After a brief lunch made from the peanut butter and white bread he found in Ray’s refrigerator, Kinley continued with his notes. For him, this tedious transcript always made for the most lackluster of his working days, the excitement of discovery already drained from the activity.
Now it was time to make a witness list, all the names that had emerged in the investigation so far, beginning with the actual trial witnesses, then expanding it to include every name that had been mentioned, no matter how peripheral the person’s involvement might have been.
Once the names had been categorized, Kinley could decide on the order in which he thought it best to seek them out for questioning. Over thirty years had passed since the trial, and it had been his experience that such a span of time drew a long, dark line between the living and the dead. By the time he’d interviewed the surviving members of the Comstock family, only a scattering of aged aunts and adolescent cousins had remained to render the first shock of the murders as it had reverberated down the family line. His research for the second book had hit similar dead ends, with Mel and Cora Flynn dead within three years of the day Mildred Haskell had invited their little boy into the smokehouse by the creek.
So it was biology more than logic which played the key role in setting up interviews, and as his eyes went down the witness list again, focusing particularly on those whose current fate he did not already know, they settled finally upon the witness who was most likely still alive despite the grim undertow of years: Helen Slater.
At the time of the trial, she’d presumably been the same age as her sixteen-year-old schoolmate, Ellie Dinker. In addition, Ben Wade had not only told Kinley that she was still alive, but precisely where she lived. His trial testimony had told him even more, and to renew his acquaintance with it, he called up the trial transcript file and scrolled down to the relevant passage:
WARFIELD: So, you went up to Carl Slater’s place, is that right?
WADE: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: And that would have been on July 3, the day after Ellie Dinker’s disappearance?
WADE: Yes, sir. I drove up from the Sheriff’s Office. It took about ten minutes, because Carl’s place is way up yonder on Foster Road.
Kinley’s mind recorded the spare detail of this part of Wade’s testimony. For now, he had little else upon which to base his discussion with Helen Slater, but in the past he had discovered that the amount of information going into an interview was not necessarily indicative of the amount that could be gained during it. The interview itself was a subtle prying open of dark chambers, the light spreading in all directions once the door had been forced open.
He inserted his notebook in his jacket pocket and headed for his car. The sun was still high over the mountain, and as he glanced up at it, he recalled Foster Road very vividly. It was on the brow of the mountain, a slender dusty line, which skirted the edge of the mountain before it finally plunged over it and disappeared into the undergrowth that had covered its final few hundred yards since the last ill-fated iron mine had gone bust over ninety years before.
Foster Road, Kinley repeated silently in his mind. He and Ray had walked it many times.
• • •
To his surprise, the road had been paved since he’d last gone down it, and along its once isolated borders a few dilapidated house trailers and unpainted tract houses now stood in the surrounding woods. The old Slater place was at the very end of the road, and it seemed almost to totter uneasily at the brow of the mountain. As he approached it, he could see a long line of thick, gray clothesline cord as it dropped heavily beneath a weight of shirts, towels and plain white boxer shorts. A large woman in a floral house dress sat wearily on a washtub beneath the gently flapping clothes, her eyes following the path of Kinley’s car until he brought it to rest only a few feet from her.
“Hi,” Kinley said as he stepped out.
The woman nodded, a single beefy hand rising to shield her eyes from the mid-afternoon sunlight.
Kinley closed the door of the car and headed toward her slowly. “My name’s Jack Kinley,” he said. “And I was hoping you might help me out a little.”
As he came nearer, Kinley focused on her face. It was unusually red, and her features were so puffy and rounded they seemed to close in on her eyes, squeezing them together until they finally appeared as little more than small slits.
“Back in 1954,” Kinley said, “this was the Slater place.”
The woman stared at him expressionlessly, with the kind of curious deadpan face he’d learned to expect from rural women, their features as shaved down as their lives.
“It still is the Slater place,” she said.
Kinley looked at her closely, his mind comparing the face before him with one of the photographs from Ray’s newspaper clippings collection on the case. It had shown a tall, strapping young girl in a loose summer dress, her hair tied in a wide ribbon. He could even remember the caption beneath it, a dramatic quotation from the girl herself: She never made it to my house.
“Are you Helen Slater?”
“Used to be,” the woman said. “Until I got married. Name’s Foley now.” She let her head loll gently to the right, as if to take in the gusty mountain breeze that had swept over the brow of the mountain, driving a low scattering of fall leaves and forest debris before it.
Kinley smiled softly as he looked at her. The vibrant young girl in the photograph survived as little more than a shadowy after-image in the face before him now.
“Do you remember Ellie Dinker?” he asked.
The woman’s eyes drifted back toward him as the breeze passed by and the little strand of graying hair it had pressed across her forehead came to rest. “Ellie Dinker?” she said, almost in wonderment, as if the name was a conjurer’s command, an abracadabra which summoned back her youth. “Oh, yes, I sure remember Ellie.”
“You went to school with her, didn’t you?” Kinley asked.
“Yes, I did,” Helen said without hesitation, almost brightly. She smiled. “Remember Ellie Dinker?” she asked rhetorically. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Ellie.”
Kinley leaned into the slender pine that stood beside him, his hand already inching upward slightly toward the notebook in his jacket pocket. “Why is that?” he asked. “It’s been a long time since she died.”
“Because she was just the sort of person you don’t forget,” Slater said. “On fire, that girl. A real pistol.”
“On fire?” Kinley asked, coaxing her along.
“Sort of wild,” Helen said. “She had a tongue on her. She used to give people hell sometimes.” The eyes drifted away a moment, lifting toward where a small wooden birdhouse hung idly in the trees. “She was mad sometimes,” she added. “There was something in her that kept her steamed up.”
Kinley indicated a small lawn chair, some of its loose folds flapping like the clothes above it. “Mind if I sit down?”
“Go ahead,” Helen said. “I just sat down myself. Doing the clothes, that always gets me down.”
Kinley drew the notebook from his jacket, his eyes still studying the woman before him, the devastation which time, work and long, uneventful hours had wrought. He had seen it before, of course, but it was always more poignant when a transcript or police report spoke of a vibrant, raw, perhaps rebellious young girl, and minutes later she was before you, old, or getting there, wearing down, all the glow smothered beneath unseemly layers of skin, the web of wrinkles, the wiry nest of gray hair, everything changed, inevitably and irrevocably changed, as it were, in an instant of tragically accelerated time.
“Did you ever get any idea about what she was mad about?” Kinley asked.
Helen thought a moment, her hands pressing the rounded folds that had gathered in her dress. “Not exactly,” she said, “but I know that just before …” She stopped, as if suddenly stricken mute, then continued, “Just before the murder, she was real mad. She was boiling over.”
Kinley quickly scribbled the description into his noteboo
k. “But you don’t know why she was feeling like that?” he asked.
Helen leaned back slightly, so that Kinley suddenly caught a more youthful profile, sharp and strong and vigorous, Helen Slater in her awesome youth. “Ellie was more grown-up than the other girls,” she said, as her eyes returned to Kinley. “She was in a hurry to grow up even more, and when you’re like that as a girl, people sometimes don’t like it much.”
Kinley nodded. “Was there anyone in particular who didn’t like her?”
Helen’s eyes fell toward the notebook. “Why are you interested in knowing things like that?”
“I’m looking into her murder,” Kinley told her. “I’m a writer.”
“You’re going to write about Ellie?” Helen asked, surprised, yet delighted, as if in writing about her, Kinley was returning her, however fleetingly, to life. “You’re going to write about her after all these years?”
“Maybe,” Kinley said. “If there’s something to write about.”
Helen stared at him silently for a moment, as if evaluating a secret set of options. “Well, I guess I could tell you what I know,” she said at last.
It was always like that, a quick, spontaneous breaking through of the more cautious bonds of silence. He’d seen it happen in witnesses, in public officials, in victims, even in those who’d done the dreadful things he’d recorded in his books. Mildred Haskell had begun to talk when he’d agreed to bring her a bag of freshly parched peanuts, and she had then sat in her chair for hours, reeling off the details of her gruesome inner world while popping the shells open one at a time in a gesture which Kinley thought must have resembled the way she’d snapped apart the spine of little Billy Flynn. He’d glimpsed this same release in Colin Bright, at first so silent and withdrawn before the emergence from the mute and guarded chamber of his solitude. It had happened in an instant, the miraculous reversal of his former reticence for which he’d given only the slimmest and most arbitrary of reasons: Because it’s you that’s here.
“I know it’s been a long time,” Kinley said, gently easing any of Helen Slater’s remaining fears, “but sometimes a lot comes back all of a sudden.”
“Not much ever left,” Helen said. She rose laboriously, pulling herself up by grasping at the small stump beside her chair. “If it wasn’t for a little bump on the mountain,” she said, “you could almost see her house from here.”
Kinley got to his feet. “Ellie Dinker’s house?”
“Yeah,” Helen said as she moved ponderously toward the edge of the mountain, raised her hand and pointed sharply to the left, angling down the mountain at what Kinley calculated as approximately forty-five degrees. “You go through those woods way down toward the bottom of the mountain, and if you went over that little hill, there, that’s where you would have found Ellie’s house if it hadn’t have burned down.”
“What happened after the fire?” Kinley asked.
“Well, Mrs. Dinker didn’t have much of a place to go,” Slater told him. “Ellie was her only child, and Mr. Dinker was long gone. Ora Fletcher took her in for a while, but she took to wandering off.” She turned to the right and nodded down the long, narrowing road which finally disappeared over the mountainside. “They found her wandering around that old mine down there.” She turned back toward him, her face oddly stricken, as if in embarrassment for her old friend’s mother. “I even saw her hanging out behind my house once,” she added, “just standing out there by the well.” She shook her head at the thought of it. “Anyway, she was wandering around the town so much, they finally just took her off to the asylum. That’s where she died.”
Kinley nodded silently.
“She never showed up, you know,” Slater added. “Ellie didn’t.”
“You mean, her body?”
“No, I mean that day she was supposed to come up here,” Slater explained, “the day she died.” She smiled sadly. “It was a Friday, and they’d let summer school out for the parade. The town was full of kids that day. We watched the parade, then a lot of us went up to the courthouse. They were about finished with it, and old Mayor Jameson was making a speech.” The smile nostalgic. “Everybody was there. All the big cheeses in town. The mayor, like I said. And Sheriff Maddox. The police chief and all the old courthouse crowd.”
Kinley offered her his best professional smile, unwilling to halt the flow of memory, afraid that it might stop her tongue as well. “It must have been quite a celebration that day,” he said.
“Oh, it was, it was,” Slater said excitedly. “They were taking pictures in front of the courthouse. You know, for the paper. It was really something. Everybody was on the courthouse steps.” Her eyes swept to the left and settled on the great gray edifice of the courthouse whose construction the town had been celebrating that day. “They’d just about finished all the work on the courthouse,” she recalled. “There was still a lot of brick and wood and bags of cement scattered around, and the flagpole wasn’t up yet, and the parking lot was full of old trucks, but otherwise, it looked real nice that day.”
Kinley nodded, a bit impatiently. He was used to tangents, to the hard, steady pull of memory, but he also knew that there was a time when every witness had to be nudged back.
“And you were planning to go to the parade with Ellie,” he said. “She was coming up here that morning.”
Her eyes shot over to him. “Morning?”
“Yes.”
She shook her head. “No, Ellie wasn’t planning on coming up that morning,” she said. “She was coming up late in the afternoon, and then we were going to go into town that evening for the fireworks.”
“But you were already in town, weren’t you?”
She nodded. “I came down early, to help with things,” she said, “and Daddy was going to drive me back up so I could meet Ellie.”
“Then you were going to walk back down to Sequoyah?”
“On foot,” Helen said. “Because Daddy needed the truck.”
“Carl Slater,” Kinley said, a follow-up response which he routinely used as a lubricant to keep the flow of conversation going.
But the mention of the name had seemed to have an opposite effect, stopping her suddenly like a blockage in the heart. “My Daddy,” she said quietly.
Kinley waited for more, but Helen continued to stare out over the rim of the mountain, her eyes fixed once again on the town below, the courthouse at its center, resting like a great gray tombstone on a rounded hill.
“Where was your Daddy that day?” Kinley asked finally.
She seemed to snap out of a trance. “After we came back up from Sequoyah, he went back down again,” she said. “I guess he was headed down the mountain about the same time as Ellie was coming up it.”
“But Ellie was walking,” Kinley reminded her. “Wouldn’t he have passed her on the road?”
“I guess so.”
“He never mentioned that?”
“Mentioned?” Helen asked. “To who?”
“To Ben Wade, the deputy who questioned him,” Kinley said. “He said he took the mountain road down toward Sequoyah, but he never mentioned seeing Ellie Dinker.”
“Other people saw her,” Helen said. “I remember hearing about other people who saw her.”
“Yes, they did,” Kinley told her. “I’m just trying to put a few things together that would help me figure out exactly where Ellie was at any given point on her way up here.”
Helen shrugged. “Well, I don’t know about where she was,” she said. “I just know she never made it up here. So, after a while, I headed on down.”
Kinley hesitated a moment, then decided to go ahead with the only question he’d actually had in mind at the time he’d decided to find Helen Slater. “Mrs. Foley, why would she have come up here at all?”
Helen looked at him oddly. “What do you mean? We were friends.”
“But the plan was to meet up here, and then for both of you to go down to Sequoyah for the fireworks that night?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
“Well, wouldn’t it have been more likely for you to meet at Ellie’s house at the bottom of the mountain, than for her to walk all the way up here, then both of you go all the way back down the mountain?”
Helen’s face took on a look of intense concentration, but she did not answer.
“Do you remember if there was any particular reason to meet at your house?” Kinley asked.
Helen continued to think about it. “Well, it was because Ellie wanted to do it that way.” She seemed to be replaying the whole scene in her mind. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll come by your house around five, and we’ll go to the fireworks.’ That’s what I told her.”
“But she didn’t want that?”
“No,” Helen said. “No, she didn’t. She said, ‘I’ll come up.’ She said it real firm-like. ‘I’ll come up.’ You know, like it’s settled. There’s no argument. ‘I’ll come up.’ Just like that.”
Kinley quickly wrote the words in his notebook, then glanced back up at Helen. “It’s an awful long walk from the Dinker house to yours, isn’t it?”
Helen nodded slowly. “Awful long,” she said, almost to herself.
“And all uphill,” Kinley added quietly.
“All uphill,” Helen repeated thoughtfully, as if replaying the whole day in her mind.
Kinley hesitated a moment, then asked his final question. “And if you weren’t supposed to meet until five, why did she leave the valley so early?”
Helen shook her head slowly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Ellie was a strange girl.” Her eyes swept over to him. “And she was so mad,” she added, “like something was eating her up.”
NINETEEN
In every case, the need finally emerged. As the data accumulated, one profound or incidental fact at a time, the mind lost its way, became entangled in the mesh of detail, and it became necessary to apply the first strategy ever invented to aid a finite intelligence.
Evidence of Blood Page 15
