“It casts an entirely different light on the whole thing,” Gaines said.

“I imagine it would, Sheriff.”

“I can’t see Matthias Wade doing that to someone, can you?”

“I can see Matthias Wade doing a great many things, Sheriff Gaines, but doing something like that for love is not one of them.”

“Thank you for telling me this,” Gaines said.

“You are welcome, Sheriff Gaines, but the best way to thank me is to get that note to Della without her brother finding out. That’s all I can ask of you.”

Gaines and Regis parted company, Regis back into the care of Ted McNamara and a pickup ride to the work party, Gaines out onto the highway once more. It was after eight o’clock by the time he saw the Parchman Farm main entrance in the rearview.

He drove in silence but for the sound of the engine and the wheels on the road. He did not switch on the radio. He just wanted a clear mind with no interruptions as he considered the implications of what Clifton Regis had told him.

That morning, little more than a week before, he, Jim Hughes, Richard Hagen, and the assembled crew had unearthed something from the riverbank. It had not just been the body of a sixteen-year-old; it had been something else entirely. They had brought out the dead, and the unresolved truth of her death was now haunting Whytesburg like a ghost. That ghost would not lie in rest until the facts were known. That ghost was in limbo, and where Michael Webster might have failed to accomplish what he had set out to do, Gaines could not.

Gaines knew that by the time he got back south, it would be too late to go see Maryanne Benedict, and besides, he wanted to find out from Eddie Holland why she’d wanted to see him. Perhaps there was something about the night of Nancy Denton’s disappearance that she’d remembered. Perhaps there was something she knew about Matthias Wade but felt safer speaking at first to Eddie Holland rather than Gaines, who, in actuality, was a complete stranger. Gaines could only guess, and guessing served no purpose.

Rather, he spent the hours of solitude between Indianola and Whytesburg turning over all that had happened in his mind. He did not believe Clifton Regis was a liar, just as he did not believe the man was a thief. He believed that Clifton Regis had met Della Wade in New Orleans, just as he’d said, and that chance rendezvous had occurred because of Eugene. Eugene was a musician, as was Regis, and Della appeared to have gravitated toward that lifestyle, the people who lived it. Matthias, staunch segregationist, perhaps racist to the core, had learned of the relationship, had learned also that ten thousand dollars of Wade money had found its way into Clifton Regis’s hands. That would have flown in the teeth of everything that Wade intended to preserve about his family’s name and reputation. The solution had been simple. A brief visit to Clifton Regis, the recovery of the money, his sister rescued, and Clifton Regis left behind minus two of his fingers. Whether the subsequent burglary charge that put Regis in Parchman had been Wade’s doing or simply another blatant example of racist railroading that was so prevalent in these parts was another matter, and frankly, something that did not overly concern Gaines at that moment. He was content to know where Regis was, encouraged by the fact that Regis was compliant, secure in the knowledge that if he got the letter to Della Wade, then some sort of dialogue might be engendered. How to get the letter to Della without Matthias’s knowledge was the next obstacle.

Arriving back in Whytesburg, Gaines did not consider it too late to go visit with Ross and Holland. They were both up, playing cards as it happened, and they welcomed Gaines’s arrival. They asked him to join them, to share a few drinks, a few hands, but he said he had no plans to stay.

“I just came to find out why Maryanne Benedict wanted to see you,” Gaines asked Holland.

“Because you scared the bejesus out of her, that’s why,” Holland replied. “A stranger shows up at her door, tells her Nancy Denton is dead, Webster, too, one of them buried in a riverbank for twenty years, the other one burned in a fire without his head. How would you feel?”

“Oh, I think I’d feel pretty much as I do right now, Eddie. Like I’m in someone else’s nightmare, and whatever I do, I just can’t wake up.”

“Well, she’s pretty much the same, my friend. She wanted to know if everything you’d said was true. She wanted to know if you could be trusted, as well.”

“Trusted?”

“Hell, I don’t know why she asked that, John. She just did. Maybe she’s gathering up the courage to tell you something.”

“I’m plannin’ on going over to see her in the morning.”

“Because?”

“Because I want her to deliver a message to Della Wade for me.”

Both Eddie Holland and Nate Ross looked up from their cards, but neither spoke.

“I got a man called Clifton Regis up at Parchman on a three-to-five that looks like a setup. He was Della’s boyfriend. Hell, they were going to elope together. Della gave him ten grand, and then Matthias found out, took her back, cut off a couple of Clifton Regis’s fingers, and shipped Della back to the Wade house. As far as I know, she’s been there ever since.”

“And what did this fella up at Parchman have to say to Della?” Holland asked.

“He says he loves her, hopes that she’s waiting for him, hopes that they’ll find some way to be together despite Matthias.”

“So this Regis has a vested interest in colluding with you any which way to get Matthias out of the picture.”

“Yes, seems that way to me.”

“And why didn’t Matthias take kindly to Della being involved with Mr. Regis?” Holland asked

“That’s easy,” Ross explained. “Because Clifton Regis is a colored man.”

“Right,” Holland said. “That’ll do it.”

“And he told me something else . . . something about why Webster cut Nancy Denton near in half and put a snake in her chest.”

“Because he was fucking crazy, right?” Holland said.

“No, Eddie . . . because he loved her more than life itself, and he was trying to bring her back.”

“You what?”

“It’s called a revival. It’s some kind of voodoo ritual, and he did that because he thought there was a chance she could be brought back to life.”

“Christ almighty,” Ross said. “Now I believe I have heard it all.”

“But I cannot deal with that now, not as part of the investigation,” Gaines said. “That has been and gone, and whatever Michael Webster thought he might be doing is history now. I have to deal with what I have right in front of me, and that is Webster’s death and whether Matthias Wade was directly involved.”

“I don’t think there’s a great deal going on around there that doesn’t involve Matthias Wade, one way or the other,” Ross said.

“They’re Klan, right?” Gaines asked.

“The Wades? Sure as hell they are. A lot of the old Southern families were—and still are. Things have changed, but they changed only a little, and they’ve changed too damned slow. It’s not the way it was in the twenties and thirties, but it’s there all right.”

“You think old man Wade is Klan, as well?”

Ross smiled. “Earl Wade was all set to be Grand Dragon for this state, possibly Louisiana and Alabama too. He was right in there, politically speaking, but after that church bombing in sixty-three, a good number of senior Klan officers distanced themselves from it, again for political reasons.”

“Church bombing?” Gaines asked.

“The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four colored girls were killed. That was eleven years ago, and they’re still no nearer to finding out who did that. It was Klan, for sure, but no one has been identified as responsible, and no arrests have been made. Then we had those three civil rights kids murdered here in Mississippi in 1964—”

“Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner,” Holland interjected, “and then those two colored kids were murdered here as well, Henry Dee and Charles Moore. There was rumor—still is—that they were killed by someone within the sheriff’s department, but—as with all these cases—there is never enough evidence, and no one is ever prepared to make a statement.”