The Devil and the River

by R.J. Ellory

  Arriving back in Whytesburg, Gaines did not consider it too late to go visit with Ross and Holland. They were both up, playing cards as it happened, and they welcomed Gaines’s arrival. They asked him to join them, to share a few drinks, a few hands, but he said he had no plans to stay.

  “I just came to find out why Maryanne Benedict wanted to see you,” Gaines asked Holland.

  “Because you scared the bejesus out of her, that’s why,” Holland replied. “A stranger shows up at her door, tells her Nancy Denton is dead, Webster, too, one of them buried in a riverbank for twenty years, the other one burned in a fire without his head. How would you feel?”

  “Oh, I think I’d feel pretty much as I do right now, Eddie. Like I’m in someone else’s nightmare, and whatever I do, I just can’t wake up.”

  “Well, she’s pretty much the same, my friend. She wanted to know if everything you’d said was true. She wanted to know if you could be trusted, as well.”

  “Trusted?”

  “Hell, I don’t know why she asked that, John. She just did. Maybe she’s gathering up the courage to tell you something.”

  “I’m plannin’ on going over to see her in the morning.”

  “Because?”

  “Because I want her to deliver a message to Della Wade for me.”

  Both Eddie Holland and Nate Ross looked up from their cards, but neither spoke.

  “I got a man called Clifton Regis up at Parchman on a three-to-five that looks like a setup. He was Della’s boyfriend. Hell, they were going to elope together. Della gave him ten grand, and then Matthias found out, took her back, cut off a couple of Clifton Regis’s fingers, and shipped Della back to the Wade house. As far as I know, she’s been there ever since.”

  “And what did this fella up at Parchman have to say to Della?” Holland asked.

  “He says he loves her, hopes that she’s waiting for him, hopes that they’ll find some way to be together despite Matthias.”

  “So this Regis has a vested interest in colluding with you any which way to get Matthias out of the picture.”

  “Yes, seems that way to me.”

  “And why didn’t Matthias take kindly to Della being involved with Mr. Regis?” Holland asked

  “That’s easy,” Ross explained. “Because Clifton Regis is a colored man.”

  “Right,” Holland said. “That’ll do it.”

  “And he told me something else . . . something about why Webster cut Nancy Denton near in half and put a snake in her chest.”

  “Because he was fucking crazy, right?” Holland said.

  “No, Eddie . . . because he loved her more than life itself, and he was trying to bring her back.”

  “You what?”

  “It’s called a revival. It’s some kind of voodoo ritual, and he did that because he thought there was a chance she could be brought back to life.”

  “Christ almighty,” Ross said. “Now I believe I have heard it all.”

  “But I cannot deal with that now, not as part of the investigation,” Gaines said. “That has been and gone, and whatever Michael Webster thought he might be doing is history now. I have to deal with what I have right in front of me, and that is Webster’s death and whether Matthias Wade was directly involved.”

  “I don’t think there’s a great deal going on around there that doesn’t involve Matthias Wade, one way or the other,” Ross said.

  “They’re Klan, right?” Gaines asked.

  “The Wades? Sure as hell they are. A lot of the old Southern families were—and still are. Things have changed, but they changed only a little, and they’ve changed too damned slow. It’s not the way it was in the twenties and thirties, but it’s there all right.”

  “You think old man Wade is Klan, as well?”

  Ross smiled. “Earl Wade was all set to be Grand Dragon for this state, possibly Louisiana and Alabama too. He was right in there, politically speaking, but after that church bombing in sixty-three, a good number of senior Klan officers distanced themselves from it, again for political reasons.”

  “Church bombing?” Gaines asked.

  “The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four colored girls were killed. That was eleven years ago, and they’re still no nearer to finding out who did that. It was Klan, for sure, but no one has been identified as responsible, and no arrests have been made. Then we had those three civil rights kids murdered here in Mississippi in 1964—”

  “Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner,” Holland interjected, “and then those two colored kids were murdered here as well, Henry Dee and Charles Moore. There was rumor—still is—that they were killed by someone within the sheriff’s department, but—as with all these cases—there is never enough evidence, and no one is ever prepared to make a statement.”

  “And then Vernon Dahmer was killed in sixty-six. He was Forrest County NAACP president. Got his house firebombed, his wife and eight kids inside. His wife got herself and all the kids out. Dahmer manages to escape, but he’s so badly burned he doesn’t make it. He dies the next day. That was one time people actually demanded a real honest-to-God investigation, and they ended up indicting fourteen men. Thirteen made it to trial, eight of them on arson and murder charges, the rest on conspiracy to intimidate and such. They even charged Sam Bowers, Imperial Wizard, got him before a judge and jury four times, but each time it ended in a mistrial. All that happened on my doorstep, literally, and it was the kind of thing that really soured a lot of people on Klan membership. They certainly were not in the business of making any new friends down here, and they lost a lot of old ones. Late sixties was when Earl Wade started to get sick, and since then, he’s not been physically well enough to be involved in anything like that.”

  “He’s sick?” Gaines asked. “Sick with what?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Ross said. “Maybe he’s just getting old. Heard word he was losing his mind, going senile, you know?”

  “But Matthias,” Holland said, “well, he’s a different animal altogether.”

  “He’s active in the Klan?” Gaines asked.

  “Who the hell knows,” Ross replied. “It isn’t something people openly admit to anymore. Back in the twenties, the Klan had something in the region of four or five million members, some say as high as six million. That was about five percent of the population. One person in every twenty was a self-professed Klan member.”

  “Well, we know for sure he had a major disagreement with his sister and Clifton Regis getting together.”

  “And Regis is on a three-to-five, you say?”

  “Right.”

  “And he’s been there how long?”

  “Seventeen months.”

  “You want me to check into it?” Ross asked. “I still have a whole network of friends and acquaintances in the legal arena. Hattiesburg, Vicksburg, Jackson, Columbus, Tupelo . . . I can find out who was on it, the judge, jury selection, all kinds of things.”

  “No,” Gaines said. “I have enough going on without worrying about whether or not Clifton Regis was set up by Matthias Wade. Right now, all I am interested in is Michael Webster’s death.”

  “And Nancy Denton’s,” Holland said.

  “No, not as much, Eddie. Webster was killed less than a week ago, Nancy twenty years ago. I think that Matthias Wade killed Nancy. I think he strangled her and dumped the body. I think Michael Webster found her, and then he did what he did. He held on to that secret for twenty years with the deluded belief that she might come back. That’s why he never spoke of it, and I think Wade knew he would never speak of it. If he spoke of what had happened, then not only would this revival be compromised, but he would go to jail for what he did to her body, for obstructing justice, and might even have been found guilty of her murder. When she was found, well, everything changed. Then Webster would be free to speak, certain that she wasn’t coming back. Wade knew that Webster had to be removed from the equation, and removed he was. If Webster did kill Nancy, well, there isn’t anything
more the law can do to him now. If Matthias killed Nancy, then even getting him for Michael Webster’s murder will serve me well enough.”

  “And you honestly think that Della is your inside line to that family?” Ross asked.

  “I have to try something, Nate. And right now, it’s the best thing I can think of.”

  “And you’re off to Gulfport tomorrow morning?” Holland asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You want me to come with you? Maryanne knows me. She trusts me. It might make the difference between her being willing to cooperate or not.”

  “Yes, that’d be really appreciated.”

  “Then I’ll be ready tomorrow morning,” Holland said.

  “I’ll come fetch you at eight.”

  “So now there’s no reason not to stay and have a drink,” Ross said. “Better here with company than home on your own, right?”

  Gaines considered the cold and empty house, the closed door of his mother’s room, the task that that lay ahead of him, of how he would cope with everything that reminded him of her. He thought of her clothes, her picture albums, her personal possessions.

  “Okay,” Gaines said. “One drink, a few hands of poker.”

  “Or a few drinks and one hand of poker,” Ross said. “Sounds better that way.”

  49

  Gaines did not leave Ross’s house until somewhere close to one a.m. He was asleep before his head hit the pillow, and yet woke suddenly a little more than five hours later.

  He paid no mind to that long-familiar sense of bone-deep fatigue. In-country, he had sleepwalked through days, never catching more than an hour or two’s rest at a time. He showered, shaved, got dressed, made some coffee, and then drove over to the office. Neither Barbara nor Hagen had arrived, and he appreciated the silence and solitude.

  The thought he had woken with, right there at the forefront of his mind, was Michael Webster’s photo album, still there in evidence lockup.

  He retrieved the album and took it to reception, sat there at the front desk to save having to walk back out every time the phone rang, and he went through it.

  Gaines studied each picture carefully, now recognizing both Maryanne Benedict and Matthias Wade without hesitation. And Nancy was there, just as before, always smiling, so full of life. The way in which she seemed to radiate from those simple, faded images was inexplicable. Maryanne was beautiful, too, undeniably, but it was after three or four pages that he recognized yet another girl. She looked a little younger than Maryanne and he suspected this was Della Wade. There was something in the eyes that reminded Gaines of Matthias, but where Matthias possessed a degree of distance, perhaps even coolness, the young Della Wade was afire with vitality and happiness, much the same as Nancy. Possibly Matthias’s seeming lack of warmth was due to Webster’s presence, the resentment Matthias must have felt as he saw the closeness Webster and Nancy shared. His bitterness would have been directed toward Webster at first, and then perhaps—finally—Nancy herself. Had Matthias killed Nancy to satiate something so petty as spite and jealousy? If I can’t have her, neither can you. Had that been the motivation? It made sense. Love became soured by rejection, and eventually that sense of rejection, festering among unexpressed thoughts and unrequited hopes, had become bitter and twisted. Finally, Matthias had convinced himself that Nancy was foolish or stupid or ignorant, that someone who would deny him what was rightfully his had no place on this earth. Or perhaps it was simply that he could not bear to be reminded of his loss every day, and the only way to remove that reminder was to remove the person he’d lost.

  But Della was there, appearing time and again through some of the later images. She could only have been ten or eleven years old. Had she and Maryanne been close? Would this gamble pay off? Would Della still hold enough feelings of affection toward Maryanne for Maryanne to get to her?

  Perhaps nothing more would be served by this venture than the ultimate reunion of Clifton Regis and Della Wade. And all of this was dependent upon the validity of what Clifton Regis had told him. There was always the possibility that Della Wade was as manipulative as Gaines believed Matthias to be, that she had used Regis as a means by which she could escape the clutches of the Wade family. Gaines didn’t believe so. He had seen something in Clifton Regis’s eyes, and he had believed the man. And good though it would be to help Regis and Della with their personal lives, Gaines was hoping for so much more. He needed a foot in the door. He needed something that would give him leverage on Matthias Wade.

  For Gaines, it seemed to no longer be a matter of law, but of justice. They were worlds apart. Gaines was not so naive as to believe they were even related. Justice had long since faded into relative obscurity with the advent of due process and bureaucracy. Hell, it was the law who was responsible for some of the Klan horrors that Ross and Holland had detailed the night before. There was no justice there, and there would be no justice here—not for Nancy or Judith, not for Michael Webster—if Gaines did not pursue this any which way he could.

  He thought of his mother. This was what she would have wanted. For him to be doing something worthwhile and purposeful, to be soldiering on, to be in control of what he was feeling and what was going on around him.

  In war, horrors were expected. In Whytesburg, Mississippi, such horrors should play no part at all.

  Gaines returned the album to the evidence room, and he left the office. He locked up behind himself, drove over to Nate Ross’s to collect Eddie Holland, all the while considering the best approach to Maryanne Benedict and the assignment he was going to ask of her. If she said no, well, he was back to square one. For some reason, he believed she was going to help him. For some reason, he believed his visit had reminded her of the life she’d once had, and to now see all aspects of that life broken apart and scattered to the four winds was more upsetting than she could bear. But, in Gaines, perhaps she saw someone who could assist her with the weight of conscience. Perhaps she was now motivated by guilt, the feeling that she could have helped Michael Webster, that she could have been there for him after Nancy’s disappearance. Maybe she had loved Michael, too, and yet had never been able to approach him, knowing always that Michael loved only Nancy. To live a life in the shadow of another was to live no life at all. To live a life perpetually compared to someone else would be the most grievous negation of one’s own worth. It struck Gaines then that his own choices had perhaps been influenced by his belief that he would never love anyone as much as he had loved Linda Newman. Possibly he and Maryanne Benedict had lived along some strange line of parallel emotions, never committing, never wholly withdrawing, existing somewhere in the middle ground, the places where neither light nor darkness ever really reached. Like ghosts of their former selves, living without really being alive.

  He was reminded of something Lieutenant Wilson had once said. “Spend time with the lost and fallen, with the lonely and the forgotten, with the ones who didn’t make it . . . That’s where you find real humanity.” And with that memory came the memory of the last words to leave Ron Wilson’s lips, uttered in the handful of seconds between changing his damp socks and the arrival of the bullet that killed him. The memory of the dead is the greatest burden of all.

  That was the burden Gaines carried, and he vowed to carry it well, to carry it resolutely, never faltering or resting until he could set that burden down at the feet of whosoever was responsible.

  And then Gaines was turning off the road and heading toward Nate Ross’s house, and he saw Eddie Holland standing on the veranda awaiting him. Less than an hour and they would be in Gulfport, and Gaines would know if Maryanne Benedict was on his side, or had chosen to abandon this game once and for all.

  50

  En route, they talked. Rather, Holland talked and Gaines listened. Holland spoke of Don Bicklow, of Gaines’s mother, of Nate Ross’s wife and the circumstances of her death. He told Gaines the details of a murder case that Bicklow and his own predecessor, George Austin, had investigated back in the latter part of
1958. It was the first real-life honest-to-God murder that had happened since his assignment to Breed County.

  “Had to stand there for three hours with a dead woman on the floor of her kitchen. Crazy husband bashed her head in with a tire iron and then said she fell and hit her head on the corner of the stove. Made me sick to my stomach, you know, but someone had to stand there while all the crime scene fellas did their thing. However, despite how bad it made me feel, it was also the thing that really convinced me that I had taken the right job. Sounds odd, but before that I reckoned on this line of work being nothing more than a regular salary, a pension at the end, something being better than nothing, you know? But that dead woman, the fact that her husband did her in and then tried to get away with it, well, that started me to thinking that there must be a lot of folks who don’t have anyone in their corner, if you know what I mean.”

  Gaines nodded, kept his eyes on the road. He didn’t acknowledge Holland because he didn’t want him to stop talking. The sound of Holland’s voice took away the incessant barrage of questions in his own mind, and it was good to have a little internal silence for a change.

  “So, that sort of resolved it all for me. I came in after the war was over, much like you after Vietnam. I know Webster was in Asia, but I served in Italy.” Holland fell quiet.

  Gaines prompted him with, “You have kids, right?”

  Holland laughed. “However old they get, they’re always still your kids, aren’t they? Yes, I got kids. Four of them, though the youngest has three daughters and a Chrysler franchise out in Waynesboro . . .”

  And off he went with wives’ names, husbands’ names, kids’ names, what happened when they all got together last Thanksgiving. That started him in on his wife and how she died, and how he’d never been able to even consider the possibility of finding someone else. With those last words, Gaines saw the sign for Gulfport, and they took the exit.