Cemetery Road

“Eighty-two.” Nadine has gotten that glint in her eye. “But the Killer still brings it.”

“They said Trump was coming to the groundbreaking ceremony, too, but all we get is the secretary of commerce.”

“I’ve got faith in Jerry Lee.”

“That’d be something to see, all right. But I’m not invited.”

Nadine looks genuinely surprised. “But the Mathesons are co-hosting. Surely Jet or Paul—”

“I’m persona non grata since writing that piece about Buck’s discovery.”

Nadine stops at the door and turns to me with her mischievous smile. “Well, I’m invited. Why don’t you be my plus-one?”

I start to decline, but this is Nadine. And the party would be a damn good opportunity to study a lot of people who are profiting off the paper mill deal. “Can I get back to you in a bit?”

She shrugs. “Open invitation.”

“I’m a little confused,” I say, unable to resist needling her. “I heard you were gay.”

She laughs out loud. “Come to the party with me, and we’ll kill that rumor for good. People will have us engaged by morning.”

As I open the door, her smile fades, and she follows me outside.

“Take a hard look at the Poker Club at the groundbreaking,” she says. “They’re bastards to a man. They’ve ruled this town for a hundred and fifty-three years, and not one of them would lose a minute’s sleep over killing Buck.”

“I actually hope that’s not true.”

She points at a display of mysteries and thrillers in her front window. “Despite my trade, the truth is there’s not much mystery to real-life murders. Cui bono, honey. That’s the only question that matters. I’d bet my store that one of those Poker Club assholes killed Buck. But don’t kid yourself about what it would mean to take them on. They’d kill you, too. Wouldn’t hesitate. Keep that in mind during your editorial meetings.”

With that, Nadine goes inside and closes her door, leaving me to walk away with the muted ring of her bell in my ears.

CHAPTER 9 (#ulink_7e280c5a-b55a-5e8c-9b67-795895b4cdbc)

THE RIDE FROM Nadine’s to the paper mill site takes ten to fifteen minutes. The land called the “industrial park” sits below the bluff south of town, where four or five large factories and a few smaller ones operated from the 1940s through the 1980s and ’90s, before going through down cycles, changes of ownership by second- and third-tier companies, and finally the sheriff chaining the gates shut. It’s the same story all over the South—all over America, really.

I drive along the bluff most of the way, thinking about Buck and who might have killed him. Both his widow and Nadine believe the Bienville Poker Club must be behind the crime. I don’t disagree in principle, but I’ve yet to see any evidence. Before I forget, I text Ben Tate, my editor at the Watchman, and ask him to find out who employed the security guards who started covering the industrial park after we published our story on Buck and whether any were on duty last night.

Again the river dominates my view for most of the route, this time on my right, as I drive south along the bluff, which is mostly covered with kudzu here. Searching the Sirius channels for some of the music Buck and I used to play together, I realize I’m thinking about my son, whom Nadine mentioned back in her bookshop. He was in my mind earlier, at the cemetery wall, just below the dark drama of Adam and my father. My talk with Nadine dispelled the clouds of sediment that memory raised, and during the drive along the bluff my little boy rises from the deep darkness.

I got married fourteen years ago, to a colleague in Washington. Her name is Molly McGeary, and quite a few TV viewers still remember her. After starting as a reporter at the Washington Times, Molly became one of the first print journalists to make the jump to television. First she moved to USA Today as a political reporter. Then a producer at NBC happened to catch her on a panel at a conference in New York, and she was off. In no time she was making appearances on the Today show, covering Washington stories and the business side of the entertainment sector.

At the time I married Molly, I believed I loved her. But looking back later, I realized I was in that situation where everyone you know—lifelong friends, colleagues, old classmates—has already been married for years and is having children, some their second or third child. Faced with this, you start wondering if you were put on earth merely to work and have a succession of sexual relationships that ultimately go nowhere. That kind of anxiety skews your objectivity, makes you persuade yourself that you’re feeling things you’re really not. You believe you ought to be feeling those things, so eventually—with the help of your parents, your cajoling friends, and a romantic co-conspirator—you do. That was my state of mind before I went to Iraq. By the time I got back, I knew that life could be snatched away at any moment, and the only sensible thing to do was get married and start procreating.

Molly and I were still in the glow of infatuation when we walked down the aisle. The first year was a good one. But after she got pregnant—a planned decision—the reality of having a child started to come home to us, and particularly to her. To my consternation, as the fetus grew inside her, and she ballooned up in the later months, she began to feel that our baby was a parasitical being, sapping the life from her, changing her irrevocably. At first I thought Molly was only half-serious. And surely, I reasoned, such feelings must be common among professional women? They would inevitably pass. But within two weeks of delivering Adam (yes, I named my son after my dead brother), I witnessed something I had never quite understood before: postpartum depression.

With the clarity of hindsight, I now believe Molly never recovered from that condition—not while we were together. We consulted a parade of medical experts, tried several promising therapies, and went to great lengths to get first-class child care so that Molly could return to her career. Nothing worked. Two years passed like that—a mostly wonderful time for Adam and me, but for Molly a sort of shadow play that never quite became real. She stayed emotionally muted, exhausted, and irritable when she did feel alert. She resented the demands of motherhood, but also the demands of her job. And then—just as I was considering a radical job change to try to improve the situation—I discovered that death had been hovering over us once more, just as it had when I was fourteen.

In late August, I was working in the main offices of the Post, on Fifteenth and L, where Woodward and Bernstein did the work that made me want to follow in their footsteps. I was supposed to be home by six thirty, to take over caring for Adam so that Molly could attend a network event. Then I got a call from CNN. Could I run over to their studio and appear on Lou Dobbs Tonight to discuss President Bush signing the bailout bill, and the suspension of trading on both Russian stock exchanges? This was before the era of ubiquitous pundits on television every night, so it was something I felt I should do. Molly agreed, though she let me know she wasn’t happy about giving up her evening to babysit our two-year-old.

I was in the midst of the interview when my cell phone vibrated an emergency code in my pocket. By the time I got off camera and checked it, the emergency was over. Molly had taken Adam to a friend’s condo about fifty yards up the street from ours. She and Taryn Waller had started drinking wine and commiserating over their husbands’ unreasonable work hours, while Adam—comatose after an ice cream cone—slept in the TV room down the hall. Taryn was pouring their fourth glass of wine when Molly realized she hadn’t checked on Adam in a while. When she went to the TV room, she didn’t see him.

They found him behind the condo, at the bottom of the Wallers’ swimming pool. While Molly and Taryn were talking, our son had awakened and somehow crawled through a homemade pet entrance set in the Wallers’ back door. He wandered onto the patio, where there was no pool fence or motion alarm. The police report said it appeared that Adam had simply walked off the edge of the swimming pool into six feet of water. He never made a sound. None that Molly heard, anyway.

Our marriage did not survive his loss.

You hear all the time how the death of a child always leads to divorce. In truth, most times it doesn’t. Sometimes that kind of tragedy strengthens a marriage. I can see how it would happen, if you were married to the right person. I wasn’t. For four years I had tried to convince myself that I was, but the fissure that opened in our relationship after Adam died proved me wrong. I tried not to blame Molly. Whether I was successful in that effort or not, she believed that I blamed her, and that—combined with her own sense of guilt—had a corrosive effect on both our marriage and her mental state.

For me, the irony was nearly fatal. Twenty-one years after my brother drowned in the Mississippi River, I had to endure my son drowning in six feet of water. Worse, I—who had been blamed by my father for my brother’s death—was now in the position of persecutor. How could she have left him unattended for more than an hour? I wondered. A two-year-old! How could she not have heard him when he woke up? Surely Adam had made some sound, called out for me or his mother, as was his habit. Especially after waking in an unfamiliar room. Or finding himself alone on a dark patio. I asked myself these questions thousands of times. And then, when I could stand it no more, I asked her. Molly hit back with the obvious: if I hadn’t forced her to cancel her plans so that I could race over and appear on CNN, Adam would still be alive.

This was unquestionably true. But accepting it did nothing to alleviate our suffering. I’ll omit the awful, protracted descent into hell that followed this exchange. Suffice to say that by the time we divorced eleven months later, we were both emotionally scarred, and Molly had lost her job. I was nearly fired myself, and were it not for the benevolence of a sympathetic friend in management, I would have been out. Instead, they kept me on, and I slowly worked my way back to some semblance of normalcy, often taking risky assignments as a way of penetrating the emotional damper that grief wraps around us.

But it was the advent of the Trump circus in 2015 that not only resurrected my career, but lifted it to new heights. I became a regular on MSNBC and an occasional guest on CNN. This spurred me into a kind of mental overdrive. Using my most closely held sources in Washington and New York, I began researching Donald Trump’s financial ties to Russian oligarchs. At the same time, I started writing a book about how the Trump phenomenon had exposed the grim truth that the sins for which the South had always been excoriated—racism, tribalism, and xenophobia—were deeply embedded in the white body politic across the United States. I was halfway through my first draft when I discovered how ill my father truly was and decided to come home. The Trump-Russia story I had to leave to others. And I was less than fours hours south of Washington when I realized that all that work I had been doing—maintaining a pace that had shocked even my most intense colleagues—had but one purpose: to shield me from the pain of losing my little boy.

Nadine knows about Adam’s death. The facts, anyway, and what it did to my marriage. She understands that I’ve never fully dealt with his loss, any more than I’ve dealt with my brother’s. As regards healthy grieving, I’ve been stuck in a state of arrested anger for decades. The death of my son piled onto the death of my brother gave me a psychological burden—or perhaps a soul burden—that requires much of my fortitude to carry through each day. “My two Adams,” I sometimes call them. I’ve had countless nightmares about both tragedies, my brother’s more than my son’s, which may seem odd. But recently, it’s my little boy I see in the long watches of my restless nights.

I see him awakening confused, even scared, calling out for me or his mother, then getting to his feet and searching the darkened condo for us, his arms stretched out before him. Drawn by the light of the little plastic trapdoor, he somehow uses his ingenuity to get it open and then crawl through, after which he scrambles to his feet and wanders out to the undulating bright blue surface of the swimming pool. Perhaps Adam sees himself reflected in the water. Perhaps he leans over to see better, looks into his own eyes … and then tips over.

That dream is worse than the one in which I’m pursued by savage soldiers with guns and knives who want to hurt me so badly that I consider suicide rather than capture. I have lived through that situation in the real world. It pales next to the image of my son sinking through cerulean water with no comprehension of what’s happening to him. Did he surface? I’ve wondered a million times. Did he flail his little arms? Did he scream for help, sucking in chlorine? Or did he die in silence at the cold, airless bottom?

I’ve never asked an expert that question. I didn’t even google it. In the last analysis, I probably don’t really want to know. But maybe I’ll meet an expert someday. Maybe I’ll find the courage to ask. Because however hesitant I might be to face reality, I’m a human being, and that’s something we have to know sooner or later. Did our loved one suffer? And if so … how badly?

It took a long time for me to start seeing women after that. Eventually I did. The first couple of tries didn’t go very well. I found it difficult to be at ease with a woman once other people were removed from the equation. Then I met Eleanor Attie, a producer at one of the cable networks. Eleanor sensed that I carried some deep pain, but she never pushed me about it, and that made intimacy possible. We’d been dating for about four months when I realized I needed to return to Bienville. We kept in close touch at first, but after three weeks or so, our calls started getting further apart and our emails less frequent—weekly, almost perfunctory things. When you leave the small, hyperconnected family that is the Washington media circus, it’s like falling off the earth—at least to the people still working under the big top.

After all, it wasn’t like I was sending in weekly reports from Zabul Province in Afghanistan. I was in Mississippi, which from Washington looks like a fourth-world country. The newspaper I’d taken over focused mostly on local matters, except for the occasional blistering screed against the depredations of Trump and his cronies, authored by my father. But it’s been two months since Dad printed one of those. Mortality is having its way with him. His diminished editorial output has cut into the profits of our local glazier, who was making good money replacing the plate-glass windows on the ground floor of our downtown office. Before Dad slowed his pace, not even security cameras stopped the angry Trump supporter who simply wore a mask as he marched up to the windows with brick in hand to make his feelings known.

As I reach the head of Port Road, which leads down the bluff to the industrial park, the sun flashes off a large gathering of cars about a mile away. This confuses me for a few seconds, because it looks more than anything like cars gathered for a sporting event. Then I realize this crowd must have assembled for the groundbreaking. As the Flex coasts down the steep bluff road, I start to make out tents set up on the actual paper mill site, where Buck found his artifacts. Several large groups of people are moving around the tents, and as I reach the level ground of the industrial park, logos on those tents become legible.

One belongs to the casino and reads SUN KING RESORT in gold letters. A larger tent reads AZURE DRAGON PAPER, which is the parent company of the mill that will be built here. The mill will operate under the name PulpCore, Inc., but Azure Dragon will own it. Off to the right, Claude Buckman’s Bienville Southern Bank has two tents set up side by side, but the grandest tent of all reads PRIME SHOT PREMIUM HUNTING GEAR. These logos tell me that the men who truly run this city are out in force today. And why not? All their years of machinations have brought them to this moment. The town took a serious hit in the ’90s, and another after 2008, but unlike the other river towns, Bienville has come through the recession strong enough to not only maintain its population, but also to expand its tax base. The twelve members of the Bienville Poker Club stand on the threshold of a billion-dollar payoff. Bigger, really, when you add in the ancillary elements of the deal. A new interstate highway that will run from El Paso, Texas, to Augusta, Georgia, passing over the new Bienville bridge as it carries Azure Dragon paper pulp to market. Weighed against all this, one archaeologist’s life wouldn’t have counted for much.

“Marshall McEwan!” cries a male voice as I get out of the Flex.

I turn to find New Jersey émigré Tommy Russo hurrying along the road in a close-fitting tailored suit. The owner of the Sun King Casino is walking in the direction of the tents. I figured Russo would have been here an hour ago, working the governor and the secretary of commerce. The only non-native-born member of the Poker Club, Tommy Russo plans to bring in a second casino as soon as I-14 becomes a reality. Bienville has a long gambling history, dating back to the Lower’ville saloons and a nineteenth-century horse track on the river. But Tommy has updated the old riverboat gambler stereotype and brought The Sopranos to Bienville. He’s quick to smile, but you sense menace just behind his eyes. He’s like a friendly snake with his fangs folded out of sight.

“I guess the Chinks are really going to make us rich after all,” he says, as I fall into step beside him. “Off the record, of course.”

“I take it a day at a time, Tommy.”

“Come on, brah. None of that pessimism. A billion dollars is like the second coming. That’s real money, even to me. Hey, did you hear about Buck Ferris?”

I show no reaction. “What about him?”

“They found him in the river this morning. I figured you’d be all over that.”

“I’ll wait and see what the police tell me.”

Russo’s predatory eyes read every line and shadow on my face. “Yeah? Good. That’s good. Last thing we need around here is more bullshit stories to upset the Chinamen. This town’s on the right track, while everybody else is starving.”

“Looks that way. I’ll catch you later, Tommy.”