The initials inside the ring were R. D. B. Lieutenant Batiste read them off in a flat voice, the way a doctor reads a result, and I felt my stomach drop out of my body. “Raymond Dale Boudreaux,” she said. I had known those letters since I was a boy of seventeen. Every kid in Bossier City had known them. Ray Boudreaux had been the captain of the football team, the boy who drove a red Camaro, the boy my sister had a crush on that whole last summer. And in forty four years he had become the High Sheriff of Caddo Parish.
I put my hand flat on the glass counter to steady myself. The video on my monitor still showed the man in the golf shirt, frozen at my counter, looking at the door. I had seen him on the television every night during the election. I had never known him with a face like this, lined and gray and old. Rhonda said, “Earl, I need you to stay calm.” I said I was calm. I was not. She said, “Do not call anybody. Do not say a word to anyone. I am going to the district attorney.”
She took the ring and the Polaroid and the folded paper in three separate evidence bags. At the door she turned. She said, “Earl, I have known this man for twenty years. I voted for him twice.” Her mouth was a hard line. “If this is what I think it is, I will personally put the cuffs on him.” I watched her car pull out onto Youree Drive. I sat down on the stool and I stayed there for a long time, looking at the empty place where the box had been, thinking about a girl with a gap in her teeth.
A man who spends forty four years doing good to cover one night has built a long, patient confession out of the lives of others.
Rhonda called me at six the next morning. Her voice was strange. She said, “Earl, I went to see the sheriff at his home last night. I knocked. He opened the door himself, in his robe, as though he had been expecting me.” She paused. “He said, Is it ninety one days? I said it was. He said, Then I suppose you have found it.” I gripped the telephone. She said, “He asked if he could sit down. He said he wanted to tell it from the beginning, and he wanted it on tape.”
He told it in four hours at the kitchen table of his own home, with his wife upstairs asleep. In August of 1981, at the age of eighteen, he had driven Darlene to the old Boudreaux camp on Caddo Lake after the skating rink, because she had asked to see the water. They had quarreled. He had said something cruel about her family. She had run, in the dark, along a rotting pier, and the pier had given way. He had dived in after her. He had not been able to find her. He had been eighteen years old and terrified, and he had gone home and said nothing.
He said that the next day he had gone back at dawn and found her. She had caught on a submerged log in four feet of water. He said he had sat on the bank beside her for hours. Then, God forgive him, he had done a thing no boy of eighteen should be asked to do and none should do. He had buried her. He had dug a grave under a cypress with a boat paddle and covered her with leaves and said a prayer, and for forty four years he had lived above that spot, and had told the police that she got out of his car on Benton Road.
The sheriff said he had never once, in all that time, gone back. He had gone into the Army, then into the police academy, and then into politics, and every step he had hoped to be absolved by being useful. He had arrested hundreds of men. He had given a thousand speeches. He had found one hundred children who had gone missing and brought them home. “I told myself,” he said, “that if I did enough good, it would balance.” He had pulled the ring and the Polaroid from his own drawer on the day he learned he had pancreatic cancer.
Rhonda found the grave on the second day. The state police dug under the cypress at the old camp and found what remained of my sister, with a small silver cross she had worn around her neck since her confirmation, and a pair of rock band earrings. I stood at the edge of the clearing in the rain, in my good coat, beside a state trooper who held an umbrella over me. I do not remember what I said. I remember the sound of the water on the leaves.
The sheriff pleaded guilty to manslaughter and concealment, and received a sentence that he would never fully serve. He died in the infirmary of the state prison in March, eleven weeks later, with a priest at his bedside. I did not attend. I had said what I had to say at a hearing the week before. I told him that I did not forgive him, and that I understood why he had given me the box. I told him that he had done one right thing in forty four years, and I thanked him for it.
We buried Darlene in October, in the cemetery behind the church in Bossier City, beside my mother and my father. Half the town came. Rhonda stood at the back with her hat in her hands. When it was done, I took out the Polaroid from my breast pocket, the girl in the band shirt laughing on the hood of the car, and I laid it on the casket before they closed the lid. I stood a long time. Then I went home and turned the sign in the window of my shop to Open.