The Devil and the River (29 page)

“So who is this Maryanne Benedict?”

“Not a great deal to go on as yet. I called up Jim Hughes. He says he vaguely remembers her but didn’t know her too well. Knew the parents, but they moved away a good while back. Maryanne was an only child, a couple of years younger than Nancy, according to the notes.”

“So if she’s alive, she’d be—what?—early thirties.”

“Right. Thirty-four, if she was fourteen when Nancy disappeared.”

“Well, you get on to tracking her down,” Gaines said. “Least of all, she might want to know that two of her childhood friends are dead, and she might be able to give us something else on the Denton girl’s disappearance.”

Hagen left. Gaines started calling around to locate Eddie Holland. Holland, predictably, was at Nate Ross’s place down on Coopers Road. Gaines asked if he could come over and speak with them. Ross seemed all too eager to receive Gaines, and Gaines knew why. There was something going on that was a great deal more interesting than the weather, and Nate Ross would be first in line to get involved.

Gaines felt it was a visit worth making. For all their bluff and bravado, Ross and Holland were good people. They were lonely; that was all. Lonely without careers, lonely without wives. They talked too much, they held court too often, voiced too many unwanted opinions, but every town in the South had their own Ross and Holland, that was for sure. They drank too much. That was obvious from the get-go. Gaines knew the pattern. At first you waited until dark before the first drink, and then dark became sunset became dusk became twilight, and finally there was no waiting at all. If you were awake, you were drunk, and it stayed that way until the drink carried you down through the closing of your life.

Perhaps that was the way he himself would go, the way that his predecessor—Don Bicklow—would have gone, had he not fucked himself into an early grave with a fifty-two-year-old widow out near Wiggins.

Ross’s house was old-style South, the balustrades, the balcony out front, the veranda and porch. Ross was there at the screen door as Gaines pulled up, and Eddie Holland was right behind him.

“Gentlemen,” Gaines said, removing his hat and leaving it on the passenger seat of the car.

“Sheriff,” Nate Ross replied, and he came down the steps to meet Gaines.

Once greetings were exchanged, Gaines followed them into the house, was directed to the kitchen, where Holland had a pot of coffee on the stove.

It did not pass Gaines by that Holland put a splash of bourbon in each cup before it was delivered to the table. Such was the way of things in Nate Ross’s house.

“So, how can we assist you, Sheriff?” Eddie Holland said as he took a seat facing Gaines.

“Information,” Gaines said.

“About?”

“Well, there’s one area where I know you can help me and one area you might not be able to help me, and that’s why I’m here.”

“Shoot,” Ross said.

“This you won’t know about so much, Nate, but back in August of 1954, a girl went missing—”

“Nancy Denton,” Holland said.

“Right. And now we’ve found her. And I believed that Mike Webster was responsible for her killing, but now I’m not so sure. I wanted to find out all I could about the original disappearance from Judith, but—”

“She committed suicide,” Ross interjected.

“And Webster is dead as well,” Gaines went on, unsurprised that Ross already knew about Judith. “And so here I am, dealing with a twenty-year-old runaway case that wasn’t really a runaway, a dead mother, a dead primary suspect, and I don’t know shit about what the hell is going on . . .”

“Except that Matthias Wade is gonna be involved, one way or another,” Holland said. “Because he paid Webster’s bail, and all of a sudden Webster is burned to hell without his head and his hand in a motel cabin out toward Bogalusa.”

“Which brings me to my second area of questions,” Gaines said, also unsurprised that Holland would have mentioned Wade’s name so readily, or that he knew of Webster’s unfortunate and distressing end. Holland had been around a long time. Whytesburg was a small town. There was little that stayed secret in such places.

“The Wades,” Gaines said, matter-of-factly. “That’s what I want to know about.”

“And what do you want to know about the Wades?” Ross asked.

“Anything you’ve got, Nate. That would be a start.”

Nate Ross shrugged. He sipped his loaded coffee, nodded at Holland, and Holland refreshed the brew with a mite more spirit. He advanced the bottle to Gaines, but Gaines declined.

“Ed’ll know more about the family as a whole, being from here an’ all. But Earl? Earl Wade must be all of seventy-five or eighty by now. Hardheaded son of a bitch, business-wise, at least. Had some dealings with him back in the early fifties, some property and land he was interested in up in Hattiesburg. The deal didn’t go through eventually, but he was ballbreaker, I’ll tell you.”

“His wife?” Gaines asked.

“His wife was Lillian Tresselt,” Holland said. “A good ten or fifteen years younger than him. They had four kids, as far as I recall, Matthias being the eldest. He’s the one who’ll inherit the businesses and the estate when the old man finally gives up the ghost.”

“His wife
was
Lillian Tresselt?”

“Yeah, was,” Ross went on. “She drank herself to death. In fact, she died around the same time as I was working on that Hattiesburg thing, so that must have been getting toward the end of fifty-two. Of course, it was never reported that she drank herself to death, but she did. She was famous for her drunken performances at the parties that Wade used to throw.”

“And their kids?” Gaines had out his notebook, started writing things down.

“Matthias is the eldest,” Holland said. “Then there’s Catherine, Eugene, then Della. As far as I know, Catherine is still married, has a family up in Tupelo. I think her husband’s a lawyer.”

“Yes, he is,” Ross said. “I know that because I met a guy a while back who was on some other realty deal with Wade. He told me that the eldest daughter’s fiancé was studying up for the law and was gonna be handling all of the Wade work when he finally got his practice.”

“His name?” Gaines asked.

Ross shook his head, looked at Holland.

“I don’t recall,” Holland said.

“So the next one?”

“Next one is Eugene, and he’s about as far from the old man as you could get. Isn’t he an artist or something, an actor maybe?”

“Musician,” Holland said. “Lives in Memphis, last I heard. He’d be maybe mid-thirties or so. Guitar player, I think. Singer, too. Can’t say as I’ve ever heard the name Eugene Wade on the wireless, so maybe he ain’t doin’ so good.”

“Could use a stage name,” Ross said. “Lot of them kind do that sort of thing. Use a false name an’ all, the musicians and the TV folk and whoever . . .”

“So Eugene isn’t like his father?” Gaines prompted, steering the discussion away from bohemian lifestyle choices and back to the matter at hand.

“Hell no,” Holland said. “Earl is a businessman through and through. Everything is money and influence and power and politics an’ all that. Eugene was the odd one in the bunch, the one that didn’t make sense. And after his mother died, well, I don’t know what was going through his mind, but he spent a good deal of time in church. Lookin’ for answers, maybe. Tryin’ to figure out why his ma died an’ all that.”

“Any possibility he wasn’t Earl’s child?”

Neither Ross nor Holland responded, and then Ross leaned forward and said, “Hell, son, this is the South. Anything’s possible, right?”

“So after Eugene?”

“There was Della,” Holland said, “and if ever there was a girl who took after her mother, it was Della Wade. She was one pretty girl, let me tell you, and I can imagine she is one pretty young woman.”

“You know where she’s at?”

“Last I heard, she was still at the Wade house, but that was a good while back, a year at least, and it’s not something I’ve been keepin’ tabs on, you know?”

“Nate?”

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

“So, to Nancy Denton,” Gaines said.

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

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

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

“Married? Kids?”

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

“You have an address for her?”

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

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

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

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

“Never a truer word,” Ross replied.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or perhaps none of these things.

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

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

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

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