Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work

by Michael Lister

  Later toward evening, Anna and I walk hand in hand along the water’s edge, and it is as much an act of worship and spiritual practice as my time alone on the beach had been.

  “Can’t tell you what it means to me that you insisted we still come,” Anna says.

  Taylor is asleep in the baby sling wrapped around her body, her small head nestled against Anna’s breasts.

  It’s after sundown and the quiet quality of evening bathes everything with an ethereal light and sound, like a palpable presence of transcendence flowing in and through and out of us.

  “I was an idiot to be hesitant in the first place,” I say.

  We had already talked at length about my dad and her mom and even the Janet Lester case earlier in the day. Now it was time for all of that—along with everything else—to remain at bay and let it be, for a short while at least, as if we are the only two people on the planet.

  “Sorry I’ve been on edge lately. It’s like some of the shit we went through is finally catching up with me.”

  “You’re handling everything extremely well,” I say. “Don’t hesitate to share it with me and let me help, and if you feel like you need to see a counselor, we’ll find you the very best.”

  “I’m married to the very best.”

  We pause long enough for me to kiss her, then continue walking.

  “You’ve been through so much,” I say.

  “Speaking of being married to the best,” she says. “I know we are married in every way that truly matters, but . . . I’d like to do it officially.”

  “I guess I always figured we would as soon as your divorce from Chris comes through,” I say.

  “It arrived in the mail this morning.”

  I stop and drop to a knee without letting go of her hand.

  “Anna, I have loved you since the moment I first met you when we were just children. I have always loved you. I will always love you. Of all the women in all the world, you are the woman to me. The only woman. You are my dream girl, my best friend, my partner in everything. You are my everything. I never again, not for one moment, want to experience life without you by my side. Will you marry me—”

  “I will.”

  “I wasn’t finished.”

  “Oh, please finish.”

  “—as soon as possible,” I say.

  She smiles as tears trickle down her cheeks.

  “Yes,” she says. “Yes. I thought you’d never ask.”

  She kneels down with me and we embrace and kiss, careful not to wake Taylor as we do.

  17

  Janet Lester had decided it was time, determined she was ready, while dancing with Ben to “How Deep Is Your Love” by the Bee Gees at the Sweethearts’ Ball.

  She had made him wait long enough, hadn’t she?

  Ben was a good guy, and he really cared for her, but he wasn’t going to wait forever. He’d been sweet and patient, but she could tell he was really beginning to get frustrated. Them not doing it was becoming a big deal.

  And what about her? Hadn’t she waited long enough? She was eighteen. It was time for her too. She was the last of her friends to still be a virgin.

  “I’ve got a surprise for you,” she whispered in his ear as they slow danced beneath the disco ball, a million tiny spots of light slowly swirling around them.

  She was wearing a beige dress with lots of ruffles similar to one she had seen Farrah Fawcett wear at a recent Hollywood premiere. He was wearing a brown suit with a beige shirt that matched her dress. They were surrounded by several other slow-dancing couples, but none that had been together a fraction of the time they had.

  “Oh yeah?” he said. “What’s that?”

  He seemed distracted and maybe even a little disinterested—two things he seemed more and more these days.

  Maybe it was because he was already drinking, but that wouldn’t explain why he had been acting that way in general lately. More and more all the time.

  Her waiting too long would explain it though. Had he lost interest in her?

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah. Why?”

  “I don’t know . . . you just seem a little . . . distracted.”

  He shrugged and shook his head, but didn’t say anything to allay her concerns.

  Was the song, the song that was playing when she decided to give herself to him, actually a warning? Should she have been questioning how deep his love was?

  “What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothin’. Why?”

  “You just seem . . . I don’t know. Like maybe you’re . . .”

  “I’m what? Let’s just enjoy the song. I really dig it. You know? You’re just trippin’ tonight for some reason. You tired from last night? Or has bein’ the queen gone to your head already? Just chill.”

  They danced in silence some more, her waiting to see if he’d mention the surprise.

  He didn’t.

  Because he didn’t care or because he was really enjoying their dance?

  She was thinking of giving him her virginity, she’d bought a special negligee for the occasion and everything, and he totally didn’t care.

  Maybe rather than this being the night she gave herself to him, maybe this was the night they’d call it quits.

  He was a stone fox and sweet to her most of the time, but . . . maybe he just didn’t love her like he used to. Maybe he had his eye on someone else. But who? One name came to mind immediately. Sabrina. She flirted with him all the time. And everybody knew she was a sure thing. Sabrina Henry. It had to be.

  Are they sleepin’ together already? Is he distracted because he’s looking for her while he’s dancing with me? That’s why he’s been so understanding about waiting—because he hasn’t been.

  Stop dancing and walk off the floor right now. Leave him here to—

  But before she could, the song came to an end and he lifted her chin and kissed her tenderly.

  “I love you so much, Janet Leigh,” he said. “Don’t forget you were my queen before you were theirs. I don’t know what I’d do without you in my life. Now what’s this surprise you’ve got for me? Is it a good surprise, or a real good surprise?”

  18

  I quietly flip through the witness statements, skimming each one in the faint splash of illumination provided by my reading light clipped to the murder book.

  Beside me Anna is asleep. Her breathing and that of Taylor’s coming through the small speaker of the baby monitor are the only sounds beside the occasional creak in the too-quiet cottage.

  Earlier in the evening, we had walked down and eaten pizza at 40th Street Pizzaria and Seafood. The pizza was some of the best we’d had in a while, and we brought a second one back with us to warm up for a snack—something we didn’t do, because Anna fell asleep before we could.

  Our moonlit walk along the beach on the way back was romantic and buoying, and I figured we might go back out later for a swim or a longer walk, but when I came in from talking to Johanna on the phone a short while later, I found Taylor and Anna fast asleep.

  I always miss Johanna, but it’s particularly acute tonight. Something about us being here without her just doesn’t seem right, and despite only being half an hour farther away from her, being out of my ordinary environment makes me feel less available for her somehow—even though on a rational level I know it’s not the case.

  I console myself with the fact that we’ll be together again at the end of the week, but the constant dull and at times acute ache of missing her feels as though it’s slowly hollowing me out inside.

  The witness statements are pretty much what I’d expected they’d be, though perhaps a little more directly contradictory than usual.

  Most of the young people at the party said they never saw Janet there, but a few did.

  A classmate of hers, Charles Fountain, the only black student at the farmhouse that night, swore she was there and that he saw her not once but a handful of times throughout the night. He even described in
detail what she was wearing—a cream crinkle-textured blouse with a lace yoke and a camel, tan, and rust floral-print skirt with a deep flounce at the bottom.

  Dad had written, How does a boy know so much about a girl’s clothes?

  Answering his own question later, Dad discovered that Fountain planned to move to New York after graduation to study fashion design, and deduced that, although he couldn’t be positive, the thin, soft-spoken black boy was most likely homosexual.

  Fountain’s only interest in Janet seemed to be as a friend—one mostly fascinated by her sense of fashion and her eye for photography.

  Another witness, a young woman named Valerie Weston, who was actually closer to Janet—though not in each other’s inner circles, they were part of the yearbook staff together—said Janet was definitely not there that night, that she spent a lot of time looking for her because she wanted to congratulate her for winning the Miss Valentine pageant and show her a totally awesome photograph she had taken. She said she definitely totally was a no-show that night. And only totally stunned spazzes would say that she was.

  Ann Patterson, a junior who shared one class with Janet, remembered seeing her briefly and described her as wearing an outfit similar to the one Charles recalled—though not nearly in as much detail.

  Kathy Moore, either Janet’s best friend or biggest competitor depending on who was asked, said Janet did grace the party with her presence but only briefly, and that she never actually came inside the house.

  This fits with what Gary Blaylock said. He said that while he was upstairs peeing, he looked out the window and not only did he see Janet but he saw Ben with her and the two of them drive off together in Janet’s car.

  In his statement, Ben said she never came—that she was supposed to, that he waited and waited for her, but that she never showed. Said he figured she couldn’t sneak out, or fell asleep waiting for her family to go to bed. It had been a big, long weekend and she was exhausted. He was disappointed but he understood. Said he never saw her again after he took her home from the Sweethearts’ Ball and didn’t know anything was wrong until his mom woke him up the next morning saying that her stepdad was on the phone looking for her.

  Though Ben never offered an alibi, he had one and it was offered for him. A girl named Sabrina Henry, who had always had a crush on Ben and who had always flirted with him and made sure he knew she was his for the taking, said he was with her, that they left the party together and were with each other the rest of the night.

  The final witness from the farmhouse party wasn’t at the party at all. A loner with a violent juvenile record who graduated the year before named Clyde Wolf said he was watching the comings and goings of the party from the woods in back of the pasture. He never stepped forward or volunteered any information, but once it was discovered he had been there, he was brought in and questioned by the investigators. He too said Janet was there that night, but never went inside, and that Ben climbed into her car and left with her.

  19

  Why didn’t you arrest Ben Tillman for Janet’s murder?” I ask.

  “You finish the book?” Dad says.

  “Finished the part where several witnesses have him leaving the party with Janet in her car—the same car she was killed in a short while later.”

  We are in his new, immaculate, white extended-cab GMC truck, but unlike any other time we ever have been, I am driving.

  It’s Tuesday afternoon and we are driving to Marianna to try to talk to Ben Tillman. We are coming from Dad’s bone marrow test at his doctor’s office in Panama City—something Anna set up and insisted he do sooner rather than later, something he agreed to when I told him we’d work the case for the remainder of the day once the test was done.

  Dad is turned in the seat, leaning on his side, keeping pressure off the hip that was used for the aspiration and biopsy. So far it’s sore but not extremely so, and though the wound is seeping, it has yet to soak the bandage or the loose jeans he’s wearing.

  “Maybe I should have,” Dad says. “Came close to it more than once during the investigation.”

  “So why didn’t you?”

  “It’s kinda complicated,” he says. “There wasn’t just one reason. Bottom line is I didn’t stay with the case as long as I should have. I should’ve seen it through, but . . . you kids were young, your mom and I were havin’ a pretty rough time of it, I had my own department to run.”

  He doesn’t say anything else but I sense there is more—other reasons why he stopped working the case when he did.

  “I worked it as long as I could and then turned everything over to the state’s attorney’s office. He convened a grand jury. I think it was a tough decision for them, but the decision not to indict was theirs.”

  “Did you turn over the case to the state’s attorney before you were finished investigating it thoroughly?”

  I’m pressing him and I expect him to become defensive, but instead he just nods.

  “I’m pretty sure I did,” he says. “I didn’t think so at the time—or I didn’t want to think so, but even then part of me knew I was.”

  “So take me through why you did. I’m not understanding.”

  “I told you why.”

  “There’s got to be more to it than that.”

  He shakes his head and I can tell that’s all I’m going to get. I file it away to revisit later.

  “The thing is, by the end of the investigation I didn’t think he did it,” Dad says. “I’m just wondering now if I was wrong.”

  “So what said he didn’t do it?” I say.

  “The girl, Sabrina Henry, swore under oath he was with her. She never wavered and we were never able to break her. There was no physical evidence against him—beyond a few fingerprints in her car that could be explained by him being in it at an earlier time. As her boyfriend he would’ve been. Would’ve been far more suspicious if there hadn’t been any. His mom said she got up to go to the bathroom in the middle of the night and looked in on him, and he was in his bed sleeping soundly. We knew what he wore from pictures taken at the party. We tested his clothes, which were still on the floor of his bedroom, and didn’t find any blood or other evidence on them—and they hadn’t been washed. Still had beer that he spilled at the party on them. And I thought then and I still think now there’s a very good chance Ted Bundy did it.”

  Marianna is an interesting place. A small town of less than seven thousand people, it’s a naturally beautiful place—like so many in North Florida—with a diverse landscape of massive old oak trees, their spreading branches draped with Spanish moss, tall North Florida pines, the Chipola River, Blue Hole Spring, and the Mariana caverns, a series of dry, air-filled caves with stunning formations of limestone stalactites, stalagmites, soda straws, flowstones and draperies.

  Unlike my flatter part of Florida, Marianna is hilly, the large farms surrounding it consisting of sloping croplands and pastures of rolling hills.

  Founded in 1828 by a Scottish entrepreneur named Scott Beverege who named the town after his wife Mary and her friend Anna, it became the county seat the following year.

  Platted along the Chipola River just below the Alabama state line, Marianna and the broader Jackson County is known for extremely fertile soil, which is why so many plantation owners from other states like North Carolina relocated here back then.

  And it’s not just the soil, Marianna is rich with history too. It’s where the Confederate governor of Florida, John Milton, is buried. It’s the scene of a Civil War battle between a small home guard of boys, old men, and wounded soldiers and a contingent of some seven hundred Federal troops. It is also the site of the savage torture and brutal lynching of Claude Neal, an African American man accused of rape and murder in 1934. Marianna is also the home to Dozier School for Boys, an infamous reform school operated by the state of Florida, which for a time was the largest juvenile reform institution in the United States. Throughout its over one-hundred-year history, the school was a place of brutality, of
abuse, beatings, rapes, torture, and murder. Marianna is, of course, also the place of the Broken Heart Miss Valentine Murder of Janet Leigh Lester, which to this day remains unsolved.

  Looking at Marianna’s quaint main street of restored old buildings, its historic district of ancient churches and antebellum homes, and its breathtaking natural beauty, it’s hard to fathom so many horrific things have happened here.

  20

  Ben Tillman was Marianna High School’s star baseball player, taking his team to state during his junior year, coming just two runs short of bringing home the championship.

  It was believed he’d do the same in his senior year, only more successfully, but then his girlfriend was murdered, he was suspected, and his life unraveled.

  Before the Broken Heart Murder case, Ben was popular and respected.

  Ben was cute in a boyish way, but it was his genuine niceness that caused most of the girls at Marianna High to find him so attractive. That said, he was strikingly photogenic and model good-looking in the many photographs Janet took of him over their years together. Nearly all in black and white, Janet’s photographs of Ben were dramatic and artistic and revealed a depth and complexity Ben rarely revealed to anyone else.

  The son of the sheriff of Jackson County, Ben was neither a bully, a punk, nor a rat. Although always careful not to break the law, except for a little underage drinking, he never made the other kids feel guilty or like they were being watched for the illicit or illegal activities they engaged in.

  Loyal to his friends, faithful to his longtime girlfriend, Ben was liked by his fellow students and well-regarded by his teachers and the school administrators.

  Apart from a few rumors about him having a pretty nasty temper, which was rarely if ever witnessed and not given much credence by most, Ben was believed to be about as perfect as an adolescent young man could be.