The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  “I think I’ll join you,” Ross said. “Anyone else?”

  Maryanne and Gaines accepted coffee, declined the bourbon. Holland wanted both.

  “So how is your life?” Gaines asked.

  “Life is a waiting game right now,” Della said. “Waiting for my father to die, waiting for Clifton to be released, waiting for a revelation about how to handle this mess better than I am handling it right now.”

  “You want some help?”

  “You think you can help me?”

  “I think we can help each other.”

  “Seriously?”

  “You doubt my intentions?” Gaines asked.

  “I don’t know anything about your intentions, Sheriff Gaines. I appreciate the fact that you are trying to do something here, and I acknowledge that you made the effort to go on up to Parchman and see Clifton, ill-advised though it was, but I don’t know what your long-term plan is, no.”

  “It’s very simple, Miss Wade. I want to find out if your brother was responsible for the deaths of Nancy Denton and Michael Webster, and if so, then I want to see him charged, arraigned, tried, convicted, and sentenced appropriately.”

  “Do we hang folks for murder now, or do we fry them?”

  “Not anymore, no. Death penalty has been suspended by the Supreme Court.”

  “I didn’t know. So, it’d be a life sentence then?”

  “Yes, it would.”

  “Up at Parchman. That would be ironic, eh?”

  Della was silent. She sipped her coffee. By the time she finished it, she would have gotten through a good three or four shots of bourbon. Maybe that was standard for Della Wade. Maybe that was the way she rounded off the edges of her awkward existence.

  Gaines watched her. There was sadness there, no doubt about it, but deep-rooted, buried beneath the brave face she wore for the world. He did not envy the life she was living, and he knew that there was no amount of Wade money, present or promised, that would change the fact that she was desperately alone without Clifton Regis.

  “Do you not hate Matthias for what he’s done?” Gaines asked.

  “Hate him? No, Sheriff, I don’t hate him. There is no point hating him. What good would it serve? What problem would be solved by allowing him to upset me that much? No, I don’t hate him. I don’t trust him, and I don’t deal with him on anything but the most superficial terms. I know who he is and how he can be, and there have been times that he has demonstrated tremendous generosity and kindness, but it’s as if he’s at war with himself. He thinks he needs to be a certain way to survive, and that makes him arrogant and self-absorbed, but I don’t believe that’s who he truly is. The difficulty is that he’s been this way for so long that who he really is has been lost forever.”

  Gaines nodded. He needed to ask Della Wade about something else, but he did not want to inspire any inherent impulse she might possess to defend her brother. He knew that she sensed this—if not in his expression, his body language, then in the seeming increase of tension in the room. It seemed that everyone was aware of this, for Della Wade pinned Gaines with a hard look and asked him outright.

  “This is not all, is it?” she said. “There is something else.”

  Gaines did not speak immediately. He started to explain, to walk around the edges of what he wanted to ask her, but she cut him short.

  “Ask me the question, Sheriff. I cannot promise that I will know the answer, or even that I will answer it, but I am big enough to be asked.”

  “January, 1968,” Gaines said. “Morgan City, Louisiana. Two girls were found murdered—”

  “I remember it,” Della said.

  “At the time—”

  “At the time, there were a lot of questions. Some of those questions were asked of Matthias, but nothing was proven. There was no evidence to link Matthias to what happened to those children.”

  “Just as there is no evidence to link Matthias to either Nancy or Michael.”

  “You honestly think Matthias could have murdered little girls?”

  “I don’t know, Miss Wade. I know Matthias even less well than I know you.”

  Della sat without speaking for a good minute, perhaps two. It seemed so much longer, and the atmosphere in the kitchen was such that no one dared move or breathe. Even more than that, no one dared think.

  Finally, she looked away toward Maryanne, not at her, just toward her, and then she turned back toward Gaines and shook her head. “I have nothing to say,” she said. “I do not want to think that my brother would be capable of such a thing. I know him, and I do not think he has it in him to do something like that. But, then, I did not believe he’d be capable of doing what he did to Clifton. I think what he did to Clifton was done out of jealousy, not prejudice or hatred, but jealousy.”

  “Jealousy?”

  “Jealous of love, Sheriff. Jealous that he does not have it, cannot find it, probably never will. He was jealous of Michael and Nancy, for sure, and he may well have been sufficiently jealous to take Nancy away from Michael. I do not know, and I am not saying that I do not want to know, but I am saying that I do not want to believe he did that. It’s natural, isn’t it? To think the best of people? To believe them good and kind and honest? But they’re not, and I’m not naive about these things. I can accept what he did to Clifton. I can accept what he has done to me. I can understand why he believes he should be this way in order to make it through this life, but I am struggling, desperately, when I consider him capable of such horrors. I am supposed to love him. He’s my brother. And I do love him, but I don’t know why. Maybe I don’t actually love him, but I have convinced myself that I do because that is what’s meant to happen. You’re not meant to hate your own family. Blood is thicker than water and all that. But this? This is someone else’s blood, isn’t it? Several people’s blood. What do you do then? What are you supposed to say? What are you supposed to feel?” She looked up at Gaines. “You don’t know, and I know you can’t answer that question, so don’t bother trying.”

  She turned to Ross. “Nate, get me another drink, and skip the coffee this time.”

  Ross brought her more bourbon, poured some into a glass while she lit another cigarette.

  Gaines leaned forward. He smiled as best he could, trying perhaps to reassure her that he was here without bias or prejudice, without preconceptions or some unspoken ulterior motive.

  “My mother died,” he said. “Just a week ago—”

  Della opened her mouth, perhaps to express her condolences.

  Gaines raised his hand, and she fell silent.

  “She had been ill for a long time. I knew she was going to die. I’d known for a long time. But I wasn’t prepared for it, and I don’t think you can ever be prepared for it. My father died back in the war in Europe, and I never knew him, and so it’s easy to feel very little about that at all. If you never had something, then you can’t miss it, right? What I’m trying to say, Miss Wade, is that I cannot imagine how you must feel. I am not going to even try to imagine how you feel. All I can say is that every once in a while we drive right into something terrible, something so devastating and overwhelming, something we have no context for, no frame of reference, and we deal with it the way that we deal with it. They say that the things that don’t kill you make you stronger, but that’s not true. Maybe those things don’t kill you physically or emotionally, but they can kill you mentally, even spiritually. I don’t know what really happened to Nancy Denton and Michael Webster, just like I don’t know what happened to Dorothy McCormick and Anna-Louise Mayhew back in 1968. What I do know is that someone killed those people, and I don’t think they deserved it any more than Clifton deserved to get his fingers cut off for loving you—”

  “Don’t try and blackmail me, Sheriff Gaines. Don’t try and make it any more personal than it already is—”

  “Della, I don’t think it could be any more personal. These are people’s lives we’re talking about. This is not some movie script where everything is going to
fall into place at the end and everything’s going to get tied up nice and neat. This is a horror story, a real-life honest-to-God horror story, and I am right in the middle of it, and so are you. Maybe you’ll get through this, maybe Clifton will, maybe me and Nate and Eddie and Maryanne will all come through this and out the other end, but maybe we won’t. Nancy didn’t, and even though that was twenty years ago and we don’t have to think about it, Michael was killed just a week ago, and that is awful close, as far as I’m concerned. That is just too damned close. And even though I didn’t know the man, and despite whatever he might have done however many years ago, I don’t think it was right what happened to him. Even if he was complicit in the death of Nancy Denton, then his penalty should still have been legal and equitable. What was done to him was no better than dragging some poor colored man out there and lynching him. Guilt by association, guilt by assumption, guilt because of your color or your religion or your political persuasion . . . These things don’t determine guilt. You know that, and I know that. What determines guilt is evidence and confession and proof, and I mean real proof, proof that can be substantiated and validated by reasonable men, men who have no ax to grind, no vested interest.” Gaines paused. He felt the passion of what he was saying in his chest, in the way his hands were shaking, in the way his voice wavered. “Now, I don’t know about you, Della, but I am of a mind to find out what really happened here and what happened back in Morgan City six years ago. I want to know who killed Nancy Denton, and I want to know who cut Michael Webster’s head off and buried it in a field behind my house. My desire to find the truth will not diminish in time, Della, and I won’t go away. I am here, and I am here for as long as it takes, and I will keep on digging and looking and asking questions until I find out what I want, or until someone kills me and buries my head someplace. That’s the simple truth of it, and you can either help me or not. You are not obligated, and I am not going to blackmail you. You can say yes or no. You can stay, or you can walk away. You have no loyalty to me, but you do have loyalty to your family. I know that I am asking a great deal of you, and I know that to be involved in this investigation is a huge risk, but right now I have no place else to go. If you say no, well, I will find another way—”

  “Stop talking, Sheriff Gaines. Just for a second, stop talking, okay?”

  Gaines nodded, leaned back in his chair, continued to look right at her.

  “Okay,” she eventually said. “If I said I was willing to help you, what would you need me to do?”

  55

  It was late morning. The clouded sun gave up a greasy light, and the air seemed thick enough to chew. Sounds were muted, the songs of blue jays and whip-poor-wills fading to silence not six inches from their throats.

  Gaines stood on the back porch steps, looked out toward the field where lay buried the memory of Michael Webster’s head and hand. Out there in the turnrows, inches beneath the surface, there was blood and wax and hair and whatever else might still remain. And beyond that, toward the horizon—out beyond the barbed-wire fence and loblolly pines, beyond the cypress and goldenrod and blue salvia, through the webs of kudzu, amid the nests of redbirds and brown thrashers, the sound of bullfrogs and squirrels, and the tracks of whitetail deer—was something else. Ghosts, perhaps. Something strange and potent, some aspect of horror that he knew he did not comprehend. Not yet.

  What else could he have asked her to do?

  What could he have said to her beyond what had already been said?

  Piecing together recent events, trying to make sense of them, was akin to reconstructing an already-forgotten dream.

  Right there in Nate Ross’s kitchen, Della Wade had as much as volunteered to help him.

  What would you need me to do?

  That’s what she asked him.

  What would you need me to do?

  He looked at her for a while and simply said, “Help me find the truth, Della. Just help me find the truth.”

  “And how am I supposed to do that?” she asked.

  “Find some way of getting him to talk,” Gaines replied. “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think about this, to make any kind of plan. I didn’t expect to be speaking with you so soon, and to tell you the truth, I half-expected never to speak to you at all.”

  “Because you thought I was some crazy woman out there in that big house who would do something only if her big brother said it was okay.”

  Gaines smiled. “Maybe so, yes.”

  He remembered her face then, the way she looked at him.

  Revelations aside, her horror at what she was being told, the sheer weight of the mental and emotional burden she must have felt, Della Wade had nevertheless seemed somehow contained, measured, able to absorb what was going on around her and deal with it. And yet now—suddenly presented with the responsibility of assisting Gaines in his investigation—she seemed fragile and afraid. Not for herself. Not that at all. Afraid that she would perhaps fail Gaines, and thus fail Nancy, Michael, the girls from Morgan City. Fail also Clifton Regis.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” Gaines continued. “I cannot gain access to the house. I cannot look for evidence. I can’t ask Matthias questions without running the risk of him finding some way to defend himself even further. But you could look, at least. You could see if there is anything that might tie him to the death of Michael Webster, just something that connects Matthias directly to these recent events.”

  “Because you simply want him convicted of something, right? Something that will enable you to put him in jail.”

  “The law is the law, Della. If he killed Michael, then he goes to jail for the rest of his life.”

  She closed her eyes. She breathed deeply several times as if trying to maintain equilibrium, as if trying not to implode and disappear, and then she shook her head slowly.

  When she opened her eyes, there were tears. They welled in her lids, and then they spilled over.

  Nate Ross stepped forward and gave Della Wade a handkerchief. She thanked him with a fleeting smile.

  “You want me to help you lock up my brother.”

  She said it so matter-of-factly, so simply, that there was nothing Gaines could do but say, “Yes, Della. If he did these things, if he killed these people, then he needs to suffer the full penalty of the law.”

  “Can you even begin to appreciate what you are asking me to do?”

  “No, Della, I can’t.”

  “And if I fail—”

  “You can’t fail,” Gaines said. “There is no such thing here. You can do whatever you can do, as much as you are willing, and beyond that there is nothing else. Right now, as it stands, I have nowhere else to go. I am not saying that to make you feel responsible for what happens. I am not saying that to make you feel obligated, Della. I am just saying that because it’s the truth. If I had more time, or if I’d had a better way of approaching this, then maybe I would have a better plan. But I don’t, and that’s all there is to it. I am hoping against all reason that there is something in your house that ties Matthias to one or more of these killings. Something, anything at all. Anything you can find will give me reason for a warrant, and if I have a warrant, perhaps we will find something else. That’s all I can hope for.”

  “And if there’s nothing? If I look as best I can and I find nothing?”

  “Then I will have to come at this from some other direction.”

  “And maybe there won’t be another direction.”

  “Maybe there won’t be.”

  “And then what?”

  Gaines shook his head. “Then we will never know the truth of what happened to Nancy or Michael or anyone else, and these things will remain unpunished.”

  “Which is not right,” she said. “That can’t be right. I understand that. But there’s something else to consider . . . the fact that he might not have killed Nancy, that he might not have killed Michael.”

  “You’re right,” Gaines said. “Maybe he didn’t kill them, but if he is innoc
ent, why is he not willing to even talk to me? Why is he so defensive?”

  “I don’t know, Sheriff. Maybe because he doesn’t want this kind of rumor and hearsay around the family. Maybe because he doesn’t want my father to hear about it.”

  “Do you think that’s the case?”

  “Oh God, I can’t answer that. Jesus Christ, you know I can’t answer that. You’re asking me to make decisions about things that are impossible to make decisions about. You’re asking me to choose Clifton over my brother . . . You’re asking—”

  “That is life,” Gaines said, interrupting her. “If life were always right, then these things would not have happened. Nancy would have married Michael, and there’d be two young women in Morgan City with lives of their own to look forward to. But they don’t, and that’s because someone kidnapped them and killed them back in 1968.”

  “Matthias,” Della said. Just his name, nothing more, but in the way she said it there was everything she was feeling—despair, loss, fear, horror, refusal, perhaps some desperate sense of hope that what was being suggested here could never be true.

  “I am sorry to be the one who—”

  “Who what?” she interjected. “You didn’t kill anyone, did you? You didn’t strangle some poor child and leave her dead somewhere, did you? You didn’t make this happen, Sheriff Gaines. What can I say? What can I tell you? Can I say that I wish I’d never known about this, that I’d stayed ignorant, uninformed? Can I say that and believe it, honestly? No, I don’t think so. What has happened has happened. We can’t go backward, can we? We can’t retrace our steps and change it all and make it right. What you say is true. Life doesn’t work that way. Life is just going to be however it is, and once a day has gone there is nothing anyone can do to fix it.”

  “But we can fix tomorrow,” Gaines said.

  “We can try and fix tomorrow,” she replied.

  “And that’s what I’m asking of you.”

  “I know what you’re asking of me, Sheriff.”