“I’ve seen the cross. Seems like you decided to help the Lord along.”
“Jail is a dangerous place for a young man.”
“That’s why we got him out.”
“You should have left him there.”
“We couldn’t protect him there.”
“You can’t protect him anywhere.”
“So what do you suggest?”
“Give him to me.”
I kicked at a pebble on the ground and watched as it bounced into a puddle. I could see my reflection, already distorted by the rain, ripple even more, and for a moment I disappeared in the dark waters, fragments of myself carried away to its farthest edges.
“I think you know that’s not going to happen, but I’d like to know why you went to Richland. Did you go there specifically to contact Atys Jones?”
“I knew his momma, and his sister. Lived close by them, down by the Congaree.”
“They disappeared.”
“That’s right.”
“You know what might have happened to them?”
He didn’t reply. Instead, he released his grip on the cross and walked toward me. I didn’t step back. There was no threat to me from this man.
“You ask questions for a living, don’t you, suh?”
“I guess so.”
“What questions you been asking Mr. Elliot?”
I waited. There was something going on here that I didn’t understand, some gap in my knowledge that Tereus was trying to fill.
“What questions should I ask?”
“You should ask him what happened to that boy’s momma and aunt.”
“They disappeared. He showed me the cuttings.”
“Maybe.”
“You think they’re dead?”
“You got this the wrong way round, suh. Maybe they dead, but they ain’t disappeared.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Maybe they dead,” he repeated, “but they ain’t gone from Congaree.”
I shook my head. This was the second time in less than twenty-four hours that somebody had spoken to me of ghosts in the Congaree. But ghosts didn’t take rocks and use them to beat in the heads of young women. Around us, the rain had stopped and the air seemed cooler. To my left, I saw Handy Andy approaching from the road. He took one look at me, shrugged resignedly, then lit another cigarette and started back the way he had come.
“You know about the White Road, suh?”
Distracted momentarily by Andy, I now found Tereus almost face-to-face with me. I could smell cinnamon on his breath. Instinctively, I took a step back from him.
“No. What is it?”
He looked once again at his feet, and the marks on his ankles.
“On the fifth day,” he said, “after they tied me to the hitching post, I saw the White Road. The blacktop shimmered and then it was like somebody had turned the world inside out. Dark became light, black became white. And I saw the road before me, and the men working, breaking rocks, and the gunbulls spitting chewing tobacco on the dirt.”
He was talking now like an Old Testament preacher, his mind filled with the vision he had seen, near crazy beneath the burning sun, his body sagging against the wood, the ropes tearing into his skin.
“And I saw the others too. I saw figures moving between them, women and children, old and young, and men with nooses around their necks and gunshots to the body. I saw soldiers, and the night riders, and women in fine, fine dresses. I saw them all, suh, the living and the dead, side by side together on the White Road. We think they gone, but they waiting. They beside us all the time, and they don’t rest till justice come. That’s the White Road, suh. It’s the place where justice is made, where the living and the dead walk together.”
With that, he removed the tinted glasses that he wore, and I saw that his eyes had been altered, perhaps by their exposure to the sun, the bright blue of the pupils dulled, the irises overlaid with white, as if a spiderweb had been cast upon them.
“You don’t know it yet,” he whispered, “but you on the White Road now, and you best not step off it, because the things waiting in the woods, they worse than anything you can imagine.”
This wasn’t getting me anywhere-I wanted to know more about the Jones sisters, and about Tereus’s reasons for approaching Atys-but at least Tereus was talking.
“And did you see them too, the things in the woods?”
He seemed to consider me for a time. I thought he might be trying to figure out whether or not I was mocking him, but I was wrong.
“I saw them,” he said. “They was like black angels.”
He wouldn’t tell me anything more, at least nothing useful. He had known the Jones family, had watched the children grow up, watched as Addy was made pregnant at the age of sixteen by a drifter who was also screwing her mother, giving birth nine months later to a son, Atys. The drifter’s name was Davis Smoot. His friends called him “Boot” on account of the leather cowboy boots he liked to wear. But I knew this already, because Randy Burris had told me all about it, just as he had told me how Tereus had served nearly twenty years in Limestone for killing Davis Smoot in a bar in Gadsden.
Handy Andy was coming back, and this time he didn’t look like he was planning on taking another long walk. Tereus picked up his bucket and mop in preparation for a return to his labors.
“Why did you kill Davis Smoot, Tereus?”
I wondered if he was going to make some expression of regret, or tell me how he was no longer the man who had taken the life of another, but he made no attempt to explain away his crime as a mistake from his past.
“I asked him for his help. He turned me down. We got to arguing and he pulled a knife on me. Then I killed him.”
“What help did you ask from him?”
Tereus raised his hand, and shook it from side to side in the negative. “That’s between him and me and the good Lord. You ask Mr. Elliot, and maybe he’ll be able to tell you how come I was looking for old Boot.”
“Did you tell Atys that you were his father’s killer?”
He shook his head. “Now why would I do somethin’ dumb as that?”
With that, he replaced his glasses on the bridge of his nose, hiding those damaged eyes, and left me standing in the rain.
15
I CALLED ELLIOT from my hotel room later that afternoon. He sounded tired. He wasn’t going to get too much sympathy from me.
“Bad day at the office?”
“I got the justice blues. You?”
“Just a bad day.” I didn’t mention Tereus to Elliot, mainly because I hadn’t learned anything useful from him as yet, but I had checked two more of the witness statements after I left LapLand. One was a second cousin of Atys Jones, a God-fearing man who didn’t approve of the lifestyles of Atys or of his missing mother and aunt, but who liked to hang around dive bars to give himself something to get offended by. A neighbor told me he was most likely back at the Swamp Rat, and that was where I found him. He recalled Atys and Marianne Larousse leaving and was still at the bar, praying for all sinners over a double, when Atys reappeared with blood and dust on his face and hands.
The Swamp Rat stood at the end of Cedar Creek Road, close to the edge of the Congaree. It wasn’t much to look at, inside or out, an eyesore of cinder blocks and corrugated iron, but it had a good jukebox and was the kind of place that rich kids went when they wanted to flirt a little with danger. I walked through the trees surrounding it and found the small clearing where Marianne Larousse had died. There was still crime-scene tape dangling from the trees, but there was no other sign that she had lost her life here. I could hear Cedar Creek flowing close by. I followed it west for a time, then headed back north, hoping to intersect with the trail that led back to the bar. Instead, I found myself at a rusted fence, dotted at intervals with PRIVATE PROPERTY signs announcing that the land was owned by Larousse Mining Inc. Through the mesh I could see fallen trees, sunken ground, and patches of what looked like limestone. This section of the coastal plain was littered with limestone deposits; in places, the acidic groundwater had percolated through the limestone, reacting with it and dissolving it. The result was the kind of karst landscape visible through the mesh, riddled with sinkholes, small caves, and underground rivers.