Дэвид Балдаччи - The Guilty

He drove along State Route 49, which cut a diagonal path toward Gulfport.

The state was comprised mostly of lowlands, its highest point under a thousand feet, and nearly 70 percent of it still covered in forested lands. He passed by farmland filled not with cotton or soybeans but rather with sweet potatoes, the state’s most valuable crop by acre. And then there were the chickens. There were nearly forty times more chickens in Mississippi than people. And Robie saw a few thousand of them on his drive down.

And Lord knows he smelled them, too!

Mississippi was a strange amalgam of vital statistics ranking near the bottom of all fifty states in many important categories. Yet while it was the poorest of the states, its citizens gave more per capita to charities than their wealthier sister states. And they also were the most religious of all Americans. Indeed, Mississippi’s constitution prohibited anyone who denied the existence of a supreme being from holding public office. Although this article was technically rendered unenforceable by federal law, the good folks of the Magnolia State apparently did not believe in the separation of church and state, and they most assuredly did not want to be led by a nonbeliever.

But not long before Robie had left home, this same overtly God-fearing state had authorized offshore casino gambling, and the gaming industry was flourishing. Apparently, one could believe in a supreme being and yet not feel too badly about relieving folks of their hard-earned money at the craps table.

Blacks had constituted the majority of the population until the commencement of two mass migrations, first north and then west over the course of sixty years starting in 1910. This exodus was largely to get away from the oppressive effects of the Jim Crow laws passed after the Civil War. These laws effectively kept freed blacks as downtrodden as when they were slaves. Jim Crow laws went on for over a century, and the pernicious reprecussions were still clearly felt today.

Robie kept driving and looking around at a place that in many ways seemed exactly the same as when he had left. More than half the residents here still lived in rural areas. He passed many a small town that was gone before you could blink five times. His trip for the most part paralleled the course of the Pearl River, one of the major waterways in the state. The last section of the Pearl River split Mississippi from Louisiana.

As a boy Robie had become very familiar with the Pearl: swimming in it despite its sometimes dangerous and unpredictable currents, pulling fish from its depths, and gliding in an old wooden skiff over its mossy-green backwater surface.

Nice memories.

Nice but faded.

At least they used to be.

He turned off Route 49 and headed southwest. He saw a “Dummy Line” road sign. Dummy Lines were abandoned railroad tracks, not for passenger trains, but to carry lumber when the boom was going on. The boom was long gone, but the signs remained because no one had bothered to take them down. It was just how it was here.

A half hour later he hit the town limits of Cantrell at exactly one in the afternoon. Interstate 10 was to the north of him and Highway 59 to the west. He was closer to the Louisiana border than he was to Gulfport. The weather was warm and the air full of moisture as befitting a state with a subtropical climate, which accommodated short, mild winters and long, humid summers. Growing up here Robie had seen snow fall twice. The first time, not knowing what it was, four-year-old Robie had run screaming into the house to escape its effects. He had survived hurricanes, F5 tornados, and intense flooding, as had all southern Mississippians.

He had survived all sorts of things that had arisen in the small town, the population of which had been 2,367 when he had left. The population now stood at three short of 2,000, or so the town’s welcome sign had proclaimed.

To Robie, it was a wonder the place was even still here. Perhaps those remaining had no way to get out.

Or lacked the will even to try.

His shiny rental stood out in a sea of dusty pickup trucks as well as old Lincolns, Furys, and wide-trunked Impalas, although there was a cherry-red late-model Beemer parked at the curb in front of a storefront advertising the best deep-sea fishing known to man.

It had been twenty-two years since he had left this place, and he swore that nothing he could see had changed much. But of course it had.

For one, his father was in jail for murder.

Unless it had been moved, Robie knew exactly where the town’s stockade was. He drove in that direction, ignoring folks staring at the newcomer. He imagined there weren’t many of those. Who would travel all this way to get to a place like Cantrell?

Well, I did.

The town jail was in its old location, though it had been spruced up some and fortified with more bars and steel doors. Robie parked his car, got out, and stared up at the brick front with the heavy metal door and barred windows. He had on jeans, a short-sleeved shirt with the tail out, and a pair of scuffed loafers. He slipped his sunglasses into his front shirt pocket.

The sign next to the door required visitors to hit the white button. He did. A few seconds later, the voice came out of the squawk box that was bolted to the doorjamb. The words were spoken slowly and each seemed to be drawn out to the absolute limit of their pronounceable length. Growing up here Robie sometimes felt he had never heard a consonant, certainly never an r . And while n ’s and g ’s at the ends of words were clearly seen on paper they were — like children and lunatic relations — never, ever heard.

“Deputy Taggert here. Can I help y’all?”

Deputy Taggert was a woman, Robie noted. He also noted the surveillance camera above his head. Deputy Taggert could see him, too.

Robie took a breath. As soon as he said the next words it would be all over town with no possibility of ever taking it back. It was like social media, without need for an Internet.

“I’m Will Robie. I’m here to see my father, Dan Robie.”

The voice said nothing for four long beats.

Then—

“Can I see me some ID?”

Robie took out his driver’s license and held it up to the camera.

“Dee-Cee?” said Taggert, referring to Robie’s District of Columbia license.

“Yes.”

“You carryin’ any weapons?”

“No.”

“Well, we see ’bout that. We got us here a metal detector. You care to answer that question different now, Mr. Robie?”

“No. I’m not armed.”

The door buzzed open. Robie gripped the handle and pulled.

He walked into a darkened space and had to blink rapidly to adjust his eyes to the low light level. A metal detector stood in front of the doorway across the space that led into the interior of the building. A uniformed man stood there, hand on the stippled butt of his nine-millimeter sidearm. He was taller than Robie, with a protruding belly but also broad shoulders and a thick neck that made his head look shrunken.

The uniform eyed him up and down. “Y’all want’a step over here.”

It wasn’t a question.

Robie was searched and then passed through the metal detector that never made a sound.

The room Robie next entered looked like a waiting room because it was. He wasn’t the only one in there. A young black woman, skinny and frail, was bouncing a pudgy diapered baby on her lap. In the far corner an old white man sat dozing, the back of his head propped against a wall painted the color of concrete. The place smelled of sweat and burned coffee and the passage of time, which held its own moldy stink. The confluence of smells hit Robie like a gut punch. Not because they were unfamiliar, but because they weren’t.