When they were done, Gaines took the bottles out and placed them near the wall on the far side. He went back to the cell and sat down.

“We saw the lightning and that was the guns,” Webster suddenly said, “and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns . . . and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling . . . and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped . . .”

Gaines frowned.

“Harriet Tubman said that,” Webster explained. “And there were two guys on the radio back in sixty-seven, guys called Gragni and Rado, and they said that the draft was white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.” He smiled. “It was a different war, but it was the same war.”

Gaines nodded. “I heard that.”

“You know what Hemingway said?” Webster asked.

“No, Mike, what did he say?”

“Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. That’s what he said.”

“Right.”

“But war is war, right? War is about two groups of people who know they might die, and they go anyway. They go because they believe in something, because they think something is important enough to fight for.”

“Except for the draft.”

“Even the draft,” Webster said. “There were plenty of people who didn’t go, plenty who dodged it, went to Canada and whatever. Conscientious objection an’ all that.” Webster smiled. “But that’s not the point here, is it? The point here is that Nancy Denton wasn’t in no war. She wasn’t in no army. She wasn’t fighting for anything except her own life. And it was taken anyway, wasn’t it? Her life was taken anyway, and what the hell did she ever do to anyone?”

“I don’t know, Mike. Why don’t you tell me what she did?”

Webster looked at Gaines. His expression was one of confusion. “What did she do? It wasn’t what she did, Sheriff; it was who she was. Bright, pretty, funny, kind. That’s who she was, and that’s why she had to die like that? Everyone loved her, but this time she was loved too much . . .”

“Loving someone too much means you have to kill them? Is that it? Because you don’t want anyone else to have them?”

“Christ almighty knows, Sheriff. Hell, maybe it was just to feel what it was like to strangle a girl like that.”

“Is that what happened?”

“Well, it’s what I think, is all,” Webster said. “You just asked me what I thought an’ I told you.”

“Was there a ritual of some kind? Is that why she was killed?”

Webster frowned, and for a moment he looked vexed. “How the hell do you think I know that?” he asked. “You think if I knew I wouldn’t tell you?”

“I don’t know, Mike,” Gaines replied. “I don’t know anything about you. You could be an honest man; you could be a liar. I just know that I have a dead sixteen-year-old girl and a lot of people waiting for an explanation.”

“Sixteen. That’s no time at all. That ain’t any kind of a life, is it, Sheriff?” Webster replied, echoing Gaines’s own thoughts from just moments before.

“No, Mike, it isn’t.”

Webster whistled through his teeth. “Sixteen years old. Jesus Christ almighty.”

“Does that change the way you feel about her?” Gaines asked.

Webster didn’t speak for a moment. He looked away toward the vent and then back at Gaines. “Change the way I feel about her?”

“Thinking about her being sixteen.”

“Would it have made a difference if she was fourteen, or fifteen maybe? Hell no, she would still be nothing but a child, Sheriff. You think if she was a year or two older it would have been any less worse?”

“No, Mike, I don’t.”

“Well, what the hell you askin’ me that for, then?”

“I’m just trying to understand why someone would do this to a girl like Nancy Denton, is all. I’m just trying to understand—”

“Same as me. I’m tryin’ to understand, too. Hell, why does anyone do anything crazy? Because they’re crazy, that’s why. Why do people start wars? Why do people murder other people? Why do people up and marry some girl and then get tired of her and beat her half to death and throw her out the car into the fucking road? I don’t know why, Sheriff. Seems to me you’d be the better one to answer that question, wouldn’t you say?”

“I don’t understand it, Mike . . . no better than you.”

Webster smiled wryly. “Then if you don’t get it an’ I don’t get it, I’d say we’re screwed.”

Gaines was quiet, and then the need to know overcame his training and his common sense. “Tell me what happened, Mike.”

“ ’Tain’t complicated. Happened not half a mile from where I live. She was just there, just right there in a shack at the side of the road. Just lying there in the doorway. Picked her up and took her back to my place. Did what I could there, and then I buried her near running water.”

“Why running water, Mike?”

“ ’S what my friend said to do.”

“Friend? What friend?”

“Friend I had back then. Al Warren was his name.”

“Was his name?”

Webster shook his head. “He didn’t make it back. He died out there. He was like a brother to me. Hard to explain that, but when you’re in a unit together, when you fight together, when you are engaged in looking after someone else’s life day after day, something happens. It’s closer than brothers, you know? Like it’s something spiritual. He was the smartest man I ever knew. No, not the smartest; he was the wisest. He was like a Buddhist or something. He was like a religious guy, but not like going to church and sayin’ prayers and whatever. He was true religion, like it was something he had a mission to do. A mission for the truth, you know?”

“I don’t understand, Michael. Your friend in the war told you to bury Nancy Denton in the riverbank?”

“He told me a lot of things, Sheriff. All about the magic. He told me who to trust and who not to trust. It was because of him I made the deal, and the deal I made has got me where I am now. I knew it would happen, and I knew I’d have to make the payback. I just didn’t know when.”

“The payback?”

“For getting out of there. For getting through the war despite the fact that everyone around me, everyone I knew, was blown to shit that day. I made a deal for that, and just to prove to me that the deal was good, that thing happened in fifty-two, and it was the same thing all over again. That’s when they started calling me the luckiest man alive.” Webster shook his head resignedly, and then he looked through Gaines as if Gaines were not there at all. “They didn’t understand that I was already dead. Had been dead ever since the moment I made that deal.”

“I don’t understand, Michael. What deal? What payback? What happened in fifty-two?”

Michael shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? She’s gone. She’s dead. She ain’t never comin’ back. Whatever I did to help her after she was dead, it all counts for shit now, doesn’t it?”

Webster turned and looked at Gaines directly. This time Gaines believed that Mike was really seeing him. Webster’s eyes were filled with tears, his skin pale, and a fine sweat varnished his brow. He looked sick, upset, agitated. “Just trying to do whatever I could to get her through this thing. I read stuff afterward, you know? Trying to understand what I’d done. Trying to understand the deal I’d made, if there was any way out of it. Well, I found out one thing for sure. There ain’t no way out of a deal like that. I was raised in Louisiana, out in Baton Rouge, and I heard what Al was saying, ’cause he was out of Louisiana, too, and later on, afterward, I read all about that stuff, and I figured there had to be some truth in some of it. That’s the way it goes when you’re raised out that way . . .”

Gaines heard the words, words he had heard before, and the memories came back, images from his own childhood, the things he had seen, and he knew what Webster was talking about.