“All right,” Lois said. “She doesn’t live in Sequoyah. She lives up on the mountain. At the end of that same road where the cemetery is, the one where Ray’s buried.”
Kinley recalled the previous night when he’d been at Ray’s grave, and his mind immediately did its miraculous trick of providing him with a fully detailed photograph. He saw the sweep of the cemetery with its crop of short, gray stones, then the wall of dark forest which lay beyond it, and somewhere deep within it, far in the distance, the small yellow light of a farmhouse near the mountain’s rim. “Near the edge,” he said. “She lives near the edge.”
Lois nodded. “In more ways than one,” she said.
NINE
The road narrowed after it passed the cemetery, curving sharply toward the mountain’s edge, the undergrowth closing in around the car so that the yellow beams of its headlights seemed to be moving down a long green funnel. The dusty light that filtered through the surrounding trees and brush narrowed as the woods thickened, then suddenly diffused as he neared the black rim of the mountain.
Even from a distance, he could see where the great granite precipice stretched out before him, the night air spilling over it like an ebony waterfall. At the very edge, the road swung abruptly to the left, and he found himself headed down a narrow path which skirted the rim for nearly half a mile. At its end, he saw the small farmhouse he’d glimpsed the night before, wood-framed and unpainted, with a small swing on its slumped front porch.
He brought the car to a halt, shut off the lights and sat motionlessly behind the wheel. If this was the place Ray had come for love, he had chosen it well. It was small and remote, a place where he need fear only the gossip of the birds.
He got out of the car and headed toward the house. He was only halfway to its front steps when a woman stepped out onto the porch.
“I’m Jack Kinley,” he said as he continued forward.
The woman had stopped before reaching the edge of the porch, her body in deep shadow.
“I’m looking for a woman named Sarah Dora Overton,” he added quickly.
“I’m Dora Overton,” the woman said. She stepped forward boldly, and the light from inside the house swept over her. She was very dark, her skin a color he would have called “Moorish” had he envisioned writing about her. Her hair was long, and he could see its reddish tint despite the subdued light.
He offered a quick, edgy smile. “You live quite a ways back.”
The woman nodded crisply. “Always have.”
It was a husky voice, but with a hard, unforgiving edge that reminded him instantly of other voices he’d heard in his work. Mildred Haskell’s, for example, soft, but with a stony undertone, a voice that had made terrible demands: All right now, boy, turn over on your back.
As he continued forward, she looked at him piercingly, with eyes that matched the voice, and which probed him openly, like fingertips.
“What do you want?” she asked.
“Lois Tindall told me about you,” Kinley began, “and I …”
“Lois Tindall doesn’t know a thing about me,” Dora said sharply.
“Well, she knew you were seeing Ray,” Kinley said as gently as he could, removing any hint of judgment or accusation.
Dora stared at him coldly. “What difference does that make now?”
Kinley remained silent, concentrating on her eyes, black and merciless.
Dora took another step toward him, her whole body now in the light. “I didn’t lie to Ray,” she said firmly, “and I didn’t let him lie to me.”
“I don’t think he would have tried,” Kinley said.
He’d meant it as a compliment, but it hadn’t worked.
Instead, he could see her harden toward him.
“Ray’s dead,” she said flatly, closing the book on the matter.
Kinley remained in place. “I was Ray’s friend,” he said, giving the only credentials he thought she might respect.
“He talked about you sometimes,” she said. “He would write to you, but you never wrote back.”
“He told you that?”
Dora nodded slowly, her eyes growing less hostile. “Anyway, he’s gone.”
Kinley watched silently as she moved to the edge of the porch and leaned against one of its supporting posts. There was something in her presence that seemed too large for the small house. He had known other such presences, but it had always been a looming and gigantic malevolence which had dwarfed the basements, bedrooms and corridors they’d briefly occupied.
“He never mentioned you,” Kinley said. “But then, we hadn’t spoken very often in the last few weeks.”
“He was old-fashioned,” Dora said off-handedly, a casual relaying of information. “He kept things to himself.”
“Yes, he did,” Kinley said softly.
She shifted her eyes to the left and stared out over the edge of the mountain. “You never know for sure what’s going on in someone else.” She returned to Kinley. “Why did you come up here?” she asked.
“I’m not sure.”
“Lois doesn’t have to worry about anything,” Dora said. “Serena either. I’m not after anything Ray left behind.”
“I don’t think that’s a matter of concern,” Kinley said, his own words sounding formal to him, a lawyer’s standard line.
“What’s the trouble, then?”
“I guess Serena wants to know a little bit more about Ray,” Kinley said.
“Not from me,” Dora said determinedly. “Ray wanted it private, and that’s how it’s going to stay.”
Kinley looked at her intently. “I guess I want to know a little bit more about him, too.”
Dora thought a moment, as if trying to find exactly the right words. She only spoke when she’d found them. “I told Ray something, and he believed me. No one ever had believed me before.” She smiled, but edgily. “It was a new experience for me.”
“What did you tell him?”
“About my father,” Dora said. “I think that in the end, he wanted to know as much as I did.”
“Know what?”
The smiled opened slightly, as if against her will. “Ray used to say that there are two kinds of people, the ones who can sleep, and the ones who can’t.”
Kinley’s mind replayed its tape of his last meeting with Ray: Do you sleep well, Kinley?
“Ray had problems sleeping, didn’t he?” he asked.
“Toward the end, I guess he did,” Dora said.
Kinley could feel his little notebook rustle slightly in his jacket pocket, as if it were a small animal rousing itself from sleep. “What was he looking for?”
She thought a moment, her eyes resting on him languidly. “I thought he might have told you.”
“Told me what?”
She shook her head slowly. “I trusted Ray. But I don’t know anything about you.” A thin smile crossed her lips as she continued to study him. “You learn a few things,” she said. “The lessons of the road, like Ray always said.” The smile vanished. “The rest is bullshit.”
He stared at her intently. “What was Ray doing in the canyon?” he asked again.
She glanced back into the house. “He liked it here,” she said, “but he never felt comfortable.”
Kinley shrugged. “It wasn’t home,” he said, matter-of-factly. “It never is.”
She studied him a moment, as if trying to get a grip on some remote element of his character. “Ray said you were smart,” she said. “He said you were a genius.”
Kinley said nothing.
She stepped over to the door and opened it. “You want to come in?”
For a moment, Kinley hesitated, his mind suddenly rushing through all those other moments of hesitation he had studied in his books: little Billy Flynn at Mildred Haskell’s smokehouse door; Wilma Jean Comstock at the edge of the woods; Kelly Pierce staring mutely toward the corridor’s unlighted end. All of them had finally shrugged away their initial apprehensions. Now all of them were dead. Colin Brig
ht had said it best, his gray hair gleaming under the prison lights, “old in his cynicism,” as Kinley had later written, “but still youthful in his malice”: In the end, they always think, “Not me.”
Kinley felt his foot rise to the bottom step, stop there. “It’s a little late,” he said. “Are you sure?”
Dora remained in place, the door open, a rectangle of light motionless behind it. “Up to you,” she said.
They think of the odds, and they say, “Not me.”
He grasped the rail and pulled himself forward slowly. “All right,” he said. “For a minute.”
She turned, and he followed her inside. The living room was small, its wooden floor covered here and there by a few hoop rugs. A wobbly floor lamp stood between two unmatching dark-blue chairs, but it was an old upright piano that dominated the room.
“My mama’s,” Dora said. “Ray said you could play.”
“A little.”
“Go ahead,” Dora said, almost as if daring him to prove it.
Kinley slid onto the stool and looked at the piece of sheet music that was already in place, then glanced back at Dora. “‘Someday My Prince Will Come,’” he said. “Is this a favorite?”
“Ray brought it,” Dora said, as she eased herself down in one of the blue chairs. “He liked it, but he always played it the wrong way.”
“How do you want me to play it?”
She shrugged. “Well, do you think anybody’s prince ever comes?”
Kinley shook his head. “No, I don’t think so.”
She smiled. “Then play it like that,” she said.
He did. Slowly, haltingly, missing a note here and there, but with a long, disillusioned refrain that drifted out the door and over the edge of the mountain, disintegrating as it fell, so that not a single melancholy note of it ever reached the sleeping town below.
When he was finished, he looked up from the keys, stared directly into her eyes, and fired his question once again. “What was Ray doing in the canyon? Did it have anything to do with you?”
She did not seem at all surprised by the question. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “There wouldn’t be anything in the canyon that had anything to do with …” She stopped.
“Anything to do with what?”
“Ray was strange. He had his own way of doing things.”
“But he was working on something, wasn’t he?” Kinley asked urgently. “I mean, for you.”
She nodded slowly. “Yes.”
“What?”
“He was trying to find out what happened to my father,” Dora told him. She paused a moment, and in those few seconds, the stony features of her face gave a bit, grew softer and more pliant as Mildred Haskell’s never had. “Have you ever heard of Ellie Dinker?” she asked.
Ellie Dinker, Kinley thought, the lost daughter of the woman in black. “Yes, I’ve heard of her,” he said. He remembered the afternoon in Jefferson’s Drug Store, Mrs. Dinker’s ghostliness, Ray’s young eyes staring at her.
He shook his head. “Surely, after all these years, Ray wasn’t trying to …”
Dora nodded determinedly. “Yes, he was,” she said.
“But why?”
Dora smiled delicately. “To finally get some sleep, I guess.”
Several hours later, as he lay awake in his bed, thinking back over everything Dora had told him during the preceding hours, he remembered a passage he’d written in his first book, and which, despite the academic archness of the language, still struck him as not too bad for a kid who still had a lot to learn:
The deepest of all human motivations are also those that move toward murder. They are buried in those contingencies of existence where the oldest and most rootless impulses still hold sway. In essence, murder is the radical insistence that the other is an obstacle it is permissible to remove. What follows is the most extreme and presumptuous claim one life can make upon the integrity of another.
Ellie Dinker.
His mind shot back to her from the lofty aerie of his more windy philosophical pretensions, and he heard Dora’s voice once again. It was low and husky, and he imagined Ray lying in her bed, listening to that voice, as he stared sleeplessly at the ceiling overhead while she narrated the story of her father’s execution.
In the case of Charles Herman Overton, it had been by means of electrocution, and Kinley had had no trouble imagining how he had been strapped into the chair and assaulted with a searing jolt of electric power. He had seen the same thing happen to Colin Bright, and at Dora’s very mention of electrocution, his mind had returned in full and excruciating detail to the only execution he’d ever witnessed. As if in a slow-motion reel, he saw Bright’s body suddenly jerk forward and grow extremely taut, the skin drawing back along the bones, as if Bright’s soul were trying desperately to escape the body in which it was imprisoned. The eyes popped out beneath their taped lids, a white froth gathered over the mouth, and a strange bluish smoke rose around him, danced for a moment in the light-green room, then vanished when the electricity was suddenly turned off. After that, Bright’s body had slumped down, his head drooping very deeply, the muscles and tendons letting go, so that he appeared miraculously stricken with unbearable remorse, his head bowed heavily, as if weighed down by shame.
They executed Charlie Overton on January 4, 1955.
That was all she’d said before adding the fact that she’d been born only a few months before. He’d nodded quietly, then said: And so you never knew your father? To which she’d replied: Only that he was innocent.
But as he thought about it, Kinley was not so sure that Overton was innocent. The evidence against him, even as Dora had gone on to describe it, struck him as unbreakable in its thoroughness, much as he’d seen before in murder convictions, one detail piled on another until the mound of accumulated evidence was so great no jury could fail to see it. It rose like a mountain, massive, impenetrable to that small light which might yet have cast the shadow of a doubt. Once it had been constructed, the prosecutor only needed to point his finger in the same direction as the evidence pointed.
And that was precisely what Thomas Warfield had done in the fall of 1954. He had pointed his finger at Charles Overton and demanded that Ellie Dinker be avenged. He’d used words that Dora’s mother had never forgotten, and that she had repeated in a morbid, bitter litany to her daughter:
That man took a child into the woods. That man forced her down upon the ground. That man took a tire iron in his hand and did an unspeakable thing to a young girl who was powerless to resist him. That man, there. That man, Charles Herman Overton, with malice aforethought, took Ellie Dinker’s life.
Or had he?
Kinley got up, still thinking about all Dora had told him. He was certain that he had been able to remember all the details, and for a moment he simply let his mind play them back, as if it were a machine bound to him in service.
Once this silent, inner recitation was completed, he stood up, grabbed the laptop computer from its place beside the bed, carried it into Ray’s office, plopped it down on his small metal desk and turned it on.
The high-tech light from the screen fell incongruously over the less modern means of information storage and retrieval upon which Ray had relied, hundreds of books, thousands of sheets of paper, dusty and cumbersome, relics of an older time. Compared to them, the sleek lines of the laptop appeared mercifully lean and uncomplicated.
He began by making a file for the computer menu. At first he didn’t know what to name it. Then her face swam into his mind, and he typed out the file name: DORA. For a sub-file, he established the code OVER:TON for Dora’s father, then proceeded to type everything he’d learned so far into it, all the details the prosecution had presented on behalf of Overton’s guilt, as Dora had detailed them.
First, he listed them chronologically, moving through Overton’s activities on the day of Ellie Dinker’s disappearance.
CHARLES HERMAN OVERTON (Hereafter known as CHO)
Activities:
7/2/54
Caveat: Testimony of Dora Overton (9/5/91) not yet verified. * indicates later verification from separate source.
1)Approximately 8 A.M., CHO leaves for his job at the Thompson Construction Company in Sequoyah.
2)At construction site, CHO works with Luther Lawrence Snow and Betty Gaines. Gaines will later testify that CHO complained of a stomach problem and left site at 12:30 P.M.
3)CHO seen talking to Ellie Dinker at approximately 12:40 P.M. by Luther Coggins.
4)Approximately 1:30 P.M., stalled truck is seen on mountain road by Seta Mae Williams. Both CHO and Dinker are gone.
5)Approximately 3 P.M. CHO arrives home on foot. He returns to the disabled truck immediately, fixes it, and arrives back at home forty-five minutes later. He does not leave home again until he heads for work the following morning.
These were the bare bones of Overton’s day as Dora had laid them out. The crucial time was obvious. From approximately 12:40 until 3:00 in the afternoon, neither Overton nor Ellie Dinker had been seen. They had disappeared into the woods, and what had happened after that, the prosecution had contended, was murder.
Kinley leaned forward again and began typing a new heading.
CHO—PROSECUTION’S CONTENTIONS:
1)That CHO murdered Ellie Dinker between the hours of 12:30 and 3 P.M. on July 2, 1954.
EVIDENCE:
1)CHO unable to account for his whereabouts at the time of the murder, other than to say that he was walking in the woods, toward his home.
2)The fact that CHO was last person seen with Ellie Dinker.
3)The discovery (late on the afternoon of July 3) of Ellie Dinker’s dress in the woods near the site where the two had been seen together.
4)The discovery (on the morning of July 4) of Ellie Dinker’s shoes beneath the front seat of Overton’s truck.
5)The discovery (on the morning of July 4) of a blood-stained tire iron under the front seat of Overton’s truck, stains which matched the blood type as it was recorded by the Sequoyah General Hospital on the birth records of Ellie Dinker as well as the records of her private physician, Dr. Joseph Stark.
Evidence of Blood Page 7
