There is little left of any of that in the middle-aged man whose face shows the signs of a hard life or hard living, or both, standing before me now.
I can’t find even a trace of the effervescent and athletic young baseball player who was smart and attractive enough to steal Janet’s heart in the too-thin, brittle-boned, sun-damaged, unkempt husk of a man hunched from carrying the invisible weight of this across all these years.
Unable to ever really get over what happened, Ben hadn’t accepted the baseball scholarships he had been offered. He had never left Marianna, never attended college, never married, never had kids, never had a decent job.
Never had a job at all. Not really. No one in town would hire him.
He has spent decades mowing grass. He doesn’t even do it under a business name, just as a cash-only odd-job approach like a grammar school kid using his parents’ mower over the summer.
We find him at the old Marianna High School building loading his mower into a rickety and rusting old trailer hitched to his rickety and rusting old Ford Ranger.
He had started shaking his head the moment I got out of the truck and walked toward him.
“Told you I wouldn’t talk to him,” he says.
When I called earlier and told him what we were doing and asked if he’d talk to us, he had said he would never speak to Dad again, which is why I asked Dad to stay in the truck while I tried to speak to Ben.
“Will you talk to me?” I ask. “If he stays in the truck. Will you just talk to me for a few minutes?”
He shakes his head, but there’s no real conviction in it. He then looks from me over toward the truck. “He ruined my life.”
His life was ruined the night of February 12th—whether he killed Janet or not—and from what I could tell, Dad hadn’t done anything to make it worse, but I don’t say anything.
“Sure, he didn’t kill Janet and he didn’t arrest me, but he didn’t clear me, didn’t catch who really did it. Cost my dad the next election and left everyone around here to suspect me for the rest of my life.” He lets out a harsh laugh. “Haven’t had a life. Not really.”
This decimated man, this later iteration of Ben Tillman, has the skinny, bleak, raw-boned, bloodshot look of an alcoholic, and though it’s early afternoon and he’s at work, I can smell the cheap liquor on his breath.
“You think he did it intentionally?” I ask. “Or just failed to solve the case?”
“Comes to the same damn thing, don’t it? Either way. It’s the same.”
Violent crime, particularly murder, breaks people, makes hollowed-out shells of previously vibrant people. And it does so to the criminals and cops no less than the loved ones left behind in the vacuous absence of the victim.
I nod toward the brown brick buildings behind him. “This is where y’all went to school, isn’t it?”
He turns and looks at it and nods slowly.
We are quiet for a few moments.
The midday sun looms high above us, radiating stifling bands of heat that seem concentrated directly on us. He had been sweating when I arrived. Now we both are. Hair and clothes damp, skin moist and clammy, beads of perspiration trickling down backs and faces.
“Lot of people’s lives peaked here,” he says. “But mine didn’t.”
I wait but he doesn’t say anything else. “No?”
“My life didn’t peak in high school. It ended.”
I nod. The truth of what he’s saying is etched in the lines of his face, written in the sad song behind his eyes.
It’s disconcerting to even think of this broken older man as the boy I’ve been picturing, the one dancing with Janet at the Sweethearts’ Ball, the one she decided to give herself to as they danced to “How Deep Is Your Love,” the one Sabrina Henry and so many other young women had such a crush on.
“Can we talk about that night?” I ask, not having to identify it in any other way.
For him and those like him, there is only one that night. For the truly fortunate, most of whom have no idea just how fortunate they are, there is no single night that is that night, that is the night by which life is divided into before and after.
He shakes his head. “Nothing to say. Said it all then, and a goddamn lot of good it did me. Got nothing to add. Janet didn’t show up that night. Period. I didn’t see her. I didn’t kill her. I didn’t have anything to do with it. I don’t know who did.”
“What about those who swore under oath they saw her there?” I say.
“Only two possibilities. They’re lying or mistaken.”
I don’t point out that another possibility is that he is.
The August heat draws the sour smell of booze and cigarette smoke and body odor out of his pores as if vapors from precipitation after a recent rain, and he smells like an old diesel engine converted to now run on rotting food byproducts.
“More than one person said they saw you leave with her,” I say.
“See previous answer. They couldn’t have seen me do something I not only didn’t do, I couldn’t do—because she wasn’t there. She stood me up. Broke my heart at first. Then I figured she was just tired and fell asleep. Later I realized while I thought she was blowing me off or sleeping through what was supposed to be the best night of our lives because being crowned queen two nights in a row took too much out of her, she was actually being murdered.”
“What about Sabrina Henry saying you were with her?”
“See previous answer. Only two possibilities.”
“I can’t see how she could be mistaken about something like that,” I say.
“So,” he says, “only one possibility. She’s lying. Why? I couldn’t tell you. What I can tell you is that someone viciously and savagely murdered the only girl I’ve ever loved. And he took her, so we couldn’t even bury her. I don’t know how. I don’t know why. I don’t know who. What I do know is Janet’s life wasn’t the only one he took that night.”
21
Sabrina Henry, now Gibbs, has the manic, uptight, slightly crazed-eyes look of someone desperately trying to hold everything together.
In high school she had been mostly on the fringes because the guys didn’t respect her and the other girls didn’t trust her. Back then she was seen as sort of slow and shallow and mostly annoying. She had a good, well-developed body and a prettyish face, but she wasn’t likable. Most of the guys who slept with her only did so once, privately confiding in each other that as good as her body was and as easy and effortless as it was to take her off into the woods or somebody’s empty river camp, it wasn’t worth the aggravation of listening to her on the way there and back.
Now a middle-aged woman with extra weight and a fading allure, she resembles Patsy Ramsey, the former beauty queen mother of the murdered six-year-old JonBenét, killed in her own home in Boulder, Colorado, on Christmas night in 1996. She has the same dyed-black hair, big blue-green eyes, immaculate makeup, and bright red lipsticked lips.
We meet with her on the pool patio behind her huge home beneath the shade of a large umbrella rising out of a wrought iron table.
A pitcher of lemonade and glasses with ice in them along with some sort of simple shortbread cookie are on a tray on the table waiting for us when we arrive.
Without apology or explanation, she tells us to park on the street down a little ways and walk around the side of the house to the gate of the tall wooden privacy fence.
“I remember you always being respectful and kind to me,” she says to Dad. “Didn’t get a lot of that back then. I really appreciated that.”
Dad nods and tips the old cowboy hat he’s wearing, then shakes her outstretched hand. “Was my pleasure, ma’am. This is my son, John. We sure do appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.”
I shake her hand and we all take a seat around the table.
“Speaking of time,” she says, “I’m sorry, but I don’t have much at all.”
“We understand,” Dad says.
He’s got his full Southern-gentleman charm flowing, which s
eems to me manipulative, insincere, and even condescending, but she seems not to see it that way at all.
“The truth is,” she says, as she pours lemonade into glasses and passes them to us, “I wouldn’t have agreed to meet anyone else. Like I said, you were very good to me back then. Even still, what happened to Janet that night has destroyed a lot of lives. I determined a long time ago it wasn’t going to destroy mine. So I’ve left the past in the past. But . . . I so want justice for Janet. It . . . does my heart . . . I just appreciate that you haven’t given up on finding out what happened to her. But I really, really want to keep this little chat just between us. None of the people in my life now have any idea about any of this—or that I was even . . . involved.”
“Including your husband?” Dad asks.
“Especially him.”
Her husband, a wealthy cattleman fifteen years her senior, owns and operates a cattle farm and processing plant of several thousand acres and worth several million dollars between Mariana and Dothan, and is rumored to be a severe, humorless man as stern with his wife as he is his business.
“Can you tell us what you think happened to her?” I ask.
Without her seeing, Dad shoots me a look that lets me know he’d rather handle the questions.
“Some absolute madman savagely murdered her and hid her body somewhere where no one could find it. It’s the only explanation. No one I know—or knew back them—could have done that. No one. It had to be a monster passing through.”
“Like Ted Bundy,” I say.
“Yeah, maybe, I guess. I heard he was around here that night. Is that true?”
Dad gives me the look again.
“He was,” Dad says. “But we really just want to hear what you remember from that night.”
Her gaze drifts up and away from us. “I just remember everybody bein’ happy. Carefree. For the last time. I guess we had the normal high school drama that we thought mattered so much, but it really was so nothing. You know? It was the last time we were ever just innocent kids. After that we always had this dark cloud hanging over us.”
“Have you remembered anything over the years since we last spoke that you didn’t remember back then?” Dad says.
She starts to answer, but stops as he adjusts in his seat and winces in pain.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
He nods. “Just got a sore hip. That’s all. What were you about to say?”
“I’m sure it’s nothing and you probably read all kinds of things wrong after something like that happens, but . . . I just remember Kathy Holmes arriving late that night and being all out of sorts. She was never late for anything. Ever. It’s the only time I can remember her being late. And I’d never seen her act like that before. She was always with it, but that night she was a basket case.”
“Who?” Dad asks. “I don’t recall anybody by that—”
“Sorry. It’s her married name now. Kathy Moore. Janet’s best friend. I’m sure she had nothing to do with it—a girl couldn’t really do something like that, could she? But it’s just what came to mind when you asked if I had thought of anything else over the years.”
“What was her relationship with Janet like?” Dad says.
“A little strange, to be honest. Like love-hate. She seemed like she really liked Janet sometimes, then others she acted so . . . I don’t know . . . like jealous, but more. Like she wanted to be her . . . or . . . replace her. I’m probably reading way too much into this now. So please take it with a . . . just for what it’s worth. But it’s my honest opinion of how it was. She works up at Sunland but she should probably be a resident.”
Sunland Center is a community serving some five hundred individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities housed in an old air force base up on Highway 71 between Marianna and Greenwood.
“You ever talk to Ben Tillman?” I ask.
“Ben? No. Why?”
Getting no look from Dad this time, I proceed.
“Y’all aren’t close?”
“Never were. I sure feel bad for the guy. I just can’t imagine what he’s . . . But no, we haven’t spoken a single word since that night.”
“So you have no reason to lie for him.”
“Right. I liked Ben. Had a crush on him. But I wouldn’t lie for anyone—especially if they could’ve killed someone else.”
“And he was with you that night?”
“He was. I swear it on my life. I have no reason to lie. If anything, I have reason to lie against him—if I was that sort of person. Like I said, he never spoke to me again. I tried so many times.”
“Why do you think he didn’t use you as an alibi?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “I have no idea. Guilt, I guess. I really don’t know. My guess is if it had come down to him actually going to jail he might have, but . . . as it was . . .”
“Y’all were together at the party and—”
She jumps up suddenly. “That’s the garage door opening,” she says.
I can hear a slow mechanical sound and various creaks and clicks coming from the other side of the wall to our right.
“It’s my husband. You’ve got to go. Now.”
She seems genuinely panicked, the crazed look in her eyes intensifying.
“Please. Come on.”
She grabs our glasses, pours the remainder of their contents back into the pitcher, then tosses them into the pool.
“Please hurry. He knows nothing about any of this. He only moved to town about ten years ago.”
We stand and begin to make our way across the patio, Dad limping, moving slowly.
She quickly walks to the wooden gate, opens it, and ushers us through it when we finally make it there.
“I’ve finally got a good life,” she says. “I can’t jeopardize it for a case that’s probably never gonna be solved anyway.”
22
How do you have people who knew her equally well disagreeing on whether she was there or not that night?” Anna says.
“Eyewitnesses,” Merrill says. “Only thing worse than one is more than one.”
I smile.
I’m truly happy to have Merrill Monroe, my closest friend since childhood, here with us. As a surprise for me, Anna had invited him to the beach house for dinner and he was here waiting on me when I returned from my day in Panama City and Marianna with Dad.
We are now sitting at a table on the deck at Toucan’s, a large, wooden ocean-side restaurant, the last of the setting sun only an orange glow sinking into the green Gulf.
Taylor is in a highchair at the end of the wooden booth, being spoon fed veggies by Anna and slipped Cheerios by Merrill.
This is the last night of our vacation, which I found out this evening is being cut short because Anna’s mom needs her help after all. Tomorrow Anna and Taylor will travel to Dothan to help care for her mom. I will use the time off I already have to help Dad reinvestigate Janet Lester’s disappearance, traveling to Anna’s parents’ farm in Dothan to stay each evening when Dad and I are done.
“I know eyewitnesses are notoriously unreliable,” Anna says, “but this isn’t that exactly, is it? It’s not like there was an accident or event and they saw different things. It’s not like they’re saying a particular person committed a crime or something like that. This is a group of kids with no discernible reason for lying, more than one of which says she was there and more than one of which says she wasn’t.”
I nod. “Yeah. There’s something off about it. I’m trying to track down pictures from that night. Hoping they will help clear up the confusion.”
“’Less it ain’t confusion,” Merrill says, “and they just lying.”
“In which case we’ll have to find out why.”
“Be hard to find out anything thirty-eight years later,” Merrill says.
I shake my head. “Nearly impossible.”
“You need help, you let me know,” he says.
“What are you doin’ with yourself these days?”
Anna asks.
About three months ago, Merrill quit his job as a correctional officer because kids were getting killed by cops in the street and he wanted to make a difference.
“This and that,” he says.
“Care to elaborate,” she says.
“A little of this. A little of that.”
“Oh, I see.”
He laughs. “Fighting the good fight,” he says. “Doing favors for friends. Helping out where I can.”
“He’s being vague out of modesty,” I say. “He’s volunteering at the Boys and Girls Club, he’s in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, he’s helping raise money for the African-American Scholarship Fund, he’s part of a program where he works with at-risk kids to build houses for seniors, and he’s helping with some group I forget the name of now that’s similar to the Innocence Project.”
Finished eating and now yawning and rubbing her eyes with her tiny fists, Taylor is ready to be out of the highchair. Anna begins to put her in her carrier, but Merrill stops her.
“Let her sleep on Uncle Merrill’s shoulder,” he says.
“Sure.”
Anna hands Taylor to Merrill, who props her on his muscular shoulder as if he’s an old pro, and Taylor rests her small head near his neck and snuggles in to sleep as if it’s how she falls asleep every night.
“And I thought you meant how was I payin’ the bills,” he says to Anna.
“How are you?” she says. “All that sounds like it pays in mansions in heaven.”
“A little of this. A little of that. Odd jobs. Favors for friends. Track down shit that’s missing—people, property, whatnot.”
“So you’re sort of like a Deep South Shaft?” she says.
“Who’s the man who’ll risk his neck for his brother man?” I say.
“Can you dig it?” Merrill says.
“Is that enough to make ends meet?” Anna says.
“First dollar I ever made, my mama made me put part of it up for a rainy day.”
“’Cause your mama told you the same thing the Shirelles’ mama told them?” Anna says.
“I’ve done that with every dollar I’ve ever made,” he says. “Still doin’ it. But it’s there if I need it. Hell, y’all need a loan, just let me know.”
Blood Cries; Blood Oath; Blood Work Page 47
