Cemetery Road

by Greg Iles

  As we drive deeper into the cemetery, we pass Scouts every thirty yards, all the way to the burial site, where a tent has been set up. As I make the final turn, I see forty or fifty cars parked along the lane beside the gravesite.

  “Thank God,” I say softly.

  “Look at the crowd down there,” my mother says. “What do you notice?”

  I gaze down the lane at the knots of people, mostly adults moving among uniformed boys. “I don’t know. What?”

  Nadine leans up between our seats. “It’s nearly all male. I’ll bet those men are Scouts, too. Men Buck mentored when they were boys.”

  “Must be,” I say, feeling my throat tighten.

  Mom squeezes my hand. “Good works never die. There’s your proof. You think those men give a damn about some paper mill?”

  “Come on,” says Nadine, touching my shoulder. “Let’s go pay our respects to Buck.”

  We walk down the asphalt lane and join the mourners. Through the bodies, I see Quinn Ferris moving from person to person, thanking each for coming. To my surprise, she’s smiling a lot of the time. When Quinn gets to me, I worry that she’ll ask me to say something over Buck’s grave, but she doesn’t. When I ask who is going to speak, she says no one. There will be no prayer, eulogy, or benediction, no Christian minister of any kind. But cryptically she adds that there will be a farewell ceremony of sorts.

  “By the way,” she says. “I got a call from Arthur Pine this morning.”

  “What did he want?”

  “He said he had a check for me. An insurance policy I knew nothing about.”

  “Huh. That’s weird.”

  “I thought so, too. Because it was a big one.” She gives me a knowing look, then stands on tiptoe and kisses my cheek. “Thank you.”

  After Quinn moves on, we choose a vantage point on some elevated ground across the lane, where we can see the faces of the mourners nearest the grave. Through the crowd I pick out an old-school campaign hat resting on Buck’s coffin lid. A fitting tribute to his lifelong avocation. A loud hum rises from the crowd, as people who haven’t seen each other for years greet friends and reminisce. But as a bank of clouds obscures the sun, they slowly fall silent. Soon not a sound can be heard from the mourners. Each is reliving moments he shared with Buck Ferris. It’s strange to hear no words spoken over the grave, no hymn or even pop tune sung with heartbreaking sincerity. As I wonder how this unusual gathering will end, a strange sound rolls over the ground, reverberating off the gravestones.

  “What’s that?” Mom asks, looking around in confusion.

  “A drum, I think.”

  Half a minute later, a column of Indians wearing ceremonial shirts adorned with colorful ribbons marches over the hill behind the gravesite, a solemn file of men and women. It’s been three decades since I attended one of the powwows Buck managed at the Indian Village, but I still recognize members of at least half a dozen tribes. Some wear their black hair long, others short. And while many have the pure blood of the first Americans to walk this ground beside the river, others have intermarried with whites and look like working-class people from any Southern town.

  “I bet this is the first time this cemetery’s seen a sendoff like this one,” I say softly.

  “It’s not bagpipes playing ‘Amazing Grace,’” Mom observes. “But it sure inspires respect and reflection.”

  As we watch in fascination, the Indians form a circle near the grave, the hide drum at the center, and eight of them begin striking it together. Then their voices rise in song.

  Mom looks back at Nadine and me. “When Duncan and I first married, he came to the Episcopal church with me. We went to the adult Sunday school. The topic of discussion that day was whether or not Buddhists and Hindus could get into heaven. Can you imagine? That was the last time Duncan darkened the door of that church. I stopped going myself. Being with your father made me see the silliness of all that. The arrogance of it. Oh, Duncan would have loved this.”

  I remember Dad sitting with me in the car yesterday, beside Adam’s statue, asking me to cast his ashes into the river. “I think you’re right.”

  After the drum falls silent and the singing fades, a group of men lowers Buck’s simple wooden coffin into the grave, and the Indians begin covering it with earth. As the shovels work steadily, I notice Jet making her way through the crowd. She’s wearing a black dress and onyx earrings, and her height and dark skin make her easy to follow. I hadn’t realized she was here. Once I’m sure she’s moving toward me, I excuse myself and signal her to meet me at a tree that will give us some cover from the crowd, so as not to appear disrespectful.

  “Are you by yourself?” I ask as she reaches the tree.

  “Kevin’s home with Paul. Sally’s service is tomorrow. I think one funeral is enough for Kevin right now.”

  “Sure.”

  She hesitates, then gives me an unguarded look. “A lot happened last night. Some things need explaining. Could you meet me at the barn today? Four thirty?”

  “The Weldon barn?”

  She nods. “Too soon?”

  “No, I can make that.”

  Jet smiles with gratitude, but then her face darkens. “How’s Nadine doing?”

  I’m not sure how honest to be about this. “She’s all right.”

  She nods but says nothing further. “Four thirty, then.”

  “Four thirty.”

  We part without touching.

  Despite the Flex’s low ground clearance and the path being thickly overgrown by weeds, I make it all the way to the clearing around the Weldon barn. Jet is already there, waiting in front of her Volvo. She’s wearing the black dress from the funeral, and staring at the remains of the old cypress structure. The barn where she and I discovered each other has mostly collapsed. It’s being slowly consumed by kudzu and poison ivy. The second story sits only four feet off the ground and looks like rattlesnake heaven. I wouldn’t climb up into it unless I was running for my life.

  While the barn itself has fallen in, the clearing looks exactly the same. The sun filters down through the canopy in thick yellow shafts, the only straight lines and angles the first people in this region would have seen. Lone wildflowers blossom in the shadows of the woods. I don’t know their names, but they’re more beautiful than any you’d find in the florist’s shop on Rembert Street. I see fewer and fewer butterflies in the world, but they still thrive here, fluttering among the vines at the edge of the clearing.

  I park beside Jet’s Volvo, then walk over and hug her. After the cemetery, I worried that this might feel awkward, but here it seems natural. We hold each other for a full minute without speaking. We do not kiss. I feel myself responding to her body, and she must feel it, too, but we draw apart without going further. Then she leads me to the edge of the sunlight and sits in a patch of clover, tucking her legs demurely beneath her. I sit facing her with my arms around my knees.

  “Do you remember the old black man who saved us from the druggies that day?” she asks.

  “Hell, yes. It was night, really.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Willis.”

  She laughs. “That’s right! He said my twelve dollars would feed him for a week. I hope it did. If I could find him now, I’d give him twelve hundred.”

  She picks a white flower from the clover, then another. With delicate, assured fingers she ties one green stem around another with a tiny knot, beginning a necklace.

  “What did you guys tell Kevin about Max?” I ask, stepping right into the unspoken issues between us.

  Jet doesn’t look up. “We told him Beau Holland got his grandfather tangled up in some serious financial crimes. We said that Max thought Beau had been murdered by some crooked partners, and he felt his only choice was to flee the country. I tried to give him the impression that Max is living on a beach somewhere, drinking tequila under another name. Costa Rica, maybe. I did tell him that I doubted we’d ever see his grandfather again.”

  “Did Kevi
n ever believe that Max hurt Sally?”

  “I don’t think so. Once news of her illness got out, he latched on to that as a legitimate motive for suicide.”

  I nod, thinking that’s probably best.

  “Last night was pretty crazy,” she says, picking another flower and going to work on its stem with deft finger movements.

  “That barely begins to describe it. I’d say the credit for saving us goes to you. You were ferocious. You scared those old guys to death.”

  She shrugs. “We all did our part.”

  “You made it sound like you and Paul are staying together.”

  She looks up at last, her eyes noncommittal. “I said what I had to. I read the moment.”

  “You read it well. I’m the only one who knew you were bluffing about the cache.”

  She laughs softly. “I wasn’t bluffing.”

  “What?”

  “One hour before they threw me in that helicopter, all I had was the number of the account I’d set up in the Seychelles.”

  “Then how—”

  “Max’s phone. Before you and Paul left to dump his body, I took the cell phone he had on him. I punched in the first password from Sally’s necklace, and it opened like a charm.”

  “My God. What was the second password to?”

  “A password vault application on his phone. That’s what ‘MaiLoc1971’ opened. Once I got into that app, it was like Aladdin’s cave. I could have emptied those accounts if I’d had time. I was still going through the stuff when Wyatt’s guys showed up to grab me. I slid it under the credenza in your den two seconds before they kicked in the door.”

  “But you remembered some account numbers?”

  Jet taps her temple and gives me an ironic smile. “‘The Brain,’ remember? I’ve never been so thankful for being a number freak. If I hadn’t been able to quote those account numbers, we’d be dead now.”

  “Yes, we would.” Given that we survived the ordeal under the pavilion, my mind has wandered back before those crisis moments, to the ones in my kitchen. “I’ve thought a lot about Max,” I tell her.

  Jet’s mouth tightens. “He was going to kill us. All of us. You said that yourself. That was the only way he could get custody of Kevin.”

  “I know. I’m sure of that. Max would have shot Paul on the patio.”

  “Then he deserved what happened to him, didn’t he?”

  I don’t answer. I’m thinking about a conversation I had with Nadine when she and I woke up this morning. It was that discussion that caused me to put Jet’s sapphire earrings in my pocket and bring them to this meeting, to give back to her.

  “It’s changed, hasn’t it?” she asks. “Between us.”

  “Yes.”

  Her dark eyes deepen. “When did it change for you?”

  I’m not sure how to answer this. “I don’t know if you ever really know something like that. You just feel one way—you see a future—and then you don’t.”

  She peers into the shadows under the trees. “I know exactly when it was for me.”

  “Really?”

  “Last night. When Max said what he did about me—the sexual thing—and you believed him, not me.”

  I don’t respond to this.

  “I know what he said sounded credible,” she goes on. “But I told you he was lying. And you still decided that I was the liar.”

  “You’re right. After we proved he had lied, I felt like throwing up. I was ashamed.”

  Her lips compress like a child’s as she works to thread one troublesome stem into a tiny knot. “I’m probably being unrealistic,” she says. “But I want somebody who’ll believe me, even if what I swear to seems impossible.”

  I know how she feels. On the other hand, two nights ago she completely fabricated the story about Max raping her, and I’d believed that. I can’t help but feel that’s what made me vulnerable to Max’s lie. I’d just as soon abandon this line of discussion, but I feel one point must be made.

  “Paul didn’t believe you, either,” I remind her.

  “No. He didn’t. But Paul and I have a child. That’s the difference.”

  She’s right, even if Paul isn’t Kevin’s biological father. In every other way, Kevin is his son. But I wonder if a man who Jet lied to for so many years will ever be able to give her the trust she craves.

  I held something back a moment ago: I know the exact instant that I realized Jet and I have no future together. It was last night under the Boar Island pavilion, when Beau Holland revealed that she was the one who had given up Nadine as the holder of Sally’s cache. I understand Jet giving a couple of thugs what they’d demanded from her. After all, they’d threatened her child. But afterward . . . she chose not to warn Nadine, or even me. She abandoned Nadine to her fate. I don’t know why she did that, and I’m not sure I ever want to know. But it changed my feelings about her forever.

  “It’s all right,” she says, watching my face. “I understand.”

  “What?”

  “Nadine. The cache. I can’t really explain what I did.”

  “How did you even know she had it?”

  Jet’s fingers stop moving, but she doesn’t look up from the string of flowers. “I didn’t know. I guessed. Once I realized it was out there, that Sally had made this thing and given it to someone, the possibilities were pretty limited. I didn’t think she’d trust any man with it, honestly. Not even an attorney. Not in this town. The Poker Club is large enough that any man could be beholden to them, and not even Sally would know. Once I got that far, I figured it had to be Nadine. If her mother had been alive, Sally would have chosen her. But she wasn’t. That’s it, really.”

  I don’t know what to say. This is actually worse than what I imagined. She gave up Nadine without even being sure she had the cache.

  “I know it’s terrible,” Jet says softly. “It’s probably the worst thing I’ve ever done. But they threatened Kevin. I was terrified for him. I wanted it all to go away. The danger. I didn’t let myself believe they would really hurt Nadine. But I was lying to myself. I know that, because it was my fear of what they would do to Kevin that drove my actions.”

  I wish I could say something to ease her conscience, but nothing comes to me.

  “Please tell Nadine I’m sorry, even though it probably won’t mean anything.”

  I nod and leave it at that.

  “Look,” Jet says, pointing under the trees. “Turn very slowly.”

  I do. Something is watching us from the edge of the clearing. It’s a doe. A spotted fawn stands just behind her in the overgrowth, nervously watching its mother. The doe stares at us for perhaps fifteen seconds, then, with supreme indifference, leaps over a patch of briars and vanishes. The fawn looks lost for a moment, then scrambles after her.

  “A good omen?” Jet whispers, plucking another flower from the ground. She has seven tied together now. Soon she will close the circle.

  “For what?” I ask. “The future?”

  She gives a slow shrug as her fingers work. “I’ve been worried about you. We talked about having a child together.” She looks up, her eyes filled with concern. “You need one. Deserve one. And neither of us are kids anymore.”

  “That’s about the last thing I’ve been thinking about.”

  Sadness creeps into her face. “Are you going back to Washington? Or will you stay here and run the paper, like you told Paul?”

  So the two of them have been talking. “I don’t know. Does it matter to you?”

  “Of course.” A strange smile tugs at the corners of her mouth. “But I can think of somebody who’d love to make babies with you, if you’re still here.”

  This is the most surreal conversation I’ve had in a long time, maybe ever. And that’s saying something. “You’re a matchmaker now? For me?”

  “Nope. Jealous rival. Always. Voilà.” She dangles her completed necklace before me from one finger. “My anniversary present to you.”

  “Anniversary?”

  She
stands and slips the necklace over my head, then pulls me to my feet. “We started growing up here. Maybe we’ve finally completed the journey. Maybe we’re grown-ups now.”

  “I don’t know about that. But it’s definitely time to put away childish things.”

  She studies me for several seconds. Then she nods. “I need to get home. One kiss? Goodbye?” She moves almost imperceptibly toward me. Her eyes seem bottomless, and her lips grow larger, fuller in my sight. Even now, she radiates some mysterious field that draws me to her—

  “Something tells me this is not a good idea,” I murmur.

  Jet goes still, then smiles and squeezes my hand, letting hers trail off mine as she turns and walks to the door of her Volvo. Watching her climb in, I remember the earrings in my pocket but decide not to stop her. She starts the engine, makes a hard turn, then heads down the overgrown path toward the real world.

  Turning back to the barn, I take out the sapphire studs she left in my bathroom as a test to see whether Nadine would find them there. With only the faintest pang of regret, I toss the earrings through the barn door, into the kudzu and poison ivy.

  This barn was my refuge from the world, long after I left it physically behind. Jet, too, was a refuge of sorts, a sanctuary from reality, a bubble of childhood in which everything seemed pure and new and the future always bright. We all carry those bubbles within us. But they’re too fragile to bring out into the sun. They’re like my brother’s laugh or my father’s pride. They’re memories.

  And the real world awaits.

  Acknowledgments

  At Writers House: Dan Conaway and Simon Lipskar.

  At William Morrow: David Highfill, Liate Stehlik, Tavia Kowalchuk, Danielle Bartlett, Chloe Moffett, and everybody in the sales department—especially the reps!

  At HarperCollins U.K.: Julia Wisdom, Charlie Redmayne, and all the team.

  My all-hours co-conspirators: Ed Stackler, Jamie Kornegay, and Laura Cherkas.

  Writers tend to know a little about everything and a lot about nothing. A novel like this requires the knowledge of many experts. I thank them here, and all mistakes are mine!