The White Road

Elliot Norton lived about two miles outside Grace Falls in a modest white faux Colonial with two pillars at its front door and a big porch ru

“Man, am I glad to see you!” he smiled. Some of his hair had been scorched away on the left side of his head. What remained had been cut back in an effort to disguise the damage. There was gauze over his left ear and burn marks glistened along his cheek, chin, and neck. His left hand, where it was visible beneath a white tube bandage, was blistered.

“Don’t take this wrong, Elliot,” I said, “but you don’t look so good.”

“I know. Fire took out most of my wardrobe. Come on.” He reached behind my back and guided me toward the house. “I’ll buy you an iced tea.”

Inside, the house smelled badly of smoke and damp. Water had penetrated the floors above and damaged the plasterwork in the downstairs rooms, brown clouds now sweeping across the white skies of the ceilings. Some of the wallpaper had already begun to peel and I reckoned there was a good chance that Elliot would be forced to replace most of the timbers in the hallway. In the front room was an unmade sofa bed and clothes hung from the curtain rail or splayed themselves across the backs of chairs.

“You’re still living here?” I asked.

“Yup,” he replied, as he washed some ash from a pair of glass tumblers.

“You might be safer in a hotel.”

“I might be, but then the folks who did this to my house would probably come back and finish the job.”

“They could come back anyway.”

He shook his head. “Nah, they’re done, for now. Murder isn’t their style. If they’d wanted to kill me, they’d have done a better job first time round.”

He took a jug of iced tea from the refrigerator and filled the tumblers. I stood by the window and stared out at Elliot’s yard and the land beyond. The skies were empty of birds and the woods surrounding Elliot’s property were almost silent. Along the coast, the migrants were already in flight, the wood ducks joining the terns, the hawks and warblers and sparrows soon to follow. Here, farther inland, there was less evidence of their departure, and even the permanent residents were not as obvious as they formerly were, their spring mating songs ended and their bright summer plumage slowly fading to the mourning cloaks of winter. As if to make up for the absence of the birds and their colors, the wildflowers had begun to bloom now that the worst of the summer heat had departed. There were asters and sunflowers and goldenrods, and butterflies flocked to them, attracted by the predominance of yellows and purples. Beneath the leaves, the field spiders would be waiting for them.

“So when do I get to meet Atys Jones?” I asked.

“Be easiest if you talk to him after we get him out of county. We pick him up from the Richland County Detention Center late tomorrow, then switch him to a second car out back of Campbell ’s Country Corner to lose anyone with an interest in where we might be taking him. From there, I’ll drive him to the safe house in Charleston.”

“Who’s the second driver?”

“Son of the old guy whose go

“Why not stash him closer to Columbia?”

“We got a better chance of keeping him safe down in Charleston, believe me. He’ll be over on the east side, in the heart of a black neighborhood. Anybody comes asking questions and we’ll hear about it in plenty of time to move him again if we have to. Anyhow, it’s a purely temporary arrangement. Could be that we’ll have to stash him somewhere more secure, maybe hire private security. We’ll see.”

“So what’s his story?” I asked.

Elliot shook his head and rubbed his eyes with dirty fingers. “His story is that he and Maria

“They were lovers?”

“Occasional lovers. Atys thinks she was using him to get back at her brother and her daddy, and he was pretty happy to go along with that.” He made a clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth. “I got to tell you, Charlie, my client ain’t exactly nature’s own charmer, if you catch my drift. He’s one hundred and thirty pounds of attitude with a mouth at one end and an asshole at the other, and most of the time I can’t tell which end is which. According to him, the night Maria

“Weapon?”

“Weapon of convenience: a ten-pound rock. Police arrested Atys with blood on his hands and clothes and fragments of rock and dust matching the weapon. He admits he touched her head and body when he found her and rolled the rock away from her skull. He’d smeared some blood on his face as well, but there was nothing consistent with the kind of blood splash you get from beating on someone with a rock. No traces of semen inside her, although they did pick up lubricant from a condom-Trojan-matching the ones found in Atys’s wallet. It looks like it was consensual sex but a good prosecutor might still be able to argue rape. You know, they get excited, then she tries to back off and he doesn’t take it so good. I don’t think it will hold up but they’ll be trying to bolster their case any way they can.”

“You think there’s enough there to sow seeds of doubt in a jury?”

“Maybe. I’m looking for an expert witness to testify on the blood splashes. The prosecution will probably find one who’ll say the exact opposite. This is a black man accused of killing a white girl from the Larousse clan. It’s all uphill on this one. Prosecutor will be looking at loading the jury with middle-income, middle-aged-to-elderly whites who’ll see in Jones the black bogeyman. Best we can hope to do is dilute it, but…”

I waited. There’s always a “but.” There wouldn’t be a story without one.

“There’s local history behind all this; the worst kind of local history.”

He flicked through the piles of files that lay on the kitchen table. I glimpsed police reports, witness statements, transcripts of the interviews conducted with Atys Jones by the police, even crime scene photographs. But I could also see photocopied pages from history books, cuttings from old newspapers, and books on slavery and rice cultivation.

“What you got here,” said Elliot, “is a regular blood feud.”