Eddie would later describe his house this way:
It was not a shack like the newspaper called it, but a real house with sheetrock on the walls and a real ceiling, not a tar roof. From the outside it might have looked like a shack, but my father had built it strong, so that when the wind blew it didn't lean or creak, and on that day, in the rain, it didn't leak because he'd sealed cracks and caulked seams and hung gutters and done a good job with the flashing, and all this careful work made it seem to me like he had wanted it to stand after he was gone, and I thought that I could learn maybe just that much from him, to do things good (which I would have said before you taught me, Mr. Branch) ... well.
It was the only house on Chambers Road. The road itself ran for nearly two miles along the eastern border of Glenford State Park. There were no streetlamps, and so the darkness gradually thickened into a kind of black syrup until Eddie's house suddenly flamed out of a forest break.
"People don't like to come out this way," Eddie said when we came to a stop in front of the house. He seemed reluctant to get out, as if the world outside my car were more perilous, a jungle he knew well but still dreaded. "People think my father picked it because it was isolated and he could do anything, and nobody would see him."
I glanced toward the house, noted that it was close to the road, with nothing but a bare lawn between the two. A blue Chevy sat heavily in the reddish clay, slumped and dusty, like a creature struggling for breath. There were no shrubs, and only one tree, and that a relatively small one, so that it seemed burdened even by the unpainted wooden swing that hung by two gray ropes from its sagging limb.
"It doesn't seem very secluded to me," I said.
"There's a shed behind the house, way back in the woods," Eddie told me. "The sheriff thought I maybe took Sheila there." He shrugged. "I guess he thinks we're two of a kind, my father and me." The stain of that blood connection flickered painfully in Eddie's eyes, a darkness that seemed to fall over him, deepening as it fell. "But I didn't hurt Sheila."
I glanced at the house cheerfully, as if it were a bright suburban ranch, complete with father and son together on a big sofa, eating popcorn and watching a ball game. "So, how long have you lived here?"
"Always," Eddie said in a tone that revealed a sense of forever, that he would never leave this place, that it wasn't a house at all but a destiny.
I started to address the issue directly, mention graduation, ask what he planned to do after that, but the hard slap of a screen door abruptly stopped me.
"Mom," Eddie said.
I turned toward the house and saw a woman with ragged brown hair that fell to her shoulders. She wore a housedress that had some kind of pattern on it. A cigarette dangled loosely from the fingers of her right hand.
"Somebody must have told her," Eddie said.
She stood on the dimly lighted porch, staring at the car, her left fist pressed into her side. She took a draw on the cigarette, then plucked it from her lips and blasted a column of smoke into the air. "What are you waiting for?" she called.
In response, Eddie reached for the door handle. "Thanks for the ride, Mr. Branch."
"No problem," I told him.
He gave a quick nod, then got out of the car.
His mother had come down the stairs by then, and was moving toward me. They met and exchanged a few words, after which Eddie headed into the house, though reluctantly, as if obeying orders he didn't like.
I would have pulled away by then, but something in the whole scene held my attention, a bedraggled mother and a boy in trouble, both of them orphaned, as it were, by a murderous man. Still, it surprised me that I didn't leave but instead waited as Eddie's mother came forward, a trail of cigarette smoke flowing behind her like a ghost's ragged veil.
I rolled down the window as she drew near, got a whiff of smoke.
"So you're Eddie's teacher?" she said.
"One of them," I told her. "He's in my specialty class."
"Any good?"
"I try to make it interesting."
Her laugh was a cackle. "I mean Eddie. Is he doing good in your class?"
"He does all right," I said. "He reads the material."
She cocked her head to the side and took a long draw on the cigarette. "You think he's like his daddy?" She saw that the question shocked me, and that I had no answer for it. My awkwardness clearly thrilled her, almost physically, a trembling delight that ended in a sharp laugh. "You know who he was, don't you, Eddie's daddy?"
"Yes. I do."
She released the cigarette like a bug she'd crushed. "Now Eddie's in trouble," she said with a resignation that hardened into a strange, vocalized bruise.
"Maybe not," I said.
Her eyes sparkled with something that could only be described as the opposite of light. "Maybe not?" She laughed mockingly. "What would you know about trouble?"
I saw the man she thought I was, an effete schoolteacher whose experience of life had come more or less from books, a creature of secure salary and vested pension, a bloodless little twit of a man who knew nothing of the cruel arbitrariness of things, life's gruesome pits, how deep they are and how suddenly we may find ourselves at the bottom of them.
"Eddie's in trouble, all right," she said firmly. "Unless that girl turns up." She stepped back and looked at me closely, like someone trying to bring a blurry photograph into focus. "What's your name?"
"Branch," I told her. "Jack."
"Branch," she said, as if turning the name over in her mind. She started to say more, then stopped and stared at me silently.
"Well, good night, Mrs. Miller," I said.
She gave no reply, not so much as a nod or a wave, but simply stood, watching silently as I eased the gear into reverse and drifted back into the concealing blackness of the unlighted road.
Back at home I turned on the television to check if there'd been any developments. On the small screen, a man in a bow tie gave the forecast. There was to be rain and thunder. We were to take care.
I switched off the television, retrieved Suetonius's Lives of the Caesars from the table where I'd left it, and sat down to read. Normally I had no trouble concentrating on whatever I was reading, but I found myself distracted, my gaze continually drawn to the mantel above the fireplace. There were only two pictures there. One was of my father and me on the day of my college graduation, I in cap and gown, he in a neat black suit. The other picture was of myself as a little boy, standing somewhere on the vast grounds of Great Oaks. I'd lived there in luxury, but also in seclusion, and in that solitude, made imaginary villains of kudzu vines and stalks of pokeweed against whom I'd defended the nobility of Great Oaks. In the evening, my father read to me from the Bible in order, he explained, to acquaint me with the language of King James, how august and gravely beautiful it was. He had not meant me to receive any of it as a sacred text, and yet the New Testament's tender call to the wayward and unmoored, the lonely and by all else abandoned, might have wooed me to its faith had not he also introduced me to a wholly secular field of interest, beginning with, of all things, Chesterton's letters to his son, then on to a host of similarly paternal figures—Cicero, Aurelius, Montaigne—the bounty of which was actually playing in my mind when the knock came at the door.
When I opened it I found a small bantam rooster of a man, with florid cheeks and tufts of red hair peeking from beneath his snap-brim hat. A field of scars, very faint but still visible, ran along the sides of his face, the mark of the rabid acne that had no doubt once afflicted him. He wore a dark suit, with white shirt and tie, and he'd pulled his hat down low, so that his eyes, small and round with somewhat yellowed whites, glimmered just beneath the brim. He smoked a white meerschaum pipe, the bowl yellowed with time and use, so that when he took it from his mouth I was surprised at how pristine he'd kept the stem.
"Mr. Branch?" he asked.
"Yes," I said.
In a clear display of his professionalism, he took out his identification. "I'm Sheriff Drummond. We spoke earlier."
I recalled that in literature men in Drummond's position were always smoking. Perhaps it went back to Faust, whose demonic inquisitor had been all but made of smoke. Compared to so imposing a figure, Drummond appeared quite innocuous, a little man with a deferential manner, who seemed determined to ape the careful dress of the class above him, and to which he'd added the "intellectual" touch of a white-bowled pipe.
"I don't mean to intrude," he added.
"You're not," I assured him politely.
"I understand you picked up Eddie Miller this evening," he said as he returned the identification to his jacket pocket.
"Yes, I did."
He glanced just over my shoulder, to the open book I'd left on my chair.
"Like your father." He took a long puff on his pipe. "A scholar."
"You were asking about Eddie Miller?"
He looked like a man suddenly called to account. "Yes," he said. "Eddie Miller. I was wondering if he might have said anything to you on the way home."
"Just what he'd already told you," I said.
"Did he say anything about Sheila Longstreet?"
"That he let her out at Clearwater. The corner there. On Route 4."
"He didn't strike me as a bad boy," Drummond said. "You're his teacher?"
"He's in my specialty class."
"Is that a class for problem kids?"
"No, it isn't."
"Slow?"
"Eddie's not slow," I said.
He took another puff on his pipe. Blue smoke twined up from its bowl. "Special in what way then?" he asked.
"It's not part of the general curriculum," I answered. "The teacher picks the subject."
"What's the subject of your class?" Drummond asked.
"Evil," I answered.
"I'll bet it's very interesting," Drummond said. "I'm sure you read wonderful books. I have very little time for reading, I'm afraid. My son was a great reader. I still have his books, but I rarely ... well ... I'm sure you understand, Mr. Branch. A workingman's life has little leisure."
It struck me that although Drummond was no doubt in the midst of performing a professional duty, he was also a man who sought information along other lines, an autodidact who garnered shreds of learning from conversation, then filed them away in precious nuggets.
"What do you have them read in your class?" Drummond asked.
He saw that I found the question odd, and suddenly looked as if I'd come to feel him rather odd, as well, and so returned immediately to Eddie.
"Of course, you probably have no time for idle conversation," he said. "So, well, I do have a few matters I'd like to be clear about." He drew a small notebook from his jacket pocket. "Where were you again when you saw Eddie's van?" He smiled. "If it was Eddie's van, of course."
"On Route 4. I was coming home from dinner with my father. Around eight. I went to Jake's and had a cup of coffee. After that, I drove to Glenford Park."
"That's a nice place, Glenford Park," Drummond said amiably. "Nice night, too. Friday night. Clear. Nearly a full moon. You probably had a good view of the lake."
"I don't remember," I said. "I wasn't there very long. I didn't even get out of my car."
Drummond said nothing, but his silence worked on me like a heavy instrument, a pry rod he used to open my mouth, keep me talking.
"I stopped at Breaker Landing," I told him without being asked. "No one else was there. I stayed a few minutes, then went home." I waited for a question, but it never came. "Which is where I stayed until Monday morning," I added.
"Was Sheila Longstreet in your class?" Drummond asked.
"Was? She still is, as far as I know."
Drummond started to respond but stopped because, in one of those unpredictable swerves that renders life a maddening uncertainty, a metallic voice suddenly came from the police radio in Drummond's car.
"A call," Drummond said. "Excuse me." He walked to his car, got in, and remained there awhile, listening. Then he got out again and came back to my door.
"They found Sheila Longstreet," he said with what seemed truly good cheer.
I thought of the dark reaches of Glenford Park, then the countless deserted places of the Delta where over the years other murdered females had been found, ditches and ravines, weedy fields, culverts, marshes, their bodies disposed of like rusty car engines or old metal filing cabinets, stuff the dump won't take.
"In Jackson," he added happily.
It was the basements and cellars of our capital city that now circled through my mind, made soundproof with thick sheets of fiberboard, windows covered with black plastic sheeting secured with packing tape, wooden rafters hung with ropes, equipped with pulleys, gouged with meat hooks.
"She's alive."
Now I imagined Sheila carried out on a stretcher, breathing faintly through bruised lips and cracked teeth, her arms and legs covered with scratches and cigarette burns, barely able to see through her swollen eyes.
"Alive and well," Drummond said with a broad smile. "At her cousin's house in Jackson." He shook his head, as if at the whimsy of life. "She took the bus there late Friday afternoon."
On those words, I saw Luther Ray Miller's old brown van draw up to an electrical pole at the corner of Clearwater Drive and Route 4, the rectangular blue bus-stop sign winking in its rearview mirror, the short list of towns the bus route served, Bryerton, Milburg, Jackson.
"It seems she had a fight with her boyfriend," Drummond went on. "She just wanted to make him miss her."
"She put a lot of people to a lot of trouble," I said.
Drummond released a short, affable chuckle. "Well, kids. What can you do?" He touched the brim of his hat in farewell. "Well, good night, Mr. Branch. Sorry for the trouble."
With that, he returned to his car and drove away. I watched him until the car turned off Maple and abruptly disappeared, then went back to the sofa, read awhile, and went to bed.
Normally I would have dropped off very quickly, but the vision of Eddie unjustly accused continued to unsettle me.
For a time, I waited it out. But after a while, I gave up, walked back to the living room, and turned on the television.
She was there almost instantly, Sheila Longstreet ushered down the steps of Jackson police headquarters and into a waiting police car that immediately pulled away, lights flashing brightly until it vanished around the corner.
Then it was the same woman, microphone in hand, who'd last reported from the steps of Lakeland High. Earlier she'd stared grimly into the camera, but now she was clearly relieved that things had turned out as they had. "So there we have it," she said happily. "A rare thing indeed in cases like this. A happy ending." She smiled and seemed to think the whole world smiled with her, all the trees and streams. But I felt something entirely different, the lingering power of a dark legacy, how Sheila's brief disappearance had, in a sense, disinterred Eddie Miller's father, Eddie now more stigmatized than ever, a victim of town memory with a sign hung round his neck: COED KILLER'S SON.
No one should have to live like that, I thought. It was the very opposite of how I lived. Eddie's family name made him infamous while mine bestowed upon me all manner of deference and respect. In addition, there was his poverty, his public-school education, both of which made him a do-gooder's dream, the little boy I'd imagined crouched in a shadowy corridor of the Confederate Orphanage and upon whom I wished to bestow my own noble beneficence.
This, too, Mr. Titus saw:
MR. TITUS: So, you felt sorry for Eddie Miller, sorry for his background, for the way he'd been treated?
MR. BRANCH: Yes.
MR. TITUS: You'd had so much and he'd had so little, and so you wanted to help him, isn't that right?
MR. BRANCH: I made myself available to him, yes.
MR. TITUS: He became your, what ... project?
MR. BRANCH: I would make myself available, if he asked.
MR. TITUS: And what did you expect him to ask you for, Mr. Branch?
MR. BRANCH: I don't know. Help with his studies.
MR. TITUS: That's all?
MR. BRANCH: At the beginning, yes.
MR. TITUS: With no idea where it would lead?
MR. BRANCH: Does anyone ever know where anything will lead?
Mr. Titus never answered that question.
But I answer it every day, and my answer is always, No.