The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  And after that, what he had said about making a deal. How he had made some kind of deal. And then something had happened in 1952, and they had started calling him the luckiest man alive. Who were they? People in general, or some specific people?

  And he had gone on to say that he had been dead already, dead ever since the moment he’d made the deal.

  What was this deal? A deal to survive the war? And with whom? Such a thing had to exist solely in Webster’s deranged mind. Did he believe he had made a deal with some divine or arcane force and thus had survived Guadalcanal while everyone else in his section had been killed? And what was this thing in ’52? Had he murdered Nancy Denton and performed some bizarre ritual on her as some kind of payback for the life he’d been given? Is that what Michael Webster actually believed?

  Gaines was even more uncertain than when he had left the office. He started to put the newspaper clippings back where he’d taken them from, careful not to disturb their original order, and it was then that he found the Bible. Battered, dog-eared, the leather cracked in places, it seemed not only old, but neglected. Flicking through it for any marker or inserts, of which there were none, he noticed the occasional underlined passage. Inside the front cover was a handwritten scrawl. This helped me. E. Who was E? Right now it was of no great concern. Maybe it was a war buddy of Webster’s, someone from the VA perhaps. As Gaines stacked the boxes once more, he found the photo album. It was there, down against the baseboard, and he nearly missed it. But something drew him to it, and even as he opened it up to look at the first picture, he hoped that here he would find something more than circumstantial evidence and the ramblings of a crazy man to connect Michael Webster to Nancy Denton.

  In the pictures she was alive. So utterly alive. She seemed always to be smiling, and when she was not smiling, she was laughing. There were images of her with three or four others, the same faces appearing time and again. There was no mistaking the presence of Lieutenant Michael Webster, sometimes in his own clothes, sometimes in uniform, and in these pictures there was no mistaking the familiarity and affection that seemed to exist between Webster the killer and Nancy the victim. Wasn’t it the case that more than eighty percent of murders were perpetrated by people who were known to the victim? The others that recurred constantly included a girl who seemed a year or two younger than Nancy, two young men who bore similarities enough to be related, and every once in a while a much younger girl. A crowd of childhood friends, it seemed, and their images looked back at Gaines from the monochrome snapshots of years gone by, and he wondered what had really happened on the August night in 1954 that saw Nancy Denton dead.

  Gaines took the album and the Bible to the car. He put them in the trunk. He closed up Webster’s room and drove back to the office.

  Once there, Gaines instructed Hagen to secure everything in the evidence room, itself little more than a store cupboard with a lock, but it sufficed for those very rare occasions when Whytesburg needed somewhere to secure items of significance or value.

  Gaines then called Dalton out at the motel.

  “We got anything?” he asked.

  “Not a great deal, Sheriff. They’re all saying the same thing. Quiet guy. Kept himself to himself. Hardly ever saw him. Kind of intense. Apart from that, squat.”

  “I reckoned that would be the case. So finish up there, and then get back here.”

  There was a moment’s pause.

  “What is it, Forrest?”

  “Figured we’d maybe be done for the night. We’re already a couple of hours over shift hours, Sheriff …”

  “Have a sixteen year-old-girl here, Officer Dalton. Sixteen years old. Don’t much care that it happened twenty years ago, but I have a whacko in the basement who sawed her pretty much in two. You got a choice. You can either come back here and keep an eye on him, or you can go out and spend the night consoling her mother.”

  “Yes,” Dalton replied. “Understood, Sheriff. Sorry about that. I’ll see you at the office.”

  20

  Gaines went on down to the basement to see Webster. He found him there on the bunk, outside the door a plate with a couple of fried pork chops and some rice and beans. Webster hadn’t touched it.

  Gaines recognized the expression on Webster’s face. It was called the thousand-yard stare. In Gaines’s experience, mostly those he had known at the VA, all veterans had it at one time or another—the odd moment, perhaps a week apart, growing ever more infrequent as the months elapsed. Seems that Webster had it almost all the time. Once again, the man seemed to possess the ability to look right through Gaines, and he did it with such intensity that Gaines felt like nothing at all. It really was that intense. If Webster had just reached out in that moment, Gaines knew Webster’s fingers would touch him and then pass right on through.

  “Michael?” Gaines said.

  A faint smile crossed Webster’s lips.

  Gaines had also seen that smile before—the haunted, guilty survivor’s smile—at the VA, at the Veterans Hospital up in Jackson, in the awkward silence of the Demobilization Center as those who had served their tours were processed out of a war and back into a world that neither could, nor would ever, understand. But above that smile were the eyes. Nineteen- and twenty-year-olds with a look in their eyes they should not have possessed until they reached their forties. Perhaps they still believed they wouldn’t make it, that their lives could be taken at any moment, so they thought it best to assume such expressions now while they still had a chance. Cynical, bitter, world-weary, battle-fatigued, hardened in so many ways, save those ways that were useful in any other life.

  Webster looked like that, as did Gaines, but Gaines knew he was still fighting against it, still escaping from it, and one day he perhaps would.

  “Sheriff,” Webster said.

  “Mike . . . I need you to tell me what happened to her heart.”

  Webster closed his eyes, opened them again, almost in slow motion. “It went into a box, Sheriff. A box that could not be broken by root nor animal nor lightning nor rain. That was what needed to be done. Four yards east, twelve yards north from where the body was planted under . . .”

  “Planted under?”

  “Want something to grow, well, you gotta plant it under, right?”

  Gaines was silent for a moment. “You put her heart in a box.”

  “I did.”

  “What kind of box did you use, Mike?”

  “I used a strong metal box that had belonged to my father, and I emptied out the nails and screws, and I wrapped Nancy’s heart in cloth, and I tied the cloth tight, and then I buried the box, like I said.”

  “Four east, twelve north from where you buried her body.”

  “ ’S right.”

  Gaines turned and walked to the base of the stairwell. He turned and looked back at Webster. Webster was gone again—into the thousand-yard stare, into whatever world existed behind those dark and distant eyes.

  Back upstairs, he told Hagen to load the car with as many torches as he could find.

  “And get sawhorses, crime-scene tape, rope as well.”

  Hagen complied without questioning their purpose. Perhaps he had now reconciled himself to the fact that from here it would likely get worse rather than better.

  Gaines checked with Barbara Jacobs if there were any outstanding messages, learned there were none, and then he headed out front to the car. What it was that alerted him, he did not know, but before he reached reception, he was aware that trouble had arrived.

  Gaines had been anticipating the inevitable appearance of ex– deputy sheriff Eddie Holland, alongside him his sidekick, Nate Ross, one-time legal eagle around these parts, now nothing more than a retired lawyer with too much time and money. Even when he’d worked under Don Bicklow, Holland had been contrariwise. Always against the grain of things, sometimes stating opinions simply because they countered the consensus. Disagreeable for disagreements’ sake. Whichever ways considered, something of an asshole. However, he had mell
owed with age, it seemed, and though he spent a good deal too much attention concerning himself with the affairs of others, Gaines did not dislike him. He did not dislike either of them, truth be known, but they always had too much to say when he had too little time to listen. Ross had been a very successful attorney, at first a public defender, then owning and managing his own practice, and then, finally, he had become a state prosecutor. Maybe he had tired of listening to his clients’ lies and bullshit and decided that jail was a better place for them. Once retired, he started looking for someplace to drown his sorrows and relieve his boredom. He used to live up in some fancy place in Hattiesburg, but then his wife died, and the three kids they’d wrestled into adulthood apparently felt there was no need to come home now that their mother had passed. Ross had rattled around the empty halls and emptier rooms for a handful of months and then sold the place for three times more than he’d paid. New money from the North was buying into the appearance of old-South wealth and style, and some stationery and office supplies tycoon had snapped up the Ross mansion. Gaines had seen the place one time—reputedly bought with money earned from prosecuting black people for things that had never happened or had been perpetrated by whites—and it looked like a three-tier wedding cake. So Nate Ross came to Whytesburg, had arrived back in the fall of 1970, just a few months after Gaines had graduated from Vicksburg and taken the job in Breed County. The sorrows Nate Ross was trying to drown still weren’t dead. They had some brave pair of lungs, or maybe some secret supply of oxygen unbeknownst to Ross. Regardless, he kept sluicing down those sorrows with good, hard liquor in the hope that he’d wake up happier tomorrow.

  Holland and Ross were rarely apart, both widowed, both lonely, both a great deal more interested in other people’s affairs than was healthy. The ex-cop and the ex-lawyer, minds set on interfering and getting involved, had somehow gotten word about Webster and had come down to see what was happening.

  “Nate,” Gaines said, “and Ed. Well, what a great pleasure it is to see you pair.”

  Ross was a good ten feet from Gaines, but Gaines could smell the liquor.

  “Don’t bullshit us, Sheriff,” Holland said, grinning broadly. “We’re the last people in the world you want to see, and that doesn’t just count for this evening.”

  Gaines paused. Inside, he just counted to ten.

  One.

  “Seems we got ourselves a situation here . . . ,” Ross said.

  Two, three.

  “A little bit of a situation, wouldn’t you say?”

  Four, five.

  “Seems to me we have a responsibility to ensure that everything—”

  Six, seven.

  “—is done right and proper.”

  Eight, nine.

  “Wouldn’t want you making a mess of such an important case as this, would we, Sheriff?”

  Ten.

  “We’re doing just fine here, gentlemen,” Gaines said. “We have everything under control . . .”

  “You sure now?” Holland asked. “Don’t seem that Whytesburg’s had such a case for as long as I can recall . . . not only a murder, but the butchering of a young girl—”

  “Now, where d’you go and hear such a thing?” Gaines asked, knowing full well that Victor Powell would have told his wife, who would then have told her friends, and before lunchtime half the folks of Whytesburg would have been fully apprised of the situation.

  “Honestly,” Gaines went on, “I don’t know that there are two more advised and responsible people in this town, and I’d have thought that such a responsibility, you with your police experience, Ed, and you, Nate, being so legally educated and wise, would feel nothing less than the full burden of care in such a matter.”

  Neither Holland nor Ross said a word. They looked at each other, then back at Gaines.

  Gaines leaned closer, the confidant, acknowledging both Holland and Ross as equals, if not superiors.

  “If I can’t rely on you guys to manage this business with confidentiality and discretion, then who can I rely on? Place like this, Whytesburg, depends upon its elders to keep order, to make sure that rumor doesn’t find its way where it shouldn’t.”

  Once again, Holland looked at Ross, and Ross looked back at Holland.

  “Now, I know you weren’t deputy when this Denton girl went missing, Ed, and you, Nate . . . well, you were up at your practice in Hattiesburg, far as I know. You are probably not aware of the original circumstances of her disappearance, and Don Bicklow and George Austin are both long gone. So that leaves me to ask questions of those who were here and those who were involved. So, unless you were here, or unless you were involved, then I don’t know that I can ask anything of you but the exercising of your sense of duty in setting a good example around and about. I will be speaking to you both, because I believe that you may know some things of value to this case, but we’re not doing that tonight. So, as far as the here and now is concerned, I have matters to attend to with some urgency. I know that you both appreciate the situation I am dealing with far better than anyone else here, maybe even better than me. I am the sheriff, and I gotta deal with this thing, but I want to know that I can count on you for assistance and advice if I should so need it.”

  “Of course, Sheriff,” Holland blurted, taken aback perhaps by the level of confidence that was being expressed in his abilities and position.

  “Without question,” Ross added. “Without any question at all.”

  “Well, that makes me feel a great deal better,” Gaines said, and he shook their hands. “Now, I really do need to impress upon you the need to maintain some sense of order on this thing, gentlemen. I know all too well how many folks around here value your opinion, and I want you to use that opinion as wisely as you can. Let’s keep this thing localized, shall we? Let’s keep this problem a Whytesburg problem, and with both of you on my side, I’m sure we can deal with it quite capably ourselves. We wouldn’t want the whole county coming on down here to have a lynching party, now, would we?”

  Gaines didn’t wait for a response. He gripped Ross’s shoulder, squeezed it assuredly, and then left the building.

  When he looked back, they were still standing there—looked like they didn’t know Tuesday from Sunday, nor any of the days in between—and Gaines smiled to himself.

  Sometimes the only way to deal with Ross and Holland was to grant them the importance they so earnestly believed they deserved. Truth was, he was perhaps granting them no more importance than they did deserve. They were good people, people used to working hard and getting things done, and retirement didn’t suit such folks.

  Hagen joined Gaines. He had loaded the trunk with everything Gaines had asked for.

  “Where we going?” Hagen asked.

  “Back to where we found her body and then a little way off.”

  “What’re we looking for?”

  “Her heart, Richard. We’re looking for her heart.”

  Hagen just looked at Gaines.

  “Seems I’m gonna spend this week looking at the faces of folks who don’t believe what I’m saying to them.”

  Hagen—wide-eyed—just nodded. He opened the driver’s-side door and climbed in.

  Gaines got in the passenger side, the car pulled away, and neither of them spoke for a good ten minutes.

  “You get him to sign that release document?” Hagen asked.

  “Oh hell, I forgot,” Gaines said. He reached into his pocket and found the paper that Hagen had given him.

  “He needs to sign it, John.”

  “Soon as I get back,” Gaines replied.

  Silence filled the car again.

  Gaines did not know if finding Nancy Denton’s heart—whatever might remain of it—would be worse than discovering nothing at all. Finding that poor girl’s heart precisely four yards east and twelve yards north of the point where they had wrestled her frail and broken body from the black filth of the riverbank would merely confirm that they were dealing with something far darker than Gaines had feared. />
  The things you witnessed in war tied your nerves in knots, tied and twisted them so damned tight they would never unravel, not with a hundred, not with a thousand years of living. And if the living brought you such things as this—things that were equal to the horrors Gaines had seen, things that were carried from the very heart of war itself into an unsuspecting, fragile small-town America—then what hope did he have of becoming fully human again? Scant hope at best, and perhaps it was this of which Gaines was most afraid.

  21

  Sometimes Gaines liked to drink a glass of whiskey, but it gave him an upset liver and a bad stomach, and thus the bad outweighed the good. That night he drank as if it was the final hour of R & R, that he—the GI round eye—was heading back to the front come daybreak.

  When he was at war, he knew it was the worst place he had ever been, the worst place he would ever be. Such an awareness did something to the mind, the emotions, the very spirit of a man. It blunted him, rendered him insensate, as if the upper and lower registers of his humanness had been cauterized. Just as he would now no longer experience any real depth of fear, so he would be immune to joy, to elation, to the sometimes giddy rush of pleasure that came from simple things. A child would smile, and he would see an eight-year-old facedown in a pool of muddy, stinking water, the back of its head blown away. A bright bouquet of flowers, and he would see not only the bursting hearts and lingering tails of magnesium flares but the zip and crash of tracers, and in his ears would be the thump and rumble of mortar fire. Like the devil’s firework show. The sounds of 105s and 155s were relentless, as if they were counting off the seconds. It was deafening, interminable, but—back then—hearing that sound at least meant you were still alive.

  And there was the smell. The smell of things burning. The unmistakable stench of chemical fires in wet vegetation. And bodies. Like scorched hair and rotted pork. Gaines knew the mind did not pick favorites, did not prefer one recollection over another. Some days he could recall the warm aroma of fresh popcorn, the ghost of some long-forgotten and too-brief childhood. But that was always fleeting—there, and then gone. The darker sense memories lingered for hours, and it was at such times that he began to worry for the stability of his own mind. He too was fragile, and he wondered how long it would be before the seams began their inevitable and irreparable divide.