The White Road

10


N OW AT LAST , in the quiet of my hotel room, I opened the file on Marianne Larousse. The darkness around me was less an absence of light than a felt presence: shadows with substance. I lit the table lamp and spread across the desk the material that Elliot had given to me. And as soon as I saw the photos I had to look away, for I felt the weight of her loss upon me, though I had not known her and would never know her now. I walked to the door and tried to banish the shadows by flooding the room with brightness, but instead they merely retreated to the spaces beneath the tables and behind the closet, waiting for the inevitable passing of the light. And it seemed to me that my being somehow separated, that I was both here in this hotel room, with the evidence of Marianne Larousse’s violent wrenching from this world, and back in the stillness of the Blythes’ living room, watching Bear’s mouth move to form well-meant lies, Sundquist like a ventriloquist beside him, manipulating, poisoning the atmosphere in the room with greed and malice and false hope while Cassie’s eyes stared out at me from a graduation photograph, that uncertain smile hovering about her mouth like a bird unsure of the safety of alighting. I found myself trying to imagine her alive now, living a new life far from home, secure in the knowledge that her decision to abandon her former existence was the right one to make. But I was unable to do so, for when I tried to picture her there was only a shadow without a face and a hand adorned with parallel wounds.

Cassie Blythe was not alive. Everything I had learned about her told me that she was not the kind of young woman to drift away and condemn her parents to a lifetime of hurt and doubt. Someone had torn her from this world, and I did not know if I could find that person and, through that discovery, reveal at last the truth behind her disappearance.

I knew then that Irving Blythe was right, that what he had said about me was true: to invite me into their lives was to admit failure and allow death its provenance, for I was the one who arrived when all hope was gone, offering nothing but the possibility of a resolution that would bring with it more grief and pain and a knowledge that perhaps would make ignorance appear like a blessing. The only consolation in all that would occur was that some small measure of justice might begin to accrue from my involvement, that lives might continue with some small degree of certainty restored: the certainty that the physical pain of a loved one was at an end, and that somebody cared enough to try to discover why that pain had been visited on them at all. When I was a younger man, I became a policeman. I joined the force because I felt that it was incumbent upon me to do so. My father had been a policeman, as had my grandfather, but my father had ended his career and his life in ignominy and despair. He took two lives before taking his own, for reasons that perhaps will never be known, and I, being young, felt the need to take his burdens upon myself and to try to make up for what he had done. But I was not a good policeman. I did not have the temperament, or the discipline. True, I had other talents—a tenacity, a need to discover and understand—but those were not enough to enable me to survive in that environment. I lacked also one other crucial element: distance. I did not have the defense mechanisms in place that enabled my peers to look upon a dead body and see it only as that: not a human being, not a person, but the absence of being, the negation of life. On a superficial but ultimately necessary level, a process of dehumanization needs to occur for the police to do their job. Its hallmarks are mortuary humor and apparent detachment, enabling them to refer to a found corpse as a “body dump” or “trash” (except in the case of a fallen comrade, for that is so close to home as to make distance impossible), to examine wounds and mutilation without descending, weeping, into a void that makes life and death impossible to bear. Their duty is to the living, to those left behind, and to the law. I did not have that. I have never had that. Instead, I have learned to embrace the dead and they, in their turn, have found a way to reach out to me. Now, in this hotel room, far from home, faced with the death of another young woman, Cassie Blythe’s disappearance troubled me once more. I was tempted to call the Blythes, but what would I have said? Down here I could do nothing for them, and the fact that I was thinking about their daughter would provide cold comfort for them. I wanted to be finished in South Carolina, to check the witness statements and assure myself of Atys Jones’s safety, however tentative it might be, then return home. I could do no more than that for Elliot.

But now Marianne Larousse’s body was beckoning me with a strange intimacy, demanding that I bear witness, that I understand the nature of that with which I was involving myself, and the possible consequences of my intervention.

I did not want to look. I was tired of looking.

Yet I looked.



The sorrow of it; the terrible, crushing sorrow of it.

It is the photographs that do it, sometimes. You never truly forget. They stay with you always. You turn a corner, drive past a boarded-up storefront, maybe a garden that’s become overgrown with weeds, the house behind it rotting like a bad tooth because nobody wants to live there, because the stink of death is still in the house, because the landlord got some immigrant laborers and paid them fifty dollars each to hose it down and they used whatever piss-poor materials they had on hand: lousy disinfectants and dirty mops that spread rather than eradicated the stench, that turned the logic of bloodstains into a chaotic smear of half-remembered violence, a swath of darkness across the white walls. Then they painted it with cheap, watery paints, running the rollers over the tainted parts two or three times more than the rest, but when the paint dried it was still there: a bloody hand that had wiped itself through the whites and creams and yellows and left the memory of its passing ingrained in the wood and plaster. So the landlord locks the door, bars the windows, and waits until people forget or until someone too desperate or dumb to care agrees to pay a cut-rate rent and he accepts it, if only to try to erase the memory of what has taken place there with the problems and worries of a new family, a kind of psychic cleansing that might succeed where the immigrants have failed. You could go inside, if you chose. You could show your badge and explain that this was routine, that old unsolved cases are rechecked after a few years have passed in the hope that the passage of time might have revealed some previously undiscovered detail. But you don’t need to go inside, because you were there on the night that they found her. You saw what was left of her on the kitchen floor, or in the garden among the shrubs, or draped across the bed. You saw how, with the last breath of air that left her body, something else had passed away too, the thing that gave her substance, a kind of inner framework wrenched somehow through her body without damaging the skin, so that now she has crumpled and faded even as she has swollen, the woman both expanding and contracting as you watch, marks already appearing on her skin where the insects have begun to feed, because the insects always get there before you do. And then maybe you have to find a photo. Sometimes, the husband or the mother, the father or the lover, will hunt it down for you, and you’re watching as their hands move across the pages of the album, through the shoe box or the purse, and you’re thinking: did they do this thing? Did they reduce this person to what I’m seeing now? Or maybe you know that they did it—you can’t tell how, exactly, but you just know—and this touching of the relics of a lost life seems somehow like a second violation, one that you should stop with a sweep of your hand because you failed once and now, now you have the chance to make up for that failure. But you don’t do it, not then. You wait, and you hope that with the waiting will come the proof or the confession, and the first steps can be taken toward restoring a moral order, a balance between the needs of the living and the demands of the dead. But still, those images will come back to you later, unbidden, and if you’re with someone whom you trust, you may say: “I remember. I remember what happened. I was there. I was a witness and, later, I tried to become more than that. I tried to achieve a measure of justice.”

And if you succeeded, if punishment was meted out and the file marked accordingly, you may feel a twinge of—not pleasure, not that, but of…peace? Relief? Maybe what you feel doesn’t have a name, shouldn’t have a name. Maybe it is only the silence of your conscience, because this time it isn’t screaming out a name in your head and you won’t have to go back and pull the file to remind yourself again of that suffering, that death, and your failure to maintain the balance that is required if life and time are not to cease forever.

Case closed: isn’t that the phrase? It’s been so long, it seems, since you’ve had call to use it, to taste the falsity of the words even as they are forming on your tongue and passing through your lips. Case closed. Except it isn’t closed, for the absence continues to be felt in the lives of those left behind, in the hundred thousand tiny adjustments required to account for that absence, for the life, acknowledged or unacknowledged, that should be impacting on other lives. Irv Blythe, for all his faults, understood that. There is no closure. There are only lives continued or lives ended, with attendant consequences in each case. At least the living are no longer your concern. It is the dead that stay with you.

And maybe you spread the photos and think: I remember.

I remember you.

I have not forgotten.

You will not be forgotten.

She was lying on her back on a bed of crushed spider lilies, the dying white blooms of the plants like starburst flaws upon the print, as if the negative itself had been sullied by its exposure to this act. Marianne Larousse’s skull had suffered massive damage. Her scalp had been lacerated in two places at either side of her central parting, hairs and fibrous strands crossing in the wounds. A third blow had broken through the right side of her cranium, and the autopsy had revealed fracture lines extending through the base of the skull and the upper edge of the left eye socket. Her face was completely red with blood, for the scalp is very vascular and bleeds profusely after damage, and her nose had been broken. Her eyes were tightly closed and her features contorted, wincing against the force of the blows.

I flipped forward to the autopsy report. There were no bite marks, bruises or abrasions to Marianne Larousse’s body consistent with sexual assault, but foreign hairs recovered from the victim’s pubic hair were found to have come from Atys Jones. There was redness around Marianne’s genitals—a result of recent sexual contact—but no internal or external bruising or laceration, although traces of lubricant were found in the vaginal canal. There was semen from Jones in her pubic hair, but no semen found inside her. Jones told the investigators, just as Elliot had told me, that they regularly used condoms during intercourse. Tests showed fibers matching Marianne Larousse’s clothes on Atys Jones’s sweater and jeans, while acrylic fibers from his car seat were found in turn on her blouse and skirt, along with cotton fibers from his clothing. According to the analysis, the chance that the fibers had a different origin was remote. Over twenty matches had been found in each case. Five or six would usually be enough for relative certainty.

The evidence still didn’t convince me that Marianne Larousse had been raped before she died, but then I wasn’t the one that the prosecutors would be trying to convince. Her blood alcohol levels were above normal, so a good prosecutor could argue that she was probably not in a position to fend off a strong young man like Atys Jones. In addition, Jones had used a condom and lubricant, and the lubricant would have reduced the level of physical damage to his victim. What could not be denied was that Marianne Larousse’s blood had been found on Jones’s face and hands when he entered the bar to call for help, and that mixed in with it were found dust fragments from the rock used to kill her. The bloodstain analysis of the area around Marianne Larousse’s body revealed medium-velocity impact splatter, the blood droplets radially distributed away from the impact site both above and beyond her head and to one side where the final, fatal blow was delivered. Her assailant would have received blood splatter to the lower legs, the hands, and possibly the face and upper body. There was no apparent blood splatter on Jones’s legs (although his jeans had been soaked through from kneeling in Marianne Larousse’s blood, so the splatter could well have been absorbed or obscured) and the blood on his face and hands had been wiped too much to reveal traces of any original splatter pattern. According to Jones’s statement, he and Marianne Larousse had met that night at nine o’clock. She had already been drinking with friends in Columbia, then had driven to the Swamp Rat to join him. Witnesses saw them talking together, then they left side-by-side. One witness, a barfly named JD Herrin, admitted to police that he had hurled racial epithets at Jones shortly before the two young people left the bar. He timed his abuse at about ten after eleven. Jones told police that he then proceeded to have sexual intercourse with Marianne Larousse in the passenger seat of his car, she on top, he seated beneath her. After intercourse, an argument had commenced, caused in part by a discussion of JD Herrin’s abuse and centering on whether or not Marianne Larousse was ashamed to be with him. Marianne had stormed off, but instead of taking her car she had run into the woods. Jones claimed that she started to laugh and called for him to follow her to the creek, but he was too angry with her to do so. Only after ten minutes had passed and she had failed to return did Jones follow her. He found her about one hundred feet down the trail. She was already dead. He claimed to have heard nothing in the intervening period: no screams, no sounds of struggle. He didn’t remember touching her body, but figured that he must have since he got blood on his hands. He also admitted that he must have handled the rock, which he later recalled as lying against the side of her head. He then went back to the bar and the police were called. He was interviewed by agents from SLED, the State Law Enforcement Division, initially without the benefit of a lawyer since he had not been arrested or charged with any crime. After the interview, he was arrested on suspicion of the murder of Marianne Larousse. He was given a court-appointed lawyer, who later stepped aside in favor of Elliot Norton.

And that was where I came in.

I ran my fingers gently across her face, the indentations in the photographic paper like the pores on her skin. I’m sorry, I thought. I didn’t know you. I have no way of telling if you were a good person or a bad one. If I had met you, encountered you in a bar or sat beside you in a coffee shop, would we have got on together, even if only in that small, passing way in which two lives may briefly interlock before continuing, somehow both altered yet unchanged, on their own paths, one of those small, flickering moments of contact between strangers that make this life liveable? I suspect not. We were, I think, very different. But you did not deserve to end your life in this way and, if I could, I would have intervened to stop what occurred, even at the risk of my own life, because I could not have stood by and allowed even you, a stranger, to suffer. Now I will try to retrace your steps, to understand what led you to this place, to rest at last among crushed lilies, the night insects drowning in your blood.

I’m sorry that I have to do this thing. People will be hurt by my intervention, and elements of your past may be revealed that you might have wished to remain undisclosed. All I can promise you is that whoever did this will not walk away and will not be allowed to go unpunished because of any action that I may take.

In all of this, I will remember you.

In all of this, you will not be forgotten.