by R.J. Ellory
“You can’t go back, Joseph,” Hennessy told me. There was concern and pity in his voice. Perhaps he’d believed I would return all at once, that seeing New York would awaken me to who I’d once been. Perhaps he imagined I would return more slowly. What he did not understand, perhaps would never understand, was that the Joseph Vaughan he remembered had long since vanished. I tried my best to remain implacable, but the past had a way of folding itself around me; Paul Hennessy was my anchor, and I was set to let go.
“I have to,” I said. “I can’t even begin to hope you’ll understand—”
“I do understand,” he interjected.
We were seated at his narrow kitchen table. The window beside us was inched open, and a breeze made its way through the gap. I shuddered.
“I don’t profess to understand what you’ve been through, Joseph, but I know you as well as anyone. If you follow this thing it will wind up killing you. Let the past go—”
I shook my head, and already I saw in his expression the futility he felt. “I can’t let it go,” I said. I reached out and took his hand. “I need some money.”
He nodded. “You have endless amounts of money. The book—”
I interrupted. “I just need a little money,” I said. “I don’t want a lot. The rest is for you.”
Hennessy laughed nervously. “I can’t possibly—”
“Yes, you can, Paul. The money is yours. Get me a thousand dollars, that’s all I need. Get me a thousand dollars and the rest you can keep.”
“A thousand dollars?” he exclaimed. “You have any idea how many thousands this book has made?”
I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t want to know, Paul. I don’t need to know. Get me a thousand dollars, that’s all I ask, and the rest is yours to do with as you wish. This is what I want.”
“As your friend, Joseph, Christ, as your friend, I can’t let you do this.”
I smiled. “As my friend, Paul, the only real friend I’ve got, you have to let me do this. I can’t stay here. I can’t just sit in some apartment in New York while this thing haunts me. This is my life, you see? This is who I am.” I looked away toward the window and closed my eyes. “Sometimes I think that this is the reason for my existence.”
“So where are you going to go?”
I opened my eyes and looked right back at Hennessy. “Georgia,” I said. “Back to Augusta Falls. I have to find Dearing. I have to find him and make him do this thing with me.”
“And you think he’ll be willing to help you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even know that he’s still alive. If he is I’ll find him, and when I do I’ll know whether he’s willing.”
“And if you get killed yourself? What then?”
“If I die then at least I’ll have died trying.”
Hennessy didn’t reply for a while. He looked away into some indistinct space between the wall and the floor, and then he turned to me and nodded. “I’ll get the money,” he said.
“Good,” I replied. “I knew I could count on you.”
Two days later, Friday the twenty-fourth, I stood in the hallway of Hennessy’s apartment, at my feet a leather holdall packed with the few things I required. In my pocket were a thousand dollars, a collection of train tickets that would take me all the way back to Georgia, and the photograph of Bridget McCormack. In an envelope in the bottom of my bag were the letter from Atlanta and the newspaper clippings, all of them in sequence from November of ’39 to February a decade later. Lucy Bradford had died nearly twenty years before. Had she lived she would have been twenty-six years old, married perhaps, children of her own, remembering some distant nightmare from her childhood when little girls were taken from her hometown and brutally murdered.
I hugged Paul Hennessy, and I wondered if I would ever see him again.
“I feel I have to—” he started, but I released him and shook my head. “Joseph—”
“I’m going now,” I said. “I will call you if I can.”
“If you need money,” he said. “I can wire more money to you if you need it.”
I smiled, leaned down and picked up my bag. “Until next time,” I said, and then I turned and made my way quietly out of the apartment and down the stairs to the street.
As I reached the junction, I turned and saw Hennessy’s face there at the window. He raised his hand once, and then he was gone.
Pennsylvania into Maryland, through Virginia into the Carolinas. Wilmington, Baltimore, Richmond, Raleigh and Columbia. Faces changed as we made each stop. Through the window the expanse of the southeast. The sound of the train all around me, thundering and crashing toward the horizon, through daylight into darkness, and out into daylight once more. Trying so hard to sleep, not to think, not to be afraid. Curled up in my sleeper car, each jolt waking me, each blast of the whistle tearing through my dreams and reminding me of where I was going, and why.
I thought of Haynes Dearing, and what was done that awful day. I thought of Reilly Hawkins and whether I would find him alive, or buried in a land he’d never left. I hadn’t seen him since the trial, all of fourteen years before. He’d be an old man, and the heart that had been broken by the pretty girl from Berrien County would not have healed. Time did not heal such wounds. Time did nothing but remind you that it was forever running out.
On Sunday the twenty-sixth we crossed the Georgia state line. I remember walking down the length of the train and standing at the window to watch the railtracks as they whipped out behind us like ribbons. I looked toward the horizon and felt the power of memory, and though there was something nostalgic about the images before me, there was also the tremendous sense of loss that Georgia represented. The land had changed, but never so much as to be anything other than what it was. This was my childhood, the death of my father, my mother’s sickness; this was the Krugers’ kitchen, the smell of bratwurst and Bundt cake; this was a Southern wake where my mother expressed her watchful silence, her kohl-rimmed eyes black like pitch. This was the Guardians and the child killer, the flyers posted on fences and gates, the curfews and warnings, the sight of Gunther standing in the darkness and scaring the hell out of me; this was Alex Webber, the schoolhouse, the tablet-arm desks, the soles of white shoes over the brow of a hill; this was ten little dead girls lined up and waiting for their wings. This was Augusta Falls, home of my heart, broken though it was.
I remember all these things in the third-floor hotel room. My legs are almost without sensation. The blood is drying and clotting. I can smell it—thick and turgid, and I remember that smell the day I found Virginia Grace Perlman, the day I went out to Fleming and found Esther Keppler. The present echoes the past, and in looking down at myself I wonder if I have not at last become the thing that has haunted me.
I close my eyes for a moment, and then I open them and look at the man facing me.
“I went back for you,” I whisper, and my voice sounds distant and faint.
I close my eyes again.
I want to sleep now, that’s all.
I just want to sleep.
THIRTY
SEVENTEEN YEARS I’D BEEN AWAY. AUGUSTA FALLS HAD NOT SO much changed as attempted to become something else. A crescent-shaped motel out beyond the land that had once belonged to Frank Turow’s brother; a small department store that already looked as if it had seen better days; Gene Fricker’s grain store had vanished utterly, and in its place was a Mobil gas station, bright red pumps standing out in the forecourt like sentinels. Everywhere I looked I could see the ghosts of the past, the indelible footprints of buildings that had once stood. A visitor would never have seen such things, but I knew Augusta Falls, it was an intrinsic element of who I was—so much so that new paint and different fencing and altered signs could not change what I recalled.
I stayed in the crescent-shaped motel. I paid in cash and took a key, and then I locked myself inside and slept for the better part of twenty-four hours. When I woke it was the morning of Tuesday, March twenty-eighth, and the motel att
endant looked at me with questions in his eyes that he would never have dared to ask. I wondered then if who I was, why I was there, or my reason for returning could be sensed or perceived. Did people look at me and see some personification of the rumors they’d heard about this killing town? Even now, the better part of twenty years later, did they watch their children with a weather eye, ever conscious of the fact that it had happened once right here, and could so easily happen again?
I told the attendant I would be staying for at least one more night.
He looked at me askance. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-five years old, and already there was something suspicious in his manner. “Another night?” he asked.
“Maybe two,” I said. “There’s a couple of people I need to see.”
The attendant frowned. “You’re from round here then?”
“Used to be,” I replied. “Many years ago.”
He nodded. “I’m not from here,” he said. “I’m from out near Race Pond.”
I smiled, and remembered the story Reilly Hawkins had told me of my father and Kempner Tzanck out beyond Race Pond. How my father had leveled a brute of a man with a roundhouse and he’d bled to death.
“Anyone in particular you’re after?” the attendant asked.
“Hawkins,” I said. “A man called Reilly Hawkins?”
He shook his head. “Don’t know I’ve ever heard of him. Best thing to do is go over and see the sheriff. Name’s Dennis Stroud. He’s been here a good ten or fifteen years. He’ll more than likely be able to help you.”
“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll be back later.”
I found the Sheriff’s Office without difficulty. It was a new building, but from where I stood I could see the site of the schoolhouse. Perhaps its shell was still there, I couldn’t tell, for the site had been extended with a low brick-built annex with more windows than it seemed to need.
I stepped up toward the Sheriff’s Office door, opened it and went inside.
A young woman looked up from a typewriter, a pretty girl with a head full of blonde curls who smiled sweetly and asked if she could be of assistance.
“I’d like to see Sheriff Stroud,” I said.
“And may I tell him what it’s about, sir?”
“I’m looking for some people and thought he might be able to help me.”
A handful of minutes later I sat in a chair facing Sheriff Dennis Stroud. His face was round like a child’s, his eyes appearing too small, but there was a sincerity in his expression, a manner about him, that told me he was a decent man. After Brooklyn, after Auburn, after everything behind me, I believed I could tell such things.
“Vaughan?” he asked, and then he frowned and scratched his head with the pencil he was holding. “Vaughan, you say? Not the Joseph Vaughan?”
I smiled. “Depends who the Joseph Vaughan would be.”
Stroud leaned forward and opened his desk drawer. From it he withdrew a copy of A Quiet Belief in Angels. He held it up. “This is the Joseph Vaughan,” he said.
“Then I must be the Joseph Vaughan.”
He laughed heartily, and then he rose from his chair. He came around the side of the desk and extended his hand. I took it and he gripped my hand with both of his.
“Augusta Falls’ famous son,” Sheriff Stroud said. “Seems you’re the only person who ever came out of this place and made something of himself.”
“I went to prison for murder, Sheriff Stroud,” I said. “I spent nearly fourteen years in Auburn State—”
“For a murder you didn’t commit, right?”
“Sure, for a murder I didn’t commit, but—”
“Hell, Mr. Vaughan, there’s nothing that the American people like more than a man surviving against the odds. Round here you’re something of a local hero.” He stood for a moment, and then he sort of tilted his head to one side, and said, “For my wife . . .” He held out the book. “Would you sign this for my wife? She’s read it three times, I think, and it still makes her cry. She’d be so darn happy, Mr. Vaughan, you have no idea.”
I took the book from him, and he handed me a pen. “What’s her name?” I asked.
“Her name’s Elizabeth, but I call her Betty. If you put it to Betty, then that’ll make it all the more personal, right?”
To Betty, I wrote. With my very best wishes to you and your family. Sincerely, Joseph Vaughan.
I handed the book back. Stroud read it and smiled. “That’s mighty appreciated, Mr. Vaughan, it really is. Now I s’pose you’re not here just visiting, or are you?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “I came looking for some people.”
“What people?” Sheriff Stroud walked back to the other side of his desk and sat down.
“Reilly Hawkins—”
Stroud shook his head. “He’s gone, Mr. Vaughan. Gone a few years ago. His heart, I believe.”
“He’s dead?”
Stroud nodded. His expression was sympathetic. “‘I’m sorry, Mr. Vaughan.”’
For a moment I could not think. I could not recall Reilly’s face, and then it came to me, slowly but surely, and I closed my eyes. Just as Hennessy represented everything that was New York, so Reilly Hawkins had been representative of everything that was Georgia.
“Sheriff Dearing?” I said, anxious to change the subject. I would think of Reilly later, perhaps visit his grave, and only then would I let myself express what I felt.
“Haynes Dearing?” Stroud asked. “And why would you be so interested in Haynes Dearing?”
“He was my conscience,” I said. “He was the sheriff when I was a kid, for all the time before I left. I came back here in 1950 when my mother died and I heard that he’d left.”
“Hell, Mr. Vaughan, that’s a story all its own. Yes, he left. That was many, many years ago. You heard about his wife, right?”
“She committed suicide, I believe.”
“She sure did. That would’ve been back around 1950 or thereabouts. When did you come back?”
“October of ’50. I came back for my mother’s funeral.”
“Right, right. So she would have committed suicide in maybe January or February, and Haynes, he upped and left in March right after. Transferred to Valdosta for a few years, maybe until 1954 or ’55, and then he retired from the police department. Don’t know where he went from there.” Stroud paused and looked at me. “Out of school, you know, but I heard word there was a drinking problem. That, and the fact that he seemed to be unable to work on anything else—” Stroud stopped mid-sentence. “This is not something I should be discussing really, Mr. Vaughan, you know. This is police business.”
I leaned back in the chair. I glanced away toward the window. “I found one of those girls,” I said. “Those murders. All those years ago. I found one of those girls, Sheriff.”
Stroud nodded. “I read your book, Mr. Vaughan.”
“And then I went to prison for thirteen years for a murder I didn’t commit. I’ve lost most of my life, Sheriff, really, the very best part of my life has gone, and now I’m back trying to understand something of what happened, and why I had to be involved. You have any idea how that must feel?”
Stroud shook his head. “No, Mr. Vaughan, I don’t.”
“I suppose I came back here looking for something that would help me make sense of all of this. Here is where I grew up, and I figure most of the people that grew up with me have left or died, or they’ve changed so much I’d never recognize them. Haynes Dearing was a part of that, a very important part. He knew my parents, and after my father died he was very good to us. He used to visit with my mother, even after the Kruger fire, even after the death of Elena, the Krugers’ little girl . . .”
“What is it that you want from me, Mr. Vaughan?”
I shook my head, “I don’t know, Sheriff. I suppose I hoped there’d be something that would help me understand what happened after I left. I went to New York. I met a girl there. She was murdered too, Sheriff, murdered just like the l
ittle girls in Augusta Falls, and—”
“And you think that it was the same man, right?”
I looked up at Stroud, surprised that he had stated the obvious so clearly.
“You figure that whoever did these killings in Augusta Falls also killed your girl in New York? I mean, that’s certainly the impression you get from reading your book. That’s what folks around here have got to believing as well, and I’d say that Haynes Dearing was perhaps the one who believed that the most.”
I frowned.
“You repeat any of this and I’ll get my hide stripped and salted, Mr. Vaughan, you get me?”
I nodded. “Not a word Sheriff, not a word.”
Stroud rose from his desk and walked to the back of the room. He opened a file drawer, reached into the back, and withdrew a slim manila folder. “When Dearing retired, when he moved away from Valdosta to wherever he ended up, they sent me some files, paperwork that related to the Augusta Falls killings. This one here had some things in it. Well, you take a look and see if it makes any sense to you.”
Stroud handed me the file. It weighed almost nothing, and when I opened it a collection of newspaper clippings spilled sideways to the floor. I gathered them up quickly, shifted my chair forward and laid them out on the edge of Stroud’s desk. They were all there. It could have been the exact same collection of clippings that now sat in the bottom of my bag at the crescent-shaped motel. I leafed through them, read their names, looked at their faces: Alice Ruth Van Horne, Ellen May Levine, Rebecca Leonard, Mary Tait . . . I turned them over one by one, and then my breath stopped. It was another clipping entirely, a clipping from a New York newspaper.
GIRL, 21, BRUTALLY MURDERED IN BROOKLYN
I looked away. I could not read the article, could not bear to see Bridget’s name in the same typeface as all the others.
