadas and a cool breeze that ruffled leaves and carried a vague haunt of music from somewhere west—and John Gaines, once again, sat in the dirt of the field behind his house. Cross-legged, his head down, his hands clasped behind, his elbows on his knees, he rocked gently back and forth. He tried to picture all their faces—Nancy Denton in ’54, the little girls from ’68, Michael and Judith and his mother. He believed they could see him, every single one of them, as if the mere devotion of his attention to the circumstances and manner of their deaths brought them back to life, if not in this world, then in some other.

Gaines could not believe that a human being was simply a body. There was so much more to it than that. As far as voodoo was concerned, he did not know what he believed or what
to
believe. He believed in murder, however, and murder had been perpetrated in this time and place, also in Morgan City in 1968, also in the woods or down by the river in 1954.

And he believed that Matthias Wade was a liar, if only from the viewpoint that there were things he was not saying, and without some of those things—Gaines felt sure—the truth of what had taken place here would never be known.

At last he rose to his feet, and with the weight of the world on his shoulders, Gaines made his way back to the house. He stood once again on the veranda, looking toward the trees, the narrow rind of moon, the sky beyond, and he wondered if that truth would ever be revealed.

He would bury his mother, he would say his goodbyes, and then—whatever it took—he would dedicate himself to this task, if not for Webster and Nancy, then for the girls in ’68, and if not for them, then for himself. To leave this unresolved did not bear consideration.

And no, he would not call the State Troopers, nor the FBI. He would do this alone. Not out of pride or the concern that his reputation would be harmed, but because he did not wish to share with anyone the satisfaction of walking Matthias Wade into court. Also, in truth, he knew that there would be disciplinary action for his mishandling of the Webster search. He would face the music for that, of course, but he would face it when the investigation was over. And it would not be a matter of trying to placate anyone with a solved case, but merely that at this juncture he could not afford to be distracted.

On the day of his mother’s death, someone has invaded his thoughts with an act of cruelty and horror. Instead of giving him time to grieve, to let go, to be the best son he could be at such a time, his attention had been snatched from her by this terrible thing. It had become a personal issue, he had been delivered a personal message, and if this was the way it was going to be, then so be it.

If Matthias Wade wanted a war, then Gaines could bring a war.

It was that simple.

I
t was Wednesday, the day of the funeral, before Gaines became aware that he had no real recollection of Monday or Tuesday. All that occupied his mind was a radio report he had heard in passing the day before, something to the effect that the
executive privilege
presented by Nixon’s advisers as a means by which he could withhold the last of the Oval Office tapes had been deemed as
not absolute
by Chief Justice Warren Burger. Nixon would have to give them up. The House judiciary had voted twenty-seven to eleven in favor of impeachment. Alice had been right. Nixon had lied his way into a corner, and he didn’t seem able to lie himself out. All that Gaines could think of was the simple fact that she had missed seeing the man take a fall.

This thought seemed to occupy his mind during the service. The small plank-board Whytesburg First Methodist Church could not have contained more people. The ceremony itself was brief, almost perfunctory. Victor Powell spoke, as did Bob Thurston, and Caroline Rousseau cried as she read a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Gaines did not speak. Those things he wished to say about his mother he had already said to her, and he was not a religious man. The minister, a man Gaines barely knew, a man who had visited his mother no more than twice in all her years of illness, was respectful but distant. Once the service was done, they all trooped out to the front of the building, and here his mother’s coffin was laid inside a hearse for the long drive to Baton Rouge.

Gaines followed in his own car, and he followed alone. He left Whytesburg behind, and it was as if he were leaving his past. He knew he would return, of course, but there was something symbolic in what was happening. One man departed; another man would come back. A man with a different viewpoint, a different purpose, a different rationale. That was how Gaines imagined it, for throughout the journey, his thoughts were no longer occupied by the downfall of Richard Nixon but by determining the truth of these most recent events. If Matthias Wade was responsible for these killings, then Wade would be finished either by the hand of the state or some other means. Three young girls and a war veteran were dead, and there was a price to be paid.

Gaines oversaw the interment, and while he stood there alongside the cemetery caretaker, behind him the two men responsible for seeing his mother’s coffin into its final resting place, it did not go unacknowledged that Baton Rouge was also the birthplace and home of Michael Webster.

Everything was done by noon, and Gaines took an early lunch in a diner not far from the cemetery. He did not want to go back to Whytesburg, not immediately, and he decided to stay overnight. He found a motel a handful of miles down I-10, watched TV, drank himself to sleep, woke with a terrible thirst and a pounding head. It was Thursday, the first of August, and he decided to simply follow 10 through New Orleans and then head back up to Whytesburg across the bridge. He took some breakfast, just a couple of warm rolls and some black coffee and then began the hundred-or-so-mile drive. The day was warm, and with the windows down, he could smell the salt air as the northwesterly breeze carried it in from the coast. Beneath it was the bayou funk, the rank and brackish ghost of waterlogged trees, of rotting corduroy roads navigated through swampland and undergrowth. It was the smell of his childhood, and not without some sense of nostalgia and affection did he recall the years he’d spent in this very part of the country. He was thirty-four years old, had left Louisiana just seven years earlier, and yet felt as if he’d been gone for more than a lifetime. So much had intervened, and though he had spent merely fourteen months at war, that also felt like a hundred times more when he considered the significance and import of what he had witnessed and experienced there.

But it seemed that Whytesburg had been the setting for the greatest tragedies of all. The loss of his mother now stood front and center in his life, and would for a great while to come. He did not feel the
alone
yet, but he knew that the feeling would come. There was a point where aloneness became loneliness, and though some seemed to deal with this well, Gaines knew he would not. Too much time in solitude and he would turn inward among his own thoughts, just as Michael Webster had done. Not completely lost, but somehow sufficiently detached and disconnected from reality to preclude the chance for any genuine well-being, and if such internalization continued for too long, perhaps there would be no recovery. He would inhabit a world of his own creating, populated by the darkness he still carried from the war, the darkness occasioned by most recent events, all of it overshadowed by the fact that he was the very last of the Gaines line, and there would be no more. It was with this self-awareness that he had joined the sheriff’s department post-demobilization. Without a structure of some fashion, there would have been little enough to support him.

Gaines had thought to stop over in New Orleans, but he did not dare. He drove on through, made a brief stop outside of Slidell to get some lunch, and was back on the road to Whytesburg within twenty minutes.

He called in first to see Powell, found him alone in the office at the rear of the building.

“As I thought, there’s not a great deal more that I can tell you. Webster’s head and his left hand were severed relatively cleanly. An ax, perhaps a machete or a heavy knife.”

Gaines sat quiet for a time, and then he said, “The Wade sister, Della. Do you know her?”

Powell shrugged his shoulders. “I know
of
her, but I wouldn’t say I know her.”

“She lives with the father and Matthias, right?”

“As far as I’m aware, yes.” Powell leaned forward. “Why? What you looking at?”

“Getting some kind of inside line on that family.”

“You really think this is the work of Matthias Wade.”

“I do.”

“Except for the fact that he has nothing to do with any of it, save that he knew Nancy Denton when he was a kid and he paid out Webster’s bail.”

“I know that, Victor.”

“I mean, I’m not supposing to tell you your business, John, but it seems like you’re chasing the longest of long shots. And besides, those people have more money than they know what to do with. You go after Matthias Wade, and you’ll just find yourself surrounded by a horde of fancy-ass lawyers from Jackson, and you won’t get a word in edgeways.”

“Which is why I’m not going after Matthias Wade.”

“But you’re gonna go after his sister.”

“I just want to talk to her, that’s all.”

“That’s not the way Matthias is going to see it, and who’s to say that she’s going to be willing to talk to you anyway?”

“She might not be, but what the hell else am I going to do? Regardless of Nancy Denton’s murder, I have Michael Webster’s killing to deal with. Even if we forget what happened twenty years ago, I can’t overlook a headless body in a burned-out motel cabin.”

“I’m not saying to overlook it, John. Of course not. I’m just advising you not to go charging in on the Wades, accusations flying all over the place. They have enough influence to make you disappear without a second thought.”

“Like they made Nancy and Michael disappear?”

“John, seriously, you’re talking first-degree murder here,” Powell said. “You’re talking a life sentence here. Say that Matthias Wade is responsible for killing Nancy Denton and that he then killed Webster to prevent Webster from talking, you think he’ll stop at anything to protect his own life? Sooner or later, that old man is going on his way, and then Matthias controls everything that the Wade family owns. It would take just the tiniest percentage of what he has in his checking account to make you vanish from the face of the earth without a single trace.”

Gaines smiled sardonically. “That can go both ways, Victor, but it wouldn’t cost me anything to make him vanish.”

“I didn’t hear that,” Powell said.

“That’s because I didn’t say it.”

“Okay, so I’m not going to stop you from trying to talk to her, but how do you do that without Matthias knowing?”

“Well, she must have her own life. I’m sure she doesn’t spend every waking hour locked up in that house. She must go out; she must know people.”

“Well, I haven’t a clue who knows them, who doesn’t, where they go, what they do. Maybe check with Bob Thurston; see if he knows who the family doctor is. Maybe he can tell you something about their comings and goings.”

Gaines’s first thought had been to check with Nate Ross and Eddie Holland. There was little they did not know, and questions along that line would be more discreet than any kind of official action. To ask the Wade doctor for anything at all would require some kind of warrant, as records and personal details would be confidential.

“I’ll start looking around,” Gaines said as he rose from his chair.

“And how are you doing?” Powell asked. “Everything went fine in Baton Rouge?”

“It hasn’t reached me yet,” Gaines replied. “Not fully. I think I have to get through a few more days without her to even realize she’s not there anymore.”

“She was one hell of a woman, John, no doubt about it. Like I said, if there is anything I can do—”

Gaines thanked Powell. They shook hands. Gaines left the building and headed back over to Nate Ross’s place on Coopers Road. Eddie Holland was evident in his absence, but Nate Ross was all too willing to welcome Gaines in and offer him a drink.

Gaines accepted, took delivery of a significantly loaded glass of W.L. Weller, and the pair of them sat in Ross’s kitchen in silence until Ross asked after Gaines’s well-being.

“I’ll be fine,” Gaines said. “I just said to Vic Powell that I have to get through a few more days of being alone to really get that she’s not here.”

“Know where that’s at,” Ross replied. “Took me a year, maybe two, to finally accept that my wife had passed. Every room seems too big, every day is too long, and it’s always so damned quiet. Half the reason I have Eddie Holland around here all the time is ’cause he makes so much noise.”

Gaines smiled. “Which begs the question, where is he?”

Ross smiled back, but knowingly. “Take a guess.”