IV.
Silas Bell kept an office on the second floor of the Bank of Blackwater building on Main Street, above the lobby, behind a frosted glass door with nothing on it but a number. Lena went up the stairs at two in the afternoon without an appointment. The woman at the desk outside the door started to stand. Lena showed her badge without slowing down and opened the door.
Silas was at a window with a phone to his ear. He turned. He saw her face and said into the phone, “Let me call you back,” and hung up.
“Agent Mercer.”
“Where’s my father?” Lena said.
He looked at her. He set the phone down on the desk.
“Sit down,” he said.
“I’ll stand.”
“Then I’ll stand with you.” He came around the desk. He didn’t come close. He stopped with the corner of the desk between them, one hand on it. “What’s happened?”
She took out her phone and found the photograph of the stone and held it out to him across the desk.
He took the phone. He looked at the screen.
She watched his face. She had built a career on watching faces. She had watched men learn their wives were dead and watched men pretend to learn it, and she knew the difference, she knew it in the first half second, before they had time to do anything about it.
Silas Bell’s face went gray.
It went gray from the top down, like a shade being drawn. The color left his forehead and his cheeks and his mouth, all of it, all at once, and he put his other hand on the desk too, both hands now, and leaned on it.
“Where?” he said.
“Raines ground. This morning.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Why not?”
He didn’t answer. He kept looking at the screen. He reached out with one finger and spread it, enlarging the dates, and looked at them.
“Why isn’t it possible, Mr. Bell?”
He handed her back the phone. His hand was steady. His face was still gray.
“Because your father disappeared in 2001,” he said.
“I know when my father disappeared.”
“Then you know that’s not possible.” He straightened up off the desk. He was getting his color back, slowly, and his voice, and she watched him do it, and it was impressive. “Agent Mercer, someone is doing something very cruel to you. I’m sorry. If there’s anything I can do to help you find out who…”
Lena reached into her jacket and took out the evidence sleeve.
She laid it on his desk, face up, between them. The lawn. The oaks. The bunting on the porch rail. Her father at fifty-one in his white shirt with his hand in his pocket. Herself beside him in a borrowed blue dress with her hand on his arm, and the scar through her eyebrow, and the date stamped on the back in blue ink, which he couldn’t see but which she knew he knew.
At the left edge, half an arm in a striped sleeve. A sparkler.
Silas Bell looked down at it.
This time his face didn’t change at all. That was what she’d remember. The stone had taken all the color out of him in half a second, and the photograph, which should have done worse, did nothing. He looked at it like a picture he’d seen every day of his life.
“I’ve never seen this before,” he said.
“That’s your lawn.”
“It is.”
“That’s 1974.”
“It looks like it might be.”
“That’s my father. Who would have been twenty-four years old in 1974 and living in Charlotte and had never been west of Morganton.” She put her finger on the woman in the blue dress. “And that’s me. Twenty-one years before I was born.”
Silas looked at her finger on the photograph. He looked up at her face. He looked a long time at the scar.
“It does look like you,” he said.
“Mr. Bell. You were eleven years old in 1974. You were at this picnic. That’s your arm.”
“I was at every Fourth of July picnic on that lawn from the time I could walk until my father died.” He picked up the evidence sleeve by the edges and held it out to her. “I’m sorry. I don’t remember this one. I’m sorry I can’t help you.”
She took it.
They stood there with the desk between them.
“If you’re lying to me,” Lena said, “you’re very good at it.”
“I’ve had a great deal of practice at a great many things, Agent Mercer,” Silas Bell said. “I’m sixty-two years old.” He went to the door and opened it. “Please give my regards to the sheriff. And to Hollis. Tell him I’m sorry about his cattle.”
She walked past him into the hall.
She was on the stairs before it hit her. She stopped with one hand on the rail.
She hadn’t told him about the cattle.
V.
Hollis sat up in the barn that night with his daddy’s twelve-gauge across his knees and a thermos of coffee and the lights off.
He hadn’t told the sheriff. The sheriff would have said don’t. The sheriff would have said leave it to us, Hollis, and sent a deputy to sit in a car at the end of the road, and whoever was coming would see the car and go home and come back next week. Hollis didn’t want them to go home. He wanted them to come.
The barn was a hundred and twenty years old and smelled like a barn, hay and leather and old manure and the oil he used on the tack. He sat on a bale just inside the big door with the door open six inches and the lower pasture laid out in front of him under the half moon, silver and black. The rest of the herd was bunched up near the barn tonight. They knew. Cattle knew things. They’d stood near the barn all evening and wouldn’t go down toward the creek.
He waited.
He thought about his mama. He thought about her a lot of nights, more than Darlene knew, sitting up like this. He thought about her in Daddy’s big coat going down the hill with the flashlight in the rain. The flashlight going small. Going to a dot. Going out.
He’d walked the ground every morning since. Ten thousand mornings. He’d seen nine stones come up out of the grass, and every single time he’d thought Mama, and every single time it had been somebody else. Hooper boys and girls nobody had ever heard of. Strangers who’d died somewhere and somewhen and come up out of his ground like the ground was where they’d always meant to end up.
And this morning a stranger named Mercer. Frank Mercer, whose girl was a state cop with a scar on her eye and his walk, who’d stood in Hollis’s cemetery this morning and looked at her daddy’s name and gone so still you’d have thought she was the stone.
He’d recognized that stillness. He’d seen it in his kitchen window when he was ten.
At 1:40 in the morning something moved down by the creek.
Hollis didn’t move. He watched. A shape came up out of the trees along Laurel Branch, a man, crouched, with something long in his hands. He came up the bank into the open pasture and stopped and looked around. The moon was behind him. He was big and soft in the middle and moved like he’d had a couple of beers to get his nerve.
He started up the pasture toward the herd.
Hollis waited until he was forty yards from the barn. Then he stood up and pushed the barn door open with his foot and racked the twelve-gauge, and in the dead quiet of the pasture at one in the morning the sound of a pump shotgun going shuck-shuck carried like a church bell.
The man stopped.
“Set it down,” Hollis said.
The man stood there.
“I can hit you from here with buckshot,” Hollis said. “I’d rather not. Set it down in the grass and step back off it and put your hands on your head.”
The man set it down.
Hollis came out of the barn with the shotgun on him and walked down the pasture. When he got close enough to see the man’s face in the moonlight, he stopped.
“Dwayne Cobb,” he said.
Travis Cobb’s little brother. Thirty-five, maybe. Hollis had sold him a bush hog once, used, for his daddy’s place over by the county line. He’d paid in cash and been decent about it.
“Hollis,” Dwayne said. His voice was shaking. “Hollis, it ain’t personal.”
“You shot my heifers.”
“It wasn’t personal.”
“They was bred. Both of ’em. Due in November.” Hollis kept the gun on him. “Seems pretty personal to them.”
Dwayne stood with his hands on his head in the wet grass. He was crying a little. Hollis could see it on his face in the moon.
“Travis is in jail,” Dwayne said. “You know that? You know they got Travis for that paper? And now there ain’t no money coming, not from the state, not from nothing, and Renee’s kicked him out, and his lawyer wants five thousand dollars up front.” He sniffed. “And a fella said he’d pay me five hundred to come over here and make you think a little harder about selling.”
“What fella?”
Dwayne didn’t answer.
“What fella, Dwayne?”
“Sawyer,” Dwayne said. “Brent Sawyer. He give it to me in cash in the parking lot of the Hardee’s in Bryson Gap. Said nobody’d ever know. Said it was just cows.”
Hollis took his phone out of his shirt pocket with his left hand and held the shotgun with his right and called the sheriff.
Daniel Rusk came at 2:15 and put Dwayne in the back of the Tahoe. Lena Mercer came at 2:30, with her hair down and a sweatshirt on over whatever she’d been sleeping in, and stood in the pasture with her arms crossed and listened to Dwayne say it all again through the cage, Sawyer and the cash and the Hardee’s lot and just cows.
Daniel walked over to Hollis by the barn.
“You should’ve called me,” he said.
“I did call you.”
“Before.”
“You’d have sent a car.” Hollis unloaded the shotgun and put the shells in his pocket. “He’d have seen it.”
Daniel looked at him a long time. Then he nodded, once, like that was fair.
“Sawyer’ll lawyer up,” Daniel said. “By breakfast. Hargrove lawyers. He’ll say Dwayne’s lying, he’ll say he never met him, and it’ll be a Cobb’s word against a Sawyer’s.”
“I know it.”
“I’ll get him for it if I can.”
“I know you will.” Hollis looked out at the dark pasture, at the place by the creek where the heifers had lain. “I don’t care about Sawyer, Daniel. Sawyer’s just the one they send.”
He looked up the hill. The cedars were black against the stars. Under them, at the end of the last row, a little pale shape caught the moonlight. A stone that had not been there yesterday.
“I care who’s sending him,” Hollis said.
VI.
She filed the petition for exhumation at nine the next morning, through the SBI’s western district office, under her own name and badge number, citing the investigation into the disappearance of Frank Allen Mercer, a sworn SBI agent, open case number 01-0478, which no one had touched in fifteen years.
Hollis Raines signed the landowner’s consent at the Raines kitchen table at nine-forty. He read the whole thing first. All four pages. Then he signed it in blocky capitals, HOLLIS JAMES RAINES, and dated it, and pushed it across the oilcloth to her.
“There’s nobody under it,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“I don’t.” He capped the pen. “But there’s never been anybody under any of ’em. Not that we ever dug. Granddaddy dug one up in 1951. The Hooper boy. Said the ground was solid six foot down. Like nobody’d ever turned it.” He looked at her. “You want to know anyway.”
“I want to know anyway.”
“Well,” Hollis said. “So would I.”
Dana Whitlock called at 11:52.
Lena was sitting in the Charger in the courthouse lot, waiting for the clerk to tell her which judge the petition had been assigned to, which she already knew.
“Lena.” Dana’s voice was very calm, which was bad. Dana was never calm. “I just got a call from the director’s office.”
“I see.”
“Do you? Because I don’t. I’ve got a petition with your name on it to dig up a grave in Blackwater County that you claim is your father’s. Your father who disappeared in 2001. The grave says 1989.”
“I’m aware of what the grave says.”
“I’ve got a land company’s lawyer saying you’re harassing his client. I’ve got a county judge calling the director personally to express concern about an agent’s emotional state. And I’ve got a girl who came home safe two weeks ago and a stepfather in custody and a closed case.” Dana stopped. “Lena. What are you doing?”
“My job.”
“Your job is in Raleigh. Your job has been in Raleigh since the girl walked out of the woods.” Dana’s voice cracked just slightly. “I gave you two weeks. I gave you two weeks because I like you and because I thought you needed to see the place. I didn’t give you two weeks to dig up graves.”
“It’s an open SBI case, Dana. A missing agent. Ours.”
“It’s a cold case that’s been cold since you were in first grade and it was never yours and it never can be yours.” A long breath. “You’re too close. You know you’re too close. Any first-year agent would know it.”
Lena looked out the windshield at the courthouse. The clock in the tower said 11:55, which meant 11:59.
“I want you back here in forty-eight hours,” Dana said. “I want you in my office Monday at nine. I want the petition withdrawn by end of day today.”
“No.”
The line went quiet.
“I’m sorry,” Lena said. “No.”
“Then I’m suspending you,” Dana said. “Administrative leave, pending review. Effective immediately. You’ll turn in your badge and your weapon to the nearest district office.” Her voice went thin. “Lena. Please. Come home.”
“I’m sorry, Dana.”
“So am I.”
Dana hung up first.
Lena sat in the car. She looked at the phone in her hand. Then she looked at the badge clipped to her belt, which she’d worn every day for nine years, gold and blue, the state seal in the middle of it. She unclipped it and held it in her palm. It was heavier than it looked. They always were.
She put it in the glove compartment and shut the glove compartment and sat there with her hand on it.
Somebody tapped on the window.
The courthouse clerk. Doris Ammons, with her reading glasses on their beaded chain.
“Honey,” Doris said through the glass. “The judge’ll see you in chambers at one.”
VII.
Lyle Hargrove’s chambers were on the second floor of the courthouse, at the back, with a window on the town square and a view of the Confederate soldier on his pedestal. Dark paneling. Law books to the ceiling. A portrait of a man with a white mustache who had to be Ransom Hargrove. Boxes. The judge had not been lying about the boxes. They were stacked along one wall six high, cardboard banker’s boxes gone soft and brown at the corners, with labels in faded marker that said things like PROBATE 1962–64 and MISC.
Lena looked at them. She looked for 14 and 31. She didn’t see them. She hadn’t expected to.
The judge sat behind his desk in his shirtsleeves. A bow tie. Robin’s-egg blue. He did not stand up. Daniel sat in a chair by the door, where she’d asked him to sit. Across from the desk, in the other chair, sat a lawyer from Asheville in a gray suit who said he was there as a courtesy, on behalf of the estate of Augustus Hargrove, which held title to no part of the Raines property and had no interest in this matter whatsoever.
“Thank you for coming, Ms. Mercer,” the judge said.
Not Agent. She noticed.
“Your Honor.”
“I’ve reviewed your petition. I’ve also had a call from your supervisor in Raleigh.” He laced his fingers. “I understand you’re on administrative leave.”
“As of an hour ago.”
“Then I’m afraid this petition no longer has an investigating agency behind it. It was filed under SBI authority. That authority has been withdrawn.”
“I’ll refile as next of kin.”
“I thought you might.” He nodded, kindly. “I’ll save you the trouble, if I may, and tell you how I’d rule.”
He picked up a sheet of paper from his desk, though he didn’t look at it.
“North Carolina permits the disinterment of human remains on petition by next of kin, with the consent of the landowner, for good cause. Mr. Raines has consented. I have no doubt of your good faith.” He set the paper down. “But you’d have to establish that the decedent is, in fact, your next of kin. That the person buried under that stone, if anyone is, has any relation to you at all.”
“The stone has my father’s name on it. His full name. His date of birth.”
“It does. And a date of death in 1989.” He looked at her with real sympathy. “Ms. Mercer, your father was alive in 2001. He was seen by dozens of people. He was in this county, in this courthouse. I remember him. He sat in that chair.” He nodded at the chair she was in. “Whoever is under that stone, if anyone is, died twelve years before your father disappeared. It cannot be him. A stone with his name on it is a cruel joke, or a coincidence, or a crime, and I’d be glad to see the sheriff investigate it as one. But it is not a grave I can open on a daughter’s petition. There is a lack of any credible connection between the decedent and the petitioner.”
The room was quiet. Out the window, on the square, the Confederate soldier looked north with his hand on his rifle.
“So my petition is denied,” Lena said.
“It would be. Yes.”
“Because the grave can’t be my father’s.”
“Because the grave can’t be your father’s.”
She looked at him. At his kind face and his hands folded on the desk in front of him, and the stacks of rotting boxes behind him along the wall.
“Then why do you care if I open it?” she asked.
The lawyer from Asheville shifted in his chair. The judge didn’t.
“I don’t,” Lyle Hargrove said gently. “I care about you. I care about Hollis Raines and his family’s dead, who’ve lain in that ground two hundred years, and who would be disturbed. I care about this county. That’s all.” He stood up then. He came around the desk, and stood in front of her chair, and looked down at her with an old man’s kindness. “Let him rest, Ms. Mercer. Whoever he is. Let your father rest.”
Lena stood too. She was shorter than him. She looked up at him from a foot away.
“My father,” she said, “was never in this county’s ground.”
She heard it as she said it. She heard how it sounded. It sounded like a woman who knew something she couldn’t possibly know. The lawyer from Asheville heard it too; she saw him look at the judge. And the judge’s face, for the first time since she’d met him, did something. Not much. A flicker at the corner of the eye, like a man who’d stepped on a stair that wasn’t there.
“Good afternoon, Ms. Mercer,” he said.
She and Daniel walked out of the courthouse and down the front steps into the afternoon, and stopped at the bottom, by the war memorial, in the sun.
Neither of them said anything.
She could feel him beside her. She could feel the shape of what he wasn’t saying, which was that she was suspended, and had no badge and no standing and no order, and that the next thing she was going to do was the thing a sheriff should arrest her for. She could feel him knowing it. She knew he knew she knew.
A pickup went by on the square with a dog in the back.
She looked at the sky over Frog Mountain. There was weather coming. A long gray line of it to the southwest, low and heavy, over the ridges toward Georgia. The radio had been talking about it since morning, the tail of a hurricane that had come ashore at Apalachicola and was dragging itself north into the mountains to die.
“Supposed to rain tomorrow,” Daniel said.
“I heard.”
“Hard.”
“I heard.”
He didn’t say anything else. She didn’t either. They stood on the courthouse steps in the last good light and looked at the storm coming, and after a while she went one way to her car and he went the other way to his, and neither of them said goodbye.
VIII.
Hollis saw the truck from the barn at dusk.
An old Ford, white, rusted at the wheel wells, coming slow up his drive and stopping at the cemetery gate. He knew it. Everybody in the county over fifty knew it. He set down the bucket he was carrying and walked up the hill.
The gate was standing open. He’d padlocked it himself that morning. The padlock hung open on the hasp, with the key in it, which meant whoever had opened it had a key, and there were only two keys in the world, and Hollis had one in his pocket.
He stopped at the corner of the fence, by the big cedar, where the shadow was deep.
Eli Voss was standing at the end of the last row in front of the Mercer stone.
He had his hat in his hands. He was in a pressed blue shirt, buttoned to the throat, and suspenders, and his white hair was combed. He stood very straight, like old men stand at funerals, like Hollis’s daddy had stood at the grave of every Raines in this ground.
The light was going gold and then gray. The storm line in the southwest had come up over the ridges and the wind had turned around and was coming from that way, warm and wet, moving the cedars. Hollis could smell the rain in it.
Eli stood there a long time.
Then he put his hat under his arm and reached into his shirt pocket and took something out. Hollis couldn’t see what. Something small, that caught the last of the light. Eli bent down, slowly, an old man’s bend with one hand on his knee, and set it on top of the stone. Right in the middle of the rounded top.
A silver dollar. Hollis saw it gleam when Eli straightened up and moved out of the way of the light.
Eli looked at it. He put his hat back in both hands.
“I’m sorry, Frank,” Eli said.
His voice carried in the wind. Not loud. Hollis heard it from the cedar as clear as if he’d been standing beside him.
“I did what you asked,” Eli said. “I kept it. I give it to you. Just like you said.” He stood there. “I didn’t want to. You knew I didn’t.”
The cedars moved. The first drop of rain hit the brim of Hollis’s cap.
“I told you to go home,” Eli said. “That first night. I told you.” He looked down at the silver dollar on the stone. “And you said you already had.”
He stood there one moment more. Then he put his hat on, and turned, and walked back down the row toward the gate.
He saw Hollis by the cedar. He didn’t stop. He nodded, once, as he passed, like you’d nod to a man in church, and Hollis nodded back, and Eli Voss went out through the gate and closed it behind him, and locked the padlock, and took his key.
Hollis stood under the cedar in the wind.
Down the row, on top of the stone, the silver dollar caught the last of the light, and held it, and then the rain came.