by Lisa Howorth
She squeezed the little truck in the bag with her sweaty palm and moved its tiny dumper thing.
“I … I actually have a picture of him with it. And some of his other trucks,” she said. “I was looking at it the other day.”
Stith’s eyebrows rose. “I really need to have that photo, if you’ll send it as soon as you can.”
“Okay.” Mary Byrd handed back the bag. She wondered if they’d ever see it again, or if they wanted to.
James, at the window with his back turned, gave the hanging spider a push. “What is it that you think might have happened to the other stuff?”
“There are a number of possibilities. One is that the evidence was lost innocently enough, however ineptly, by Detective Danvers, who transferred it from the RPD to the FBI, which at that time made its labs and forensic experts available to small police departments. You know—left in a box in someone’s trunk, or in a locker and accidentally thrown away. The records here show the evidence being signed out and signed back in to the department, but they might have been altered. Fahey, the lead detective, knew the evidence for Stevie’s case was lost—or was ‘disappeared,’ as you say—but wanted to cover up that fact, therefore disallowing comparisons between Stevie’s fingernails and Zepf’s hair and blood when he assaulted Brickle. That’s why Fahey had the bandana discarded. And there’s the possibility that there was something even more … criminal going on.”
James gave the spider a harder push—a punch. Stith looked over but went on.
“Possibly one or more of the detectives involved were … encouraged in some way to lose the evidence, although we have no proof to that effect. Zepf’s father was a wealthy developer and his uncle was a county executive. Both were large contributors to the local Republican Party. Judge Fairborn was appointed by Nixon. Chuck Richards, Zepf’s ‘best friend,’ who was Zepf’s defense attorney in the Brickle trial, later received an appointment as a U.S. District Court judge, also from the Nixon administration. It’s also possible that Richards and Zepf had a sexual relationship, which of course Richards, who was married with a family, would have made every effort to conceal. Some or all of these things could account for what did, or did not, happen, including why no one in the Zepf family was ever questioned in either of the two boys’ cases, and why your family and the public were never made aware of Zepf. Why, when Stevie’s case was reopened when Zepf was a suspect in Illinois, these … injustices weren’t discovered, and why no reporters were made aware of these events, particularly Zepf’s trial for the attempted murder of Freddy, and why the prosecutor put up with being prohibited from connecting Freddy’s case to Stevie’s. It’s also true, but no excuse, that by 1987, everyone around here was … preoccupied with the Southside Strangler. There’s some stuff we’ll probably never be able to know. I, speaking personally and as a member of the department, could not be sorrier. I hope that eventually an official apology will be made to all of you, and to the public, for what’s been a tragic failure to protect this community, and other communities, from crimes like this, for what that’s worth. Although those other communities—in California and Illinois—need to face up to their own failures as well.”
“Eventually?” Nick said. “There’ll be an apology in another thirty years maybe?”
“We need a conviction first, right now,” Stith said. “And look, in no way do I want to be defending the officers involved, but I’ve got to say that at the time, in 1966, the RPD was a podunk operation. These guys didn’t have adequate training in homicides and forensic science. Most small police departments still don’t have access to proper training and facilities. This is a personal soapbox of mine. We’ve come a long way. Now there’s the Virginia Institute of Forensic Science and John Jay College’s Crime Scene Academy.”
James interrupted, “And that helps us how?”
Stith was unflustered. “Unfortunately, these crimes will not stop happening, but the more we know, the more we can prevent them.”
“Maybe even in this century,” Nick said. He cleared his throat, and Mary Byrd hoped he wouldn’t spit.
Their mother picked up her crochet bag and started fiddling in her purse for her keys. She was done. They all were.
Stith wasn’t, and preached on. “Things move too slowly because the legal system is overwhelmed. There’s a big difference between a child taken by a parent and one snatched by a predator, and there’s a difference between real predators and a nineteen-year-old kid who has sex with a sixteen-year-old girl, as Mr. D’Abruzzi pointed out, and the law needs to catch up. I say this somewhat lamely because I know that nothing can bring Stevie back. I am so, so sorry for what you’ve been through. I have children. If we can keep Zepf behind bars, and I think we can, maybe that will be some comfort to you.” Stith looked exhausted and genuinely sad.
Except for their mother rattling her keys, they sat limply while Stith briefly laid out the plan to retry Zepf. He asked them to be patient and wait a little longer, saying again that he hoped they would resist talking about it. They had his promise that he was doing everything he could to stop Zepf’s release, but if he failed, they could—should—go public with their story in any way they wished. It was their story, after all.
“One more question,” Nick said, standing to go. “Can this guy still get the death penalty?”
“It’s not likely,” Stith said. “But it’s a possibility you might want to think about.” He reached over and snapped off the recorder.
They left the room wasted and sad, their tough mother forging ahead, Stith following them. Like a beaten dog, thought Mary Byrd. He rushed ahead of her to speak to her brothers and mother. She lagged behind, struggling with her coat.
Stith waited for her to catch up. “Can I talk to you a sec?”
“Okay,” she said doubtfully. What fresh hell?
He smiled gratefully and held the door open. “I could use a smoke.”
Outside he said, “Wow! Pure, frigid oxygen!”
“Let’s ruin it. What I really need is a drink,” Mary Byrd said, taking the Marlboro and the light he offered. She sucked in the soothing smoke. “Have y’all ever thought of putting in a bar? It might help with confessions. Let a detective pose as the bartender.”
Stith looked surprised. “I’d expect you to be a little more … circumspect, at the moment.”
“What should we be doing? Ululating? Tearing out our hair and beating our breasts?”
“I’m sorry you had to come so far to do this, but your mother insisted you’d want to.”
“My mom is great at deciding how I feel,” Mary Byrd said.
Stith smiled, but said apologetically, “This had to be … grim.”
“It couldn’t have been very fun for you, either. And I’m guessing it’s going to get worse when everything is out there.”
“It’s what I was hired to do.” Stith shrugged. “There’s some satisfaction in it.”
“How do you do this stuff, day in and day out?”
“Somebody has to,” he shrugged again. “Maybe it makes me a better person, if that makes sense. Like, if you can understand—or I guess confront is a better word—the worst in people, you’re better able to appreciate the best? I admit there’s a rush when you solve a case. I’m no superhero, but I’d like to be one.” He grinned. His teeth looked perfect and white; weird for a smoker.
“I sometimes think about how … lucky we are, because at least Stevie was found the next day. I can’t imagine how the families whose children are never found get through life.”
“They hope,” he said. “Even when they know, they hope.”
“What about Tuttle? He’s been blamed all these years.”
Stith nodded. “I’m going to try to locate him and set that straight.”
No telling how Tuttle’s life had been fucked up. Mary Byrd shook her head, stepping on her cigarette butt, then picked it up and put it in her pocket. “Well, we all thank you very much, even if we seemed to be hating your guts.”
; Stith smiled. “When we no longer need the little truck, would you like to have it?
“Oh. Yes, sure.” She wasn’t at all sure.
“I just offered to send it to your mom or brothers, but they didn’t want it; they said you might because you have a little boy. And your mother said, ‘Yes, she’ll want it. She’s a terrible hoarder.’”
“Guilty,” Mary Byrd said. “I like little things.” She felt tears. “My son might like it, but he’s more into tanks and planes. But thanks. I would really like to have it. And I’ll send you that photograph of it as soon as I get home.”
“There’s something else.” Stith drew something from his pocket. “They’re yours.”
He handed her a small green book with gold edges, and an envelope.
“Oh, jeez,” she said, recognizing her ancient, pitiful diary. Embarrassed, she could only think to say, “Thank you.”
“I don’t know why they were never returned,” Stith said. “Or why they were asked for. They were never needed.”
Seeing the old envelope addressed to her in Tuttle’s boyish scrawl, she said, “I don’t think I want this.”
“It’s yours to destroy.”
“They told me … Did they ever even really think that Ned Tuttle had killed Stevie to get back at me?”
Stith looked puzzled. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“That’s what a detective told me. That’s why they took the diary.” She wondered if Stith had read it.
“Are you sure you’re remembering that right?” Stith asked. “Sometimes, when people are so traumatized …”
“I’ve been remembering it correctly for thirty years. It’s not something a girl would forget.” Eliza would kill anyone who looked at her diary.
Stith put his hands in his pockets and looked down. “I would let that go. I’m just glad you have your things back.”
He raised his head and looked her in the eye, honest and stern, like a dad. Or a shrink.
Mary Byrd made up her mind to do what he said. It was time.
They shook hands. She noticed his nice wrists. What was wrong with her? Stith said he would stay in touch until it was over. Mary Byrd ran to catch up with her family, who she knew would be fuming in the car, pissed off at her for keeping them waiting, her big, middle-age brothers crammed and doubled up in the backseat, her pipsqueak mom at the wheel, insisting on driving in spite of the gouty tophus, taking the lives she’d given them back in her bony little hands.
Twelve
Evagreen sat on her porch in the weak winter sun, smoking a Salem. They were burying Rod; she hadn’t gone. She couldn’t, although L. Q. and Ken had. She’d used the excuse that somebody had to stay back with Desia. Desia, Angie’s girl, sat on a blanket on the walk playing, having given up trying to ride the plastic Big Wheel Ken had brought her. L. Q. and Ken had cleared most of the fallen branches, but the trees dripped a little from melting ice.
Evagreen had plaited Desia’s soft hair with pink beads and a few yellow jessamine blossoms that, being so close to the house, had survived the storm. The tiny girl looked so much like her father, something that Evagreen knew would haunt them all forever. Girls look like they daddies, she’d heard somewhere, so their daddies don’t turn on them. Eliza Thornton look just like her daddy, too, thought Evagreen, so maybe that true. Maybe so.
Desia was trying to arrange some sticks, oak leaves, and an empty Salem pack to make a little house, managing a sort of hut. From a pile of old chinaberries that had blown down during the storm, she took three. “This the mama and the daddy,” she said. “My mama and daddy gone love to see this, Granmama.” She looked up at Evagreen and grinned.
Evagreen smiled back. They hadn’t told Desia yet. What you gone tell a four-year-old? she’d said to L. Q. and Ken. She just like me. All she want in this life is a nice home, a family that act right, be good to one another. They had let it drop for the time being. Evagreen hoped Desia hadn’t seen much of the ugliness between her parents. Whatever happened with Angie, she and L. Q. and Rod’s folks were going to make a happy home for Desia right here.
Ken and L. Q. had taken Evagreen to see Angie in Memphis. All Angie could do was cry, cry, cry. Evagreen hadn’t even been able to hold her; had to stay across the table in the visiting room. And she’d had to be strong; she’d told herself; wouldn’t help nobody, all of us be crying. L. Q. had prayed, and Ken had promised he would work things out the best he could. They could count on that, he’d said. The guards had led Angie away, and all she had been able to say was, “I’m sorry, Mama.” That moment, taking her good baby girl away, had hurt Evagreen more than anything. She thought it might have hurt less if Angie had died. “Hope and strength what I’m lookin’ for,” she said out loud. “That, and some a that mercy they always be talking ’bout.”
Desia looked up at her solemnly, and with a big breath, like she was blowing out candles on a birthday cake, blew at her stick-and-leaf house. “I huffed and I puffed and I blowed our house down!” she said. The sticks fell apart and the three chinaberries rolled away in different directions.
Thirteen
They were a little late to Ernest’s church, although the service hadn’t started and the musical warm-up was going on. Teever’s giant old Bruzzi Boots made a lot of noise as he clumped along, so they slipped quickly into the very back pew, which is where they wanted to be anyway: easy in, easy out. They were both a little uncomfortable being in church, but the simple space, just a cube of whitewashed beaded board ceiling and walls and a rough plank floor, was so plain and informal that they relaxed a little. A young girl dressed in a long granny gown stepped up with her little violin to play an almost-perfect “Ashokan Farewell”—an off-key note and her wide blue eyes enhancing the sweet PBS poignancy of the tune. Then an old man played a buzzy keyboard and a big lady in a bluebird-colored robe rose from the side of the altar, swaying and singing in a strong, even jazzy, voice about mercy, salvation, God’s love, and life everlasting. It was rousing and lovely, even if the lady looked more like Mary Byrd’s old Carolina-blue VW Beetle than an angel, and even if the message was the spiritual version of Corelle.
Mary Byrd was surprised to hear Teever’s gravelly voice join in softly when the whole congregation began to sing. He leaned over to say proudly, “I remember some o’ them old songs, Mudbird.” She realized that at some point long ago, Teever must have had something that resembled a normal family and home life—church, regular meals and baths, and work, and maybe even school—although he never talked about it. Not to her anyway. She wondered at what point things had gone off-road for him. He hadn’t just stepped out of a cotton field. Vietnam? Or maybe before that—the Meredith crisis? Either one was enough to make a kid go wrong. Maybe she’d ask him some stuff on the way back.
It was amazing how little the country church resembled the cold and scary Catholic church of her childhood—about as much as a square dance resembled a ballet. It wasn’t even like the Episcopalian and Presbyterian churches Charles’s family attended, either. There wasn’t a lot of mumbo-jumbo, or bowing and scraping, or fancy trappings and incense. Presbyterians were pretty plain. But they were still pretty stiff. And when did they start doing communion, for god’s sake? Here—did this little church even have a name?—the otherness felt similar to Mary Byrd; the feeling of them and me. They knew the drills and she didn’t, not unlike the Latin masses of her childhood. But in this old rickety place, where they seemed to value light and air, and even on this dreary wintry day, it wasn’t forbidding and gloomy inside. It reminded her of Evagreen’s church. She supposed that not having a lot of dark wood beams and chiseled stone and drapey crap made the difference. The stained-glass windows weren’t advertisements for wealthy church families, but each pane was simply glazed in rectangles of blue, red, or yellow. Did people need all the trappings to feel more serious about their religion? The opposite ought to be true. No distractions. She didn’t care about any of it, but the plainness of this space seemed so much more—something. Ho
lier, or homier. A holy kind of home, maybe.
The only decoration in the place, other than winter greenery—magnolia leaves and cherry laurel—was some kind of icon on the wall above the altar. She could barely make it out from so far back. The flat, expressionless face, its features crudely painted on, looked just like the Jesus face she’d seen in the spectacular cathedral at Kizhi, built all of wood without a single nail. This Jesus looked like a big rag doll that had been loin-clothed and arranged in the crucified position, although the arms of the thing were a little too straight-up—more Superman than Jesus. Or maybe the arms were supposed to be raised up to the dingy cotton-ball clouds across the top. What looked like actual bird wings stuck out from behind each shoulder, and a broken piece of chain, ends dangling, hung around its middle. Plastic greenery arched around the sides of it, and in the two bottom corners, printed large, were the Greek letters A and O. The background was either old sprigged blue fabric or patterned wallpaper bordered with large, faded gold something—rickrack?—the whole thing framed in pine with stars, or darker wooden crosses at the corners. Block-lettered on the wall beneath it were the words and god so loved the world. Really? Mary Byrd thought. What father would ever have sacrificed his child? But it was a very amazing piece, and it was sort of more amazing that some folk art picker asshole hadn’t come around and bought it or stolen it and sold it in Atlanta or New York for a zillion dollars. She pictured it in her living room or kitchen, looking wrong but very cool.
It dawned on Mary Byrd that even though the ankles of the icon were crossed, and it looked like there were spots where the stigmata ought to have been, it was not a crucifixion, but an ascension. She thought of the famous ones she’d seen at the Uffizi; one by Mantegna, maybe? It was a triptych, and one of the panels showed Jesus standing on a solid cloud as if he were on a cherry picker, his robes perfectly shaped and intact. He was holding a flag and surrounded by putti, and with his right hand he made the gesture he always made, a sort of gentle, instructional, palm-out-and-up gesture: “Hark, listen up, everybody.” In those old paintings, Jesus was natural and life-like and the scenes often so graphic that you totally got it about Jesus’s humanity and suffering. In the odd little puppety thing here, Mary Byrd was struck by how the figure sort of clobbered you in the same way, somehow transcending its toyness and commanding attention to the earthly lessons of Jesus’s life, and to the mystical and supernatural properties of Christianity itself, blah blah. Well, she thought, it was just a rag doll, scraps, and a Walmart glue gun, and she was just flashing on her William and Mary Renaissance Art lectures. Sometimes a weird rag-doll Jesus was just a weird rag-doll Jesus. But it did have a kind of sacred, mummy-in-the-mvsevm thing about it, some powerful voodoo appeal. Some redneck Giotto knew what he—or she—was doing.
