THE LEVEE is about how suspicion can ruin the best of friendships. When the popular young Spanish teacher at Colin Douglas' high school is found murdered near Colin's favorite camping spot on the levee, Colin is torn by suspicion and doubt. Was the killer a vagrant who just happened by the old cemetery where Senorita Gloria was found? Or was the crime committed by a lover-the father of one of Colin's friends and camping-buddies? Could it have been Toby, the boy who left camp in his car and didn't return until dawn? Or could it even have been Colin's widower father? THE LEVEE, told largely through flashbacks, evokes a period of innocence that is about to end-the late 1950s in the Deep South. It's only when Colin comes back years later that he learns the truth about the crime.

PROLOGUE

It was right after the execution that the dreams started. But maybe they were always there, crouching like monsters just outside the campfire circle as we huddled around the flames on those distant summer nights. I only know that for a long time I seldom let myself think about what happened over forty years ago, in May of my second high school year. I grew up, left home, settled in Colorado, where I married the love of my college years and wrote my books, and only occasionally did I let my mind wander back. When I did, I always managed to distract myself with another project. True crime was my passion, everything from the initial newspaper account to the judgment of the criminal. After my first books sold, I flattered myself that I could see inside the minds of the victim, the witnesses and, most important, the murderer. Until I met a murderer who, on the last day of his life, asked me why.

The dreams began after that.

At first I thought it was the result of having forced myself to witness an execution, an experience that left me feeling hollow, with a copper taste in my mouth. I told myself I would recover but when the dreams began to pound me, night after night, and I shot upright in bed, soaked in sweat, I started to doubt my sanity.

Back at our home in Boulder, Carolyn told me I needed a vacation. Research for the last book, which ended with the killer's lethal injection, had been the most intense of all my writing projects. I had a movie deal in the offing and had already made one publicity tour. I'd driven myself harder than ever before and I was, after all, a sixty-three year-old man.

We told the kids, both grown and living their own lives, that we were going to Cancun, and we locked up the house. But even lying on the beach in the Mexican sun I felt the fingers curling around my mind like claws, trying to drag me into the past. I saw the arsenic-green foliage, smelled the mud and oil of the river, heard the croak of frogs, the thin buzz of insects, and felt the horrible fear I'd managed to suppress for four decades of my life.

When we returned I saw a psychologist, an earnest man with a gaunt face who asked about the dreams and jotted notes on a pad while the wheels of his recorder turned. We discussed my career (successful), my marriage (solid), my economic circumstances (comfortable), and he began to delve into the past.

“Why do you think you write about murders, Mr. Douglas?” he asked and I suddenly saw him in prison dungarees and a white t- shirt, leering at me through the bars, four hours before he was to die.

I tried to tell him then about the levee.

It is not as if I don't remember but, rather, as if the emotion had been blocked out before the dreams started. For years I thought I could recall what happened, recite the events in my mind, but I felt nothing, as if I were reading a newspaper account. It was only when the dreams began that I started to feel. And because I began to feel, I began to fear.

It is morning and I stare up at the green blur of the tent and listen for the sound of breathing from the sleeping bag beside me. But the only sound is the lapping of the river at the edge of the bluff, thirty feet away, and the squawk of a jay. I call Stan's name but there is no answer. I struggle out of the sleeping bag, shivering in the dawn chill, fumble for my glasses and pull on my jeans, heavy with the smoke smell of last night's camp fire. I crawl out of the tent, throw on my windbreaker, and look around me. The fog is shroud-gray, and cold as an open grave. The campfire, six feet away, has been dead for hours, ever since we let it burn itself out last night, and our aluminum cooking kits, bought from the official Boy Scout store downtown, are where we left them after supper.

As I look around me, trying to fathom why I am alone, I have a vague sense that something happened last night, but just what I can't recall. That is because this is a dream, I tell myself. I will make myself wake up and I will be at home in my bed and it will be morning and the sun will be slanting in through the blinds and my father will be calling for me to get ready for ten o'clock Mass.

Except that I cannot wake up.

“Stan?” I call his name again, knowing he won't answer. It is like a carefully rehearsed drama, in which I am a character, saying my lines and walking through my part until the end of the scene. The moves are foreordained and there is no way to break out.

I duck back into the tent for my .22 but the rifle is gone. Yet I know I put it beside me last night, because this is a wild place, five miles from the city, and there are sounds at night that make you lean closer to the fire, and eyes that stare at you from the dark. Who could have taken the rifle while we slept?

Something is wrong and I know I must get help. I find my boots and shake out my socks, then lace up and start down the trail, threading my way through the willows toward the borrow pit.

There is a smell of dead leaves and soil, overlain by a curious oil odor that has seeped into the earth from the refineries upriver and spilled into the borrow area during times of high water.

Fronds and branches brush my face and I recoil as a web materializes before me, woven during the night by a great yellow spider that hangs eye to eye with me until I reach for a stick and knock the sticky silver threads away.

The trail dips down now and I feel my feet sliding on the dewy grass. The full borrow pit, its placid brown surface broken by the trunks of trees, stretches for fifty feet between the batture and the levee. Once I cross I will be on the slick, grassy slope that rises thirty feet and protects the fields on the other side from the river. I still cannot see it for the mist but I know it is there. And on top will be the car and escape.

But as I reach the water's edge I realize with a shock that the canoe is gone. I must make my way across on a log that slides and rolls with my weight. I try to hurry, picking my way around jutting limbs, and that is when I hear it behind me, not a rustling so much as a panting, a rasp like someone--or something---that is short of breath.

I make myself walk faster but as I reach the far side my boots slip off the shifting trunk and I sink into the slime. Two more steps and the gumbo mud holds me fast. The panting is louder now and I use all my strength to yank my legs from the mud but it is like walking under water and the mud sucks at my feet with each step, until I have sunk to my knees.

And I do not ever reach the levee. view abbreviated excerpt only...

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