Greg Iles: Cemetery Road

Taking out my iPhone, I dial Buck’s house. Not even one full ring passes before his wife pounces on the phone.

“Marshall?” Quinn Ferris says breathlessly.

“It was him,” I tell her, knowing the slightest delay would only make it worse. “Buck’s dead.”

There’s a deep-space silence for two full seconds, and then Quinn says in a tiny voice, “You’re sure?”

“I saw his face, Quinn.”

“Oh, God. Marshall … what do I do? Is he all right? Is he comfortable? I mean—”

“I know what you mean. They’re treating him with respect. Byron Ellis picked him up. I imagine they’ll take Buck to the hospital for a brief period. There’s going to have to be an autopsy in Jackson.”

“Oh … no. They’re going to cut him open?”

“There’s no way around it, I’m afraid.”

“Was it not an accident?”

Here a little soft-pedaling won’t hurt anyone. Not in the short run. “They don’t know yet. But anyone who dies while not under a physician’s care has to have a postmortem.”

“Dear Lord. I’m trying to get my mind around it.”

“I think you should stay at home for a while, Quinn.”

“I can’t. I have to see him. Marshall, does he look all right?”

“He was in the river. That doesn’t do anybody any favors. I think you should stay out at your place for a bit. I’ll drive out to see you in a couple of hours.”

“No. No, I’m coming in. I can take it. He was my husband.”

“Quinn, listen. This is me, not the police, asking. Do you know where Buck was last night?”

“Of course. He was going back to the industrial park to try to find some bones.”

I fight the urge to groan. The industrial park is the site of the new paper mill, where the groundbreaking will happen in two hours. Buck was jailed for five hours for digging at that site the first time, and charged with felony trespass. He knew he would only get in more trouble if he went back there. But more important, that site lies downstream from where Buck was found.

“Did they kill him?” Quinn asks. “Did some of those greedy bastards murder my husband because of their stupid mill?”

“I don’t know yet, Quinn. But I’m going to find out.”

“If you don’t, we’ll never know. I don’t trust one of those sons of bitches in the sheriff’s department. They’re all owned by the local big shots. You know who I’m talking about.”

I grunt but say nothing.

“The goddamn Bienville Poker Club,” she says.

“You could be right. But we don’t know that.”

“ I know. They don’t care about anything but money. Money and their mansions and their spoiled rotten kids and—oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s just not right. Buck was so … good .”

“He was,” I agree.

“And nobody gives a damn,” she says in a desolate voice. “All the good he did, all those years, and in the end nobody cares about anything but money.”

“They think the mill means survival for the town. Boom times again.”

“ Damn this town,” she says savagely. “If they had to kill my husband to get their mill, Bienville doesn’t deserve to survive.”

There it is.

“You need to call Jet Matheson,” she says. “She’s the only one with the guts to take on the Poker Club. Not that you haven’t done some things. I mean, you’ve printed stories and all. But Jet’s own father-in-law is a member, and she’s still gone after a couple of them like a pit bull. She took Dr. Warren Lacey to court and damn near stripped him of his license.”

Quinn got to know Jet during our senior year in high school, and better during the years I was away. “Jet’s out of town this morning,” I tell her, “taking a deposition in a lawsuit. I’ll speak to her when she gets back.”

“Good.”

Quinn goes silent, but I can almost hear her mind spinning, frantically searching for anything to distract her from the immediate, awful reality. I wait, but the new widow says nothing more, probably realizing that no matter what I do, or what Jet Matheson or anyone else does, her husband will still be dead.

“Quinn, I need to get back to work. I’ll check in with you soon, I promise. You call me if you have any trouble with anyone or anything today.”

“I can handle it, Marshall. I’m a tough old girl. Come out later if you get a chance. This house is going to seem pretty empty. You’ll remind me of better times. All my old Eagle Scouts around the dinner table. Well, Buck’s, really.”

Quinn and Buck married in their early forties, and she was never able to have children of her own. Buck’s Boy Scouts always got an extra dose of maternal affection from her, one much needed by some.

“Yours too, Quinn.”

“They were. And all the music. Lord, you and Buck played through till dawn so many nights. I’d get so mad knowing we had to be up the next day, but I never said anything. It was so pure. I knew how lucky we were, even then.”

And with that, my first tears come. “I remember you complaining a time or two,” I tell her.

“Well, somebody had to be responsible.” She laughs softly, then her voice drops to a confiding whisper. “I know you know what I’m going through, Marshall. Because of Adam.”

I close my eyes, and tears roll down my cheeks. “I’ve gotta go, Quinn.”

“I didn’t mean to— Oh, hell. Death sucks .”

“I’ll call you this afternoon.”

I hang up and strike off down the bluff, away from Denny Allman, who doesn’t need to see me crying right now. Denny’s father abandoned him a long time ago, and while it might be good for him to see how grown men react to death, I don’t want to explain that the loss robbing me of my composure now didn’t happen last night, but thirty-one years ago.

A fourteen-year-old boy doesn’t need to know grief can last that long.

WHILE DENNY ALLMAN flies his drone up the bluff face to change batteries and begin searching for Buck Ferris’s truck, I walk north along the fence and try to get myself under control. It’s tough with the Mississippi River dominating my field of view. Seeing Buck pulled dead from that water kicked open a door between the man I am now and the boy I was at fourteen, the year fate ripped my life inside out. That door has been wedged shut for more years than I want to think about. Now, rather than face the dark opening, my mind casts about for something to distract itself from peering into the past.

My finger itches to make that call I cannot make, but the person I want to talk to can’t take a call from me right now. I’ve slept with married women twice in my life. The first time was in my twenties, and she was French—my professor at Georgetown. I didn’t even know she was married when I started sleeping with her; her husband lived most of the year in France. The risks during that affair never rose above the possibility of an awkward meeting at a restaurant, which might have resulted in a sharp word later, for her not me. The woman I’m sleeping with now has a husband quite capable of killing me, were he to learn of our affair. If I called her now, she could try to play it off as business, but even people of marginal intelligence can detect intimacy in the human voice. I don’t intend to have my life upended—or even ended—because of an unguarded syllable decoded by a nosy paralegal. I could send a text, of course, but SMS messages leave a digital trail.

For now I must suffer in silence.

A group of women power walking along the bluff approaches from a distance. An asphalt trail follows the bluff for two miles—the Mark Twain Riverwalk—and in the early mornings and evenings it’s quite busy. Thankfully, by nine thirty most of the serious walkers have retreated to coffee shops or to their SUVs for morning errands. For the first hundred yards, I keep my eyes rightward, on the buildings that line Battery Row. I pass the old clock tower, the Planters’ Hotel, two antebellum mansions. Behind them stands the tallest building in the city, the Aurora Hotel. Next comes the memorial fountain enshrining 173 Confederate dead. It’s a stone’s throw from the emplacements where thirty-two-pounder Seacoast guns covered the Mississippi River during the Civil War. Across from the fountain stand a couple of bars and restaurants, another antebellum home, and then the new amphitheater, paid for by casino money.