Greg Iles - The Devil’s Punchbowl

If only Tim’s evolution had stopped there ….

As her husband slowly regained the bearings he’d lost during his early twenties, he’d begun to experience a kind of emotional fallout. His memory, which had blocked out so much during his lost years, began to fill in the gaps, and waves of guilt and regret would assail him. Tim rediscovered God, which might have been all right had he not acted like a religious convert, more zealous than those born into the faith. He saw choices starkly, as either right or wrong, and despite his own past he judged those who didn’t measure up to his idea of ethical responsibility. It wasn’t a moral prissiness–he didn’t condemn people for the common human lapses–but he began to obsess about the big things in life. Politics. Organized religion. The diamond brokers in Sierra Leone, the starving children in the Sudan, the good Muslims in Iraq. The uneducated blacks right here in Mississippi .

And then it happened. Exactly what, Julia didn’t know. But it was something at work. Tim had witnessed something terrible, or overheard something, and from that night forward he’d been a man possessed. With each passing week he’d grown more withdrawn, more irritable, to the point that she feared he’d begun using again. But it wasn’t that. Tim had apparently discovered something that so outraged him he felt compelled to right the wrong himself. And that terrified her. Tim wasn’t the kind of man to take on that kind of trouble. He was smart, and he was good-hearted, but he wasn’t hard inside, the way her first husband had been. Tim had illusions about people; he wanted them to be better than they were, and you couldn’t fight evil men if you thought that way. You couldn’t win, anyway. Julia had lived enough life to know that .

The only thing that had given her any comfort was Tim telling her that Penn Cage would be helping him. Julia had known Penn in high school too. She’d even kissed him once, beside a car one night at a senior party that she and a friend had sneaked off to. Penn Cage wasn’t like Tim. He wasn’t timid or uncertain; he made decisions and stuck with them, and life had worked out for him. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t suffered; he’d lost his wife to cancer; but everybody paid for the things they got, some way or other. You had to pay just for being alive .

And that, Julia guessed, was what Tim was trying to do. He wanted to make up for all the years he had wasted, for all the things he could have accomplished and had not. It wasn’t for her, she knew, and this both relieved and wounded her. She’d done all she could to prove to Tim that he owed her nothing–nothing except all the time he could give to her and the baby. But that wasn’t enough for him. Tim’s obsession was rooted in his relationship with his father. He felt he had betrayed his father as well as himself, and something was driving him to prove that he was in fact the man his father had dreamed he might one day become .

Julia hopes Tim wasn’t lying about Penn, that he didn’t simply tell her whatever he thought would quiet her while he went off to God-knew-where to earn the right to feel good about himself again. And so she waits, and watches her baby, and prays that someone will take the cross from her husband’s back and carry it for him. For in the inmost chamber of her heart Julia is certain that if Tim goes on alone, he will die before finding the salvation he seeks .

I should probably drive straight home from the cemetery, but as Tim predicted, I cannot free my mind from the terrible images in his photographs. Instead, I drive up Linton Avenue, turn on Madison Street, and cruise past the newspaper building, where my old lover once worked as publisher. While Caitlin Masters lived in Natchez, everything she could uncover and verify about the city was printed in the paper. Now, despite the fact that her father still owns the Examiner , much of the investigative fire seems to have gone out of the staff. If Caitlin were still here, I suspect, the rumors that Tim fleshed out tonight would already be halfway to the front page.

I turn on State Street and negotiate a series of right angles on the city’s notorious one-way streets, checking for a tail as I make my way to City Hall. The cop at the cemetery proved easy enough to handle, but I’m not sure he bought my explanation of visiting my wife’s grave. He kept glancing over my shoulder as though he expected a half-dressed woman to appear from among the gravestones beyond the cemetery wall. Of course, he might also have been searching for Tim Jessup, and that’s why I’m keeping my eyes on my rearview mirror as I drive. I’d like to know just how interested the police are in my movements.

Unlike most Mississippi towns, Natchez has no central square dominated by a courthouse or a Confederate soldier on a pillar. The lifeblood of this city has always been the river, and the stately old commercial blocks platted in 1790 march away from it as though with regret, toward onetime plantations now mostly subdivided into residential neighborhoods. City Hall faces Pearl Street and abuts the county courthouse at the rear. The courthouse is the larger of the two buildings, but people often see them as a single structure, since only a narrow alley separates them.

Parking before the cream-colored stone of City Hall, I walk beneath hundred-year-old oaks to the main entrance. The building is usually locked by 5:00 p.m., but the chandelier in the foyer blazes like the ballroom of the Titanic , and I use its light to find the proper key on my ring. A couple of years before I was elected mayor, the previous board of selectmen awarded me a key to the city. This token of recognition didn’t mean much at the time–it was the kind of honor you might dream about as a kid watching a Disney movie–but tonight, unlocking City Hall with the actual key to the building, I feel the crushing weight of my responsibility to the people who elected me.

Upstairs, in my office, I kneel before my safe and open its combination lock. The few sensitive documents I deal with as mayor reside in this safe, among them my file on the Golden Parachute Gaming Corporation, the Los Angeles-based company that owns the Magnolia Queen . Feeling strangely furtive, I slip the thick file inside my button-down shirt before I walk downstairs and lock the door. With the file still tucked against my belly, I drive the ten blocks required to reach my home on Washington Street three blocks away, my eyes alert for police cars.

When I moved back to town, I had the morbid luck to arrive shortly before the patriarch of an old Natchez family died, which resulted in their family home coming up for sale after a century of benign neglect. I bought it the same day, and I’ve never regretted it. An elegant, two-story Federal town house of red brick, it stands at the center of one of the most beautiful enclaves of the city. Town houses of various styles and pedigrees stand along both sides of the street like impeccably dressed ladies and gentlemen from another era, gradually giving way to the Episcopal Church, the Temple B’nai Israel, Glen Auburn–a four-story French Second Empire mansion–and Magnolia Hall, a massive Greek Revival mansion and the headquarters of one of the once-powerful local garden clubs. The town houses aren’t antebellum for the most part, but rather the dwellings of the merchants, lawyers, and physicians who prospered in Natchez in the Victorian era. The entire downtown length of Washington Street is lined with fuchsia-blooming crape myrtle trees, which are tended by ladies obsessively dedicated to their survival.

As I park and exit my car, a faint but steady glow from the second floor of the house across the street catches my eye. My stomach gives a little flip and I pause, trying to recall whether I’ve seen that light in the past few weeks. The question has some importance, for the house still belongs to Caitlin, though she hasn’t lived in it for eighteen months, preferring to spend most of her time in Charlotte, North Carolina, where her father’s newspaper chain is based. But the house remains furnished, and she does not rent it out. Caitlin and I parted on good enough terms that I still possess a key, in theory so that should any kind of emergency befall the house, I could help the proper people to deal with it.