Gaines’s head was filled with thoughts, images, bizarre ideas, and none of it made sense. In the final analysis, all that mattered was the identity of Nancy Denton’s killer, the identity of Michael Webster’s killer, and Gaines could not escape from the intuitive certainty that they were one and the same person: Matthias Wade.

Irrespective of what Gaines might believe, however, he had nothing of a probative nature with which to pursue an investigation of Wade. Wade had paid Michael Webster’s bail, had driven him away from the Sheriff’s Office, and that was that.

If Gaines discovered nothing else of significance, then the investigation—to all intents and purposes—was over.

That troubled him more than anything else: the simple fact that whoever had done these things might never be called to account.

But tonight, just for a few hours perhaps, he had to let it go. He had to rest his mind from the ever-nagging insistence of these mysteries. He had to devote some time to his mother, to her needs and wants. He had neglected her these past days, and that needed to be remedied.

Gaines turned on the radio. He turned it up loud. He found a music station somewhere out of Mobile. He forced himself to hear the song. He tried hard not to picture Maryanne Benedict’s face as she’d told him that the devil had come to Whytesburg.

39

Yes, childhood was a time of magic, but perhaps the magic came at a price.

People do bad things, and then they run away from reminders. They move towns, change states, sometimes even countries. But conscience is an internal country, and guilt is a town you can never leave, and that’s just part of being human. No matter how you change the landscape, there’ll always be someone or something that reminds you of the worst you’ve ever done. What was it that we did that made this happen? I didn’t know then, and I don’t know now.

It was a special time, but it ended with a strange and inexplicable tragedy that no one could comprehend.

But that day, that afternoon, that evening seemed like all the others.

Dusk approached; the sun kissed the tops of the trees, and we could hear Matthias returning with the record player even before we saw him.

Matthias had changed his shirt and combed his hair, and as he set up the player and started winding it, he glanced at me.

He knew that I would have to dance with him, and yet I sensed something else. More than before, I was aware of how pleased he was that Eugene was not there to vie with him for my attention. I felt awkward, and then I dismissed it. This was Matthias. This was my friend Matthias. Nothing would happen here unless I wanted it to, unless I agreed to it. How naive I was, for never once did I consider that what would happen might involve Michael and Nancy.

Matthias put on a record. It was “Cry” by Johnnie Ray, and then he played “Why Don’t You Believe Me?” by Joni James. I danced with him, and I could feel how close he was. I think he must have been wearing some of his father’s cologne, because he smelled sweet, like lavender maybe, or violets.

I danced with Matthias for a little while, and then I was content to just lie down in the cool grass and watch Michael and Nancy.

I felt warm and sleepy and so utterly alive.

Matthias sat right there beside me, and I could feel his hand against my leg, and even though I was aware of how close we were, I did not want to move.

Nancy was perfect. Michael said one time that they left the gates of heaven open for a moment, and an angel escaped. She seemed like that to me that night, more than any other night, and it was as if her feet never touched the ground as she danced with her soldier, her Michael, the handsomest and bravest man in Whytesburg.

But there was something else present, too, though I could never have defined it.

Perhaps I knew the end was on its way. Perhaps I knew in my heart that here was a night that I would recall for the rest of my life. When I became an old lady, sitting somewhere on a stoop, perhaps rocking in a chair on a veranda somewhere, I would cast my mind back and relive this evening, this night. But I would not remember it for the sunshine or the picnic hamper or the music we played that evening, or the way Nancy danced with Michael, her with her bare feet on his shoes, the way he held her at a gentle distance, never too close, never too near, as if he understood and respected the simple fact that she was not yet the woman he could love with anything but his heart and mind. No, I would not remember it for those things, but for something altogether different. Something terrible and awful, something that struck right through my heart like an iron nail, a nail that would lodge there and spread its rust into my blood for the rest of my life.

It should have all been so right, and yet it was all so very wrong.

Love may be blind. It may be quiet. It may rage like a torrent or howl like a storm. It may begin lives and end them. It may have the power to extinguish the sun, to stop the sea, to illuminate the deepest of all shadows. It may be the torch that lights the way to redemption, to salvation, to freedom. It may do all these things. But regardless of its power, it is something we will never truly understand. We do not know why we feel this thing for someone. We just know we need to be near them, beside them, to feel the touch of their hand, the brush of their lips against our cheek, the smell of them, the sensation of their fingers in our hair, the realness of who they are, and know that they will forever find a home in our heart. We need this, but we do not comprehend it.

But loss. We understand loss. Loss is simple. It is perfect in its simplicity.

They were there, and then they were gone.

That is all there is to say.

I could feel their love—the love so effortlessly shared by Michael Webster and Nancy Denton—and it was pure and simple and perfect.

It should have stayed that way forever, but nothing lasts forever, does it?

At least nothing like love.

40

His mother was well enough. She had slept much of the day. She told him that Caroline had brought her some supper, and now all she wanted to do was sleep some more.

Gaines sat with her for a good hour, listened to her talk of Nixon yet again, what a dreadful man he was, how he had lied his way into office, how he was now attempting to lie his way out of any responsibility for what he had done. “He will fall,” she said, “but it is just a matter of how many others he will take with him when he goes.”

Gaines listened, but he did not pay a great deal of mind to the significance of what she was saying. In that moment, the machinations of Nixon’s tentative hold on power were the least of his concerns. When it came to politics, Gaines agreed with Eugene McCarthy, that it was nothing more than a game for those smart enough to understand it and yet dumb enough to think it was important.

It was nearing ten by the time Alice Gaines finally wound down and drifted to sleep.

Gaines left her room and went to the kitchen. He fetched down the bottle of bourbon, a clean glass, took some ice from the freezer. He sat in silence, drinking a little, thinking a lot, considering the facts that within one day he had discovered the decapitated body of Michael Webster in the burned-out shell of his motel room, the dead body of Nancy’s mother, and had spoken to both Matthias Wade and Maryanne Benedict. One day. So much in so little time. He remembered a quote from Wendell Holmes, how a man’s mind, once stretched by an idea, never again regained its original dimensions. That had applied in war, but it applied here as well. Whatever may have happened twenty years before, and whatever was happening now, irrespective of whether Gaines believed in these undertones of cabalistic and occult influence, they were still present, still in force, and they needed to be understood.