Gaines didn’t reply. He did not know the answer to that question either. He did not wish to voice his suspicions or enter into any discussion with Maryanne Benedict until she began that discussion. He was determined not to lead her.

“You have your suspicions, Sheriff?” she asked.

Gaines shook his head.

“Not even Matthias?”

Gaines hesitated. Once again, he tried to give away nothing in his expression. Evidently he failed.

“Matthias is a law unto himself,” Maryanne said.

“Why do you say that?”

“People with money always are.”

“You know him well?”

“No,” she said matter-of-factly. “I knew him, at least to some degree, when we were younger, but we were never that close. I spent more time with Eugene than I did with Matthias. But Nancy was my closest friend. Nancy was like my sister . . .”

“I can imagine how difficult—”

“Can you, Sheriff?”

Gaines looked at her. “Yes, Miss Benedict, I can.”

She looked down at the floor, then looked at her hands on the table as if they belonged to someone else. “Three dead . . . two murders, one suicide, all in a matter of days . . .”

“All in a matter of twenty years,” Gaines said. “Nancy died the night she disappeared, or very soon thereafter.”

“How do you even comprehend this? How do you deal with something like this? I mean, there’s no point of reference. There’s no context . . .”

“What do you think happened that night, Miss Benedict?”

“To Nancy? I think she was taken by someone . . .” She paused. “Was she . . . you know, was she sexually . . . ?”

“No,” Gaines said. “She was not raped. She was strangled, and her heart was cut out, but she was not raped.”

Maryanne lowered her head. Her entire body seemed to diminish in size as she exhaled. “It is just too unbearable to imagine . . . ,” she whispered.

“So what do you think happened?” Gaines prompted.

For a while, Maryanne Benedict said nothing. Gaines did not interrupt the silence in that room. She had to absorb and come to terms with what he was telling her in her own way. There was no way to speed up the process, no way to circumvent whatever was going on in her mind. She looked away several times—to the floor, toward the window—but she was not looking at anything present or tangible. She was looking with her mind’s eye, recalling events, situations, words exchanged, perhaps ideas that she had considered during the previous two decades. “I think she was taken by someone,” she eventually said. Her voice was measured, controlled, precise. “Now you have told me that she was strangled . . . I don’t know . . . Perhaps Michael found her dead and then, for some reason known only to him, he did this terrible thing to her body . . .” Maryanne shook her head. “Michael had his dark side, like everyone. He survived the war, you know?”

“I heard about that . . . in Guadalcanal, the only surviving member of his unit.”

“The luckiest man alive,” Maryanne interjected.

“He said that,” Gaines replied. “Lester Cobb said it, too. What does that mean?”

“Means what it says,” Maryanne replied. “He survived the war, and then he survived the thing that happened at the factory in 1952. That’s when he started to believe he was protected . . .”

“Protected?”

Maryanne smiled. It was a sad and resigned smile. “I never made that tea,” she said. “You want some?”

37

Gaines watched her as she went about the business of preparing tea.

She didn’t say a word as she recovered the kettle from the sink, filled it, set it atop the stove, lit the gas. She fussed with leaves and cups, and she stood for a while gazing through the small window that overlooked the yard. She was alone within whatever world she inhabited, internally and externally it seemed, and Gaines—despite feeling the sense of emptiness around her—withheld himself from saying or doing anything to interrupt that aloneness.

Eventually, she turned and looked at Gaines, her hands behind her on the edge of the sink, her head down, but her eyes fixed on him.

“To think . . . all these years, and it ends like this. There hasn’t been a single day when I haven’t thought of her. Of Nancy, you know? Twenty years. I knew she was dead, but I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know why. I hoped she wasn’t, of course, but I knew it was hopeless. She wasn’t a runaway. Everyone said she was a runaway, but they didn’t know her, and they didn’t understand her relationship with Michael. All she talked about was reaching eighteen and marrying Michael. And Matthias was jealous as hell, but he loved her enough to understand that she had made her decision.” Maryanne smiled, a memory right there in her eyes. “I asked Matthias one time if he thought that Michael was too old for Nancy, and he said that there was about one year more between Michael and Nancy as there was between his own mom and dad. He didn’t answer the question, but I could tell what he meant. He did not have an easy relationship with his parents, and I think that was down to the fact that his parents did not have an easy relationship with each other. Matthias believed that he was right for Nancy and that no one else was.”

Maryanne turned back to the worktop and poured tea. She brought the cups to the table, set one in front of Gaines, and took her seat once more.

“Me and Nancy, Michael and Matthias. I cannot think of one of us without seeing all of us together.”

“But there were others, right?”

“Sure there were, but they weren’t part of us in the same way. They were there, of course, but—” She left the statement unfinished.

Gaines let the silence hang between them for a moment, just to ensure that she wasn’t going to start talking again, and then he said, “And you now have nothing to do with Matthias Wade? Nothing at all?”

She shook her head. “Like I said, I haven’t seen him for a decade and a half, perhaps more.”

“Did he know Judith?”

“Nancy’s mother? Yes, of course he did.”

Gaines cast his mind back to the conversation he’d had with Wade, the fact that Wade had said he did not know Judith Denton. The comment he’d made could be interpreted as a denial of any knowledge of her, or—as was perhaps the case here—a simple statement to the effect that he did not know her. She was an acquaintance from many years ago, the mother of a childhood friend, and nothing more significant.

“You were going to tell me about what happened in 1952,” Gaines prompted.

“Yes, I was,” Maryanne replied. She hesitated, looking at him then as if with some sense of apologetic resignation, as if she would now share with him something of the awkward, broken tangle of her life, and she knew it would unsettle him.

Gaines thought to tell her that nothing would now surprise him, that he had seen and heard it all, the very worst the world could offer up—not only in Vietnam, but here in this small-town catastrophe—but he remained silent.

“There was a machine plant west of Picayune,” she said, “east of the Pearl River. They built it there because of the water supply, but that didn’t serve them so well when it was really needed. The plant is not there now, for obvious reasons.” She smiled awkwardly. “For reasons that will become obvious when I tell you what happened. The plant was originally built by another family, many decades ago, back at the end of the eighteen hundreds, I think. Anyway, it was a business that changed hands, changed purpose, was turned over to munitions manufacturing during the war, and when the war was over and munitions were no longer required, the Wades bought it. Matthias’s father was forever buying up other businesses, even ones that didn’t make any money. It was as if he just set his mind to owning as much as he could, regardless of its real value. Anyway, they made ball bearings, springs, axels for vehicles and such. Other things as well, metal trays for prison food, enamel cups, everything. It was a small business, maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty men worked there, but it was prosperous. And Matthias got Michael a job there. Usually, they only took on people who were already skilled, but Matthias had influence, of course, and he arranged for Michael to get an apprenticeship there. And Michael kept to his word, and he showed up, and he learned how to do whatever was needed, and he was a good employee. He always worked hard; he wasn’t late; he did overtime. It was like he had spent all these years doing nothing after the war, and then finally he had something to throw himself into.”