The Devil and the River (3 page)

“Any ideas?” Powell asked.

Hagen shook his head. “Doesn’t look familiar to me.”

“She could be from anywhere,” Gaines said. “She doesn’t have to be one of ours.”

“Well, I’d say she’s somewhere between fifteen and eighteen,” Powell said. He took a tape measure from a trolley against the wall and measured her. “Five foot four. At a guess, maybe ninety-five pounds. I can give you specifics when I’ve cleaned her up.”

Gaines reached out his hand. His fingers hovered over the crude stitching that dissected her torso. Of this no one had yet spoken. He did not touch her, almost could not bring himself to, and he withdrew his hand slowly.

“Get back to the office,” he told Hagen. “Put a wire out, all surrounding counties, and get every missing persons report on female teenagers for the last month.” He looked across at Powell. “How long has she been dead, d’you think?”

“Decomp is minimal . . . At a guess, I’d say a week, two at most, but I need to do the autopsy. I can give you a better indication in a couple of hours. I need to take liver temp, find out how cold it was where she was buried and factor that in . . .”

“So beautiful,” Hagen said, hesitating at the door. “This is just horrific.”

“Go, Richard,” Gaines said. “I want to find out who she is as soon as possible.”

Hagen departed, glancing back toward the girl twice more before he disappeared from the end of the corridor.

“What can you say?” Powell asked, a rhetorical question. “Such things happen. Infrequently, thank God, but they do happen.”

“This incision,” Gaines said. “What the hell is that?”

“Who knows, John? Who knows? People do what people do, and sometimes there’s no explaining it.”

Gaines heard Hagen’s car pull away, and almost without pause, the sound of another car slowing to a halt on the gravel in front of the building. That would be Bob Thurston, Whytesburg’s doctor. Thurston was a good man, a good friend, and Gaines was relieved that he would be present. He did not want Victor Powell to have to endure such a difficult task alone.

“So do the autopsy,” Gaines said. “Let me know as soon as you have anything. I’ll get back to the office and start working through whatever missing persons reports have been filed. My fear is that she’s from a long way off and we won’t find out who she is.”

“I’ll get pictures done once I’ve cleaned her up,” Powell said. “You can get those out on the wire . . .”

“For sure,” Gaines said. “But I have to be honest, Victor . . . There’s always the chance that we’ll never know.”

“I know it’s hard to be positive at a time like this,” Powell said, “but jumping to conclusions about what might or might not have happened here is going to do us no good. This is rare. A killing in Whytesburg. A murder here? It doesn’t happen, John, not from one year to the next. I can’t have seen more than half a dozen murders in Whytesburg—in the county, for that matter—in all my career. However, it has happened now. She’s someone’s daughter, and that someone needs to know.”

Gaines turned as Thurston started down the corridor. “Bob’s here,” he said.

“What’s this about a dead girl in the riverbank?” Thurston asked before he entered the room.

Gaines extended his hand, and they shook.

Thurston was trying to smile, trying to be businesslike, but when he saw the girl laid out on the slab, he visibly paled.

“Oh my Lord . . . ,” he said.

“We figure she’s somewhere between fifteen and eighteen,” Powell said. “This incision along the length of her torso might be the cause of death. I’m ready to start the autopsy. I could use your help, if you’re willing.”

Thurston had not moved. His eyes wide, his face seemed like some ever-shifting confusion of frowns and unspoken questions.

“I’ve sent Hagen to check on any outstanding reports,” Gaines said. “I can’t think of any from here for months, but she could have come from anywhere. All we do know is that we have to identify her and find out how she died . . .”

Thurston set his bag down on the floor. He stepped forward and placed his hand on the edge of the table. For a moment it seemed as though he were trying to steady himself.

“No . . . ,” he whispered.

Gaines looked at Powell. Powell frowned and shook his head.

“Bob? You okay?” Powell asked.

Both Gaines and Powell watched as Bob Thurston reached out his right hand and touched the girl’s face. The gesture was gentle, strangely paternal even, and Gaines was both bemused and unsettled by Thurston’s reaction.

“Christ, Bob, anyone’d think you knew her,” he said.

Thurston turned and looked at Gaines. Was there a tear in his eye?

“I do,” Thurston said.

“What?”

“I know who this is,” he said, and his voice cracked.

Gaines stepped forward. “You what?” he repeated, scarcely believing what he was hearing.

“I’ve delivered every child in this town for thirty years,” Thurston said, “and even those who were born before I got here have come to me with influenza and broken bones and poison ivy. I know this girl, John. I
knew
her. I am looking at her now, and it doesn’t make sense . . .”

“That she’s dead . . . Of course that doesn’t make sense,” Powell said. “A dead child can never make sense.”

“I don’t mean that, Victor,” Thurston said. “Look at her. Look at her face. Who does she remind you of?”

Powell frowned. He stepped closer, looked down at the girl’s face. It was half a minute, perhaps more, and then some sort of slowdawning realization seemed to register in his eyes.

“She looks like Judith,” Powell said. “Oh my God . . . no . . .”

“What is going on here?” Gaines said, agitation evident in his voice. “What the hell is going on here?”

“This can’t be,” Powell said. “This can’t be . . . No, no, this isn’t right . . . This isn’t right at all . . .”

“She was found buried, you say?” Thurston asked.

“Yes,” Gaines replied. “We just dug her out of the riverbank. She was buried—”

“In the mud,” Powell said.

“I’ve heard of it before,” Thurston said. “It has happened before . . .”

“Jesus Christ, you guys, what the hell are you talking about? If someone doesn’t start explaining what the hell is going on here, I’m arresting the pair of you for withholding evidence.”

“You know Judith Denton,” Powell said.

“Sure I know Judith,” Gaines replied.

“This is her daughter, John. This is Nancy Denton, Judith’s daughter.”

Gaines shook his head. “Judith doesn’t have a daughter—”

“Doesn’t now,” Thurston interjected, “but she did.”

“I’m confused,” Gaines said. “Doesn’t now, but did have a daughter . . . a daughter when? What daughter? You’re not making any sense.”

“
This
doesn’t make any sense,” Thurston said. “The fact that she is here and still a teenager is the thing that doesn’t make any sense.”

“Why? Why doesn’t it make sense?”

“Because she’s been missing for a long time, John,” Powell said. He looked at Thurston. “How long, Bob? How long since she went missing?”

“It was in fifty-four,” Thurston replied. “She went missing toward the end of 1954.”

Powell exhaled audibly and closed his eyes for a moment. “Well, we found her, didn’t we? Twenty years it took, but we found her . . . and she was here all along . . .”

“Twenty years?” Gaines asked. “1954? You can’t be serious. There must be a mistake. This can’t be her. How can she have gone missing twenty years ago and still look the same?”

“I guess she was dead within hours or days of her disappearance,” Powell said, “and whoever did this to her, well, they buried her in the mud, and the mud kept her just as she was.”

“This is unbelievable,” Gaines said.

“Believe it,” Thurston said. “This is Nancy Denton. No doubt, no question, no hesitation. I knew it the moment I saw her.”

“And we have to tell her mother,” Powell said.

“You want me to come with you, John?” Thurston asked.

Gaines shook his head. “No, I need you here with Victor. I need the autopsy done. I need to find out how she died. I need . . .” He stepped away from the table and started toward the door, turning back as he reached it and looking at both Thurston and Powell in turn. Then he looked at the body on the table once again. “You have to be right. You have to be sure. You have to tell me that there is no chance it could be someone else.”

“It’s her, John,” Thurston said. “I treated her a dozen times for colds and coughs, measles one time, I think . . . I would know this girl anywhere.”

“Good God almighty,” Gaines said. “I need . . . I need . . .”

“You need to go tell Judith Denton that her daughter’s come home . . .”

Gaines stood stock-still for just a second, and then he turned and walked down the corridor.

Thurston looked at Powell. Powell looked down at Nancy.

“So let’s find out what happened to you, my dear,” he said softly, and began to roll up his sleeves.

J
udith Denton was damaged below the waterline. She seemed to have been born under a black star that had followed her for life. She was raised in the jumble of shacks at the edge of the county line, amid dark cedar swamps, the trees dressed in Spanish moss and Virginia creeper as if some huge spider had spent eons building defenses. The land was poisoned with Australian pine, with melaleuca trees and Brazilian pepper, and what little irrigation could be mustered from the bayous did not make the farming any easier. Judith’s father—Marcus—was an itinerant journeyman, a guitar player, a field hand, and always ready for
the next big thing
. His left nostril was gapped with an upside-down
V
, a gash too severe to heal and close, and the scar from the upward arc of a shrub knife had dissected his cheek, his eyelid, and his forehead with a pale line that disappeared somewhere within his hair. Years before, there was fighting down here, boxers who would grease their ears and shoulders so they could never be held. Marcus Denton was in there taking bets, making a handful of dollars from sweaty men aiming to thump one another senseless. He was a small and furtive character, always on the edge of things, his skin the color of sour cream. His wife, Evangelina, her shoes perforated with rot, her skirt nothing more than a ragtag collection of mismatched shirt pockets stitched to a slip, followed on behind him like he might one day know something of worth. Such a day never came. Judith—the only child of this couple of transient hopefuls—was born in March of 1917. She was little more than a year old when Marcus went down with a steamer on the Mississippi near Vidalia. Late at night, almost silent, nothing but the sound of bubbles like lips smacking, Marcus Denton and his pitiful luggage—his cards, his pocket watch, his dreams and aspirations for
the next big thing
—disappeared with eleven crew and sixteen guests beneath the pitch-black water. Not so much a life as a brief distraction between birth and death, events uncomfortably close to each other, his presence no more than a semicolon in between.

So Judith was raised by Evangelina, more a drunk than a mother, and when Evangelina died in May of 1937, Judith—all of twenty years old—upped and left for Whytesburg, perhaps believing that a change of location would establish the precedent for a change in fortune. That change, significantly less fortunate than she’d perhaps hoped, came in the guise of Garfield Thomasian, a shoe salesman out of Biloxi with a new station wagon and a popular line in smart cordovan wingtips. Their affair was brief and heated, fruitful in the way of Judith’s immediate pregnancy, but Garfield Thomasian didn’t hang around to see the results of his efforts. He was gone—gone, but not forgotten. Exhaustive attempts to locate him resulted in nothing but the discovery of a similar pattern of philandering adventures across this and several other states. Thomasian was a bad squall; he blew in, blew out, left nothing but small devastations in his wake.

Judith went the term, and when Nancy was born on the 10th of June, 1938, her mother believed that perhaps good things could come from bad. The child was beautiful and bright, as unlike the father as any betrayed mother could hope for, and things seemed to take a turn for the better.

Of Judith Denton, Gaines knew a little. Of her daughter, Nancy, he had known nothing. Not until today. Perhaps a small ghost of Whytesburg’s past, only those present at the time being party to such information as rumor and hearsay could provide.

Nancy Denton’s disappearance one warm evening in August of 1954 preceded Gaines’s official investigatory responsibilities by two decades, and only now—the 24th of July, 1974—was Whytesburg aware of the fact that Nancy never really did go missing.

Nancy Denton, buried in the mud at the side of the river, had been here all along.

Gaines, still confused, still uncertain as to how such a thing could have happened, how a body could be preserved without deterioration to such an extent as was the case here, nevertheless understood the weight of this thing.

Thurston had possessed no doubt as to the identity of the girl.

It seemed that Judith Denton had been a single mother with a single child.

But no longer.

Now she would be a single mother with no child at all.

Gaines exited his car a half block from the Denton house and stood for a moment. He took a deep breath and considered what was ahead of him. Children went missing and children died. Didn’t matter which town, which city, it was the same everywhere. Which was better—vanished or dead? If they were dead, perhaps some sense of closure could be attained. Perhaps. But if they vanished, there was always the hope that they would return. That, in itself, was enough to have you waiting for the rest of your life. Persuading yourself to just move on felt like the worst kind of betrayal, as if forgetting would consign them to history. Was this how Judith Denton had spent the last two decades? Looking from the window into the street? Imagining that one day her daughter might turn the corner and be standing right there in the yard? And what would Judith Denton fear? That she would not recognize her? That with each passing year, the daughter had grown and changed, had become a woman, and that she could walk right by her in the street and never know?