The Devil and the River Read online

  So Judith was raised by Evangelina, more a drunk than a mother, and when Evangelina died in May of 1937, Judith—all of twenty years old—upped and left for Whytesburg, perhaps believing that a change of location would establish the precedent for a change in fortune. That change, significantly less fortunate than she’d perhaps hoped, came in the guise of Garfield Thomasian, a shoe salesman out of Biloxi with a new station wagon and a popular line in smart cordovan wingtips. Their affair was brief and heated, fruitful in the way of Judith’s immediate pregnancy, but Garfield Thomasian didn’t hang around to see the results of his efforts. He was gone—gone, but not forgotten. Exhaustive attempts to locate him resulted in nothing but the discovery of a similar pattern of philandering adventures across this and several other states. Thomasian was a bad squall; he blew in, blew out, left nothing but small devastations in his wake.

  Judith went the term, and when Nancy was born on the 10th of June, 1938, her mother believed that perhaps good things could come from bad. The child was beautiful and bright, as unlike the father as any betrayed mother could hope for, and things seemed to take a turn for the better.

  Of Judith Denton, Gaines knew a little. Of her daughter, Nancy, he had known nothing. Not until today. Perhaps a small ghost of Whytesburg’s past, only those present at the time being party to such information as rumor and hearsay could provide.

  Nancy Denton’s disappearance one warm evening in August of 1954 preceded Gaines’s official investigatory responsibilities by two decades, and only now—the 24th of July, 1974—was Whytesburg aware of the fact that Nancy never really did go missing.

  Nancy Denton, buried in the mud at the side of the river, had been here all along.

  Gaines, still confused, still uncertain as to how such a thing could have happened, how a body could be preserved without deterioration to such an extent as was the case here, nevertheless understood the weight of this thing.

  Thurston had possessed no doubt as to the identity of the girl.

  It seemed that Judith Denton had been a single mother with a single child.

  But no longer.

  Now she would be a single mother with no child at all.

  Gaines exited his car a half block from the Denton house and stood for a moment. He took a deep breath and considered what was ahead of him. Children went missing and children died. Didn’t matter which town, which city, it was the same everywhere. Which was better—vanished or dead? If they were dead, perhaps some sense of closure could be attained. Perhaps. But if they vanished, there was always the hope that they would return. That, in itself, was enough to have you waiting for the rest of your life. Persuading yourself to just move on felt like the worst kind of betrayal, as if forgetting would consign them to history. Was this how Judith Denton had spent the last two decades? Looking from the window into the street? Imagining that one day her daughter might turn the corner and be standing right there in the yard? And what would Judith Denton fear? That she would not recognize her? That with each passing year, the daughter had grown and changed, had become a woman, and that she could walk right by her in the street and never know?

  This was a strange day. A strange day indeed.

  Fifteen yards from the road, Gaines met Judith’s neighbor, Roy Nestor. Gaines had taken him in on a suspected B&E a couple of years before. Didn’t ever come to anything, but here it didn’t matter. Once you got the label, the label stuck. He had a long history of trickery and connivance. A century earlier, he’d have sold snake oil remedies to folks who had insufficient money to feed their kids. Rumor gave him a dozen post office boxes in a dozen different names, and into those boxes would come small-denomination checks for worthless items advertised in leaflets and newspapers, said items never delivered. The amounts paid were too insignificant for disgruntled and disappointed clients to chase refunds, even on principle, but those small amounts added up to handsome totals for Roy Nestor. Nestor would never find permanent work again. He was a journeyman, just as Marcus Denton had been, and Gaines had heard word of him in Wiggins, Lucedale, as far north as Poplarville, even Columbia where the I-98 met the Pearl River. He was a drinker and a fighter, forever smelled of bad armpits and stale tobacco, and irrespective of whatever money he might have swindled from people, he always looked homeless, his clothes raggedy, his shoes burst open and irreparable.

  Nestor nodded at Gaines. “ ’S up Sheriff?”

  “Little business here, Roy. You know where Judith is at?”

  The eyes. The eyes always gave it away. That immediate dimming of the light.

  “Wha’s happening?”

  “Can’t say nothing, Roy. You know that. Where’s Judith at?”

  Gaines took a step forward. Nestor moved to the right, and all of a sudden there was a tension and a threat in the air.

  “Roy,” Gaines said patiently.

  “Somethin’ happen?” Nestor asked. “You don’t come down here unless it’s bad news, eh? Never come down here to give up somethin’ good, right?”

  “Roy . . . please. This is personal business—”

  “Personal? What could be personal that d’ain’t have somethin’ to do with her best friend now . . .”

  “If you’re her best friend, then you will let me deal with what I have to deal with here, Roy, and not be interfering.”

  “Did somethin’ bad happen here, She’ff?”

  “Roy, I’m telling you now, and I’ll tell you again, this is Judith’s personal business and I don’t want you involved. Matters that involve her and her family—”

  “Her family?”

  “Roy . . . I mean it.”

  “You said her family, She’ff. You said her family. She ain’t got no family, you know? I’m her family, you see? I’m the only—”

  And then Roy Nestor stopped. His eyes widened, and he looked at Gaines with an expression that said everything that needed to be said, but he still didn’t believe it.

  “The girl?”

  Gaines did not respond.

  “You found her? You found her girl? Tell me you found her girl . . .”

  Gaines said nothing, but the answer was so obvious in his eyes.

  “You found her, didn’t you, She’ff? You done found the girl.”

  Gaines nodded.

  “Oh, Lord have mercy . . . Oh, Lord almighty have mercy . . .”

  “I have to go and speak to Judith, Roy.”

  “She done for, ain’t she? Tell me she ain’t done for . . . Oh, this is so bad . . . It can’t be anything else, can it? She’s dead, ain’t she?”

  Once again, Gaines did not reply, but whatever words he did not utter were right there in his expression.

  “Oh, man,” Nestor said. “This had to happen, didn’t it? This day had to come. Oh Lord, oh Lord, oh Lord . . .”

  “Roy . . . I need to get by now. I don’t have an ID as yet, but it looks that way, and I’m trusting you not to say a word—”

  “Think I should be the one to tell her, She’ff,” Nestor said, and there was something sympathetic in his expression, something so human, it was hard for Gaines to ignore it. “I knowed that girl, and I knowed Judith ever since. Man, she waited for that girl all these years. She done waited for here, thinkin’ she gon’ come on back, and now she gon’ find out she dead. I listened to her cry too many times to let her deal with this ’un on her own.”

  Gaines looked at the man, his raggedy clothes, his weatherworn face, and he saw real humanity there in his eyes. Roy Nestor cared, and right now Judith Denton would perhaps need a friend more than at any other time in her life. Gaines placed his hand on Nestor’s shoulder, squeezed it reassuringly. “Okay, Roy. I’m sure she would appreciate it if you were there for her. Think she’s gonna need all the good people she can find right now.”

  Nestor shook his head slowly. He sighed deeply. “Shee-it, damned in hell we’ll all be—”

  Gaines frowned. “Why’d you say that?”

  “Says a great deal about us when we can’t take care of our own, do
esn’t it?”

  “Does indeed, Roy.”

  Gaines, feeling the weight of the world on his shoulders, started walking, and Roy Nestor followed on behind.

  It would come in stages, and the stages were like waves, and once the waves came, there would be nothing at all that could be done to stop them. There would be disbelief, shock, a sense of paralysis and utter terror, and then following on, close as shadows, there would be guilt, more disbelief, a vague and disorienting attempt to locate the last thing you said, the last thing you did . . . the last words that passed between you . . .

  Twenty years of waiting, and all the while knowing that when the news came, it would not be good. But still believing that there might have been a chance, just a small chance, the slimmest splinter of a chance that there was a rational explanation for her disappearance, her absence for all these years, and now they would be reunited and it would be as if never a day had passed . . .

  And once the mind started to get a grip on what it all meant, it was then that the pain would arrive, a pain so deep it would feel as if the world had closed its fist around you, and there would be nails and spikes and blades inside that fist, and they would be driven through you with such force.

  And then it would seem that all the shattered parts of your mind had slipped their moorings, and you would be left with nothing but a vast abyss ahead of you, and you would fall in, and there would be no one beneath you and no one behind, and as you fell, there would be nothing on either side to hold on to, nothing to slow the fall, nothing to give you certainty that your drop would cease . . .

  It was this that confronted Judith Denton in the moment she saw Sheriff John Gaines walking down the path toward her house, Roy Nestor walking on behind him, his head bowed, his eyes brimmed with tears and full of despair. They may as well have worn their church suits. There was a darkness about them that communicated everything without the need for words.

  When Gaines arrived at the screen door, he was carrying his hat. This merely served to confirm that the message he brought was of the worst kind.

  It really was as if she had been waiting on this day for twenty years.

  Judith Denton smiled, a faint ghost of a smile, for she knew Sheriff Gaines. She understood his place in the scheme of things, and he understood hers, and though their places were worlds apart, he didn’t take that as license to be anything less than courteous and respectful.

  So Judith Denton saw John Gaines coming down toward the house, and she saw Roy Nestor, too, and she stood there for some seconds with an awkward expression on her face. The light hadn’t dimmed yet. She was convincing herself it was something else, something unrelated, and despite the fact that Gaines was looking right at her, despite the fact that Roy Nestor, the very man she’d spoken to of this day so many times, was walking beside him, and despite the fact that neither of them were smiling, despite knowing that this wasn’t any kind of social call . . .

  Despite all these things, it was nothing less than human nature to try and convince herself that it wasn’t bad news.

  But she knew.

  She’d known from the moment they appeared.

  In her expression was everything—the simple, unfailing certainty that now she would never be short of things to regret.

  And when Gaines was within ten feet of the screen door, Judith coming forward to greet him, she raised her eyebrows with a question, and the question was right there on her lips without her ever having to utter a word. It was then that Sheriff Gaines slowly shook his head, and she knew for certain. A mother would always know.

  He opened the screen door, and he stood there without words. “Judith.”

  “Sheriff.”

  “We believe we may have found the body of your daughter . . .”

  And then it was simply a question of whether a mistake had been made. How could they know it was her? I mean, how could they know for sure? If she herself—Judith, Nancy’s own mother—could have walked by Nancy on the street and not recognized her, then how could John Gaines, a man who had never known her, be so certain that this girl they had found was her?

  And then it was, how bad it could be? How had she died? How terrible had it been? And when? That same day she vanished? Or a later day? Two days, three days, a week, a year, a decade? Had she been beaten? Had she been raped . . . ?

  So she asked Gaines, and her question anticipated the worst of all answers, and there was a hard edge of resignation in her eyes even before the words were uttered.

  “How do you know?”

  “Bob Thurston was with me . . .”

  And Gaines didn’t finish the statement, because he could see that moment of recognition. Bob Thurston had known Nancy, had known her well, had cared for her when she was ill, and if anyone could recognize Nancy, it would be someone like Bob Thurston.

  Judith’s breathing faltered. “Are you sure?” she asked. Her voice cracked, and the words seemed faint and uncertain.

  Roy Nestor turned away, unable to hold her gaze.

  Gaines looked down at the ground and then back at Judith.

  “No,” Judith said, her voice a broken-up whisper. “No, no, tell me no. For God’s sake, no . . .” And she looked at her neighbor, and he still could not look back at her, and it was then that the waves came. They came fast and resolute, unerring in their accuracy, right through the heart, and they battered like fists at the door.

  She seemed to fold in the middle as if a crease were already there, well marked from previous losses and disappointments. The heartbreak came, and it came with every kind of nightmare in tow, and she lowered her head as if this were the very last straw.

  They tried to help her—Sheriff John Gaines and Roy Nestor—but she resisted them. They followed her into the narrow wooden house, down along a corridor to the room where she had slept alone for the past twenty years. A moment of hesitation, and then she turned once more toward the parlor. And here she stood, the room no more than eight by twelve, a single window—four panes of dirty glass—a vague greasy light trying its hardest to gain entry. Beneath it sat a beaten-up chair, cotton stuffing growing through the holes in the cover, to the right a plain deal table, a two-shelf cupboard covered with netting to keep the flies out. The floor was mismatched pieces of oilcloth and linoleum, and everywhere was a feeling of despair and heartbreak.

  Setting her down in the chair, Gaines paused for a moment to catch his breath.

  Judith Denton looked right back at him, but he knew that she did not see him. He imagined that she was looking at the last time she’d seen Nancy, perhaps trying to convince herself that there had been some dreadful, dreadful mistake, that this was a nightmare, that any second now she would stir and wake, that she would know that her daughter was not dead, but still missing . . . and if she were missing, then there was still some small hope that one day she might return.

  Better vanished or dead? Gaines asked himself again. Better to live with certainty or with hope?

  But it was not a nightmare, and Judith Denton did not wake, and she felt no sense of relief.

  Perhaps only then did Judith feel the full force of that news, and Gaines was on his knees before her, holding her hand while she closed up inside. The look in her eyes was now fierce and hateful, as if the world had conspired at last to take from her the only thing that mattered.

  She gasped, and for a while it seemed that she would take only one breath, and somehow that single breath would be her last, and she, too, would die—right there in Gaines’s arms. But she breathed again, and then again, and then she started to sob, and Gaines held her close to his chest. He felt her tears through the thin cotton of his shirt, and Judith Denton’s tears felt like the bitter, black rain that had fallen as they’d exhumed her only child from that filthy, terrible grave.

  Finally, through staggered breaths, through tears that would not stop, she found her voice. It was weak, a terrible, fragile sound, and though she uttered just a handful of words, those words seemed more powerful than anything
Gaines had ever heard.

  “Th-the day sh-she we-went miss-missing,” Judith stammered. “The day she went miss-missing, I ne-never said I love you. I al-always say I love you. But not that day. It ha-had to be th-that day, didn’t it? The day she disappeared . . .”

  5

  Gaines remembered the awareness of being alive, of waking on those rare occasions when he had clawed a handful of hours’ sleep between one march and the next, between one firefight and the next, and being surprised to find himself alive. Before the war, he had taken such a thing for granted. He had taken many things for granted. He’d promised himself that afterward—if he made it home—he would acknowledge his survival, his aliveness, each and every day. But slowly, insidiously, without even realizing it, he had forgotten to make those acknowledgments. Now it was only special occasions—Thanksgiving, birthdays, Christmas—that he remembered the promise. And times of horror. He remembered the promise in times of horror. Small horrors compared to those he had survived, but horrors all the same. Perhaps he had chosen this line of work for that reason. To keep himself reminded of how sudden, how brutal, how terrible it all could be. To forever appreciate the fragility of life. How precious, and yet how terribly fragile. Of all things, however, those who came home from war were haunted by the ghosts of those who did not. At first a sense of disbelief, becoming at once a sense of responsibility to do something special, something rare and meaningful and extraordinary with their lives. Ultimately a sense of guilt that they had not and more than likely never would. What those who did not return would never know was that all you ever wanted were the small things, the narrow routines, the insignificant details of normalcy. You did not want to stand out, to be visible, to be noticed. Invisibility had engendered survival. It was against human nature to change a pattern that facilitated a future.