The White Road

Mobley was the first to head after her, then Foster. Elliot, torn between taking his turn with the girl on the ground or stopping her sister, stood unmoving for a time before ru

The purchase of the karst had been an expensive mistake for the Larousse family. The land was honeycombed by underwater streams and caves, and they had almost lost a truck down a sinkhole following a collapse before they discovered that the limestone deposits weren’t even big enough to justify quarrying. Meanwhile, successful mines were being dug in Cayce, about twenty miles up-river, and Wy

Melia passed some fallen, rusted fencing, and a bullet-riddled NO TRESPASSING sign. Her feet were torn and bleeding, but she kept moving. There were houses beyond the karst, she knew. There would be help for her there, help for her sister. They would come for them and take them to safety and-

She heard the men behind her, closing rapidly. She peered back, still ru

The sinkholes had, over the years, become a dumping ground for poisons and chemicals, the waste infecting the water supply and slowly, over time, entering the Congaree itself, for all of these hidden streams ultimately co

They were highly flammable.

The three men stepped back hurriedly as a pillar of flame shot up from the depths of the hole, illuminating the trees, the broken ground, the abandoned machinery, and their faces, shocked and secretly delighted at the effect they had achieved.

One of them wiped his hands on the remains of the old sheet he had torn for use as a wick, trying to rid himself of the worst of the gasoline.

“Fuck her,” said Elliot Norton. He wrapped the rag around a stone and tossed it into the inferno. “Let’s go.”

I said nothing for a time. Poveda was tracing unknowable patterns on the tabletop with his index finger. Elliot Norton, a man whom I had considered a friend, had participated in the rape and burning of a young girl. I stared at Poveda, but he was intent upon his finger patterns. Something had broken inside Phil Poveda, the thing that had allowed him to continue living after what they had done, and now Phil Poveda was drowning in the tide of his recollection.

I was watching a man go insane.

“Go on,” I said. “Finish it.”

“Finish her,” said Mobley. He was looking down at Earl Larousse, who was kneeling beside the prone woman, buttoning his pants. Earl’s brow furrowed.

“What?”

“Finish her,” repeated Mobley. “Kill her.”

“I can’t do that,” said Earl. He sounded like a little boy.

“You fucked her quick enough,” said Mobley. “You leave her here and somebody finds her, then she’ll talk. We let her go, she’ll talk. Here.” He picked up a rock and tossed it at Earl. It struck him painfully on the knee and he winced, then rubbed at the spot.

“Why me?” he whined.

“Why any of us?” asked Mobley.

“I’m not doing it,” said Earl.

Then Mobley pulled a knife from beneath the folds of his shirt. “Do it,” said Mobley, “or I’ll kill you instead.”

Suddenly, the power in the group shifted and they understood. It had been Mobley all along: Mobley who had led them; Mobley who had found the pot, the LSD; Mobley who had brought them to the women; and Mobley who had ultimately damned them. Maybe that had been his intention all along, thought Phil later: to damn a group of rich, white boys who had patronized him, insulted him, then taken him under their wing when they saw what he could procure for them just as they would surely abandon him when his usefulness came to an end. And of them all, it was Larousse who was the most spoiled, the most cosseted, the weakest, the most untrustworthy; and so it would fall to him to kill the girl.

Larousse began to cry. “Please,” he said. “Please don’t make me do this.”

Mobley, unspeaking, lifted the blade and watched it gleam in the moonlight. Slowly, with trembling hands, Larousse picked up the rock.

“Please,” he said, one last time. To his right, Phil turned away, only to feel Mobley’s hand wrench him around.

“No, you watch. You’re part of it, you watch it end. Now-” He turned his attention back to Larousse. “Finish her, you chickenshit fuck. Finish her, you fucking pretty boy, unless you want to go back to your daddy and have to tell him what you’ve done, cry on his shoulder like the little fucking faggot that you are, beg him to make it go away. Finish her. Finish her!”

Larousse’s whole body was shaking as he raised the rock then brought it down, with minimal force, on the girl’s face. Still there came a cracking sound, and she moaned. Larousse was howling now, his face convulsed with fear, the tears rolling down his cheeks, streaking through the dirt that had accumulated on them during the rape of the girl. He raised the rock a second time, then brought it down harder. This time, the crack was louder. The rock came up once more, then down, faster now, and Larousse was making a high-pitched mewling sound as he struck at the girl again and again and again, lost in the frenzy of it, blood-spattered, until hands reached out for him and they dragged him from her body, the rock still grasped between his fingers, his eyes huge and white in his red face.

The girl on the ground was long dead.

“You did good,” said Mobley. The knife was gone. “You’re a regular killer, Earl.” He patted the sobbing man on the shoulder. “A regular killer.”

“Mobley took her away,” said Poveda. “People were coming, drawn by the fire, and we had to leave. Landron’s old man was a gravedigger in Charleston. He’d opened a grave in Magnolia the day before, so Landron and Elliot dumped her there and used some of the earth to cover her. They buried the guy on top of her the next day. He was the last in his family. Nobody was ever going to be digging up the plot again.” He swallowed. “At least, they weren’t until Landron’s body got dumped there.”

“And Melia?” I asked.

“She was burned alive. Nothing could have survived that blaze.”

“And nobody knew about this? You told no one else about what you’d done?”

He shook his head. “It was just us. They looked for the girls, but they never found them. Rains came and washed everything away. As far as anybody knew, they’d just disappeared off the face of the earth.

“But somebody found out,” he concluded. “Somebody’s making us pay. Maria