Greg Iles: Cemetery Road

HarperCollins Publishers

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2019

Copyright © Greg Iles 2019

Cover design by Holly Macdonald © HarperCollins Publishers Ltd 2019

Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com

Greg Iles asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

This is entirely a work of fiction. Any references to real people, living or dead, real events, businesses, organizations and localities are intended only to give the fiction a sense of reality and authenticity. All names, characters and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and their resemblance, if any, to real-life counterparts is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2019 © ISBN: 9780008270148

Version: 2019-02-14

To all those adults who return home to repay the debt of childhood, and find they never really left. Listen while you still can.

A secret is not something untold.

It’s something which can’t be told.

—Terence McKenna

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Chapter 52

Chapter 53

Chapter 54

Chapter 55

Chapter 56

Acknowledgments

Keep Reading …

About the Author

Also by Greg Iles

About the Publisher

I NEVER MEANT to kill my brother. I never set out to hate my father. I never dreamed I would bury my own son. Nor could I have imagined that I would betray the childhood friend who saved my life, or win a Pulitzer Prize for telling a lie.

All these things I have done, yet most people I know would call me an honorable man. I wouldn’t go that far. But I try to be a good man, and most of the time, I believe I succeed. How is this possible? These are complicated times.

And it’s not easy to be good.

HUNCHED ON HIS knees, Buck Ferris pulled a ball of fired clay from the sandy soil beside the Mississippi River, then got to his feet with a groan and climbed out of the hole beside the foundation pier. It was difficult to be certain about the era by moonlight, and he couldn’t risk a light—not here. And yet … he was certain. The sphere sitting in his palm had been fired a few centuries before Moses started wandering through the desert with the children of Israel. Ferris had been an archaeologist for forty-six years, but he’d never discovered anything like this. He felt as though the little ball were vibrating in his hand. The last human to touch this clay had lived nearly four thousand years ago—two millennia before Jesus of Nazareth walked the sands of Palestine. Buck had waited all his life to find this artifact; it dwarfed everything he’d ever done. If he was right, then the ground upon which he stood was the most important undiscovered archaeological site in North America.

“What you got there, Buck?” asked a male voice.

Blue-white light stabbed Ferris’s eyes. He nearly pissed himself, he was so stunned. He’d thought he was alone on the vast, low-lying ground of the industrial park. A quarter mile to the west, the eternal river flowed past, oblivious.

“Who are you?” Ferris asked, throwing up his left hand to shield his eyes. “Who is that?”

“You were warned not to disturb this ground,” said the man behind the light. “It’s private property.”

The speaker had a refined Southern accent that tickled Buck’s memory. He couldn’t quite place it, though. Nor could Buck say much in his own defense. He’d applied for permission to dig in this earth seven times over the past forty years, and he’d been turned down every time. But five days ago, the county had cleared the debris of the electroplating factory that had stood here since World War II. And two days from now, a Chinese company would begin building a new paper mill in its place. If anyone was going to find out what lay beneath this ground, it was now—the consequences be damned.

“Where did you come from?” Buck asked. “I didn’t see anybody when I came down here.”

“Oh, Buck … You always were a good ol’ boy. Why couldn’t you have left well enough alone?”

“Do I know you?” Ferris asked, certain that he’d heard that voice before.

“You don’t seem to.”

“I don’t think you understand the value of what I have here,” Ferris said, his voice edged with excitement.

“You don’t have anything there,” said the voice. “You’re not here.”

Buck got the gist of it then, and something started thrumming in his belly, like stretched-taut wire plucked hard. “Wait, listen,” he tried, “this ground you’re standing on … it’s an Indian settlement that’s four thousand years old. Maybe five or six thousand, depending on what I find if we dig deeper.”

“You hoping for a PBS series?”

“God, no. Don’t you understand what I’m telling you?”

“Sure. You found some Injun bones. Thing is, that’s bad news for everybody.”

“No, listen . There’s a site just like this only fifty miles from here, in Louisiana. It’s called Poverty Point. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage site. Thousands of tourists visit it every year.”

“I’ve been there. A couple of mounds of dirt, and the grass needs cutting.”

Buck realized then that this was like trying to tell a hillbilly about Bach. “That’s ridiculous. You—”