I CALLED ELLIOT from my hotel room later that afternoon. He sounded tired. He wasn’t going to get too much sympathy from me.
“Bad day at the office?”
“I got the justice blues. You?”
“Just a bad day.” I didn’t mention Tereus to Elliot, mainly because I hadn’t learned anything useful from him as yet, but I had checked two more of the witness statements after I left LapLand. One was a second cousin of Atys Jones, a God-fearing man who didn’t approve of the lifestyles of Atys or of his missing mother and aunt, but who liked to hang around dive bars to give himself something to get offended by. A neighbor told me he was most likely back at the Swamp Rat, and that was where I found him. He recalled Atys and Marianne Larousse leaving and was still at the bar, praying for all sinners over a double, when Atys reappeared with blood and dust on his face and hands.
The Swamp Rat stood at the end of Cedar Creek Road, close to the edge of the Congaree. It wasn’t much to look at, inside or out, an eyesore of cinder blocks and corrugated iron, but it had a good jukebox and was the kind of place that rich kids went when they wanted to flirt a little with danger. I walked through the trees surrounding it and found the small clearing where Marianne Larousse had died. There was still crime-scene tape dangling from the trees, but there was no other sign that she had lost her life here. I could hear Cedar Creek flowing close by. I followed it west for a time, then headed back north, hoping to intersect with the trail that led back to the bar. Instead, I found myself at a rusted fence, dotted at intervals with PRIVATE PROPERTY signs announcing that the land was owned by Larousse Mining Inc. Through the mesh I could see fallen trees, sunken ground, and patches of what looked like limestone. This section of the coastal plain was littered with limestone deposits; in places, the acidic groundwater had percolated through the limestone, reacting with it and dissolving it. The result was the kind of karst landscape visible through the mesh, riddled with sinkholes, small caves, and underground rivers.
I followed the fence for a time, but found no gap. It began to rain again, and I was soaked through once more by the time I got back to the bar. The barman didn’t know much about the Larousse land, except that he thought it might once have been the site of a proposed limestone quarry that had never been developed. The government had made offers on it to the Larousses in an effort to extend the state park, but they’d never been taken up.
The other witness was a woman named Euna Schillega who had been shooting pool in the Swamp Rat when Atys and Marianne had entered the bar. She recalled the racist abuse directed at Atys and confirmed the times that they had arrived and left. She knew because, well, because the man she was shooting pool with was the man she was seeing behind her husband’s back, you know what I mean, hon, and she was keeping a close eye on the time so that she’d be home before he finished his evening shift. Euna had long red hair, tinted to the color of strawberry jelly, and a small tongue of fat jutted over the lip of her faded jeans. She was saying good-bye to her forties, but in her mind she was only half as old and twice as pretty.
Euna worked part-time as a waitress in a bar near Horrel Hill. A couple of servicemen from Fort Jackson were sitting in a corner sipping beers and sweating gently in the afternoon heat. They were sitting as close as they could to the a/c but it was nearly as old as Euna. The army boys would have been better off blowing air at each other over the edges of their cold bottles.
Euna was about the most cooperative of the witnesses to whom I’d spoken so far. Maybe she was bored and I was providing a distraction. I didn’t know her, and I didn’t imagine that I was going to, but I guessed that the pool player was probably a distraction too, the latest in a long line of distractions. There was something restless about Euna, a kind of roving hunger fueled by frustration and disappointment. It was there in the way she held herself as she spoke, the way her eyes wandered lazily across my face and body as if she were figuring out which parts to use and which to discard.
“Did you see Marianne Larousse in the bar before that night?” I asked her.
“Couple of times. Seen her in here too. She was a rich girl, but she liked to slum it some.”
“Who was she with?”
“Other rich girls. Rich boys, sometimes.”
She gave a little shudder. It might have been distaste, or perhaps something more pleasurable.
“You got to watch their hands. Those boys, they think their money buys them beer but their tip buys them mining rights, you get my meaning.”
“I take it that it doesn’t.”
Remembered hunger flashed in her eyes, then was softened by the memory of her appetite’s satiation. She took a long drag on her cigarette.
“Not every time.”
“You ever see her with Atys Jones before that night?”
“Once, but not in here. It ain’t that kind of place. It was back at the Swamp Rat. Like I said, I go there some.”
“How did they look to you?”
“They weren’t touching or nothing, but I could tell they was together. I guess other folks could too.”
She let her last words hang.
“There was trouble?”
“Not then. Next night she was back in here and her brother came looking for her.” Again there was a shudder, but this time her feelings were clear.
“You don’t like him?”
“I don’t know him.”
“But?”
She looked around casually, then leaned in slightly closer across the bar. The action forced her shirt open a little, exposing the sweep of her breasts and their dusting of freckles.
“The Larousses keep a lot of folks in jobs around here, but that don’t mean we got to like them, Earl Jr. least of all. There’s something about him, like… like he’s a faggot but not a faggot? Don’t get me wrong, I like all men, even the ones that don’t like me, you know, physically and all, but not Earl Jr. There’s just something about him.”
She took another drag on her cigarette. It was almost gone after three puffs.
“So Earl Jr. came into the bar looking for Marianne?”
“That’s right. Took her by the arm and tried to drag her out. She slapped him, then this other fella came forward and together they managed to get her away.”
“Do you remember when this happened?”
“About a week before she was killed.”
“You think they knew about her relationship with Atys Jones?”
“Like I said, other folks knew about it. If they knew, it would get back to her family in the end.”
The door behind me opened, and a group of men entered, shouting and laughing. It was the start of the evening rush.
“I got to go, hon,” said Euna. She had already declined to sign a written statement.
“Just one more question: Did you recognize the man with Earl Jr. that night?”
She thought for a moment. “Sure. He’s been in here once or twice before. He’s a piece of shit. His name is Landron Mobley.”
I thanked her, and left a twenty on the bar to cover my OJ and her time. She gave me her best smile.
“Don’t take this wrong, hon,” said Euna as I stood to leave, “but that boy you’re trying to help deserves what he’s got coming.”
“Lot of people seem to think that way.”
She blew a steady stream of smoke from her cigarette into the air, pushing out her lower lip as she did so. It was swollen slightly, like it had been bitten recently. The smoke dissipated. I watched it go.
“He raped and killed that girl,” continued Euna. “I know you got to do what you’re doing, asking questions and all, but I hope you don’t find out nothing to get that boy off.”
“Even if I find out that he’s innocent?”
She lifted her breasts from the bar and stabbed her cigarette out in the ashtray.
“Hon, there ain’t nobody innocent in this world except little babies, and sometimes I ain’t even sure about them.”
I told all of this to Elliot over the phone.
“Maybe you should talk to your client Mobley when you find him, see what he knows.”
“If I can find him.”
“You think he’s skipped?”
“I hope he’s skipped,” said Elliot, but when I asked him to explain what he meant he laughed it off. “I mean, I think Landron’s facing serious jail time if it goes to trial. In legal terms, Landron’s fucked.”
But that wasn’t what he meant.
That wasn’t what he meant at all.
• • •
I showered, then ate in my room. I called Rachel and we spoke for a while. MacArthur had been true to his word in calling by regularly, and Klan Killer was staying out of sight when the cops came by. If Rachel hadn’t quite forgiven me for springing him on her, she seemed to be finding something vaguely reassuring in his presence. He was also clean and didn’t leave the toilet seat up, factors that tended to weigh heavily in Rachel’s formation of opinions about people. MacArthur was due to go out with Mary Mason that evening, and MacArthur had promised to keep Rachel posted. I told her that I loved her, and she told me that if I loved her I’d bring her back chocolates. Sometimes, Rachel was a simple girl.
After we had talked, I called to check on Atys. The woman answered and told me, best that I could understand, that he was a “spile chile. Uh yent hab no mo’ pashun wid’um.” Clearly, she was less sympathetic to Atys’s plight than her husband. I asked her to put Atys on the line. Seconds later, I heard footsteps and he answered.
“How you doing?” I asked.
“Okay, I guess.” He lowered his voice. “The old woman is killin’ me. She’s hard.”
“Just be nice to her. You got anything more you want to tell me?”
“No. I done tole you all I can.”
“And all you know?”
He didn’t answer for so long I thought that he had simply put the phone down and walked away. Then he spoke.
“You ever feel like you been shadowed all your life, like there’s always someone there with you, someone you can’t see most of the time, but you know, you just know that they’s there?”
I thought of my wife and my daughter, of their presence in my life even after they had gone, of shapes and shadows glimpsed in darkness.
“I think so,” I said.
“The woman, she’s like that. I been seein’ her all my life, so’s I don’t know if I dream her or not, but she’s there. I know she is, even if there ain’t nobody else sees her. That’s all I know. Don’t ask me no more.”
I changed the subject.
“You ever have a run-in with Earl Larousse Jr.?”
“No, never.”
“Landron Mobley?”
“I heard he was looking for me, but he didn’t find me.”
“You know why he was looking for you?”
“To kick the shit out of me. Why you think Earl Jr.’s dog be lookin’ for me?”
“Mobley worked for Larousse?”
“He didn’t work for him, but when they needed they dirty work done for them they went to Mobley. Mobley had friends too, people worse than him.”
“Like?”
I heard him swallow.
“Like that guy on TV,” he said. “The Klan guy. Bowen.”
• • •
That night, far to the north, the preacher Faulkner lay awake in his cell, his hands clasped behind his head, and listened to the night sounds of the prison: the snores, the cries from troubled sleepers, the footsteps of the guards, the sobbing. It no longer kept him awake as it had once done. He had quickly learned how to ignore it, reducing it, at worst, to the level of background noise. He could now sleep at will, but this night his thoughts were elsewhere, as they had been since the release of the man named Cyrus Nairn. And so he lay unmoving on his bunk, and waited.
• • •
“Get them off me! Get them off me!”
The prison guard Dwight Anson awoke in his bed, kicking and wrenching at the sheets, the pillow beneath his head soaked with sweat. He leaped from the bed and brushed at his bare skin, trying to remove the creatures that he felt crawling across his chest. Beside him, his wife, Aileen, reached out and switched on the bedside lamp.
“Jeez, Dwight, you’re dreaming again,” she said. “It’s just a dream.”
Anson swallowed hard and tried to slow down the beating of his heart, but he still found himself shuddering and brushing aimlessly at his hair and arms.
It was the same dream, for the second night running: a dream of spiders crawling across his skin, biting him while he lay constrained in a filthy bathtub in the center of a forest. As the spiders bit him his skin began to rot, the flesh falling from his body in small clumps that left gray hollows in their wake. And all the time he was being watched from the shadows by a strange, emaciated man with red hair and thin, white fingers. The man was dead, though: Anson could see his ruined skull illuminated by the moonlight, could pick out the blood on his face. Still, his eyes were alive with pleasure as he watched his pets feeding on the trapped man.
Anson placed his hands on his hips and shook his head.
“Come back to bed, Dwight,” said his wife, but he didn’t move, and after a few seconds had elapsed, the disappointment showed in her eyes and she turned over and pretended to go back to sleep. Anson almost reached over to touch her, then decided against it. He didn’t want to touch her. The girl he wanted to touch was missing.
Marie Blair had disappeared on the way home from her job at the Dairy Queen the night before, and had not been seen or heard from since. For a time, Anson half expected the police to come looking for him. Nobody knew about his thing with Marie, or nobody was supposed to know, but there was always the possibility that she had shot off her mouth to one of her dumb-ass friends and that, when the police came calling, they might have mentioned his name. But so far there had been nothing. Anson’s wife had sensed his unease and knew that there was something bothering him, but she hadn’t brought it up and that suited him fine. Still, he was worried for the girl. He wanted her back, as much for his own selfish reasons as for her own sake.
Anson left his unmoving wife and headed down the stairs to the kitchen. It was only when he opened the door of the refrigerator and reached for the milk that he felt the blast of cool air at his back and heard, almost simultaneously, the banging of the screen door against the frame.
The kitchen door was wide open. He supposed that the wind could have blown it open, but he didn’t think it was likely. Aileen had come to bed after him, and she usually made sure that all the doors were locked. It wasn’t like her to forget. He wondered too why they had not heard it banging before now, for even the slightest noise in the house was normally enough to wake him from his sleep. Carefully, he laid down the carton of milk and listened, but he could hear no sound in the house. From out in the yard came the whispering of the wind in the trees, and the sound of distant cars.
Anson kept a Smith & Wesson 60 in his night table. He briefly considered heading back upstairs to retrieve it before deciding against it. Instead, he took the carving knife from its block and padded to the door. He glanced first right, then left, to make sure there was nobody waiting for him outside, then pushed it open. He stood on the porch and looked out on the empty yard. Ahead of him was an expanse of tidy lawn with trees planted at its verge, shielding the house from the road beyond. The moon shone behind him, sending the clean lines of the house racing ahead of him.
Anson stepped out onto the grass.
A figure detached itself from where it had lain beneath the porch steps, the sound of its approach masked by the wind, its shape devoured by the black mass of the house’s shade. Anson was not even aware of its presence until something gripped his arm and he felt a pressure across his throat, followed by a surge of pain as he watched the blood shoot up into the night. The knife fell from his grip and he turned, his left hand pressed uselessly against the wound in his neck. His legs weakened and he fell to his knees, the blood coming less freely now as he began to die.
Anson looked up into the eyes of Cyrus Nairn, and at the ring Nairn was holding in the palm of his hand. It was the garnet ring that Anson had given Marie Blair for her fifteenth birthday. He would have known it anywhere, he thought, even if it hadn’t been circling Marie’s severed forefinger. Then Cyrus Nairn turned away as Anson’s legs began to shake uncontrollably, the moonlight gleaming on the killer’s knife as he made his way to the house, Anson shaking and, at last, dying as Nairn turned his thoughts to the now slumbering Aileen Anson and the place he had prepared for her.
And in his cell at Thomaston, Faulkner closed his eyes and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.