The Devil and the River (58 page)

G
aines left Hagen behind to deal with the local authorities. He did not speak of the leather case. He did not speak of the newspaper clippings he had found. Hagen was instructed to explain to the attending officers that the dead man was responsible for a twenty-year-old murder. Details were of no great concern now. There were no living relatives to inform of the ultimate justice that had befallen the perpetrator of Nancy Denton’s murder. There would be no charges to file, no arraignment to schedule, no jury to select. Gaines would go back and bring closure to the families who had lost their children, of course, but right now that was not his foremost concern.

Maryanne accompanied Gaines to the car.

“We’re going back to Whytesburg,” he said, “and I’ll have one of my deputies drive you home.”

She was there on the passenger seat beside him for some minutes before she spoke.

She had seen him set the small case on the rear seat. She had watched as he closed his eyes for a moment before starting the car, the way he had clenched and unclenched his fists, the way his hand shook ever so slightly as he tried to get the key into the ignition.

And then she reached out, and she placed her hand over his, and he looked at her.

“Tell me,” she said.

Gaines shook his head. He looked away through the window, and she could see his knuckles whitening as he gripped the steering wheel.

“John?”

And then he nodded, as if reconciling something within himself. He reached behind himself, retrieved the case, and handed it to her.

She held it in her hands and then placed it on her lap.

She placed her fingers on the latches, but she did not open it.

“Look,” Gaines said. “You want to know . . . then look.”

Maryanne hesitated, and then she flipped the latches. The sound was sharp and loud in the confines of the car.

The smell of musty paper filed her nostrils, and she started to look through the newspaper clippings within.

On the morning of March 19, 1957, a bright and cool Tuesday morning, Jeanette Ferguson, a fourteen year-old girl from Lyman went missing on the way home from school. She was reported missing that same evening. She was found four days later in a derelict house.

On Saturday, November 10, 1960, just a day after John Fitzgerald Kennedy became the youngest man ever to win the presidency, Mary Elizabeth Duggan was found strangled in the back of a Greyhound bus. Mary Elizabeth had boarded the bus in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, bound for Monroe, Louisiana. She was eighteen years old. The bus had made stops in Collins, Magee, Mendenhall, Jackson, Vicksburg, Tallulah, and Rayville. Mary Elizabeth’s cousins—Stan and Willa Blakely—had waited in the depot for Mary Elizabeth to disembark. She did not. Puzzled, they asked if they could perhaps search the bus to see if she had somehow remained asleep. The driver said there was no one back there, but he gave them permission to look anyway. At the very back of the vehicle, there beneath the seat, they found Mary Elizabeth on the floor, wrapped from head to toe in a blanket. She was not sleeping. She was dead.

A lengthy and extensive investigation was undertaken. Police departments from both Mississippi and Louisiana were involved. An attempt was made to locate every single passenger who had used that service between Hattiesburg and Monroe, but anyone could buy tickets and no identification was required; nor was any record maintained beyond the number of tickets sold and their respective costs. The investigation, it appeared, had come to nothing.

On Saturday, October 7, 1961, Frances Zimmerman, a nineteen-year-old from Monticello, ironically the girl chosen to present Vice President Richard Nixon with flowers upon his arrival at the Mississippi State Fair in 1958, was found strangled in the men’s restroom at Brookhaven train station. She had been left in an open doorway.

August 19, 1962, just two weeks after the death of Marilyn Monroe, Kathleen Snow, a fifteen-year-old, was reported missing from her afternoon classes at St. Mary Magdalene Catholic School for Girls in Jackson. Her friends said she had left the school at lunchtime to
meet someone
. The identity of the person was unknown to her friends, and Kathleen had assured them she would be gone for no more than half an hour. They had promised they would cover for her. Kathleen did not return. Her body was found the following day by a volunteer crossing guard. Kathleen had been strangled, but strangled with such force that the hand prints of her killer were visible on her throat as dark welts.

And so it went on—through ’63, ’64, a year or two skipped here and there, but those reports seemed endless. And then Maryanne found them. Morgan City, January of 1968, the faces of Dorothy McCormick and Anna-Louise Mayhew.

She held up the clipping. Gaines looked at those faces, and they looked back at him, just as they had from the files he had read in Dennis Young’s office.

Fourteen victims spanning seventeen years.

“I can’t believe—”

She shook her head, and there were tears in her eyes, and they welled over the lids and rolled down her cheeks.

Gaines started the car.

“You’re going to see him . . . Matthias?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“I don’t want to see him, John.”

“You won’t, Maryanne. Go home, or even stay in my office, but don’t see him.”

There was silence between them for the rest of the journey, and once they arrived, Gaines had Forrest Dalton fetch a squad car to take Maryanne home.

It was then, as she left Gaines’s office, that she hesitated. She touched his arm, looked at him directly, unerringly, and said, “Enough people have come to grief. Enough people have died. And this man—”

“This man is not going to kill anyone,” Gaines replied. “I do not think he has ever killed anyone. I think he got Devereaux to kill Webster, and he hid his brother from the law. I don’t even know that he was aware of what Eugene had really done. His crime was his silence, the same as Della, the same as Earl.”

“And Devereaux? Didn’t he kill Devereaux?”

Gaines shook his head. “I don’t believe he did, no. I think Devereaux was killed in revenge for something else entirely.”

Her expression was questioning, but it was obvious Gaines was not going to explain further.

“Be careful,” she said, and there was something in that entreaty that touched Gaines, as if she really meant it, as if she really wanted to ensure that he came back safely.

“I will,” Gaines replied, and then she left.

Half an hour later, Gaines was again at the Wade house. He pounded on the door with the side of his fist, and the door was hurriedly opened. He did not wait to be invited across the threshold. He walked in, the leather suitcase in his hand, said that he needed to see both Matthias and Della, and then he crossed the hallway and entered the same library where he had spoken with Earl Wade only that morning.

Della appeared within a minute.

“What is it?” she said. “What is going on?”

“Where is Matthias?” Gaines asked.

“He’s upstairs with Father. Why? Why have you come back here?”

“Eugene is dead,” Gaines said matter-of-factly.

Once again, real or perfectly portrayed, Della Wade expressed utter disbelief and shock in her expression, in her absence of words, in the way in which the color drained from her face and her eyes widened.

“Dead?”

“He hung himself, Della. He committed suicide. He has been dead for a few days, and I think it would interest you to know that Leon Devereaux might very well have been the last person to see him. That is an assumption on my part, but I think it will prove to be fact.”

Della walked to the window, back to the door, looking sideways at Gaines as if reminding herself that he was in the room, that this wasn’t some hideous nightmare from which she could force herself to wake.

“I have a question for you, Della.”

She paused, looked directly at him.

“Did you kill Leon Devereaux?”

“Say nothing, Della.”

She turned, her mouth open as if to speak, silenced by the sudden appearance of Matthias, entering the room and interrupting proceedings just as she herself had done with her father.

“Do not say a word to this man,” Matthias went on. “He has no right to be here. He has no warrant. He has no evidence, no nothing.”

Gaines did not speak. He set the leather case down on the table, opened it, and withdrew the sheaf of clippings. He took three or four steps toward Della and held out his hand.

She took them from him.

“What is this?” Matthias asked, and he reached out to take them from Della.

Della snatched her hand back, walked away toward the window and Gaines felt the tension in the room increase in proportion to the slow-dawning realization that was taking place. Perhaps, once again, it was his imagination; perhaps no one but he could sense it, but it was there. He felt sure of it.

When she turned, tears in her eyes, there were many things written in her expression.

For the first time since he’d met her, Gaines believed that now she was going to tell the truth.

“This?” she asked. “This is what?”

“This is what you have done by saying nothing,” Gaines said.

“Saying nothing about what? About—”

“About nothing,” Matthias interjected. “About some wild flight of imagination that Sheriff Gaines has convinced himself is the truth.”

“About the fact that your brother Eugene was the one who killed Nancy Denton. Matthias knew, your father as well, and Judge Wallace, and maybe even Leon Devereaux. I don’t know how many more people knew what really happened back then, twenty years ago, but I think Matthias was the only one who knew what happened afterward, right, Matthias?”

Matthias Wade didn’t respond. He looked back at Gaines implacably, as if Gaines had commented on nothing more consequential than the weather.

“And this?” Della said, holding out the clippings. “This is Eugene’s doing? These are people Eugene has murdered?”

“Seems that when you release a monster from the cage, he doesn’t stop being a monster,” Gaines said.

“Matthias?” Della said. “Matthias, is this true? Is Eugene responsible for all of this? Did Eugene kill Nancy? Is that what happened?”

She looked back at Gaines. “All this time, I wanted to believe it had nothing to do with us.”

“Della,” Matthias Wade said, his tone authoritative, almost threatening.

“She just ran away from home. That was all. She was scared, something happened, something we knew nothing about, and she ran away from home. I wanted to believe she would come back, just like Michael did, and I never even imagined that she had been murdered by someone in my own family—”

“Della, seriously, enough is enough.” Matthias took a step forward.

Della turned and looked at him, her expression one of dismay and horror. “And then I talked to Sheriff Gaines, and he told me some things, Matthias. He told me some painful things, and it got me to thinking that it might have been you. You could have done this terrible thing. You sent that terrible man to frighten Clifton, and that man cut off his fingers. Did you tell him to do that, or did he just get inventive?”

Matthias advanced again and was now within arm’s length of his sister.

“Yes, I started to think that you could have killed Nancy. And then I thought no, you could never have done that. You weren’t capable of murder, surely. And then I started thinking that if it wasn’t you, then who could it be? Who would you be so eager to protect? There was only one person. There could only have been one possible person, right? Our father. That’s who you were protecting. All this while doing nothing but hiding the truth from everyone, trying to protect our father, trying to protect the family name, trying to protect your inheritance and not see it wasted on defending—”

Matthias lashed out and caught her across the side of the face. She fell awkwardly, the newspaper clippings spilling from her hand.

Matthias Wade stood silently, staring at Gaines, ignoring his sister as she struggled to her feet.

“My brother is dead,” Matthias Wade said, “and so are Nancy Denton and Michael Webster and Leon Devereaux. They are all dead. No one’s coming back, Sheriff. No one’s going to substantiate what you are saying. No one is going to make any statements or testify in court, and even if there were someone to help you, I think you would find that the courts were not going to give you whatever justice you were hoping for.”

Della was on her feet. “This is true,” she said. “What he is saying is true, Matthias? Eugene killed Nancy, and he’s been doing this . . . these things, and all this time you knew about it? Is this true?”

Matthias looked back at his sister. “Don’t even talk to me, Della. Don’t you act judgmental with me. How fucking dare you? Drugs, abortions, sleeping with colored men. You are a fucking whore just like Father says you are. You are a worthless fucking whore, a worthless human being, and if you weren’t my sister, maybe Leon would have come and visited with you as well.”

Della snatched a handful of clippings from the floor and thrust them at Matthias.

“You did this,” she said. “You are as guilty as Eugene. You knew what he did to Nancy. You knew what he’s been doing since, and you did nothing? You did absolutely nothing?”

“What would you have had me do, Della? Kill him? Is that what you would have had me do? Kill my own brother? He was sick. He was mentally ill. Like our mother, alcoholic that she was. Drowning her depression in whiskey. You have no idea how much time and effort and energy it takes to control what happens around this family. You have not the faintest clue how much trouble you have caused for me. Eugene was your brother, too, Della, and just because he lost his mind when our mother died, you think that gave me license to neglect him, to abandon him, to pretend he was no longer part of us. You can’t explain what he did. He believed he was doing the right thing. He believed that maybe he could bring her back. He honestly believed that. And our father? Lost his mind, too, eh? What would you have me do? Kill all of them, anyone that doesn’t meet your standards of sanity? Oh, and what a standard that would be, Della. What a fucking standard that would be!”