Greg Iles - Blood Memory

“Sho was. I think everybody who ever worked up here for your family was born on the island. Dr. Kirkland always saying nobody knows how to work no more. He ’bout right, too. He say people from the island still do a day’s work for a day’s pay.”

Poverty wages, probably. “Do you like my grandfather, Mose?”

“Oh, yes, ma’am. Dr. Kirkland been real good to me.”

“I think you know what I mean.”

Mose looks around as though someone might be eavesdropping. “You know your granddaddy, Miss Catherine. He a tough man, and he know how to squeeze a nickel till the buffalo shits-pardon my language.”

I say nothing, leaving a vacuum that Mose feels compelled to fill.

“Dr. Kirkland be kind of like that story I heard a long time ago. The plantation owner gives a slave a pint of whiskey. Another slave asks how he liked it, and the first slave says, ‘Well, if it’d been any better, he wouldn’t have give it to me, and if it’d been any worse, I couldn’t have drunk it.”

Mose isn’t simpleminded at all.

“Dr. Kirkland takes care of the people on the island, though,” he adds quickly. “They better off than a lot of black folks here in town.”

“What about my father, Mose?”

He looks confused for a minute. “Mr. Luke, you mean?”

“Yes.”

He smiles broadly, revealing tobacco-stained teeth. “Mr. Luke always had a good word for me when he passed. Sometimes he gave me a smoke off whatever he was smoking, too. If you know what I mean.”

“I do.”

“I liked ol’ Luke, but I had to be careful around him. Dr. Kirkland didn’t like him none at all.”

Michael’s Expedition is close now, threading its way through the trees like a tank wary of land mines. “Did you like the island, Mose?”

He shrugs. “Didn’t know nothing else back then. I wouldn’t go back now, though. I like my TV in the evenings. And I don’t like that river. Too many people done died in that water.”

“Did you know somebody who drowned?”

“I had a cousin drown in it. Sho did.”

“Girl or boy?”

“Boy. Name of Enos. But I believe a little girl drowned some years before that, too.”

“Do you think the island is a bad place?”

Mose squints at me as though trying to make out something far away. “What you mean, Miss Catherine?”

“Is there something bad there? Something you might not be able to explain, but that you just feel? I used to feel something like that there.”

The yardman closes his eyes. After a moment, a little shudder goes through him. Then he opens his eyes and looks at me like a little boy. “When I was young, the old folks used to say killers from the prison roamed the roads at night. From Angola, you know? Like they’d slip out of the prison at night, float over to the island, and walk the roads looking for children. All that seems like a fairy story now, something they used to scare us. But still, a lot of kids wouldn’t get near them roads anytime round dark, and not even in the daytime by themselves.”

“Why not?”

He shrugs again. “That’s just how it was. You’d have to ask somebody else the why of it. But I’ll tell you this…I got me a lot of kin down there, and I hardly been back there in forty years. And now that you ask me, I don’t care if I never go back again.”

As Michael’s Expedition rumbles up beside Mose, the yardman gives me a wave and ambles off through the trees. By the time Michael rolls down his window, Mose has vanished. Like my father, he is another ghost of Malmaison.

I take up Luke Ferry’s bag of secrets and climb into the SUV.

Michael Wells and I are sitting on a leather couch in the private office of Dr. Tom Cage, a general practitioner in Natchez for more than forty years. Bookshelves line all four walls, some stuffed with medical treatises, others with histories of the Civil War. There’s a stack of medical charts a foot high on Dr. Cage’s desk, the bane of every physician. A half-painted lead soldier holding a musket stands in the shadow of the charts, a bottle of gray paint beside him. Like us, he seems to be waiting for the doctor to appear.

But what holds my attention now, what I’ve hardly been able to take my eyes off since arriving, is the polished white skull being used as a bookend in the shelf behind Dr. Cage’s desk. The empty eye sockets stare at me with what looks like mockery, reminding me yet again that Nathan Malik is dead, that the murders in New Orleans remain unsolved, and that I am still a suspect.

Since finding the Polaroids of the naked children in my father’s bag, I’ve been unable to think clearly. The voices that tormented me long ago have returned, a susurrant undercurrent of vicious commentary that I cannot silence. More disturbing, something deep within me seems to have cracked, leaving me broken in a way I cannot begin to mend. What is broken, I think, is my faith-my desperate hope that despite what Grandpapa told me, my father could not have done such terrible things to me.

But pictures don’t lie.

Michael has done all he can to ease my anxiety. Though he believes it would be a mistake to exhume my father’s body, he telephoned his attorney during the drive over and asked what was required to accomplish such a thing. There’s no law in Mississippi governing the exhumation of bodies; in fact, not even a permit is required. What is required is the presence of a funeral director as a witness. However, when Michael phoned the funeral director, he was told that the funeral home would oversee no exhumation without a court order. Michael’s lawyer believes such an order can be obtained from the chancery judge ex parte-without a hearing-but to do so will require an affidavit stating the reason for the exhumation from the decedent’s next of kin.

My mother.

“Hi, Michael. Sorry to keep you two waiting.” A tall man with white hair and a white beard marches into the room and pumps Michael’s hand. Then he turns to me and smiles. “So, you’re Catherine Ferry?”

I stand and offer Dr. Cage my hand. “Please call me Cat.”

He takes it and squeezes softly with arthritic fingers. “And I’m Tom.”

He moves behind his desk and takes a seat. A big cigar and several tongue depressors protrude from his white lab coat, and a red stethoscope hangs around his neck. It’s clear that Tom Cage practices the kind of medicine my grandfather hasn’t deigned to practice in many years.

Dr. Cage takes a Diet Coke from a minifridge behind his desk, pops it open, and takes a long pull from the can. After a long exhalation of satisfaction, he sets the can on the desk and fixes his eyes on me.

“Luke Ferry. What do you want to know?”

“I’m not sure. Everything you remember, I suppose.”

“That’s a lot. I treated Luke as a boy, treated his parents before they died, and I treated the uncle who raised him off and on. What are you most interested in?”

I look at the floor where my father’s green bag rests between my feet. “Vietnam,” I say softly. “The White Tigers.”

Dr. Cage’s eyes flicker. “You already know more than I thought you would. Cat…your father learned to shoot to put food on his family’s table. He shot better as a boy than most men could after a lifetime of practice. But in the war they made him use that talent for another purpose. They made him a sniper. Luke had mixed feelings about that job. On one hand, he was proud of his professionalism.” Dr. Cage gestures at his bookshelves. “As you can see, I’m a military history buff. I also served in Korea. Did you know that in Vietnam, the average number of rounds expended per dead enemy soldier was fifty thousand?”

“Fifty thousand!” Michael says beside me. “That can’t be right.”