A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  I rose and showered, I shaved, changed my clothes. I stood before the mirror and asked myself whether I was ready to meet with Haynes Dearing. I tried to be strong and retain some sense of resolve about what I was doing.

  I tried to eat some bread and cheese but I had no appetite.

  The room was nothing more than my new prison cell, and though I could leave whenever I wished, though there was no lock on the door and no one stood beyond to prevent my exit, I could leave no more easily than when I’d been in Auburn. Everything in the present seemed a mere echo of the past. Somewhere I had made a decision—perhaps something simple, even insignificant—and as a result of that decision everything from that point forward had slipped off kilter, onto other axis. The real Joseph Vaughan existed within a parallel world, a world without dead children, a world where he had grown old with Alex Webber, where his mother had lived to some ancient age, where she was ever present, ever beautiful, ever pleased with the life she had created for herself and her son. Or perhaps even earlier. Some other life where Earl Vaughan’s heart had been sound and strong, the heart of a giant, and nothing so inconsequential as the rheum had afflicted him. He was somewhere even now with his wife, and though they’d never had more than one child, that child, their son, was an inspiration for them. He was a writer, and people knew his name. He was the son of Augusta Falls, and Augusta Falls would be remembered for that son.

  Some other world. Some other life.

  Not this one.

  By two I had opened the window and sat there on a chair with my forearms on the sill. Watching and waiting, praying that Dearing had not been overcome with second thoughts. I willed him to come. I placed everything within a single thought and sent it out there. I wanted to see him turn the corner at the junction. I wanted to see him make his way down the sidewalk with that unforgettable gait. I wanted him to look up at the window and see me, to raise his hand, to smile, and start speaking to me even before I could hear him.

  I watched cars and cabs crawl down the street, wishing any one of them would draw to a stop against the curb, that the rear door would open, and after a moment’s hesitation Haynes Dearing would appear, and I would see nothing but the top of his hat as he emerged, but I would know it was him. No doubt. No uncertainty. Haynes Dearing in Brooklyn and at my hotel.

  By the time the sun began to set I was beside myself with agitation. I could not speak. I tried to look at myself in the mirror, pretend I was someone else, start a conversation just so I could hear a voice. Any voice. Nothing but a strangled sound emerged from my lips, and I closed my eyes and breathed deeply.

  I am an exile, I thought, and wondered if here I would stay, forever trapped within a prison of my own making, caught in some hiatus of time and place, waiting for someone who would never arrive.

  I am an exile, and no one knows I’m here except the man I’m waiting for. And he will never come. Never intended to come. Made a promise and then broke it. Just like the promise I made to Elena. Broken words. Broken oaths. Worthless vows. This is who I have become, and I have created this for myself. No one else has done this but me. No one else but me.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  IT WAS DARK. THROUGH A THIN GAP IN THE DRAPES I COULD SEE THE moon, high and full. It shone like a single eye into my room and found me there sitting on the floor with my back to the wall beside the bed.

  I heard the car pull up. I heard an exchange of muffled words. I heard the door slam, the engine start, the car pull away.

  My body fought against me, but I dragged myself up from the floor and made it to the window.

  I pulled back the drapes and tugged up the window. I looked down and it could have been the same day.

  Thursday, February seventeenth, 1949.

  He looked the same as he had then. When he came to drive me to Jesup.

  When I saw him take a moment, glance back toward the road, and then look up at the house like his own angel of death was planning to appear from within, I knew.

  I knew.

  He raised his hand.

  I extended my hand through the open window.

  “Joseph,” he said, and his voice was almost a whisper.

  “Third floor,” I said. “The room at the end of the hall.”

  He nodded, took a moment to set his hat on his head like a punctuation mark, and then he walked slowly toward the front door.

  I rummaged through my bag. I gathered the newspaper clippings and put them out on the bed. My heart was thundering in my chest, my hands were sweating. I could feel my pulse in my temples and my head was ready to burst. I took the chairs from near the window and set them facing one another in the middle of the room.

  I stepped toward the door.

  I could hear his footfalls on the stairwell. I stood for a moment. I tried to breathe deeply and gather myself together. I stepped back, sat down in the chair, and closed my eyes for just a second.

  The door started to open, I could see the handle turning. I had almost passed out, believed for a moment that I would lose myself completely. I watched the door open inch by inch, and then Haynes Dearing was standing there in front of me, and he was smiling, smiling high, wide and handsome, and though he had aged, though the better part of twenty years had passed since I had seen him, I did see him. I saw him as though for the first time.

  “Joseph,” he said, and he stepped into the room and closed the door behind him.

  “Sheriff Dearing,” I said.

  “It’s good to see you.”

  “Is it?”

  He glanced at the bed as he turned, saw the newspaper clippings spread across it. He smiled understandingly, even compassionately. “These are our ghosts, are they not?”

  “I believe so, Sheriff,” I said, and somewhere within me I found some deep well of resolve and inner strength. “Come and sit down,” I said. “Come sit down and tell me how you’ve been.”

  Dearing did not carry a bag. He wore a long coat, and he took a moment to remove it. He folded it neatly and placed it on the small table beside the bed.

  “You been here long, Joseph?” he asked as he walked forward and sat down.

  “A couple of days.”

  He smiled and started to laugh. “It smells like someone died in here, Joseph.”

  “Perhaps someone did.”

  There was nothing between us for a moment, and then Dearing reached into his jacket pocket and withdrew his gun. He pointed it unerringly at my chest.

  “How long?” he asked, and his voice sounded caring and sympathetic.

  “How long?” I said. “I don’t know, Sheriff. Everything’s blurred together and there are no seams. I look back and see everything as if it happened yesterday.”

  “Do you understand anything of what has happened?” he asked.

  “I understand that you turned my mother against the Krugers, that you made her believe that Gunther Kruger, perhaps even Walter, was responsible for the children that died. I think you were the one that shot a bullet through Kruger’s window, and you killed his dog as well. I think you fired the Kruger house, and then you visited my mother all those times at Waycross and made her believe that she had done it.”

  Dearing stared back at me implacably. There was a twitch along the line of his mouth, and this was all that told me he was alive. His eyes were dark, lightless and deep. I could see my own reflection there, and what I saw frightened me.

  “And you went out there and hanged Gunther Kruger. You used me, didn’t you? Used me as your scapegoat. You went there and killed him, and you put that ribbon in his hand, and you put those things beneath the floorboards. Your evidence that Gunther was the child killer.”

  Dearing’s eyes closed for a moment, and when he opened them he had a vague and distant smile on his face.

  “I think you put that note in the file you left in Valdosta. You wanted to find the Kruger boys, perhaps were afraid that they would realize you murdered their father. People saw that note and believed you suspected one of them. Walter? Was he the
one you were afraid of?”

  Dearing didn’t respond. I felt my heart hammering relentlessly in my chest.

  “You feared him, and you wanted to find him too, didn’t you? And you feared me as well, what I knew, what I might say. I think that you came to kill both me and Bridget that day, and as I wasn’t there you just killed her. I believe you spoke to the police, that perhaps you made them think I was not only responsible for Bridget’s death, but that the Augusta Falls killings had never been solved, that they had continued and therefore Gunther Kruger could not have been the one. I think you put doubt in their minds and made them hate me enough to do anything. You convinced them to look no further, and they didn’t, and because of that I lost nearly fourteen years of my life . . . a life you had already as good as destroyed.”

  Dearing raised the gun and pointed it at my face. “Enough,” he said. “I don’t want to listen to you anymore—”

  “And the little girls,” I said, my voice faltering as I stared at the barrel of Dearing’s gun. “So many of them. And you took them all in broad daylight. You kept your uniform, didn’t you? Put your uniform on and drove from town to town, and people saw you and paid no mind because you were a police officer. Even the little girls never suspected who you were. I’m right, aren’t I, Sheriff Dearing? That’s what happened, didn’t it?”

  I sensed his hand tighten on his gun, and I raised my own gun from down beside the chair and pulled the trigger.

  The shots were almost simultaneous. Even as I saw the impact of the bullet in Haynes Dearing’s chest I felt the sudden and intense pain across my shoulder, my chest, my heart. As though I’d shot myself.

  I dropped my gun, as did Dearing, and for a moment we sat there staring at one another.

  Dearing opened his mouth to speak, but already his eyes were closing. He mumbled something unintelligible, and then his head lolled forward.

  The room was silent except for my faltering breathing, as I felt myself slipping toward something from which I believed I would never return.

  Darkness came then—gray waves and scarlet flashes of pain, and beneath that some well of blackness that seemed to swallow me. I slipped in and out of consciousness, and I heard the sound of my own heart, and beneath that the sound of breath shuddering through punctured lungs, and I knew that I wouldn’t be there for long.

  I forced myself to stay awake, to concentrate, and I looked at Haynes Dearing and started talking to him.

  “I am an exile,” I said, and my voice was frail, little more than a whisper.

  “I take a moment . . . to look back . . . across the span of my life . . . and . . . and I try to see it for what it was . . .”

  I spoke to him for a long time, and then I could not speak anymore.

  At one point a cooling breeze came through the window and seemed to fill the room, and then I closed my eyes and felt nothing at all.

  My mother was there, my father; Elena and Alex and Bridget. They were all there, and they watched for me to take the first step toward them.

  And then there was light, and there were voices, and people were shouting, and for a moment I believed I opened my eyes and saw Reilly Hawkins standing over me laughing about the fool that I was. And when he opened his mouth he started screaming at the top of his voice, and what he said made no sense at all . . .

  “Someone call an ambulance! He’s alive for Christ’s sake! Get a fucking doctor!”

  For the life of me I did not know who they were talking about, and for some reason it did not matter.

  EPILOGUE

  NEW YORK TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

  Monday, August 15, 2005

  Reclusive Author Enchants New York

  Yesterday evening, before a packed Brooklyn Academy, Joseph Vaughan (77)—reclusive author and literary enigma—gave a reading from his latest publication, a companion work to his controversial 1965 novel A Quiet Belief in Angels. Entitled The Guardians, the book tells of Vaughan’s life subsequent to his release from Auburn State Prison in February 1967. His first work, a novella entitled The Homecoming, was published in June 1952, and then nothing further was heard of Vaughan until his wrongful arrest for murder in November of the same year. Vaughan was tried, convicted, and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. With the aid of a friend, Paul Hennessy, Vaughan’s autobiographical work A Quiet Belief in Angels was handwritten in prison, smuggled out and typed for publication. Its release sparked an outcry which resulted in Vaughan’s case being heard before the United States Supreme Court. His conviction was overturned and he was released after having served more than thirteen years.

  Upon his release Vaughan committed himself to identifying the perpetrator of more than thirty-two known child murders spanning five states and more than three decades. Vaughan’s investigation resulted in the eventual discovery and shooting of a retired Georgia sheriff, Haynes Dearing, an action taken in self-defense as Vaughan himself was also shot. Vaughan then disappeared once more, and did not surface until last fall when rumor had it that another book had been written. The capacity Brooklyn Academy audience was present for the first reading from this work. Before speaking, Vaughan dedicated the book “to Elena, to Alex and to Bridget . . . and also to my mother who would have told me that I’d waited too long to write this.”

  The Guardians is due for release next Monday, and is already tipped to be the number one bestseller of the year.