For Gaines, it seemed to no longer be a matter of law, but of justice. They were worlds apart. Gaines was not so naive as to believe they were even related. Justice had long since faded into relative obscurity with the advent of due process and bureaucracy. Hell, it was the law who was responsible for some of the Klan horrors that Ross and Holland had detailed the night before. There was no justice there, and there would be no justice here—not for Nancy or Judith, not for Michael Webster—if Gaines did not pursue this any which way he could.

He thought of his mother. This was what she would have wanted. For him to be doing something worthwhile and purposeful, to be soldiering on, to be in control of what he was feeling and what was going on around him.

In war, horrors were expected. In Whytesburg, Mississippi, such horrors should play no part at all.

Gaines returned the album to the evidence room, and he left the office. He locked up behind himself, drove over to Nate Ross’s to collect Eddie Holland, all the while considering the best approach to Maryanne Benedict and the assignment he was going to ask of her. If she said no, well, he was back to square one. For some reason, he believed she was going to help him. For some reason, he believed his visit had reminded her of the life she’d once had, and to now see all aspects of that life broken apart and scattered to the four winds was more upsetting than she could bear. But, in Gaines, perhaps she saw someone who could assist her with the weight of conscience. Perhaps she was now motivated by guilt, the feeling that she could have helped Michael Webster, that she could have been there for him after Nancy’s disappearance. Maybe she had loved Michael, too, and yet had never been able to approach him, knowing always that Michael loved only Nancy. To live a life in the shadow of another was to live no life at all. To live a life perpetually compared to someone else would be the most grievous negation of one’s own worth. It struck Gaines then that his own choices had perhaps been influenced by his belief that he would never love anyone as much as he had loved Linda Newman. Possibly he and Maryanne Benedict had lived along some strange line of parallel emotions, never committing, never wholly withdrawing, existing somewhere in the middle ground, the places where neither light nor darkness ever really reached. Like ghosts of their former selves, living without really being alive.

He was reminded of something Lieutenant Wilson had once said. “Spend time with the lost and fallen, with the lonely and the forgotten, with the ones who didn’t make it . . . That’s where you find real humanity.” And with that memory came the memory of the last words to leave Ron Wilson’s lips, uttered in the handful of seconds between changing his damp socks and the arrival of the bullet that killed him. The memory of the dead is the greatest burden of all.

That was the burden Gaines carried, and he vowed to carry it well, to carry it resolutely, never faltering or resting until he could set that burden down at the feet of whosoever was responsible.

And then Gaines was turning off the road and heading toward Nate Ross’s house, and he saw Eddie Holland standing on the veranda awaiting him. Less than an hour and they would be in Gulfport, and Gaines would know if Maryanne Benedict was on his side, or had chosen to abandon this game once and for all.

50

En route, they talked. Rather, Holland talked and Gaines listened. Holland spoke of Don Bicklow, of Gaines’s mother, of Nate Ross’s wife and the circumstances of her death. He told Gaines the details of a murder case that Bicklow and his own predecessor, George Austin, had investigated back in the latter part of 1958. It was the first real-life honest-to-God murder that had happened since his assignment to Breed County.

“Had to stand there for three hours with a dead woman on the floor of her kitchen. Crazy husband bashed her head in with a tire iron and then said she fell and hit her head on the corner of the stove. Made me sick to my stomach, you know, but someone had to stand there while all the crime scene fellas did their thing. However, despite how bad it made me feel, it was also the thing that really convinced me that I had taken the right job. Sounds odd, but before that I reckoned on this line of work being nothing more than a regular salary, a pension at the end, something being better than nothing, you know? But that dead woman, the fact that her husband did her in and then tried to get away with it, well, that started me to thinking that there must be a lot of folks who don’t have anyone in their corner, if you know what I mean.”

Gaines nodded, kept his eyes on the road. He didn’t acknowledge Holland because he didn’t want him to stop talking. The sound of Holland’s voice took away the incessant barrage of questions in his own mind, and it was good to have a little internal silence for a change.

“So, that sort of resolved it all for me. I came in after the war was over, much like you after Vietnam. I know Webster was in Asia, but I served in Italy.” Holland fell quiet.

Gaines prompted him with, “You have kids, right?”

Holland laughed. “However old they get, they’re always still your kids, aren’t they? Yes, I got kids. Four of them, though the youngest has three daughters and a Chrysler franchise out in Waynesboro . . .”

And off he went with wives’ names, husbands’ names, kids’ names, what happened when they all got together last Thanksgiving. That started him in on his wife and how she died, and how he’d never been able to even consider the possibility of finding someone else. With those last words, Gaines saw the sign for Gulfport, and they took the exit.

Gaines remembered the way to Maryanne Benedict’s house, and when they pulled up outside, he was certain he saw the curtain flicker in an upstairs window.

He had been here the day before his mother died—Saturday, the 27th. He had driven away from here, returned home, and it was that night, as Saturday became Sunday, that Alice had gone.

Before Gaines was out of the car, Maryanne Benedict had opened the front door of her house.

Eddie Holland was there first. He hugged her, turned back as Gaines approached, and started to explain their visit.

Maryanne came forward and took Gaines’s right hand. “Eddie told me about your mother, Sheriff,” she said, “and I want you to know how sorry I am for your loss.”

“Thank you, Miss Benedict,” Gaines replied. She had told him to call her Maryanne last time he’d been here, but somehow it still did not seem appropriate.

“Please come in,” she said.

She released Gaines’s hand, went on back, Holland behind her, Gaines following Holland, and she led them through to the kitchen, where she asked them to sit.

Gaines’s last visit seemed to belong to some distant other life. Even the room seemed not to be the room he remembered from their last conversation.

Once she had made coffee, Maryanne sat down and looked directly at Gaines.

“Before you ask me,” she said, “and despite the fact that I know I should help you, I am not willing to talk to Matthias.”

Gaines nodded. “I understand, and that is precisely what I don’t want you to do.”

Maryanne frowned.

“I wanted to ask you about Della,” he said. “Last time I came, you spoke about Matthias, about Michael, you told me about the fire at the plant, about the night that Nancy went missing, but you never mentioned Della, not once. As far as I can work out, she was about ten years old at the time, and I wondered whether you and she had been friends.”

“I didn’t mention Catherine or Eugene either,” Maryanne replied. “Eugene was sixteen, only two years older than me, and Catherine was close to nineteen.”

Gaines stayed silent. He just looked at her and waited for her to go on.