In time, there was movement from the doorway and Tereus appeared, surrounded by fading sunlight. He had a spade in his hands, which he rested against the doorjamb before entering the cabin and squatting down before me. I could see no trace of the woman, but I sensed her nearby and guessed that she was back in her own darkened room, surrounded by images of a physical beauty she would never again be able to claim as her own.
‘Welcome back, brother,’ said Tereus. He removed his dark glasses. Up close, the membrane that coated his eyes was clearer. It reminded me of tapetum, the reflective surface that some nocturnal animals develop to magnify low light and improve their night vision. He filled a water bottle from the faucet, then brought it to me and tilted it to my mouth. I drank until the water ran down my chin. I coughed, and winced at the pain it caused in my head.
‘I’m not your brother.’
‘You weren’t my brother, you’d be dead by now.’
‘You killed them all, didn’t you?’
He leaned in close to me. ‘These people got to learn. This is a world of balances. They took a life, destroyed another. They got to learn about the White Road, got to see what’s waiting for them there, got to pass over and become part of it.’
I looked away from him toward the window, and saw that the light was failing. Soon, it would be dark.
‘You rescued her,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘I couldn’t save her sister, but I could save her.’
I saw regret, and more: I saw love.
‘She was burned bad, but stayed under the surface, and the underground streams carried her out. I found her stretched over a rock, then I took her home and me and my momma, we took care of her. And when my momma died, she took care of herself for a year until I got released from jail. Now I’m back.’
‘Why didn’t you just go to the police, tell them what happened?’
‘That ain’t the way these things is done. Anyhow, her sister’s body was gone. It was a dark night, and she was suffering. She can’t even talk – she had to write their names for me – and even if she could tell who they was, who would believe it of young, rich white men like that? I ain’t even sure what she thinks no more. The pain drove her crazy.’
But that didn’t answer it. That wasn’t enough to explain what had happened, what he had endured and what he had forced others to endure.
‘It was Addy, wasn’t it?’
He didn’t reply.
‘You loved her, maybe before Davis Smoot ever appeared. Was he your child, Tereus? Was Atys Jones your child? Was she afraid to tell others because of what you were, because even the blacks looked down on you, because you were an outcast from the swamps? That’s why you went looking for Smoot, why you didn’t tell Atys what landed you in jail: you didn’t tell him you’d killed Smoot because it wasn’t important. You didn’t believe Smoot was his father, and you were right. The dates didn’t match. You killed Smoot for what he did to Addy, then fled back here in time to discover another violation being visited on the woman you loved. But before you could avenge yourself on Larousse and his friends, the cops came for you and sent you back to Alabama for trial, and you were lucky just to get twenty years because there were enough witnesses to back up your claim of self-defense. I reckon that once old Davis caught sight of you he went straight for the nearest weapon, and you had an excuse to kill him. Now you’re back, making up for lost time.’
Tereus did not respond. There would be no confirmation from him, and no denial. One of his big hands gripped my shoulder and dragged me to my feet. ‘That time is now, brother. Rise up, rise up.’
A blade cut the ropes at my feet. I felt the pain begin as the blood began to circulate properly at last.
‘Where are we going?’
He looked surprised, and I knew then just how crazy he was, crazy even before they chained him to a post in the blazing sun, crazy enough to keep an injured woman out here for years, protected by an old woman, in order to serve some strange messianic purpose of his own.
‘Back to the pit,’ he said. ‘We going back to the pit. It’s time.’
‘Time for what?’
He drew me gently toward him.
‘Time to show them the White Road.’
Although his small boat had an engine, he untied my hands and made me row. He was afraid: afraid that the noise might draw the men to him before he was ready, afraid that I might turn on him if he did not find some way to occupy me. Once or twice I considered striking out at him, but the revolver he now carried was unwavering in his grip. He would nod and smile at me in warning if I even paused in my strokes, as if we were two old friends on a boating trip together as the day descended softly into night and the dark gathered around us.
I didn’t know where the woman was. I knew only that she had left the house before us.
‘You didn’t kill Marianne Larousse,’ I said as we came in sight of a house set back from the bank and a dog barked at our passing, his chain jangling softly in the evening air. A light went on in the porch of the house, and I saw the form of a man emerge and heard him hush the dog. His voice was not angry, and I felt a rush of affection for him. I saw him tousle the dog’s fur, and the silhouette of its dark tail flicked back and forth in response. I was tired. I felt as if I were approaching the very end of things, as if this river was a kind of Styx across which I was being forced to row myself in the absence of the boatman, and as soon as the boat struck the bank I would descend into the underworld and become lost in the honeycomb.
I repeated the comment.
‘What does it matter?’ he replied.
‘It matters to me. It probably mattered to Marianne while she was dying. But you didn’t kill her. You were still in jail.’
‘They say the boy killed her, and he ain’t about to contradict them now.’
I stopped rowing, and heard the click of the hammer cocking a moment later.
‘Don’t make me shoot you, Mr. Parker.’
I rested the oars and raised my hands.
‘She did it, didn’t she? Melia killed Marianne Larousse, and her own nephew, your son, died as a result.’
He regarded me silently for a time before he spoke.
‘She knows this river,’ he said. ‘Knows the swamps. She wanders in them. Sometimes, she likes to watch the folks drinkin’ and whorin’. I guess it reminds her of what she lost, of what they took away from her. It was just pure dumb luck that she saw Marianne Larousse running among the trees that night, nothing more. She recognized her face from the society pages of the newspapers – she likes to look at the pictures of the beautiful ladies – and she took her chance.
‘Dumb luck,’ he intoned again. ‘That’s all it was.’
But it wasn’t, of course. The history of these two families, the Larousses and the Joneses, the blood spilled and lives destroyed, meant that it could never be anything as pure as luck or coincidence that drew them together. Over more than two centuries they had bound themselves, each to the other, in a pact of mutual destructiveness only partly acknowledged on either side, fueled by a past that allowed one man to own and abuse another and fanned into continuous flame by remembered injuries and violent responses. Their paths through this world were interweaved, crisscrossing at crucial moments in the history of this state and in the lives of their families.
‘Did she know that the boy with Marianne was her own nephew?’
‘She didn’t see him until the girl was dead. I—’
He stopped.
‘Like I said, I don’t know what she thinks, but she can read some. She saw the newspapers, and I think she used to watch the jailhouse some, late at night.’
‘You could have saved him,’ I said. ‘By coming forward with her, you could have saved Atys. No court would convict her of murder. She’s insane.’
‘No, I couldn’t do that.’
He couldn’t do it because then he would not have been able to continue punishing the rapists and killers of the woman he had loved. Ultimately, he was prep
ared to sacrifice his own son for revenge.
‘You killed the others?’
‘We did, the two of us together.’
He had rescued her and kept her safe, then killed for her and the memory of her sister. In a way, he had given up his life for them.
‘It was how it had to be,’ he said, as if guessing the direction of my thoughts. ‘And that’s all I got to say.’
I started to row again, drawing deep arcs through the water, the droplets falling back to the river in what seemed like impossibly languid descents, as if somehow I were slowing down the passage of time, drawing each moment out, longer and longer again, until at last the world would stop, the oars frozen at the moment they broke the water, the birds trapped in midflight, the insects caught like motes of dust in a picture frame, and we would never have to go forward again. We would never have to find ourselves by the lip of that dark pit, with its smells of engine oil and effluent, and the memory of the burning marked with black tongues along the grooves of its stone.
‘There’s just two left,’ said Tereus at one point. ‘Just two more, and it will all be over.’
And I could not tell if he was talking to himself, or to me, or to some unseen other. I looked to the bank and expected to see her shadowing our progress, a figure consumed by pain. Or to see her sister, her jaw hanging loose, her head ruined but her eyes wild and bright, burning with a rage fierce as the flames that had engulfed her sister.
But there was only tree shade and the darkening sky, and waters glittering with the fragmented ghosts of early moonlight.
‘This is where we get off,’ he whispered.
I steered the boat toward the left bank. When it struck land I heard a soft splash behind me and saw that Tereus was already out of the boat. He gestured for me to move toward the trees, and I began to walk. My trousers were wet and swamp water squelched in my shoes. I was covered in bites; my face felt swollen from them, and the exposed skin of my back and chest itched furiously.
‘How do you know that they’ll be here?’ I asked.
‘Oh, they’ll be here,’ he said. ‘I promised them the two things they wanted the most: the answer to who killed Marianne Larousse.’
‘And?’
‘And you, Mr. Parker. They’ve decided that you’ve outlived your usefulness. That Mr. Kittim, I reckon he’s gonna bury you.’
I knew that it was true, that the part Kittim was to play represented the last act in the drama they had planned. Elliot had brought me down here, ostensibly to find out about the circumstances of Marianne Larousse’s murder in an effort to clear Atys Jones, but in reality, and in collusion with Larousse, to find out if her murder was linked to what was happening to the six men who had raped the Jones sisters, then killed one of them and left the other to burn. Mobley had worked for Bowen and I guessed that at some point Bowen had learned through him of what he and the others had done, which gave him the leverage he required to use Elliot and probably Earl Jr. too. Elliot would draw me down, and Kittim would destroy me. If I discovered the truth about who was behind the killings before I died, then so much the better. If I didn’t, then I still wasn’t going to live long enough to collect my fee.
‘But you’re not going to hand Melia over to them,’ I said.
‘No, I’m going to kill them.’
‘Alone.’
His white teeth gleamed.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I told you. Not alone. Never alone.’
It was still as Poveda had described it after all these years. There was the broken fence that I had skirted days earlier and the pockmarked ‘No Trespassing’ sign. I could see the sinkholes, some of them small and masked by vegetation, others so large that whole trees had fallen into them. We had walked for just five minutes when I smelled an acrid chemical stink in the air that at first was merely unpleasant but, as we drew closer to the hole, began to scorch the nostrils and cause the eyes to water. Discarded trash lay unmoving upon the ground without a breeze to stir it, and the skeletons of decayed trees, their trunks gray and lifeless, stretched thin shadows across the limestone. The hole itself was about twenty feet in circumference, and so deep that its base was lost in darkness. Roots and grasses overhung the verge, trailing down into the shadows.
Two men stood at the far side of the hole, looking down into its depths. One was Earl Jr. The second man was Kittim. He was without his trademark shades now that it was growing dark and he was the first to sense our approach. His face remained blank even as we stood and faced them across the expanse of the pit, Kittim’s eyes briefly resting on me before he gave his full attention to Tereus.
‘Do you recognize him?’ he asked Earl Jr.
Earl Jr. shook his head. Kittim seemed dissatisfied with the answer, with the fact that he did not have the information he required to make an accurate assessment of the situation.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘My name is Tereus.’
‘Did you kill Marianne Larousse?’
‘No, I did not. I killed the others, and I watched Foster attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and feed it in through his window. But I didn’t kill the Larousse girl.’
‘Then who did?’
She was nearby. I knew she was. I could feel her. It seemed to me that Larousse did too, because I watched his head flick back suddenly like a startled deer, his eyes roving across the trees, looking for the source of his unease.
‘I asked you a question,’ Kittim persisted. ‘Who killed her?’
Three armed men emerged from the trees at either side of us. Instantly, Tereus dropped his gun to the ground and I knew that he had never planned to walk away from this.
Two of the men beside us I did not recognize.
The third was Elliot Norton.
‘You don’t seem surprised to see me, Charlie,’ he said.
‘It takes a lot to surprise me, Elliot.’
‘Even the return of an old friend from the dead?’
‘I have a feeling you’ll be making a more permanent return in the near future.’ I was too tired even to show my anger. ‘The blood in the car was a nice touch. How were you going to explain your resurrection? A miracle?’
‘We were under threat from some crazy Negro, so I did what I had to do to hide myself. What are they going to charge me with? Wasting police time? False suicide?’
‘You killed, Elliot. You led people to their deaths. You bailed Atys just so your friends could torture him and find out what he knew.’
He shrugged. ‘Your fault, Charlie. If you’d been better at your job and got him to tell all, he might still be alive.’
I winced. He’d struck close to the bone, but I wasn’t going to bear the responsibility for Atys Jones’s death alone.
‘And the Singletons. What did you do, Elliot? Sit with them in the kitchen drinking their lemonade, waiting for your friends to come and kill them while the only person who could have protected them was in the shower. The old man said it was a changeling that attacked them, and the police thought that he was talking about Atys until he turned up tortured to death, but it was you. You were the changeling. Look at what they’ve reduced you to, Elliot, what you’ve reduced yourself to. Look at what you’ve become.’
Elliot shrugged. ‘I had no choice. Mobley told Bowen everything, once when he was drunk. Landron never admitted it, but it was him. So Bowen had something on all of us and he used it to make me bring you down here. But by then all of this’ – he made an all-encompassing gesture with his free hand, taking in the hole, the swamp, dead men, and the memory of raped girls – ‘had started happening, so we used you. You’re good, Charlie, I’ll give you that. In a way, you’ve brought us all to this point. You should go to your grave a satisfied man.’
‘Enough.’ It was Kittim. ‘Make the Negro tell us what he knows and we can finish this for good.’
Elliot raised his gun, pointing it first at Tereus, then at me.
‘You shouldn’t have come to the swamp alone, Charlie.’
&n
bsp; I smiled at him.
‘I didn’t.’
The bullet hit him on the bridge of the nose and knocked his head back so hard I could hear the vertebrae in his neck crack. The men at either side of him barely had a chance to react before they too fell. Larousse stood confused and then Kittim was raising his weapon and I felt Tereus push me to the ground. There were shots, and warm blood splashed my eyes. I looked up to catch the look of surprise in Tereus’s face before he tumbled into the pit and landed with a splash in the water far below.
I picked up his fallen revolver and ran for the woods, expecting to feel one of Kittim’s shots tear into me at any moment, but he was already fleeing. I caught a glimpse of Larousse disappearing into the trees, and then he also disappeared from sight.
But only for a moment.
He reemerged seconds later, backing slowly away from something in the trees. I saw her moving toward him, draped in the light material, the only cloth that she could wear without paining her ruined body. Her head was uncovered. The skull was hairless, the features beneath it melting into one another, a blur of disfigurement and remembered beauty. Only her eyes appeared intact, glittering beneath her swollen eyelids. She extended a hand to Larousse and there was almost a tenderness to the gesture, like a rejected lover reaching out one last time to the man who had turned his back upon her. Larousse released a small cry, then struck out at her arm, breaking the skin. Instinctively, he rubbed his hand with disgust against his jacket, then moved quickly to his right in an effort to get by her and make for the safety of the forest.
Louis stepped from the shadows and pointed his gun at Larousse’s face.
‘Now where you goin?’ he asked.
He stopped, caught between the woman and the gun.
Then she sprang at him, the force of her propelling them both backward, and she wrapped herself around him as they fell, he screaming, she silent, into the black water below. For a moment, I thought I saw a whiteness spread upon the surface, and then they were gone.