Текст книги "The Devil and the River"

Автор книги: R. J. Ellory

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Текущая страница: 22 (всего у книги 33 страниц)

48

Clifton Regis wrote the letter. He insisted that Gaines read it. Gaines said that whatever business existed between him and Della Wade was their business alone, but Regis made it a condition.

“I want you to understand what this means to me,” he said. “I want you to appreciate how significant this thing is, because that’ll make me feel like you will try your hardest to get this to her without her brother finding out.”

“So read me the letter,” Gaines said.

Regis cleared his throat, looked at Gaines with that wide-eyed hopefulness, and then started.

“D. Got a chance here to get you a letter, so I’m taking it. A man came to see me. He’s a sheriff from Whytesburg called John Gaines, and he told me that M is maybe in some trouble down there. I know you feel the same way about M as me, and I know that you get why I’m here. I am also hoping that what we had in New Orleans is still alive and that you are waiting for me. I need you to know that everything that has happened between us means as much now as it did back then and that I will do anything to be with you again. I want you to talk to this man, and I want you to tell him what you know. I want you to help him if you can, so that we have a chance to be together again. That’s why I want you to do this. If you cannot do this, or you have decided that we cannot be together, then I need you to tell me so I can make my decisions. And if you cannot help this man or you are not willing to talk to him, then just burn this letter and do not let M see it. Not for my sake, but because I know he will get mad and hurt you if he thinks that we are in contact. Somehow, some way, I think we can be together again. That is what I live for. I just want to see you again, to hold you, to tell you how much I love you. I wish every day that you feel the same. I believe in my heart that you do. Love you forever. C.”

Gaines merely nodded in acknowledgment. Then he took the letter from Regis, folded it, tucked it into his shirt pocket, and got up.

They shook hands again, and Gaines thanked Regis for his time and his help.

“You gonna be okay when you go back?” Gaines asked.

“Back into population? Sure, why’d you ask?”

“McNamara said that maybe you’d get some trouble for being out here talking to the law.”

“Hey, they’re gonna believe whatever I tell ’em. I don’t get no trouble from these guys. I can take care of myself.”

“Good to hear it.”

“One other thing,” Regis said.

“Yes?”

“You get her that letter, you find out what she says about me, whether she’s waiting for me, and you gotta let me know somehow, okay?”

“Yes,” Gaines replied. “I can do that for sure.”

“You got family, Sheriff Gaines?”

“No, Clifton, I don’t.”

“Well, good enough.”

Gaines frowned.

“I’d be more worried for you if you had a wife and some little ’uns to mourn you. You step all over Matthias Wade’s toes and he ain’t gonna take a polite apology. He’s gonna take your head.”

“Well, he did that already to someone else, and I think it’s about time he got some retribution.”

Regis got up, and the pair of them walked to the makeshift door.

“So you really think he killed some girl?” Regis asked.

“I do. At first I thought it was someone else, and now I think it was Matthias.”

“And you said something about her heart?”

Gaines nodded. “Yes. She was sixteen, a pretty, bright teenage girl, and someone strangled her and then cut out her heart.”

Regis’s expression was suddenly one of intense curiosity. “That is a very strange thing to do, Sheriff.”

Gaines smiled sardonically. “Cutting her heart out was nothing compared to what they did next—”

“Which was?”

“You won’t believe me, but in place of her heart they put a wicker basket—”

“With a snake inside,” Regis said, and he looked down at the ground. It was not a question; it was a statement. Regis’s entire body language changed. It seemed as if a great weight had been lowered down onto his shoulders.

“How did you—”

Regis looked up. “They did a revival, Sheriff Gaines. Whoever killed your girl, someone tried to bring her back.”

Gaines couldn’t speak. He just looked at Regis with an expression of utter disbelief.

“As old as God,” Regis said. “This shit is as old as God. You take out the heart, you bury the heart elsewhere, a specific place, a specific distance from the body, and then you replace the heart with a wicker basket. Inside the basket is a snake, its tail in its mouth, and you sew them up a special way—thirteen punctures as far as I recall, six on the right, seven on the left, and the stitch crosses itself five times—and then you bury the body near running water. And you never speak a word of what you have done. Not to anyone. Not ever. Even if you do it with someone, even if they were there, you never speak of it between you. If you do, it breaks the spell and the person will not be revived.”

Gaines stayed silent. His mouth was dry. His breath felt heavy in his chest.

“That’s the revival, Sheriff. That’s what was done to your girl back then. You still have her body?”

Gaines nodded.

“Well, you go look, and if there are seven holes on the left side and six on the right, and if she was tied in such a way as to cross those stitches five times, then you have someone trying to revive her.”

“Y-you can’t be se-serious,” Gaines stammered, but already he had begun to understand what had happened. He knew that Webster had done this. It was as if the entire case had turned on its head. All of a sudden, Webster appeared to be the one who’d told the truth. Webster had tried to bring Nancy Denton back. What a sad, desperate, terrible, pointless thing. It was heartbreaking to even consider. He had loved the girl—that was evident from what Gaines had heard, from the almost-visible chemistry between them in their pictures—and he had cut open her chest, removed her heart, and done this dreadful thing in some vain and futile effort to bring her back to life. And that was why he had never spoken of it. Maybe Wade had known this, and such was Webster’s belief in what he was doing, such was Wade’s certainty that Webster would maintain his silence, that it had not been necessary to kill Webster. Only when Nancy’s body had been found, thus demonstrating once and for all that the revival would never work, did Wade need to take care of Michael Webster.

It was utterly unbelievable, but—as Gaines’s mother used to say—what we knew of the world was dwarfed by what we did not know.

“I know it sounds like some crazy occult Frankenstein raising-people-from-the-dead thing,” Regis said, “but this is hoodoo, and this has an awful lot less to do with what you may or may not believe and a great deal to do with what other folks believe. And what other folks believe has brought about the killing of a young girl and the desecration of her body. If Wade did that, then—”

“I don’t think Wade did that,” Gaines said, almost to himself. “I think he killed her, and then someone who loved her found her and did what he thought would bring her back.”

Gaines tried to picture Nancy’s body. He tried to recall the number of punctures in the torso, the way in which it had been laced. He could call Powell, but he knew without even asking that it would be precisely as Regis had explained.

“So it seems you are dealing with something else now,” Regis said.

“Y-yes,” Gaines replied. “But how do you know this?”

Regis smiled. The scar down his cheek was like the crease in a sheet of paper. “I am a black man from Louisiana, Sheriff Gaines,” he said. “You gotta get the spirit of Legba back into them, and Legba is gonna either bring them back to you or carry them over into the afterlife. The serpent represents the power of Legba. It represents healing and the connection between heaven and earth. Whoever does it usually does it for love . . . to make sure that the one they love never gets caught in limbo between this world and the next. And whoever did this to your girl would have suffered terribly, I’m sure, because to do that to someone you love . . .” Regis shook his head. “And you can never say a word . . . never . . .”

“It casts an entirely different light on the whole thing,” Gaines said.

“I imagine it would, Sheriff.”

“I can’t see Matthias Wade doing that to someone, can you?”

“I can see Matthias Wade doing a great many things, Sheriff Gaines, but doing something like that for love is not one of them.”

“Thank you for telling me this,” Gaines said.

“You are welcome, Sheriff Gaines, but the best way to thank me is to get that note to Della without her brother finding out. That’s all I can ask of you.”

Gaines and Regis parted company, Regis back into the care of Ted McNamara and a pickup ride to the work party, Gaines out onto the highway once more. It was after eight o’clock by the time he saw the Parchman Farm main entrance in the rearview.

He drove in silence but for the sound of the engine and the wheels on the road. He did not switch on the radio. He just wanted a clear mind with no interruptions as he considered the implications of what Clifton Regis had told him.

That morning, little more than a week before, he, Jim Hughes, Richard Hagen, and the assembled crew had unearthed something from the riverbank. It had not just been the body of a sixteen-year-old; it had been something else entirely. They had brought out the dead, and the unresolved truth of her death was now haunting Whytesburg like a ghost. That ghost would not lie in rest until the facts were known. That ghost was in limbo, and where Michael Webster might have failed to accomplish what he had set out to do, Gaines could not.

Gaines knew that by the time he got back south, it would be too late to go see Maryanne Benedict, and besides, he wanted to find out from Eddie Holland why she’d wanted to see him. Perhaps there was something about the night of Nancy Denton’s disappearance that she’d remembered. Perhaps there was something she knew about Matthias Wade but felt safer speaking at first to Eddie Holland rather than Gaines, who, in actuality, was a complete stranger. Gaines could only guess, and guessing served no purpose.

Rather, he spent the hours of solitude between Indianola and Whytesburg turning over all that had happened in his mind. He did not believe Clifton Regis was a liar, just as he did not believe the man was a thief. He believed that Clifton Regis had met Della Wade in New Orleans, just as he’d said, and that chance rendezvous had occurred because of Eugene. Eugene was a musician, as was Regis, and Della appeared to have gravitated toward that lifestyle, the people who lived it. Matthias, staunch segregationist, perhaps racist to the core, had learned of the relationship, had learned also that ten thousand dollars of Wade money had found its way into Clifton Regis’s hands. That would have flown in the teeth of everything that Wade intended to preserve about his family’s name and reputation. The solution had been simple. A brief visit to Clifton Regis, the recovery of the money, his sister rescued, and Clifton Regis left behind minus two of his fingers. Whether the subsequent burglary charge that put Regis in Parchman had been Wade’s doing or simply another blatant example of racist railroading that was so prevalent in these parts was another matter, and frankly, something that did not overly concern Gaines at that moment. He was content to know where Regis was, encouraged by the fact that Regis was compliant, secure in the knowledge that if he got the letter to Della Wade, then some sort of dialogue might be engendered. How to get the letter to Della without Matthias’s knowledge was the next obstacle.

Arriving back in Whytesburg, Gaines did not consider it too late to go visit with Ross and Holland. They were both up, playing cards as it happened, and they welcomed Gaines’s arrival. They asked him to join them, to share a few drinks, a few hands, but he said he had no plans to stay.

“I just came to find out why Maryanne Benedict wanted to see you,” Gaines asked Holland.

“Because you scared the bejesus out of her, that’s why,” Holland replied. “A stranger shows up at her door, tells her Nancy Denton is dead, Webster, too, one of them buried in a riverbank for twenty years, the other one burned in a fire without his head. How would you feel?”

“Oh, I think I’d feel pretty much as I do right now, Eddie. Like I’m in someone else’s nightmare, and whatever I do, I just can’t wake up.”

“Well, she’s pretty much the same, my friend. She wanted to know if everything you’d said was true. She wanted to know if you could be trusted, as well.”

“Trusted?”

“Hell, I don’t know why she asked that, John. She just did. Maybe she’s gathering up the courage to tell you something.”

“I’m plannin’ on going over to see her in the morning.”

“Because?”

“Because I want her to deliver a message to Della Wade for me.”

Both Eddie Holland and Nate Ross looked up from their cards, but neither spoke.

“I got a man called Clifton Regis up at Parchman on a three-to-five that looks like a setup. He was Della’s boyfriend. Hell, they were going to elope together. Della gave him ten grand, and then Matthias found out, took her back, cut off a couple of Clifton Regis’s fingers, and shipped Della back to the Wade house. As far as I know, she’s been there ever since.”

“And what did this fella up at Parchman have to say to Della?” Holland asked.

“He says he loves her, hopes that she’s waiting for him, hopes that they’ll find some way to be together despite Matthias.”

“So this Regis has a vested interest in colluding with you any which way to get Matthias out of the picture.”

“Yes, seems that way to me.”

“And why didn’t Matthias take kindly to Della being involved with Mr. Regis?” Holland asked

“That’s easy,” Ross explained. “Because Clifton Regis is a colored man.”

“Right,” Holland said. “That’ll do it.”

“And he told me something else . . . something about why Webster cut Nancy Denton near in half and put a snake in her chest.”

“Because he was fucking crazy, right?” Holland said.

“No, Eddie . . . because he loved her more than life itself, and he was trying to bring her back.”

“You what?”

“It’s called a revival. It’s some kind of voodoo ritual, and he did that because he thought there was a chance she could be brought back to life.”

“Christ almighty,” Ross said. “Now I believe I have heard it all.”

“But I cannot deal with that now, not as part of the investigation,” Gaines said. “That has been and gone, and whatever Michael Webster thought he might be doing is history now. I have to deal with what I have right in front of me, and that is Webster’s death and whether Matthias Wade was directly involved.”

“I don’t think there’s a great deal going on around there that doesn’t involve Matthias Wade, one way or the other,” Ross said.

“They’re Klan, right?” Gaines asked.

“The Wades? Sure as hell they are. A lot of the old Southern families were—and still are. Things have changed, but they changed only a little, and they’ve changed too damned slow. It’s not the way it was in the twenties and thirties, but it’s there all right.”

“You think old man Wade is Klan, as well?”

Ross smiled. “Earl Wade was all set to be Grand Dragon for this state, possibly Louisiana and Alabama too. He was right in there, politically speaking, but after that church bombing in sixty-three, a good number of senior Klan officers distanced themselves from it, again for political reasons.”

“Church bombing?” Gaines asked.

“The 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama. Four colored girls were killed. That was eleven years ago, and they’re still no nearer to finding out who did that. It was Klan, for sure, but no one has been identified as responsible, and no arrests have been made. Then we had those three civil rights kids murdered here in Mississippi in 1964—”

“Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner,” Holland interjected, “and then those two colored kids were murdered here as well, Henry Dee and Charles Moore. There was rumor—still is—that they were killed by someone within the sheriff’s department, but—as with all these cases—there is never enough evidence, and no one is ever prepared to make a statement.”

“And then Vernon Dahmer was killed in sixty-six. He was Forrest County NAACP president. Got his house firebombed, his wife and eight kids inside. His wife got herself and all the kids out. Dahmer manages to escape, but he’s so badly burned he doesn’t make it. He dies the next day. That was one time people actually demanded a real honest-to-God investigation, and they ended up indicting fourteen men. Thirteen made it to trial, eight of them on arson and murder charges, the rest on conspiracy to intimidate and such. They even charged Sam Bowers, Imperial Wizard, got him before a judge and jury four times, but each time it ended in a mistrial. All that happened on my doorstep, literally, and it was the kind of thing that really soured a lot of people on Klan membership. They certainly were not in the business of making any new friends down here, and they lost a lot of old ones. Late sixties was when Earl Wade started to get sick, and since then, he’s not been physically well enough to be involved in anything like that.”

“He’s sick?” Gaines asked. “Sick with what?”

“I don’t know for sure,” Ross said. “Maybe he’s just getting old. Heard word he was losing his mind, going senile, you know?”

“But Matthias,” Holland said, “well, he’s a different animal altogether.”

“He’s active in the Klan?” Gaines asked.

“Who the hell knows,” Ross replied. “It isn’t something people openly admit to anymore. Back in the twenties, the Klan had something in the region of four or five million members, some say as high as six million. That was about five percent of the population. One person in every twenty was a self-professed Klan member.”

“Well, we know for sure he had a major disagreement with his sister and Clifton Regis getting together.”

“And Regis is on a three-to-five, you say?”

“Right.”

“And he’s been there how long?”

“Seventeen months.”

“You want me to check into it?” Ross asked. “I still have a whole network of friends and acquaintances in the legal arena. Hattiesburg, Vicksburg, Jackson, Columbus, Tupelo . . . I can find out who was on it, the judge, jury selection, all kinds of things.”

“No,” Gaines said. “I have enough going on without worrying about whether or not Clifton Regis was set up by Matthias Wade. Right now, all I am interested in is Michael Webster’s death.”

“And Nancy Denton’s,” Holland said.

“No, not as much, Eddie. Webster was killed less than a week ago, Nancy twenty years ago. I think that Matthias Wade killed Nancy. I think he strangled her and dumped the body. I think Michael Webster found her, and then he did what he did. He held on to that secret for twenty years with the deluded belief that she might come back. That’s why he never spoke of it, and I think Wade knew he would never speak of it. If he spoke of what had happened, then not only would this revival be compromised, but he would go to jail for what he did to her body, for obstructing justice, and might even have been found guilty of her murder. When she was found, well, everything changed. Then Webster would be free to speak, certain that she wasn’t coming back. Wade knew that Webster had to be removed from the equation, and removed he was. If Webster did kill Nancy, well, there isn’t anything more the law can do to him now. If Matthias killed Nancy, then even getting him for Michael Webster’s murder will serve me well enough.”

“And you honestly think that Della is your inside line to that family?” Ross asked.

“I have to try something, Nate. And right now, it’s the best thing I can think of.”

“And you’re off to Gulfport tomorrow morning?” Holland asked.

“Yes.”

“You want me to come with you? Maryanne knows me. She trusts me. It might make the difference between her being willing to cooperate or not.”

“Yes, that’d be really appreciated.”

“Then I’ll be ready tomorrow morning,” Holland said.

“I’ll come fetch you at eight.”

“So now there’s no reason not to stay and have a drink,” Ross said. “Better here with company than home on your own, right?”

Gaines considered the cold and empty house, the closed door of his mother’s room, the task that that lay ahead of him, of how he would cope with everything that reminded him of her. He thought of her clothes, her picture albums, her personal possessions.

“Okay,” Gaines said. “One drink, a few hands of poker.”

“Or a few drinks and one hand of poker,” Ross said. “Sounds better that way.”