The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

“And you did the burglary you got this three-to-five for?”

  “Never burgled anyplace in my life.”

  Gaines frowned and shook his head. “But—”

  “But what, Sheriff? You know how this goes. We all look the same. We all do the same things. We’re all guilty of the same shit, so it don’t matter which ones they throw in jail. I agree it was a little stretch to have me climbing walls and breaking windows and whatever, having lost two of my fingers only a month beforehand, but hell, what does a detail like that count for when you have the kind of public defenders we get assigned to us?”

  “You think Matthias Wade had any part in getting you sent up here?”

  “Seems like it would be a good way for him to get me a couple hundred miles away from Della, doesn’t it?”

  “Sure does,” Gaines replied.

  “So what now?” Regis asked.

  “Like I said, I need to get to Della. I need to ask her some things.”

  “And you think she’ll say enough for you to be able to get something on her brother for these killings you spoke of?”

  “That’s the plan.”

  “You don’t have a prayer, sir, not a single, solitary prayer. Della would no more turn her brother in to the law than she would . . . well hell, I don’t know what. But you’re just wishin’ on some kinda wild dream there.”

  “You could testify that he threatened you, that he was there when this man cut your fingers off.”

  “For what? What the hell have you been smokin’? Jeez, do you have even the faintest idea who you’re dealin’ with? Even if something like that got a charge, you’d have three hundred lawyers and the judge hisself swearing they was home with Matthias Wade as their dinner guest at precisely the moment I got my fingers removed.”

  “You know who this man was who was with him?”

  “No idea. Just one of Wade’s people. There’s no end of people who’ll do that kind of work for someone like him.”

  “If I could get a message to her for you, would that be something—”

  “Man, if you could get a message to her, that would be just un-fucking-believable.”

  “You want to get her back, right?”

  Clifton Regis looked at Gaines then, and the expression in his eyes was one of such desperate hope that it was all Gaines could do to remain implacable. However, beneath that hope was a sense of exhausted resignation. Gaines did not so much see it, as feel it around the man.

  “You ever been in love, Sheriff Gaines?”

  Gaines felt himself sigh inside. He remembered Linda Newman. “One time,” he replied, “but that was a long time ago.”

  “Doesn’t matter how long ago it was. It’s still gonna make you feel the same.”

  “You think she still loves you?” Gaines asked.

  “If I believed she didn’t, then there’d be no point going on. That’s what I tell myself, you know? But sometimes I believe I just have to accept that she’s gone for good—”

  “But bringing down Matthias Wade gives you a chance of seeing her and finding out whether there is some hope you could be together again.”

  “Bringing down Matthias Wade? Like I said, I think you are dreamin’. You bring him down, then you’re gonna have to bring down a great deal more than just him. They’re all living out of each other’s pockets. The lawyers, the judges, the rich folks, they’re all working for one another, and that’s one hell of a lot of people. All that stuff I said, how I’ve been working as hard as I can to forget her . . . that’s just because I know there’ll never be a hope that we’ll be together again.”

  “Unless he’s gone, right?”

  “Maybe. Maybe then there’s a chance.”

  “But you’ll help me?”

  Regis shrugged. “Help you? How the hell could I help you?”

  “You can start by writing a letter to Della Wade to tell her that she should meet with me. If I can get it to her, then there’s a chance she might trust me enough to tell me something that will help. If she feels for you the way you feel for her, then how can she not talk to me?”

  “And how the hell you gonna get a letter to Della without Matthias finding out about it?”

  “I think there might be someone who’ll help me,” Gaines said, “someone that Matthias won’t refuse entry to that house.”

  “Well, you get me a pen and some paper and I’ll write your letter,” Regis said, “but this goes down wrong and they end up comin’ after me, then I’m gonna be comin’ after you, you understand?”

  “I don’t doubt it, Clifton,” Gaines replied.

  “This is a bad scene you got yourself involved in, man, a real bad scene. Maybe the Wades ain’t as bad as they get down here, but they’re pretty damned bad. You know the kind of shit these Klan people do when they get let off the leash, right?”

  “I do, sure, though we ain’t had a great deal of it in Breed County while I’ve been there.”

  “Well, people like Matthias Wade are not so dumb as to be shitting on their own porch, are they? More ’an likely they take whoever over the state line into Louisiana and run their hunting trips there.”

  Gaines had heard of such things, the Klan abducting some unsuspecting colored, driving them across state lines into some area outside of town, and then a half dozen or more good ol’ boys would hunt them down like a safari. Dogs, trucks, a whole bellyful of liquor for every man, and they would make a night of it. End up with some guy stripped, beaten, lynched, one time even crucified. Maybe the civil rights movement got a say-so in Memphis or Atlanta, but in the backwoods of Mississippi and Alabama they hadn’t even heard of such a thing. For such people, civil rights meant the right to civilize a neighborhood or a town, and the only way to do that was to rout out and get rid of the coloreds.

  Gaines got up. “I’m gonna get some paper and a pen, and you write me a letter for Della, and I give you my word I will do everything I can to get it to her. Only way Matthias will find out is if she then gives it to him herself.”

  “I don’t see her doin’ that,” Regis replied. “Not in a hundred lifetimes.”

  “You cannot be sure,” Gaines replied. “People’s minds can get turned awful fast. You haven’t seen her for the better part of two years, and she’s been right there in that family all this time, listening to whatever Matthias Wade has to say about the way of things. This goes to hell, and both you and I are in it neck-deep.”

  “Well, sir, you didn’t know Della, and if you think there is anything even remotely similar between her and Matthias, then you’re gonna have to look again. Doesn’t make sense to me Matthias and Della are even in the same family.”

  “So you’re sure?”

  “You get me the paper there, Sheriff Gaines. You’ll get your letter. You get it to Della, and we’ll see what the hell happens, eh?”

  48

  Clifton Regis wrote the letter. He insisted that Gaines read it. Gaines said that whatever business existed between him and Della Wade was their business alone, but Regis made it a condition.

  “I want you to understand what this means to me,” he said. “I want you to appreciate how significant this thing is, because that’ll make me feel like you will try your hardest to get this to her without her brother finding out.”

  “So read me the letter,” Gaines said.

  Regis cleared his throat, looked at Gaines with that wide-eyed hopefulness, and then started.

  “D. Got a chance here to get you a letter, so I’m taking it. A man came to see me. He’s a sheriff from Whytesburg called John Gaines, and he told me that M is maybe in some trouble down there. I know you feel the same way about M as me, and I know that you get why I’m here. I am also hoping that what we had in New Orleans is still alive and that you are waiting for me. I need you to know that everything that has happened between us means as much now as it did back then and that I will do anything to be with you again. I want you to talk to this man, and I want you to tell him what you know. I want you to help him if you can, s
o that we have a chance to be together again. That’s why I want you to do this. If you cannot do this, or you have decided that we cannot be together, then I need you to tell me so I can make my decisions. And if you cannot help this man or you are not willing to talk to him, then just burn this letter and do not let M see it. Not for my sake, but because I know he will get mad and hurt you if he thinks that we are in contact. Somehow, some way, I think we can be together again. That is what I live for. I just want to see you again, to hold you, to tell you how much I love you. I wish every day that you feel the same. I believe in my heart that you do. Love you forever. C.”

  Gaines merely nodded in acknowledgment. Then he took the letter from Regis, folded it, tucked it into his shirt pocket, and got up.

  They shook hands again, and Gaines thanked Regis for his time and his help.

  “You gonna be okay when you go back?” Gaines asked.

  “Back into population? Sure, why’d you ask?”

  “McNamara said that maybe you’d get some trouble for being out here talking to the law.”

  “Hey, they’re gonna believe whatever I tell ’em. I don’t get no trouble from these guys. I can take care of myself.”

  “Good to hear it.”

  “One other thing,” Regis said.

  “Yes?”

  “You get her that letter, you find out what she says about me, whether she’s waiting for me, and you gotta let me know somehow, okay?”

  “Yes,” Gaines replied. “I can do that for sure.”

  “You got family, Sheriff Gaines?”

  “No, Clifton, I don’t.”

  “Well, good enough.”

  Gaines frowned.

  “I’d be more worried for you if you had a wife and some little ’uns to mourn you. You step all over Matthias Wade’s toes and he ain’t gonna take a polite apology. He’s gonna take your head.”

  “Well, he did that already to someone else, and I think it’s about time he got some retribution.”

  Regis got up, and the pair of them walked to the makeshift door.

  “So you really think he killed some girl?” Regis asked.

  “I do. At first I thought it was someone else, and now I think it was Matthias.”

  “And you said something about her heart?”

  Gaines nodded. “Yes. She was sixteen, a pretty, bright teenage girl, and someone strangled her and then cut out her heart.”

  Regis’s expression was suddenly one of intense curiosity. “That is a very strange thing to do, Sheriff.”

  Gaines smiled sardonically. “Cutting her heart out was nothing compared to what they did next—”

  “Which was?”

  “You won’t believe me, but in place of her heart they put a wicker basket—”

  “With a snake inside,” Regis said, and he looked down at the ground. It was not a question; it was a statement. Regis’s entire body language changed. It seemed as if a great weight had been lowered down onto his shoulders.

  “How did you—”

  Regis looked up. “They did a revival, Sheriff Gaines. Whoever killed your girl, someone tried to bring her back.”

  Gaines couldn’t speak. He just looked at Regis with an expression of utter disbelief.

  “As old as God,” Regis said. “This shit is as old as God. You take out the heart, you bury the heart elsewhere, a specific place, a specific distance from the body, and then you replace the heart with a wicker basket. Inside the basket is a snake, its tail in its mouth, and you sew them up a special way—thirteen punctures as far as I recall, six on the right, seven on the left, and the stitch crosses itself five times—and then you bury the body near running water. And you never speak a word of what you have done. Not to anyone. Not ever. Even if you do it with someone, even if they were there, you never speak of it between you. If you do, it breaks the spell and the person will not be revived.”

  Gaines stayed silent. His mouth was dry. His breath felt heavy in his chest.

  “That’s the revival, Sheriff. That’s what was done to your girl back then. You still have her body?”

  Gaines nodded.

  “Well, you go look, and if there are seven holes on the left side and six on the right, and if she was tied in such a way as to cross those stitches five times, then you have someone trying to revive her.”

  “Y-you can’t be se-serious,” Gaines stammered, but already he had begun to understand what had happened. He knew that Webster had done this. It was as if the entire case had turned on its head. All of a sudden, Webster appeared to be the one who’d told the truth. Webster had tried to bring Nancy Denton back. What a sad, desperate, terrible, pointless thing. It was heartbreaking to even consider. He had loved the girl—that was evident from what Gaines had heard, from the almost-visible chemistry between them in their pictures—and he had cut open her chest, removed her heart, and done this dreadful thing in some vain and futile effort to bring her back to life. And that was why he had never spoken of it. Maybe Wade had known this, and such was Webster’s belief in what he was doing, such was Wade’s certainty that Webster would maintain his silence, that it had not been necessary to kill Webster. Only when Nancy’s body had been found, thus demonstrating once and for all that the revival would never work, did Wade need to take care of Michael Webster.

  It was utterly unbelievable, but—as Gaines’s mother used to say—what we knew of the world was dwarfed by what we did not know.

  “I know it sounds like some crazy occult Frankenstein raising-people-from-the-dead thing,” Regis said, “but this is hoodoo, and this has an awful lot less to do with what you may or may not believe and a great deal to do with what other folks believe. And what other folks believe has brought about the killing of a young girl and the desecration of her body. If Wade did that, then—”

  “I don’t think Wade did that,” Gaines said, almost to himself. “I think he killed her, and then someone who loved her found her and did what he thought would bring her back.”

  Gaines tried to picture Nancy’s body. He tried to recall the number of punctures in the torso, the way in which it had been laced. He could call Powell, but he knew without even asking that it would be precisely as Regis had explained.

  “So it seems you are dealing with something else now,” Regis said.

  “Y-yes,” Gaines replied. “But how do you know this?”

  Regis smiled. The scar down his cheek was like the crease in a sheet of paper. “I am a black man from Louisiana, Sheriff Gaines,” he said. “You gotta get the spirit of Legba back into them, and Legba is gonna either bring them back to you or carry them over into the afterlife. The serpent represents the power of Legba. It represents healing and the connection between heaven and earth. Whoever does it usually does it for love . . . to make sure that the one they love never gets caught in limbo between this world and the next. And whoever did this to your girl would have suffered terribly, I’m sure, because to do that to someone you love . . .” Regis shook his head. “And you can never say a word . . . never . . .”

  “It casts an entirely different light on the whole thing,” Gaines said.

  “I imagine it would, Sheriff.”

  “I can’t see Matthias Wade doing that to someone, can you?”

  “I can see Matthias Wade doing a great many things, Sheriff Gaines, but doing something like that for love is not one of them.”

  “Thank you for telling me this,” Gaines said.

  “You are welcome, Sheriff Gaines, but the best way to thank me is to get that note to Della without her brother finding out. That’s all I can ask of you.”

  Gaines and Regis parted company, Regis back into the care of Ted McNamara and a pickup ride to the work party, Gaines out onto the highway once more. It was after eight o’clock by the time he saw the Parchman Farm main entrance in the rearview.

  He drove in silence but for the sound of the engine and the wheels on the road. He did not switch on the radio. He just wanted a clear mind with no interruptions as he consid
ered the implications of what Clifton Regis had told him.

  That morning, little more than a week before, he, Jim Hughes, Richard Hagen, and the assembled crew had unearthed something from the riverbank. It had not just been the body of a sixteen-year-old; it had been something else entirely. They had brought out the dead, and the unresolved truth of her death was now haunting Whytesburg like a ghost. That ghost would not lie in rest until the facts were known. That ghost was in limbo, and where Michael Webster might have failed to accomplish what he had set out to do, Gaines could not.

  Gaines knew that by the time he got back south, it would be too late to go see Maryanne Benedict, and besides, he wanted to find out from Eddie Holland why she’d wanted to see him. Perhaps there was something about the night of Nancy Denton’s disappearance that she’d remembered. Perhaps there was something she knew about Matthias Wade but felt safer speaking at first to Eddie Holland rather than Gaines, who, in actuality, was a complete stranger. Gaines could only guess, and guessing served no purpose.

  Rather, he spent the hours of solitude between Indianola and Whytesburg turning over all that had happened in his mind. He did not believe Clifton Regis was a liar, just as he did not believe the man was a thief. He believed that Clifton Regis had met Della Wade in New Orleans, just as he’d said, and that chance rendezvous had occurred because of Eugene. Eugene was a musician, as was Regis, and Della appeared to have gravitated toward that lifestyle, the people who lived it. Matthias, staunch segregationist, perhaps racist to the core, had learned of the relationship, had learned also that ten thousand dollars of Wade money had found its way into Clifton Regis’s hands. That would have flown in the teeth of everything that Wade intended to preserve about his family’s name and reputation. The solution had been simple. A brief visit to Clifton Regis, the recovery of the money, his sister rescued, and Clifton Regis left behind minus two of his fingers. Whether the subsequent burglary charge that put Regis in Parchman had been Wade’s doing or simply another blatant example of racist railroading that was so prevalent in these parts was another matter, and frankly, something that did not overly concern Gaines at that moment. He was content to know where Regis was, encouraged by the fact that Regis was compliant, secure in the knowledge that if he got the letter to Della Wade, then some sort of dialogue might be engendered. How to get the letter to Della without Matthias’s knowledge was the next obstacle.