Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“Just south of it.”

He banks the Cessna in a wide arc to the west, and almost immediately I see the silver line of the river ahead.

“Can you fly low?”

“Sure. We can buzz the treetops.”

“No thanks. Just low enough to make out cars and people.”

Michael laughs and begins descending.

Soon the river is a great silver serpent slithering across a vast green floor. On the near shore, endless ranks of trees march over the hills. On the far bank, flat fields of cotton and soybeans stretch as far as the eye can see. The river cuts through the land with implacable abandon, bisecting the continent almost as an afterthought.

“Can you believe we were right down there the night before last?” I ask. “Or all that’s happened since then?”

Michael tilts the plane a little and looks down. “I can’t believe you swam that river. I mean shit. ”

“Do you see an island?”

“I see a half dozen of them.”

“This one’s four miles long.”

Michael whistles low. “I think I was looking right at it without knowing it. There’s Angola prison. So that must be DeSalle Island.”

I can’t see it from my side, and Michael quickly realizes this. He banks and drops the nose, and suddenly we’re boring in on the long, humped mass of the island like a fighter plane on a strafing run.

“How high are we?”

“I’m going to stay at four hundred feet. You can see all you need to from there.”

In a matter of seconds, we’re roaring over the island. I’ve seen it from the air before: once long ago from the cockpit of a crop duster, then later from the basket of a hot-air balloon. Today’s view reminds me of that first trip, the landscape below flashing past at a hundred miles an hour. I see the hunting camp, the lake, the lodge, the pastures and the pond, and then we’re banking left to avoid what might be restricted airspace over Angola.

“Can you make another pass?”

“Sure. What are you looking for?”

“A car. A blue Cadillac.”

“I’ll climb to a thousand feet. You’ll have a better view between the trees.”

Michael executes a 360-degree turn, climbing as he goes. This time the island looks more like a satellite photo, the chaos caused by proximity now softened into geometric patterns. I see the road that runs the perimeter of the island and the branch that cuts south of the hunting camp, widening into an open space near the cluster of cabins that house the workers. Four white pickups are parked by the cabins. To the left of them, a baby blue sedan stands gleaming in the sun.

Pearlie’s Cadillac.

“Okay!” I tell Michael. “Let’s go home.”

“You saw the car?”

I nod and point northward, toward Natchez. I don’t really feel like talking now. I just want to know what drove Pearlie Washington to travel to the island where she was born, a place where, according to her, she is no longer welcome. One more mystery among many. Yet something tells me that if I could read Pearlie’s mind, all the other mysteries would be solved.

The Natchez airport is a tiny facility, two runways and a brick administration building laid out near the origin of the Natchez Trace. Michael makes a perfect three-point landing, then transfers me to his Expedition, and within fifteen minutes we’re approaching the driveway of Malmaison. The sight of the oak-bordered drive with its pink Pilgrimage tour sign gives me a strange feeling of foreboding.

“You want me to drive up to the house?” he asks.

I wave him past the opening in the trees. “Let’s go to your house and walk through the woods to the barn. If Billy Neal and my grandfather are there, I’d rather have some privacy for this.”

Michael pulls into Brookwood and drives to the back of the subdivision, where his house stands quietly under the trees.

“Do you have bolt cutters or anything?”

He shakes his head. “I may have a hacksaw.”

“That could work. What about an ax?”

“Yeah. We going to tear the place down?”

“Be prepared. Weren’t you a Boy Scout?”

Michael actually blushes when he says no.

Three minutes later, we’re jogging through the trees toward Malmaison. I’m carrying the hacksaw, he the ax. When I sight the main house, I bear right, toward the low-lying land bordering the bayou at the back of the property. The city of Natchez is built on hills transected by bayous and deep gullies, a secret network of waterways known by the children but forgotten by adults. Most adults, anyway. I still know them all.

We approach the barn from the side, then circle around back, so as to be shielded from anyone glancing down from the parking lot behind the slave quarters. The wall boards are dry and weathered gray, but the door still resists a stout pull. I lay the hacksaw blade against the padlock and set to work. When the sweat begins pouring off my face, Michael takes over the saw. The cords and muscles in his forearms bulge as he works, and it strikes me that Michael is stronger than he looks-definitely not the fat boy I remembered from high school.

“There,” he says, blowing metal shavings away from the cut. “Give me the ax.”

I pass it to him. With the blunt side of the head, he bashes the lock off the heavy hasp. “Open sesame,” he says.

Then he pulls open the door.

My indrawn breath remains locked in my chest.

Inside the barn are more Luke Ferry sculptures than I’ve ever seen gathered in one place. There must be twenty, most of them taller than my head, and some twenty feet high.

“Wow,” Michael whispers. “It’s like a museum. A private museum.”

The sight of all that polished metal wrought into abstract yet beautiful forms by my father’s hands is almost more than I can bear. When the smell hits me-the scent of hay that Daddy could never get out of the barn-my knees go weak. Even his tools are here, his cutting torch with its big gas cylinders, his metal saw…

“Cat? Are you okay?”

I clutch Michael’s arm and take a step into the barn. “I didn’t need to look at this stuff right now. It’s too much, you know?”

“Yeah. It’s powerful even for me, and I didn’t know the guy. Did you know all this was here?”

“Not like this. My grandfather must have lost his mind. He never liked my father’s work. Now, it’s like he’s cornering the market.”

“Do you still want to look for the bag?”

“Hell, yes. That’s why we’re here.”

I quickly thread my way through the sculptures to the foot of the timber post that my father walked to in my dream. It’s uncanny how certain I feel that I’m standing in the right place. If that bag is beneath these boards, my dream was just as Nathan Malik described a repressed memory: buried deeply, but intact. And true.

“The ax?”

Michael passes me the ax like a nurse passing a retractor to a surgeon. With the head, I press down on one end of the first board I saw my father touch in my dream. When the other end of the board lifts a little, my heartbeat stutters. I catch that end of the board with my shoe, hold it in place, then reach down and pull the board out of the floor.

“Look at that,” Michael whispers.

My hand tingles as I slip it into the darkness beneath the floor. Then it closes around dry, rubbery fabric. The bag. As I pull on the neck of the bag, two more floorboards come up with it, exposing an olive drab sack that looks as if it holds nothing more than old laundry.

“I think we just proved that repressed memories exist,” I say.

Instead of poking blindly through the bag with my hand, I carefully shake out its contents on the floor. The first thing that falls out is a magazine. Playboy. It’s dated 1970 and boasts the Playmate of the Year on its cover. Relief washes through me.