DARK.

CORNER.

BRANDON Ma.s.sEY.

To my mother who made it possiblein more ways than one.

In the Beginning.

*lthough William Hunter had lived his entire life as a slave ion a plantation in the Mississippi Delta, he had never experienced anything like the horror he was about to face.

His muscles ached. His hands were sore and dark with gunpowder. Blood not his own-soiled his ragged shirt and pants.

Killing was hard work.

But they weren't done yet. The worst was still ahead of them.

He was part of a group of four men. One was a black man, a slave from the same cotton fields on which William had once toiled; one was a young white man, their slave master's son; the last man was a warrior from a Chickasaw Indian tribe.

They were an unlikely team, drawn together to battle a common enemy. Only an hour ago, there had been seven of them. Two had been killed; the other, unable to endure the terror, had run away.

"We don't have much time till dusk," William said, looking to the edge of the forest, where the orange-red sun steadily sank into the horizon. "We must finish what we've begun."

The men grunted. Their faces, sweaty and spattered with blood, were grim with resolve.

William knew that every one of them was as frightened as he was, but they were determined to conceal their anxiety. True courage was doing what you had to do-without giving in to fear.

Almost as one, they shifted to confront the cave. The ragged mouth was large enough to admit three men. Sharp stones jutted from the ridge of the maw, like teeth.

Like fangs, William thought. A shiver rattled down his spine.

The fading sunlight did not penetrate the thick blackness that lay beyond the entrance. Stepping inside the cavern would be like plunging into a deep Mississippi night.

He hoped that their weapons would be sufficient. He was armed with a rifle. The Indian warrior had arrows, the heads wrapped in kerosene-soaked cloth. The other black man gripped a shotgun, and the white man had a revolver-and a supply of dynamite powerful enough to shatter the cavern walls, if need be.

All of them carried whiskey bottles full of kerosene. A cotton rag dangled from each lip, a poor man's fuse.

They'd done the best they could with the wreckage they discovered at the ravaged plantation, the place that, only yesterday, had been his home.

William had fashioned a torch from a broken broom and a towel. He struck a match and lit the makeshift wick. The fire sputtered, then strengthened into a healthy flame.

He advanced to the front of the group. Holding the torch aloft, he looked at each man.

They were brave men. He did not understand how he'd become their leader. He did not understand much of anything that had happened since his old life had ended last night. He walked on instinct and faith.

"One day, our children will thank us for this," he said. "Let us pray that they never have to follow in our footsteps"

The men nodded and murmured their agreement.

William Hunter turned to face the cave's mouth. This close, the stench of death wafted from inside like a dense fog.

He whispered a prayer, for himself and his men.

Then, he led them into the darkness.

Part One.

HOMECOMING.

Evil knows where evil sleeps.

-Ethiopian proverb.

One who enters the forest does not listen to the breaking of the twigs in the brush.

-Zambian proverb.

Not to know is bad; not to wish to know is worse.

-Nigerian proverb.

Chapter 1.

*t sunrise on Friday, August 23, David Hunter drove away from his town house in Atlanta with a U-Haul trailer hitched to his Nissan Pathfinder. The trailer contained clothes, two computers, books, small pieces of furniture, and other a.s.sorted items that held sentimental or practical value. He had left behind everything else at the town house, which, in his absence, would be occupied by his younger sister and her roommate.

In the SUV, David had a road map, a thermos full of strong black coffee, a vinyl CD case full of hip-hop, R&B, gospel, and jazz discs, and his four-year-old German shepherd, King. King lay on the pa.s.senger seat, looking out the window as they rolled across the highway. David tended to drive with one hand resting on the canine's flank.

They made excellent time. Traveling Interstate 20 West, they swept through Georgia and entered Alabama within a couple of hours. It was a fine day for a road trip. The morning sunlight was golden, and the cloudless sky was a tranquil ocean blue. Traffic was light and flowed smoothly.

After three hours on the road, sixteen miles outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama, David pulled into a rest area. He kept King on a leash as they walked along the gra.s.sy sward of the designated pet walk, but the dog was well behaved and didn't wrestle against the leash or try to force David into a run. King handled his business near a tree with the solemn dignity that befitted his name.

David was returning to the truck, planning to let the dog inside so he could go back and use the rest room himself, when he saw the man.

He leaned against a white Cadillac DeVille. Slender and brown-skinned, perhaps in his mid-fifties, he wore a green shirt and tan slacks. He talked on a cell phone, checked his watch.

From a distance of about thirty feet, the man looked like David's father.

David stiffened and stopped. King, brought to a halt, looked at David questioningly.

Although the day was warm and humid, a chill fell over David.

As if sensing David's attention, the man turned. He met David's eyes briefly, then looked away, continuing to chat on the phone.

The man was not Richard Hunter, his father. Of course it wasn't him. His father had died five months ago.

David sighed, went to the SUV, and let King climb inside.

I need to stop this, David thought, as he walked to the rest area washrooms. I'll never see my father again. I have to accept it.

He used the rest room, then returned to the parking lot. The man who resembled his father was gone. Whoever he had been.

David got behind the wheel of the SUV.

His cell phone chirped.

"Hey, it's your mama. Where are you?"

It was just like his mother to call the moment after he experienced an episode of weirdness.

"Hey, Mom. I'm right outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I pa.s.sed the big Mercedes-Benz plant a little while ago"

"You're driving too fast. You shouldn't be that far already."

Although David was twenty-nine years old and had traveled extensively throughout the country, by air and by car, Mom never hesitated to dole out travel tips and cautions.

"I've been cruising at seventy-five. Traffic has been light." He paused, then added, "I'm at a rest area. I just saw a man who looked like Dad"

"Oh," Mom said. A note of melancholy crept into her voice. "Remember how the same thing happened to both of us, when your granddad pa.s.sed? For a while, it seemed that once a month we'd see a man who looked exactly like him."

"I remember. But I feel different about this. Because there's always a chance . . ."

"David, honey, it's not good for you to think about that. I know it's painful for you, but you need to try to let it go. Your father is gone"

David swallowed. A monarch b.u.t.terfly landed on the windshield, its colorful wings gilded with sunlight. It seemed to peer inside the truck at David.

His mother was right. He had told himself the same thing many times. His father, Richard Hunter, was dead and gone forever. Any stranger who looked like him was just that-a stranger.

But the circ.u.mstances of his father's death stirred a naive hope that he might be alive.

Richard Hunter had not been an ordinary man. He was a writer, not merely good but brilliant; a Pulitzer Prize winner who evoked favorable comparison to the revered literary lions in the canon of African-American literature: Ellison, Hurston, Wright, Morrison. Richard Hunter had lived an adventurous, colorful life that matched his literary accomplishments. After a brief, disastrous marriage to David's mother that produced only one child, Hunter moved to Paris to write his first novel, an immediate best-seller, and thereafter embarked on a series of journeys that took him from Morocco to China, from South Africa to Nepal, from Australia to Indonesia, from Brazil to Denmark ... his father's travels could've filled a dozen issues of National Geographic. Writing and publishing one best-selling novel after another, publishing essays in The New Yorker, crafting stage plays that opened on Broadway, and penning the script of an Oscar award-winning film, Richard Hunter had the proverbial Midas touch in the literary world. But his ability to sustain meaningful, long-term relationships seemed to be directly inverse to his writing talent.

David hardly knew his father. Throughout his dad's endless globetrotting, it was a rare event to receive so much as a postcard from him, to say nothing of a birthday or Christmas gift. He called or wrote David every few years, and visited less often. Although Hunter married three more times, and entertained countless girlfriends and mistresses, he never had another child. Often, David had thought that being Hunter's only child would have meant something to his father, but their relationship never developed beyond a superficial, awkward friendliness. David had learned more about Richard Hunter by reading about him in magazines than he had through direct contact with his dad.

But in March of that year, his father had been on a boat in the Gulf of Mexico, deep-sea fishing, when a storm swept him off the deck and into the ocean. An extensive search by the coast guard failed to recover his body. At the coroner's inquest, he was declared legally dead.

Richard Hunter's will revealed that he had bequeathed his money, property, and belongings to David-the total value of which equaled over four million dollars.

David was suddenly rich, granted a fortune by a man who was a relative stranger to him.

Nagging questions circled David's thoughts. Why did his father ignore him for his entire life and then will him every thing he had owned? Had his father loved him, but been unable to express his feelings? What kind of man had Richard Hunter been, outside his literary exploits?

And the question that haunted David most of all remained: Was his father really dead? His body had never been recovered, which gave David a fragile hope that, somehow, his father had survived the accident. But if Richard Hunter had survived, then where was he? Why hadn't he resurfaced to reclaim his life?

It was hard to speculate about stuff like that. One bewildering question led to a slew of others even more puzzling.

"I hope you learn a lot about your dad while you're in Mississippi," Mom said. "Like I've told you before, I don't think you need to make this trip, but I know you won't be happy otherwise."

Although his father had been a world traveler, between his journeys, he always returned to his hometown: Mason's Corner, Mississippi. There, he lived in a modest house that had been in the Hunter family for generations. The home had been vacant since his father's death.

"Well, like I've said, I'll be there for a year," David said. "Maybe not that long. It depends on how things go, and what I find out"

"What do you expect to find out, David?" Mom said. Mom had asked him the same question before, but there was a desperation in her voice that he hadn't heard previously. "It's a tiny town with three traffic lights. What do you think you're going to learn there?"

David turned the key in the ignition. The engine hummed to life.

"I don't know, Mom," David said. "Maybe ... the truth"

At a quarter past three o'clock in the afternoon, driving north on Interstate 55, David pa.s.sed a road sign that announced the upcoming exit for Mason's Corner.

Antic.i.p.ation tingled in his gut.

It had been about fifteen years since he had visited Mississippi. He had purposefully taken a longer route to Mason's Corner, traveling Interstate 20 West into Jackson, at the center of the state, where he then connected with Interstate 55 North, which would take him up to the northwest region, at the edge of the delta. He wanted to absorb the sounds and sights, and immerse himself in this place where his father's family had lived for so long.

Mostly, the land was covered with verdant hills that appeared to stretch to the edge of the world. At other times, maple trees and pine trees crowded the highway, their trunks festooned with kudzu. In many of the open stretches, he saw vast fields of soybean and cotton.

It was easy to imagine that this had once been a land in which cotton plantations had sustained the economy. The earth was so fertile it seemed anything might thrive in the rich soil. North of Jackson, David had stopped to refuel, and the warm, humid air was like the inside of a greenhouse.

The exit ramp for Mason's Corner came into view. He turned onto the winding lane, and entered a tunnel of trees that blanketed the road in dense shadows. Then, the trees thinned out and gave way to a suspension bridge. A sunlightspangled river rushed in the chasm below. Two black children stood along the sandy bank, working fishing poles.

The bridge, about forty feet long, rattled and clinked as he drove across it. King poked his nose out the half-open window. He whined.

David stroked the dog's neck. "We're almost there, boy. I know you're fed up with riding in here"

Ahead, a blue sign read in white letters: Welcome to Mason's Corner, the Jewel of Mississippi. Pop. 3,200.

The town limits were marked only by small, erratically s.p.a.ced homes. Rusty cars sitting on concrete blocks filled front yards, and clotheslines heavy with garments snapped in the summer breeze. People-everyone David saw was black-sat on porches and lawn chairs. They watched him drive by, and he thought he could hear what they were thinking: "Who's that guy moving here?" This wasn't like Atlanta. In a small town like Mason's Corner, a new resident would be noteworthy.

The road, Main Street, cut through the center of downtown-though calling the tiny business district "downtown" was being generous. While he waited at a traffic light, he looked around. Faded storefronts lined the road: a diner, a clothing shop, a florist, a furniture store. Old black men sat in chairs in front of a barbershop, talking and watching anyone of interest-all of them looked his way, their gazes lingering over the trailer. A scattering of cars and trucks were parked diagonally along the curb; a lot of people owned pickup trucks.