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 doppelg?nger 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.”