Before leaving the house, Gaines went back and spoke to his mother. “I need you to do whatever’s needed to let this go no further. Do not call anyone, Ma. Don’t discuss this with Caroline any more. I am serious. Right now this is a murder, plain and simple, and I have to deal with it just as it is. People are super-stitious, always have been and always will be, and I need to contain this right now.”

“You can’t contain such things, John. Seriously, things like this do not belong to any world you’re familiar with—”

“Ma, enough, okay?”

She looked at him maternally, almost sympathetically. She looked at him with the same expression she’d worn when she’d tried to explain why his father was never coming home.

17

Whytesburg Sheriff’s Office, representative office of the entire Breed County Police Department, provided four basement cells, two on the left, two on the right, with a walkway between them wide enough to prevent prisoner contact. At the end of the room, an inclined vent allowed a ghost of light and fresh air into the space. Regardless, the basement had always suffered from an ever-present odor of damp mustiness that did not change season to season. In the summer it smelled rotten, in the winter merely aged and decayed. A brick wall separated each adjacent pair, the remaining two sides of each merely bars. There was no privacy, no solitary confinement. These were designed for nothing but temporary holding.

Gaines arrived at the office, and even before he started down the steps to the basement cells, he could hear Webster’s voice.

“. . . must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature . . . We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds . . .”

Hagen was down there, exasperated and angry.

“Over and over again, he’s been saying this,” he told Gaines. “Guy’s fucking crazy.”

“It’s Lincoln,” Gaines said. “He’s quoting Abraham Lincoln.”

Gaines approached the cell. He stood inches from the bars and looked directly at Webster.

After a moment, Gaines started speaking, merely echoed precisely what Webster was saying. They went through it twice, and then Webster fell silent. He smiled, nodded at Gaines.

“Sheriff,” he said.

“You think that girl was one of the better angels, Michael?”

“Everyone thought she was an angel, Sheriff.”

“I figure she might very well have been, you know?”

Webster shrugged, at once noncommittally, and then he glanced away, looked down, and when he looked back, there seemed to be tears in his eyes. What was this? Remorse?

“You hungry, Michael?”

“Not ’specially.”

“You eaten anything today?”

Webster shook his head.

“I’m gonna send out for some sandwiches. I’m gonna come on in there with you and we can talk, and then we can have some sandwiches. Sound okay to you?”

“Sure thing, Sheriff.”

“What do you like?”

“Oh, anything you got. Ham on rye, cheese, whatever’s easy.”

Gaines turned and nodded at Hagen. Hagen gave the cell keys to Gaines and then headed for the stairwell.

“Bring some Coke, as well,” Gaines called out, and then—turning back to Webster—asked, “Or do you want root beer?”

“Coke is good,” Webster replied.

Hagen looked back at Gaines, the expression on his face like, What, all of a sudden I’m a waiter?

Gaines paused until he heard the door close at the top of the stairwell, and then he took out his gun, laid it on the floor out of arm’s reach from the cell, and unlocked the door.

Webster just stayed right where he was, seated there on the bunk, his feet bare, his hands beneath his thighs, but Gaines was alert for any movement, attuned to the slightest shift in Webster’s position. That same sense returned. Gaines could smell the funk of the waterlogged riverbank, the smell of the girl as she surfaced, the smell of her in the morgue as she lay there with her torso unlaced.

Gaines could picture Victor Powell’s face as the snake emerged from the box, its tail in its mouth.

Hesitating for just a moment, Gaines then closed the cell door behind him. It remained ajar, unlocked, but Gaines positioned himself on the edge of the bunk so he could merely stand and block Webster if Webster attempted to run.

There was silence between them for a moment, and then Gaines spoke.

“So you wanna tell me about Nancy Denton, Michael?”

Webster was looking toward the inclined vent, at the vague light that crept on through, at the motes of dust dancing and shifting perpetually.

“I just don’t know what to say, Sheriff,” Webster replied.

“Just tell me whatever you can . . . whatever you want to tell me . . .”

“Well, I don’t know what it is, aside from a terrible thing an’ all. Her being dead like that and what was done to her—”

“Done to her?”

“The way she was killed, you know? She was strangled. She was held down and the life was strangled right out of her.”

“Right,” Gaines said. So consumed had he been by the fact that her heart had been removed that he had failed to appreciate what she must have gone through before she died. She had been strangled to death. Someone—and it certainly seemed that Michael Webster was the primary candidate in that moment—had put their hands around her pale throat and choked her. They had looked right into her eyes, a fragile teenage girl, and had not let go until she had gasped her final, tortured breath. Sixteen years old. It was no life at all. Jesus Christ.

Gaines felt a sudden hatred for Webster. A intense feeling overcame him, a sense of righteous outrage, a feeling that this business would be resolved right here, right now if he also put his hands around Webster’s throat and choked the last of his sick life right out of him.

Gaines closed his eyes for just a moment. He breathed deeply. He tried to center himself.

“It’s a terrible, terrible business,” Webster said. “Somethin’ like that done to a young girl. How do you deal with something like that, Sheriff?”

Webster looked at Gaines.

Gaines didn’t speak.

“I mean, we saw some things out there,” Webster went on. “We saw the worst of all of it out there. Kids all blown to hell an’ back. People decapitated, people run through with knives and machetes. People smashed up in pieces and spread all through the trees, right? We seen all of it and then some, but there’s little I can remember that compares to Nancy Denton . . . seein’ her lyin’ there, not a movement, not a sound . . .”

Webster’s voice trailed away.

Gaines was struggling to comprehend how someone could do such a thing and then speak of it with such distance. Was this what war had done to Lieutenant Michael Webster? Was this the legacy of Guadalcanal for this man? For America? Surely not, for Gaines himself had seen the very things of which Webster spoke and yet he was not compelled to strangle a child, to cut out her heart, to defile her body in such a way and then bury it in mud. No, this was not the war; this was just the man.

“So you want to tell me how it happened, Michael?” Gaines repeated.

Webster shook his head. “I don’t want to say nothin’.”

Gaines turned at the sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs. Hagen came down with sandwiches, bottles of Coke. Gaines went out through the door and collected them. He returned to the cell, set the sandwiches on the bunk, handed a bottle to Webster, and then started eating.

Webster followed suit, neither of them speaking, Webster looking in the direction of the vent, Gaines looking at his shoes, every once in a while glancing at the man beside him.