Holy City

By Henry Wise

EDGAR AWARD WINNER FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL OF THE YEAR

“Holy City is an amazing piece of work. A Southern novel that examines the pathos and ethos of small-town life and the weight of both grief and hatred. Love it.”—S.A. Cosby

No one innocent. No one free. Nothing sacred.

Holy City is the captivating debut from Henry Wise about a deputy sheriff who must work alongside an unpredictable private detective after he finds himself on the outs from his sheriff's department over his unwillingness to look the other way when an innocent man is arrested for murder.

After a decade of exile precipitated by the tragic death of his mother, Will Seems returns home from Richmond to rural Southern Virginia, taking a job as deputy sheriff in a landscape given way to crime and defeat. Impoverished and abandoned, this remote land of tobacco plantations, razed forests, and boarded-up homes seems stuck in the past in a state that is trying to forget its complex history and move on.

Will’s efforts to go about his life are wrecked when a mysterious, brutal homicide claims the life of an old friend, Tom Janders, forcing Will to face the true impetus for his return: not to honor his mother’s memory, but to pay a debt to a Black friend who, in an act of selfless courage years ago, protected Will and suffered permanent disfigurement for it.

Meanwhile, a man Will knows to be innocent is arrested for Tom’s murder, and despite Will’s pleas, his boss seems all too content to wrap up the case and move on. Will must weigh his personal guilt against his public duty when the local Black community hires Bennico Watts, an unpredictable private detective from Richmond, to help him find the real killer. It would seem an ideal pairing—she has experience, along with plenty of sand, and Will is privy to the details of the case—but it doesn’t take long for either to realize they much prefer to operate alone.

Bennico and Will clash as they each defend their untraditional ways on a wild ride that wends deep into the Snakefoot, an underworld wilderness that for hundreds of years has functioned as a hideout for outcasts—the forgotten and neglected and abused—leaving us enmeshed in the tangled history of a region and its people that leaves no one innocent, no one free, nothing sacred.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Press
• Release date: Jun 4, 2024
• ISBN: 9780802162922

Book preview

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HOLY CITY

HOLY CITY

A NOVEL

HENRY WISE

Atlantic Monthly Press

New York

Copyright © 2024 by Henry Wise

Jacket collage and design by Daniel Rembert

Jacket photo of house by Henry Wise

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Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: June 2024

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available for this title.

ISBN 978-0-8021-6291-5

eISBN 978-0-8021-6292-2

Atlantic Monthly Press

an imprint of Grove Atlantic

154 West 14th Street

New York, NY 10011

Distributed by Publishers Group West

groveatlantic.com

HOLY CITY

FIRE WAS THE DREAM that broke him.

He sat stiff as a dead cat, felt for the handle of his pistol under the seat, relaxed. The sad night came back to him, one of many like it, riding indefinitely, listening to the angry word of God through a thin static distance, the voice somehow both austere and intimate, seeming to speak directly to him with piercing certainty. He listened because there was nothing else out here—no other radio station—between hamlets or villages or four-way intersections, some of which at one point probably had been towns, nothing to see between them but a country undulating in pursuit of some sort of equilibrium, a pulse one could assess only by covering its distances, surprising because the countryside felt dead otherwise. It was not the soft, green, junglelike vegetation of so much of Virginia, but a hard, coarse, spiky land. The lonely roads wended like snakes through close forest or open fields or woods felled entirely for their lumber, leaving the ground as naked and weird as a skinned bear. And as he passed the fading houses like craters, kudzu-covered or through-grown with wild privet and poison ivy and chipping of paint, out of a wood-paneled darkness came the dark, paternal, familiar voice, companionate and suggestive of violence, of guile, the voice clean-shaven, austere, piercing, and expectant, some local celebrity preacher in a countryside rife with bewildering crime.

Will Seems had returned from a decade in Richmond—the Holy City—to a land he had called home each year of that decade, a country he now saw was peopled by a kind of disparate lost congregation. Last year, a man had cut his wife’s throat with a Buck lock-blade, shooting himself after with a Walther PPK, failing on both counts. His wife was able to stop the bleeding from her neck with a pillow before calling 911, and the man woke up in a hospital room missing most of his jaw and wearing handcuffs to boot. Then, a few months ago now, a man in Halifax County who had been stopped for a burnt-out taillight had shot the policeman dead and driven away without contest. Even now, no leads. But one of the strangest incidents had occurred only recently. A complaint had been submitted in town because of an odor emanating from a particular home. The middle-aged unmarried resident had wrapped her dead mother—deceased by natural causes—in winter blankets, leaving the body in the house for over two months. Will remembered the investigation they’d conducted, wearing masks that did little to mitigate the stench, counting out with watering eyes 116 air fresheners sprinkled over the quilts. The sheriff was glad enough to let Troy St. Pierre, the medical examiner, remove the corpse, but he and Will were stuck with the daughter of the deceased. When questioned, the woman could not explain why she hadn’t reported her own mother’s death, the only reason they had cause to arrest her. Will saw in her a sad and childish desperation that was not necessarily unique; he’d seen it in the faces of the county, a puckered, hopeless, dopey defeat. Will guessed she was so afraid of being alone in this world that she had considered the dead welcome company.

Will got out of his truck and stretched and made use of a tree, looking down at the flat water of the creek, the dream still nagging him, the taste of smoke refusing to fade. He couldn’t keep doing this, riding late-night to wear himself out, ending up back at the creek to sleep and leaving early, before the fishermen came with their buckets and their lines. He’d smoked too much last night, tasted the cotton mouth now, remembered an acute craving for a Coke with vanilla, the way it was served at the nearest Waffle House up in Petersburg. He reached in the pickup and took a sip now of leftover coffee in an open Styrofoam cup he’d picked up yesterday evening from the Get ’N’ Go, some cooked-down tired version of what it had been when brewed that morning, and now it was twenty-four hours old, and it seemed nothing had happened in twenty-four hours, but that everything and everyone had moved and breathed just that much forward.

He tossed the dregs at the ground and turned to see, beyond the plain white Baptist church, a pillar of black smoke coming from the direction of the Hathom house or, beyond it, the Janders place. He grabbed his cell from the cup holder, called it in, climbing in and starting the pickup and pulling onto the road as the phone rang.

This is Deputy Seems reporting a fire in Turkey Creek. He rounded a bend. It’s the Janders house.

Copy, Tania said. She’d worked for the sheriff’s department longer than Will and had never seen a day in the field. Fire truck is on its way. Wait for it, you hear me?

Will slapped his phone closed.

Tom’s truck sat in the yard, the tractor by the shed; the smell of old lumber and paint burning filled the air. Will slid through a dirt turn, pulling a parachute of dust into the yard, and saw now the side of Tom’s mother’s house (he still thought of it as hers) on fire, melting inward like blossom-end rot on some strange fruit.

Will pocketed the phone. The fire had already consumed the right side of the house but had not reached the front door.

Tom! Will could feel the heat baking into his cheeks. Day! Tom!

It was too soon to hear a siren. The fire truck was twenty-five minutes out from the time he called if he was lucky. He breathed deep, kicked open the front door, a plume of hot black smoke rolling into his face. He crouched, moving through the house, unable to hear anything but fire. The flames roared over him, and pieces of ceiling fell nearby. He groped along the kitchen floor, the vinyl curling like antique documents, holding his breath as long as he could, until he stumbled into something. A boot, steel toe, hot to the touch. He found the other foot and pulled them both, making it to the side door, tugging at what must have been Tom’s body. He was crying with smoke, coughed when he tried to breathe, found himself on his knees in the yard, trying to stand, trying to breathe, smoke in the bridge of his nose. Tears and smoke, tears and smoke. Finally, he returned to the threshold, pulled the body free, dragged it ungracefully down the three steps and into the yard, and fell beside it in the grass, coughing.

WHEN WILL CAME TO, Sheriff Mills was breathing heavily down at him, patting Will’s face with his rough hand to wake him, and an EMT had a stethoscope on his chest. A bandage had been placed on his arm, and he felt the burn. Will could smell the spearmint from the gum Mills chewed compulsively, a habit he’d formed years ago in an effort to quit tobacco. Will sat up to see the fire truck hosing down the house in splintering rainbows beyond which, in the distance, he could see a bald eagle perched at the top of a pine tree.

You all right, son? Mills said. You got some kind of death wish I need to know about?

The sheriff helped Will to his feet, and they looked at Tom in the grass, his clothes blackened, face covered in soot. A look of eternal blankness, until Will realized why.

Shit, Mills said, sounding it as shiat. Eyes gone, melted.

Mills turned the powerful body over with catlike, delicate care and inspected Tom’s corpse, looked at the steps smudged with dark matter and again at the body.

Hold on, now, Sheriff Mills said to himself.

Mills took out a pair of latex gloves from his pocket, pinched Tom’s shirt just under the left shoulder blade, so that it lifted like a tent, revealing a rift in the fabric and a dark wet stain, darker and more consistent than the soot. He spread the rift with two fingers and inspected the skin, finding soot-caked gash marks, maybe two, maybe three. Will put his hands on his knees in an athlete’s resting position and looked down as Sheriff Mills let the soaked hot shirt fall back onto the soaked hot skin.

Homicide, Will said, the word echoing, almost a question. This wasn’t picking up drunks or issuing speeding tickets or nailing vagrants for trespassing on abandoned properties. Who’d . . . ?

Will watched the sheriff: quiet, thoughtful, composed. The man seemed to sharpen, brighten into a quiet efficiency, fully alive.

Mills said, It’s a miracle he didn’t burn worse than this. You neither. Check his pockets.

No wallet, no phone. Nothing.

Will felt light-headed, empty. He began coughing again. The sheriff said, Tape this off while I call Sheriff Edgars and Troy over here. Keep everyone out unless it’s them. When they get here, I’ll need you to take pictures. Camera’s in my truck.

Will was heading for the tape when he detected movement behind the house, wishing he hadn’t, but Mills saw it too.

Head up the trees, Mills said. I’ll swing around from the field. Watch yourself now.

Will ran, his body a confusion of sweat and smoke and speed against the slow, muddled summer-morning heat and sudden, incredibly parching thirst that made it difficult to breathe. He ran like a setter on the scent, one thing on his mind, his legs blurring like water beneath him.

He tracked the runner to the edge of a tobacco field where it abutted the low muddy creek lined in thick trees and poison ivy. He stopped to listen for movement. Birds twittered loudly all around him in the trees, flew crisp against the white morning heat. He thought he heard a crash way out, maybe fifty yards up, into the field.

He began to run again, hearing only his steps thudding through his heavy body, in the direction of the noise, weaving around the large, heady tobacco plants, thick and green with summer and Jurassic-­looking. He could hear tires popping the gravel, see a dull white cloud lift above the field like a floating spirit, and then felt through the ground an impact followed by a splash. The runner must have seen the cloud or heard the truck and changed his direction, deciding to brave the summer creek with its swollen oaks tall and sturdy at the cutbanks sprawling with invisible copperheads like roots.

Will followed, calling out, Stop! Euphoria County Sheriff’s Department!

He came to the bank, and to his surprise, the runner turned to face him from the other side, dripping, no longer trying to hide, a man who looked aged and familiar, with a gray head and a powerful farm-strong build.

Will! the man whispered loudly over the water and the birds.

Mr. Hathom!

Will had known Zeke Hathom for years; Floressa, Zeke’s wife, had worked many years for the Seems family, and Will and Sam, their son, had grown up together.

I didn’t do nothing, Zeke hissed. I swear.

Better for you to come on in. If you’re innocent, you’ll be released.

I come in, I’m guilty. Now come on, Will.

Will was about to say something. He trusted Zeke was innocent and knew he owed the man.

Deputy, Sheriff Mills called out, stepping like the shadow of a ghost into the shade and removing his hat and sunglasses, running his fingers through his short sweaty hair. Arrest that man.

Will could see the fight go out of Zeke’s eyes, cursed himself for hesitating to let him go.

Please, Mr. Sheriff, Zeke said. I swear. I saw the fire from my place. Saw it and came to help.

Deputy.

He didn’t do anything, Will said.

Read Zeke his rights.

Looking at the creek water, Will said, Zeke Hathom, the first time he had ever called the man by his first name. You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you. You have the right to an attorney . . . , and on and on. Words that meant nothing to him right now. He couldn’t believe he’d come back in part to help the man he was now arresting. He thought of Floressa, a mother to him after his own had passed, and knew this was a mistake he’d have to reckon with.

Cuff him, Mills said, taking his handcuffs out and tossing them to Will.

Mr. Hathom isn’t running from us.

Damn right, Mills said, swatting at something. He knows better, don’t you, Zeke? Come on over here. Don’t make this worse on yourself.

Zeke crossed the water as if being baptized and held out his hands, together, gently, with a look in his eyes Will couldn’t stomach, and, as if physically compelled by a force like water or gravity or heritage, Will clicked the cuffs shut just as gently, helping Zeke up the cutbank and into the field under the hottest of fires, even more puzzled and light-headed when Zeke whispered, tears in his voice, I’m sorry, Will.

WILL STRUNG UP yellow caution tape to secure the scene, a desolate ruin gutted by fire and still steam-smoking, and Sheriff Mills deputized his gap-toothed cousin Buddy Monroe and another regular, Silas King, as he did when they needed more men. He muttered something about harm coming to that coward Seth Grady for quitting him. It was well known Will had been hired to replace Grady, who’d been a sheriff’s deputy since Will could remember.

Within an hour, Sheriff Weenie Edgars drove up in a black Suburban with a couple of investigators from Tupelo County. Troy St. Pierre followed in the old white minivan he used to transport bodies. Since there were limited personnel in Euphoria, it was not uncommon for Edgars to assist in murder investigations.

Hot damn, Edgars said. Howdy, Jeff.

Weenie, Mills said. The two sheriffs shook hands. How’re y’all?

The other men nodded and put on gloves and eyed the atmosphere with disapproval, as if crossing the county line had left a bad taste in their mouths. Their posture made clear this was an inconvenience.

Sheriff Edgars was a short man with a barrel chest he thrust around like something he was proud of. He took in the scene, and Will realized this was his cue to exit, so he went to get the sheriff’s camera, avoiding any conversation with Zeke in the back, then grabbing the film camera from his own truck.

Edgars said to Mills, Talk to me.

Well, we got a suspect. Caught him fleeing the scene. Got a body, stabbed in the back, under the left shoulder blade. No weapon, no ID on him, but we know he’s Tom Janders.

The football player?

Yessir.

Goddamn. Weenie whistled through his teeth as if the recognition of the victim made the crime worse. "Homicide and arson. Hell of a time for this, ain’t it, Jeff? I must’ve seen five signs with your name on ’em."

"Ain’t no competition. But I want this to go smooth as

can."

Sheriff Edgars smirked, hands in his pockets, toeing at nothing on the ground.

I’ll bet you do, he said. But you and I both know that would mean calling State. You’re understaffed and underfunded. Nothing but a green deputy sheriff and two part-times. He craned his head toward Mills, as if he dreaded the answer to his next question. Call ’em yet?

I called you.

How’d I become so goddamn lucky? Edgars said. Turn it over to State, and it’s out of your hands.

I don’t like that. I want to handle as much of this as we can as soon as we can. I want Troy doing the autopsy, and I want to know whatever he finds out before sending away evidence. You hear that, Troy?

Yessir.

Good, Mills said, winking. Maybe you can use some of those connections in the state lab you’re always bragging about to expedite our samples.

He turned again to Edgars. You know about Sheriff Ramsey over in Mecklenburg. Busted up a drug ring almost a year ago. Them folks is sittin’ in the courthouse jail yet, waiting on their lab results just so they can go to trial. That’s how it goes when you call in State. I don’t like the way they look down on us, those goddamn eggheads in the state lab.

Edgars raised his hand to placate Mills (he’d heard all this before) and said, Where’s the suspect?

He’s sitting yonder in the back of my truck. Wet from the waist down, I might add.

Edgars squinted in that direction. Who is he?

Fella by the name of Zeke Hathom.

Hathom. Was he the one you called me about before? Wanted for B and E?

That was his son. Whole goddamn family of criminals.

I reckon so. But it’s no surprise, is it? What ever happened to that boy?

Nobody’s found him yet. He’s either holed up somewhere or he left the county.

I’ll bet that galls you. Well, anyway, you got one.

I’m a little uncomfortable about it, though. Zeke is well liked. A churchgoer, works out at the sawmill. No record but a gambling here and there. Drunk in public when he was younger.

Well. People ain’t always what they seem; maybe he’s just been lucky and it’s catching up with him now. Luck can have its price.

They stood for a moment without a word, as if such a statement voiced an untidy profundity they needed to digest.

Edgars broke the silence: Show us the body.

They walked over the tape toward where Tom Janders lay in the yard. Troy said, Jesus Christ, at the missing eyes, put on a pair of glasses and gloves, took his bearings, looked at the gashes on his back.

Your deputy moved him?

Yeah.

Well, I guess it was either that or nothing at all.

Edgars got the EMTs to help bag the body, and Edgars and Troy walked with Mills to his truck to get custody of the body signed over to Troy.

Edgars said, You said the victim didn’t have no ID. You got anybody that could identify him?

Just then, a green ’93 Honda Accord, with its passenger side cratered in and the front bumper partly held in place by fraying duct tape, pulled up in a back-eddy of dust, and Ferriday Pace got out, the dust from her approach like a cloud mixing with the sour steam of the rubble.

My house! she yelled. My house!

She got past Will quickly, dodging the bystanders—Sheriff Edgars’s men—like a running back. She was screaming, grief trailing her like blood or death itself. Oh my god! She broke down, sobbing.

Sheriff Mills made it to her and, as she attempted to dodge him, caught her with an athleticism defying his age, holding her in an embrace she fought, so that for several moments they appeared to be dancing in a stupefied sleep until she simply surrendered and cried in his arms. He could feel the tears through his undershirt, smelled the spray and sweat in her hair before she turned her face to him.

Where is he? she said. Where is Tom?

Mills looked into her face and moved his hands across her back. She tried to break free again, but he held her, talked to her as he might have a horse or a dog or a baby, in soothing, flowing whispers no one but she could hear. He stopped his gum chewing until she seemed to calm a little. Will watched, aimed, heard the shutter close before he knew he’d even aimed. Almost before he could think, he had taken several pictures. He’d previously thought Mills a good ol’ boy who didn’t think anything beyond the job. Here he was, calming a woman who was about to discover she had lost the father of her child.

I’ve got you, Mills said, quietly, as if nobody was here but Day, who could have been his daughter or even granddaughter, and himself. She nodded, looking up into his square, timeless face, a terse fitness in the cheeks under his prominent cheekbones, tan under bright close-cropped silver hair, like a kid watching something for the first time. Stay with me. There, there, he said. We’re taking care of everything. Everything’s going to be all right. Everything is going to be all right.

She seemed to be in a kind of trance. Mills walked her away from the yard, where Tom’s body lay. Soon enough she’d have to ID him.

But Tom.

Miss, he’s not with us anymore. I’m sorry.

She collapsed in Sheriff Mills’s arms. He nodded to one of the EMTs, who came over to make sure she was all right, but she gathered herself after only a moment.

Sheriff Mills said, Where were you coming from now, Miss Pace?

Will was listening as he walked over to the Accord and shut off the ignition. He looked into the back seat at a baby staring at him. Tom’s baby, Destinee, her face like clotted cream. She cried the minute she saw his face.

I was out, Day said. I got a carful of groceries as I was coming back in town.

When did you leave town?

Yesterday afternoon.

The baby wailed, a gummy, squawking, shouting cry.

Miss Pace went over and picked up the little girl, bouncing her up and down, the baby staring back and forth between the men.

Come on to the station, Sheriff Mills said. We’ll make sure you’ve got everything you need, a place to stay, all that. Tipping his hat, he said, I’m very sorry for your loss.

Mills walked to Will, and Day watched after him in a waifish daze. Under his breath, the sheriff said, Thank god this didn’t happen in town, where we’d be dealing with a crowd. I’ll finish up here and take Zeke over to the magistrate and all that.

You need my help?

You just finish taking pictures, and get on home and clean up and meet me at the office at ten. I want you with me when I talk to Zeke.

Yessir.

I’ll keep Buddy and Silas out here. Good work.

Will moved around the still-hot, smoking ruins of the pitiful house as best he could, taking pictures of different angles, creating a POV film, which the sheriff liked for him to do. But he didn’t think his efforts now would do any good. Fire was a criminal’s best friend. He thought about Zeke. He’d arrested Mr. Hathom, goddamnit. That seemed like ages ago.

As Will was leaving, Silas gave him a nod, thumbs in his belt. Way to go, bud. Will must have looked confused, because Silas had to explain: Going in there and getting about the only evidence I imagine there’ll be.

Buddy said, "Guaranteed it was over some money or some shit. These people always fightin’ over