Tim was about ready to give up. Jonas had continually insisted he didn’t know anything about what had happened to the man whose body had been brought out of the swamp two nights before.
“Did you like George Coulton, Jonas?” Tim asked now, taking a new tack.
Jonas’s expression remained impassive. “Didn’t hardly know ’im,” he said. “ ’Sides, way I heard it, that were an old man you found in the swamp. George ain’t much older’n me.”
“You just said you hardly knew him,” Kitteridge reminded him.
“I know who he be,” Jonas growled. “Ain’t no reason I shouldn’t. There ain’t that many folk in the swamp.”
Kitteridge decided to take a shot in the dark. “But you and George were some kind of brothers, weren’t you? Amelie Coulton says you’re both the Dark Man’s kids.”
Jonas’s eyes narrowed, his lips curling into a sneer. “Amelie don’t know nothin’! Hell, I don’t hardly even know who my folks is!”
Kitteridge took a deep breath. “Now, come on, Jonas. You must know who your parents are.”
Jonas shook his head. “Lotsa kids in the swamp don’t know who their folks is.”
“Come on, Jonas,” Tim repeated, but Judd Duval interrupted him.
“It’s true, Chief. There’s all kinds of kids out there bein’ raised by folks who ain’t their parents. Since they won’t come into town to have their babies, some of ’em just die a-birthing, and other people take the kids. After a while, you don’t hardly know who belongs to who.”
Tim shook his head. It was almost unbelievable that people could live like that at the end of the twentieth century. And yet he’d seen their houses, scattered through the swamp, seen the way they lived. Hell, it was a miracle any of them survived at all. Then he had an idea.
“Are those the kids Amelie was talking about? The ones she called the Dark Man’s kids? Is he the one who decides who gets the kids?”
Though he was speaking to Judd Duval, his eyes were on Jonas. He thought the boy stiffened at the mention of the Dark Man’s name.
“That’s it, isn’t it?” he asked. “Those are the kids Amelie was talking about. The Dark Man’s kids, she said. And she said you’re one of them.”
Jonas’s face remained impassive. “I don’t know what you be talkin’ ’bout.”
Tim leaned forward. “Sure you do,” he said, boring into the boy with his eyes. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.”
“No,” Jonas whispered, his own eyes flicking toward Judd Duval as if searching for help.
But Tim wouldn’t let him go. “That’s it, isn’t it, Jonas?” he pressed, his voice dropping. “Amelie told me about you and George. She told me you were dead. Not just George. You, too.”
Jonas’s eyes widened. “No,” he breathed again, but now his voice was shaking.
“And you are, aren’t you, Jonas? You’ve got no mama, and you’ve got no papa, and you never did have. Isn’t that what the Dark Man tells you? That you’re dead, because you’ve got no folks?”
Jonas’s eyes took on the look of a cornered rat. “Who told you that?” he demanded.
Tim ignored the question. “It’s true, isn’t it? It’s not just George Coulton. It’s you, too! You’re dead!”
Jonas shrank back, and Tim knew he’d struck a nerve. But it was crazy, all of it! Jonas wasn’t dead—he was sitting right there. Was it possible that there really was something going on out there in the swamp? That somehow, for some reason, someone calling himself the Dark Man had convinced a bunch of kids that they were dead?
But why?
And what about the others? The adults? Could they really be so superstitious that they believed in something so crazy?
And then he remembered the voodoo cults of the bayous in Louisiana, and the zombie cults of the Caribbean. There were still people who believed in all of it, and there was no reason for him to think that some of those people might not live right here in the swamp outside Villejeune.
But it still didn’t solve the problem of what had happened to George Coulton.
He didn’t believe that Jonas had killed Coulton—hell, he didn’t really have any proof that the corpse in the cemetery was Coulton. And even if he could prove the identity of the corpse, how could he connect it to the slack-jawed, ferret-faced, empty-eyed boy who sat across from him now? Nowhere, he was sure, would he be able to find out anything about Jonas Cox. From what he’d learned the past couple of days, anyone in the swamp could be related