As his eyes moved about the room, he could feel them gather in its small details. It had always been this way, his mind, a thing that feasted on the tiniest particulars. The apartment it inventoried now was a kingly banquet. There was a large, slightly faded doily on the boxy television. The lamp on top of it resembled a small mound of seashells or various other beach droppings, all of them glued together and polished to a glassy sheen. In a far bedroom, he could see part of the wooden bed frame, and a bit of the wallpaper behind it, English fox-hunting scenes, red jackets, horses, dogs. He remembered similar wallpaper in the little house where he’d grown up, only it had been a Southern scene, little girls in bonnets and hoopskirts dancing on a vast green lawn. Tara, his grand-mother had called it, though always with that arctic smile.
Other walls, other rooms had suggested other things: the illuminated Christ that hung over Wilma Jean Comstock’s bed (how fervently she must have prayed to it during the hours it took for Colin Bright to kill her); the pentagram in Mildred Haskell’s dripping smokehouse (what must little Billy Flynn have thought?); the life-sized, semen-stained diagram of internal organs that Willie Connors had slept with before trying the real thing (had Wyndham Knight seen that?). He wondered what his grandmother would have called such adornments had she seen them as he had seen them, live, in living color.
His eyes returned to the witness. “Did he ever mention why he was doing any of this?” he asked.
She shook her head determinedly. “No, no, he never said anything like that.”
Kinley brought his pencil to attention. “Okay, just tell me what happened after you got in the car.”
“Right after he pushed me in. He made me do it.” She looked away shyly, a nun again. “To myself.”
Kinley noted the slight hesitation before the last two words, and the barely perceptible sense of shame which accompanied them, all common victim reactions, a strange, irrational belief that nothing ever happened entirely by accident, that even the most horrible events had some kind of explanation, something you’d done to make it happen. Maybe my hair was too loose, my sweater too tight; maybe that’s what made him do it to me.
“Play with myself. He made me do it. In the car while we were going.” She took a long draw on the cigarette. Her foot began to tap at the floor in a soft, rapid beat. “He looked like he’d done it before, made girls do that.”
“Did he say he’d done it before?”
If she said yes, he’d have to do more leg work, track down the possibility, however remote, that he had, in fact, done it before. He waited as she considered the question.
“No.”
“You just had that feeling?”
“Yes. Just the way he did things. Like he’d done it before. Like it wasn’t just something he was making up as he went along.”
The “he” was Fenton Norwood, now resident number EG14679 at the Walpole Correctional Institute in Walpole, Massachusetts. At the time he’d abducted her, fall, 1974, he’d been twenty-four years old, a high school dropout and U.S. Army deserter roaming the Portuguese districts of New Bedford. As far as Kinley had been able to track down, Maria Spinola had been his first victim. Still, he needed to be sure.
“So he didn’t actually mention anything about having done it before?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you where he was taking you?”
“No, but we were on the highway. Going east. Southeast. Toward the Cape.”
At the time of the incident, Maria Spinola had been sixteen years old. Now she was just over thirty, an alcoholic with an edgy manner, twice divorced, the mother of two children currently in her former husband’s custody, her life in ruins, she claimed, because of what Fenton Norwood had done to her.
But as he looked at her, Kinley found he could not wholly accept the notion that Fenton Norwood was entirely to blame for Spinola’s fate. He had seen too many other people like her, programmed for misfortune, as if there were a trapdoor at the core of their makeup. He had checked her school records, talked with her former guidance counselor. When Norwood had picked her up, she’d already been pregnant by a high school boy who periodically beat her, and Kinley suspected it had been her pregnancy that had probably prevented Norwood—the former Catholic altar boy, working through his own oblique moral gymnastics: murder one thing, abortion another—from killing her. In any event, her life had already begun to strike him as one of those for which no safe harbor was ever really available, a wingless and descending life that on one particular afternoon had simply drifted aimlessly toward a shadow.
For the first time she seemed to stiffen slightly, as if in a sudden surge of resentment. “I couldn’t ever go to the Cape after what happened. I’ve never been to Cape Cod, you know? Not since that night. My whole life. Only a few miles away. But I can’t go there.” The momentary flash was quickly smothered by a thin, wet smile. “He didn’t look like he could do what he did. Strange, huh?”
Kinley stared at Spinola, but saw Norwood instead, a pudgy pink face, bug eyes and fat lips. The ultimate disguise, Jack the Ripper in the body of Elmer Fudd.
She lifted her head slightly. “He should have killed me. Right there in the woods that night. In a way, he did.”
But he didn’t. All of that had come later. First the woman in the discount clothing store in New Bedford; then the little girl in Boston, the one he’d kept for nearly three weeks, walking her on a leash through the Commons the rainy afternoon before he killed her; finally two at a time, twelve-year-old twins vacationing at Nickerson State Park on the Cape. The one similarity had been in their looks, all of them with dark skin, eyes and hair. Once, when Kinley had pointed it out to Norwood, his fat face had gone blank for a few seconds before brightening with an impish grin. “Maybe I just like em slightly toasted,” he’d said.
Spinola’s resentment built a moment, then reached its crescendo in a sudden burst. “Just left me in the woods. All dirty, filthy. Just left me there, the bastard.” She pulled in a long, exhausted breath, regained control. “Did you see the pictures?”
Kinley gave no indication of an answer, but he’d seen them, ail right, the way he’d seen hundreds of others. Maria Spinola’s were nothing special in the gallery of his mind. They showed a young girl in torn clothes, with a muddy face and wet, matted hair. The forest was apathetically beautiful behind her, and there was even a hint of the blue-green pond Norwood had planned to drown her in. As pictures, they were a long way from others he had seen: dark cellars fitted with chains, pulleys, eyebolts, jungles of rope, clothesline, straps and latches, miniature racks, pillories, dunking stools, and everywhere, in every vision, the shadows of hooks.
She shook her head despondently, reaching out for his tender word. “I sometimes wish he’d gone ahead and done his worst to me,” she said.
Kinley looked at her distantly, remembering. No, you don’t Believe me. No, you don’t.
He took the five o’clock shuttle out of Logan and arrived at La Guardia less than an hour later. The cab ride to his apartment on the Upper West Side came to almost thirty dollars, and once there, he walked to his desk, pulled out his business expense notebook and recorded the amount precisely for the IRS. Precision was everything to him, and he often clung to it the way another might cling to a log in a maelstrom, as something fixed within the chaos. It gave him comfort to see all his notes in order, all his books in a neat row. And though he recognized his obsessive orderliness, with its accompanying mother lode of rock-ribbed discipline and self-control, as a mild form of compulsiveness, its exact source continued to elude him. It was one of his own shadows, he supposed, but one that had always served him well, ensuring that he would complete one book after another while others foundered in a seedy alcoholism or stumbled groggily from one domestic horror to the next. Whatever else could be said of a clean, unencumbered life, he often thought, it certainly was clean and unencumbered, and he had never felt the inclination to apologize for the choices he had made.
Even the simple arra
ngement of his desk for the night’s work brought him a sense of stability and resourcefulness, and after he’d done it, Kinley fixed himself a scotch and slouched down on the small sofa by the window. He always allowed himself a few minutes of calm between the interview and its transcription, though this, too, was “working” time, his mind playing it all through again, from the moment Spinola had opened the door until the time she closed it, her small brown face continuing to watch him, as witnesses always watched him, warily from the shadows behind their windows, as if he were somehow as threatening as the ones who’d done them harm.
He looked at the digital clock on his desk. It was now almost seven o’clock, and the evening shade was falling over the streets below. He could hardly wait for it to deepen, since, in a way, he had always thought of night as his best friend. It was silent and unpeopled, a world of vastly reduced distractions. In the quiet he could let his mind do what it did best, retrieve and analyze, order and distinguish.
He was nearly finished playing back the interview with Maria Spinola when the phone rang. It was Wendy Lubeck, his agent, and for the next few minutes, Kinley listened as she related the details of a series of murders that had occurred in the Maine woods along the Canadian border. A publisher had asked if he might be interested in doing a book on the case, Wendy told him, and in response Kinley promised to think about it.
But he didn’t. Instead, as he sat down on the sofa by the window, he thought about something else entirely, a place about as far from Maine as he could imagine, the northern Appalachian foothills of Georgia in which he’d been brought up by Granny Dollar, the maternal grandmother who’d taken him in after his parents had been killed in an automobile accident.
Granny Dollar had died only two months before, and since then he’d noticed his tendency to drift back to his past from time to time, quietly, unexpectedly, in those dead moments when his work left him, and he found himself alone in his apartment, wifeless, childless, with only Granny Dollar to remind him of the texture of family life he’d once known.
That texture had been very dense, indeed, it seemed to him now. She’d raised him in almost complete solitude, the two of them perched on an isolated ridge overlooking a desolate canyon, with nothing but the sounds of crickets and night birds to break the silence that surrounded them. Since that time he’d been a loner, and over the years, he’d come to believe that for people like himself, the true solitaires, it was better to have no one to answer to, wonder about, no one whose affections mattered more to him than the esteem he expected from the little Chinese woman who did his shirts: Goo to see you, Missur Kahnley.
He was working at his desk when the phone rang. He looked at the clock. It was just nearly seven-thirty, so he suspected it might be Wendy, still chewing at her idea. It could not be Phyllis, his old-time drinking buddy, because she was on assignment in Venezuela. As for the type of woman other men spent so much time searching for, or trying to figure out, Kinley had long ago admitted that the Mythical She had either eluded him or he had eluded her. Instead, he dwelt in harmony with the dark-eyed murderesses of his work, admiring their coldly calculating eyes, the edge of cruelty and dominion which clung to their false smiles, their minds even more intricate, limitless and unknowable than his own.
The phone rang a third time, and he glanced at the message machine. He’d turned it off when he’d started to work, and now regretted it. There was no choice but to pick up the phone.
“Yes?” he answered curtly.
“Hello, Mr. Kinley?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Serena Tindall.”
He thought it was odd that she’d said her last name, but he made nothing of it. “Hello, Serena,” he said. “Are you in New York?”
“No, I’m at home,” Serena said. “For summer break. I’ve been working at the high school.”
“Your father’s old stomping ground.”
He heard her breath catch in that tense, briefly suspended way he’d often heard others pause before making the great plunge into their tragic tales. “It’s about Daddy,” she said.
“Ray? What? What is it?”
Her voice broke as she told him. “He died this afternoon.”
He tried to continue with his transcription of the Spinola interview after talking to Serena, but found he couldn’t, so after a while, he poured himself another scotch and sat down at the small desk by the window. On the hanging shelf just above it, he’d arranged all his books, as if he still needed solid, physical evidence of how far he’d come from where he’d started. Up north, he sometimes referred to his native region as “Deliverance country,” but in his own mind, it had always remained “Ray’s country.”
Joe Ray Tindall.
Kinley turned on his computer, as if with Ray gone, it was now his only completely reliable friend, and wrote out Ray’s name. Including it among the body of data he’d accumulated in his work seemed to give it an honored resting place, and for a moment, Kinley stared at the name, his mind conjuring up the face that went with it. It was a large, broad-boned face, and Kinley could clearly recall the first time he’d seen it. He’d been standing in the crowded corridor of Sequoyah High, small, timid, aloof, not only the new boy in school, but the one who’d been singled out by a group of Yankee IQ researchers, branded “very superior” by their tests, and reported, almost like a dangerous alien, to the Sequoyah County Board of Education. The Board had subsequently pulled him from his mountain grammar school and rushed him down into the valley to join, at mid-year, the more advantaged freshman class of Sequoyah High School.
Ray had been the first person to speak to him there, an oversized boy clad in blue jeans and a checkered shirt, staring at him from across the hall, his eyes, as they always were, motionless and intense, as if taking aim before finally speaking to him.
You that freshman from up on the mountain?
Yes.
The one that’s supposed to be a genius?
I guess.
Special tests and everything, you must be a whiz. My name’s Ray Tindall.
Jackson Kinley.
Sounds like two last names. You give them to me in the right order?
Yeah.
You ever go hunting?
Yeah.
Maybe we’ll go up to the canyon sometimes, shoot something.
Okay.
How about this Saturday? I’ll meet you on the road to Rocky Ridge. Then we’ll just head into the woods up there.
Okay.
Kinley peered at the name on the screen. He typed something else under it: ROCKY RIDGE. That’s where they’d gone that first time. And as it turned out, it was also where they’d found Ray face down on the forest’s leafy floor. It was the only question he’d asked Serena beyond the usual ones about the funeral: “What was he doing down in the canyon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who found him?”
“Some old man who lives up on the ridge.”
“Was Ray on a case?”
“He was always on a case. That’s just the way he was.”
“What was it anyway?”
“I don’t know. Something in the District Attorney’s Office, I guess.”
“No, Serena. I’m sorry. I meant, what killed him?”
“Oh. Well, it was probably his heart.”
It had not been a soft heart, in the sense of great compassion or an infinitely extended understanding, Kinley thought as he continued to sit at his desk, still watching the computer screen, but it was a rich, difficult, complicated heart. There was something about Ray that could never be figured out exactly. Even the way he looked led you slightly off the mark. He had had wiry reddish-brown hair and a sallow complexion that easily burned in the summer sun. He had not been an intimidatingly large man, but when he came into a room, he seemed to shrink it just a bit. He had liked the woods but hated the water, loved fast cars but avoided planes, talked religion but never gone to church, read but rarely spoken of what he read. There had been something myste
rious about him, something Kinley had noticed even mat first day in the canyon, the way his eyes seemed to focus on something far away, unreachable even when he spoke of something near at hand, perhaps no further than a short walk into the woods.
There’s an old house down here, but nobody lives in it anymore.
In the canyon? Where?
Not far from here. You want to see it?
I guess.
It’s the perfect place. You can only find it if you really look hard.
Even now, it was impossible for Kinley to know why he’d followed Ray down the narrow, granite ledge and into the dark labyrinth of the canyon. He could remember the frothy green river that had tumbled along the canyon bottom, the sounds of its waters moving softly through the trees, even the unseasonably cool breeze that shook the slender green fingers of the pines, then swooped down to rifle through the leaves at his feet. It was his one great gift. He could remember everything.
And now he remembered that as they’d advanced on the house, the going had gotten rougher, the sharp claws of the briers grabbing at his shirt, low-slung limbs suddenly flying into his face like quick slaps to warn him back. The last hundred yards had seemed to take forever, as if the air had thickened, turned to an invisible gelatin which had to be plowed through as arduously as the bramble. It had taken them almost an hour to make it to the general vicinity of the old house Ray had spoken of, and by that time, Kinley remembered, the trek had begun to exhaust him, his legs growing more feeble with each step, his breathing more labored and hard-won, the old plague of his asthma snatching at his breath. It had been enough to rouse his new friend’s concern.
Kinley, are you all right? We don’t have to keep going.
How far is it?
The Chatham School Affair Page 28
