by Greg Iles
“Whatever you been doin’, try it ’bout twice as hard. Start gentle, but take it up steady, you understand? That girl’ll holler in three, fo’ minutes, I guarantee.”
“Um . . . I gotta go,” I croaked, backing away fast, then turning to run.
His cackling laughter followed me back up the ladder.
I found Jet waiting at the top, looking frightened, but once I explained what had happened, she calmed down. I didn’t think we should return to the barn anymore, but Jet thought it was fine.
Two days later, we discovered I’d been right.
On that day, some dopeheads from the public high school showed up at the barn and sat outside in the clearing, getting high. Jet and I hid in silence on the second floor, waiting for them to leave. But when they started building a campfire, we knew we had to go. We tried to slip away unnoticed, but they heard us trying to sneak out the far side of the barn. In seconds they surrounded us and started the usual bullying that older guys love to deal out to young guys as tall as me. It was during this hazing that they noticed how beautiful Jet was.
The conversation that followed that realization scared me in a way I’d never experienced before. These guys didn’t look like the potheads I knew, gentle dudes who’d rather lie on their backs staring at the moon than exert a single muscle. These guys looked like what my father called “dopers,” needle freaks. As they talked, I saw all the blood leave Jet’s face. They were sixteen or seventeen, pale and dirty looking. And they meant to have her. The tallest one told Jet to take off her clothes before it got too dark to see her. If she refused, he said, they would take them off for her. When she didn’t move to obey, one guy said he wanted to see what A-rab pussy tasted like. I wanted to protect her, but I couldn’t see any option other than getting honorably beaten within an inch of my life. I didn’t want Jet to know how scared I was, but when I stole a glance at her, I saw tears on her cheeks. That was when I heard a low, dangerous voice speak from the darkness under the barn.
“You boys ’bout to buy yourselves a boxcar full of trouble.”
The leader’s head snapped left. Like me, he saw Willis coming through the dark barn door, looking pretty goddamn intimidating. I suppose the three older teenagers could have taken that old man, but they didn’t look too sure they wanted to find out what it would cost them to do it.
“What you gonna do, nigger?” asked the leader, sounding more petulant than threatening.
Willis regarded him in silence for about ten seconds. Then he said, “What I’m gon’ do? That’s what you axed? Well . . .” Willis scratched his bearded chin. “I’ll prob’ly start by bendin’ you over that log there and fuckin’ you up da ass. That’s how we broke in fresh stuff like you in Parchman. You’ll feel just like a girl to me, boy. Tighter, prob’ly.”
My blood ran cold when Willis said that, but the threat had its intended effect. The three freaks shared a long look. Then the smallest skittered into the darkness under the trees. The other two followed, though the leader vowed revenge from the shadows. It was hard to believe the situation had changed so fast. It was as though a grizzly bear had scattered a pack of dogs.
“Were you really in Parchman?” I asked, after Jet had gotten control of herself.
“Nah,” Willis said. “My cousin was, though. I been in the county lockup a couple times, but not the Farm. I knew that’d scare them dopers, though.”
“Man . . . thank you so much.”
Jet began crying and shivering—delayed shock, I guess—but she thanked Willis profusely. When I rolled her bike out to her, she said, “What if they’re waiting for us on the path somewhere?”
“I’ll walk out with y’all,” Willis said. “I can’t come back here no more anyways. Them boys’ll go home and tell their daddies a mean nigger threatened to whup ’em on the Weldon place, and the sheriff’ll be out here to run me in. I need to find somethin’ to eat anyway.”
“I’ve got twelve dollars in my pocket,” Jet told him, digging in her jeans. “You’re welcome to it.”
Willis smiled. “Twelve dollars’ll keep me fed for most of a week, missy. I’ll take it.”
That was the last day we went to the barn.
We soon found another sanctuary—one equally as isolated and even more beautiful—but it was never quite the refuge that the barn was. It was a spring-fed pool that lay about six miles out Cemetery Road, on the old Parnassus Plantation. Generations of kids had spent summers partying out there, even skinny-dipping, until an accidental drowning and subsequent suicide forced the owner to fence off the hill where the spring bubbled out of the earth. I never saw anything quite like that place again, but I know it remains unspoiled, because Jet and I met there several times before I bought my house outside town.
Thirty-two years ago, she and I spent the last half of July and part of August at that pool, which had gone by many names since Indian times. Our trance slipped a level deeper in its cold, clear water and as we lay on the warm banks in the afternoon sun, like the turtles that were our company. But our time was growing shorter each day. I was scheduled to start summer football practice, and Jet had some sort of mathematics camp to go to. Like many fools before me, I assumed that time was infinite, that we would spend the rest of our school years together, then marry and strike out into the world to do great things—things the people of little Bienville had never dreamed about. To this end, Jet had already persuaded her parents to let her transfer to St. Mark’s, despite the extra expense. I couldn’t know that within a month, Jet’s father would vanish, severing the fragile filament that had bound us like a common blood vessel until then.
The disappearance of Joe Talal shocked all of Bienville. It wasn’t one of the garden-variety abandonments that were becoming more common as the ’80s progressed. Jet’s father was a chemical engineer, seemingly the most stable of men, and his work ethic was legendary. He’d invented a new chemical process at the electroplating plant, something that would have made him rich, had he not done it on company time. But the company patented it and took the money. This would have embittered most men, but Joe Talal took it well, and management rewarded him with what he most wanted, which was acceptance. Joe’s brilliance and can-do attitude earned him the respect of the whites at the plant, and their acceptance was naturally extended to his daughter. After all, Jet’s mother was white, and a Methodist in good standing. Joe might not have gone to church himself, but any time the congregation needed volunteers to build booths or mow grass, they knew Joe Talal would show up, ready and eager to work.
The cataclysm came the September after our magical summer. Joe had flown up to Connecticut for a continuing education class in electrochemistry. He did that kind of thing every couple of years. Only this time, he didn’t come back. Janet Turner Talal initially covered for her husband with a story about a sick relative, so it took a couple of weeks for people to figure out something was wrong. But before a month had passed, plant management was informed that Joe had resigned his position. Two days later, it leaked out that Jet’s father had returned to the Middle East, from which he’d emigrated in 1965. Jet had been putting a good face on things at school, but once this news got out, she stayed absent for three days. When she did come back, she was a different person. She had withdrawn into herself, and for the first time, I saw shame in her.
One month later, an explosive revelation swept through Bienville: Joe Talal had another family back in Jordan—a wife and a son. No one was sure about the details. Some folks said Joe had been mixed up in political trouble, Arab craziness, and that his family had been mistakenly declared dead years before. Others claimed he’d been a bigamist all along. In any case, Joe had abandoned his American family to be with his Arab wife and son, and he had no intention of returning to America.
It took me twenty years and a FOIA request to learn the true details of Joe’s departure from our lives. As a journalist, I now understand that the tragedy of the Talal family was but a tiny footnote to the Cold War politics of the United State
s in the Middle East during that era. All that mattered to me at the time was that Jet’s father had broken that trance in which she and I existed as one being. Worse, within a month Jet took up with Paul Matheson, who was a year older than we were and one of the least introspective guys I knew. I couldn’t understand it, except to reason that after being abandoned by her foreign father, she’d decided to grab the most quintessentially American boy she could find, one whose father’s fortune would guarantee security for life—if she could hold on to him. Jet did hold on to Paul, at least until he left Bienville for Ole Miss. They were the golden couple of our high school. Yet by the time Paul left college to join the army and fight in Iraq, things had changed again. But that’s another story.
Paternal abandonment is the central fact of Jet’s life: it shaped every decision she made afterward. Eight months after Joe Talal abandoned his daughter, I lived through a different version of the same experience—emotional abandonment by a father physically present—and there’s no question that it dictated every major decision of my youth. You’d think that shared trauma would have brought Jet and me even closer together. But human relationships aren’t symmetrical. The ultimate result of her father’s departure was that, after my brother drowned and my father began to blame and isolate me, I faced that situation utterly alone.
Perhaps if I’d still had Jet, I could have weathered the glacial coldness without permanent damage. But I didn’t. As the next year wore on, I quit every athletic team, stopped hanging out with former friends, and holed up in my room with the Cure and U2’s Joshua Tree album. My dad was drinking heavily at this time, so I found it easy to pilfer whatever I wanted from his stock. My mother had been prescribed several drugs in the wake of Adam’s death, and I ate those, too. While Jet worked tirelessly to distract herself from her pain, I sank ever deeper into mine, until almost no light from the world above penetrated down to where I existed.
One year to the day after Adam drowned, I drove my mother’s car out to the Mississippi River at dawn, stripped off all my clothes, and began swimming toward Louisiana. I was drunk on bourbon, stoned on pills. When I pushed away from the shore, I fully intended to drown myself. As pathetic as it sounds now, I thought about Jet as I stroked toward the middle of the mighty river. I thought about my father, too, how he lived as if I didn’t exist. I figured I would do him the favor of making reality conform to his desire. But when I reached the middle of the current, it was my mother who filled my mind and heart. How could I force her to suffer the loss of her only other son? Who would do that to her? A coward, answered a voice from deep within. A gutless coward. In that moment, an anger unlike anything I’d ever experienced was born within me. And that anger had but one object: the man who had failed me as a father.
Ping, ping, ping . . .
The text tone of my iPhone breaks through my dark reverie like a persistent alarm clock. I’m not sure how many times it went off before it finally registered in my brain, but now I look down at the screen. The text message is from Denny. It reads:
Finished twenty minutes ago! U gonna leave me up here all day or what?
On my way, I type, cranking the Flex and backing it around toward the riprap that lines the last drop to the river. Then I drive over the levee.
The industrial park is enveloped in a vast cloud of dust. The crest of the bluff is barely visible through the thinner dust at the top of the cloud. I point the Flex toward it, but I know that somewhere out there, heavy equipment is scraping and pushing dirt without any regard for me. As I inch along the gravel road that crosses the mill site between the levee and Port Road, another text arrives: One of the bulldozers blocked the bluff road for ten minutes. I was scared, but it’s clear now. U better haul butt.
A big yellow Caterpillar D7 churns out of the dust to my right, moving toward me. This is how you treat a crime scene if you want to bury evidence. After gauging the movement of the bulldozer, I jam my accelerator to the floor and race for the bluff.
Chapter 12
“What did you see?” I ask as Denny opens the Flex’s back door and sets a wheeled Pelican case on my backseat. I guess that’s how he carries his drone around.
“Check for yourself.” He hands a micro SD card in a tiny plastic case over the seat, then comes around and gets up front.
“How about a summary?” I ask, putting the Flex in gear and heading north along the heavily wooded bluff.
“I definitely saw places where someone has been digging.”
“By the foundation piers?”
“One of them. Also out in the open ground. But those bulldozers have torn that section up by now.”
“I can’t believe they’ve moved this fast. They weren’t scheduled to start today.”
Denny grins. “The good news is, I have GPS coordinates for the whole flight. I can tell you exactly where to dig to find the places I saw today.”
“Can I read the coordinates off the card?”
“If you know what you’re looking at.”
I hand him back the SD card case. “Why don’t you make me a video file and email it to me? Or use Dropbox. Make it a highlight reel with everything marked simply enough for an idiot to read locations.”
“You gonna pay me for my time?”
“Absolutely.” I take a curve that gives us another broad river vista through the trees. “I appreciate you flying that site, especially coming early.”
“Hey, this is what I live for. We’re working a real-life murder case, man. We should make a podcast out of this. Like Serial, about Adnan Syed.”
A chill of foreboding raises the hair on my arms. “There’s not going to be any podcast, Denny. This is serious, okay? Buck’s dead. Gone. Forever. You saw his head.”
“Sure, I get it. But I still don’t see why we can’t—”
“No damn podcast,” I snap. “If I ever go public with this, I’ll credit you for your work. But I don’t want you taking any risks. None.”
“If you go public?” he says, looking incredulous. “Why wouldn’t you?”
“Because I don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”
“Sure you do! Somebody murdered Dr. Buck. And they probably did it at the place we just left. Not at Lafitte’s Den, where I found the truck.”
“What’s your evidence for that? Some disturbed dirt on a building site?”
“It’s obvious, isn’t it? He came back out here to find some more relics, and they deleted him.”
“Maybe,” I concede. “But we’re not going to tell anybody that. Not yet.”
Denny looks more than resentful of this restriction. “Isn’t there going to be an autopsy or something?”
“Eventually. Depends on the backlog in Jackson. I’m going to speak to the coroner after he’s looked at the body. The people who run things around here wouldn’t want me to, but I know Byron Ellis pretty well. Also, he’s black, which means he might not be as eager to do the bidding of the people who’d like Buck’s death to be ruled an accident.”
Denny is scanning Instagram on his phone. “So are you gonna go back out there tonight and hunt for evidence?”
“Hell, no. They put guards out there after Buck’s first discovery. There’s no reason to think they won’t be there tonight.”
“But—”
“Leave it alone, Denny. Please.”
“Just think about it,” he says, looking up from his phone. “In their minds, Buck was the threat, right? But he’s dead now. And they think they’re wiping out all the evidence right this minute. So tonight’s the perfect night to go out there and dig.”
“Jesus, I already regret getting you involved.”
He grins again. “You sound like my mom. Don’t worry, that feeling won’t last long. Just until you watch my drone footage.”
I hope you’re right, I think, speeding up so that I can get him home sooner. Into the silence between us flows my memory of Paul Matheson asking me if I think Jet could be sleeping with her paralegal. What the hell? And after Buck’
s death. It’s like four hours ago, the world turned upside down.
We’re less than a mile from Denny’s mother’s house when my iPhone rings. It’s Ben Tate from the Watchman office. “What you got, Ben?” I ask.
“It looks like somebody broke into Buck Ferris’s house.”
“Last night?”
“No, today. His wife called the sheriff’s office about an hour ago.”
“Quinn Ferris?”
“Yeah. She was at the funeral home, working on her husband’s arrangements, when it happened. What do you think they were looking for? More artifacts?”
“Bones. They’re scared shitless that he found bones. Bones would halt the project. They’ve got a bunch of bulldozers out there tearing up the mill site right now.”
“Can we stop that? Get an injunction or something?”
“Not with what we have now.” Up ahead, the mailbox of the Allman house comes into view. “Hey, did you find out who posted the security guards at the mill site on Saturday?”
“No. I’ve talked to the Chinese, the county supervisors, and any other candidates I could think of. Everybody denies hiring guards. Are you sure they were out there?”
“According to Buck, they were.” Nothing about this is going to be easy. “Is there anything else going on?”
“Yes, actually. Quinn called here for you just a minute ago. She wants to talk to you.”
“She’s probably trying to call me now. Let me go.”
“Hang on, man. I heard a rumor that Jerry Lee Lewis might be playing that VIP party on the rooftop of the Aurora Hotel tonight. You hear anything about that?”
Ben’s a big music fan. “Something. But don’t worry about missing out. This is one of those rumors that doesn’t pan out. Besides, the Killer’s over eighty now.”
Ben laughs. “I hear you. Later.”
I start to summarize the call for Denny, but his young ears already picked up both sides of the conversation. He’s working hard not to look excited, but I can see the fantasy in his head: a viral reality podcast with web links to drone footage chronicling a “real-life” murder investigation. He could be famous before he enters the ninth grade. As I pull into his mother’s driveway, Denny turns to me, his face suddenly serious, his excitement gone.