by David Stout
God, he was getting old. It seemed the bass festival came up every month instead of once a year. Jesus, how long had it been since he had fished on the lake with his father—his father, who kept asking to go out on the boat with him and Bob.… A light was flickering in his brain, and while he could not tell where it was coming from or what it meant, he knew it was significant.
Now, what the hell had bothered him …?
That cutout of the fish that Bestwick was putting up. A long time since he had fished with his dad on the lake and, of course, Junior Stoker would never forget that one day, when they were met on the shore by that bunch who would gladly have lynched, or castrated, that black kid.… Now when the hell was that? I wasn’t but seventeen, so that had to be—
Oh, Christ. I’m not only getting old, I’m getting stupid. Stoker fumbled with the keys to his office. Once inside, he ignored the case files already on his desk. Sure, it all seems too farfetched to believe, he thought. Sure, and my dad always said that the truth was odder than fairy tales, if you lived long enough.
Stoker picked up the phone. “Bestwick,” he shouted. “I need the files from 1944. And I mean right now.”
There, Stoker thought. There it was, a manila envelope, dirty now with age and from being handled.
He studied the notes and looked at the awkward, self-conscious signature of a black adolescent from many years ago next to the more rigid, controlled signature of his father, and he smiled. He smiled, too, at the language of the confession. The words were his father’s, of course; young teenagers, white or black, today or over forty years ago, just didn’t talk quite that way. Besides, Junior could easily detect his father’s stylistic gaucheries.
He picked up an envelope which, he could tell at once, contained several photographs. He shook the contents onto his desk. Instantly, he was horrified and, almost, ashamed. Junior Stoker had never seen the photographs of the victims’ bodies next to the tracks, hair and clothes still soaked.
The autopsy pictures were even worse. Looking at the hideous wounds, the innocent, prepubescent bodies lying nude on the metal tables, eyes glassy from the moment of their terrifying deaths, Junior Stoker was embarrassed. He ought not to be looking; no one should. It was as though he had never before seen a human body, or a picture of a body, instead of hundreds of bodies and hundreds of pictures.
He would go to the girls’ graves and pray, someday soon.
He put the pictures back in the envelope and looked again at the mug shot of Linus Bragg. He stared at the face, a child’s face, frozen forever in time. A killer’s face, the law said. Junior Stoker hated the boy he saw in the picture, and understood the need for revenge that could make people kill.
With a clarity that made him heartsick these four decades later, Junior Stoker remembered the morning of the trip to Columbia with his father. Going to watch that boy sacrificed on the altar of vengeance.
What a lovely Carolina morning, not too hot. He would have enjoyed the ride more were it not for one of his earliest experiments with peach wine two nights before. And the dog in the road. That dying dog with that poor colored family. My God, whatever happened to them? Did they still live around here, those kids? Grown-ups now. Who knew, and who cared? Junior Stoker did.
He had never loved his father, the sheriff, more than he did that morning. Truth to tell, as his father used to say. Junior remembered how his father had comforted the colored children, what he had said to them.… The dog had been merely a hint of the death Junior Stoker was to experience that day. Death, and then more tragedy …
But that was over forty years ago, he thought. And he ought to be more concerned about investigating the deaths of Dexter Cody and Tyrone than about taking a trip through time. Well, suppose there wasn’t anything to investigate, that Dexter just fell on his shotgun. Wouldn’t be the first guy to do it.
No. Too much of a coincidence. Dexter Cody, a hunter much of his life, killed with his own gun. Just about the same time a pathetic old black man died down by the mill near the scene of a long-ago murder.
Too many coincidences. Oh, they happened, all right. Coincidences. Junior Stoker believed in them. But he didn’t see them as an explanation for two violent deaths in a quiet little county.
Actually, Junior Stoker had long ago lost the capacity to be surprised by crime. Horrified, sickened, depressed—all of that. But not surprised.
He remembered a case he had read about several years before. A woman had been experiencing severe nervousness and terrible nightmares in which she saw the face of her long-dead father staring up at her, as though from the bottom of a muddy pit. Under hypnosis, she began to recall a night from her childhood. She remembered being awakened in the middle of the night and seeing her mother and a man dragging a long box down the hall past her room. The next morning, her father was gone, and her mother said he had just run away and would never come back. The years went by, and the girl grew up, but she never got over the sense of loss about her father.
But what, the hypnotherapist pressed her, was the muddy pit that had claimed her father? The outhouse behind her mother’s old farm, the patient said finally. And so the police went to dig (the outhouse was long gone and the pit filled in and planted over), and they found the skeleton of the missing father.
The mother had been all sweetness, serving lemonade to the diggers, but when the searchers started pulling bones out of the earth, the old woman walked into the nearby woods and shot herself in the head.
No, Junior Stoker was not surprised anymore.
The phone rang. “Captain,” Bestwick said, “Sheriff Fischer says he’ll be in touch as soon as he can. He’s gonna stop and see Judah Brickstone. Seems Judah met up with somebody connected with an old case of his. The guy was pretty mad, like Judah cheated him or something. Judah’s afraid the guy’s gonna come back and hurt him.…”
“Thanks, Bestwick.” Stoker chuckled; he had long had a grudging admiration for Brickstone’s smooth, ingratiating manner, and an envy for the way Brickstone prospered because of it, especially by Clarendon County standards. So now Brickstone has someone mad at him. Probably a new experience for him.
Stoker was about to close the envelope on the Ellerby-Clark case when something caught his eye. It was so apparently inconsequential that it had not registered before, even though, he now realized, he had indeed seen it. The yellow piece of paper with his father’s notes showed the imprint of a paper clip in one corner, though the paper clip was no longer there. Stoker looked at the back of the sheet and saw some old pencil smudges.
No, not smudges, he suddenly realized. The marks were the obverse, the mirror image, of whatever had been written, or printed, on the paper that had once been clipped to the paper he held in his hand. So it wasn’t just a paper clip that was missing but, naturally and much more important, a piece of paper. How I do get smart in my advancing age, Stoker thought.
Holding the old yellow sheet by one corner with just a thumb and forefinger, Stoker went into the men’s room. Standing under the bright fluorescent light, he held the old pencil smudges close to the mirror. “Ck Camp for poss,” it read.
The “ck” seemed clear enough to Junior Stoker. It meant “check” and was an abbreviation he himself used all the time. The longer he looked at “Camp,” the more he wondered if the “C” was lower-case, perhaps a reference to a logging camp or an Army camp. “For poss” could mean “for possession.” No, Stoker thought. “Possession” was a word modern cops heard all the time, what with drugs and all. In my dad’s time, it probably would have meant “possibilities.”
Stoker was intrigued. He recalled stories, from his childhood and teenage years, about the logging camps and, once the war started, Army camps—how they brought together big groups of men, and how when you had a big group of men you were bound to have some who were untrustworthy, or dangerous. So his father, all those years ago, had written a note to himself about them.
Only, Junior could not remember any big Army or logging camps
around Manning or Alcolu.…
The phone rang as he reentered his office. It was Bestwick again. “Captain, lady over at the courthouse says a stranger was in there, looking at some old will.…”
“Well, that getting to be against the law all of a sudden?” Stoker was annoyed at the interruption.
“Beg pardon, Captain. No, it ain’t against the law. Just that the woman in the courthouse was suspicious, the man being a stranger and all …”
“Sorry, and I don’t mean to bite your head off.” Stoker tried to make it an inviolable rule (though his temper occasionally got the better of him) not to snap at a subordinate; it was the worst way to kill initiative.
“No problem, Captain. Uh, what do you want me to tell her?”
“Well, does she feel in some kind of danger? I mean, I guess there ain’t nothing for us to do if this guy ain’t breaking any law.…”
“Well, I don’t know, Captain. The lady, she was just puzzled ’cause she can’t remember anybody ever coming to look at Mr. Tyler’s will before. Before my time, Captain, but I guess he used to own that sawmill.…”
“Shit,” Junior Stoker said.
It seemed to Junior Stoker that the court clerk was embarrassed but grateful for the attention.
“Captain, I’m sorry. I know you’re busy, and I hope I did the right thing.…”
“You did just fine. Tell you what. Let’s just have a look at that old will and see just what it was our friend might have been interested in. I don’t see any harm in that, do you?”
“No, sir.”
Hardly ever looked at, Stoker thought as he handled the crisp, stiffly folded but almost unwrinkled legal paper. Now, then: Here’s a piece of paper the people outside the Tyler family don’t give a good goddamn about, and now we got some stranger in here asking to see it. Now, what the hell does that tell you? Stoker was damned if he knew the answer, but he knew the will might hold a clue.
Stoker found it depressing, reading the will. It made him feel guilty. If he got hit by a truck tomorrow, his own affairs would be left in a bit of a tangle. Shit, what to do about Jen (he owed her something, goddamn it), and what to do about—oh, God, what to do about Thomas? Not to mention …
At first glance, old Tyler’s will seemed routine enough. But Stoker was surprised that his nephew, T. J. Campbell, didn’t get all that much, despite a lot of kind words from Tyler about his nephew trying to be his son and all that.…
So the old bastard could be generous after all. Charities didn’t do all that bad by him, and neither did the university. Wonder if the school spent any of that on a couple of good linebackers. Oh, hell. Long time ago …
Jesus. Then Stoker saw it. His knees felt weak.
His red radio light was flashing when he got back to his car.
“Go ahead, Bestwick.”
“Captain, Sheriff Fischer wants to talk to you right away about that man who bothered Judah Brickstone today. Says it’s urgent.”
“Put me through.”
Bryant Fischer told him in a matter-of-fact way that Judah Brickstone had told him about a visit from a man who spoke mysteriously, and with more than a hint of menace, about a murder case over forty years ago and an innocent child and—
“Yeah, that figures, Bryant,” Stoker said. “I catch on to everything just a step too late. Jen always said …”
“Huh?”
“Never mind. Listen, this same guy was just over here at the courthouse, checking up on old Harry Tyler’s will. I ain’t checked Judah’s description of his visitor with what the courthouse people remember, but I don’t have to. I know it’s the same guy. And guess who handled Tyler’s will way back a long time ago.”
“Judah, probably.”
“You got it. Oh, guess what else. Tyler left a tidy sum to the NAACP. Imagine that.”
“Who would’ve figured. What’s it mean?”
“Don’t know. Listen, I’m heading in.”
When Stoker got back to headquarters, a note was waiting on his desk, telling him to call the medical examiner’s office. He did, and found that the autopsy on Tyrone had detected an injury on the back of his head near his neck, an injury serious enough to have rendered him unconscious, or even to have killed him. The medical examiner was reasonably certain the injury had been inflicted before the fire since the wound was too serious to have been caused by a fall.
Stoker got hold of Fischer again and suggested he send a deputy over to the mill area to see if anyone had met a stranger, especially one who resembled the man who had visited Brick-stone and the courthouse.
Stoker was pleased that Fischer had already begun checking the motels in the area. Then (suspending his own rule that investigators should share their information rather than hide it from each other) he went to see his father, the sheriff, to see if the old man could remember what he had meant all those years ago when he jotted “ck camp for poss.”
“Hello, Mr. Stoker, and how are you today?”
“Just fine, thanks.”
“Your father is being just a bit difficult,” the starched, plump, middle-aged attendant said in a maddeningly cheerful voice.
“That so?” Junior couldn’t blame his father a bit.
“Yes, indeed. Said he didn’t want any of that nice vegetable beef soup—”
“Uhhnnn.…”
Junior could tell from the tone of the grunt that his father was, indeed, angry.
“—and I told him he just had to eat something or I surely wouldn’t pour him anything from that bottle.” The attendant said “that bottle” as though she was referring to opium or heroin instead of whiskey.
“Well, he sure does know what he wants sometimes. Ain’t that right, old sheriff …”
“Uhnnn …”
There: The old man’s tone was softening, Junior thought.
Sheriff Hiram Stoker damn well knew he had all his marbles, at least for today. He hadn’t liked the vegetable soup because it was cold, and the pain in the ass in the white uniform had not made the slightest effort to understand him.
It was goddamn unfair, and it frustrated the sheriff no end to not be able to tell her how goddamn unfair it was.
“Hell, this soup’s cold,” Junior said as he picked up the dish. “No wonder you don’t have much of an appetite.…”
“Uhnnn …” Junior understood! The sheriff instantly felt better.
“Well, let’s just get it warmed up. Tell you what, I’ll pour you a little something to go with it, too. How’s that?”
“Uhnnn …”
Junior opened a bureau drawer and took out the heating coil he had stashed there. A heating unit was against regulations, but Junior didn’t care. It was just the thing to make his father a cup of hot chocolate on a chilly winter day—or heat up his soup. As the coil did its work atop the bureau, Junior got out the whiskey, dusted off a tumbler, and poured his father a half-inch.
“This’ll clear your throat a bit there,” Junior said.
The old sheriff lifted the glass, slowly and carefully, and sniffed the contents. Then he took a gulp.
“Bet this’ll taste a lot better now,” Junior said, offering his father a spoonful of the rewarmed soup. “I’ll serve you a couple of ladles and then let you get back to that amber stuff.…”
The sheriff wished he could tell Junior how grateful he was that Junior understood so much about what he wanted, and when. He was a good son, and it was too bad the three of them— Junior, the sheriff, and Bob—couldn’t get together more often.…
No, no. The sheriff knew he was mixed up, had jumbled all the things up from one time to another.… Never mind.
This is going to be tricky, Junior thought. Got to keep the old man from getting too excited, because if he gets too excited he wouldn’t be able to distinguish his “yes” grunt from his “no” grunt. And he didn’t want to upset him.
“I meant to ask you,” Junior began tentatively. “I know I was a teenager at the time, but like most teenagers I didn’t pay a lot
of attention. I mean, I might have forgotten some things.…”
The sheriff knew Junior was being slightly deceitful; Junior was never a clever enough speaker to fool him. But then, Junior was his son.
“You, uh, remember any big Army camps hereabouts, back during the war?”
“Uh …”
“I didn’t think so either. Well, how about any logging camps?”
“Uh …”
“No, huh. Hmmm. Uh, tell you why I asked. I was, uh, looking through some old case files just recently. Just for old times’ sake, if you know what I mean. And I, uh, saw a note in one. ‘Check camp for poss,’ it said, assuming you meant ‘check’ when you put down a ‘C’ and a ‘K’ like that. Anyhow …”
“Uhnnn …” The sheriff was agitated. No, no! That’s not what he had meant at all, not at all! How could he make Junior understand.… He could print it out! It might take him half an hour, but if he could get Junior to give him pencil and paper, he could print it out. Of course, it would take a while.…
“So, anyhow …” Junior began. He stopped short when his father’s arm suddenly swept across the table, spilling soup and whiskey onto the floor.
Oh, goddamn it! Sheriff Hiram Stoker thought. “Uhn …” Son of a bitch, I’m sorry, Junior. No, no, goddamn it. Leave the mess alone. “Uhnnn …” No, just get a pencil and paper. Clean up later …
“That’s okay, old fella,” Junior said, mopping the mess up with paper towels. Well, enough. He just wasn’t in the mood to put up with his father’s tantrums. Not today. “Listen, I’m gonna get going. I’ll stop in again real soon.…”
“Uhn …” Goddamn it. Sometimes Junior was really thick.
Junior Stoker was sad and annoyed, doubly annoyed. He hated to see his father not quite in control of himself, which made Junior annoyed both at his father and at himself, for not having more patience.
It was a relief for Junior to find his message light flashing when he got back to his car. Anything to take his mind off the visit with his father …
“Stoker here.”
