The White Road

17

IT WAS ALMOST SUNRISE.

Cyrus Nairn crouched naked in the dark womb of the hollow. Soon, he would have to leave this place. They would come looking for him, suspecting immediately some form of vendetta against the guard Anson and turning their attention toward those who had most recently been released from Thomaston. Cyrus would be sorry to go. He had spent so long dreaming of being back here, surrounded by the smell of damp earth, root ends caressing his bare back and shoulders. Still, there would be other rewards. He had been promised so much. In return, sacrifices were to be expected.

From outside there came the calling of the first birds, the gentle lapping of the water upon the banks, the buzzing of the last night insects as they fled the approaching light, but Cyrus was deaf to the sounds of life beyond the hole. Instead he remained motionless, conscious only of the noises coming from the loose earth under his feet, both watching and feeling the slight shifting as Aileen Anson struggled beneath the dirt and, finally, grew still.

I was woken up by the telephone ringing in my room. It was 8:15 A.M.

“Charlie Parker?” said a male voice that I didn’t recognize.

“Yeah. Who is this?”

“You got a breakfast appointment in ten minutes. You don’t want to keep Mr. Wyman waiting.” He hung up.

Mr. Wyman.

Willie Wyman.

The boss of the Dixie Mafia’s Charleston branch wanted to have breakfast with me.

This was not a good way to start the day.

The Dixie Mafia had existed, in one form or another, since Prohibition, a conglomeration of loosely associated criminals with bases in most of the big Southern cities but particularly Atlanta, Georgia, and Biloxi, Mississippi. They recruited one another for out-of-state jobs: an arson attack in Mississippi might be the work of a firefly from Georgia, or a hit in South Carolina could be farmed out to a contract killer from Maryland. The Dixies were pretty unsophisticated, dealing in drugs, gambling, murder, extortion, robbery, arson. The closest they ever got to white-collar crime was robbing a laundry, but that didn’t mean that they weren’t a force to be reckoned with. In September 1987, the Dixie Mafia had murdered a judge, Vincent Sherry, and his wife, Margaret, at their home in Biloxi. It was never made clear why Sherry and his wife had been shot-there were allegations that Vincent Sherry had been involved in criminal operations through the law offices of Halat and Sherry, and Sherry’s law partner, Peter Halat, was later convicted on charges of racketeering and murder connected to the deaths of the Sherrys-but the reasons behind the murders were largely inconsequential. Men who kill judges are dangerous because they will act before they think. They don’t weigh up the consequence of their actions until after the fact.

In 1983 Paul Mazzell, the then boss of the Charleston branch, was convicted with Eddie Merriman of the murder of Ricky Lee Seagreaves, who had robbed one of Mazzell’s drug deals. Since then, Willie Wyman had been the king in Charleston. He was five-four in height and weighed about one hundred pounds in wet clothes, but he was mean and cunning and capable of doing just about anything to maintain his position. At 8:30 A.M., he was sitting at a table by the wall in Charleston Place ’s main dining room, eating bacon and eggs. There was one other empty chair at the table. Nearby, four men sat in two pairs at separate tables, keeping watch over Willie, the door, and me.

Willie had short, very dark hair, deeply tanned skin, and was wearing a bright blue shirt and blue chinos. The shirt was decorated with small white clouds. He looked up at me as I approached the table and waved his fork to indicate that I should join him. One of his men seemed about to frisk me but Willie, conscious of operating in a public place, waved him away.

“We don’t need to frisk you, do we?”

“I’m not armed.”

“Good. I don’t think the people at Charleston Place would appreciate their breakfast tables being all shot up. You want to order? It’s on you.” He grinned humorlessly.

I ordered coffee, juice, and toast from the waitress. Willie finished devouring his food and wiped his mouth on a napkin.

“Now,” he said, “to business. I hear you kicked Andy Dalitz’s nuts so far up his tubes that he can scratch them by sticking his fingers in his mouth.”

He waited for a reply. Under the circumstances, it seemed wise to oblige.

“ LapLand ’s your place?” I said.

“One of them. Look, I know Andy Dalitz is a moron. Hell, I’ve wanted to kick him in the nuts for as long as I’ve known him, but the guys got three fucking Adam’s apples now because of you. Maybe he had it coming, I don’t know. All I’m saying is that if you want to visit one of our clubs, then you should ask, and ask nice. Kicking the manager so hard that he can taste his balls in his mouth is not asking nice.

“And I got to tell you: if you’d done that in public, in front of customers or the girls, then we’d be having a very different conversation now. Because if you make Andy look bad then you make me look bad, and the next thing you know I have guys thinking maybe my time has come and I should make way for somebody new. Then I have two choices: I either convince them that they’re wrong, and then I got to find somewhere to put them and we waste a day driving around with them stinking up the trunk until we find a place, or else I’m the one stinking up the trunk and, between you and me, that’s not gonna happen. We clear?”

My coffee, OJ, and toast arrived. I poured the coffee and offered Willie the option of a fresh refill. He accepted, and thanked me. He was nothing if not polite.

“We’re clear,” I assured him.

“I know all about you,” he said. “You could screw up Paradise. The only reason you’re still alive is that even God doesn’t want you near Him. I hear you’re working with Elliot Norton on the Jones case. Is there something I need to know here, because that case stinks like my kid’s diapers? Andy told me you wanted to speak to the half-breed, Tereus.”

“Is that what he is?”

“The fuck am I, his cousin?” He relented a little. “His people came from Kentucky way back, is all I know. Who knows who they were fucking out there? There are people in those mountains who are maybe half fucking goat because their daddies got an itch at a bad time. Even the blacks don’t want nothing to do with Tereus or his kind. Lesson over. Give me something.”

I didn’t have any choice but to tell him something of what I knew.

“Tereus visited Atys Jones in jail. I wanted to know why.”

“You find out?”

“I think Tereus knew the family. Plus he’s found Jesus.”

Willie looked unhappy, although not terminally so.

“That’s what he told Andy. I figure Jesus should be more careful about who finds Him. I know you’re not telling me everything, but I’m not going to make an issue of it, not this time. I’d prefer it if you didn’t go back to the club, but if you do have to go, keep it discreet and don’t kick Andy Dalitz in the balls again. In return, I expect you to let me know if there’s anything that I should be worried about, you understand?”

“I understand.”

He nodded, seemingly content, then sipped his coffee.

“You tracked down that preacher, right? Faulkner?”

“That’s right.”

He watched me carefully. He seemed amused.

“I hear Roger Bowen is trying to get him out.”

I hadn’t called Elliot since Atys Jones had told me of Mobley’s connection to Bowen. I wasn’t sure how it fitted into what I already knew. Now, as Willie Wyman mentioned Bowen’s name, I tried to block out the noise from the adjoining tables and listen only to him.

“You curious about why that might be?” Willie continued.

“Very.”

He leaned back and stretched, exposing a sprinkling of sweat under his arms.

“Roger and me go way back, and not in a good way. He’s a fanatic and he has no respect. I’ve thought about maybe sending him away on a cruise: a long cruise, strictly one-way to the bottom, but then the crazies would come knocking on my door and it would be cruises for everyone. I don’t know what Bowen wants with the preacher: a figurehead, maybe, or could be the old man has something stashed away that Bowen wants to get hold of. Like I said, I don’t know, but you want to ask him, I can tell you where he’ll be later today.”

I waited.

“There’s a rally in Antioch. Rumor is that Bowen is going to talk at it. There’ll be press there, maybe some TV. Bowen didn’t use to make public appearances too often, but this Faulkner thing has brought him out from under his rock. You go along, you might get to say hi.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He stood, and the other four men rose at the same time.

“I figure why should it just be me who has his day fucked up by you, you know? If you’ve got shit on your shoe, you spread it around. And Bowen’s already having a bad day. I like the idea of you making it worse.”

“What’s so bad about today for Bowen?”

“You should watch the news. They found his pitbull Mobley up at Magnolia Cemetery last night. He was castrated. I gotta go tell Andy Dalitz, maybe make him see how lucky he was just to get his nuts bruised instead of cut off completely. Thanks for breakfast.”

He left me, his blue shirt billowing, his four goons in tow like big children following a little piece of fallen sky.

Elliot did not turn up for our scheduled meeting that morning. The answering machine was picking up calls at his office and at his home. His cell phones-both his own and the clean one we were using for day-to-day contact-were off. Meanwhile, the papers were full of the discovery of Landron Mobley’s body at the Magnolia Cemetery, but hard details were scarce. According to the reports, Elliot Norton had been uncontactable for comment on his client’s death.

I spent the morning confirming the details of more witness statements, knocking on trailer doors, and fighting off dogs in overgrown yards. By midday I was worried. I checked on Atys by phone, and the old man told me he was doing okay, although he was becoming a little stir-crazy. I spoke to Atys for a couple of minutes, but his replies were surly at best.

“When can I leave here, man?” he asked me.

“Soon,” I replied. It was only a half truth. If Elliot’s fears about his safety were real, my guess was that we’d be moving him soon enough, but only to another safe house. Until his trial, Atys was going to have to get used to staring at TVs in unfamiliar rooms. Pretty soon, though, he wouldn’t be my concern. I was getting nowhere fast with the witnesses.

“You know Mobley’s dead?”

“Yeah, I heard. I’m all cut up.”

“Not as cut up as he is. You got any idea who might have done a thing like that to him?”

“No I ain’t, but you find out you let me know. I want to shake the man’s hand, m’sayin?”

He hung up. I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve. It would take me more than an hour to get to Antioch. I tossed a mental coin and decided to go.

The Carolina Klans, in common with klaverns across the country, had been in decline for the best part of twenty years. In the case of the Carolinas the decline could be dated back to November 1979, when five Communist Workers died in a shootout with Klansmen and neo-Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina. The anti-Klan movements assumed a new momentum in the aftermath while Klan membership continued to drop, and on those occasions when Klansmen took to the streets they were vastly outnumbered by protesters. Most of the recent Klan rallies in South Carolina had been the work of the Indiana-based American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, since the local Carolina Knights had demonstrated a reluctance to become involved.

But against their decline had to be set the fact that over thirty black churches had been burned in South Carolina since 1991 and Klansmen had been linked to at least two of those burnings, in Williamsburg and Clarendon counties. In other words, the Klan may have been dying on its feet, but the hatred that it represented was still alive and well. Now Bowen was trying to give that hatred a new momentum, and a new focus. If the news reports were to be believed, he was succeeding.

Antioch didn’t look like it had too much to recommend it at the best of times. It resembled the suburb of a town that didn’t exist: there were houses, and streets that somebody had taken the trouble to name, but none of the larger malls or town centers that might have been expected to grow up alongside them. Instead, the section of 119 that passed through Antioch had sprouted small strip malls like clumps of mushrooms, boasting between them little more than a couple of gas stations, a video store, a pair of convenience stores, a bar, and a laundromat.

It looked like I had missed the parade, but midway along the strip was a green square surrounded by a wire fence and untended trees. Cars were parked nearby, maybe sixty in all, and a makeshift stage had been created on the back of a flatbed truck from which a man was addressing the crowd. A group of about eighty or ninety, consisting mostly of men but with some women scattered throughout, stood before the stage listening to the speaker. A handful wore white robes but most of them were dressed in their usual T-shirts and jeans. The men in the robes were sweating visibly beneath the cheap polyester. A crowd of fifty or sixty protesters stood some distance away, kept back from Bowen’s people by a line of police. Some were chanting and catcalling, but the man speaking from the stage never broke his stride.

Roger Bowen had a thick brown mustache and wavy brown hair, and he looked like he kept himself in good condition. He wore a red shirt and blue jeans, but despite the heat his shirt appeared to be unsullied by sweat. He was flanked by two men who led the occasional bursts of applause when he said something particularly important, which seemed to be about every three minutes, judging by his aides. Each time they applauded, Bowen looked to his feet and shook his head, as if embarrassed by their enthusiasm yet unwilling to curb it. I spotted the cameraman from the Richland County lockup close by the stage with a pretty blond reporter close by. He was still wearing his fatigues, but this time nobody was giving him a hard time over them.

I had a CD playing in the car at top volume as I cruised in. I’d chosen it especially for the occasion. My timing was pretty good. Joey Ramone’s girl had gone to LA and never come back, and Joey was blaming the KKK for taking his baby away just as I swung into the parking lot.

Bowen paused in his speech and stared over in my direction. A considerable portion of the crowd followed his gaze. A guy with a shaven head and wearing a black “Blitzkrieg” T-shirt approached the car and asked politely but firmly if I would turn the music down. I killed the engine, cutting the music off, then stepped from the car. Bowen kept looking in my direction for about another ten seconds, then continued his speech.

Perhaps he was conscious of the media presence, but Bowen appeared to be keeping the invective to a minimum. True, he tossed in references to Jews and “coloreds,” talked of how non-Christians had seized control of the government at the expense of white people, and spoke of AIDS as a visitation from God, but he steered away from the worst racial slurs. It was only as his speech reached its close that he got to his main point.

“There is a man, my friends, a good man, a Christian man, a man of God, who is being persecuted for daring to say that homosexuality and abortion and the mixing of races is against the will of the Lord. A show trial is being organized in the state of Maine to bring this man down and we have evidence, my friends, hard evidence, that his capture was funded by Jews.” Bowen waved some papers that looked vaguely legal in form. “His name, and I hope you know it already, is Aaron Faulkner. Now they’ve said some things about him. They’ve called him a murderer and a sadist. They have tried to smear his name, to drag him down before his trial has even begun. They are doing this because they have no proof against him and are trying to poison the minds of the weak so that he will be found guilty before he even has the chance to defend himself. The Reverend Faulkner’s message is one that we should all take to heart, because we know it is right and true. Homosexuality is against God’s law. Baby killing is against God’s law. The mixing of bloods, the undermining of the institutions of marriage and the family, the elevation of non-Christian worship above the one true religion of Jesus Christ, our Lord and Savior, all are against God’s law, and this man, the Reverend Faulkner, has taken a stand against it. Now his only hope for a fair trial is if he can assemble himself the best defense possible, and to do that he needs funds to get himself out of jail and pay the finest attorneys that money can buy. And that’s where you folks come in: you give what you can. I count maybe one hundred here. You give twenty bucks each, and I know that’s a lot for some of you people, and we got two thousand dollars. If those of you that can afford it give a little more, well, then that’s all for the better.

“Because you mark my words: it is not just one man who is facing a false trial. It is a way of life. It is our way of life, our beliefs, our faith, our futures that will be on trial in that courtroom. The Reverend Aaron Faulkner represents us all, and if he falls, then we fall with him. God is with us. God will give us strength. Hail Victory! Hail Victory!”

The chant was taken up by the crowd as men moved among them with buckets, collecting donations. I saw the odd ten or five slipped in, but most gave twenties, even fifties or hundreds. At a conservative estimate, I reckoned Bowen’s work this afternoon had probably made three thousand dollars. According to that day’s paper, which had carried some advance coverage of the rally, Bowen’s people had been working flat out since shortly after Faulkner’s arrest, encouraging everything from yard sales and bakeoffs to a draw for a new Dodge truck donated by a sympathetic auto dealer, with thousands of tickets already sold at twenty dollars a pop. Bowen had even succeeded in galvanizing into action those who would not usually have been drawn to his cause, the vast constituency of the faithful who saw in Faulkner a man of God being persecuted for beliefs that were similar, if not identical, to their own. Bowen had taken Faulkner’s arrest and approaching trial and made it a matter of faith and goodness, a battle between those who feared and loved the Lord and those who had turned their backs on him. When the subject of violence was raised Bowen usually skirted the issue, arguing that Faulkner’s message was pure and that he could not be held accountable for the actions of others, even if those actions were justified in many cases. Racist insults would be kept for the old guard and for those occasions where TV cameras and microphones were absent or forbidden. Today, he was preaching to the new converts and those who had yet to be converted.

Bowen stepped from the stage and people moved forward to shake his hand. Just inside the gate, two trestle tables had been set up so that the women behind them could display the items they had brought for sale: Johnny Reb flags, Nazi battle flags decorated with eagles and swastikas, bumper stickers announcing that the driver was WHITE BY BIRTH, SOUTHERN BY GRACE. There were also cassettes and CDs of country and western music, although I figured that they weren’t the kind Louis would have wanted in his collection. Pretty soon, the two women were doing steady business.

A man appeared at my side. He wore a dark suit over a white shirt, with a baseball cap perched incongruously on his head. His skin was reddish purple, and peeling badly. Clumps of fair hair hung on grimly to his skull like sparse vegetation on a hostile landscape. Shades concealed his eyes. I could see an earpiece in his left ear, connected to a unit at his belt. Immediately, I felt uneasy. Maybe it was the strangeness of his appearance, but there was a sense of unreality about him. There was also a smell emanating from him, like the odor left after an oil fire has been extinguished.

He smelled of slow burning.

“Mr. Bowen would like to talk to you,” he said.

“It was the Ramones,” I said. “On the CD player. I’ll make him a copy if he’d like it.”

He didn’t blink.

“Like I said, Mr. Bowen wants to talk to you.”

I shrugged and followed him through the crowd. Bowen had almost finished glad-handing the troops, and as I watched, he stepped behind the truck to a small area enclosed by a white tarp that stretched from the bed of the truck. Beneath it were chairs, a portable a/c unit, and a table with a cooler on top. I was shown through to Bowen, who sat in one of the chairs sipping from a can of Pepsi. The cap-wearing man stayed but the other people bustling outside moved away to give us some privacy. Bowen offered me a drink. I declined.

“We didn’t expect to see you down here today, Mr. Parker,” he said. “You considering joining our cause?”

“I don’t see much of one,” I said, “unless you call hustling rednecks for dimes a cause.”

Bowen exchanged a look of mock disappointment with the other man. There was blood in Bowen’s eyes. Although he was ostensibly in charge, he appeared to defer to the man in the suit. Even his posture suggested that he was somehow afraid of him, his body turned slightly away from the other man, his head lowered. He looked like a cowering dog.

“I should have introduced you,” he said. “Mr. Parker, this is Mr. Kittim. Sooner or later, Mr. Kittim is going to teach you a harsh lesson.”

Kittim removed his sunglasses. The eyes revealed were empty and green, like raw, flawed emeralds.

“Forgive me if I don’t shake hands,” I said to him. “You look like bits of you might start to drop off.”

Kittim didn’t react, but the smell of oil grew stronger. Even Bowen’s nose wrinkled slightly.

Bowen finished his cola and tossed it in the garbage bag.

“Why are you here, Mr. Parker? If I was to get up on that stage and announce to the crowd who you are, I think your chances of getting back to Charleston unscathed would be very slim.”

Maybe I should have been surprised that Bowen knew that I was staying in Charleston, but I wasn’t.

“Keeping track of my movements, Bowen? I’m flattered. By the way, it’s not a stage. It’s a truck. Don’t get above yourself. You want to tell the morons who I am, go right ahead. The TV cameras will eat it up. As for why I’m here, I wanted to take a look at you, see if you’re really as dumb as you seem to be.”

“Why am I dumb?”

“Because you’re aligning yourself with Faulkner, and if you were smart you’d see that he’s crazy, even crazier than your friend here.”

Bowen’s eyes flicked toward the other man. “I don’t think Mr. Kittim is crazy,” he said. The words left a sour taste in his mouth. I could see it in the curl of his lips.

I followed his glance. There were flakes of dried skin caught in Kittim’s remaining hair and his face almost throbbed with the pain of his condition. He seemed to be slowly disintegrating. His was a Catch-22 situation: looking and feeling the way he did, he’d have to be crazy not to be crazy.

“The Reverend Faulkner is a man unjustly persecuted,” resumed Bowen. “All I want to see is justice done, and justice will result in his vindication and release.”

“Justice is blind, not stupid, Bowen.”

“Sometimes it’s both.” He stood up. We were almost the same height but he was broader than I was. “The Reverend Faulkner is about to become a figurehead for a new movement, a unifying force. We’re bringing more people into our fold day by day. With people come money and power and influence. This isn’t complex, Mr. Parker. It’s very simple. Faulkner is the means. I am the end. Now, I’d advise you to go and take in some of the sights of South Carolina while you still can. I have a feeling it may be the last chance that you have. Mr. Kittim will escort you back to your car.”

With Kittim at my side, I walked through the crowd. The TV crews had packed up and left. Children had joined the celebrations, running in between the legs of their parents. Music was playing from the trestle tables, country music that spoke of war and vengeance. Barbecues had been set up, and the smell of burning meat filled the air. Close by one of them, a man with slicked-back hair bit greedily into a hot dog. I looked away before he could see me staring at him. I recognized him as the man who had followed me from the airport to Charleston Place and who had then pointed me out to Earl Larousse Jr. Both Atys Jones and Willie Wyman had confirmed to me that the late Landron Mobley, in addition to being a client of Elliot’s, had been one of Bowen’s attack dogs. Mobley, it seemed, had also been helping the Larousses hunt down Atys before Marianne’s death. Now another link between the Larousses and Bowen had been revealed.

At my car I turned to Kittim. He had replaced his sunglasses, obscuring his eyes. An object lay on the ground between us. He pointed his finger at it.

“You dropped something,” said Kittim.

It was a black skullcap, ringed with a red and gold band. Blood had soaked into it. It hadn’t been there when I’d parked.

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“I suggest you take it with you. I’m sure you know some old kikes who’d be glad to receive it. It might answer some questions that they have.”

He backed away from me, made a pistol from the finger and thumb of his right hand, then fired it at me as a farewell.

“I’ll be seeing you,” he said.

I picked up the skullcap from the ground and wiped the dirt from it. There was no name inside it, but I knew that it could only have come from one source. I drove as far as the nearest strip mall and made a call to New York.

When the end of the working day came with no contact from Elliot, I decided to go looking for him. I drove out to his house, but the workmen hadn’t seen him since the day before, and as far as they could tell, he hadn’t slept in the house the previous night. I headed back to Charleston and decided to check the tag number of Elliot’s dining companion from earlier in the week. I took out my laptop, and ignoring the E-mail notifications, went straight to the Web. I entered the license plate on three databases, including the huge NCI and CDB Infotek services as well as SubTrace, which flirted with illegality and was more expensive than regular searches but was faster too. I red-flagged the SubTrace request and got a response less than an hour later. Elliot had been arguing with one Adele Foster of 1200 Bees Tree Drive, Charleston. I found Bees Tree on my DeLorme street atlas and headed out.

Number 1200 was an impressive classical revival tabby manse that must have been more than a century old, its facade constructed from a mixture of oyster shell and lime mortar and dominated by a two-tiered entry porch supported by slender white columns. The SUV was parked to the right of the house. I walked slowly up the central staircase, stood in the shade of the porch, and rang the doorbell. The sound of it echoed in the hallway beyond, eventually losing itself in the sound of firm footsteps on the boards before the door opened. I half-expected Hattie McDaniel to be standing before me in a pinafore, but instead it was the woman I had seen arguing with Elliot Norton on my first night in town. Behind her, dark wood extended through the empty white hallway like muddy water through snow.

“Yes?”

And suddenly I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t even sure why I had come here, except that I couldn’t find Elliot and something told me that the argument I had witnessed went beyond any professional issue, that there was more between them than a typical client-lawyer relationship. Also, seeing her up close for the first time, I was confirmed in another suspicion that I had: she was wearing widow’s weeds. All she needed was a hat and a veil and the look would have been complete.

“I’m sorry to disturb you,” I said. “My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator.”

I was about to reach into my pocket for id but a movement on her face stopped me. Her expression didn’t soften, exactly, but something flashed across it, like a tree moving in the wind that briefly allows moonlight to flash through its branches and illuminate the bare ground beneath.

“You’re him, aren’t you?” she said softly. “You’re the one that he hired.”

“If you mean Elliot Norton, then yes, I’m the one.”

“Did he send you here?” There was no hostility in the question. Instead, I thought there was something almost plaintive in it.

“No, I saw you…talking to him in a restaurant two nights ago.”

Briefly, she smiled. “I’m not sure that ‘talking’ was what we were doing. Did he tell you who I was?”

“To be honest, I didn’t tell him that I’d seen you together, but I made a note of your license plate.”

She pursed her lips. “How very farsighted of you. Is that how you usually behave: making notes on women you’ve never met?”

If she was expecting me to act embarrassed, she was disappointed.

“Sometimes,” I said. “I’m trying to give it up, but the flesh is weak.”

“So why are you here?”

“I was wondering if you might have seen Elliot.”

Instantly, there was worry on her face.

“Not since that night. Is something wrong?”

“I don’t know. Can I come in, Ms. Foster?”

She blinked. “How do you know my name? No, let me guess, the same way you found out where I lived, right? Jesus, nothing’s private anymore.”

I waited, anticipating the closing of the door in my face. Instead, she stepped to one side and gestured for me to enter. I followed her into the hallway and the door closed softly behind me.

There was no furniture in the hall, not even a hat stand. Before me, a staircase swept up to the second floor and the bedrooms. To my right was a dining room, a bare table surrounded by ten chairs at its center. To my left was a living room. I followed her into it. She took a seat at one end of a pale gold couch, and I eased myself into an armchair close by. Somewhere, a clock ticked, but otherwise the house was silent.

“Elliot’s missing?”

“I didn’t say that. I’ve left messages. So far, he hasn’t replied.”

She digested the information. It seemed to disagree with her.

“And you thought that I might know where he is?”

“You met him for dinner. I figured that you might be friends.”

“What kind of friends?”

“The kind that have dinner together. What do you want me to say, Ms. Foster?”

“I don’t know, and it’s Mrs. Foster.”

I started to apologize but she waved it away. “It’s not important,” she said. “I suppose you want to know about Elliot and me?”

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to pry into her affairs any more than was necessary, but if she felt the need to talk then I’d listen in the hope that I might learn something from her.

“Hell, you saw us fighting, you can probably guess the rest. Elliot was a friend of my husband. My late husband.” She was smoothing her skirt with her hand, the only indication she gave that she might be nervous.

“I’m sorry.”

She nodded. “We all are.”

“Can I ask what happened?”

She looked up from her skirt and stared directly at me. “He killed himself.” She coughed once, then seemed to have trouble continuing. The coughing grew in intensity. I stood and followed the living room through to where a bright modern kitchen had been added to the rear of the house. I found a glass, filled it with water from the tap and brought it back to her. She sipped at it, then placed it on the low table before her.

“Thank you,” she said. “I don’t know why that happened. I guess I still find it hard to talk about. My husband, James, killed himself one month ago. He asphyxiated himself in his car by attaching a pipe to the exhaust and feeding it through the window. It’s not uncommon, I’m told.”

She could have been talking about a minor ailment, like a cold or a rash. Her voice was studiedly matter-of-fact. She took another sip from the glass of water.

“Elliot was my husband’s lawyer, as well as his friend.”

I waited.

“I shouldn’t be telling you this,” she said. “But if Elliot’s gone…”

The way that she said the word “gone” made my stomach lurch, but still I didn’t interrupt.

“Elliot was my lover,” she said at last.

“Was?”

“It ended shortly before my husband’s death.”

“When did it begin?”

“Why do these things ever begin?” she answered, mishearing the question. She wanted to tell and she would tell it in her own way and at her own pace. “Boredom, discontent, a husband too tied up with his work to notice that his wife was going crazy. Take your pick.”

“Did your husband know?”

She paused before she answered, as if she were thinking about it for only the first time. “If he did, then he didn’t say anything. At least, not to me.”

“To Elliot?”

“He made comments. They were open to more than one interpretation.”

“How did Elliot choose to interpret them?”

“That James knew. It was Elliot who decided to end things between us. I didn’t care enough about him to disagree.”

“So why were you arguing with him at dinner?”

She resumed the rhythmic stroking of her skirt, picking at pieces of lint too small to be of real concern.

“Something is happening. Elliot knows, but he pretends that he doesn’t. They’re all pretending.”

The stillness in the house suddenly seemed terribly oppressive. There should have been children in this house, I thought. It was too big for two people, and far too large for one. It was the kind of house bought by wealthy people in the hope of populating it with a family, but I could see no trace of any family here. Instead there was only this woman in her widow’s black picking methodically at the tiny flaws in her skirt, as if by doing so she could make the greater wrongs right again.

“What do you mean by ‘them all’?”

“Elliot. Landron Mobley. Grady Truett. Phil Poveda. My husband. And Earl Larousse. Earl Jr., that is.”

“Larousse?” I couldn’t keep the surprise from my voice.

Once again, there was the trace of a smile on Adele Foster’s face. “They all grew up together, all six of them. Now something has started to happen. My husband’s death was the beginning. Grady Truett’s was the continuation.”

“What happened to Grady Truett?”

“Somebody broke into his home about a week after James died. He was tied to a chair in his den, then his throat was cut.”

“And you think the two deaths are connected?”

“Here’s what I think: Marianne Larousse was killed ten weeks ago. James died six weeks later. Grady Truett was killed one week after that. Now Landron Mobley has been found dead, and Elliot is missing.”

“Were any of them close to Marianne Larousse?”

“No, not if you mean intimate with her, but like I said they grew up with her brother and would have known her socially. Well, maybe not Landron Mobley but certainly the others.”

“And what do you believe is happening, Mrs. Foster?”

She took a deep breath, her nostrils flaring, her head rising, then released it slowly. In the gesture there was a trace of a spirit that had been subdued by the black clothes and it was possible to see what had attracted Elliot to her.

“My husband killed himself because he was afraid, Mr. Parker. Something he had done had come back to haunt him. He told Elliot, but Elliot wouldn’t believe him. He wouldn’t tell me what it was. Instead, he pretended that everything was normal, right up until the day he went into the garage with a length of yellow hose and killed himself. Elliot is also trying to pretend that things are normal, but I think he knows better.”

“What do you think your husband was afraid of?”

“Not what. I think he was afraid of someone.”

“Do you have any idea who that person might have been?”

Adele Foster rose and, with a movement of her hand, indicated that I should follow her. We ascended the staircase, past what, in the house’s former days, would have been used as a receiving room for visitors but was now a large and very luxurious bedroom. We paused in front of a closed door, in its keyhole a key, which she now turned to unlock the door. Then, keeping her back to the room, she pushed the door open and revealed its contents.

The room had once been a small bedroom or dressing room but James Foster had transformed it into an office. There was a computer desk and chair, a drafting board, and a set of shelves against one wall lined with books and files. A window looked out onto the front yard, the top of the flowering dogwood below the window visible above the bottom of the frame, the last of its white blooms now fading and dying. A blue jay stood on its topmost branch, but our movement behind the glass must have disturbed him because he disappeared suddenly with a flash of his blue rounded tail.

Yet, in truth, the bird was only a momentary distraction, because it was the walls that drew the eye. I couldn’t tell what color they had been painted because no paint showed through the blizzard of paper that seemed to have adhered to them, as if the room was in a constant state of motion and they had been propelled there and held in place by centrifugal force. The sheets were of varying sizes, some little more than Post-it notes, others larger than the surface of Foster’s drafting board. Some were yellow, others dark, some plain, a few lined. The detail varied from drawing to drawing, from hurried sketches executed with a flurry of pencil strokes to ornate, intricate depictions of their subject. James Foster had been quite an artist, but he seemed to have only one main theme.

Almost every drawing depicted a woman, her face concealed, her body swathed in a cloak of white from the top of her head to the soles of her feet. The cloak spread out behind her like water pooling from an ice sculpture. It was not a false impression, for Foster had drawn her as if the material that covered her was wet. It clung to the muscles in her legs and buttocks, to the sweep of her breasts and the thin blades of her fingers, the bones of the knuckles clearly visible where she gripped the cloak tightly from beneath.

But there was something wrong with her skin, something flawed and ugly. Her veins appeared to be above rather than beneath the epidermis, creating a tracery of raised pathways across her body like the levees over a flooded rice field. The result was that the woman under the veil seemed almost to be plated, her skin armored like that of an alligator. Unconsciously, instead of drawing closer I took a single step back from the wall and felt Adele Foster’s hand come to rest gently on my arm.

“Her,” she said. “He was afraid of her.”

We sat over coffee, some of the drawings spread on the coffee table before us.

“Did you show these to the police?”

She shook her head. “Elliot told me not to.”

“Did he tell you why?”

“No. He just said that it would be best not to show them the drawings.”

I rearranged the papers, setting the depictions of the woman aside and revealing a set of five landscapes. Each depicted the same scene: a huge pit in the ground, surrounded by skeletal trees. In one of the drawings a pillar of fire emerged from the pit, but it was still possible to pick out, even there, the shape of the hooded woman now clothed in flame.

“Is this a real place?”

She took the picture from me and studied it, then handed it back to me with a shrug.

“I don’t know. You’d have to ask Elliot. He might know.”

“I can’t do that until I find him.”

“I think something has happened to him, maybe the same thing that happened to Landron Mobley.”

This time, I heard the disgust in her voice when she said Mobley’s name.

“You didn’t like him?”

She scowled. “He was a pig. I don’t know why they let him stay with them. No-” she corrected herself-“I do know why. He could get things for them: drugs, booze when they were younger, maybe even women. He knew the places to go. He wasn’t like Elliot and the others. He didn’t have money, or looks, or a college education, but he was prepared to go places that they were afraid to go, at least at first.”

And Elliot Norton had still seen fit, after all those years, to represent Mobley in the impending case against him, despite the fact that it could bring no credit to Elliot. This was the same Elliot Norton who had grown up with Earl Larousse Jr. and was now representing the young man accused of killing his sister. None of this made me feel good.

“You said that they did something, when they were younger, something that had come back to haunt them. Do you have any idea what that might be?”

“No. James would never talk about it. We weren’t close before his death. His behavior had altered. He wasn’t the man I married. He began to hang out with Mobley again. They went hunting together up at Congaree. Then James started going to strip clubs. I think he might have been seeing prostitutes.”

I laid the drawings down carefully on the table.

“You know where he might have gone?”

“I followed him, two or three times. He always went to the same place, because it was where Mobley liked to go when he was in town. It’s called LapLand.”

And while I sat talking to Adele Foster, surrounded by images of spectral women, a disheveled man wearing a bright red shirt, blue jeans, and battered sneakers strolled up Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side of New York and stood in the shadow of the Orensanz Center, the oldest surviving synagogue in New York. It was a warm evening and he had taken a cab down here, electing not to endure the heat and discomfort of the subway. A daisy chain of children floated by, suspended between two women wearing T-shirts identifying them as members of a Jewish community group. One of the children, a little girl with dark curls, smiled up at him as she passed and he smiled back at her, watching her as she was carried around the corner and out of his sight.

He walked up the steps, opened the door, and moved into the neo-Gothic main hall. He heard footsteps approach from behind and turned to see an old man with a sweeping brush in his hand.

“Can I help you?” said the cleaner.

The visitor spoke.

“I’m looking for Ben Epstein,” he said.

“He is not here,” came the reply.

“But he does come here?”

“Sometimes,” the old man conceded.

“You expecting him this evening?”

“Maybe. He comes, he goes.”

The visitor found a chair in the shadows, turned it so that its back was facing the door, and sat down carefully upon it, wincing slightly as he lowered himself down. He rested his chin on his forearms and regarded the old man.

“I’ll wait. I’m very patient.”

The old man shrugged, and began sweeping.

Five minutes went by.

“Hey,” said the visitor. “I said I was patient, not made of fucking stone. Go call Epstein.”

The old man flinched but kept sweeping.

“I can’t help you.”

“I think you can,” said the visitor, and his tone made the old man freeze. The visitor had not moved, but the geniality and passivity that had made the little girl smile at him was now entirely gone. “You tell him it’s about Faulkner. He’ll come.”

He closed his eyes, and when he opened them again there was only spiraling dust where the old man had stood.

Angel closed his eyes again, and waited.

It was almost seven when Epstein arrived, accompanied by two men whose loose shirts did not quite manage to hide the weapons they carried. When he saw the man seated on the chair, Epstein relaxed and indicated to his companions that they could leave him be. Then he pulled up a chair and sat opposite Angel.

“You know who I am?” asked Angel.

“I know,” said Epstein. “You are called Angel. A strange name, I think, for I see nothing angelic about you.”

“There’s nothing angelic to see. Why the guns?”

“We are under threat. We believe we have already lost a young man to our enemies. Now we may have found the man responsible for his death. Did Parker send you?”

“No, I came here alone. Why would you think Parker sent me?”

Epstein looked surprised. “We spoke with him, not long before we learned of your presence here. We assumed that the two occurrences were related.”

“Great minds thinking alike, I guess.”

Epstein sighed. “He quoted Torah to me once. I was impressed. You, I think, even with your great mind, will not be quoting Torah. Or Kaballah.”

“No,” admitted Angel.

“I was reading, before I came to you: the Sefer ha-Bahir, the Book of Brightness. I have long been considering its significance, more often now since the death of my own son. I had hoped to find meaning in his sufferings, but I am not wise enough to understand what is written.”

“You think suffering has to have meaning?”

“Everything has meaning. All things are the work of the Divine.”

“In that case, I got some harsh words to say to the Divine when I see Him.”

Epstein spread his hands. “Say them. He is always listening, always watching.”

“I don’t think so. You think He was listening and watching when your son died? Or worse: maybe He was and just decided not to do anything about it.”

The old man winced involuntarily at the hurt that Angel’s words caused him, but the younger man did not appear to notice. Epstein took in the rage and grief on his face. “Are you talking about my son, or yourself?” he asked gently.

“You didn’t answer the question.”

“He is the Creator: all things come from Him. I do not pretend to know the ways of the Divine. That is why I read Kaballah. I do not yet understand all that it says, but I am beginning to comprehend a little.”

“And what does it say to explain the torture and death of your son?”

This time, even Angel recognized the pain that he had caused.

“I’m sorry,” he said, reddening. “Sometimes, I get angry.”

Epstein nodded-“I too get angry.”-then resumed.

“I think it speaks of harmony between the upper and lower worlds, between the visible and the unseen, between good and evil. World above, world below, with angels moving in between. Real angels, not nominal ones.”

He smiled.

“And because of what I have read I wonder, sometimes, about the nature of your friend Parker. It is written in the Zohar that angels must put on the garment of this world when they walk upon it. I wonder now if this is true of angels both good and evil, that both hosts must walk this world in disguise. It is said of the dark angels that they will be consumed by another manifestation, the destroying angels, armed with plagues and the avenging wrath of the fury of the Divine, two hosts of His servants fighting against one another, for the Almighty created evil to serve His purposes, just as He created good. I must believe that or else the death of my son has no meaning. I must believe that his suffering is part of a larger pattern that I cannot comprehend, a sacrifice in the name of the greater, ultimate good.”

He leaned forward on his chair.

“Perhaps your friend is such an angel,” he concluded. “An agent of the Divine: a destroyer, yet a restorer of the harmony between worlds. Perhaps, just as his true nature is hidden from us, so too it may be hidden even from himself.”

“I don’t think Parker is an angel,” said Angel. “I don’t think he does either. If he starts saying he is, his girlfriend will have him committed.”

“You think these are an old man’s fancies? Perhaps they are. An old man’s fancies, then.” He dismissed them with a graceful sweep of his hand. “So why are you here, Mr. Angel?”

“To ask for something.”

“I will give you all that I can. You punished the one who took my son from me.” For it was Angel who had killed Pudd, who had in turn killed Epstein’s son Yossi; Pudd, or Leonard, the son of Aaron Faulkner.

“That’s right,” said Angel. “Now I’m going to kill the one who sent him.”

Epstein blinked once.

“He is in jail.”

“He’s going to be released.”

“If they let him go, men will come. They will protect him, and they will take him out of your reach. He is important to them.”

Angel found himself distracted by the old man’s words. “I don’t understand. Why is he so important?”

“Because of what he represents,” replied Epstein. “Do you know what evil is? It is the absence of empathy: from that, all evil springs. Faulkner is a void, a being completely without empathy, and that is as close to absolute evil as this world can bear. But Faulkner is worse still, for he has the capacity to drain empathy from others. He is like a spiritual vampire, spreading his infection. And such evil draws evil to itself, both men and angels, and that is why they seek to protect him.

“But your friend Parker is tormented by empathy, by his capacity to feel. He is all that Faulkner is not. He is destructive, and angry, but it is a righteous anger, not merely wrath, which is sinful and works against the Divine. I look to your friend and I see a greater purpose in action. If evil and good are both creations of the Almighty, then the evil visited on Parker, the loss of his wife and child, was an instrument of the greater good, just like Yossi’s death. Look at the men that he has hunted down as a result, the peace that he has brought to others, living and dead, the balance that he has restored, all born of the sorrow that he has endured, that he continues to endure. In his response to all that he has suffered, I, for one, see the work of the Divine.”

Angel shook his head in disbelief.

“So this is some kind of test for him, for all of us?”

“No, not a test: an opportunity to prove ourselves worthy of salvation, to create that salvation for ourselves, maybe even to become salvation itself.”

“I’m more concerned with this world than the next.”

“There is no difference. They are not separate, but linked. Heaven and hell begin here.”

“Well, one of them sure does.”

“You are a wrathful man, are you not?”

“I’m getting there. I hear another sermon and I’ll arrive.”

Epstein raised his hands in surrender.

“So you are here because you want our help? Our help with what?”

“Roger Bowen.”

Epstein’s smile widened.

“That,” he said, “will be a pleasure.”

18

I LEFT ADELE FOSTER and headed back into Charleston. Her husband had begun visiting LapLand prior to his death, and LapLand was where Tereus worked. Tereus had hinted to me that Elliot knew more than he was telling me about the disappearances of Atys Jones’s mother and aunt, and from what Adele Foster had told me Elliot and a group of his former boyhood friends were now under active threat from some outside force. That group included Earl Larousse Jr. and three men now deceased: Landron Mobley, Grady Truett, and James Foster. I tried Elliot’s phones again, with no result, then swung by his office close by the intersection of Broad and Meeting, what the locals called the Corners of Four Laws since St. Michael’s Church, the federal court, the state courthouse, and city hall each occupied a corner of the intersection. Elliot occupied a building with two other law firms, all three sharing a single, street-level entrance. I headed straight for the third floor but there was no sign of life behind the frosted glass door. I took off my jacket, placed it against the door, then used the butt of my gun to break through the glass. I reached in through the hole and opened the door.

A small reception area with a secretary’s desk and shelves of files led into Elliot’s office. The door was unlocked. Inside, filing cabinet drawers were open and files lay scattered across the desk and chairs. Whoever had gone through the files knew what he or she was looking for. There was no Rolodex or address book that I could find, and when I tried to access the computer I found that it was password-locked. I spent a few minutes going through the alphabetically ordered files, but could find nothing on Landron Mobley and nothing on Atys Jones that I did not already have in my possession. I turned out the lights, stepped over the broken glass at the door, and closed it softly behind me.

Adele had given me an address in Hampton for Phil Poveda, one of the by now rapidly dwindling group of friends. I drove out there in time to find a tall man with long gray-black hair and a flecked beard closing his garage door from the inside. As I approached him he paused. He looked nervous and skittish.

“Mr. Poveda?”

He didn’t reply.

I reached for my id. “My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. I wondered if I could have a few minutes of your time.”

He still didn’t reply, but at least the garage door remained open. I took it as a positive sign. I was wrong. Phil Poveda, who looked like a hippie computer geek, pulled a gun on me. It was a.38, and it shook in his hand like unset Jell-O, but it was still a gun.

“Get out of here,” he said. His hand was still shaking, but compared to his voice it was steady as a rock. Poveda was falling apart. I could see it in his eyes, in the lines around his mouth, in the sores that had opened on his face and neck. On my way to his house, I had wondered if he might be responsible in some way for what was occurring. Now, faced with the reality of his disintegration and the fear he exuded, I knew that he was a potential victim, not a possible killer.

“Mr. Poveda, I can help you. I know something is happening. People are dying, people to whom you were once close: Grady Truett, James Foster, Landron Mobley. I think Marianne Larousse’s death may also be linked. Now Elliot Norton is missing.”

He blinked. “Elliot?” he said. Another little shard of hope seemed to fall away from him and shatter on the ground.

“You have to talk to somebody. I think that sometime in the past, you and your friends did something, and now the consequences of that act have come back to haunt you. A snub-nosed.38 in a shaky hand isn’t going to save you from what’s coming.”

I took a step forward, and the garage door slammed down in front of me before I could get to it. I hammered hard on it.

“Mr. Poveda!” I shouted. “Talk to me.”

There was no reply, but I sensed him there, waiting, at the other side of the metal, trapped in a darkness of his own devising. I took a card from my wallet, inserted it partly into the gap between the door and the ground, then left him there with his sins.

When I looked back, the card was gone.

Tereus wasn’t at LapLand when I called by, and Handy Andy, his courage now boosted by the presence of a bartender and a couple of doormen in black jackets, wasn’t in any mood to be helpful. I also failed to get a reply from Tereus’s apartment: according to the old guy with the permanent residency on the front steps, he had left for work that morning and hadn’t returned since. I seemed to be having a lot of trouble finding the people with whom I needed to talk.

I walked across King and entered Janet’s Southern Kitchen. Janet’s was a relic of times past, where folks took a tray and lined up to receive fried chicken, rice, and porkchops over the counter. I was the only white person eating, but nobody paid me much attention. I picked at my chicken and rice, but my appetite had still not returned. Instead, I drank glass after glass of lemonade in an effort to cool myself down, but it did me no good. I was still parched, and my temperature was still way above normal. Louis would be here soon, I told myself. Things would become clearer then. I pushed my plate to one side and headed back to the hotel.

Once again, as darkness fell, my desk was covered in depictions of a woman. The folder containing the Larousse crime scene photographs and reports lay closed by my left hand. All other available space was taken up by James Foster’s drawings. In one picture, the woman had been captured in the act of looking over her shoulder, the place where her face should have been shaded in tones of gray and black, the bones in her fingers visible beneath the thin material that enveloped her body and what seemed like the tracery of raised veins or scales shrouding her skin. There was also, I thought, something almost sexual about her depiction, a combination of loathing and desire expressed in artistic form. The shape of her buttocks and legs was carefully etched, as if sunlight were shining between her legs, and her nipples were erect. She was like the lamia of myth, a beautiful woman from the waist up but a serpent from the waist down, beguiling travelers with the sound of her voice only to devour them when they came within reach. Except, in this case, the scales of the serpent appeared to have spread across her entire body; the myth’s origins in a male fear of aggressive female sexuality had clearly found fertile ground in Foster’s imagination.

And then there was the second subject of his endeavors, the pit surrounded by stone and rugged, barren ground, the shapes of thin trees in the background like mourners around a grave. In the first drawing, the pit was simply a dark hole, seemingly deliberately reminiscent of the woman’s hooded face, the shelving of the ground at its lip like the folds of cloth around her head. But in the second drawing, the column of fire roared up from deep within, as if a channel had been opened straight to the earth’s core or to hell itself. The woman at its heart was consumed by flames, her body wreathed in fingers of orange and red, her legs wide, her head thrown back in pain or ecstasy. It might have been dime-store psychological analysis, but my guess was that Foster had been a very disturbed man. That’ll be one hundred dollars. You can pay my secretary on the way out.

The final item that his widow had allowed me to remove from his office was a photograph, a picture of six young men standing together before a bar, a neon Miller sign visible behind the figure at the far left of the group. Elliot Norton was smiling, a bottle of Bud raised in his right hand, his left arm curled around the waist of Earl Larousse Jr. Beside him was Phil Poveda, taller than the rest, leaning back against a car, his legs crossed at the ankles, his white shirt open to his chest, his arms folded before him, a beer bottle poking out close to his left breast. Next in line was the smallest member of the company, a dough-faced, curly-haired boy-man with a starter-kit beard and legs that seemed too short for his body. He had been caught in a dancer’s pose, his left leg and left arm outstretched before him, his right raised high behind him, tequila glistening in the flash of the bulb as the last of it spilled from the bottle in his hand: the late Grady Truett. Beside him, a boyish face peered bashfully into the camera, chin lowered to chest. This was James Foster.

The last young man was not smiling as widely as the rest. His grin seemed forced, his clothes somehow cheaper. He wore jeans and a check shirt, and he stood awkward and straight upon the gravel and dirt of the parking lot, like one who was not used to having his picture taken. Landron Mobley, the poorest of the six, the only one who did not go on to college, who did not progress to greater things, the only one never to leave the state of South Carolina to advance himself. But Landron had his own uses: Landron could score drugs; Landron could find cheap, slutty women who would go down for the price of a beer; Landron’s big fists could pummel anyone who decided to take issue with a bunch of wealthy young men intruding on territory that was not their own, taking women that were not theirs to take, drinking in bars that held no welcome for them. Landron was the point of entry for a world that these five men wanted to use and abuse, but of which they wanted no lasting part. Landron was the gatekeeper. Landron knew things.

Now Landron was dead.

According to Adele Foster, the allegations of improper relationships made against Mobley had come as no surprise to her. She knew what Landron Mobley was like, knew what he liked to do to girls even while he was systematically flunking high school. And though her husband claimed to have cut off all ties with him, she had seen him talking to Landron a couple of weeks before his death, had seen Landron pat him on the arm as he leaned into the car, and had watched as James had passed him a small wad of bills from his wallet. She had confronted him that evening, only to be told that Landron was down on his luck since he’d lost his job, and he had only given him the money so that he would go away and leave James alone. She hadn’t believed him, though, and his patronage of LapLand had only confirmed her suspicions. By that time the distance between husband and wife was growing ever greater, and she had told me that it was to Elliot Norton, not James, that she had confessed her fears about Landron Mobley as she lay beside him in the small room above his office, the room in which he sometimes slept when working on a particularly demanding case but which now, increasingly, he used to satisfy other, more pressing, demands.

“Has he approached you for money?” she asked Elliot.

Elliot looked away. “Landron always needs money.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’ve known Landron for a long time, and yes, I’ve helped him out from time to time.”

“Why?”

“What do you mean, ‘why?’”

“I don’t understand, that’s all. He wasn’t like the rest of you. I can see why he might have been useful to you when you were young and wild-”

He reached for her then-“I’m still wild”-but she forced him gently away.

“But now,” she continued, “what part can somebody like Landron Mobley have to play in your lives? You should have left him in your past.”

Eliot pushed back the sheets to stand naked in the moonlight, his back to her, and it seemed that his shoulders dropped briefly, the way a man’s shoulders will slump when exhaustion threatens to overcome him and he briefly accedes to it.

And then he said something strange.

“Some things you can’t leave in the past,” he said. “Some things follow you all through your life.”

That was all he said. Seconds later, she heard the sound of the shower from the bathroom, and knew that it was time to leave.

It was the last time that she and Elliot had made love.

But Elliot’s loyalty to Landron Mobley had gone beyond simply helping him out when he needed a few bucks. Elliot was representing his old friend in what could have turned out to be a very nasty rape case, a case now rendered null and void by Mobley’s death. In addition, Elliot appeared willing to destroy a long-standing friendship with Earl Larousse Jr. in order to defend a young black man with whom Elliot had no apparent connection. I pulled out the notes I had made so far and went through them once again, hoping to find something that I might have missed. It was only when I laid the sheets of paper side by side that I noticed one curious correspondence: Davis Smoot had been killed in Alabama only a few days before the disappearance of the Jones sisters in South Carolina. I went back to the notes I had jotted down while talking to Randy Burris about the events surrounding Smoot’s death and the hunt for, and subsequent arrest of, Tereus for the killing. According to what Tereus himself had told me, he had gone down to Alabama to seek the help of Smoot, who had fled South Carolina in February 1980, days after the alleged rape of Addy Jones, and had remained in hiding until at least July 1981, when he was confronted and killed by Tereus. He had denied to prosecutors that his confrontation with Smoot was in any way connected with rumors that Smoot had raped Addy. Addy Jones had subsequently given birth to her son Atys early in August 1980.

There had to be some mistake.

The sound of the cell phone pulled me away. I recognized the number on display immediately. The call was coming from the safe house. I picked it up on the second ring. There was no speech, just a tapping, as if somebody was banging the phone gently on the ground.

Tap-tap-tap.

“Hello?”

Tap-tap-tap.

I picked up my jacket and ran for the parking garage. The gaps between the taps were growing longer now and I knew for certain that the person at the other end was in trouble, that somebody’s strength was fading, and this was the only way that he or she could communicate.

“I’m on my way,” I said. “Hold on. Just hold on.”

There were three young black guys standing outside the safe house when I arrived, shifting uncertainly from foot to foot. One of them was carrying a knife and he spun toward me as I ran from the car. He saw the gun in my hand and raised his hand in acquiescence.

“What happened?”

He didn’t answer, but an older guy behind him did.

“We heard glass breaking. We didn’t do nothin’.”

“Keep it that way. Just stay back.”

“Fuck you, man,” was the reply, but they made no further move toward the house.

The front door was locked so I made for the rear of the house. The back door was wide open but undamaged. The kitchen was empty but the ever present lemonade jug now lay shattered on the floor. Flies buzzed around the liquid pooled upon the cheap linoleum.

I found the old man in the living room. There was a sucking hole in his chest and he lay like a black angel lost in his own blood, red wings spreading outward from behind. In his left hand he held the phone while the fingers of his right scraped at the wooden boards. He had scraped so hard that he had torn the nails and drawn blood from his fingers. He was reaching for his wife. I could see her foot in the doorway, the slipper pulled back from her heel by the pressure of her bent toes. There was blood on the back of her leg.

I knelt by the old man and clasped his head, looking for something with which to stem the flow of blood from the gunshot wound. I was shrugging off my jacket when he reached for my shirt, gripping it tightly in his fist.

“Uh ent gap me mout’!” he whispered. His teeth were pink with blood. “Uh ent gap me mout’!”

I didn’t tell.

“I know,” I said, and I felt my voice break. “I know you didn’t. Who did this, Albert?”

“Plateye,” he hissed. “Plateye.”

He eased his grip on my shirt and reached again for his dead wife.

“Ginnie,” he called.

His voice faded.

“Ginnie,” he repeated, and then he was gone.

I let his head rest on the floor, then stood and moved toward the woman. She lay face down with two holes in the back of her dress: one low to the left of her spine, the other higher, close to her heart. There was no pulse.

I heard a noise on the floor behind me and turned to see one of the boys from outside the house standing in the kitchen doorway.

“Stay out!” I said. “Call 911.”

He took one more look at me, his eyes falling to the body of the old man, then disappeared.

No noise came from upstairs. The couple’s son Samuel, who had driven Atys to the house earlier in the week, lay naked and dead in the bathtub, the shower curtain clenched in his hand and the water from the shower head still beating down upon his face and body. He had taken two shots in the chest. When I searched the four rooms above I could find no trace of Atys, but the window of his room was broken and tiles had been dislodged from the kitchen roof. It looked like he might have jumped, which meant that Atys might still be alive.

I went back downstairs and was standing in the yard when the police arrived. My gun was back in its holster and I was holding my license and permit. Naturally, the cops took my gun and my phone away and made me sit in a car until the detectives arrived. By now, a crowd had gathered and the uniforms were doing their best to keep them back, the lights on the Crown Vics casting firework glows across the faces and houses. There were a lot of cars because the Charleston PD assigned only one officer to a car, with the exception of the safe streets unit, two officers from which had arrived on the scene within minutes of the call. The mobile crime scene unit, an old converted bookmobile, had also pulled up by the time a pair of detectives from the violent crimes unit decided that they wanted to talk to me.

I had told them to find Atys Jones and they were already looking for him, although not as a potential victim but as a suspect in two further murders. They were wrong, of course. I knew that they were wrong.

At a gas station in South Portland, the hunched man stood over the Nissan and filled the car with twenty dollars’ worth of gas. There was only one other vehicle at the pumps: an ’86 Chevy C-10 with a busted right wing that had cost its new owner the grand total of eleven hundred dollars, half down with the rest to pay by the end of the year. It was the first car Bear had owned in more than half a decade and he was hugely proud of it. Now, instead of bumming rides to the co-op, he was there waiting each morning when they opened up, music blaring from the Chevy’s tinny stereo.

Bear hardly glanced at the other man close by. He had seen enough strange men in prison to know that the best thing to do in their presence was to mind his own business. He gassed the car with money borrowed from his sister, checked the pressure on every tire, then drove away.

Cyrus had paid the bored gas station attendant in advance and was aware that the young man was still watching him, mesmerized by Cyrus’s crooked body. Although used to the revulsion of others, Cyrus still considered it bad manners to be too obvious about it. The boy was lucky that he was safe behind the glass and that Cyrus had other things to occupy him. Still, if he had time he might come back and teach him that it was rude to stare. Cyrus finished fueling, sat in the car, and took his notebook from beneath the seat. He had been keeping careful notes of all that he saw and did, because it was important that he did not forget anything useful.

The boy went into the notebook, along with Cyrus’s other observations that evening: the movements of the redheaded woman in her house and the brief, troubling sighting of the large black man who now shared it with her. It made Cyrus unhappy.

Cyrus didn’t like getting the blood of men upon him.

19

THE HEADQUARTERS OF the Charleston PD occupied a redbrick structure on Lockwood Boulevard, opposite the Joe Riley Stadium and facing out over Brittlebank Park and the Ashley River. The interview room didn’t have much of a view, though, unless you counted the faces of the two irate detectives currently sharing it with me.

To understand the Charleston Police Department, you had to understand Chief Reuben Greenberg. Greenberg had been chief since 1982 and was that contradiction in terms, a popular police chief. In his eighteen years in charge he had introduced a range of innovations that had contributed to containing, and in some cases reducing, the crime rate in Charleston: everything from “Weed and Seed” programs in poorer areas to issuing running shoes to officers to enable them to chase felons more effectively. Homicide rates had consistenly dropped in that time, allowing Charleston to compare favorably with any Southern city of similar size.

Unfortunately, the deaths of Albert, Ginnie, and Samuel Singleton meant that any hopes of matching the previous year’s figures were pretty much gone, and anybody even remotely connected with holing the good ship Crime Statistics below the waterline was likely to be very unpopular at 180 Lockwood Boulevard.

I was very unpopular at 180 Lockwood Boulevard.

After an hour spent waiting in a locked patrol car outside the East Side house, I was brought to a room painted in two shades of ugly and furnished by Functional-R-Us. A cup of coffee had since grown cold in front of me. The two detectives who questioned me weren’t noticeably warmer.

“Elliot Norton,” the first repeated. “You say you’re working for Elliot Norton.”

His name was Adams, and there were patches of sweat beneath the arms of his blue shirt. His skin was blue black and his eyes were bloodshot. I’d already told him twice that I was working for Elliot Norton, and we’d gone through Albert’s final words half-a-dozen times, but Adams saw no reason why I shouldn’t do it all again.

“He hired me to do some background work on the Jones case,” I said. “We picked Atys up from the Richland County lockup and took him to the Singleton place. It was supposed to be a temporary safe house.”

“Mistake Number Two,” said Adams ’s partner. His last name was Addams, and he was as pale as his partner was dark. Somebody in the Charleston PD had a warped sense of humor. It was only the third time that he had spoken since the interview had begun.

“What was Mistake Number One?” I asked.

“Getting involved with the Jones case in the first place,” he replied. “Or maybe stepping off the plane at Charleston International. See, now you got three mistakes.”

He smiled. I smiled back. It was only polite.

“Doesn’t it get confusing, you being called Addams and him being called Adams?”

Addams scowled. “No, see I’m A dd ams, with two d s. He’s A d ams, with one d. It’s easy.”

He seemed serious about it. The Charleston PD offered an ascending scale of incentive pay based on educational achievement, from 7 percent for an associate’s degree to 22 percent for a Ph.D. I knew this from reading and re-reading the notices on the board behind Addams’s head. I was guessing that the incentive box on Addams’s pay slip was pretty empty, unless they gave him a nickel a month for his high school diploma.

“So,” his partner resumed, “you pick him up, drop him at the safe house, go back to your hotel…?”

“Clean my teeth, go to bed, get up, check on Atys, make some calls-”

“Who’d you call?”

“Elliot, some people back in Maine.”

“What did you say to Norton?”

“Nothing much. We just touched base. He asked me if I was making any progress and I told him that I was just getting started.”

“Then what did you do?”

We had reached the point, once again, where the paths of truth and untruth diverged. I opted for the middle ground, hoping to pick up the path of truth again later.

“I went to a strip joint.”

Adams ’s right eyebrow made an ecclesiastical arch of disapproval.

“Why’d you do that?”

“I was bored.”

“Norton pay you to go to strip joints?”

“It was my lunch break. I was on my own time.”

“And after?”

“Went back to the hotel. Had dinner. Bed. This morning: tried calling Elliot, had no luck, checked witness statements, went back to my hotel room. The call came about an hour later.”

Adams rose wearily from the table and exchanged a look with his partner.

“Doesn’t sound to me like Norton was getting his money’s worth,” he said.

For the first time, I picked up on his use of the past tense.

“What do you mean, ‘was’?”

The look passed between them again, but neither replied.

“Do you have any papers relating to the Jones case that might prove helpful to the course of this investigation?” asked Addams.

“I asked you a question.”

Addams’s voice rose a notch. “And I asked you a question: do you, or do you not, have material in your possession that might assist this investigation?”

“No,” I lied. “Elliot had it all.”

I caught myself.

“Eliot has it all,” I corrected. “Now tell me what happened.”

It was Adams who spoke.

“Highway Patrol found his car off 176, down by Sandy Road Creek. It was in the water. Looks like he swerved to avoid something on the road and ended up in the river. The body’s missing, but there’s blood in the car. A lot of blood. Blood type is B Positive, which matches Norton’s. We know he participates in the city’s blood drives, so we’re checking the samples from the car against a sample of his donated blood.”

I buried my head in my hands and took a deep breath. First Foster, then Truett and Mobley, and now Elliot. That left two names: Earl Larousse Jr. and Phil Poveda.

“Can I go now?” I wanted to return to my hotel room and get the material there out of harm’s way. I just hoped that Adams and Addams hadn’t gone looking for a search warrant while I was locked up.

Before either of the detectives could answer, the door to the interview room opened. The man who entered was two or three inches taller, and at least two decades older, than I was. He had buzz-cut gray hair, gray blue eyes and carried himself like he’d just stepped out of Parris Island to hunt down some AWOL marines. The military impression was enforced by his immaculate uniform and name badge. It read “S. Stilwell.” Stilwell was the lieutenant colonel in charge of the Charleston PD’s Operations Bureau, answerable only to the chief himself.

“Is this the man, Detective?” he asked.

“Yes sir.” It was Addams. He shot me a look that told me my troubles had only just begun and that he was going to enjoy what came next.

“Why is he here? Why is he not currently occupying a holding cell with the worst filth, the most disgusting reprobates that this fine city can furnish?”

“We were questioning him, sir.”

“And did he answer your questions in a satisfactory manner, Detective?”

“No sir, he did not.”

“Did he not indeed?”

Stilwell turned to Adams. “You, Detective, you are a good man, are you not?”

“I try to be, sir.”

“I do not doubt that, Detective. And do you not, to the best of your abilities, look favorably on your fellow man?”

“I do, sir.”

“I would expect no less of you, Detective. Do you read your Bible?”

“Not as much as I should, sir.”

“Damn right. Nobody reads his Bible as much as he should. A man should be out living the word of God, not studying on it. Am I right?”

“You are, sir.”

“And does the Bible not tell us to think well on our fellow man, to give him every chance that he deserves?”

“I couldn’t say for sure, sir.”

“Neither could I, but I feel certain that there is such an injunction. And, if there is not such an injunction in the Bible, then it was an oversight, and the man responsible, if he could go back and correct his mistake, would most certainly return and include said injunction, would he not?”

“He most certainly would, sir.”

“Amen. So we are agreed, Detective, that you have given Mr. Parker every chance to answer the questions put to him; that you, as a God-fearing man, have heeded the Bible’s probable injunction to take all that Mr. Parker has said as the word of an honest man; and yet you still doubt his basic sincerity?”

“I guess so, sir.”

“Well that certainly is a most unfortunate turn of events.”

He gave me his full attention for the first time.

“Statistics, Mr. Parker. Let’s talk about statistics. Do you know how many people were murdered in the fine city of Charleston in the year of our Lord, nineteen hundred and ninety-nine?”

I shook my head.

“I will tell you: three. It was the lowest murder rate in more than forty years. Now, what does that tell you about the police force in the fine city of Charleston?”

I didn’t reply. He cupped his left hand around his left ear and leaned toward me.

“I can’t hear you, son.”

I opened my mouth, which gave him his cue to continue before I could say anything.

“I will tell you what it says about this police force. It says that this fine body of men and women does not tolerate murder; that it actively discourages said form of antisocial activity; and that it will come down upon those who commit murder like two tons of shit from a trainload of elephants. But your arrival in our city appears to have coincided with a shocking increase in acts of homicide. That will affect our statistics. It will cause a blip on the screen, and Chief Greenberg, a fine, fine man, will have to go to the mayor and explain this unfortunate turn of events. And the mayor will ask him why this should be, and Chief Greenberg will then ask me, and I will say that it is because of you, Mr. Parker. And the chief will ask me where you are, and I will lead him to the deepest, darkest hole that the city of Charleston can provide for those of whom it most seriously disapproves. And under that hole will be another hole, and in that hole will be you, Mr. Parker, because I will have put you there. You will be so far below the ground that you will no longer officially be in the jurisdiction of the city of Charleston. You will not even officially be within the jurisdiction of the United States of America. You will be in the jurisdiction of the People’s Republic of China, and you would be advised to hire yourself a Chinese lawyer in order to cut down on traveling expenses incurred by your legal representative. Do you think I am shitting you, Mr. Parker? Because I am not shitting you. I do not shit people like you, Mr. Parker, I shit on people like you, and I have been saving some of my nastiest shit for just such an occasion as this. Now, do you have anything further that you wish to share with us?”

I shook my head. “I can’t tell you any more.”

He stood. “Then our business here is concluded. Detective, do we have a holding pen available for Mr. Parker?”

“I’m sure we do, sir.”

“And will he be sharing this holding pen with the dregs of this fine city, with drunks and whoremongers and men of low moral character?”

“That can be arranged, sir.”

“Then arrange it.”

I made a vain attempt to assert my rights.

“Don’t I get to call a lawyer?

“Mr. Parker, you do not need a lawyer. You need a travel agent to get you the hell out of this city. You need a priest to pray that you do not irritate me any more than you already have. And finally, you need to go back in time to get hold of your mother before your father impregnates her with his sorry seed and ask her not to let you be born because, if you continue to obstruct this investigation, you are going to regret the day she thrust you mewling and screaming into this world. Detectives, get this man out of my sight.”

They put me in the drunk tank until 6 A.M., then when they felt I had stewed for long enough and the decision to charge me with something or set me free became imminent, Addams came down and had me released. As we headed for the main door, his partner stood in the hallway and watched us pass.

“I find out anything on Norton, I’ll let you know,” he said. I thanked him, and he nodded.

“I found out what ‘plateye’ means too. Had to ask Mr. Alphonso Brown himself, man who guides folks round the old Gullah places. He said it was a kind of ghost: a changeling, one that could shift its form. Could be he was trying to say that your client turned on them.”

“Could be, except that Atys didn’t have a gun.”

He didn’t reply, and his partner hustled me on.

My possessions were handed back to me, minus my gun. I was given a slip and told that the gun was not being returned to me for the time being. Through the doors I could see prisoners in jail blues arriving to work on the lawns and clear garbage from the flower beds. I wondered how much trouble I’d have getting a cab.

“You planning on leaving Charleston in the near future?” asked Addams.

“No. Not after this.”

“Well, you make a move and you let us know, y’hear?”

I made for the door but found Addams’s hand resting against my chest. “You remember this, Mr. Parker: I got a bad feeling about you. I made some calls while you was in here and I didn’t like one thing that I heard. I don’t want you starting one of your crusades in Chief Greenberg’s city, you understand me? So just to guard against that, and to make sure that you call on us again when you’re leaving, we’ll be holding on to that Smith 10 of yours until your plane starts heading down the runway. Then maybe we’ll give you your cannon back.”

The hand dropped, and Addams opened the door for me.

“Be seeing you,” he said.

I stopped, frowned, and clicked my fingers.

“Which one were you again?”

“Addams.”

“With one d.”

“Two d s.”

I nodded. “I’ll try to remember.”

When I got back to my hotel I barely had enough energy to undress before I fell into my bed and slept soundly until after ten. I didn’t dream. It was as if the deaths of the night before had never happened.

But Charleston had not yielded up the last of its bodies. While the cockroaches skittered across the cracked sidewalks to hide from the daylight and the last of the night owls made for their beds, a man named Cecil Exley was walking to the site of the small bakery and coffee shop that he owned over on East Bay. There was work to be done, fresh bread and croissants to be baked, and although the clock had not yet struck six, Cecil was already running late.

At the corner of Franklin and Magazine, he began to slow down slightly. The bulk of the old Charleston jail loomed over him, a testament to misery and grief. A low white wall surrounded a yard thick with long grass, at the center of which stood the jail itself. The red bricks that had formed its sidewalks were missing in places, stolen, presumably, by those who felt their need was greater than the demands of history. Twin four-story towers topped with battlements and weeds stood at either side of the locked main gate, its bars and the bars of the windows around and above it stained red with oxidized rust. The concrete had crumbled and fallen from around the frames, exposing the brickwork beneath, as the old building succumbed to slow decay.

Denmark Vesey and his coconspirators in the ill-fated slave revolt of 1822 had been chained up in the whipping house for blacks at the back of the jail before their execution, most of them led to the gallows still proclaiming their innocence and one of them, Bacchus Hammett, even laughing as they placed the noose around his neck. Many others had passed through its gates before and since. There was nowhere else in Charleston, Cecil Exley believed, where the past and the present were so closely linked, where it was possible to stand quietly on an early morning and feel the aftershocks of past violence still shuddering through new days. It was Cecil’s habit to pause occasionally at the gates of the old jail and say a short, silent prayer for those who had languished there at a time when men with skin the color of Cecil’s could not even arrive in Charleston as part of a ship’s crew without being consigned to a cell for the duration of their visit.

To Cecil’s right, as he stood at the gates, was the old paddy wagon known as Black Lucy. It had been many years since Lucy had thrown her arms open to receive a new guest but, as Cecil looked closer, he could see a shape standing against the bars at the rear of the wagon. For a moment, Cecil’s heart seemed to pause in its beats, and he leaned a hand against the gate to guard against collapse. Cecil had already suffered two minor heart attacks in the previous five years, and he did not particularly want to leave this world in the event of a third. But instead of holding his weight, the gate opened inward with a creak.

“Hey,” said Cecil. He coughed. His voice sounded like it was about to break. “Hey,” he repeated. “You okay in there?”

The figure did not move. Cecil entered the grounds of the jail and walked warily toward Black Lucy. Dawn was lighting the city, the walls glowing dimly in the first rays of the early morning sun, but the figure in the wagon was still cast in shadow.

“Hey,” said Cecil, but his voice was already fading, the single syllable transformed into a descending cadence by the realization of what he was seeing.

Atys Jones had been tied to the bars of the wagon, his arms outstretched. His body was bruised, his face bloodied and almost unrecognizable, swollen by the blows. Blood had darkened and dried upon his chest. There was also blood-too much blood to have merely soaked down-on his white shorts, the only clothing that he retained. His chin rested on his chest, his knees bent, his feet curled slightly inward. The T-bar cross was missing from around his neck.

The old jail had just added a new ghost to its legions.

20

IT WAS ADAMS who broke the news to me. His eyes were even more bloodshot than before from lack of sleep when he met me in the lobby of my hotel, and he had built up a sprinkling of gray black stubble that had already begun to itch. He scratched at it constantly as we spoke, with a noise like bacon sizzling in a pan. A smell rose from him, the smell of sweat and spilled coffee, of grass and rust and blood. There were grass stains too on his trousers and on the sides of his shoes. Around his wrists, I could see the circular marks left by the disposable gloves he had worn at the scene as they had struggled to contain the great bulk of his hands.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got nothing good to say to you about what happened to that boy. He died hard.”

I felt Atys’s death as a weight on my chest, as if we had both fallen at the same time and his body had come to rest across my own. I had failed to protect him. We had all failed to protect him and now he had died for a crime that he had not committed.

“Do you have a time of death?” I asked him, as he drowned a piece of toast in thick butter.

“Coroner reckons he’d been dead for about two or three hours when he was found. Doesn’t look like he was killed at the jail, either. There wasn’t enough blood in the paddy wagon, and none that we’ve found so far on the walls or grounds of the jail itself, even under UV light. The beating was systematic: started at his toes and fingers, then moved on to his vital organs. They castrated him before he died, but probably not too long before. Nobody saw a thing. My guess is they picked him up before he got too far from the house, then took him somewhere quiet to work on him.”

I thought of Landron Mobley, the cruelties visited upon his body, and almost spoke, but to give Adams more than he already had would be to give him everything and I was not ready to do that. There was too much here that I did not yet understand.

“You going to talk to the Larousses?”

Adams finished off his toast. “My guess is they knew about it as soon as I did.”

“Or maybe even sooner.”

Adams waved a finger at me in warning. “That’s the kind of implication could get a man in trouble.” He gestured to a waitress for more coffee. “But, since you brought it up, why would the Larousses want Jones beaten in that way?”

I stayed silent.

“I mean,” he continued, “the nature of the injuries he received seems to indicate that the people who killed him wanted him to reveal something before he died. You think they wanted him to confess?”

I almost spit in contempt.

“Why? For the good of his soul? I don’t think so. If these people went to the trouble of killing his guardians and then hunting him down, then it doesn’t seem to me like they were in any doubt about why they were doing it.”

There was, though, the possibility that Adams was at least partly right in his suggestion that a final confession was the motive. Suppose the men who hunted him down were almost certain that he had killed Marianne Larousse, but almost certain wasn’t good enough. They wanted it from his own lips because if he wasn’t responsible then the consequences were even more serious, and not simply because the real culprit might evade detection. No, the actions that had been taken in the last twenty-four hours indicated that some people were very concerned indeed about the possibility that someone might have targeted Marianne Larousse for very particular reasons. It seemed to me that it was about time to ask some hard questions of Earl Larousse Jr. but I wasn’t about to do that alone. The Larousses were hosting their party the following day, and I was expecting some company to join me in Charleston. The Larousses would have two unwelcome guests crashing their big occasion.

That afternoon, I did some research in the Charleston Public Library. I pulled up the newspaper reports of Grady Truett’s death, but there was little more than Adele Foster had already told me. Persons unknown had entered his house, tied him to a chair, and cut his throat. No prints had been lifted, but the crime scene squad had to have found something. No crime scene is entirely clean. I was tempted to call Adams but, once again, to do so would be to risk blowing everything that I had. I also found out a little more about the plateye. According to a book called Blue Roots, the plateye was a permanent resident of the spirit world, the underworld, although it was capable of entering the mortal world to seek retribution. It also had the ability to alter its form. As Adams had said, the plateye was a changeling.

I left the library and headed onto Meeting. Tereus had still not returned to his apartment, and he now hadn’t shown up for work in two days. Nobody would tell me anything about him, and the stripper who had taken the twenty and then sold me out to Handy Andy was nowhere to be seen.

Finally, I called the public defender’s office and was told that Laird Rhine was defending a client over at the State Courthouse that afternoon. I parked at my hotel and walked down to the Four Corners, where I found Rhine in courtroom number three at the arraignment of a woman named Johanna Bell who had been accused of stabbing her husband in the course of a domestic argument. Apparently, she and her husband had been separated for about three months when he had returned to the family home and a quarrel had broken out over the ownership of the couple’s VCR. The quarrel had ended abruptly when she stabbed him with a carving knife. Her husband sat two rows behind her, looking sorry for himself.

Rhine handled himself pretty well as he asked the arraignment judge to convert her bail to OR release. He was probably in his early thirties but he put up a good argument, pointing out that Bell had never been in trouble before; that she had been forced to call the cops on a number of occasions during the dying months of her marriage following threats and actual physical assualt by her husband; that she could not meet the bail set; and that no purpose could be served by keeping her in jail and away from her infant son. He made her husband sound like a creep who was lucky to get away with a punctured lung, and the judge agreed to her release on her own recognizance. Afterward, she hugged Rhine and took her son in her arms from an older woman who stood waiting for her at the back of the court.

I intercepted Rhine on the courtroom steps.

“Mr. Rhine?”

He paused, and something like worry flashed across his face. As a public defender, he encountered some of the lowest forms of life and was sometimes forced to try to defend the indefensible. I didn’t doubt that, on occasion, his clients’ victims took things personally.

“Yes?” Up close he looked even younger. He hadn’t started to gray yet and his blue eyes were shielded by long, soft lashes. I flashed him my license. He glanced at it and gave a nod.

“What can I do for you, Mr. Parker? You mind if we talk while we walk? I promised my wife I’d take her out to dinner tonight.”

I fell into step alongside him.

“I’m working with Elliot Norton on the Atys Jones case, Mr. Rhine.”

His steps faltered for a moment, as though he had briefly lost his bearings, then resumed at a slightly faster speed. I accelerated to keep up.

“I’m no longer involved in that case, Mr. Parker.”

“Since Atys is dead, there isn’t much of a case, period.”

“I heard. I’m sorry.”

“I’m sure. I have some questions for you.”

“I’m not sure that I can answer any questions. Maybe you should ask Mr. Norton.”

“You know, I would, except Elliot isn’t around, and my questions are kind of delicate.”

He stopped at the corner of Broad as the light changed to red. He gave the offending signal a look that suggested he was taking its interference in the course of his life kind of personally.

“Like I said, I don’t know that I can help you.”

“I’d like to know why you gave up the case.”

“I have a lot of cases.”

“Not like this one.”

“My caseload doesn’t allow me to pick and choose, Mr. Parker. I was handed the Jones case. It was going to take up a lot of my time. I could have cleared ten cases in the time it took me just to go through the files. I wasn’t sorry to see it go.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why not?”

“You’re a young public defender. You’re probably ambitious and from what I saw of your work today you have good reason to be. A high-profile case like the murder of Marianne Larousse doesn’t come along every day. If you had acquitted yourself well, even if you had ultimately lost, it would have opened doors for you. I don’t think you wanted to give it up so easily.”

The lights had changed again, and we were jostled slightly as people crossed ahead of us. Still, Rhine didn’t move.

“Whose side are you on in this, Mr. Parker?”

“I haven’t decided yet. In the end, though, I guess I’m on the side of a dead woman and a dead man, for what it’s worth.”

“And Elliot Norton?”

“A friend. He asked me to come down here. I came.”

Rhine turned to face me.

“I was asked to pass the case on to him,” he said.

“By Elliot?”

“No. He never approached me. It was another man.”

“You know who he was?”

“He said his name was Kittim. He had something wrong with his face. He came to my office and told me that I should let Elliot Norton defend Atys Jones.”

“What did you say?”

“I told him that I couldn’t do that. There was no reason to. He made me an offer.”

I waited.

“We all have skeletons in our closet, Mr. Parker. Suffice it to say that he gave me a glimpse of mine. I have a wife and a young daughter. I made mistakes early in my marriage, but I haven’t repeated them. I wasn’t planning on having my family taken away from me for sins that I’ve tried to make up for. I told Jones that Elliot Norton would be better qualified to handle his case. He didn’t object. I walked away. I haven’t seen Kittim since then, and I hope I never see him again.”

“When were you approached?”

“About three weeks ago.”

Three weeks ago: about the time that Grady Truett had been killed. By then, James Foster and Marianne Larousse were also dead. As Adele Foster had said, something was happening, and whatever it was, it had reached a new level with the death of Marianne Larousse.

“Is that all, Mr. Parker?” asked Rhine. “I’m not happy about what I did. I don’t really want to go over it again.”

“That’s pretty much it,” I said.

“I really am sorry about Atys,” he said.

“I’m sure that’s a great comfort to him,” I replied.

I returned to my hotel. There was a message from Louis, confirming that he would be arriving the next morning, a little later than expected. My spirits lifted slightly.

That night, I stood at the window of my hotel, drawn by the steady, repeated hooting of a car horn. Across the street, in front of the cash machine, the black Coupe de Ville with the shattered windshield idled by the curb. As I watched, the rear driver’s side door opened, and the child emerged. She stood by the open door and beckoned to me, her lips moving soundlessly.

I got a place we can go

Her hips moved, shimmying to music only she could hear. She lifted her skirt, and she was naked yet sexless beneath, the skin smooth as a child’s doll. Her tongue moved over her lips.

Come down

Her hand moved over the smoothness of herself.

I got a place

She thrust herself at me once more before she climbed back into the car and it began to pull away, spiders spilling from its half-closed door. I awoke rubbing gossamer from my face and hair and had to shower to banish the sensation of creatures moving across my body.

21

I WAS AWAKENED BY a knock at my door shortly after 9 A.M. Instinctively, I felt myself reaching for a gun that was no longer there. I wrapped a towel around my waist, then padded softly to the door and peered through the peephole.

Six feet six inches of attitude, razor-sharp dress sense, and gay Republican pride looked me square in the eye.

“I could see you looking out,” said Louis as I opened the door. “Shit, don’t you ever go to the movies? Guy knocks, skinny-ass character actor looks out, guy puts barrel of gun to glass and shoots skinny-ass in the eye.” He was dressed in a black linen suit, offset with a white collarless shirt. A wave of expensive eau de cologne followed him into the room.

“You smell like a French whore,” I told him.

“I was a French whore, you couldn’t afford me. By the way, you maybe could use a little makeup yourself.”

I paused, saw myself in the mirror by the door, and looked away again. He was right. I was pale, and there were dark smudges under my eyes. My lips were cracked and dry, and I could taste something metallic in my mouth.

“I picked up something,” I said.

“No shit. The fuck you pick up, the plague? They bury people look better than you.”

“What have you got, Tourette’s? You have to swear all the time?”

He raised his hands in a backing-off gesture. “Hey, glad I came. Nice to be appreciated.”

I apologized. “You checked in?”

“Uh-huh, ’cept some motherfucker-sorry, but, shit, he was a motherfucker-try to hand me his bags at the door.”

“What did you do?”

“Took them, put them in the trunk of a cab, gave the guy fifty bucks, and told him to take them to the charity store.”

“Classy.”

“I like to think so.”

I left him watching television while I showered and dressed, then we headed down to Diana’s on Meeting for coffee and a bite to eat. I ate half a bagel, then pushed it away.

“You got to eat.”

I shook my head. “It’ll pass.”

“It’ll pass and you be dead. So how we doin’?”

“Same as usual: dead people, a mystery, more dead people.”

“Who we lost?”

“The boy. His guardians. Maybe Elliot Norton.”

“Shit, don’t sound like we got anybody left. Anyone hires you better leave you your fee in their will.”

I filled him in on all that had occurred, leaving out only the black car. That I didn’t need to burden him with.

“So what you gonna do?”

“Push a stick into the beehive and rustle up some bees. The Larousses are hosting a party today. I think we should avail ourselves of their hospitality.”

“We got an invite?”

“Has not having one ever stopped us before?”

“No, but sometimes I just like to be invited to shit, you know what I’m sayin’, instead of havin’ to bust in, get threatened, irritate the nice white folks, put the fear of the black man on them.”

He paused, seemed to think for a while about what he had just said, then brightened.

“Sounds good, doesn’t it?” I said.

“Real good,” he agreed.

We drove most of the way to the old Larousse plantation in separate vehicles, Louis parking his car about half a mile from the gates before joining me for the rest of the journey. I asked him about Angel.

“He workin’ on a job’.”

“Anything I should know about?”

He looked at me for a long time.

“I don’t know. Maybe, but not now.”

“Uh-huh. I see you made the news.”

He didn’t reply for a couple of seconds. “Angel tell you somethin’?”

“Just gave me the name of the town. You waited a long time to settle that score.”

He shrugged. “They was worth killin’, they just wasn’t worth travelin’ too far to kill.”

“And since you were on your way down here anyway…”

“I figured I’d stop by,” he finished. “Can I go now, Officer?”

I let it drop. At the entrance to the Larousse estate, a tall man in a flunky’s suit waved us down.

“Can I see your invitations, gentlemen?”

“We didn’t get invitations,” I said, “but I’m pretty sure somebody is expecting us.”

“The names?”

“Parker. Charlie Parker.”

“By two,” added Louis, helpfully.

The guard spoke into his walkie-talkie, out of earshot from us. We waited, two or three cars lining up behind us, until the guard finished talking.

“You can go ahead. Mr. Kittim will meet you at the parking area.”

“Surprise, surprise,” said Louis. I had told him about my encounter with Bowen and Kittim at the Antioch rally.

“Told you this would work,” I said. “That’s why I’m a detective.” It struck me then, my worries about the consequences of the Caina incident aside, that I was already feeling better since Louis had arrived. That wasn’t too surprising, since I now had a gun, thanks to him, and I was pretty certain that Louis had at least one more on his person.

We followed half a mile of live oaks, palmettos, and palms, much of it overhung with Spanish moss. Cicadas chirped in the trees and droplets from the morning’s now departed rain kept up a steady rhythmic patter on the roof and road until we emerged from the trees and onto an expanse of green lawn. Another white-gloved flunky directed us to park the car beneath one of a number of tarpaulins erected to shelter the vehicles from the sunlight, the canvas shifting slightly in the currents of cold air cast by one of a number of huge industrial air conditioners arrayed on the grass. Long tables had been arranged along three sides of a square and covered by starched linen tablecloths. Huge amounts of food had been arrayed upon them while black servants in pristine white shirts and trousers hovered anxiously, waiting to serve guests. Others moved through the crowds already gathered on the lawn, offering champagne and cocktails. I looked at Louis. He looked at me. Apart from the servants, he was the only person of color present. He was also the only guest dressed in black.

“You should have worn a white jacket,” I said. “You look like an exclamation mark. Plus, you might have picked up a few bucks in tips.”

“Look at them brothers,” he said, despairingly. “Ain’t nobody here heard of Denmark Vesey?”

A dragonfly glided across the grass by my feet, hunting for prey among the blades. There were no birds to prey on him in turn, at least none that I could see or hear. The only sign of life came from a single heron standing in a patch of marshland to the northeast of the house, the waters around it seemingly stilled by a carpet of algae. Beside it, amid rows of oak and pecans, stood the remains of small dwellings, equidistantly spaced, their tiled roofs now gone and the miscast and broken bricks used in their construction weathered by the elements over the century and a half that had probably passed since their original establishment. Even I could guess what it represented: the remains of a slave street.

“You’d think they’d have knocked them down,” I said.

“That’s heritage,” said Louis. “Right up there with flying the Confederate flag and keeping one pillowcase clean at all times. Y’know, for special wear.”

The Larousses’s old plantation house was pre-Revolutionary redbrick, a Georgian-Palladian villa dating back to the mid-eighteenth century. Limestone steps led up a set of twin staircases to a marble-floored portico. Four Doric pillars supported the gallery that ran across the front of the house, four windows on either side over two levels. Elegantly dressed couples crowded in the shade of the porch.

Our attention was distracted by a party of men moving quickly across the lawn. They were all white, all had earpieces, and all were sweating beneath their dark suits, despite the efforts of the air conditioners. The only exception was the man at the center of the group. Kittim wore a blue blazer over tan trousers and penny loafers, his white shirt buttoned to the neck. His head and face were largely concealed by the baseball cap and sunglasses, but they couldn’t conceal the blade wound that had been torn in his right cheek.

Atys. That was why the T-bar cross had not been on his body when he was found.

Kittim stopped about five feet away from us and raised his hand. Instantly, the men around him paused, then spread out in a semicircle surrounding us. No words were spoken for a moment. His attention shifted from Louis to me, then back again. His smile remained fixed in place, even when Louis spoke to him for the first time.

“What. The fuck. Are you?” asked Louis.

Kittim didn’t respond to him.

“This is Kittim,” I explained.

“Ain’t he the pretty one?”

“Mr. Parker,” said Kittim, still ignoring Louis. “We weren’t expecting you.”

“It was a last-minute decision,” I replied. “Some sudden deaths cleared my schedule.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Kittim. “I can’t help but notice that you and your colleague appear to be armed.”

“Armed.” I looked disapprovingly at Louis. “Told you it wasn’t that kind of party.”

“Never hurts to come prepared. Folks don’t take us seriously otherwise,” said Louis.

“Oh, I take you very seriously,” said Kittim, acknowledging him properly for the first time. “So seriously that I’d be grateful if you would come with us to the basement, where we can dispose of your weapons without alarming the other guests.”

Already I could see people casting curious looks in our direction. As if on cue, a string quartet struck up from the far side of the lawn. They were playing a Strauss waltz. How quaint.

“No offense, man, but we ain’t goin’ to no basement with you.” It was Louis.

“Then you’ll force us to take action.”

Louis’s eyebrow rose about half an inch. “Yeah, what you gonna do, kill us on the lawn? That’s gonna be some party, you do that. People be talking about it for a loooong time. ‘Hey, you remember Earl’s party, when those sweaty guys and the fucker with leprosy tried to take the guns away from those fellas that arrived late, and they drew down on them and Bessie Bluechip got all that blood on her dress? Man, how we laughed…’”

The tension was perceptibly rising. The men around Kittim were waiting for an indication from him on how to proceed, but he wasn’t moving. His smile remained fixed in place as if he’d died with it and then been stuffed and mounted on the lawn. I felt something roll down my back and pool at the base of my spine, and realized that the security guards weren’t the only ones who were sweating.

The tension was broken by a voice from the porch.

“Mr. Kittim,” it said. “Don’t keep our guests on the grass. Bring them up here.”

The voice came from Earl Jr., looking elegantly wasted in a blue double-breasted jacket and jeans pressed with the crease along the knee. His light hair was brushed forward to disguise his widow’s peak, and his lips seemed even fuller and more feminine than when last I saw him. Kittim inclined his head slightly, indicating we should do as requested, then he and his men fell into place behind and around us. It was obvious to anyone with half a brain that we were about as welcome as bugs in the buffet, but the guests around us studiously pretended to ignore us. Even the servants didn’t look our way. We were led through the main doors and into a great hall floored with loblolly pine. Two drawing rooms opened up on either side, and a graceful double stairway led to the upper floor. The doors closed behind us and we were disarmed within seconds. They got two guns and a knife out of Louis. They seemed impressed.

“Look at you,” I said. “Two guns.”

“And a knife. I had to get the trousers cut special.”

Kittim moved around until he was standing by Earl Jr.’s side. Kittim had a shiny blue Taurus in his hand.

“Why are you here, Mr. Parker?” said Larousse. “This is a private party, the first such occasion since the death of my sister.”

“Why break out the champagne now? You have something to celebrate?”

“Your presence is not welcome here.”

“Somebody killed Atys Jones.”

“I heard. You’ll forgive me if I shed no tears.”

“He didn’t murder your sister, Mr. Larousse, but I suspect you already know that.”

“Why would you suspect that?”

“Because I think Mr. Kittim here probably tortured Atys before he killed him in an effort to find out who did. Because you think, as I do, that the person responsible for your sister’s death may also be responsible for the deaths of Landron Mobley, Grady Truett, the suicide of James Foster, and possibly the death of Elliot Norton.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He didn’t look surprised at the mention of Elliot’s name.

“I also think that Elliot Norton might have been trying to find out who was responsible as well, which was why he took on the Jones case, and I’m starting to think that he may have taken it on with your approval, maybe even your cooperation. Except he wasn’t making enough progress, so you took matters into your own hands after Mobley’s body was found.”

I turned to Kittim.

“Did you enjoy killing Atys Jones, Kittim? Did you enjoy shooting an old woman in the back?”

I saw the blow coming too late to react. His fist caught me in the hollow of my left temple and sent me sprawling to the ground. Louis twitched slightly, on the verge of movement, but froze with the sound of hammers cocking.

“You need to work on your manners, Mr. Parker,” said Kittim. “You can’t come in here and make accusations of that kind without incurring the consequences.”

I raised myself slowly onto my hands and knees. The punch had rattled me, and I felt bile rising into my throat. I gagged, then vomited.

“Oh dear,” said Larousse. “Now look what you’ve done. Toby, get somebody to clean that up.”

Kittim’s feet appeared beside me. “You’re a mess, Mr. Parker.” He squatted down so I could see his face. “Mr. Bowen doesn’t like you. Now I can see why. Don’t think that we’ve finished with you yet. Me, I’d be very surprised if you make it home alive out of South Carolina. In fact, I’d say the odds against it would be quite attractive, if I were a gambling man.”

The door in front of me opened, and a manservant entered. He didn’t appear to register the guns or the tension in the room. He simply knelt down as I stood unsteadily, and began to scrub the floorboards clean. He was followed by Earl Sr.

“What’s going on here?” he asked.

“Some uninvited guests, Mr. Larousse,” replied Kittim. “They’re about to leave.”

The old man barely glanced at him. It was clear that Larousse didn’t like Kittim and resented his presence in his house, yet still Kittim was here. Larousse said nothing to him and instead diverted his attention to his son, whose confidence immediately began to dissipate in his father’s presence.

“Who are they?” he asked.

“This is the investigator I spoke to at the hotel, the one hired by Elliot Norton to get Marianne’s nigger murderer off the hook,” stammered Earl Jr.

“Is that true?” asked the older man.

I wiped the back of my hand over my mouth.

“No,” I said. “I don’t believe that Atys Jones killed your daughter, but I will find out who did.”

“It’s not your business.”

“Atys is dead. So are the people who gave him sanctuary in their home. You’re right: finding out what happened isn’t my business. It’s more than that. It’s my moral obligation.”

“I would advise you to take your moral obligations elsewhere, sir. This one will lead you to ruin.” He turned to his son. “Have them escorted off my property.”

Earl Jr. looked to Kittim. The decision was clearly his to make.

After a pause to assert his authority, Kittim nodded to his men and they moved forward, their guns held discreetly by their sides so as not to alarm the guests when we left the house.

“And, Mr. Kittim,” added Earl Sr.

Kittim turned to look at him.

“In future, conduct your beatings elsewhere. This is my house and you are not a member of my staff.”

He shot a final harsh look at his son, then went out onto the lawn to rejoin his guests.

We were placed at the center of a circle of men and escorted to the car. Our weapons were placed in the trunk, minus their ammunition. Kittim leaned on the driver’s side window as I prepared to drive away. The smell of burning was so strong that I almost gagged again.

“Next time I see you will be the last,” he said. “Now take your porch monkey and get out of here.” He winked at Louis, then he patted the roof of the car and watched us drive away.

I touched my temple where Kittim’s punch had landed, and winced at the contact.

“You okay to drive?” asked Louis.

“I think so.”

“Looked like Kittim was makin’ himself at home back there.”

“He’s there because Bowen wants him there.”

“Means Bowen got something on the Larousses, if his boy has the run of the house.”

“He called you a bad name.”

“I heard.”

“You seem to be taking it pretty calmly, all things considered.”

“Wasn’t worth dyin’ over. Least, not worth my dyin’ over. Kittim’s another matter. Like the man said, we be seein’ him again. It’ll wait.”

“You think you can stay with him?”

“Sure. Where you goin’?”

“To get a history lesson. I’m tired of being nice to people.”

Louis looked mildly surprised.

“Just how exactly you been definin’ ‘nice’ up to now?”

22

THERE WAS A message waiting for me when I got back to my hotel. It was from Phil Poveda. He wanted me to call him. He didn’t sound panicked, or fearful. In fact, I thought I detected a note of relief in his voice. First, though, I called Rachel. Bruce Taylor, one of the patrolmen out of Scarborough, was in the kitchen when she answered, drinking coffee and eating a cookie. It made me feel better knowing that the cops were dropping by as MacArthur had promised and that somewhere the Klan Killer was being intolerant of lactose, among other things.

“Wallace has been by a few times as well,” said Rachel.

“How is Mr. Lonelyheart?”

“He went shopping in Freeport. He bought himself a couple of jackets in Ralph’s, some new shirts and ties. He’s a work in progress, but there’s potential there. And Mary really seems to be his type.”

“Desperate?”

“The word you’re looking for is ‘easygoing.’ Now go away. I have an attractive man in uniform to take care of.”

I hung up and dialed Phil Poveda’s number.

“It’s Parker,” I said, when he picked up the phone.

“Hey,” he replied. “Thanks for calling.” He sounded upbeat, almost cheerful. This was a far cry from the Phil Poveda who had threatened me with a gun two days before. “I’ve just been putting my affairs in order. You know, wills and shit. I’m a pretty wealthy man, I just never knew it. Admittedly, I’ll have to die to capitalize on it, but that’s cool.”

“Mr. Poveda, are you feeling okay?” It was kind of a redundant question. Phil Poveda appeared to be feeling better than okay. Unfortunately, I figured Phil Poveda felt that way because his sanity was falling down around his ears.

“Yeah,” he said, and for the first time a twinge of doubt crept into his voice. “Yeah, I think so. You were right: Elliot’s dead. They found his car. It was on the news.”

I didn’t reply.

“Like you said, that leaves just me and Earl and, unlike Earl, I don’t have my daddy and my Nazi friends to protect me.”

“You mean Bowen.”

“Uh-huh, Bowen and that Aryan freak of his. But they won’t be able to protect him forever. Someday, he’ll find himself alone, and then…”

He let himself trail off before resuming.

“I just want it all to be over.”

“You want what to be over?”

“Everything: the killing, the guilt. Hell, the guilt most of all. You got time, we can talk about it. I got time. Not much, though, not much. Time’s running out for me. Time’s running out for all of us.”

I told him I’d be right over. I also wanted to tell him to stay away from the medicine cabinet and any sharp objects, but by then the glimmer of sanity that had briefly shone through had been swallowed up by the dark clouds in his brain. He just said “Cool!” and put down the phone.

I packed my bags and checked out of the hotel. Whatever happened next, I wouldn’t be back in Charleston for a while.

Phil Poveda answered his door wearing shorts, deck shoes, and a white T-shirt depicting Jesus Christ pulling back his robes to reveal the thorn-enclosed heart within.

“Jesus is my savior,” explained Phil. “Every time I look in the mirror, I’m reminded of that fact. He is ready to forgive me.”

Poveda’s pupils had shrunk to the size of pinheads. Whatever he was on was strong stuff. You could have given it to the folks on the Titanic and watched them descend beneath the waves with beatific smiles on their faces. He shepherded me into his neat oak kitchen and made decaf coffee for both of us. For the next hour, his coffee sat untouched beside him. Pretty soon, I’d laid mine aside as well.

After hearing Phil Poveda’s tale, I didn’t think I’d ever want to eat or drink again.

The bar, Obee’s, is gone now. It was a roadhouse dive off Bluff Road, a place where clean-cut college boys could get five-dollar blow jobs from poor blacks and poorer whites out among the trees that descended in dark concave down to the banks of the Congaree, then return to their buddies, high-fiving and grinning, while the women washed their mouths out from the tap in the yard. But close to where it once stood is a new structure: the Swamp Rat, where Atys Jones and Marianne Larousse spent their last hours together before her death.

The Jones sisters used to drink in Obee’s, though one of them, Addy, was barely seventeen and the older sister, Melia, by a quirk of nature, looked younger still. By then, Addy had already given birth to her son, Atys: the fruit, it appeared, of an ill-fated liaison with one of her momma’s passing boyfriends, the late Davis “Boot” Smoot, a liaison that might have been classified as rape had she seen fit to report it. So Addy had begun to raise the boy with her grandma, for her mother couldn’t bear to look at her. Pretty soon, she wouldn’t be there for her mother to ignore, for on this night all traces of Addy and her sister were about to be erased from this earth.

They were drunk and swaying slightly as they emerged from the bar, a chorus of whistles and catcalls sending them on their way, a boozy wind in their sails. Addy tripped and landed on her ass, and her sister doubled over with laughter. She hauled the younger girl up, her skirt rising to reveal her nakedness, and as they stood swaying they saw the young men packed into the car, the ones in the back climbing over one another to catch a glimpse. Embarrassed and not a little afraid, even in their drunkenness, the laughter of the young women faded and they aimed for the road, their heads down.

They had walked only a few yards when they heard the sound of the car behind them and the headlights picked them out among the stones and fallen pine needles on the road. They looked behind them. The huge twin eyes were almost upon them, and then the car was alongside and one of the rear doors had opened. A hand reached out for Addy, grasping. It tore her dress and drew ragged parallel cuts along her arm.

The girls started running into the undergrowth toward the smell of water and rotting vegetation. The car pulled in by the side of the road, the lights died, and with whoops and war cries, the chase was on.

“We used to call them whores,” said Poveda. His eyes were still unnaturally bright. “And they were, or as good as. Landron knew all about them. That was why we let him hang out with us, because Landron knew all the whores, the girls who’d let you fuck them for a six-pack of beer, the girls who wouldn’t talk if you maybe had to force them a little. It was Landron who told us about the Jones sisters. One of them had a child, and she couldn’t have been but sixteen when it was born. And the other one, Landron said she was just crying out for it, took it anyway she could. Hell, they didn’t even wear panties. Landron said that was so the men could get in and out easier. I mean, what kind of girls were they, drinking in bars like that, going around buck naked under their skirts? They were advertising it, so why not sell? They might even have enjoyed it, if they’d heard us out. And we’d have paid them. We had money. We didn’t want it for nothing.”

He was in his own place now, no longer Phil Poveda, a late thirty-something software engineer with a paunch and a mortgage. Instead, he was a boy again. He was back with the others, running through the long grass, his breath catching in his throat, feeling the ache at his crotch.

“Hey, hold up!” he cried. “Hold up, we got money!”

And around him, the others cracked up laughing, because it was Phil, and Phil knew how to have a good time. Phil always made them laugh. Phil was a funny guy.

They chased the girls into the Congaree and along Cedar Creek, Truett stumbling and falling into the water, James Foster helping him to his feet again. They caught up with them where the waters began to grow deeper, close by the first of the big cypress trees with their swollen boles. Melia fell, tripping on an exposed root, and before her sister could pull her to her feet they were on them. Addy struck out at the man nearest her, her small fist impacting above his eye, and Landron Mobley hit her so hard in response that he broke her jaw and she fell back, dazed.

“You fucking bitch,” Landron said. “You fucking, fucking bitch.” And there was something in his voice, the low menace, that made the others pause; even Phil, who was struggling to hold on to Melia. And they knew then that it was going down, that there was no turning back. Earl Larousse and Grady Truett held Addy down for Landron while the others stripped her sister. Elliot Norton, Phil, and James Foster looked at each other, then Phil pushed Melia to the ground and soon he, like Landron, was moving inside, the two men falling into a rhythm beside each other while the night insects buzzed around them, attracted by the scent of them, feeding on the men and on the women, and probing at the blood that began to seep into the ground.

It was Phil’s fault, in the end. He was getting off the girl, breathing hard, his face turned away from her, looking toward her sister and her sister’s ruined face, the import of what they were doing gradually dawning on him now that he had spent himself, when suddenly he felt the impact at his groin and he tumbled sideways, the shock already transforming itself into a burning at the pit of his stomach. Then Melia was on her feet and running away from the swamp, heading east toward the Larousse tract and the main road beyond.

Mobley was the first to head after her, then Foster. Elliot, torn between taking his turn with the girl on the ground or stopping her sister, stood unmoving for a time before running after his friends. Grady and Earl were already pushing at each other, joshing as they fought for their turn with Addy.

The purchase of the karst had been an expensive mistake for the Larousse family. The land was honeycombed by underwater streams and caves, and they had almost lost a truck down a sinkhole following a collapse before they discovered that the limestone deposits weren’t even big enough to justify quarrying. Meanwhile, successful mines were being dug in Cayce, about twenty miles up-river, and Wynnsboro, up 77 toward Charlotte, and then there were the tree huggers protesting at the potential threat to the swamp. The Larousses turned their attentions in other directions, leaving the land as a reminder to themselves never to be caught out like that again.

Melia passed some fallen, rusted fencing, and a bullet-riddled NO TRESPASSING sign. Her feet were torn and bleeding, but she kept moving. There were houses beyond the karst, she knew. There would be help for her there, help for her sister. They would come for them and take them to safety and-

She heard the men behind her, closing rapidly. She peered back, still running, and suddenly her toes were no longer on solid ground but were suspended over some deep, dark place. She teetered on the brink of the sinkhole, smelling the filthy, polluted water below, then her balance failed her and she plummeted over the edge. She landed with a splash far below, emerging seconds later choking and coughing, the water burning her eyes, her skin, her privates. She looked up and saw the three men silhouetted against the stars. With slow strokes, she swam for the edges of the hole. She tried to find a handhold, but her fingers kept slipping on the stone. She heard the men talking, and one of them disappeared. Her arms and legs moved slowly as she kept herself afloat in the dank, viscous waters. The burning was getting worse now, and she had trouble keeping her eyes open. From above, there came a new light. She stared up in time to see the rag flare and then the gasoline can was falling, falling…

The sinkholes had, over the years, become a dumping ground for poisons and chemicals, the waste infecting the water supply and slowly, over time, entering the Congaree itself, for all of these hidden streams ultimately connected with the great river. Many of the substances dumped in the hole were dangerous. Some were corrosives, others weedkillers. Most, though, had one thing in common.

They were highly flammable.

The three men stepped back hurriedly as a pillar of flame shot up from the depths of the hole, illuminating the trees, the broken ground, the abandoned machinery, and their faces, shocked and secretly delighted at the effect they had achieved.

One of them wiped his hands on the remains of the old sheet he had torn for use as a wick, trying to rid himself of the worst of the gasoline.

“Fuck her,” said Elliot Norton. He wrapped the rag around a stone and tossed it into the inferno. “Let’s go.”

I said nothing for a time. Poveda was tracing unknowable patterns on the tabletop with his index finger. Elliot Norton, a man whom I had considered a friend, had participated in the rape and burning of a young girl. I stared at Poveda, but he was intent upon his finger patterns. Something had broken inside Phil Poveda, the thing that had allowed him to continue living after what they had done, and now Phil Poveda was drowning in the tide of his recollection.

I was watching a man go insane.

“Go on,” I said. “Finish it.”

“Finish her,” said Mobley. He was looking down at Earl Larousse, who was kneeling beside the prone woman, buttoning his pants. Earl’s brow furrowed.

“What?”

“Finish her,” repeated Mobley. “Kill her.”

“I can’t do that,” said Earl. He sounded like a little boy.

“You fucked her quick enough,” said Mobley. “You leave her here and somebody finds her, then she’ll talk. We let her go, she’ll talk. Here.” He picked up a rock and tossed it at Earl. It struck him painfully on the knee and he winced, then rubbed at the spot.

“Why me?” he whined.

“Why any of us?” asked Mobley.

“I’m not doing it,” said Earl.

Then Mobley pulled a knife from beneath the folds of his shirt. “Do it,” said Mobley, “or I’ll kill you instead.”

Suddenly, the power in the group shifted and they understood. It had been Mobley all along: Mobley who had led them; Mobley who had found the pot, the LSD; Mobley who had brought them to the women; and Mobley who had ultimately damned them. Maybe that had been his intention all along, thought Phil later: to damn a group of rich, white boys who had patronized him, insulted him, then taken him under their wing when they saw what he could procure for them just as they would surely abandon him when his usefulness came to an end. And of them all, it was Larousse who was the most spoiled, the most cosseted, the weakest, the most untrustworthy; and so it would fall to him to kill the girl.

Larousse began to cry. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t make me do this.”

Mobley, unspeaking, lifted the blade and watched it gleam in the moonlight. Slowly, with trembling hands, Larousse picked up the rock.

“Please,” he said, one last time. To his right, Phil turned away, only to feel Mobley’s hand wrench him around.

“No, you watch. You’re part of it, you watch it end. Now-” He turned his attention back to Larousse. “Finish her, you chickenshit fuck. Finish her, you fucking pretty boy, unless you want to go back to your daddy and have to tell him what you’ve done, cry on his shoulder like the little fucking faggot that you are, beg him to make it go away. Finish her. Finish her!”

Larousse’s whole body was shaking as he raised the rock then brought it down, with minimal force, on the girl’s face. Still there came a cracking sound, and she moaned. Larousse was howling now, his face convulsed with fear, the tears rolling down his cheeks, streaking through the dirt that had accumulated on them during the rape of the girl. He raised the rock a second time, then brought it down harder. This time, the crack was louder. The rock came up once more, then down, faster now, and Larousse was making a high-pitched mewling sound as he struck at the girl again and again and again, lost in the frenzy of it, blood-spattered, until hands reached out for him and they dragged him from her body, the rock still grasped between his fingers, his eyes huge and white in his red face.

The girl on the ground was long dead.

“You did good,” said Mobley. The knife was gone. “You’re a regular killer, Earl.” He patted the sobbing man on the shoulder. “A regular killer.”

“Mobley took her away,” said Poveda. “People were coming, drawn by the fire, and we had to leave. Landron’s old man was a gravedigger in Charleston. He’d opened a grave in Magnolia the day before, so Landron and Elliot dumped her there and used some of the earth to cover her. They buried the guy on top of her the next day. He was the last in his family. Nobody was ever going to be digging up the plot again.” He swallowed. “At least, they weren’t until Landron’s body got dumped there.”

“And Melia?” I asked.

“She was burned alive. Nothing could have survived that blaze.”

“And nobody knew about this? You told no one else about what you’d done?”

He shook his head. “It was just us. They looked for the girls, but they never found them. Rains came and washed everything away. As far as anybody knew, they’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.

“But somebody found out,” he concluded. “Somebody’s making us pay. Marianne was killed. James took his own life. Grady got his throat cut. Mobley was murdered, then Elliot. Someone is hunting us down, punishing us. I’m next. That’s why I had to get my affairs in order.”

He smiled.

“I’m leaving it all to charity. You think that’s a good thing to do? I think so. I think it’s a good thing.”

“You could go to the police. You could tell them what you did.”

“No, that’s not the way. I have to wait.”

“I could go to the police.”

He shrugged. “You could, but I’ll just say you made it all up. My lawyer will have me out in a matter of hours, if they even bother to take me in at all, then I’ll be back here, waiting.”

I stood.

“Jesus will forgive me,” said Poveda. “He forgives us all. Doesn’t He?”

Something flickered in his eyes, the last dying thrashing of his sanity before it sank beneath the waves.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know if there’s that much forgiveness in the universe.”

Then I left him.

The Congaree. The spate of recent deaths. The link between Elliot and Atys Jones. The T-bar in Landron Mobley’s chest, and the smaller version of it that hung from the neck of the man with the damaged eyes.

Tereus. I had to find Tereus.

The old man still sat on the worn steps of the rooming house, smoking his pipe and watching the traffic go by. I asked him for the number of Tereus’s room.

“Number 8, but he ain’t there,” he told me.

“You know, I think you may be bad luck for me,” I said. “Whenever I come here, Tereus is gone but you’re taking up porch space.”

“Thought you’d be glad to see a familiar face.”

“Yeah, Tereus’s.”

I walked past him and headed up the stairs. He watched me go.

I knocked on the door to 8, but there was no reply. From the rooms at either side I could hear competing radios playing, and stale cooking smells clung to the carpets and the walls. I tried the handle and it turned easily, the door opening onto a room with a single unmade bed, a punch-drunk couch and a gas stove in one corner. There was barely enough room between the stove and the bed for a thin man to squeeze by and look out of the small, grime-caked window. To my left was a toilet and shower stall, both reasonably clean. In fact, the room might have been threadbare, but it wasn’t dirty. Tereus had done his best to make something of it: new drapes hung from the plastic rail at the window, and a cheap framed print of roses in a vase hung on the wall. There was no TV, no radio, no books. The mattress had been torn from the bed and thrown in a corner, and clothes were scattered around the room, but I guessed that whoever had trashed the place had found nothing. Anything of value Tereus owned he kept elsewhere, in his true home.

I was about to leave when the door opened behind me. I turned to find a big, overweight black man in a bright shirt blocking my way out. He had a cigarette in one hand and a baseball bat in the other. Behind him, I could see the old man puffing on his pipe.

“Can I help you with something?” asked the man with the bat.

“You the super?”

“I’m the owner, and you’re trespassing.”

“I was looking for somebody.”

“Well, he ain’t here, and you got no right to be in his place.”

“I’m a private detective. My name is-”

“I don’t give a good goddamn what your name is. You just get out of here now before I have to defend myself against an unprovoked assault.”

The old man with the pipe chuckled. “Unprovoked assault,” he echoed. “Thass good.” He shook his head in merriment and blew out a puff of smoke.

I walked to the door and the big man stood to one side to let me pass. He still filled most of the doorway and I had to breathe in deeply to squeeze by. He smelled of drain cleaner and Old Spice. I paused at the stairs.

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“How come his door is unlocked?”

The man’s face creased in puzzlement. “You didn’t open it?’

“No, it was open when I got here, and somebody had gone through his things.”

The owner turned to the man with the pipe. “Anybody else asking after Tereus?”

“No, sir, just this man.”

“Look, I’m not trying to make any trouble,” I continued. “I just need to talk to Tereus. When was the last time that you saw him?”

“Few days ago,” said the owner, relenting. “Round about eight, after he finished over at the club. He had a pack with him, said he wouldn’t be back for a couple of days.”

“And the door was locked then?”

“Watched him lock it myself.”

Which meant that somebody had entered the building since the death of Atys Jones and had probably done what I had just done: gone into the apartment, either to find Tereus himself or something connected with him.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Yeah, don’t mention it.”

“Unprovoked assault,” said the pipe smoker again. “Thass funny.”

The late afternoon deviants were already assembled in LapLand by the time I arrived, among them an elderly man in a torn shirt who rubbed his hand up and down his beer bottle in a manner that suggested he spent too much time alone thinking about women, and a middle-aged guy in a tatty business suit, his tie already at half-mast, and a shot glass before him. His briefcase lay at his feet. It had fallen open and now stood, slack-jawed, on the floor. It was empty. I wondered when he would pluck up the courage to tell his wife that he’d lost his job, that he’d been spending his days watching pole dancers or low-priced afternoon movies, that she didn’t have to iron his shirts anymore because, hell, he didn’t have to wear a shirt. In fact, he didn’t even have to get out of bed in the mornings if he didn’t feel like it and hey, you got a problem with that then don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

I found Lorelei sitting at the bar, waiting for her turn to dance. She didn’t look too happy to see me, but I was used to that. The bartender made a move to intercept me, but I lifted a finger.

“My name’s Parker. You got a problem, you call Willie. Otherwise, back off.”

He backed off.

“Slow afternoon,” I said to Lorelei.

“They’re always slow,” she said, her head turning away from me to signal her lack of interest in engaging me in conversation. I figured that she’d taken an earful from her boss for talking too much the last time I visited, and didn’t want to be seen to repeat her mistake. “The only cash these guys got are nickels and dimes and Canadian quarters.”

“Well then, I guess you’ll be dancing for the love of your art.”

She shook her head and stared back at me over her shoulder. It wasn’t a friendly look.

“You think you’re funny? Maybe even think you got ‘charm’? Well, let me tell you something: you don’t. What you got I see here every night, in every guy who sticks a dollar bill in the crack of my ass. They come in, they think they’re better than me, they maybe even got some fantasy that I’ll look at them and I won’t want to take their money, I’ll just want to take them home and fuck them till their lights go out. Well, that just ain’t gonna happen, and if I don’t put out for free for them, I sure ain’t gonna put out for free for you, so if you want something from me, you show me green.”

She had a point. I put a fifty on the bar, but kept my finger firmly fixed on the nose.

“Call me cautious,” I said. “Last time, I think you reneged on our agreement.”

“You got to talk to Tereus, didn’t you?”

“Yeah, but I had to go through your boss to get to him. Literally. Where is Tereus?”

Her lips thinned. “You really got it in for that guy, don’t you? You ever get tired of pressuring people?”

“Listen to me,” I said. “I’d prefer not to be here. I’d prefer not to be talking to you in this way. I don’t think I’m better than you, but I’m certainly no worse than you, so save the speeches. You don’t want my money? That’s fine.” The music came to a close, and the few customers clapped desultorily as the dancer gathered up her clothes and headed for the dressing room.

“You’re up,” I said. I began to pull the fifty back, but her hand slapped down upon the edge.

“He didn’t come in this morning. Last couple of mornings neither.”

“So I gather. Where is he?”

“He has a place in town.”

“He hasn’t been back there in days. I need more than that.”

The bartender announced Lorelei’s name, and she grimaced. She slipped from her chair, the fifty still trapped between us.

“He got hisself a place up by the Congaree. There’s some private land in the reserve. That’s where he’s at.”

“Where exactly?”

“You want me to draw you a map? I can’t tell you, but there ain’t but one stretch of private left in the park.”

I released the fifty.

“Next time, I don’t care how much money you bring, I ain’t talking to you. I’d be better earning two dollars from those sorry motherfuckers than a thousand selling out good people to you. But you can take this for free: you ain’t the only one bein’ askin’ about Tereus. Couple of guys came in yesterday, but Willie gave them the bum’s rush, called them fucking Nazis.”

I nodded my thanks.

“And I still liked them better than you,” she added.

With that she walked to the stage, the CD player behind the bar knocking out the first bars of “Love Child.” She had palmed the fifty.

Obviously, she planned to turn over her new leaf tomorrow.

Phil Poveda was sitting at his kitchen table that night, two cups of cold coffee still lying untouched close by, when the door opened behind him and he heard the padding of feet. He raised his head, and the lights danced in his eyes. He turned around in his chair.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

The hook was poised above his head, and he recalled, in his final moments, Christ’s words to Peter and Andrew by the Sea of Galilee:

I will make you fishers of men.

Poveda’s lips trembled as he spoke his last words.

“This won’t hurt, will it?”

And the hook descended.

23

I DROVE IN silence to Columbia. There was no music in the car. I seemed to drift along I-26, northwest through Dorchester, Orangeburg, and Calhoun counties, the lights of the cars that passed me in the darkness like flights of fireflies moving in parallel, slowly fading into the distance or lost to the twists and bends of the road.

And everywhere there were trees, and in the blackness beyond their margins the land brooded. How could it not? It had been tainted by its own history, enriched by the bodies of the dead that lay beneath the leaves and the rocks: British and Colonial, Confederate and Union, slave and freeman, the possessor and the possessed. Go north, to York and Lancaster counties, and there were trails once traversed by the night riders, their horses galloping through dirt and water, white-draped, mud-speckled, the riders urging them on, terrorizing, annihilating, stamping the first shoots of a new future into the dirt beneath the horses’ hooves.

And the blood of the dead ran into the earth and clouded the rivers, flowing from the mountain forests of poplar, red maple, and flowering dogwood, the sculpin and dace absorbing it into their system as it passed through their gills; and the river otters that plucked them from the water gulped them down, and the blood with them. It was in the mayflies and stoneflies that darkened the air of the Piedmont Shoals, in the black-sided darters that anchored themselves to the bottom of ponds to avoid being eaten, in the sunfish that hovered near the safety of the spider lilies, the beauty of their white flowers masking their ugly, arachnoid underparts.

Here, on these silt-loaded waters, the sunlight moves in strange patterns, independent of the flow of the river or the demands of the breeze. These are the shiners, the small, silvery fish that blend with the light reflecting off the surface of the stream, dazzling predators into seeing the shoal as one single entity, one enormous, threatening life-form. These swamps are their safe haven, although the old blood had found its way even into them.

(And is that why you stayed here, Tereus? Is that why the little apartment contained so few traces of your existence? For you don’t exist in the city, not as you truly are. In the city you’re just another ex-con, another poor man cleaning up after those wealthier than himself, witnessing their appetites while quietly praying to your God for their salvation. But that’s just a front, isn’t it? The reality of you is very different. The reality of you is out here, in the swamps, with whatever you’ve been hiding for all these years. It’s you. You’re hunting them down, aren’t you, punishing them for what they did so long ago? This is your place. You discovered what they did and you decided to make them pay. But then jail got in the way-although, even in that, you were making somebody pay for his sins-and you had to wait to continue your work. I don’t blame you. I don’t think any man could look upon what those creatures had done and not want to punish them in any way possible. But that’s not true justice, Tereus, because by doing what you’re doing, the truth of what they did-Mobley and Poveda, Larousse and Truett, Elliot and Foster-will never be revealed, and without that truth, without that revelation, there can be no justice achieved.

And what of Marianne Larousse? Her misfortune was to be born into that family and to be marked by her brother’s crime. Unknowingly, she took his sins upon herself and was punished for them. She should not have been. With her death, a step was taken into another place, where justice and vengeance were without distinction.

So you have to be stopped, and the story of what took place in the Congaree told at last, because otherwise the woman with the scaled skin will continue wandering through the cypress and holly, a figure glimpsed in the shadows but never truly seen, hoping to find at last her lost sister and hold her close, cleansing the blood and filth from her, the misery and humiliation, the shame and the pain and the hurt.)

The swamps: I was passing close by them now. I drifted for a moment and felt the car cleave to one side, crossing the hard shoulder, jolting against the uneven ground, until I found myself back on the road. The swamps are a safety valve: they soak up the floodwater, keep the rains and the sediment from affecting the coastal plains. But the rivers still flow through them and the traces of the blood still linger. They are with them when the waters reach the coastal plain, there when they enter the black water, there when the flow of the salt marshes begins to slow, and there at last when they disappear into the sea: a whole land, a whole ocean, tainted by blood. One single act, its ramifications felt throughout all of nature; and so a world can be changed, ineffably altered, by a single death.

Flames: the light of the fires set by the night riders; the burning houses, the smoldering crops. The sound of the horses as they begin to smell the smoke and panic, their riders wrenching at the reins to hold them, to keep their eyes from the flames. But when they turn there are pits set in the ground before them, dark holes with black water in their depths, and more flames emerge, pillars of fire shooting up from the interconnected caverns, and the screams of the woman are lost in their roar.

Richland County: the Congaree River flowed to the north, and I was floating above the road, carried ever onward, my momentum determined by my surroundings. I was moving toward Columbia, toward the northwest, toward a reckoning, but I could think of nothing but the girl on the ground, her jaw detached, her eyes already emptying of consciousness.

Finish her.

She blinks.

Finish her.

I am no longer of myself.

Finish her.

Her eyes roll. She sees the rock descend.

Finish her.

She is gone.

I had booked a room at Claussen’s Inn on Greene Street, a converted bakery in the Five Points neighborhood close to the University of South Carolina. I showered and changed, then called Rachel again. I just needed to hear her voice. When she answered the phone she sounded a little drunk. She’d had a glass of Guinness-the pregnant woman’s friend-with one of her Audubon colleagues in Portland and it had gone straight to her head.

“It’s the iron,” she said. “It’s good for me.”

“They say that about a lot of things. It’s usually not true.”

“What’s happening down there?”

“Same old same old.”

“I’m worried about you,” she said, but her voice had changed. This time there was no slurring, no tipsiness, and I realized that the hint of drunkenness in her voice was a disguise, like a quickly executed artwork painted onto an Old Master to hide it and protect it from recognition. Rachel wanted to be drunk. She wanted to be happy and merry and unconcerned, drifting slightly on a glass of beer, but it was not to be. She was pregnant, the father of her child was far to the south, and people around him were dying. Meanwhile, a man who hated us both was trying to free himself from the state prison, and his promises of bargains and truces echoed dully in my head.

“I mean it,” I lied. “I’m okay. It’s coming to a close. I understand now. I think I know what happened.”

“Tell me,” she said. I closed my eyes, and it was as if we were lying side by side in the darkness. I caught the faint scent of her, and thought I felt the weight of her against me.

“I can’t.”

“Please. Share it, whatever it is. I need you to share something important with me, to reach out to me in some way.”

And so I told her.

“They raped two young women, Rachel, two sisters. One of them was the mother of Atys Jones. They beat her to death with a rock, then burned the other one alive.”

She didn’t respond, but I could hear her breathing deeply.

“Elliot was one of the men.”

“But he brought you down there. He asked you to help.”

“That’s right, he did.”

“It was all lies.”

“No, not entirely.” For the truth was always close to the surface.

“You have to get away from there. You have to leave.”

“I can’t.”

“Please.”

“I can’t. Rachel, you know I can’t.”

“Please!”

I ate a burger at Yesterday’s on Devine. Emmylou Harris was playing over the sound system. She was singing “Wrecking Ball,” Neil Young’s cracked voice harmonizing with Emmylou’s on his own song. In an age of Britneys and Christinas, there was something reassuring and strangely affecting about two older voices, both perhaps past their peak but weathered and mature, singing about love and desire and the possibility of one last dance. Rachel had hung up in tears. I could feel nothing but guilt for what I was putting her through but I couldn’t walk away, not now.

I ate in the dining area then moved into the bar and sat in a booth. Beneath the Plexiglass of the table lay photographs and old advertisements, all fading to yellow. A fat man in diapers mugged for the camera. A woman held a puppy. Couples hugged and kissed. I wondered if anyone remembered their names.

At the bar, a man in his late twenties, his head shaved, glanced at me in the mirror, then looked back down at his beer. Our eyes had barely met, but he couldn’t hide the recognition. I kept my eyes on the back of his head, taking in the strong muscles at his neck and shoulders, the bulge of his lats, his narrow waist. To a casual observer, he might have looked small, almost feminine, but he was wiry and he would be hard to knock down, and when he was knocked down he would get right back up again. There were tattoos on his triceps-I could see the ends of them below the sleeves of his T-shirt-but his forearms were clear, the bundles of muscle and tendon bunching then relaxing again as he clenched and unclenched his fists. I watched him as he flicked his glance at the mirror for a second time, then a third. Finally, he reached into the pocket of his faded, too tight jeans, and dumped some ones on the bar before springing from his stool. He advanced on me, even as the older man beside him at last understood what was happening and tried to reach out to stop him.

“You got a problem with me?” he asked. In the booths at either side of mine the conversation faded, then died. His left ear was pierced, the hole contained within an Indian ink clenched fist. His brow was high, and his blue eyes shone in his pale face.

“I thought you might have been coming on to me, way you were looking at me in the mirror,” I said. To my right, I heard a male voice snicker. The skinhead heard it too because his head jerked in that direction. The snickering ceased. He turned his attention back to me. By now, he was bouncing on the balls of his feet with suppressed aggression.

“Are you fucking with me?” he said.

“No,” I replied innocently. “Would you like me to?”

I gave him my most endearing smile. His face grew redder and he seemed about to make a move toward me when there came a low whistle from behind him. The older man materialized, his long dark hair slicked back against his head, and grasped the younger man firmly by the upper arm.

“Let it go,” he advised.

“He called me a fag,” protested the skinhead.

“He’s just trying to rile you. Walk away.”

For a moment, the skinhead tugged ineffectually at the older man’s grip, then spit noisily on the floor and stormed toward the door.

“I got to apologize for my young friend. He’s sensitive about these things.”

I nodded but gave no hint that I recalled the man before me. It was Earl Jr.’s messenger from Charleston Place, the man I had seen eating a hotdog at Roger Bowen’s rally. This man knew who I was, had followed me here. That meant that he knew where I was staying, maybe even suspected why I was here.

“We’ll be on our way,” he said.

He dipped his chin once in farewell, then turned to go.

“Be seeing you,” I said.

His back stiffened.

“Now why would you think that?” he asked, his head inclined slightly so that I could see his profile: the flattened nose, the elongated chin.

“I’m sensitive about these things,” I told him.

He scratched at his temple with the forefinger of his right hand. “You’re a funny man,” he said, giving up the pretense. “I’ll be sorry when you’re gone.”

Then he followed the skinhead from the bar.

I left twenty minutes later with a crowd of students, and stayed with them until I reached the corner of Greene and Devine. I could see no trace of the two men, but I had no doubt that they were close by. In the lobby of Claussen’s, jazz was playing over the speakers at low volume. I nodded a good night to the young guy behind the desk. He returned the gesture from over the top of a psychology textbook.

I called Louis from the room. He answered cautiously, not recognizing the number displayed.

“It’s me,” I said.

“How you doin’?”

“Not so good. I think I picked up a tail.”

“How many?”

“Two.” I told him about the scene in the bar.

“They out there now?”

“I’d guess they are.”

“You want me to come up there?”

“No, stay with Kittim and Larousse. Anything I should know?”

“Our friend Bowen came through this evening, spent some time with Earl Jr. and then a whole lot longer with Kittim. They must figure they got you where they want you. It was a trap, man, right from the start.”

No, not just a trap. There was more to it than that. Marianne Larousse, Atys, his mother and sister: what happened to them was real and terrible and unconnected to anything that had to do with Faulkner or Bowen. It was the real reason that I was down here, the reason that I had stayed. The rest was unimportant.

“I’ll be in touch,” I said, then hung up.

My room was at the front of the inn, facing out onto Greene Street. I took the mattress from the bed and laid it on the floor, arranging the sheets loosely on top of it. I undressed, then lay close to the wall beneath the window. The chain was on the door, there was a chair in front of it, and my gun lay on the floor beyond my pillow.

She was moving out there, somewhere, a white blur among the trees, illuminated by bleak moonlight. Behind her, it bedecked the river with glittering stars as it flowed beneath the overhanging trees.

The White Road is everywhere. It is everything. We are on it, and we are of it.

Go to sleep. Go to sleep dreaming of shadows moving along the White Road. Go to sleep watching falling girls crush lilies beneath them as they die. Go to sleep with Cassie Blythe’s torn hand emerging from the darkness.

Go to sleep without knowing if you are among the lost or the found, the living or the dead.

24

I HAD SET my alarm for 4 A.M. and was still bleary-eyed as I made my way across the lobby to the back door of the inn. The night clerk looked at me curiously, saw that I wasn’t carrying my bags, then went back to his books.

If I was being watched, then the two men were divided between the front and back doors. The back door led to the parking lot, with exits onto both Greene and Devine, but I doubted if I could drive away without being picked up. I took a handkerchief from my pocket and unscrewed the light inside the door. I’d already taken the precaution of shattering the outside light with the sole of my shoe when I had come in the night before. I opened the door a fraction, waited, then slipped out into the darkness. I used the ranks of parked cars to hide my progress until I reached Devine, then called a cab from a pay phone outside a gas station. Five minutes later, I was on my way to the Hertz desk at Columbia International Airport; from there, I drove back in a loop toward Congaree.

The Congaree Swamp is still comparatively inaccessible by road. The main route, along Old Bluff and Caroline Sims, takes visitors to the ranger station and from there sections of the swamp can be explored on foot using a system of boardwalks. But to venture deeper into the Congaree requires a boat, so I’d arranged to hire a ten-footer with a small outboard. The old guy who hired them out was waiting for me at the Highway 601 landing when I arrived, traffic rumbling across the Bates Bridge overhead. We exchanged cash and he took my car keys as security, and then I was on the river, the early morning sun already shining on the brown waters and on the huge cypress and water oak that overshadowed the banks.

In wet weather, the Congaree swells and floods the swamp, dumping nutrients on the plain. The result was the enormous trees that lined the river, their boles monstrous and swollen, their foliage so wide that at times it created a canopy over the flow, darkening and shading the waters beneath. Hurricane Hugo might have claimed some of the largest trees as casualties when it tore through the swamp, but this was still a place to make a man catch his breath at the size and scale of the great forest through which he was passing.

The Congaree marks the borders of Richland and Calhoun counties, its meanderings determining the limits of local political power, police jurisdictions, ordinances, and a hundred other tiny factors that influence the day-to-day lives of those who live within its reach. I had traveled some twelve miles along it when I came to a huge fallen cypress that jutted about halfway into the river. This, the old boatman had told me, marked the end of the state land and the beginning of the private tract, a section of swamp just under two miles long. Somewhere in there, probably close to the river, was Tereus’s home. I only hoped that it wouldn’t be too hard to find.

I tied up the boat at the cypress then jumped for the bank. The chorus of crickets nearby grew suddenly silent, then picked up again as I began to move away. I stayed with the bank, looking for signs of a trail, but could find nothing. Tereus had kept his presence here as low-key as possible. Even if trails had once existed before he was jailed, they were long overgrown by now and he had made no effort to clear them again. I stood at the bank and tried to find landmarks that would allow me to get my bearings when I made my way back to the river, then headed into the swamp.

I sniffed the air, hoping to detect wood smoke or cooking, but I could smell only damp and vegetation. I passed through a forest of sweet gums and water oaks, and water tupelos thick with dark purple fruit. Lower on the ground there was pawpaw and alder and great American holly bushes, the earth so thick with shrubs that all I could see was green and brown, the ground wet and slippery with decaying leaves and vegetation. At one point I almost walked into the web of a spiny orb weaver, the spider hanging like a small dark star in the center of its own galaxy of influence. It wasn’t dangerous, but there were other spiders here that were and I had endured enough of spiders in recent months to last me a lifetime. I picked up a branch about eighteen inches long and used it to strike out in front of me when I passed through stands of higher shrubs and trees.

I had been walking for about twenty minutes when I saw the house. It was an old cottage, based around a simple hall-and-parlor plan, two rooms wide and one room deep, but it had been expanded by the addition of an enclosed front porch and a long, narrow extension at the rear. There were signs of recent repairs to its heavy timber framing, and the central chimney had recently been repointed, but from the front the house still looked virtually the same as it had when it was first constructed, probably during the last century when the slaves who built the levees chose to stay on in the Congaree. There were no signs of life: the washing line that hung between two trees was bare and no sounds came from within. At the back of the house was a small shed, which probably housed the generator.

I climbed the rough-hewn stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. There was no reply. I walked to the window and put my face close to the glass. Inside, I could see a table and four chairs, anold couch and easy chair, and a small kitchen area. An open doorway led into the main bedroom, and a second doorway had been created at the back of the house leading into the rear extension. That door was closed. I knocked one last time, then walked to the back of the house. From somewhere in the swamp, I heard the sound of gunshots, their noise muffled by the damp air. Hunters, I guessed.

The windows to the extension had been blacked out. I thought for a moment that there were dark drapes obscuring them, but when I drew closer I saw the lines that the brush had drawn through the paint. There was a door at the end. For the final time, I knocked and called before trying the knob. The door opened and I stepped into the room.

The first thing that I noticed was the smell. It was strong and faintly medicinal, although I detected something herbal and grassy to it rather than the sterile scent of pharmaceutical products. It seemed to fill the long room, which was furnished with a cot, a TV, and a set of cheap bookshelves uncluttered by any books. Instead, there were piles of out-of-date soap opera magazines and wrinkled, much read copies of People and Celebrity.

Every bare space on the walls had been covered by photographs culled from the magazines. There were models and actresses and, in one corner, what looked like a shrine to Oprah. Most of the women in the photos were black: I recognized Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, the R amp;B group TLC, Jada Pinkett Smith, even Tina Turner. Over by the TV were three or four photographs from the society pages of local newspapers. Each showed the same person: Marianne Larousse. There was a thin coating of wood dust on the photos, but the blacking on the windows had prevented any fading. In one, Marianne was smiling in the middle of a group of pretty young women at her graduation. Another had been taken at a charity auction, a third at a party held by the Larousses to raise funds for the Republican party. In every photo, Marianne Larousse’s beauty made her stand out like a beacon.

I stepped closer to the cot. The medicinal smell was stronger here and the sheets were stained with brown patches like spilled coffee. There were also lighter blotches, some of them veined with blood. I gently touched the bedsheet. The stains felt moist beneath my fingers. I moved away and found the small bathroom, and the source of the smell. A basin was filled with a thick brown substance that had the consistency of wallpaper paste and dripped viscously from my fingers as I held them up before me. The bathroom itself had a free-standing bath, with a handrail attached to the wall and a second support rail screwed into the floor beside it. There was a clean toilet and the floor had been expertly, if cheaply, tiled.

There was no mirror.

I stepped back into the bedroom and checked the single closet. What looked like white and brown sheets lay piled on the floor and shelves, but once again I could find no mirror.

From outside, I heard the shots come again, closer now. I made a cursory search of the rest of the house, registering the man’s clothing in the closet in the main bedroom and the woman’s clothing, cheap and dated, that had been packed into an old sea chest; the tinned foods in the kitchen area; the scrubbed pots and pans. In a corner behind the couch I found a camp bed, but it was covered in dust and had clearly not been used in many years. Everything else was clean, spotlessly so. There was no telephone, and when I tried the light switch the lights came on low, bathing the room in a faint orange glow. I switched them off again, opened the front door and stepped out onto the porch.

There were three men moving through the trees. Two of them I recognized as the men from the bar the night before, both the skinhead and the older man still wearing the same clothes. They had probably slept in them. The third was the overweight man who had been at the airport with his hunting partner on the day that I had first arrived in Charleston. He wore a brown shirt with his rifle slung over his right shoulder. He spotted me first, raised his right hand, and then all three paused at the tree line. None of us spoke for a moment. It seemed it was up to me to break the silence.

“I think you boys may be hunting out of season,” I said.

The oldest of the three, the man who had restrained the skinhead in the bar, smiled almost sadly.

“What we’re hunting is always in season,” he replied. “Anybody in there?”

I shook my head.

“Figured you’d say that, even if there was,” he said. “You ought to be more careful who you hire your boats from, Mr. Parker. That, or you ought to pay them a little extra to keep their mouths shut.”

He held his rifle at port arms, but I saw his finger move from outside to inside the trigger guard.

“Come on down here,” he said. “We got some business with you.”

I was already moving into the cottage when the first shot hit the door frame. I raced straight through, pulling my gun from its holster, and cleared the side of the generator hut as the second shot blew a chunk of bark from an oak tree to my right.

And then I was in the forest, the canopy rising above me until it was about a hundred feet above my head. I brushed through alders and holly, my head down. I slipped once on the slick leaves and landed hard on my side. I paused for a moment, but could hear no sounds of pursuit from behind me. I saw something brown about one hundred yards behind me, moving slowly through the trees: the fat man. He stood out only because he was stealing across the green of a holly bush. The others would be close by, listening for me. They would try to encircle me, then close in. I took a deep breath, drew a bead on the brown shirt, then squeezed the trigger slowly.

A red jet erupted from the fat man’s chest. His body twisted and he slumped back heavily into the bushes behind him, the branches bending and cracking beneath his weight. Twin booms came from my left and right, followed by more shots, and suddenly the air was filled with splinters and falling leaves.

I ran.

I ran to the high ground, where the red maples and ironwoods grew, trying to avoid the open areas of the understory and sticking instead to places thick with bush and vines. I closed my jacket despite the warmth in order to hide my white T-shirt and stopped from time to time, trying to detect signs of my pursuers, but wherever they were they were staying quiet and low. I smelled urine-a deer maybe, or even a bobcat-and found traces of an animal trail. I didn’t know where I was going: if I could find one of the boardwalk trails it would lead me back to the ranger station, but it would also leave me dangerously exposed to the men behind me. That was assuming that I could even find the boardwalk this far in. The wind had been blowing northeast across the Congaree when I was making my way to the cottage, and now blew lightly at my back. I stayed with the animal trail, hoping to trace my way back to the river. If I got lost in the Congaree, I would become easy prey for these men.

I tried to disguise the signs of my passage, but the ground was soft and I seemed to leave sunken footprints and flattened shrubbery as I went. After about fifteen minutes, I came to an old fallen cypress, its trunk blasted in two by lightning and a huge crater beneath its overhanging roots. Shrubs had already begun to grow around it and in the depths of the crater, rising to meet the roots and creating a kind of barred hollow. I leaned against it to catch my breath, then unzipped my jacket, tossed it on the trunk, and stripped off my T-shirt. I leaned into the hollow, scaring the beetles, and draped my T-shirt midway down, snagging it among the twisted roots. Then I put my jacket back on and retreated into the undergrowth. I lay flat on the ground, and waited.

It was the skinhead who appeared first. I caught a glimpse of the egglike pallor of his skull behind a loblolly pine as he peered out then ducked back in again. He had spotted the shirt. I wondered how dumb he was.

Dumb, but not dumb enough. He let out a low whistle and I saw a stand of alder twitch slightly, although I could see no sign of the man who had caused the movement. I wiped the sweat from my brow against the sleeve of my jacket to stop the worst of it from dropping into my eyes. Again, the movement came from behind the pine. I aimed and blinked the last of my sweat as the skinhead burst from cover then stopped dead, seemingly distracted by something nearby.

Instantly, he was pulled off his feet and yanked backward into the undergrowth. It happened so quickly that I was unsure of what I had seen. I thought for a moment that he might have slipped, and was half expecting to see him rise again, but he didn’t reappear. From the alders came a whistle, but there was no response. The skinhead’s companion whistled again. All was quiet. By then I was already retreating, crawling backward on my belly, desperate to get away from here, from the last of the hunters and from whatever was now pursuing us both through the sun-dappled green of the Congaree.

I had belly-crawled about fifty feet before I felt confident enough to rise. From somewhere ahead of me came the sound of water. From behind me I heard gunshots, but they were not aimed in my direction. I didn’t stop, even when the stump of a broken branch ripped through my sleeve and drew a ragged line of blood across my upper arm. My head was up and I was breathing hard, a stitch building in my side, when I saw the flash of white to my right. Part of me tried to reassure myself that it was a bird of some kind: an egret, perhaps, or an immature heron. But there had been something about the way that it moved, a halting, loping progress, that was partly an attempt at concealment and partly a physical disability. When I tried to find it again among the undergrowth I could not, but I knew it was there. I could feel it watching me.

I moved on.

I could see the water gleaming through the trees, could hear it flowing. Lying about thirty feet to my left was a boat: it wasn’t my boat, but at least two of the men who had brought it here were already dead and the third was somewhere behind me, running for his life. I stepped into a clearing dominated by cypress knees, the strange, vaguely conical shapes bursting from the soil like some miniature landscape from another world. I threaded my way through them and was almost at the boat when the dark-haired man emerged from the trees to my left. He no longer had his rifle, but he did have a knife, and he was already springing for me when I raised my gun and fired. I was off balance and the shot struck him in the side, breaking his stride but not stopping him. Before I could get off a second shot he was on top of me, his left arm forcing my gun hand away from him while I tried to arrest the progress of the knife. I aimed my knee at his injured side, but he anticipated the movement and used it against me, spinning me around and striking out at my left foot. I toppled as his boot connected with my hand, knocking the gun painfully from my fingers. I kicked out at him again as he descended on me, this time connecting with his wounded side. Spittle shot from his mouth and his eyes opened wide in surprise and pain, but by then his knee was on my chest and I was once again trying to keep that knife away from me. Still, I could see that he was dazed, and the wound in his side was bleeding freely. I suddenly eased some of the pressure on his arms and, as he fell forward, my head came up hard and connected with his nose. He cried out and I forced him off me, then rose up, knocked his feet out from under him, and slammed him back to the ground with all of the force that I could muster.

There was a wet crunching sound when he hit the earth and something exploded from his chest, as if one of his ribs had broken free and blasted through the skin. I stepped back and watched the blood running off the cypress knee as the man pinned upon it struggled to rise. He reached out and touched the wood, his fingers coming back red. He held them up to me, as if to show me what I had done, and then his head fell back and he died.

I wiped my sleeve against my face. It came back damp with sweat and filth. I turned to get my gun and saw the shrouded figure watching me from the trees.

It was a woman. I could see the shape of her breasts beneath the material, although her face remained covered. I called her name.

“Melia,” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”

I advanced toward her just as the shadow fell over me. I looked behind me. Tereus had a hook in his left hand. I just had time to register the crude sap in his right as it flew at me through the air, and then all was dark.

25

IT WAS THE smell that brought me back, the smell of the medicinal herbs that had been used to make the unguent for the woman’s skin. I was lying in the kitchen area of the cottage, my hands and legs bound tightly with rope. I raised my head and the back of my skull nudged the wall. The pain was bad. My shoulders and back ached, and my jacket was gone. I guessed that I had lost it as Tereus dragged me back to the cabin. I had vague memories of passing beneath tall trees, the sunlight spearing me through the canopy. My cell phone and gun were both missing. I lay on the floor for what seemed like hours.

In time, there was movement from the doorway and Tereus appeared, surrounded by fading sunlight. He had a spade in his hands, which he rested against the doorjamb before entering the cabin and squatting down before me. I could see no trace of the woman, but I sensed her nearby and guessed that she was back in her own darkened room, surrounded by images of a physical beauty she would never again be able to claim as her own.

“Welcome back, brother,” said Tereus. He removed his dark glasses. Up close, the membrane that coated his eyes was clearer. It reminded me of tapetum, the reflective surface that some nocturnal animals develop to magnify low light and improve their night vision. He filled a water bottle from the faucet, then brought it to me and tilted it to my mouth. I drank until the water ran down my chin. I coughed, and winced at the pain it caused in my head.

“I’m not your brother.”

“You weren’t my brother, you’d be dead by now.”

“You killed them all, didn’t you?”

He leaned in close to me. “These people got to learn. This is a world of balances. They took a life, destroyed another. They got to learn about the White Road, got to see what’s waiting for them there, got to pass over and become part of it.”

I looked away from him toward the window, and saw that the light was failing. Soon, it would be dark.

“You rescued her,” I said.

He nodded. “I couldn’t save her sister, but I could save her.”

I saw regret, and more: I saw love.

“She was burned bad-even now, I don’t know how she survived-but I guess she stayed under the surface and the underground streams carried her out. I found her stretched over a rock, then I took her home and me and my momma, we took care of her. And when my momma died, she took care of herself for a year until I got released from jail. Now I’m back.”

“Why didn’t you just go to the police, tell them what happened?”

“That ain’t the way these things is done. Anyhow, her sister’s body was gone. It was a dark night. How would she know who these men were? She can’t even talk no more, could barely write their names down to tell me who they were, and even so who would believe it of young, rich white men like that? I ain’t even sure what she thinks no more. The pain drove her crazy.”

But that didn’t answer it. That wasn’t enough to explain what had happened, what he had endured and what he had forced others to endure.

“It was Addy, wasn’t it?”

He didn’t reply.

“You loved her, maybe before Davis Smoot ever appeared. Was he your child, Tereus? Was Atys Jones your child? Was she afraid to tell others because of what you were, because even the blacks looked down on you, because you were an outcast from the swamps? That’s why you went looking for Smoot, why you didn’t tell Atys what landed you in jail: you didn’t tell him you’d killed Smoot because it wasn’t important. You didn’t believe Smoot was his father, and you were right. The dates didn’t match. You killed Smoot for what he did to Addy, then fled back here in time to discover another violation being visited on the woman you loved. But before you could avenge yourself on Larousse and his friends the cops came for you and sent you back to Alabama for trial, and you were lucky just to get twenty years because there were enough witnesses to back up your claim of self-defense. I reckon that once old Davis caught sight of you he went straight for the nearest weapon, and you had an excuse to kill him. Now you’re back, making up for lost time.”

Tereus did not respond. There would be no confirmation from him, and no denial. One of his big hands gripped my shoulder and dragged me to my feet. “That time is now, brother. Rise up, rise up.”

A blade cut the ropes at my feet. I felt the pain begin as the blood began to circulate properly at last.

“Where are we going?”

He looked surprised, and I knew then just how crazy he was, crazy even before they chained him to a post in the blazing sun, crazy enough to keep an injured woman out here for years, protected by an old woman, in order to serve some strange messianic purpose of his own.

“Back to the pit,” he said. “We going back to the pit. It’s time.”

“Time for what?”

He drew me gently toward him.

“Time to show them the White Road.”

Although his small boat had an engine, he untied my hands and made me row. He was afraid: afraid that the noise might draw the men to him before he was ready, afraid that I might turn on him if he did not find some way to occupy me. Once or twice I considered striking out at him, but the revolver he now carried was unwavering in his grip. He would nod and smile at me in warning if I even paused in my strokes, as if we were two old friends on a boating trip together as the day descended softly into night and the dark gathered around us.

I didn’t know where the woman was. I knew only that she had left the house shortly before us.

“You didn’t kill Marianne Larousse,” I said, as we came in sight of a house set back from the bank and a dog barked at our passing, his chain jangling softly in the evening air. A light went on in the porch of the house, and I saw the form of a man emerge and heard him hush the dog. His voice was not angry, and I felt a rush of affection for him. I saw him tousle the dog’s fur, and the silhouette of its dark tail flicked back and forth in response. I was tired. I felt as if I were approaching the very end of things, as if this river was a kind of Styx across which I was being forced to row myself in the absence of the boatman, and as soon as the boat struck the bank I would descend into the underworld and become lost in the honeycomb.

I repeated the comment.

“What does it matter?” he replied.

“It matters to me. It probably mattered to Marianne while she was dying. But you didn’t kill her. You were still in jail.”

“They say the boy killed her, and he ain’t about to contradict them now.”

I stopped rowing, and heard the click of the hammer cocking a moment later.

“Don’t make me shoot you, Mr. Parker.”

I rested the oars and raised my hands.

“She did it, didn’t she? Melia killed Marianne Larousse, and her own nephew, your son, died as a result.”

He regarded me silently for a time before he spoke.

“She knows this river,” he said. “Knows the swamps. She wanders in them. Sometimes, she likes to watch the folks drinkin’ and whorin’. I guess it reminds her of what she lost, of what they took away from her. It was just pure dumb luck that she saw Marianne Larousse running among the trees that night, nothing more. She recognized her face from the society pages of the newspapers-she likes to look at the pictures of the beautiful ladies-and she took her chance.

“Dumb luck,” he intoned again. “That’s all it was.”

But it wasn’t, of course. The history of these two families, the Larousses and the Joneses, the blood spilled and lives destroyed, meant that it could never be anything as pure as luck or coincidence that drew them together. Over more than two centuries they had bound themselves, each to the other, in a pact of mutual destructiveness only partly acknowledged on either side, fueled by a past that allowed one man to own and abuse another and fanned into continuous flame by remembered injuries and violent responses. Their paths through this world were interwoven, crisscrossing at crucial moments in the history of this state and in the lives of their families.

“Did she know that the boy with Marianne was her own nephew?”

“She didn’t see him until the girl was dead. I-”

He stopped.

“Like I said, I don’t know what she thinks, but she can read some. She saw the newspapers, and I think she used to watch the jailhouse some, late at night.”

“You could have saved him,” I said. “By coming forward with her, you could have saved Atys. No court would convict her of murder. She’s insane.”

“No, I couldn’t do that.”

He couldn’t do it because then he would not have been able to continue punishing the rapists and killers of the woman he had loved. Ultimately, he was prepared to sacrifice his own son for revenge.

“You killed the others?”

“We did, the two of us together.”

He had rescued her and kept her safe, then killed for her and the memory of her sister. In a way, he had given up his life for them.

“It was how it had to be,” he said, as if guessing the direction of my thoughts. “And that’s all I got to say.”

I started to row again, drawing deep arcs through the water, the droplets falling back to the river in what seemed like impossibly languid descents, as if somehow I were slowing down the passage of time, drawing each moment out, longer and longer again, until at last the world would stop, the oars frozen at the moment they broke the water, the birds trapped in midflight, the insects caught like motes of dust in a picture frame, and we would never have to go forward again, we would never have to find ourselves by the lip of that dark pit, with its smells of engine oil and effluent, and the memory of the burning marked with black tongues along the grooves of its stone.

“There’s just two left,” said Tereus at one point. “Just two more, and it will all be over.”

And I could not tell if he was talking to himself, or to me, or to some unseen other. I looked to the bank and half-expected to see her shadowing our progress, a figure consumed by pain. Or to see her sister, her jaw hanging loose, her head ruined but her eyes wild and bright, burning with a rage fierce as the flames that had engulfed her sister.

But there was only tree shade and the darkening sky, and waters glittering with the fragmented ghosts of early moonlight.

“This is where we get off,” he whispered.

I steered the boat toward the left bank. When it struck land I heard a soft splash behind me and saw that Tereus was already out of the boat. He gestured for me to move toward the trees, and I began to walk. My trousers were wet and swamp water squelched in my shoes. I was covered in bites; my face felt swollen from them, and the exposed skin of my back and chest itched furiously.

“How do you know that they’ll be here?” I asked.

“Oh, they’ll be here,” he said. “I promised them the two things they wanted the most: the answer to who killed Marianne Larousse.”

“And?”

“And you, Mr. Parker. They’ve decided that you’ve outlived your usefulness. That Mr. Kittim, I reckon he’s gonna bury you.”

I knew that it was true, that the part Kittim was to play represented the last act in the drama they had planned. Elliot had brought me down here, ostensibly to find out about the circumstances of Marianne Larousse’s murder in an effort to clear Atys Jones, but in reality, and in collusion with Larousse, to find out if her murder was linked to what was happening to the six men who had raped the Jones sisters, then killed one of them and left the other to burn. Mobley had worked for Bowen and I guessed that at some point Bowen had learned through him of what he and the others had done, which gave him the leverage he required to use Elliot and probably Earl Jr. too. Elliot would draw me down, and Kittim would destroy me. If I discovered the truth about who was behind the killings before I died, then so much the better. If I didn’t, then I still wasn’t going to live long enough to collect my fee.

“But you’re not going to hand Melia over to them,” I said.

“No, I’m going to kill them.”

“Alone.”

His white teeth gleamed.

“No,” he said. “I told you. Not alone. Never alone.”

It was still as Poveda had described it after all these years. There was the broken fence that I had skirted days earlier and the pock-marked NO TRESPASSING sign. I could see the sinkholes, some of them small and masked by vegetation, others so large that whole trees had fallen into them. We had walked for about five minutes when I smelled an acrid chemical stink in the air that at first was merely unpleasant but, as we drew closer to the hole, began to scorch the nostrils and cause the eyes to water. Discarded trash lay unmoving upon the ground without a breeze to stir it, and the skeletons of decayed trees, their trunks gray and lifeless, stretched thin shadows across the limestone. The hole itself was about twenty feet in circumference, and so deep that its base was lost in darkness. Roots and grasses overhung the verge, trailing down into the shadows.

Two men stood at the far side of the hole, looking down into its depths. One was Earl Jr. The second man was Kittim. He was without his trademark shades now that it was growing dark and he was the first to sense our approach. His face remained blank even as we stood and faced them across the expanse of the pit, Kittim’s eyes briefly resting on me before he gave his full attention to Tereus.

“Do you recognize him?” he asked Earl Jr.

Earl Jr. shook his head. Kittim seemed dissatisfied with the answer, with the fact that he did not have the information he required to make an accurate assessment of the situation.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Tereus.”

“Did you kill Marianne Larousse?”

“No, I did not. I killed the others, and I watched Foster attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and feed it in through his window. But I didn’t kill the Larousse girl.”

“Then who did?”

She was nearby. I knew she was. I could feel her. It seemed to me that Larousse did too, because I watched his head flick back suddenly like a startled deer, his eyes roving across the trees, looking for the source of his unease.

“I asked you a question,” Kittim persisted. “Who killed her?”

Three armed men emerged from the trees at either side of us. Instantly Tereus dropped his gun to the ground and I knew that he had never planned to walk away from this.

Two of the men beside us I did not recognize.

The third was Elliot Norton.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me, Charlie,” he said.

“It takes a lot to surprise me, Elliot.”

“Even the return of an old friend from the dead?”

“I have a feeling you’ll be making a more permanent return in the near future.” I was too tired even to show my anger. “The blood in the car was a nice touch. How were you going to explain your resurrection? A miracle?”

“We were under threat from some crazy Negro, so I did what I had to do to hide myself. What are they going to charge me with? Wasting police time? False suicide?”

“You killed, Elliot. You led people to their deaths. You bailed Atys just so your friends could torture him and find out what he knew.”

He shrugged. “Your fault, Charlie. If you’d been better at your job and got him to tell all, he might still be alive.”

I winced. He’d struck close to the bone, but I wasn’t going to bear the responsibility for Atys Jones’s death alone.

“And the Singletons. What did you do, Elliot? Sit with them in the kitchen drinking their lemonade, waiting for your friends to come and kill them while the only person who could have protected them was in the shower? The old man said it was a changeling that attacked them, and the police thought that he was talking about Atys until he turned up tortured to death, but it was you. You were the changeling. Look at what they’ve reduced you to, Elliot, what you’ve reduced yourself to. Look at what you’ve become.”

Elliot shrugged. “I had no choice. Mobley told Bowen everything, once when he was drunk. Landron never admitted it, but it was him. So Bowen had something on all of us and he used it to make me bring you down here. But by then all of this”-he made an all-encompassing gesture with his free hand, taking in the hole, the swamp, dead men, and the memory of raped girls-“had started happening, so we used you. You’re good, Charlie, I’ll give you that. In a way, you’ve brought us all to this point. You should go to your grave a satisfied man.”

“Enough.” It was Kittim. “Make the Negro tell us what he knows and we can finish this for good.”

Elliot raised his gun, pointing it first at Tereus, then at me.

“You shouldn’t have come to the swamp alone, Charlie.”

I smiled at him.

“I didn’t.”

The bullet hit him on the bridge of the nose and knocked his head back so hard I could hear the vertebrae in his neck crack. The men at either side of him barely had a chance to react before they too fell. Larousse stood confused and then Kittim was raising his weapon and I felt Tereus push me to the ground. There were shots, and warm blood splashed my face. I looked up to catch the look of surprise in Tereus’s eyes before he tumbled into the pit and landed with a splash in the water far below.

I picked up his fallen revolver and ran for the woods, expecting to feel one of Kittim’s shots tear into me at any moment, but he was already fleeing. I caught a glimpse of Larousse disappearing into the trees, and then he also disappeared from sight.

But only for a moment.

He reemerged seconds later, backing slowly away from something in the trees. I saw her moving toward him, draped in the light material, the only cloth that she could wear without paining her ruined body. Her head was uncovered. The skull was hairless, the features beneath it melting into one another, a blur of disfigurement and remembered beauty. Only her eyes appeared intact, glittering beneath her swollen eyelids. She extended a hand to Larousse and there was almost a tenderness to the gesture, like a rejected lover reaching out one last time to the man who had turned his back upon her. Larousse released a small cry then struck out at her arm, breaking the skin. Instinctively, he rubbed his hand with disgust against his jacket, then moved quickly to his right in an effort to get by her and make for the safety of the forest.

Louis stepped from the shadows and pointed his gun at Larousse’s face.

“Now where you goin’?” he asked.

He stopped, caught between the woman and the gun.

Then she sprang at him, the force of her propelling them both backward, and she wrapped herself around him as they fell, he screaming, she silent, into the black water below. For a moment, I thought I saw a whiteness spread upon the surface, and then they were gone.

26

W E WALKED BACK to Louis’s car, but could find no trace of Kittim along the way.

“You understand now?” asked Louis. “You understand why we can’t let them go, can’t let none of them go?”

I nodded.

“The bail hearing is in three day’s time,” he said. “The preacher’s gonna walk, and then none of us will be safe again.”

“I’m in,” I said.

“You sure?”

I barely paused.

“I’m sure. What about Kittim?”

“What about him?”

“He got away.”

Louis almost smiled.

“Did he?”

Kittim drove at speed into the Blue Ridge, arriving at his destination in the early hours. There would be other chances for him, other opportunities. For the present, it was time to rest up and wait for the preacher to be brought to safety. After that, there would be a new momentum achieved.

He pulled into the clearing before the cabin, then walked to the door and unlocked it. The moonlight streamed through the windows, illuminating the cheap furniture, the unadorned walls. It shone too on the man who sat facing the door, and on the silenced pistol in his hand. He wore sneakers and faded jeans, and a loud silk shirt that he’d bought at final markdown in Filene’s Basement. His face was unshaven and very pale. He didn’t even blink as the shot hit Kittim in the belly. Kittim fell and tried to wrench his gun from his belt, but the man was already upon him. His gun dug into Kittim’s right temple as Kittim eased his hand away from his belt and his weapon was taken from him.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m an angel,” said the man. “What the fuck are you?”

Now there were other figures around him. Kittim’s hands were pulled behind his back and cuffed before he was turned onto his back to face his captors: the small man in the mismatched shirt, two younger men armed with pistols who came in from the yard, and an older man who emerged from the shadows at the back of Kittim’s cabin.

“Kittim,” said Epstein, as he examined the man on the ground. “An unusual name, a scholarly name.”

Kittim did not move. There was a watchfulness about him now, despite the agony of his wound. He kept his eyes fixed on the older man.

“I recall that the Kittim were the tribe destined to lead the final assault against the sons of light, the earthly agents of the powers of darkness,” continued Epstein. He leaned forward, so close that he could smell the breath of the injured man. “You should have read your scrolls more closely, my friend: they tell us that the dominion of the Kittim is short-lived, and for the sons of darkness there shall be no escape.”

Epstein’s hands had been clasped behind his back. Now they emerged, and the light caught the metal case in their grasp.

“We have questions for you,” said Epstein, removing the syringe and sending a jet of clear liquid into the air. The needle descended toward Kittim, as the thing that lived inside him began the fruitless struggle to escape its host.

I left Charleston late the following evening. I told the SLED agents in Columbia, Adams and Addams beside them in the interview room, almost everything that I knew, lying only to leave out the involvement of Louis and the part I had played in the deaths of the two men in Congaree. Tereus had disposed of their bodies while I was tied up in his shack, and the swamp had a long history of swallowing up the remains of the dead. They would not be found.

As for those who had been killed by the old sinkhole, I lied and said that they had died at the hands of Tereus and the woman, taken by surprise before they even had a chance to react. Tereus’s body had floated to the surface, but there was no sign as yet of the woman or Earl Jr. As I sat in the interrogation room, I saw them falling once again, disappearing into the dark pool, sinking, the woman dragging the man down with her into the streams that lay beneath the stone, holding him until he drowned, the two united unto death and beyond.

At the Charleston airport terminal, a limousine waited, the tinted windows up so that no one could see the occupants. As I walked to the doorway, my baggage in my hand, one window rolled slowly down and Earl Larousse looked at me, waiting for me to approach.

“My son,” he said.

“Dead, like I told the police.”

His lips trembled, and he blinked away tears. I felt nothing for him.

“You knew,” I said. “You must have known all along what your son did. When he came home that night, covered in her blood, didn’t he tell you everything that he had done? Didn’t he beg for your help? And you gave it to him, to save him and to save your family name, and you held on to that piece of worthless land in the hope that what had happened there would remain hidden. But then Bowen came along and got his hooks into you, and suddenly you weren’t in control anymore. His people were in your house, and my guess is he was bleeding you for money. How much did you give him, Mr. Larousse? Enough to bail Faulkner, and then some?”

He didn’t look at me. Instead, he retreated into the past, descending into the grief and madness that would finally consume him.

“We were like royalty in this city,” he whispered. “We’ve been here since its birth. We are part of its history, and our name has lived for centuries.”

“Your name is going to die with you now, and they can bury your history with you.”

I walked away. When I reached the doors the car was no longer reflected in the glass.

And in a shack on the outskirts of Caina, Georgia, Virgil Gossard awoke to a feeling of pressure on his lips. He opened his eyes as the gun forced itself into his mouth.

The figure before him was dressed entirely in black, its face concealed beneath a ski mask.

“Up,” it said, and Virgil recognized the voice from the night at Little Tom’s. His hair was gripped and he was dragged from his bed, the gun trailing spittle and blood as it was pulled from his mouth. Virgil, wearing only his tattered briefs, was pushed toward the kitchen of his pitiful home, and the back door leading to the fields beyond.

“Open it.”

Virgil began to cry.

“Open it!”

He opened the door and a hand at his back forced him out into the night. Barefoot, he walked through the yard, feeling the coldness of the ground beneath his feet, the long blades of overgrown grass slicing at his skin. He could hear the man breathing behind him as he walked toward the woods at the verge of his land. A low wall, barely three bricks high, came into view. A sheet of corrugated iron had been laid across it. It was the old well.

“Take the cover off.”

Virgil shook his head. “No, don’t,” he said. “Please.”

“Do it!”

Virgil squatted down and dragged the sheet away, exposing the hole beneath.

“Kneel down on the wall.”

Virgil’s face was contorted with fear and the force of his tears. He could taste snot and salt in his mouth as he eased himself down and stared into the darkness of the well.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry.”

He felt the pressure of the gun in the hollow at the base of his skull.

“What did you see?” said the man.

“I saw a man,” said Virgil. He was beyond lying now. “I looked up, I saw a man, a black man. There was another man with him. He was white. I didn’t get a good look at him. I shouldn’t have looked. I shouldn’t have looked.”

“What did you see?”

“I told you. I saw-”

The gun cocked.

“What did you see?”

And Virgil at last understood.

“Nothing,” he said. “I saw nothing. I wouldn’t know the guys if I saw them again. Nothing. That’s all. Nothing.”

The gun moved away from his head.

“Don’t make me come back here, Virgil,” said the man.

Virgil’s whole body shook with the force of his sobs.

“I won’t,” he said. “I promise.”

“Now you stay there, Virgil. You keep kneeling.”

“I will,” said Virgil. “Thank you. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” said the man.

Virgil didn’t hear him moving away. He just stayed kneeling until at last the sun began to rise and then, shivering, he rose and walked back to his little house.