Holy City E-Book

Henry Wise

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 416

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'Rarely has dysfunctional small-town life been so movingly portrayed.' Daily Express 'A dense, brilliantly rendered novel by a new master of Southern gothic' Kirkus After a decade of exile precipitated by the tragic death of his mother, Will Seems returns home from Richmond to rural Southern Virginia, taking a job as deputy sheriff in a landscape given way to crime and defeat. But his attempts to start again are wrecked when a brutal homicide claims the life of an old friend and he is forced to face the true reason for his return – to pay an old debt. Then a man Will knows to be innocent is arrested for his friend's murder, and his boss seems all too happy to wrap up the case and move on. Will must weigh his personal guilt against his public duty and work alongside an unpredictable private detective to help him find the real killer. And, in facing a community that refuses to confront its history, perhaps he can atone for the past.

Leseprobe

JOIN OUR COMMUNITY!

Sign up for all the latest crime and thriller

news and get free books and exclusive offers.

BEDFORDSQUAREPUBLISHERS.CO.UK

Praise for Holy City

‘Thomas Wolfe wrote that “you can’t go home again,” and in this highly anticipated debut, Wise explores what happens when you do and nothing – and everything – has changed… Wise’s writing is strongly evocative of its unique setting, redolent with the sights and sounds of small-town Virginia. Fans of both Southern and crime fiction will welcome this new voice, a hybrid of Faulkner and Grisham, to the genre’ Booklist

‘A heinous crime tests a freshly minted deputy sheriff’s allegiances in Wise’s stylish debut… Bold characters and splendid prose further enhance the proceedings. Wise knocks it out of the park his first time up to bat’ Publishers Weekly

‘Henry Wise’s striking debut Holy City is a haunting story of crime and the myriad ways that one can be punished. Set deep in the rural expanse of southern Virginia, it’s both a thriller and a dark fairy tale, filled with danger and menace, loss and longed-for redemption’ Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of The Turnout

‘Holy City is a hell of an impressive debut by a great new voice in crime fiction. Henry Wise balances a bold literary voice with authentic storytelling in the kind of gritty Southern thriller that’s right down my alley. From page one, you’ll be absolutely hooked into this evocative world’ Ace Atkins, author of The Heathens

‘A devastating first novel… Henry Wise arrives with a powerful new voice in the rarified air of truly literary crime fiction… Holy City is an engaging, original, and sometimes explosive take on what it can mean to go home again… Not only wise, but brave as well, Holy City is a compelling and affecting read, not to be missed’ James A McLaughlin, Edgar Award winning author of Bearskin

‘Henry Wise is a talented storyteller who brings a poet’s ear to the southern landscape he knows so well. The dialogue crackles with authenticity and the characters are drawn with great compassion’ Chris Offutt, author of The Killing Hills

Fire was the dream that broke him.

He sat stiff as a dead cat, felt for the handle of his pistol under the seat, relaxed. The sad night came back to him, one of many like it, riding indefinitely, listening to the angry word of God through a thin static distance, the voice somehow both austere and intimate, seeming to speak directly to him with piercing certainty. He listened because there was nothing else out here – no other radio station – between hamlets or villages or four-way intersections, some of which at one point probably had been towns, nothing to see between them but a country undulating in pursuit of some sort of equilibrium, a pulse one could assess only by covering its distances, surprising because the countryside felt dead otherwise. It was not the soft, green, junglelike vegetation of so much of Virginia, but a hard, coarse, spiky land. The lonely roads wended like snakes through close forest or open fields or woods felled entirely for their lumber, leaving the ground as naked and weird as a skinned bear. And as he passed the fading houses like craters, kudzu-covered or through-grown with wild privet and poison ivy and chipping of paint, out of a wood-paneled darkness came the dark, paternal, familiar voice, companionate and suggestiveofviolence,ofguile,thevoiceclean-shaven,austere,piercing, and expectant, some local celebrity preacher in a countryside rife with bewildering crime.

Will Seems had returned from a decade in Richmond – the ‘Holy City’ – to a land he had called home each year of that decade, a country he now saw was peopled by a kind of disparate lost congregation. Last year, a man had cut his wife’s throat with a Buck lock-blade, shooting himself after with a Walther PPK, failing on both counts. His wife was able to stop the bleeding from her neck with a pillow before calling 911, and the man woke up in a hospital room missing most of his jaw and wearing handcuffs to boot. Then, a few months ago now, a man in Halifax County who had been stopped for a burnt-out taillight had shot the policeman dead and driven away without contest. Even now, no leads. But one of the strangest incidents had occurred only recently. A complaint had been submitted in town because of an odor emanating from a particular home. The middle-aged unmarried resident had wrapped her dead mother – deceased by natural causes – in winter blankets, leaving the body in the house for over two months. Will remembered the investigation they’d conducted, wearing masks that did little to mitigate the stench, counting out with watering eyes 116 air fresheners sprinkled over the quilts. The sheriff was glad enough to let Troy St Pierre, the medical examiner, remove the corpse, but he and Will were stuck with the daughter of the deceased. When questioned, the woman could not explain why she hadn’t reported her own mother’s death, the only reason they had cause to arrest her. Will saw in her a sad and childish desperation that was not necessarily unique; he’d seen it in the faces of the county, a puckered, hopeless, dopey defeat. Will guessed she was so afraid of being alone in this world that she had considered the dead welcome company.

Will got out of his truck and stretched and made use of a tree, looking down at the flat water of the creek, the dream still nagging him, the taste of smoke refusing to fade. He couldn’t keep doing this, riding late-night to wear himself out, ending up back at the creek to sleep and leaving early, before the fishermen came with their buckets and their lines. He’d smoked too much last night, tasted the cotton mouth now, remembered an acute craving for a Coke with vanilla, the way it was served at the nearest Waffle House up in Petersburg. He reached in the pickup and took a sip now of leftover coffee in an open Styrofoam cup he’d picked up yesterday evening from the Get ’N’ Go, some cooked-down tired version of what it had been when brewed that morning, and now it was twenty-four hours old, and it seemed nothing had happened in twenty-four hours, but that everything and everyone had moved and breathed just that much forward.

He tossed the dregs at the ground and turned to see, beyond the plain white Baptist church, a pillar of black smoke coming from the direction of the Hathom house or, beyond it, the Janders place. He grabbed his cell from the cup holder, called it in, climbing in and starting the pickup and pulling onto the road as the phone rang.

‘This is Deputy Seems reporting a fire in Turkey Creek.’ He rounded a bend. ‘It’s the Janders house.’

‘Copy,’ Tania said. She’d worked for the sheriff’s department longer than Will and had never seen a day in the field. ‘Fire truck is on its way. Wait for it, you hear me?’

Will slapped his phone closed.

Tom’s truck sat in the yard, the tractor by the shed; the smell of old lumber and paint burning filled the air. Will slid through a dirt turn, pulling a parachute of dust into the yard, and saw now the side of Tom’s mother’s house (he still thought of it as hers) on fire, melting inward like blossom-end rot on some strange fruit.

Will pocketed the phone. The fire had already consumed the right side of the house but had not reached the front door.

‘Tom!’ Will could feel the heat baking into his cheeks. ‘Day! Tom!’

It was too soon to hear a siren. The fire truck was twenty-five minutes out from the time he called if he was lucky. He breathed deep, kicked open the front door, a plume of hot black smoke rolling into his face. He crouched, moving through the house, unable to hear anything but fire. The flames roared over him, and pieces of ceiling fell nearby. He groped along the kitchen floor, the vinyl curling like antique documents, holding his breath as long as he could, until he stumbled into something. A boot, steel toe, hot to the touch. He found the other foot and pulled them both, making it to the side door, tugging at what must have been Tom’s body. He was crying with smoke, coughed when he tried to breathe, found himself on his knees in the yard, trying to stand, trying to breathe, smoke in the bridge of his nose. Tears and smoke, tears and smoke. Finally, he returned to the threshold, pulled the body free, dragged it ungracefully down the three steps and into the yard, and fell beside it in the grass, coughing.

When Will came to, Sheriff Mills was breathing heavily down at him, patting Will’s face with his rough hand to wake him, and an EMT had a stethoscope on his chest. A bandage had been placed on his arm, and he felt the burn. Will could smell the spearmint from the gum Mills chewed compulsively, a habit he’d formed years ago in an effort to quit tobacco. Will sat up to see the fire truck hosing down the house in splintering rainbows beyond which, in the distance, he could see a bald eagle perched at the top of a pine tree.

‘You all right, son?’ Mills said. ‘You got some kind of death wish I need to know about?’

The sheriff helped Will to his feet, and they looked at Tom in the grass, his clothes blackened, face covered in soot. A look of eternal blankness, until Will realized why.

‘Shit,’ Mills said, sounding it as shiat. ‘Eyes gone, melted.’

Mills turned the powerful body over with catlike, delicate care and inspected Tom’s corpse, looked at the steps smudged with dark matter and again at the body.

‘Hold on, now,’ Sheriff Mills said to himself.

Mills took out a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, pinched Tom’s shirt just under the left shoulder blade, so that it lifted like a tent, revealing a rift in the fabric and a dark wet stain, darker and more consistent than the soot. He spread the rift with two fingers and inspected the skin, finding soot-caked gash marks, maybe two, maybe three. Will put his hands on his knees in an athlete’s resting position and looked down as Sheriff Mills let the soaked hot shirt fall back onto the soaked hot skin.

‘Homicide,’ Will said, the word echoing, almost a question. This wasn’t picking up drunks or issuing speeding tickets or nailing vagrants for trespassing on abandoned properties. ‘Who’d… ?’

Will watched the sheriff: quiet, thoughtful, composed. The man seemed to sharpen, brighten into a quiet efficiency, fully alive.

Mills said, ‘It’s a miracle he didn’t burn worse than this. You neither. Check his pockets.’

No wallet, no phone. Nothing.

Will felt light-headed, empty. He began coughing again. The sheriff said, ‘Tape this off while I call Sheriff Edgars and Troy over here. Keep everyone out unless it’s them. When they get here, I’ll need you to take pictures. Camera’s in my truck.’

Will was heading for the tape when he detected movement behind the house, wishing he hadn’t, but Mills saw it too.

‘Head up the trees,’ Mills said. ‘I’ll swing around from the field. Watch yourself now.’

Will ran, his body a confusion of sweat and smoke and speed against the slow, muddled summer-morning heat and sudden, incredibly parching thirst that made it difficult to breathe. He ran like a setter on the scent, one thing on his mind, his legs blurring like water beneath him.

He tracked the runner to the edge of a tobacco field where it abutted the low muddy creek lined in thick trees and poison ivy. He stopped to listen for movement. Birds twittered loudly all around him in the trees, flew crisp against the white morning heat. He thought he heard a crash way out, maybe fifty yards up, into the field.

He began to run again, hearing only his steps thudding through his heavy body, in the direction of the noise, weaving around the large, heady tobacco plants, thick and green with summer and Jurassic-looking. He could hear tires popping the gravel, see a dull white cloud lift above the field like a floating spirit, and then felt through the ground an impact followed by a splash. The runner must have seen the cloud or heard the truck and changed his direction, deciding to brave the summer creek with its swollen oaks tall and sturdy at the cutbanks sprawling with invisible copperheads like roots.

Will followed, calling out, ‘Stop! Euphoria County Sheriff’s Department!’

He came to the bank, and to his surprise, the runner turned to face him from the other side, dripping, no longer trying to hide, a man who looked aged and familiar, with a gray head and a powerful farm-strong build.

‘Will!’ the man whispered loudly over the water and the birds.

‘Mr Hathom!’

Will had known Zeke Hathom for years; Floressa, Zeke’s wife, had worked many years for the Seems family, and Will and Sam, their son, had grown up together.

‘I didn’t do nothing,’ Zeke hissed. ‘I swear.’

‘Better for you to come on in. If you’re innocent, you’ll be released.’

‘I come in, I’m guilty. Now come on, Will.’

Will was about to say something. He trusted Zeke was innocent and knew he owed the man.

‘Deputy,’ Sheriff Mills called out, stepping like the shadow of a ghost into the shade and removing his hat and sunglasses, running his fingers through his short sweaty hair. ‘Arrest that man.’

Will could see the fight go out of Zeke’s eyes, cursed himself for hesitating to let him go.

‘Please, Mr Sheriff,’ Zeke said. ‘I swear. I saw the fire from my place. Saw it and came to help.’

‘Deputy.’

‘He didn’t do anything,’ Will said.

‘Read Zeke his rights.’

Looking at the creek water, Will said, ‘Zeke Hathom,’ the first time he had ever called the man by his first name. ‘You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. You have the right to an attorney…’ and on and on. Words that meant nothing to him right now. He couldn’t believe he’d come back in part to help the man he was now arresting. He thought of Floressa, a mother to him after his own had passed, and knew this was a mistake he’d have to reckon with.

‘Cuff him,’ Mills said, taking his handcuffs out and tossing them to Will.

‘Mr Hathom isn’t running from us.’

‘Damn right,’ Mills said, swatting at something. ‘He knows better, don’t you, Zeke? Come on over here. Don’t make this worse on yourself.’

Zeke crossed the water as if being baptized and held out his hands, together, gently, with a look in his eyes Will couldn’t stomach, and, as if physically compelled by a force like water or gravity or heritage, Will clicked the cuffs shut just as gently, helping Zeke up the cutbank and into the field under the hottest of fires, even more puzzled and light-headed when Zeke whispered, tears in his voice, ‘I’m sorry, Will.’

Will strung up yellow caution tape to secure the scene, a desolate ruin gutted by fire and still steam-smoking, and Sheriff Mills deputized his gap-toothed cousin Buddy Monroe and another regular, Silas King, as he did when they needed more men. He muttered something about harm coming to that coward Seth Grady for quitting him. It was well known Will had been hired to replace Grady, who’d been a sheriff’s deputy since Will could remember.

Within an hour, Sheriff Weenie Edgars drove up in a black Suburban with a couple of investigators from Tupelo County. Troy St Pierre followed in the old white minivan he used to transport bodies. Since there were limited personnel in Euphoria, it was not uncommon for Edgars to assist in murder investigations.

‘Hot damn,’ Edgars said. ‘Howdy, Jeff.’

‘Weenie,’ Mills said. The two sheriffs shook hands. ‘How’re y’all?’

The other men nodded and put on gloves and eyed the atmos-phere with disapproval, as if crossing the county line had left a bad taste in their mouths. Their posture made clear this was an inconvenience.

Sheriff Edgars was a short man with a barrel chest he thrust around like something he was proud of. He took in the scene, and Will realized this was his cue to exit, so he went to get the sheriff’s camera, avoiding any conversation with Zeke in the back, then grabbing the film camera from his own truck.

Edgars said to Mills, ‘Talk to me.’

‘Well, we got a suspect. Caught him fleeing the scene. Got a body, stabbed in the back, under the left shoulder blade. No weapon, no ID on him, but we know he’s Tom Janders.’

‘The football player?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Goddamn.’ Weenie whistled through his teeth as if the recognition of the victim made the crime worse. ‘Homicide and arson. Hell of a time for this, ain’t it, Jeff? I must’ve seen five signs with your name on ’em.’

‘Ain’t no competition. But I want this to go smooth as can.’

Sheriff Edgars smirked, hands in his pockets, toeing at nothing on the ground.

‘I’ll bet you do,’ he said. ‘But you and I both know that would mean calling State. You’re understaffed and underfunded. Nothing but a green deputy sheriff and two part-times.’ He craned his head toward Mills, as if he dreaded the answer to his next question. ‘Call ’em yet?’

‘I called you.’

‘How’d I become so goddamn lucky?’ Edgars said. ‘Turn it over to State, and it’s out of your hands.’

‘I don’t like that. I want to handle as much of this as we can as soon as we can. I want Troy doing the autopsy, and I want to know whatever he finds out before sending away evidence. You hear that, Troy?’

‘Yessir.’

‘Good,’ Mills said, winking. ‘Maybe you can use some of those connections in the state lab you’re always bragging about to expedite our samples.’

He turned again to Edgars. ‘You know about Sheriff Ramsey over in Mecklenburg. Busted up a drug ring almost a year ago. Them folks is sittin’ in the courthouse jail yet, waiting on their lab results just so they can go to trial. That’s how it goes when you call in State. I don’t like the way they look down on us, those goddamn eggheads in the state lab.’

Edgars raised his hand to placate Mills (he’d heard all this before) and said, ‘Where’s the suspect?’

‘He’s sitting yonder in the back of my truck. Wet from the waist down, I might add.’

Edgars squinted in that direction. ‘Who is he?’

‘Fella by the name of Zeke Hathom.’

‘Hathom. Was he the one you called me about before? Wanted for B and E?’

‘That was his son. Whole goddamn family of criminals.’

‘I reckon so. But it’s no surprise, is it? Whatever happened to that boy?’

‘Nobody’s found him yet. He’s either holed up somewhere or he left the county.’

‘I’ll bet that galls you. Well, anyway, you got one.’

‘I’m a little uncomfortable about it, though. Zeke is well liked. A churchgoer, works out at the sawmill. No record but a gambling here and there. Drunk in public when he was younger.’

‘Well. People ain’t always what they seem; maybe he’s just been lucky and it’s catching up with him now. Luck can have its price.’

They stood for a moment without a word, as if such a statement voiced an untidy profundity they needed to digest.

Edgars broke the silence: ‘Show us the body.’

They walked over the tape toward where Tom Janders lay in the yard. Troy said, ‘Jesus Christ,’ at the missing eyes, put on a pair of glasses and gloves, took his bearings, looked at the gashes on his back.

‘Your deputy moved him?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Well, I guess it was either that or nothing at all.’

Edgars got the EMTs to help bag the body, and Edgars and Troy walked with Mills to his truck to get custody of the body signed over to Troy.

Edgars said, ‘You said the victim didn’t have no ID. You got anybody that could identify him?’

Just then, a green ’93 Honda Accord, with its passenger side cratered in and the front bumper partly held in place by fraying duct tape, pulled up in a back-eddy of dust, and Ferriday Pace got out, the dust from her approach like a cloud mixing with the sour steam of the rubble.

‘My house!’ she yelled. ‘My house!’

She got past Will quickly, dodging the bystanders – Sheriff Edgars’s men – like a running back. She was screaming, grief trailing her like blood or death itself. ‘Oh my god!’ She broke down, sobbing.

Sheriff Mills made it to her and, as she attempted to dodge him, caught her with an athleticism defying his age, holding her in an embrace she fought, so that for several moments they appeared to be dancing in a stupefied sleep until she simply surrendered and cried in his arms. He could feel the tears through his undershirt, smelled the spray and sweat in her hair before she turned her face to him.

‘Where is he?’ she said. ‘Where is Tom?’

Mills looked into her face and moved his hands across her back. She tried to break free again, but he held her, talked to her as he might have a horse or a dog or a baby, in soothing, flowing whispers no one but she could hear. He stopped his gum chewing until she seemed to calm a little. Will watched, aimed, heard the shutter close before he knew he’d even aimed. Almost before he could think, he had taken several pictures. He’d previously thought Mills a good ol’ boy who didn’t think anything beyond the job. Here he was, calming a woman who was about to discover she had lost the father of her child.

‘I’ve got you,’ Mills said, quietly, as if nobody was here but Day, who could have been his daughter or even granddaughter, and himself. She nodded, looking up into his square, timeless face, a terse fitness in the cheeks under his prominent cheekbones, tan under bright close-cropped silver hair, like a kid watching something for the first time. ‘Stay with me. There, there,’ he said. ‘We’re taking care of everything. Everything’s going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right.’

She seemed to be in a kind of trance. Mills walked her away from the yard, where Tom’s body lay. Soon enough she’d have to ID him.

‘But Tom.’

‘Miss, he’s not with us anymore. I’m sorry.’

She collapsed in Sheriff Mills’s arms. He nodded to one of the EMTs, who came over to make sure she was all right, but she gathered herself after only a moment.

Sheriff Mills said, ‘Where were you coming from now, Miss Pace?’

Will was listening as he walked over to the Accord and shut off the ignition. He looked into the back seat at a baby staring at him. Tom’s baby, Destinee, her face like clotted cream. She cried the minute she saw his face.

‘I was out,’ Day said. ‘I got a carful of groceries as I was coming back in town.’

‘When did you leave town?’

‘Yesterday afternoon.’

The baby wailed, a gummy, squawking, shouting cry.

Miss Pace went over and picked up the little girl, bouncing her up and down, the baby staring back and forth between the men.

‘Come on to the station,’ Sheriff Mills said. ‘We’ll make sure you’ve got everything you need, a place to stay, all that.’ Tipping his hat, he said, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss.’

Mills walked to Will, and Day watched after him in a waifish daze. Under his breath, the sheriff said, ‘Thank god this didn’t happen in town, where we’d be dealing with a crowd. I’ll finish up here and take Zeke over to the magistrate and all that.’

‘You need my help?’

‘You just finish taking pictures, and get on home and clean up and meet me at the office at ten. I want you with me when I talk to Zeke.’

‘Yessir.’

‘I’ll keep Buddy and Silas out here. Good work.’

Will moved around the still-hot, smoking ruins of the pitiful house as best he could, taking pictures of different angles, creating a POV film, which the sheriff liked for him to do. But he didn’t think his efforts now would do any good. Fire was a criminal’s best friend. He thought about Zeke. He’d arrested Mr Hathom, goddamnit. That seemed like ages ago.

As Will was leaving, Silas gave him a nod, thumbs in his belt. ‘Way to go, bud.’ Will must have looked confused, because Silas had to explain: ‘Going in there and getting about the only evidence I imagine there’ll be.’

Buddy said, ‘Guaranteed it was over some money or some shit. These people always fightin’ over money and drugs.’

Will nodded, climbed into his truck, and leaned his head back and closed his eyes, almost falling asleep or disappearing. ‘Fuck,’ he sighed.

He took the back way onto the property, passing the abused cabins and trailers of his Black cousins, scattered near the plantation as if held to it by some kind of orbit or magnetism, temporal as well as spatial. He lurched through fields planted with tobacco and soybeans and surveilled by vacant plywood towers against the tall pines and parked behind the house, which could barely be seen from the road in summer for the trees, and in winter was a stark silhouette on a slight rise in the land. The yard had been overgrown for so long it looked like a wild tangled glade, hiding the sign with the year of its reconstruction – 1819 – and the name of the house – Promised Land Plantation – along with the ‘For Sale by Owner’ sign that had been stuck in the ground by the road for over a decade now. The trees hovered close to the structure like old men, leaning with their age. The building was the single thing that seemed to emit a sense of pride in something long ignored or forgotten. Snakes often writhed into the house, sleek trespassers making full use of the broken foundation, leaving their long skins indoors in a tortured coiled loneliness, and sleeping in the cursive, illegible shapes of a maniac’s writing, and he had to check for them under his bed every night. It was a house like a shipwreck. One window remained unboarded, simply because whoever had boarded it all up had not purchased enough plywood. That project, like the house, abandoned.

He slid out of his truck and shut the door, feeling old and raw and heavy and needing a shower. Kudzu cloaked some of the distance with a fecund verdant monotony, softening the often hard and spiky landscape like a kind of flesh over bones.

He took his boots off outside and beat them against each other, leaving them by the door. Socks flapping at his toes, he opened the back-porch door – an addition from the ’50s where a game freezer like a rusted coffin buzzed – and made coffee. While it was brewing, he peeled off his ruined clothes and took a shower and shaved.

He dressed in his uniform with a mug filled and steaming on the counter and sat, hands paused over the top button of his starched, untucked shirt, looking at the sun hard already over the gray tired earth. He’d been counting on making a run to Richmond today, but with the investigation he doubted that would be possible. Sam would have to deal with it. This was going to throw everything off.

He’d been listening as much as possible to Edgars and Mills, heard Mills’s comment about the Hathoms, about Sam hiding out somewhere or having left the county with a warrant out for his arrest. Will thought now about the night last month he responded to a break-in, caught the man, awkward and on the run with a backpack full and loud with monogrammed sterling silverware. Will had left his truck and tackled the man, who sucker-punched Will before the cuffs were on, then cursed and cried, then pleaded with Will by name. Will stood up, wondering how this man knew him, wiped off his grass-stained uniform, shoved the man into the back of the car, got in the driver’s seat, turned on the interior lights, and looked in the rearview. In the light, Will barely recognized him. It was a shadow of Sam, but it was Sam sure enough. He’d heard things – the rehab, the warrants – but how could someone he’d known so well physically change so much? He knew about Sam’s previous injuries, but this was different, and he had to remind himself he’d been gone for ten years. Sam was gaunt now, his face all scratched up, scarred, and bleeding, something Will would later understand could be an effect of cutting heroin with fentanyl.

‘What the fuck are you doing?’ Will said.

‘Stealing spoons.’

‘You know you got a warrant out?’

‘So either way I’m fucked. May as well keep doing what I’m doing till I get caught.’

‘Well, you’re caught now.’

‘Fuck you.’

‘They said you were doing all right. I thought you were in rehab.’

‘I was sober for eighty-nine days, man.’

‘What happened?’

‘You wouldn’t understand. You’re just like every other motherfucker who wants to tell me what to do. I’ll bet it’s easy, you sitting there, to tell me how to live my life. Fuck you.’

‘How can you say that to me?’

‘You left.’

‘You know I didn’t have a fucking choice.’

‘Go on. Take me in. See if I give a fuck.’

Just then, Tania came through on the radio.

‘Will, talk to me. What’s your status?’

Will pulled the radio toward his face, looked again into the rearview, whispered ‘motherfucker’ upon seeing a bruise developing on his cheek, locked eyes with Sam. ‘Fuck,’ he sighed, still not pressing the send button to respond.

‘Will, your status?’ Tania said.

‘No sign of suspect.’

‘Repeat?’

‘No sign of suspect. I lost him.’

‘Copy,’ she said. He knew her well enough to hear the what-the-fuck in her voice. She’d tell the sheriff and catch hell for it. Then Will would catch hell for it. The sheriff was big on keeping headlines out of the paper unless they showed the sheriff’s department favorably. And how the fuck would Will explain his eye or the grass stains on his uniform?

When Will turned around, Sam said, ‘Shit, brother. You’re in it now.’

Will glared back at Sam, opened his mouth to tell him to fuck himself, but Sam was laughing. Will couldn’t keep himself from joining in.

He walked down the hallway now. The house was floored with wide boards smoothed over the past two centuries, pale where fine tapestries of rugs had once covered it. He walked past the parlor, with its moth-eaten French wallpaper from the 1830s, and climbed the stairs, entering his sister’s old room and approaching a mattress on the floor next to a stack of books.

Will nudged Sam. ‘Yo,’ he said. ‘Coffee’s up.’ He pulled the blanket away, shoved Sam again, and walked back downstairs to the kitchen.

He looked through the porch window out at the fields, the trees that broke them. It seemed a hell of vegetation, overgrown and yet somehow desolate, a desert of plenty. Will had taken Sam in because he wanted to believe the past did not have to control the future, and he wanted Sam to believe it too. People around here seemed to live in a cloud of defeat, self-wrought and inherited. Whites had the lost cause; Blacks had slavery. It would seem they should be pitted against each other, but they were really dug in behind the same trench, and the rest of the state, the rest of the country, was out there. Virginia was changing, leaving places like Euphoria County behind. He wondered why it is people return to the very things that guarantee them pain. Life, it seemed, might not be progressing toward an end but learning only to return to something again and again.

Will could hear the jingle of a belt, and Sam came down the hallway, scratching the back of his head, shivering, approaching through a golden dust floating in sunrays. Despite his pale left eye, his frantic blinking, the crooked nose and jaw, and the fact that he favored his left leg, he looked healthier now than what he’d been a month ago. Still too thin, awkward, and scarred, but the outside work had done him some good.

Sam nodded at Will’s arm. ‘What happened to you?’

‘Nothing,’ Will said, waving his hand. ‘How’d you sleep?’

‘All right. You out all night?’

‘Yeah,’ Will said. He didn’t know if he should say more. He poured Sam a mug and handed it to him. ‘I’m going to need you to weed as much as you can in the watermelon patch. Careful with the vines. And the black-eyed peas can be picked. Prune and tie up some of the tomato plants. The graveyard looks good. Tobacco looks good.’

‘You said you was going to Richmond today.’

‘As soon as I can.’

‘You said today. Unless you got something I don’t know about.’

‘All I got is some weed right now, but you can help yourself.’

‘I’m not talking about no weed.’

‘I’m going to go as soon as I can. Something has come up.’

‘You promised.’ Sam was close to tears.

‘Sam, Tom Janders is dead.’

‘Dead?’ Sam stepped back, instinctively raising his hands to scratch his face.

‘He died this morning.’

‘How? I got to go…’

‘You can’t be going out there for any reason. Tom’s dead. There’s nothing you can do about it.’

‘But what about his mama? What about Day?’

‘I’ll look in on them. But if anybody finds out you’re here, you and I are both in deep shit. Take care of the garden today. I’ll see if I can slip away. But in a murder investigation…’

‘Murder? Murder? Who the fuck gonna kill Tom?’

Will couldn’t believe he’d let that slip. He was tired, sloppy. But he would not risk telling Sam his father was their primary suspect. If he did, Sam would leave without a thought. If he didn’t get caught, he might well overdose (he was lucky enough to be alive as it was). It was best he didn’t know. Will was able to tell a truth without saying anything about Zeke’s arrest: ‘I don’t know. Promise me… promise you’ll stay here as we agreed. Just until we can figure all this out.’

‘You still got my cell?’

‘That’s a part of our deal. You can’t go calling people up right now. Calls can be traced.’

‘Fuck, man. Where’s that weed at?’

So Will left for the courthouse. He remembered Tom emerging from out of the tobacco, out of the past thirteen years, carrying Sam. It was Will’s fault, and he closed his eyes, then as well as now, against this world of broken sins.

Floressa hathom came to the courthouse in Dawn in time to see Sheriff Mills bring her husband in front of the magistrate, Judge Allen, a sleepy man with a red nose, white hair, and a face like a closed drawstring bag. The purse draped over her shoulder looked tiny against her as she stood in Sunday clothes, her hair straightened, eyes red and worn out. Will Seems came in a few minutes late, and sheriff and deputy gave an account of that morning’s events – Will Seems finding Tom Janders’s body, calling it in, spotting Zeke fleeing the scene, and the pursuit and subsequent arrest – and the judge issued a warrant to hold Zeke in custody in the Euphoria County jail, without bond, at least until the arraignment on Friday, day after tomorrow. None of them – not the judge, not Zeke, not the sheriff, not Will – acknowledged Floressa’s presence. It seemed to her they were all ashamed.

She dabbed her eyes with a handkerchief outside the courtroom as they took Zeke away. A few minutes later, she pushed through the doors of the sheriff’s department.

‘I want to talk to Zeke,’ she said.

Before Tania could say anything, Sheriff Mills came out of his office.

‘Mrs Hathom,’ he said.

‘Take me to my husband.’

‘We haven’t had time to question him yet.’

‘You know they were friends. Ask anybody.’

‘Haven’t you ever heard of friends getting into an argument?’

‘This ain’t that. I saw Zeke last night. He wasn’t angry at Tom.’

‘Mrs Hathom, we have a responsibility to look into every possible cause of Tom’s death. We’ll get to the bottom of this, I promise.’

Floressa saw Will then. ‘Put a uniform on a good boy and it change him.’

‘No, ma’am,’ Mills said. ‘This is a good man doing his job.’

‘I reckon what they say true,’ she said. ‘Like father like son.’

She glared at Will, her eyes seekers of weakness, seekers of softness and strength.

‘Zeke innocent,’ she said, addressing the room. ‘Everybody know that man don’t have a mean bone in him. Sometimes I wish he did. I got to be mean instead.’

‘You’re going to have to let us do our jobs, Mrs Hathom,’ Mills said. ‘Once the lab results come back, we’ll let you know.’

‘I tell you, Mr Mills, ain’t always evidence the most important thing. There’s what you can’t see. There’s what you believe. Your faith in the law because of the justice it represents.’

‘Can’t operate by belief in this line of work. That may work in a nice white chapel.’ He held his hand up as if swearing an oath. ‘Now I believe in God; I was raised a God-fearing Christian. Belief has its place, but you gotta balance faith with a healthy doubt. Otherwise, you float away.’

‘So you doubting Zeke, a man ain’t never hurt no one ’cept when drunk and attacked first.’

‘Anyone is capable of anything, Mrs Hathom. Worrisome as it is to admit it.’

She was going to object, but then she looked at Will.

‘I guess that is true,’ she said. She faced the sheriff again. ‘When I come back later, I expect to see him.’

She turned and marched out the door heavily, as if carrying a great unseen but physical burden.

‘Deputy,’ Mills said.

Will followed Sheriff Mills back into his office and sat down and watched Ferriday Pace sitting there, pretty but disheveled, clutching the baby to her, looking out of her lightly freckled face with huge, fathomless shadow-eyes through a stray lock of strawberry-blond hair she’d teased into loose curls. She looked, in a way, like a child. Having lived away for years, Will had seen her only a couple of times and at a distance, at the supermarket or across a parking lot, but something about her was familiar to him, caught his eye. He’d met Tom two, three weeks ago and been struck hard with a sadness he expected was due to something at home. Maybe it was just the area: Euphoria County seemed for most of its residents to tighten like a vise, and you were either crushed or pushed out under the pressure and set out for life somewhere else. Back in high school, Tom was going places. Now, with some puzzlement, Will wondered how he had settled for the woman in front of him, noticing all the while an intense and luckless sorrow similar to Tom’s. She was twenty-eight, younger than Tom by three years, but something about her emitted age and hardship. She had a bruise on her cheek that had been covered with makeup. There was a quality of dressed-up shame about her. She put herself together like a little girl who can make cheap clashing materials shine by sheer willpower. Her fingernails had been painted a glittering purple at the Vietnamese salon where she worked, her V-neck shirt hung low, and her jean shorts were cut so short the front pockets poked out from under the frayed edge, revealing her lightly tanned but pale freckled skin. Her forearm and ankle displayed tattoos, already greened with age.

Sheriff Mills began, ‘We just want to ask you some questions. We are not interrogating you. You understand you have the right to speak with an attorney if you so wish?’

‘I’m a mama now. I ain’t got nothing to hide.’

The absurdity of her statement caused Mills to pause his gum-chewing for a moment. She spoke like a country girl, neither white nor Black but raceless, and had a kind of self-consciousness Will had rarely seen but took as a sign that she had experienced a great deal.

Sheriff Mills said, ‘When was the last time you saw Tom?’

‘Yesterday morning.’

‘Tuesday, July nineteenth,’ he said, jotting it down. ‘And where were you last night?’

‘I was out of town,’ she said with an upturned intonation, seeming shy or embarrassed, making that statement into something resembling a question, as if awaiting approval. It seemed she was about to cry again. She covered her face and wiped it with her hands. Sheriff Mills adjusted himself.

‘Where? Why? Help us fill in some blanks.’

‘I don’t want to say,’ she said.

‘It’d look better if you did. Your beau was murdered.’

She stopped bouncing the baby, closed her eyes as if in prayer. ‘I thought it was a fire.’

‘We found some evidence that suggests otherwise. Please. Tell us what you know, who might have done this, where you were, so that we can help you.’

She sighed, looked at Mills, and patted the baby on her back, readjusting a cloth on her own shoulder. From out of her purse, one-handed, she brought her wallet and produced a folded paper and handed it to Will as if passing a note in class, all the while watching the sheriff.

‘Well?’ Sheriff Mills said.

‘A receipt for a motel,’ Will said. ‘The Rebel Inn.’

‘What were you doing there?’

‘I went back home to see my people.’

‘What people?’ Mills said.

‘Out there to Sassafras Ridge. Granny, I call her. She’s not blood, but I call her Granny.’

Mills seemed to smile to himself. ‘You mean that old palm reader in the Snakefoot?’

‘That’s why I don’t want to say,’ she said. ‘You just gonna laugh.’

‘What’d you see her about?’

‘I visit her sometimes.’

‘Why stay the night out that way? Shoot, can’t take you an hour to get back.’

‘I got tired. The baby was needing to feed. I can park at a motel if I want to.’

‘Were you and Tom having problems?’

‘No, sir. I just got tired is all.’

‘Did you let Tom know at any point that you were going to be away?’

‘I sent him a message, I think. I can’t remember. The baby was crying, and I had to feed her and put her down. I knew he’d be playing cards out at Arnie’s Lounge, losing all his money, not that it matters now.’

The baby was crying now and piped up shrill. Day then looked up at the sheriff as if she were asking something only he could understand.

‘Excuse me, sirs. She could use some feeding now,’ she said, two tear streaks on her face and a tremor in her voice.

She reached up to adjust her bra, and the men stood gravely in unison, walked to the door.

Mills said, ‘We’ll just be outside.’

At the threshold, Will turned back. She was already watching him.

‘Did you go home at all between the time you left and when we saw you this morning?’

‘No, sir. I was gone all night, until I came back to the house and found y’all there, my house all aflame’ – her voice began to shake – ‘my man dead and gone.’

‘Deputy,’ Mills said, and they shut the door and walked out to Will’s desk in the main office, over by the old radiator against the windows, the shades closed. Will moved a stack of files aside. Tania went about her work across the room.

They paused awkwardly, as if holding their breath.

Will said, ‘You know Zeke didn’t do it.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I know the man.’

‘That’s not good enough. We have to wait for the results. You know that.’

‘I know it looks bad for him. But there’s got to be more to the story.’

‘You can’t assume that. You been sheriff’s deputy over a year. You know better than to cloud the facts with bias.’

‘Yessir, I know.’

‘What were you doing out there anyway, calling in a fire out in goddamn Turkey Creek?’

‘I was just out; fell asleep out there.’

Sheriff Mills chuckled to himself, shaking his head. ‘You’re living hard, it seems. Guilty conscience? Bad dreams?’

‘There a law against insomnia?’

‘You keep in mind that someone less considerate would make a point of finding out how come you were out there, on that side of town, why you’ve been looking through all these criminal files, like you’re trying to memorize something. Oh yeah, don’t think I don’t notice.’

He stared at Will. The wet sound of his chewing and breathing and thinking. It seemed he wanted to say more but shook his head like this was a great pity and Will hadn’t caught on as to why.

‘You got baggage, son,’ the sheriff said finally. ‘But you handled yourself real good out there today. You may have got us the evidence we need. Call up that motel and confirm Miss Pace was there, and let me know what you find out.’

Mills surveyed the room, remembering some of the changes he’d seen, his days as a deputy, the way it all used to be, back when his daddy was sheriff. Southside could be rough, and this job brought you in touch with the thresholds of good and evil. But back then, investigating led you somewhere if you put in the work. Now, it seemed the harder you looked, the worse you got lost. He saw in Will Seems something he’d been missing in his department for years. He was an old soul, one of them. He’d do all right. If he could just pace himself, learn how to work on the team.

‘That Mrs Hathom was right about one thing,’ Mills said. ‘You’re a lot like your daddy.’

‘He ran away,’ Will said. ‘I came back.’

‘Yes, you did. And I’m wondering if that’s got something to do with why you can’t sleep in your own house. Now hold on. I’m going to need a report on my desk first thing tomorrow morning.’

Will got up. ‘Yessir.’

‘You look like you got somewhere else to be.’

‘I thought we were finishing up.’

‘Not by a long shot.’

Will cleared his throat. ‘Sir, Silas and Buddy are out at the crime scene, and Troy has the evidence. Could I take the afternoon?’

The sheriff looked at the ground. ‘I’m gonna forget you asked that. We need to talk to Zeke, search the Hathom house, find anybody who saw Tom last night for questioning, you need to write that report, and right now, I need you to go over to Mrs Claudette Janders’s house and give her the news.’

‘Sir?’

‘Rumor will be spreading fast,’ he said. ‘She has a right to learn from us about Tom’s death. And see if she’d be willing to take in Miss Pace for the next little while as all this gets resolved. When you get back, we’ll start in on the other stuff.’

Sheriff Mills whistled something, stretched, and stood up. ‘Tania, darlin’. Get Will that address.’

‘Yes, sir,’ she said. Mills turned for his office, knocked, went in.

‘Congratulations,’ Tania said as Will approached her desk. ‘For getting Tom out I mean.’

‘I wish I hadn’t been there.’

‘I know,’ she said, a look of pity on her face. ‘You just got to remember, you didn’t put Zeke there. You did what you had to do.’

She looked up from her desk, and it hit him, as it sometimes did, and he looked away. Tania had grown up in the county one year behind Will. She’d gone to community college and student-taught before attending the academy but was still, after a couple of years working for the sheriff’s department, working dispatch, organizing files, even getting lunches. Will felt some guilt about having been hired after Mr Grady had quit, when the obvious decision would have been to put Tania in the field.

She cleared her voice. ‘You ready? Need a pen and paper?’

‘You can tell me,’ Will said.

‘Fifty-two Walker Court Road,’ she said.

‘Fifty-two Walker Court Road.’