The Devil and the River (6 page)

“And if I don’t, you can have me arrested?”

“Judith, you know I would never do such a thing.”

She closed her eyes.

Gaines fell silent.

The tension between them was tangible.

“You gonna find the truth of what happened to her?” Judith asked.

“I’m going to do my best . . . That’s all I can tell you. I’m gonna do everything within my power to find out what happened—”

Judith was distant for a while. “Everyone loved her,” she said. “
Everyone.
And that night . . . the night she went missing . . .” She shook her head and looked down at the floor. “That was supposed to be a party. Just a party for no reason other than to have a party, but everyone was there. Michael was there, Maryanne, too, and the Wade boy. Michael had on his uniform, and he was so handsome . . .”

Judith looked back at Gaines. “I let her stay out. I let her stay out all night. She was sixteen years old, and she was a good girl. I trusted her . . .”

Gaines reached out and took her hand. He could feel the dampness of tears on her skin from where she had been clutching her handkerchief.

“You promise me—”

“You know I can’t promise anything, Judith. You cannot ask me to promise anything.”

“ ’Cept that you’ll do your best?” she asked. “You can promise me that much?”

“Yes. That much I can promise. That I’ll do my best.”

Judith Denton rose awkwardly, as if there were little strength in her knees.

“I’ll drive you home,” he said.

“I’m gonna walk, if you don’t mind, Sheriff. Been inside here enough. Been inside the house, inside the car. Feel like I’ve been inside for twenty years, you know? Want some air. Want to walk out there by myself and have a little time.”

“I understand.”

Judith Denton looked down at Gaines. “I’ll be expecting her home soon as you can bring her,” she said. “Home is where she belongs.”

“You have my word, Judith,” he replied. “You have my word.”

Gaines walked her to the door and watched her until she disappeared at the corner, and then he returned to the morgue.

Powell was standing over the still-shrouded body of Nancy Denton, and as Gaines entered, he drew back the entire length of the sheet and exposed the naked form of the girl.

“How can this be?” Gaines asked, still disbelieving.

“The mud,” Powell replied. “I don’t know a great deal about it, John, ’cept that it can happen. High salt content, low oxygen, buried deep enough to stay cold. And the fact that the mud got inside her as well. I’m sure that had something to do with it. It’s something you’d have to consult a forensic archaeologist or someone about, but I’ve heard of bodies being preserved for hundreds of years, not just decades.”

“Unbelievable,” Gaines said. “This is truly unbelievable.”

“The fact that you found her there is the least unbelievable thing about this,” Powell said. “It gets a great deal crazier from here on. Trust me.”

Gaines frowned.

“She wasn’t sexually assaulted,” Powell said. “I expected to find that she had been, but she hadn’t. I think her hands and feet were tied, but I cannot be sure. There are no signs of any real physical injury at all.”

“Cause of death?” Gaines asked.

“Asphyxiation, as far as I can tell right now,” Powell replied. “The hyoid bone in the throat is broken, concurrent with strangulation, but I’m not done.”

Powell indicated the eighteen-inch incision down her torso. “But this is my greatest concern . . .”

“This is what you needed me to know?” Gaines asked, almost afraid to ask, aware that even he was close to his own level of tolerance.

“Yes, John, I did.”

Powell leaned over the body, and then he carefully worked his fingers into the wound. Slowly, he drew the edges apart, and even as he did so, Gaines was aware that something was very wrong indeed.

“Where is her heart?” Gaines asked.

“She did not have one,” Powell replied. He reached left and came back with a metal dish. In it seemed to be shreds of fabric, perhaps some kind of plant matter. And there was something else. Something that disturbed Gaines greatly.

“This came apart as I removed it,” Powell said.

Gaines looked at Nancy’s face. Something seemed to have changed. This was not the way she had appeared when he had entered the room with Judith. The face now seemed tight, the skin drawn, the lips pulled back against the teeth.

It was the body being influenced by the air, the change in temperature perhaps, he told himself. Nothing more than that.

Gaines closed his eyes and mouthed a few silent words.

“What?” Powell asked.

“Nothing,” Gaines replied.

“You ready for this?” Powell asked.

“As I’ll ever be.”

“This,” Powell said, indicating the few shreds of cloth in the metal dish, “is the remains of a basket.”

“A what?”

“A basket. Very carefully constructed, almost spherical. Made in two halves, it was hinged on one side with wire and had a wire catch on the other. And it was made to open just like a pocket watch . . .”

Powell set the dish down on the table.

“A basket? What the hell?” Gaines started.

“Hold your breath, John,” Powell replied, “because you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”

Powell took a wooden depressor and poked at a small shape to the side of the basket’s remains. It seemed to uncurl, and despite its fragility, it still retained its circular shape. It was then that Gaines’s eyes seemed to deceive him.

It was a snake. No question about it. An infant, its type and exact length impossible to ascertain, it was nevertheless a snake.

“Jesus Christ. What the fuck?”

“Exactly what I said,” Powell interjected. “Someone strangled her, and then they opened her up, cut out her heart, and then replaced it with a snake in a basket.”

Gaines didn’t say a word. He simply felt a quiet sense of dread drowning every other emotion he was feeling.

S
ometimes the mind slipped its moorings.

Gaines, standing quietly in the corridor outside the morgue, thought of Linda Newman. At first he did not know why she came to mind, but then—after a little while—he did know. It was because of the child. The child that never was.

It was 1959, and he—all of nineteen years old—met a girl in the Laundromat. As good a place as any other to meet a wife, he believed. Not like there was some wife-farm where you could go pick your own and then maybe take her back if she turned out to be a sour ’un. Her name was Linda, and she got herself all trained up in a beautician school in Baton Rouge. She came on back to Opelousas, where Gaines was living at the time, but there didn’t appear to be a great demand for the things she proposed to provide. The women all wore housecoats and thick socks. They were up at five in the morning, chopping wood, firing the stove to make oatmeal for a hungover husband and a brood of kids, and such routines didn’t sit so well with a bouffant and a manicure. Women like that would rather you open up another liquor store, maybe a bar or something, so their husbands would spend more nights sleeping in the garage. Lack of employment aside, John Gaines and Linda Newman figured they would make it work somehow, and they stayed together. One time in the fall of 1960, just for the hell of it, they had driven from Alexandria to Shreveport. They had shared a passion for Nabs crackers, had eaten much of the state’s available supply en route. And then, in the early part of 1961, Linda got pregnant. When she was pregnant, she was crazy for frozen Milky Ways. For her, frozen Milky Ways were not so far from a religious experience.

While he was in-country, Gaines had thought about that child a lot. The child that almost was. Squatting in a foxhole, the darkness stabbing at his eyes, his mind playing tricks (for once it was dark, everyone believed in ghosts), he would make-believe that the child was alive, that he or she had made it, that Linda Newman and the child were waiting for him in Opelousas. But there had been no child, and there was no Linda Newman. Linda had miscarried, and afterwards it seemed that she could not bear to be around him, and so she’d returned to her folks in New Orleans. So many times Gaines had thought to find her, to speak to her, to try to convince her they could start over. He had imagined those conversations, practiced his lines, but they had never been delivered. Gaines had rehearsed a part he’d known he would never play, because he knew all along that it would never have worked. What had happened between them, how it had ended, had been so finite, so permanent, and they had both known it completely.

Gaines had tried so hard to think of other things, but it just kept coming back, like the taste of bad garlic, and it had made him bitter. The child he’d been denied. Seemed there was always something to remind him, and now this—this dead girl with a snake for a heart—was the most potent and powerful of all.

Linda had been gone all of thirteen years. His fourteen months in Vietnam had ended in December of 1968, and yet he was still alone, still caring for his mother, living now in Mississippi instead of Louisiana, but little, if anything, had changed.

He believed he had done the right things. However, doing the right thing was only a comfort if the result was right. There were individuals who accepted what nature had given them and others who strived against it. There were others who floated in limbo. They were waiting, it seemed, but for what? Even they did not know.

There was one God for the rich folks, one for the poor. And there were some men who spent the entirety of their lives looking for signs of forgiveness for a crime they had not committed.

Gaines, every once in a while, would still awaken in four-hour shifts. Suddenly, his eyes wide, his mind alert, a voice insisting in a hurried whisper,
Hey! Hey, Gaines! You’re up
, and he would lie there, the silence of the house around him, and realize that he did not need to get up, that there was no watch to be performed tonight, that if he stepped out behind the house and stared into the darkness, he would see nothing but distance and shadows. Whatever war had existed for him was now over. Vietnam was nine and a half thousand miles away, and yet sometimes he believed it was as close as his shadow. Believed, perhaps, that it
was
his shadow. It was a mighty war, both terrible and terrifying, and back then—at twenty-seven years of age—he had been a child among children, and they had been presented with both horror and rapture in equal parts. It was said that the mind healed if given sufficient time. It did not. It merely built ever-greater defenses against the ravages of conscience and memory.

After a while you forgot what was dream and what was memory.

Above and beneath all that, John Gaines was the man he had become in Vietnam. He was a man of war. A dark and merciless and unrelenting war that took everything good from the soul and replaced it with nothing. It was hard to appreciate how little more than a year could influence and affect a human being to such a degree. But it had. There was no question that it had.

Some said they left a part of themselves in the jungles and villes and tunnels of Southeast Asia. This was not true. They left all of themselves behind. They returned as someone else, and their friends, their families, their wives and mothers and daughters, struggled to recognize them. To themselves, as well, they had become almost strangers.

Gaines had not gone the route of grad school deferment, nor the National Guard, nor the reserves; he did not cite opposition in principle, nor from some religious or ethical stance, nor from some real or imagined medical status; he did not think of running away or hiding in Canada or Mexico. On Thursday, February 9, 1967, he received his
Order to Report for Physical Exam
. He attended the exam. On Wednesday, May 10, he received his
Order to Report for Induction
. He simply read the draft notice carefully, read it once again, and then returned it to the envelope.
So that’s it
, his mother had said.
Yes
, Gaines had replied.
That’s it.

Even now, looking back, he could remember the expression on her face.
I lost my husband to war
, that expression said,
and now I will lose my son
. She had been born Alice Devereau in Pointe à la Hache, Louisiana, in January of 1915. She met her husband-to-be, Edward, in 1937. Within two years, they were married. John, their only child, was born in June of 1940. When John was two, his father left for Europe. He served with the First Army, and was killed near Malmedy and Stavelot on the road to Liege, Belgium, on December 23, 1944. Alice Gaines had been all of twenty-nine years old.

So she looked at her son, two years younger than she herself had been when she’d lost her husband, and she asked him if there was any other way.

“No,” John had said. “There is no other way.”

Five days later, John Gaines reported for Basic Combat Training at Fort Benning, Georgia. Boots, bed, hygiene, weaponry and maintenance, C rations, first aid, land navigation, rules of war, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, marching in ranks and parade, inspections. He graduated in July, moved on to Advanced Individual Training. He learned how to hide from people. He learned how to follow people. Then he learned how to kill them. In September, he graduated to Republic of Vietnam Training. Toward the end of the month, he took a week’s leave, went home to see his mother, helped her move to Whytesburg, Mississippi, so as to be nearer an old friend, and then he shipped out. Fort Benning to Saigon, Saigon to Đà Lat, Đà Lat and onward into the Central Highlands. Two weeks’ in-country orientation and training, and he was set.

Back then, back in the real history of the thing, there were smaller empires. Vietnam was a world all its own, and included the territories of Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, out to Laos and Cambodge sat Siam in the west. Now it was all North and South, nothing more. Before the Second World War, the French maintained Indochinese colonies. They occupied Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia until they were overrun by the Japanese. After the Japanese surrender, the French came back. They wanted a new French Union. Ho Chi Minh wanted complete independence. The United States supported France, but when the fortress of Dien Ben Phu fell in May of 1954, it was all over.