“So who is this Maryanne Benedict?”

“Not a great deal to go on as yet. I called up Jim Hughes. He says he vaguely remembers her but didn’t know her too well. Knew the parents, but they moved away a good while back. Maryanne was an only child, a couple of years younger than Nancy, according to the notes.”

“So if she’s alive, she’d be—what?—early thirties.”

“Right. Thirty-four, if she was fourteen when Nancy disappeared.”

“Well, you get on to tracking her down,” Gaines said. “Least of all, she might want to know that two of her childhood friends are dead, and she might be able to give us something else on the Denton girl’s disappearance.”

Hagen left. Gaines started calling around to locate Eddie Holland. Holland, predictably, was at Nate Ross’s place down on Coopers Road. Gaines asked if he could come over and speak with them. Ross seemed all too eager to receive Gaines, and Gaines knew why. There was something going on that was a great deal more interesting than the weather, and Nate Ross would be first in line to get involved.

Gaines felt it was a visit worth making. For all their bluff and bravado, Ross and Holland were good people. They were lonely; that was all. Lonely without careers, lonely without wives. They talked too much, they held court too often, voiced too many unwanted opinions, but every town in the South had their own Ross and Holland, that was for sure. They drank too much. That was obvious from the get-go. Gaines knew the pattern. At first you waited until dark before the first drink, and then dark became sunset became dusk became twilight, and finally there was no waiting at all. If you were awake, you were drunk, and it stayed that way until the drink carried you down through the closing of your life.

Perhaps that was the way he himself would go, the way that his predecessor—Don Bicklow—would have gone, had he not fucked himself into an early grave with a fifty-two-year-old widow out near Wiggins.

Ross’s house was old-style South, the balustrades, the balcony out front, the veranda and porch. Ross was there at the screen door as Gaines pulled up, and Eddie Holland was right behind him.

“Gentlemen,” Gaines said, removing his hat and leaving it on the passenger seat of the car.

“Sheriff,” Nate Ross replied, and he came down the steps to meet Gaines.

Once greetings were exchanged, Gaines followed them into the house, was directed to the kitchen, where Holland had a pot of coffee on the stove.

It did not pass Gaines by that Holland put a splash of bourbon in each cup before it was delivered to the table. Such was the way of things in Nate Ross’s house.

“So, how can we assist you, Sheriff?” Eddie Holland said as he took a seat facing Gaines.

“Information,” Gaines said.

“About?”

“Well, there’s one area where I know you can help me and one area you might not be able to help me, and that’s why I’m here.”

“Shoot,” Ross said.

“This you won’t know about so much, Nate, but back in August of 1954, a girl went missing—”

“Nancy Denton,” Holland said.

“Right. And now we’ve found her. And I believed that Mike Webster was responsible for her killing, but now I’m not so sure. I wanted to find out all I could about the original disappearance from Judith, but—”

“She committed suicide,” Ross interjected.

“And Webster is dead as well,” Gaines went on, unsurprised that Ross already knew about Judith. “And so here I am, dealing with a twenty-year-old runaway case that wasn’t really a runaway, a dead mother, a dead primary suspect, and I don’t know shit about what the hell is going on . . .”

“Except that Matthias Wade is gonna be involved, one way or another,” Holland said. “Because he paid Webster’s bail, and all of a sudden Webster is burned to hell without his head and his hand in a motel cabin out toward Bogalusa.”

“Which brings me to my second area of questions,” Gaines said, also unsurprised that Holland would have mentioned Wade’s name so readily, or that he knew of Webster’s unfortunate and distressing end. Holland had been around a long time. Whytesburg was a small town. There was little that stayed secret in such places.

“The Wades,” Gaines said, matter-of-factly. “That’s what I want to know about.”

“And what do you want to know about the Wades?” Ross asked.

“Anything you’ve got, Nate. That would be a start.”

Nate Ross shrugged. He sipped his loaded coffee, nodded at Holland, and Holland refreshed the brew with a mite more spirit. He advanced the bottle to Gaines, but Gaines declined.

“Ed’ll know more about the family as a whole, being from here an’ all. But Earl? Earl Wade must be all of seventy-five or eighty by now. Hardheaded son of a bitch, business-wise, at least. Had some dealings with him back in the early fifties, some property and land he was interested in up in Hattiesburg. The deal didn’t go through eventually, but he was ballbreaker, I’ll tell you.”

“His wife?” Gaines asked.

“His wife was Lillian Tresselt,” Holland said. “A good ten or fifteen years younger than him. They had four kids, as far as I recall, Matthias being the eldest. He’s the one who’ll inherit the businesses and the estate when the old man finally gives up the ghost.”

“His wife was Lillian Tresselt?”

“Yeah, was,” Ross went on. “She drank herself to death. In fact, she died around the same time as I was working on that Hattiesburg thing, so that must have been getting toward the end of fifty-two. Of course, it was never reported that she drank herself to death, but she did. She was famous for her drunken performances at the parties that Wade used to throw.”

“And their kids?” Gaines had out his notebook, started writing things down.

“Matthias is the eldest,” Holland said. “Then there’s Catherine, Eugene, then Della. As far as I know, Catherine is still married, has a family up in Tupelo. I think her husband’s a lawyer.”

“Yes, he is,” Ross said. “I know that because I met a guy a while back who was on some other realty deal with Wade. He told me that the eldest daughter’s fiancé was studying up for the law and was gonna be handling all of the Wade work when he finally got his practice.”

“His name?” Gaines asked.

Ross shook his head, looked at Holland.

“I don’t recall,” Holland said.

“So the next one?”

“Next one is Eugene, and he’s about as far from the old man as you could get. Isn’t he an artist or something, an actor maybe?”

“Musician,” Holland said. “Lives in Memphis, last I heard. He’d be maybe mid-thirties or so. Guitar player, I think. Singer, too. Can’t say as I’ve ever heard the name Eugene Wade on the wireless, so maybe he ain’t doin’ so good.”

“Could use a stage name,” Ross said. “Lot of them kind do that sort of thing. Use a false name an’ all, the musicians and the TV folk and whoever . . .”

“So Eugene isn’t like his father?” Gaines prompted, steering the discussion away from bohemian lifestyle choices and back to the matter at hand.

“Hell no,” Holland said. “Earl is a businessman through and through. Everything is money and influence and power and politics an’ all that. Eugene was the odd one in the bunch, the one that didn’t make sense. And after his mother died, well, I don’t know what was going through his mind, but he spent a good deal of time in church. Lookin’ for answers, maybe. Tryin’ to figure out why his ma died an’ all that.”

“Any possibility he wasn’t Earl’s child?”

Neither Ross nor Holland responded, and then Ross leaned forward and said, “Hell, son, this is the South. Anything’s possible, right?”

“So after Eugene?”

“There was Della,” Holland said, “and if ever there was a girl who took after her mother, it was Della Wade. She was one pretty girl, let me tell you, and I can imagine she is one pretty young woman.”

“You know where she’s at?”