The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  Do the dead commune with the dead?

  Is that how it worked?

  And then—once more—the sense of chill and dread that invaded his whole body when he asked himself what they had unleashed in Whytesburg.

  He did not pursue that thought. He let it go. He tried to listen to the Rousseaus. He tried to stay right there in the kitchen with his neighbors and be the person he was supposed to be at such a time.

  It was not long before Bob Thurston returned, and then came Eddie Holland and Nate Ross, and shortly thereafter Richard Hagen arrived from the Sheriff’s Office, Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton in tow, and soon the house was filled with voices and noise. No one seemed to notice when Gaines slipped away to his mother’s room, drew a chair to the edge of the bed, and sat there with his eyes closed, the tears welling behind, the anguish and pain in his chest too much to bear now, the words that he wanted to say vanished somewhere forever.

  It was Thurston who came to find him, and he stood there with his hand on Gaines’s shoulder, and he said nothing as Gaines sobbed. When Gaines could cry no more, he just waited with him until he had gathered himself together again, and then they left the room and returned to the kitchen.

  Hagen had gone, as had Dalton, Chantry, Ross, and Holland. Margaret and Leonard were back home, but Caroline had stayed. So it was that the three of them—Alice Gaines’s son, her doctor, her caregiver—sat in that kitchen and spoke of other things, things that bore no relevance to the death of Alice, things that were meaningless and irrelevant in the face of what had happened, but—at such a time—were perhaps the best things of which to speak.

  Gaines understood that it would be weeks, months, before he even began to appreciate the meaning of this. It was said that each anniversary and special occasion needed to pass at least once—a full turn of the calendar—before you could begin to accommodate such a change. Only then, as he contemplated this, did Gaines appreciate some small aspect of what Judith Denton had suffered. Death, at least in a physical sense, was all encompassing and final. There was no coming back. There was no chance of circumstances conspiring to present some other outcome. But Nancy’s disappearance for all of twenty years? The sense of hope, growing ever weaker with each passing year and yet somehow kept alive by the sheer will of her mother, was then dashed to pieces. Judith Denton’s suicide demonstrated that she had continued to survive solely and only because of her hope. And when that hope had gone, well, there was no reason to continue.

  Gaines always imagined that Alice had hung in there for one reason—to see him find someone, to see him married, perhaps start a family, to give herself the certainty that her son would be cared for. But perhaps it had not been that at all. Perhaps she had finally resigned herself to the fact that the only way to get her son to do anything along that line was to show him how deep and profound real loneliness could be. She was all he had, and with her gone, well, perhaps his necessity would rise to the point where he did something about it.

  He did not know, and for now it did not matter.

  It was late afternoon by the time Bob Thurston and Caroline Rousseau bade their farewells, Caroline with the reminder that she and her folks were only next door, that Gaines should come across and eat with them if he felt like it.

  He thanked her, thanked Thurston for his time, his concern, his friendship, and then he watched them leave the house, Caroline turning left, Thurston driving away toward the center of town and home.

  Gaines stood there for a while. The evening was warm, a good deal of moisture in the air, and he went back inside to pour himself a drink.

  It was as he raised the glass to his lips that he remembered the light in the field. He smiled to himself. Why did this thing engage his attention so much? Surely it was nothing.

  He set the glass down, left the house by the back door, and stood on the veranda. He looked out toward the point where he had seen it.

  There was no reason for any sense of disquiet or unease, but as he tried to identify the precise spot, he was aware that the air seemed cooler, an almost electric tension present in the atmosphere. He passed it off as merely imagination. It had been a terrible day, a day filled with awkward, inexplicable emotions, a day of guilt and sadness and pain and heartbreak, a day that presented him with a future that he neither understood, nor cared to understand.

  He went on looking, ever more aware of the fact that something—what, he did not know—did not feel right. In truth, something felt very wrong indeed.

  The entirety of his world seemed nothing less than surreal, as if here he had found some middle ground between what was real and what was simply imagination.

  Sheriff John Gaines considered the possibility that he had never returned from the nine levels of hell, that somewhere he had slipped through a gap in time and space, and everything that had happened, everything that was happening, was merely a creation of his own darkest thoughts and fears. Or maybe he had in fact returned, but in returning he had carried the nine levels with him, bearing them gently, bearing them undisturbed and complete, and here—in this small Mississippi town—he had delivered them for all to see.

  Perhaps Maryanne Benedict had been right in one sense.

  Perhaps the devil had in fact come to Whytesburg, but it was he—John Gaines—who had opened the door.

  42

  The sun had not yet set, and the air was warm and filled with moisture, and Gaines started down the short flight of steps and headed for the horizon.

  At least here, he had believed, unlike in war, the night was some slight and brief reprieve from the darkness of the day. But no, the darkness followed whoever it chose to follow, and it found you wherever you were.

  Gaines went out across the yard behind the house, through the low gate at the end, across the rutted, foot-worn walkway that passed left and right to adjacent properties, and he descended the small incline into the field. The simple action of placing one foot before the other took some concentration and effort. He had felt this before, his boots waterlogged, thigh-deep in dirty water, his rifle held high, his eyes peeled for the slightest movement, his ears attuned for the briefest suggestion of anomalous sound. It became a state of mind, that degree of sensitivity, and if you did not recognize the difference between recon and rest, then you started to hear many more words than were spoken, began to receive messages that were never meant at all. Even the voices that belonged to the ghosts of your past knew that the best way to be heard was to whisper. And once you gave them space on the stage, they never left.

  Gaines walked, one foot after the other, one step, a second, a third, and he felt the weight of all that he was confronting. At one point, he merely stopped and looked back toward the house, a house he had known for all the years since his return, a house that had come to represent his life with his mother.

  It was hard to fathom, hard to absorb, harder to comprehend. The closest he had ever come to such a wide and strange spectrum of emotions was the loss of Linda Newman. But she was not dead, merely departed. He had seen men die in war—brutally, tragically, suddenly, and in ways that no human being should ever have to witness—but, in the main, they had been men he did not know. Their names yes, sometimes their occupations before the draft, but little else. They were there, and then they were gone. Linda was different, a thousand times different, and then the loss of his mother was a hundred thousand times beyond even that. There was no means by which he could measure the extent of his sadness. Perhaps when people grieve, they do not grieve for the loss of what has passed but the loss of what might have been. They grieve for a future that will never be.

  Gaines sat on the ground. He did not know why. After a while, he remembered where he had been going, the fact that going there—to find out what had caught his attention in the field—was something he had started simply to have something to do. He got up, brushed down his pants, and carried on walking.

  He did not know how long he had paused, at first to look back at the house, then to sit in the dirt, but
the sun had lowered and the shadows had lengthened.

  Not all things needed to be rationalized or explained. Gaines believed his mother was attuned to things beyond the immediately corporeal and tangible. She had said little of this, but she believed it. If others believed something so strongly that they could then act upon those beliefs, did that not make them as real as any other beliefs? Who said that one belief was more valid and believable than another?

  Gaines realized he had stopped walking again. He had taken no more than three or four steps, and he had come to a stop once more. He smiled to himself, a fleeting consideration of his own indecisiveness, and then he moved once more.

  Surely he must have reached the point from where the flickering light had come.

  And then he had another thought, and the thought seemed to swallow up every other thought in one simple go. What if it had not been a physical light? What if it had been something else entirely? What if he had seen the light of life? Seriously, what if he had experienced some bizarre and surreal perception of something beyond the physical? What if such things could be perceived? Was there a life force that, in leaving the body, could remain for a while and could be seen, literally seen with the eyes?

  Gaines shuddered. Was a ghost nothing more than the soul of a person, sometimes remaining for some time after the event of death, perhaps with some intent to communicate what had been left unsaid?

  Had he seen his mother out here in the field? Was that what had happened? Had only he been able to see her?

  It was this thought that underpinned every accepted reality, every certainty possessed about the nature of life and death for centuries—that the very essence of man was a spiritual thing—and he wrestled with that thought right until the moment that he came upon the thing that had winked and flickered at him through the darkness.

  Clearly visible beneath the thick rivulets of melted wax was a dismembered hand.

  Gaines had read of such things, had seen representations and images. He had heard of Petit Albert, but how he had heard of it, he could not recall. Perhaps it had been something of which his mother had spoken. Perhaps it was something there within the woof and warp of New Orleans history and heritage and folklore and rumor.

  The image was undeniable and surreal, both horrific and somehow, strangely, expected.

  Perhaps this was nothing more than a catalyst, the single thing that tipped him over the edge of his internal defenses, but he felt those defenses yielding. He felt the tension unraveling in his chest—a combination of despair and grief, of loss and horror, within this some kind of bone-deep certainty that he had brought this upon himself—even brought it upon the whole town of Whytesburg—by failing to hold Webster, by failing to keep him alive, but most of all for bringing Nancy Denton back from that stinking, black grave.

  And it was then that Gaines cried again, but really cried, not like a man who’d lost his mother, but like a man who’d lost everything.

  Gaines knelt down in the dirt, his knees in the furrows of the fields, and he sobbed until his chest was racked with pain, and through his tear-filled eyes he looked at Michael Webster’s dismembered hand—for he knew without doubt that this was all it could be—the skin caked with melted wax, the last vestige of the candle burned down to nothing. He remembered how that light had flickered while his mother lay dead, and he wondered what terrible nightmare had been unleashed in Whytesburg that had opened a twenty-year-old grave and put a Hand of Glory out here in the darkness for him to find.

  And he knew that Webster’s head would be buried somewhere close, though what he would find beyond that he did not know.

  Gaines did not believe that this was some arcane and occult conjuration. This was merely violence and some perverse desire to frighten Gaines more than he was already frightened.

  Michael Webster had left the Sheriff’s Office with Matthias Wade. Matthias Wade knew something of this, and it was a great deal more than he had already said. Gaines was certain that Wade knew the truth of Nancy Denton, that he knew the truth of Webster, and that such truths were the only thing that would relieve the terrible pressure that Gaines felt all around him. It was as if such a revelation would open the only door that was needed, the door through which could pass the dreadful horrors that had befallen Whytesburg these past few days.

  It was a long time before Gaines rose to his feet, and when he did, he walked back to the house and called Richard Hagen. He told him to bring sawhorses and crime-scene tape, torches, a shovel, and to call Victor Powell and tell him to get out there also.

  Hagen didn’t ask questions. Perhaps he, too, did not want to know what John Gaines had found. Perhaps he, too, believed that the worst had already been witnessed.

  On the back steps of the house, John Gaines waited patiently for the arrival of his deputy and the coroner.

  In that moment, the world seemed very small indeed, claustrophobic with shadows and whispered voices, and Gaines believed that his mother’s voice was among those that he heard, and she was telling him to leave.

  43

  It was a task of careful excavation—to retain as much physical evidence as they could. Powell assisted too, and it was Powell who said what Gaines had hoped he would not hear.

  “There is something buried here.”

  Powell’s voice was calm and measured, and yet Gaines could hear that edge of agitated disturbance beneath it. Powell was uneasy, as was Hagen, as was Gaines himself. It was dark, and they worked by flashlight, and the constant movement of shadows around them added nothing but further disquiet to the already tense atmosphere.

  Gaines and Hagen held their lights steady as Powell worked his fingers around the edges of what had had found.

  “Some sort of canvas,” Powell said. “Something wrapped in canvas, I think.”

  He dug further, Hagen assisting then, until it was nothing less than obvious what they had found. They carefully eased back the edges of the wrapping, and the features were unmistakable.

  “Webster’s head,” Powell said, and he looked up at Gaines.

  Gaines directed his flashlight, and for a moment it seemed that Michael Webster had been buried up to his neck, only his head protruding from the dirt. He looked back at Gaines with blank and lifeless eyes. Gaines knew that he would never be able to blanch his mind of such a grotesque and strange image.

  Their work was swift then, almost as if they wanted to be engaged in the task for as brief a time as possible. Preserving as much integrity as they could in the surrounding earth, they lifted the decapitated head from the ground and set it aside on some plastic sheeting that Hagen had brought from the trunk of the car. They would need to take pictures now, not wait until morning, so Gaines dispatched Hagen to get more lights, to bring the camera and flashbulbs from the office, and they would do the best they could.

  After Hagen’s departure, Gaines and Powell stood back from the scene.

  There was a tense and awkward silence between them for some minutes, and then Powell broke the deadlock with, “So, serious business or bullshit designed to scare you?”

  Gaines shook his head. “It’s never what you believe, but what others believe.”

  “But what do you believe?”

  Gaines smiled resignedly. “I am a Louisianan. I was raised in New Orleans. This kind of thing has been there all through my life. Alice believed in it, and she saw things that she couldn’t even begin to explain, but . . .” He shook his head. “I am the eternal skeptic.”

  “And it’s supposed to mean what?”

  “The thing with the hand? It’s called a Hand of Glory. As far as I can recall, it’s supposed to be the dried and pickled hand of a hanged man. Usually the left hand, the sinister, unless the man was hanged for murder, in which case it’s the hand that he used to commit the murder. And fat is taken from the body and mixed with virgin wax and sesame oil to make a candle, and his hair is used for a wick. Whoever makes it is supposed to be able to render any person motionless and open any door. But I don’
t think this is anything but a message.”

  “And the message is what? That you should stay away? That you’ll be next to get your head buried in a field?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Any thoughts?”

  “I’m pretty sure now that Webster did not kill Nancy. That he found her, just as he said. Why he did the thing with her heart, maybe we’ll never know. Now I’m starting to think that whoever killed Nancy also killed Michael and did this too. Or someone paid someone to do it.”

  “Wade?”

  “That’s what I’m thinking.”

  “But you have nothing on him.”

  “Right.”

  “Except that he was the one who bailed Webster out, and he was the last person to see him.”

  “Absolutely, yes. But I cannot arrest him for paying bail or giving the man a ride.”

  “So what do you do when you have nothing probative?”

  “You make something.”

  “Meaning?”

  Gaines turned at the sound of Hagen returning in the black-and-white.

  “Right now? Hell, I don’t know. I need to get this out of here. I need to organize my mother’s funeral. I need to . . .” Gaines sighed audibly.

  Victor Powell put his hand on Gaines’s shoulder.

  “Maybe you should call State.”

  “Maybe I will,” Gaines replied.

  Hagen pulled up five yards away and got out of the car. Within minutes, they had erected lights, hooked them up to the car battery, and flooded the scene. From a distance, a bright ghost of illumination hovered in the field behind Gaines’s house, and Gaines busied himself taking shots of the dismembered hand, the hole in which the head had been buried, the head itself, the surrounding furrows where footprints had flattened the dirt.

  Soon they were done, and Hagen and Gaines returned the lights to the car while Powell gently lifted the head and hand into separate containers and put them in the trunk of his vehicle.