“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.”

“He did it for love,” she says. “But to do that to someone you love? I can’t even begin to imagine what that did to him.”

“I know what it did to him,” Gaines says. “He lost his mind, Della. He truly lost his mind.”

“Such a waste of life,” she says.

“Yes, it is,” Gaines replies, and wants to add, Just like in war, but he does not.

He reaches out and takes her hand, and he holds it reassuringly, and he looks at her for a very long time and neither of them speak.

74

On an unseasonably cool day, August 8, 1974—as America and the world watched events unfold around the resignation of Richard M. Nixon—a funeral was held in the small Mississippi town of Whytesburg.

It was a strange funeral, perhaps more a memorial service, and though there were no family members there to represent any of the deceased, that same small church that had seen Alice Gaines’s funeral just one week earlier was filled to capacity. Nate Ross, Eddie Holland, John Gaines, Richard Hagen, Officers Chantry and Dalton were front right. Front left were the Rousseaus, Bob Thurston, Victor Powell, Maryanne Benedict, and Della Wade. In the seats behind were many of the eldest Whytesburg citizens—those who remembered Nancy Denton, those who had perhaps been involved in those initial searches for her whereabouts on the day after her disappearance.

Gaines spoke this time. He did not say a great deal, but his words were meaningful and heartfelt, and he felt sure that they would be heard.

Later, the gathered attendees walked out to the cemetery, and there—in plots paid for by the county purse—Judith and Nancy were buried side by side, and next to Nancy they laid the body of Michael Webster, the man who loved her enough to do what he did and try to live with the consequences.

In some days’ time there would be a funeral for Eugene Wade, another for Matthias, but there would be few attendees, and those funerals would be held far from Whytesburg. Della would not attend, and neither would Earl Wade, his health and mental well-being having deteriorated to the point where he was bed-bound much of the time.

Della Wade told Gaines that she had tried to explain things to her father, but her father did not, or could not, understand.

Catherine Wade had been apprised of all that needed to be known, and Catherine—now the eldest—was making plans to have her father deemed legally incapable of managing his own affairs. She would act as proxy, and she—with Della’s agreement—had decided to sell the house. There was a great deal of money. They were taking equal shares. The Wade dynasty would end right there with the death of Earl, and Della did not believe it would be long before he passed away.

“I think he knows what happened here,” she told Gaines. “I think he is drowning in his own lies and secrets.”

Gaines did not say anything directly, but it was evident in his expression that he agreed.

The events of that day, primarily the self-defense shooting of Matthias Wade by his sister, were corroborated by John Gaines. Gaines also wrote a report that identified Matthias Wade as the killer of Leon Devereaux. There were those—Richard Hagen and Victor Powell among them—who were required to say certain things, to sign certain things, and they did so without question.

Gaines also visited with Marvin Wallace. He took Nate Ross with him. Wallace was informed that there would be no further financial or political support from the Wades. Gaines told him that it was possibly a good time to retire, that he should sell up and move on, perhaps head south in search of warmer climes and better golf courses. Wallace listened carefully, and he had no questions. Gaines asked him to sign a declaration of proxy assigning Catherine Wade as the manager of all Wade affairs. He did so without hesitation. He was then told to authorize a complete review of the Clifton Regis case, to suggest in his letter that if the review did not exonerate Regis of the Henderson B&E, an appeal should be lodged at state level. Again Wallace complied without hesitation or question. Within two weeks, Judge Marvin Wallace had tendered his resignation, and his resignation had been accepted.

Gaines made a careful and thorough investigation into any possibility that Jack Kidd might have been involved in the numerous dismissed cases and exonerations afforded Leon Devereaux in Wallace’s courtroom. Gaines found nothing incriminating, and he dropped it.

And so it was that on August 12th, exactly twenty years to the day since Nancy Denton had walked into the woods at the end of Five Mile Road, John Gaines—who had lately, and by providence or default, come to the position of sheriff of Whytesburg, Breed County, Mississippi, and before that had come alive from the nine circles of hell that was the war in Vietnam, who was himself born in Lafayette, a Louisianan from the start—stood on the back porch of his mother’s house and looked out into the darkness.

The darkness was constant, as were the shapes and sounds within it, and within those shapes and sounds would forever be the memory of what had happened here, of the people who had died, the voices that would no longer be heard.

Nancy, Michael, Judith, Leon, Matthias, Eugene.

And there was Alice, of course.

There would always be those who killed for greed, for revenge, for hate, for something they believed was love. And there would always be those who died.

Here was to be found the precise and torturous gravity of conscience.

Here was to be found the true and onerous weight of the dead.

The dreams of these events would come—fractured, surreal, some of them understandable, some of them without any meaning or significance he could fathom. Gaines knew that. He anticipated those dreams, even longed for them, for in dreaming, he would then find wakefulness, and in waking he would know that some part of the dream had thus been left behind, and in such small increments he would recover his own self and one day become something of the person he had been before he went to war.