A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  Duggan stepped forward. His thumbs came out from his belt and he stopped there, his fists clenching and unclenching. “Seems it’d have to be a pretty tight arrangement for someone to kill themselves on behalf of someone else, Joseph.”

  “Someone like family?”

  “Family? What the hell’re you talking about?”

  “I’m saying that maybe it wasn’t Gunther at all. Maybe—”

  Ronnie Duggan raised his hand. “Maybe nothing, Joseph. Maybe it ain’t nothing at all. That’s what I’m trying to tell you but it seems you’re selectively deaf. That thing ended in 1949. That’s the better part of twenty years ago.”

  “I don’t think it ended, Ronnie. And I think Sheriff Dearing felt the same way.”

  “Enough now. This is a conversation I’m not having, not now, not ever. We aren’t children anymore, Joseph. We have lives to get on with. There are people here who decided to leave the past behind, and I think it’d be real smart if you did the same thing. No one wants all these memories stirred up again. It’s 1967. The world has changed. Augusta Falls isn’t your hometown anymore. You should go back to New York, Joseph. For God’s sake, let this thing lie.”

  “We were the Guardians,” I said. “We made an oath, a promise—”

  “We were kids, for fuck’s sake! That’s all we were. We were never going to stop what happened, and we knew it. We were frightened and desperate, and we made believe that we could do something about it, but we couldn’t—we couldn’t then, and we can’t now.”

  “Now? What d’you mean, now! You know it never stopped, don’t you?”

  There was a flicker of anger in Ronnie’s eyes. He took a step toward me and I could see the muscles twitching along his jawline.

  “Look at me, Ronnie. Look at me and tell me you know it was Gunther Kruger.”

  Ronnie Duggan stared back at me with a fierce and unrelenting gaze. “I know it was Gunther Kruger,” he said. “Are you happy now? That’s what you want me to say, then there you have it. I know it was Gunther Kruger, and the evil bastard hanged himself in his own barn, and they found a ribbon in his hand, all kinds of things that could only have come from those poor little girls. He killed them. He raped and abused them and killed them and cut them up. He threw bits of them around the fucking countryside, and then he died and went to Hell where he damn well belonged. That’s what I’m saying because that’s what I believe.”

  “That’s what you believe, or that’s what you want to believe?”

  He was silent for a moment, and then he looked away toward the horizon and smiled. “I’m gonna go now, Joseph. I can’t say that it’s been a pleasure seeing you again, but for politeness sake I’m gonna say that it was. I’d appreciate it if you’d do whatever you have to do and move on out of here soon as is convenient. I’ll pass on your best wishes to Michael, any of the other folks that you know, and I’ll say goodbye.” He stepped forward and held out his hand. I took it, and he gripped my hand too firmly and looked me in the eye. “So it’s goodbye, Joseph, and I figure this is the last time we’ll be speaking to one another.”

  He released my hand, and then turned to walk away.

  “What if it didn’t stop, Ronnie? What then?”

  Duggan turned back. “Then it’ll be someone else’s kids, Joseph, not mine, not Michael’s or Maurice’s. The nightmare visited Augusta Falls, and then it moved on. I ain’t calling up the ghosts just to see if they came back.” He smiled once more. “You take care now, Vaughan, okay?”

  I nodded and watched silently as Ronnie Duggan walked away. The Guardians—whatever we might have believed ourselves to be—had died with the murder of Elena Kruger, the one I’d promised to protect, the one that had proved to the Guardians that whatever we did we could not make a difference.

  I stayed there for some minutes, and then I turned back the way I’d come and returned to the motel.

  Thinking back to that moment I cannot help but smile to myself. What had I expected? Who was I fooling?

  We were the Guardians. Me and Michael Wiltsey, Ronnie Duggan, Daniel McRae and Maurice Fricker. All these years later, what made me even think they would be pleased to see me?

  We were frightened back then, each and every one of us, but time had passed and the kind of fear they’d felt had changed. Now they were afraid to be wrong. Afraid that the nightmare of the past hadn’t ended. Afraid that if they stirred up the ghosts it would all come back to haunt them. They hadn’t forgotten. They would never forget.

  I had assumed, and I assumed wrong. I walked away from the Falls Inn, and I knew who I was looking for. I thought of Gabillard, of Lowell Shaner, others that had been there, and I wondered whether they would want to know what had happened. I sat in that cheap motel cabin, the door ajar, a thin breeze making its way inside, and I realized that the end of this thing wasn’t so far away. There would just be the two of us: Joseph Vaughan versus the child killer. Like some old-time B horror movie. And if I died . . . well, if I died there would be no one behind me. There would be no second strike. There was no doubt that I was afraid, but the sense of closure I perceived outweighed the fear. I would find some backstreet army surplus store and buy a gun.

  I decided to head for Columbus, a big enough city to find such a place, and then I would cross the county line into Alabama. I would visit Union Springs, the first of those places about which Dearing had kept newspaper clippings. October of 1950 another little girl had died. Perhaps there would be people who remembered. Perhaps they would be able to tell me something to point me in the right direction.

  I closed the cabin door and lay down and slept in my clothes. I did not dream, and for that small mercy I was grateful.

  The chill of early morning awoke me. I gathered my few belongings together and checked out.

  I took the bus to Tifton, and there I waited at the depot for a connection to Columbus. I passed out toward the Georgia state line. I believed that no one would remember me, and if they did I trusted that they would forget.

  THIRTY-ONE

  REILLY HAWKINS FILLED MY THOUGHTS AS WE MADE OUR WAY TO Columbus. I had thought to see his grave, perhaps to see the house where I’d lived, to find out if the Kuharczyks were still there, but I could not. I believed that seeing such reminders would provoke only anger, maybe grief, and almost certainly despair. Twice I had returned and twice I had lost someone I loved. I could never go back.

  And Michael? Ronnie, Maurice Fricker, Daniel McRae—who’d escaped just as I had, but had done it smart, had made his way half across the world—what of them? They belonged to a past that had stayed behind, and they had no wish to follow me. I was the fool, wasn’t I? I was the one who had allowed it all to become a burden.

  Columbus was a new city, a place I had never visited before. I appreciated the anonymity, and when I checked into a hotel on the night of the twenty-ninth I stood at the window and looked out at the lights that burned in the darkness. The sky was clear, midnight blue, and the moon rose high and bright and full. I closed my eyes and thought of the house on Throop and Quincy, of Aggie Boyle, of Joyce Spragg and Ben Godfrey. I thought of Arthur Morrison and The Homecoming and recalled the day Bridget and I had walked into a bookstore and believed that the world and all it had to offer was right there ahead of us just waiting to be grasped. We missed the chance we were given. That was the simplicity of it: we were given one chance and we blew it.

  I slept well. The sounds from the street below were unfamiliar, and that was comfort in itself. When I woke the day was clear, the traffic-filled street reminded me of my first day in Brooklyn.

  I walked until hunger assaulted me, and then I stopped in a diner and ate breakfast. I walked some more, down backstreets, alleyways, eyes open for a pawnshop. I found one on the corner of Young and Ninth Street, and there—behind a mesh counter—was exactly the kind of man I was looking for. Fifteen minutes and seventy-five dollars later I left the shop. I hurried back to the hotel, retrieved my bag, and walked downtown to the bus depot.
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br />   An hour and a half later I arrived in Alabama. It was raining lightly, and when I stepped down from the bus I knew instinctively that Union Springs had seen the same ghost that had walked through Augusta Falls. I sensed it. Something preternatural and intuitive. I believed it would be the same in Heflin, in Pulaski and Calhoun, and I knew then that visiting such towns would serve no purpose. The damage had been done. Whatever had walked these streets had long since left. But I knew there would be others. Recent towns, recent killings. I turned around and headed back to the depot. I took a bus to Montgomery, the nearest city where there would be a library of records. I was chasing a mirage, a phantom, a specter, and I was losing myself in the process. My mind was focused, single-tracked, unerring. I did not think to eat or sleep. Necessity forced such things upon me, and without that necessity I would have walked until I dropped. It was after midnight when I arrived in Montgomery and hailed a cab. I asked the driver to take me to the nearest hotel and, seated in the back, I realized how sour my odor was and how bad I must have looked. He set me down ahead of an imposing building with revolving glass doors. I waited for the cab to pull away and then hurried along the street until I found a decrepit-looking place with a broken neon sign. The first hotel would never have let me enter, but here they wouldn’t care.

  Once inside I stripped off my clothes and bathed. I washed my hair, shaved as carefully as I could, and then spent some time trying to gather my thoughts together.

  Montgomery would have the information I needed; somewhere within its city library there would be newspapers from all over the state, and several states beyond, and there would be similarities. Always there were similarities.

  I lay awake through the night, and when a thin, gray light seeped through the curtain I rose and dressed.

  I was there when the doors of the library opened, and I asked for directions to the public records section. I started with Alabama; I found the Union Springs girl, an eight-year-old called Frances Resnick. Found murdered on Wednesday, October eleventh, 1950. Frances Resnick had been raped and decapitated. Her headless body had been thrown into a gully and covered with rocks and earth. Heflin, Saturday, February third, 1951, an eleven-year-old called Rita Yates was found dead after being missing for two days. Her arms had been severed from her torso; one of them was located, the other not. She too had been sexually assaulted. Pulaski, Tennessee; Saturday, August sixteenth, 1952, a local farmworker had found the scant remains of Lillian Harmond, the twelve-year-old daughter of the town’s postmaster. Her body had been cut clean in two across the midriff, her upper half found in a shallow grave, her lower half left beneath a tree. The farmworker, a young man called Garth Trent, was quoted as saying, “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. It was like she just sat there, but there was just her legs.” I thought of Virginia Perlman, and I understood what he had felt. And then back to Georgia. The small town of Calhoun. Sunday, January tenth, 1954, the dismembered body of seven-year-old Hettie Webster was found by a group of children. First they found her left arm, then her right shoulder and most of her head. Then they ran away. Hettie had been walking back from Sunday school alone. It was late morning, a bright and clear day, and no one had seen a thing. Police were baffled. The citizens of Calhoun felt much the same as those of Augusta Falls.

  I found nothing else for two hours. My eyes hurt. A headache raged between my temples, but I scoured the newspaper binders—page after page, volume after volume. I went through Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia and Mississippi looking for the child killer. I found him in 1956 in a small town called Ridgeland, South Carolina. That town was a mere handful of miles from the Savannah River, no more than a hundred and twenty miles from Augusta Falls. The girl’s name was Janice Waterson. She was nine years old; an only child. Her parents—Reanna and Milton—had told the world that she was “a bright and inquisitive girl, always helpful, always polite, and not like we’d ever had to teach her to be polite, she just seemed to do it naturally.” Her feet had been cut from her ankles, as had her hands from her wrists. She was buried without them, because they were never found. They had a closed coffin too, as much of her face had been taken away with a serrated blade.

  It seemed then that I was tuned to his movements. I seemed to find them with greater ease, and I counted as I went, took note of names and dates and places; details of the manner of death, the ways in which the girls had been found, who had found them and what they’d said. I felt like I was tracking him—Monck’s Corner, Sparta, Enterprise, Alexander City, through ’57, ’58, ’61, ’63. I could see his face. I could see his pattern. Small towns, never far from the highway, girls no younger than seven, no older than twelve.

  And I kept thinking of the scrawled note in Dearing’s file: Where did the boy go after Jesup?

  By the time I was done it was late afternoon. I had not eaten or moved from the desk. The library attendant—a middle-aged woman, graying hair tied in tight bundles against the side of her head, aubergine lipstick, a loud flower-print skirt and a heavy woolen cardigan—had caught my eye a little after two o’clock.

  “All right there?” she’d asked, and I’d smiled warmly and told her that everything was fine, that I was researching a book, that I tended to get a little obsessed with my work.

  “You need anything there you don’t hesitate to let me know,” she’d replied, and then she’d walked away.

  I left Montgomery City Library with a list of nineteen names, the last one less than four months ago in a town called Stone Gap, no more than a handful of miles south of Macon. Twenty-nine killings in all, spanning the better part of thirty years. One a year it seemed, but I knew there were more. Those reported missing and never found. Even more tragically, those who disappeared and went unreported.

  I made my way back to the broken-neon hotel. I knew I had to find Dearing. He was out there somewhere. He was out there looking for the next one. We were running a parallel track.

  The last killing had been in Georgia, on Tuesday, November twenty-ninth, 1966; a nine-year-old girl named Rachel Garrett. Memories would be fresh, people might remember a man like Dearing. No one had witnessed the child’s abduction, but a man coming after the fact, a stranger asking questions? Surely there would be someone who would recall such a thing . . .

  Once in my hotel room I packed my things, then sat on the edge of the bed and let my mind run through everything that had happened. It was as if I was coming to the end of a chapter of my life, a chapter that had begun with the death of my father, my mother’s alliance with Gunther Kruger, and the killing of Alice Ruth Van Horne.

  They were all out there, every single one of them, and I knew they were waiting.

  Waiting for me to find their killer and release them.

  In the night the Guardians came, and they came as children.

  They came with hands held wide as if to welcome me, and as I reached them they turned their backs. There was the sound of laughter, and beneath that the sound of crying, and beneath that the sound of a serious man doing the Devil’s work.

  The sawing of bones, the letting of blood, the shame and guilt and anguish.

  And then there was a cool wind blowing, and inside of that wind I heard the sound of wings, and with it came a sense of calm.

  I slept again. I did not dream.

  In the morning it was raining.

  THIRTY-TWO

  SATURDAY, APRIL FIRST. I SAT AT THE BACK OF THE BUS AND RODE away from Alabama. Once again I crossed the Georgia state line and headed for Stone Gap. I knew how the town would look before I arrived. I knew how people’s voices would sound, the color of their eyes, and the depth of their suspicion. Perhaps they would see me as I was. Perhaps they would see me as something to fear. Now it did not matter. Nothing mattered but finding Haynes Dearing.

  Stone Gap, as I knew all too well, was a small Southern town. The climate, the inconsistent humidity, the ordinariness of life. Nothing ever happened in places like Stone Gap; no one famous hailed from its schools or small Methodist Colleg
e. The roads were uneven, the cars ancient, the politics indefinite. It professed to be a religious-minded community, a community of tolerance and temperance, but the bars were crowded, and somewhere on the outskirts of town there would be a house owned by an unmarried woman, and living in that house would be two or three girls. Men would visit that house, as they had done for a hundred years or more, but there would be no mention of this building in the town records. It was as if it did not exist, and never had, and such an omission would never raise questions in the land census. Beyond the immediate town limits the houses grew smaller and farther apart, as if the people who lived there had been banished. The people of Stone Gap abhorred violence, but every man owned a gun and every woman had bloodied her hands around the throat of a slit pig. There was a way to do things, and it was an old way, but Stone Gap knew that the old ways were the best ways. Cities like New York and Las Vegas, even such places as Montgomery, were representative of a different type of America, an America that had forgotten the land and its laws.

  Such a place would not wish to remember the murder of a child, but it would not be able to forget it. Such a thing would lie beneath the surface like an indelible bruise, mentioned only in looks and glances, each person knowing without words what the other was saying. And just like Augusta Falls, Stone Gap would know that such a thing could not have been perpetrated by one of their own. It would have been a foreigner, an outsider, and for years afterward anyone arriving who was not a native of this place would find thin comfort and short shrift.

  I stood outside the bus depot, nothing more than a plankboard lean-to with a corrugated roof, and I felt I knew Stone Gap as well as my own hometown. This was the world I had sought to leave, but my leaving had merely tempted destiny to bring me back. Stone Gap had lost one of its own: I could feel it in the air, see it in the faces of people as they passed me by, and I tried my best to avoid eye contact; to be inconspicuous, to raise no questions.