The White Road

10

NOW AT LAST, in the quiet of my hotel room, I opened the file on Marianne Larousse. The darkness around me was less an absence of light than a felt presence: shadows with substance. I lit the table lamp and spread across the desk the material that Elliot had given to me.

And as soon as I saw the photos I had to look away, for I felt the weight of her loss upon me, though I had not known her and would never know her now. I walked to the door and tried to banish the shadows by flooding the room with brightness, but instead they merely retreated to the spaces beneath the tables and behind the closet, waiting for the inevitable passing of the light.

And it seemed to me that my being somehow separated, that I was both here in this hotel room, with the evidence of Marianne Larousse’s violent wrenching from this world, and back in the stillness of the Blythes’ living room, watching Bear’s mouth move to form well-meant lies, Sundquist like a ventriloquist beside him, manipulating, poisoning the atmosphere in the room with greed and malice and false hope while Cassie’s eyes stared out at me from a graduation photograph, that uncertain smile hovering about her mouth like a bird unsure of the safety of alighting. I found myself trying to imagine her alive now, living a new life far from home, secure in the knowledge that her decision to abandon her former existence was the right one to make. But I was unable to do so, for when I tried to picture her there was only a shadow without a face and a hand adorned with parallel wounds.

Cassie Blythe was not alive. Everything I had learned about her told me that she was not the kind of young woman to drift away and condemn her parents to a lifetime of hurt and doubt. Someone had torn her from this world, and I did not know if I could find that person and, through that discovery, reveal at last the truth behind her disappearance.

I knew then that Irving Blythe was right, that what he had said about me was true: to invite me into their lives was to admit failure and allow death its provenance, for I was the one who arrived when all hope was gone, offering nothing but the possibility of a resolution that would bring with it more grief and pain and a knowledge that perhaps would make ignorance appear like a blessing. The only consolation in all that would occur was that some small measure of justice might begin to accrue from my involvement, that lives might continue with some small degree of certainty restored: the certainty that the physical pain of a loved one was at an end, and that somebody cared enough to try to discover why that pain had been visited on them at all.

When I was a younger man, I became a policeman. I joined the force because I felt that it was incumbent upon me to do so. My father had been a policeman, as had my grandfather, but my father had ended his career and his life in ignominy and despair. He took two lives before taking his own, for reasons that perhaps will never be known, and I, being young, felt the need to take his burdens upon myself and to try to make up for what he had done.

But I was not a good policeman. I did not have the temperament, or the discipline. True, I had other talents-a tenacity, a need to discover and understand-but those were not enough to enable me to survive in that environment. I lacked also one other crucial element: distance. I did not have the defense mechanisms in place that enabled my peers to look upon a dead body and see it only as that: not a human being, not a person, but the absence of being, the negation of life. On a superficial but ultimately necessary level, a process of dehumanization needs to occur for the police to do their job. Its hallmarks are mortuary humor and apparent detachment, enabling them to refer to a found corpse as a “body dump” or “trash” (except in the case of a fallen comrade, for that is so close to home as to make distance impossible), to examine wounds and mutilation without descending, weeping, into a void that makes life and death impossible to bear. Their duty is to the living, to those left behind, and to the law.

I did not have that. I have never had that. Instead, I have learned to embrace the dead and they, in their turn, have found a way to reach out to me. Now, in this hotel room, far from home, faced with the death of another young woman, Cassie Blythe’s disappearance troubled me once more. I was tempted to call the Blythes, but what would I have said? Down here I could do nothing for them, and the fact that I was thinking about their daughter would provide cold comfort for them. I wanted to be finished in South Carolina, to check the witness statements and assure myself of Atys Jones’s safety, however tentative it might be, then return home. I could do no more than that for Elliot.

But now Marianne Larousse’s body was beckoning me with a strange intimacy, demanding that I bear witness, that I understand the nature of that with which I was involving myself, and the possible consequences of my intervention.

I did not want to look. I was tired of looking.

Yet I looked.

The sorrow of it; the terrible, crushing sorrow of it.

It is the photographs that do it, sometimes. You never truly forget. They stay with you always. You turn a corner, drive past a boarded-up storefront, maybe a garden that’s become overgrown with weeds, the house behind it rotting like a bad tooth because nobody wants to live there, because the stink of death is still in the house, because the landlord got some immigrant laborers and paid them fifty dollars each to hose it down and they used whatever piss-poor materials they had on hand: lousy disinfectants and dirty mops that spread rather than eradicated the stench, that turned the logic of bloodstains into a chaotic smear of half-remembered violence, a swath of darkness across the white walls. Then they painted it with cheap, watery paints, running the rollers over the tainted parts two or three times more than the rest, but when the paint dried it was still there: a bloody hand that had wiped itself through the whites and creams and yellows and left the memory of its passing ingrained in the wood and plaster.

So the landlord locks the door, bars the windows, and waits until people forget or until someone too desperate or dumb to care agrees to pay a cut-rate rent and he accepts it, if only to try to erase the memory of what has taken place there with the problems and worries of a new family, a kind of psychic cleansing that might succeed where the immigrants have failed.

You could go inside, if you chose. You could show your badge and explain that this was routine, that old unsolved cases are rechecked after a few years have passed in the hope that the passage of time might have revealed some previously undiscovered detail. But you don’t need to go inside, because you were there on the night that they found her. You saw what was left of her on the kitchen floor, or in the garden among the shrubs, or draped across the bed. You saw how, with the last breath of air that left her body, something else had passed away too, the thing that gave her substance, a kind of inner framework wrenched somehow through her body without damaging the skin, so that now she has crumpled and faded even as she has swollen, the woman both expanding and contracting as you watch, marks already appearing on her skin where the insects have begun to feed, because the insects always get there before you do.

And then maybe you have to find a photo. Sometimes, the husband or the mother, the father or the lover, will hunt it down for you, and you’re watching as their hands move across the pages of the album, through the shoe box or the purse, and you’re thinking: did they do this thing? Did they reduce this person to what I’m seeing now? Or maybe you know that they did it-you can’t tell how, exactly, but you just know-and this touching of the relics of a lost life seems somehow like a second violation, one that you should stop with a sweep of your hand because you failed once and now, now you have the chance to make up for that failure.

But you don’t do it, not then. You wait, and you hope that with the waiting will come the proof or the confession, and the first steps can be taken toward restoring a moral order, a balance between the needs of the living and the demands of the dead. But still, those images will come back to you later, unbidden, and if you’re with someone whom you trust, you may say: “I remember. I remember what happened. I was there. I was a witness and, later, I tried to become more than that. I tried to achieve a measure of justice.”

And if you succeeded, if punishment was meted out and the file marked accordingly, you may feel a twinge of-not pleasure, not that, but of…peace? Relief? Maybe what you feel doesn’t have a name, shouldn’t have a name. Maybe it is only the silence of your conscience, because this time it isn’t screaming out a name in your head and you won’t have to go back and pull the file to remind yourself again of that suffering, that death, and your failure to maintain the balance that is required if life and time are not to cease forever.

Case closed: isn’t that the phrase? It’s been so long, it seems, since you’ve had call to use it, to taste the falsity of the words even as they are forming on your tongue and passing through your lips. Case closed. Except it isn’t closed, for the absence continues to be felt in the lives of those left behind, in the hundred thousand tiny adjustments required to account for that absence, for the life, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that should be impacting on other lives. Irv Blythe, for all his faults, understood that. There is no closure. There are only lives continued or lives ended, with attendant consequences in each case. At least the living are no longer your concern. It is the dead that stay with you.

And maybe you spread the photos and think: I remember.

I remember you.

I have not forgotten.

You will not be forgotten.

She was lying on her back on a bed of crushed spider lilies, the dying white blooms of the plants like starburst flaws upon the print, as if the negative itself had been sullied by its exposure to this act. Marianne Larousse’s skull had suffered massive damage. Her scalp had been lacerated in two places at either side of her central parting, hairs and fibrous strands crossing in the wounds. A third blow had broken through the right side of her cranium, and the autopsy had revealed fracture lines extending through the base of the skull and the upper edge of the left eye socket. Her face was completely red with blood, for the scalp is very vascular and bleeds profusely after damage, and her nose had been broken. Her eyes were tightly closed and her features contorted, wincing against the force of the blows.

I flipped forward to the autopsy report. There were no bite marks, bruises or abrasions to Marianne Larousse’s body consistent with sexual assault, but foreign hairs recovered from the victim’s pubic hair were found to have come from Atys Jones. There was redness around Marianne’s genitals-a result of recent sexual contact-but no internal or external bruising or laceration, although traces of lubricant were found in the vaginal canal. There was semen from Jones in her pubic hair, but no semen found inside her. Jones told the investigators, just as Elliot had told me, that they regularly used condoms during intercourse.

Tests showed fibers matching Marianne Larousse’s clothes on Atys Jones’s sweater and jeans, while acrylic fibers from his car seat were found in turn on her blouse and skirt, along with cotton fibers from his clothing. According to the analysis, the chance that the fibers had a different origin was remote. Over twenty matches had been found in each case. Five or six would usually be enough for relative certainty.

The evidence still didn’t convince me that Marianne Larousse had been raped before she died, but then I wasn’t the one that the prosecutors would be trying to convince. Her blood alcohol levels were above normal, so a good prosecutor could argue that she was probably not in a position to fend off a strong young man like Atys Jones. In addition, Jones had used a condom and lubricant, and the lubricant would have reduced the level of physical damage to his victim.

What could not be denied was that Marianne Larousse’s blood had been found on Jones’s face and hands when he entered the bar to call for help, and that mixed in with it were found dust fragments from the rock used to kill her. The bloodstain analysis of the area around Marianne Larousse’s body revealed medium-velocity impact splatter, the blood droplets radially distributed away from the impact site both above and beyond her head and to one side where the final, fatal blow was delivered. Her assailant would have received blood splatter to the lower legs, the hands, and possibly the face and upper body. There was no apparent blood splatter on Jones’s legs (although his jeans had been soaked through from kneeling in Marianne Larousse’s blood, so the splatter could well have been absorbed or obscured) and the blood on his face and hands had been wiped too much to reveal traces of any original splatter pattern.

According to Jones’s statement, he and Marianne Larousse had met that night at nine o’clock. She had already been drinking with friends in Columbia, then had driven to the Swamp Rat to join him. Witnesses saw them talking together, then they left side-by-side. One witness, a barfly named JD Herrin, admitted to police that he had hurled racial epithets at Jones shortly before the two young people left the bar. He timed his abuse at about ten after eleven.

Jones told police that he then proceeded to have sexual intercourse with Marianne Larousse in the passenger seat of his car, she on top, he seated beneath her. After intercourse, an argument had commenced, caused in part by a discussion of JD Herrin’s abuse and centering on whether or not Marianne Larousse was ashamed to be with him. Marianne had stormed off, but instead of taking her car she had run into the woods. Jones claimed that she started to laugh and called for him to follow her to the creek, but he was too angry with her to do so. Only after ten minutes had passed and she had failed to return did Jones follow her. He found her about one hundred feet down the trail. She was already dead. He claimed to have heard nothing in the intervening period: no screams, no sounds of struggle. He didn’t remember touching her body, but figured that he must have since he got blood on his hands. He also admitted that he must have handled the rock, which he later recalled as lying against the side of her head. He then went back to the bar and the police were called. He was interviewed by agents from SLED, the State Law Enforcement Division, initially without the benefit of a lawyer since he had not been arrested or charged with any crime. After the interview, he was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Marianne Larousse. He was given a court-appointed lawyer, who later stepped aside in favor of Elliot Norton.

And that was where I came in.

I ran my fingers gently across her face, the indentations in the photographic paper like the pores on her skin. I’m sorry, I thought. I didn’t know you. I have no way of telling if you were a good person or a bad one. If I had met you, encountered you in a bar or sat beside you in a coffee shop, would we have got on together, even if only in that small, passing way in which two lives may briefly interlock before continuing, somehow both altered yet unchanged, on their own paths, one of those small, flickering moments of contact between strangers that make this life liveable? I suspect not. We were, I think, very different. But you did not deserve to end your life in this way and, if I could, I would have intervened to stop what occurred, even at the risk of my own life, because I could not have stood by and allowed even you, a stranger, to suffer. Now I will try to retrace your steps, to understand what led you to this place, to rest at last among crushed lilies, the night insects drowning in your blood.

I’m sorry that I have to do this thing. People will be hurt by my intervention, and elements of your past may be revealed that you might have wished to remain undisclosed. All I can promise you is that whoever did this will not walk away and will not be allowed to go unpunished because of any action that I may take.

In all of this, I will remember you.

In all of this, you will not be forgotten.

11

I CALLED THE number on the Upper West Side the next morning. Louis picked up.

“You still coming down here?”

“Uh-huh. Be down in a couple of days.”

“How’s Angel?”

“Quiet. How you doin’?”

“Same old same old.”

“That bad?”

I had just spoken to Rachel. Hearing her voice had made me feel alone and had renewed my concern for her now that she was so far away.

“I have a favor to ask,” I said.

“Ask away. Askin’ is free.”

“You know someone who could stay with Rachel for a while, at least until I get back?”

“She ain’t goin’ to like it.”

“Maybe you could send someone who wouldn’t care.”

There was a silence as he considered the problem. When he eventually spoke, I could almost hear him smile.

“You know, I got just the guy.”

I spent the morning making calls, then drove up to Wateree and spoke to one of the Richland county deputies who had been first on the scene the night Marianne Larousse was killed. It was a pretty short conversation. He confirmed the details in his report but it was clear that he believed Atys Jones was guilty and that I was trying to pervert the course of justice by even speaking to him about the case.

I then headed on up to Columbia and spent some time speaking with a special agent named Richard Brewer at the headquarters of SLED. It was SLED special agents that had investigated the murder, as they did all homicides committed in the state of South Carolina, with the occasional exception of those that occurred within the jurisdiction of the Charleston PD.

“They like to think of themselves as independent down there,” said Brewer. “We call it the Republic of Charleston.”

Brewer was about my age, with straw-colored hair and a jock’s build. He wore standard issue SLED gear: green combats, a black T-shirt with “SLED” in green letters on the back, and a Glock 40 on his belt. He was one of the team of agents that had worked the case. He was a little more forthcoming than the deputy but could add little to what I already knew. Atys Jones was virtually alone in the world, he said, with only a few distant relatives left alive. He had a job packing shelves at a Piggly Wiggly and lived in a small one-bed walk-up in Kingville that was now occupied by a family of Ukrainian immigrants.

“That boy,” he said, shaking his head. “He had few people in this world to care about him before this, and he has a whole lot fewer now.”

“You think he did it?”

“Jury will decide that. Off the record, I don’t see no other candidates on the horizon.”

“And it was you that spoke to the Larousses?” Their statements were among the material Elliot had passed on to me.

“Father and son, plus the staff at their house. They all had alibis. We’re pretty professional here, Mr. Parker. We covered all the bases. I don’t think you’ll find too many holes in them there reports.”

I thanked him and he gave me his card in case I had any other questions.

“You got yourself a hard job, Mr. Parker,” he said as I stood to leave. “I reckon you’re going to be about as popular as shit in summertime.”

“It’ll be a new experience for me.”

He raised a skeptical eyebrow.

“You know, I find that hard to believe.”

Back at my hotel, I spoke to the people at the Pine Point Co-op about Bear, and they confirmed that he had arrived on time the day before and had worked about as hard as a man could be expected to work. They still sounded a little nervous, so I asked them to put Bear on the line.

“How you doing, Bear?”

“Okay.” He reconsidered. “Good, I’m doing good. I like it here. I get to work on boats.”

“Glad to hear it. Listen, Bear, I have to say this: you screw this up, or cause these people any trouble, and I’ll personally hunt you down and drag you to the cops, you understand.”

“Sure.” He didn’t sound aggrieved or hurt. I figured Bear was used to people warning him not to screw up. It was just a question of whether or not he took it in.

“Okay, then,” I said.

“I won’t screw up,” he confirmed. “I like these people.”

After I hung up on Bear, I spent an hour in the hotel gym followed by as many lengths of the pool as I could manage without cramping and drowning. Afterward, I showered and reread those sections of the case file that Elliot and I had discussed the night before. I kept coming back to two items: the story, photocopied from an out-of-print local history, of the death of the trunk minder Henry; and the disappearance, two decades before, of Atys Jones’s mother and aunt. Their pictures stared out at me from the newspaper clippings, two women forever frozen in their late teens and vanished from a world that had largely forgotten about them, until now.

As evening approached, I left the hotel and had coffee and a muffin in the Pinckney Café. While I waited for Elliot to arrive, I leafed through a copy of the Post and Courier that somebody had abandoned. One story in particular caught my eye: a warrant had been issued for the arrest of a former prison guard named Landron Mobley after he had missed a hearing of the Corrections Committee in connection with allegations of “improper relationships” with female prisoners. The only reason the story attracted my attention was because Landron Mobley had hired one Elliot Norton to represent him at both the hearing and what was expected to be a subsequent rape trial. I mentioned the case to Elliot when he arrived fifteen minutes later.

“Old Landron’s a piece of work,” said Elliot. “He’ll turn up, eventually.”

“Doesn’t seem like a high-class client,” I commented.

Elliot glanced at the story, then pushed it away although he still seemed to feel that some further explanation was necessary.

“I knew him when I was younger, so I guess that’s why he came to me. And, hey, every man is entitled to representation, doesn’t matter how guilty he is.”

He raised his finger to the waitress for the check, but there was something about the movement, something too hurried, that indicated Landron Mobley had just ceased to be a welcome topic of conversation between us.

“Let’s go,” he said. “Least I know where one of my clients is at.”

The Richland County Detention Center stood at the end of John Mark Dial Road, about one hundred miles northwest of Charleston, the approach marked by the offices of bondsmen and attorneys. It was a complex of low redbrick buildings surrounded by two rows of fencing topped with razor wire. Its windows were long and narrow, overlooking the parking lot and the woods beyond on one side. The inner fence was electrified.

There wasn’t a great deal that we could do to prevent the knowledge of Atys Jones’s impending release from reaching the media, so it wasn’t too much of a surprise to find a camera crew and a handful of journalists and photographers in the parking lot, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. I had gone on ahead of Elliot and had been watching them for about fifteen minutes by the time Elliot’s car appeared. Nothing exciting had happened to either them or me in the interim, apart from one brief flurry of domestic theater when an unhappy wife, a small, dainty woman in high heels and a blue dress, arrived to collect her husband after he’d spent some time cooling his heels in a cell. He had blood on his shirt and beer stains on his pants as he emerged blinking into the fading light of the early evening, at which point his wife slapped him once across the head and gave him the benefit of her wide and pretty profane vocabulary. He looked like he wanted to run back to jail and lock himself in his cell, especially when he saw all the cameras and thought, for one brief moment, that they’d come for him.

The media pounced on Elliot as soon as he stepped from his car, then tried to block his way again when he came out twenty minutes later through the wired tunnel that led into the jail’s reception area, his arm around the shoulders of a young man with light brown skin who kept his head low and his baseball cap pulled down almost to the bridge of his nose. Elliot didn’t even dignify them with a “No comment.” Instead, he thrust the young man into the car and they drove away, speeding. The more sensationalist members of the fourth estate raced to their vehicles to follow him.

I was already in place. I waited until Elliot had passed me, then kept close behind him as far as the exit road, at which point I gave the wheel a good spin and managed to block both lanes before stepping from the car. The TV van ground to a halt a few feet from my door and a cameraman in jungle fatigues opened the driver’s door and started screaming at me to get out of his way.

I examined my nails. They were nice and short. I tried to keep them neat. Neatness was a very underrated virtue.

“You hear me? Get the fuck out of the way,” yelled Combat Man. His face was turning a bright shade of red. Behind his van I could see more media types congregating as they tried to figure out what all the fuss was about. A small group of young black males in low-slung jeans and Wu Wear shirts emerged from a bondsman’s office and wandered down to enjoy the show.

Combat Man, tired of shouting and achieving no result, stormed toward me. He was overweight and in his late forties. His clothing looked kind of ludicrous on him. The black guys started in on him almost immediately.

“Yo, GI Joe, where the war at?”

“ Vietnam over, motherfucker. You gotta let it go. You can’t be livin’ in the past.”

Combat Man shot them a look of pure hatred. He stopped about a foot from me and leaned in until our noses were almost touching.

“The fuck are you doing?” he asked.

“Blocking the road.”

“I can see that. Why?”

“So you can’t get through.”

“Don’t get smart with me. You move your car or I’ll drive my van through it.”

Over his shoulder I could see some prison guards emerging from the lockup, probably on their way to see what all the fuss was about. It was time to go. By the time the reporters got on to the main road, it would be too late for them to find Elliot and Atys. Even if they did find the car, their quarry would not be in it.

“Okay,” I told Combat Man. “You win.”

He seemed a little taken aback.

“That’s it?”

“Sure.”

He shook his head in frustration.

“By the way-”

He looked up at me.

“Those kids are stealing stuff from the back of your van.”

I let the media convoy get well ahead of me, then drove along Bluff Road, past the Zion Mill Creek Baptist Church and the United Methodist, until I reached Campbell ’s Country Corner at the intersection of Bluff and Pineview. The bar had a corrugated roof and barred windows and didn’t look a whole lot different in principle from the county lockup, except that you could order a drink and walk away any time you wanted. It advertised “cold beer at low prices,” held a turkey shoot Fridays and Saturdays, and was a popular stopping-off point for those enjoying their first alcoholic taste of freedom. A hand-lettered sign warned patrons against bringing in their own beer.

I turned onto Pineview, past the side of the bar and a yellow lockup storage garage, and saw a shack standing in the middle of an overgrown yard. Behind the shack a white GMC 4×4 was waiting, into which Elliot and Atys had been transferred before Elliot’s own car, now being driven by another man, had continued on its way. It pulled out of the lot as I appeared, and I stayed a few cars behind it as it headed along Bluff toward 26. The plan was that we would drive Jones straight into Charleston and take him to the safe house. It was kind of a surprise, then, to see Elliot make a left into the lot of Betty’s Diner before he even reached the highway, open the passenger door, and allow Jones to walk ahead of him into the restaurant. I parked the Neon in back then followed them inside, trying to look casual and unconcerned.

Betty’s Diner was a small room with a counter to the left of the door, behind which two black women took orders while two men worked the grills. It was furnished with plastic garden tables and chairs, and the windows were obscured by both blinds and bars. Two TVs played simultaneously and the air was thick with the smell of fried foods and oil. Elliot and Jones were sitting at a table at the back of the room.

“Do you want to tell me what you’re doing?” I asked when I reached them.

Elliot looked embarrassed.

“He said he needed to eat,” he stammered. “He was cramping. Said he was going to collapse on me if he didn’t eat. He even threatened to jump from the car.”

“Elliot, step outside and you can still hear the echo of his cell door closing. Any closer and he’d be eating prison food again.”

Atys Jones spoke for the first time. His voice was higher than I expected, as if it had broken only recently instead of over half a decade before.

“Fuck you, man, I gots to eat,” he said.

He had a thin face, so light in color as to be almost Hispanic, and nervous, darting eyes. His head stayed low when he spoke, and he looked up at me from under his cap. Despite his bluster, his spirit had been broken. Atys Jones was about as tough as a piñata. Hit him hard enough and candy would come out his ass. Still, it didn’t make his manners any easier to take.

“You were right,” I told Elliot. “He’s quite the charmer. You couldn’t have picked someone a little less irritating to save?”

“I tried, but the Little Orphan Annie case was already taken.”

“The fuck-”

Jones was about to launch into a predictable tirade. I raised a finger at him.

“Stop right now. You swear at me again and that salt shaker is as close as you’ll get to a meal.”

He backed down.

“I didn’t eat nothing in jail. I was scared.”

I felt a stab of guilt and shame. He was a frightened young man with a dead girlfriend and the memory of her blood on his hands. His fate was in the hands of two white men and a jury that would most likely redefine the word “hostile.” All things considered, he was doing well just to be sitting upright with dry eyes.

“Please, man,” he said. “Just let me eat.”

I sighed. From the window where we sat I could see the road, the 4×4 and anybody approaching on foot. Even if somebody had taken it into his mind to hurt Jones, he wasn’t going to do it in Betty’s Diner. Elliot and I were the only white folk in the place, and the handful of people at the other tables were very deliberately ignoring our presence. If we saw any journalists, I could take him out the back way, assuming Betty’s had a back way. Maybe I was overreacting.

“Whatever,” I conceded. “Just be quick about it.”

It was pretty obvious that Jones hadn’t eaten much during his time in jail. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes sunken, and spots and boils had erupted on his face and neck. He devoured a plate of smothered porkchops with rice, green beans, and macaroni and cheese, then followed it with a slice of strawberry cream cake. Elliot nibbled at some fries while I stuck with coffee from the Mr. Coffee machine on the counter. When we were done, Elliot left Jones with me and went to pay the check.

Jones’s left hand lay flat upon the table, its only adornment a cheap Timex. His right hung on the stainless steel cross around his neck. It was T-shaped, and both its vertical and horizontal shafts appeared hollow. I reached out to touch it, but he drew back and there was something in his eyes that I didn’t like.

“What you doin’?”

“I just wanted to take a look at your cross.”

“It’s mine. I don’t want nobody else touchin’ it.”

“Atys,” I said softly. “Let me see the cross.”

He held onto it for a moment longer, then uttered a long “Shiiiit.” He lifted the cross from around his neck and let it fall gently into the palm of my hand. I dangled it from my fingers, then gave the shaft an experimental twist. It came loose in my hand. I let it fall to the table, exposing a two inch length of sharpened steel. I clasped the T in the palm of my hand, closed my fist and left the point sticking out between my middle and ring fingers.

“Where did you get this?”

The sunlight danced on the blade, reflecting in Jones’s eyes and face. He was reluctant to answer.

“Atys,” I said, “I don’t know you, but you’re already starting to bug me. Answer the question.”

He did some theatrical head shaking before he answered.

“Preacher gave it to me.”

“The chaplain?”

Jones shook his head. “No, one of the ministers comes to the jail. Tole me he was a prisoner too, once, ’cept the Lord set him free.”

“Did he say why he was giving this to you?”

“Tole me he knowed I was in trouble, knowed there was people tryin’ to kill me. Tole me that it would protect me.”

“He give you his name?”

“Tereus.”

“What did he look like?”

Jones met my eyes for the first time since I had taken the cross.

“He looked like me,” he replied, simply. “He looked like a man seen trouble.”

I replaced the shaft, covered the blade, then after a moment’s hesitation handed it back to him. He looked surprised, then nodded at me once in acknowledgment.

“If we do this right, then you won’t need it,” I said. “And if we screw up, maybe you’ll be glad of it.”

With that, Elliot returned and we left. Neither of us mentioned the knife to him. This time, there were no more stops, and nobody followed us as we made our way to Charleston and the East Side.

The East Side neighborhood was one of the original developments outside the old walled city, and had always been unsegregated. Blacks and whites shared the warren of streets bordered by Meeting and East Bay to the west and east, and the Crosstown Expressway and Mary Street to the north and south, although even in the mid-nineteenth century the black population was higher than the white. Working-class blacks, whites, and immigrants continued to live together on the East Side until after World War II, when the whites moved to the suburbs west of the Ashley. From then on, the East Side became a place into which you didn’t want to stray if you were white. Poverty took root, bringing with it the seeds of violence and drug abuse.

But the East Side was changing once again. Areas south of Calhoun Street and Judith Street that had once been exclusively black were now nearly all white, and wealthily so, and the wave of urban renewal and gentrification was also breaking on the southern verges of the East Side. Six years before, the average price of a house in the area was about $18,000. Now there were houses on Mary Street making $250,000, and even homes on Columbus and Amherst, close to the small park where the drug dealers congregated and within sight of the brownstone projects and yellow and orange public housing, were selling for two or three times what they were worth only half a decade before. But this was still, for the present, a black neighborhood, the houses painted in faded pastels, relics of the days without air-conditioning. The Piggly Wiggly grocery store at Columbia and Meeting, the yellow Money Man pawn shop across from it, the cut-rate liquor store nearby all spoke of lives far removed from those of the wealthy whites returning to the old streets.

The faces of the young men at the corners and the old people on their porches regarded us warily as we drove: a black man and a white man in one car, being tailed by a white man in a second car. We might not have been Five-O, but whatever we were we were still bad news. At the corner of American and Reid, on the side of a two-room house erected as some kind of art exhibit, someone had written the following lines:

THE AFRO-AMERICAN HAS BEEN HEIR TO THE MYTHS THAT IT IS BETTER TO BE POOR THAN RICH, LOWER-CLASS RATHER THAN MIDDLE OR UPPER, EASYGOING RATHER THAN INDUSTRIOUS, EXTRAVAGANT RATHER THAN THRIFTY AND ATHLETIC RATHER THAN ACADEMIC.

I didn’t know the source of the quotation, and neither did Elliot when I asked him about it later. Atys had apparently just looked blankly at the words on the wall. I guess he probably already knew all that it said from experience. Around us, hydrangeas were in bloom, and heavenly bamboo grew by the front steps of a neat two-story house on Drake Street, midway between a ruined building at the junction of Drake and Amherst and the Fraser Elementary at the corner of Columbus. It was painted white with yellow trim, and there were shutters drawn on both the upper and lower floors, slatted on the top floor to let the air in. A bay window faced out onto the street from beneath the porch, with the front doorway to the right, a mass-produced carved wood pattern above it for decoration. A flight of five stone steps led up to the door.

When he was certain the street was quiet, Elliot backed the GMC into the yard to the right of the doorway. I heard the sound of the doors opening, then footsteps as Atys and Elliot entered the house from the rear. Drake seemed largely empty apart from two small kids playing ball by the railings of the school. They remained there until it began to rain, the raindrops glittering in the glow of the street lamps that had just begun to shine, then ran for shelter. I waited ten minutes, the rain falling hard on the car, until I was certain that we hadn’t been followed, before I too headed into the house.

Atys-I was forcing myself to think of him by his first name in an effort to establish some kind of connection with him-sat uncomfortably at a cheap pine kitchen table, Elliot beside him. By the sink, an elderly black woman with silver hair was pouring five glasses of lemonade. Her husband, who was a lot taller than she was, held the glasses as she poured, then passed them, one by one, to their guests. His shoulders were slightly stooped, but the strength of his deltoid and trapezius muscles was still apparent from their definition beneath his white shirt. He was well over sixty years old, but I guessed that he could have taken Atys easily in a straight fight. He could probably have taken me.

“Devil and wife fighting,” he said, as I shook the rain from my jacket. I must have looked puzzled, because he repeated himself then pointed out the window at the rain and sunlight mingling.

“De wedduh,” he said. “Een yah cuh, seh-down.”

Elliot grinned at the incomprehension on my face. “Gullah,” he explained. “Gullah” was the term commonly used to describe the language and the people of the coastal islands, many of them the descendants of slaves who had been given island land and abandoned rice fields to settle in the aftermath of the Civil War.

“Ginnie and Albert used to live out on Yonges Island, but then Ginnie got sick and one of their sons, Samuel, the one who’s taking care of my car, insisted they move back to Charleston. They’ve been here ten years now, and I still don’t get some of what they say, but they’re good people. They know what they’re doing. He’s asking you to come in and sit down.”

I accepted the lemonade, thanked them, then took Atys by the shoulder into the small living room. Elliot seemed like he was about to follow me, but I indicated that I wanted a minute or two alone with his client. Elliot didn’t look too happy about it, but he stayed where he was.

Atys sat down on the very edge of the sofa, as if he were preparing to make a break for the door at any moment. He wouldn’t meet my eye. I sat opposite him in an overstuffed armchair.

“You know why I’m here?” I asked.

He shrugged. “’Cause you bein’ paid to be here.”

I smiled. “There’s that. Mostly, I’m here because Elliot doesn’t believe that you killed Marianne Larousse. A lot of other people do, though, so it’s going to be my job to maybe find evidence to prove them wrong. I can only do that if you help me.”

He licked his lips. There was sweat beading on his forehead. “They goan kill me,” he said.

“Who’s going to kill you?”

“Larousses. Don’t matter if they do it theyselves or get the state to do it, they still goan kill me.”

“Not if we can prove them wrong.”

“Yeah, and how you goan do that?”

I hadn’t figured that out yet, but talking to this young man was a first step.

“How did you meet Marianne Larousse?” I asked.

He sank back heavily into the sofa, resigned now to speaking of what had occurred.

“She was a student in Columbia.”

“I don’t see you as the student type, Atys.”

“Shit, no. I sold weed to them motherfuckers. They like to score.”

“Did she know who you were?”

“No, she didn’t know shit about me.”

“But you knew who she was?”

“’S right.”

“You know about your past, about the problems between your family and the Larousses.”

“That’s old shit.”

“But you know about it.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“She come on to you, or did you come on to her?”

He blushed and his face broke into a shit-eating grin. “Oh man, y’know, she was smokin’ and I was smokin’ and, ’s like, shit happened.”

“When did this start?”

“January, maybe February.”

“And you were with her all that time?”

“I was with her some. She went away in June. I didn’t see her from end of May until week, maybe two weeks before…” His voice trailed off.

“Did her family know she was seeing you?”

“Maybe. She didn’t tell them nothin’, but shit gets out.”

“Why were you with her?”

He didn’t answer.

“Because she was pretty? Because she was white? Because she was a Larousse?”

There was just a shrug in reply.

“Maybe all three?”

“I guess.”

“Did you like her?”

A muscle trembled in his cheek.

“Yeah, I liked her.”

I let it rest. “What happened on the night she died?”

Atys’s face seemed to fall, all of the confidence and front disappearing from it like a mask yanked away to reveal the true expression beneath. I knew then for certain that he hadn’t killed her for the pain was too real, and I guessed that what might have started out as a means of getting back at some half-sensed enemy had developed, at least on his side, into affection, and perhaps something more.

“We was screwing around in my car, out at the Swamp Rat by Congaree. Folks there don’t give a shit what you do, ’long as you got money and you ain’t a cop.”

“You had sex?”

“Yeah, we had sex.”

“Protected?”

“She was on the pill and, like, I been tested and shit but, yeah, she still like me to use a rubber.”

“Did that bother you?”

“What are you, man, stupid? You ever fucked with a rubber? It ain’t the same. It’s like…“He struggled for the comparison.

“Wearing your shoes in the bathtub.”

For the first time he smiled and a little of the ice broke.

“Yeah, ’cept I ain’t never had a bath that good.”

“Go on.”

“We started arguing.”

“About what?”

“About how maybe she was ashamed of me, didn’t want to be seen with me. Y’know, we was always fuckin’ in cars, or in my crib if she got drunk enough not to care. Rest of the time, she drift by me like I don’t exist.”

“Did this argument turn violent?”

“No, I never touched her. Ever. But she start screamin’ and shoutin’ and, next thing I know, she’s runnin’ away. I was goan just let her go, m’sayin, let her cool off and shit? Then I went after her, callin’ her name.

“Then I found her.”

He swallowed and placed his hands behind his head. His lips narrowed. He seemed on the verge of tears.

“What did you see?”

“Her face, man, it was all busted in. Her nose…there was just blood. I tried to lift her, tried to brush away her hair from her face, but she was gone. There was nothin’ I could do for her. She was gone.”

And now he was crying, his right knee pumping up and down like a piston with the grief and rage that he was still suppressing.

“We’re nearly done,” I said.

He nodded and wiped away his tears with a sharp, embarrassed jerk of his arm.

“Did you see anybody, anyone at all, who might have done this to her?”

“No, man, nobody.”

And for the first time, he lied. I watched his eyes, saw them look up and away from me for an instant before he answered.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m sure.”

“I don’t believe you.”

He was about to give me outraged when I reached across and raised a finger in warning before him.

“What did you see?”

His mouth opened and closed twice without producing any sound, then: “I thought I saw something, but I’m not sure.”

“Tell me.”

He nodded, more to himself than to me.

“I thought I saw a woman. She was all in white, and movin’ away into the trees. But when I looked closer, there was nothin’ there. It could have been the river, I guess, with the light shinin’ on it.”

“Did you tell the police?” There had been no mention of a woman in the reports.

“They said I was lyin’.”

And he was still lying. Even now, he was holding back, but I knew I was going to get nothing more from him for the present. I sat back in the chair, then passed him the police reports. We went through them for a time, but he could find nothing to question beyond their implicit assumption of his guilt.

He stood as I placed the reports back in their file. “We done?”

“For now.”

He moved a couple of steps, then stopped before he reached the door.

“They took me past the death house,” he said softly.

“What?”

“When they was takin’ me to Richland, they drove me to Broad River and they showed me the death house.”

The state’s capital punishment facility was located at the Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia, close by the reception and evaluation center. In a move that combined psychological torture with democracy, prisoners convicted of capital crimes prior to 1995 were allowed to choose between electrocution and lethal injection as their final punishment. All others were executed by injection, as Atys Jones would be if the state succeeded in its efforts to convict him of Marianne’s murder.

“They tole me I was goan be strapped down and then they was goan inject poisons into me, and that I’d be dying inside but I wouldn’t be able to move or cry out none. They tole me it be like suffocatin’ slow.”

There was nothing I could say.

“I didn’t kill Marianne,” he said.

“I know you didn’t.”

“But they goan kill me for it anyhow.”

His resignation made me feel cold inside.

“We can stop that from happening, if you help us.”

But he just shook his head and loped back to the kitchen. Elliot entered the room seconds later.

“What do you think?” he asked in a whisper.

“He’s holding something back,” I replied. “He’ll give it to us, in time.”

“We don’t have that kind of time,” snapped Elliot.

As I followed him into the kitchen, I could see the muscles bunched beneath his shirt, and his hands flexing and unflexing by his sides. He turned his attention to Albert.

“You need anything?”

“Us hab ’nuff bittle,” said Albert.

“I don’t mean just food. You need more money? A gun?”

The woman slammed her glass down on the table and shook her finger at Elliot.

“Don’ pit mout’ on us,” she said firmly.

“They think having a gun in the house will bring them bad luck,” Elliot said.

“They may be right. What do they do if there’s trouble?”

“Samuel lives with them, and I suspect he has less trouble with guns than they have. I’ve given them all our numbers. If anything goes wrong, they’ll call one of us. Just make sure you keep your phone with you.”

I thanked them both for the lemonade, then followed Elliot to the door.

“You leavin’ me here?” cried Atys. “With these two?”

“Dat boy ent hab no mannus,” scolded the old woman. “Dat boy gwi’ punish fuh ’e wickitty.” She poked at Atys with her finger.

“Debblement weh dat chile lib.”

“Get off me,” he retorted, but he looked kind of worried.

“Be good, Atys,” said Elliot. “Watch some TV, get some sleep. Mr. Parker will check on you tomorrow.”

Atys raised his eyes to mine in a last, desperate plea.

“Shit,” he said, “by tomorrow these two probably have eaten me.”

When we left him, the old woman had just started poking him again. Outside, we passed their son, Samuel, on the way back to the house. He was a tall, handsome man, my age or a little younger, with large brown eyes. Elliot introduced us and we shook hands.

“Any trouble?” asked Elliot.

“None,” Samuel confirmed. “I parked outside your office. Keys are on top of the right rear wheel.”

Elliot thanked him and he headed toward the house.

“You sure he’ll be okay with them?” I asked Elliot.

“They’re smart, like their boy, and the folks round here look out for them. Any strangers come sniffing down this street and half the young bucks will be following them before they have a chance to get their shoes dirty. As long as he’s here, and no-one finds out about it, he’ll be safe.”

The same faces watched us leave their streets and I thought that maybe Elliot was right. Maybe they would take account of strangers coming into their neighborhood.

I just wasn’t sure that it would be enough to keep Atys Jones safe from harm.

12

ELLIOT AND I exchanged a few words outside the house, then parted. Before we did, he handed me a newspaper from the backseat of his car.

“Since you been reading the newspapers so closely, you happen to see this?”

The story was buried in the lifestyles section and headlined IN THE MIDST OF TRAGEDY, CHARITY. The Larousses were hosting a charity lunch in the grounds of an old plantation house on the western shore of Lake Marion later that week, one of two large houses that the family owned. From the list of expected guests, half the grandees in the state were going to be there.

“While still mourning the death of his beloved daughter Marianne,” the report read, “Earl Larousse, his son Earl Jr. by his side, said that ‘we have a duty to those less fortunate than ourselves that even the loss of Marianne cannot absolve.’ The charity lunch, in aid of cancer research, will be the first public engagement for the Larousse family since the murder of Marianne, 19, last July.”

I handed the paper back to Elliot.

“You can bet that there’ll be judges and prosecutors there, probably the governor too,” he said. “They should just hold the trial right there on the lawn and get done with it.”

Elliot told me he had business to conclude back at his office, and we agreed to meet again over the next day or two to discuss progress and options. I followed his car as far as Charleston Place, then peeled off and parked. I showered in my room and called Rachel. She was just about to head into South Portland for a reading at Nonesuch Books. She’d mentioned it to me a couple of days earlier, but I’d forgotten about it until now.

“An interesting thing happened today,” she said, giving me just enough time to get the word “hi” out of my mouth. “I opened the front door and there was a man on my doorstep. A big man. A very big, very black man.”

“Rachel-”

“You said it would be discreet. His T-shirt had the words ‘Klan Killer’ written on the front.”

“I-”

“And do you know what he said?”

I waited.

“He handed me a note from Louis and told me he was lactose intolerant. That was it. Note. Lactose intolerant. Nothing else. He’s coming to the reading with me. It was all I could do to get him to change his T-shirt. The new one reads ‘Black Death.’ I’m going to tell people it’s a rap band. Do you think it’s a rap band?”

I figured it was probably his occupation, but I didn’t say that. Instead, I said the only thing I could think of to say.

“Maybe you’d better buy some soy milk.”

She hung up without saying good-bye.

Despite the earlier rain, it was still stiflingly warm when I left the hotel to grab a bite to eat, and I felt as if my clothes were soaked through before I’d walked more than a few blocks. I passed the site of the Confederate Museum, its exterior now surrounded by scaffolding, and headed into the residential district between East Bay and Meeting, admiring the big old houses, the lamps by their doors glowing softly. It was just after ten and the tourists had begun to throng the dive bars on East Bay that sold premixed cocktails in souvenir glasses. Young men and women cruised up and down Broad, rap and nu-metal grinding out insistent, competing beats. Fred Durst, record company vice president, proud father and multimillionaire, was telling the kids how their parents just didn’t understand his generation. There’s nothing sadder than a thirty-year-old man in short trousers rebelling against his mom and dad.

I was looking for somewhere to eat when I saw a familiar face at the window of Magnolia’s. Elliot was sitting across from a woman with jet-black hair and tight lips. He was eating, but the pained look on his face told me that he wasn’t enjoying his meal, maybe because the woman was clearly unhappy with him. She was leaning across the table, her palms flat upon the cloth, and her eyes were blazing. Elliot gave up trying to feed himself and spread out his hands in a “Be reasonable” gesture, the one that men use when they’re feeling put upon by a woman. It doesn’t work, mainly because there’s nothing guaranteed to add fuel to the fire of a male-female argument quicker than one party suggesting to the other that she’s being unreasonable. True to form, the woman stood up abruptly and walked determinedly from the restaurant. Elliot didn’t follow. He sat for a moment looking after her, then shrugged resignedly, picked up his knife and fork and resumed his meal. The woman, dressed entirely in black, got into an Explorer parked a couple of doors down from the restaurant and drove off into the night. She wasn’t crying but her anger lit up the interior of the SUV like a flare. Out of little more than habit I memorized the tag number. I briefly considered joining Elliot but I didn’t want him to think that I might have seen the argument and, anyway, I wanted some time alone.

I ended up on Queen Street and ate at Poogan’s Porch, a Cajun and Low Country restaurant that was rumored to be a favorite of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward, although the celebrity count was zero that night. Poogan’s had flowered wallpaper and glass on the tables, and I pretty much had to take one of the staff hostage to keep the ice water coming fast enough to cool me down, but the Cajun duck looked good. Despite my hunger, I barely picked at my food when it arrived. A memory flashed: Faulkner spitting in my mouth, the taste of him on my tongue. I pushed the plate away.

“Is there something wrong with your food, sir?”

It was the waiter. I looked up at him but he was blurred, like a Batut photograph in which images of different individuals had been overlaid on one another to create a single composite.

“No,” I said. “It’s fine. I’ve just lost my appetite.”

I wanted him to go away. I couldn’t look at his face. It reminded me of slow decay.

The cockroaches were clicking across the sidewalks when I left the restaurant, the remains of those that had not been quick enough to avoid human footfalls lying scattered in small dark piles, troops of ants already feeding hungrily upon them. I found myself walking down deserted streets watching the lights in the windows of the houses, catching shadow plays of the lives continuing behind the drapes. I missed Rachel and wished that she were with me. I wondered how she was getting along with the Klan Killer, now apparently aka Black Death. Trust Louis to send along the only guy who looked more conspicuous than he did, but at least I was no longer worrying as much about Rachel. I still wasn’t even sure how much help I could be to Elliot down here. True, I was curious about the jailhouse preacher who had given Atys Jones the T-bar knife, but it seemed to me that I was somehow adrift from all that was happening, that I had not yet found a way to break the surface and explore the depths beneath, and I still didn’t fully share Elliot’s faith in the ability of the old Gullah couple and their son to handle any situation that might arise. I found a public phone and checked in with the safe house. The old man answered and confirmed that all was well.

“Mek you duh worry so?” he said. “Dat po’ creetuh, ’e rest.”

I thanked him and was about to hang up when he spoke again.

“De boy suh ’e yent kill de gel, ’e meet de gel so.”

I had to ask him to repeat himself twice before I understood.

“He told you that he didn’t kill her? You’ve talked to him about it?”

“Uh-huh. Uh ax, ’en ’e mek ansuh suh ’e yent do’um.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“’E skay’d. ’E skay-to-det.”

“Scared of what?”

“De police. De ’ooman.”

“What woman?”

“De ole people b’leebe sperit walk de nighttime up de Congaree. Dat ’ooman alltime duh fludduh-fedduh.”

Again, I had to get him to repeat himself. Eventually, I managed to figure out that he was talking about spirits.

“You’re telling me that there is the ghost of a woman in the Congaree?”

“Uh-huh.”

“And this is the woman Atys saw?”

“Uh yent know puhzac’ly, but uh t’ink so.”

“Do you know who she is?”

“No, suh, I cahn spessify, bud ’e duh sleep tuh Gawd-acre.”

God-acre: the cemetery.

I asked him to try to get something more from Atys, because it still seemed to me that he knew more than he was telling. The old man promised to try, but said he wasn’t no “’tarrygater.”

By now I was in the French Quarter between Meeting and East Bay. I could hear the sounds of distant traffic, and sometimes raised voices as revelers moved through the night, but around me there was no life.

And then, as I passed by Unity Alley, I heard singing. The voice was a child’s, and very lovely. It was singing a version of an old Roba Stanley number, “Devilish Mary,” but it sounded as if the child didn’t know the whole song or else had just decided to sing her favorite part, which was the nursery-rhyme refrain at the end of each verse:

A ring-tuma-ding-tuma dairy

A ring-tuma-ding-tuma dairy

Prettiest girl I ever saw

And her name was Devilish Mary.

The singing stopped, and the girl stepped from the murk of the alleyway to be illuminated by the lamps on the adjoining houses.

“Hey, mister,” she said. “You got a light?”

I stopped. She was thirteen or fourteen, and wore a short, tight black skirt with no stockings. Her bare legs were very white, and her midriff was exposed beneath a black, cut-off T-shirt. Her face, too, was pale, smudged dark with makeup around the eyes and wounded by a streak of too-red lipstick around her mouth. She wore high heels, but still stood no taller than five feet as she leaned against the brickwork. Her hair was brown and untidy, and partially obscured her face. The darkness seemed to move around her, as if she were standing beneath a moonlit tree, its branches moving slowly in an evening breeze. She seemed strangely familiar, in the way that a childhood photograph will contain traces of the woman that the child will become. I felt as though I had seen the woman first, and now was being allowed to see the child that she once was.

“I don’t smoke,” I said. “Sorry.”

I stared at her for a few seconds more, then began to move away. “Where you going?” she said. “You want to have some fun? I got a place we can go.” She stepped forward and I saw that she was younger even than I had thought. This girl was barely into double figures, and yet there was something about her voice. It sounded older than it should have, far older.

She opened her mouth and licked her lips. Her teeth were green where they met the gums.

“How old are you?” I asked her.

“How old would you like me to be?” She wiggled her hips in a kind of parody of lasciviousness, and the grating tone to her voice was clearer now. She gestured with her right hand toward the alleyway. “Come on, down here. I got a place we can go.” Slowly, she placed her hand on the hem of her skirt and began to lift. “Let me show you-”

I reached out to her and her smile broadened, then froze as I gripped her arm. “Maybe we should get you to the police,” I told her. “They’ll find someone who can help you.” But her arm felt wrong: not firm, but liquid, like a body in the process of putrefaction. There was heat there but it was extreme, and I was reminded of the preacher in his cell, burning up from within.

The girl hissed and with a movement of surprising strength and agility wrenched herself from my grasp.

“Don’t touch me!” she hissed. “I’m not your daughter.”

For seconds, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even speak. Then she started to run down the alleyway and I followed her. I thought I would catch her easily, but suddenly she was ten feet ahead of me, then twenty, moving yet not moving, like a film from which somebody had removed crucial frames at regular intervals. She passed by McCrady’s Restaurant in a kind of blur, then paused as she neared East Bay.

The car appeared behind her as she stood waiting. It was a black Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with a battered front bumper and a star-shaped crack in the corner of the darkened windshield. The rear passenger door opened beside the girl and a kind of dark light spilled out, seeping like oil across the sidewalk.

“No!” I shouted. “Get away from the car.”

Her head turned and she stared into the interior, then looked back at me. She smiled, her features already blurring, the gums receding, the teeth like yellowed stones.

“Come on,” she said. “I got a place we can go.”

She climbed into the car and it pulled away from the curb, its brake lights glowing as it disappeared into the night.

But shapes had fallen from the interior of the car before the door had closed, dropping like small clods of dirt to the sidewalk. While I watched, they converged on a cockroach and began to crawl across its body, biting at its head and underside, trying to slow it down so that they could begin to consume it. I knelt and saw the distinctive violin-shaped mark on the back of one of the spiders.

Recluses. The cockroach was covered with recluses.

I felt something shudder through my system and a huge spasm wrenched at my gut. I collapsed back against the wall and wrapped my arms around myself as the nausea passed over me in waves. I could taste duck and rice in my mouth as my food threatened to come back up from my stomach. I took deep breaths and kept my head down. Then, when I could walk again, I hailed a cab on East Bay and returned to my hotel.

I drank some water in my room to try to cool myself down but my temperature was way up. I was feverish and ill. I tried to concentrate on the TV, but the colors hurt my eyes and I turned it off before the late night news bulletin came on with the first details of the killings of three men in a bar near Caina, Georgia. Instead, I lay down in bed and tried to sleep but the heat was too much, even with the a/c on full. I found myself drifting in and out of consciousness, unsure of whether I was awake or dreaming when I heard a knock at the door and saw, through the peephole, the figure of a little girl in black waiting at my door, her lipstick smeared

hey mister, I got a place we can go

and when I tried to open the door I found that I was holding the chrome of a Coupe de Ville. I smelled the stench of rotting meat as I heard the lock release with a click.

And all was darkness within.

13

THEY HAD TRAVELED separately to the motel, the tall black man driving there in a three-year-old Lumina, the shorter white man arriving later in a cab. They each took a standard double room on different levels, the black man on the first floor, the white man on the second. There was no communication between them, nor would there be until they departed from this place the following morning.

In his room, the white man checked his clothes carefully for traces of blood but could find none. When he was satisfied that they were clean, he tossed them on the bed and stood naked before the mirror in the small bathroom. Slowly, he turned his body, wincing a little as he did so, to reveal the scars on his back and his thighs. He stared at them for a long time, gently tracing the pattern of them against his skin. He watched himself blankly in the mirror, as if he were looking not at his own reflection but at a distinct entity, one that had suffered terribly and was now marked not only psychologically but physically as well. Yet this man in the glass was no part of him. He himself was unblemished, untouched and, as soon as the lights went out and the room grew dark, he could walk away from the mirror and leave the scarred man behind, remembering only the look in his eyes. He allowed himself the luxury of the fantasy for a few moments longer, then quietly wrapped himself in a clean towel before the glow of the television.

There had been a great many misfortunes in the life of the man named Angel. Some of them, he knew, could be attributed to his own larcenous nature, to his once strongly held belief that if an item was saleable, moveable, and stealable, then it was only to be expected that a transfer of ownership should occur in which he, Angel, would play a significant if fleeting part. Angel had been a good thief, but he had not been a great one. Great thieves do not end up in prison, and Angel had spent enough time behind bars to realize that the flaws in his character prevented him from becoming one of the true legends of his chosen profession. Unfortunately he was also an optimist at heart and it had taken the combined efforts of prison authorities in two different states to cloud his naturally sunny predisposition toward crime. Yet he had chosen this path, and he had taken his punishment, when possible, with a degree of equanimity.

But there were other areas of his life over which Angel had been granted little control. He had not been allowed to choose his mother, who had disappeared from his life when he was still crawling on all fours, whose name appeared on no marriage certificate, and whose past was as blank and unyielding as a prison wall. She had called herself Marta. That was all he knew of her.

Worse, he had not been able to choose his father, and his father had been a bad man: a drunk, a petty criminal, an indolent, solitary character who had kept his only son in filth, feeding him on breakfast cereals and fast food when he could remember, or work up the enthusiasm, to do so. The Bad Man. Rarely father, in his memories, and never dad.

Just the Bad Man.

They lived in a walk-up on Degraw Street, in the Columbia Street waterfront district of Brooklyn. At the turn of the last century it had been home to the Irish who worked the nearby piers. In the 1920s, they had been joined by the Puerto Ricans, and from then on Columbia Street had remained relatively unchanged until after World War II, but the area was already in decline when the boy was born. The opening of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway in 1957 had sundered working-class Columbia from the wealthier districts of Cobble Hill and Carroll Gardens, and a plan to build a commercial containerization port in the neighborhood had led many residents to sell up and move elsewhere. But the container port did not materialize; instead, the shipping industry moved to Port Elizabeth, New Jersey, with the result that there was massive unemployment in Columbia Street. The Italian bakeries and the grocery stores began to close, Puerto Rican casitas instead springing up in the empty lots. The solitary boy moved through this place, claiming boarded-up buildings and unroofed rooms as his own, trying always to stay out of the path of the Bad Man and his increasingly volatile moods. He had few friends and attracted the attentions of the more violent of his peers the way some dogs attract maulings from others of their kind, until their tails remain forever fastened between their legs, their ears plastered low to their heads, and it becomes impossible to tell if their attitude is a consequence of their sufferings or the very reason for them.

The Bad Man lost his delivery job in 1958 after he attacked a union activist during a drunken brawl and found himself blacklisted. Men had come to the apartment some days later and beaten him with sticks and lengths of chain. He was lucky to get away with some broken bones, for the man he had attacked was a union leader in name only and the office that bore his name was rarely troubled by his presence. A woman, one of the few who passed like unwelcome seasons through the life of the boy, trailing cheap scent and cigarette smoke behind them, nursed him through the worst of it and fed the boy on bacon and eggs fried in beef fat. She left following an altercation with the Bad Man in the night, one that drew the neighbors to their windows and the police to their door. There were no more women after her, as the Bad Man descended into despair and misery, dragging his son down with him.

The Bad Man sold Angel for the first time when he was eight years old. The man gave him a case of Wild Turkey in return for his son, then drove him home five hours later wrapped in a blanket. The boy who became Angel lay awake in his bed that night, his eyes fixed to the wall, afraid to blink in case, in that second of darkness, the man should return, afraid to move for fear of the pain he felt below.

The Bad Man had fed him Fruit Loops when he returned, and a Baby Ruth bar as a special treat.

Even now, looking back, Angel could not recall properly how many days passed in this way, except that the transactions became more and more frequent, and the number of bottles involved became fewer and fewer, the handful of bills slimmer and slimmer. At the age of fourteen, after several attempts to flee had been met with severe punishment by the Bad Man, he broke into a candy store on Union Street, just a couple of blocks from the 76th Precinct, and stole two boxes of Baby Ruth bars, then devoured them in an empty lot on Hicks Street until he vomited. When the police found him the cramps in his stomach were so severe that he could barely walk. The robbery earned him a two-month stretch in juvie because of the damage he had caused while breaking into the store and the judge’s desire to make an example of someone in the face of growing youth crime in the dying neighborhood. When he was finally released the Bad Man was waiting for him at the gates, and there were two more men sitting smoking in the grubby brownstone apartment that father and son shared.

This time, there was no candy bar.

At sixteen, he left and took the bus across the river to Manhattan, and for almost four years he lived life on the margins, sleeping rough or in dingy, dangerous tenements, supporting himself through dead-end jobs and, increasingly, theft. He recalled the flash of knives and the sound of gunshots; the scream of a woman slowly fading to sobs before she drifted into sleep or eternal silence. The name Angel became a part of his escape, a shedding of his old identity just as a snake sheds its skin.

But at night he would still imagine the Bad Man coming, padding softly through the empty hallways, the windowless rooms, listening for his son’s breathing, his hands filled with candy bars. When the Bad Man at last passed away, burning himself to death in a fire that consumed his apartment and those above it and on either side, a consequence of a lit cigarette left to dangle while its smoker slept, the boy-man learned about it from the newspapers, and cried without knowing why.

In a life that had not been short of misfortune, of pain and humiliation, Angel would still look back on September 8, 1971, as the day when events went from bad to very bad indeed. For on that day, a judge sentenced Angel and two accomplices to a nickel in Attica for their part in a warehouse robbery in Queens, a destination partly dictated by the fact that two of the accused had attacked a bailiff in the corridor after he had suggested that by the end of the day they would be facedown on bunks with towels stuffed in their mouths. Angel, at nineteen, was the youngest of the three to be imprisoned.

To be sent to the Attica Correctional Facility, thirty miles east of Buffalo, was bad enough. Attica was a hellhole: violent, overcrowded, and a tinderbox waiting to explode. On September 9, 1971, the day after Angel arrived in Prison Yard D, Attica did just that, and Angel’s luck really started to run out. The siege at Attica that resulted from the seizure by prisoners of several parts of the facility would eventually leave forty-three men dead and eighty wounded. Most of the fatalities and injuries resulted from the decision of Governor Nelson A. Rockefeller to order the retaking of Prison Yard D using whatever force was necessary. Tear gas canisters rained down on the inmates in the yard and then the shooting began, indiscriminate firing into a crowd of over twelve hundred men followed by a wave of state troopers armed with guns and batons. When the smoke and gas had cleared, eleven guards and thirty-two prisoners were dead, and the reprisals were swift and merciless. Inmates were stripped and beaten, forced to eat mud, pelted with hot shell casings, and threatened with castration. The man named Angel, who had spent most of the siege cowering in his cell, fearful of his own fellow inmates almost as much as of the inevitable punishment that would befall all involved when the prison was retaken, was forced to crawl naked over a yard full of broken glass while the guards watched. When he stopped, unable any longer to take the pain in his stomach, hands, and legs, a guard named Hyde had walked over to him, the glass crunching beneath his heavy shoes, and had stood on Angel’s back.

Almost three decades later, on August 28, 2000, federal judge Michael A. Telesca of the Federal District Court in Rochester finally divided an $8 million settlement among five hundred former Attica inmates and their relatives for what had taken place in the aftermath of the uprising and siege. The case had been delayed for eighteen years but in the end some two hundred plaintiffs got to tell their stories in open court, including one Charles B. Williams, who had been so badly beaten that his leg had to be amputated. Angel’s name was not among those attached to the class action suit, for Angel was not a man who believed that reparation came from courtrooms. Other prison terms had followed his time spent in Attica, including a total of four years in Rikers. When he had emerged from what would be his final prison term, he was broke, depressed, and on the verge of suicide.

And then, one hot August night, he spotted an open window in an apartment on the Upper West Side, and he used the fire escape to gain access to the building. The apartment was luxurious, fifteen hundred square feet in size, with Persian carpets laid over bare boards, small items of African art tastefully arrayed on shelves and tables, and a collection of vinyl and compact discs that, with its almost exclusive emphasis on country music, led Angel to suspect that he had somehow wandered into Charley Pride’s New York crash pad.

He went through all of the rooms and found them empty. Later, he would wonder how he had missed the guy. True, the apartment was huge, but he’d searched it. He’d opened closets, even checked under the bed, and he hadn’t even found dust. But just as he was about to lift the television out onto the fire escape, a voice behind him said: “Man, you the dumbest damn burglar since Watergate.”

Angel turned around. Standing in the doorway, wearing a blue bath towel around his waist, was the tallest black man Angel had ever seen outside a basketball court. He was at least six-six and totally bald, his chest hairless, his legs smooth. His body was a series of hard curves and knots of muscle, almost entirely without fat. In his right hand he held a silenced pistol, but it wasn’t the gun that scared Angel. It was the guy’s eyes. They weren’t psycho eyes, for Angel had seen enough of those in prison to know what they looked like. No, these eyes were intelligent and watchful, amused and yet strangely cold.

This guy was a killer.

A real killer.

“I don’t want no trouble,” said Angel.

“Ain’t that a shame?”

Angel swallowed.

“Suppose I told you that this isn’t what it looks like.”

“It looks like you tryin’ to steal my TV.”

“I know that’s what it looks like, but-”

Angel stopped and decided, for the first time in his life, that honesty might at this point be the best policy.

“No, it is what it looks like,” he admitted. “I am trying to steal your TV.”

“Not anymore you ain’t.”

Angel nodded.

“I guess I should put it down.” In truth, the TV was starting to feel kind of heavy in his arms.

The black guy thought for a moment. “No, tell you what, why don’t you hold on to it,” he said at last.

Angel’s face brightened. “You mean I can keep it?”

The gunman almost smiled. At least, Angel thought it might have been a smile; that, or some kind of spasm.

“No, I said you could hold on to it. You just stay there and keep holdin’ my TV. ’Cause if you drop it-” The smile broadened. “I’ll kill you.”

Angel swallowed. Suddenly, the weight of the TV seemed to double.

“You like country music?” asked the guy, reaching for the remote control and causing the CD player to light up.

“Nope,” said Angel.

From the speakers came the sound of Gram Parsons singing “We’ll Sweep Out the Ashes in the Morning.”

“Then you shit out of luck.”

Angel sighed. “Tell me about it.”

The half-naked man settled himself into a leather armchair, rearranged his towel carefully, and trained the gun on the hapless burglar.

“No,” he said. “You tell me…”

The man named Angel thought about these things, these seemingly random events that had brought him to this place, as he sat in the semidarkness. The final words of Clyde Benson, just before Angel had killed him, replayed themselves in his memory.

I made my peace with the Lord.

Then you got nothing to worry about.

He had asked for mercy but had received none.

For so much of his life, Angel had been at the mercy of others: his father; the men who had taken him in back rooms and sweat-filled apartments; the guard Hyde in Attica; the prisoner Vance in Rikers, who had decided that Angel’s continued existence was an insult that could not be tolerated, until someone else had stepped in and ensured that Vance would no longer be a danger to Angel, or to anyone else.

And then he had found this man, the man who now sat in a room below, and a new life of sorts had begun, a life in which he would no longer be the victim, in which he would no longer be at the mercy of others, and he had almost started to forget the events that had made him what he was.

Until Faulkner had chained him to a shower rail and begun to cut the skin from his back, his son and daughter holding the hanging man still, the woman licking at the sweat that broke from Angel’s brow, the man hushing him softly as he screamed through the gag. He remembered the feel of the blade, the coldness of it, the pressure on his skin before it broke through and entered the flesh beneath. All of the old ghosts had come howling back then, all of the memories, all of the suffering, and he could taste candy bars in his mouth.

Blood and candy bars.

Somehow, he had survived.

But Faulkner too was still alive, and that was simply too much for Angel to bear.

For Angel to live, Faulkner had to die.

And what of this other man, the quiet, deliberate black male with the killer’s eyes?

Each time he watched his partner dress and undress, Louis’s face remained studiedly neutral, but he felt his gut clench as the tangled scars were revealed on the back and thighs, as the other man paused to let the pain subside while pulling on a shirt or pants, sweat dotting his forehead. In the beginning, in those first weeks after he returned from the clinic, Angel had simply neglected to remove his clothes for days, preferring instead to lie, fully clothed, on his stomach until it became necessary to change his dressings. He rarely spoke of what had occurred on the preacher’s island, although it consumed his days and drew out his nights.

Louis knew a great deal more about Angel’s past than his partner had learned about his, Angel recognizing in his reticence a reluctance to reveal himself that went beyond mere privacy. But Louis understood, at some minor level, the sense of violation that Angel now felt. Violation, the infliction of pain upon him by someone older and more powerful, should have been left behind long ago, sealed away in a casket filled with hard hands and candy bars. Now, it was as if the seal had been broken and the past was seeping out like foul gas, polluting the present and the future.

Angel was right: Parker should have burned the preacher when he had the chance. Instead, he had chosen some alternative, less certain path, placing his faith in the force of law while a small part of him, the part of him that had killed in the past and would, Louis felt certain, kill again in the future, recognized that the law could never punish a man like Faulkner because his actions went so far beyond anything that the law could comprehend, impacting on worlds gone and worlds yet to exist.

Louis believed that he knew why Parker had acted in the way that he had, knew that he had spared the unarmed preacher’s life because he believed the alternative was to reduce himself to the old man’s level. He had chosen his own first faltering steps toward some form of salvation over the wishes, perhaps even the needs, of his friend, and Louis could not find it in him to blame Parker for this. Even Angel did not blame him: he merely wished that it were otherwise.

But Louis did not believe in salvation, or if he did, he lived his life knowing that its light would not shine upon him. If Parker was a man tormented by his past, then Louis was a man resigned to it, accepting the reality, if not the necessity, of all that he had done and the requirement that, inevitably, a reckoning would have to be endured. Occasionally, he would look back over his life and try to determine the point at which the path had fatally forked, the precise moment in time at which he had embraced the incandescent beauty of brutality. He would picture himself, a slim boy in a houseful of women, with their laughter, their sexual banter, their moments of prayerfulness, of worship, of peace. And then the shadow would fall, and Deber would appear, and the silence would descend.

He did not know how his mother had found such a man as Deber, still less how she had endured his presence, however inconstant, for so long. Deber was small and mean, his dark skin pitted about the cheeks, a relic of shotgun pellets discharged close to his face when he was a boy. He carried a metal whistle on a chain around his neck, and used it to call breaks for the Negro work crews that he supervised. He used it also to impose discipline in the house, to draw the family to supper, to call the boy for chores or punishment, or to summon the boy’s mother to his bed. And she would stop what she was doing and, head low, follow the whistle, and the boy would close his ears to the sound of them coming through the walls.

One day, after Deber had been absent for many weeks and a kind of peace had descended upon the house, he came and took the boy’s mother away, and they never saw her alive again. The last time her son saw his mother’s face, they were closing the casket over her and the mortician’s cosmetics were heavy on the marks beside her eyes and behind her ears. A stranger had killed her, they said, and Deber’s friends had provided him with an alibi that could not be shaken. Deber stood by the casket and accepted the condolences of those too afraid not to show their faces.

But the boy knew, and the women knew. Yet Deber returned to them, a month later, and he led the boy’s aunt into a bedroom that night, and the boy lay awake and listened to the moaning and swearing, the woman whimpering and, once, emitting a yell of pain that was muffled by a pillow to her mouth. And when the moon was still full, dim-shining on the waters beyond the house, he heard a door open and he stole to the window and watched as his aunt descended to the waters then, hunched over, cleansed herself of the man who now lay sleeping in the bedroom beyond, before she sank down in the still lake and began to cry.

The next morning, when Deber was gone and the women were about their chores, he saw the tangled sheets and the blood upon them, and he made his choice. He was fifteen by then and he knew that the law was not written to protect poor black women. There was an intelligence to him beyond his years and his experience, but something else too, something that he thought Deber had begun to sense because a duller, less sophisticated version of it dwelt within himself. It was a potential for violence, the aptitude for lethality that, many years later, would cause an old man at a gas station to lie for fear of his life. The boy, despite his delicate good looks, represented a burgeoning threat to Deber, and he would have to be dealt with. Sometimes, when Deber returned from his labors and sat on the porch step, carving a stick with his knife, the boy would become conscious of his gaze upon him and, with the foolishness of youth, would hold his stare until Deber smiled and looked away, the knife still in his hand but the knuckles now white as he clenched it in his fist.

One day, the boy watched while Deber stood at the edge of the trees and beckoned to him. He had a curved filleting knife in his hand, and his fingers were red with blood. He had caught him some fish, he said, needed the boy to come help him gut them. But the boy did not go to him and he saw Deber’s face harden as he backed away from him. From around his neck, the man drew his whistle to his mouth and blew. It was the summons. They had all heard it, all responded to it in their time, but on this occasion the boy recognized the finality in it and he did not respond. Instead, he ran.

That night the boy did not return to the house but slept among the trees and allowed the mosquitoes to feed upon him, even as Deber stood upon the porch and blew the whistle emptily, again and again and again, disturbing the stillness of the night with its promise of retribution.

The boy did not go to school the next day, for he was convinced that Deber would come looking for him and take him away as he had taken away his mother, and this time there would be no body to bury, no hymns by the graveside, merely a covering of grass and swamp dirt, and the calling of birds and the scrabbling of animals come to feed. Instead, he remained hidden in the woods, and waited.

Deber had been drinking. The boy smelled it as soon as he entered the house. The bedroom door was open and he could hear the sound of Deber’s snoring. He could kill him now, he thought, cut his throat as he lay sleeping. But they would find him and they would punish him, perhaps punish the women as well. No, the boy thought, better to continue with what he had set out to do.

White eyes grew in the darkness and his aunt, her small breasts bare, stared at him silently. He placed his finger to his lips, then indicated the whistle that lay close by her on the bedside locker. Slowly, so as not to disturb the sleeping man, she reached across his body and gathered up the chain. It made a soft scraping sound on the wood but Deber, deep in his alcoholic sleep, did not move. The boy reached out, and the woman dropped the whistle into his hand. Then he left.

That night, he broke into the school. It was a good school, by the standards of this place, unusually well equipped and supported with funds from a local man made good in the city, with a gym and a football field and a small science lab. The boy made his way quietly to the lab and set about assembling the ingredients that he needed: solid iodine crystals, concentrated ammonium hydroxide, alcohol, ether, all staples of even the most basic of school laboratories. He had learned their uses through trial and sometimes painful error, facilitated by petty theft and backed up with voracious reading. He slowly combined the iodine crystals and the ammonium hydroxide to create a brownish red precipitate, then filtered it through paper and washed it, first with alcohol and then with ether. Finally, he wrapped the substance carefully and laid it into a beaker of water. This was nitrogen triiodide, a simple compound he had encountered in one of the old chemistry books in the public library.

He used a steamer to separate the metal whistle into its natural halves, then, with wet hands, packed the nitrogen triiodide into the sides of the whistle until each was about a quarter full. He replaced the ball of the whistle with a wad of crumpled sandpaper, then carefully glued the two halves of the whistle back together again before returning to the house. His aunt was still awake. She reached out her hand for the whistle, but he shook his head and placed it carefully on the table, smelling Deber’s breath upon him as he did so. As the boy walked away, he smiled to himself. There was, he thought, an aptness to what was about to occur.

The next morning Deber rose early, as he usually did, and left the house carrying the brown paper sack of food that the women always left for him. That day he drove eighty miles to start a new job and the nitrogen triiodide was as dry as dust when he put the whistle to his mouth for the last time and blew, the little ball of sandpaper providing the friction required to set off the primitive explosive charge.

They questioned the boy, of course, but he had cleaned the lab and washed his hands in bleach and water to remove all traces of the substances he had handled. And the boy had an alibi: God-fearing women who would swear that the boy had been with them the previous day, that he had never left the house during the night for they would surely have heard him, that Deber had in fact lost the whistle some days before and was desperate for its recovery, regarding it as a totem, a lucky charm. The police held him for a day, beat him halfheartedly to see if he would crack, then let him go, for there were disaffected workers, jealous husbands, and humiliated enemies to pursue in his place.

After all, that was a miniature bomb that had torn Deber’s face apart, designed so that Deber, and Deber alone, would suffer when it exploded. That wasn’t the work of a boy.

Deber died two days later.

It was, folks said, a mercy.

In his room, Louis watched impassively as the late news on cable reported on the discovery of the bodies and a bewildered Virgil Gossard enjoyed his fifteen minutes of fame, his head bandaged and his dried urine still upon his fingers. A police spokeswoman announced that they were following definite leads and a description of the old Ford was given out. Louis’s brow furrowed slightly. They had set fire to the car in a field west of Allendale, then headed on north in the clean Lumina before splitting up at the edge of the city. If found and connected to the killings, the Ford would yield up no evidence, constructed as it was from the cannibalized innards of half a dozen other vehicles and kept ready for fast use and easy disposal. What bothered him was that somebody had seen them leave, in which case a description might follow. Those fears were eased somewhat, but not eradicated entirely, when the spokeswoman announced that they were seeking a black male and at least one other unidentified person in connection with what had occurred.

Virgil Gossard, thought Louis. They should have killed him when they had the chance, but if he was the only witness and all he knew was that one of the men was black then they had little to worry about, although the possibility that the police knew more than they were saying troubled him vaguely. It would be better if he and Angel separated for a time, and the decision brought his thoughts back to the man in the room above him. He lay thinking about him until the streets beyond grew quiet, then left the motel and began to walk.

The phone booth stood five blocks north, in the parking lot behind a Chinese laundry. He dropped in two dollars in quarters, dialed, and heard the phone ring three times at the other end before it was picked up.

“It’s me. I got something for you to do. There’s a gas station down by the Ogeechee, on 16 out of Sparta. You can’t miss it, place look like the Teletubbies decorated it. The old guy inside need to remember to forget the two men that passed through his place yesterday. Man will know what you’re talkin’ about.”

He paused and listened to the voice at the other end of the line.

“No, it come to that I will do it myself. For now, just make sure he understand the consequences if he decide to be a good citizen. Tell him the worms don’t make no distinction between good and bad meat. Then find a man called Virgil Gossard, a regular local celebrity by now. Buy him a drink, see what he knows about what went down. Find out what he saw. When you’re done and back you call me, then check your messages for the next week. I got something else I may need you for.”

With that, Louis hung up the phone, removed the cloth from his hand, and used it to wipe down the phone keys. Then, head low, he walked back to the motel and lay awake until the passing cars grew sparse and a stillness descended on the world.

And so these two remained in their separate rooms, apart but somehow together, barely thinking about the men who had died at their hands that night. Instead, one reached out to the other and wished him peace, and that peace was granted, temporarily, by sleep.

But true peace would require a sacrifice.

Already, Louis had some idea of how that sacrifice might be achieved.

Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn was enjoying his first night of freedom.

He had been released from Thomaston that morning, his possessions contained in a black plastic garbage bag. His clothes still fitted him no better or no worse than they ever had, for incarceration had made little impact on Cyrus’s crooked body. He stood outside the walls and looked back at the prison. The voices were silent so he knew that Leonard was there with him, and he felt no fear at the sight of the things that crowded along the walls, their huge wings drawn back against their bodies, their dark eyes watchful. Instead, he reached behind his back and imagined that he felt, at either side of his curved spine, the first swellings of those great wings upon his own body.

Cyrus made his way to Thomaston’s main street and ordered a Coke and a doughnut in the diner, pointing silently at the items that he wanted. A couple at a nearby table stared at him, then looked away when he caught their eye, his demeanor giving him away as much as the black bag at his feet. He ate and drank quickly, for even a simple Coke tasted better outside those walls, then gestured for a refill and waited for the diner to empty. Presently, he found himself alone, with only the women behind the counter to cast the odd anxious glance in his direction.

Shortly after midday, a man entered and took the table next to Cyrus. He ordered a coffee, read his newspaper, then departed, leaving the newspaper behind. Cyrus reached out for it and pretended to read the front page, then dropped it back on his own table. The envelope concealed within the newspaper’s folds slid into his hand with only the gentlest of jingles, and from there, into the pocket of his jacket. Cyrus left four dollars for his food on the table, then walked quickly from the diner.

The car was an anonymous, two-year-old Nissan. Inside the glove compartment was a map, a piece of paper with two addresses and a telephone number written upon it, and a second envelope, containing one thousand dollars in used bills and a set of keys for a trailer located in a park near Westbrook. Cyrus memorized the addresses and the number, then disposed of the paper by masticating it into a wet ball and dropping it down a drain, as he had been instructed to do.

Finally, he leaned down and felt beneath the passenger seat with his hand. He ignored the gun taped into place and instead allowed his fingers to brush the blade once, twice, before he raised them to his nostrils and sniffed.

Clean, he thought. Nice and clean.

Then he turned the car and headed south, just as the voice came to him.

Happy, Cyrus?

Happy, Leonard.

Very happy.

14

I LOOKED AT myself in the mirror.

My eyes were bloodshot and there was a red rash across my neck. I felt like I’d been drinking the night before: my movements were out of sync and I kept bumping into the furniture in the room. My temperature was still above normal and my skin was clammy to the touch. I wanted to crawl back into bed and pull the covers up over my head, but I didn’t have that luxury. Instead, I made coffee in my room and watched the news. When the Caina story came on, I put my head in my hands and let my coffee go cold. A long time went by before I felt certain enough of myself to start working the phone.

According to a man named Randy Burris at the South Carolina Department of Corrections, the Richland County Detention Center was one of a number of institutions participating in a scheme involving former prisoners who preached the gospel to those still incarcerated. The program, called FAR (Forgiveness And Renewal) and run out of Charleston, was an outreach ministry similar to the THUG (True Healing Under God) program that was trying to help inmates in the north of the state by using ex-offenders to convince others not to reoffend. In South Carolina, about 30 percent of the ten thousand inmates released each year ended up back behind bars within three years, so it was in the interest of the state to support the ministry in whatever way it could. The man named Tereus-his only given name-was a recent recruit to FAR, and according to one of the administrators, a woman named Irene Jakaitis, the only one of its members to opt for a ministry as far north as Richland. The warden at Richland told me that Tereus had spent most of his time at the prison counseling Atys Jones. Tereus now had an address in a rooming house off King Street close by the Wha Cha Like gospel store. Prior to that, he had lived in one of the city’s charity hostels while he searched for a job. The rooming house was about a five-minute ride from my hotel.

The tourist buses were making their way along King as I drove and the spiel of the guides carried above the noise of passing cars. King has always been Charleston ’s center of commerce, and down by Charleston Place there are some pretty nice stores aimed mostly at the out-of-towners. But as you head north, the stores become more practical, the restaurants a little more homely. There are more black faces, and more weeds on the sidewalks. I passed Wha Cha Like and Honest John’s TV Repair and Record Store. Three young white men in gray dress uniforms, cadets from the Citadel, marched silently along the sidewalk, their very existence a reminder of the city’s past, for the Citadel owed its beginnings to the failed slave revolt of Denmark Vesey and the city’s belief that a well-fortified arsenal was necessary to guard against future uprisings. I stopped to let them cross then turned left onto Morris Street and parked across from the Morris Street Baptist Church. An old black man watched me from where he sat on the steps leading up to the side porch of Tereus’s home, eating what looked like peanuts from a brown paper bag. He offered the bag to me as I approached the steps.

“Goober?”

“No thanks.” Goobers were peanuts boiled in their shells. You sucked them for a time, then cracked them open to eat the nuts inside, made soft and hot by their time spent in the water.

“You allergic?”

“No.”

“You watching your weight?”

“No.”

“Then take a damn goober.”

I did as I was told, even though I didn’t care much for peanuts. The nut was so hot I had to pucker and suck in air in order to cool my mouth down.

“Hot,” I said.

“What you expect? I done tole you it was a goober.”

He peered at me like I was kind of slow. He might have been right.

“I’m looking for a man called Tereus.”

“He ain’t home.”

“You know where I might find him?”

“Why you lookin’ for him?”

I showed him my id.

“You a long ways from home,” he said. “Long ways.” He still hadn’t told me where I might find Tereus.

“I don’t mean him any harm, and I don’t want to cause him trouble. He helped a young man, a client of mine. Anything Tereus can tell me might make the difference between living and dying for this kid.”

The old man eyed me up for a time. He had no teeth, and his lips made a wet sucking sound as he worked on the nut in his mouth.

“Well, living and dying, that’s pretty serious,” he said, with just a hint of mockery. He was probably right to yank my chain a little. I sounded like a character from an afternoon soap.

“I sound overdramatic?”

“Some,” he nodded. “Some.”

“Well, it’s still pretty bad. It’s important that I talk to Tereus.”

With that, the shell softened enough for him to bite through to the nuts inside. He spit the remnants carefully into his hand.

“Tereus work down at one of them titty bars off Meeting,” he said, grinning. “Don’t take off his clothes, though.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“He cleans up,” he continued. “Man’s a jizzmopper.”

He cackled and slapped his thigh, then gave me the name of the club: LapLand. I thanked him.

“Can’t help but notice that you still suckin’ on that goober,” he said, as I was about to leave him.

“To be honest, I don’t like peanuts,” I confessed.

“I knowed that,” he said. “I just wanted to see if you had the good manners to accept what was offered you.”

I discreetly spit the peanut into my hand and tossed it in the nearest trash can, then left him laughing to himself.

The city of Charleston ’s sporting fraternity had been out celebrating since the day I had arrived in the city. That weekend, the South Carolina Gamecocks had ended a twenty-one-game losing streak by beating New Mexico State 31-0 in front of almost eighty-one thousand victory-starved supporters who hadn’t had a reason to cheer for more than two years, not since the Gamecocks beat Ball State 38-20. Even quarterback Phil Petty, who for the whole of last season hadn’t looked like he could lead a group of old people in a conga line, headed two touchdown drives and completed 10 of 18 for 87 yards. The sad cluster of strip joints and gentlemen’s clubs on Pittsburg Avenue had probably made a real killing from the celebrants over the last few days. One of the clubs offered a nude car wash (hey, practical and fun!) while another made a hopeful play for class customers by denying access to anyone in jeans or sneakers. It didn’t look like LapLand had any such scruples. Its parking lot was pitted with water-filled holes around which a handful of cars had conspired to arrange themselves without losing a wheel in the mire. The club itself was a single-story concrete slab painted in varying shades of blue-porn blue, sad stripper blue, cold skin blue-with a black steel door at its center. From inside came the muffled sound of Bachman Turner Overdrive’s “You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet.” BTO in a strip joint had to be a sign that the place was in trouble.

Inside it was dark as a Republican donor’s motives, apart from a strip of pink light along the bar and the flashing bulbs that illuminated the small central stage, where a girl with chicken legs and orange-peel thighs waved her small breasts at a handful of rapt drunks. One of them slipped a dollar bill into her stocking then took the opportunity to press his hand between her legs. The girl moved away from him but nobody tried to drag him outside and kick him in the head for touching the dancer. LapLand clearly encouraged a more than average amount of customer-artiste interaction.

Over by the bar, two women dressed in lace bras and G-strings sat drinking sodas through straws. As I tried to avoid tripping over a table in the gloom, the elder of the two, a black woman with heavy breasts and long legs, moved toward me.

“I’m Lorelei. Get you somethin,’ sugar?”

“Soda is fine. And something for yourself.”

I handed her a ten and she wiggled her hips at me as she walked away. “I be right back,” she assured me.

True to her word, she materialized a minute later with a warm soda, her own drink and no change.

“Expensive here,” I said. “Who’d have thought it?”

Lorelei reached across and laid her hand on the inside of my thigh, then moved her fingers across it, allowing the back of her hand to glance against my crotch.

“You get what you pay for,” she said. “And then some.”

“I’m looking for somebody,” I said.

“Sugar, you found her,” she breathed, in what passed for an approximation of sexy if you were paying for it by the hour, and paying cheap. It seemed like LapLand was flirting perilously with prostitution. She leaned in closer, allowing me to peer at her breasts if I chose. Like a good Boy Scout, I looked away and counted the bottles of cheap, watery liquor above the bar.

“You ain’t watchin’ the show,” she said.

“High blood pressure. My doctor warned me not to get overexcited.”

She smiled and dragged a fingernail across my hand. It left a white mark. I glanced up at the stage and found myself looking at the girl from an angle even her gynecologist probably hadn’t explored. I left her to it.

“You like her?” Lorelei asked, indicating the dancer.

“She seems like a fun girl.”

“I can be a fun girl. You lookin’ for fun, sugar?” The back of her hand pressed harder against me. I coughed and discreetly moved her hand back onto her own chair.

“No, I’m good.”

“Well, I’m baaaad…”

This was getting kind of monotonous. Lorelei seemed to be some kind of double entendre machine.

“I’m not really a fun kind of guy,” I told her. “If you catch my drift.”

It was as if a pair of transparent shutters had descended over her eyes. There was intelligence in those eyes too: not merely the low cunning of a woman turning tricks in a dying strip joint but something clever and alive. I wondered how she kept the two sides of her character apart without one seeping into the other and poisoning it forever.

“I catch it. What are you? You’re not a cop. Process server, maybe, or a debt collector. You got that look about you. I should know, I’ve seen it enough.”

“What look would that be?”

“The look that says you’re bad news for poor folks.” She paused and reappraised me for a second. “No, on second thoughts, I reckon you’re bad news for just about everybody.”

“Like I said, I’m looking for somebody.”

“Go fuck yourself.”

“I’m a private detective.”

“Oooh, look at the bad man. Can’t help you, sugar.”

She began to move away, but I gripped her wrist gently and placed two more tens on the table. She stopped and waved to the bartender, who had begun to sense trouble and was moving to alert the gorilla at the door. He went back to polishing glasses but kept a discreet eye on our table.

“Wow, two dimes,” said Lorelei. “I be able to buy me a whole new outfit.”

“Two, if you stick with the kind you’re wearing.”

I said it without sarcasm and a small smile broke through the ice pack on her face. I showed her my license. She picked it up and examined it closely before tossing it back on the table.

“Maine. Looks like you the real deal. Congratulations.” She made a move for the bills but my hand was quicker.

“Uh-uh. Talk first, then the money.”

She glanced back at the bar then slid reluctantly into the chair. Her eyes bored a hole through the back of my hand to the notes beneath.

“I’m not here to cause trouble. I just want to ask some questions. I’m looking for a man named Tereus. You know if he’s here?”

“What you lookin’ him for?”

“He helped a client of mine. I wanted to thank him.”

She laughed humorlessly. “Yeah, right. You got a reward, you give it to me. I’ll pass it on. Don’t fuck with me, mister. I may be sittin’ here with my titties hangin’ out, but don’t mistake me for no fool.”

I leaned back. “I don’t think you’re a fool, and Tereus did help a client of mine. He spoke to him in jail. I just want to know why.”

“He found the Lord, that’s why. He even tried to convert some of the johns who come in here, till Handy Andy threatened to beat him upside the head.”

“Handy Andy?”

“He runs this place.” She made a gesture with her hand as of a man slapping someone across the back of the head. “You get me?”

“I get you.”

“You gonna cause that man more trouble? He done had his share. He don’t need no more.”

“No trouble. I just want to talk.”

“Then give me the twenty. Go outside and wait around back. He’ll be out soon enough.”

For a moment I held her eyes and tried to find out if she was lying. I couldn’t be sure but I still released the bills. She grabbed them, slipped them into her bra and walked away. I saw her exchange a few words with the bartender then pass through a door marked DANCERS AND GUESTS ONLY. I knew what was behind it: a dingy dressing room, a bathroom with a busted lock, and a couple of rooms equipped with nothing more than chairs, some rubbers, and a box of tissues. Maybe she wasn’t so intelligent after all.

The dancer on stage finished her set, then picked up her discarded underwear and headed for the bar. The barman announced the next dancer and her place was taken by a small, dark-haired girl with sallow skin. She looked about sixteen. One of the drunks whooped with delight as Britney begged to be hit one more time.

Outside, it was beginning to rain, droplets distorting the shapes of the cars and the colors of the sky reflected in the puddles on the ground. I followed the wall around to where a Dumpster stood half-full of trash next to some empty beer kegs and stacks of crated bottles. I heard footsteps behind me and turned to find a man who most certainly wasn’t Tereus. This guy was six-four and built like a quarterback, with a domed, shaved head and small eyes. He was probably in his late twenties. A single gold ring glittered in his left ear, and he had a wedding band on one of his huge fingers. The rest of him was lost beneath a baggy blue sweatshirt and a pair of gray sweatpants.

“Whoever you are, you got ten seconds to get the fuck off my property,” he said.

I sighed. It was raining and I didn’t have an umbrella. I didn’t even have a coat. I was standing in the parking lot of a third-rate strip joint being threatened by a woman beater. Under the circumstances, there was only one thing to do.

“Andy,” I said. “You don’t remember me?”

His brow furrowed. I took one step forward, my hands open, and drove the toe of my right foot as hard as I could between his legs. He didn’t let out a sound, apart from the rush of air and spittle that shot from his lips as he collapsed to the ground. His head touched the gravel and he started to retch.

“You won’t forget me again.”

There was the bulge of a gun at his back and I removed it from his waistband. It was a stainless steel Beretta. It looked like it had never been used. I tossed it in the Dumpster then helped Handy Andy to his feet and left him leaning against the wall, his bald head speckled with raindrops and the knees and shins of his sweatpants soaked with filthy water. When he had recovered a little, he placed his hands on his knees and glared at me.

“You want to try that one more time?” he whispered.

“Nope,” I answered. “It only works once.”

“What do you do for an encore?”

I removed the big Smith 10 from its holster and let him take a good look at it.

“Encore. Curtain down. Theater closed.”

“Big man with a gun.”

“I know. Look at me.”

He tried to stand upright, thought better of it, and kept his head down instead.

“Look,” I said, “this doesn’t have to be difficult. I talk, I go away. End of story.”

He thought about what I’d said.

“Tereus?” He seemed to be having trouble speaking. I wondered if I’d kicked him too hard.

“Tereus,” I agreed.

“That’s all?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then you go away and you never come back?”

“Probably.”

He staggered away from the wall and made for the back door. He opened it, the volume of the music immediately increasing, then seemed about to disappear inside. I stopped him by whistling at him and jogging the Smith.

“Just call him,” I said, “then take a walk.” I gestured to where Pittsburg disappeared into warehouses and green grass. “Over there.”

“It’s raining.”

“It’ll stop.”

Handy Andy shook his head, then called into the darkness.

“Tereus, get your ass out here.”

He held the door as a lean man appeared on the step beside him. He had a black man’s hair and dark olive skin. It was almost impossible to tell his race, but his striking features marked him out as a member of one of those strange ethnic groups that seemed to proliferate in the South: Brass Ankle, maybe, or an Appalachian Melungeon, a group of “free people of color” with a mixture of black, Native American, British, and even Portuguese blood, a dash of Turkish reputedly thrown in to confuse the issue even more. A white T-shirt hugged the long thin muscles on his arms and the curve of his pectorals. He was at least fifty years old and taller than I was, but there was no stoop to him, no sign of weakness or disintegration apart from the tinted glasses that he wore. The cuffs of his jeans had been turned up almost to the middle of his shins and he wore plastic sandals on his feet. In his hand was a mop, and I could smell it from where I stood. Even Handy Andy took a step back.

“Damn head again?”

Tereus nodded, looked from Andy to me then back to Andy again.

“Man wants to talk to you. Don’t take too long.” I stepped aside as Andy slowly walked toward me then proceeded onto the road. He took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one as he walked gingerly away, holding the glowing end toward his palm to shelter it from the rain.

Tereus descended onto the pitted tarmac of the yard. He seemed composed, almost distant.

“My name’s Charlie Parker,” I said. “I’m a private detective.”

I reached out my hand but he didn’t take it. In explanation he pointed to the mop. “You don’t want to shake hands with me, suh, not now.”

I gestured to his feet. “Where’d you do your time?”

There were marks around his ankles, circular abrasions as if the skin had been rubbed away to such a degree that it could never be restored to its former smoothness. I knew what those marks were. Only leg irons could leave them.

“Limestone,” he said. His voice was soft.

“Alabama. Bad place to do time.”

Ron Jones, Alabama’s Commissioner of Corrections, had reintroduced chain gangs in 1996: ten hours breaking limestone in 100-degree heat, five days each week, the nights spent with four hundred other inmates in Dorm 16, an overcrowded cattle shed originally built for two hundred. The first thing an inmate on the chain gang did was to remove his laces from his boots and tie them around the irons to prevent the metal from rubbing against his ankles. But somebody had taken Tereus’s laces and kept them from him for a long time, long enough to leave permanent scarring on his flesh.

“Why’d they take away your laces?”

He gazed down at his feet. “I refused to work the gang,” he said. “I’ll be a prisoner, do prisoner’s work, but I won’t be no slave. They tied me to a hitching post in the sun from five A.M. to sunset. They had to drag me back to sixteen. I lasted five days. After that, I couldn’t take no more. To remind me of what I’d done, gunbull took away my laces. That was in ninety-six. I got paroled a few weeks back. I spent a lot of time without laces.”

He spoke matter-of-factly, but he fingered the cross around his neck as he spoke. It was a replica of the one that he had given to Atys Jones. I wondered if his cross contained a blade as well.

“I’ve been employed by a lawyer. His name is Elliot Norton. He’s representing a young man you met in Richland: Atys Jones.”

At the mention of Atys, Tereus’s attitude changed. It reminded me of the woman in the club when it became clear that I wasn’t going to pay for her services. Seemed like I had ended up paying anyway.

“You know Elliot Norton?” I asked.

“Know of him. You’re not from around here?”

“No, I’ve come from Maine.”

“That’s a long way to travel. How come you ended up working way down here?”

“Elliot Norton is a friend of mine, and nobody else seemed keen to get involved in this case.”

“You know where the boy at?”

“He’s safe.”

“No, he’s not.”

“You gave him a cross, just like the one you wear around your neck.”

“You must have faith in the Lord. The Lord will protect you.”

“I’ve seen the cross. Seems like you decided to help the Lord along.”

“Jail is a dangerous place for a young man.”

“That’s why we got him out.”

“You should have left him there.”

“We couldn’t protect him there.”

“You can’t protect him anywhere.”

“So what do you suggest?”

“Give him to me.”

I kicked at a pebble on the ground and watched as it bounced into a puddle. I could see my reflection, already distorted by the rain, ripple even more, and for a moment I disappeared in the dark waters, fragments of myself carried away to its farthest edges.

“I think you know that’s not going to happen, but I’d like to know why you went to Richland. Did you go there specifically to contact Atys Jones?”

“I knew his momma, and his sister. Lived close by them, down by the Congaree.”

“They disappeared.”

“That’s right.”

“You know what might have happened to them?”

He didn’t reply. Instead, he released his grip on the cross and walked toward me. I didn’t step back. There was no threat to me from this man.

“You ask questions for a living, don’t you, suh?”

“I guess so.”

“What questions you been asking Mr. Elliot?”

I waited. There was something going on here that I didn’t understand, some gap in my knowledge that Tereus was trying to fill.

“What questions should I ask?”

“You should ask him what happened to that boy’s momma and aunt.”

“They disappeared. He showed me the cuttings.”

“Maybe.”

“You think they’re dead?”

“You got this the wrong way round, suh. Maybe they dead, but they ain’t disappeared.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Maybe they dead,” he repeated, “but they ain’t gone from Congaree.”

I shook my head. This was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that somebody had spoken to me of ghosts in the Congaree. But ghosts didn’t take rocks and use them to beat in the heads of young women. Around us, the rain had stopped and the air seemed cooler. To my left, I saw Handy Andy approaching from the road. He took one look at me, shrugged resignedly, then lit another cigarette and started back the way he had come.

“You know about the White Road, suh?”

Distracted momentarily by Andy, I now found Tereus almost face-to-face with me. I could smell cinnamon on his breath. Instinctively, I took a step back from him.

“No. What is it?”

He looked once again at his feet, and the marks on his ankles.

“On the fifth day,” he said, “after they tied me to the hitching post, I saw the White Road. The blacktop shimmered and then it was like somebody had turned the world inside out. Dark became light, black became white. And I saw the road before me, and the men working, breaking rocks, and the gunbulls spitting chewing tobacco on the dirt.”

He was talking now like an Old Testament preacher, his mind filled with the vision he had seen, near crazy beneath the burning sun, his body sagging against the wood, the ropes tearing into his skin.

“And I saw the others too. I saw figures moving between them, women and children, old and young, and men with nooses around their necks and gunshots to the body. I saw soldiers, and the night riders, and women in fine, fine dresses. I saw them all, suh, the living and the dead, side by side together on the White Road. We think they gone, but they waiting. They beside us all the time, and they don’t rest till justice come. That’s the White Road, suh. It’s the place where justice is made, where the living and the dead walk together.”

With that, he removed the tinted glasses that he wore, and I saw that his eyes had been altered, perhaps by their exposure to the sun, the bright blue of the pupils dulled, the irises overlaid with white, as if a spiderweb had been cast upon them.

“You don’t know it yet,” he whispered, “but you on the White Road now, and you best not step off it, because the things waiting in the woods, they worse than anything you can imagine.”

This wasn’t getting me anywhere-I wanted to know more about the Jones sisters, and about Tereus’s reasons for approaching Atys-but at least Tereus was talking.

“And did you see them too, the things in the woods?”

He seemed to consider me for a time. I thought he might be trying to figure out whether or not I was mocking him, but I was wrong.

“I saw them,” he said. “They was like black angels.”

He wouldn’t tell me anything more, at least nothing useful. He had known the Jones family, had watched the children grow up, watched as Addy was made pregnant at the age of sixteen by a drifter who was also screwing her mother, giving birth nine months later to a son, Atys. The drifter’s name was Davis Smoot. His friends called him “Boot” on account of the leather cowboy boots he liked to wear. But I knew this already, because Randy Burris had told me all about it, just as he had told me how Tereus had served nearly twenty years in Limestone for killing Davis Smoot in a bar in Gadsden.

Handy Andy was coming back, and this time he didn’t look like he was planning on taking another long walk. Tereus picked up his bucket and mop in preparation for a return to his labors.

“Why did you kill Davis Smoot, Tereus?”

I wondered if he was going to make some expression of regret, or tell me how he was no longer the man who had taken the life of another, but he made no attempt to explain away his crime as a mistake from his past.

“I asked him for his help. He turned me down. We got to arguing and he pulled a knife on me. Then I killed him.”

“What help did you ask from him?”

Tereus raised his hand, and shook it from side to side in the negative. “That’s between him and me and the good Lord. You ask Mr. Elliot, and maybe he’ll be able to tell you how come I was looking for old Boot.”

“Did you tell Atys that you were his father’s killer?”

He shook his head. “Now why would I do somethin’ dumb as that?”

With that, he replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose, hiding those damaged eyes, and left me standing in the rain.

15

I CALLED ELLIOT from my hotel room later that afternoon. He sounded tired. He wasn’t going to get too much sympathy from me.

“Bad day at the office?”

“I got the justice blues. You?”

“Just a bad day.” I didn’t mention Tereus to Elliot, mainly because I hadn’t learned anything useful from him as yet, but I had checked two more of the witness statements after I left LapLand. One was a second cousin of Atys Jones, a God-fearing man who didn’t approve of the lifestyles of Atys or of his missing mother and aunt, but who liked to hang around dive bars to give himself something to get offended by. A neighbor told me he was most likely back at the Swamp Rat, and that was where I found him. He recalled Atys and Marianne Larousse leaving and was still at the bar, praying for all sinners over a double, when Atys reappeared with blood and dust on his face and hands.

The Swamp Rat stood at the end of Cedar Creek Road, close to the edge of the Congaree. It wasn’t much to look at, inside or out, an eyesore of cinder blocks and corrugated iron, but it had a good jukebox and was the kind of place that rich kids went when they wanted to flirt a little with danger. I walked through the trees surrounding it and found the small clearing where Marianne Larousse had died. There was still crime-scene tape dangling from the trees, but there was no other sign that she had lost her life here. I could hear Cedar Creek flowing close by. I followed it west for a time, then headed back north, hoping to intersect with the trail that led back to the bar. Instead, I found myself at a rusted fence, dotted at intervals with PRIVATE PROPERTY signs announcing that the land was owned by Larousse Mining Inc. Through the mesh I could see fallen trees, sunken ground, and patches of what looked like limestone. This section of the coastal plain was littered with limestone deposits; in places, the acidic groundwater had percolated through the limestone, reacting with it and dissolving it. The result was the kind of karst landscape visible through the mesh, riddled with sinkholes, small caves, and underground rivers.

I followed the fence for a time, but found no gap. It began to rain again, and I was soaked through once more by the time I got back to the bar. The barman didn’t know much about the Larousse land, except that he thought it might once have been the site of a proposed limestone quarry that had never been developed. The government had made offers on it to the Larousses in an effort to extend the state park, but they’d never been taken up.

The other witness was a woman named Euna Schillega who had been shooting pool in the Swamp Rat when Atys and Marianne had entered the bar. She recalled the racist abuse directed at Atys and confirmed the times that they had arrived and left. She knew because, well, because the man she was shooting pool with was the man she was seeing behind her husband’s back, you know what I mean, hon, and she was keeping a close eye on the time so that she’d be home before he finished his evening shift. Euna had long red hair, tinted to the color of strawberry jelly, and a small tongue of fat jutted over the lip of her faded jeans. She was saying good-bye to her forties, but in her mind she was only half as old and twice as pretty.

Euna worked part-time as a waitress in a bar near Horrel Hill. A couple of servicemen from Fort Jackson were sitting in a corner sipping beers and sweating gently in the afternoon heat. They were sitting as close as they could to the a/c but it was nearly as old as Euna. The army boys would have been better off blowing air at each other over the edges of their cold bottles.

Euna was about the most cooperative of the witnesses to whom I’d spoken so far. Maybe she was bored and I was providing a distraction. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t imagine that I was going to, but I guessed that the pool player was probably a distraction too, the latest in a long line of distractions. There was something restless about Euna, a kind of roving hunger fueled by frustration and disappointment. It was there in the way she held herself as she spoke, the way her eyes wandered lazily across my face and body as if she were figuring out which parts to use and which to discard.

“Did you see Marianne Larousse in the bar before that night?” I asked her.

“Couple of times. Seen her in here too. She was a rich girl, but she liked to slum it some.”

“Who was she with?”

“Other rich girls. Rich boys, sometimes.”

She gave a little shudder. It might have been distaste, or perhaps something more pleasurable.

“You got to watch their hands. Those boys, they think their money buys them beer but their tip buys them mining rights, you get my meaning.”

“I take it that it doesn’t.”

Remembered hunger flashed in her eyes, then was softened by the memory of her appetite’s satiation. She took a long drag on her cigarette.

“Not every time.”

“You ever see her with Atys Jones before that night?”

“Once, but not in here. It ain’t that kind of place. It was back at the Swamp Rat. Like I said, I go there some.”

“How did they look to you?”

“They weren’t touching or nothing, but I could tell they was together. I guess other folks could too.”

She let her last words hang.

“There was trouble?”

“Not then. Next night she was back in here and her brother came looking for her.” Again there was a shudder, but this time her feelings were clear.

“You don’t like him?”

“I don’t know him.”

“But?”

She looked around casually, then leaned in slightly closer across the bar. The action forced her shirt open a little, exposing the sweep of her breasts and their dusting of freckles.

“The Larousses keep a lot of folks in jobs around here, but that don’t mean we got to like them, Earl Jr. least of all. There’s something about him, like…like he’s a faggot but not a faggot? Don’t get me wrong, I like all men, even the ones that don’t like me, you know, physically and all, but not Earl Jr. There’s just something about him.”

She took another drag on her cigarette. It was almost gone after three puffs.

“So Earl Jr. came into the bar looking for Marianne?”

“That’s right. Took her by the arm and tried to drag her out. She slapped him, then this other fella came forward and together they managed to get her out.”

“Do you remember when this happened?”

“About a week before she was killed.”

“You think they knew about her relationship with Atys Jones?”

“Like I said, other folks knew about it. If they knew, it would get back to her family in the end.”

The door behind me opened, and a group of men entered, shouting and laughing. It was the start of the evening rush.

“I got to go, hon,” said Euna. She had already declined to sign a written statement.

“Just one more question: Did you recognize the man with Earl Jr. that night?”

She thought for a moment. “Sure. He’s been in here once or twice before. He’s a piece of shit. His name is Landron Mobley.”

I thanked her, and left a twenty on the bar to cover my OJ and her time. She gave me her best smile.

“Don’t take this wrong, hon,” said Euna as I stood to leave, “but that boy you’re trying to help deserves what he got coming.”

“ Lot of people seem to think that way.”

She blew a steady stream of smoke from her cigarette into the air, pushing out her lower lip as she did so. It was swollen slightly, like it had been bitten recently. The smoke dissipated. I watched it go.

“He raped and killed that girl,” continued Euna. “I know you got to do what you’re doing, asking questions and all, but I hope you don’t find out nothing to get that boy off.”

“Even if I find out that he’s innocent?”

She lifted her breasts from the bar and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray.

“Hon, there ain’t nobody innocent in this world except little babies, and sometimes I ain’t even sure about them.”

I told all of this to Elliot over the phone.

“Maybe you should talk to your client Mobley when you find him, see what he knows.”

“If I can find him.”

“You think he’s skipped?”

There was a pause.

“I hope he’s skipped,” said Elliot, but when I asked him to explain what he meant he laughed it off. “I mean, I think Landron’s facing serious jail time if it goes to trial. In legal terms, Landron’s fucked.”

But that wasn’t what he meant.

That wasn’t what he meant at all.

I showered, then ate in my room. I called Rachel and we spoke for a while. MacArthur had been true to his word in calling by regularly, and Klan Killer was staying out of sight when the cops came by. If Rachel hadn’t quite forgiven me for springing him on her, she seemed to be finding something vaguely reassuring in his presence. He was also clean and didn’t leave the toilet seat up, factors that tended to weigh heavily in Rachel’s formation of opinions about people. MacArthur was due to go out with Mary Mason that evening, and MacArthur had promised to keep Rachel posted. I told her that I loved her, and she told me that if I loved her I’d bring her back chocolates. Sometimes, Rachel was a simple girl.

After we had talked, I called to check on Atys. The woman answered and told me, best that I could understand, that he was a “spile chile. Uh yent hab no mo’ pashun wid’um.” Clearly, she was less sympathetic to Atys’s plight than her husband. I asked her to put Atys on the line. Seconds later, I heard footsteps and he answered.

“How you doing?” I asked.

“Okay, I guess.” He lowered his voice. “The old woman is killin’ me. She’s hard.”

“Just be nice to her. You got anything more you want to tell me?”

“No. I done tole you all I can.”

“And all you know?”

He didn’t answer for so long I thought that he had simply put the phone down and walked away. Then he spoke.

“You ever feel like you been shadowed all your life, like there’s always someone there with you, someone you can’t see most of the time, but you know, you just know that they’s there?”

I thought of my wife and my daughter, of their presence in my life even after they had gone, of shapes and shadows glimpsed in darkness.

“I think so,” I said.

“The woman, she’s like that. I been seein’ her all my life, so’s I don’t know if I dream her or not, but she’s there. I know she is, even if there ain’t nobody else sees her. That’s all I know. Don’t ask me no more.”

I changed the subject.

“You ever have a run-in with Earl Larousse Jr.?”

“No, never.”

“Landron Mobley?”

“I heard he was looking for me, but he didn’t find me.”

“You know why he was looking for you?”

“To kick the shit out of me. Why you think Earl Jr.’s dog be lookin’ for me?”

“Mobley worked for Larousse?”

“He didn’t work for him, but when they needed they dirty work done for them they went to Mobley. Mobley had friends too, people worse than him.”

“Like?”

I heard him swallow.

“Like that guy on TV,” he said. “The Klan guy. Bowen.”

That night, far to the north, the preacher Faulkner lay awake in his cell, his hands clasped behind his head, and listened to the night sounds of the prison: the snores, the cries from troubled sleepers, the footsteps of the guards, the sobbing. It no longer kept him awake as it had once done. He had quickly learned how to ignore it, reducing it, at worst, to the level of background noise. He could now sleep at will, but this night his thoughts were elsewhere, as they had been since the release of the man named Cyrus Nairn. And so he lay unmoving on his bunk, and waited.

“Get them off me! Get them off me!”

The prison guard Dwight Anson awoke in his bed, kicking and wrenching at the sheets, the pillow beneath his head soaked with sweat. He leaped from the bed and brushed at his bare skin, trying to remove the creatures that he felt crawling across his chest. Beside him, his wife, Aileen, reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.

“Jeez, Dwight, you’re dreaming again,” she said. “It’s just a dream.”

Anson swallowed hard and tried to slow down the beating of his heart, but he still found himself shuddering and brushing aimlessly at his hair and arms.

It was the same dream, for the second night running: a dream of spiders crawling across his skin, biting him while he lay constrained in a filthy bathtub in the center of a forest. As the spiders bit him his skin began to rot, the flesh falling from his body in small clumps that left gray hollows in their wake. And all the time he was being watched from the shadows by a strange, emaciated man with red hair and thin, white fingers. The man was dead, though: Anson could see his ruined skull illuminated by the moonlight, could pick out the blood on his face. Still, his eyes were alive with pleasure as he watched his pets feeding on the trapped man.

Anson placed his hands on his hips and shook his head.

“Come back to bed, Dwight,” said his wife, but he didn’t move, and after a few seconds had elapsed, the disappointment showed in her eyes and she turned over and pretended to go back to sleep. Anson almost reached over to touch her, then decided against it. He didn’t want to touch her. The girl he wanted to touch was missing.

Marie Blair had disappeared on the way home from her job at the Dairy Queen the night before, and had not been seen or heard from since. For a time, Anson half expected the police to come looking for him. Nobody knew about his thing with Marie, or nobody was supposed to know, but there was always the possibility that she had shot off her mouth to one of her dumb-ass friends and that, when the police came calling, they might have mentioned his name. But so far there had been nothing. Anson’s wife had sensed his unease and knew that there was something bothering him, but she hadn’t brought it up and that suited him fine. Still, he was worried for the girl. He wanted her back, as much for his own selfish reasons as for her own sake.

Anson left his unmoving wife and headed down the stairs to the kitchen. It was only when he opened the door of the refrigerator and reached for the milk that he felt the blast of cool air at his back and heard, almost simultaneously, the banging of the screen door against the frame.

The kitchen door was wide open. He supposed that the wind could have blown it open, but he didn’t think it was likely. Aileen had come to bed after him, and she usually made sure that all the doors were locked. It wasn’t like her to forget. He wondered too why they had not heard it banging before now, for even the slightest noise in the house was normally enough to wake him from his sleep. Carefully, he laid down the carton of milk and listened, but he could hear no sound in the house. From out in the yard came the whispering of the wind in the trees, and the sound of distant cars.

Anson kept a Smith amp; Wesson 60 in his night table. He briefly considered heading back upstairs to retrieve it before deciding against it. Instead, he took the carving knife from its block and padded to the door. He glanced first right, then left, to make sure there was nobody waiting for him outside, then pushed it open. He stood on the porch and looked out on the empty yard. Ahead of him was an expanse of tidy lawn with trees planted at its verge, shielding the house from the road beyond. The moon shone behind him, sending the clean lines of the house racing ahead of him.

Anson stepped out onto the grass.

A figure detached itself from where it had lain beneath the porch steps, the sound of its approach masked by the wind, its shape devoured by the black mass of the house’s shade. Anson was not even aware of its presence until something gripped his arm and he felt a pressure across his throat, followed by a surge of pain as he watched the blood shoot up into the night. The knife fell from his grip and he turned, his left hand pressed uselessly against the wound in his neck. His legs weakened and he fell to his knees, the blood coming less freely now as he began to die.

Anson looked up into the eyes of Cyrus Nairn, and at the ring Nairn was holding in the palm of his hand. It was the garnet ring that Anson had given Marie Blair for her fifteenth birthday. He would have known it anywhere, he thought, even if it hadn’t been circling Marie’s severed forefinger. Then Cyrus Nairn turned away as Anson’s legs began to shake uncontrollably, the moonlight gleaming on the killer’s knife as he made his way to the house, Anson shaking and, at last, dying as Nairn turned his thoughts to the now slumbering Aileen Anson and the place he had prepared for her.

And in his cell at Thomaston, Faulkner closed his eyes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

16

MAGNOLIA CEMETERY LIES at the end of Cunnington Street, east of Meeting. Cunnington Street is a virtual Cemetery Row: here can be found the Old Methodist, the Friendly Union Society, the Brown Fellowship, the Humane and Friendly, the Unity and Friendship. Some are better kept than others but each serves to hold the dead with equal ease; the poor are as well-off as the wealthy, and all make the worms fat.

The dead lie scattered around Charleston, their remains resting beneath the feet of tourists and revelers. The bodies of slaves are now covered by parking lots and convenience stores, and the junction of Meeting and Water marks the site of the old cemetery where the Carolina pirates were buried after their execution. The place in which they were interred was once the low-water mark in the marsh but the city has expanded since then and the hanged men have long since been forgotten, their bones crushed by the foundations of mansions and the streets that run beside them.

But in the cemeteries of Cunnington Street the dead are remembered, in however small a way, and the greatest of these cemeteries is Magnolia. Fish jump in the waters of its lake, watched from the rushes by lazy herons and gray white wood storks, and a sign warns of a two-hundred-dollar fine for feeding the alligators. Flocks of curious geese throng the narrow road to the offices of the Magnolia Cemetery Trust. Evergreens and wax myrtle shade the stones, and laurel oaks dotted with blood-spot lichen hide crying birds.

The man named Hubert has been coming here for two years. Sometimes, he chooses to sleep among the monuments with rye bread for sustenance and a bottle for comfort. He has learned the ways of the cemetery, the movements of the mourners and the staff. He does not know if his presence is tolerated or merely unnoticed, and he does not care. Hubert keeps to himself and he tries to bother others as little as possible in the hope that his quiet existence may continue undisturbed. There have been one or two scares with gators but nothing worse than that, although the gators were bad enough to be getting along with, if you asked Hubert.

Hubert once had a job, and a house, and a wife, until Hubert lost his job and then, in quick succession, lost his house and his wife too. For a time he even lost himself, until he came to in a hospital bed with his legs in plaster casts after a truck sideswiped him out on Route 1 somewhere north of Killian. Since then he has tried to be more careful but he will never return to his former life, despite the efforts of the social workers to establish him in a permanent home. Hubert doesn’t want a permanent home because he is wise enough to understand that there is no such thing as permanency. In the end, Hubert is just waiting, and it doesn’t matter where a man waits as long as he knows what he is waiting for. The thing that is coming for Hubert will find him, wherever he is. It will draw him to itself, and wrap him in its cold, dark blanket, and his name will be added to the roll call of paupers and indigents buried in cheap plots by chain-link fences. That much Hubert knows, and of that alone he is certain.

When the weather grows cold or wet, Hubert walks to the Men’s Shelter of the Charleston Interfaith Crisis Ministry at 573 Meeting, and if there is a bed available, he fishes in the purse he keeps around his neck and hands over three crumpled dollar bills for a night’s lodging. No one is ever turned away empty-handed from the shelter; at the very least they are given a full supper, toiletries if needed, even clothing. The shelter takes messages and passes on mail, although no one has sent mail to Hubert in a very long time.

It has been many weeks since Hubert last took a bed in the shelter. There have been wet nights since then, nights when the rain soaked him through and left him sneezing for days, but he has not returned to the beds at 573 Meeting, not since the night that he saw the olive-skinned man with the damaged eyes, the strange light that danced before him, and the shape that it assumed.

He had noticed him for the first time in the showers. Hubert doesn’t look at the other men in the showers as a rule. That is a way of attracting attention and maybe trouble to himself, and Hubert doesn’t want that. Hubert isn’t very tall or very strong and he has lost possessions in the past to men more violent than he. He has learned to stay out of their way and not to meet their eyes, which is why he always looks down in the shower, and why the other man first came to his notice.

It was his ankles, and the scarring around them. Hubert had never seen anything like it before. It was as if the man’s feet had been severed from his legs and then crudely reattached, leaving the marks of the stitches as a reminder of what had occurred. It was then that Hubert broke his own rule and glanced up at the man beside him, at his stringy muscles, his frizzy hair, and his strange haunted eyes, semibleached of color and obscured by clouds. He was humming something to himself, and Hubert thought that it might have been a hymn or one of those old Negro spirituals. The words were unclear, but Hubert picked up on some of them.

Walk with me, brother,

Come walk with me, sister,

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk

On the White Road to-

The man caught Hubert looking at him and fixed him with a stare.

“You ready to walk, brother?” he asked.

And Hubert found himself answering, his voice sounding strange to him as it echoed hollowly from the tiles: “Walk where?”

“On the White Road. Are you ready to walk on the White Road? She’s waiting for you there, brother. She’s watching you.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Hubert.

“Sure you do, Hubert. Sure you do.”

Hubert turned off the shower and stood back, grabbing his towel from the rail. He didn’t say anything more, even when the man began to laugh and called to him: “Hey, brother, you mind your step, now, y’hear? You don’t go stumbling, you don’t go falling. You don’t want to fall down on the White Road, because they folks waiting for you, waiting for you to fall. And when you fall, they going to take you. They going to take you and they going to tear you apart!”

And as Hubert hurried from the showers, the song began again:

Walk with me, brother.

Come walk with me, sister.

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk

On the White Road together.

That night, Hubert was assigned a cot by the rest rooms. Hubert didn’t mind. His bladder played up sometimes, and he often had to get up two or three times a night to take a leak. But it wasn’t his bladder that caused him to awake that night.

It was the sound of a female voice, crying.

Hubert knew that couldn’t be right. The Family Shelter was down at 49 Walnut, and that was where the women and children slept. There was no cause for a woman to be in the men’s shelter, but there were men among the homeless whose ways nobody could know and Hubert didn’t want to think of a woman or, worse, a child being hurt by anybody.

He rose from his bed and followed the noise. It came from the showers, he thought. He recognized the way the voice echoed, recalling the sound of his own voice and the man’s song earlier in the evening. Hubert padded to the entrance and stood there, transfixed. The olive-skinned man was standing before the silent showers, dressed in cotton shorts and an old black T-shirt, his back to the doorway. There was a light shining before him, bathing his face and body in light, although the showers themselves were dark and the fluorescents were off. Hubert found himself moving to catch a better sight of the light source, sliding softly to his right in his bare feet, his eyes straining.

There was a pillar of light before the man, maybe five feet in height. It shifted, flickering like a candle flame, and it seemed to Hubert that there was a figure behind or within it, cocooned in its glow.

It was a little blond girl. Her face was contorted in pain, her head shaking from side to side in a blur of movement, faster than was humanly possible, and he could hear the sound of her cries, a steady nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh filled with fear and agony and rage. Her clothes were shredded and she was naked from the waist down, her body torn and marked where she had been dragged along the road beneath the wheels of the car.

Hubert knew who she was. Oh yes, Hubert knew. Ruby Blanton, that was her name. Pretty little Ruby Blanton, killed when a guy distracted by his pager hit her as she was crossing the street to her house and dragged her sixty feet beneath the wheels of his car. Hubert recalled her head turning at the last moment, the impact of the hood against her body, the final sight of her eyes before she disappeared under his wheels.

Oh, Hubert knew who she was. He knew for sure.

The man standing before her made no attempt to reach for her, or to console her. Instead, he hummed the song that Hubert had heard for the first time that day.

Walk with me, brother.

Come walk with me, sister.

And we’ll walk, and we’ll walk-

He turned, and something shone behind those blighted eyes as they regarded Hubert.

“You on the White Road now, brother,” he whispered. “You come see what’s been waiting for you on the White Road.”

He moved aside, and the light advanced toward Hubert, the girl’s head shaking, her eyes closed and the sound pouring from her lips like the steady drip of water.

Nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh-nuh.

Her eyes opened and Hubert stared into them, his guilt reflected deep within, and he felt himself falling, falling to the clean tiles, falling toward his own reflection.

Falling, falling, to the White Road.

They found him there later, blood pooling from the wound he had opened in his head on impact. A doctor was called, and he asked Hubert about dizzy spells and alcohol consumption and suggested that Hubert should maybe take up the offer of a proper home. Hubert thanked him, then collected his things and left the shelter. The olive-skinned man was already gone and Hubert didn’t see him again, although he found himself looking over his shoulder and, for a time, he didn’t sleep in Magnolia, preferring instead to sleep in streets and alleyways, among the living.

But now he has returned to the cemetery. It is his place, and the memory of the vision in the showers is almost forgotten, the stain of its recalling papered over with the excuse of alcohol and tiredness and the temperature he had been running since before that night at the shelter.

Hubert sometimes sleeps close to the Stolle grave, marked by the figure of a woman weeping at the foot of a cross. It is sheltered by trees, and from here he can see the road and the lake. Nearby is a flat granite stone covering the resting place of a man named Bennet Spree, a comparatively recent addition to the old cemetery. The plot had been in the ownership of the Spree family for a very long time but Bennet Spree was the last of his line and he had finally claimed the plot as his own when he died in July 1981.

There is a shape lying on Bennet Spree’s stone as Hubert approaches. For a moment he almost turns away, not wanting to argue with another wanderer over territory and not trusting a stranger enough to want to sleep beside him in the cemetery, but something about the form draws him closer. As he nears it a light breeze stirs the trees, dappling the figure with moonlight, and Hubert can see that it is naked and that the shadows that lie on the body are unaltered by the movement of the trees.

There is a ragged wound at the man’s throat, a strange hole, as if something has been inserted into his mouth through the soft flesh beneath his chin. The torso and legs are almost black with blood.

But there are two other things that Hubert notices before he turns and runs.

The first is that the man has been castrated.

The second is the implement that has been thrust into his chest. It is rusted and T-shaped and a note is impaled upon it, the blood from the man’s chest staining it slightly. There is something written on the note in neatly drawn letters.

It reads: DIG HERE

And they will dig. A judge will be sought and an exhumation order signed, for Bennet Spree has no living relatives to give their consent to the further desecration of his resting place. It will be a day or two before the rotting coffin is lifted from the ground, carefully bound with ropes and plastics so that it does not fall apart and spill Bennet Spree’s mortal remains upon the dark, exposed earth.

And where the coffin had rested for so long they will find a thin sprinkling of earth, and as they move it carefully away bones will be revealed: first the ribs, then the skull, its jawbone shattered, the cranium itself broken, cracks radiating from the ragged holes gouged in it by the blows that killed her.

It is all that is left of a girl on the verge of becoming a woman.

It is all that is left of Addy, the mother of Atys Jones.

And her son will die without ever knowing the final resting place of the woman who brought him into this world.