Gaines was even more uncertain than when he had left the office. He started to put the newspaper clippings back where he’d taken them from, careful not to disturb their original order, and it was then that he found the Bible. Battered, dog-eared, the leather cracked in places, it seemed not only old, but neglected. Flicking through it for any marker or inserts, of which there were none, he noticed the occasional underlined passage. Inside the front cover was a handwritten scrawl. This helped me. E. Who was E? Right now it was of no great concern. Maybe it was a war buddy of Webster’s, someone from the VA perhaps. As Gaines stacked the boxes once more, he found the photo album. It was there, down against the baseboard, and he nearly missed it. But something drew him to it, and even as he opened it up to look at the first picture, he hoped that here he would find something more than circumstantial evidence and the ramblings of a crazy man to connect Michael Webster to Nancy Denton.

In the pictures she was alive. So utterly alive. She seemed always to be smiling, and when she was not smiling, she was laughing. There were images of her with three or four others, the same faces appearing time and again. There was no mistaking the presence of Lieutenant Michael Webster, sometimes in his own clothes, sometimes in uniform, and in these pictures there was no mistaking the familiarity and affection that seemed to exist between Webster the killer and Nancy the victim. Wasn’t it the case that more than eighty percent of murders were perpetrated by people who were known to the victim? The others that recurred constantly included a girl who seemed a year or two younger than Nancy, two young men who bore similarities enough to be related, and every once in a while a much younger girl. A crowd of childhood friends, it seemed, and their images looked back at Gaines from the monochrome snapshots of years gone by, and he wondered what had really happened on the August night in 1954 that saw Nancy Denton dead.

Gaines took the album and the Bible to the car. He put them in the trunk. He closed up Webster’s room and drove back to the office.

Once there, Gaines instructed Hagen to secure everything in the evidence room, itself little more than a store cupboard with a lock, but it sufficed for those very rare occasions when Whytesburg needed somewhere to secure items of significance or value.

Gaines then called Dalton out at the motel.

“We got anything?” he asked.

“Not a great deal, Sheriff. They’re all saying the same thing. Quiet guy. Kept himself to himself. Hardly ever saw him. Kind of intense. Apart from that, squat.”

“I reckoned that would be the case. So finish up there, and then get back here.”

There was a moment’s pause.

“What is it, Forrest?”

“Figured we’d maybe be done for the night. We’re already a couple of hours over shift hours, Sheriff …”

“Have a sixteen year-old-girl here, Officer Dalton. Sixteen years old. Don’t much care that it happened twenty years ago, but I have a whacko in the basement who sawed her pretty much in two. You got a choice. You can either come back here and keep an eye on him, or you can go out and spend the night consoling her mother.”

“Yes,” Dalton replied. “Understood, Sheriff. Sorry about that. I’ll see you at the office.”

20

Gaines went on down to the basement to see Webster. He found him there on the bunk, outside the door a plate with a couple of fried pork chops and some rice and beans. Webster hadn’t touched it.

Gaines recognized the expression on Webster’s face. It was called the thousand-yard stare. In Gaines’s experience, mostly those he had known at the VA, all veterans had it at one time or another—the odd moment, perhaps a week apart, growing ever more infrequent as the months elapsed. Seems that Webster had it almost all the time. Once again, the man seemed to possess the ability to look right through Gaines, and he did it with such intensity that Gaines felt like nothing at all. It really was that intense. If Webster had just reached out in that moment, Gaines knew Webster’s fingers would touch him and then pass right on through.

“Michael?” Gaines said.

A faint smile crossed Webster’s lips.

Gaines had also seen that smile before—the haunted, guilty survivor’s smile—at the VA, at the Veterans Hospital up in Jackson, in the awkward silence of the Demobilization Center as those who had served their tours were processed out of a war and back into a world that neither could, nor would ever, understand. But above that smile were the eyes. Nineteen- and twenty-year-olds with a look in their eyes they should not have possessed until they reached their forties. Perhaps they still believed they wouldn’t make it, that their lives could be taken at any moment, so they thought it best to assume such expressions now while they still had a chance. Cynical, bitter, world-weary, battle-fatigued, hardened in so many ways, save those ways that were useful in any other life.

Webster looked like that, as did Gaines, but Gaines knew he was still fighting against it, still escaping from it, and one day he perhaps would.

“Sheriff,” Webster said.

“Mike . . . I need you to tell me what happened to her heart.”

Webster closed his eyes, opened them again, almost in slow motion. “It went into a box, Sheriff. A box that could not be broken by root nor animal nor lightning nor rain. That was what needed to be done. Four yards east, twelve yards north from where the body was planted under . . .”

“Planted under?”

“Want something to grow, well, you gotta plant it under, right?”

Gaines was silent for a moment. “You put her heart in a box.”

“I did.”

“What kind of box did you use, Mike?”

“I used a strong metal box that had belonged to my father, and I emptied out the nails and screws, and I wrapped Nancy’s heart in cloth, and I tied the cloth tight, and then I buried the box, like I said.”

“Four east, twelve north from where you buried her body.”

“ ’S right.”

Gaines turned and walked to the base of the stairwell. He turned and looked back at Webster. Webster was gone again—into the thousand-yard stare, into whatever world existed behind those dark and distant eyes.

Back upstairs, he told Hagen to load the car with as many torches as he could find.

“And get sawhorses, crime-scene tape, rope as well.”

Hagen complied without questioning their purpose. Perhaps he had now reconciled himself to the fact that from here it would likely get worse rather than better.

Gaines checked with Barbara Jacobs if there were any outstanding messages, learned there were none, and then he headed out front to the car. What it was that alerted him, he did not know, but before he reached reception, he was aware that trouble had arrived.

Gaines had been anticipating the inevitable appearance of ex– deputy sheriff Eddie Holland, alongside him his sidekick, Nate Ross, one-time legal eagle around these parts, now nothing more than a retired lawyer with too much time and money. Even when he’d worked under Don Bicklow, Holland had been contrariwise. Always against the grain of things, sometimes stating opinions simply because they countered the consensus. Disagreeable for disagreements’ sake. Whichever ways considered, something of an asshole. However, he had mellowed with age, it seemed, and though he spent a good deal too much attention concerning himself with the affairs of others, Gaines did not dislike him. He did not dislike either of them, truth be known, but they always had too much to say when he had too little time to listen. Ross had been a very successful attorney, at first a public defender, then owning and managing his own practice, and then, finally, he had become a state prosecutor. Maybe he had tired of listening to his clients’ lies and bullshit and decided that jail was a better place for them. Once retired, he started looking for someplace to drown his sorrows and relieve his boredom. He used to live up in some fancy place in Hattiesburg, but then his wife died, and the three kids they’d wrestled into adulthood apparently felt there was no need to come home now that their mother had passed. Ross had rattled around the empty halls and emptier rooms for a handful of months and then sold the place for three times more than he’d paid. New money from the North was buying into the appearance of old-South wealth and style, and some stationery and office supplies tycoon had snapped up the Ross mansion. Gaines had seen the place one time—reputedly bought with money earned from prosecuting black people for things that had never happened or had been perpetrated by whites—and it looked like a three-tier wedding cake. So Nate Ross came to Whytesburg, had arrived back in the fall of 1970, just a few months after Gaines had graduated from Vicksburg and taken the job in Breed County. The sorrows Nate Ross was trying to drown still weren’t dead. They had some brave pair of lungs, or maybe some secret supply of oxygen unbeknownst to Ross. Regardless, he kept sluicing down those sorrows with good, hard liquor in the hope that he’d wake up happier tomorrow.