The Guilty

by David Baldacci

  She looked doubtful. “He’s fixin’ to eat his lunch right now.”

  Robie looked at an empty chair in the room. “I can wait then.”

  “He expectin’ you?”

  “Don’t think so, no.”

  “How you know he been arrested then?” she said suspiciously.

  Robie now recalled that as a child and later a teenager Sheila Duvall had been sharp and seemingly missed nothing.

  “Friend of a friend.”

  “Uh-huh.” In a more strident tone she added, “Do I look like a dumbass to you, Will Robie?”

  He could hear the squeak of the metal detector guard’s gun belt as the big man eased into the room behind him, prompted probably by the rising of Taggert’s voice.

  “No, you don’t, Deputy Taggert. You look as sharp and professional as they come, actually.”

  The eyes flickered. “You go take yourself a seat, right now.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Robie sat across from the black woman with the big baby. She stared over at him for a moment before dropping her gaze to the floor. But she continued to bounce her child with her stick-thin arms that were all mottled and bruised.

  The old man had woken and was staring at Robie, too. His face was deeply tanned, and his hair, what was left of it, was starkly white and pitched helter-skelter over his scalp like sea spray in a storm. His jowls hung low and his lined, spotted face told of many decades under an unrelenting southern sun. He had on seersucker pants, a white shirt with sweat stains at the armpits, and scuffed white loafers on his sockless feet. Clip-on red suspenders held up his trousers, and a battered straw hat rested on his knee.

  Robie didn’t know the man and wondered if he had recognized Robie’s name. Everybody here must know Dan Robie, he figured. And Dan Robie’s being in jail for killing a fellow Cantrell citizen must be the biggest news of the year for the tiny hamlet.

  “How long do you think it’ll be?” Robie asked.

  Taggert looked up from her desk. “I done told you before. He’s havin’ his meal. Can’t say how long the man’ll be. I don’t count chews.”

  Robie sat back in the chair. The other uniform leaned against the wall, folded his arms over his chest, and settled his gaze on Robie.

  Robie gave him a quick glance and then looked away.

  Thirty minutes passed, and he had counted six flies buzzing overhead in the warm, humid space, the air disturbed only slightly by an ancient ceiling fan that seemed to be on its last few whirls of mechanical life.

  A minute later Robie glanced over as Taggert picked up a phone, spoke into it in a low voice, and then put the receiver back. She rose and walked over to him.

  Robie stood. “Lunch over?”

  “He don’t want’a see you,” she said matter-of-factly.

  “So somebody told him I was here? You?”

  “Suppose you can head on then,” she said, ignoring his question.

  “I’ve come a long way to see him.”

  “Yep. All the way from Dee-Cee. Don’t know what to tell y’all ’cept good-bye.”

  This drew a snort from the other deputy.

  “Well, can I at least talk to him on the phone somehow?”

  “Naw. We don’t do that here.”

  “So that’s it then?”

  She said nothing.

  “Has he been arraigned?”

  “That be in the mornin’ over the courthouse.”

  “Can you tell me what happened at least? With Sherman Clancy?”

  “I’m busy, Robie. I ain’t got no time to have a conversation with the likes’a you.”

  “The likes of me? I’m from Cantrell.”

  “You was from Cantrell.”

  “Who’s his lawyer?”

  “Not my business.”

  “Can you suggest a place for me to stay then?”

  “Why you stayin’?” she asked.

  “Because my father has been arrested for murder. If you were me, would you stay?”

  “I ain’t you. Got ’nuff trouble bein’ me.”

  This drew another snort from her partner.

  But she walked back over to her desk, took her time writing something down on a piece of paper, folded it over, and handed it to him. “Fair rates and clean sheets. Can’t ask for mor’n that.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Uh-huh.” She turned away.

  Robie walked out, conscious that all eyes were on him as he did so.

  He sat in his car and opened the slip of paper.

  Off duty at five. Momma Lulu’s on Little Choctaw.

  Chapter

  9

  ROBIE HAD A few hours to kill before meeting Taggert at Momma Lulu’s on Little Choctaw, a place he knew was three streets over from the jail. He decided to spend the time exploring his old hometown.

  He pointed his rental back the way he had come, conscious again of the faces peering at him from all corners. He might as well have been driving in a lunar rover for all the attention he was getting. Tourism apparently wasn’t a thriving industry here, not that he had expected it to be.

  Robie quickly left the tiny downtown area of Cantrell. A half hour later he turned down a narrow dirt lane that ended at the rim of a small homestead.

  He had not chosen this place by chance. This had been his home growing up.

  The house was old and small, about nine hundred square feet, and directly behind it was a two-story barn topped by a hayloft. It was set on twenty mostly treed acres, though the Robies had raised their own vegetables in a large kitchen garden, grew some corn for sale, and also kept a few horses and cows. And of course chickens.

  The front yard was dirt; the bushes and other minimal landscaping had gone to seed. The front porch was sagging. And if that wasn’t enough evidence for Robie that his ramrod-straight father no longer called this place home, three little shirtless black boys were running in circles in the front yard, while their twenty-something mother in cutoff jean shorts and a white tank top hustled after them.

  The woman stopped running when Robie pulled up and got out of the car. The three children crowded next to their mother’s broad hips and warily watched his approach, their eyes big as bottle caps.

  “Can I help you?” asked the woman, taking a step back and drawing her kids with her. “My husband’s right inside cleanin’ his gun,” she added, in the form of a clear warning. “He just done him some huntin’,” she added. “Kilt him some things.”

  Robie looked over her shoulder. “I used to live here a long time ago. My father Dan Robie owned the place. How long have you been here?”

  She looked a bit confused and then, as he expected, realization spread over her features. “Robie? Dan Robie is your daddy?”

  Robie nodded and again looked toward the house. “So did you buy this place from him?”

  “Uh-uh. We moved in two years ago, but we bought it from the Harpers. They headed on up to Chattanooga.”

  Robie nodded. “Okay, thanks.” He turned and walked back to his car.

  The woman called after him, “Your daddy done kilt a man.”

  He turned back around. “So I heard.”

  He drove off in a swirl of dust. In the rearview he saw the woman hustle inside, no doubt to tell her hunter husband all about it.

  He headed back to Cantrell thinking that he should have asked the woman if she knew where his father now lived. But he hadn’t, so he would have to gain that information some other way. He could ask people in town. It was small enough that someone would know. But he didn’t want to do that, either. After Taggert and then the young mom, he had grown weary of seeing the looks on people’s faces when he identified himself as the son of a murderer.

  Alleged murderer, he mentally corrected.

  He got back to the main street that cut Cantrell proper into two roughly equal halves and spied what he had earlier. An old phone booth. Through the dirty glass he could see the phone book dangling on the end of a chain.

  He parked at the curb, st
epped inside the booth, gripped the slender phone book, and flipped through its few pages until he got to the right section.

  Dan Robie. He now lived at Willow Hall.

  The Willows, as everyone in Cantrell had always called it.

  Robie read through this line twice more to make sure he was seeing right.

  It wasn’t a street name. It was the name of the house. He knew the place well. He had once dated a girl who lived there with her family.

  Laura Barksdale’s father could trace his roots all the way back to when Mississippi was first settled. The Willows had once been a classic southern plantation complete with an army of slaves. The Barksdales’ ancestors had commanded Confederate troops in the Civil War. They had led Citizens’ Councils to keep blacks in their place when the civil rights movement came to Mississippi. They were prominent and wealthy and…

  And now his father owned the place?

  He left the phone booth to find two black men staring at him from a few feet away. One was big and bulky, wearing faded jeans, white sneakers, and a gray T-shirt.

  The other man was smallish but wiry, with sculpted shoulders and thick forearms shown off because he had on a wife beater along with baggy black corduroys.

  Robie nodded at them both and then started to walk past.

  “Will Robie?” said the bigger man.

  Robie turned to look at him. He was maybe twenty, not even born when Robie had left this place.

  “Yeah?”

  “You know my daddy?”

  “I don’t know. Who’s your daddy?”

  “Billy Faulconer.”

  The image of a huge teenager with enormous shoulders, beefy arms, and a hearty laugh, which he used often, seeped into Robie’s brain.

  Robie said, “We were on the football team together. He was a helluva left tackle. Protected my blind side really well.”

  “Y’all were state champs your senior year. Got yourselves a parade and everythin’. Daddy still talks ’bout it.”

  Billy Faulconer must’ve had kids young, Robie calculated. Pretty much right after high school. But in Cantrell that was not so unusual. There was no mad rush off to college for the high school graduates. There was only one sudden, panicked thought, really:

  Now what the hell do I do?

  He said, “It was a nice ride. Good for the town. No team from here had ever beaten a team from Jackson.”

  “He talked ’bout you, too. Said you just upped and left one night after you finished high school. Nobody heard from you no mo’.”

  Robie was not about to get into all that. “So how’s Billy doing?”

  “Not so good. He got the cancer in his lungs. Ain’t long for this world.”

  “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

  The tall young man looked at him appraisingly. “You here ’bout your daddy, ain’t you? What got you back here, right?”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Named after my daddy. But folks just call me Little Bill.”

  “You’re pretty big for that name.”

  “My daddy’s bigger. Least he used to be before the cancer got him.”

  “So what do you know about Sherman Clancy dying? And my father being arrested for the murder?”

  Little Bill shrugged. “Not much. Bad blood twixt the two.”

  “Based on what?”

  The smaller man said, “Jury ain’t convict old Clancy and that got your daddy all riled, I reckon.”

  “Convict him of what?”

  “Killin’ that gal,” said Little Bill. “Janet Chisum. Nice gal. Till someone did what they done to her.”

  “I don’t know anything about it. I never heard of the Chisums.”

  “They moved here a while back. She was a pretty white gal. One of three gals in the family. She done went out one night and never come back. Found her in the damn Pearl River the next day hooked on a tree. Shot in the head. Gator had taken a bite outta her, too.”

  “And Clancy was arrested for the murder? Why?”

  The smaller man said, “Somebody done seen him with the gal. That part of the Pearl is near his house. Other stuff cops know about.”

  “But the jury acquitted him?”

  “Yes they did,” said the smaller man.

  “Why?”

  The smaller man was about to say something but Billy broke in, “Clancy’s got himself a lot of friends hereabouts.” He rubbed his thumb and two fingers together. “And he got him money.”

  His friend gave Little Bill a funny look but said nothing.

  Robie looked confused. “Money! The Clancys were dirt-poor farmers when I was here.”

  Little Bill shook his head. “That all changed. They done found gas or oil on his land. And then he took that money and got in early with some of the casino boys. Made himself a lotta cash. A lot. Got him a big old place down by the Pearl.”

  “Had,” said his friend. “He ain’t got nothin’ no mo’.”

  Robie said, “Okay, but why would my father be so angry that he was acquitted that he would kill him?”

  “’Cause he be the judge,” said Little Bill.

  Robie stared at him. When he’d left Cantrell his father had a small law practice that barely kept the roof over their heads. Most of his fees were paid in barter.

  Little Bill seemed to read Robie’s mind. “Your daddy’s been the judge here ’bout ten years now. Things change. Yes they do. Even in Cantrell.”

  “Yes they do,” agreed Robie. “You tell your daddy I said hello.”

  “I sure will. Maybe you come see him while you here. We live down on Tiara Street, last house on the left.” He stared dead at Robie. “He ain’t got much longer, Mr. Robie. Bet it’d do him good, you know. Old times. Good times. Maybe only ones he ever had.”

  Robie nodded. “I’ll sure see if I can do that.”

  He got back in his car and drove off.

  His mind was whirling with many new facts now. His father a judge.

  The Clancys, rich.

  This Janet Chisum, dead.

  But then his mind focused on where he was going.

  The Willows.

  And with it, all those memories.

  From his last night in Cantrell.

  Chapter

  10

  WILLOW HALL HAD been aptly named nearly two centuries ago, because there had been a line of willow oaks on both sides of the long drive heading up to the house. Or so Robie had been told—the trees had died away many decades before he had been born. The cause had been the drying up of an underground spring that fed the willows’ thirsty roots.

  In their place had been planted longleaf pines that could tolerate drier conditions and were a native species. They ran in columns eighty