It seemed that they stayed that way for some small eternity, and then Margaret pulled Caroline away from him. They all sat, and Margaret made coffee, and Caroline started talking. Once she started talking, it seemed that she did not want to stop, for to stop would mean silence, and it was always in the silence that her grief returned to fill the vacuum.

They talked among themselves then—Margaret and Leonard and Caroline—and Gaines listened, as if eavesdropping on a conversation that had nothing to do with him. He was thankful for their presence, for the decision that Margaret made to make eggs, to feed him, for had they not been there, he would have eaten nothing.

He did eat, surprising even himself, and quietly, as if in slow motion, he seemed to return, inch by inch, to some semblance of the real world, to the reality that necessitated funeral arrangements, a memorial service, the transportation of his mother’s body out to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to be buried in the plot that was always meant to welcome his father.

It seemed then, strangely, that Alice had been yet another victim of this sequence of events that had begun with the discovery of Nancy Denton.

Gaines was struck with the oddest thought: that Alice had gone after Nancy, after Webster, too, to find them, to ask them, to resolve the mystery for herself.

Do the dead commune with the dead?

Is that how it worked?

And then—once more—the sense of chill and dread that invaded his whole body when he asked himself what they had unleashed in Whytesburg.

He did not pursue that thought. He let it go. He tried to listen to the Rousseaus. He tried to stay right there in the kitchen with his neighbors and be the person he was supposed to be at such a time.

It was not long before Bob Thurston returned, and then came Eddie Holland and Nate Ross, and shortly thereafter Richard Hagen arrived from the Sheriff’s Office, Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton in tow, and soon the house was filled with voices and noise. No one seemed to notice when Gaines slipped away to his mother’s room, drew a chair to the edge of the bed, and sat there with his eyes closed, the tears welling behind, the anguish and pain in his chest too much to bear now, the words that he wanted to say vanished somewhere forever.

It was Thurston who came to find him, and he stood there with his hand on Gaines’s shoulder, and he said nothing as Gaines sobbed. When Gaines could cry no more, he just waited with him until he had gathered himself together again, and then they left the room and returned to the kitchen.

Hagen had gone, as had Dalton, Chantry, Ross, and Holland. Margaret and Leonard were back home, but Caroline had stayed. So it was that the three of them—Alice Gaines’s son, her doctor, her caregiver—sat in that kitchen and spoke of other things, things that bore no relevance to the death of Alice, things that were meaningless and irrelevant in the face of what had happened, but—at such a time—were perhaps the best things of which to speak.

Gaines understood that it would be weeks, months, before he even began to appreciate the meaning of this. It was said that each anniversary and special occasion needed to pass at least once—a full turn of the calendar—before you could begin to accommodate such a change. Only then, as he contemplated this, did Gaines appreciate some small aspect of what Judith Denton had suffered. Death, at least in a physical sense, was all encompassing and final. There was no coming back. There was no chance of circumstances conspiring to present some other outcome. But Nancy’s disappearance for all of twenty years? The sense of hope, growing ever weaker with each passing year and yet somehow kept alive by the sheer will of her mother, was then dashed to pieces. Judith Denton’s suicide demonstrated that she had continued to survive solely and only because of her hope. And when that hope had gone, well, there was no reason to continue.

Gaines always imagined that Alice had hung in there for one reason—to see him find someone, to see him married, perhaps start a family, to give herself the certainty that her son would be cared for. But perhaps it had not been that at all. Perhaps she had finally resigned herself to the fact that the only way to get her son to do anything along that line was to show him how deep and profound real loneliness could be. She was all he had, and with her gone, well, perhaps his necessity would rise to the point where he did something about it.

He did not know, and for now it did not matter.

It was late afternoon by the time Bob Thurston and Caroline Rousseau bade their farewells, Caroline with the reminder that she and her folks were only next door, that Gaines should come across and eat with them if he felt like it.

He thanked her, thanked Thurston for his time, his concern, his friendship, and then he watched them leave the house, Caroline turning left, Thurston driving away toward the center of town and home.

Gaines stood there for a while. The evening was warm, a good deal of moisture in the air, and he went back inside to pour himself a drink.

It was as he raised the glass to his lips that he remembered the light in the field. He smiled to himself. Why did this thing engage his attention so much? Surely it was nothing.

He set the glass down, left the house by the back door, and stood on the veranda. He looked out toward the point where he had seen it.

There was no reason for any sense of disquiet or unease, but as he tried to identify the precise spot, he was aware that the air seemed cooler, an almost electric tension present in the atmosphere. He passed it off as merely imagination. It had been a terrible day, a day filled with awkward, inexplicable emotions, a day of guilt and sadness and pain and heartbreak, a day that presented him with a future that he neither understood, nor cared to understand.

He went on looking, ever more aware of the fact that something—what, he did not know—did not feel right. In truth, something felt very wrong indeed.

The entirety of his world seemed nothing less than surreal, as if here he had found some middle ground between what was real and what was simply imagination.

Sheriff John Gaines considered the possibility that he had never returned from the nine levels of hell, that somewhere he had slipped through a gap in time and space, and everything that had happened, everything that was happening, was merely a creation of his own darkest thoughts and fears. Or maybe he had in fact returned, but in returning he had carried the nine levels with him, bearing them gently, bearing them undisturbed and complete, and here—in this small Mississippi town—he had delivered them for all to see.

Perhaps Maryanne Benedict had been right in one sense.

Perhaps the devil had in fact come to Whytesburg, but it was he—John Gaines—who had opened the door.

42

The sun had not yet set, and the air was warm and filled with moisture, and Gaines started down the short flight of steps and headed for the horizon.

At least here, he had believed, unlike in war, the night was some slight and brief reprieve from the darkness of the day. But no, the darkness followed whoever it chose to follow, and it found you wherever you were.

Gaines went out across the yard behind the house, through the low gate at the end, across the rutted, foot-worn walkway that passed left and right to adjacent properties, and he descended the small incline into the field. The simple action of placing one foot before the other took some concentration and effort. He had felt this before, his boots waterlogged, thigh-deep in dirty water, his rifle held high, his eyes peeled for the slightest movement, his ears attuned for the briefest suggestion of anomalous sound. It became a state of mind, that degree of sensitivity, and if you did not recognize the difference between recon and rest, then you started to hear many more words than were spoken, began to receive messages that were never meant at all. Even the voices that belonged to the ghosts of your past knew that the best way to be heard was to whisper. And once you gave them space on the stage, they never left.