Cemetery Road

by Greg Iles

  “Jesus Christ. I’m so happy for Buck. But sad, too. Goddamn it.”

  “I know. We’ve got to get those bastards, Marshall.”

  “We will. Can you send me your friend’s contact information? I need Ben Tate to call him.”

  “Will do.”

  “Thanks, Quinn. Be careful coming home.”

  I hang up, but before I can even reflect on what she told me, I hit the brakes. I’m not even sure why. Then I register what my intuition picked up. On the right shoulder of the highway sits a battered blue Ford Explorer. As I get closer, I see it’s an Eddie Bauer model, and most of the cladding has been ripped away. Sure enough, Dixie Allman gets out of the driver’s seat wearing jeans and a halter top and kicks the back door panel with surprising force.

  A tractor-trailer behind me honks angrily as I pull onto the shoulder to park behind the Explorer. Dixie looks back at me with annoyance, but then she recognizes my vehicle.

  “Hey, Goose!” she calls as I get out. “Bad luck, as usual.”

  “That sucks. Is Denny in there with you?”

  “Nah, he’s home on his computer.”

  The closer I get, the rougher Dixie looks. Like Paul in my office today, she appears to be in her mid-fifties, not her mid-forties. In three seconds I take in bloodshot eyes, dry skin yellowed by decades of smoking, yellow teeth, and stringy hair that hasn’t been washed for a while. Dixie looks emaciated up top, but she has a paunch. Only under her jeans do I see a trace of the muscle tone that made her an athlete in high school.

  “Are you out of gas or what?”

  “Yep. Happens once or twice a month. My gauge has been reading a quarter full for three years. I try to keep plenty in it, but sometimes I forget.”

  I give her a smile. “No sweat. There’s a station a mile east of here.”

  “I was about to walk to it.”

  Looking at the horizon, I figure there’s about thirty minutes of light left before full dark. Some drivers have already switched on their headlights. “Jump in. We’ll take care of this.”

  She manages a tired smile. “Hang on, I’ve got a gas can in back. The last guy who helped me out threw it in there and told me to keep it.”

  She opens the hatch of the Explorer, and I transfer the sun-faded plastic can to the back of my Flex. Then she climbs in beside me and we merge into the eastbound traffic.

  “Where were you headed?” I ask.

  She flips her hand like a sorority girl taking a spin in a Porsche. “Nowhere, really.”

  Nowhere? “Just riding, huh?”

  “Pretty much.” She takes out a pack of Virginia Slims, then cracks her window and lights up. “Denny said he’s been filming some stuff for you.”

  “Yeah. He’s great with that drone. We may post some of it to our website.”

  My iPhone pings with the contact information of Buck’s colleague at LSU. I’ll send it to Ben when I can add an explanation.

  Dixie holds out her left hand and examines her bright pink fingernails, which are peeling badly. “You gonna pay Denny anything?”

  “Sure, of course.”

  “Good. ’Cause that boy needs some real work.”

  We reach the service station without further conversation, and I pay to fill the five-gallon can. After I pull back onto the highway, Dixie starts to light up again, but I shake my head and use my thumb to point behind us.

  “What?” she asks.

  “Gas fumes.”

  She looks blankly at me for a couple of seconds, then gets it. “Ohh.” Frowning, she slips the cigarette back into the pack.

  We reach her Explorer in less than a minute, and she opens the gas cap for me to start pouring from the can. While the biting smell rises from the opening, I catch Dixie’s eye. “What are you really doing out here? You headed to Jackson or something?”

  She sighs with irritation, looks away. “What do you think I’m doing? Making a drug deal or something?”

  “I don’t know, Dixie. I’m just wondering.”

  “Well, it ain’t your damn business, is it? But if you have to know, I’m on my way to work. And I’m running late.” Her tone is accusatory, like it’s my fault she ran out of gas.

  “Where you working now?”

  Color rises into her cheeks. “The Show ’n’ Tail. What of it?”

  My mouth falls open before I can cover my reaction. The Show ’n’ Tail is a titty bar on the county line, where drug-addicted girls fresh out of high school dance for truckers and meth heads. Word is the lap dances are bottomless for the right price, and most of the girls turn tricks in the trailers behind the cinder-block club. Several citizens’ groups have tried to get it closed, but so far they’ve failed. I’ve heard speculation that a powerful silent partner keeps it open.

  “Dixie, you’re right, it’s not my business. But we went to school together for twelve years. Tell me you’re not stripping out in that shithole.”

  She runs her tongue around inside her cheek, then bursts into laughter. “I’m forty-six years old, Marshall! You think they’d pay me to take my clothes off?” She pops a stripper move, throwing her chest forward to emphasize the sagging mammaries under her halter. “Young stuff only out there, bub. I work behind the bar.”

  This is better than what I feared, which was Dixie making a drug run while her son sits home by himself. Still, a sickening sense of futility settles into my bones. This woman is Denny’s mother. She graduated with me, and the best job she can get is working in a joint where every girl on the premises is in desperate straits?

  “Listen,” I say without thinking. “Today’s Thursday. I want you to go home and get some sleep. Tomorrow, get up and come down to the newspaper. I’m hiring you for the advertising department.”

  She knits her brow, watching me with something like suspicion. “I heard the bank shut down your paper today. Foreclosed on y’all.”

  I stand in silent shock for a few seconds. Jesus. I’m like a person who speaks of a relative in the present tense, having forgotten that they died earlier in the day.

  “You’re right,” I tell her. “But that’s just temporary. I’ll have it back up and running in a week. And I’ll hire you now for then. I don’t want you working at the damn Show ’n’ Tail.”

  “You don’t, huh?”

  “No.”

  She nods as though considering my offer. I see shame in her face, but also anger. “Well,” she says. “Who died and made you Jesus?”

  Her words shock me so deeply that I simply wait for what follows.

  “You think you’re saving me or something?” she asks. “I don’t need saving, okay? And you ain’t in any position to save me anyway. You need to save your own damn self.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her laugh has a raucous, almost mocking undertone. “I read the paper. I hear people talk. You’ve crossed that Poker Club, haven’t you? Tried to get ’em in trouble over Buck Ferris. You even got my Denny caught up in that shit.”

  The implication that I’ve somehow led her son astray brings blood into my cheeks. “I’m sorry. I thought you wanted me to spend time with him.”

  Dixie starts to say something, then looks at the ground as though she’s changed her mind. “Why are you so fired up to get those Poker Club guys, Marshall?”

  “Because they killed my friend.”

  “Who, Buck? Do you know that for sure? Can you prove it?”

  The gas can is empty. I pull the nozzle from the tank, screw the cap back on, then replace the can in her Explorer. By the time I’ve closed the rear hatch door, she’s lit up another Virginia Slim.

  “I’ll prove it,” I tell her.

  “You will, huh?” She looks skeptical. “In case you haven’t noticed, this isn’t the town we grew up in anymore. People get killed all the time. It’s been what, five black boys since January? And more coming, I’m sure. Man, a month before you moved back, some guys locked a girl from the club in her car trunk and set it on fire. Drug debt. You get me? Didn’t y
ou pass those big signs when you came this way? You see there’s a Super Target coming? Bonefish Grill? At least the Poker Club’s doing something to help this town. I’m only working the Show ’n’ Tail until T.J. Maxx opens. Joey Peters is gonna be manager, and he told me he’d hire me two weeks before the grand opening. But you want to hire me at your nonexistent newspaper. Well, aren’t you special?”

  “Dixie—”

  “I don’t need your damn help! Neither does Denny. Your high school Boy Scout bullshit won’t help Denny in this world we got now.” She shakes her head with bitter frustration. “But anyway . . . thanks for getting my gas.”

  As she throws down her cigarette and stamps it out, a gleaming white King Ranch F-250 zooms toward us, then passes at seventy miles an hour. Without even thinking, I register it as Max Matheson’s truck. But what lingers in my mind is the outline of the woman who was sitting next to him in the cab.

  Jet.

  “What’s the matter?” Dixie asks. “You see a ghost?”

  I dig out my burner phone and check it. No messages or missed calls. Looking down Highway 36, I see Max’s taillights as the Ford speeds away through the falling dusk. For a moment doubt makes me waver, and I think of asking Dixie if she saw Jet in that truck. But something stops me.

  “Dixie, I need to borrow your Explorer.”

  “What?”

  “I need your truck.”

  She looks at the Explorer as though trying to discern something that’s been invisible up to this moment.

  “Dixie!”

  Her face is a study in confusion. “But . . .”

  “You can take my Flex. You’ll love it, it’s practically new.”

  “What the hell’s going on, Marshall?”

  “I’ll trade you back in a day or two. Do you want it or not?”

  She looks back at my shining SUV. Then she shrugs. “Sure. What the hell?”

  I exchange keys with her, then climb behind the wheel of her wreck and slam the door. I don’t know where Max could be taking Jet, but under the circumstances, her presence in that truck can’t be good. Closing my eyes, I turn the key and pray. The Explorer whines, stutters, coughs, then dies. Cursing, I floor the gas pedal and repeat the sequence. This time it ends with the engine rumbling to life.

  “Don’t scratch my truck now!” Dixie hollers as I jerk the Ford into gear. She cackles as I peel off the worn asphalt shoulder, gunning the old engine in the faint hope of catching Max’s $80,000 pickup.

  Chapter 37

  I’m pushing Dixie Allman’s rattle-trap Explorer to ninety-five, and I’ve yet to see any sign of Max’s truck. Dusk is coming on fast. The land in the eastern half of the county is relatively flat, but there’s a fair amount of traffic on the highway headed toward Jackson. This makes it hard to discern different vehicles far ahead. I can’t figure where Max and Jet might be going, unless it’s to Max’s house in the Belle Rose development, which lies in this direction but ten miles farther east. I can’t imagine Jet going there with him, unless . . .

  She’s trying to get hold of his cell phone.

  What excuse would she have used to get him to drive her out into the county? A mobile client consultation? She could have faked car trouble and asked Max for a ride home. But would he buy that? Jet would have called Paul if she needed a ride home. Her husband might not be her first choice, but surely Max would know he would be her last.

  Just as the Explorer reaches a hundred, I catch sight of Max’s pickup parked nose-out at a tiny store across the four-lane. Rather than hit the brakes, I zoom past the store so as not to draw attention to myself. There’ll be a turnaround soon, and if not, I can drive across the shallow median ditch. Why that store? I wonder, catching sight of a rutted cut-through a quarter mile ahead. Did Max need gas? The way he was parked, it almost looked like he was checking to see if anybody’s tailing him.

  By the time I get the Explorer turned around, I remember that store sits at the junction of a narrow road that cuts north through the woods to the Little Trace. Max’s truck has already vanished when I reach it, but a pair of taillights that look like his flash in the distance, disappearing into the forest. If that’s him, all I need to do now is stay close enough to see which way he turns when he hits the Little Trace.

  I consider texting Jet to make sure she’s all right, but something stops me. I can’t imagine that Max means her physical harm. Why go to the trouble of blackmailing us with the video if he intended to hurt her? Also, she still has value to him as his lawyer. No, the best plan is to hang back and be ready to intervene if anything crazy happens. I might be too late to help her if he gets violent, but if Jet were to leap from Max’s truck with his cell phone in hand, I could swoop in and rescue her on my borrowed, if battered, steed.

  Three minutes on a narrow lane like a tunnel through trees takes me almost to the Little Trace. I use the time to text the contact info of Quinn’s archaeologist to Ben Tate, followed by a brief explanation. At the Little Trace, Max turns left, but as I turn to follow, I see him veer right onto another winding lane that leads farther north. Unless the memories of my youth are wrong, that little lane winds through the forest like a creek, eventually intersecting the worn asphalt of Cemetery Road. Which leaves me with a mystery. All three main routes out here—Highway 36, the Little Trace, and Cemetery Road—run east-west. If Max wanted to get somewhere on Cemetery Road, why ride this far out on 36, then cut north through the woods on crummy little roads?

  I tap my brake pedal when I see his brake lights flash. Sure enough, he turns right onto Cemetery Road, heading east again. Now I’m in familiar territory. A few miles behind me stands the barn where Aaron and Gabriel are working to produce the front page of tomorrow’s gonzo edition of the Watchman. Only at the end of our magic summer did Jet and I cycle this far out, when we rode to the spring at Parnassus Plantation, which had replaced the Weldon barn as our private Eden. Parnassus lies about four miles east of here, and once you pass its gate, there’s nothing but woods till you hit the county line. Where could Max be headed? Maybe he owns or manages some timberland out this way?

  I can already see Parnassus Hill in the distance to my left. Though it would be but a molehill in a mountainous state, locals took to calling the three-hundred-foot hump “the mountain” long ago. The thickly wooded hill is a smudge of dark green against the vivid purple sky, rising like a miniature volcano out of knee-high soybeans. Now that we’ve broken out of the forest, light seems plentiful again. Two cars separate me from Max’s F-250, which suddenly moves into the left lane and begins to slow.

  Could he be headed to Parnassus?

  A mile farther on, his brake lights flash, and he turns left at the brick-pillared gate of the plantation. The main road beyond that gate leads to a large Greek Revival mansion with two slave quarters standing behind it in the classic fashion. Even before I reach the gate, I see Max veer right off the main drive. About where he turned, a dirt road makes the long run across the empty fields to Parnassus Hill. With a chill of foreboding, I pull through the gate and park in the shadow of one of the great pillars. It’s still light enough that if I start across the flats right away, Max will likely see me in his rearview mirror. I’ve got to wait until he reaches the hill, then race across the fields while he’s climbing the back side.

  While I wait, it strikes me that you can come to feel you own a place simply by spending time there. Someone else’s name may be signed to the deed in some courthouse file cabinet. But once you have walked it, worked it, made love on it, or bled on it, that land becomes part of you. The Weldon barn was that way for Jet and me, until the three freaks trespassed there and left the serpent of fear behind them. That close call drove us out here, to Parnassus.

  At the summit of the hill lies a geologic anomaly for this area, a circular, spring-fed pool a hundred yards across. Thanks to the Artesian spring that is its source, the water stays cool all year round. The banks are grassy, but deer generally keep them trampled down enough to access the pool
in a couple of places. That pool has a long history, and more names than are known. The Indian name has long been forgotten. The French christened the spring Bellefontaine and used it as a bathing spot. The English used a name I don’t recall. The slaves on Parnassus called it “the drowning pool” for some reason lost to history, but the owner of the plantation named it Delphi Springs. The bastardized version became “Delfey Springs” (coined by Confederate raiders who hid out there), and that’s what high school kids had called it since long before our time.

  As I stare across the fields, Max’s headlights finally disappear behind the hill, which is covered with oak, pecan, elm, and pine trees. In a few places only a thin fringe of pines lines the shoulder of the road, and a skid would send your car tumbling down the hillside. But for most of its length Max will be blind to everything crossing the fields below. The sun has dropped well below the horizon now. If I keep my headlights off, the falling darkness might give me sufficient cover to make the run safely even if Max circles the hill before I reach its base.

  Jamming the Explorer into Drive, I gun the motor and tear across the flats toward the great dark hump. Forty seconds at seventy miles an hour carries me to the broad base of the hill. I figure Max is five hundred yards ahead of me. The road that climbs Parnassus is barely wide enough for one vehicle, and it encircles the hill the way roads climb the Smoky Mountains. At the crest, the road ends in a small turnaround cut into the woods. From there a narrow footpath leads to the pool. Max will reach the top before me, and if he shuts off his engine—and they get out of the truck—they’ll surely hear the Explorer climbing the hill.

  Pressing harder on the gas pedal, I begin circling up the hill, keeping my eye on the ragged edge of dirt to my right. About eighty vertical feet from the crest, I stop the Explorer in the road. My first instinct is to back into the trees, but I decide to leave the Ford where it is. I don’t want Max racing back down with Jet while I’m climbing this damned hill on foot. The Explorer is wide enough to stop him from getting past, and best of all, Max doesn’t know the vehicle. Pocketing Dixie’s keys, I get out and look up the dirt road. The underbrush is too thick here to try to climb straight up through the trees. After making sure my pistol is snug in my waistband, I start running up the road.