Gaines smiled. “Maybe so, yes.”

He remembered her face then, the way she looked at him.

Revelations aside, her horror at what she was being told, the sheer weight of the mental and emotional burden she must have felt, Della Wade had nevertheless seemed somehow contained, measured, able to absorb what was going on around her and deal with it. And yet now—suddenly presented with the responsibility of assisting Gaines in his investigation—she seemed fragile and afraid. Not for herself. Not that at all. Afraid that she would perhaps fail Gaines, and thus fail Nancy, Michael, the girls from Morgan City. Fail also Clifton Regis.

“I don’t know what to tell you,” Gaines continued. “I cannot gain access to the house. I cannot look for evidence. I can’t ask Matthias questions without running the risk of him finding some way to defend himself even further. But you could look, at least. You could see if there is anything that might tie him to the death of Michael Webster, just something that connects Matthias directly to these recent events.”

“Because you simply want him convicted of something, right? Something that will enable you to put him in jail.”

“The law is the law, Della. If he killed Michael, then he goes to jail for the rest of his life.”

She closed her eyes. She breathed deeply several times as if trying to maintain equilibrium, as if trying not to implode and disappear, and then she shook her head slowly.

When she opened her eyes, there were tears. They welled in her lids, and then they spilled over.

Nate Ross stepped forward and gave Della Wade a handkerchief. She thanked him with a fleeting smile.

“You want me to help you lock up my brother.”

She said it so matter-of-factly, so simply, that there was nothing Gaines could do but say, “Yes, Della. If he did these things, if he killed these people, then he needs to suffer the full penalty of the law.”

“Can you even begin to appreciate what you are asking me to do?”

“No, Della, I can’t.”

“And if I fail—”

“You can’t fail,” Gaines said. “There is no such thing here. You can do whatever you can do, as much as you are willing, and beyond that there is nothing else. Right now, as it stands, I have nowhere else to go. I am not saying that to make you feel responsible for what happens. I am not saying that to make you feel obligated, Della. I am just saying that because it’s the truth. If I had more time, or if I’d had a better way of approaching this, then maybe I would have a better plan. But I don’t, and that’s all there is to it. I am hoping against all reason that there is something in your house that ties Matthias to one or more of these killings. Something, anything at all. Anything you can find will give me reason for a warrant, and if I have a warrant, perhaps we will find something else. That’s all I can hope for.”

“And if there’s nothing? If I look as best I can and I find nothing?”

“Then I will have to come at this from some other direction.”

“And maybe there won’t be another direction.”

“Maybe there won’t be.”

“And then what?”

Gaines shook his head. “Then we will never know the truth of what happened to Nancy or Michael or anyone else, and these things will remain unpunished.”

“Which is not right,” she said. “That can’t be right. I understand that. But there’s something else to consider . . . the fact that he might not have killed Nancy, that he might not have killed Michael.”

“You’re right,” Gaines said. “Maybe he didn’t kill them, but if he is innocent, why is he not willing to even talk to me? Why is he so defensive?”

“I don’t know, Sheriff. Maybe because he doesn’t want this kind of rumor and hearsay around the family. Maybe because he doesn’t want my father to hear about it.”

“Do you think that’s the case?”

“Oh God, I can’t answer that. Jesus Christ, you know I can’t answer that. You’re asking me to make decisions about things that are impossible to make decisions about. You’re asking me to choose Clifton over my brother . . . You’re asking—”

“That is life,” Gaines said, interrupting her. “If life were always right, then these things would not have happened. Nancy would have married Michael, and there’d be two young women in Morgan City with lives of their own to look forward to. But they don’t, and that’s because someone kidnapped them and killed them back in 1968.”

“Matthias,” Della said. Just his name, nothing more, but in the way she said it there was everything she was feeling—despair, loss, fear, horror, refusal, perhaps some desperate sense of hope that what was being suggested here could never be true.

“I am sorry to be the one who—”

“Who what?” she interjected. “You didn’t kill anyone, did you? You didn’t strangle some poor child and leave her dead somewhere, did you? You didn’t make this happen, Sheriff Gaines. What can I say? What can I tell you? Can I say that I wish I’d never known about this, that I’d stayed ignorant, uninformed? Can I say that and believe it, honestly? No, I don’t think so. What has happened has happened. We can’t go backward, can we? We can’t retrace our steps and change it all and make it right. What you say is true. Life doesn’t work that way. Life is just going to be however it is, and once a day has gone there is nothing anyone can do to fix it.”

“But we can fix tomorrow,” Gaines said.

“We can try and fix tomorrow,” she replied.

“And that’s what I’m asking of you.”

“I know what you’re asking of me, Sheriff.”

“And can you help us? Can you do what I’m asking?”

“I can. Of course I can. It’s not a question of whether or not I can. It’s a question of whether or not I am willing to.”

“And are you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I am willing to help you, Sheriff Gaines, but I can guarantee nothing.”

“I know.”

She shook her head. “No, I don’t think you do know. I don’t think you understand who you are dealing with here. If my brother is anything, he is organized. He is methodical. He is businesslike in everything he does, from the clothes he wears to the things he says, the way he manages my father’s companies, the finances, the help, the land we own, everything. Everything is under control; everything is precise. If he killed Michael Webster, then he did not kill him. He had someone else do it. That’s what he would have done. My brother, believe me, will not have Michael Webster’s blood on his hands.”

“But maybe there is something,” Gaines said. “That’s all we have right now . . . the possibility that there is something.”

“And there is something I want from you.”

Gaines didn’t ask her. He waited for her to tell him.

“I need you to do everything you can to help Clifton. If I help you do this, I want Clifton out of there, out of Parchman and back here with me.”

“I cannot promise—”

“And neither can I,” she said. “We are not asking each other for promises, Sheriff Gaines. We are asking each other to do the best we can. You want me to find evidence that will convict my brother of murder. I want you to dispute and disprove the evidence that put Clifton in prison.”

“This is a condition?”

Della frowned, looked at Gaines as if he had insulted her. “You don’t get this at all, do you? Maybe you do, and you’re just protecting yourself. Of course it’s not a condition. What kind of person do you think I am? You think I am going to trade the lives of innocent people for my own advantage?”

“I’m sorry, Della. I didn’t mean for it to sound that way.”

“Well, I don’t know what way you meant for it to sound, Sheriff. It sounded just about right to me. Maybe the Wades have a reputation around here. Maybe people think we’re nothing but a bunch of racist, self-interested, hardheaded assholes out to take advantage of any situation that presents itself. Well, maybe some of us have been that way, but I am not one of them, I can assure you.”