“Gradney never mentioned it,” he said. “He didn’t give me any details.”

“Why d’you want to know?” Gaines asked.

“I know a little about guns,” Della replied. “Enough to know what’s a revolver, what’s not. If there was no gun there and Matthias did kill him, then maybe the gun he used is in the house. I know where he keeps his guns.”

“Call Gradney,” Gaines told Hagen.

Maryanne got up to show Hagen where the phone was. Hagen was no more than a minute or two. He returned to the kitchen and said, “They don’t have ballistics confirmation, but Gradney says that from the look of it, it wasn’t a big caliber. He says maybe a .22 or a .25. Not a .38. Said there wasn’t enough frontal damage for a .38.”

“I’ll look,” Della said. “I know the difference between a .38 and a smaller-caliber gun. If I find something, I’ll contact Maryanne.”

“You have to take care, Della. Seriously, we’ve had three deaths here in the last week and a half—granted one of them was a suicide—but this is all tied together. I do not need another killing in Whytesburg.”

Della Wade got up from her chair and straightened her coat. “I have no intention of dying just yet, Sheriff Gaines. I have a man up at Parchman expecting to come back and find me very much alive.” Gaines rose also, took Della’s hand, held it for just a moment. “What you are doing is very much appreciated,” he said. “I want you to know that.”

“I am not doing it for you, Sheriff,” she said. “I am doing it for myself and maybe for Nancy Denton and Michael Webster. Seems that maybe Leon Devereaux might have got what he deserved, but I can find no justification for what was done to Nancy and Michael. They loved each other. Was that their crime?”

She turned and looked at Maryanne. “You knew them,” she said. “They didn’t deserve that, did they?”

“No,” Maryanne said. “They did not.”

“Take care,” Gaines said, and he released her hand.

Maryanne showed her to the door, waited with her for the minutes before the cab arrived.

She returned to the kitchen, found the three men in silence.

It seemed to be some small eternity before anyone uttered a word.

68

She came to him in his dreams.

Della Wade.

Of course it was not her, not in appearance, but in her words, it could have been no one else.

And in listening to her, he knew that she had lied to him.

The war raged about them, and they stood in some clearing. Through the overhanging trees, he could still see the ghosts of tracers, the way the phosphorous hung above the ground, and there was the smell of cordite and blood and the stagnant water that seemed to find its way into everything—your fatigues, your boots, your skin.

For a while she looked like a little Vietnamese girl. She stood silent, and there was blood on her ai do, and there was blood on her hands.

It was the blood on her hands that told Gaines that she had lied.

The blood on her hands made him think about what she had said.

And then the little girl opened her mouth, and though she did not make a sound, Gaines could understand what she was saying.

War cleanses men of all that is best in them.

It cleanses with fire, with bullets and blades and bombs and blood.

It cleanses with loss and pain.

But the only things that can kill you out here are faithlessness and shortness of breath.

Later, when Gaines woke from the dream, the memory of it fading from his thoughts too rapidly, he recalled Della’s words.

He would send Devereaux to shoot him in the head.

It was that statement, those few words, that did not ring true.

Gaines, sitting there on the edge of his bed, looking out the window and awaiting the ghost of dawn that slept just a few inches beneath the horizon, did not believe that Matthias Wade had said any such thing to his younger brother.

Matthias Wade, if nothing else, was a smart man.

Matthias Wade may very well have threatened Eugene, but he would not have used Leon Devereaux’s name.

That did not make sense.

Gaines could have been wrong, of course. He knew that. He knew he could be wrong about Michael Webster. He may have been the one who stole Nancy Denton away that night and strangled her. He knew he could be wrong about Marvin Wallace. He could be wrong about Matthias Wade. Matthias could be no more responsible for the death of Nancy Denton than he was himself.

This was not detective work. This was a blunt and brutal fist of a thing, constantly hammering away at nothing in the hope that some small truth might be revealed. He was surrounded by liars, people who knew things that they would not share, people who themselves had been misled, deceived, betrayed. He had no leads. He had nothing of significance or consequence, and it had been this way right from the start. He had made guesses and assumptions. He had chased shadows and specters. He had asked questions of those who did not wish to be asked and read a second meaning into their answers.

And this was what he had, in and of itself the merest shadow of the truth, and it served in the absence of anything else.

However, Gaines knew he had to believe in something, so he chose to believe that Della Wade had lied to him about Eugene and Leon Devereaux.

Gaines showered and dressed. He made coffee. He stood on the back porch and looked out toward the trees.

He closed his eyes and spoke to his mother. He hoped she was well, that she had found peace, that there was something beyond this life that made this life make sense.

He dared to believe that there might be something, for what was here made no sense at all. The world made no sense, people made no sense; what they did to one another, what they said. How man treated his fellow man, not just in war, but also in peace, for peace seemed to be nothing but a charade to pass the time between each outbreak of violence. He had read this one time, that there had been eleven days of peace in the last two thousand years. Why would people want to live this way? Why would such a thing be considered a worthwhile existence?

He drank his coffee. He smoked his cigarette. He knew he had to go up to the Wade house and confront the truth.

Once inside, Gaines pressed a clean shirt, shined his shoes, cleaned, and reloaded his gun, even gave a sheen to the worn leather holster he had used since he’d first joined the Breed County Sheriff’s Department.

Today was the day.

Today something would happen.

Enough of the lies, the deceptions, the mysteries, the unknowns.

Today the truth would out, and if the truth would not be coaxed out with words, then perhaps something else was needed.

Perhaps a war.

Perhaps that’s what he would deliver into the hands of Matthias and Della Wade: a war.

Someone should go with him. But not Hagen. Hagen was a married man, a man with children. Nate Ross or Eddie Holland. Perhaps both of them.

And then Gaines decided against it. This was a matter of law, and he represented the law. Eddie was retired and no longer possessed any official authority. Nate was a lawyer, not a policeman. If Gaines could not deal with this alone, then he could not deal with it at all.

And so he waited, waited until the sun had broken the horizon and started its slow ascent. He stood inside the front doorway of his mother’s house, and he watched as the colors of the fields and trees were revealed, as the shadows lengthened, as the redbirds and thrashers finished their chorus, and then he walked down to his car, started the engine, and drove away from Whytesburg toward that beautiful old house on the banks of the Pearl River.

This was the end of it.

It had to be.

69

Sheriff John Gaines, standing there between the high pillars of the Wade house entranceway, was permitted by one of the staff to step inside.