And despite all of this, this desire to find the truth, to do the right thing, to then spend your working hours reviled and despised by people—people who didn’t know you, would never know you, not unless something happened—was harder than people imagined. And when that something happened, when the darkness of the world came at them with all the forces it could muster, you became the most important person in the world—friend, confidant, confessor, vigilante.

It was a strange and awkward existence, crowded with people, but lonely.

Gaines spoke briefly to Hagen. Hagen concurred. Until they had something more concrete, they could do little. A confession would give them a warrant. A warrant would give them access to Webster’s room, and a thorough search might give them something substantive and physical to connect Webster and Nancy Denton. Unlikely, but always a possibility.

For some reason, however, Gaines believed that Webster would talk. Hadn’t he said that he’d been waiting twenty years for someone to ask him the question? He had carried the guilt of whatever he’d done for two decades, and now he was ready to unburden himself, to seek forgiveness, to experience the relief that so often comes with telling the truth. If Gaines went down there right now and asked Webster what had happened, he believed Webster would just open his mouth and tell Gaines whatever he wanted to know.

But, for some reason, Gaines believed he was not ready to hear it.

He told Hagen to get busy on finding Webster a lawyer, that he was leaving to check on his mother, that he would be back soon.

Gaines did not need to see his mother. Caroline would be with her, and all would be fine. In truth, he simply wished to be out of the building, to breathe a different air than that which Michael Webster was breathing, to see something other than his own office and the basement for a brief while. He needed an interlude before he faced up to this madness again.

16

Gaines met Caroline in the kitchen of his house and knew immediately that something was awry.

“Sheriff,” she said, in her voice a sense of urgency. She grabbed his sleeve and tugged it like she needed to secure his undivided attention. “I heard that some girl was killed . . .”

Gaines stayed silent. He’d known word would get out quickly, but he hadn’t expected it to be quite this fast.

“Heard that someone killed her . . . killed her and put a snake inside her . . .” She shuddered visibly. “Put a dead snake in her . . . you know, her . . .” She looked awkward, embarrassed. She indicated her midriff, then lower, finally resting her hand just above her crotch.

“And who in Christ’s name told you such a thing, Caroline?” Gaines asked, less amazed at the wild variation of the truth that had found its way to Caroline Rousseau than the speed at which it had happened. The Denton girl’s body had been discovered only twenty-four hours earlier, and already there was rumor and hearsay on its way around Whytesburg.

“So they didn’t?” she asked.

“Didn’t kill her, or didn’t put a dead snake up inside of her?”

“I know some girl was killed, Sheriff, but it was the snake thing . . .”

Gaines indicated left. “Sit down,” he told Caroline. “Just calm yourself for a minute and let me explain the deal here.”

Caroline Rousseau sat down.

Gaines sat facing her, his hands on the table, his palms together, and as he spoke, he emphasized his words with brief and emphatic gestures.

“A girl called Nancy Denton was killed, yes. Twenty years ago, okay? She was killed before you were even born. We don’t know how. We don’t know who did it. There was something unusual about the way in which her body was found, but she sure as hell did not have a dead snake in her vagina.”

As Gaines spoke, he looked directly at Caroline. Caroline grimaced, shuddered again.

“And I would appreciate it, Caroline, if you would do everything possible to prevent such a rumor from finding its way into the collective ears of Whytesburg. More important, I don’t want you discussing this with my mother . . .”

It was there in the sudden widening of the eyes, the way she raised her brows, the tension in her lips.

“You already told her,” Gaines said matter-of-factly.

“I couldn’t . . . I didn’t . . .”

Gaines raised his right hand and Caroline fell silent. “What’s done is done,” he said. “I’ll deal with that, but what I said about not spreading this rumor—”

“I won’t say a word, Sheriff. And I’m sorry about speakin’ to your mom an’ everything . . .”

“It’s okay, Caroline. I’ll go see her now.”

Gaines got up. He realized he still had on his hat. His mind was elsewhere. He never entered the house without removing his hat.

The expression was there. Alice Gaines had something on her mind and there was no way she wasn’t going to be talking about it.

“Seen it before,” she said as Gaines entered the room, “and the one thing that shocks me, John, is that I had to hear about it from the help and not from you.”

“For Christ’s sake, Ma, you can’t call her that. She is not the help. She comes over here because she cares for you and because she likes your company.”

“Don’t change the subject, John. You tell me what has been going on now . . .”

“Police business, Ma, that’s what’s been going on.”

“This dead girl, what, all of ten or twelve years old, a virgin no doubt, and someone killed her and put a snake in her . . .”

“They did not.”

Alice stopped suddenly, her eyes wide. “Didn’t what? Kill her?”

“No, they killed her, Ma, but they didn’t do the other thing . . . and besides, she wasn’t ten or twelve. She was sixteen, and I have not the faintest clue whether she was a virgin or not. Regardless, this isn’t something you should be troubling yourself about. It happened in 1954, and you didn’t even get here till fourteen or fifteen years later. It’s none of your business, okay?”

“Shouldn’t be troubling myself about? This is exactly the kind of thing I should be troubling myself about. You’re my son, and you’ve got this kind of thing going on . . .”

“What kind of thing?”

“This ritual killing stuff. I’ve seen this kind of thing before . . . well, not seen it, but heard plenty about it, and this is a little more significant than just a plain old murder.”

“A plain old murder?” Gaines smiled ruefully. “You mean like the plain old murders that just happen every couple of hours around here?”

Alice looked at Gaines, a look he had known since childhood, since the earliest moment of his first sarcastic retort. “We can do without the backtalk, young man.”

“Ma, seriously, this is my work, and I need you to stay out of it . . .”

“Stay out of it? I’m not in it, John, but I’ll tell you now that if someone has killed a little girl and put a snake in her . . .”

“She was not so little, and the snake was not in her vagina, okay? Where the hell that came from, I do not know, but no doubt that will be what everyone will now be thinking—”

“There is something wrong with this, John, and you know it. Wherever this damned snake might have been, there is something terribly wrong with this . . .”

“The fact that a teenage girl has been murdered, that is as wrong as it needs to get. I am investigating the murder of a teenage girl, and that is all.”

His words hung in the air. He knew that he was actually investigating a great deal more than the simple murder of Nancy Denton.

And that itself was an irony, something that Gaines never believed he would hear from himself in small-town middle-American Whytesburg.

The simple murder of a girl. Was there ever such a thing?

Gaines did not want to hear any more. He left his mother’s room and went back to the kitchen.

His mother was right: Irrespective of whether or not such things bore any truth, regardless of whether Gaines believed or not, it had everything to do with what other people believed. There were explanations and rationales for murders that could be comprehended—jealousy, revenge, financial gain, crimes of passion, acts of hatred and bigotry and racism. But this? This was in a territory all its own. Here was the zone inhabited by serial killers, sadists, sex-and-death torture freaks. Those who killed for its own sake. Those who sought out victims by appearance or physical type, those who killed strangers for no other reason than some imagined but nevertheless very real motive. And if they could kill for such incredible reasons, they could sure as hell open up a body, replace a heart with a snake in a box, and stitch it back up. This was perhaps in the realms of hoodoo and religious ritual, and Gaines’s first thought in considering this was whether Webster had acted alone, or if he was part of a group. The Klan was still down here, would always be down here as far as Gaines could see. There were lynchings and murders. Hell, those three civil rights workers had been killed up near Meridian, and that was just ten years before. That had been the White Citizens’ Council, but the Neshoba County deputy who arrested the three kids and kept them in his jail until the murder squad could be organized was Klan. The car was driven into Bogue Chitto swamp and set on fire, and once the three boys had been beaten half to death and shot, their bodies had been buried in an earthen dam. Regardless of the manner of death—shooting, stabbing, hanging, choking—a murder was still a murder, and a riverbank was not so different from an earth dam. The national uproar had driven Lyndon Johnson to threaten Hoover with political reprisals if he didn’t send the FBI down there. Hoover conceded. The Feds went in. They even had navy divers searching for those three bodies, and in the process they discovered a further seven dead blacks whose disappearances had gone unnoticed by the rest of the country. And even when the bodies were found, even when the murderers were named and arrested, Mississippi refused to prosecute them for murder. So now? Was this Klan? Was this some bizarre ritual enacted by white supremacists? Couldn’t be. Had it been Klan or Council then Nancy Denton would have been a black girl. No, this was something different. This was something that Lieutenant Michael Webster needed to explain, and he needed to explain it now.