The road curved left. Elizabeth downshifted, then accelerated through the back of it.
“Eli was my friend. And they killed him for what he knew, not for being a thief or a killer, but for this thing that he alone could tell them. They came on a Sunday and took him. I didn’t see him for nine days after that, and when he did come back, it was only to die.” Adrian kept his eyes on the swamp, on stalking birds and black lilies. “They broke half the bones in his body, then brought him back thinking he’d tell me the secret he’d refused to tell them. I watched him drown in his own blood and held him as it happened. After that, I was next.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said; but he didn’t care for her pity.
“I wanted them to pay for what they did. I’ve had dreams of killing them.”
“But, you let Olivet live.”
“That was Eli, too. That mercy.”
“What about William Preston?”
Adrian looked at his swollen hands and nodded once. “I’m fine with that, too.”
He said nothing else for twenty minutes. He pointed left or right, and she made the turns as the road dwindled to broken pavement, then gravel and soft, black earth. Elizabeth wanted to know more, but was patient. Besides, broken as it was, the road into the swamp was his confessional, not hers.
“Do you know where we are?”
“Yes.”
She considered the unbroken forest. “There’re no signs or markers.”
“It took seven hours for Eli’s lungs to fill with the blood that drowned him. Every word was an agony for him. I couldn’t forget them if I tried. He wanted me to find this place.”
“Because…?”
“Slow down,” he said. “This is it.”
Elizabeth stopped in the center of the old road. They were thirty miles from the nearest town, deep in the woods that bled into the swamp. The place he meant was a gash in the trees beside a mound of tumbled stone and a fallen sign that was no more than a square of rusted iron. “Are you sure this is it?”
“It fits what he told me.”
Elizabeth didn’t like it. The track was overgrown, but not completely. At some point people used it. “What’s down there?”
“The reason for everything.”
Elizabeth didn’t like the answer, either. She looked up and down the empty road, then into the gloom beneath the trees, seeing shadows and vines and broadleaf plants the size of a child. The whole place felt bottomless and forgotten.
“You’re sure about this?” Adrian nodded so Elizabeth eased onto the track, scraping through the deepest ruts before the ground smoothed enough to go faster than a walk. “How far?”
“There’s an old mill and deep water. A mile or so, he told me. The road should end there.”
Elizabeth pushed in; trees closed above them. “This is where he lived?”
“Born here; lived here. His mother died in childbirth, and it was just him and his father. No electricity or plumbing. They didn’t even own a car.”
It took a long time to cover the mile. When the track broke from the trees, it bent to an abandoned mill that stood beside the rowed teeth of a rotted dock, and water that stretched off in the mist. The mill was ancient. The roof was gone, but bits of paddle wheel remained where a creek pooled behind an impoundment, then broke white over bits of stone. Elizabeth stopped next to the building; saw moss on the wall, and moisture dripping. Adrian got out of the car, and something splashed far out in the mist.
“He used to talk about his childhood here, about family and disappointment, the hard life of a shoeless boy.”
Elizabeth peered into the mill. The floors were rotted out, the walls bare stone. “How long ago are we talking about?”
“Eli was born in the shadow of the First World War, but never knew the actual date. The mill was closed when they lived here and had been since the 1800s. They were basically squatters: Eli’s father, his grandfather before that. They fished the swamp and hunted, poached cypress for the sawmills, grew some crops. There were other families around, but mostly on the low, small islands far out in the swamp.”
“What are we doing here, Adrian?”
But he would not be rushed. He touched the wall of the mill, took a dozen steps toward the rotted dock, and spoke with his hands pushed deep in his pockets. “You have to understand this was an old man talking, ninety or better and looking back on a hard life without phones or power or radio. He’d been decades in prison by the time we met, but could talk about this place like he’d seen it yesterday. He hated it here, you see: the heat and mosquitoes, the lonesomeness and mud and life on the water. He’d be the first to tell you he was young and arrogant and wanted better things. When he spoke of it, though, he was like a poet, the words rough and ready but just … perfect. He talked of black mud, and I could smell it. I knew what rattlesnake tasted like, having never tasted it. Same with the suckers and the gars, the catfish and the bullhead.”