Carolina Skeletons

by David Stout

  “I’m on the auxiliary.”

  “Great. Say, maybe you can help me with some directions.”

  “Anyone can, I can. Lived around here all my life.”

  No pushover, this one, Willop thought. Eyes like a hawk. “Tell me if I’m going the right way to the old Tyler mill.”

  The woman’s eyes brightened and she cocked her head. “Straight down the way you’re going,” she said, her voice taut. “You’ll go under the interstate highway, then bear right. See a sign that says ‘Alcolu.’ Should see the mill then. First turn to your right.”

  “Appreciate it.”

  “The railroad owns it now. The mill …” The old woman sounded hypnotized.

  “Right. Well, thanks.” Willop was so uneasy, he could almost feel the hairs on his arms standing up. Still, she seemed to know her way around, so he asked her the other directions he wanted. The old woman gave them in a voice clear as a bell. It was the eyes that Willop couldn’t stand to look into.

  “Appreciate it,” he said, driving off in a hurry. Goddamn, I ain’t seen so many strange people since I saw Deliverance.

  All around him lay acres of grass shining yellow-green in the sun; the colors seemed to have been squeezed from a paint tube. Hundreds of yards apart. On either side of the road, farm houses anchored patches of soil so rich it looked black, almost wet. Willop breathed deeply.

  The quiet loveliness of the place simply could not be denied. The air was cool and pure. Now, this is the way the world should be, he thought. It was almost impossible to imagine something evil and bloody happening in this place.

  Several hundred feet away, the mill hummed and whined. Out of sight, diesel trucks could be heard revving up and moving away. Used to be horses here, Willop thought. Where’d the horses go?

  Horses, hell. Man, where did all the people go? He knew that, all around him, where there was shining yellow-green grass, there had been a colony of shacks for the blacks—the colored, the niggers—who toiled at the mill. Gone now, the shacks. Gone, the people. Gone north, gone south, gone old, gone dead …

  A railroad spur looped around the perimeter of the mill grounds. Willop began walking along the edges of the ties, faster as he got farther away from the road. He felt sweat on his forehead.

  A church, there in a clearing, and smooth old gravestones nearby. A simple, clean, white wooden box of a church. Paint fresh. People still come here.

  Oh my God, Willop thought when he saw the sign. Green Hill Church. His mother, his uncle, they had come here, sung inside there. No songs now, only the wind.

  For a moment, Willop wanted to go inside. But he did not want to waste the time, and his knees were already weak.

  On he walked. The spur started to swing back toward the mill, but Willop kept walking, straight away from the road. A path, there was a path. A path for children on bicycles. Down there …

  Willop stopped, breathed deep. A breeze came by. Smells of dirt and grass, cut wood and … flowers? This time of year …

  Hum of the mill, smell of cut wood. Birds. Willop felt outside himself. There were flowers down that way. He could see them in the distance. Pretty, down that path.

  The breeze came by again. Smells of grass and water. There would have been the smell of blood in the air that day.

  “Any ghosts down there?” Willop whispered.

  He would go no farther. Let the spot where they died stay covered with flowers, he thought. I don’t have to trample there.

  Willop savored the breeze and the day one last moment, then wiped his forehead. It was time to go.

  21

  The woman was white-haired, thin, and frail-looking through the screen door of the farmhouse, but she did not seem afraid of Willop. She said her husband was out tromping through the fields. With a shotgun. “Practicing on the crows for when quail season comes around. Mostly, he just walks for the exercise.”

  That sounded harmless enough, but it was still enough to make Willop nervous. Suppose Dexter Cody had something to hide, even after all these years. Willop remembered from his days on the police beat what a shotgun could do to a human body at close range.

  Willop had parked on a hard shoulder in a gentle dip in the road a few yards from the house. After talking to Cody’s wife and hearing that the old deputy had a shotgun, Willop went back to his car. He took the revolver from under the seat, loaded it and dropped it in his jacket pocket. He was not comfortable, carrying something to kill with, but he would do almost anything to keep from getting a shotgun blast in the stomach.

  Willop locked his car. He looked up and down the road; nothing as far as he could see. Then he started into the fields, hoping Cody would not be hard to find, and hoping even more that he would see Cody before Cody saw him. He walked at an even pace, not hesitating, not hurrying.

  Ideally, he would have gone to the sheriff’s office first, found a cooperative clerk who would get out the old case file, and sat down to study the whole thing, paper by paper, hour after hour, if need be. Until he was steeped in it. But it hadn’t worked out that way with the phone call. Real hard ass, that state police captain.

  Light green, middle green, dark green waving in the breeze. A clean blue sky painted with long strokes of cloud. Suppose this guy is one tough nut and has something to hide besides, Willop thought. Well, then, I picked a great day to die in case he turns his gun on me before I can react.

  Willop was not consoled by the thought.

  He could feel the sweat on his forehead and under his arms. He wished he had paid more attention to his physical condition. He stopped, breathed deeply. His heart was pounding.

  Scared.

  On he walked. The breeze stroked the grass, fluffed the clouds high in the sky. A beautiful day to live, a beautiful day to die, if need be.

  Up a gentle hill. Long, slow strides. No hurry. God, no hurry. The countryside, how beautiful! Could he stay here? Belong? Bring Moira here to live. Take her to Green Hill Church to pray? Jesus, what a crazy thought.

  The breeze was a little stronger near the top of the hill; it dried the sweat on his face.

  A shotgun boomed; Willop’s knees shook. There, down the hill, just at the edge of a line of trees along a creek. The man was tall, thin, and his back was to Willop. He wore tan clothes and an orange cap that accented his thick white hair.

  Willop started down the hill.

  “Linus, boy, maybe we can start to find the truth,” Willop whispered, hoping to muster courage from the sound of his own voice. The breeze whispered back, uncaring.

  Weeds and grass swished away from Willop’s feet. Closer.

  It was never like this in the movies, Willop thought. A hard-ass detective walked into strange bars in strange towns, said strange words to strange men and women, beat the shit out of the men who got in his way, bedded down with the women … all before the first beer commercial. But he, Willop, was scared just about shitless.

  The old man’s back was still to him. Tall and lean, he moved awkwardly, almost as though on stilts. He was looking into the trees. The man crouched, pointed his shotgun into the trees for a moment, then changed his mind. He straightened up and cradled the gun across his arms.

  “Afternoon,” Willop said.

  The old man’s shoulders moved with the start, then he turned around slowly, his hunter’s caution keeping his shotgun pointed away from the approaching stranger. The old man had clear, ice-blue eyes and shiny skin stretched taut across cheekbones. Old or not, he was formidable, and Willop could understand the stories he had heard about how tough and mean he could be.

  “Who’re you?” the old man asked.

  “My name is Willop. I’m from up north. I want to ask you a few questions about a case—”

  “I’m retired. Have been for some time.”

  “A case you were on a long time ago …”

  “How’d you find me?”

  He’s a tough old bastard, Willop thought. And suspicious.

  “Easy,” Willop said, trying to smoo
th the nervousness in his voice. “You’re still pretty well known around here, retired or not. And this ain’t that big a community, so I just asked around.”

  Willop thought, from the look in his eyes, that the old man bought the explanation, one which, as a matter of fact, was true.

  “What case?” the man asked.

  “An old murder.”

  Willop could not stop his knees from shaking. Suppose the old man had something to hide. He, Willop, was the stranger, asking questions on the old man’s property.

  And if Willop were to get blown apart with a 12-gauge at point-blank range, the old man would probably have a lot of willing listeners. After all, his turf extended far beyond his own fields and hills.

  “Uh, Mr. Cody, could I ask you a favor right off? I know it’s silly, but guns make me nervous. Could you, uh, unload that shotgun? I’d really appreciate it.”

  Blue eyes staring at Willop, measuring him, retired Deputy Dexter Cody effortlessly worked the slide action, chucking glistening red shells out of the shotgun and catching them in his palm.

  “That better?” Cody asked when he was done.

  “Oh, yes. Thanks. I’m sorry. It’s just the way I am.” Willop kept his hand in his pocket, palm on the revolver grip, just in case.

  “Funny way to be around here. Nervous about guns,” Cody said.

  “I guess so. The case I hope you can help me with was the one with those two little girls. Grade-school girls. Killed not too far from the sawmill in 1944.”

  “Colored kid did it. From the shacks they used to have over there. What’s your interest?”

  “I might be doing a book.” Not exactly a lie, Willop thought.

  “Ain’t much of a book. At least, far’s any story’s concerned. Little colored boy, he wanted somethin’. Tried to take it, and they put up a fight. So he killed them. Confessed to it readily enough.”

  “Well, maybe it wasn’t all that simple.…”

  “Sure it was. Shit, the nigger confessed plain as day.”

  Bad enough, Willop thought, that he doesn’t seem that eager to talk; he’s gotta be a bigot, too. Well, what had he expected in the middle of South Carolina.

  “What about the confession?”

  “Simple as that. He confessed, like I told you. I softened him up a bit, made sure he was afraid of me. Then the sheriff went in and took the confession. Simple.”

  “And you and the sheriff had done some looking around before?”

  “’Course. How’d you think we picked up the nigger in the first place? Went snooping around over by the shantytown where they all lived, all them mill workers. Asked around, we did. The sheriff, he was a damn good law man in his day.”

  “So somebody in the shanties …”

  “Old man. Old crippled-up nigger.” The old deputy’s ice-blue eyes were alert and suspicious and Willop wondered if he detected a knowing look. “Anyhow, this old nigger—Crooks, his name was, I think, dead a long time now—he saw the nigger boy pulling a cow, real mean-like. By the nose, hard. Right around the time the girls were known to have gone down by the mill. Mean reputation, the kid had …”

  Willop had learned from hearing witnesses at trials, and reading reports typed up by policemen, and in his own interviewing over the years, that you usually didn’t get neat answers. It could be bewildering, even exhausting, to listen to people’s answers, trying to sort out the irrelevant and the incongruous and hoping to recognize the seemingly trivial detail that might be all-important.

  “His name was Linus Bragg, right?”

  “Damned if you ain’t right.”

  “So the old man, Crooks, said this Linus was mean.…”

  “Mean as hell. Did some dirty, rotten trick on old Crooks once. Let the water out of his fish barrel, or something. So Crooks, he was an old fart, he had good reason to remember.”

  “So Linus was the only suspect? Right from the start?”

  The breeze played teasingly off the grass. The trees soughed heedlessly, as they had done more than forty years ago, as they would tomorrow.

  “Well, now …” Cody’s forehead wrinkled.

  “I mean, were there any loose ends?”

  “Loose ends … depends on who you talk to, I guess. Always that way. Talk to a hundred people, get a hundred answers …”

  Willop’s breath caught in his dry throat and his heart beat fast. The breeze teased, and the trees soughed, uncaring, and this thin old man—a bigot to his bone marrow—couldn’t make up his mind what kind of answer to give to the most important question Willop would ask him. “I meant, were there any other—”

  “Back then, the niggers in the shacks all had stories. About this foreman, or that one. Pushing ’em around, screwing the women whenever they wanted. That stuff. Old Mr. Tyler, he owned the mill, he was good to ’em, but you know …”

  “Know what?”

  “Well, probably was some of that goin’ on. The sheriff, he checked up on some loose ends. Damn good law man, the sheriff …”

  “What loose ends?”

  “Hell, I can’t remember that. Ain’t even sure if the sheriff told me, exactly. Besides, after the sheriff checked up, they weren’t loose ends anymore.”

  “So the sheriff was satisfied the boy did it?”

  “Hell, yes. Nigger confessed. Signed a piece of paper, then ate a big, hearty meal. That much I remember.…”

  “Remember anything he said?”

  “Didn’t mean to, he said. Didn’t mean to …”

  “Didn’t mean to what?”

  “Way I recall it, little bastard said he didn’t mean to look at ’em, even. Something like that.”

  Across the creek a bird sang. Willop was conscious of the water slipping lazily over rocks, as it had done yesterday and the day and the year before, as it would tomorrow.

  “He didn’t mean to look at them?” He didn’t mean to look. To look. A memory flickered in Willop’s brain, a memory of terrifying stories told to little black boys about bad things that would happen if they dared look at white girls a certain way.…

  “Didn’t even mean to look. That’s what the sheriff said he said. Kid sure did a lot more than look. We didn’t mess around with ’em, not back then. Right to the chair. Sheriff, he kept the nigger from getting strung up, in fact. Plenty of folks was ready to hang the bugger. Or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “I’ve seen worse. You got any more questions?”

  “I guess not.”

  “Damn long time ago. Deserved what he got, that kid. Black or white.”

  “I’ll let you go back to your hunting,” Willop said. He was tired and exhilarated and not a little relieved.

  “Naw. About time for me to quit. Legs get tired.” With that, Cody worked the slide of the shotgun another time, and one more gleaming red shell plopped into his hand. “I kept one round in the chamber,” Cody said matter-of-factly.

  Willop felt for the handle of the revolver, but his arm felt like cement, and he was not at all sure he could move it.

  “Cautious old habits,” Cody explained. “Now if you’re done …”

  “Well, guess I am, for now. Maybe we could talk some more.…”

  “Done all I want to,” Cody said. His voice had gone hard.

  “Understood,” Willop said. “Thanks again. So long.”

  Willop tried to smile, tried to affect a casual farewell wave as he turned and started back toward the car. Not for a moment did he think of turning to see if Cody was still standing there; he was afraid he would see the shotgun pointed at him.

  As he walked, Willop tried to remember how many strides he had taken. It wouldn’t be that many, he knew, before he was out of killing range. The shotgun, so deadly within a few yards, would only give him a back full of skin-deep pellet wounds if Cody waited long enough. Ah, maybe he won’t fire at all.

  And then he was back on the road. He looked in both directions, then around him at the fields. He was alone. Willop got into the car, slumped in the seat,
and discovered that his shirt was stuck to his back with sweat.

  22

  Bill D. Stoker shut off the alarm, plugged in the coffee pot, and got into the shower. He let the water run as hot as he could stand it and thought of what he would put on his list for the day. Call about cable service; call Jen; call about …

  Shutting off the water, he forced himself to put the list out of his head. He had always kept himself organized that way, with lists (some on paper, some in his head), sometimes to Jen’s considerable annoyance.

  He could never put it into words as well as Jen herself had (yeah, she was good with words), but she had told him, in effect, that to put everything down on a list, or to be so endlessly organized and methodical, could get in the way of feelings. She had told him that a lot of times. Then her line had changed: She had started telling him that he deliberately put a lot of things down on lists so that he wouldn’t have to face up to emotions. “And that gets in the way of a lot of things, including love,” she had said finally.

  Later on, when he had almost had it figured out, Stoker realized Jen said the last thing just about the time she was going to that therapist to learn more about her feelings. Sure …

  He was proud that the skin he was toweling covered (for the most part) good, lean muscle. Too many men, once they got to be sixty or so, figured it was okay to go soft in the body.

  Not Bill Stoker. You didn’t have to be a health nut or run ten miles a day or lift weights. Just stick to a few basic things, he always said: Use the stairs instead of the elevator once in a while; keep your dinners small; drink moderately. And it didn’t hurt to jog once in a while and take long walks.

  That reminded him: He would have to leave a note for Bryant Fischer, a tactful note, telling him that some of his deputies were getting a bit thick around the middle. Nothing serious, but better to catch it before it got serious. Little things had a way of turning into big things. Some of the hair and sideburns were getting a bit long also.…

  He picked out a pair of comfortable slacks that weren’t dirty and a shirt and a tie that didn’t clash with either and sat down to his coffee, juice, and unbuttered toast. He had taken only a few sips when the stuff about the cable began to annoy him again.