The Devil and the River

  “No, they killed her, Ma, but they didn’t do the other thing . . . and besides, she wasn’t ten or twelve. She was sixteen, and I have not the faintest clue whether she was a virgin or not. Regardless, this isn’t something you should be troubling yourself about. It happened in 1954, and you didn’t even get here till fourteen or fifteen years later. It’s none of your business, okay?”

  “Shouldn’t be troubling myself about? This is exactly the kind of thing I should be troubling myself about. You’re my son, and you’ve got this kind of thing going on . . .”

  “What kind of thing?”

  “This ritual killing stuff. I’ve seen this kind of thing before . . . well, not seen it, but heard plenty about it, and this is a little more significant than just a plain old murder.”

  “A plain old murder?” Gaines smiled ruefully. “You mean like the plain old murders that just happen every couple of hours around here?”

  Alice looked at Gaines, a look he had known since childhood, since the earliest moment of his first sarcastic retort. “We can do without the backtalk, young man.”

  “Ma, seriously, this is my work, and I need you to stay out of it . . .”

  “Stay out of it? I’m not in it, John, but I’ll tell you now that if someone has killed a little girl and put a snake in her . . .”

  “She was not so little, and the snake was not in her vagina, okay? Where the hell that came from, I do not know, but no doubt that will be what everyone will now be thinking—”

  “There is something wrong with this, John, and you know it. Wherever this damned snake might have been, there is something terribly wrong with this . . .”

  “The fact that a teenage girl has been murdered, that is as wrong as it needs to get. I am investigating the murder of a teenage girl, and that is all.”

  His words hung in the air. He knew that he was actually investigating a great deal more than the simple murder of Nancy Denton.

  And that itself was an irony, something that Gaines never believed he would hear from himself in small-town middle-American Whytesburg.

  The simple murder of a girl. Was there ever such a thing?

  Gaines did not want to hear any more. He left his mother’s room and went back to the kitchen.

  His mother was right: Irrespective of whether or not such things bore any truth, regardless of whether Gaines believed or not, it had everything to do with what other people believed. There were explanations and rationales for murders that could be comprehended—jealousy, revenge, financial gain, crimes of passion, acts of hatred and bigotry and racism. But this? This was in a territory all its own. Here was the zone inhabited by serial killers, sadists, sex-and-death torture freaks. Those who killed for its own sake. Those who sought out victims by appearance or physical type, those who killed strangers for no other reason than some imagined but nevertheless very real motive. And if they could kill for such incredible reasons, they could sure as hell open up a body, replace a heart with a snake in a box, and stitch it back up. This was perhaps in the realms of hoodoo and religious ritual, and Gaines’s first thought in considering this was whether Webster had acted alone, or if he was part of a group. The Klan was still down here, would always be down here as far as Gaines could see. There were lynchings and murders. Hell, those three civil rights workers had been killed up near Meridian, and that was just ten years before. That had been the White Citizens’ Council, but the Neshoba County deputy who arrested the three kids and kept them in his jail until the murder squad could be organized was Klan. The car was driven into Bogue Chitto swamp and set on fire, and once the three boys had been beaten half to death and shot, their bodies had been buried in an earthen dam. Regardless of the manner of death—shooting, stabbing, hanging, choking—a murder was still a murder, and a riverbank was not so different from an earth dam. The national uproar had driven Lyndon Johnson to threaten Hoover with political reprisals if he didn’t send the FBI down there. Hoover conceded. The Feds went in. They even had navy divers searching for those three bodies, and in the process they discovered a further seven dead blacks whose disappearances had gone unnoticed by the rest of the country. And even when the bodies were found, even when the murderers were named and arrested, Mississippi refused to prosecute them for murder. So now? Was this Klan? Was this some bizarre ritual enacted by white supremacists? Couldn’t be. Had it been Klan or Council then Nancy Denton would have been a black girl. No, this was something different. This was something that Lieutenant Michael Webster needed to explain, and he needed to explain it now.

  Before leaving the house, Gaines went back and spoke to his mother. “I need you to do whatever’s needed to let this go no further. Do not call anyone, Ma. Don’t discuss this with Caroline any more. I am serious. Right now this is a murder, plain and simple, and I have to deal with it just as it is. People are super-stitious, always have been and always will be, and I need to contain this right now.”

  “You can’t contain such things, John. Seriously, things like this do not belong to any world you’re familiar with—”

  “Ma, enough, okay?”

  She looked at him maternally, almost sympathetically. She looked at him with the same expression she’d worn when she’d tried to explain why his father was never coming home.

  17

  Whytesburg Sheriff’s Office, representative office of the entire Breed County Police Department, provided four basement cells, two on the left, two on the right, with a walkway between them wide enough to prevent prisoner contact. At the end of the room, an inclined vent allowed a ghost of light and fresh air into the space. Regardless, the basement had always suffered from an ever-present odor of damp mustiness that did not change season to season. In the summer it smelled rotten, in the winter merely aged and decayed. A brick wall separated each adjacent pair, the remaining two sides of each merely bars. There was no privacy, no solitary confinement. These were designed for nothing but temporary holding.

  Gaines arrived at the office, and even before he started down the steps to the basement cells, he could hear Webster’s voice.

  “. . . must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature . . . We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds . . .”

  Hagen was down there, exasperated and angry.

  “Over and over again, he’s been saying this,” he told Gaines. “Guy’s fucking crazy.”

  “It’s Lincoln,” Gaines said. “He’s quoting Abraham Lincoln.”

  Gaines approached the cell. He stood inches from the bars and looked directly at Webster.

  After a moment, Gaines started speaking, merely echoed precisely what Webster was saying. They went through it twice, and then Webster fell silent. He smiled, nodded at Gaines.

  “Sheriff,” he said.

  “You think that girl was one of the better angels, Michael?”

  “Everyone thought she was an angel, Sheriff.”

  “I figure she might very well have been, you know?”

  Webster shrugged, at once noncommittally, and then he glanced away, looked down, and when he looked back, there seemed to be tears in his eyes. What was this? Remorse?

  “You hungry, Michael?”

  “Not ’specially.”

  “You eaten anything today?”

  Webster shook his head.

  “I’m gonna send out for some sandwiches. I’m gonna come on in there with you and we can talk, and then we can have some sandwiches. Sound okay to you?”

  “Sure thing, Sheriff.”

  “What do you like?”

  “Oh, anything you got. Ham on rye, cheese, whatever’s easy.”

  Gaines turned and nodded at Hagen. Hagen gave the cell keys to Gaines and then headed for the stairwell.

  “Bring some Coke, a
s well,” Gaines called out, and then—turning back to Webster—asked, “Or do you want root beer?”

  “Coke is good,” Webster replied.

  Hagen looked back at Gaines, the expression on his face like, What, all of a sudden I’m a waiter?

  Gaines paused until he heard the door close at the top of the stairwell, and then he took out his gun, laid it on the floor out of arm’s reach from the cell, and unlocked the door.

  Webster just stayed right where he was, seated there on the bunk, his feet bare, his hands beneath his thighs, but Gaines was alert for any movement, attuned to the slightest shift in Webster’s position. That same sense returned. Gaines could smell the funk of the waterlogged riverbank, the smell of the girl as she surfaced, the smell of her in the morgue as she lay there with her torso unlaced.

  Gaines could picture Victor Powell’s face as the snake emerged from the box, its tail in its mouth.

  Hesitating for just a moment, Gaines then closed the cell door behind him. It remained ajar, unlocked, but Gaines positioned himself on the edge of the bunk so he could merely stand and block Webster if Webster attempted to run.

  There was silence between them for a moment, and then Gaines spoke.

  “So you wanna tell me about Nancy Denton, Michael?”

  Webster was looking toward the inclined vent, at the vague light that crept on through, at the motes of dust dancing and shifting perpetually.

  “I just don’t know what to say, Sheriff,” Webster replied.

  “Just tell me whatever you can . . . whatever you want to tell me . . .”

  “Well, I don’t know what it is, aside from a terrible thing an’ all. Her being dead like that and what was done to her—”

  “Done to her?”

  “The way she was killed, you know? She was strangled. She was held down and the life was strangled right out of her.”

  “Right,” Gaines said. So consumed had he been by the fact that her heart had been removed that he had failed to appreciate what she must have gone through before she died. She had been strangled to death. Someone—and it certainly seemed that Michael Webster was the primary candidate in that moment—had put their hands around her pale throat and choked her. They had looked right into her eyes, a fragile teenage girl, and had not let go until she had gasped her final, tortured breath. Sixteen years old. It was no life at all. Jesus Christ.

  Gaines felt a sudden hatred for Webster. A intense feeling overcame him, a sense of righteous outrage, a feeling that this business would be resolved right here, right now if he also put his hands around Webster’s throat and choked the last of his sick life right out of him.

  Gaines closed his eyes for just a moment. He breathed deeply. He tried to center himself.

  “It’s a terrible, terrible business,” Webster said. “Somethin’ like that done to a young girl. How do you deal with something like that, Sheriff?”

  Webster looked at Gaines.

  Gaines didn’t speak.

  “I mean, we saw some things out there,” Webster went on. “We saw the worst of all of it out there. Kids all blown to hell an’ back. People decapitated, people run through with knives and machetes. People smashed up in pieces and spread all through the trees, right? We seen all of it and then some, but there’s little I can remember that compares to Nancy Denton . . . seein’ her lyin’ there, not a movement, not a sound . . .”

  Webster’s voice trailed away.

  Gaines was struggling to comprehend how someone could do such a thing and then speak of it with such distance. Was this what war had done to Lieutenant Michael Webster? Was this the legacy of Guadalcanal for this man? For America? Surely not, for Gaines himself had seen the very things of which Webster spoke and yet he was not compelled to strangle a child, to cut out her heart, to defile her body in such a way and then bury it in mud. No, this was not the war; this was just the man.

  “So you want to tell me how it happened, Michael?” Gaines repeated.

  Webster shook his head. “I don’t want to say nothin’.”

  Gaines turned at the sound of the door opening at the top of the stairs. Hagen came down with sandwiches, bottles of Coke. Gaines went out through the door and collected them. He returned to the cell, set the sandwiches on the bunk, handed a bottle to Webster, and then started eating.

  Webster followed suit, neither of them speaking, Webster looking in the direction of the vent, Gaines looking at his shoes, every once in a while glancing at the man beside him.

  When they were done, Gaines took the bottles out and placed them near the wall on the far side. He went back to the cell and sat down.

  “We saw the lightning and that was the guns,” Webster suddenly said, “and then we heard the thunder and that was the big guns . . . and then we heard the rain falling and that was the blood falling . . . and when we came to get in the crops, it was dead men that we reaped . . .”

  Gaines frowned.

  “Harriet Tubman said that,” Webster explained. “And there were two guys on the radio back in sixty-seven, guys called Gragni and Rado, and they said that the draft was white people sending black people to fight yellow people to protect the country they stole from red people.” He smiled. “It was a different war, but it was the same war.”

  Gaines nodded. “I heard that.”

  “You know what Hemingway said?” Webster asked.

  “No, Mike, what did he say?”

  “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime. That’s what he said.”

  “Right.”

  “But war is war, right? War is about two groups of people who know they might die, and they go anyway. They go because they believe in something, because they think something is important enough to fight for.”

  “Except for the draft.”

  “Even the draft,” Webster said. “There were plenty of people who didn’t go, plenty who dodged it, went to Canada and whatever. Conscientious objection an’ all that.” Webster smiled. “But that’s not the point here, is it? The point here is that Nancy Denton wasn’t in no war. She wasn’t in no army. She wasn’t fighting for anything except her own life. And it was taken anyway, wasn’t it? Her life was taken anyway, and what the hell did she ever do to anyone?”

  “I don’t know, Mike. Why don’t you tell me what she did?”

  Webster looked at Gaines. His expression was one of confusion. “What did she do? It wasn’t what she did, Sheriff; it was who she was. Bright, pretty, funny, kind. That’s who she was, and that’s why she had to die like that? Everyone loved her, but this time she was loved too much . . .”

  “Loving someone too much means you have to kill them? Is that it? Because you don’t want anyone else to have them?”

  “Christ almighty knows, Sheriff. Hell, maybe it was just to feel what it was like to strangle a girl like that.”

  “Is that what happened?”

  “Well, it’s what I think, is all,” Webster said. “You just asked me what I thought an’ I told you.”

  “Was there a ritual of some kind? Is that why she was killed?”

  Webster frowned, and for a moment he looked vexed. “How the hell do you think I know that?” he asked. “You think if I knew I wouldn’t tell you?”

  “I don’t know, Mike,” Gaines replied. “I don’t know anything about you. You could be an honest man; you could be a liar. I just know that I have a dead sixteen-year-old girl and a lot of people waiting for an explanation.”

  “Sixteen. That’s no time at all. That ain’t any kind of a life, is it, Sheriff?” Webster replied, echoing Gaines’s own thoughts from just moments before.

  “No, Mike, it isn’t.”

  Webster whistled through his teeth. “Sixteen years old. Jesus Christ almighty.”

  “Does that change the way you feel about her?” Gaines asked.

  Webster didn’t speak for a moment. He looked away toward the vent and then back at Gaines. “Change the way I feel about her?”

  “Think
ing about her being sixteen.”

  “Would it have made a difference if she was fourteen, or fifteen maybe? Hell no, she would still be nothing but a child, Sheriff. You think if she was a year or two older it would have been any less worse?”

  “No, Mike, I don’t.”

  “Well, what the hell you askin’ me that for, then?”

  “I’m just trying to understand why someone would do this to a girl like Nancy Denton, is all. I’m just trying to understand—”

  “Same as me. I’m tryin’ to understand, too. Hell, why does anyone do anything crazy? Because they’re crazy, that’s why. Why do people start wars? Why do people murder other people? Why do people up and marry some girl and then get tired of her and beat her half to death and throw her out the car into the fucking road? I don’t know why, Sheriff. Seems to me you’d be the better one to answer that question, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I don’t understand it, Mike . . . no better than you.”

  Webster smiled wryly. “Then if you don’t get it an’ I don’t get it, I’d say we’re screwed.”

  Gaines was quiet, and then the need to know overcame his training and his common sense. “Tell me what happened, Mike.”

  “ ’Tain’t complicated. Happened not half a mile from where I live. She was just there, just right there in a shack at the side of the road. Just lying there in the doorway. Picked her up and took her back to my place. Did what I could there, and then I buried her near running water.”

  “Why running water, Mike?”

  “ ’S what my friend said to do.”

  “Friend? What friend?”

  “Friend I had back then. Al Warren was his name.”

  “Was his name?”

  Webster shook his head. “He didn’t make it back. He died out there. He was like a brother to me. Hard to explain that, but when you’re in a unit together, when you fight together, when you are engaged in looking after someone else’s life day after day, something happens. It’s closer than brothers, you know? Like it’s something spiritual. He was the smartest man I ever knew. No, not the smartest; he was the wisest. He was like a Buddhist or something. He was like a religious guy, but not like going to church and sayin’ prayers and whatever. He was true religion, like it was something he had a mission to do. A mission for the truth, you know?”