He had to tell her the next thing, but tell her so she understood that Nancy was already dead when it happened.
“After she was dead . . . after she was dead, it . . .”
“What, Sheriff? After she was dead, what?”
“She was cut open, Miss Benedict . . . She was cut open down the length of her torso, and her heart was removed . . .”
Maryanne Benedict covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh, Lord almighty . . .”
“Some kind of ritual perhaps. We don’t know yet. We don’t understand what really happened . . . the circumstances, you know? All we have is what her body tells us, and her body tells us that some sort of ritual was performed . . .”
“Her heart? Someone took out her heart?”
“Yes,” Gaines replied. “Someone took out her heart.” He looked away.
“What else?” she said, interpreting that look for what it was.
“Something was put in its place,” he said. “Someone replaced her heart with a snake . . .”
Maryanne Benedict’s reaction was not as Gaines had expected. A hysterical response? An exclamation of utter disbelief? What had he anticipated? Certainly not the silent lowering of the head, the way she closed her eyes, the way her hands came together as if in prayer. Certainly not the sound of her breathing deeply as if trying to focus everything at once, trying to pull everything together and prevent herself from unraveling at the seams right before his eyes.
And if Gaines was surprised at her absence of reaction, then he was even further surprised by what she said next.
“Did Michael do that to her?”
Gaines couldn’t hide his expression.
Maryanne looked at him, her eyes tortured with something indefinable. “Did Michael do that to her . . . this thing?”
“We think so,” Gaines said.
“Did he commit suicide?”
Gaines shook his head. “He was murdered . . .”
Maryanne lowered her head, and when she looked up, her brow was furrowed, her eyes intense. “What? He was murdered?”
“Yes,” Gaines said. “He was decapitated and his left hand was removed. His body was left in the room where he lived, and it was burned to the ground.”
Maryanne started to get up, using the table to support herself as she tried to stand, but her knees gave way and she sat in the chair heavily.
Gaines knew there was no good time for this. He had told her of Nancy, of Michael, and now the truth about Judith Denton needed to be confronted.
“And Judith Denton, Nancy’s mother . . . she committed suicide.” Gaines cleared his throat. His voice sounded calm, almost too calm, and quiet, as if she would have to struggle to hear him. “In the early hours of this morning,” Gaines went on. “She took an overdose of sleeping tablets, and she died . . .”
“Nothing to live for now,” Maryanne said. “At last she found out that Nancy would never be coming home, and there was nothing to live for . . .”
“Yes, I believe so.”
Maryanne leaned back. She inhaled deeply, exhaled again, closed her eyes once more, and sat there immobile for a good minute or two.
Eventually, seeming to surface from her reverie, she opened her eyes and looked unerringly at Gaines. “I do not believe that Michael Webster murdered Nancy Denton,” she said. “He loved her. He loved her with everything he had. She was in love with him, as well. He was a strong man, a patient man, and he told her that he would wait five years, ten years, whatever was needed. They loved each other so much, but nothing ever happened between them of a . . . you know, of a sexual nature. It wasn’t like that at all. Michael was our soldier. He was our protector and defender. He would never have let any harm come to me or Nancy, and he loved Nancy unquestioningly. He was utterly devoted to her, and she to him, and that was just the way it was. They were meant to be together, but something happened, and she was born fifteen years too late. There was always going to be that gap between them, but they knew what they had, and it didn’t matter. He would never have killed her . . .” Maryanne looked away toward the window and then looked back at Gaines. “No, he could not have done that, Sheriff Gaines.”
“Did you know anything about this before today?” Gaines asked.
She shook her head. “No, of course I didn’t know.”
“Did he say anything, do anything . . . ?”
Maryanne was silent for some time, and then she cleared her throat. “We fell apart after she was gone. Before that, we were always together. Every moment we could spend together, we did. That was who we were. And then she disappeared, and we didn’t see one another for a long time. I haven’t seen Matthias for fifteen years, perhaps more. Michael I last saw maybe three or four years ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to speak to him. I did ask him once if he knew what had happened, if he had any idea at all. This was a long time ago, maybe twelve or thirteen years, and all he said was that he could not speak of it, but he was still waiting. He said that if he broke his vow of silence, it would all come to nothing . . .” She paused, breathed deeply. “I didn’t understand what he meant then, and I don’t understand it now. Michael said he was still waiting for her, and he didn’t say anything else.”
Gaines leaned back. He reached for his hat there on the table, fingered the brim nervously.
Maryanne Benedict held Gaines with an intense and penetrating gaze. “Do you have any idea what he might have meant?”
“No idea at all, Miss Benedict.”
“So the question, now that we know she is dead, is who did kill her? If Michael didn’t kill her, then who did?”
Gaines didn’t reply. He did not know the answer to that question either. He did not wish to voice his suspicions or enter into any discussion with Maryanne Benedict until she began that discussion. He was determined not to lead her.
“You have your suspicions, Sheriff?” she asked.
Gaines shook his head.
“Not even Matthias?”
Gaines hesitated. Once again, he tried to give away nothing in his expression. Evidently he failed.
“Matthias is a law unto himself,” Maryanne said.
“Why do you say that?”
“People with money always are.”
“You know him well?”
“No,” she said matter-of-factly. “I knew him, at least to some degree, when we were younger, but we were never that close. I spent more time with Eugene than I did with Matthias. But Nancy was my closest friend. Nancy was like my sister . . .”
“I can imagine how difficult—”
“Can you, Sheriff?”
Gaines looked at her. “Yes, Miss Benedict, I can.”
She looked down at the floor, then looked at her hands on the table as if they belonged to someone else. “Three dead . . . two murders, one suicide, all in a matter of days . . .”
“All in a matter of twenty years,” Gaines said. “Nancy died the night she disappeared, or very soon thereafter.”
“How do you even comprehend this? How do you deal with something like this? I mean, there’s no point of reference. There’s no context . . .”
“What do you think happened that night, Miss Benedict?”
“To Nancy? I think she was taken by someone . . .” She paused. “Was she . . . you know, was she sexually . . . ?”
“No,” Gaines said. “She was not raped. She was strangled, and her heart was cut out, but she was not raped.”
Maryanne lowered her head. Her entire body seemed to diminish in size as she exhaled. “It is just too unbearable to imagine . . . ,” she whispered.
“So what do you think happened?” Gaines prompted.
For a while, Maryanne Benedict said nothing. Gaines did not interrupt the silence in that room. She had to absorb and come to terms with what he was telling her in her own way. There was no way to speed up the process, no way to circumvent whatever was going on in her mind. She looked away several times—to the floor, toward the window—but she was not loo
king at anything present or tangible. She was looking with her mind’s eye, recalling events, situations, words exchanged, perhaps ideas that she had considered during the previous two decades. “I think she was taken by someone,” she eventually said. Her voice was measured, controlled, precise. “Now you have told me that she was strangled . . . I don’t know . . . Perhaps Michael found her dead and then, for some reason known only to him, he did this terrible thing to her body . . .” Maryanne shook her head. “Michael had his dark side, like everyone. He survived the war, you know?”
“I heard about that . . . in Guadalcanal, the only surviving member of his unit.”
“The luckiest man alive,” Maryanne interjected.
“He said that,” Gaines replied. “Lester Cobb said it, too. What does that mean?”
“Means what it says,” Maryanne replied. “He survived the war, and then he survived the thing that happened at the factory in 1952. That’s when he started to believe he was protected . . .”
“Protected?”
Maryanne smiled. It was a sad and resigned smile. “I never made that tea,” she said. “You want some?”
37
Gaines watched her as she went about the business of preparing tea.
She didn’t say a word as she recovered the kettle from the sink, filled it, set it atop the stove, lit the gas. She fussed with leaves and cups, and she stood for a while gazing through the small window that overlooked the yard. She was alone within whatever world she inhabited, internally and externally it seemed, and Gaines—despite feeling the sense of emptiness around her—withheld himself from saying or doing anything to interrupt that aloneness.
Eventually, she turned and looked at Gaines, her hands behind her on the edge of the sink, her head down, but her eyes fixed on him.
“To think . . . all these years, and it ends like this. There hasn’t been a single day when I haven’t thought of her. Of Nancy, you know? Twenty years. I knew she was dead, but I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know why. I hoped she wasn’t, of course, but I knew it was hopeless. She wasn’t a runaway. Everyone said she was a runaway, but they didn’t know her, and they didn’t understand her relationship with Michael. All she talked about was reaching eighteen and marrying Michael. And Matthias was jealous as hell, but he loved her enough to understand that she had made her decision.” Maryanne smiled, a memory right there in her eyes. “I asked Matthias one time if he thought that Michael was too old for Nancy, and he said that there was about one year more between Michael and Nancy as there was between his own mom and dad. He didn’t answer the question, but I could tell what he meant. He did not have an easy relationship with his parents, and I think that was down to the fact that his parents did not have an easy relationship with each other. Matthias believed that he was right for Nancy and that no one else was.”
Maryanne turned back to the worktop and poured tea. She brought the cups to the table, set one in front of Gaines, and took her seat once more.
“Me and Nancy, Michael and Matthias. I cannot think of one of us without seeing all of us together.”
“But there were others, right?”
“Sure there were, but they weren’t part of us in the same way. They were there, of course, but—” She left the statement unfinished.
Gaines let the silence hang between them for a moment, just to ensure that she wasn’t going to start talking again, and then he said, “And you now have nothing to do with Matthias Wade? Nothing at all?”
She shook her head. “Like I said, I haven’t seen him for a decade and a half, perhaps more.”
“Did he know Judith?”
“Nancy’s mother? Yes, of course he did.”
Gaines cast his mind back to the conversation he’d had with Wade, the fact that Wade had said he did not know Judith Denton. The comment he’d made could be interpreted as a denial of any knowledge of her, or—as was perhaps the case here—a simple statement to the effect that he did not know her. She was an acquaintance from many years ago, the mother of a childhood friend, and nothing more significant.
“You were going to tell me about what happened in 1952,” Gaines prompted.
“Yes, I was,” Maryanne replied. She hesitated, looking at him then as if with some sense of apologetic resignation, as if she would now share with him something of the awkward, broken tangle of her life, and she knew it would unsettle him.
Gaines thought to tell her that nothing would now surprise him, that he had seen and heard it all, the very worst the world could offer up—not only in Vietnam, but here in this small-town catastrophe—but he remained silent.
“There was a machine plant west of Picayune,” she said, “east of the Pearl River. They built it there because of the water supply, but that didn’t serve them so well when it was really needed. The plant is not there now, for obvious reasons.” She smiled awkwardly. “For reasons that will become obvious when I tell you what happened. The plant was originally built by another family, many decades ago, back at the end of the eighteen hundreds, I think. Anyway, it was a business that changed hands, changed purpose, was turned over to munitions manufacturing during the war, and when the war was over and munitions were no longer required, the Wades bought it. Matthias’s father was forever buying up other businesses, even ones that didn’t make any money. It was as if he just set his mind to owning as much as he could, regardless of its real value. Anyway, they made ball bearings, springs, axels for vehicles and such. Other things as well, metal trays for prison food, enamel cups, everything. It was a small business, maybe a hundred or a hundred and fifty men worked there, but it was prosperous. And Matthias got Michael a job there. Usually, they only took on people who were already skilled, but Matthias had influence, of course, and he arranged for Michael to get an apprenticeship there. And Michael kept to his word, and he showed up, and he learned how to do whatever was needed, and he was a good employee. He always worked hard; he wasn’t late; he did overtime. It was like he had spent all these years doing nothing after the war, and then finally he had something to throw himself into.”
Maryanne looked up at Gaines, perhaps lost somewhere in her recollection and then remembering Gaines’s presence in front of her. She smiled. “It wasn’t a hugely important purpose, of course, but it was a purpose. It was a reason to get up in the morning, and he seized it. And he had money then, of course, and he insisted on paying for things and buying things for Nancy and me. One Christmas, we were all invited to the Wade house for their Christmas Eve party, and Michael bought dresses for both of us from a store in Biloxi. Silk dresses, yellow and pink, and flowers, too, and we went up there to the big house and felt like we were in Gone with the Wind.”
Maryanne laughed softly. It was a beautiful sound.
“He was always like that then. Generous, kind, patient. We all loved him, but whereas he cared for me and Matthias and the others greatly, he loved only Nancy. Anyway, it was June of 1952. Michael would have been in his late twenties by then, and Nancy, she would have been . . . well, yes, it was just three or four days before her fourteenth birthday. I remember now. We had a party planned, just something simple, but considering what happened, we had to cancel it. Anyway, it was June, and everything was fine, everything was normal, and then we got word that there had been a terrible fire at the plant. It wasn’t the whole plant, because each section had its own building, if you like. Auto things were made in one factory, metal pressings in another, enamel goods in another, you know? Anyway, by this time, Michael was one of the foremen in the building where they cast things in iron or steel or whatever. They had these huge containers of sand, because they used sand to make the molds for some of the things they manufactured. They were like enormous wooden barrels, but raised up about six feet high, and they held tons and tons of sand. So, there was a fire somewhere in the back of the building, and there were maybe twenty-five or thirty men working in that building. Once the fire got a grip, there were a number of them trapped in one section of the building. What happened w
as that the wooden legs of these sand barrels gave way, and these things came over and created this obstacle between one part of the building and the next. There were a number of men behind this great mountain of sand. The sand was scorching hot, and they couldn’t climb over it and they couldn’t get around it. So Michael took half a dozen other men, and they went outside the building from the other end. They took digger trucks and some kind of wagon and they drove those trucks into the back wall again and again until they breached it, and they made an escape route for the men who had been trapped inside. But not all of them came out, and Michael figured they must have been overcome by smoke or something. The fire department had arrived by then, and because the summer had been so hot, the river was low, and they couldn’t get the water up as fast as they needed it. Anyway, Michael took a team of firemen in to show them where these workers were trapped, and they disappeared into the smoke and not one of them came out. Not the workers who’d been left behind, not the firemen. Just Michael. The roof came down, and then the back wall collapsed, and the firemen and the workers were trapped in there and they died. Somehow Michael came out. And, after what had happened in the war, that’s when he became known as the luckiest man alive.”
Gaines had watched her talking the entire time. The more she spoke, the more alive she appeared to become. As if to recount this terrible tragedy had somehow reminded her of not only her own mortality, but also her own aliveness. There was something truly captivating about the woman, as if something inside her was alight and yet hidden behind the shadows of the past. Past experience had buried who she was, and in speaking of these things, perhaps some small avenue of escape had become visible.
“And Michael?” Gaines asked.
“He withdrew to a degree, just as he had after his return from the war. We still spent time together, and he was still as much in love with Nancy as he’d ever been, but something had changed. It wasn’t even identifiable. It wasn’t something you could put your finger on. He wasn’t crazy. He didn’t act crazy. Nothing like that. It was like there was only seventy-five percent of him there, whereas before there had been a hundred. And then, after Nancy’s disappearance two years later . . . well, that’s when he really started to display signs of the lonely, crazy man he became. After that, I hardly ever saw him. I didn’t want to see him. When I did see him, he spoke about how he was a curse on everyone around him, about how he had made a pact with the devil, about how his own life had been spared twice, but that the price he now had to pay was the sacrifice of the one person he truly loved. It was too much to listen to him. It overwhelmed you. It was scary, terrifying, you know? It was obsessive.”