I started to row again, drawing deep arcs through the water, the droplets falling back to the river in what seemed like impossibly languid descents, as if somehow I were slowing down the passage of time, drawing each moment out, longer and longer again, until at last the world would stop, the oars frozen at the moment they broke the water, the birds trapped in midflight, the insects caught like motes of dust in a picture frame, and we would never have to go forward again, we would never have to find ourselves by the lip of that dark pit, with its smells of engine oil and effluent, and the memory of the burning marked with black tongues along the grooves of its stone.
“There’s just two left,” said Tereus at one point. “Just two more, and it will all be over.”
And I could not tell if he was talking to himself, or to me, or to some unseen other. I looked to the bank and half-expected to see her shadowing our progress, a figure consumed by pain. Or to see her sister, her jaw hanging loose, her head ruined but her eyes wild and bright, burning with a rage fierce as the flames that had engulfed her sister.
But there was only tree shade and the darkening sky, and waters glittering with the fragmented ghosts of early moonlight.
“This is where we get off,” he whispered.
I steered the boat toward the left bank. When it struck land I heard a soft splash behind me and saw that Tereus was already out of the boat. He gestured for me to move toward the trees, and I began to walk. My trousers were wet and swamp water squelched in my shoes. I was covered in bites; my face felt swollen from them, and the exposed skin of my back and chest itched furiously.
“How do you know that they’ll be here?” I asked.
“Oh, they’ll be here,” he said. “I promised them the two things they wanted the most: the answer to who killed Marianne Larousse.”
“And?”
“And you, Mr. Parker. They’ve decided that you’ve outlived your usefulness. That Mr. Kittim, I reckon he’s gonna bury you.”
I knew that it was true, that the part Kittim was to play represented the last act in the drama they had planned. Elliot had brought me down here, ostensibly to find out about the circumstances of Marianne Larousse’s murder in an effort to clear Atys Jones, but in reality, and in collusion with Larousse, to find out if her murder was linked to what was happening to the six men who had raped the Jones sisters, then killed one of them and left the other to burn. Mobley had worked for Bowen and I guessed that at some point Bowen had learned through him of what he and the others had done, which gave him the leverage he required to use Elliot and probably Earl Jr. too. Elliot would draw me down, and Kittim would destroy me. If I discovered the truth about who was behind the killings before I died, then so much the better. If I didn’t, then I still wasn’t going to live long enough to collect my fee.
“But you’re not going to hand Melia over to them,” I said.
“No, I’m going to kill them.”
“Alone.”
His white teeth gleamed.
“No,” he said. “I told you. Not alone. Never alone.”
It was still as Poveda had described it after all these years. There was the broken fence that I had skirted days earlier and the pock-marked NO TRESPASSING sign. I could see the sinkholes, some of them small and masked by vegetation, others so large that whole trees had fallen into them. We had walked for about five minutes when I smelled an acrid chemical stink in the air that at first was merely unpleasant but, as we drew closer to the hole, began to scorch the nostrils and cause the eyes to water. Discarded trash lay unmoving upon the ground without a breeze to stir it, and the skeletons of decayed trees, their trunks gray and lifeless, stretched thin shadows across the limestone. The hole itself was about twenty feet in circumference, and so deep that its base was lost in darkness. Roots and grasses overhung the verge, trailing down into the shadows.
Two men stood at the far side of the hole, looking down into its depths. One was Earl Jr. The second man was Kittim. He was without his trademark shades now that it was growing dark and he was the first to sense our approach. His face remained blank even as we stood and faced them across the expanse of the pit, Kittim’s eyes briefly resting on me before he gave his full attention to Tereus.
“Do you recognize him?” he asked Earl Jr.
Earl Jr. shook his head. Kittim seemed dissatisfied with the answer, with the fact that he did not have the information he required to make an accurate assessment of the situation.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“My name is Tereus.”
“Did you kill Marianne Larousse?”
“No, I did not. I killed the others, and I watched Foster attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and feed it in through his window. But I didn’t kill the Larousse girl.”
“Then who did?”
She was nearby. I knew she was. I could feel her. It seemed to me that Larousse did too, because I watched his head flick back suddenly like a startled deer, his eyes roving across the trees, looking for the source of his unease.
“I asked you a question,” Kittim persisted. “Who killed her?”
Three armed men emerged from the trees at either side of us. Instantly Tereus dropped his gun to the ground and I knew that he had never planned to walk away from this.
Two of the men beside us I did not recognize.
The third was Elliot Norton.
“You don’t seem surprised to see me, Charlie,” he said.
“It takes a lot to surprise me, Elliot.”
“Even the return of an old friend from the dead?”
“I have a feeling you’ll be making a more permanent return in the near future.” I was too tired even to show my anger. “The blood in the car was a nice touch. How were you going to explain your resurrection? A miracle?”
“We were under threat from some crazy Negro, so I did what I had to do to hide myself. What are they going to charge me with? Wasting police time? False suicide?”
“You killed, Elliot. You led people to their deaths. You bailed Atys just so your friends could torture him and find out what he knew.”
He shrugged. “Your fault, Charlie. If you’d been better at your job and got him to tell all, he might still be alive.”
I winced. He’d struck close to the bone, but I wasn’t going to bear the responsibility for Atys Jones’s death alone.
“And the Singletons. What did you do, Elliot? Sit with them in the kitchen drinking their lemonade, waiting for your friends to come and kill them while the only person who could have protected them was in the shower? The old man said it was a changeling that attacked them, and the police thought that he was talking about Atys until he turned up tortured to death, but it was you. You were the changeling. Look at what they’ve reduced you to, Elliot, what you’ve reduced yourself to. Look at what you’ve become.”
Elliot shrugged. “I had no choice. Mobley told Bowen everything, once when he was drunk. Landron never admitted it, but it was him. So Bowen had something on all of us and he used it to make me bring you down here. But by then all of this”-he made an all-encompassing gesture with his free hand, taking in the hole, the swamp, dead men, and the memory of raped girls-“had started happening, so we used you. You’re good, Charlie, I’ll give you that. In a way, you’ve brought us all to this point. You should go to your grave a satisfied man.”
“Enough.” It was Kittim. “Make the Negro tell us what he knows and we can finish this for good.”
Elliot raised his gun, pointing it first at Tereus, then at me.
“You shouldn’t have come to the swamp alone, Charlie.”
I smiled at him.
“I didn’t.”
The bullet hit him on the bridge of the nose and knocked his head back so hard I could hear the vertebrae in his neck crack. The men at either side of him barely had a chance to react before they too fell. Larousse stood confused and then Kittim was raising his weapon and I felt Tereus push me to the ground. There were shots, and warm blood splashed my face. I looked up to catch the look of surprise in Tereus’s eyes before he tumbled into the pit and landed with a splash in the water far below.