The Devil and the River (59 page)

Della slapped her brother. The sound was ferocious. He looked at her as if she had barely touched him.

He smiled strangely, and then he lowered his head as if dismissing her from the room.

Della, her eyes ablaze, tears rolling down her cheeks, caught somewhere in the midst of a whirlwind of emotions, stormed out.

Gaines heard her as she ran across the hall and started up the stairs.

Matthias Wade turned back to Gaines. “It’s over,” Wade said. “The game is finished. The people who really did these things are dead. Perhaps it is time for you to just accept the fact that sometimes things happen, and there is nothing you can do to influence or change any of it.”

“I don’t believe that, Mr. Wade.”

Wade nodded slowly. He looked down at the clippings on the floor, and then back up at Gaines. “Who’s to say that one life is worth more than another? Not for us to say, right? I don’t know about you, Sheriff, but I tend to be fatalistic about these things. If I were a religious man, if I held to the view that God created all men in His own image, then He created Eugene just the same as He created me or you or Della or these children. Maybe there is a balance in all things. Maybe He gives and at the same time He takes away, and there is nothing we can do to change that. Perhaps these people were all meant to die, and if it had not been Eugene to take care of that, then it would have been someone else—”

“Is that how you have justified your decision all these years?”

“My decision, Sheriff?”

“Your decision to say nothing when you found out that Eugene killed Nancy Denton.”

Wade smiled. “Are we still playing that game, Sheriff? What I say here has no bearing on anything. Whatever you think I might be admitting to will be so strenuously denied. It is your word against mine, Sheriff Gaines, and I believe I know enough people of enough significance to make anything you say sound like the ramblings of a war veteran with some inexplicable personal grudge.”

Gaines looked at the man, and he saw it in his eyes. There never was a decision. Nancy Denton did not matter, not compared to the shame and discredit that could have been directed toward the family.

“You are no different,” Gaines said. “You may as well have killed her yourself. You may as well have killed all of them. You knew what had happened, and you let it go. You just stepped away and did nothing.”

“I think you are delusional, Sheriff. I think that maybe you are shell-shocked, a little mentally unbalanced. After all, war can have such a destructive and deteriorative effect on a man’s mental stability, can it not?”

“You killed your own brother, Matthias. You sent Leon Devereaux up there to tell him that Nancy Denton’s body had been found, that the truth was going to come out. You knew what he would do, didn’t you? You knew he would kill himself. There was no other way out for him, was there? Did you think he would just be forgotten? Another lonely suicide somewhere, hushed up by the Wade family, everything forgotten? Is that what you anticipated?”

Matthias Wade waved the questions aside as if they were irrelevant.

“Life might be a matter of doing the things you want to do, Sheriff, but surviving is a matter of doing the things that need to be done. Sometimes people agree with those things, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes others feel that the things you choose to do are not acceptable, and that is their right. People should have a right to disagree, Sheriff, but that doesn’t necessarily give them the right to try to prevent you from doing those things. For me, it is very simple.”

“And for me, too.”

Matthias Wade turned as Della came into the room. She had a gun in her hand, a small revolver, and she aimed it unerringly at her brother.

“What is this?” Wade asked. “What the fuck is this, Della?”

“Justice, Matthias. Plain and simple.”

“Put the fucking gun down, Della. You are not going to use it.”

“You don’t think I’m capable?”

“Capable? Capable? What I think you’re capable of is getting drunk and fucking some colored man, you ignorant bitch. That’s what I think you’re capable of.”

“You think I don’t possess some sense of pride, Matthias? You think I don’t want to do everything to save our father from the shame and disgrace you are going to bring on this family?”

“Oh, enough, Della. Put the gun down and go away for Christ’s sake.”

Della took another step forward. She steadied her shaking hand. “Say goodbye, you asshole,” she hissed, and she pulled the trigger.

The bullet, a .25 caliber, entered Matthias Wade’s throat at the base. It did not possess sufficient force to exit through the rear of his neck, but it punctured his trachea and lodged in the vertebrae.

Matthias Wade did not fall or stagger backward, as if he could not believe that his sister had shot him, and such was his certainty that he was able to defy the physical reality of its occurrence.

Nevertheless, the physical reality could not be denied, and blood started to choke out of the puncture in his throat. It soaked the front of his shirt, and when he saw that blood, he started trying to gather it up, as if returning it would somehow reverse what had happened.

Matthias dropped to his knees. He just stared back at his little sister and opened his mouth to say something.

Whatever he had planned to say never made the distance from his mind to his lips. He keeled over sideways and lay on the floor. He was motionless aside from his right leg, which kicked back and forth a half-dozen times and then stopped.

Della Wade looked at Gaines. Gaines looked back at Della.

“Is there another gun in the house?” Gaines asked, his voice direct, not to be questioned. It was as if every ounce of adrenaline available to him was coursing through his body. He felt certain, focused, not even shocked. He felt utterly calm.

Della just stared back at him as if she had not heard him.

“Della. Look at me. Is there another gun in the house? A gun that belongs to Matthias?”

She nodded once, twice, and then seem to snap to. “Y-yes,” she said. “He has—”

“Go get it,” he said. “Hurry!”

Della moved suddenly, crossing the room, heading down the corridor and away.

She was back within a minute, in her hand a .38.

Gaines took the revolver from her, wiped off her prints with his shirt-tail, and then put the gun in Matthias’s lifeless hand. He held the gun level, and then fired a single shot somewhere into the wall behind where Della had been standing.

Della jumped, startled, and dropped the .25.

He looked back at Della. “Self-defense,” he said. “You shot him in self-defense. Do you understand?”

Della was speechless.

Gaines was up on his feet, had her by the shoulders, started shaking her, getting her to focus, to look at him, to get her attention.

“You understand what I’m saying?” he said.

“Ye-yes,” she said. “Yes, self-defense.”

“Now, go to your room. Stay there. Don’t say anything. Don’t call anyone. Don’t do anything until I tell you, okay?”

She looked at him blankly.

“Okay?”

“Yes, yes okay,” she said, and with that she hurried from the room.

Gaines turned back and looked at Matthias Wade.

He saw the dead teenager, the one who carried a single grenade, the one who got in the way of the bullet.

The gods of war were fickle. They didn’t care who they took, or why.

Most often they were just dispassionate and indifferent, but every once in a while they got it right.

D
ella Wade sits quietly in the basement cell. It is not the cell that housed Michael Webster, but the one that faces it.

She is there partly for her own protection, to keep her away from the horde of journalists that seem to have descended on Whytesburg, but there also while Gaines deals with the issues surrounding the deaths of Matthias Wade and Leon Devereaux. There are things that have to be made right, things to be settled, and while they remain unresolved, she is best served by being in his care rather than anyone else’s.

Eddie Holland sits on a chair six feet from the cell. He doesn’t speak to her. She doesn’t speak to him.

Gaines is upstairs dealing with the reporters, the photographers, the official necessities surrounding such a situation. The reception area of the Sheriff’s Office reminds him of the Danang Press Center.

It is the following morning when Gaines comes to speak with her. Wednesday, August 7th. It is somewhere after nine in the morning, and Gaines has received word that Della Wade has still not eaten a thing since he brought her in.

Lyle Chantry is keeping watch on her, and Gaines sends Chantry away. He lets himself into the cell, pulls the door closed behind him, and sits beside her.

He clears his throat, and then he starts talking. “When I was in the army,” he says, “I went to war. It was a war that other people had decided was a good idea. It wasn’t my decision, nothing to do with me, but the law said I had to go, and so I did.” Gaines turns and leans against the back wall. He lifts one foot and places it on the edge of the bunk. He takes cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lights two, passes one to Della, and goes on. “War is a lottery. War is like some kind of doorway into hell, and you run through that doorway into oncoming fire, and you see people die all around you, people whose names you don’t even know, and yet you are all supposed to be fighting for the same thing. I asked a lot of people, and no one seemed to know what we were fighting for. I had this lieutenant. His name was Ron Wilson—”

“Sheriff?”

“Yes, Della.”

“Are you going to charge me with the murder of Leon Devereaux?”

“No, Della, I am not.”

“Why?”

“Because I believe it was the right thing to do, and if I had been in your situation, I would have done the same thing.”

“I was afraid that he would get away.”

“Devereaux?”

“No, Matthias. I believed he had killed Nancy. I
really
did believe he had killed Nancy, but I thought he would get away with it, and I couldn’t bear it. After what he did to Clifton, and then when you came and started asking questions, and you were convinced he had done this, then I thought that Leon Devereaux should die—”

“And that Matthias would be blamed?”

She doesn’t speak for a moment, and then she nods her head. “Yes,” she replies. “I wanted him to be punished for killing someone, even if it wasn’t the right person.”

“He was complicit in the deaths of many people,” Gaines tells her. “Perhaps there were more, but we have evidence that implicates Eugene in the deaths of at least five girls. Those are ones we have something substantive to corroborate, some physical evidence that we found in his apartment.”

“Physical evidence?”

“Items of clothing, jewelry, things like that.”

“And Matthias knew he was killing these girls . . . these children?”

“He knew about Nancy. I am sure of that. And he knew about the two girls in Morgan City. They were both daughters of Wade employees, and Matthias got so involved in that case that he himself was suspected for a long time. There are still people who think Matthias was the one who murdered them.”

“And now he is dead. And Eugene, too.”

“Yes.”

“And Michael?” she asks. “He did that terrible thing . . .”

“He did something to try to bring her back,” Gaines replies. “Michael Webster loved that girl more than life itself. Without her . . . well, he was devastated, and he did the only thing he could think of doing.”

“He did it for love,” she says. “But to do that to someone you love? I can’t even begin to imagine what that did to him.”

“I know what it did to him,” Gaines says. “He lost his mind, Della. He truly lost his mind.”

“Such a waste of life,” she says.

“Yes, it is,” Gaines replies, and wants to add,
Just like in war
, but he does not.

He reaches out and takes her hand, and he holds it reassuringly, and he looks at her for a very long time and neither of them speak.

O
n an unseasonably cool day, August 8, 1974—as America and the world watched events unfold around the resignation of Richard M. Nixon—a funeral was held in the small Mississippi town of Whytesburg.

It was a strange funeral, perhaps more a memorial service, and though there were no family members there to represent any of the deceased, that same small church that had seen Alice Gaines’s funeral just one week earlier was filled to capacity. Nate Ross, Eddie Holland, John Gaines, Richard Hagen, Officers Chantry and Dalton were front right. Front left were the Rousseaus, Bob Thurston, Victor Powell, Maryanne Benedict, and Della Wade. In the seats behind were many of the eldest Whytesburg citizens—those who remembered Nancy Denton, those who had perhaps been involved in those initial searches for her whereabouts on the day after her disappearance.

Gaines spoke this time. He did not say a great deal, but his words were meaningful and heartfelt, and he felt sure that they would be heard.

Later, the gathered attendees walked out to the cemetery, and there—in plots paid for by the county purse—Judith and Nancy were buried side by side, and next to Nancy they laid the body of Michael Webster, the man who loved her enough to do what he did and try to live with the consequences.

In some days’ time there would be a funeral for Eugene Wade, another for Matthias, but there would be few attendees, and those funerals would be held far from Whytesburg. Della would not attend, and neither would Earl Wade, his health and mental well-being having deteriorated to the point where he was bed-bound much of the time.

Della Wade told Gaines that she had tried to explain things to her father, but her father did not, or could not, understand.

Catherine Wade had been apprised of all that needed to be known, and Catherine—now the eldest—was making plans to have her father deemed legally incapable of managing his own affairs. She would act as proxy, and she—with Della’s agreement—had decided to sell the house. There was a great deal of money. They were taking equal shares. The Wade dynasty would end right there with the death of Earl, and Della did not believe it would be long before he passed away.