“Jealousy?”

“Jealous of love, Sheriff. Jealous that he does not have it, cannot find it, probably never will. He was jealous of Michael and Nancy, for sure, and he may well have been sufficiently jealous to take Nancy away from Michael. I do not know, and I am not saying that I do not want to know, but I am saying that I do not want to believe he did that. It’s natural, isn’t it? To think the best of people? To believe them good and kind and honest? But they’re not, and I’m not naive about these things. I can accept what he did to Clifton. I can accept what he has done to me. I can understand why he believes he should be this way in order to make it through this life, but I am struggling, desperately, when I consider him capable of such horrors. I am supposed to love him. He’s my brother. And I do love him, but I don’t know why. Maybe I don’t actually love him, but I have convinced myself that I do because that is what’s meant to happen. You’re not meant to hate your own family. Blood is thicker than water and all that. But this? This is someone else’s blood, isn’t it? Several people’s blood. What do you do then? What are you supposed to say? What are you supposed to feel?” She looked up at Gaines. “You don’t know, and I know you can’t answer that question, so don’t bother trying.”

She turned to Ross. “Nate, get me another drink, and skip the coffee this time.”

Ross brought her more bourbon, poured some into a glass while she lit another cigarette.

Gaines leaned forward. He smiled as best he could, trying perhaps to reassure her that he was here without bias or prejudice, without preconceptions or some unspoken ulterior motive.

“My mother died,” he said. “Just a week ago—”

Della opened her mouth, perhaps to express her condolences.

Gaines raised his hand, and she fell silent.

“She had been ill for a long time. I knew she was going to die. I’d known for a long time. But I wasn’t prepared for it, and I don’t think you can ever be prepared for it. My father died back in the war in Europe, and I never knew him, and so it’s easy to feel very little about that at all. If you never had something, then you can’t miss it, right? What I’m trying to say, Miss Wade, is that I cannot imagine how you must feel. I am not going to even try to imagine how you feel. All I can say is that every once in a while we drive right into something terrible, something so devastating and overwhelming, something we have no context for, no frame of reference, and we deal with it the way that we deal with it. They say that the things that don’t kill you make you stronger, but that’s not true. Maybe those things don’t kill you physically or emotionally, but they can kill you mentally, even spiritually. I don’t know what really happened to Nancy Denton and Michael Webster, just like I don’t know what happened to Dorothy McCormick and Anna-Louise Mayhew back in 1968. What I do know is that someone killed those people, and I don’t think they deserved it any more than Clifton deserved to get his fingers cut off for loving you—”

“Don’t try and blackmail me, Sheriff Gaines. Don’t try and make it any more personal than it already is—”

“Della, I don’t think it could be any more personal. These are people’s lives we’re talking about. This is not some movie script where everything is going to fall into place at the end and everything’s going to get tied up nice and neat. This is a horror story, a real-life honest-to-God horror story, and I am right in the middle of it, and so are you. Maybe you’ll get through this, maybe Clifton will, maybe me and Nate and Eddie and Maryanne will all come through this and out the other end, but maybe we won’t. Nancy didn’t, and even though that was twenty years ago and we don’t have to think about it, Michael was killed just a week ago, and that is awful close, as far as I’m concerned. That is just too damned close. And even though I didn’t know the man, and despite whatever he might have done however many years ago, I don’t think it was right what happened to him. Even if he was complicit in the death of Nancy Denton, then his penalty should still have been legal and equitable. What was done to him was no better than dragging some poor colored man out there and lynching him. Guilt by association, guilt by assumption, guilt because of your color or your religion or your political persuasion . . . These things don’t determine guilt. You know that, and I know that. What determines guilt is evidence and confession and proof, and I mean real proof, proof that can be substantiated and validated by reasonable men, men who have no ax to grind, no vested interest.” Gaines paused. He felt the passion of what he was saying in his chest, in the way his hands were shaking, in the way his voice wavered. “Now, I don’t know about you, Della, but I am of a mind to find out what really happened here and what happened back in Morgan City six years ago. I want to know who killed Nancy Denton, and I want to know who cut Michael Webster’s head off and buried it in a field behind my house. My desire to find the truth will not diminish in time, Della, and I won’t go away. I am here, and I am here for as long as it takes, and I will keep on digging and looking and asking questions until I find out what I want, or until someone kills me and buries my head someplace. That’s the simple truth of it, and you can either help me or not. You are not obligated, and I am not going to blackmail you. You can say yes or no. You can stay, or you can walk away. You have no loyalty to me, but you do have loyalty to your family. I know that I am asking a great deal of you, and I know that to be involved in this investigation is a huge risk, but right now I have no place else to go. If you say no, well, I will find another way—”

“Stop talking, Sheriff Gaines. Just for a second, stop talking, okay?”

Gaines nodded, leaned back in his chair, continued to look right at her.

“Okay,” she eventually said. “If I said I was willing to help you, what would you need me to do?”

55

It was late morning. The clouded sun gave up a greasy light, and the air seemed thick enough to chew. Sounds were muted, the songs of blue jays and whip-poor-wills fading to silence not six inches from their throats.

Gaines stood on the back porch steps, looked out toward the field where lay buried the memory of Michael Webster’s head and hand. Out there in the turnrows, inches beneath the surface, there was blood and wax and hair and whatever else might still remain. And beyond that, toward the horizon—out beyond the barbed-wire fence and loblolly pines, beyond the cypress and goldenrod and blue salvia, through the webs of kudzu, amid the nests of redbirds and brown thrashers, the sound of bullfrogs and squirrels, and the tracks of whitetail deer—was something else. Ghosts, perhaps. Something strange and potent, some aspect of horror that he knew he did not comprehend. Not yet.

What else could he have asked her to do?

What could he have said to her beyond what had already been said?

Piecing together recent events, trying to make sense of them, was akin to reconstructing an already-forgotten dream.

Right there in Nate Ross’s kitchen, Della Wade had as much as volunteered to help him.

What would you need me to do?

That’s what she asked him.

What would you need me to do?

He looked at her for a while and simply said, “Help me find the truth, Della. Just help me find the truth.”

“And how am I supposed to do that?” she asked.

“Find some way of getting him to talk,” Gaines replied. “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think about this, to make any kind of plan. I didn’t expect to be speaking with you so soon, and to tell you the truth, I half-expected never to speak to you at all.”

“Because you thought I was some crazy woman out there in that big house who would do something only if her big brother said it was okay.”