“Last I heard, she was still at the Wade house, but that was a good while back, a year at least, and it’s not something I’ve been keepin’ tabs on, you know?”

“Nate?”

“Couldn’t tell you, Sheriff. Didn’t know her, didn’t really know any of them by face. Just knew the name, a little of the business dealings. Not like Ed here. Ed is Whytesburg, whereas I’m Hatties-burg.”

“So, to Nancy Denton,” Gaines said.

“I wasn’t deputy back then,” Holland said. “Deputy back then was George Austin, but he died in sixty-seven, and that’s when I took over. Don Bicklow was sheriff, as you know. But regardless, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to talk about. Everyone figured she was a runaway. She was spirited girl, John, a firecracker, you know? It was before I was in the department. I was away a lot of the time, traveling around and about, selling shoes and tires and whatnot, but I remember them kids all together. Her and Matthias, the other Wades, Michael Webster when he came back from the war, and Maryanne Benedict—”

“That was the other one I wanted to ask you about,” Gaines interjected. “The Benedict girl.”

“Lives in Gulfport,” Holland said. “And I know that because her father and I were friends a long while back. Her parents are both dead now, but I have always kept tabs on her. Haven’t spoken to her since . . . oh, I don’t know, Christmas maybe, but last time I did, she was still down there.”

“Married? Kids?”

“Nope, never did marry,” Holland said. “Strange. Always seemed like she’d make just the best mother.”

“You have an address for her?”

“Sure do,” Holland said. “Lives on Hester Road in Gulfport.”

“Knew it would be a worthwhile trip out here,” Gaines said.

“Hell, Sheriff, places like this, everyone knows everyone, and they’re all in and out of one another’s business, right?”

“Seems a shame such familiarity comes up most useful when someone gets themselves killed,” Gaines said.

“Never a truer word,” Ross replied.

“I’ll be off to see her, then.” Gaines drained his coffee cup, appreciated the warm bloom of liquor in his chest, and rose from his chair. “I don’t doubt I’ll be back with more questions at some point.”

“Look forward to it, Sheriff,” Ross said, and walked Gaines out to the porch.

Gaines called Hagen from the car before he’d even left Nate Ross’s driveway.

“I’m off to see this Maryanne Benedict. Got her address from Eddie.”

“I was checking on her, too. Got an address. Hester Road in Gulfport, right?”

“Jeez, Richard, I figure I might as well just go home and let you do all the work. Seems you’re better at it than me.”

“I didn’t want to be the one to raise that point, John, but . . .”

Gaines laughed, hung up the radio, started the engine, and pulled away.

35

For some reason, Gaines thought of his father as he drove the thirty or so miles to Gulfport.

It was late afternoon, the day had cooled somewhat, some song had come on the radio, and he had gotten to thinking about the man, about what life might have been like for him and his mother had Edward Gaines returned from the war instead of losing his life somewhere along the road near Malmedy and Stavelot two days before Christmas, 1944.

Gaines had been four years old at the time, could recall nothing personal about him, save the fact that, for some brief while, there had been someone other than his mother in the house. A presence, that was all. Just a fatherly presence.

From what his mother had told him, Edward Gaines was a tough man. Awkward, opinionated, as if he’d set himself to stand at some angle contrary to the world and weather whatever came. Alice said that he was the kind of man who believed that abstinence and self-denial were somehow the roads to health and good humor. His was not and never would be a life of comforts, and though she sensed that sometimes he would long for such things and feel an ache of absence in his bones, he would never accede to such temptations. To succumb would be to admit defeat. To what, he did not know nor care. It would simply be defeat, and this was something he never wished to have said of him. But he provided for his wife and then his son, and though he did not squander what little money they had on fripperies and such, he did ensure that there was always sufficient of what was needed. And then the war came, the same year that he and Alice were married, and Edward Gaines watched the drama unfold with a weather eye. He knew it would ultimately turn toward the Pacific, toward the need for America to engage in this struggle, and when that need came, he was one of the first in line. So he went, and he survived for thirteen or fourteen months, and then it was all done.

Gaines had looked for Malmedy on a map one time. It was in a province called Liège in Belgium. It was infamous during the Battle of the Bulge, for here the SS had murdered eighty-four American prisoners. And then—during that fateful week in December of 1944, despite the fact that the area was under US control—it had been relentlessly bombed by US forces. Two hundred civilians were killed. The number of American soldiers who lost their lives was not revealed by the Department of Defense.

Gaines did not want to believe that his father had been killed by a bomb made at the Elwood Ordnance Plant in Illinois. He did not want to know if the explosive that blew him to pieces had been manufactured by E.I. du Pont or Sanderson and Porter or the United States Rubber Company. He did not want details. He wanted to believe that his father had died doing whatever he considered was the right thing to do—for himself, for his family, for his country. It was that simple.

And why he thought of him then, as he drove along 10 toward Lyman and then took the south turning to Gulfport, he did not know. Perhaps it was this talk of dying, of childhood friends, of people who went missing and never returned.

Or perhaps none of these things.

Perhaps it was nothing more than some deep-rooted sense of aloneness that invaded his thoughts and emotions every once in a while.

Like when he thought of Linda and the child that never was.

He wondered where she was now, what she was doing, if she had married, raised a family, whether she ever thought of him.

Did a distant memory of John Gaines invade her thoughts in those quiet times, the times that the world briefly stopped and there was space between the minutes?

Maybe, Gaines thought, once this thing was done, once he knew the truth of what had really happened that night in August of 1954, he would take some time away from the horrors of the world—those that he remembered from his own war experiences, those that he was now witnessing—and look at the possibility of remedying the sense of aloneness that seemed to be growing ever more noticeable. Maybe Bob Thurston was right. Maybe Alice would hang on in there until she believed her son would be okay without her. She was, if nothing else, the personification of maternal instinct. That’s the only way she could be described, as if she knew that her place on this earth was to care for everyone who fell within her circle of influence. Caring was something of which she would never grow tired. Caring for others seemed not to drain her, but to revive her, as if her heart were a battery that absorbed all those thank-yous and converted them into whatever energy was needed to go on. Maybe it was now time to let her go. Such a thought did not instill a sense of guilt in Gaines, but rather a sense of relief, if not for himself then for his mother. She was in pain—he knew that—and almost constantly. How much pain, he did not know, and she would never do anything but her best to hide it. Again, that was borne out of her consideration for him. She should have married again. She should have had more children. Twenty-nine years old when she lost her one and only husband, and she had then spent the rest of her life alone. Had she felt that marrying again would be a betrayal of Edward’s memory? Had she believed that to take another husband, to have had more children, would somehow have caused difficulty for her son? There would be an explanation for her choice, of course, but just as Gaines was unaware of it, so he too believed that Alice might herself be unaware. There was no explaining his own decision to remain single, but remain so he did.