Cemetery Road. Greg Iles
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and management rewarded him with what he most wanted, which was acceptance. Joe’s brilliance and can-do attitude earned him the respect of the whites at the plant, and their acceptance was naturally extended to his daughter. After all, Jet’s mother was white, and a Methodist in good standing. Joe might not have gone to church himself, but any time the congregation needed volunteers to build booths or mow grass, they knew Joe Talal would show up, ready and eager to work.
The cataclysm came the September after our magical summer. Joe had flown up to Connecticut for a continuing education class in electrochemistry. He did that kind of thing every couple of years. Only this time, he didn’t come back. Janet Turner Talal initially covered for her husband with a story about a sick relative, so it took a couple of weeks for people to figure out something was wrong. But before a month had passed, plant management was informed that Joe had resigned his position. Two days later, it leaked out that Jet’s father had returned to the Middle East, from which he’d emigrated in 1965. Jet had been putting a good face on things at school, but once this news got out, she stayed absent for three days. When she did come back, she was a different person. She had withdrawn into herself, and for the first time, I saw shame in her.
One month later, an explosive revelation swept through Bienville: Joe Talal had another family back in Jordan—a wife and a son. No one was sure about the details. Some folks said Joe had been mixed up in political trouble, Arab craziness, and that his family had been mistakenly declared dead years before. Others claimed he’d been a bigamist all along. In any case, Joe had abandoned his American family to be with his Arab wife and son, and he had no intention of returning to America.
It took me twenty years and a FOIA request to learn the true details of Joe’s departure from our lives. As a journalist, I now understand that the tragedy of the Talal family was but a tiny footnote to the Cold War politics of the United States in the Middle East during that era. All that mattered to me at the time was that Jet’s father had broken that trance in which she and I existed as one being. Worse, within a month Jet took up with Paul Matheson, who was a year older than we were and one of the least introspective guys I knew. I couldn’t understand it, except to reason that after being abandoned by her foreign father, she’d decided to grab the most quintessentially American boy she could find, one whose father’s fortune would guarantee security for life—if she could hold on to him. Jet did hold on to Paul, at least until he left Bienville for Ole Miss. They were the golden couple of our high school. Yet by the time Paul left college to join the army and fight in Iraq, things had changed again. But that’s another story.
Paternal abandonment is the central fact of Jet’s life: it shaped every decision she made afterward. Eight months after Joe Talal abandoned his daughter, I lived through a different version of the same experience—emotional abandonment by a father physically present—and there’s no question that it dictated every major decision of my youth. You’d think that shared trauma would have brought Jet and me even closer together. But human relationships aren’t symmetrical. The ultimate result of her father’s departure was that, after my brother drowned and my father began to blame and isolate me, I faced that situation utterly alone.
Perhaps if I’d still had Jet, I could have weathered the glacial coldness without permanent damage. But I didn’t. As the next year wore on, I quit every athletic team, stopped hanging out with former friends, and holed up in my room with the Cure and U2’s Joshua Tree album. My dad was drinking heavily at this time, so I found it easy to pilfer whatever I wanted from his stock. My mother had been prescribed several drugs in the wake of Adam’s death, and I ate those, too. While Jet worked tirelessly to distract herself from her pain, I sank ever deeper into mine, until almost no light from the world above penetrated down to where I existed.
One year to the day after Adam drowned, I drove my mother’s car out to the Mississippi River at dawn, stripped off all my clothes, and began swimming toward Louisiana. I was drunk on bourbon, stoned on pills. When I pushed away from the shore, I fully intended to drown myself. As pathetic as it sounds now, I thought about Jet as I stroked toward the middle of the mighty river. I thought about my father, too, how he lived as if I didn’t exist. I figured I would do him the favor of making reality conform to his desire. But when I reached the middle of the current, it was my mother who filled my mind and heart. How could I force her to suffer the loss of her only other son? Who would do that to her? A coward, answered a voice from deep within. A gutless coward. In that moment, an anger unlike anything I’d ever experienced was born within me. And that anger had but one object: the man who had failed me as a father.
Ping, ping, ping …
The text tone of my iPhone breaks through my dark reverie like a persistent alarm clock. I’m not sure how many times it went off before it finally registered in my brain, but now I look down at the screen. The text message is from Denny. It reads:
Finished twenty minutes ago! U gonna leave me up here all day or what?
On my way, I type, cranking the Flex and backing it around toward the riprap that lines the last drop to the river. Then I drive over the levee.
The industrial park is enveloped in a vast cloud of dust. The crest of the bluff is barely visible through the thinner dust at the top of the cloud. I point the Flex toward it, but I know that somewhere out there, heavy equipment is scraping and pushing dirt without any regard for me. As I inch along the gravel road that crosses the mill site between the levee and Port Road, another text arrives: One of the bulldozers blocked the bluff road for ten minutes. I was scared, but it’s clear now. U better haul butt.
A big yellow Caterpillar D7 churns out of the dust to my right, moving toward me. This is how you treat a crime scene if you want to bury evidence. After gauging the movement of the bulldozer, I jam my accelerator to the floor and race for the bluff.
“WHAT DID YOU see?” I ask as Denny opens the Flex’s back door and sets a wheeled Pelican case on my backseat. I guess that’s how he carries his drone around.
“Check for yourself.” He hands a micro SD card in a tiny plastic case over the seat, then comes around and gets up front.
“How about a summary?” I ask, putting the Flex in gear and heading north along the heavily wooded bluff.
“I definitely saw places where someone has been digging.”
“By the foundation piers?”
“One of them. Also out in the open ground. But those bulldozers have torn that section up by now.”
“I can’t believe they’ve moved this fast. They weren’t scheduled to start today.”
Denny grins. “The good news is, I have GPS coordinates for the whole flight. I can tell you exactly where to dig to find the places I saw today.”
“Can I read the coordinates off the card?”
“If you know what you’re looking at.”
I hand him back the SD card case. “Why don’t you make me a video file and email it to me? Or use Dropbox. Make it a highlight reel with everything marked simply enough for an idiot to read locations.”
“You gonna pay me for my time?”
“Absolutely.” I take a curve that gives us another broad river vista through the trees. “I appreciate you flying that site, especially coming early.”
“Hey, this is what I live for. We’re working a real-life murder case, man. We should make a podcast out of this. Like Serial, about Adnan Syed.”
A chill of foreboding raises the hair on my arms. “There’s not going to be any podcast, Denny. This is serious, okay? Buck’s dead. Gone. Forever. You saw his head.”
“Sure, I get it. But