The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  “I have a question for you, Della.”

  She paused, looked directly at him.

  “Did you kill Leon Devereaux?”

  “Say nothing, Della.”

  She turned, her mouth open as if to speak, silenced by the sudden appearance of Matthias, entering the room and interrupting proceedings just as she herself had done with her father.

  “Do not say a word to this man,” Matthias went on. “He has no right to be here. He has no warrant. He has no evidence, no nothing.”

  Gaines did not speak. He set the leather case down on the table, opened it, and withdrew the sheaf of clippings. He took three or four steps toward Della and held out his hand.

  She took them from him.

  “What is this?” Matthias asked, and he reached out to take them from Della.

  Della snatched her hand back, walked away toward the window and Gaines felt the tension in the room increase in proportion to the slow-dawning realization that was taking place. Perhaps, once again, it was his imagination; perhaps no one but he could sense it, but it was there. He felt sure of it.

  When she turned, tears in her eyes, there were many things written in her expression.

  For the first time since he’d met her, Gaines believed that now she was going to tell the truth.

  “This?” she asked. “This is what?”

  “This is what you have done by saying nothing,” Gaines said.

  “Saying nothing about what? About—”

  “About nothing,” Matthias interjected. “About some wild flight of imagination that Sheriff Gaines has convinced himself is the truth.”

  “About the fact that your brother Eugene was the one who killed Nancy Denton. Matthias knew, your father as well, and Judge Wallace, and maybe even Leon Devereaux. I don’t know how many more people knew what really happened back then, twenty years ago, but I think Matthias was the only one who knew what happened afterward, right, Matthias?”

  Matthias Wade didn’t respond. He looked back at Gaines implacably, as if Gaines had commented on nothing more consequential than the weather.

  “And this?” Della said, holding out the clippings. “This is Eugene’s doing? These are people Eugene has murdered?”

  “Seems that when you release a monster from the cage, he doesn’t stop being a monster,” Gaines said.

  “Matthias?” Della said. “Matthias, is this true? Is Eugene responsible for all of this? Did Eugene kill Nancy? Is that what happened?”

  She looked back at Gaines. “All this time, I wanted to believe it had nothing to do with us.”

  “Della,” Matthias Wade said, his tone authoritative, almost threatening.

  “She just ran away from home. That was all. She was scared, something happened, something we knew nothing about, and she ran away from home. I wanted to believe she would come back, just like Michael did, and I never even imagined that she had been murdered by someone in my own family—”

  “Della, seriously, enough is enough.” Matthias took a step forward.

  Della turned and looked at him, her expression one of dismay and horror. “And then I talked to Sheriff Gaines, and he told me some things, Matthias. He told me some painful things, and it got me to thinking that it might have been you. You could have done this terrible thing. You sent that terrible man to frighten Clifton, and that man cut off his fingers. Did you tell him to do that, or did he just get inventive?”

  Matthias advanced again and was now within arm’s length of his sister.

  “Yes, I started to think that you could have killed Nancy. And then I thought no, you could never have done that. You weren’t capable of murder, surely. And then I started thinking that if it wasn’t you, then who could it be? Who would you be so eager to protect? There was only one person. There could only have been one possible person, right? Our father. That’s who you were protecting. All this while doing nothing but hiding the truth from everyone, trying to protect our father, trying to protect the family name, trying to protect your inheritance and not see it wasted on defending—”

  Matthias lashed out and caught her across the side of the face. She fell awkwardly, the newspaper clippings spilling from her hand.

  Matthias Wade stood silently, staring at Gaines, ignoring his sister as she struggled to her feet.

  “My brother is dead,” Matthias Wade said, “and so are Nancy Denton and Michael Webster and Leon Devereaux. They are all dead. No one’s coming back, Sheriff. No one’s going to substantiate what you are saying. No one is going to make any statements or testify in court, and even if there were someone to help you, I think you would find that the courts were not going to give you whatever justice you were hoping for.”

  Della was on her feet. “This is true,” she said. “What he is saying is true, Matthias? Eugene killed Nancy, and he’s been doing this . . . these things, and all this time you knew about it? Is this true?”

  Matthias looked back at his sister. “Don’t even talk to me, Della. Don’t you act judgmental with me. How fucking dare you? Drugs, abortions, sleeping with colored men. You are a fucking whore just like Father says you are. You are a worthless fucking whore, a worthless human being, and if you weren’t my sister, maybe Leon would have come and visited with you as well.”

  Della snatched a handful of clippings from the floor and thrust them at Matthias.

  “You did this,” she said. “You are as guilty as Eugene. You knew what he did to Nancy. You knew what he’s been doing since, and you did nothing? You did absolutely nothing?”

  “What would you have had me do, Della? Kill him? Is that what you would have had me do? Kill my own brother? He was sick. He was mentally ill. Like our mother, alcoholic that she was. Drowning her depression in whiskey. You have no idea how much time and effort and energy it takes to control what happens around this family. You have not the faintest clue how much trouble you have caused for me. Eugene was your brother, too, Della, and just because he lost his mind when our mother died, you think that gave me license to neglect him, to abandon him, to pretend he was no longer part of us. You can’t explain what he did. He believed he was doing the right thing. He believed that maybe he could bring her back. He honestly believed that. And our father? Lost his mind, too, eh? What would you have me do? Kill all of them, anyone that doesn’t meet your standards of sanity? Oh, and what a standard that would be, Della. What a fucking standard that would be!”

  Della slapped her brother. The sound was ferocious. He looked at her as if she had barely touched him.

  He smiled strangely, and then he lowered his head as if dismissing her from the room.

  Della, her eyes ablaze, tears rolling down her cheeks, caught somewhere in the midst of a whirlwind of emotions, stormed out.

  Gaines heard her as she ran across the hall and started up the stairs.

  Matthias Wade turned back to Gaines. “It’s over,” Wade said. “The game is finished. The people who really did these things are dead. Perhaps it is time for you to just accept the fact that sometimes things happen, and there is nothing you can do to influence or change any of it.”

  “I don’t believe that, Mr. Wade.”

  Wade nodded slowly. He looked down at the clippings on the floor, and then back up at Gaines. “Who’s to say that one life is worth more than another? Not for us to say, right? I don’t know about you, Sheriff, but I tend to be fatalistic about these things. If I were a religious man, if I held to the view that God created all men in His own image, then He created Eugene just the same as He created me or you or Della or these children. Maybe there is a balance in all things. Maybe He gives and at the same time He takes away, and there is nothing we can do to change that. Perhaps these people were all meant to die, and if it had not been Eugene to take care of that, then it would have been someone else—”

  “Is that how you have justified your decision all these years?”

  “My decision, Sheriff?”

  “Your decision to say nothing when you found out that Eugene killed
Nancy Denton.”

  Wade smiled. “Are we still playing that game, Sheriff? What I say here has no bearing on anything. Whatever you think I might be admitting to will be so strenuously denied. It is your word against mine, Sheriff Gaines, and I believe I know enough people of enough significance to make anything you say sound like the ramblings of a war veteran with some inexplicable personal grudge.”

  Gaines looked at the man, and he saw it in his eyes. There never was a decision. Nancy Denton did not matter, not compared to the shame and discredit that could have been directed toward the family.

  “You are no different,” Gaines said. “You may as well have killed her yourself. You may as well have killed all of them. You knew what had happened, and you let it go. You just stepped away and did nothing.”

  “I think you are delusional, Sheriff. I think that maybe you are shell-shocked, a little mentally unbalanced. After all, war can have such a destructive and deteriorative effect on a man’s mental stability, can it not?”

  “You killed your own brother, Matthias. You sent Leon Devereaux up there to tell him that Nancy Denton’s body had been found, that the truth was going to come out. You knew what he would do, didn’t you? You knew he would kill himself. There was no other way out for him, was there? Did you think he would just be forgotten? Another lonely suicide somewhere, hushed up by the Wade family, everything forgotten? Is that what you anticipated?”

  Matthias Wade waved the questions aside as if they were irrelevant.

  “Life might be a matter of doing the things you want to do, Sheriff, but surviving is a matter of doing the things that need to be done. Sometimes people agree with those things, and sometimes they do not. Sometimes others feel that the things you choose to do are not acceptable, and that is their right. People should have a right to disagree, Sheriff, but that doesn’t necessarily give them the right to try to prevent you from doing those things. For me, it is very simple.”

  “And for me, too.”

  Matthias Wade turned as Della came into the room. She had a gun in her hand, a small revolver, and she aimed it unerringly at her brother.

  “What is this?” Wade asked. “What the fuck is this, Della?”

  “Justice, Matthias. Plain and simple.”

  “Put the fucking gun down, Della. You are not going to use it.”

  “You don’t think I’m capable?”

  “Capable? Capable? What I think you’re capable of is getting drunk and fucking some colored man, you ignorant bitch. That’s what I think you’re capable of.”

  “You think I don’t possess some sense of pride, Matthias? You think I don’t want to do everything to save our father from the shame and disgrace you are going to bring on this family?”

  “Oh, enough, Della. Put the gun down and go away for Christ’s sake.”

  Della took another step forward. She steadied her shaking hand. “Say goodbye, you asshole,” she hissed, and she pulled the trigger.

  The bullet, a .25 caliber, entered Matthias Wade’s throat at the base. It did not possess sufficient force to exit through the rear of his neck, but it punctured his trachea and lodged in the vertebrae.

  Matthias Wade did not fall or stagger backward, as if he could not believe that his sister had shot him, and such was his certainty that he was able to defy the physical reality of its occurrence.

  Nevertheless, the physical reality could not be denied, and blood started to choke out of the puncture in his throat. It soaked the front of his shirt, and when he saw that blood, he started trying to gather it up, as if returning it would somehow reverse what had happened.

  Matthias dropped to his knees. He just stared back at his little sister and opened his mouth to say something.

  Whatever he had planned to say never made the distance from his mind to his lips. He keeled over sideways and lay on the floor. He was motionless aside from his right leg, which kicked back and forth a half-dozen times and then stopped.

  Della Wade looked at Gaines. Gaines looked back at Della.

  “Is there another gun in the house?” Gaines asked, his voice direct, not to be questioned. It was as if every ounce of adrenaline available to him was coursing through his body. He felt certain, focused, not even shocked. He felt utterly calm.

  Della just stared back at him as if she had not heard him.

  “Della. Look at me. Is there another gun in the house? A gun that belongs to Matthias?”

  She nodded once, twice, and then seem to snap to. “Y-yes,” she said. “He has—”

  “Go get it,” he said. “Hurry!”

  Della moved suddenly, crossing the room, heading down the corridor and away.

  She was back within a minute, in her hand a .38.

  Gaines took the revolver from her, wiped off her prints with his shirt-tail, and then put the gun in Matthias’s lifeless hand. He held the gun level, and then fired a single shot somewhere into the wall behind where Della had been standing.

  Della jumped, startled, and dropped the .25.

  He looked back at Della. “Self-defense,” he said. “You shot him in self-defense. Do you understand?”

  Della was speechless.

  Gaines was up on his feet, had her by the shoulders, started shaking her, getting her to focus, to look at him, to get her attention.

  “You understand what I’m saying?” he said.

  “Ye-yes,” she said. “Yes, self-defense.”

  “Now, go to your room. Stay there. Don’t say anything. Don’t call anyone. Don’t do anything until I tell you, okay?”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Okay?”

  “Yes, yes okay,” she said, and with that she hurried from the room.

  Gaines turned back and looked at Matthias Wade.

  He saw the dead teenager, the one who carried a single grenade, the one who got in the way of the bullet.

  The gods of war were fickle. They didn’t care who they took, or why.

  Most often they were just dispassionate and indifferent, but every once in a while they got it right.

  73

  Della Wade sits quietly in the basement cell. It is not the cell that housed Michael Webster, but the one that faces it.

  She is there partly for her own protection, to keep her away from the horde of journalists that seem to have descended on Whytesburg, but there also while Gaines deals with the issues surrounding the deaths of Matthias Wade and Leon Devereaux. There are things that have to be made right, things to be settled, and while they remain unresolved, she is best served by being in his care rather than anyone else’s.

  Eddie Holland sits on a chair six feet from the cell. He doesn’t speak to her. She doesn’t speak to him.

  Gaines is upstairs dealing with the reporters, the photographers, the official necessities surrounding such a situation. The reception area of the Sheriff’s Office reminds him of the Danang Press Center.

  It is the following morning when Gaines comes to speak with her. Wednesday, August 7th. It is somewhere after nine in the morning, and Gaines has received word that Della Wade has still not eaten a thing since he brought her in.

  Lyle Chantry is keeping watch on her, and Gaines sends Chantry away. He lets himself into the cell, pulls the door closed behind him, and sits beside her.

  He clears his throat, and then he starts talking. “When I was in the army,” he says, “I went to war. It was a war that other people had decided was a good idea. It wasn’t my decision, nothing to do with me, but the law said I had to go, and so I did.” Gaines turns and leans against the back wall. He lifts one foot and places it on the edge of the bunk. He takes cigarettes from his shirt pocket, lights two, passes one to Della, and goes on. “War is a lottery. War is like some kind of doorway into hell, and you run through that doorway into oncoming fire, and you see people die all around you, people whose names you don’t even know, and yet you are all supposed to be fighting for the same thing. I asked a lot of people, and no one seemed to know what we were fighting for. I had th
is lieutenant. His name was Ron Wilson—”

  “Sheriff?”

  “Yes, Della.”

  “Are you going to charge me with the murder of Leon Devereaux?”

  “No, Della, I am not.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I believe it was the right thing to do, and if I had been in your situation, I would have done the same thing.”

  “I was afraid that he would get away.”

  “Devereaux?”

  “No, Matthias. I believed he had killed Nancy. I really did believe he had killed Nancy, but I thought he would get away with it, and I couldn’t bear it. After what he did to Clifton, and then when you came and started asking questions, and you were convinced he had done this, then I thought that Leon Devereaux should die—”

  “And that Matthias would be blamed?”

  She doesn’t speak for a moment, and then she nods her head. “Yes,” she replies. “I wanted him to be punished for killing someone, even if it wasn’t the right person.”

  “He was complicit in the deaths of many people,” Gaines tells her. “Perhaps there were more, but we have evidence that implicates Eugene in the deaths of at least five girls. Those are ones we have something substantive to corroborate, some physical evidence that we found in his apartment.”

  “Physical evidence?”

  “Items of clothing, jewelry, things like that.”

  “And Matthias knew he was killing these girls . . . these children?”

  “He knew about Nancy. I am sure of that. And he knew about the two girls in Morgan City. They were both daughters of Wade employees, and Matthias got so involved in that case that he himself was suspected for a long time. There are still people who think Matthias was the one who murdered them.”

  “And now he is dead. And Eugene, too.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Michael?” she asks. “He did that terrible thing . . .”

  “He did something to try to bring her back,” Gaines replies. “Michael Webster loved that girl more than life itself. Without her . . . well, he was devastated, and he did the only thing he could think of doing.”