“So you’re sure?”

“You get me the paper there, Sheriff Gaines. You’ll get your letter. You get it to Della, and we’ll see what the hell happens, eh?”

48

Clifton Regis wrote the letter. He insisted that Gaines read it. Gaines said that whatever business existed between him and Della Wade was their business alone, but Regis made it a condition.

“I want you to understand what this means to me,” he said. “I want you to appreciate how significant this thing is, because that’ll make me feel like you will try your hardest to get this to her without her brother finding out.”

“So read me the letter,” Gaines said.

Regis cleared his throat, looked at Gaines with that wide-eyed hopefulness, and then started.

“D. Got a chance here to get you a letter, so I’m taking it. A man came to see me. He’s a sheriff from Whytesburg called John Gaines, and he told me that M is maybe in some trouble down there. I know you feel the same way about M as me, and I know that you get why I’m here. I am also hoping that what we had in New Orleans is still alive and that you are waiting for me. I need you to know that everything that has happened between us means as much now as it did back then and that I will do anything to be with you again. I want you to talk to this man, and I want you to tell him what you know. I want you to help him if you can, so that we have a chance to be together again. That’s why I want you to do this. If you cannot do this, or you have decided that we cannot be together, then I need you to tell me so I can make my decisions. And if you cannot help this man or you are not willing to talk to him, then just burn this letter and do not let M see it. Not for my sake, but because I know he will get mad and hurt you if he thinks that we are in contact. Somehow, some way, I think we can be together again. That is what I live for. I just want to see you again, to hold you, to tell you how much I love you. I wish every day that you feel the same. I believe in my heart that you do. Love you forever. C.”

Gaines merely nodded in acknowledgment. Then he took the letter from Regis, folded it, tucked it into his shirt pocket, and got up.

They shook hands again, and Gaines thanked Regis for his time and his help.

“You gonna be okay when you go back?” Gaines asked.

“Back into population? Sure, why’d you ask?”

“McNamara said that maybe you’d get some trouble for being out here talking to the law.”

“Hey, they’re gonna believe whatever I tell ’em. I don’t get no trouble from these guys. I can take care of myself.”

“Good to hear it.”

“One other thing,” Regis said.

“Yes?”

“You get her that letter, you find out what she says about me, whether she’s waiting for me, and you gotta let me know somehow, okay?”

“Yes,” Gaines replied. “I can do that for sure.”

“You got family, Sheriff Gaines?”

“No, Clifton, I don’t.”

“Well, good enough.”

Gaines frowned.

“I’d be more worried for you if you had a wife and some little ’uns to mourn you. You step all over Matthias Wade’s toes and he ain’t gonna take a polite apology. He’s gonna take your head.”

“Well, he did that already to someone else, and I think it’s about time he got some retribution.”

Regis got up, and the pair of them walked to the makeshift door.

“So you really think he killed some girl?” Regis asked.

“I do. At first I thought it was someone else, and now I think it was Matthias.”

“And you said something about her heart?”

Gaines nodded. “Yes. She was sixteen, a pretty, bright teenage girl, and someone strangled her and then cut out her heart.”

Regis’s expression was suddenly one of intense curiosity. “That is a very strange thing to do, Sheriff.”

Gaines smiled sardonically. “Cutting her heart out was nothing compared to what they did next—”

“Which was?”

“You won’t believe me, but in place of her heart they put a wicker basket—”

“With a snake inside,” Regis said, and he looked down at the ground. It was not a question; it was a statement. Regis’s entire body language changed. It seemed as if a great weight had been lowered down onto his shoulders.

“How did you—”

Regis looked up. “They did a revival, Sheriff Gaines. Whoever killed your girl, someone tried to bring her back.”

Gaines couldn’t speak. He just looked at Regis with an expression of utter disbelief.

“As old as God,” Regis said. “This shit is as old as God. You take out the heart, you bury the heart elsewhere, a specific place, a specific distance from the body, and then you replace the heart with a wicker basket. Inside the basket is a snake, its tail in its mouth, and you sew them up a special way—thirteen punctures as far as I recall, six on the right, seven on the left, and the stitch crosses itself five times—and then you bury the body near running water. And you never speak a word of what you have done. Not to anyone. Not ever. Even if you do it with someone, even if they were there, you never speak of it between you. If you do, it breaks the spell and the person will not be revived.”

Gaines stayed silent. His mouth was dry. His breath felt heavy in his chest.

“That’s the revival, Sheriff. That’s what was done to your girl back then. You still have her body?”

Gaines nodded.

“Well, you go look, and if there are seven holes on the left side and six on the right, and if she was tied in such a way as to cross those stitches five times, then you have someone trying to revive her.”

“Y-you can’t be se-serious,” Gaines stammered, but already he had begun to understand what had happened. He knew that Webster had done this. It was as if the entire case had turned on its head. All of a sudden, Webster appeared to be the one who’d told the truth. Webster had tried to bring Nancy Denton back. What a sad, desperate, terrible, pointless thing. It was heartbreaking to even consider. He had loved the girl—that was evident from what Gaines had heard, from the almost-visible chemistry between them in their pictures—and he had cut open her chest, removed her heart, and done this dreadful thing in some vain and futile effort to bring her back to life. And that was why he had never spoken of it. Maybe Wade had known this, and such was Webster’s belief in what he was doing, such was Wade’s certainty that Webster would maintain his silence, that it had not been necessary to kill Webster. Only when Nancy’s body had been found, thus demonstrating once and for all that the revival would never work, did Wade need to take care of Michael Webster.

It was utterly unbelievable, but—as Gaines’s mother used to say—what we knew of the world was dwarfed by what we did not know.

“I know it sounds like some crazy occult Frankenstein raising-people-from-the-dead thing,” Regis said, “but this is hoodoo, and this has an awful lot less to do with what you may or may not believe and a great deal to do with what other folks believe. And what other folks believe has brought about the killing of a young girl and the desecration of her body. If Wade did that, then—”

“I don’t think Wade did that,” Gaines said, almost to himself. “I think he killed her, and then someone who loved her found her and did what he thought would bring her back.”

Gaines tried to picture Nancy’s body. He tried to recall the number of punctures in the torso, the way in which it had been laced. He could call Powell, but he knew without even asking that it would be precisely as Regis had explained.

“So it seems you are dealing with something else now,” Regis said.

“Y-yes,” Gaines replied. “But how do you know this?”

Regis smiled. The scar down his cheek was like the crease in a sheet of paper. “I am a black man from Louisiana, Sheriff Gaines,” he said. “You gotta get the spirit of Legba back into them, and Legba is gonna either bring them back to you or carry them over into the afterlife. The serpent represents the power of Legba. It represents healing and the connection between heaven and earth. Whoever does it usually does it for love . . . to make sure that the one they love never gets caught in limbo between this world and the next. And whoever did this to your girl would have suffered terribly, I’m sure, because to do that to someone you love . . .” Regis shook his head. “And you can never say a word . . . never . . .”