Among those pages I found a crude map. Its dominant feature was a straight hatched line, apparently depicting a rail line. I could make out the west terminus as Everglades City, while the opposite end was scratched "Miami." Along the hatch marks, childlike drawings of tree palms were spaced at odd intervals, and at each of these was a cluster of faded X's. Two at one spot, three at another, six farther to the right toward Miami. The spots also bore numbers above the tree drawings, which I recognized as longitude and latitude indices. And beneath the X's were dollar amounts much like the prices marked in earlier pages. The left, and I assumed western group, where there were two X's, was marked "II-$600.00." The three X's were marked "III-$900.00." The eastern grouping was marked "IIII I-$1,800.00." I began to feel nauseated as I stared at the figures and went down on one knee, with the book still balanced on the other. Sweat was now running in rivulets down my back, and I pulled at the front of my shirt to tighten the fabric and soak up the moisture between my shoulder blades. I wiped at my eyes and carefully turned the page to the subsequent rows of the ledger. There, listed under the name "Noren," were the same figures, dated and grouped "ea./$300 +.15 ammunition." Gator hides, I knew, were going for $1.50 a foot in those days. John William was not killing alligators for three hundred dollars apiece. Even the most luscious and illegal flamingo plumes did not bring those kinds of prices.
I placed the book back in the crate, rewrapped the Winchester and tamped the panel back into place on the crate. I used the pry bar to reset the nails, and with the crate held tight against my chest, climbed back down the staircase and snapped the light off. The reverend Jefferson did not show himself again. He may have been in the house, having lunch with his wife. He may have been out in the back rows of his garden. He may have been somewhere quiet and cool where he went to pray alone.
I carried the crate to my truck and slid it into the space behind the seats on top of my bag. I climbed in, started the engine and kicked on the AC. The reverend's sedan and family van were still parked side by side, and I watched the front of the house as I backed away but saw no movement at the curtains or the door. As I drove away I kept my eyes on the rearview mirror until the dust billowed up and the house and the oaks disappeared.
When I got to Billy's it was late and the overnight desk manager looked long and hard at the crate under my arm as he passed me through.
"Good evening, Mr. Freeman," he said with his stiff British accent. "Mr. Manchester is still out for the evening."
I nodded and continued to the elevator.
"Do you require the freight elevator, sir?" he said, still looking with disdain at the wooden box, judging perhaps its rough corners and the damage they might do to the paneled walls.
"No. I'm fine," I said as the regular elevator doors slid open.
The apartment was lit, although the lamps and recessed spots were dimmed. Billy remembered well his days in a chopped-up tenement building in North Philly, where the lights would be shut down sometimes for days because of blown fuses or blown deadlines for making the payments. He never wanted to come home to a dark house again.
I laid the crate on the carpeted floor and went to the guest room and found a large bath towel in the bathroom linen closet. My own image in the mirror stopped me. The light blue oxford shirt I'd worn to church that morning was creased and rumpled, and so was the face above it. The skin was deeply tanned, left even darker by the unshaven stubble. The crow's-feet were pronounced and pouches of skin hung beneath my eyes, the exhaustion of hours on the road. I leaned in closer. I didn't have a mirror at the river shack and sometimes didn't look at myself for weeks at a time, and even then, not closely or seriously. The reverend's last words had followed me for the entire drive back, and I looked into the black irises of my eyes. Was my father in there? And if so, which one? The relentless cop who wouldn't let a child-killer go unpunished? Or an alcoholic racist who beat his wife? Or both? Or neither? "We leave more than DNA behind," the living William Jefferson had said. But how much more? The answers weren't in the mirror.
I took the towel with me out to the living room and spread it out on Billy's polished wood dining table, then carefully laid the crate on it. I used a screwdriver from the utility drawer to pry the top off and took out the ledger. Under better light I sat at the kitchen bar counter and studied the pages while sipping cold bottles of beer from the refrigerator. The man had been meticulous. If my interpretations were right, John William had recorded every dime he had paid out or taken in from the time he landed in Everglades City until 1962, when he'd blown his brains out in his barn one late summer night. The entries were filled with figures, dates, mileage, the running costs of supplies and their changes from year to year. But there was not a single sentence of opinion or emotion or aesthetic description in all the dry, yellowed pages.
It was past midnight when I gently closed the book and took a fresh beer out onto the patio. There was an uncharacteristic chill coming in on the northeast ocean wind. I could hear the surf chopping at the sand, and interrupted moonlight caught on the swells at sea far from the shore. Weather was kicking up. I took another long drink from the bottle and found it difficult to focus on the lights of a ship at sea. Then from behind me I heard my name being called.
"M-Max."
Billy was looking down into the crate when I came in through the sliding doors. Diane was at his side, barely a step behind. Billy was in a tuxedo and black tie, and looked every bit like a version of the most recent Academy Award winner. Diane was in a long gown, an expensive-looking lace shawl still around her shoulders. Billy looked up at me.
"M-Max. What the h-hell is this doing in my home?"
I hesitated only a second. My mind might have been muddled at the moment, but it was made up.
"That, my friend, may be the murder weapon used to kill our Mr. Cyrus Mayes and his family."
I drank coffee after that, standing next to the pot in the kitchen. Diane tasted a glass of chardonnay and Billy drank bottled water as they sat on stools on the other side of the counter going carefully over John William's ledger. Billy had pulled on a pair of thin latex gloves before handling the book and Diane only looked over his shoulder, letting him touch the pages.
I narrated the story of John William Jefferson as it was told to me. They listened, interrupting only for clarification, which lawyers do, and even that happened less and less as the coffee sobered me. When he got to the pages showing the diagram of the trail, Billy spent several minutes staring at the markers.
"Jesus, M-Max," he said.
Billy had come to the same assumption that I had: the possibility of grave markers. X's where bodies where buried or simply left some eighty years ago.
"Yeah. But not enough to get a warrant for all of PalmCo's records pertaining to their part in building the road, is it?"
The two attorneys did not look at each other but both were subtly shaking their heads.
"N-No names. No use of the word 'bodies.' No description of killing or the three hundred dollars b-being the rate for the d- disposal of a human being."
"Any attorney is going to argue that those entries could represent anything from rattlesnakes to bobcats," McIntyre said.
"We could use it as m-more ammunition to get PalmCo to consider a settlement, but that's n-not what Mayes wants. Or anyone else," Billy said, looking at me.
"We still need the bodies," I said.