Cemetery Road

In late August, I was working in the main offices of the Post, on Fifteenth and L, where Woodward and Bernstein did the work that made me want to follow in their footsteps. I was supposed to be home by six thirty, to take over caring for Adam so that Molly could attend a network event. Then I got a call from CNN. Could I run over to their studio and appear on Lou Dobbs Tonight to discuss President Bush signing the bailout bill, and the suspension of trading on both Russian stock exchanges? This was before the era of ubiquitous pundits on television every night, so it was something I felt I should do. Molly agreed, though she let me know she wasn’t happy about giving up her evening to babysit our two-year-old.

I was in the midst of the interview when my cell phone vibrated an emergency code in my pocket. By the time I got off camera and checked it, the emergency was over. Molly had taken Adam to a friend’s condo about fifty yards up the street from ours. She and Taryn Waller had started drinking wine and commiserating over their husbands’ unreasonable work hours, while Adam—comatose after an ice cream cone—slept in the TV room down the hall. Taryn was pouring their fourth glass of wine when Molly realized she hadn’t checked on Adam in a while. When she went to the TV room, she didn’t see him.

They found him behind the condo, at the bottom of the Wallers’ swimming pool. While Molly and Taryn were talking, our son had awakened and somehow crawled through a homemade pet entrance set in the Wallers’ back door. He wandered onto the patio, where there was no pool fence or motion alarm. The police report said it appeared that Adam had simply walked off the edge of the swimming pool into six feet of water. He never made a sound. None that Molly heard, anyway.

Our marriage did not survive his loss.

You hear all the time how the death of a child always leads to divorce. In truth, most times it doesn’t. Sometimes that kind of tragedy strengthens a marriage. I can see how it would happen, if you were married to the right person. I wasn’t. For four years I had tried to convince myself that I was, but the fissure that opened in our relationship after Adam died proved me wrong. I tried not to blame Molly. Whether I was successful in that effort or not, she believed that I blamed her, and that—combined with her own sense of guilt—had a corrosive effect on both our marriage and her mental state.

For me, the irony was nearly fatal. Twenty-one years after my brother drowned in the Mississippi River, I had to endure my son drowning in six feet of water. Worse, I—who had been blamed by my father for my brother’s death—was now in the position of persecutor. How could she have left him unattended for more than an hour? I wondered. A two-year-old! How could she not have heard him when he woke up? Surely Adam had made some sound, called out for me or his mother, as was his habit. Especially after waking in an unfamiliar room. Or finding himself alone on a dark patio. I asked myself these questions thousands of times. And then, when I could stand it no more, I asked her. Molly hit back with the obvious: if I hadn’t forced her to cancel her plans so that I could race over and appear on CNN, Adam would still be alive.

This was unquestionably true. But accepting it did nothing to alleviate our suffering. I’ll omit the awful, protracted descent into hell that followed this exchange. Suffice to say that by the time we divorced eleven months later, we were both emotionally scarred, and Molly had lost her job. I was nearly fired myself, and were it not for the benevolence of a sympathetic friend in management, I would have been out. Instead, they kept me on, and I slowly worked my way back to some semblance of normalcy, often taking risky assignments as a way of penetrating the emotional damper that grief wraps around us.

But it was the advent of the Trump circus in 2015 that not only resurrected my career, but lifted it to new heights. I became a regular on MSNBC and an occasional guest on CNN. This spurred me into a kind of mental overdrive. Using my most closely held sources in Washington and New York, I began researching Donald Trump’s financial ties to Russian oligarchs. At the same time, I started writing a book about how the Trump phenomenon had exposed the grim truth that the sins for which the South had always been excoriated—racism, tribalism, and xenophobia—were deeply embedded in the white body politic across the United States. I was halfway through my first draft when I discovered how ill my father truly was and decided to come home. The Trump-Russia story I had to leave to others. And I was less than fours hours south of Washington when I realized that all that work I had been doing—maintaining a pace that had shocked even my most intense colleagues—had but one purpose: to shield me from the pain of losing my little boy.

Nadine knows about Adam’s death. The facts, anyway, and what it did to my marriage. She understands that I’ve never fully dealt with his loss, any more than I’ve dealt with my brother’s. As regards healthy grieving, I’ve been stuck in a state of arrested anger for decades. The death of my son piled onto the death of my brother gave me a psychological burden—or perhaps a soul burden—that requires much of my fortitude to carry through each day. “My two Adams,” I sometimes call them. I’ve had countless nightmares about both tragedies, my brother’s more than my son’s, which may seem odd. But recently, it’s my little boy I see in the long watches of my restless nights.

I see him awakening confused, even scared, calling out for me or his mother, then getting to his feet and searching the darkened condo for us, his arms stretched out before him. Drawn by the light of the little plastic trapdoor, he somehow uses his ingenuity to get it open and then crawl through, after which he scrambles to his feet and wanders out to the undulating bright blue surface of the swimming pool. Perhaps Adam sees himself reflected in the water. Perhaps he leans over to see better, looks into his own eyes … and then tips over.

That dream is worse than the one in which I’m pursued by savage soldiers with guns and knives who want to hurt me so badly that I consider suicide rather than capture. I have lived through that situation in the real world. It pales next to the image of my son sinking through cerulean water with no comprehension of what’s happening to him. Did he surface? I’ve wondered a million times. Did he flail his little arms? Did he scream for help, sucking in chlorine? Or did he die in silence at the cold, airless bottom?

I’ve never asked an expert that question. I didn’t even google it. In the last analysis, I probably don’t really want to know. But maybe I’ll meet an expert someday. Maybe I’ll find the courage to ask. Because however hesitant I might be to face reality, I’m a human being, and that’s something we have to know sooner or later. Did our loved one suffer? And if so … how badly?

It took a long time for me to start seeing women after that. Eventually I did. The first couple of tries didn’t go very well. I found it difficult to be at ease with a woman once other people were removed from the equation. Then I met Eleanor Attie, a producer at one of the cable networks. Eleanor sensed that I carried some deep pain, but she never pushed me about it, and that made intimacy possible. We’d been dating for about four months when I realized I needed to return to Bienville. We kept in close touch at first, but after three weeks or so, our calls started getting further apart and our emails less frequent—weekly, almost perfunctory things. When you leave the small, hyperconnected family that is the Washington media circus, it’s like falling off the earth—at least to the people still working under the big top.

After all, it wasn’t like I was sending in weekly reports from Zabul Province in Afghanistan. I was in Mississippi, which from Washington looks like a fourth-world country. The newspaper I’d taken over focused mostly on local matters, except for the occasional blistering screed against the depredations of Trump and his cronies, authored by my father. But it’s been two months since Dad printed one of those. Mortality is having its way with him. His diminished editorial output has cut into the profits of our local glazier, who was making good money replacing the plate-glass windows on the ground floor of our downtown office. Before Dad slowed his pace, not even security cameras stopped the angry Trump supporter who simply wore a mask as he marched up to the windows with brick in hand to make his feelings known.

As I reach the head of Port Road, which leads down the bluff to the industrial park, the sun flashes off a large gathering of cars about a mile away. This confuses me for a few seconds, because it looks more than anything like cars gathered for a sporting event. Then I realize this crowd must have assembled for the groundbreaking. As the Flex coasts down the steep bluff road, I start to make out tents set up on the actual paper mill site, where Buck found his artifacts. Several large groups of people are moving around the tents, and as I reach the level ground of the industrial park, logos on those tents become legible.

One belongs to the casino and reads SUN KING RESORT in gold letters. A larger tent reads AZURE DRAGON PAPER, which is the parent company of the mill that will be built here. The mill will operate under the name PulpCore, Inc., but Azure Dragon will own it. Off to the right, Claude Buckman’s Bienville Southern Bank has two tents set up side by side, but the grandest tent of all reads PRIME SHOT PREMIUM HUNTING GEAR. These logos tell me that the men who truly run this city are out in force today. And why not? All their years of machinations have brought them to this moment. The town took a serious hit in the ’90s, and another after 2008, but unlike the other river towns, Bienville has come through the recession strong enough to not only maintain its population, but also to expand its tax base. The twelve members of the Bienville Poker Club stand on the threshold of a billion-dollar payoff. Bigger, really, when you add in the ancillary elements of the deal. A new interstate highway that will run from El Paso, Texas, to Augusta, Georgia, passing over the new Bienville bridge as it carries Azure Dragon paper pulp to market. Weighed against all this, one archaeologist’s life wouldn’t have counted for much.

“Marshall McEwan!” cries a male voice as I get out of the Flex.

I turn to find New Jersey émigré Tommy Russo hurrying along the road in a close-fitting tailored suit. The owner of the Sun King Casino is walking in the direction of the tents. I figured Russo would have been here an hour ago, working the governor and the secretary of commerce. The only non-native-born member of the Poker Club, Tommy Russo plans to bring in a second casino as soon as I-14 becomes a reality. Bienville has a long gambling history, dating back to the Lower’ville saloons and a nineteenth-century horse track on the river. But Tommy has updated the old riverboat gambler stereotype and brought The Sopranos to Bienville. He’s quick to smile, but you sense menace just behind his eyes. He’s like a friendly snake with his fangs folded out of sight.

“I guess the Chinks are really going to make us rich after all,” he says, as I fall into step beside him. “Off the record, of course.”

“I take it a day at a time, Tommy.”

“Come on, brah. None of that pessimism. A billion dollars is like the second coming. That’s real money, even to me. Hey, did you hear about Buck Ferris?”

I show no reaction. “What about him?”

“They found him in the river this morning. I figured you’d be all over that.”

“I’ll wait and see what the police tell me.”

Russo’s predatory eyes read every line and shadow on my face. “Yeah? Good. That’s good. Last thing we need around here is more bullshit stories to upset the Chinamen. This town’s on the right track, while everybody else is starving.”

“Looks that way. I’ll catch you later, Tommy.”

Just as I start to break away, another member of the Poker Club emerges from the parked cars and calls, “Tommy Flash! What you doin’ fraternizing with the enemy?”

Beau Holland is a real estate developer, and he likes to tell people that his family can trace itself back eight generations in Bienville. If you let him talk, Beau will swear he’s descended from French royalty. A few years shy of fifty, Holland is the second-youngest member of the Poker Club. He owns property all over south Mississippi, and he developed both white-flight subdivisions on the eastern edge of the county that have attracted affluent young professionals from Jackson. Word is he’s speculated heavily in all sorts of ventures since finding out that Azure Dragon would be building its newest mill at Bienville.

“Marshall’s not the enemy,” Russo says as Holland catches up to us, wearing a suit that probably cost more than my entire wardrobe. “He’s just doin’ his job.”

“Could’ve fooled me with that story on Buck Ferris.”

Beau Holland always sounds like an irritated spinster to me. He reminds me of some Mississippi Delta boys I met when I went to Boys’ State as a junior in high school. They weren’t gay, but they spoke with a soft lisp and a passive-aggressive sarcasm that fit the old stereotype. What they were was mama’s boys.

“At least we won’t have to worry about Buck anymore,” Beau adds, finding it impossible to suppress his bile.

“I wouldn’t be too sure of that,” I mutter.

“What?” he asks sharply, reaching out to stop me.

I keep walking, and Tommy stays apace.

“I’m talking to you, McEwan!” Holland snaps.

“Keep talking,” I call over my shoulder. “Maybe somebody will come by who gives a shit.”

Tommy Russo snickers under his breath.

As we come to the tents, I say, “Catch you later, Tommy,” then break away and push into the edge of the crowd, trying to avoid eye contact where possible. I don’t want to suffer through fishing expeditions by people wanting information about Buck’s death.

Moving into the crowd’s center, I see Max Matheson holding court beneath the Prime Shot tent. Max radiates the same vitality he always did as a younger man, his lean build, deep tan, and hard blue eyes making it easy to visualize him in a sergeant’s uniform in a Vietnam rice paddy. As I focus on his gray-blond head, I see his son standing to his left and, beside Paul, several attractive young women wearing Prime Shot polo shirts. Something tells me they’re here to keep the Chinese officials entertained. As I hover between two tents, a dark-skinned, black-haired beauty behind the Prime Shot girls draws my gaze. She’s wearing an indigo sundress that exposes perfect shoulders. She’s older than the Prime Shot girls, but even behind large sunglasses, she’s clearly out of their league. As I shield my eyes against the glare of the sun, I curse out loud.

The unknown beauty is Jet Matheson. And she’s looking right at me. Glancing at her husband’s back, Jet points to her right, where a refreshments bar has been set up. Without nodding, I head in that direction, my heart rate increasing with each step. What is Jet doing here? She’s supposed to be taking a deposition in Jackson. I get into the queue at the refreshments bar and force myself to focus on a stack of soft drinks and bottled water.

I can’t believe I was looking right at Jet without recognizing her. Especially since she’s one of the most unusual-looking women I’ve ever seen. Buck Ferris once described her as an Arabic Emmylou Harris. Jet’s father was Jordanian, her mother American. That’s one reason she always stands out in Mississippi crowds. I suppose the Jackie O sunglasses and the crowd of Prime Shot hostesses obscured enough of her to confuse me, and my belief that she was sixty miles away did the rest.

“I heard about Buck’s death before I went into the deposition,” Jet whispers from behind me in the line. “I canceled it and headed straight back. I had Josh with me, so I didn’t text you.”

Josh Germany is her paralegal.

“Are you all right?” she goes on. “I know what he meant to you.”

I nod but say nothing.

“Do you know who killed him?”

Almost imperceptibly, I shake my head.

“Betsy Peters!” Jet says effusively. “My God, it’s been an age. What a pretty day, isn’t it? What a crowd.”

“It’s awesome,” says a woman with a heavy Southern accent. “Good times are finally coming. I’m so ready for that party tonight.”

“Me, too,” Jet gushes, as though she has all day to shoot the breeze. “I was actually thinking of quitting early today. By three, probably.”

My heart thumps. Jet’s last statement was code, telling me that she wants to meet me in private. Today—at three P.M. Our default meeting place is my home.

“Did you hear about old Buck Ferris?” Betsy Peters asks in a softer voice. “They found him dead in the river.”

“I did,” Jet replies.

“I hate to say it,” Betsy goes on at 50 percent volume, “but it’s a damn lucky thing for Bienville. We don’t need that old crank screwing up this China deal. I don’t care if the damned Indians raised the dead on this ground we’re standing on. Their time’s done. This is survival.”

“It is,” Jet says, but her tone sounds contemplative rather than indicative of assent.

After Betsy passes on, I turn as though looking casually around. “Jet Matheson!” I cry, feigning surprise. “What are you doing here? Spying on the enemy?”

Through her sunglass lenses, I see Jet’s eyes cut over to the Prime Shot tent. “You could say that,” she answers in a theatrical voice. “But God knows I want success for this town. I just want it to be on the up-and-up.”

She’s wearing sapphire stud earrings and a silver pendant necklace that hangs just above the neckline of her sundress. Beads of sweat glisten around the pendant, which appears to be an Arabic symbol. Smiling at her, I glance quickly around, taking in everyone standing within thirty feet of us. A couple of faces look familiar, but none do I know well. Of course, that doesn’t mean they don’t know me.

“I’m jealous,” I tell her. “I’m way too busy to take off early. I’m working overtime every day this past month.”

“I’ll bet.” She reads my negative reply as the coded positive it was. Looking back toward her husband, Jet says in a louder voice, “I need to get back to the tent. Could you bring me a Sprite or something? Paul wants me close today for some reason. Arm candy, I suppose.”

“Sure, glad to,” I tell her, forcing another smile, but feeling almost dizzy with disorientation. I’m not sure whether her request was serious or she was using it to break away from the queue—and from me. “What’s that symbol mean?” I ask, pointing at her necklace.

She smiles, and her brilliant teeth shine against her dark skin and red lips. “Peace, of course. Salam.”

“Ah. We could use some of that, all right.”

No one but me would have noticed the flash of emotion in her eyes.

“Thanks for the Sprite, Goose,” she says brightly, using my high school nickname, which will instantly put distance between us for anyone within earshot. As she turns to walk away, she catches hold of my wrist in a seemingly casual gesture of thanks, but she squeezes so hard that pain shoots up my arm. Then she lets go and recedes into the crowd, her dark shoulders and long neck making her easy to follow to the Prime Shot tent.

Her painful squeeze communicated intense emotion; the problem is, I can’t read it. Was she reassuring me of our bond, despite the public charade? She doesn’t usually risk that kind of thing. Was she signaling fear? Even desperation? A combination of all three? The moment she touched me, I felt myself getting aroused. I hope my face isn’t flushed, but it’s hard to control that response when a woman touches you like that—especially the woman you’ve been fucking every day for twelve weeks.

CHAPTER 10

THE TOUGHEST ACTING job in the world is behaving normally in the presence of someone with whom you’re having illicit sex. Most people who find themselves in this situation think they can handle it, but the truth is sooner or later people pick up on intimacy. Even if they don’t see it, they feel it. They notice a hitch in the breathing, an altered tone of voice, a difference in the way you deal with space around someone. And, of course, the eyes. Reality abides in the eyes. What keeps most of these situations from exploding is the tendency of the betrayed not to see what their eyes and other senses tell them.

After my surprise interaction with Jet, I have to decide whether she was serious when she asked me to deliver a Sprite to the Prime Shot tent. To do so will mean interacting with her husband, Paul, whom I have known since I was three years old. Also with her father-in-law, Max, who’s one of the most powerful members of the Poker Club. Since Paul might have watched us talking in the refreshment line, the best choice is probably to take Jet the drink.

Prime Shot Premium Hunting Gear was founded by Wyatt Cash, a Bienville native who made some money as a professional baseball player, then parlayed it into a wildly successful company that makes everything from custom camouflage clothing to all-terrain vehicles. Most of the Poker Club members on hand today have gravitated to Cash’s tent, although I see a couple of older members at the Bienville Southern Bank tent, paying court to its octogenarian founder, Claude Buckman.

“Yo, Goose!” Paul Matheson calls as I approach the Prime Shot tent. “Wassup, man?”

At six feet even, Paul is a slightly smaller version of his father. Blond, gregarious, still muscular at forty-seven. There’s no one on earth with whom I have a more complex history.

“Just covering this Chinese fire drill,” I tell him. “Jet passed me in the drink line and asked me to bring her a Sprite.”

“What a gentleman. We got beer in a cooler back here. Scotch if you’re feeling frisky.”

“At eleven A.M.? I’ll pass.”

“Hey, this is a celebration day. All day, all night.”

I hand him the Sprite. “Can you make sure Jet gets this?”

“I’ll take it myself,” Jet says, stepping up from behind me and brushing my cheek with a kiss. God, this woman has nerve.

She moves on through the bodies under the tent, stopping to speak to her paralegal, who’s talking to one of the Prime Shot girls. Paul steps closer to me. “I heard about Buck, man. I’m sorry as hell. I know how close you two were.”

“Yeah. Thanks.”

“What do you think happened?”

“Don’t know. Guess I’ll wait to hear from the police.”

Paul snorts. “Like you’ve never done once in your life. Come on, man.”

“I really don’t know. Accident seems unlikely. Floating into that snag would be a stretch. That’s a wide river.”

“Yeah.” Paul lowers his voice. “You think somebody stuck him out there? Wasted him, then tried to hand the cops an accident on a platter?”

“Buck wasn’t going to win a popularity contest during this past week.”

“No shit. I sure hope it was an accident.”

“He didn’t die where they found his truck,” I say, watching Paul from the corner of my eye. “Somebody staged that.”

This intrigues him. “You have proof of that?”

“Call it intuition. But your buddy Beau Holland sure seems on edge about the whole thing.”

“Fuck Beau Holland,” he says with venom. “He ain’t my buddy.”

“Did you say you want to have sex with Beau Holland?” asks a deeper male voice.

Max Matheson claps his son on the back, then laughs heartily. “Hey, Goose, how’s it hanging?”

I nod but say nothing. Back when he coached us as boys, Max would ask this to trigger responses like “Long and loose and full of juice.”

“Heard about Buck,” he says, then takes a pull from what looks like Scotch on the rocks. “Bad luck.”

“Maybe.”

Max’s eyes linger on mine long enough for him to read my emotions. He’s always had that gift, the predator’s lightning perception. “That river can kill you quick. You know that better than anybody.”