The Case Against Owen Williams

by Allan Donaldson

  “It was sort of a little clearing we went to,” Williams said, “and there was a place in one corner where there was some tall grass. She got me to take my tunic off, and she sat on that so she wouldn’t get stains on her dress, and I just sat on the grass. After a while we stretched out.”

  “Did you talk? What did she say?”

  “She said she liked me, and she asked me if I liked her. I said that I did.”

  “And did you?”

  “Yes, I guess so.”

  “Why? Why did you like her?”

  “I don’t know. She was sort of fun to be with.”

  “Okay,” Dorkin said, “so what else did you talk about?”

  “I remember she asked me what I was going to do after I got out of the army, and I said that I would probably go back to Fredericton and get another job like the one I had. And she said she’d never been as far as Fredericton. And she said she’d like to go away and live somewhere bigger. She said she didn’t like Wakefield.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “So then?”

  “She kissed me.”

  “And?”

  “She let me touch her, like I told you before. Then she asked me if I wanted her to take her pants off, and I said yes.”

  “And she did?’

  “Yes.”

  Williams shifted in his chair and looked out the window.

  “Tell me the rest,” Dorkin said. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got to know everything that happened.”

  “Well, you know…”

  “You touched her.”

  “Yes. After a few minutes, she asked me if I wanted to go all the way. And I said yes. I’d bought that tin of Sheiks from one of the other guys. We’d got a lot of lectures about vd and about getting girls pregnant, and I wanted to be careful. But when she saw what I was doing, she said she didn’t like those things. And I said I didn’t want to get her into any trouble. And she said that couldn’t happen because it was the wrong time of the month. She said girls can only get pregnant at certain times in the month between their periods and that this was a safe time. I was scared of vd as well, but I didn’t want to say that, so I just said I still wanted to be sure nothing happened. We argued for a little while, and then she said all right, I could go ahead and use it. But I think she was sort of mad at me. I had one of the Sheiks in my billfold, and I got it out, but it was dark, and I couldn’t see very well, and I had trouble getting it on.”

  He stopped, blushing furiously, still not looking at Dorkin.

  “So?” Dorkin said.

  There was a long pause.

  “Tell me,” Dorkin said. “I’ve got to know.”

  “Well, before I could get it on, it happened. You know?”

  “Yes,” Dorkin said. “Don’t worry about it. You’re not the first.”

  Jesus Christ! he thought, relaxing for the first time since Williams began. All of this had come about because of nothing more than that.

  “So then?” he asked.

  “She didn’t realize what had happened at first, and I had to tell her. Then she did get mad. She got up and put her pants on and left.”

  “She put her pants back on?” Dorkin said. “You’re sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “You didn’t walk her out to the road?”

  “No.”

  “Did you see which way she went?”

  “Yes, she went out towards the Hannigan Road. When I got my tunic back on, I went the same way.”

  “How long did that take?”

  “I don’t know. A minute or two. I didn’t realize she was leaving. I thought she might just have gone a little ways.”

  “So when you got out to the Hannigan Road, did you see her again?”

  “No.”

  “Have you any idea where she went?”

  “I don’t know. She could have been walking up the Hannigan Road. It was dark, and I couldn’t see very far.”

  “Did you look?”

  “Yes, but not very hard because I knew by then that she didn’t want me to walk her home. I thought of going back to the dance, but I didn’t feel like it, so I went down the Bangor Road and stopped at the canteen.”

  “You never stood with her anywhere on the Hannigan Road?”

  “No, I never saw her again after she left.”

  It sounded like the truth.

  “Did you see anyone else on the Hannigan Road?” Dorkin asked.

  “No. But it was pretty dark.”

  “Why do you think she didn’t want you to use the safe?”

  “She said she didn’t like them,” Williams said.

  “Maybe,” Dorkin said. “But she was also in need of a husband.”

  Williams had to think before taking it in.

  “Why didn’t she get whoever got her pregnant to marry her?” he said.

  “That’s the interesting question,” Dorkin said. “That’s what I’d like to find out.”

  Dorkin parked on Broad Street near the pine tree under which Clemens had testified that he had seen Sarah and the soldier. He got out of his car, crossed the Hannigan Road, and walked down to the entrance to Birch Road. What he wanted first was to find the clearing on the upper side of the road where Williams had said that he and Sarah had made abortive love. A hundred yards in, he came to a track running off up into the woods to his right that looked as if it might once have been a woods road but was now partly overgrown. A hundred yards beyond that, just where Birch Road was itself beginning to deteriorate into a mere track, he came to a clearing that fitted Williams’s description—a ragged semicircle of tall grass and devil’s paint brushes, sundrenched now but at night no doubt private enough for quickies for dancers with nowhere more comfortable to go. Dorkin wondered if Sarah had used it with others before Williams.

  At the back of the clearing, not visible from the road, he found a path, hardly more than an accidental pattern in the trees. Curious, he followed it in, and when he came to a fork, he bore right in the general direction of the Hannigan Road and at a second fork bore right again, realizing that what seemed from the road a uniform and impenetrable mass of trees had in fact a network of tracks and paths as intricate as the network of streets and alleys in some old, unplanned city. After a few minutes, he came to a wider track that he realized must be the overgrown woods road he had noticed earlier.

  He deliberated and then decided to follow it to see where it came out. As the track meandered among the trees, he began to lose his sense of direction and was thinking of retracing his steps when he heard quite close off to his right the sound of a car on what he realized must be the Hannigan Road.

  He emerged onto it a quarter of a mile above the entrance to Birch Road and well beyond Broad Street and the churchyard. Just at the end, the track widened out, and there was an old cedar culvert over the ditch where a car might easily pull off and park. It struck Dorkin that after leaving Williams, Sarah, knowing the woods as she evidently did, might well have taken this shortcut along the hypotenuse of the triangle rather than walk all the way out to the Hannigan Road and then up. If that were the case, she would never have passed the corner of Broad Street where Clemens had testified that he had seen her. It struck Dorkin also that it may have been along this track that her murderer, knowing these woods also and having waited his chance, intercepted her.

  To be sure that he had not confused one track with another, Dorkin followed the track back and came out where he expected to on Birch Road. He walked back out onto the Hannigan Road and up to the churchyard. He circled the desolate, boarded-up church, threading his way among the tombstones that stood up to their waist in the long grass, reading here and there an inscription, the testimonials of long-dead love: beloved wife, beloved husband, our dearest daughter, our precious flower, whom God gave us for 2 years, l0 months, and 3 days.

  At the back of the churchyard, Dorkin cruised the decaying cedar-rail fence, looking for any kind of path on the other side that might lead d
own through the bushes into the gravel pit. He had not been mistaken. There were no paths, only a few places where it would be possible to push down through the bushes. There was no doubt in his mind now that Sarah, alive or already dead, had been taken down into the pit that night or a night or two later by the road in a car or truck.

  He climbed over the fence at the side of the churchyard and walked along Broad Street and down the road into the gravel pit. For a few minutes, he stood looking at the grassy depression in which she had been found. Then he went back to his car.

  Just south of where the Bangor Road entered town, there was one of those areas to which, as a town grows, there drift all those things that nobody wants around, together with some of the people whom nobody wants around either. As he bounced along the potholed gravel road, Dorkin noticed an asphalt plant belching smoke and hot dust, a small iron works with a lot of rusting machinery standing around in the yard, a field of cars in various states of demolition, a pen full of cattle. Among these and off on little mud sideroads, there were clutches of jerry-built shanties with weedy dooryards full of woodpiles and flapping laundry and dirty-faced kids.

  At the edge of the flat ground at the foot of a steep, wooded hill, the road made a loop back on itself, and just off the loop down a mud road flanked by ditches full of burdocks and chokecherries, Dorkin found what he was looking for. The crude, hand-painted sign on the board fence said L.R. ROSEN. Hides Bought and Sold. Bottles. Scrap Metal. Fox Feed. General Trucking.

  He drove through the open gate and parked in the big yard inside. In the middle stood a great, weathered, two-storey frame shed that had started to lean to one side and was held from flattening itself out across the yard by three triangles of eight-inch timber like flying buttresses. Behind it was a scattering of smaller sheds, and just inside the gate a little shack with a tin smokestack that looked like an office. Louie’s truck was backed up to the door of the big shed in the centre of the yard.

  Inside, Dorkin found Louie, squat, bow-legged, black-armed, as solid as a bear, standing on one side of a pile of hides. A tall, young Indian was standing on the other, and they were turning the hides over onto a second pile. The Indian fixed Dorkin with his unflickering black eyes, and Louie turned.

  “Well, well,” he said. “To what do I owe such an honour as this?”

  “No honour, Louie,” Dorkin said. “I wonder if I could talk with you for a few minutes.”

  Louie considered, while the Indian continued to watch, immobile. “This here’s Cat Polchis,” Louie said. “He works for me.”

  “How do you do,” Dorkin said.

  The Indian nodded. He seemed so much the inscrutable Indian that Dorkin wondered if he were playing at it.

  “Okay,” Louie said. “Let’s go over to the office. But I ain’t got much time.”

  “Toady!” he shouted, and a fat teenage boy emerged from somewhere out of the shadows at the back of the building. “Help Cat go through that stuff.”

  “I’m gonna fire that useless son of a bitch the end of the week,” Louie said when they were out in the yard. “Cat don’t like him, and he ain’t worth a shit. But it’s hard to get anybody these days. Fuckin’ war’s fucked up everything.”

  “Where did you get the Indian?” Dorkin asked. “Out of a movie?”

  “Cat? No. He’s from down the river. His father and mother got killed in a car just before the war, and he went to live with an uncle. But the uncle drank and treated him bad, so Cat left. He was kickin’ around, and I hired him. He lives out back and looks after the place when I’m not around. He pitches for the local baseball team, what’s left of it.”

  The office shack was a single room with an old oak desk, three armchairs, all different, and a pot-bellied stove with a teakettle on top. The walls were decorated with an assortment of calendars, some with woods scenes, some with coy pin-up girls in shorts. The desk was scattered with old magazines and newspapers. There was no sign of bookkeeping.

  Louie sat down behind the desk and lit a cigarette.

  “So?” he said.

  “You told me the other day that you know everybody around here,” Dorkin said. “Tell me what you know about Dan Coile.”

  Louie raised his eyebrows and studied him through the cigarette smoke.

  “Why should I want to do that?” he asked. “I mean is it the law that I have to?”

  “No,” Dorkin said. “I’m not a cop. There isn’t any law.”

  “Then why should I stick my neck out?”

  “As a favour, Louie.”

  “I don’t owe you any favours. And I can’t see that I’m ever likely to.”

  “Look, Louie, I’m only after what’s public knowledge, the kind of things everyone in a place like this is going to know. I can probably get it from other people, but it will take a lot more time, and I haven’t got a lot of time.”

  Louie sighed and coughed and looked out the window.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “What do you want to know?”

  “Well, for a start, tell me about Dan Coile. Where does he come from?”

  “He don’t come from nowhere. That farm belonged to his father, and he got it when the old man died. Long time ago. Twenty years ago or more. He had some brothers, but they went away and never come back. But there’s still lots of other Coiles around here. Cousins and stuff.”

  “It doesn’t look like much of a farm.”

  “It ain’t. They grow their own vegetables and sell a few. And he raises a few beef cows and some pigs to get cash. He don’t work no more than he has to.”

  “And the wife?”

  “She’s a Fowler from out at Sherburn. About five miles further out near the border. I heard he knocked her up, and that’s why they got married. They were both pretty wild when they were younger. But she got religion, and now she don’t drink or smoke—nor nothin’ else neither maybe.”

  “Does Coile drink?”

  “Off and on. He’s supposed to have got religion too, but I don’t think it means much. He may be just goin’ along with his wife to keep the peace.”

  “What’s he like when he’s drunk?”

  “Mean. I hear he used to knock the wife around, but I don’t know whether he still does now that she’s become a saint.”

  “What was he like with the kids? Did he knock them around too?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised. But I never heard nothin’ particular.”

  “How many kids are there?”

  “There’s a brother in the army. And there’s a girl a bit older than Sarah was. Named Sheila. And a younger one. And another boy.”

  “Are the other two girls still home?”

  “The young one is. The other one’s livin’ with an aunt out at Sherburn.”

  “Do you know why she moved out?” Dorkin asked.

  “No, I don’t think I ever heard,” Louie said.

  “Did you ever hear anything about Dan Coile messing around with her—or with Sarah?”

  “I’m not sure I’m understandin’ what you’re askin’.”

  “It’s called incest. Getting into bed—or the hay or whatever— with your own daughter.”

  Louie raised his eyebrows.

  “It goes on, Louie,” Dorkin said.

  “I know. I know,” Louie said. “Some people even do it with cows. ‘Once I was happy but look at me now, in the Dorchester pen for fuckin’ a cow.’”

  “I don’t care about the cows,” Dorkin said. “I’m wondering if you’ve heard anything about Coile and his daughters.”

  “No, I haven’t. But that’s not the kind of stuff that gets talked around too much, is it?”

  “Probably not. You can end up in jail for it if anybody wants to take the trouble. But sometimes it gets around all the same. You’ve never heard anything like that?”

  “No,” Louie said. “Nothin’ like that.”

  “Have you ever been around their place?”

  “Some. I bought some hides from him a few times. You think he’s the o
ne who knocked the girl up?”

  “It’s possible. It helps to explain a lot of strange things.”

  “And you think maybe Coile killed her to keep her quiet?”

  “It’s crossed my mind. But don’t talk that around.”

  “Don’t worry,” Louie said. “I don’t intend to.”

  “I’d be interested in talking to the older girl and the aunt,”

  Dorkin said. “Do you know where they are exactly?”

  “Sure. They’re out in Sherburn, where the Fowlers come from. The aunt’s married name is MacMillan. Fern MacMillan. But I think you better be careful. This is rough stuff you’re talkin’, kid. You better understand that there are people that fancy uniform ain’t going to protect you against even in broad daylight, let alone after dark.”

  “Like Dan Coile?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe just somebody who wants your boy hanged and don’t like you messin’ around with stuff they think ain’t your business. Maybe just somebody who don’t like Yids.”

  “Are there lots of those around here?”

  “Enough,” Louie said. “There’s always a few of them around everywhere. Especially if you stir them up by actin’ as if you were a real, honest-to-god, Anglo-Saxon human being.”

  “These ones are mostly Irish and Scottish.”

  “Whatever.”

  “So tell me about Aunt Fern,” Dorkin said. “Has she got religion too?”

  “Not that I know of, not that kind anyways,” Louie said. “A spitfire. Them Fowler girls out there are hot stuff, if you know what I mean.”

  “And Mr. MacMillan?”

  “He farms. And works in the woods. And traps a little too.”

  “Kids?”

  “No, no kids.”

  “You don’t think it would be smart for me to go out there?”

  “I don’t think it’s smart for you to even be here,” Louie said. “I don’t think any of it’s smart.”

  “Okay,” Dorkin said. “I’ll think about it. But draw me a little map anyway in case I decide not to take your advice.”

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  “Turn right,” Dorkin said, and Smith stopped, looked both ways along the deserted road, cornered carefully, and started slowly down a long slope.