“Well, I don’t even know what to say to that. You think sorry does it for me? You think sorry makes me any less pissed with you? I don’t think you even get what I’m talking about here—”

“Like I said, Miss Wade, I apologize for what you think might have happened, but I want you to know that this was a considered action on my part. I went to see Clifton as a means to reach you.”

“To reach me? What the hell are you talking about? I live a handful of miles from here. You drove the better part of three hundred miles to see Clifton, got him to write me a letter, used Maryanne as your courier, and never thought of picking up the telephone and calling me?”

“I did not think that you would talk to me.”

“Because?”

“Because of your brother, Miss Wade.”

“My brother? What the hell has he got to do with whether I talk to the local sheriff or not?”

“Because he’d then know that I was pursuing a line of inquiry that involved him—”

Della Wade opened her mouth to speak, and then she stopped. “I’m sorry?”

“I did not want him to know that I was investigating him.”

“Investigating him for what? For what he did to Clifton?”

“No, Miss Wade, for murdering both Nancy Denton and Michael Webster.”

Della Wade frowned, her head to one side, and then she seemed to double take. She looked at Maryanne, at Eddie Holland, she started to smile, anticipating that one of those present would suddenly smile with her, that they’d start to laugh, that this would all be exposed as some surreal practical joke.

But no one smiled, and no one laughed, and Della Wade lost all the color from her cheeks and the intensity from her eyes, and she walked two or three steps forward and sort of folded herself loosely into one of the kitchen chairs.

“Oh,” she said quietly, and then she looked at Gaines, and Gaines took the seat facing her, and for a while they did nothing but look at each other in silence.

Della Wade broke that silence with, “You think my brother killed Nancy?”

“Yes, Miss Wade, I do.”

“And who is this other person?”

“Michael Webster.”

Della looked at Maryanne. “Michael?” she asked her. “The Michael? Nancy’s Michael?”

Maryanne nodded.

“He’s dead?” Della asked.

“Yes,” Gaines said. “You didn’t know?”

Della shook her head. “No, why would I?”

“You don’t read the papers?”

“No, I don’t read newspapers,” she said. “Haven’t for years.”

“Well, yes, Michael is dead. He was found in the burned-out wreckage of his home, and he had been decapitated.”

“I’m sorry . . . what?”

“Decapitated, Miss Wade . . . his head and his left hand had been cut off.”

“This is unreal. This is . . .” Her voice faded. She looked at Maryanne, wide-eyed and wordless for some moments, and then she looked back at Gaines and said, “And you think Matthias did this?”

“Let’s just say that he is on my list of suspects.”

“But Nancy Denton? Nancy Denton ran away, right?” Again Della turned to Maryanne, as if Maryanne were the one she trusted to confirm or deny what she was being told.

Maryanne merely held Della’s gaze and said nothing.

“No, Miss Wade,” Gaines said. “Nancy did not run away. You weren’t aware that we found her?”

Della Wade looked visibly stunned.

Gaines was struck with an intense feeling of déjà vu. He was reprising the conversation he’d had with Maryanne Benedict during his first visit to her home the day before his mother’s death.

He glanced at Maryanne. Maryanne shook her head. She had not told Della about Nancy or Michael. She had left that for Gaines to deal with.

Everything went in circles. Life and death and all in between.

“You found her? Where? When?”

“We found her on the morning of Wednesday the twenty-fourth, eleven days ago.”

“How? What happened?”

“There was a rainstorm, a very heavy one, and it broke up the riverbank, and we found her buried there. We can only assume that she had been there since the night of her disappearance.”

Gaines watched the woman come apart at the seams. Things she believed in no way involved or concerned her now seemed so close to home, and she was struggling desperately not only to absorb what was happening, but also to place it within any frame of reference. Gaines could so easily have told her that there was no context within which such things made sense, but he believed her already fully aware of this.

“And she was killed?” Della asked.

“Strangled,” Gaines replied.

“By Matthias?”

“I believe so.”

“And Michael was killed? Why was Michael killed? Why would Matthias kill Michael?”

“To stop him from speaking of what happened that night.”

Della shook her head. “That makes no sense, no sense at all. Nancy disappeared twenty years ago. Michael Webster had two decades to tell anyone he liked whatever he knew about what happened.”

“Michael was bound by his own decision not to say a word.”

“But why? What possible reason could he have had for not saying what happened?”

“Because he was involved, too,” Gaines said.

“In Nancy’s death? No, no way. Michael loved her. Even I could see that. I was just a child and even I could see that.” She turned to Maryanne. “Isn’t that right? Michael loved Nancy and she loved him back, and he would never have done anything to hurt her. Tell him, Maryanne.”

“He didn’t do anything to hurt her,” Gaines said. “He did something that he believed would help her, and what he did and why he did it meant that he could never speak about it. Then, when she was found, he knew that what he’d done hadn’t worked and now never would. That was why he had to be silenced.”

“I do not understand what you’re saying. This makes no fucking sense. What the hell are you saying? What did he do to her? What did Michael do to Nancy?”

Gaines paused. He waited until Della Wade’s eyes were firmly fixed on his own, and then he said, “He tried to raise her from the dead, Miss Wade. Michael Webster tried to raise Nancy Denton from the dead.”

Della Wade did smile then and then she started to laugh, but she stopped suddenly when she again realized that her reaction was singular and without support.

She looked at John Gaines for further explanation.

Gaines said nothing.

54

Maryanne Benedict held Della Wade’s shoulders as she cried. She did not cry for more than a few moments, and then she seemed to gather herself together with surprising composure. It was as if she were somehow demonstrating vulnerability, and this facet of herself she did not wish to share with those present in Nate Ross’s kitchen.

“Tell me everything,” she said. “Tell me everything you know about Nancy and Michael.”

Gaines did. He explained the sequence of events from the moment Nancy’s body was first discovered right up to the meeting they were now having in Nate Ross’s kitchen.

And when he was done, he sat back in his chair and watched as she tried to take it all in.

A couple of times she seemed to have a question on her lips, but then it vanished as she considered some other aspect of what she’d been told. Finally, minutes having passed, she asked the one thing that needed to be asked, the only question that really held any significance or meaning.

“And you have no evidence at all, do you?” she said. “Nothing that directly implicates Matthias in any of this? Not in Nancy’s death and not in Michael’s.”

“No, Miss Wade, I do not,” Gaines said.

“So what is this based on? Your intuition?”

“Perhaps,” Gaines said.

“Perhaps?”

“My intuition, yes, but also the fact that Matthias was in love with Nancy and yet could not have her, that he was with her the night she disappeared, that Matthias paid Michael’s bail, that he was the last person seen with Michael, the fact that he had someone terrorize Clifton, had them cut off his fingers, and just to stop you seeing him, even the fact that—”