“This doesn’t make any sense,” Thurston said. “The fact that she is here and still a teenager is the thing that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why? Why doesn’t it make sense?”

“Because she’s been missing for a long time, John,” Powell said. He looked at Thurston. “How long, Bob? How long since she went missing?”

“It was in fifty-four,” Thurston replied. “She went missing toward the end of 1954.”

Powell exhaled audibly and closed his eyes for a moment. “Well, we found her, didn’t we? Twenty years it took, but we found her . . . and she was here all along . . .”

“Twenty years?” Gaines asked. “1954? You can’t be serious. There must be a mistake. This can’t be her. How can she have gone missing twenty years ago and still look the same?”

“I guess she was dead within hours or days of her disappearance,” Powell said, “and whoever did this to her, well, they buried her in the mud, and the mud kept her just as she was.”

“This is unbelievable,” Gaines said.

“Believe it,” Thurston said. “This is Nancy Denton. No doubt, no question, no hesitation. I knew it the moment I saw her.”

“And we have to tell her mother,” Powell said.

“You want me to come with you, John?” Thurston asked.

Gaines shook his head. “No, I need you here with Victor. I need the autopsy done. I need to find out how she died. I need . . .” He stepped away from the table and started toward the door, turning back as he reached it and looking at both Thurston and Powell in turn. Then he looked at the body on the table once again. “You have to be right. You have to be sure. You have to tell me that there is no chance it could be someone else.”

“It’s her, John,” Thurston said. “I treated her a dozen times for colds and coughs, measles one time, I think . . . I would know this girl anywhere.”

“Good God almighty,” Gaines said. “I need . . . I need . . .”

“You need to go tell Judith Denton that her daughter’s come home . . .”

Gaines stood stock-still for just a second, and then he turned and walked down the corridor.

Thurston looked at Powell. Powell looked down at Nancy.

“So let’s find out what happened to you, my dear,” he said softly, and began to roll up his sleeves.

4

Judith Denton was damaged below the waterline. She seemed to have been born under a black star that had followed her for life. She was raised in the jumble of shacks at the edge of the county line, amid dark cedar swamps, the trees dressed in Spanish moss and Virginia creeper as if some huge spider had spent eons building defenses. The land was poisoned with Australian pine, with melaleuca trees and Brazilian pepper, and what little irrigation could be mustered from the bayous did not make the farming any easier. Judith’s father—Marcus—was an itinerant journeyman, a guitar player, a field hand, and always ready for the next big thing. His left nostril was gapped with an upside-down V, a gash too severe to heal and close, and the scar from the upward arc of a shrub knife had dissected his cheek, his eyelid, and his forehead with a pale line that disappeared somewhere within his hair. Years before, there was fighting down here, boxers who would grease their ears and shoulders so they could never be held. Marcus Denton was in there taking bets, making a handful of dollars from sweaty men aiming to thump one another senseless. He was a small and furtive character, always on the edge of things, his skin the color of sour cream. His wife, Evangelina, her shoes perforated with rot, her skirt nothing more than a ragtag collection of mismatched shirt pockets stitched to a slip, followed on behind him like he might one day know something of worth. Such a day never came. Judith—the only child of this couple of transient hopefuls—was born in March of 1917. She was little more than a year old when Marcus went down with a steamer on the Mississippi near Vidalia. Late at night, almost silent, nothing but the sound of bubbles like lips smacking, Marcus Denton and his pitiful luggage—his cards, his pocket watch, his dreams and aspirations for the next big thing—disappeared with eleven crew and sixteen guests beneath the pitch-black water. Not so much a life as a brief distraction between birth and death, events uncomfortably close to each other, his presence no more than a semicolon in between.

So Judith was raised by Evangelina, more a drunk than a mother, and when Evangelina died in May of 1937, Judith—all of twenty years old—upped and left for Whytesburg, perhaps believing that a change of location would establish the precedent for a change in fortune. That change, significantly less fortunate than she’d perhaps hoped, came in the guise of Garfield Thomasian, a shoe salesman out of Biloxi with a new station wagon and a popular line in smart cordovan wingtips. Their affair was brief and heated, fruitful in the way of Judith’s immediate pregnancy, but Garfield Thomasian didn’t hang around to see the results of his efforts. He was gone—gone, but not forgotten. Exhaustive attempts to locate him resulted in nothing but the discovery of a similar pattern of philandering adventures across this and several other states. Thomasian was a bad squall; he blew in, blew out, left nothing but small devastations in his wake.

Judith went the term, and when Nancy was born on the 10th of June, 1938, her mother believed that perhaps good things could come from bad. The child was beautiful and bright, as unlike the father as any betrayed mother could hope for, and things seemed to take a turn for the better.

Of Judith Denton, Gaines knew a little. Of her daughter, Nancy, he had known nothing. Not until today. Perhaps a small ghost of Whytesburg’s past, only those present at the time being party to such information as rumor and hearsay could provide.

Nancy Denton’s disappearance one warm evening in August of 1954 preceded Gaines’s official investigatory responsibilities by two decades, and only now—the 24th of July, 1974—was Whytesburg aware of the fact that Nancy never really did go missing.

Nancy Denton, buried in the mud at the side of the river, had been here all along.

Gaines, still confused, still uncertain as to how such a thing could have happened, how a body could be preserved without deterioration to such an extent as was the case here, nevertheless understood the weight of this thing.

Thurston had possessed no doubt as to the identity of the girl.

It seemed that Judith Denton had been a single mother with a single child.

But no longer.

Now she would be a single mother with no child at all.

Gaines exited his car a half block from the Denton house and stood for a moment. He took a deep breath and considered what was ahead of him. Children went missing and children died. Didn’t matter which town, which city, it was the same everywhere. Which was better—vanished or dead? If they were dead, perhaps some sense of closure could be attained. Perhaps. But if they vanished, there was always the hope that they would return. That, in itself, was enough to have you waiting for the rest of your life. Persuading yourself to just move on felt like the worst kind of betrayal, as if forgetting would consign them to history. Was this how Judith Denton had spent the last two decades? Looking from the window into the street? Imagining that one day her daughter might turn the corner and be standing right there in the yard? And what would Judith Denton fear? That she would not recognize her? That with each passing year, the daughter had grown and changed, had become a woman, and that she could walk right by her in the street and never know?

This was a strange day. A strange day indeed.

Fifteen yards from the road, Gaines met Judith’s neighbor, Roy Nestor. Gaines had taken him in on a suspected B&E a couple of years before. Didn’t ever come to anything, but here it didn’t matter. Once you got the label, the label stuck. He had a long history of trickery and connivance. A century earlier, he’d have sold snake oil remedies to folks who had insufficient money to feed their kids. Rumor gave him a dozen post office boxes in a dozen different names, and into those boxes would come small-denomination checks for worthless items advertised in leaflets and newspapers, said items never delivered. The amounts paid were too insignificant for disgruntled and disappointed clients to chase refunds, even on principle, but those small amounts added up to handsome totals for Roy Nestor. Nestor would never find permanent work again. He was a journeyman, just as Marcus Denton had been, and Gaines had heard word of him in Wiggins, Lucedale, as far north as Poplarville, even Columbia where the I-98 met the Pearl River. He was a drinker and a fighter, forever smelled of bad armpits and stale tobacco, and irrespective of whatever money he might have swindled from people, he always looked homeless, his clothes raggedy, his shoes burst open and irreparable.