The Devil and the River (30 page)

Maybe, Gaines thought, once this thing was done, once he knew the truth of what had really happened that night in August of 1954, he would take some time away from the horrors of the world—those that he remembered from his own war experiences, those that he was now witnessing—and look at the possibility of remedying the sense of aloneness that seemed to be growing ever more noticeable. Maybe Bob Thurston was right. Maybe Alice would hang on in there until she believed her son would be okay without her. She was, if nothing else, the personification of maternal instinct. That’s the only way she could be described, as if she knew that her place on this earth was to care for everyone who fell within her circle of influence. Caring was something of which she would never grow tired. Caring for others seemed not to drain her, but to revive her, as if her heart were a battery that absorbed all those thank-yous and converted them into whatever energy was needed to go on. Maybe it was now time to let her go. Such a thought did not instill a sense of guilt in Gaines, but rather a sense of relief, if not for himself then for his mother. She was in pain—he knew that—and almost constantly. How much pain, he did not know, and she would never do anything but her best to hide it. Again, that was borne out of her consideration for him. She should have married again. She should have had more children. Twenty-nine years old when she lost her one and only husband, and she had then spent the rest of her life alone. Had she felt that marrying again would be a betrayal of Edward’s memory? Had she believed that to take another husband, to have had more children, would somehow have caused difficulty for her son? There would be an explanation for her choice, of course, but just as Gaines was unaware of it, so he too believed that Alice might herself be unaware. There was no explaining his own decision to remain single, but remain so he did.

It was with the vague aftermath of these thoughts still in his mind that Gaines arrived in Gulfport. It was a little after five, and he pulled to the curb on the central drag and asked a passerby for directions to Hester Street. It was no more than three blocks, and Gaines decided to walk. He went on down there, hat in hand, and he stood for a while on the sidewalk in front of Maryanne Benedict’s house. It was a simple home—white plank board–built, a short veranda that spanned merely the facade, beneath each window a box containing flowers in various colors.

Gaines’s hesitation was evident in his manner as he approached, and before he even reached the screen, the inner door opened and he saw Maryanne Benedict.

For a moment, all thoughts stopped. Later, he could not identify what it was about her that struck him so forcibly, but Maryanne Benedict possessed something undeniable and unforgettable in the way that she appeared, there in the doorway of her own small house on Hester Road. Something that defied easy description. She was not a beautiful woman, not in any classically accepted sense. Her features were defined, but shadowed, simple but strangely elegant. She looked through the mesh of the screen door, and—had Gaines thought of it—he again would have defined that look as a thousandyard stare. But it was not. It was something beyond that.

The outer door swung open, and she remained silent until Gaines had reached the lower steps that led up to the veranda.

“You have good manners or bad news,” she said, “or both.”

Gaines smiled awkwardly. He looked down at the hat in his hand. “Perhaps the first,” he replied. “Definitely the second.”

“Well, both my folks are dead and I’m an only child. I never married, have no kids, and so it’s a neighbor or a friend or someone you think I care about.”

“Nancy Denton,” Gaines said, and in that second he saw a change of expression so sudden, so dramatic, that he could say nothing further.

He remembered delivering the news to Judith.
Your daughter is dead. Your only child, the one you have been waiting for these past twenty years, is dead.

In some way, a way that Gaines could not understand, this felt even worse.

Maryanne Benedict seemed to lean against the frame of the door for support. A brief sound escaped her lips. A whimper. A cry of repressed astonishment and disbelief.

Gaines walked up the steps toward her, held out his hand to assist her, but she waved him back. Gaines just stood there in silence, not knowing where to look but unable to avert his eyes from the woman.

Standing closer now, he felt awkward, ashamed, embarrassed to have been the one to bring news that would create such an effect, but unable to move, unable to think of any words that might alleviate the distress that Maryanne Benedict was evidently experiencing.

She was first to speak, standing straight and looking back into the house. “I need to get inside,” she said, her voice cracking. “I need to sit down . . .”

She left the door open wide, and Gaines could do nothing but follow her.

Inside, the house was much as it had appeared from the street. Neat, orderly, precise. The furnishings were feminine but functional, nothing too embellished or decorative. It seemed Spartan to Gaines, almost unlived in, and in some strange way reminiscent of his own quarters. There was nothing there that really communicated anything of Maryanne Benedict’s personality—no photographs, no trinkets, no paintings on the walls.

She walked back through the house to the kitchen, Gaines following on behind her.

She turned suddenly. “Some tea,” she said. “We will have tea.”

Gaines didn’t reply.

Maryanne filled the kettle, set it on the stove, busied herself with a teapot, cups, saucers.

“I am sorry to be the one to bring this news,” Gaines said, and for some strange reason, his voice sounded strong and definite.

“You will tell me what happened,” Maryanne said, without turning around.

“I’ll tell you what I can,” Gaines replied.

She nodded.

“There is something else—”

And this time she did turn around, and her expression was alive and anticipatory, her eyes bright, rimmed with tears, the muscles in her jawline twitching visibly. Everything was there—every feeling, every thought and emotion and fear—and she was using every single last line of defense to hold it all inside.

“Michael . . . ,” Gaines said.

“Michael,” she echoed.

“Michael Webster.”

“Yes, yes, I know Michael . . . I know of Michael. What about Michael . . . ? Did you tell him, as well?”

Gaines nodded. “I did, Ms. Benedict, yes.”

“And is he okay? What did he say? Oh my God, I can’t even begin to imagine what he—”

“Michael is dead as well, Miss Benedict.”

The last line went down. The depth of pain that seemed to fill that small kitchen as Maryanne Benedict broke down was greater than anything Gaines had before witnessed.

She dropped a cup into the sink. It somehow did not break.

Gaines was there to hold Maryanne Benedict. She seemed to fold in half—mentally, spiritually, just like Judith—and she sobbed uncontrollably for as long a time as Gaines had ever known.

T
he sun was nearing the horizon. Gaines was aware of this as he sat at the kitchen table.

For a long while the woman said nothing at all, merely glancing at Gaines, her eyes swollen, her mouth forming words that never reached him, as if she were holding some conversation with Nancy, perhaps with Michael, perhaps with someone else entirely.

Gaines remained silent. He felt it best not to interrupt whatever internal monologue was taking place. People dealt with such things in their own ways, and Gaines believed himself more than capable of sitting there as long as was needed. For some reason, he did not feel awkward in the presence of Maryanne Benedict. Perhaps this was due to nothing more than his own emotional exhaustion. He was not fighting anymore. The deaths of Nancy, Michael Webster, and Judith Denton seemed to have bleached his mind of thoughts. He anticipated everything now, as if nothing at all could surprise him. Like Vietnam. Be ready for anything. Run for three days, stand still for four. Move at a moment’s notice; go back the way you came—all of it without explanation as to why.

Eventually, Maryanne Benedict seemed to wind down. Gaines could feel it in the silence between them.

“I am sorry,” she said, and her voice was a whisper.

“You have nothing to be sorry for, Miss Benedict.”

A faint smile flickered across her lips, as if it amused her to be called
Miss Benedict
, but she did not correct Gaines.

“It must be awful for you,” she went on, “having to do this . . .”

Gaines looked at her. He had yet to tell her about Judith Denton’s suicide. Would there be a better time than now?

“I am sorry about what happened to your friends,” Gaines said. “I understand that you and Nancy and Michael were very close when you were younger.”

Again that faint smile, and then Maryanne looked away toward the window and seemed lost for some minutes.

“When you were children,” Gaines added.

“We were all close,” she said. She looked back at Gaines. “I was fourteen when Nancy disappeared. She was sixteen. Matthias was all grown-up too, but it never felt like we were anything but the same age. Della was ten, soon to be eleven. Eugene was a couple of years older than me, and Catherine was a month or so away from her nineteenth birthday. And Michael? Michael was thirty-one.” She shook her head. “It seems strange now to consider such a thing, but at the time it didn’t seem strange at all. He didn’t seem that much older than us, either. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like there was any difference between us at all, but now . . .” Her voice trailed away. “He was twice her age, wasn’t he?”

Gaines said nothing.

“And there was Matthias . . . ,” she said quietly.

“I have spoken to Matthias.”

“You have?”

“Yes.”

“And . . .”

Gaines shifted in the chair. He had to tell her what had happened, but he did not want to.

“Tell me, Sheriff. I don’t know that you can be the bearer of any worse news than you’ve already been . . .”

Gaines’s expression gave him away.

“Oh,” she said, in her response the sound of despair.

“Nancy . . . Nancy was found buried, Miss Benedict . . . buried in the riverbank in Whytesburg. Appeared she had been there for twenty years . . .”

“Oh,” Maryanne said again, but it was an involuntary reaction, an unintentional sound, and she looked as surprised as Gaines to hear her own voice.

“That’s not all,” Gaines went on.

Maryanne’s eyes widened, perhaps in anticipation, perhaps in disbelief that the news could be any worse.

“It seems she had been . . . well, she had been strangled. That was the cause of death, you see? She was strangled . . .” Gaines’s voice faded. He did not want to say
butchered
. He did not want to tell her that. He wanted only to tell Maryanne Benedict only that her childhood friend had been strangled, not that she had been violated so terribly. He was thankful then—perhaps more than ever—that Nancy had not been raped. He could recall memories of such things. Those girls in Vietnam—those children—seemed to have had whatever internal light that animated their thoughts and feelings just snuffed out. Somebody was home, but everything was in darkness. Some of them committed suicide. Once he had seen a girl no more than twelve snatch a sidearm and just shoot herself in the head. He had seen it with his own eyes. She was kneeling before she was dead, still kneeling afterward, eyes still open, still gazing into some vague middle distance where resided her innocence and childlike naïveté, perhaps the belief that she could survive this terrible war, that she could come through the other end of this and have a future. But no, someone had mercilessly snatched away such a belief and with it had gone any reason she might have possessed to go on living. No, whatever horrors he was bringing to Maryanne Benedict’s door, at least he was not bringing that.

He had to tell her the next thing, but tell her so she understood that Nancy was already dead when it happened.

“After she was dead . . . after she was dead, it . . .”

“What, Sheriff? After she was dead, what?”

“She was cut open, Miss Benedict . . . She was cut open down the length of her torso, and her heart was removed . . .”

Maryanne Benedict covered her mouth with her hand. “Oh my God,” she said. “Oh, Lord almighty . . .”

“Some kind of ritual perhaps. We don’t know yet. We don’t understand what really happened . . . the circumstances, you know? All we have is what her body tells us, and her body tells us that some sort of ritual was performed . . .”

“Her heart? Someone took out her heart?”

“Yes,” Gaines replied. “Someone took out her heart.” He looked away.

“What else?” she said, interpreting that look for what it was.

“Something was put in its place,” he said. “Someone replaced her heart with a snake . . .”

Maryanne Benedict’s reaction was not as Gaines had expected. A hysterical response? An exclamation of utter disbelief? What had he anticipated? Certainly not the silent lowering of the head, the way she closed her eyes, the way her hands came together as if in prayer. Certainly not the sound of her breathing deeply as if trying to focus everything at once, trying to pull everything together and prevent herself from unraveling at the seams right before his eyes.

And if Gaines was surprised at her absence of reaction, then he was even further surprised by what she said next.

“Did Michael do that to her?”

Gaines couldn’t hide his expression.

Maryanne looked at him, her eyes tortured with something indefinable. “Did Michael do that to her . . . this thing?”

“We think so,” Gaines said.

“Did he commit suicide?”

Gaines shook his head. “He was murdered . . .”

Maryanne lowered her head, and when she looked up, her brow was furrowed, her eyes intense. “What? He was
murdered
?”

“Yes,” Gaines said. “He was decapitated and his left hand was removed. His body was left in the room where he lived, and it was burned to the ground.”

Maryanne started to get up, using the table to support herself as she tried to stand, but her knees gave way and she sat in the chair heavily.