If Matthias Wade wanted a war, then Gaines could bring a war.

It was that simple.

44

It was Wednesday, the day of the funeral, before Gaines became aware that he had no real recollection of Monday or Tuesday. All that occupied his mind was a radio report he had heard in passing the day before, something to the effect that the executive privilege presented by Nixon’s advisers as a means by which he could withhold the last of the Oval Office tapes had been deemed as not absolute by Chief Justice Warren Burger. Nixon would have to give them up. The House judiciary had voted twenty-seven to eleven in favor of impeachment. Alice had been right. Nixon had lied his way into a corner, and he didn’t seem able to lie himself out. All that Gaines could think of was the simple fact that she had missed seeing the man take a fall.

This thought seemed to occupy his mind during the service. The small plank-board Whytesburg First Methodist Church could not have contained more people. The ceremony itself was brief, almost perfunctory. Victor Powell spoke, as did Bob Thurston, and Caroline Rousseau cried as she read a poem by Emily Dickinson.

Gaines did not speak. Those things he wished to say about his mother he had already said to her, and he was not a religious man. The minister, a man Gaines barely knew, a man who had visited his mother no more than twice in all her years of illness, was respectful but distant. Once the service was done, they all trooped out to the front of the building, and here his mother’s coffin was laid inside a hearse for the long drive to Baton Rouge.

Gaines followed in his own car, and he followed alone. He left Whytesburg behind, and it was as if he were leaving his past. He knew he would return, of course, but there was something symbolic in what was happening. One man departed; another man would come back. A man with a different viewpoint, a different purpose, a different rationale. That was how Gaines imagined it, for throughout the journey, his thoughts were no longer occupied by the downfall of Richard Nixon but by determining the truth of these most recent events. If Matthias Wade was responsible for these killings, then Wade would be finished either by the hand of the state or some other means. Three young girls and a war veteran were dead, and there was a price to be paid.

Gaines oversaw the interment, and while he stood there alongside the cemetery caretaker, behind him the two men responsible for seeing his mother’s coffin into its final resting place, it did not go unacknowledged that Baton Rouge was also the birthplace and home of Michael Webster.

Everything was done by noon, and Gaines took an early lunch in a diner not far from the cemetery. He did not want to go back to Whytesburg, not immediately, and he decided to stay overnight. He found a motel a handful of miles down I-10, watched TV, drank himself to sleep, woke with a terrible thirst and a pounding head. It was Thursday, the first of August, and he decided to simply follow 10 through New Orleans and then head back up to Whytesburg across the bridge. He took some breakfast, just a couple of warm rolls and some black coffee and then began the hundred-or-so-mile drive. The day was warm, and with the windows down, he could smell the salt air as the northwesterly breeze carried it in from the coast. Beneath it was the bayou funk, the rank and brackish ghost of waterlogged trees, of rotting corduroy roads navigated through swampland and undergrowth. It was the smell of his childhood, and not without some sense of nostalgia and affection did he recall the years he’d spent in this very part of the country. He was thirty-four years old, had left Louisiana just seven years earlier, and yet felt as if he’d been gone for more than a lifetime. So much had intervened, and though he had spent merely fourteen months at war, that also felt like a hundred times more when he considered the significance and import of what he had witnessed and experienced there.

But it seemed that Whytesburg had been the setting for the greatest tragedies of all. The loss of his mother now stood front and center in his life, and would for a great while to come. He did not feel the alone yet, but he knew that the feeling would come. There was a point where aloneness became loneliness, and though some seemed to deal with this well, Gaines knew he would not. Too much time in solitude and he would turn inward among his own thoughts, just as Michael Webster had done. Not completely lost, but somehow sufficiently detached and disconnected from reality to preclude the chance for any genuine well-being, and if such internalization continued for too long, perhaps there would be no recovery. He would inhabit a world of his own creating, populated by the darkness he still carried from the war, the darkness occasioned by most recent events, all of it overshadowed by the fact that he was the very last of the Gaines line, and there would be no more. It was with this self-awareness that he had joined the sheriff’s department post-demobilization. Without a structure of some fashion, there would have been little enough to support him.

Gaines had thought to stop over in New Orleans, but he did not dare. He drove on through, made a brief stop outside of Slidell to get some lunch, and was back on the road to Whytesburg within twenty minutes.

He called in first to see Powell, found him alone in the office at the rear of the building.

“As I thought, there’s not a great deal more that I can tell you. Webster’s head and his left hand were severed relatively cleanly. An ax, perhaps a machete or a heavy knife.”

Gaines sat quiet for a time, and then he said, “The Wade sister, Della. Do you know her?”

Powell shrugged his shoulders. “I know of her, but I wouldn’t say I know her.”

“She lives with the father and Matthias, right?”

“As far as I’m aware, yes.” Powell leaned forward. “Why? What you looking at?”

“Getting some kind of inside line on that family.”

“You really think this is the work of Matthias Wade.”

“I do.”

“Except for the fact that he has nothing to do with any of it, save that he knew Nancy Denton when he was a kid and he paid out Webster’s bail.”

“I know that, Victor.”

“I mean, I’m not supposing to tell you your business, John, but it seems like you’re chasing the longest of long shots. And besides, those people have more money than they know what to do with. You go after Matthias Wade, and you’ll just find yourself surrounded by a horde of fancy-ass lawyers from Jackson, and you won’t get a word in edgeways.”

“Which is why I’m not going after Matthias Wade.”

“But you’re gonna go after his sister.”

“I just want to talk to her, that’s all.”

“That’s not the way Matthias is going to see it, and who’s to say that she’s going to be willing to talk to you anyway?”

“She might not be, but what the hell else am I going to do? Regardless of Nancy Denton’s murder, I have Michael Webster’s killing to deal with. Even if we forget what happened twenty years ago, I can’t overlook a headless body in a burned-out motel cabin.”

“I’m not saying to overlook it, John. Of course not. I’m just advising you not to go charging in on the Wades, accusations flying all over the place. They have enough influence to make you disappear without a second thought.”

“Like they made Nancy and Michael disappear?”

“John, seriously, you’re talking first-degree murder here,” Powell said. “You’re talking a life sentence here. Say that Matthias Wade is responsible for killing Nancy Denton and that he then killed Webster to prevent Webster from talking, you think he’ll stop at anything to protect his own life? Sooner or later, that old man is going on his way, and then Matthias controls everything that the Wade family owns. It would take just the tiniest percentage of what he has in his checking account to make you vanish from the face of the earth without a single trace.”