The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  But no one smiled, and no one laughed, and Della Wade lost all the color from her cheeks and the intensity from her eyes, and she walked two or three steps forward and sort of folded herself loosely into one of the kitchen chairs.

  “Oh,” she said quietly, and then she looked at Gaines, and Gaines took the seat facing her, and for a while they did nothing but look at each other in silence.

  Della Wade broke that silence with, “You think my brother killed Nancy?”

  “Yes, Miss Wade, I do.”

  “And who is this other person?”

  “Michael Webster.”

  Della looked at Maryanne. “Michael?” she asked her. “The Michael? Nancy’s Michael?”

  Maryanne nodded.

  “He’s dead?” Della asked.

  “Yes,” Gaines said. “You didn’t know?”

  Della shook her head. “No, why would I?”

  “You don’t read the papers?”

  “No, I don’t read newspapers,” she said. “Haven’t for years.”

  “Well, yes, Michael is dead. He was found in the burned-out wreckage of his home, and he had been decapitated.”

  “I’m sorry . . . what?”

  “Decapitated, Miss Wade . . . his head and his left hand had been cut off.”

  “This is unreal. This is . . .” Her voice faded. She looked at Maryanne, wide-eyed and wordless for some moments, and then she looked back at Gaines and said, “And you think Matthias did this?”

  “Let’s just say that he is on my list of suspects.”

  “But Nancy Denton? Nancy Denton ran away, right?” Again Della turned to Maryanne, as if Maryanne were the one she trusted to confirm or deny what she was being told.

  Maryanne merely held Della’s gaze and said nothing.

  “No, Miss Wade,” Gaines said. “Nancy did not run away. You weren’t aware that we found her?”

  Della Wade looked visibly stunned.

  Gaines was struck with an intense feeling of déjà vu. He was reprising the conversation he’d had with Maryanne Benedict during his first visit to her home the day before his mother’s death.

  He glanced at Maryanne. Maryanne shook her head. She had not told Della about Nancy or Michael. She had left that for Gaines to deal with.

  Everything went in circles. Life and death and all in between.

  “You found her? Where? When?”

  “We found her on the morning of Wednesday the twenty-fourth, eleven days ago.”

  “How? What happened?”

  “There was a rainstorm, a very heavy one, and it broke up the riverbank, and we found her buried there. We can only assume that she had been there since the night of her disappearance.”

  Gaines watched the woman come apart at the seams. Things she believed in no way involved or concerned her now seemed so close to home, and she was struggling desperately not only to absorb what was happening, but also to place it within any frame of reference. Gaines could so easily have told her that there was no context within which such things made sense, but he believed her already fully aware of this.

  “And she was killed?” Della asked.

  “Strangled,” Gaines replied.

  “By Matthias?”

  “I believe so.”

  “And Michael was killed? Why was Michael killed? Why would Matthias kill Michael?”

  “To stop him from speaking of what happened that night.”

  Della shook her head. “That makes no sense, no sense at all. Nancy disappeared twenty years ago. Michael Webster had two decades to tell anyone he liked whatever he knew about what happened.”

  “Michael was bound by his own decision not to say a word.”

  “But why? What possible reason could he have had for not saying what happened?”

  “Because he was involved, too,” Gaines said.

  “In Nancy’s death? No, no way. Michael loved her. Even I could see that. I was just a child and even I could see that.” She turned to Maryanne. “Isn’t that right? Michael loved Nancy and she loved him back, and he would never have done anything to hurt her. Tell him, Maryanne.”

  “He didn’t do anything to hurt her,” Gaines said. “He did something that he believed would help her, and what he did and why he did it meant that he could never speak about it. Then, when she was found, he knew that what he’d done hadn’t worked and now never would. That was why he had to be silenced.”

  “I do not understand what you’re saying. This makes no fucking sense. What the hell are you saying? What did he do to her? What did Michael do to Nancy?”

  Gaines paused. He waited until Della Wade’s eyes were firmly fixed on his own, and then he said, “He tried to raise her from the dead, Miss Wade. Michael Webster tried to raise Nancy Denton from the dead.”

  Della Wade did smile then and then she started to laugh, but she stopped suddenly when she again realized that her reaction was singular and without support.

  She looked at John Gaines for further explanation.

  Gaines said nothing.

  54

  Maryanne Benedict held Della Wade’s shoulders as she cried. She did not cry for more than a few moments, and then she seemed to gather herself together with surprising composure. It was as if she were somehow demonstrating vulnerability, and this facet of herself she did not wish to share with those present in Nate Ross’s kitchen.

  “Tell me everything,” she said. “Tell me everything you know about Nancy and Michael.”

  Gaines did. He explained the sequence of events from the moment Nancy’s body was first discovered right up to the meeting they were now having in Nate Ross’s kitchen.

  And when he was done, he sat back in his chair and watched as she tried to take it all in.

  A couple of times she seemed to have a question on her lips, but then it vanished as she considered some other aspect of what she’d been told. Finally, minutes having passed, she asked the one thing that needed to be asked, the only question that really held any significance or meaning.

  “And you have no evidence at all, do you?” she said. “Nothing that directly implicates Matthias in any of this? Not in Nancy’s death and not in Michael’s.”

  “No, Miss Wade, I do not,” Gaines said.

  “So what is this based on? Your intuition?”

  “Perhaps,” Gaines said.

  “Perhaps?”

  “My intuition, yes, but also the fact that Matthias was in love with Nancy and yet could not have her, that he was with her the night she disappeared, that Matthias paid Michael’s bail, that he was the last person seen with Michael, the fact that he had someone terrorize Clifton, had them cut off his fingers, and just to stop you seeing him, even the fact that—”

  “Enough,” Della said. “Enough now.”

  “You’re right, Miss Wade. It’s all circumstantial or coincidental, and no, I do not have anything that I can prove or substantiate, but sometimes an intuitive feeling possesses more substance than anything else.”

  “And you thought that because of what happened with Clifton, I might be willing to help you incriminate and expose my brother as a murderer?”

  “Miss Wade, I do not know for sure that he is a murderer.”

  “But you believe he is.”

  “I consider him the most likely contender.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she said, her voice almost a whisper. “This is just a nightmare, a fucking nightmare.”

  “I understand.”

  She looked up suddenly. “Do you? Do you even have the faintest idea what it’s like to be told that your own brother is a murderer, that he murdered someone twenty years ago, an innocent girl for God’s sake, and he’s lived with that for two decades?”

  Gaines shook his head. “No, I don’t. I don’t have a clue how this must feel.”

  Della sighed. “I am upset with you, Sheriff Gaines. I am upset with Maryanne. I am upset that you went to see Clifton. Clifton knows I love him. He doesn’t need to ask me. He knows I love him enough to wait for however
long it takes. The moment he’s out, we are gone, seriously. And we will be gone so far and so fast that Matthias will not even know about it until it’s too late to do anything. And it’s not only Matthias that makes it difficult for us to have a future together. A white girl and a colored man cannot have a relationship here. It is not possible. That is just the way of things. We should have been smarter. We should have been more careful. I have to accept responsibility for what happened, as I was the one who gave him the money. It was a stupid and impulsive thing to do, and we learned a hard lesson. But I am patient, and I can wait, and then Clifton and I will wish this part of the world goodbye, and we won’t be coming back. I want you to know that if Matthias had seen this letter, then Clifton would be dead. You understand?”

  “I do, yes,” Gaines replied.

  “And he asked you to send word back from me?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Well, if you go up there again, you tell him that nothing has changed, that everything is the same. But you tell him, Sheriff Gaines. No one else. You do not pass on a message. You do not send the message with someone else. And if you cannot go there, then you do nothing. Are we clear on that?”

  “Yes, we are. Absolutely.”

  “Okay then,” Della said. She turned to Nate Ross. “What you got that’s halfway toward moonshine in this place?”

  “Got some good bourbon,” Ross replied.

  “Well, I need some. I need a good slug in a cup of coffee.” She took a packet of cigarettes from her jacket pocket and lit one.

  “So how was Clifton?” she said.

  “He looked good,” Gaines replied. “As good as could be expected under the circumstances.”

  “You know he’s a musician, right? You know I met him through Eugene?”

  “Yes, he told me that.”

  Della smoked her cigarette for a while. Ross brought her the laced coffee. She drank half of it, nodded at Ross, who then added more bourbon.

  “Okay, okay, okay,” she said, almost to herself. “This is not what you think it is, Sheriff Gaines. This is not just a matter of walking up to the house and accusing my brother of murder and trusting that he will fall apart and confess.”

  “I appreciate that, Miss Wade.”

  “So what the hell do you think I’m going to be able to do?”

  “Well, the mere fact that you have not leapt to his defense tells me something.”

  “What, exactly? What does it tell you?”

  “It tells me that you believe he might have done this, that such a thing would not have been beyond him.”

  She smiled sardonically. “My brother is a man of many faces, Sheriff. Those who know him do not really know him, and those who don’t know him know more than they think. Who he is, and who he wants the world to believe he is, are two different things entirely.”

  She hesitated for a moment. Gaines said nothing, his silence the best encouragement.

  “He wants everyone to believe that he’s the master of his own little world. He runs my father’s businesses, or at least he pretends to. He appears every once in a while at the plants, at the refineries. He tells the people there what to do. They listen; they acknowledge him, and once he’s gone, they do what they were going to do before he showed up. He knows it, they know it, and it’s an arrangement of tacit consent. It works just fine on both sides. They get to make the companies and businesses work, and he gets to take the director’s salary.”

  “And your father?”

  “What about my father?”

  “He doesn’t manage the businesses anymore?”

  “My father is seventy-six years old, Sheriff Gaines. He has not been involved in any real capacity in his businesses for at least five years. After the illness—”

  “The illness?”

  “He was ill, seriously ill. At first they believed it was some kind of heart condition, but it wasn’t. Then they said it was a nerve disease, a deterioration of something in his brain, but he didn’t have the right symptoms. No one seems to know what was wrong with him, but it got worse and worse, and then it seemed to level out. He reached a state about a year or a year and a half ago, and he doesn’t seem to have gotten any worse since then.”

  “And how is he? What effects has this illness had on him?”

  “Everything, Sheriff. Everything about him has changed. He has moments of lucidity, but rarely. The times I have with my father, I mean, really have with him, are so few and far between these days. An hour or two a week, if I am lucky. He is elsewhere. He doesn’t remember the simplest things, and yet he can recall precise details of some event that happened fifty years ago as if it was yesterday. He rambles; he talks incessantly about nothing, and then he is completely silent for days at a stretch.”

  “Is he aware of what happened with you and Clifton?”

  “Sheriff, sometimes he doesn’t even know who I am, and I live with him.”

  “And if he had known about you and Clifton, what would he have said?”

  “You mean, would he have let me get involved with a colored man?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, he would not. Well, I think he would have done everything he could to discourage me, but if I had fought him—and believe me, I would have—he would have finally relented. He would not have let me stay here, but he would not have disowned me, neither in name nor financially.”

  “And he would not have threatened Clifton or had him sent to Parchman.”

  Della smiled ruefully. “Whatever has been said about my father, he was never a vindictive man. He was a businessman. He was tough, aggressive, but he was not cruel.”

  Gaines looked at Ross, at Holland, at Maryanne. It seemed as though he might have been angling for some unspoken moral support, and Della picked this up immediately.

  “What?” she asked.

  “There’s a question I want to ask you, but I don’t want to cause offense—”

  “Do I seem like the sort of person who is going to take offense at being asked a question, Sheriff?”

  Gaines sighed and shook his head. “I don’t know what kind of person you are, Miss Wade.”

  “Well, ask me the question, and if there’s gonna be a fistfight, then you’ve got three friends here to hold me down if it gets dirty.”

  “Your father . . . his political persuasion, his loyalties, so to speak—”

  “Ask the question, Sheriff. Politeness has its place, but directness serves us far better in the long run of things.”

  “Is he Klan?” Gaines asked. “That direct enough for you?”

  Della shrugged. “Well, at least I know what you’re asking me now.”

  “So?”

  “Politically, yes, personally, no. But then, such a balance cannot easily be maintained around here, if you know what I mean.”

  “Explain.”

  “I don’t need to explain, Sheriff. You know precisely what I mean. It’s all very well and good saying you’re in the club, but saying you are goes only so far. Every once in a while you have to do something that proves you’re in the club; otherwise folks start to get fidgety and unsettled. The Klan is on the decline. It might come to life again, but those who are out there with their mouths open, airing their opinions and whatnot, are becoming more and more rare as the years pass. It is not so fashionable nowadays, even down here, and if you are of that inclination, then it is expected that you keep your opinions to yourself, just to keep up appearances, you know? It’s a double-edged sword, especially when it comes to business. For some people, you have to say one thing, for others something else.”

  “But your father has not been involved in business for some time, right?”

  “Right, so that is a problem he has not had to deal with.”

  “And Matthias?”

  “I think you know where Matthias’s sympathies lie.”

  “But does that extend further than his concern for his family? Is he just prejudiced when it comes to his sister getting involved with a colored man, or
does it apply to everyone?”

  “If you’re asking whether or not he goes out late at night with a pillowcase on his head, then no, he does not. Where he puts money, what he supports, whom he speaks with, where his allegiances lie, I do not know. You have to appreciate that my brother and I have not maintained the most amicable of relationships for quite some time.”

  “So why do you stay at the house?”

  “Have you seen the house?”

  “Yes, I have,” Gaines said. “Not inside, but I was there very briefly, speaking to your brother a while back.”

  “You could lose an entire family in that house. I can go for days without seeing him. It suits me to stay there right now.”

  “For financial reasons?”

  Della looked awkward for a moment, as if caught off guard. “I don’t see that—” She hesitated, turned to glance at Maryanne, standing in silence there by the back door. She sighed audibly, seemed perhaps exasperated. “For financial reasons, yes.”

  “Do you think that if your father were able to maintain some coherence in his mental state, you could then explain your situation to him and he would help you?”

  “It would not be a problem I would want to give him, Sheriff. I wouldn’t want to put him in the middle of any conflict I might be having with Matthias.”

  “Are you not able to make financial arrangements to secure your independence from Matthias? Is that not possible?”

  Della smiled. “However advanced into the twentieth century things may appear to be, Sheriff, there are some things that stay traditional. I have absolutely no influence or control over any aspect of the Wade fortune. In the event of my father’s death, everything comes under Matthias’s control. That’s the way he wants it, and that’s the way it will be. Perhaps that is unusual, but then my father has always been an unusual man. And taking into consideration the fact that my father is not able to manage his own affairs, he might as well already be dead, at least from a business point of view.”

  Della lifted her coffee cup and drained it. She held it out toward Ross. “Same again, barkeep.”