The Devil and the River (10 page)

Searching the burned wreckage of his trailer home, parked there on the outskirts of Whytesburg, Bicklow and Gaines had discovered the remnants of photographs. The star of these photographs, discernible only by those who might have known him, was William Hammond, the son of a wealthy local sawmill owner. Bicklow visited the elder Hammond, they shared words, the discovered photograph remnants were produced, and though Bicklow knew he would never tie the death of Bradley Gardner to the Hammond family, he nevertheless wanted them to know that he knew. Whatever the younger Hammond might have been doing in those pictures would remain unknown, but Hammond the elder was smart enough to realize that staying in Whytesburg would only exacerbate Bicklow’s desire to see justice arrive in some fashion. By the end of August 1973, the Hammonds were gone—lock, stock, and barrel. Bicklow didn’t ask after them, and Hammond didn’t send flowers to Bicklow’s funeral two months later. Whether money exchanged hands in that June meeting at the Hammond place—the kind of money that put Don Bicklow’s mistress in a neat little apartment in Lyman—Gaines would never know, and he had long since reconciled himself to letting it lie. Gaines knew that if you asked questions that folks didn’t want to be asked, you more than likely got answers you didn’t want to hear. No need to sully Bicklow’s reputation now that the man was dead. The heart attack,
in flagrante delicious
, seemed punishment enough.

So John Gaines, as a soldier, had seen more than enough death for any lifetime. As a police officer, he had seen all too little to be on firm ground with the Nancy Denton case. People would look to him—for order, for answers, for investigation, for results. This was local. There would be no external assistance. No one outside of Whytesburg would be interested in a twenty-year-old murder. The resources he possessed were the resources he could use. Richard Hagen, his deputy, and two other uniforms—Lyle Chantry and Forrest Dalton, twenty-six and twenty-four respectively. It would be the four of them, and they would have to deal with every aspect of it.

It was this simple truth that John Gaines confronted as he considered the injuries that had been inflicted upon the person of Nancy Denton. What would the law say about this?
That someone did murder the person of Nancy Grace Denton against the peace and dignity of the state of Mississippi.
What about the peace and dignity of a teenage girl? Where did that get lost in the law books?

“John?”

Gaines looked up at Powell as he drew the white sheet back over the girl.

“Any more questions?”

“You know who did this thing, Victor?” Gaines asked.

“No, John, I don’t,” Powell replied.

“Then I have no more questions.”

I
t was seven o’clock. Gaines drove home to see his mother, to make a sandwich, to take a moment’s respite from the insanity of the day.

When he arrived, he found his neighbor’s daughter, Caroline, bringing soup to the downstairs back bedroom where Gaines’s mother now spent her days.

“I’ll take it,” Gaines said. “You go on home.”

“Thanks, John,” Caroline said. “I got a date tonight. Jimmy’s coming in half an hour or so. We’re going to the movie theater in Bay St. Louis.”

“What you gonna see?”

“Well, I wanna see
The Sugarland Express
, but Jimmy wants to see some macho thing with Clint Eastwood,
Thunder and Lightning
or something—”

Gaines smiled. “
Thunderbolt and Lightfoot
.”

“Yeah, that’s the one.”

“I’m sure you’ll get your own way,” Gaines said. “Anyway, you should’ve called me,” Gaines said. “I’d have come down sooner.”

“Picture doesn’t start till eight thirty. It’s fine, John.”

“How’s she been today?”

“Asking after you, you know? Usual stuff.”

“Crazy talk?”

“No more than yesterday. She’s on about Nixon again, how he’s the devil, an’ all that other stuff she was sayin’ a while back.”

Gaines nodded. His mother had it in for the president. Sure he was a liar, sure he was as crooked as a country river, but Alice Gaines seemed to believe there was a special hot place in hell being saved for Tricky Dicky.

Ever since the Watergate break-in, she’d been rambling about him. Two years now. Nixon was still in the White House, and Alice Gaines was still dying of cancer. Maybe she was hanging on just to see for herself that he got his ass kicked good.

Gaines wished Caroline a good night out, told her to make sure Jimmy didn’t drink before he drove her home, that if he did drink, she was to call Gaines and he would go fetch them both.

“He won’t drink,” Caroline said.

“But if he does—”

“If he does, I’ll call you.” Caroline Rousseau smiled one more time, and then she left the house.

Gaines stood there for a moment, the tray in his hand, the soup getting cold, and he wondered what kind of world this was.

He took the soup through to his mother.

“John,” she said, and she smiled. She looked well. There was some color in her cheeks. She had on
The Bob Newhart Show
, told Gaines to turn it down some.

Gaines set the tray on the dresser, rearranged the pillows behind his mother’s head so she could sit and eat more comfortably, and then he put the tray in front of her. He sat on the edge of the bed. He watched her eat, as he did most evenings. This was her routine. Spend most of the day with Caroline, evening meal with her son, her waking hours filled with
The Young and the Restless
,
Columbo
, and
Barnaby Jones
. After her evening meal, Gaines would give her a sleeping tablet, and—aside from sometimes waking at three or four for help with the bathroom—she would be gone until he came in with her breakfast at six thirty. She was fifty-nine, looked seventy, but her mind—when she was lucid, when the morphine wasn’t assaulting her reality with hallucinations—was as sharp and facile as it had ever been. She had been dying for six years, would go on dying for another six or ten or twelve, it seemed. She refused all treatment but the painkillers, said that things were the way they were and that was that. Bob Thurston said that she should have died within two or three years, five at most, but something kept her going.

“I think she wants to see you married,” he told Gaines on one occasion. “Maybe she wants to see if you can muster up the energy to get her some grandkids.”

“Not the marrying kind.”

“Never done it, have you?”

“Nope.”

“So how do you know it won’t suit you?”

Gaines had shrugged. “I know me, and I would be a nightmare to live with. Besides, I have Ma—”

“Well, if my theory is right, once you got yourself hitched, she wouldn’t hang around much longer.”

“Well, Bob, you stick to your theories, and I’ll stick to mine.”

Thurston hadn’t mentioned it again, but Caroline was in his ear on a routine basis about finding someone as well. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, it was the very least of his concerns.

“They’re gonna get him, you know?” Alice said.

Gaines snapped to. “Get who, Ma?”

“Tricky Dicky.”

“Why? What’s he done now?”

“Same things he’s always been doin’. You know. ’Cept that now they’re making him hand over the tape recordings he made. The Supreme Court, that is. House Judiciary Committee will impeach the son of a bitch—”

“Ma—”

“Don’t be so naive, John. He’s a liar through and through. Everyone’s all up in arms saying he’s a good man, that he brought the war to an end, but the war isn’t at an end, is it, John? There’s still American soldiers out there, plenty of them, and plenty of them are going to die yet.”

Gaines couldn’t argue, didn’t want to. He had enough on his mind without starting some political debate with his mother. Besides, she was right. The January 1973 cease-fire had held, for sure, but it was only a matter of time before the Vi
t Minh would come in from Laos and Cambodia, and then Saigon would fall. However, America’s attention was on Nixon. He’d talked his way out of the frying pan and into the fire. Reports of the last US troops coming out of Southeast Asia at the end of March had been overshadowed by the resignation of Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, and a whole handful of others. It was a mess. Nixon himself had as much as admitted that there had been a cover-up. The country was in limbo, everyone waiting to see whether Nixon would be impeached. Nixon
was
a crook—no doubt about it—and more than likely Chief Justice Warren Burger would get those tapes and the curtains would come down.

Alice Gaines drank her soup. John Gaines sat and watched
The Bob Newhart Show
with her, and then he fetched her sleeping tablets from the bathroom.

As she drifted away, she held his hand. “How was your day, sweetheart?” she asked.

“Same old, same old,” he said.

She reached up and touched his face. “You look tired.”

“I’m okay, Ma.”

“You worry too much about me. You don’t need to have Caroline over here day in and day out. She’s a young woman now. She has things she needs to be doing. She has her own life.”

“She’s happy to come over, Ma, and besides, I give her some money, and if she weren’t here, she’d have to go get a job, and she doesn’t want to do that right now.”

“She should have stayed in school.”

“She can do whatever she pleases, Ma; you know that. Don’t get on her about it, now. Just leave her be.”

“She tells me . . .” Alice Gaines smiled wryly. She knew she was starting something that would never finish.

“Ma—”

“I’ll be gone soon enough,” Alice interjected, “and you’re not getting any younger, and if you want children—”

“Ma—”

She squeezed her son’s hand. “Enough,” she said. “I’ll leave you be. You want to be a bitter and lonely old man, then that’s your business.”

Her eyes started to droop. She inhaled deeply, exhaled slowly, and Gaines knew she was almost asleep.

“Love you, Ma,” he whispered.

“Love you, Edward,” she whispered back, and Gaines knew that in whatever world she inhabited when she slept, his father was there. Edward Gaines, the father that never was.

Maybe Edward was waiting for her. Maybe it would be best to just let her go. Gaines glanced at the morphine tablets in a bottle on the bedside table. He closed his eyes for a moment and then shook his head.

He rose slowly, removed the tray, drew one of the pillows out from behind his mother’s head, and eased her down. She did not stir or murmur.

Gaines left the room, headed back to the kitchen to wash up and make himself a sandwich. He sat in the front room, ate slowly, drank a glass of root beer.

He thought of his father, of his mother, of what she would have to say about Nancy Denton.

One dead body was more disturbing than a hundred. One dead body was you, your friend, someone you loved, someone you just knew. A hundred dead was a featureless mass, an event, a happening, something distant and disconnected.

Gaines thought of the ones who never came home. The ones who never would. Just like Nancy Denton. Families kept looking, kept hoping, kept praying, all of them believing that if they wished hard enough, well, the wish had to come true. Not so. They did not understand that if a wish was destined to be realized, then it needed to be wished only once. Real magic was never hard work. And even if they did return, they would see that the world they’d left behind would never accept them again, would never contain them, would never be big enough or forgiving enough to absorb what they had become.

Here he was—a veteran, a casualty of war—starting a new war here in Whytesburg. A war against hidden truths. If there was one thing he knew, it was the degree of creativity and imagination that could be employed to bring a life to some unnatural end. But this? This was without precedent.

The strength of the heart had been measured—not in emotional terms, not in terms of love or passion or betrayal, for this was not possible. It had been measured in physical terms, in pounds of pressure per square inch, the force with which it could move so many gallons of blood for so many meters at such and such a speed. But the heart, irrespective of its power, was silent until fear crept in. Until panic or trauma or terror assaulted our senses, the heart went quietly about its powerful, secret business. Now Gaines believed his heart was more alive than it had been since leaving Vietnam.

Mayhem and a dark kind of magic had seemed inseparably blended as he’d looked down into the cavity of Nancy Denton’s chest, as he had seen the basket, the snake that had been within it.

When you saw a blond, nineteen-year-old high school football star decapitate a fifteen-year-old Vietnamese kid and then stand there for snapshots, the head dangling from his hand by the hair, its eyes upturned, the rictus grin, the pallid hue of bloodless flesh, you knew something was wrong with the world. You never looked at people the same way again.

This was the same. The same sense of surreal and morbid fascination. The same sense of dark and terrible wonder.

Gaines closed his eyes and breathed deeply.

Seemed that we all made a deal with God. Believe, trust, have faith in His goodness, and it will all be fine. Well, hell, it wasn’t fine. Never had been, never would be. It was all horror and bullshit.