by Greg Iles
The subtext of that comment was Not everybody did. This makes me want to hear his story, but Tim Weathers silences any elaboration with a single glance that is impossible to misread. There will be no war stories in front of eleven-year-olds.
We attack the steaming red piles of crawfish for another half hour, and then Carl and I go down to my basement office with a couple of beers.
“I’m glad you came in person,” I tell him.
“I didn’t want to call you about this.”
“You still don’t trust everybody in your department?”
“Billy Ray Ellis is still sheriff. That ought to tell you all you need to know.”
I nod dispiritedly. “What have you got?”
“My dad knows the woman you asked about. The one whose son got lynched. His voice had a real funny sound when he told me. He said this lady knew the worst story in the world.”
“The worst story in the world? Coming from your father . . .”
“That means something, brother. I’m not sure I even want to know. You know?”
“Yeah. But to nail Snake, maybe we have to know.”
Carl nods soberly. “Her name is Cleotha Booker. She’s a widow. Long time now. She’s real old and mostly keeps to herself. Daddy talked to her about you. She refused to speak to you at first, but then she found out you were Dr. Cage’s son. She said if you were willing to drive down to Athens Point, she’d talk to you. But she told Daddy right up front that she doesn’t know anything about who killed her boy.”
“Damn. And her daughter-in-law?”
“She passed way back in ’67 or ’68. Committed suicide up north somewhere.”
“That’s what my dad remembered, too.”
“Don’t sound like much of a lead, Penn.”
I shrug. “You never know. I’ve broken cases with less.”
Carl takes a long swallow of Corona. “So, Mr. Mayor. Who is that hot thing upstairs?”
“Serenity? She’s a writer, like I said. She’s in town doing research.”
Carl manages to hold a neutral expression for about two seconds. Then he breaks into wild laughter and slaps his thigh with his free hand. “Lord, is she hot! Ain’t no way that girl was in the army. No army I was ever in, anyway.”
Carl has got me chuckling with him. “She’s not hard to look at, I’ll grant you that. She is about ten years older than you, though. I figured you’d see her as an old lady.”
Carl draws his head back like I’m a drunk driver who just swore he’s sober. “Get out with that shit. I’d trade ten college girls for a night with that lady up there. That’s a real woman. You can tell.”
“I think you’re probably right. You ought to read her book.”
Carl’s serious look returns, but then he breaks up again. “I might read a chapter if it’ll get me a chance to talk to her.”
“Hell, you can go up and talk to her right now.”
“Penn, Penn, Penn—I mean talk to her. Man, you’re old sometimes.”
Forty-five minutes later, Carl looks well on his way to getting his wish. The off-duty security guys are sitting on the back porch drinking beer. Annie is doing something on her computer, and Mia looks content reading on the sofa with her feet kicked up on the arm. I’m putting away dishes when I decide to ask Carl something about the sheriff in Lusahatcha County. Before I go looking for him, though, he and Serenity appear in the kitchen doorway.
“I’m gonna take Tee to see a couple of things before the sun goes down,” Carl says, looking innocent as a choirboy.
“Great,” I reply, just as innocently. “Get her to tell you about our visit to some Double Eagles this morning.”
“The mayor is easily impressed,” Tee says from behind Carl. “Let’s go. Sun’s going down.”
Ten seconds later the front door slams.
Standing at the sink, I survey the kitchen, which is pretty clean, considering. Annie’s lost in her computer. Looking past her to the den, I see Mia reading her book on the sofa. I may be wrong, but there appears to be a trace of a smile on her lips. Though I watch her for some time, she never looks up at me. She merely licks one finger and turns the page, the faint smile still in place.
About ten thirty p.m., Serenity texts me that she wants to drive down to Athens Point to see Cleotha Booker in the morning, if I have time. So . . . she wangled that private information out of Carl without any trouble. I text her that I do have time, if we leave early. She sends another text saying that she’s talking to Keisha Harvin’s brothers and won’t be back for some time yet. It’s then I realize that I’ve been waiting for her to return so that we can discuss the Athens Point issue as well as what happened at the Devine house.
Once I know Tee will be late, I decide to go upstairs and try to get some sleep. As I say good night to the girls, Annie looks up from the TV and says, “Is Serenity coming back tonight?”
So I’m not the only one waiting for Tee’s return. “Yes, but not for a while yet.”
My daughter looks worried. “Is she okay?”
“Oh, yeah. Carl will take good care of her.”
Mia glances up at me then, but she makes no comment.
“I’ll see ya’ll in the morning,” I say.
“’Night, Dad.”
At the foot of the staircase, I realize I’m not really ready to sleep. Instead, I text Tim and ask if he’d like to take a walk with me. He’s been doing some paperwork on one of the cots in the basement, and he’s happy for a chance to get some exercise in the night air. The only caveat: he insists that I put on my bulletproof vest—with the ceramic inserts—which goes a long way toward turning our outing into a good walk spoiled.
As we start toward the river, I spy an old man walking his dog in the distance, where Commerce Street meets Orleans. The animal seems to be pulling its master along, impatient at being constrained by age or infirmity. Something about the old man looks familiar, but I say nothing to Tim, who is also watching the pair. Natchez is a small town, and if I don’t know the dog walker well, I’ve certainly seen him many times in my life.
We walk down to the bluff and stand looking at the muted sheen of the river in the darkness two hundred feet below. Then we check the doors and windows of Edelweiss, which Quentin Avery and his wife, Doris, will be moving into tomorrow for the duration of the trial. As we head home, I think about walking up State Street to take a look at the jail that tomorrow will become my father’s home until his case is judged. But in the end, I decide I don’t want that image in my mind while I try to fall asleep tonight.
We walk up Washington instead, and Tim smokes a cigar on the way. As we near the top of the incline where the public library, the Episcopal church, Temple B’nai Israel, and majestic Glen Auburn face one another from four corners, Tim stops to stub out his cigar. While I stand looking at the steps of the church, where I stood after graduating from high school, Tim looks back down the long grade we just walked.
“There’s that old man again,” he says. “Walking his dog.”
I peer down through the sporadically lit darkness until I see man and beast slowly cross Washington on Wall Street. “Looks like the dog is walking the man.”
“I just realized something,” Tim says. “Those Double Eagles are all old guys. Maybe we need to have a word with our dog lover down there.”
“Next time,” I tell him, sweating under my bulletproof vest. “I’m ready to hit the rack.”
“Okay,” he says after a few seconds. “Tomorrow.”
Sunday
Chapter 17
Serenity and I got up early to make the drive to Athens Point. We don’t have all day to spend following this lead. According to John Kaiser’s latest call, my father is scheduled to depart the Pollock FCI for the Adams County jail at two p.m. He’ll be transferred in an FBI vehicle, which should put him at the sheriff’s office for the handover and processing at about three. Mom will be following in her own car, with an FBI vehicle bringing up the rear. I plan to be back to Natchez to ge
t Mom settled in at my house.
Serenity has said nothing about her late activities last night, and I haven’t asked. Our breakfast conversation consisted of arguing with Tim Weathers until he agreed to let us make this trip without bodyguards. Tim didn’t like it, but Serenity forcefully persuaded him that she could not only spot a tail from a mile away, but kill any civilian foolish enough to try to ambush us on the road or in Athens Point.
South of Woodville, we turn east off Highway 61 and head toward the Mississippi River, devouring the bends of the serpentine road that leads to the old logging town. I drove these curves back in December, and at a much higher speed, while searching for Caitlin. Not far to the east lies Valhalla, where I killed Forrest Knox, but I don’t mention that to Serenity. The swamp where Caitlin died lies to the south, in the lowland between the green hills and the river, and I can feel it pulling me, like some low-frequency magnetic field that tugs at flesh and bone.
“This is pulpwood country,” Serenity says in a hushed voice. “I feel it. A lot of shortwood came out of these forests. A lot of men lost fingers and hands up in here, or had their legs and backs broken.”
“They still do a lot of logging down here.”
She cuts her eyes at me. “I thought you read my book. Pulpwooding’s not logging. It’s nigger logging.”
I look sharply over at her, but she’s staring out the window at the virginal green of early spring. Pine and hardwood trees cover the hills from here to the Mississippi River, and most observers would think the sight beautiful. But Serenity Butler sees only suffering in those trees.
“You saw the Bone Tree, right?” she asks, still looking out the window. “When you found Caitlin and your father there?”
Her forwardness in asking about the place my fiancée was murdered surprises me, but it’s also refreshing. Serenity simply doesn’t worry about things like propriety.
“Yeah,” I say quietly, recalling the shock of leaping out of the helicopter into the swamp, fighting my way toward Caitlin’s bloody body. “I saw it.”
“Keisha told me they burned it.”
“Only partially.”
“I’d like to see what’s left someday.”
“Why?”
She raises a finger and taps the window beside her cheek. “Do you think some places are inherently evil?”
I want to answer no, but in truth I’m not sure. “Do you?”
She tilts her head, watching the forest rush past, then begins to speak softly. “I’ve stood on the sites of massacres. I’ve pulled my boots out of the sand in a mass grave. And I felt strange things there. But I think that feeling of wrongness came from inside me. From my knowledge of what had been done there. The land has nothing to do with it. The buildings, either. Nuns and children have been slaughtered in churches, schools, fields of flowers. It sucks, but that’s the human species.”
“I agree in principle. But the Bone Tree . . . people have done murder beneath it for centuries. Rape and torture, too. Why?”
She shrugs. “It’s isolated. Ancient. Different. Humans have always attached a totemic significance to that kind of thing. But in the end, it’s just an old tree. Right?”
“Kaiser isn’t sure the Bureau ever found all the bones in the mud beneath it. And Reverend Sims told Carl that Mrs. Cleotha Booker knew the worst story in the world. Maybe we should ask her about that tree.”
“If she’s really the one. And if she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s or something.”
“To tell you the truth,” I say bitterly, “if I went back to that tree, I’d dump five gallons of high-octane gas over it and burn what’s left down to the ground. Like St. Boniface felling Thor’s oak.”
Serenity finally turns from the window and gives me a long look, as though she wants to ask me another, more personal question. But in the end she looks through the windshield and watches the blacktop being swallowed by the car.
We find the house Carl Sims described without too much trouble. It’s more shack than house, really, standing alone at the end of a dirt road, just as Carl’s father, Reverend Sims, said it would. The road itself doesn’t register on my GPS unit, but it’s there nonetheless. Mrs. Booker’s home leans like a listing ship or a house drawn in a Dr. Seuss book, but no canted house in Whoville ever looked so poor. I can see cracks between the unpainted barn boards of the front exterior wall, and the patched tin roof has been dented by a hundred fallen limbs. Behind the dwelling lies a junk-filled gully spiked with trees being slowly strangled by kudzu.
The raised porch is the kind that often shelters a mean dog who will attack anyone who approaches, but no animal emerges as Serenity and I walk up the steps. No one answers our knock. Then a curtain flutters in the window to our right, and a gray cat leaps onto the sill and regards us with intense curiosity.
“What do you think?” I ask. “Does this look like the place where you hear the worst story in the world?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think there’s anyone inside?”
Serenity nods. “She’s in there.”
I hear a strange clump and shuffle that reminds me of someone walking on crutches, or on a walker with tennis balls on its feet. Then the door opens, and I see what looks like the oldest woman in Mississippi standing before us, gripping a dented aluminum walker. Sure enough, the ends of its four legs have been jammed into slits in faded green tennis balls. The old woman blinks at the daylight with yellowed eyes set in a head that trembles constantly on her neck.
“Mrs. Booker?” I ask.
“Sho’ is. And you’re Dr. Cage’s boy. I can see it in your face.”
“Can you really?”
She nods. “You’ve got his eyes. Kind eyes. Dr. Cage was a true healer.”
“Thank you, ma’am. This is my friend, Serenity Butler. She’s a writer, too.”
“Is that right? Well, I can’t read no more, since my eyes gone bad. I used to take the Reader’s Digest. But ya’ll come on in. And please be patient. I can’t get around like I used to.”
The old lady stumps toward a battered La-Z-Boy recliner. “If any of my babies get in your way, just give ’em a shove with your foot.”
Only now do I realize the house is full of cats. Felines of all sizes occupy every horizontal surface. At least a dozen animals are perched on various pieces of furniture, and two sit atop an ancient Frigidaire visible through a door at the back of the front room. I smell at least one litterbox, but the house doesn’t actually stink, as I would have expected. Maybe Mrs. Booker spends what energy she has cleaning up after the cats rather than doing housework. I don’t relish the prospect of sitting on what looks like flea-infested upholstery, but I do. The cat in my chosen chair seems ambivalent about moving, but it finally surrenders and concedes its territory.
“The chil’ren ’round here call me the Cat Lady,” Mrs. Booker says. “You can see why. Nobody loves these babies but me. I don’t understand why. They don’t ask much from you, and they can just about take care of themselves. That’s what’s special about a cat. A dog’ll love anybody, but a cat’s love is a gift.”
I’m not sure how to start a conversation about a lynching, but Serenity takes care of that. She walks over to a photograph of a strapping man in blue overalls with a bandanna on his head and asks, “Is this your son, Mrs. Booker?”
The old lady laughs. “Lord no, that’s my husband, Lemuel.”
“He’s a handsome man.”
“Yes, indeed. Lem was a good man, too, but he’s gone more than forty years now. Got crushed by a log, loading a pulpwood truck. Chain broke.”
“I’m sorry,” I say automatically.
“My family were pulpwood cutters,” Serenity says. “Cutters, haulers, you name it, they did it. Bleeding for turpentine, if you go further back.”
Mrs. Booker has gone still. Then she squints at Serenity. “Is that right? Where you from, girl?”
“Up around Laurel. Longleaf pine country, back in the old days. All those old trees are long gone, thoug
h.”
“Sho’ is, baby. Long gone. And the men who cut ’em gone, too. Pulpwoodin’s a dangerous business, but that’s about all the work there is down in these woods for a black man. Or workin’ at the sawmill. White men do the proper loggin’ ’round here. Always have. Ya’ll push them cats out these chairs and set down. Tell me what you come to find out from the old Cat Lady. Lots of bad things happened ’round here back in my day. Nobody cares about that now, though. Nobody even remembers.”
“We care,” Serenity says. “Do you remember?”
The watery eyes close, and the lined face tightens with grief. “Oh, Lord, yes. I wish I didn’t. But I’ll never forget.” She nuzzles the chin of a thin calico with her foot. “You want to know about my real baby, Sam.”
“We do,” I tell her.
“That’s Samuel over there,” Mrs. Booker says, pointing to a framed photo on a table near the wall. Serenity goes over and looks at the photo, then picks it up and brings it to me. It shows a young man of about twenty holding a .22 rifle in one hand and a mess of squirrels by their tails in the other. Sam was thinner than his father, but just as handsome, and his eyes are bright with intelligence.
“That boy started putting food on the table when he was twelve years old,” Mrs. Booker informs us. “Take a seat, baby,” she says to Serenity. “Over here where I can see you.”
Serenity nudges an orange tomcat off an old club chair and perches on the edge of it.
“Have you two had happy lives?” Mrs. Booker asks, her eyes filled with concern.
“I suppose so,” I tell her, looking around the room. “I feel pretty lucky.”
The old woman smiles. “Have you seen bad things?”
Serenity and I share a quick glance.
“You can’t go through life without seeing some bad things,” I say. “Can you?”
“No, no. But I mean evil things. Because there is real evil in this world.” She turns to Serenity. “What about you, darling? You look too young to have seen much wickedness.”
“I fought in a war, Mrs. Booker. And I covered the crime beat in a lot of urban housing projects. I’ve seen some of the worst things people can do to other people.”