The White Road

“I’ll be in touch,” I said, then hung up.

My room was at the front of the i

She was moving out there, somewhere, a white blur among the trees, illuminated by bleak moonlight. Behind her, it bedecked the river with glittering stars as it flowed beneath the overhanging trees.

The White Road is everywhere. It is everything. We are on it, and we are of it.

Go to sleep. Go to sleep dreaming of shadows moving along the White Road. Go to sleep watching falling girls crush lilies beneath them as they die. Go to sleep with Cassie Blythe’s torn hand emerging from the darkness.

Go to sleep without knowing if you are among the lost or the found, the living or the dead.

24

I HAD SET my alarm for 4 A.M. and was still bleary-eyed as I made my way across the lobby to the back door of the i

If I was being watched, then the two men were divided between the front and back doors. The back door led to the parking lot, with exits onto both Greene and Devine, but I doubted if I could drive away without being picked up. I took a handkerchief from my pocket and unscrewed the light inside the door. I’d already taken the precaution of shattering the outside light with the sole of my shoe when I had come in the night before. I opened the door a fraction, waited, then slipped out into the darkness. I used the ranks of parked cars to hide my progress until I reached Devine, then called a cab from a pay phone outside a gas station. Five minutes later, I was on my way to the Hertz desk at Columbia International Airport; from there, I drove back in a loop toward Congaree.

The Congaree Swamp is still comparatively inaccessible by road. The main route, along Old Bluff and Caroline Sims, takes visitors to the ranger station and from there sections of the swamp can be explored on foot using a system of boardwalks. But to venture deeper into the Congaree requires a boat, so I’d arranged to hire a ten-footer with a small outboard. The old guy who hired them out was waiting for me at the Highway 601 landing when I arrived, traffic rumbling across the Bates Bridge overhead. We exchanged cash and he took my car keys as security, and then I was on the river, the early morning sun already shining on the brown waters and on the huge cypress and water oak that overshadowed the banks.

In wet weather, the Congaree swells and floods the swamp, dumping nutrients on the plain. The result was the enormous trees that lined the river, their boles monstrous and swollen, their foliage so wide that at times it created a canopy over the flow, darkening and shading the waters beneath. Hurricane Hugo might have claimed some of the largest trees as casualties when it tore through the swamp, but this was still a place to make a man catch his breath at the size and scale of the great forest through which he was passing.

The Congaree marks the borders of Richland and Calhoun counties, its meanderings determining the limits of local political power, police jurisdictions, ordinances, and a hundred other tiny factors that influence the day-to-day lives of those who live within its reach. I had traveled some twelve miles along it when I came to a huge fallen cypress that jutted about halfway into the river. This, the old boatman had told me, marked the end of the state land and the begi

I tied up the boat at the cypress then jumped for the bank. The chorus of crickets nearby grew suddenly silent, then picked up again as I began to move away. I stayed with the bank, looking for signs of a trail, but could find nothing. Tereus had kept his presence here as low-key as possible. Even if trails had once existed before he was jailed, they were long overgrown by now and he had made no effort to clear them again. I stood at the bank and tried to find landmarks that would allow me to get my bearings when I made my way back to the river, then headed into the swamp.

I sniffed the air, hoping to detect wood smoke or cooking, but I could smell only damp and vegetation. I passed through a forest of sweet gums and water oaks, and water tupelos thick with dark purple fruit. Lower on the ground there was pawpaw and alder and great American holly bushes, the earth so thick with shrubs that all I could see was green and brown, the ground wet and slippery with decaying leaves and vegetation. At one point I almost walked into the web of a spiny orb weaver, the spider hanging like a small dark star in the center of its own galaxy of influence. It wasn’t dangerous, but there were other spiders here that were and I had endured enough of spiders in recent months to last me a lifetime. I picked up a branch about eighteen inches long and used it to strike out in front of me when I passed through stands of higher shrubs and trees.

I had been walking for about twenty minutes when I saw the house. It was an old cottage, based around a simple hall-and-parlor plan, two rooms wide and one room deep, but it had been expanded by the addition of an enclosed front porch and a long, narrow extension at the rear. There were signs of recent repairs to its heavy timber framing, and the central chimney had recently been repointed, but from the front the house still looked virtually the same as it had when it was first constructed, probably during the last century when the slaves who built the levees chose to stay on in the Congaree. There were no signs of life: the washing line that hung between two trees was bare and no sounds came from within. At the back of the house was a small shed, which probably housed the generator.

I climbed the rough-hewn stairs to the porch and knocked on the door. There was no reply. I walked to the window and put my face close to the glass. Inside, I could see a table and four chairs, anold couch and easy chair, and a small kitchen area. An open doorway led into the main bedroom, and a second doorway had been created at the back of the house leading into the rear extension. That door was closed. I knocked one last time, then walked to the back of the house. From somewhere in the swamp, I heard the sound of gunshots, their noise muffled by the damp air. Hunters, I guessed.

The windows to the extension had been blacked out. I thought for a moment that there were dark drapes obscuring them, but when I drew closer I saw the lines that the brush had drawn through the paint. There was a door at the end. For the final time, I knocked and called before trying the knob. The door opened and I stepped into the room.

The first thing that I noticed was the smell. It was strong and faintly medicinal, although I detected something herbal and grassy to it rather than the sterile scent of pharmaceutical products. It seemed to fill the long room, which was furnished with a cot, a TV, and a set of cheap bookshelves uncluttered by any books. Instead, there were piles of out-of-date soap opera magazines and wrinkled, much read copies of People and Celebrity.

Every bare space on the walls had been covered by photographs culled from the magazines. There were models and actresses and, in one corner, what looked like a shrine to Oprah. Most of the women in the photos were black: I recognized Halle Berry, Angela Bassett, the R amp;B group TLC, Jada Pinkett Smith, even Tina Turner. Over by the TV were three or four photographs from the society pages of local newspapers. Each showed the same person: Maria