A Blind Eye

by G. M. Ford

  “There’s a store up here?” Dougherty said from the backseat.

  Rosen threw his hands in the air. “A store and a fire-house…a church, a post office…even a liquor store. All the necessities of life. The store started out back in the 1830s as Van Dynes Dry Goods,” he said. “Went through so many owners the locals gave up on the proper name and just started calling it ‘the store.’ You hear one of them saying he’s going to the store…that’s where he’s headed.”

  Corso dropped the Ford into low gear as the incline steepened. What had started as a two-lane blacktop road had, in the space of five miles, morphed into a well-worn goat track winding around the contours of the hill like a cracked asphalt bezel.

  “These days the kids are much more worldly. They’ve been going to public school for three generations. The local demographic’s gotten a lot more diverse. They don’t stick out like they used to, so most of them leave and live down in the lowlands.”

  “Where was Smithville in relation to the store?” Dougherty asked.

  “Up north in New York State.” He pointed out the passenger window. “Maybe ten miles that way, up by the Rockland County line.” Rosen shifted in the seat so he could face Dougherty. “Even by Jackson White standards, Smithville was out in the boonies,” Rosen said. “Smithville was the extreme northern end of the area. Their kids went to school in Mahwah. I’ve heard it said that the whole town was one big extended family. Maybe forty, fifty people all with the same last name. Real clannish. Everybody said they were hostile to outsiders, maybe even dangerous, so she…Justine…” He appeared confused for a moment. “Justine…”He looked around the cab. “She was…”

  “The exotic girl from high school,” Dougherty said.

  The words seemed to snap Rosen from his reverie. “Yes. I was hot for going to Smithville. Would have been like discovering a lost Amazon tribe or something. But she never would take me up there. It was like her clan and the Smithville clan had a feud or something. She told me that all her life her family had told her to keep away from those people, like there was something wrong with them or something, but that nobody would ever tell her exactly what the deal was.”

  As they crested a steep rise, the trees peeled back and the windshield suddenly filled with hazy blue sky. Instinctively both Dougherty and Rosen reached for the overhead handles as the front wheels briefly left the ground. And then they were bouncing, level again, a trio of bobbleheads staring in disbelief at the town before them in the clearing.

  At first sight, Fredrikstown appeared smaller than it was. First thing you saw were the Sunoco gas pumps, the big green and red sign reading “Ramapo Variety,” and then the post office and the liquor store and, at the far end, the firehouse and the flagpole. Wasn’t until your eye finished taking them in that you noticed the six or eight clapboard houses set back from the road, fanning out on either side of the commercial buildings. Roofs green with moss, sides streaked gray and white by weather, the houses, with their neat little fences and yards, played counterpoint to the prevailing rural squalor, thus providing an air of respectability, which the scene otherwise lacked.

  Wasn’t until Corso had gotten out of the car and had a chance to look around that he began to notice the other dwellings tucked back into the edges of the clearing. A three-sixty perusal revealed maybe a dozen houses and about half that many trailer homes wedged in among the trees. Allowing for houses he couldn’t see, Corso estimated that something like a hundred and fifty people lived in greater Fredrikstown. Nearly a third of the entire Jackson White community, if Rosen’s figures were to be believed.

  “This is amazing,” Dougherty said from the backseat. “It’s like the Waltons.” Corso snickered as he stretched.

  Rosen winced. “Make sure you don’t say anything like that to them, okay? Not only do these people not like to be thought of as quaint, but over the years, their dealings with outsiders have been something less than positive…so they tend to be a bit touchy.”

  A trio of dusty pickup trucks were angle-parked in front of the post office. Ramapo Variety occupied the center of the block. The concrete stairs had been built wide, as if offering equal entrance to any of the five or six separate roads leading into the clearing.

  They followed Rosen across the patched asphalt and into the store. Floor-to-ceiling shelves. Rolling ladders along each wall. Couple of those wooden arm extensions whose metal fingers plucked cans from overhead shelves and then dropped them down into waiting aprons. Kind of general store you only see in the movies these days. Friction tape and first aid. Butter pecan and barrel staves. Shotguns and shortbread. You name it, they had it.

  Must have been a slow day. Except for a couple in their mid-sixties, the place was empty. Gospel music seeped from a white plastic radio. Behind the counter, the man and woman were stocking the shelves. The man caught sight of them first.

  He’d lost most of his hair. Apparently the deprivation had encouraged him to maximize what he had left, as he’d grown his remaining halo of hair about a foot long. The fringe hung down to his collar like Spanish moss from a bayou tree.

  “Ilta,” he said.

  She finished fitting a can of condensed milk onto the shelf before she turned toward the sounds behind her. She looked from Corso to Dougherty to Rosen, where her eyes flickered for an instant. She was as gaunt as the old man was chubby. Long gray hair piled up on top of her head. Her hawklike nose pointed unwaveringly at Rosen.

  “I remember you,” she said. “You’re the one was doggin’ after that girl from up by Hewlitt.” When Rosen didn’t deny it, she searched her memory banks. “Come back after that too, several times as I recall,” she said. “Studyin’ us.”

  “He the one writes about us?” the old man asked.

  “That’s the one,” she said.

  “Randy Rosen.” He offered a hand to the old man, who turned away. Rosen swallowed once and made introductions. Ilta and Hiram Woolfe.

  “What you up here for?” the old man asked. “You gonna study us like bugs again? That what you’re doing here?”

  “No, sir, I’m not,” Rosen said affably.

  “What you want, then?” the old guy demanded.

  “Trying to get a little information about a Smithville girl,” Rosen said.

  The answer seemed to relax them both. “It’s gone,” Ilta Woolfe said. “Been gone for thirty years or so. Nothing to tell.”

  “One day it was there. Next it was gone,” the old man said. When he turned their way, his black eyes were defiant. “They was good people. Minded their own damn business. Didn’t talk about nothin’ wasn’t their own damn business.”

  Rosen seemed momentarily flustered. Corso jumped in. “So how did this closemouthed little community go from something to nothing virtually overnight?” he wanted to know.

  “Kinda started with the Parker fella,” the woman said. “As I recall, that was pretty much the beginning of the end for Smithville.”

  Rosen turned to Corso and Dougherty. “You remember Richard Leon Parker?” he asked. Dougherty shook her head. Corso nodded.

  “The serial murderer.”

  “Killed a bunch of girls from this area,” Ilta Woolfe said. “All up and down the northern part of the state. Took a girl from Smithville. Velma de Groot was her name. Poor unfortunate thing, she was.” She swirled a finger at the side of her head. “Not all there, if you know what I mean. That Parker fella snatched her right offa the bus stop…so a lot of her kin blamed the government for what happened to her. Stopped sending their kids down to school.”

  Corso remembered the name well. Richard Leon Parker had been the primary suspect in a series of grisly rapes and murders. Schoolgirls. Nearly thirty, as Corso recalled. Hung himself in his jail cell before they ever got him to trial, either in shame, so nobody could be sure about what he had and hadn’t done, or as a final act of cruelty, leaving the victims’ loved ones without even the cold comfort of closure.

  “Never woulda happened if’n the state had left us
the hell alone,” her husband added. “We was doin’ just fine without them and their damn laws and their damn schools.”

  His wife rolled her eyes. “Soon as they stopped sending their young ones, the social workers arrived, and then they brought in the cops—”

  “Same cops shoulda been lookin’ for whoever killed the poor little de Groot girl. That’s what they shoulda been doin’ instead of pokin’ their noses into what wasn’t none of their damn business anyway.”

  Rosen wagged a finger at the couple. “That’s right,” he said. “Her name was de Groot. That was the big name in Smithville…de Groot.”

  “That was the only damn name in Smithville,” the old man spat.

  Rosen furrowed his brow. “When was that?” he asked.

  Ilta Woolfe stuck out her lower lip and thought about it. “’Sixty-eight, ’69, someplace in there somewhere.”

  “The old woman’s right,” the man said. “I remember ’cause that’s just about the time some of them lowland hippies decided they was gonna join us up here in the hills.” His mouth broke into a grin. “Found out damn quick,” he cackled. “Found out they was better off back where they came from.” He slapped his rounded side. “They surely did.”

  “And there’s nothing left up there at all?” Rosen asked.

  They both shook their heads. “Piles of trash,” she said. “Old broke-down fences.”

  “That’n dead de Groots,” the old man said with a twisted smile.

  “Graveyard’s about all that’s left. It was a shame,” his wife agreed.

  “It was a damn mess is what it was,” said the old man. “Buncha people not doin’ nothin’ but mindin’ their own business, when all of a sudden they got cops all over the place tellin’ them what they gotta do, and the next thing you know they’s people going off to jail and the whole damn town is just gone.” He swept his arm in a circle. “Nowadays you can’t hardly find a de Groot nowhere in the Ramapo hills. Used to be one of the names you heard most, and now, ’cept for old Rodney, you can’t find hardly a one anywhere around here.”

  His wife took the lead. “You want to know about Smithville, you go see Rodney de Groot. He’s about the last of them I know. Lives up next to Sterling Lake now. Right there on the south shore. If anybody’s gonna know anything about what happened in Smithville back then, he’d be the one. He was there when the whole thing come undone. He’s the one to know.”

  “You sure he’s still up there?” Rosen asked.

  The old man scoffed. “’Course he’s still up there. Where the hell else would he be?” He cackled again and went back to stocking the shelves.

  “He was in a couple of weeks back,” the old woman said. “Cashed his check and bought a twenty-pound bag of rice. He’s up there all right.”

  “Could you maybe draw us a map?” Rosen asked.

  She jabbed a thumb toward the old man. “Hiram will help you out. I’m no good at directions. Been here all my life and I got no more direction sense than a lowlander.”

  Hiram didn’t much like being volunteered but, after a bit of grumbling, led Rosen all the way across the store to a black-and-white Bureau of Land Management map that was tacked on the far wall. He pointed with a bony finger. “Now pay attention here, damn it,” he said, “ ’cause I’m only gonna show you this once.”

  The old woman had turned back to her work. Dougherty stepped in close.

  “You remember that girl Mr. Rosen was chasing?” she asked the woman’s back. The only sign that the woman had heard was that her hands stopped moving. She shot a quick glance across the room, where her husband was running a finger along the map while Rosen scribbled notes. She looked back over her shoulder. “Maybe I do.” She said it as if the mere acknowledgment of a person’s existence violated some unwritten mountain code.

  “You know where to find her?” Dougherty asked.

  The old woman’s eyes moved across the room and back twice and then stopped on Dougherty. “He still carrying that torch, is he? After all these years?”

  “I believe so.”

  She stared up into Dougherty’s eyes for a long moment. “Women can tell that kind of thing, now can’t they?” she said.

  Dougherty agreed. Across the room, Rosen was pocketing his notebook and trying to thank the old man, who was having none of it. “Don’t be blaming me you get lost out there.” Hiram chopped the air with the edge of his hand. “Folks come up from down below…next thing you know…”

  The old woman beckoned for Dougherty to bend over, then whispered in her ear.

  “She died back in ’88. Cervical cancer.” She flicked her eyes toward the returning Rosen. “You gonna tell him?” she asked.

  Dougherty shook her head. “Not me,” she said.

  18

  Rodney de Groot’s house sat on an unpaved road that ran along the southern edge of Sterling Lake, a mile-long ribbon of oily black water that had begun to see recent gentrification along its northern shore but that at Rodney’s end remained firmly mired in the early nineteenth century. Although the property extended to the waterline, a thick stand of cedars shielded the house from the lake, as if any desire Rodney de Groot may have had for a lake view had been summarily sacrificed for the sake of privacy.

  The cabin itself was two stories high. The exterior was covered with tar paper, which, in places, had peeled away, revealing the house’s original white cedar shingles. The overgrown yard was decorated with seven cars. One up on blocks. Two on their sides. The newest, which looked like it probably ran, was a piebald twenty-year-old Chevy Impala parked over by the front door. Apparently Rodney saw fit to keep his collection of personal memorabilia nestled outside among the autos, as a couple of old refrigerators, a hand-wringer washing machine, a vacuum cleaner, and what appeared to be the remains of a pinball machine lay scattered about the grass. Despite the sensory overload, what caught Corso’s eye was the central incongruity: the red hand pump standing on a small wooden platform in the yard and the satellite dish atop the ten-foot steel pole right there next to it.

  Corso braked the Ford to a halt behind a restored red and black Studebaker pickup. Through the oval rear window, he could see a high-powered rifle with a scope, hanging from a gun rack. Corso got out, looked over at the pump again, and smirked.

  To the left of the front door, a thick plank spanned a pair of five-gallon cans. A man with long tangled hair sat on the plank hand-rolling a cigarette.

  Rosen did not approach. Instead he cupped a hand around his mouth.

  “You Rodney de Groot?” he shouted.

  The man on the porch gave a nearly imperceptible shake of his head and then looked down at the partially rolled smoke in his hand.

  “Hey,” Rosen tried again. The guy brought the smoke to his mouth and licked the paper. His body language said the head shake was all they were going to get.

  A white-haired African-American man appeared in the doorway. He was muscular and well built and moved with an economy of motion belying his advanced years. He wore a faded red T-shirt that had long ago had its pocket torn free and a pair of grimy white boxer shorts. When he spoke, the warm air in his lungs became a thick white plume in the cold air. “Don’t just stand out there shoutin’,” he hollered. “Come the hell in.” With that pronouncement, he turned and quickly disappeared inside. The wispy trails of his floating breath were all that remained.

  Single file, they picked their way along an uneven bark path to the front steps. The man on the porch didn’t move a muscle until Rosen stepped up onto the porch. His head seemed abnormally small for his body. He had a thin, pointed face and bright blue eyes. From close range, he was younger than he’d appeared from the car. He wore a visored leather cap that had become dark with age. His shirt was coarse-woven and had eyelets down the front through which he had woven a leather thong. Below the waist he wore canvas trousers and a battered pair of Red Wing work boots.

  As the trio stepped up onto the porch, he turned his undersized head away, refusing to acknowle
dge their presence. “Nice day,” Corso ventured on his way past. The man looked up, pinning Corso with a pair of defiant eyes. “If you say so.” His mustache and fingers were stained yellow by nicotine. In a much practiced move, he flipped the cigarette in the air, caught it in the corner of his mouth, and simultaneously used his thumb to fire a kitchen match and light it. Pleased with his little trick, he took a big pull, expelling the smoke through his nose. Still holding Corso’s gaze, he spat a thick brown stream onto the ground and then, with a narrow smile, turned his back to the doorway. Corso followed the others inside. He reached to close the door.

  “Leave it open,” Rodney de Groot called. “I favor the air.”

  The cabin was L-shaped. Straight ahead was the kitchen, where Rodney sat at a yellow linoleum table chomping a pork chop, fried potatoes, and white bread. At the center of the space was a huge coal stove, from whose stout black body shimmers of heat radiated in all directions. The room to the right was lined with threadbare but comfortable-looking couches and chairs of all sorts. At the far end, a thirty-six-inch Toshiba flat-screen TV squatted in the corner like a shiny silver elephant. CNN. Close-captioned. Yasir Arafat making a speech.

  De Groot asked each of them in turn if he could cook them a pork chop. Said they could have as much bread as they wanted, but seemed a little relieved when nobody took him up on it. “Don’t believe in eatin’ till I’m hungry,” Rodney declared. “Hope you don’t mind if I finish up here.” He shoveled another forkful of potatoes into his mouth and then swallowed and made a circular gesture with the fork. “Find yourselves a seat,” he said. “Don’t get many visitors. Especially not people lookin’ for me. Get some lost lowlanders…maybe some of those new folk from up-lake…but nobody lookin’ for Rodney de Groot.”

  As bidden, Corso, Rosen, and Dougherty found themselves a place to sit. For the next five minutes they watched in silence as Rodney methodically made his way through his meal. On two occasions he stopped eating long enough to refill his glass from the gallon jug of water on the table and then went back to his repast. When the plate was empty, he pushed it away and leaned back in his chair until the front legs came off the floor. “Well,” he said, lacing his fingers over his middle, “you folks came a long way off the beaten path. What can I help you with?”