The Devil and the River

  “Nate?”

  “Couldn’t tell you, Sheriff. Didn’t know her, didn’t really know any of them by face. Just knew the name, a little of the business dealings. Not like Ed here. Ed is Whytesburg, whereas I’m Hatties-burg.”

  “So, to Nancy Denton,” Gaines said.

  “I wasn’t deputy back then,” Holland said. “Deputy back then was George Austin, but he died in sixty-seven, and that’s when I took over. Don Bicklow was sheriff, as you know. But regardless, there wasn’t a hell of a lot to talk about. Everyone figured she was a runaway. She was spirited girl, John, a firecracker, you know? It was before I was in the department. I was away a lot of the time, traveling around and about, selling shoes and tires and whatnot, but I remember them kids all together. Her and Matthias, the other Wades, Michael Webster when he came back from the war, and Maryanne Benedict—”

  “That was the other one I wanted to ask you about,” Gaines interjected. “The Benedict girl.”

  “Lives in Gulfport,” Holland said. “And I know that because her father and I were friends a long while back. Her parents are both dead now, but I have always kept tabs on her. Haven’t spoken to her since . . . oh, I don’t know, Christmas maybe, but last time I did, she was still down there.”

  “Married? Kids?”

  “Nope, never did marry,” Holland said. “Strange. Always seemed like she’d make just the best mother.”

  “You have an address for her?”

  “Sure do,” Holland said. “Lives on Hester Road in Gulfport.”

  “Knew it would be a worthwhile trip out here,” Gaines said.

  “Hell, Sheriff, places like this, everyone knows everyone, and they’re all in and out of one another’s business, right?”

  “Seems a shame such familiarity comes up most useful when someone gets themselves killed,” Gaines said.

  “Never a truer word,” Ross replied.

  “I’ll be off to see her, then.” Gaines drained his coffee cup, appreciated the warm bloom of liquor in his chest, and rose from his chair. “I don’t doubt I’ll be back with more questions at some point.”

  “Look forward to it, Sheriff,” Ross said, and walked Gaines out to the porch.

  Gaines called Hagen from the car before he’d even left Nate Ross’s driveway.

  “I’m off to see this Maryanne Benedict. Got her address from Eddie.”

  “I was checking on her, too. Got an address. Hester Road in Gulfport, right?”

  “Jeez, Richard, I figure I might as well just go home and let you do all the work. Seems you’re better at it than me.”

  “I didn’t want to be the one to raise that point, John, but . . .”

  Gaines laughed, hung up the radio, started the engine, and pulled away.

  35

  For some reason, Gaines thought of his father as he drove the thirty or so miles to Gulfport.

  It was late afternoon, the day had cooled somewhat, some song had come on the radio, and he had gotten to thinking about the man, about what life might have been like for him and his mother had Edward Gaines returned from the war instead of losing his life somewhere along the road near Malmedy and Stavelot two days before Christmas, 1944.

  Gaines had been four years old at the time, could recall nothing personal about him, save the fact that, for some brief while, there had been someone other than his mother in the house. A presence, that was all. Just a fatherly presence.

  From what his mother had told him, Edward Gaines was a tough man. Awkward, opinionated, as if he’d set himself to stand at some angle contrary to the world and weather whatever came. Alice said that he was the kind of man who believed that abstinence and self-denial were somehow the roads to health and good humor. His was not and never would be a life of comforts, and though she sensed that sometimes he would long for such things and feel an ache of absence in his bones, he would never accede to such temptations. To succumb would be to admit defeat. To what, he did not know nor care. It would simply be defeat, and this was something he never wished to have said of him. But he provided for his wife and then his son, and though he did not squander what little money they had on fripperies and such, he did ensure that there was always sufficient of what was needed. And then the war came, the same year that he and Alice were married, and Edward Gaines watched the drama unfold with a weather eye. He knew it would ultimately turn toward the Pacific, toward the need for America to engage in this struggle, and when that need came, he was one of the first in line. So he went, and he survived for thirteen or fourteen months, and then it was all done.

  Gaines had looked for Malmedy on a map one time. It was in a province called Liège in Belgium. It was infamous during the Battle of the Bulge, for here the SS had murdered eighty-four American prisoners. And then—during that fateful week in December of 1944, despite the fact that the area was under US control—it had been relentlessly bombed by US forces. Two hundred civilians were killed. The number of American soldiers who lost their lives was not revealed by the Department of Defense.

  Gaines did not want to believe that his father had been killed by a bomb made at the Elwood Ordnance Plant in Illinois. He did not want to know if the explosive that blew him to pieces had been manufactured by E.I. du Pont or Sanderson and Porter or the United States Rubber Company. He did not want details. He wanted to believe that his father had died doing whatever he considered was the right thing to do—for himself, for his family, for his country. It was that simple.

  And why he thought of him then, as he drove along 10 toward Lyman and then took the south turning to Gulfport, he did not know. Perhaps it was this talk of dying, of childhood friends, of people who went missing and never returned.

  Or perhaps none of these things.

  Perhaps it was nothing more than some deep-rooted sense of aloneness that invaded his thoughts and emotions every once in a while.

  Like when he thought of Linda and the child that never was.

  He wondered where she was now, what she was doing, if she had married, raised a family, whether she ever thought of him.

  Did a distant memory of John Gaines invade her thoughts in those quiet times, the times that the world briefly stopped and there was space between the minutes?

  Maybe, Gaines thought, once this thing was done, once he knew the truth of what had really happened that night in August of 1954, he would take some time away from the horrors of the world—those that he remembered from his own war experiences, those that he was now witnessing—and look at the possibility of remedying the sense of aloneness that seemed to be growing ever more noticeable. Maybe Bob Thurston was right. Maybe Alice would hang on in there until she believed her son would be okay without her. She was, if nothing else, the personification of maternal instinct. That’s the only way she could be described, as if she knew that her place on this earth was to care for everyone who fell within her circle of influence. Caring was something of which she would never grow tired. Caring for others seemed not to drain her, but to revive her, as if her heart were a battery that absorbed all those thank-yous and converted them into whatever energy was needed to go on. Maybe it was now time to let her go. Such a thought did not instill a sense of guilt in Gaines, but rather a sense of relief, if not for himself then for his mother. She was in pain—he knew that—and almost constantly. How much pain, he did not know, and she would never do anything but her best to hide it. Again, that was borne out of her consideration for him. She should have married again. She should have had more children. Twenty-nine years old when she lost her one and only husband, and she had then spent the rest of her life alone. Had she felt that marrying again would be a betrayal of Edward’s memory? Had she believed that to take another husband, to have had more children, would somehow have caused difficulty for her son? There would be an explanation for her choice, of course, but just as Gaines was unaware of it, so he too believed that Alice might herself be unaware. There was no explaining his own decision to remain single, but remain so he did.

  It was
with the vague aftermath of these thoughts still in his mind that Gaines arrived in Gulfport. It was a little after five, and he pulled to the curb on the central drag and asked a passerby for directions to Hester Street. It was no more than three blocks, and Gaines decided to walk. He went on down there, hat in hand, and he stood for a while on the sidewalk in front of Maryanne Benedict’s house. It was a simple home—white plank board–built, a short veranda that spanned merely the facade, beneath each window a box containing flowers in various colors.

  Gaines’s hesitation was evident in his manner as he approached, and before he even reached the screen, the inner door opened and he saw Maryanne Benedict.

  For a moment, all thoughts stopped. Later, he could not identify what it was about her that struck him so forcibly, but Maryanne Benedict possessed something undeniable and unforgettable in the way that she appeared, there in the doorway of her own small house on Hester Road. Something that defied easy description. She was not a beautiful woman, not in any classically accepted sense. Her features were defined, but shadowed, simple but strangely elegant. She looked through the mesh of the screen door, and—had Gaines thought of it—he again would have defined that look as a thousandyard stare. But it was not. It was something beyond that.

  The outer door swung open, and she remained silent until Gaines had reached the lower steps that led up to the veranda.

  “You have good manners or bad news,” she said, “or both.”

  Gaines smiled awkwardly. He looked down at the hat in his hand. “Perhaps the first,” he replied. “Definitely the second.”

  “Well, both my folks are dead and I’m an only child. I never married, have no kids, and so it’s a neighbor or a friend or someone you think I care about.”

  “Nancy Denton,” Gaines said, and in that second he saw a change of expression so sudden, so dramatic, that he could say nothing further.

  He remembered delivering the news to Judith. Your daughter is dead. Your only child, the one you have been waiting for these past twenty years, is dead.

  In some way, a way that Gaines could not understand, this felt even worse.

  Maryanne Benedict seemed to lean against the frame of the door for support. A brief sound escaped her lips. A whimper. A cry of repressed astonishment and disbelief.

  Gaines walked up the steps toward her, held out his hand to assist her, but she waved him back. Gaines just stood there in silence, not knowing where to look but unable to avert his eyes from the woman.

  Standing closer now, he felt awkward, ashamed, embarrassed to have been the one to bring news that would create such an effect, but unable to move, unable to think of any words that might alleviate the distress that Maryanne Benedict was evidently experiencing.

  She was first to speak, standing straight and looking back into the house. “I need to get inside,” she said, her voice cracking. “I need to sit down . . .”

  She left the door open wide, and Gaines could do nothing but follow her.

  Inside, the house was much as it had appeared from the street. Neat, orderly, precise. The furnishings were feminine but functional, nothing too embellished or decorative. It seemed Spartan to Gaines, almost unlived in, and in some strange way reminiscent of his own quarters. There was nothing there that really communicated anything of Maryanne Benedict’s personality—no photographs, no trinkets, no paintings on the walls.

  She walked back through the house to the kitchen, Gaines following on behind her.

  She turned suddenly. “Some tea,” she said. “We will have tea.”

  Gaines didn’t reply.

  Maryanne filled the kettle, set it on the stove, busied herself with a teapot, cups, saucers.

  “I am sorry to be the one to bring this news,” Gaines said, and for some strange reason, his voice sounded strong and definite.

  “You will tell me what happened,” Maryanne said, without turning around.

  “I’ll tell you what I can,” Gaines replied.

  She nodded.

  “There is something else—”

  And this time she did turn around, and her expression was alive and anticipatory, her eyes bright, rimmed with tears, the muscles in her jawline twitching visibly. Everything was there—every feeling, every thought and emotion and fear—and she was using every single last line of defense to hold it all inside.

  “Michael . . . ,” Gaines said.

  “Michael,” she echoed.

  “Michael Webster.”

  “Yes, yes, I know Michael . . . I know of Michael. What about Michael . . . ? Did you tell him, as well?”

  Gaines nodded. “I did, Ms. Benedict, yes.”

  “And is he okay? What did he say? Oh my God, I can’t even begin to imagine what he—”

  “Michael is dead as well, Miss Benedict.”

  The last line went down. The depth of pain that seemed to fill that small kitchen as Maryanne Benedict broke down was greater than anything Gaines had before witnessed.

  She dropped a cup into the sink. It somehow did not break.

  Gaines was there to hold Maryanne Benedict. She seemed to fold in half—mentally, spiritually, just like Judith—and she sobbed uncontrollably for as long a time as Gaines had ever known.

  36

  The sun was nearing the horizon. Gaines was aware of this as he sat at the kitchen table.

  For a long while the woman said nothing at all, merely glancing at Gaines, her eyes swollen, her mouth forming words that never reached him, as if she were holding some conversation with Nancy, perhaps with Michael, perhaps with someone else entirely.

  Gaines remained silent. He felt it best not to interrupt whatever internal monologue was taking place. People dealt with such things in their own ways, and Gaines believed himself more than capable of sitting there as long as was needed. For some reason, he did not feel awkward in the presence of Maryanne Benedict. Perhaps this was due to nothing more than his own emotional exhaustion. He was not fighting anymore. The deaths of Nancy, Michael Webster, and Judith Denton seemed to have bleached his mind of thoughts. He anticipated everything now, as if nothing at all could surprise him. Like Vietnam. Be ready for anything. Run for three days, stand still for four. Move at a moment’s notice; go back the way you came—all of it without explanation as to why.

  Eventually, Maryanne Benedict seemed to wind down. Gaines could feel it in the silence between them.

  “I am sorry,” she said, and her voice was a whisper.

  “You have nothing to be sorry for, Miss Benedict.”

  A faint smile flickered across her lips, as if it amused her to be called Miss Benedict, but she did not correct Gaines.

  “It must be awful for you,” she went on, “having to do this . . .”

  Gaines looked at her. He had yet to tell her about Judith Denton’s suicide. Would there be a better time than now?

  “I am sorry about what happened to your friends,” Gaines said. “I understand that you and Nancy and Michael were very close when you were younger.”

  Again that faint smile, and then Maryanne looked away toward the window and seemed lost for some minutes.

  “When you were children,” Gaines added.

  “We were all close,” she said. She looked back at Gaines. “I was fourteen when Nancy disappeared. She was sixteen. Matthias was all grown-up too, but it never felt like we were anything but the same age. Della was ten, soon to be eleven. Eugene was a couple of years older than me, and Catherine was a month or so away from her nineteenth birthday. And Michael? Michael was thirty-one.” She shook her head. “It seems strange now to consider such a thing, but at the time it didn’t seem strange at all. He didn’t seem that much older than us, either. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like there was any difference between us at all, but now . . .” Her voice trailed away. “He was twice her age, wasn’t he?”

  Gaines said nothing.

  “And there was Matthias . . . ,” she said quietly.

  “I have spoken to Matthias.”

  “You
have?”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . .”

  Gaines shifted in the chair. He had to tell her what had happened, but he did not want to.

  “Tell me, Sheriff. I don’t know that you can be the bearer of any worse news than you’ve already been . . .”

  Gaines’s expression gave him away.

  “Oh,” she said, in her response the sound of despair.

  “Nancy . . . Nancy was found buried, Miss Benedict . . . buried in the riverbank in Whytesburg. Appeared she had been there for twenty years . . .”

  “Oh,” Maryanne said again, but it was an involuntary reaction, an unintentional sound, and she looked as surprised as Gaines to hear her own voice.

  “That’s not all,” Gaines went on.

  Maryanne’s eyes widened, perhaps in anticipation, perhaps in disbelief that the news could be any worse.

  “It seems she had been . . . well, she had been strangled. That was the cause of death, you see? She was strangled . . .” Gaines’s voice faded. He did not want to say butchered. He did not want to tell her that. He wanted only to tell Maryanne Benedict only that her childhood friend had been strangled, not that she had been violated so terribly. He was thankful then—perhaps more than ever—that Nancy had not been raped. He could recall memories of such things. Those girls in Vietnam—those children—seemed to have had whatever internal light that animated their thoughts and feelings just snuffed out. Somebody was home, but everything was in darkness. Some of them committed suicide. Once he had seen a girl no more than twelve snatch a sidearm and just shoot herself in the head. He had seen it with his own eyes. She was kneeling before she was dead, still kneeling afterward, eyes still open, still gazing into some vague middle distance where resided her innocence and childlike naïveté, perhaps the belief that she could survive this terrible war, that she could come through the other end of this and have a future. But no, someone had mercilessly snatched away such a belief and with it had gone any reason she might have possessed to go on living. No, whatever horrors he was bringing to Maryanne Benedict’s door, at least he was not bringing that.