Copyright

HarperCollinsPublishers

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First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2019

Copyright © Greg Iles 2019

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Greg Iles asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2019 © ISBN: 9780008270148

Version: 2019-02-14

Dedication

To all those adults who return home to repay the debt of childhood, and find they never really left. Listen while you still can.

Epigraph

A secret is not something untold.

It’s something which can’t be told.

—Terence McKenna

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Greg Iles

About the Publisher

CHAPTER 1

I NEVER MEANT to kill my brother. I never set out to hate my father. I never dreamed I would bury my own son. Nor could I have imagined that I would betray the childhood friend who saved my life, or win a Pulitzer Prize for telling a lie.

All these things I have done, yet most people I know would call me an honorable man. I wouldn’t go that far. But I try to be a good man, and most of the time, I believe I succeed. How is this possible? These are complicated times.

And it’s not easy to be good.

CHAPTER 2

HUNCHED ON HIS knees, Buck Ferris pulled a ball of fired clay from the sandy soil beside the Mississippi River, then got to his feet with a groan and climbed out of the hole beside the foundation pier. It was difficult to be certain about the era by moonlight, and he couldn’t risk a light—not here. And yet … he was certain. The sphere sitting in his palm had been fired a few centuries before Moses started wandering through the desert with the children of Israel. Ferris had been an archaeologist for forty-six years, but he’d never discovered anything like this. He felt as though the little ball were vibrating in his hand. The last human to touch this clay had lived nearly four thousand years ago—two millennia before Jesus of Nazareth walked the sands of Palestine. Buck had waited all his life to find this artifact; it dwarfed everything he’d ever done. If he was right, then the ground upon which he stood was the most important undiscovered archaeological site in North America.

“What you got there, Buck?” asked a male voice.

Blue-white light stabbed Ferris’s eyes. He nearly pissed himself, he was so stunned. He’d thought he was alone on the vast, low-lying ground of the industrial park. A quarter mile to the west, the eternal river flowed past, oblivious.

“Who are you?” Ferris asked, throwing up his left hand to shield his eyes. “Who is that?”

“You were warned not to disturb this ground,” said the man behind the light. “It’s private property.”

The speaker had a refined Southern accent that tickled Buck’s memory. He couldn’t quite place it, though. Nor could Buck say much in his own defense. He’d applied for permission to dig in this earth seven times over the past forty years, and he’d been turned down every time. But five days ago, the county had cleared the debris of the electroplating factory that had stood here since World War II. And two days from now, a Chinese company would begin building a new paper mill in its place. If anyone was going to find out what lay beneath this ground, it was now—the consequences be damned.

“Where did you come from?” Buck asked. “I didn’t see anybody when I came down here.”

“Oh, Buck … You always were a good ol’ boy. Why couldn’t you have left well enough alone?”

“Do I know you?” Ferris asked, certain that he’d heard that voice before.

“You don’t seem to.”

“I don’t think you understand the value of what I have here,” Ferris said, his voice edged with excitement.

“You don’t have anything there,” said the voice. “You’re not here.”

Buck got the gist of it then, and something started thrumming in his belly, like stretched-taut wire plucked hard. “Wait, listen,” he tried, “this ground you’re standing on … it’s an Indian settlement that’s four thousand years old. Maybe five or six thousand, depending on what I find if we dig deeper.”

“You hoping for a PBS series?”

“God, no. Don’t you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Sure. You found some Injun bones. Thing is, that’s bad news for everybody.”

“No, listen. There’s a site just like this only fifty miles from here, in Louisiana. It’s called Poverty Point. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Thousands of tourists visit it every year.”

“I’ve been there. A couple of mounds of dirt, and the grass needs cutting.”

Buck realized then that this was like trying to tell a hillbilly about Bach. “That’s ridiculous. You—”

“A billion dollars,” the man cut in.

“Beg your pardon?”

“A billion dollars. That’s what you could cost this town.”

Buck tried to focus on the conversation, but the ball in his hand still felt like it was vibrating. Known as a “Poverty Point object,” it had been used by Indians to cook meat under dirt. God only knew what else lay in the loess soil beneath their feet. Pottery, spear points, jewelry, religious artifacts, bones. How could someone not understand what it meant to stand on this ground and know what he knew? How could someone not care?

“This doesn’t have to ruin your deal,” he said. “Situations like this get handled all the time, to the satisfaction of all parties. The Department of Archives and History comes in, assesses the site, and then they move things, if that’s even necessary. To protect them. That’s all.”

“Would they have moved all of Poverty Point to build a paper mill, Buck?”

No, he thought. They wouldn’t.

“A billion dollars,” the man said again. “In Mississippi. That’s like ten billion in the real world. And that doesn’t begin to address what it could cost me personally to lose the mill.”

“Could you take that light out of my eyes?” Buck asked. “Can’t we talk like civilized men?”

“Do it,” said the voice.

“What?” Buck said. “Do what?”

“I always liked your guitar pickin’,” said the man. “You should’ve stuck to that.”

Buck heard something shift on the ground behind him, but he couldn’t turn fast enough to see who was there, or to protect himself. A white afterimage on his retinas filled his eyes, and out of that whiteness came a dense black rectangle.

Brick.

He threw up his hands, but too late. The brick crashed into his skull, scrambling his perception. He felt only pain and the lurching nausea of falling into darkness. His wife’s face flickered in his mind, pale with worry when he’d left her earlier tonight. As he collided with the earth, he thought of Hernando de Soto, who died near the Mississippi in 1542, not far from here. He wondered if these men would bury him beside the river he’d loved so long.

“Hit him again,” said the voice. “Beat his brains out.”

Buck tried to cover his head, but his arms wouldn’t move.

CHAPTER 3

MY NAME IS Marshall McEwan.

I ran away from home when I was eighteen. It wasn’t Mississippi I was running from—it was my father. I swore I would never go back, and for twenty-six years I kept my promise, excepting a few brief visits to see my mother. The road was not an easy one, but I eventually became one of the most successful journalists in Washington, D.C. People say it must be the ink in my blood; my father was a legendary newspaper editor and publisher in the 1960s—the “Conscience of Mississippi,” the New York Times called him—but I didn’t learn my trade from Duncan McEwan. My dad was a legend who became a drunk and, like most drunks, remained one. Still, he haunted me, like a second shadow at my side. So I suppose it was inevitable that his death would be the thing that brought me home.

Oh, he’s not dead yet. His death has been approaching like a lone black ship that makes itself felt by the waves pushed ahead of it, dark waves that disturb a once-keen mind and roll over the protective boundaries of a family. What drives that black ship is what the doctors call comorbid conditions: Parkinson’s disease, heart failure, hypertension, an alcoholic’s liver. I ignored the situation for as long as I could. I’ve watched brilliant colleagues—most ten or fifteen years my senior—struggle to care for ailing parents back in the small towns of the republic, and in every case their careers suffered. By chance or by karma, my career entered a meteoric phase after Trump’s election in 2016. I had no desire to leap from my meteor, land back in Mississippi, and start babysitting the eighty-four-year-old man who had pretended I didn’t exist since I was fourteen years old.

I finally surrendered because my father was so ill that I could no longer help my mother manage him from a thousand miles away. Dad has spent the past three decades sliding ever deeper into anger and depression, making those around him miserable and ruining his health in the process. But since I’m a good Southern boy at heart, the fact that an unbridgeable gulf had existed between him and me for more than thirty years was irrelevant. It’s an unwritten law down here: when your father is dying, you go home and sit the deathwatch with your mother. Besides, our family business—the Bienville Watchman (founded 1865)—was disintegrating under his increasingly erratic stewardship, and since he’d stubbornly refused to sell our dinosaur of a newspaper for the past two decades, I had to keep it a going concern until what remained could be sold for salvage upon his death.

That’s what I told myself, anyway.

In truth my motive was more complicated. We rarely act from logic when facing the critical choices of our lives. I couldn’t recognize my self-deception then. I was still in a state of prolonged shock from a marriage that had endured a tragedy—or more accurately, failed to endure one—then spiraled into divorce as my professional life entered the stratosphere, but I see it now.

I came home because of a woman.

She was only a girl when I left home, and I, a confused boy. But no matter how relentlessly life tried to beat the softness out of me, to encase me in the hard, brittle carapace of cynicism, one pure thing remained alive and true: the half-Jordanian, half-Mississippian girl who unfolded the secret joys of life for me was so deeply imprinted upon my soul that no other woman ever measured up to her. Twenty-eight years of separation had proved insufficient to kill my yearning to be near her again. Sometimes I worry that my mother has known my hidden motive from the start (or maybe only sensed it and prayed that she was wrong). But whether she knows or whether she remains as ignorant as I was on the day I finally gave in, I took a leave of absence from my print and TV gigs, packed up my essentials, and made a white-knuckled drive south to test Thomas Wolfe’s most famous dictum.

Of course you can go home again, answered my pride. At least for a little while. You can do your filial duty. For what man who thinks of himself as a gentleman would not? And once that duty is discharged, and Himself is dead, perhaps you can persuade your mother to return with you to Washington. Truth be told, I probably knew this was a forlorn hope, but it gave me something to tell myself, rather than think too deeply about the unsolvable problem. No, not my father’s situation. The girl. She’s a woman now, of course, a woman with a husband, who is probably my best friend from childhood. She also has a son, who is twelve years old. And while this knot may not seem particularly Gordian in our age of universal divorce, other factors ensure that it is. My father’s plight, on the other hand … will inevitably resolve itself.

I sound cold, I suppose.

I don’t say that Dad bears all the blame for his situation. He endured his share of suffering, God knows—enough to cure him of religion for life. Two years before he married my mother, he lost his first wife and baby daughter in a car crash. As if that weren’t enough, when I was in the ninth grade my eighteen-year-old brother also died in an accident, a tragedy that struck our town like a bomb dropped from an invisible height. Perhaps losing two children in succession broke my father. I could understand that. When my brother, Adam, died, it was as though God reached out and switched off the lights of the world, leaving me to stumble through the next two years like a blind man unable to adapt to his new affliction.

But “God” wasn’t done with me yet. Twenty years after Adam’s death, I lost my two-year-old son—my only child—in the most domestic of accidents. I know what it means to be broken by fate.

I do, however, still function.

I work sources, write stories, go on CNN and MSNBC to comment on the issues of the day. I even make speeches for $35,000 a pop (or I used to, before I moved back to my third-world state and sent my market quote into irreversible decline). The point is I suffered, but I got on with it. That’s what I was taught to do—by my mother, of course, not my father. Also by Buck Ferris, the archaeologist and scoutmaster who stepped in after my father opted out of his paternal duty and did what he could to make a man of me. After all my success, Buck figured he’d accomplished that. I’ve never been sure. If I do prove it to myself one day, he’ll never know. Because sometime last night, Buck Ferris was murdered.

Buck’s passing seems a natural place to begin this story, because that’s the way these things generally start. A death provides a convenient line of demarcation, kicking off the familiar tableau of investigation, the assigning of guilt, the determining of punishment. But beginnings are complex things. It can take decades to determine the exact chain of cause and effect that led to any single outcome. My degree in history taught me that, if little else. But I can’t wait twenty years to address these events. For while I’m healthy at this moment—and I’ve done what I can to protect myself—there are people who would prefer me otherwise. Best to get it on paper now.

But as we dance these familiar steps together, please remember that nothing is what it seems. While Buck’s murder provides a natural jumping-off point, this story really began when I was fourteen years old. The people whose lives would intertwine with fatal consequences were alive then, and some were already lovers. To understand this story, you must swim between two times like a person moving from wakefulness to sleep and then back again. Given the nature of the mind, we’ll consider the dreams of sleep to be the past, never quite accurate in recollection, always made to serve our desires (except when haunting us for our sins). And the wakeful present … well, it, too, holds its dangers.

When I was thirteen, I came upon a bobwhite quail perched upon a log in the woods. Another quail lay at its feet. It appeared to be dead, but I knelt very near and watched them both for half a minute, one motionless, the other making inquisitive movements, as though waiting impatiently for its partner to rise. Only after my eyes lost focus, perhaps from strain, did I notice the rattlesnake coiled two feet away, tensing to strike. The heavy eastern diamondback was four feet long, and focused on me, not the bird.

I lived that day, and I learned: Close enough to see is close enough to kill.

CHAPTER 4

BY THE TIME I got word that there was a body in the Mississippi River, the sheriff had already deployed the county rescue boat to recover the corpse. Normally, I would dispatch a staff reporter to document this, but because my source sounded pretty sure the dead man was Buck Ferris, I know I have to go myself. Which presents difficulties. For me, water and death are inextricably entwined. I never go down to the river—or even drive across it on the high bridge—unless I have no other choice. That can make living in a river town pretty inconvenient.

Today I have no choice.

Before I leave the Watchman offices, I call Quinn Ferris, Buck’s wife. Quinn treated me like a son when I was at her house, which was often and for long periods. Despite my having been absent from Bienville for twenty-eight years (excepting the last five months), we’re close enough that I know she would rather get tragic news from me than from the police or the coroner. As I feared, word has already reached her—the curse of a small town. She’s running around her house, trying to find her keys so that she can get down to the river. Because she lives fifteen miles out in the county, Quinn desperately wants to start toward town, but I somehow persuade her to wait at home until I call with confirmation of what is still only a rumor.

My SUV is parked in the employee lot behind the newspaper building. We’re only four blocks from the bluff, where Front Street slices down the two-hundred-foot drop to the river at a forty-degree angle. Pulling out onto Buchanan Street, I go over what my source told me on the phone. About 8:40 A.M. a retired kayaker discovered a man he believed to be Buck Ferris wedged in the fork of a cottonwood snag in the Mississippi River, four hundred yards south of the Bienville landing. The kayaker didn’t know Buck well, but he’d attended a couple of his archaeological presentations at the Indian Village. Anyone who knows the Mississippi River recognizes this story as a miracle. If Buck hadn’t floated by chance into the fork of that tree, he might have drifted all the way to Baton Rouge or New Orleans before being discovered, if he was found at all. A lot of people drown in the Mississippi, and while most are eventually recovered, there are times when the river god refuses to give up his dead.

Dread settles in my stomach as I drive down the steep incline of Front Street to what locals call Lower’ville—short for Lower Bienville—but which the Chamber of Commerce calls the Riverfront. The Mississippi is already high, even for spring, and a brisk breeze is kicking up whitecaps on its broad, muddy surface. Pulling my eyes from the water, I focus on the cars parked along the timber guardrail blocking the precipitous drop to the river, but this does little to calm my anxiety. I’ve tried for more than thirty years to rid myself of what is surely a phobia about this river, but I’ve failed.

I’m going to have to gut it out.

TWO NARROW STREETS ARE all that remain of Lower’ville, the den of the demimonde who lived in the shadow of the Bienville bluff in the nineteenth century. Two hundred years ago, this infamous river landing offered flatboatmen and steamboat crews everything from gambling and fancy women to prime whiskey and rentable dueling pistols. Through Lower’ville moved a brisk trade in everything from long-staple cotton to African slaves, enriching the nabobs who lived in the glittering palaces atop the bluff and whose money flowed back into the district as payment for exclusive vices.

Today all that has changed. The relentless river has reduced Lower’ville to two parallel streets and the five short alleys that link them, most of which are lined with tourist bars and restaurants. The Sun King Gaming Company maintains a small office and transit bus stop here to serve its garish Louis Quatorze–themed casino, which stands a mile upriver. A local tour operator runs open-air buses from down here, and a whiskey distiller practices his craft in an old warehouse butted against the foot of the bluff. Everything else is overpriced shops. There are no whores, steamboat captains, knife-wielding flatboatmen, or pistol duels. The duels happen in Bucktown these days, the weapons of choice being the Glock and the AR-15. For gambling you have to shuttle upriver to the Sun King. I almost never visit this part of town, and on the rare occasion that I’m forced to meet someone in one of the river-facing restaurants, I sit with my back to the picture windows, so I don’t have to look at the big water.

Today I won’t have the luxury of avoiding my stressor. Parking my Ford Flex a few feet from the river’s edge, I spy the county rescue boat anchored in the current a quarter mile south of the landing, a hundred yards out in the river. A broken line of people stands watching the desultory action on the water. Three-quarters of a mile beyond the bobbing boat, the low shore of Louisiana hovers above the river. The sight from this angle brings on a wave of nausea, partly because of the river, but also because I’m starting to internalize the reality that Buck Ferris could have left the planet last night while I slept in my bed. I knew he might be in danger, yet wherever he went last night, he went alone.

Forcing myself to look away from the opposite shore, I walk downstream from the gawkers to get a clear line of sight to the boat. Without binoculars I can’t see much, but the two deputies on board appear to be trying to wrestle something out of the water on the far side of the boat.

There are three kinds of snags in the river, all of which could, and did, wreck many a steamboat back in the age of Mark Twain. The worst is the “planter,” which occurs when an entire tree uprooted by the river wedges itself into the bottom and becomes braced by accumulating silt. Often showing only a foot or two of wood above the water, these massive trees lever gently up and down in the current, waiting to rip deadly gashes in the hulls of boats steered by careless pilots. Given the deputies’ obvious difficulties, I figure they’re struggling to free the corpse from a half-submerged fork in a planter. Even after accomplishing this, they’ll have to deadlift his body over the gunwale of the rescue boat, which is no easy task. As I ponder their predicament, the obvious question runs through my mind: What are the odds that a man who fell into a mile-wide river would float into one of the few obstacles that could have stopped him from being washed toward the Gulf of Mexico?

While I watch the sweat-stained backs of the deputies, a whirring like a swarm of hornets passes over my head, pulling my attention from the boat. Looking up, I see a small quad-rotor drone—a DJI, I think—zoom out over the water at about a hundred feet of altitude, making for the sheriff’s department boat. The drone ascends rapidly as it approaches the craft; whoever is piloting it obviously hopes to avoid pissing off the deputies. Knowing the Tenisaw County Sheriff’s Department as I do, I doubt that pilot will have much luck.

One deputy has already noticed the drone. He waves angrily at the sky, then lifts binoculars to his face and starts panning the riverbank in search of the pilot. I follow his gaze, but all I see is a couple of city cops doing the same thing I am, scanning the line of rubberneckers for someone holding a joystick unit in their hands.

After thirty fruitless seconds of this, I decide the pilot must be guiding the drone from atop the bluff behind us. If the drone pilot is working from the bluff, which rises two hundred feet above the river, flying a low approach to the county boat was smart. That gave the deputies the feeling that he or she must be working from the low bank. Without tilting my head back, I scan the iron fence atop the bluff. It doesn’t take long to notice a slight figure 150 yards south of the landing, standing attentively at the fence with something in its hands.

While I can’t make out features or even gender at this distance, the sight gives me a ping of recognition. I know a kid with a knack for capturing newsworthy events on his aerial camera: the son of a girl I went to high school with. Though only fourteen, Denny Allman is a genius with drones, and I’ve posted some of his footage on the paper’s website. Most kids wouldn’t have a way to get to the bluff on a Tuesday morning while school is in session, but Denny is homeschooled, which means he can get away from the house if, say, he hears about a dead body on the police scanner he begged his mother to buy him last Christmas.

As I watch the figure on the bluff, the coroner’s wagon rumbles down Front Street. It’s a 1960s vintage Chevy panel truck. Rather than stop in the turnaround, as I did, the driver pulls onto the hard dirt and drives downstream along the riverbank, finally stopping about thirty yards from where I stand. Byron Ellis, the county coroner, climbs out and walks toward me, avoiding the gawkers who pepper him with questions.

You don’t have to be an M.D. to get elected coroner in Bienville, Mississippi. Byron Ellis is a former ambulance driver and paramedic who, as he approached his sixtieth birthday, decided to become the first African American to secure the position. Byron and I have gotten to know each other well over the last five months, for a tragic reason. Bienville is in the grip of a violent crime wave that’s 100 percent confined to the black community. About six months before I arrived, black teenagers began killing each other in ambushes and shoot-outs that have terrified the citizenry, both black and white. Despite the best efforts of law enforcement and dedicated intervention by church, school, and neighborhood leaders, the cycle of retribution has only escalated. Byron and I have stood alone over too many bullet-riddled children, facing the inarguable fact that our society has gone mad.

“Who’s out there, Marshall?” Byron asks as he nears me.

“I’ve heard it’s Buck Ferris. Don’t know for sure yet. I hope to hell it’s not.”

“You and me both.” Byron slaps my offered hand. “That man never hurt a fly.”

I look back at the deputies struggling in the boat. “I figured you’d beat me down here.”

“Got another kid in my wagon. Been sweating my ass off already.”

I turn to him in surprise. “I didn’t hear about any shooting last night.”

He shrugs. “Nobody reported this kid missing till his mama went in to give him his Cap’n Crunch this morning and saw he wasn’t in his bed. Convict road crew found him lying in a ditch out where Cemetery Road crosses Highway 61. He took eighteen rounds, best I could count. I pulled what looks like a .223 slug out of what was almost an exit wound in his back.”

“Goddamn, Byron. This is getting out of hand.”

“Oh, we’re way past that, brother. We in a war zone now. Drowned archaeologist seems kinda tame after that, don’t it?”

It takes all my willpower to hold a straight face. Byron has no idea that Buck Ferris was like a father to me, and there’s no point making him feel bad by telling him now. “Maybe,” I murmur. “I’ll be surprised if this was an accidental death, though. I’ve got a feeling there’s something serious behind this. Some powerful people.”

“Yeah? Well, that sounds like your department.” Byron chuckles, the low laughter rumbling in his generous belly. “Look at them keystone cops out there. Deputy Dawg, man. That drone ’bout to run ’em crazy!”

“I’ll call you later,” I tell him. “I’ve got work to do.”

“Sure, man. Just leave me out in this sun. Don’t worry ’bout me.”

Byron winks as I give him a mock salute.

Getting back into the Flex, I push the engine button and head up Foundry Road, which ascends the bluff on an opposite angle to Front Street. As my motor strains on the incline, a pistol shot cracks over the river, echoes off the bluff face. I jump in my seat, stunned by the reckless idiocy of a deputy firing into the air in a populated area to try to hit a drone. Another shot pops off below me. I hope they don’t have a shotgun on board the boat. If they do, they can probably bring down the little aircraft, which by law must carry a registration number. And since Bienville has an asshole for a sheriff, the pilot will wind up in a lot of trouble. If the pilot is who I think it is, that’s a story I don’t want to have to cover.

I don’t pray, but all the way up the hill I beg the universe to grant me one dispensation in the midst of its daily creation and destruction: Let that body belong to someone else. Don’t let it be the man who stopped me from killing myself at fifteen.

Don’t let it be Buck.

CHAPTER 5

ON THE BIENVILLE bluff, you can’t park closer than thirty yards from the edge. Within the city limits, there’s a buffer of green space between Battery Row and the iron fence that keeps kids and drunks from killing themselves on a daily basis. As I’d hoped, the slight figure standing at the fence turns out to be my friend’s son, fourteen-year-old Denny Allman. Denny surely recognized my Flex as I parked it—if he hadn’t, he would have bolted.

I lift my hand in greeting as I approach him. Denny tosses his head in acknowledgment, then turns back to the river, his hands never leaving the drone controller. Even with his back to me, I can see his mother in his stance. Dixie Allman was athletic and attractive in high school. A C student, mostly because of laziness, she had a quick mind. Her problem was that from age ten she’d focused it solely on getting male attention. She married at eighteen—pregnant—and divorced by twenty-five. Denny’s father was her third husband, and he abandoned them when Denny was five or six. Dixie has done her best to raise the boy right, and that’s one reason I’ve encouraged him by posting his stuff on our website.

“Did they shoot at your drone?” I call to him.

“Shit, yeah! Morons.”

I force a laugh and walk up to the fence. Denny has a salty vocabulary for an eighth grader, but so did my friends and I at that age. “They probably called a backup car to hunt for you.”

“They did, but it went down to the river. I grabbed some altitude and landed behind some trees farther south. They’re trying to work their way down there now. They’ll never make it through the kudzu.”

The drone controller in his hands mates an iPad Mini to a joystick unit. Denny has strapped a sun hood onto his iPad, so I can’t see the screen with a casual glance. Looking over the fence, I see the county boat down on the river. It’s headed toward the dock now. The deputies must have finally taken their cargo on board.

“Did you get a good look at the body?” I ask.

“Not live,” Denny replies, focusing on his screen. “I had to keep my eyes on the deputies while I was shooting.”

“Can we look now?”

He shrugs. “Sure. What’s the rush?”

“Did you ever meet Dr. Ferris, out at the Indian mounds?”

“Yeah. He came to my school a couple of times. I—” Denny goes pale. “That’s him in the water? Old Dr. Buck?”

“It might be.”

“Oh, man. What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe he was looking for arrowheads or something and walked too far out on a sandbar. They collapse under people sometimes.”

The boy shakes his head forcefully. “Dr. Buck wouldn’t do that. He walked rivers and creeks all the time hunting for stuff, usually after storms. He found tons of Indian swag, even mastodon bones. You should see the stuff he’s found for the museum in Jackson.”

“I have.”

“Then you know there’s no way he fell into the Mississippi. Not unless he had a heart attack or something.”

“Maybe that’s what happened,” I say, though I don’t believe it. “Or a stroke. Buck was over seventy. With some luck, we’ll find out where he went in. That might tell us what he was doing.”

I can see Denny making mental calculations. “I need to leave the DJI down there till the cops leave,” he says, “but I can access the file from here. It just eats up a lot of my monthly data allowance.”

“I’ll reimburse you.”

His face lights up. “Awesome!”

He stabs the iPad screen, waves me closer. Thanks to the sun hood, I now have a glare-free view of what Denny shot only a few minutes ago. On the screen, two deputies with no experience at hauling corpses out of water are attempting to do just that. All I can see of the dead man is one side of a gray-fleshed face and a thin arm trailing in the muddy current. Then the head lolls over on the current, and a wave of nausea rolls through me. My mouth goes dry.

It’s Buck.

I can’t see his whole head, but the far side of his skull appears to have been broken open by some sort of fracture. As I strain to see more, his head sinks back into the water. “Fast-forward,” I urge.

Denny’s already doing it. At triple speed, the deputies dart around the deck of the rescue boat like cartoon characters, occasionally leaning over the gunwale to try to yank Buck’s body free of the tree fork holding him in the water. Suddenly one looks skyward and begins waving his arms. Then he starts yelling, draws his pistol, and fires at the camera suspended beneath the drone.

“What a freakin’ idiot,” Denny mutters, as the deputy fires again.

“Does he not realize those bullets have to come down somewhere?” I ask.

“He flunked physics.”

“Don’t they teach gravity in grade school?”

After holstering his gun, the deputy stomps back to a hatch in the stern and removes what looks like a ski rope. Then he makes a loop in the rope, leans over the gunwale, and starts trying to float the lasso he made down over Buck’s body.

“No, damn it!” I bellow. “Have some goddamn respect!”

Denny snorts at this notion.

“He needs to tie the rope around his waist,” I mutter, “then get in the water himself and free the body.”

“You’re dreaming,” Denny says in the lilt of a choirboy whose voice has not yet broken. “He’s gonna lasso the body, gun the motor, and leave a rooster tail all the way back to the dock.”

“And rip Buck’s body in half in the process.”

“Was it Buck for sure?” he asks. “I couldn’t tell.”

“Yeah. It’s him.”

Denny lowers his head over the screen.

It takes some time, but the deputy eventually gets the rope around Buck, and he does in fact use the motor to tear him free of the snag’s grasp. Thankfully, the corpse appears to stay in one piece, and after the boat stops, the deputies slowly drag it up over the transom.

“Oh, man,” Denny mutters.

“What?”

“Look at his head. The side of it. It’s all messed up.”

It doesn’t take a CIA analyst to see that something caved in the left side of Buck Ferris’s skull. The vault of his cranium has a hole the size of a Sunkist orange in it. Now that he’s out of the water, his face looks oddly deflated. “I saw.”

“What did that?” Denny asks. “A baseball bat?”

“Maybe. Could have been a gunshot. Gunshot wounds don’t look like they do on TV, or even in the movies. But it might be blunt force trauma. A big rock could have done that. Maybe he took a fall before he went into the river.”

“Where?” Denny asks, incredulous. “There’s hardly any rocks around here. Even if you fell off the bluff, you wouldn’t hit one. Not igneous rocks. You’d have to hit concrete or something to do that.”

“He could have fallen onto some riprap,” I suggest, meaning the large gray rocks the Corps of Engineers carpets the riverbanks with to slow erosion.

“I guess. But those are right down by the water, not under the bluff.”

“And he would have had to fall from a height to smash his skull like that.” Despite my emotional state, I’m suddenly wondering about the legal implications of Denny’s drone excursion. “You know, you really need to turn this footage over to the sheriff.”

“It’s not footage, man. It’s a file. And it’s mine.”

“The district attorney would probably dispute that. Are you licensed to fly that drone?”

“I don’t need a license.”

“You do for commercial work. And if I put it up on our website, or pay your data bill, you’re doing this for hire.”

Denny scowls in my direction. “So don’t pay me.”

“You’re missing the point, Denny.”

“No, I’m not. I don’t like the sheriff. And the chief of police I like even less. They hassle me all the time. Until they need me, of course. That time they had a car wreck down in a gully by Highway 61, they called me to fly down in there and check to see if anybody was alive. They were glad to see me then. And at the prison riot, too. Although they stole my micro SD cards and copied them. But any other time, they’re major A-holes.”

“I heard they have their own drone now.”

Once again, Denny snorts in contempt.

“You know what I’m thinking?” I say.

“Nope.”

“The next thing we need to know is where Buck’s truck is. He drives an old GMC pickup. It’s bound to be upstream from where he was found—unless something isn’t what it appears to be.”

Denny is nodding. “You want me to fly the banks and look for his truck?”

“Seems like the thing to do, doesn’t it? You got enough battery left?”

“Two is one, one is none.”

“What?”

“Navy SEAL motto. Meaning I brought some extras.” Denny leans over the fence and looks down the sharp incline of Front Street. “Looks like they’re loading him into the coroner’s wagon. Let the deputies get clear, and I’ll fly the drone back up here, change out my battery, and start checking the banks.”

“Sounds good. Let’s try the Mississippi shore first.”

“Yep.”

We stand at the fence together, looking down into Lower’ville, which on most mornings would be virtually empty (except in March, which is peak tourist season for our city). But on this May morning, death has drawn a crowd. Though they’re almost stick figures from our perspective, I recognize Byron Ellis helping the deputies slide the sheet-covered body from his gurney into the old Chevy. Watching them wrestle that mortal weight, I hear a snatch of music: Robert Johnson playing “Preachin’ Blues.” Turning back to the road, I look for a passing car but see none. Then I realize the music was in my head. “Preachin’ Blues” was one of the first songs Buck taught me on guitar. The harmless man lying beneath the coroner’s sheet with his skull cracked open salvaged my young life. The realization that he has been murdered—possibly on the river—is so surreal that I have to force it into some inaccessible place in my mind.

“Hey, are you okay?” Denny asks in a hesitant voice.

I wipe my eyes and turn back to him. “Yeah. Buck and I were close back when I lived here. When I was a kid.”

“Oh. Can I ask you something?”

He’s going to ask me about my brother dying, I think, searching for a way to avoid the subject. Seeing Buck pulled from the river has already knocked me off-balance. I don’t want to dwell on the nightmare that poisoned the river for me.

“Sure,” I reply, sounding anything but.

“I knew you won a Pulitzer Prize and all, when you were in Washington. But I didn’t realize what it was for. I was online last week and saw it was for something you wrote about being embedded in Iraq. Were you with the SEALs or somebody like that? Delta Force?”

A fourteen-year-old boy’s question. “Sometimes,” I tell him, relief coursing through me. “I was embedded in Afghanistan before Iraq, with the Marines. But in Iraq I was with private security contractors. Do you know what those are?”

“Like Blackwater and stuff?”

“Exactly. Most guys who do that work in Afghanistan are former soldiers: Rangers, Delta, SEALs. But a lot of them in Iraq were just regular cops back in the world, believe it or not. And lots of those were from the South. They go over there for the money. It’s the only way they can make that kind of paycheck. They earn four times what the regular soldiers do. More than generals.”

“That doesn’t seem fair.”

“It’s not.”

Denny thinks about this. “So what’s it like? For real. Is it like Call of Duty come to life?”

“Not even close. But until you’ve been there, you can’t really understand it. And I hope you never do. Only a few things in life are like that.”

“Such as?”

“That’s a different conversation. One for you and your mom.”

“Come on. Tell me something cool about it.”

I try to think like a fourteen-year-old for a minute. “You can tell what units the contractors came from by the sunglasses they wear. Wraparound Oakleys for Delta Force. SEALs wear Maui Jims. Special Forces, Wiley X.”

“No way. What about Ray-Bans?”

“Over there? Only for punks and phonies. Over here, that’s what I wear.” I glance at my wristwatch. “I need to call Buck’s wife, Denny.”

“Sure, okay. But like, how did you get that kind of job? I mean, that kind of access?”

“A guy I went to high school with helped me out. He was an Army Ranger a long time ago, during the Persian Gulf War. He got me that gig with the private contractors. He also saved my life over there. That’s what won me the Pulitzer, that assignment. What I saw over there.”

Denny nods like he understands all this, but I have a feeling he’ll be buying my book online this afternoon.

“Save your money,” I tell him. “I’ll give you a copy.”

“Cool. Who was the guy? Your friend?”

“Paul Matheson.”

His eyes widen. “Kevin Matheson’s dad?”

“That’s right.”

“That dude’s like, rich. Really rich.”

“I guess he is, yeah. Paul didn’t go over there for the money, though. It started as a sort of Hemingway trip for him. Do you know what I mean by that?”

“Not really.”

“A macho thing. He had problems with his father. He felt like he had a lot to prove.”

“That I understand.”

I’ll bet you do.

“Hey,” Denny says, his voice suddenly bright. “We should go up to the cemetery to run this search. That ground’s like forty feet higher than here, counting the hills. Better line of sight up there, which gives me better control.”

The thought of the Bienville Cemetery resurrects the dread I felt earlier. “Let’s just do it from here, okay? I’m on a tight schedule this morning.”

The boy gives me a strange look. “What you gotta do?”

“They’re breaking ground on the new paper mill at eleven A.M. I need to be there for that.”

He laughs. “The Mississippi Miracle? I’ll believe it when they build it.”

Denny sounds like he’s quoting someone else. “Where’d you hear that line?”

He looks sheepish. “My uncle Buddy.”

Denny’s uncle is a mostly out-of-work contractor who spends his days getting high in front of the TV. “That paper mill’s the real deal. The Chinese have the money. And a billion-dollar investment could put this town in the black for the next fifty years.”

Denny looks a little less skeptical. “My mom’s been kind of hoping to get work out there.”

“I’ll bet. The average salary’s going to be sixty thousand dollars. And that,” I think aloud, “is why I’m afraid that the new paper mill might have played some part in Buck’s death.”

Denny’s head whips toward me. Even a fourteen-year-old boy can put this together. “I read your article about the artifact Buck found. Would that mess up the paper mill somehow?”

“It could. It scared the shit out of most people in this town. The whole county, really.”

“You think somebody would kill Buck over that?”

“I can think of about thirty-six thousand suspects at this point.”

“For real?”

“Kids are killing kids over cell phones in this town, Denny. What do you think people will do for a billion dollars?”

“A billion dollars?”

“That’s what the Chinese are investing here, not counting all the millions that will come with the new bridge and interstate.”

“Wow. I see what you mean. Well …” He looks over the fence again. “The coroner’s splitting. I’ll get the drone back up here and start checking the riverbanks.”

I give him a thumbs-up. “I’m going to walk down the fence and make a few calls. Holler if you see anything.”

“I will.”

For a second I wonder if I could be putting him in danger by having him search for Buck’s pickup, but I can’t see how. Turning, I walk north along the fence, looking down at the roof of the coroner’s wagon as it hauls Buck’s remains up from the river for the final time. I really have only one call to make, because the call I want to make, I can’t. Not for several hours yet. The call I must make I’d give anything to avoid.

Taking out my iPhone, I dial Buck’s house. Not even one full ring passes before his wife pounces on the phone.

“Marshall?” Quinn Ferris says breathlessly.

“It was him,” I tell her, knowing the slightest delay would only make it worse. “Buck’s dead.”

There’s a deep-space silence for two full seconds, and then Quinn says in a tiny voice, “You’re sure?”

“I saw his face, Quinn.”

“Oh, God. Marshall … what do I do? Is he all right? Is he comfortable? I mean—”

“I know what you mean. They’re treating him with respect. Byron Ellis picked him up. I imagine they’ll take Buck to the hospital for a brief period. There’s going to have to be an autopsy in Jackson.”

“Oh … no. They’re going to cut him open?”

“There’s no way around it, I’m afraid.”

“Was it not an accident?”

Here a little soft-pedaling won’t hurt anyone. Not in the short run. “They don’t know yet. But anyone who dies while not under a physician’s care has to have a postmortem.”

“Dear Lord. I’m trying to get my mind around it.”

“I think you should stay at home for a while, Quinn.”

“I can’t. I have to see him. Marshall, does he look all right?”

“He was in the river. That doesn’t do anybody any favors. I think you should stay out at your place for a bit. I’ll drive out to see you in a couple of hours.”

“No. No, I’m coming in. I can take it. He was my husband.”

“Quinn, listen. This is me, not the police, asking. Do you know where Buck was last night?”

“Of course. He was going back to the industrial park to try to find some bones.”

I fight the urge to groan. The industrial park is the site of the new paper mill, where the groundbreaking will happen in two hours. Buck was jailed for five hours for digging at that site the first time, and charged with felony trespass. He knew he would only get in more trouble if he went back there. But more important, that site lies downstream from where Buck was found.

“Did they kill him?” Quinn asks. “Did some of those greedy bastards murder my husband because of their stupid mill?”

“I don’t know yet, Quinn. But I’m going to find out.”

“If you don’t, we’ll never know. I don’t trust one of those sons of bitches in the sheriff’s department. They’re all owned by the local big shots. You know who I’m talking about.”

I grunt but say nothing.

“The goddamn Bienville Poker Club,” she says.

“You could be right. But we don’t know that.”

“I know. They don’t care about anything but money. Money and their mansions and their spoiled rotten kids and—oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s just not right. Buck was so … good.”

“He was,” I agree.

“And nobody gives a damn,” she says in a desolate voice. “All the good he did, all those years, and in the end nobody cares about anything but money.”

“They think the mill means survival for the town. Boom times again.”

“Damn this town,” she says savagely. “If they had to kill my husband to get their mill, Bienville doesn’t deserve to survive.”

There it is.

“You need to call Jet Matheson,” she says. “She’s the only one with the guts to take on the Poker Club. Not that you haven’t done some things. I mean, you’ve printed stories and all. But Jet’s own father-in-law is a member, and she’s still gone after a couple of them like a pit bull. She took Dr. Warren Lacey to court and damn near stripped him of his license.”

Quinn got to know Jet during our senior year in high school, and better during the years I was away. “Jet’s out of town this morning,” I tell her, “taking a deposition in a lawsuit. I’ll speak to her when she gets back.”

“Good.”

Quinn goes silent, but I can almost hear her mind spinning, frantically searching for anything to distract her from the immediate, awful reality. I wait, but the new widow says nothing more, probably realizing that no matter what I do, or what Jet Matheson or anyone else does, her husband will still be dead.

“Quinn, I need to get back to work. I’ll check in with you soon, I promise. You call me if you have any trouble with anyone or anything today.”

“I can handle it, Marshall. I’m a tough old girl. Come out later if you get a chance. This house is going to seem pretty empty. You’ll remind me of better times. All my old Eagle Scouts around the dinner table. Well, Buck’s, really.”

Quinn and Buck married in their early forties, and she was never able to have children of her own. Buck’s Boy Scouts always got an extra dose of maternal affection from her, one much needed by some.

“Yours too, Quinn.”

“They were. And all the music. Lord, you and Buck played through till dawn so many nights. I’d get so mad knowing we had to be up the next day, but I never said anything. It was so pure. I knew how lucky we were, even then.”

And with that, my first tears come. “I remember you complaining a time or two,” I tell her.

“Well, somebody had to be responsible.” She laughs softly, then her voice drops to a confiding whisper. “I know you know what I’m going through, Marshall. Because of Adam.”

I close my eyes, and tears roll down my cheeks. “I’ve gotta go, Quinn.”

“I didn’t mean to— Oh, hell. Death sucks.”

“I’ll call you this afternoon.”

I hang up and strike off down the bluff, away from Denny Allman, who doesn’t need to see me crying right now. Denny’s father abandoned him a long time ago, and while it might be good for him to see how grown men react to death, I don’t want to explain that the loss robbing me of my composure now didn’t happen last night, but thirty-one years ago.

A fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t need to know grief can last that long.

CHAPTER 6

WHILE DENNY ALLMAN flies his drone up the bluff face to change batteries and begin searching for Buck Ferris’s truck, I walk north along the fence and try to get myself under control. It’s tough with the Mississippi River dominating my field of view. Seeing Buck pulled dead from that water kicked open a door between the man I am now and the boy I was at fourteen, the year fate ripped my life inside out. That door has been wedged shut for more years than I want to think about. Now, rather than face the dark opening, my mind casts about for something to distract itself from peering into the past.

My finger itches to make that call I cannot make, but the person I want to talk to can’t take a call from me right now. I’ve slept with married women twice in my life. The first time was in my twenties, and she was French—my professor at Georgetown. I didn’t even know she was married when I started sleeping with her; her husband lived most of the year in France. The risks during that affair never rose above the possibility of an awkward meeting at a restaurant, which might have resulted in a sharp word later, for her not me. The woman I’m sleeping with now has a husband quite capable of killing me, were he to learn of our affair. If I called her now, she could try to play it off as business, but even people of marginal intelligence can detect intimacy in the human voice. I don’t intend to have my life upended—or even ended—because of an unguarded syllable decoded by a nosy paralegal. I could send a text, of course, but SMS messages leave a digital trail.

For now I must suffer in silence.

A group of women power walking along the bluff approaches from a distance. An asphalt trail follows the bluff for two miles—the Mark Twain Riverwalk—and in the early mornings and evenings it’s quite busy. Thankfully, by nine thirty most of the serious walkers have retreated to coffee shops or to their SUVs for morning errands. For the first hundred yards, I keep my eyes rightward, on the buildings that line Battery Row. I pass the old clock tower, the Planters’ Hotel, two antebellum mansions. Behind them stands the tallest building in the city, the Aurora Hotel. Next comes the memorial fountain enshrining 173 Confederate dead. It’s a stone’s throw from the emplacements where thirty-two-pounder Seacoast guns covered the Mississippi River during the Civil War. Across from the fountain stand a couple of bars and restaurants, another antebellum home, and then the new amphitheater, paid for by casino money.

The old railroad depot functions as the hub of the bluff, with its small café, convenience shop, tourist information office, and herd of blue bicycles for rent. Past the depot stands the only modern building on the bluff, the Holland Development Company, headquarters of our local real estate king. Just down the street from that crouches the Twelve Bar, a ratty blues club owned by a native son who’s turned down stunning sums to hold on to his pride and joy. Across from the Twelve Bar is a graded site awaiting the granite slab of a promised civil rights memorial, but somehow the final money never seems to get appropriated. I’ve walked this route too many times over the past months to be distracted for long. Eventually the gravity of the river draws my gaze to the west.

From the midpoint of the Bienville bluff, you can see seventeen miles of river. Thanks to the misguided Corps of Engineers, the Mississippi upstream from Bienville looks like a canal. It’s a nine-mile run to the first meander, and two meanders above that stands the siege city of Vicksburg. Besieged by Yankees during the Civil War and by economic woes today, the city fights hard to survive. It’s a grim reality, but the river towns are dying in Mississippi, by a slow exsanguination of people and talent that functions like a wasting disease. Most have changed so little over time that if you resurrected a citizen who lived in the 1890s, they would still recognize the streets they once walked. In Natchez and Bienville, you could do that with someone from the 1850s.

Of all the famous Mississippi cotton towns—from Clarksdale in the Delta to Natchez on its bluff—only Bienville is holding its own against the tides of time, race, and terminal nostalgia. The reason is complex, largely illegal, and has occupied much of my thoughts and work since I moved back here five months ago. My gut tells me that Buck Ferris’s death will ultimately be added to the list of smaller crimes committed in the quest for Bienville’s economic survival, but right now my mind refuses to track on that.

Right now I’m thinking how this day feels a lot like the day my feelings about the Mississippi River changed forever. It was May then, too. A glorious May. I loved the river then. As a boy, I’d fished in it, hunted along it, canoed across it, camped above it as a Boy Scout, even skied over its backwaters during flood years. The Mississippi was as much a part of me then as it ever was of Huck Finn or Sam Clemens. The year I left Bienville to attend college at the University of Virginia, I came across a letter by T. S. Eliot, who I had always vaguely assumed was English. To my surprise, I discovered that Eliot had grown up along the same river I had, in St. Louis, and to a friend he wrote this about the Mississippi: I feel that there is something in having passed one’s childhood beside the big river, which is incommunicable to those who have not. I consider myself fortunate to have been born here, rather than in Boston, or New York, or London. I knew exactly what Eliot meant.

All my life, I’ve felt a constant, subterranean pull from the great river that divides America into east and west, this slow juggernaut of water that was the border of my home, a force that tugged at me like spiritual gravity. But after one day in 1987, what it pulled on in me changed. Today smells a lot like that day: Confederate jasmine and honeysuckle, late-blooming azaleas. The sun is hot, but the air is cool. And the river’s running high, just as it was thirty-one years ago.

But unlike today, which began with death, that day began in glory. Glory for my family and my friends. The idea that the angel of death was circling over us would have seemed preposterous.

My brother and I had spent the afternoon in Jackson, the state capital, running in the state track meet for St. Mark’s Episcopal Day School. When I write “Episcopal Day School,” don’t picture an ivy-walled temple of learning. Picture three gray corrugated aluminum buildings without air-conditioning and a bumpy football field in a former cow pasture. Correction: The teacher’s lounge and the library had window AC units. The school board couldn’t have hired anyone to teach us without them. Academic rigor was stressed at St. Mark’s, but—as in the rest of the former Confederacy—football was a religion. Basketball and baseball also rated as manly sports, though second tier, while running track was viewed merely as training duty. Golf, tennis, and swimming were hobbies pursued by dandies. Swimming was the one activity at which I truly excelled, but St. Mark’s didn’t have a team. I had to swim for the City of Bienville.

Thanks to my brother Adam and his senior classmates, St. Mark’s had thus far won both the Class A state championship in football and the Overall State championship in basketball, defeating the preeminent Quad A school in the state, Capital Prep in Jackson. This miracle had been accomplished only twice in the state’s history. It was Hoosiers, rewritten for the Deep South. We’d only managed to win South State in baseball, but at the track meet on that day we racked up our third state title.

Though I was still three weeks shy of turning fifteen, I ran in both the mile and two-mile relays (we won firsts), and I took third place in the high jump. But my older brother was the star of the team. Adam had filled that role in every sport for St. Mark’s since his sophomore year, when he began playing quarterback for the varsity football team. That year Adam McEwan led the Crusaders to a South State title, beginning his meteoric rise to statewide legend status. There’s nothing unusual in that, of course. Every couple of years, a kid from some little Mississippi town gets canonized as the Next Big Thing, the next Hot College Prospect who’s “maybe good enough to go pro.” My brother happened to be that kid. The thing was, most people who canonized him had no idea how unique he really was.

Adam wasn’t like the other small-town demigods—phenomenal at one sport, or two, or even three. He was gifted at everything he put his hand to. I once saw him (having touched a bow and arrow only once, as a boy at day camp) try a compound bow at a demonstration being given by a hunting expert at a local gun show. After an hour of informal advice, Adam outshot every hunter present and even matched the instructor on distance shots.

But Adam’s embarrassment of riches did not end with sports. As a junior, with no background in music, Adam walked onto the stage during the St. Mark’s production of My Fair Lady and sang “On the Street Where You Live” in a tenor voice so tender yet powerful that it literally stopped the show. To add insult to injury, Adam was as beloved by his English teachers as by those who taught calculus and physics. His SAT scores came in fifty points higher than anyone else’s in the senior class, cementing a National Merit Scholarship, and by the afternoon of that track meet in 1987, he’d been accepted to five Ivy League universities. Our father wanted him to attend Sewanee, his own alma mater, but in a rare rebellion, Adam told me he planned to insist on Brown University.

I loved him for that, for breaking free from our father’s life template. Mississippians with Adam’s gifts rarely leave Mississippi, much less the South. When you’re from Mississippi, Vanderbilt is considered a northern school. My brother not only decided to attend an Ivy League school in the far north, but the least structured institution of them all. Oh, I loved him for that.

Yet even so, it was tough to have a brother like Adam.

The three years between us might have provided a protective cushion with a normally gifted older brother, but there was simply no escaping Adam’s shadow. The glare of the spotlight he walked in whited out everything around him. And while I stood six feet tall as a ninth grader, and was no slouch in the classroom, I couldn’t possibly stand tall enough to escape the penumbra around my brother. Yet as I watched him stride like Apollo through our earthly realm, what amazed me most was his humility. Despite being subjected to near continuous adulation, Adam did not “get the big head.” He kept himself apart from all cliques, treated everyone as an equal, and he almost never got angry. Adam seemed, by any measure of human frailty, too good to be true. And while someone so universally admired almost inevitably generates resentment or outright enmity in some people, Adam seemed the exception. Even teams he embarrassed on the hotly contested fields of Mississippi embraced him as a kind of hero, someone they would later boast they had played against.

By the end of his senior year—at least the athletic year, of which that track meet marked the coda—Adam wasn’t the only high school boy feeling immortal. As soon as the coaches handed out our trophies, we broke out in spectacular fashion. After holding ourselves in check for most of the year—limiting ourselves to a few beers on weekends—we switched to Jack Daniel’s or vodka for the ride home, and some guys even broke out the weed. By ten P.M. in Bienville, every member of every St. Mark’s boys’ athletic team was wasted.

We started in one big group, a convoy of cars and trucks that hit all the high school hangout spots like a motorized Roman triumph. McDonald’s, the mall parking lot, the recently closed electroplating factory, and finally the sandbar by the river. But as the hours wore on, the liquor and grass began culling the weaker members of the tribe. Some left to find girlfriends for late-night rendezvous, while others simply passed out in cars at various places around the city. By midnight, we were down to a core squad of six guys in two vehicles.

Adam and I were riding in Joey Burrell’s beat-up Nissan 280ZX 2+2. In the other car were Paul Matheson and his two cousins from Jackson—prize assholes and stars at Capital Prep. Like Paul, they were blond and annoyingly handsome (our cheerleaders loved them, the bastards). Having won the Quad A division of the state track meet, the Matheson cousins had driven their sparkling new IROC-Z Camaro the forty miles from Jackson to Bienville to “teach Cousin Paul how to celebrate.”

Paul Matheson didn’t need any lessons in that department. It was Paul who’d supplied the weed after we got back from Jackson, and I was pretty sure he’d been smoking it all year long, between seventh period and afternoon practices. Though only a year older than I, Paul was talented enough to outplay most of us stoned. His father, Max, had been a football legend at Bienville’s public high school in 1969, before he went to Vietnam, and the son had inherited enough of those genes to return punts and kickoffs for the varsity and to take people’s heads off as a strong safety on the starting defense. Paul had also been sixth man on the championship basketball team that defeated Capital Prep—something that drove his cousins crazy.

Despite the age difference between us, Paul and I had been friends on and off since we were young boys. Back then, his house wasn’t far from mine; we swam at the same pool, and by the time I was seven we were playing on the same sports teams. After going through Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts together, we found ourselves playing for St. Mark’s junior high. In that sense, we were comrades in arms and close to brothers. The main thing that separated us was money.

Paul’s father was rich. His uncle in Jackson was richer still. Paul’s family owned the lumber mill in town and also a wood treatment plant by the river. The uncle was a big contractor who did a lot of state jobs. My father earned a decent living publishing the Bienville Watchman, but our family cars were ten years old, and we lived in a tract house built in 1958. We had no second home on Lake Comeaux, no killer stereo or projection TV, and no kids’ phone line or swimming pool in the backyard as we hit our teenage years.

As a boy, I never noticed this wealth gap. Paul shared what he had, and money didn’t seem important. Besides, his dad had won some big medals for bravery in Vietnam, and not many people begrudge a veteran success when he survives combat. But having Max Matheson for an old man was a heavy cross to bear for Paul. The war hero was a hard-ass, despite being known to party on occasion, and he pressured his son to win every contest in which he participated.

From the way Paul’s cousins acted the night of the track meet, I figured the uncle must be an even bigger bastard than Max. They’d come to Bienville still angry about losing Overall State to us back in February. By the time they found us, they were toasted on some combination of grass and speed. Not that we were sober. Even Adam—who always imbibed in moderation—had skipped the Miller ponies in favor of Jack Daniel’s. The hours before midnight passed amicably enough, but after twelve, things started to get contentious. The Matheson cousins had been digging at us all night, and we had been paying them back with interest. But around two A.M., things drifted out of control.

We were parked at the foot of the big electrical tower near the port, close enough to the river to get hit by barge searchlights as they passed. The Matheson boys weren’t rocket scientists, but they had the animal cleverness of natural predators. Dooley was seventeen, his brother Trey a year older. Dooley had the mean streak. All night they’d been calling us faggots, losers, and cheaters—because if we hadn’t cheated, how else could Capital Prep have been beaten by a pissant Single A team? The fact that we’d won by only one point was to them clear evidence that we’d bribed a referee, at the least.

I didn’t give a damn what they said, but for some reason Adam couldn’t endure their incessant ragging. This got my attention, because my brother was the most unflappable guy I knew. And somehow, before I understood what was happening, Adam had accepted a challenge for a hundred-yard sprint along the road beneath the tower. One minute we were a group of griping drunks, the next we were lined up along the asphalt in the beam of the IROC-Z’s headlights, smashing bottles and waiting for the starting gun.

Joey Burrell kept a pistol in his car, a little .25. He fired it into the sky, sending us all blazing down the road with adrenaline, alcohol, and cannabis roaring in our veins. I ran so hard I thought my heart might burst, but I only came in fourth place. Adam won the race, beating Paul by half a step. Trey Matheson was third, then me, and finally Dooley Matheson, the complainingest son of a bitch I’d ever met. All the way back to the cars, Dooley bitched about Adam and Paul getting a head start.

We should have stopped then, but when we reached the foot of the tower, Dooley demanded a chance to get his own back. He didn’t want to do it on foot, though. He wanted a drag race along the levee road. This was preposterous. Their IROC-Z boasted a hundred more horsepower than Joey’s 280ZX, but nevertheless I soon found myself sitting shotgun in the Nissan while Dooley and his brother revved the big engine of the IROC-Z. Adam sat in the backseat behind me, his seat belt cinched tight, while Paul angrily took the backseat of his cousins’ car to keep the weight distribution even. The finish line was a grain elevator at the end of Port Road, roughly two miles away. After Joey and Dooley shouted a mutual countdown from five, we were off, blasting along the levee, watching the taillights of the IROC-Z as it vanished like an F-16 ahead of us. That Camaro beat us so badly that by the time we reached the grain elevator, the Mathesons were lounging against their car drinking beer.

At that point, we should have quit while we were behind, but the drag race only sparked further madness. We were boys, after all, and the testosterone was flowing. After handing out the embarrassing loss, the Mathesons insisted on giving us a chance to “win our pride back.” I didn’t know what they were talking about until Dooley pointed up at the electrical tower standing two miles back at the starting line. At six hundred feet tall, that tower—and its twin on the Louisiana shore a mile away—supported the high-voltage transmission lines that carried electrical power across the Mississippi River. I knew a few guys who’d claimed to have climbed that tower, but I’d never believed them. Nor could I see how climbing a six-hundred-foot-tall erector set represented any kind of winnable contest. But as the drunken discussion progressed, it became apparent that this was more of a test of manhood than a contest.

Once again, I was shocked to see my older brother buy into this idea. On any other night, Adam would have laughed at the absurdity of the dare. But that night, he let himself be baited. As subtly as I could, I tried to stop him. I wasn’t scared of much back then, but heights I did not handle well. That tower was as tall as a fifty-five-story building. Even standing with both feet planted squarely on the ground, I felt the soles of my feet tingle as I looked up at the metal beams and struts silhouetted against a moonlit cloud.

By the time we’d driven over to the tower’s massive base, the Mathesons had imposed a penalty for chickening out. Anyone who didn’t make it to the top would have to streak stark naked down six blocks of Main Street at dawn. Great, I thought, picturing myself sprinting down Main with one hand over my cock and balls. Just getting up to the main ladder proved difficult. First we had to park a car beneath a tree that grew near one of the tower’s four legs. Climbing onto the roof, we managed to grab the lowest limb on the tree, and that ultimately took us to a point where we could stretch precariously over a twenty-foot drop and grab the metal pegs that served as the ladder for the first hundred feet of the climb. (The power company had undoubtedly designed this obstacle to prevent drunken fools such as ourselves from attempting the suicidal climb. Clearly, they underestimated our stupidity.)

While still in the tree, Joey Burrell decided he was too drunk to try crossing to the metal pegs, so he turned back, becoming the first to earn the penalty. But soon the rest of us were clinging to the tower leg, like newborn raccoons afraid to follow their mother up a tree. Trey Matheson was highest, followed by his brother Dooley. Then Paul, Adam, and, last of all, me. I went last because something told me I might have to make a strategic retreat. I didn’t want to, but I wasn’t so deluded as to think I might not get into trouble.

For most of the climb, I stared only at the ladder rungs, focusing on the few square inches where I would place my free hand, then release the other and reach up again, finding the next rung—again and again and again. I heard birds and bats flying around me, but I didn’t turn to see them. Mosquitoes bit me, sucking my blood without interruption as the wind whipped my shirt, tearing at my body. I sweated continuously, soaking my clothes. The boys above me chattered and laughed, and the Mathesons whooped like madmen every minute or two. All this I ignored to keep my Zen-like focus.

Two-thirds of the way up—at about four hundred feet—I made the mistake of looking out over the river. A paralyzing wave of vertigo hit me, and it was all I could do not to vomit. My vision blurred. I became vaguely aware of the lights of faraway towns and farms, and the great glittering serpent of the river running beneath us. From six hundred feet in the air you can see thirty miles. At only four hundred feet, I was incapacitated.

Adam soon realized I was in trouble. He stopped climbing and offered to come back and follow me down, discarding any thought of the climb as a test of manhood. But since we were already two-thirds of the way up, I decided to go on. I didn’t want to suffer the penalty and risk arrest for indecent exposure; nor did I want to suffer Paul and his preppy cousins ragging me for all eternity.

I made it fifty more feet. Then my nerve broke.

It was the signal failure of my life. While the Mathesons hooted with derision from above, yelling “Pussy!” at the top of their lungs, I clung to that ladder like an arthritic old lady asked to scale the Matterhorn. This time Adam insisted on escorting me down. Shivering in terror, I told him I would descend only if he pushed on to the top. Besides, I whimpered, we were on a ladder. How the hell could he help me get to the ground? Adam said he would tie one end of his belt to his ankle and the other to my left arm, so that if I slipped, I’d have an instant to catch myself before the belt broke and I went into free fall.

I wasn’t going to put my brother in that kind of danger. When Adam saw that I wouldn’t change my mind, he finally started up again. My subsequent descent was a triumph of courage over abject terror. I was still two hundred feet off the ground when I saw the others “summit” the tower. And once they were on the platform, six hundred feet in the sky, I learned just how crazy the Matheson cousins were. Dooley, the seventeen-year-old, climbed onto the top strut where the aircraft warning lights were mounted. There he stood up like a gymnast on a balance beam. There was nothing to hold him, not a safety rail, not a belt … nothing. A single gust of wind could have plucked him off that tower like a dandelion seed. Watching him dance along that strut like a drunken court jester nauseated me. Dooley Matheson was willing to throw away his life to try to get back at my brother for a basketball loss that could never be erased. That, I thought, is what makes McEwans superior to Mathesons on the evolutionary scale.

Then, to my horror, I saw my celebrated brother prove he was just as crazy as Dooley Matheson. As Dooley climbed down into his brother’s arms, Adam mounted the strut and not only walked along it, but extended his arms like wings while his shirt parachuted around him in the wind. When I saw the wind whipping his shirt like a sail in a storm, I finally puked. After I recovered myself and looked back up, I saw Adam bend his knees, take Paul’s hand, and drop back onto the platform. Relief surged through me like an anesthetic.

Then, as Adam started down the ladder, I saw Trey Matheson leap from the platform and catch hold of a high-voltage line where it passed over a horizontal strut that protruded from the tower. My heart started slapping my chest wall. The madman was hanging from a wire carrying 50,000 volts of electricity across the Mississippi River! God only knew what he must have been feeling: every hair on his body had to be standing on end. What I couldn’t see was how he would get back onto the tower without killing himself. If he grounded his body to the metal, the electrical current would blow off his legs as it shorted out his brain and heart. I watched Trey the way I’d watched the trapeze artist from the Ringling Bros. Circus as a little boy, until the elder Matheson finally swung himself repeatedly to gain velocity, then let go of the wire and flew back to the tower ladder like Spider-Man.

The shame and abuse they heaped on me when they finally reached the foot of that tower was almost unbearable. I heard the word pussy a hundred times in five minutes. Dooley crowed about how I had “pussied out, like all faggots do when the going gets tough.” Trey stared at us with a trancelike glaze in his eyes, claiming he’d gotten a massive hard-on as soon as he grabbed the high-voltage line. Pretty soon they were bragging that there was nothing that required balls they couldn’t beat us at. The basketball championship had obviously been a fluke. Then Dooley started singing “The Ballad of Casey Jones,” substituting profanity at every available opportunity. “Marshall McEwan was a pussy from hell, born sucking dicks in Bee-en-VILLE, tried to climb a tower with some ree-ul men, then he pussied out all over again!”

I laughed, even as some part of me wondered why Dooley seemed so obsessed with homosexuality. Did he really hate queers that much? Or was he secretly gay himself? As he started another verse, I wondered whether Dooley’s IQ might be marginally higher than I’d initially guessed—but Adam wasn’t having any. He told Paul to shut his cousin up, or he’d shut his mouth for him. I hadn’t seen Adam make such a threat since he’d defended me from a bully when I was ten years old. Dooley started squaring up to fight Adam, and Adam’s eyes went strangely flat. Paul Matheson looked worried. Paul knew all too well what Adam could do to someone on the football field when he felt no particular animus toward them. What would happen if Adam McEwan decided to really mess somebody up? I could see Paul wondering. There was more tension in the air than there had been atop that electrical tower, but Paul’s cousins didn’t seem to realize the danger.

Then I heard myself say, “There’s something I can beat you assholes at. And I’ll bet any amount of money you want on it.”

This took their attention off Adam, and quick. What was I talking about? they demanded. Some kind of fag parlor game, like bridge?

“I can beat you across the river,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Trey demanded. “Like racing over the bridge? We already won the drag race.”

“Not in the cars,” I said, feeling eerily calm. “Swimming.”

That stopped them. I knew then that, whatever they might say, they couldn’t refuse my challenge. Refusal didn’t fit into their fantasy of themselves. I had them cornered.

“Bull-fuckin’-shit,” Dooley said finally. “You won’t swim that river. It’s a mile wide.”

“More like half a mile. Three-quarters maybe, with the high water. And I’ll beat you by a hundred yards, you stupid cow-fucker.”

They looked at me like I was delusional.

“You ever swum it before?” Trey asked cannily.

“No.”

“He lying?” Dooley asked Paul, over his shoulder.

“No. But he’s a hell of a swimmer.”

“Well, shit. I’m a hell of a swimmer, too!” Dooley crowed. “I’m a great swimmer! I won the hundred-meter freestyle when I was thirteen.”

“Blue ribbon,” I said with mock awe. “So you’re all ready.”

“Fuck you,” Dooley growled. “I was born ready.”

“Nobody’s getting into that river,” Adam said with sobering authority. He sounded exactly like our father. “We’re all wasted, and a sober man would be crazy to try to swim that river, especially at night. Not to mention at high water, which only a lunatic would try at noon. Plus, that water is runoff from the north. It’s iceberg cold. So forget it.”

“I can do it,” I said quietly.

“I said forget it,” Adam snapped. “We’re going home.”

“You go if you want. I’m swimming it.”

“Then put your money where your mouth is,” said Trey Matheson. “I don’t get wet for free.”

In the end, we bet four hundred dollars on the race. Four hundred dollars then was like forty thousand to me now. More. It was all I had in the world, every dollar saved from working minimum-wage jobs. But I risked it, because I believed in myself. But what happened afterward—

“Hey, Marshall!” calls a high-pitched voice. Not Adam’s …

I blink myself from my trance and see the river two hundred feet below the bluff, stretching north through clear sunlight, not cloaked in fog like that terrible night—

“Marshall!” Denny Allman calls, running along the fence on the bluff’s edge. “Come see! I found the truck! I found Dr. Buck’s truck!”

By the time Denny reaches me, panting like mad, I’ve come back to myself. He jams the shaded screen of his iPad Mini up to my face. A green sea of treetops glides past below the flying camera, as though shot by Stanley Kubrick.

“Is that a live shot?” I ask.

“No, the drone’s flying back on autopilot. My battery was low. This is recorded. There’s the truck! See it?”

Denny apparently put his drone into a hover over a local make-out and picnic spot north of town called Lafitte’s Den. The den is a geologic anomaly, a sandstone cave set low in the loess bluff, long said to have been the hideout of pirate Jean Lafitte while he evaded U.S. Navy ships pursuing him from New Orleans. No one has ever satisfactorily explained where Lafitte could have concealed his ships while he hid in the cave, and historians consider the story more legend than fact. As Denny’s drone descends toward the treetops on the screen, I see the rusted orange roof of Buck Ferris’s GMC pickup.

“That’s it,” I marvel. “You did it!”

Denny is beaming with pride. “Yep. I thought about flying down and looking into the windows, but the trees are pretty tight, and we’re at the limit of my range.”

“No, this is great. Don’t risk your drone.”

Staring at the abandoned truck parked in the dirt turnaround by Lafitte’s Den, I’m sure of only one thing: Buck wouldn’t have wasted five minutes digging at that natural homeless shelter. Thanks to the Lafitte legend, over the decades the earth in and around that sandstone cave has been ratholed like a block of cheese by an army of gomers with metal detectors, ten-year-olds with toy shovels, and housewives with garden spades. The most anyone has ever found there are arrow points and pottery shards, which can be picked up anywhere in or around Bienville after a heavy rain. No one in the past two hundred years has ever found a single gold piece of eight.

“Buck wouldn’t dig there,” Denny says, reading my mind. “There’s nothing at that cave except empty beer cans and used rubbers.”

This kid. “You’re right. Something’s wrong here.”

“But there is sandstone in the ground around the cave. Could falling on that have crushed Buck’s head like we saw?”

“I don’t think so. First, most of the ground is covered with dirt. Second, even the sandstone is so soft you can dig a hole in it with a car key. Third, the cave is deep but not high, so he couldn’t have fallen that far.”

“Unless he fell from the top of the bluff,” Denny points out.

“If that’s what happened, he’ll have multiple broken bones. Also, there should be traces of sandstone in Buck’s wound.”

“What are you gonna do?”

I look down into the boy’s expectant face. I always see his mother when I do that. Like a lot of guys, I slept with her a few times in high school. Dixie was a good person, but I knew even then that she would never get out of this town or even to college. “Do you want credit for finding Buck’s truck?”

Denny thinks about it for a few seconds. “That won’t make up for the sheriff finding out for sure it was me filming his morons on the river earlier.”

“Probably not. Somebody will find that truck in the next few hours, but the sooner the better, as far as making a murder case. How about an anonymous call?”

Denny nods.

“Okay, then. I’ll handle it.”

“How? There’s no pay phones anymore.”

With my burner phone, of course, I think. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Okay,” he says skeptically. “So what’s next?”

I start to ask him what he means, but I know. And I’m glad. Because though Denny’s only fourteen, he has a resource I can’t easily replace.

“I’ve got a feeling I know where Buck was really digging last night. And it wasn’t that cave.”

Denny’s eyes light up. “Where?”

“The new paper mill site, in the industrial park. I think we could use a little aerial surveillance out there. Check for signs of recent digging.”

“But you said they have the groundbreaking ceremony there today.”

I glance at my watch. “In an hour and a half. The time for an overflight is this afternoon. Can you meet me out there later if I call your mother and make sure it’s okay?”

“You bet your ass! I mean—no problem.”

“Thanks, Denny. You need a ride home?”

“Nah. I’m good. Going over to the depot for some food.”

“Okay.” I pat him on the shoulder and start back in the direction of the Flex, but he stops me by calling my name.

“What is it?” I ask, turning back.

“Are you okay?” he asks, looking genuinely worried.

“Yeah, yeah. I was just thinking about something that happened a long time ago.”

Denny Allman doesn’t look puzzled or even curious. He works his mouth around for a few seconds, then says, “Your brother?”

So he does know. “Yeah. Who told you about that?”

“My mom.”

Of course. “I figured.”

“She said it was the worst thing that ever happened in this town.”

That doesn’t surprise me. “That’s what it felt like, at the time. Actually, some pretty bad things have happened in this town since it was founded.”

Denny bites his bottom lip and looks at the ground. “Maybe one happened last night, huh?”

“That’s what I’m thinking. You get home and do your schoolwork. I’ll call your mom later on.”

Before I turn to go, the hornet humming of the drone sounds above us, and Denny’s DJI quad-rotor descends rapidly on autopilot, hovers for a few seconds, then slowly lands thirty yards away from us.

He grins proudly. “Pretty cool, huh?”

“Pretty cool.”

CHAPTER 7

AFTER LEAVING DENNY Allman near the old railroad depot, I walk back to the Flex and start the engine but leave it in Park. My anonymous call made, the rush of discovering Buck’s pickup has already faded. Seeing my surrogate father dragged from the river has left a deep shadow over me, one I sense will not pass for a long time.

I have an hour and fifteen minutes to wait before the groundbreaking ceremony for the new paper mill, but I have no desire to go back to the office. I’m craving coffee, but I’m in no condition to go to Nadine’s, which is where I usually spend my morning coffee break. Nadine Sullivan is about ten times more perceptive than Denny Allman, and I don’t want her picking at my soul until I get my defenses back up. The thing about kicking open a door to the past is that sometimes what’s behind it comes out under its own power. You can try to run, but no matter how fast you do, you’re dragging your demons behind you. At a certain point, you might as well stop, turn, and let them roll over you, enfold you. If you’re lucky, maybe they’ll die in the light of day.

Quinn Ferris’s accusations about the Bienville Poker Club still ring in my ears, but I don’t care to think about that right now. I’ll see those guys at the groundbreaking, where there’ll be plenty of time to study them in their native environment. Putting the Flex in gear, I drive slowly north along the bluff, skirting the edge of town, moving toward the Garden District, where six blocks of lovingly preserved Victorians stand between the commercial district and the high ground of the city cemetery. As I drive, I realize that despite being back in Bienville for five months, I’ve yet to go out to the cemetery once.

Soon after losing sight of the bluff, I turn left onto Hallam Avenue, which will carry me through the Garden District to Cemetery Road, which runs west-to-east from the graveyard to the eastern forests of Tenisaw County. Two- and three-story gingerbread houses drift past on both sides of my SUV, set back behind wrought-iron fences, but I don’t really see them. In my mind I’m standing on the bank of the river with my brother, peering through the fog at the Louisiana shore, which has never seemed so far away.

On that night, we drove down the levee in the Camaro and the Nissan until we came to a place where the river lay only twenty yards away. As soon as we arrived, Adam—speaking in my father’s voice again—declared that no one was getting into the water before the sun came up. That meant an hour’s wait at least. Hoping to talk me out of the swim, Adam asked me to sit in the car with him for a minute. Instead, I walked up and down the levee fifty yards at a time, breathing deeply, limbering my muscles, and trying to burn off as much alcohol as possible. After my failure to climb the electrical tower, I felt exultant at the prospect of redeeming myself and teaching Paul’s cousins a much-needed lesson.

Trey and Dooley Matheson sat in their IROC-Z, steadily taking hits from a Cheech-and-Chong-size joint. While the moon set and the sky grew blacker, two strings of barges moved downriver, and one moved up. As the last barge passed, its big diesels vibrating the ground beneath our feet, I noticed fog building over the surface of the river. That wouldn’t interfere with our swim, but it made me wonder about the temperature of the water.

When the eastern horizon began to lighten, four of us walked down the levee to the water’s edge: Trey, Dooley, Adam, and me. A thousand yards of river lay in front of us, a sheet of fog six feet thick hovering over the surface. It looked like the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. Joey Burrell stood on the levee behind us, telling us we were crazy to even consider trying to swim it. Paul stood silent beside him, watching intently. Joey was simply afraid, which showed he had good sense. But I’d never seen Paul display fear, and he knew his cousins would give him hell for skipping this. His refusal told me that either Paul knew I was the best swimmer and didn’t need his help to beat his cousins, or he’d assessed the situation and, despite his considerable athletic ability, decided the risk of death was too great to chance the river.

That should have given me pause.

It didn’t. I wanted to show those rich bastards that they weren’t invincible, or blessed, or any more than just plain average. I wasn’t sure Adam was going to come with me, but when the Mathesons and I pulled off our Levi’s, Adam followed suit. At that point I told him he didn’t need to go, but he quietly replied that he couldn’t let me try the swim alone. If I drowned, Adam said, he’d never be able to face our parents and tell them what had happened. For a moment I thought of arguing with him, but in truth I was glad he would be with me out there.

The coldness of the river shocked me when we waded in, and the Mathesons howled. Adam and I made no sound, other than a quick sucking in of breath, then grunts of acceptance as we pushed off the flooded levee grass with our toes and joined the main current of the river.

“Nothing to it,” I told him. “Just do what I do.”

“Lead on,” he said. “I’m right behind you.”

It was strange, being the leader for once. But Adam didn’t hesitate to yield authority to me in the water. The fog was thicker than it looked from the levee, but I knew we could make the swim. In a pool I could cover the distance in twenty minutes. In a flooded river moving at eight or ten miles per hour—and with the added responsibility of shepherding Adam across—I’d need to drift as much as swim. If I guessed right, and we made steady progress, we would end up maybe four miles downstream on the Louisiana shore. The whole thing ought to take half an hour. Forty minutes, tops.

I looked back and relayed all this to Adam in a loud whisper. He nodded and said we should stay as far as we could from Trey and Dooley. I agreed, but before we were thirty yards into the current, Dooley swam over and tried to push me under the water. I easily avoided him, but he threw an arm backward and got hold of Adam before Adam saw the danger. They struggled for half a minute, Dooley managing to duck him until I went deep, grabbed Dooley’s leg, and dragged his head under. He fought hard, but I held him down until I heard him screaming. When I surfaced, I saw that Adam had bloodied Trey’s nose in a skirmish I’d missed. As soon as Adam saw that I was okay, we started kicking toward Louisiana, half swimming, half floating, staying high in the water like cottonmouth moccasins.

That worked well for fifteen minutes. Then we got separated. I’m still not sure how it happened. Maybe one of us got into an eddy, a boil, a whirlpool, something—but we lost sight of each other, and in the fog voices proved hard to track. The treachery of the Mississippi lies in its currents, which flow at different speeds and depths. This process creates dangerous surface effects. I’d thought I could handle them, but I was growing less sure as time passed. For the first ten minutes of the swim, I’d heard the Mathesons yelling and cursing, hooting insults. But for the last five minutes I’d heard nothing. Even stoned, they must have figured out that wasting energy in the river would kill them.

Tiring more quickly than I’d expected to, I started to worry about Adam. Certain he was behind me, I swam back and started a zigzag search, calling his name every ten seconds. The effort cost me two minutes, but I felt better after I collided with him in the fog. Then I saw that he looked pale, and he was panting in a way I’d never heard before. When I asked if he was okay, Adam told me somebody had been pulling at his legs, dragging him under. I was pretty sure the Mathesons were ahead of us, not behind, so I had no idea what might have been bothering him. An alligator gar? A big catfish? Both were unlikely.

I managed to stay close to him for another five minutes, but then we got separated again. Adam called out that he was okay and I should keep going. I did, but much more slowly than I could have, and I did a voice check every twenty seconds or so. I risked going a little ahead because I wanted to sight the opposite shore as soon as possible, to correct our course if we weren’t moving aggressively enough across the current. The sun had cleared the horizon by then, but with the fog it didn’t help much. As I swam, I realized my teeth were chattering. I wondered how long I had been shivering. I also sensed a vibration in the water, a subsonic rumble that felt more like my body was generating it than some external source. When Adam cried out for help, I turned back instantly, but again it took some time to find him in the fog.

As soon as I did, I saw he was in trouble. He was doubled over in the water, struggling even to stay afloat.

“My legs cramped up,” he choked out. His face was gray, his eyes glassy, and his teeth were chattering. “My calves. I can’t get them loose!”

I knew what had happened. The past thirty-six hours—which included the state track meet, serious alcohol intake, the foot race on the levee, and the long tower climb—had depleted Adam’s potassium to the point that his skeletal muscles wouldn’t function properly. I tried diving to massage the cramps out, but it did little good. I needed to get him to shore.

“Trey!” I shouted. “Dooley! Adam’s in trouble! We need help!”

“They won’t help,” Adam said. “They’ll be lucky to make it themselves.”

“Listen, I need you to go limp. Try to relax. I’m going to put you in a buddy tow and swim you to shore.”

“You can’t tow me that far. Not in this river.”

“Bullshit. You know I can. Do what I say.”

“I can make it,” Adam insisted, trying to pull himself through the water.

“Not cramped like that, you can’t. Lie back! I’m going to tow you to Louisiana.”

“Just gotta wait for my legs to …”

He fell silent. Adam had heard what I had. The rumble I’d barely perceived before seemed suddenly upon us, around us, beneath us. Somewhere in that fog, not far away, a string of barges was being pushed by a tugboat. Pushed toward us. Panic bloomed in my chest, and Adam saw it in my eyes.

“We’ve gotta move!” I cried. “Lie back!”

I’d never seen my brother’s eyes fill with fear, nor his face look so exhausted that I doubted his ability to continue. I had never seen him helpless. I couldn’t have imagined it. No one in Bienville could. But in that river, on that morning, our golden Apollo was as helpless as a newborn baby. Worse off, actually, since I could have easily hauled a baby to shore, whereas dragging 190 pounds of muscle would be like trying to swim an anchor through the water. Nevertheless, I dove and swam behind Adam, then surfaced and got my arm around his neck, up under his chin, and my left hip beneath his lower back. Then I started the “combat stroke” I’d been taught by my swimming coach, a former navy rescue swimmer. I had long since abandoned any thought of the Mathesons. From that point on, our lives depended on me.

The tugboat was closer, I could feel it. That meant the barges, which might extend a quarter mile in front of the tug, could run us over any second. Abandoning the alternating scissor-kick-and-pull stroke, I kicked constantly, with all the power in my legs. But as I did, I realized something that took my fear to a higher pitch: I was shivering; Adam wasn’t. His core temperature had dropped. The combination of cold water, exhaustion, dehydration, and alcohol was killing him. If I let go, he could sink without even struggling.

Summoning every atom of energy in my body, I kicked with focused violence and pulled water with my right hand, vowing I could do the work of two. But after the long day’s exertion, this was akin to hauling my brother up a mountain on my back. Worse, the diesel rumble had steadily grown louder, yet the fog still prevented me from determining the exact direction of the threat. I only knew it was upstream from us.

“You’re fading!” Adam gasped in my ear. “You can’t do it, Marsh.”

“Bullshit,” I panted, worried I was hyperventilating.

“You’re gonna kill us both. That barge is coming downstream, hauling ass.”

“Shut up, why don’t you?” I snapped, kicking like a madman.

“Can you see the shore?”

“Not yet … can’t be far, though.”

Before Adam spoke again, a gray wall as tall as a house appeared out of the fog to my right. It was the flat bow of the lead barge, maybe thirty-five yards away, growing larger by the second. I couldn’t scream or speak.

“Let me go,” Adam coughed.

I suddenly realized that I’d stopped swimming. I started kicking again, searching the fog for the edge of that wall.

“Let go!” Adam screamed. “You can still make it!”

Tears streaming from my eyes, I kicked with everything I had left, but it wasn’t enough. I felt five years old. The next time I looked up, the barge was twenty yards away. In that moment Adam bit into my neck. As searing pain arced through me, my brother punched me in the face, then kicked free of me. Separated by three feet of water, we looked into each other’s eyes with desperate intensity. Then a mass of water lifted us both, shoving us several feet downstream.

“Go,” Adam said with a calmness that haunts me to this day. Then he smiled sadly and slid beneath the surface.

For some fraction of time that will always be eternal, I stared at the empty space where my brother had been. Then my brainstem took control of my body. Freed from Adam’s weight, I cut across the water in a freestyle that felt like flying. The barge’s bow crashed past my feet so closely that the wake lifted me like a surfer catching a wave. A vicious undertow grasped at my lower body, pulling me back toward the steel hulk, but terror must have granted me superhuman strength. I fought my way clear.

After twenty more strokes, I spied the low shore of Louisiana 150 yards away. White sand, gray riprap, waist-high weeds. When I reached the rocks, I didn’t have the strength to climb out of the water, only to get my head clear and rest my weight on the submerged stones.

Some of what followed I can’t bear to think about even now. What I do remember is the search for Adam’s body. It will be remembered as long as men live and work along the Lower Mississippi. Everyone took part: the Coast Guard, twelve sheriff’s departments, four tugboat companies, a hundred private boaters, professional salvage divers, and even the Boy Scouts in a dozen counties and parishes lining the Mississippi River.

Nobody found him.

My father borrowed a Boston Whaler from a friend and went up and down the river for months, searching the banks and islands for his lost son. I would have gone with him, but Dad didn’t want me in that boat. Though my eyes were far sharper than his, he couldn’t bear my presence during his search.

That’s how it began. Not so much his withdrawal into himself, which my mother also went through, but his erasure of me, the guilty survivor. That was not Duncan McEwan’s first voyage into grief, of course. He had lost a child once before. I knew about that, but I’d never really thought deeply about it. That before he married my mother, he’d had another family. Sure, my father had always been older than my friends’ dads, but it never seemed like an issue. Yet in the wake of my brother’s loss—while I sat alone at home and my father plied the river in the vain hope of a miracle—his first wife and daughter seemed suddenly relevant.

Eloise and Emily. Emmie was the daughter. Two years old. My mother told me that they’d died in a one-car accident on Cemetery Road in 1966, taking a shortcut home after visiting Dad at the newspaper. I’d ridden over that exact spot a thousand times. It’s a dogleg turn where three sets of railroad tracks cross through the asphalt. Deep gullies gape on both sides of the road. At night, in a blinding rain, their car—Dad’s car, actually, an Oldsmobile Delta 88—spun off the road and tumbled into one of the ravines, coming to rest upside down in three feet of runoff water. Mother and child drowned in less than a minute. I can’t imagine what that must have been like for my father, to have endured that and then have built another life—to have been gifted a son like Adam—and then be told that he’d been taken by the river during a stupid teenage dare. It was more than my father could bear. And without a corpse to mourn, he simply refused to believe that Adam was dead. Who could blame him? When you’re blessed with a god for a son, it’s tough to accept mortality.

Thinking of my father like that, boarding that Boston Whaler down below Front Street every day, on a hopeless quest for his dead son, I suddenly realize that I’ve come to the low stone wall that borders the Bienville Cemetery. Hallam Avenue has intersected Cemetery Road. The bluff and the river aren’t quite visible from here, but I see Laurel Hill, the westernmost hill in the Bienville necropolis, where the monument to Adam stands. The statue—of an athletic young man who appears to mournfully stand watch over the river—was sculpted in Italy, by an artist my father met while working in Rome as an army reporter for Stars and Stripes. Another story for another day. The statue is famous among barge crews, who call it “the Watchman.” Poised 240 feet above the river, it’s the first thing the crews look for as they pass north of Bienville. Despite the tragedy behind the statue’s existence, it reassures them somehow, like a life-size St. Christopher medal.

Its effect on the town was impossible to foresee. Within hours after being erected on the hill, Adam’s statue became a shrine for local teenagers. By that time I was in a pit of despair, suffering from what doctors would later diagnose as PTSD. But I still went to school, and I heard the stories. On any given weekend, you could find kids leaning against its pedestal, watching the sunset. At dawn you’d find different kids watching the sunrise from the same spot. Since coming back home, I’ve been told this still happens, thirty-one years later, even though the present generation knows nothing about Adam beyond what their parents have told them. Pilgrims have prayed to Adam’s statue, conceived children under it, left rafts of flowers and poems at its feet. But I haven’t stood before it in twenty-eight years. I can’t bear to. The last time I did, the experience hurled me back to that terrible morning in the river—just as seeing Buck’s body did today. But the worst hour of that morning, worse even than abandoning my brother to his death under that barge, was the soul-scalding act of walking into my family’s home with the sheriff and telling my parents that their oldest son wouldn’t be coming home ever again.

And then explaining why.

Parked beside the cemetery wall, only two hundred yards from Adam’s statue, I decide I’m still not ready to confront his marble doppelgänger from any closer proximity. Not yet, at least. Better to drive back to town and have a cup of coffee at Nadine’s, settle my nerves, then ride out to the groundbreaking and try to figure out which of my fine fellow citizens acted on the nearly universal desire to silence Buck Ferris.

CHAPTER 8

MY DAILY SANCTUARY is a bookstore/coffee shop called Constant Reader, which is nestled between two large buildings on Second Street near the bluff. Bienville has had five bookstores during the modern era, none of which survived more than fifteen years. A big chain store in the mall hung on until a couple of years ago but finally gave up the ghost. After this grim record, Nadine Sullivan wisely opened Constant Reader only two blocks from Battery Row and one block from the Aurora Hotel, the art deco grande dame of Bienville, which serves as the primary downtown landmark of the postbellum era. While the Aurora is currently shut down for renovations, nearly every tourist coming up from the riverboats or walking the bluff still passes Nadine’s door, and most step inside for coffee and a muffin, if not to buy books, those musty relics of the twentieth century.

Nadine is eight years younger than I, but like me, she attended St. Mark’s Episcopal. She was far enough behind me that I barely knew she existed, but she graduated knowing a fair bit about me. Neither of us could have known that decades after high school, a common experience would make us close friends. The daughter of a traveling pharmaceutical rep who left town permanently when she was nine, Nadine became a highly successful personal injury lawyer in Raleigh, North Carolina. Married at twenty-seven, she divorced at thirty-one, with no children to fight over. After winning a huge settlement against a drug company, she was planning to open an indie bookstore in Charleston, South Carolina, when her mother was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Nadine moved home for what she thought would be a brief nursing period, but her mother rallied under her care and lived two more years. (Though my father has not rallied, this similar experience made Nadine and me natural confidants.) During the period that Mrs. Sullivan was ill, Nadine ran a weekly book club for her and a few close friends. So no one was surprised when, after her mother died, Nadine purchased a nineteenth-century pharmacy building downtown, restored it, and opened Constant Reader. Only tourists and newcomers refer to the store by its official name. Natives call it “Nadine’s place” or simply “Nadine’s.”

In the five months since I’ve been back, Nadine has hosted book signings by some of the finest writers in the South. She was one of the first to recognize the genius of Jesmyn Ward and Angie Thomas, and she’s also hosted small concerts by famous musicians she came to know while living in the Carolinas. Nadine is the kind of person who effortlessly pulls people into her orbit. Her gift for dealing with people can’t be attributed to any identifiable personal style, but rather to the vibe she radiates. Nadine Sullivan simply settles your soul, the way being around a baby does. Not that she has any childish quality; I know for a fact that she was a shark in the courtroom. But that’s difficult to imagine now. There is a purity about Nadine, a clarity in her eyes that—combined with a lack of any detectable tendency to judge people—invites the world in on its own terms. That said, her store is not merely a shelter for those in need of sympathy or conversation. Her author parties and musical events are webcast live to tens of thousands of followers, and she does good business mailing autographed books and CDs all over the world.

Most mornings, I drop by the store about 10:15, after the old men have finished bitching about “libtards” and the walking ladies have scarfed down their power waters and muffins. Nadine usually brings my coffee over herself, then lingers to chat for a couple of minutes, depending on how busy she is. Most days she remains on her feet, catching me up on any local gossip worth hearing. But some days she sits and sounds me out on events she’s thinking of scheduling, or just talks about the world in general. We’ve told each other about our respective divorces, and our shared commiseration imparted an intimacy that has made some of her customers wonder if we’re sleeping together. We’re not. But were I not committed elsewhere, I would certainly have tested her feelings on the matter.

Nadine says people gossip about us because until I showed up, the word around town was that she’s gay. That rumor started after she rejected just about every single man in Bienville, plus a lot of the married strays. Her target status is no mystery. Bienville is brimming with fake blondes with fake tits. Nadine, on the other hand, is a natural blonde with a sharp wit and a mischievous twinkle in her eye. Two years shy of forty, her body remains well distributed and finely calibrated when it moves, which alone would draw men to her. She’s assured me that her constant rejections have less to do with her sexual orientation than her strict standards when it comes to men. When she wants sex, she goes out of town. I don’t know where, and I don’t ask. Nor has Nadine volunteered the information. I must admit that, despite our familiarity, I find myself intrigued by the air of mystery that surrounds that part of her life.

A brass bell clangs as I step into the shop, and the scent of hot coffee pulls me through the bookselling area like a rope around my neck. The café tables in back are empty but for a young couple who have the look of French tourists. Nadine stands behind the counter, cleaning her espresso machine. She smiles over her shoulder, then says sotto voce, “Is it true about Buck?”

I move up to the counter before answering. “What did you hear?”

“They found him in the river. Dead.”

I nod, then shiver as the air-conditioning chills my sweaty shirt. “I just watched them pull him out.”

She shakes her head, then drops her rag and turns away from the gleaming machine. “Accident?”

“Between you and me? No way.”

She sucks in her lips and looks down at her counter, absorbing the news. “Was it the Indian artifacts? The threat to the paper mill?”

“I think so. Which, if you include residents of the county, gives us about thirty-six thousand suspects.”

“That sounds about right. You want coffee? I figured you’d be out at the groundbreaking.”

“I’m going, but I needed my caffeine.”

Her eyes probe mine with almost physical thoroughness. “You need something stronger than that. Are you okay? Seriously.”

I look down at the oversized muffins under the glass. “That scene at the river … no good for me.”

She reaches over the counter and squeezes my hand, then turns to prepare my coffee. “You going to sit? Or you in too much of a hurry?”

“Do you have time to sit?”

She looks around the store and smiles again. “Be there in a sec. How’s your dad doing?”

“’Bout the same,” I lie, from habit.

As I survey the eight café tables, I hear the couple speaking French while consulting a guidebook. On the round table before them lie copies of Richard Grant’s Dispatches from Pluto and Richard Wright’s Native Son. Anticipating the conversation Nadine and I will have, I detour into the book-signing nook, a C-shaped banquette set on a large dais raised two feet above the rest of the café.

The walls above the banquette are covered with signed author photos, most black-and-white. Facing me as I take a seat are Rick Bragg, Chris Offutt, Kathryn Stockett, John Grisham, and Pat Conroy (that one signed shortly before his death). Above these, a dozen more photos climb toward the ceiling. Behind me hangs a collection of signed photos given to Nadine by loyal customers. These include Eudora Welty, James Dickey, and Donna Tartt, as well as Mississippi blues singers Sam Chatmon and Son Thomas. Placed side by side to my left are signed publicity shots of the young Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis, wearing their 1950s duds. Jerry Lee is considered practically a native son, since he hails from Ferriday, Louisiana, just forty miles down the river. Rarest of all is a signed photo of Bobbie Gentry, the reclusive singer of “Ode to Billie Joe.”

Waiting for Nadine, I recall a weekend when Buck recruited a group of musician friends from around the South to play this store. Despite the superior musicianship, Buck included me both nights. We had two guitars, a mandolin, a fiddle, a bass, a harmonica, and a trap kit. After one set, the crowd got so big that people spilled out into the street, and rather than interfere, the cops closed Second Street to auto traffic and gave us a block party. Sometimes living in a small town is cool.

Nadine walks lightly up the steps to the nook and sets a heavy china mug in front of me. She joins me at the table with a cup of green tea and gives me a smile designed to buck up my spirits.

“No avoidance today,” she says. “The river, I mean. It was bad, huh?”

“Bad enough. To tell you the truth, I feel like I killed Buck.”

Her eyes darken. “Oh, come on. That’s bullshit.”

“Is it? I knew when I published that story it would make people furious. I tried to argue him out of it, but Buck wanted it in the paper. It was so unlike him to stir up controversy. All the years he lived here, he never did anything like that. He went out of his way not to. But this was like a mission for him. A life quest.”

“Why was it so important to him? I’m guessing you know a lot more than you put in the paper.”

“Some. But I hadn’t talked to him in a couple of days. I was really sort of waiting for the next shoe to drop.”

“I guess it has.” Nadine blows air across her tea. “Just not the way you were hoping.”

“I was hoping the Department of Archives and History would come in here and take over the site. They’ve got a lot of power in these situations. They appoint their own board, and in theory are immune to political pressure. They can place a preservation easement on public land—which the mill site is—and that would give them control of the site. At least while they survey and assess it.”

“That’s exactly what people are afraid of, right? It would have delayed construction?”

“No doubt.”

“Possibly even ended it?”

“If the site is what Buck believed it was.”

“Which is what? A site like Poverty Point? A potential UNESCO World Heritage site?”

“Yep. And I think it is. Poverty Point is only forty miles from here, as the crow flies. And there are remnants of that same culture down at Anna’s Bottom, north of Natchez. Buck believed that a deeper strata might hold evidence of an even older culture, like the one at Watson Brake, Louisiana. That’s only seventy miles from here, and it predates both the Giza pyramids and Stonehenge.”

Nadine is smiling with what looks like wistfulness. “My dad took me to Poverty Point when I was a little girl. I never told you that. It’s one of my few good memories of him. We had a picnic there. When you think about people living along the river before the pyramids, that’s pretty mind-blowing.”

“If only Buck had made his finds in the middle of nowhere, rather than an industrial park.”

Nadine pulls a wry face. “One that was nearly awarded Superfund status for its toxic sludge. What did you leave out of your article?”

“Mostly Buck’s persistence. About thirty years back, some small clues got him thinking there might have been an ancient civilization near here, one that vastly predated the known tribes. The Indians we’re famous for—the Natchez, mainly—were relative latecomers. They’re fascinating because they were sun-worshipping, corn-growing mound-builders, like the Maya. Buck first made his reputation by documenting their involvement with the French and English in slave trading.”

“The Indians were involved in the slave trade?”

“Big time. Anyway, the electroplating factory that used to sit on the paper mill site was built during World War Two. Buck had heard rumors that the construction workers turned over artifacts every day with their bulldozers. He tracked down a few old-timers, checked out the relics they’d given to their kids. But it was all later-era stuff—1500 to 1730. A lot of guys would have quit there, but Buck had seen descriptions of the site that predated even its agricultural use. Before that land was plowed up during the early 1800s by tobacco and cotton farmers, there were supposedly semicircular rings on the ground—raised concentric ridges facing the river, possibly built up on an older bend where the river used to flow. That’s exactly how Poverty Point is oriented.”

“I remember.” Nadine is nodding and smiling as though reliving her childhood picnic. “Buck couldn’t prove that?”

“No. Most of the acreage around the factory had been graded flat and paved over. The company refused to let him dig out there—even on the fringes—and Buck was so busy with other projects that he just let it go.”

Nadine sips her tea. “So what made him suddenly dig at the mill site this month? Finding that mysterious map?”

“Yeah. I was vague in the article, because the guy who found it didn’t want to be named.”

Nadine gives me a look that says she fully expects me to take her into my confidence. When I hesitate, she says, “It’s in the vault.”

“Okay. Six weeks ago—just as the county started tearing down the old factory in anticipation of the Chinese deal going through—old Bob Mortimer, the antique dealer, came into possession of some books from the attic of a local antebellum home. Folded into one he found some papers. Three sheets were early nineteenth-century maps that turned out to be hand-drawn by a guy named Benjamin L. C. Wailes.”

“The famous historian mentioned in your story.”

“Right. The first geologist in this part of Mississippi. Wailes’s maps are like the Bible of archaeology in this region.”

“And this new map showed what, exactly? Indian mounds?”

“Yes, but also the concentric semicircular ridges Buck had heard about. Plus some depressions that might be holes for wooden posts, like Mayan stelae. Posts oriented into a Woodhenge, a huge circle for astronomical observations.”

“Like Stonehenge?”

“Exactly like that. Or Cahokia, a similar site up in Illinois. Anyway, as soon as Buck saw the map, he intuited the whole history of the place. He figured a succession of tribes had built over the original earthwork of that first Neolithic culture, because the site was so good. And once Buck saw that Wailes map, nothing was going to stop him from digging.”

“And a week ago, the county conveniently finished tearing down the old factory. Even the parking lot, right?”

“Yep. Of course, no one was going to give him legal permission to dig there. The Chinese won’t either, once all the papers go through.”

“And soon there’ll be a billion-dollar paper mill sitting on top of it. So he did it guerrilla style.” Nadine smiles with fond admiration. “Who bailed him out of jail? I’m guessing you.”

“I should have left him there. Maybe he’d still be alive.”

She sips her tea and checks on the French tourists. “So why hasn’t the state come in and roped off the site?”

“Normally they would. But that mill—plus the interstate and the new bridge to service it—is going to transform all of southwest Mississippi. It’s like the Nissan plant going to Canton. The goddamn governor is going to be out there in an hour blessing the ground. Trump’s commerce secretary is flying in for a photo op, for God’s sake. In a perfect world, MDAH would have shut it down yesterday, if not over the weekend. Buck’s case was very strong. As I wrote in the article, a lot of archaeologists believe Poverty Point was a pre-pottery culture. That its builders only used carved stone bowls obtained from other tribes. But the potsherds Buck found help support the theory that Poverty Point was the original pottery-making center of the Lower Mississippi Valley. There’s no tempering material mixed into the clay of the fragments he found. He also found drilled beads that match Poverty Point artifacts, as well as what are called Pontchartrain projectiles. He had no doubt about what he’d discovered. But a boatload of academics could be hired to refute his assertions. So. While the Department of Archives and History may have the legal power to act in this situation, we live in the real world.”

Nadine laughs. “You call Mississippi the real world?”

“Sadly, yes. The only thing that could change the equation is bones. And that’s what Buck went back last night to find.”

She looks confused. “I thought Buck died in the river.”

I shake my head. “Quinn told me he went back to the mill site last night.”

“You think he was killed there, then dumped upstream?”

“We found his truck at Lafitte’s Den, half an hour ago.”

“We?”

“Denny Allman. My drone pilot.”

Nadine shakes her head. “I know that kid. Reads way over his age level.” The bell on the front door rings, but Nadine only glances in that direction. “So who would have caught Buck at the mill site? There aren’t lights out there anymore, right? It’s Bumfuck, Egypt.”

“The night after I ran my story about Buck, somebody posted guards out there. They patrol all night.”

“Who?”

“Maybe the Chinese? Maybe the county. I don’t know yet.”

“You think security guards killed him?”

I shrug. “Seems unlikely, and risky, but who knows? That could explain the body being moved. Guards at the mill site would have to explain how he died.”

Nadine purses her lips, pondering all I’ve told her. “Tell me why finding bones would make such a difference.”

I’m about to answer when a short man wearing a coat and tie steps up into the banquette. He’s about sixty, and he’s holding a James Patterson novel, but he’s staring intently at me. He looks oddly familiar (as have hundreds of people I’ve seen since getting back to town), but I can’t place him. Then Nadine says, “Hello, Dr. Bortles.”

He gives her a tight smile but keeps his eyes on me. “Do you remember me, Mr. McEwan?”

“Sure,” I tell him, racking my memory for anything to add. “You’re the … dentist, right?”

“Orthodontist. I came over because I was very disheartened to read your story on Buck Ferris’s recent digging by the river.”

Oh boy. Here it comes. “The Watchman prints the news, Dr. Bortles.”

He smirks at this. “Bad news, in that instance.”

“I could debate that. But even if you’re right, what’s your thesis? I’m not supposed to print bad news?”

He makes a sour face, as though he’s being forced to converse with an idiot. “You know, it’s easy for you to stir this up. You don’t live here anymore, not really. After your father passes, you’ll go back to Washington and spend your nights on TV, telling people how smart you are. What do you care if this town dries up and blows away?”

“I happen to care a lot about that.”

“Then stop printing stories about crazy Buck Ferris and his Indians. Keep it up, and you can rename this town Poverty Point. Nobody will have a job that pays more than minimum wage.”

Anger flares in my gut, but I force myself to stay in my seat. I look closer at him, at the meticulous comb-over, the plastic surgery around his eyes, the Apple watch with the $5,000 band. “Buck Ferris wasn’t crazy,” I tell him. “But you don’t have to worry about Buck anymore. Somebody killed him.”

Shock blanks the orthodontist’s face. “What?”

“The next thing I’ll be printing about Buck is his obituary.”

Dr. Bortles stands blinking like a rodent after someone hit the lights in a dirty kitchen, disoriented but not entirely unhappy. “Do you mean that he died? Or that someone killed him?”

“Read tomorrow’s paper and find out.”

Bortles shakes his head. “Well. You can’t say he didn’t ask for it.”

My right fist tightens, and I’m halfway out of my chair when Nadine touches my arm and gives me a sharp look.

“Why don’t you let us finish our conversation, Doctor?” she says in a syrupy Southern voice that bears little resemblance to her own.

The round-faced Bortles looks surprised, then indignant. He’s clearly unaccustomed to being dismissed by anyone. “You’ve certainly gotten rude all of a sudden, Ms. Sullivan.”

Nadine gives him the too-broad smile of a woman whose mouth wouldn’t melt butter. “I never knew you were an asshole before, Doctor. Now I do.”

Bortles draws himself up to his full five feet six inches and in a pompous voice announces, “I will never buy another book in this shop. You have lost my patronage, Ms. Sullivan. Forever.”

The French tourists are watching from their table.

“Then why are you still standing here?” Nadine asks. She waves in Bortles’s face with mock solicitude. “Toodle-loo. You have a blessed day.”

Bortles huffs a couple of times but doesn’t manage any coherent response. Then he marches out, dropping his book loudly on a display table before slamming the door and filling the shop with the high clanging of the bell.

“Well,” I say. “You are something, Ms. Sullivan.”

She waves her hand in disgust. “The only reason I can do that is because I have some money. If I relied on this store to put food on my table, I’d have had to sit here and listen to that shit.”

I nod, dispirited. “That prick is probably an accurate reflection of how most people in town will feel about Buck’s death.”

“Were you telling the truth? Is Buck’s obit the next thing you’ll write about him? Or are you going to blow this story wide open tomorrow?”

“I don’t know. I need more facts before I can do anything.”

She nods thoughtfully. “You never answered my question. Why were bones the Holy Grail of Buck’s little Indiana Jones excursion?”

I smile. Like any good lawyer, she doesn’t lose the thread of the narrative, no matter the distractions. “You’re the lawyer.”

“Oh. Does Mississippi have some kind of grave-desecration statute? I know they differ from state to state.”

“Mississippi does, thank God. Anybody who comes across human remains in this state must report them. And a discovery like that stops whatever’s going on around it. Even major construction. Doesn’t matter whether the land is public or private.”

“Oh, man. The local politicians would crap their drawers.” Nadine is working it all out in her mind. “But for how long? It’s one thing if a team comes in, catalogs things, then moves them to a museum. But you can’t move a Poverty Point. That’s like discovering the pyramids.”

“You’re right. That level of find would kill the paper mill. The Chinese would move on to one of their alternate sites. Arkansas or Alabama.”

“Is the paperwork not fully completed? They’re breaking ground in less than an hour, for God’s sake.”

“That’s all for show. Gold shovels and glad-handing. The Chinese company has an office here and reps, but nothing’s final-final. The associated state projects are finishing the planning stage. The I-14 route is on the verge of final approval, but technically the mill is at binding letters of intent. There’s still due diligence to be done. If the Chinese really wanted to, they could fold up their tents and leave next week.”

Nadine sits back in her chair. “I’d say that’s a motive for murder.”

“I’m not sure how many people truly understand that risk at this point.”

“Does it matter? Anybody who fears the worst could have killed Buck. Even some hotheaded version of Dr. Bortles.”

“I guess so. Well, the powers that be will want this to go down as an accidental death. But it’ll be tough to hide. Buck has a massive skull wound, maybe from a rifle bullet, maybe a rock.”

Nadine is studying me as though trying to see behind my eyes. “What are you thinking, Marshall? I know you. You’re going to go out there and try to dig up some bones yourself, aren’t you?”

I take another long sip of coffee. “I’m not anxious to get my skull caved in. But Buck was right. Old B. L. C. Wailes wouldn’t have wasted time drawing maps of nothing. I think there are bones out there, thousands of them. The bones of people who were living in this county four millennia ago, and maybe five or six. Right where you and I grew up.”

Nadine steeples her fingers and smiles the way my favorite English teacher used to, as if she’s about to test me in some private way. “In a vacuum,” she intones, “I’d say that’s one of the coolest things I’ve ever heard. But the way things are now …” She sighs.

“Go on.”

“Bortles is an asshole, but he raised a real dilemma. What if you go out tonight and dig up some bones? You trace out the Woodhenge and uncover a major archaeological site. A new Poverty Point. Would you kill the paper mill deal to do that? Would you kill the future of this town to do it?”

There’s surprising passion in her voice. “Killing that mill deal wouldn’t kill the town.”

“Don’t be so sure.” She raises her right forefinger, and again I flash back to school. “The new white-flight neighborhoods in the eastern part of the county have brought in some money from Jackson, and there’s some smaller commercial activity going on—indie retail, like my store—and some light industry. But to really survive, Bienville has to have something like that paper mill. Hundreds of jobs that pay sixty or seventy grand, with good benefits. God knows how many ancillary jobs will be created. The construction alone will be a bonanza for this town. Then—”

I lift my right hand to stop her. “You’re right, no question. The bridge and the interstate alone mean hundreds of millions. Even the ancillary stuff …” I look up into her bright eyes. “They killed Buck, Nadine. You know? They murdered him.”

“Who’s ‘they,’ Marshall?”

I sigh heavily. “Quinn Ferris thinks the Poker Club did it.”

“The venerable Bienville Poker Club,” Nadine whispers. She raises her hands and makes a mock show of reverence. “The descendants of the hallowed founders. I’d say Quinn’s instincts are dead-on, as usual.”

“I’m about to see most of them at the groundbreaking ceremony. I may try to talk to a few.”

The front bell rings again. Nadine looks over to see a familiar customer, an older lady, who walks to the mystery section. Turning back to me, she whispers, “What does Jet say about all this?”

“I haven’t spoken to Jet.”

She looks surprised. “Why not?”

“She’s out of town today, taking a deposition in that suit over rigged construction bids. She probably hasn’t even heard Buck’s dead.”

Nadine slowly shakes her head. “That’s going to hit her hard. But she’s going to have some ideas about who did it. She knows more about the Poker Club than we ever will.”

“Because she married into it,” I say in a sour voice. I look at my watch, then gulp the rest of my coffee. “I need to get moving if I’m going to make it.”

“You want a go cup?”

“No, thanks.” I start to stand, but Nadine reaches out and catches my right forearm, holding me in my seat.

“One second.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I see something in your eyes. Something I haven’t seen before. Not even when you talked about your divorce. Or … your son.”

A cold blade slices through my heart. “I’m okay.”

“Come on. This is me. When you came in, you said the river got to you this morning. Did it make you think about Adam? The day he drowned?”

God, this woman knows me. After a few seconds, I nod. “It’s like Buck’s death pulled a cork on something, and the past came rushing out. It feels like water rising over my head.”

She nods slowly. “Should you talk to somebody?”

“I’m talking to you.”

“A professional.”

“Come on. I haven’t talked to a shrink since I was fifteen.”

“Maybe you didn’t need to. Do you want to come back here after lunch?”

“No, I’m fine.” I move to get up again, but something holds me in my place. “I think how I feel has as much to do with my dad as Adam.”

“That was the start of your problems, right? Him blaming you for Adam’s death.”

“Yeah. And it was my fault, as much as something can be your fault when you’re fourteen. The thing is, after Dad stopped hunting for Adam’s body, he finally apologized. This was like four months after the memorial service. I’m pretty sure my mother made him do it.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because he didn’t mean it. Dad wasn’t sorry he’d blamed me. He’s blamed me every day since. That was the central fact of my life for three years. He never said it out loud again. But he never truly made eye contact with me after that day. Not unless I caught him staring at me when he thought I was preoccupied. And when I did catch him, I could read his mind like a neon sign blinking on his forehead.”

“Don’t say it, Marshall.”

“Why are you here? That’s what the sign said. Why are you here when he’s gone? Where’s the justice in that?”

“That’s your guilt talking,” Nadine insists. “You’re flagellating yourself. Your father’s a good man. He just couldn’t—”

“Sure, sure,” I say angrily. “A hero to millions. The Conscience of Mississippi, right? But to me? He was a living rebuke. Never mind that the tower climb could have killed Adam just as easily.”

Nadine takes my hands in hers. “Don’t you get it? This is why you’re back here. You didn’t come only because your mother needed you, or even because he’s sick. You came because you have to settle this between you. You have to forgive each other before he goes.”

I appreciate Nadine’s efforts, but very gently I remove my hands from hers. “That’s not going to happen. I’ve been alone with him several times now, hard as that is, and he hasn’t said one word about it. He just sits there and yells at the television. The news, of course.”

“He’ll get there,” she says with absolute assurance. “He probably carries unimaginable guilt for doing that to you. He had to blame somebody. He could have blamed God, but he didn’t believe in God. You were handier.”

For five seconds I allow myself to recall the black hole of my life from the end of ninth through tenth grade. The black hole that Buck Ferris pulled me out of. I sigh heavily, then stand. “Thanks for the coffee. Also the floor show with Dr. Bortles. I’ll update you tomorrow morning.”

She walks me to the door. “Hey, have you heard the rumor about the party tonight? On the roof of the Aurora?”

“The celebration of the mill deal? What about it?”

“They say Jerry Lee Lewis is going to be there. He’s supposed to play a set, like he used to in the old days.”

“No way. Isn’t he like eighty-five or something?”

“Eighty-two.” Nadine has gotten that glint in her eye. “But the Killer still brings it.”

“They said Trump was coming to the groundbreaking ceremony, too, but all we get is the secretary of commerce.”

“I’ve got faith in Jerry Lee.”

“That’d be something to see, all right. But I’m not invited.”

Nadine looks genuinely surprised. “But the Mathesons are co-hosting. Surely Jet or Paul—”

“I’m persona non grata since writing that piece about Buck’s discovery.”

Nadine stops at the door and turns to me with her mischievous smile. “Well, I’m invited. Why don’t you be my plus-one?”

I start to decline, but this is Nadine. And the party would be a damn good opportunity to study a lot of people who are profiting off the paper mill deal. “Can I get back to you in a bit?”

She shrugs. “Open invitation.”

“I’m a little confused,” I say, unable to resist needling her. “I heard you were gay.”

She laughs out loud. “Come to the party with me, and we’ll kill that rumor for good. People will have us engaged by morning.”

As I open the door, her smile fades, and she follows me outside.

“Take a hard look at the Poker Club at the groundbreaking,” she says. “They’re bastards to a man. They’ve ruled this town for a hundred and fifty-three years, and not one of them would lose a minute’s sleep over killing Buck.”

“I actually hope that’s not true.”

She points at a display of mysteries and thrillers in her front window. “Despite my trade, the truth is there’s not much mystery to real-life murders. Cui bono, honey. That’s the only question that matters. I’d bet my store that one of those Poker Club assholes killed Buck. But don’t kid yourself about what it would mean to take them on. They’d kill you, too. Wouldn’t hesitate. Keep that in mind during your editorial meetings.”

With that, Nadine goes inside and closes her door, leaving me to walk away with the muted ring of her bell in my ears.

CHAPTER 9

THE RIDE FROM Nadine’s to the paper mill site takes ten to fifteen minutes. The land called the “industrial park” sits below the bluff south of town, where four or five large factories and a few smaller ones operated from the 1940s through the 1980s and ’90s, before going through down cycles, changes of ownership by second- and third-tier companies, and finally the sheriff chaining the gates shut. It’s the same story all over the South—all over America, really.

I drive along the bluff most of the way, thinking about Buck and who might have killed him. Both his widow and Nadine believe the Bienville Poker Club must be behind the crime. I don’t disagree in principle, but I’ve yet to see any evidence. Before I forget, I text Ben Tate, my editor at the Watchman, and ask him to find out who employed the security guards who started covering the industrial park after we published our story on Buck and whether any were on duty last night.

Again the river dominates my view for most of the route, this time on my right, as I drive south along the bluff, which is mostly covered with kudzu here. Searching the Sirius channels for some of the music Buck and I used to play together, I realize I’m thinking about my son, whom Nadine mentioned back in her bookshop. He was in my mind earlier, at the cemetery wall, just below the dark drama of Adam and my father. My talk with Nadine dispelled the clouds of sediment that memory raised, and during the drive along the bluff my little boy rises from the deep darkness.

I got married fourteen years ago, to a colleague in Washington. Her name is Molly McGeary, and quite a few TV viewers still remember her. After starting as a reporter at the Washington Times, Molly became one of the first print journalists to make the jump to television. First she moved to USA Today as a political reporter. Then a producer at NBC happened to catch her on a panel at a conference in New York, and she was off. In no time she was making appearances on the Today show, covering Washington stories and the business side of the entertainment sector.

At the time I married Molly, I believed I loved her. But looking back later, I realized I was in that situation where everyone you know—lifelong friends, colleagues, old classmates—has already been married for years and is having children, some their second or third child. Faced with this, you start wondering if you were put on earth merely to work and have a succession of sexual relationships that ultimately go nowhere. That kind of anxiety skews your objectivity, makes you persuade yourself that you’re feeling things you’re really not. You believe you ought to be feeling those things, so eventually—with the help of your parents, your cajoling friends, and a romantic co-conspirator—you do. That was my state of mind before I went to Iraq. By the time I got back, I knew that life could be snatched away at any moment, and the only sensible thing to do was get married and start procreating.

Molly and I were still in the glow of infatuation when we walked down the aisle. The first year was a good one. But after she got pregnant—a planned decision—the reality of having a child started to come home to us, and particularly to her. To my consternation, as the fetus grew inside her, and she ballooned up in the later months, she began to feel that our baby was a parasitical being, sapping the life from her, changing her irrevocably. At first I thought Molly was only half-serious. And surely, I reasoned, such feelings must be common among professional women? They would inevitably pass. But within two weeks of delivering Adam (yes, I named my son after my dead brother), I witnessed something I had never quite understood before: postpartum depression.

With the clarity of hindsight, I now believe Molly never recovered from that condition—not while we were together. We consulted a parade of medical experts, tried several promising therapies, and went to great lengths to get first-class child care so that Molly could return to her career. Nothing worked. Two years passed like that—a mostly wonderful time for Adam and me, but for Molly a sort of shadow play that never quite became real. She stayed emotionally muted, exhausted, and irritable when she did feel alert. She resented the demands of motherhood, but also the demands of her job. And then—just as I was considering a radical job change to try to improve the situation—I discovered that death had been hovering over us once more, just as it had when I was fourteen.

In late August, I was working in the main offices of the Post, on Fifteenth and L, where Woodward and Bernstein did the work that made me want to follow in their footsteps. I was supposed to be home by six thirty, to take over caring for Adam so that Molly could attend a network event. Then I got a call from CNN. Could I run over to their studio and appear on Lou Dobbs Tonight to discuss President Bush signing the bailout bill, and the suspension of trading on both Russian stock exchanges? This was before the era of ubiquitous pundits on television every night, so it was something I felt I should do. Molly agreed, though she let me know she wasn’t happy about giving up her evening to babysit our two-year-old.

I was in the midst of the interview when my cell phone vibrated an emergency code in my pocket. By the time I got off camera and checked it, the emergency was over. Molly had taken Adam to a friend’s condo about fifty yards up the street from ours. She and Taryn Waller had started drinking wine and commiserating over their husbands’ unreasonable work hours, while Adam—comatose after an ice cream cone—slept in the TV room down the hall. Taryn was pouring their fourth glass of wine when Molly realized she hadn’t checked on Adam in a while. When she went to the TV room, she didn’t see him.

They found him behind the condo, at the bottom of the Wallers’ swimming pool. While Molly and Taryn were talking, our son had awakened and somehow crawled through a homemade pet entrance set in the Wallers’ back door. He wandered onto the patio, where there was no pool fence or motion alarm. The police report said it appeared that Adam had simply walked off the edge of the swimming pool into six feet of water. He never made a sound. None that Molly heard, anyway.

Our marriage did not survive his loss.

You hear all the time how the death of a child always leads to divorce. In truth, most times it doesn’t. Sometimes that kind of tragedy strengthens a marriage. I can see how it would happen, if you were married to the right person. I wasn’t. For four years I had tried to convince myself that I was, but the fissure that opened in our relationship after Adam died proved me wrong. I tried not to blame Molly. Whether I was successful in that effort or not, she believed that I blamed her, and that—combined with her own sense of guilt—had a corrosive effect on both our marriage and her mental state.

For me, the irony was nearly fatal. Twenty-one years after my brother drowned in the Mississippi River, I had to endure my son drowning in six feet of water. Worse, I—who had been blamed by my father for my brother’s death—was now in the position of persecutor. How could she have left him unattended for more than an hour? I wondered. A two-year-old! How could she not have heard him when he woke up? Surely Adam had made some sound, called out for me or his mother, as was his habit. Especially after waking in an unfamiliar room. Or finding himself alone on a dark patio. I asked myself these questions thousands of times. And then, when I could stand it no more, I asked her. Molly hit back with the obvious: if I hadn’t forced her to cancel her plans so that I could race over and appear on CNN, Adam would still be alive.

This was unquestionably true. But accepting it did nothing to alleviate our suffering. I’ll omit the awful, protracted descent into hell that followed this exchange. Suffice to say that by the time we divorced eleven months later, we were both emotionally scarred, and Molly had lost her job. I was nearly fired myself, and were it not for the benevolence of a sympathetic friend in management, I would have been out. Instead, they kept me on, and I slowly worked my way back to some semblance of normalcy, often taking risky assignments as a way of penetrating the emotional damper that grief wraps around us.

But it was the advent of the Trump circus in 2015 that not only resurrected my career, but lifted it to new heights. I became a regular on MSNBC and an occasional guest on CNN. This spurred me into a kind of mental overdrive. Using my most closely held sources in Washington and New York, I began researching Donald Trump’s financial ties to Russian oligarchs. At the same time, I started writing a book about how the Trump phenomenon had exposed the grim truth that the sins for which the South had always been excoriated—racism, tribalism, and xenophobia—were deeply embedded in the white body politic across the United States. I was halfway through my first draft when I discovered how ill my father truly was and decided to come home. The Trump-Russia story I had to leave to others. And I was less than fours hours south of Washington when I realized that all that work I had been doing—maintaining a pace that had shocked even my most intense colleagues—had but one purpose: to shield me from the pain of losing my little boy.

Nadine knows about Adam’s death. The facts, anyway, and what it did to my marriage. She understands that I’ve never fully dealt with his loss, any more than I’ve dealt with my brother’s. As regards healthy grieving, I’ve been stuck in a state of arrested anger for decades. The death of my son piled onto the death of my brother gave me a psychological burden—or perhaps a soul burden—that requires much of my fortitude to carry through each day. “My two Adams,” I sometimes call them. I’ve had countless nightmares about both tragedies, my brother’s more than my son’s, which may seem odd. But recently, it’s my little boy I see in the long watches of my restless nights.

I see him awakening confused, even scared, calling out for me or his mother, then getting to his feet and searching the darkened condo for us, his arms stretched out before him. Drawn by the light of the little plastic trapdoor, he somehow uses his ingenuity to get it open and then crawl through, after which he scrambles to his feet and wanders out to the undulating bright blue surface of the swimming pool. Perhaps Adam sees himself reflected in the water. Perhaps he leans over to see better, looks into his own eyes … and then tips over.

That dream is worse than the one in which I’m pursued by savage soldiers with guns and knives who want to hurt me so badly that I consider suicide rather than capture. I have lived through that situation in the real world. It pales next to the image of my son sinking through cerulean water with no comprehension of what’s happening to him. Did he surface? I’ve wondered a million times. Did he flail his little arms? Did he scream for help, sucking in chlorine? Or did he die in silence at the cold, airless bottom?

I’ve never asked an expert that question. I didn’t even google it. In the last analysis, I probably don’t really want to know. But maybe I’ll meet an expert someday. Maybe I’ll find the courage to ask. Because however hesitant I might be to face reality, I’m a human being, and that’s something we have to know sooner or later. Did our loved one suffer? And if so … how badly?

It took a long time for me to start seeing women after that. Eventually I did. The first couple of tries didn’t go very well. I found it difficult to be at ease with a woman once other people were removed from the equation. Then I met Eleanor Attie, a producer at one of the cable networks. Eleanor sensed that I carried some deep pain, but she never pushed me about it, and that made intimacy possible. We’d been dating for about four months when I realized I needed to return to Bienville. We kept in close touch at first, but after three weeks or so, our calls started getting further apart and our emails less frequent—weekly, almost perfunctory things. When you leave the small, hyperconnected family that is the Washington media circus, it’s like falling off the earth—at least to the people still working under the big top.

After all, it wasn’t like I was sending in weekly reports from Zabul Province in Afghanistan. I was in Mississippi, which from Washington looks like a fourth-world country. The newspaper I’d taken over focused mostly on local matters, except for the occasional blistering screed against the depredations of Trump and his cronies, authored by my father. But it’s been two months since Dad printed one of those. Mortality is having its way with him. His diminished editorial output has cut into the profits of our local glazier, who was making good money replacing the plate-glass windows on the ground floor of our downtown office. Before Dad slowed his pace, not even security cameras stopped the angry Trump supporter who simply wore a mask as he marched up to the windows with brick in hand to make his feelings known.

As I reach the head of Port Road, which leads down the bluff to the industrial park, the sun flashes off a large gathering of cars about a mile away. This confuses me for a few seconds, because it looks more than anything like cars gathered for a sporting event. Then I realize this crowd must have assembled for the groundbreaking. As the Flex coasts down the steep bluff road, I start to make out tents set up on the actual paper mill site, where Buck found his artifacts. Several large groups of people are moving around the tents, and as I reach the level ground of the industrial park, logos on those tents become legible.

One belongs to the casino and reads SUN KING RESORT in gold letters. A larger tent reads AZURE DRAGON PAPER, which is the parent company of the mill that will be built here. The mill will operate under the name PulpCore, Inc., but Azure Dragon will own it. Off to the right, Claude Buckman’s Bienville Southern Bank has two tents set up side by side, but the grandest tent of all reads PRIME SHOT PREMIUM HUNTING GEAR. These logos tell me that the men who truly run this city are out in force today. And why not? All their years of machinations have brought them to this moment. The town took a serious hit in the ’90s, and another after 2008, but unlike the other river towns, Bienville has come through the recession strong enough to not only maintain its population, but also to expand its tax base. The twelve members of the Bienville Poker Club stand on the threshold of a billion-dollar payoff. Bigger, really, when you add in the ancillary elements of the deal. A new interstate highway that will run from El Paso, Texas, to Augusta, Georgia, passing over the new Bienville bridge as it carries Azure Dragon paper pulp to market. Weighed against all this, one archaeologist’s life wouldn’t have counted for much.

“Marshall McEwan!” cries a male voice as I get out of the Flex.

I turn to find New Jersey émigré Tommy Russo hurrying along the road in a close-fitting tailored suit. The owner of the Sun King Casino is walking in the direction of the tents. I figured Russo would have been here an hour ago, working the governor and the secretary of commerce. The only non-native-born member of the Poker Club, Tommy Russo plans to bring in a second casino as soon as I-14 becomes a reality. Bienville has a long gambling history, dating back to the Lower’ville saloons and a nineteenth-century horse track on the river. But Tommy has updated the old riverboat gambler stereotype and brought The Sopranos to Bienville. He’s quick to smile, but you sense menace just behind his eyes. He’s like a friendly snake with his fangs folded out of sight.

“I guess the Chinks are really going to make us rich after all,” he says, as I fall into step beside him. “Off the record, of course.”

“I take it a day at a time, Tommy.”

“Come on, brah. None of that pessimism. A billion dollars is like the second coming. That’s real money, even to me. Hey, did you hear about Buck Ferris?”

I show no reaction. “What about him?”

“They found him in the river this morning. I figured you’d be all over that.”

“I’ll wait and see what the police tell me.”

Russo’s predatory eyes read every line and shadow on my face. “Yeah? Good. That’s good. Last thing we need around here is more bullshit stories to upset the Chinamen. This town’s on the right track, while everybody else is starving.”

“Looks that way. I’ll catch you later, Tommy.”

Just as I start to break away, another member of the Poker Club emerges from the parked cars and calls, “Tommy Flash! What you doin’ fraternizing with the enemy?”

Beau Holland is a real estate developer, and he likes to tell people that his family can trace itself back eight generations in Bienville. If you let him talk, Beau will swear he’s descended from French royalty. A few years shy of fifty, Holland is the second-youngest member of the Poker Club. He owns property all over south Mississippi, and he developed both white-flight subdivisions on the eastern edge of the county that have attracted affluent young professionals from Jackson. Word is he’s speculated heavily in all sorts of ventures since finding out that Azure Dragon would be building its newest mill at Bienville.

“Marshall’s not the enemy,” Russo says as Holland catches up to us, wearing a suit that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. “He’s just doin’ his job.”

“Could’ve fooled me with that story on Buck Ferris.”

Beau Holland always sounds like an irritated spinster to me. He reminds me of some Mississippi Delta boys I met when I went to Boys’ State as a junior in high school. They weren’t gay, but they spoke with a soft lisp and a passive-aggressive sarcasm that fit the old stereotype. What they were was mama’s boys.

“At least we won’t have to worry about Buck anymore,” Beau adds, finding it impossible to suppress his bile.

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” I mutter.

“What?” he asks sharply, reaching out to stop me.

I keep walking, and Tommy stays apace.

“I’m talking to you, McEwan!” Holland snaps.

“Keep talking,” I call over my shoulder. “Maybe somebody will come by who gives a shit.”

Tommy Russo snickers under his breath.

As we come to the tents, I say, “Catch you later, Tommy,” then break away and push into the edge of the crowd, trying to avoid eye contact where possible. I don’t want to suffer through fishing expeditions by people wanting information about Buck’s death.

Moving into the crowd’s center, I see Max Matheson holding court beneath the Prime Shot tent. Max radiates the same vitality he always did as a younger man, his lean build, deep tan, and hard blue eyes making it easy to visualize him in a sergeant’s uniform in a Vietnam rice paddy. As I focus on his gray-blond head, I see his son standing to his left and, beside Paul, several attractive young women wearing Prime Shot polo shirts. Something tells me they’re here to keep the Chinese officials entertained. As I hover between two tents, a dark-skinned, black-haired beauty behind the Prime Shot girls draws my gaze. She’s wearing an indigo sundress that exposes perfect shoulders. She’s older than the Prime Shot girls, but even behind large sunglasses, she’s clearly out of their league. As I shield my eyes against the glare of the sun, I curse out loud.

The unknown beauty is Jet Matheson. And she’s looking right at me. Glancing at her husband’s back, Jet points to her right, where a refreshments bar has been set up. Without nodding, I head in that direction, my heart rate increasing with each step. What is Jet doing here? She’s supposed to be taking a deposition in Jackson. I get into the queue at the refreshments bar and force myself to focus on a stack of soft drinks and bottled water.

I can’t believe I was looking right at Jet without recognizing her. Especially since she’s one of the most unusual-looking women I’ve ever seen. Buck Ferris once described her as an Arabic Emmylou Harris. Jet’s father was Jordanian, her mother American. That’s one reason she always stands out in Mississippi crowds. I suppose the Jackie O sunglasses and the crowd of Prime Shot hostesses obscured enough of her to confuse me, and my belief that she was sixty miles away did the rest.

“I heard about Buck’s death before I went into the deposition,” Jet whispers from behind me in the line. “I canceled it and headed straight back. I had Josh with me, so I didn’t text you.”

Josh Germany is her paralegal.

“Are you all right?” she goes on. “I know what he meant to you.”

I nod but say nothing.

“Do you know who killed him?”

Almost imperceptibly, I shake my head.

“Betsy Peters!” Jet says effusively. “My God, it’s been an age. What a pretty day, isn’t it? What a crowd.”

“It’s awesome,” says a woman with a heavy Southern accent. “Good times are finally coming. I’m so ready for that party tonight.”

“Me, too,” Jet gushes, as though she has all day to shoot the breeze. “I was actually thinking of quitting early today. By three, probably.”

My heart thumps. Jet’s last statement was code, telling me that she wants to meet me in private. Today—at three P.M. Our default meeting place is my home.

“Did you hear about old Buck Ferris?” Betsy Peters asks in a softer voice. “They found him dead in the river.”

“I did,” Jet replies.

“I hate to say it,” Betsy goes on at 50 percent volume, “but it’s a damn lucky thing for Bienville. We don’t need that old crank screwing up this China deal. I don’t care if the damned Indians raised the dead on this ground we’re standing on. Their time’s done. This is survival.”

“It is,” Jet says, but her tone sounds contemplative rather than indicative of assent.

After Betsy passes on, I turn as though looking casually around. “Jet Matheson!” I cry, feigning surprise. “What are you doing here? Spying on the enemy?”

Through her sunglass lenses, I see Jet’s eyes cut over to the Prime Shot tent. “You could say that,” she answers in a theatrical voice. “But God knows I want success for this town. I just want it to be on the up-and-up.”

She’s wearing sapphire stud earrings and a silver pendant necklace that hangs just above the neckline of her sundress. Beads of sweat glisten around the pendant, which appears to be an Arabic symbol. Smiling at her, I glance quickly around, taking in everyone standing within thirty feet of us. A couple of faces look familiar, but none do I know well. Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t know me.

“I’m jealous,” I tell her. “I’m way too busy to take off early. I’m working overtime every day this past month.”

“I’ll bet.” She reads my negative reply as the coded positive it was. Looking back toward her husband, Jet says in a louder voice, “I need to get back to the tent. Could you bring me a Sprite or something? Paul wants me close today for some reason. Arm candy, I suppose.”

“Sure, glad to,” I tell her, forcing another smile, but feeling almost dizzy with disorientation. I’m not sure whether her request was serious or she was using it to break away from the queue—and from me. “What’s that symbol mean?” I ask, pointing at her necklace.

She smiles, and her brilliant teeth shine against her dark skin and red lips. “Peace, of course. Salam.”

“Ah. We could use some of that, all right.”

No one but me would have noticed the flash of emotion in her eyes.

“Thanks for the Sprite, Goose,” she says brightly, using my high school nickname, which will instantly put distance between us for anyone within earshot. As she turns to walk away, she catches hold of my wrist in a seemingly casual gesture of thanks, but she squeezes so hard that pain shoots up my arm. Then she lets go and recedes into the crowd, her dark shoulders and long neck making her easy to follow to the Prime Shot tent.

Her painful squeeze communicated intense emotion; the problem is, I can’t read it. Was she reassuring me of our bond, despite the public charade? She doesn’t usually risk that kind of thing. Was she signaling fear? Even desperation? A combination of all three? The moment she touched me, I felt myself getting aroused. I hope my face isn’t flushed, but it’s hard to control that response when a woman touches you like that—especially the woman you’ve been fucking every day for twelve weeks.

CHAPTER 10

THE TOUGHEST ACTING job in the world is behaving normally in the presence of someone with whom you’re having illicit sex. Most people who find themselves in this situation think they can handle it, but the truth is sooner or later people pick up on intimacy. Even if they don’t see it, they feel it. They notice a hitch in the breathing, an altered tone of voice, a difference in the way you deal with space around someone. And, of course, the eyes. Reality abides in the eyes. What keeps most of these situations from exploding is the tendency of the betrayed not to see what their eyes and other senses tell them.

After my surprise interaction with Jet, I have to decide whether she was serious when she asked me to deliver a Sprite to the Prime Shot tent. To do so will mean interacting with her husband, Paul, whom I have known since I was three years old. Also with her father-in-law, Max, who’s one of the most powerful members of the Poker Club. Since Paul might have watched us talking in the refreshment line, the best choice is probably to take Jet the drink.

Prime Shot Premium Hunting Gear was founded by Wyatt Cash, a Bienville native who made some money as a professional baseball player, then parlayed it into a wildly successful company that makes everything from custom camouflage clothing to all-terrain vehicles. Most of the Poker Club members on hand today have gravitated to Cash’s tent, although I see a couple of older members at the Bienville Southern Bank tent, paying court to its octogenarian founder, Claude Buckman.

“Yo, Goose!” Paul Matheson calls as I approach the Prime Shot tent. “Wassup, man?”

At six feet even, Paul is a slightly smaller version of his father. Blond, gregarious, still muscular at forty-seven. There’s no one on earth with whom I have a more complex history.

“Just covering this Chinese fire drill,” I tell him. “Jet passed me in the drink line and asked me to bring her a Sprite.”

“What a gentleman. We got beer in a cooler back here. Scotch if you’re feeling frisky.”

“At eleven A.M.? I’ll pass.”

“Hey, this is a celebration day. All day, all night.”

I hand him the Sprite. “Can you make sure Jet gets this?”

“I’ll take it myself,” Jet says, stepping up from behind me and brushing my cheek with a kiss. God, this woman has nerve.

She moves on through the bodies under the tent, stopping to speak to her paralegal, who’s talking to one of the Prime Shot girls. Paul steps closer to me. “I heard about Buck, man. I’m sorry as hell. I know how close you two were.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Don’t know. Guess I’ll wait to hear from the police.”

Paul snorts. “Like you’ve never done once in your life. Come on, man.”

“I really don’t know. Accident seems unlikely. Floating into that snag would be a stretch. That’s a wide river.”

“Yeah.” Paul lowers his voice. “You think somebody stuck him out there? Wasted him, then tried to hand the cops an accident on a platter?”

“Buck wasn’t going to win a popularity contest during this past week.”

“No shit. I sure hope it was an accident.”

“He didn’t die where they found his truck,” I say, watching Paul from the corner of my eye. “Somebody staged that.”

This intrigues him. “You have proof of that?”

“Call it intuition. But your buddy Beau Holland sure seems on edge about the whole thing.”

“Fuck Beau Holland,” he says with venom. “He ain’t my buddy.”

“Did you say you want to have sex with Beau Holland?” asks a deeper male voice.

Max Matheson claps his son on the back, then laughs heartily. “Hey, Goose, how’s it hanging?”

I nod but say nothing. Back when he coached us as boys, Max would ask this to trigger responses like “Long and loose and full of juice.”

“Heard about Buck,” he says, then takes a pull from what looks like Scotch on the rocks. “Bad luck.”

“Maybe.”

Max’s eyes linger on mine long enough for him to read my emotions. He’s always had that gift, the predator’s lightning perception. “That river can kill you quick. You know that better than anybody.”

“Jesus, Pop,” Paul says. “Shut the fuck up, why don’t you?”

Max clucks his tongue. “All right. Guess I’ll leave you girls to it.”

As he slides away, Wyatt Cash walks up wearing navy chinos and a Prime Shot polo beneath an olive blazer. With his 1970s mustache and bulging muscles, he still looks like a baseball player. The girls in the Prime Shot shirts are watching him with something like reverence. I’m guessing they’ve all ridden on either his jet or his helicopter. Cash hands me a sweating Heineken and smiles.

“Welcome to my humble abode, sir.”

Most people under this tent would prefer me anywhere but here, but Cash is being polite. “Thanks, Wyatt.”

He pats Paul on the shoulder, then moves off in Jet’s direction. As I follow him with my eyes, I see Jet’s left hand wrapped around one of the poles supporting the tent. Not her whole hand, actually. Only three fingers. Three P.M.

Her flagrant flouting of danger makes me dizzy.

When I look back at Paul, he’s watching me with his usual lazy alertness. We stare at each other for several seconds without speaking. It amazes me how deeply I can bury the sin of sleeping with his wife while we’re together. In this moment he’s the guy I played ball with for years, the buddy who saved my life in Iraq. Who am I to him right now?

“Listen,” he says, so softly I have to strain to understand him. “What do you think about that guy?” He nods in Jet’s direction.

“Who? Wyatt?”

“No, dumbass. The paralegal. Josh whoever.”

“Josh Germany? In what capacity?”

Paul raises his eyebrows like, Come on, man. “Him and Jet.”

The rush of adrenaline that flushes through me after these words makes it hard to hold my composure. “You’re kidding, right? The kid’s like, what, twenty-five?”

“Exactly.”

To mask my gut reaction, I look down the tent at Josh Germany. He’s a good-looking guy, blond and fit, but still a boy—not remotely the kind of man that interests Jet. Witness myself, exhibit A. “Dude, there’s no way. What made you ask that?”

Paul doesn’t answer. His eyes are fixed upon his wife.

Wyatt Cash leans over Germany’s shoulder and says something brief, and Jet laughs with obvious enjoyment. “I’d suspect Wyatt before that kid,” I add.

“No way,” says Paul. “It’s a rule.”

“A rule?”

“Poker Club rule. Other members’ women are off-limits. Period.”

“You’re not an official member, are you?”

Paul considers this. “That’s true. But Wyatt knows how bad I’d fuck him up if he crossed that line. The kid, on the other hand, may not realize the risk.”

I need an infusion of morphine. At no time in the three months since I’ve been sleeping with Jet has Paul even hinted at suspicion of infidelity—not to her or to me. In relative terms, this is an earthquake. Then it hits me: Is this why she squeezed my wrist and asked for a meeting at three o’clock?

“For real,” Paul says. “If somebody killed Buck, who do you think it was?”

Thankful for the 180-degree turn, I decide to throw out some bait. “Some people have suggested the Poker Club killed him.”

Paul’s face tells me he doesn’t believe this. “Doesn’t make sense, Goose. Murder creates problems. They’d have bought Buck off, not killed him.”

He’s right. Bribery would be the logical move. And maybe they tried that. “There’s one problem with that theory.”

“You gonna tell me Buck couldn’t be bought?”

I nod.

Paul gives me a tight smile. “I may not be an official Poker Club member, but I’ve learned one thing by being around those guys: everybody has a price.”

“You sound like Arthur Pine.” Pine, a former county attorney, is the Poker Club member who works every angle of every sleazy deal without hindrance of moral scruples.

“Yeah?” says Paul. “What did that vain old prick say?”

“‘We’re all whores, we’re just haggling over the price.’”

Paul shakes his head. “That sounds like Arthur, all right. King of the Whores.”

A shriek of feedback hits the tents, causing everyone to cover their ears. After it fades, Paul says, “Guess they’re about to start this gong show. You gonna hang in the tent with us?”

“Nah. I’m going to move back and try to see the big picture.”

Paul gives me his sarcastic smile. “Good luck with that. And about that other thing … not a word to Jet.”

I look down the tent at the woman still carrying my seed from yesterday. “No problem, man.”

I FIND A GOOD viewing perch atop a flatbed trailer parked well back from the tents. From here I can observe the main players without seeming too interested. After my exchange with Paul, my mind is flooded with thoughts of Jet and our constant dilemma, which exerts emotional pressure every hour of the day. Only by learning to compartmentalize all she represents have I been able to function in this town. But rather than get caught in an infinite loop of what-ifs—which won’t be resolved until our afternoon meeting—I decide to focus on the men most likely to have ordered Buck’s murder.

The eternally feuding county supervisors and city aldermen have broken precedent to come together for this show. Thirteen gold shovels wait in a stand before the Azure Dragon tent, which matches the number of city and county representatives, plus the mayor. But the real power in Bienville doesn’t reside in its supervisors and aldermen, or even in the mayor. The elected officials in this town are hired hands. They’re the ones standing in the sun in their best suits and dresses, but the ruddy-faced men who control them are under the tents, drinking from crystal highball glasses and watching with the disinterested calm of gamblers who already know the outcome of every race. I’ve spoken to a few already. But to truly understand those men, and the power that they wield, one must understand the unique history of the town where I was born.

Bienville, Mississippi, began as a French fort built by young Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville, one year after he founded Natchez and one year before he founded New Orleans. Still a year shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, Governor Bienville initially named the fort Langlois after his housekeeper, who had overseen the French “casquette girls”—twenty-three poor virgins removed from convents and orphanages and shipped to Fort Mobile to keep the soldiers there from taking Native American mistresses. Each casquette girl brought all her belongings in a single trunk or “casket,” and while no one knows their ultimate fates, their arrival succeeded in preventing large-scale sexual exploitation of the Indian women at Mobile. Farther north, however, French soldiers did take Indian mistresses, which triggered the Natchez Indian Revolt in 1729 and the terrible French reprisals that followed. Four years later, Sieur de Bienville—by then back in France—was asked to return to La Louisiane and hunt down the Natchez survivors who had taken refuge among the Chickasaw. During this effort, Bienville rebuilt Fort Langlois, which had fallen into disrepair, and used it as a base from which to attack his enemies.

By the time Bienville sailed back to France, both Indians and whites in the area had taken to calling the fort after its founder. Fort Bienville and its surrounding town grew steadily, and in 1763 it came by treaty under British rule, as did Natchez to the south. Bienville proper began to grow along the pristine bluff above the Mississippi River, and generous land grants by King George created large inland plantations, which produced tobacco and indigo. After sixteen years of British rule, Spain took control of the town, but Charles IV held it only as long as King George. In 1795, Bienville was ceded to the United States, where it became the far edge of the American West. This cosmopolitan history left Bienville perfectly positioned to exploit the cotton gin, which had been developed in 1793.

As the new century clattered to life like a great steam engine, Bienville joined a cotton boom that brought spectacular wealth to the Lower Mississippi Valley, all on the backs of African slaves, who had proved easier to control than enslaved Indians, who knew the land better than their putative masters and had homes to run to when they managed to escape. The moonlight-and-magnolia dream of the Anglophile whites—and the nightmare of the black Africans—lasted only sixty years. By 1863, Ulysses Grant and an army of seventy thousand Yankees were camped four miles outside Bienville, aiming to conquer Vicksburg, forty miles to the north. Bienville waited in schizophrenic expectation, its anxious planters hoping to surrender, its workingmen and planters’ sons ready to fight to the last man.

Bienville’s Civil War history usually fills a bloody chapter in books on the Vicksburg campaign. All that matters now is that on June 7, 1863, General Grant decided that, despite fierce Confederate resistance that had originated there, Bienville—like Port Gibson to the east—would not burn. Grant’s decision ensured the survival of more than fifty antebellum homes, many mansions that would draw enough tourists during the Great Depression to bring the city back from the dead. The history of the years that followed was as troubled as that in the rest of the South, and it ensured that by the 1960s a crisis would come. Bienville weathered those racial troubles better than most of its neighbors, but the deepest issues were never fully addressed, setting the stage for a reckoning that by 2018 still has not come.

The reason it has not bears a name: the Bienville Poker Club.

When I was a boy, I sometimes heard references to a “poker club,” most often when I was visiting Paul Matheson’s house. Back then, I thought the term referred to a weekly card game Paul’s dad played in sometimes. At that age, I couldn’t have imagined its true nature or function, and my father certainly never talked about it. Dad had to have known about it, of course, for the Bienville Poker Club was founded seventy years before he was born and had exerted profound influence over this area ever since. But though my father published many scathing editorials about Bienville politics, he never once wrote about the Poker Club as a political force. To this day, I’m not sure why.

Thanks to the Poker Club, while the other Mississippi River towns withered during the final quarter of the twentieth century, Bienville continued to grow. Up in the Delta, there are drug dealers living in the mansions of former cotton planters. In Natchez, forty miles downstream, commercial real estate values have been eroding for two decades. But in Bienville business is on the march. Quite a few observers have speculated about the reasons for this. Some tout the foresight of Bienville’s leaders. Others point to economic diversification. One particularly naïve journalist wrote a piece about Bienville’s “uniquely congenial” race relations and cribbed from Atlanta’s old pitch as being “the city too busy to hate.”

All that is bullshit.

The Bienville Poker Club was founded shortly after Lee’s surrender at Appomattox. The original members—most of whom were ancestors of the twelve present members—created the shadow organization to defend themselves against the depredations of the “carpetbaggers” who swarmed south like boll weevils to plunder what remained of the Confederacy. Since the Yankees saw Southern gentlemen as habitual gamblers who loved wasting time indulging in whiskey and cigars away from their family homes, nightly poker games provided credible cover for more subversive activities. While men in other towns formed parties of night riders that would soon become the Ku Klux Klan, the pragmatic businessmen of Bienville employed more Machiavellian methods of resistance. Rather than fight under an ideological banner of violence, they worked relentlessly to keep their hands on every lever of power still within reach. They collaborated with the Yankees when necessary, but betrayed them when they could. They employed cardsharps, whores, and criminals to control the carpetbaggers and Negro politicians of the new inverted world, and by the Compromise of 1877—which mandated the removal of the federal troops that enforced Reconstruction laws—the Poker Club had most of the town’s institutions firmly in its hands.

It is testament to the vision of those men that 153 years later, I stand in the shadow of a bluff that still supports their mansions, witnessing their descendants consummating what the Wall Street Journal dubbed the “Mississippi Miracle.” Down in front of the Azure Dragon tent, the governor of Mississippi has introduced a Chinese man in a tailored suit. He takes the microphone with Bienville’s mayor at his side, a local sidekick grinning like an organ-grinder’s monkey. The company man has a Chinese accent, but his vocabulary is better than the mayor’s. When the mayor leans out and calls the aldermen and supervisors forward to the line of shovels to play out their charade for the cameras, I shift my gaze to the Prime Shot tent, where most current members of the Bienville Poker Club stand watching, expressions of mild amusement on their faces.

The 2018 iteration of the Poker Club isn’t nearly so rich as the original group prior to the Civil War, when they ranked only behind New York, Philadelphia, and Natchez in banked millions. But the war gutted those fortunes, and that kind of damage takes a long time to make up. Today’s club controls something north of a billion dollars among the twelve members. That’s a long way from New York rich, but in this corner of Mississippi, it’s enough to mold the shape of life for all.

Blake Donnelly, the oilman, is worth more than $200 million. Claude Buckman, the banker, is in the same league. Donnelly’s in his mid-seventies, though, and Buckman’s over eighty. Max Matheson made his fortune in timber, and together he and Paul run a huge lumber mill north of town, plus the Matheson Wood Treatment plant near the sandbar to the south. They also manage hundreds of thousands of acres of timber all over the state. I’m not sure how much Wyatt Cash is worth. I do know he owns one river island outright, which he operates as an exclusive hunting camp—one frequented by NFL players and college coaches, most from the SEC.

Beau Holland, the asshole I met down on the road with Tommy Russo, is the hungry jackal among the lions of the club. From what Jet tells me, Holland has used inside information to exploit every aspect of the new paper mill, bridge, and interstate. Until last year, Beau had a junior partner named Dave Cowart working for him as a contractor. Cowart built most of Belle Rose and Beau Chene, the two residential developments at the eastern edge of the county. But last year, Jet went after Cowart with a lawsuit alleging rigged bidding on a project partly funded by federal dollars. As a result, Cowart and one alderman ended up doing time in federal prison. This did not endear Jet to the remaining club members, but since she’s Max Matheson’s daughter-in-law, there was little they could do except bitch on the golf course.

The other members span the professions. Tommy Russo has his casino. Arthur Pine handles the legal paper. Warren Lacey is a plastic surgeon and nursing home king whom Jet nearly sent to jail over bribery of state officials. (Dr. Lacey ended up with a suspended sentence and a one-year suspension of his medical license. He’d happily inject Jet with a lethal drug cocktail if he could.) Then there’s U.S. senator Avery Sumner, the former circuit judge whom the Poker Club somehow got appointed to the seat recently vacated by the senior senator from Mississippi for health reasons. Sumner flew in for today’s event on a CitationJet owned by Wyatt Cash’s company. The jet’s livery features a large circular view through a riflescope, with buck antlers centered in the reticle. The other three members of the club I know little about, but they surely fulfill their function of greasing the wheels of commerce while pocketing whatever they can skim from every transaction or building project.

What must those men feel as they watch the local elected officials—nine whites and four blacks—lift the gold shovels from the stand and spade them into the pre-softened earth? The aldermen and supervisors are mugging for the cameras now, trying to look like Leland Stanford at the golden spike ceremony in 1869. A paper mill is no transcontinental railroad, but any project that brings a new interstate to a county containing only thirty-six thousand people comes pretty close to salvation.

When the photographers stop snapping pictures, the ceremony is over. The crowd disperses quickly, and crews miraculously appear to break down the tents. As the governor’s motorcade roars up Port Road, Jet and Paul give each other a quick connubial hug, then separate to find their respective vehicles. Was that hug for show? I wonder. Max and Paul walk side by side to a couple of Ford F-250s, while a few yards to their right, Beau Holland climbs into a vintage Porsche 911.

I half expect Jet to text me, but she doesn’t. She and Josh Germany climb into her Volvo SUV—Jet behind the wheel—and pull onto Port Road, heading toward the bluff without even a glance in my direction. Suddenly Paul’s suspicion doesn’t seem so absurd. As I follow the Volvo with my eyes, I notice something I missed when I arrived: a small fleet of earthmoving equipment parked in the shadow of the bluff, under a line of cottonwood trees. As Jet’s XC60 vanishes at the top of the bluff, black smoke puffs from a couple of smokestacks, and then the low grinding of heavy Caterpillar engines rolls toward me. I had no idea they intended to start work so soon. In fact, I’m pretty sure they didn’t. Nobody made any mention of it today.

They’re going to wipe out all traces of Buck’s digging, I realize. And maybe of Buck himself. Suddenly I’m as sure as I’ve ever been of anything that Buck was murdered here last night.

A chill races over my skin as the big yellow monsters crawl out of the shadows. I’m not sure what I can do to stop them or even slow them down. As I ponder this question, I hear a much higher sound, rapidly increasing in amplitude. It’s the hornet buzz of a drone, the same buzz I heard this morning. Looking up, I see the familiar silhouette of a DJI quad-rotor flying what appears to be a precise grid pattern over the paper mill site.

I want to cheer out loud. Denny Allman didn’t wait for the appointed time to meet me here. He came straight to the site and got down to business as soon as the crowd broke up. For a few seconds I worry that the equipment operators will get suspicious and call someone about the drone, but in all likelihood they can’t even hear the damned thing above the roar of their big diesel motors. Even if they do, they’ll assume that Beau Holland or some other Poker Club member—or even the Chinese—is using the drone for a commercial purpose related to the site. As I glance over at the Flex, trying to decide what to do next, my iPhone pings.

Piloting from the woods, reads Denny’s message. Can you pick me up on top of bluff in 20 mins?

Will do, I reply.

Any place need special attention?

Look for disturbed earth. This is our only chance before those graders and dozers tear it up. I remember Buck telling me that he unearthed the largest Poverty Point fragment near one of the foundation piers of the old electroplating plant. Don’t fly too low, I advise Denny, but get good coverage of the footprint of the old plant. The foundation especially. Understand?

10-4, comes the reply.

C u in 20 mins, I type, walking rapidly to the Flex.

I don’t need to hang out here on the flats, drawing attention. Where to go? Beyond the twenty-foot-high levee that protects the industrial park from the Mississippi River should be a thirty-foot slope to the water. That would put me out of sight of the equipment drivers. They might know I’m there, but out of sight is usually out of mind.

From the moment I saw Buck’s shattered skull through Denny’s drone camera, I’ve had a sense of disparate threads coming together, of a hidden pattern revealing itself. A town like Bienville is like the river it was founded on, filled with deep and conflicting currents. Most times, the only way to detect such a current is by seeing something unexpected shoot to the surface. Buck’s corpse might be that surprise. There is another way, of course, but it’s usually fatal.

Fall in and get sucked under.

CHAPTER 11

YOU DON’T GROW up thinking you’ll sleep with someone else’s husband or wife. But life has a way of taking us places we never planned to go, and the moral restraints we absorb as children tend to fall away in the face of protracted frustration and desire. Many a man or woman has awakened from a months-long oxytocin high and realized that they’ve put their spouse, their children, or even their life at risk in a blind quest to regain a purity and intensity of experience allowed only to the young. Sometimes we’re chasing reflections of romantic ideals unconsciously implanted in us by our parents. Other times we stumble into someone who carries a key that could open or close a door on some formative trauma we might not even remember. Whatever the trigger of our passion, we cross a line that we once believed inviolate, and by so doing throw the world out of balance in such a way that it must eventually right itself, regardless of human casualties.

Ironically, our passion blinds us to our true motives in these cases. Often we perceive our personal world as out of balance and seize on the notion that another person will somehow right the ship, restoring the “happiness” we crave. The mind-altering ecstasy of sexual union further distorts our perception, making it infinitely harder to navigate the maze we have created for ourselves. This self-induced blindness pushes us to take insane risks. I’ve had to restrain Jet more than once during the past three months. The compulsion to be “free” from a perceived trap can be overwhelming, and many a human being has gnawed off more than an arm or leg in their desperation.

I began my affair with Jet with both eyes open. I wasn’t driven by sexual compulsion to possess her body, which I had come to know intimately as a boy. Nor did I crave the thrill of forbidden assignations, which can amplify sex into a druglike addiction. What I wanted from Jet was everything: her present and all that remains of her future. She wants the same. Our general plan is simple: After my father dies, I’ll return to Washington, with or without my widowed mother. A month or two later, Jet will tell Paul that she believes they need some time apart. This will lead to a trial separation, then to discussions of divorce, while I—the cause of this action—will have long been out of the picture. At some point during this phase they will deal with the issue of their son, Kevin, whom Jet wants to bring to Washington to live with us.

The plan is sound, as such things go. The problem is that, for Jet, that final matter is a deal-breaker. She will not leave Bienville without Kevin. Yet she insists that Paul and his father will break every law on the books to ensure that she never takes him away. Since the Poker Club exercises absolute control over the chancery judges in Bienville, Max Matheson can dictate the terms of Jet’s divorce. Yet somehow, we’ve allowed ourselves to ignore this fact. Since my father has not died, we’ve contented ourselves with stolen hours, pretending the risk is minimal. For three months, we’ve drifted along on a tide of bliss, believing our plan must eventually come to fruition of its own accord.

Paul’s suspicion under the Prime Shot tent showed me in one gut-wrenching minute how blind we have become. Our long-range divorce plan is meaningless now. Paul already suspects Jet of infidelity. If we keep taking these risks for even a week, he’ll discover the truth. But if we stop seeing each other, what then? My father could die tomorrow, or he could live another six months. Can we go six months under conditions of absolute separation? Can I live every day as an actor in a theater of the absurd? Can Jet?

Could we live six months without water?

YOU THINK YOU KNOW everyone in a small town, but you don’t. Besides, Bienville isn’t that small. Not like Soso or Stringer or Frogmore. When I was a boy, Bienville proper had twenty-four thousand people in it, and outside the city limits the county held another fourteen thousand. That meant a school system big enough to make a certain amount of anonymity possible. If you went to a private school, for example, there were always kids at the public school you didn’t know. I knew most of the boys in town, of course, from playing ball and riding bikes and swim team and a dozen other things. But the girls—especially the girls at the public school—were mostly a mystery to me.

Several boys in my neighborhood still went to public school, and one—John Hallberg—was a good friend, though he was a year older than I. One weekend John took me to the movies with him, to sneak into Highlander, which was rated R. When we arrived at the cinema, we found three public school girls he knew waiting in line for Pretty in Pink, which was the movie we were pretending to go see. Two were the ubiquitous archetypes of my childhood, freckled and blue-eyed, one with dirty-blond hair, the other with light brown curls. But with them was a girl unlike any I’d ever seen. Her skin was as dark as a summer tan, though it was only March, and her jet-black hair reached almost to her behind. She was tall for her age, but what captured me from the first moment was her eyes, which were huge and dark above angular cheeks that descended to the dramatic V of her chin. And they took in everything.

John introduced this exotic creature as “Jet,” which I assumed was a nickname, albeit an unusual one for a girl. I would learn later that her given name was Jordan Elat Talal. “Jet” was an acronym coined by her aunt, one that even her mother used. And though this “Jet” was the same age as her friends, she seemed at least a year older, probably because she didn’t giggle or blush or cut up the way they did. When one of her friends invited Hallberg to skip Highlander in favor of Pretty in Pink and John said no, it was the dark-haired Jet who suggested the girls try Highlander instead.

One of the blessings of my life was that I wound up with Jet Talal sitting on my left in that movie theater, my nerves singing with excitement. This only happened because both other girls wanted to sit beside John, which left Jet little choice but to sit beside me. We didn’t talk much during the movie, but we stole several glances at each other, some I remember to this day. They were searching glances of curiosity and, after an hour or so, longer looks of recognition.

After the movie we all went to the nearby Baskin-Robbins and ate ice cream, which sounds corny today, but which in fact was pretty damn great. While John talked about the swordfights in the movie and the girls gossiped about junior high, Jet told me she’d actually wanted to see Salvador, a film about journalists covering some Central American civil war. I had no idea what she was talking about, but I faked my way through, and by ten that night I’d squeezed out every drop of information my father possessed on the subject. The other girls made fun of Jet for her comment, but she endured their teasing with impressive equanimity. Hallberg later told me that the public school kids called Jet “the Brain” because of her freakish abilities in math and science. But that mildly pejorative epithet failed to marginalize her, because her beauty was undeniable, and at that age (as at most ages), beauty was the currency of popularity.

I spent ten days trying to get up the nerve to call her, and when I finally did, her father answered the telephone. The sound of his heavily accented voice paralyzed me. Joe Talal was “that Arab scientist from the plating plant,” but most of the fathers spoke of him with respect. I would learn later that Joe Talal laughed a lot, but back then, my heart stuttered when his brusque baritone asked who I was. When Jet finally came on the line, a different kind of panic gripped me, but somehow, through the painful pauses, she made it all right.

During the final month of school, we met a few times at the Baskin-Robbins, each riding our bikes there, and we grew closer with every meeting. Soon I was waiting outside old Mr. Weissberg’s house during Jet’s violin lessons, reading The Prince of Tides and trying to think of something interesting to say to her. I wasn’t sure I ever did, but when summer finally came, I learned that I had.

I know now that I was blessed in another way to be from Bienville, because my boyhood summers in the 1980s were more like the summers the rest of America lived during the 1960s and ’70s. When school let out in May, we hit the door barefooted and didn’t return home till dark. Not a house on our block was locked, and every one had a mom in it. Many of those mothers made sure we had food if we wanted it, and all were free to discipline any child who required it. Our playground was all the land we could cover on our bicycles and still get home before full dark (around nine P.M.). That was about forty square miles.

Jet and I made the most of that freedom.

We usually met in the mornings, riding our ten-speeds to LaSalle Park, then spent the entire day together, pedaling all over Bienville, even way out on Cemetery Road, into the eastern part of the county. We had little contact with other people during this time, but we didn’t want it, and nobody questioned our behavior. In retrospect, I believe we entered a sort of trance that May or June, one that would not be broken until the following September. Our trance had phases, each one a level deeper, as though we were descending into a warm pool, a shared fugue state where we existed as a single person, not distinct bodies or personalities.

The first descent occurred on the day we turned north off Cemetery Road and pedaled deep into the woods, following what appeared to be a deer path through what had once been the Luxor Plantation. Luxor’s “big house” had burned in the 1880s, and the Weldon family, who owned it, had moved into the slave quarters. As a younger boy, I and my friends had discovered an old cypress barn that stood on the property, partly collapsed and surrounded by a thick stand of trees. The disused barn made a wonderful fort and an ideal base from which to explore the woods. On the day Jet turned down the path that led to the Luxor barn, I hadn’t been there for a couple of years, but I was glad she’d done it.

Until that day, when we rode our bikes, we talked endlessly. But on the day we entered the Luxor barn, we stopped talking. The ground floor was heavily overgrown with ragweed and poison ivy, and it looked snaky. But a ladder led up to the spacious, tin-roofed second floor, which was open to the forest at both ends. As I followed her onto that high platform, I remembered standing along the edge with my friends, aiming golden arcs higher than our heads as we competed to see who could pee the farthest. I’d learned that day that a ten-year-old boy can piss fifteen feet laterally before his urine hits the ground—at least from a ten-foot elevation. But I quickly forgot that detail as Jet walked over and stood beside me, then took hold of my arms and turned me to face her.

My stomach flipped as she leaned toward me. The kiss that followed lasted close to an hour. There were breaks, of course. Brief ones, for air. But during that hour we passed out of whatever place we’d existed in before, into a country where words were superfluous. We went back to that barn the next day, and the next. By the third afternoon, our hands began moving over each other’s bodies, seeking what they would. I’ve never forgotten the succession of shocks that went through me when my hand slipped inside the waistband of her jeans. The hair down there was abundant, thick and coarse, which stopped me for a moment. The next shock came when my fingers went between her thighs. She was so slippery that I wasn’t sure what I was touching—a world apart from the classmate who’d let me finger her outside a traveling carnival one night. But even that shock dimmed when I felt Jet reach down and unsnap her jeans so that I could reach her without straining. My face suddenly felt sunburned, and I got light-headed for a couple of minutes. Then she put her mouth beside my ear and whispered, “That feels good.”

That feels good …

All my life I’d been conditioned to believe that sex was something girls didn’t want, but submitted to only after a long siege by a boy who felt and vowed unending love. To hear this sublimely feminine creature tell me that it felt good for me to do something that her father would have killed us both for doing was almost more than I could bear. But I didn’t stop. The next day, while rain beat endlessly on the rusted tin roof, Jet reached down, placed her hand over mine, and began guiding my movements. It was then that I discovered what pleasured her most wasn’t on the inside at all.

For weeks we rode our bikes to that barn. We spent whole days on that second story, living in our world apart. As the summer sun rode its long arc across the sky, the light would change until the barn became a cathedral. Golden shafts spilled through openings in the roof, and dust motes hovered and spun around us as though suspended in liquid. The things we did in our cathedral we did standing, for some reason. Perhaps we knew that if we lay down on those old dry barn boards, we would cross the only boundary that remained uncrossed, and we were too young to deal with the consequences of that. If we had, I’m not sure we would have ridden home as darkness settled over the woods.

That phase of our trance ended on the day I heard a noise from the floor below us. It wasn’t a footstep or a voice, but it was a distinctly human sound. A cough maybe, or a wheeze. As quietly as I could, I climbed down the ladder and made my way through the fallen boards that lay tangled in vines and thorns. As I neared an old, broken-wheeled wagon parked under the second-floor joists, I heard weight shift on wood. I froze, my heart pounding, then took three quick steps forward and froze again. I was looking into the eyes of an old black man with a grizzled salt-and-pepper beard. He was lying in the wagon on a pile of big green leaves, a dead cigar stub in his mouth.

Instinct told me to bolt back the way I came, but something stopped me. Maybe it was that he lay supine in the wagon and showed no inclination to rise. Perhaps it was the look of amusement in his features or the weariness in his eyes. As we stared at each other, he lifted a small paper bag and took a swig from the dark bottleneck protruding from it. Then he wiped his mouth with his sleeve and gave me an avuncular grin.

“You been up there two hours and I ain’t heard that girl holler yet,” he said. “What you doin’ up there? Readin’ the Bible together?”

“What?” I asked dully.

“I said, what you doin’ up there? I shoulda heard that girl holler two, three times by now. She old enough.”

“Whuh—who are you?” I stammered.

“I ain’t nobody. Who you?”

“Marshall McEwan.”

“You ain’t a Weldon?”

“No, sir. I’m friends with Pete Weldon, though.” The Weldons still owned the land the barn sat on. “Who are you?”

“Name’s Willis. I work for Mr. Weldon.”

I weighed this answer. “Mr. Weldon pays you to sleep in his barn?”

The man scowled. “Don’t get smart now, Marshall. I wouldn’t want to have to get up and teach you a lesson.”

By this time I had studied “Willis” a bit. He was a lot heavier than I, and he looked pretty strong, but I was sure I could outrun him. Of course, Jet was upstairs. She could probably outrun him, too. But she would have to get safely to the ground before she could.

“I’m guessing you don’t want me to tell Mr. Weldon you were here,” I said.

Willis scowled again. “I’m guessing you don’t want him knowing you out here, either, smart boy.”

I shrugged and tried to look nonchalant.

“Why don’t we make a little deal?” Willis suggested. “We’ll both just keep our business to ourselves.”

I waited a decent interval, then said, “That sounds cool.”

“Okay, then. You’d best get back up there and tend to business. That girl prob’ly gettin’ nervous by now.”

I took a tentative step back. “Are you gonna be here anymore? I mean, after today?”

“I been here other times, too, if that’s what you wonderin’. My old lady kicked me out the house, and I ain’t got no place to stay.”

“You sleep out here?”

Willis nodded. “Right now, anyways.”

I thought about this. “Okay, then.”

“Hey,” he called as I turned to go. “Don’t be afraid of it.”

“What?”

“Girls ain’t made of glass, boy. They want it, same as you. Don’t be afraid to work it. And lick it, too. You lick it?”

My face was turning purple. The old man laughed.

“Whatever you been doin’, try it ’bout twice as hard. Start gentle, but take it up steady, you understand? That girl’ll holler in three, fo’ minutes, I guarantee.”

“Um … I gotta go,” I croaked, backing away fast, then turning to run.

His cackling laughter followed me back up the ladder.

I found Jet waiting at the top, looking frightened, but once I explained what had happened, she calmed down. I didn’t think we should return to the barn anymore, but Jet thought it was fine.

Two days later, we discovered I’d been right.

On that day, some dopeheads from the public high school showed up at the barn and sat outside in the clearing, getting high. Jet and I hid in silence on the second floor, waiting for them to leave. But when they started building a campfire, we knew we had to go. We tried to slip away unnoticed, but they heard us trying to sneak out the far side of the barn. In seconds they surrounded us and started the usual bullying that older guys love to deal out to young guys as tall as me. It was during this hazing that they noticed how beautiful Jet was.

The conversation that followed that realization scared me in a way I’d never experienced before. These guys didn’t look like the potheads I knew, gentle dudes who’d rather lie on their backs staring at the moon than exert a single muscle. These guys looked like what my father called “dopers,” needle freaks. As they talked, I saw all the blood leave Jet’s face. They were sixteen or seventeen, pale and dirty looking. And they meant to have her. The tallest one told Jet to take off her clothes before it got too dark to see her. If she refused, he said, they would take them off for her. When she didn’t move to obey, one guy said he wanted to see what A-rab pussy tasted like. I wanted to protect her, but I couldn’t see any option other than getting honorably beaten within an inch of my life. I didn’t want Jet to know how scared I was, but when I stole a glance at her, I saw tears on her cheeks. That was when I heard a low, dangerous voice speak from the darkness under the barn.

“You boys ’bout to buy yourselves a boxcar full of trouble.”

The leader’s head snapped left. Like me, he saw Willis coming through the dark barn door, looking pretty goddamn intimidating. I suppose the three older teenagers could have taken that old man, but they didn’t look too sure they wanted to find out what it would cost them to do it.

“What you gonna do, nigger?” asked the leader, sounding more petulant than threatening.

Willis regarded him in silence for about ten seconds. Then he said, “What I’m gon’ do? That’s what you axed? Well …” Willis scratched his bearded chin. “I’ll prob’ly start by bendin’ you over that log there and fuckin’ you up da ass. That’s how we broke in fresh stuff like you in Parchman. You’ll feel just like a girl to me, boy. Tighter, prob’ly.”

My blood ran cold when Willis said that, but the threat had its intended effect. The three freaks shared a long look. Then the smallest skittered into the darkness under the trees. The other two followed, though the leader vowed revenge from the shadows. It was hard to believe the situation had changed so fast. It was as though a grizzly bear had scattered a pack of dogs.

“Were you really in Parchman?” I asked, after Jet had gotten control of herself.

“Nah,” Willis said. “My cousin was, though. I been in the county lockup a couple times, but not the Farm. I knew that’d scare them dopers, though.”

“Man … thank you so much.”

Jet began crying and shivering—delayed shock, I guess—but she thanked Willis profusely. When I rolled her bike out to her, she said, “What if they’re waiting for us on the path somewhere?”

“I’ll walk out with y’all,” Willis said. “I can’t come back here no more anyways. Them boys’ll go home and tell their daddies a mean nigger threatened to whup ’em on the Weldon place, and the sheriff’ll be out here to run me in. I need to find somethin’ to eat anyway.”

“I’ve got twelve dollars in my pocket,” Jet told him, digging in her jeans. “You’re welcome to it.”

Willis smiled. “Twelve dollars’ll keep me fed for most of a week, missy. I’ll take it.”

That was the last day we went to the barn.

We soon found another sanctuary—one equally as isolated and even more beautiful—but it was never quite the refuge that the barn was. It was a spring-fed pool that lay about six miles out Cemetery Road, on the old Parnassus Plantation. Generations of kids had spent summers partying out there, even skinny-dipping, until an accidental drowning and subsequent suicide forced the owner to fence off the hill where the spring bubbled out of the earth. I never saw anything quite like that place again, but I know it remains unspoiled, because Jet and I met there several times before I bought my house outside town.

Thirty-two years ago, she and I spent the last half of July and part of August at that pool, which had gone by many names since Indian times. Our trance slipped a level deeper in its cold, clear water and as we lay on the warm banks in the afternoon sun, like the turtles that were our company. But our time was growing shorter each day. I was scheduled to start summer football practice, and Jet had some sort of mathematics camp to go to. Like many fools before me, I assumed that time was infinite, that we would spend the rest of our school years together, then marry and strike out into the world to do great things—things the people of little Bienville had never dreamed about. To this end, Jet had already persuaded her parents to let her transfer to St. Mark’s, despite the extra expense. I couldn’t know that within a month, Jet’s father would vanish, severing the fragile filament that had bound us like a common blood vessel until then.

The disappearance of Joe Talal shocked all of Bienville. It wasn’t one of the garden-variety abandonments that were becoming more common as the ’80s progressed. Jet’s father was a chemical engineer, seemingly the most stable of men, and his work ethic was legendary. He’d invented a new chemical process at the electroplating plant, something that would have made him rich, had he not done it on company time. But the company patented it and took the money. This would have embittered most men, but Joe Talal took it well, and management rewarded him with what he most wanted, which was acceptance. Joe’s brilliance and can-do attitude earned him the respect of the whites at the plant, and their acceptance was naturally extended to his daughter. After all, Jet’s mother was white, and a Methodist in good standing. Joe might not have gone to church himself, but any time the congregation needed volunteers to build booths or mow grass, they knew Joe Talal would show up, ready and eager to work.

The cataclysm came the September after our magical summer. Joe had flown up to Connecticut for a continuing education class in electrochemistry. He did that kind of thing every couple of years. Only this time, he didn’t come back. Janet Turner Talal initially covered for her husband with a story about a sick relative, so it took a couple of weeks for people to figure out something was wrong. But before a month had passed, plant management was informed that Joe had resigned his position. Two days later, it leaked out that Jet’s father had returned to the Middle East, from which he’d emigrated in 1965. Jet had been putting a good face on things at school, but once this news got out, she stayed absent for three days. When she did come back, she was a different person. She had withdrawn into herself, and for the first time, I saw shame in her.

One month later, an explosive revelation swept through Bienville: Joe Talal had another family back in Jordan—a wife and a son. No one was sure about the details. Some folks said Joe had been mixed up in political trouble, Arab craziness, and that his family had been mistakenly declared dead years before. Others claimed he’d been a bigamist all along. In any case, Joe had abandoned his American family to be with his Arab wife and son, and he had no intention of returning to America.

It took me twenty years and a FOIA request to learn the true details of Joe’s departure from our lives. As a journalist, I now understand that the tragedy of the Talal family was but a tiny footnote to the Cold War politics of the United States in the Middle East during that era. All that mattered to me at the time was that Jet’s father had broken that trance in which she and I existed as one being. Worse, within a month Jet took up with Paul Matheson, who was a year older than we were and one of the least introspective guys I knew. I couldn’t understand it, except to reason that after being abandoned by her foreign father, she’d decided to grab the most quintessentially American boy she could find, one whose father’s fortune would guarantee security for life—if she could hold on to him. Jet did hold on to Paul, at least until he left Bienville for Ole Miss. They were the golden couple of our high school. Yet by the time Paul left college to join the army and fight in Iraq, things had changed again. But that’s another story.

Paternal abandonment is the central fact of Jet’s life: it shaped every decision she made afterward. Eight months after Joe Talal abandoned his daughter, I lived through a different version of the same experience—emotional abandonment by a father physically present—and there’s no question that it dictated every major decision of my youth. You’d think that shared trauma would have brought Jet and me even closer together. But human relationships aren’t symmetrical. The ultimate result of her father’s departure was that, after my brother drowned and my father began to blame and isolate me, I faced that situation utterly alone.

Perhaps if I’d still had Jet, I could have weathered the glacial coldness without permanent damage. But I didn’t. As the next year wore on, I quit every athletic team, stopped hanging out with former friends, and holed up in my room with the Cure and U2’s Joshua Tree album. My dad was drinking heavily at this time, so I found it easy to pilfer whatever I wanted from his stock. My mother had been prescribed several drugs in the wake of Adam’s death, and I ate those, too. While Jet worked tirelessly to distract herself from her pain, I sank ever deeper into mine, until almost no light from the world above penetrated down to where I existed.

One year to the day after Adam drowned, I drove my mother’s car out to the Mississippi River at dawn, stripped off all my clothes, and began swimming toward Louisiana. I was drunk on bourbon, stoned on pills. When I pushed away from the shore, I fully intended to drown myself. As pathetic as it sounds now, I thought about Jet as I stroked toward the middle of the mighty river. I thought about my father, too, how he lived as if I didn’t exist. I figured I would do him the favor of making reality conform to his desire. But when I reached the middle of the current, it was my mother who filled my mind and heart. How could I force her to suffer the loss of her only other son? Who would do that to her? A coward, answered a voice from deep within. A gutless coward. In that moment, an anger unlike anything I’d ever experienced was born within me. And that anger had but one object: the man who had failed me as a father.

Ping, ping, ping …

The text tone of my iPhone breaks through my dark reverie like a persistent alarm clock. I’m not sure how many times it went off before it finally registered in my brain, but now I look down at the screen. The text message is from Denny. It reads:

Finished twenty minutes ago! U gonna leave me up here all day or what?

On my way, I type, cranking the Flex and backing it around toward the riprap that lines the last drop to the river. Then I drive over the levee.

The industrial park is enveloped in a vast cloud of dust. The crest of the bluff is barely visible through the thinner dust at the top of the cloud. I point the Flex toward it, but I know that somewhere out there, heavy equipment is scraping and pushing dirt without any regard for me. As I inch along the gravel road that crosses the mill site between the levee and Port Road, another text arrives: One of the bulldozers blocked the bluff road for ten minutes. I was scared, but it’s clear now. U better haul butt.

A big yellow Caterpillar D7 churns out of the dust to my right, moving toward me. This is how you treat a crime scene if you want to bury evidence. After gauging the movement of the bulldozer, I jam my accelerator to the floor and race for the bluff.

CHAPTER 12

“WHAT DID YOU see?” I ask as Denny opens the Flex’s back door and sets a wheeled Pelican case on my backseat. I guess that’s how he carries his drone around.

“Check for yourself.” He hands a micro SD card in a tiny plastic case over the seat, then comes around and gets up front.

“How about a summary?” I ask, putting the Flex in gear and heading north along the heavily wooded bluff.

“I definitely saw places where someone has been digging.”

“By the foundation piers?”

“One of them. Also out in the open ground. But those bulldozers have torn that section up by now.”

“I can’t believe they’ve moved this fast. They weren’t scheduled to start today.”

Denny grins. “The good news is, I have GPS coordinates for the whole flight. I can tell you exactly where to dig to find the places I saw today.”

“Can I read the coordinates off the card?”

“If you know what you’re looking at.”

I hand him back the SD card case. “Why don’t you make me a video file and email it to me? Or use Dropbox. Make it a highlight reel with everything marked simply enough for an idiot to read locations.”

“You gonna pay me for my time?”

“Absolutely.” I take a curve that gives us another broad river vista through the trees. “I appreciate you flying that site, especially coming early.”

“Hey, this is what I live for. We’re working a real-life murder case, man. We should make a podcast out of this. Like Serial, about Adnan Syed.”

A chill of foreboding raises the hair on my arms. “There’s not going to be any podcast, Denny. This is serious, okay? Buck’s dead. Gone. Forever. You saw his head.”

“Sure, I get it. But I still don’t see why we can’t—”

“No damn podcast,” I snap. “If I ever go public with this, I’ll credit you for your work. But I don’t want you taking any risks. None.”

“If you go public?” he says, looking incredulous. “Why wouldn’t you?”

“Because I don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.”

“Sure you do! Somebody murdered Dr. Buck. And they probably did it at the place we just left. Not at Lafitte’s Den, where I found the truck.”

“What’s your evidence for that? Some disturbed dirt on a building site?”

“It’s obvious, isn’t it? He came back out here to find some more relics, and they deleted him.”

“Maybe,” I concede. “But we’re not going to tell anybody that. Not yet.”

Denny looks more than resentful of this restriction. “Isn’t there going to be an autopsy or something?”

“Eventually. Depends on the backlog in Jackson. I’m going to speak to the coroner after he’s looked at the body. The people who run things around here wouldn’t want me to, but I know Byron Ellis pretty well. Also, he’s black, which means he might not be as eager to do the bidding of the people who’d like Buck’s death to be ruled an accident.”

Denny is scanning Instagram on his phone. “So are you gonna go back out there tonight and hunt for evidence?”

“Hell, no. They put guards out there after Buck’s first discovery. There’s no reason to think they won’t be there tonight.”

“But—”

“Leave it alone, Denny. Please.”

“Just think about it,” he says, looking up from his phone. “In their minds, Buck was the threat, right? But he’s dead now. And they think they’re wiping out all the evidence right this minute. So tonight’s the perfect night to go out there and dig.”

“Jesus, I already regret getting you involved.”

He grins again. “You sound like my mom. Don’t worry, that feeling won’t last long. Just until you watch my drone footage.”

I hope you’re right, I think, speeding up so that I can get him home sooner. Into the silence between us flows my memory of Paul Matheson asking me if I think Jet could be sleeping with her paralegal. What the hell? And after Buck’s death. It’s like four hours ago, the world turned upside down.

We’re less than a mile from Denny’s mother’s house when my iPhone rings. It’s Ben Tate from the Watchman office. “What you got, Ben?” I ask.

“It looks like somebody broke into Buck Ferris’s house.”

“Last night?”

“No, today. His wife called the sheriff’s office about an hour ago.”

“Quinn Ferris?”

“Yeah. She was at the funeral home, working on her husband’s arrangements, when it happened. What do you think they were looking for? More artifacts?”

“Bones. They’re scared shitless that he found bones. Bones would halt the project. They’ve got a bunch of bulldozers out there tearing up the mill site right now.”

“Can we stop that? Get an injunction or something?”

“Not with what we have now.” Up ahead, the mailbox of the Allman house comes into view. “Hey, did you find out who posted the security guards at the mill site on Saturday?”

“No. I’ve talked to the Chinese, the county supervisors, and any other candidates I could think of. Everybody denies hiring guards. Are you sure they were out there?”

“According to Buck, they were.” Nothing about this is going to be easy. “Is there anything else going on?”

“Yes, actually. Quinn called here for you just a minute ago. She wants to talk to you.”

“She’s probably trying to call me now. Let me go.”

“Hang on, man. I heard a rumor that Jerry Lee Lewis might be playing that VIP party on the rooftop of the Aurora Hotel tonight. You hear anything about that?”

Ben’s a big music fan. “Something. But don’t worry about missing out. This is one of those rumors that doesn’t pan out. Besides, the Killer’s over eighty now.”

Ben laughs. “I hear you. Later.”

I start to summarize the call for Denny, but his young ears already picked up both sides of the conversation. He’s working hard not to look excited, but I can see the fantasy in his head: a viral reality podcast with web links to drone footage chronicling a “real-life” murder investigation. He could be famous before he enters the ninth grade. As I pull into his mother’s driveway, Denny turns to me, his face suddenly serious, his excitement gone.

“If you had a son,” he says, trying to sound casual, “would you leave him and stay away? Never come back?”

Whoa. I’ve wondered if he’d ever ask me something like this. I guess he figures his mom can’t give him the answer he needs. I’m not sure I can, either. Trying to formulate a coherent reply, I stare at his mother’s transportation, a battered Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer from the early nineties. Its navy-blue panels are dented, rusted through in some places, and the khaki cladding once so prized by yuppies has mostly been ripped away by countless fender benders. Thanks to the father who left long ago, this wreck is the vehicle that carries Denny through the world.

“I had a son, Denny,” I say softly. “He drowned in a swimming pool when he was two. My wife and I ended up getting divorced because of it.”

“Oh. I’m sorry. My mom never told me that.”

“I thought about him today for the first time in a long while. Because of Buck’s drowning. My son never got a chance to be a person. Not even a boy, really. I mean, he had a personality. I could see hints of who he might become. But that’s all. Still … he was happy while he lived.”

“He was lucky, then.”

“Yeah. Until he wasn’t.” I look out at the unmown grass in Denny’s yard. “When I was your age, there wasn’t much divorce among my friends’ families. But it accelerated pretty fast. Till now …”

“I know, right? More than half of every class at the school has divorced parents. It’s not like I’m the only one or anything. But still … most of them have dads. Around. Somewhere.”

“I know what you mean.”

He picks at something on his pant leg. “Wouldn’t you think my dad would just be curious?”

I’m tempted to lie, to paint him a rosy picture. But how could that help him? “Maybe I shouldn’t give you advice. But I’ll say this: if your dad doesn’t come around, it’s because he doesn’t want to. That’s got nothing to do with you. He’s missing something in his character. Divorce is one thing, leaving a wife. But a man who leaves his children is something else. I’ve got no respect for a man who does that. A father who leaves his children does damage that can never be repaired. That’s why you’re hurting now.”

Denny nods slowly, then wipes his eyes.

“My father didn’t leave our house,” I hear myself saying. “But he left me. You understand? He pretended I wasn’t there.”

Denny looks confused. “How come? Because of the thing with your brother?”

“That’s right. He blamed me for my brother’s death. Still does. You know who really acted like a father to me?”

“Who?”

“Buck Ferris.”

Denny’s eyes narrow. “No way.”

“Yep. He was my scoutmaster. I didn’t even know what depression was, but I was messed up. When Buck saw that my dad wasn’t doing his job, he stepped in and picked up the slack. He taught me how to play guitar, how to use tools. That guy was an artist with a chisel. And what a teacher. Hell, I built a guitar when I was seventeen.”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah. I’ve still got it.”

“That’s so cool. Is that what you’ve been doing for me? What Dr. Buck did for you?”

The image of Buck being dragged from the river flashes through my mind once more. “Maybe,” I concede. “A little bit.”

He nods. “Well … I like it.”

What a day. “Denny, listen. The time may come when your father will be filled with regret and come looking for you. Or he’ll call you to come see him, maybe even live with him. When that day comes, you might be tempted to leave your mom.”

The boy is staring at me now, hanging on every word.

“I’m not saying you don’t talk to him. Do what you need to do. But don’t live your life waiting for that day, okay? Don’t dream of life with him because you feel like your mother doesn’t understand you. She’s doing the work your dad should have done, on top of her own. You hear me?”

“Yeah.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Yes, sir.” He looks into his lap. “So what’s your next step?”

“Talk to Buck’s widow. She lives out on the Little Trace.”

“Oh, yeah. The break-in.”

“I’ll look forward to seeing your video. It’ll be a huge help.”

“I’m going to go edit it right now. Watch your email inbox.”

I give him a firm handshake, and his slim hand squeezes tight. Then he scrambles out of the Flex and unloads his drone.

“Hey,” I call through the passenger window. “You got a lawnmower?”

“Uhh, yeah.”

“Use it. I don’t want to hear your mother had to cut that grass herself or pay somebody else to do it. You hear me?”

He rolls his eyes. “Maybe you’re taking this dad thing a little far?”

“You want to be part of this case? Cut the damn grass.”

“Okay.” He turns and walks into his house.

Before I can back out of the driveway, Denny’s mother leans out her door and gives me a weary wave. She looks tired, this woman I slept with thirty years ago because I needed comfort. She generously gave me that comfort, as she did many others. Even from this distance, I see the passage of every year on her face. Three husbands, at least one abortion in high school, a series of crappy jobs, and one precocious son. What does she think when she looks out here? I wonder as I back into the road. Who the hell are we? And why do we do the things we do?

A quarter mile from Denny’s house, I dictate a text to Byron Ellis, the Tenisaw County coroner: You ready to talk about Buck? I’m hoping the friendship I’ve made with Byron while covering the recent spate of shootings in the African American community will prompt him to feed me some inside information. I’ve sensed deep frustration in the coroner, much of it based on his awareness that the white men who manipulate Bienville’s elected officials have no interest in solving the problems that cause the violence, but only in jailing the perpetrators and minimizing publicity.

My iPhone pings, and Byron’s reply flashes up on the Flex’s nav screen: Not yet. Don’t call. Give me an hour, maybe less. This is heavy.

My hands tighten on the wheel. Byron must already be feeling pressure to steer the narrative away from murder. While the implications of this go through my mind, I take out my burner phone. Texting Jet is a risk, but after what Paul said to me under the tent, I don’t think I can wait until three. With one hand I type: Paul asked me if u sleeping w Josh Germany. WTF??? Why he suspicious all of a sudden?

I’ve got a twenty-five-minute drive to my next stop. This trip will eat a lot of my day, but Quinn Ferris treated me like a son for two years; the least I can do is fulfill that role when she needs one. I only hope Jet will get back to me before I reach Quinn’s house. If Paul is truly suspicious, he might know much more than he revealed to me. What if he’s following her? Should Jet even try to get to my house this afternoon? Filled with unexpected anxiety, I drive with the burner phone in my left hand, dividing my attention between the road and its LCD screen. “Come on, come on,” I murmur, a desperate mantra.

Nothing.

CHAPTER 13

PAUL MATHESON SAT at the long rosewood conference table on the second floor of Claude Buckman’s bank, the Bienville Southern, waiting for more Poker Club members to arrive. This was an informal gathering, one called by Paul himself after the groundbreaking ceremony. Though he wasn’t an official member, it was understood that he would one day take his father’s seat, and the other members were curious about what had prompted him to ask for a meeting.

Claude Buckman sat at the head of the table, Blake Donnelly at his right hand. Senator Sumner sat on Buckman’s left. Next on that side came Wyatt Cash and Arthur Pine. Across the table from Cash sat Paul’s father, and to Max’s right sat Dr. Warren Lacey. Paul figured Beau Holland and Tommy Russo were the only other members likely to attend. The remaining three were older men—older even than Buckman, who was eighty-three—and rarely attended meetings. There’d been some small talk, but Paul had not taken part. Being seated at the far end of the long table made casual conversation stilted.

The conference room was a temple to antebellum Bienville. The grass-cloth walls were lined with nineteenth-century photographs depicting the booming cotton economy of the pre-war years. Horse-drawn wagons hauling white gold wrapped in burlap from outlying Tenisaw County to the river. Steamboats docked at Lower’ville, so loaded with cotton bales that they looked as though they’d capsize in a mild storm. A big black locomotive shuttling onto the rail ferry that once linked the cotton fields of Louisiana to the market on the Mississippi side of the river. A few photos depicted the war years. Yankee officers stood on verandas owned by ancestors of the men around the table, sipping drinks and watching ladies cavort at badminton on the lawns. For some officers from Philadelphia and New York, the occupation of Bienville had been a welcome reunion with old friends from Harvard, Yale, and Penn. It was connections like those, Paul knew, that had helped Bienville to survive the war mostly intact, rather than winding up a charred ruin, like Jackson and Atlanta.

“Here they are,” announced Blake Donnelly, waving at Beau Holland and Tommy Russo, who’d just walked through the door behind Paul. “About time, fellas.”

Russo and Holland took seats beside Dr. Lacey, and before Buckman could bring the meeting to order, Beau Holland said, “What’s this all about? We’ve got the Azure Dragon guys in town, and I’ve got meetings all day.”

“Are everyone’s cell phones powered down?” Buckman asked in his perpetually hoarse voice. He sounded like a man who had smoked all his life and took pride in telling his doctors to go to hell.

There was a shuffle as a few members switched off their phones.

“Paul has a question for us,” Buckman told them.

All eyes settled on Paul Matheson. He wasn’t sure how to go about this, but he figured he knew most of these men well enough not to pussyfoot around.

“I’ll say it plain, gentlemen. Did we have anything to do with what happened to Buck Ferris?”

Everyone averted his eyes. Suddenly Paul seemed to be the least interesting object in the room.

“Well,” he said. “I guess that answers that question.”

“Not at all,” Buckman protested. “So far as I know, Dr. Ferris had an unfortunate accident. A fall, most likely. Regardless of what speculation the Bienville Watchman might be pushing tomorrow.”

“Damn right,” said Beau Holland, the real estate developer. “I’ve heard McEwan is out asking questions, implying foul play. That’s downright irresponsible with the Chinese in town.”

“Irresponsible?” Paul laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “Beau, what planet do you live on?”

Holland’s eyes flashed anger. He wasn’t accustomed to being spoken to that way.

Arthur Pine, the club’s in-house attorney, spoke up. “You obviously have a point to make, Paul. Why not make it?”

“You can forget about this playing as an accident,” Paul said. “This is a murder case now.”

“There’s no reason to think that,” Buckman countered. “I’ve been assured the autopsy is well under control. Death by misadventure will be the finding. Ferris was digging up above that cave mouth where he had no business being.”

Paul snorted. “You’re assured? Who the hell assured you of that?”

No one offered an answer.

Paul looked around the room in disbelief. “You’re living in a bubble, Claude,” Paul went on. “Like some Hollywood actor. Nobody wants to give you bad news.”

“Which is?” asked the old man.

“Marshall McEwan. Marshall’s not his old man, okay? He’s spent the last twenty-five years in Washington, digging up scandals that shake the Capitol Building. Major Defense Department stuff. He’s supposed to be writing a book about racism while he’s here, but he was investigating Trump’s Russian financial dealings when he came home to take care of his father. Azure Dragon and the paper mill are bush-league for him. Do not kid yourselves. Whatever rocket scientist decided to kill Buck Ferris has got Marshall after his ass now. You’d better get ready for some shit to hit the fan.”

Beau Holland leaned back in his chair, his usual smirk pulling at his mouth. “McEwan’s a friend of yours, isn’t he? Can’t you get him to ease off on the muckraking? At least for a week?”

Paul leaned forward. “Is that a joke? Buck Ferris was almost a father to him. Marshall went all the way to Eagle Scout because of Buck.”

“Sounds like sentimental bullshit,” said Holland.

“Yeah? See how sentimental you feel when Marshall shoves a proctoscope up your butt on CNN. He’s got the cell number of every anchor and producer for every major network in D.C. and New York.” Paul looked to the head of the table. “Claude, you want to have the club’s finances broken down on Meet the Press? McEwan can put you there.”

Buckman shifted in his seat.

“If Marshall smells foul play,” Paul said, “he’ll sink his teeth into this case and shake it like a pit bull. He won’t let go. If there’s anything to find, he’ll find it.”

“I don’t like the sound of that,” said Tommy Russo.

“There’s nothing for him to find,” Blake Donnelly asserted. “Hell, I liked Buck a lot. But if he ran up on some bad characters and got himself killed, that’s nothing to do with us. Maybe he walked up on a drug deal out at Lafitte’s Den.”

“He didn’t die at that cave,” Paul said irritably. “Marshall told me that in the tent. Somebody staged things to look that way.” He looked around the table, giving the younger members a searching glance.

“What’s your problem?” Beau snapped. “You got something to say to me?”

Paul smiled, knowing he’d gotten to Holland. “Whoever was dumb enough to kill Buck Ferris put everybody in this room at risk, and every element of the Azure Dragon deal as well.”

“Hey,” Holland said angrily. “It’s not your place to pass judgment on anything a member might do.”

Max Matheson leaned forward and cast his eyes down the table at Holland. “Are you saying you killed Ferris?”

Holland glared at Paul’s father, which was not something people with good sense generally did. But Beau had always been an arrogant son of a bitch.

“I’m saying if anybody in this room did kill Buck Ferris,” Holland replied, “then it’s none of Paul’s business. Until he’s a full voting member, our decisions are above his pay grade.”

Paul turned up his left hand and gestured at Holland, as if to say, You guys see why I’m worried?

Claude Buckman spoke in a tone that brooked no argument. “This group approved no decision to remove Mr. Ferris, however inconvenient his activities had become. And no individual member is empowered to make such a decision alone, except in extreme emergency. Is that understood by all present?”

A few nods signaled general agreement around the table.

Tommy Russo, the only man in the room without a Southern accent, said, “We know Ferris was digging out at the mill site, right?”

“He was,” Wyatt Cash confirmed. “I placed cellular game cameras out there that recorded him.”

“And if he found bones, that could have stopped construction?”

“No question,” said Arthur Pine. “We’d have had to cancel the groundbreaking.”

Russo tilted his head to one side and stuck out his bottom lip, as though gauging the amount of life left in a dog that had been run over. “Hard to see how that guy getting dead is a bad thing.”

Senator Sumner sighed in distaste and looked at his watch.

“A delay like that could have caused the Chinese to pull up stakes and go to Alabama,” Holland pointed out. “We’re not dealing with International Paper or Walmart here. Azure Dragon doesn’t tolerate mistakes. They hit a bump in the road, they find a different road.”

“Somewhere people know how to flatten bumps?” Paul asked.

Russo chuckled.

“Is there anything else?” Donnelly asked. “I’ve got a foursome of investors waiting on me out at Belle Rose.”

“Paul’s point is well-taken,” Buckman said. “If anyone has information about Dr. Ferris’s death that I need to know, I expect you to come to me. And if anyone has any influence over Mr. McEwan or his father, now is the time to use it to get him to soft-pedal this story. Or at least keep it separate from anything to do with the mill. Duncan McEwan always treated us fairly over the years.”

“Duncan’s got nothing to do with editorial content now,” Paul told them. “Don’t kid yourself. Marshall decides what goes in that newspaper.”

“Let’s buy him off then,” Holland suggested. “Justifiable PR expense.”

“Great idea,” Paul said. “How much you thinking? I know of a Russian oligarch who offered Marshall half a million bucks to kill a story.”

“He turned it down?” asked Buckman.

“Yes, sir. Then the oligarch threatened to kill him. Marshall went with the story anyway.”

“So he’s got balls,” Russo said. “That doesn’t sound good for us.”

“I’m thinking about the Watchman,” said Arthur Pine. “I’m surprised that rag hasn’t closed down yet. I think the father’s badly overextended. About eight years ago, he took out a big loan to buy out his brother’s stake in the newspaper.”

“Who’s carrying the paper on that?” asked Buckman.

“Marty Denis at First Farmers. He and Duncan McEwan go way back together.”

“Let’s look into that.”

“Duncan’s also carrying a business loan on a new press he bought about the same time,” Pine informed them. “Nearly two million, I think.”

Buckman’s eyes glinted. “Marty Denis have that loan, too?”

“I’m pretty sure he does.”

The old banker smiled with satisfaction. “Duncan McEwan never learned his way around a balance sheet. Typical English major. Let’s get into it, Arthur, just in case.”

“Right.”

These guys, Paul thought bitterly. If they want to destroy somebody, they find a way to do it without even un-assing their chairs. An honest man doesn’t stand a chance. And Duncan McEwan, for all his faults, is an honest man.

“Long as we’re in here,” Beau Holland said, “what’s your wife up to lately, Paul? She still trying to put any of us in jail? Because I heard she drove to Jackson today to take a deposition in a bid-rigging case.”

Paul gave Holland a dark look. Had they been alone, Beau would never have dared speak to him that way.

“I asked you a question,” Holland pressed.

“He gave you the answer you deserved,” Max said, his eyes glinting with an odd light that had moved many a man back a step. “We don’t discuss wives and children in this room.”

“Maybe not,” Holland said. “But your daughter-in-law makes herself impossible to ignore, Max. And a lot of people around this table agree with me.”

There was some awkward shifting in the chairs, but nobody spoke in support of Holland. Paul was grateful for his father’s defense.

“I hear she works with McEwan on stories,” Beau went on. “Feeds his reporters information. And some of that stuff splashes on us.”

“Then get yourself a fucking raincoat,” Max said. “Bid-rigging sounds like your area. You feeling the heat, Beau?”

Holland’s eyes smoldered, but Buckman spoke up before he could shoot back at Max. “Max is right,” the banker said with an air of finality. “Wives and children are off-limits. Paul, I wonder if you’d mind excusing yourself now. We have a little housekeeping business to take care of before we adjourn.”

There were no groans at this announcement, Paul noticed. Everyone in the room was watching him again, and the air felt brittle with expectation.

“Sure,” he said. “No problem.”

He slid his chair back and got up, then walked to the door, his eyes on a photograph of stooped black figures chopping cotton in a field. I know how you feel, he thought. As he took the elevator down to the first floor and moved through the lobby, he came to a certainty about one thing: Somebody in that room killed Buck Ferris.

The only thing he wasn’t sure of was whether they’d done it on orders from the club. He thought about waiting for his father to come down, but then the others would see that he’d waited. If Max wanted to tell him anything, he would call.

Three minutes later, Paul’s cell phone rang as he pulled his F-250 into his spot down at the wood treatment plant.

“Hey, Pop,” he said. “How about Beau Holland, huh?”

“I’m gonna hammer a punji stick up his ass one day.”

“Beau might just like that.”

Max laughed heartily. “You know he would.”

A flatbed truck pulled through the gate stacked with bundles of green pressure-treated fence posts.

“What do you think about the Buck Ferris thing?”

“I think Holland killed him. Unless it was Russo. He’s got the history for it.”

“Did the club order that hit?” Paul asked tentatively.

“No. But I don’t think anybody’s upset about it. Buck was a real threat to the mill. You know that.”

“Problem is, killing him didn’t remove the threat. It magnified it. You guys better walk on eggshells for a while.”

“You mean ‘we,’ don’t you?”

“Yeah, sure. But I’m not a real member. And I don’t stand to make half as much off the ancillary deals as those assholes do.”

“You’ll be making plenty. And I’ll be making more. You need to keep that in mind if your buddy Goose makes himself a problem.”

Paul said nothing.

“You also need to make sure he doesn’t get too tight with Jet. The two of them together make a bad combination.”

Paul felt his face color. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Exactly what I said. Just make sure your wife doesn’t insert herself where she doesn’t belong. And vice versa.”

Max’s syntax was too tortured to try to unravel, but Paul got the point. “I’m losing you, Pop. You going by the field tonight?”

“Yeah. I know we have that party, but Kevin’s pitching good. I’ll make it to the Aurora in plenty of time to see the Killer.”

Paul got out and walked into his office, the conflicting odors of creosote and chromated copper arsenate following him through the door. As he nodded to the receptionist, he remembered seeing Marshall talking to Jet in the refreshment line down at the industrial park. When she’d lowered her sunglasses to look at Marshall, Paul had seen one thing with painful clarity: she was glowing. Given the complicated history they shared, it would be naïve to expect Jet and Marshall to avoid each other under the present circumstances. But it had been a long time since Jet had glowed like that when she looked at Paul. Years …

He thought about the last time he’d slept with her. Nearly a month ago now. He’d felt good going into it, and he’d taken a 50 mg Viagra to be sure he could finish her properly. But while Jet hadn’t put him off, she’d submitted to the act as though it were any other habitual duty. Again he saw her face tilt up to Marshall’s. Thirty years had fallen away from her in that moment. Hell, she even walked different when Marshall was around. A stab of pain hit Paul in the back of his neck, near the base of his skull. He reached into his top drawer and twisted the cap off a prescription bottle, then ground an Oxy between his back teeth before swallowing the fragments. I should’ve asked Dr. Lacey for another ’scrip at that meeting, he thought, shaking the bottle.

“Goddamn IEDs,” he muttered. “Sometimes I wonder if you haji bastards got me after all.”

CHAPTER 14

THE EIGHTEEN-MILE STRIP of asphalt known as the Little Trace began as a deer path in pre-Columbian times, was widened by Indians hunting the deer, then centuries later was taken over by whites traveling from Fort Bienville to the Natchez Trace, where it crossed the eastern edge of Tenisaw County. In those days outlaws would lie in wait along the trail, ready to ambush travelers unprepared to defend themselves with powder and shot. What irony that Buck, who chose to live along that historic route, would be murdered by modern outlaws exploiting that same weakness.

As I turn onto the Little Trace east of town, I wonder who might have staked out Buck’s house, waiting for his grieving widow to depart so that they could ransack the place. But before I’ve covered two miles, my thoughts return to Jet and her father, and to Paul Matheson, who is quite capable of killing me if he finds out I’m sleeping with his wife. To be clear, Paul isn’t simply capable of killing me; he’s been trained to do it. And unlike a lot of men with that training, Paul has used what he knows—just like his father did in Vietnam. I’ve seen him do it.

By the time Jet and I began our senior year, Paul had graduated from St. Mark’s and left for Ole Miss, and this opened the possibility of a new life to me. Thanks to Buck Ferris—and my failed suicide attempt—I had rejoined the world of the living by then. My home life sucked, but at least Dad had settled into a well-worn groove of pretending I was part of the furniture. My struggle with Adam’s death was something I pressed down deep in order to survive. The loss of Jet still stung, even after three years, but Paul leaving town had taken a weight from my shoulders.

During the previous year, my athletic pursuits had forced me into constant contact with him. We’d played football and basketball and even run track together, which meant that we’d spent hundreds of hours in each other’s company. We shared locker rooms, showers, bus rides, fast-food joints, team suppers, and crazy stunts in the dead of night. Despite the fact that he’d essentially taken Jet away from me, all this activity allowed our childhood friendship to reassert itself. We parted on good terms when he left for Oxford, but there was no denying the sense of relief I felt as he drove away from my house in the Corvette that had been his graduation present from Max.

To my surprise, when school started I found that I had become something of a star in my own right at St. Mark’s. In many ways, “Goose” McEwan seemed a character apart from me, but because he was accepted by all, life was easier when I pretended to be him. My grades had always been the best on the sports teams, and after Paul’s class graduated, I suddenly emerged as a replacement for my dead brother—or at least a reasonable facsimile of what everyone’s expectations for Adam had been. (To everyone except my father, of course.)

With Paul no longer around, Jet and I found ourselves thrown together almost every day. We were awkward around each other at first, but before long the feelings we’d shared during our magical summer returned, and nervousness blossomed into mutual attraction. In physics class one day an analogy hit me: Paul had stood between us like a lead shield separating radioactive masses. The moment he was withdrawn, Jet and I surged toward criticality.

Paul hadn’t broken up with her when he left for Ole Miss, as so many college-bound guys did when dating juniors. He’d promised he would come home every weekend, even though Ole Miss was four hours away. As it turned out, Paul didn’t return to Bienville for seven weeks, and that left Jet and me sufficient time to find each other again. We began in secret. That was when she told me that her father had originally been resettled in America by the CIA, for whom he had worked against Gamal Nasser, in Egypt. She also confided that a year earlier, Joe Talal had written a letter asking her to come to Jordan and live with his other family. This request had stunned Jet, and her mother had descended into depression, fearing that her daughter, too, would abandon her. As Jet and I grew closer, she gently probed me about Adam’s death. Soon we were comforting each other in places far removed from our classmates.

Then the rumors started finding their way back from Ole Miss. Since leaving Bienville, Paul had apparently been screwing every girl in Oxford willing to remove her sorority skirt, or even hike it up behind the frat house. At first Jet wrote these stories off as malicious gossip. Then she had a confrontation with a drunk girl who’d graduated from St. Mark’s three years earlier. The girl ended up yelling that she’d not only slept with Paul at Ole Miss, but had also had him the previous year, while Jet was going around on his arm like the queen of the city.

Two days later, Jet and I properly consummated our relationship. It was a bittersweet experience for me. I’d slept with three other girls by then, but Jet had learned a lot during her years with Paul. I couldn’t escape the feeling that he had explored and awakened parts of her that I had been meant to, and only because Jet’s father had abandoned her a month after our summer ended. Jet sensed a shadow between us, and eventually she asked me about it. This conversation finally exorcised Paul’s ghost for me—her assertion that I was not a substitute for Paul, but rather the reverse. He had been a replacement for me, during a time when she’d been too wounded to trust any emotion that made her feel vulnerable. She’d wrapped herself in a shiny new life with an extrovert jock, rather than a wounded, self-conscious introvert like me.

Paul finally came home in late October, and he expected Jet to pick right up with him. When she refused, he got angry for about five minutes. Then he found another girl and spent the night with her. Despite this public abdication of their role as the school’s golden couple, Jet and I kept our heads down. For a week we met out at the spring at Parnassus. With cars at our disposal, we could easily drive out there separately, then relive the afternoons of three years before, only with penetration added to the mix. But it was inevitable that someone would eventually see us behaving like lovers, and they did. When word reached Paul, he went crazy.

It turned out that Jet had shared many details of our first summer with him. Because he’d had far more sexual experience than Jet, she’d used her experiences with me to pay him back in kind for his too-vivid recounting of previous exploits. This left Paul feeling that no matter how many times he had sex with her, he would never elicit the purity or depth of response in her that I had.

I hoped he was right.

The night he heard about our new relationship, Paul demanded to meet me at the Bienville Country Club the next day. At four P.M. on a weekday—I still remember that. Through a mutual friend he had called me out, Old West style. The story spread like wildfire. The next day, he skipped class and drove four hours to kick my ass.

To my surprise, the country club was closed when I arrived, apparently for remodeling, but a line of cars was parked outside the entrance, a 1980s analog of the mob that watched the “chickie-run” in Rebel without a Cause. I hadn’t known the club was closed, because my family had never belonged to it. Dooley Matheson, Paul’s mean Jackson cousin, opened the locked gate for me, and I drove in to meet my destiny. The sky was overcast with steel-gray clouds. Paul stood out on the practice green, staring off toward the tree line, looking ten pounds heavier than when he’d left town.

We walked the first five holes in silence, not looking at each other except for sidelong glances, the way you look at other men in public restrooms. He stank of sweat and stale beer. I had an eerie feeling that he was measuring me for the first blow. In preparation for my senior football season, I’d put on a lot of muscle over the summer. Paul had been out of training for months, pounding bourbon and Cokes and chowing down with his frat buddies. I had never seen him show fear, and I didn’t that day. But he seemed to be wondering whether taking me on might prove more painful than he’d imagined after a few shots of whiskey at Ole Miss.

As dusk fell over the sixth fairway, he started talking. Not to me exactly, just venting. Strangely, he wasn’t talking about Jet. He was mumbling that college had turned out to be nothing like he’d imagined. It was basically an extension of high school, he said, and nobody he knew had any idea what they were going to do in the real world. A couple of St. Mark’s guys were on track to be doctors. Others claimed accounting was the quickest path to a Beemer and a Rolex and a McMansion in Dallas. None of that interested Paul. He’d been raised by a father who was larger than life—an athlete and war hero who could outrun, outplay, outshoot, outwork, outdrink, and outfuck (just ask him) any other man in whatever state he happened to be in at the time. In short, Max Matheson was a tough act to follow, and Paul didn’t seem to have any idea how to go about it.

At the ninth-hole tee, he stopped to piss out the beer he’d drunk during the drive down from Oxford. Then, as though taking out his dick had somehow broached the subject we were there to discuss, he said, “You love her, don’t you?”

When I didn’t answer, he said, “You’ve always loved her, man. Don’t try to deny it.”

“I didn’t deny anything,” I said, still tense with the expectation of violence.

He sniffed, then looked off in the direction of the river, which flowed a half mile to the west. “I know she’s pissed at me. I’ve banged a lot of chicks up there, you know that. But Jet’s nothing like them. Not even the hottest ones at Ole Miss. Or the smart ones. She’s … freaking perfect.”

“Perfect’s a pretty high bar,” I said, but I secretly believed the same thing.

“I used to think so,” he said. “But Jet clears it.”

He finally looked over at me, and when our eyes met, I saw a guy who was hurting at least as much as I had been for a long time. Why? I wondered. Surely not because of Jet. Maybe it’s something to do with his old man—

“The thing about Jet,” Paul said softly, “is that no matter what you do to her, or with her, she stays pure. You know? She’s above all that, somehow—even though she’s doing it, and into it. Right?”

I knew what he meant. He was trying to describe something rare back then, the utter absence of shame in Jet’s carnality. But I didn’t say so. My mind was running rampant. What did Jet think of him in bed, really? Had she been honest with me? Or had she, out of a desire not to hurt me, pretended that sex with Paul was nothing special? How far had she gone with him? What boundaries had they crossed together?

“If you think she’s so perfect,” I said evenly, “why do you sleep with half the girls at Ole Miss? Why waste your time?”

“Why do you think?” he asked, looking out toward the river again. “I’m stuck there with nothing else to do. You think I’m going to lie around the dorm studying? You know me better than that.”

In truth, I didn’t know why Paul had even bothered going to college. It was a foregone conclusion that he’d end up working for his father in the lumber business. I guess he’d expected Jet to put up with a few flings, then be waiting for him when he came home with a report card full of “incompletes,” ready to settle into the rut that had always been waiting for him. One thing I knew—Jet had no intention of marrying into that life.

“You’re boning her, aren’t you?” Paul said, and this time his voice had an edge to it.

I said nothing, but my nerves sang, and the muscles in my arms quivered in expectation of a fight.

“You know,” he went on, “I could tell you something that would hurt you. Hurt you bad.”

My eyes burned and watered, but I held my silence. I wasn’t going to take the bait. I feared what he might say too much.

Paul looked off to the west again. Against the clouds I saw the great electrical tower we had climbed two and a half years earlier, just before Adam drowned. The sight half made me want to fight Paul. Fight somebody, anyway. He saw the tower, too, and maybe the flash of rage in my eyes, because his next words were not what I’d expected.

“Everybody’s gonna ask what happened out here,” he said. “If I kicked your ass or what.”

I was surprised to discover that I didn’t care one way or the other. My fear had seeped out of me during the walk, or else the sight of the tower had driven it from me. “If you want to try,” I said, “let’s get it over with.”

“How about we don’t and say we did?” Paul suggested. “I need a fucking drink.”

The implications of his words washed over me like water in a heat wave. “What do we say out there?”

He shrugged. “Fought to a draw. Got tired of beating up on each other. No girl’s worth killing each other over. Not even Jet.”

I wasn’t sure of this. “No black eyes?”

Paul chuckled. “You want to pop each other once apiece? To sell the story?”

I thought about this. “Not really.”

“Fuck it,” he said. “Let’s get back to the cars. I’ve got an ice chest in my backseat.”

This bloodless accommodation couldn’t have been what he had in mind when he drove down from Oxford with his hands clenched on the wheel of his Corvette. But whatever rage he’d felt over Jet’s cleaving to me had subsided. Night was falling, and a cold wind blew off the river, making the long walk back to the clubhouse an unpleasant prospect. I asked Paul if he wanted to run it, but he just laughed. Three days later, he dropped out of college and joined the army. Everyone we knew was flabbergasted. When George H. W. Bush gave the go order for Desert Storm, Paul was sitting in Saudi Arabia, waiting for the balloon to go up.

The honk of a horn startles me out of my reverie.

I speed up and wave to the impatient driver behind me, surprised to find myself on the Little Trace and nearly to the turn for Buck’s house, which sits well back in the hardwood forest in rural Tenisaw County. I’ve driven out here so many times that I can do it on autopilot, even after an almost thirty-year gap.

The narrow gravel road arrows away from the black asphalt and runs through tall trees wearing the fresh pale green of spring. Back in those trees, Quinn Ferris sits in a house with a bed that will never again hold the weight of the man who built it. Handcrafted guitars hang on its walls—and a mandolin and a mandocello and two dulcimers—that will never have another note pulled from them by Buck’s gifted fingers. All because he threatened to slow down the gravy train of the bastards who run Bienville like their personal fiefdom. I dread facing Quinn in her grief and anger, but what choice do I have? If the Poker Club killed her husband, it’s because nobody ever planted themselves in their path and said, “This far, but no farther.” Am I that guy? My father never set himself against them. But if my brother had lived, he would have. If only for that reason, I realize, I must do it.

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