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“Jealousy?”
“Jealous of love, Sheriff. Jealous that he does not have it, ca
She turned to Ross. “Nate, get me another drink, and skip the coffee this time.”
Ross brought her more bourbon, poured some into a glass while she lit another cigarette.
Gaines leaned forward. He smiled as best he could, trying perhaps to reassure her that he was here without bias or prejudice, without preconceptions or some unspoken ulterior motive.
“My mother died,” he said. “Just a week ago—”
Della opened her mouth, perhaps to express her condolences.
Gaines raised his hand, and she fell silent.
“She had been ill for a long time. I knew she was going to die. I’d known for a long time. But I wasn’t prepared for it, and I don’t think you can ever be prepared for it. My father died back in the war in Europe, and I never knew him, and so it’s easy to feel very little about that at all. If you never had something, then you can’t miss it, right? What I’m trying to say, Miss Wade, is that I ca
“Don’t try and blackmail me, Sheriff Gaines. Don’t try and make it any more personal than it already is—”
“Della, I don’t think it could be any more personal. These are people’s lives we’re talking about. This is not some movie script where everything is going to fall into place at the end and everything’s going to get tied up nice and neat. This is a horror story, a real-life honest-to-God horror story, and I am right in the middle of it, and so are you. Maybe you’ll get through this, maybe Clifton will, maybe me and Nate and Eddie and Marya
“Stop talking, Sheriff Gaines. Just for a second, stop talking, okay?”
Gaines nodded, leaned back in his chair, continued to look right at her.
“Okay,” she eventually said. “If I said I was willing to help you, what would you need me to do?”
55
It was late morning. The clouded sun gave up a greasy light, and the air seemed thick enough to chew. Sounds were muted, the songs of blue jays and whip-poor-wills fading to silence not six inches from their throats.
Gaines stood on the back porch steps, looked out toward the field where lay buried the memory of Michael Webster’s head and hand. Out there in the turnrows, inches beneath the surface, there was blood and wax and hair and whatever else might still remain. And beyond that, toward the horizon—out beyond the barbed-wire fence and loblolly pines, beyond the cypress and goldenrod and blue salvia, through the webs of kudzu, amid the nests of redbirds and brown thrashers, the sound of bullfrogs and squirrels, and the tracks of whitetail deer—was something else. Ghosts, perhaps. Something strange and potent, some aspect of horror that he knew he did not comprehend. Not yet.
What else could he have asked her to do?
What could he have said to her beyond what had already been said?
Piecing together recent events, trying to make sense of them, was akin to reconstructing an already-forgotten dream.
Right there in Nate Ross’s kitchen, Della Wade had as much as volunteered to help him.
What would you need me to do?
That’s what she asked him.
What would you need me to do?
He looked at her for a while and simply said, “Help me find the truth, Della. Just help me find the truth.”
“And how am I supposed to do that?” she asked.
“Find some way of getting him to talk,” Gaines replied. “I don’t know. I haven’t had time to think about this, to make any kind of plan. I didn’t expect to be speaking with you so soon, and to tell you the truth, I half-expected never to speak to you at all.”
“Because you thought I was some crazy woman out there in that big house who would do something only if her big brother said it was okay.”