We walk down to the bluff and stand looking at the muted sheen of the river in the darkness two hundred feet below. Then we check the doors and windows of Edelweiss, which Quentin Avery and his wife, Doris, will be moving into tomorrow for the duration of the trial. As we head home, I think about walking up State Street to take a look at the jail that tomorrow will become my father’s home until his case is judged. But in the end, I decide I don’t want that image in my mind while I try to fall asleep tonight.
We walk up Washington instead, and Tim smokes a cigar on the way. As we near the top of the incline where the public library, the Episcopal church, Temple B’nai Israel, and majestic Glen Auburn face one another from four corners, Tim stops to stub out his cigar. While I stand looking at the steps of the church, where I stood after graduating from high school, Tim looks back down the long grade we just walked.
“There’s that old man again,” he says. “Walking his dog.”
I peer down through the sporadically lit darkness until I see man and beast slowly cross Washington on Wall Street. “Looks like the dog is walking the man.”
“I just realized something,” Tim says. “Those Double Eagles are all old guys. Maybe we need to have a word with our dog lover down there.”
“Next time,” I tell him, sweating under my bulletproof vest. “I’m ready to hit the rack.”
“Okay,” he says after a few seconds. “Tomorrow.”
Sunday
Chapter 17
Serenity and I got up early to make the drive to Athens Point. We don’t have all day to spend following this lead. According to John Kaiser’s latest call, my father is scheduled to depart the Pollock FCI for the Adams County jail at two p.m. He’ll be transferred in an FBI vehicle, which should put him at the sheriff’s office for the handover and processing at about three. Mom will be following in her own car, with an FBI vehicle bringing up the rear. I plan to be back to Natchez to get Mom settled in at my house.
Serenity has said nothing about her late activities last night, and I haven’t asked. Our breakfast conversation consisted of arguing with Tim Weathers until he agreed to let us make this trip without bodyguards. Tim didn’t like it, but Serenity forcefully persuaded him that she could not only spot a tail from a mile away, but kill any civilian foolish enough to try to ambush us on the road or in Athens Point.
South of Woodville, we turn east off Highway 61 and head toward the Mississippi River, devouring the bends of the serpentine road that leads to the old logging town. I drove these curves back in December, and at a much higher speed, while searching for Caitlin. Not far to the east lies Valhalla, where I killed Forrest Knox, but I don’t mention that to Serenity. The swamp where Caitlin died lies to the south, in the lowland between the green hills and the river, and I can feel it pulling me, like some low-frequency magnetic field that tugs at flesh and bone.
“This is pulpwood country,” Serenity says in a hushed voice. “I feel it. A lot of shortwood came out of these forests. A lot of men lost fingers and hands up in here, or had their legs and backs broken.”
“They still do a lot of logging down here.”
She cuts her eyes at me. “I thought you read my book. Pulpwooding’s not logging. It’s nigger logging.”
I look sharply over at her, but she’s staring out the window at the virginal green of early spring. Pine and hardwood trees cover the hills from here to the Mississippi River, and most observers would think the sight beautiful. But Serenity Butler sees only suffering in those trees.
“You saw the Bone Tree, right?” she asks, still looking out the window. “When you found Caitlin and your father there?”
Her forwardness in asking about the place my fiancée was murdered surprises me, but it’s also refreshing. Serenity simply doesn’t worry about things like propriety.
“Yeah,” I say quietly, recalling the shock of leaping out of the helicopter into the swamp, fighting my way toward Caitlin’s bloody body. “I saw it.”
“Keisha told me they burned it.”
“Only partially.”
“I’d like to see what’s left someday.”
“Why?”
She raises a finger and taps the window beside her cheek. “Do you think some places are inherently evil?”
I want to answer no, but in truth I’m not sure. “Do you?”
She tilts her head, watching the forest rush past, then begins to speak softly. “I’ve stood on the sites of massacres. I’ve pulled my boots out of the sand in a mass grave. And I felt strange things there. But I think that feeling of wrongness came from inside me. From my knowledge of what had been done there. The land has nothing to do with it. The buildings, either. Nuns and children have been slaughtered in churches, schools, fields of flowers. It sucks, but that’s the human species.”
“I agree in principle. But the Bone Tree . . . people have done murder beneath it for centuries. Rape and torture, too. Why?”
She shrugs. “It’s isolated. Ancient. Different. Humans have always attached a totemic significance to that kind of thing. But in the end, it’s just an old tree. Right?”
“Kaiser isn’t sure the Bureau ever found all the bones in the mud beneath it. And Reverend Sims told Carl that Mrs. Cleotha Booker knew the worst story in the world. Maybe we should ask her about that tree.”
“If she’s really the one. And if she doesn’t have Alzheimer’s or something.”
“To tell you the truth,” I say bitterly, “if I went back to that tree, I’d dump five gallons of high-octane gas over it and burn what’s left down to the ground. Like St. Boniface felling Thor’s oak.”
Serenity finally turns from the window and gives me a long look, as though she wants to ask me another, more personal question. But in the end she looks through the windshield and watches the blacktop being swallowed by the car.
We find the house Carl Sims described without too much trouble. It’s more shack than house, really, standing alone at the end of a dirt road, just as Carl’s father, Reverend Sims, said it would. The road itself doesn’t register on my GPS unit, but it’s there nonetheless. Mrs. Booker’s home leans like a listing ship or a house drawn in a Dr. Seuss book, but no canted house in Whoville ever looked so poor. I can see cracks between the unpainted barn boards of the front exterior wall, and the patched tin roof has been dented by a hundred fallen limbs. Behind the dwelling lies a junk-filled gully spiked with trees being slowly strangled by kudzu.
The raised porch is the kind that often shelters a mean dog who will attack anyone who approaches, but no animal emerges as Serenity and I walk up the steps. No one answers our knock. Then a curtain flutters in the window to our right, and a gray cat leaps onto the sill and regards us with intense curiosity.
“What do you think?” I ask. “Does this look like the place where you hear the worst story in the world?”
“Maybe.”
“Do you think there’s anyone inside?”
Serenity nods. “She’s in there.”
I hear a strange clump and shuffle that reminds me of someone walking on crutches, or on a walker with tennis balls on its feet. Then the door opens, and I see what looks like the oldest woman in Mississippi standing before us, gripping a dented aluminum walker. Sure enough, the ends of its four legs have been jammed into slits in faded green tennis balls. The old woman blinks at the daylight with yellowed eyes set in a head that trembles constantly on her neck.