A Quiet Belief in Angels (48 page)

“Sheriff Dearing?” I said, anxious to change the subject. I would think of Reilly later, perhaps visit his grave, and only then would I let myself express what I felt.

“Haynes Dearing?” Stroud asked. “And why would you be so interested in Haynes Dearing?”

“He was my conscience,” I said. “He was the sheriff when I was a kid, for all the time before I left. I came back here in 1950 when my mother died and I heard that he’d left.”

“Hell, Mr. Vaughan, that’s a story all its own. Yes, he left. That was many, many years ago. You heard about his wife, right?”

“She committed suicide, I believe.”

“She sure did. That would’ve been back around 1950 or thereabouts. When did you come back?”

“October of ’50. I came back for my mother’s funeral.”

“Right, right. So she would have committed suicide in maybe January or February, and Haynes, he upped and left in March right after. Transferred to Valdosta for a few years, maybe until 1954 or ’55, and then he retired from the police department. Don’t know where he went from there.” Stroud paused and looked at me. “Out of school, you know, but I heard word there was a drinking problem. That, and the fact that he seemed to be unable to work on anything else—” Stroud stopped mid-sentence. “This is not something I should be discussing really, Mr. Vaughan, you know. This is police business.”

I leaned back in the chair. I glanced away toward the window. “I found one of those girls,” I said. “Those murders. All those years ago. I found one of those girls, Sheriff.”

Stroud nodded. “I read your book, Mr. Vaughan.”

“And then I went to prison for thirteen years for a murder I didn’t commit. I’ve lost most of my life, Sheriff, really, the very best part of my life has gone, and now I’m back trying to understand something of what happened, and why I had to be involved. You have any idea how that must feel?”

Stroud shook his head. “No, Mr. Vaughan, I don’t.”

“I suppose I came back here looking for something that would help me make sense of all of this. Here is where I grew up, and I figure most of the people that grew up with me have left or died, or they’ve changed so much I’d never recognize them. Haynes Dearing was a part of that, a very important part. He knew my parents, and after my father died he was very good to us. He used to visit with my mother, even after the Kruger fire, even after the death of Elena, the Krugers’ little girl . . .”

“What is it that you want from me, Mr. Vaughan?”

I shook my head, “I don’t know, Sheriff. I suppose I hoped there’d be something that would help me understand what happened after I left. I went to New York. I met a girl there. She was murdered too, Sheriff, murdered just like the little girls in Augusta Falls, and—”

“And you think that it was the same man, right?”

I looked up at Stroud, surprised that he had stated the obvious so clearly.

“You figure that whoever did these killings in Augusta Falls also killed your girl in New York? I mean, that’s certainly the impression you get from reading your book. That’s what folks around here have got to believing as well, and I’d say that Haynes Dearing was perhaps the one who believed that the most.”

I frowned.

“You repeat any of this and I’ll get my hide stripped and salted, Mr. Vaughan, you get me?”

I nodded. “Not a word Sheriff, not a word.”

Stroud rose from his desk and walked to the back of the room. He opened a file drawer, reached into the back, and withdrew a slim manila folder. “When Dearing retired, when he moved away from Valdosta to wherever he ended up, they sent me some files, paperwork that related to the Augusta Falls killings. This one here had some things in it. Well, you take a look and see if it makes any sense to you.”

Stroud handed me the file. It weighed almost nothing, and when I opened it a collection of newspaper clippings spilled sideways to the floor. I gathered them up quickly, shifted my chair forward and laid them out on the edge of Stroud’s desk. They were all there. It could have been the exact same collection of clippings that now sat in the bottom of my bag at the crescent-shaped motel. I leafed through them, read their names, looked at their faces: Alice Ruth Van Horne, Ellen May Levine, Rebecca Leonard, Mary Tait . . . I turned them over one by one, and then my breath stopped. It was another clipping entirely, a clipping from a New York newspaper.

GIRL, 21, BRUTALLY MURDERED IN BROOKLYN

I looked away. I could not read the article, could not bear to see Bridget’s name in the same typeface as all the others.

I looked up at Stroud. He was peering over the desk at the sections of newspaper. “There’s more,” he said quietly.

I opened the file once again, and there were other clippings that had not fallen to the floor.

I took them out one by one.

Alabama, the
Union Springs Courier
, October 11, 1950:
GIRL, 10, KIDNAPPED, FOUND DEAD
.

Once again in Alabama, a town called Heflin on February 3, 1951:
CHILD MURDERED, POLICE BAFFLED.

From Pulaski, Tennessee on August 16, 1952:
LOCAL GIRL FOUND DEAD.

The last one was from Calhoun, right back here in Georgia, on January 10, 1954:
MISSING GIRL DISCOVERED DEAD.

“You see where he was going?” Stroud asked.

I looked up at Stroud.

“Shee-it, Mr. Vaughan, you’re damned near white as a bedsheet.”

“It carried on,” I said, barely able to find my words. Heart stopped in my chest, a feeling of claustrophobia, a tension that held me rigid in the chair.

“Certainly appears that Sheriff Dearing was of that opinion,” Stroud said.

“And he was still looking for him. After all these years Dearing knew he was still out there and he was trying to find him, wasn’t he?”

Stroud said nothing until the silence became tangible. Finally he spoke, “You were here when the Kruger guy hanged himself, right?”

I nodded. “Back in February of ’49. I left for Brooklyn a couple of months later.”

“You heard rumors?”

“About what? About Gunther Kruger?”

Stroud nodded. “That he wasn’t responsible for those murders . . .”

I shook my head. “Gunther Kruger is dead, Sheriff, and there’s nothing we can do to change that. I don’t know whether Haynes Dearing had anything to do with Gunther Kruger’s death, at least not directly—”

“But there were rumors, Mr. Vaughan.”

“Rumors are rumors, Sheriff Stroud. I came down here looking for some kind of understanding that was reliable.”

Stroud shook his head. “That I can’t help you with. You’re talking about things that happened the better part of twenty and thirty years ago. There aren’t that many people left here that you’d remember. People moved on, went different places as they do. Other folks died, like Reilly Hawkins, Frank Turow. Even Gene Fricker . . . never met a man I considered healthier . . . he was hit by a car in Camden County. Killed him outright. His son’s still here but he has a family all his own. Minds his business, you know? Don’t know that I can necessarily speak for all of them, but it seems to be that they wouldn’t want to go dredging up the past.”

“I’m not here to upset people, Sheriff.”

Stroud smiled, but there was a suspicious undercurrent in his tone when he asked, “So why exactly
are
you here, Mr. Vaughan?”

I thought for a moment of what to tell him. “I don’t know, Sheriff. I suppose I don’t have a single understandable reason for being here.”

“These are simple people, Mr. Vaughan. This town went through a terrible thing, but that was a lot of years ago. People have chosen to forget what took place, and though I can sympathize with your situation I cannot encourage you to go stirring things up that have no relevance to Augusta Falls as it is now. I can’t stop you being here, and I have no wish to, but I can ask you to be discreet, to see whoever you came here to see, and then to move on.”

I gathered the newspaper clippings together and returned them to the file. I handed the file back to Stroud and rose to my feet. “You have any idea where I’d start looking for Haynes Dearing?” I asked.

Stroud rose also, and I sensed in him a feeling of relief that I was leaving. “Haynes Dearing? Christ, I wouldn’t know where to start. Last place I heard of him was Valdosta, like I said. You could speak to the Sheriff’s Department people out there and see if they know what happened to him. I wouldn’t even know if he was still alive, Mr. Vaughan.”

I extended my hand, thanked Sheriff Stroud for his help, and turned to leave. It was as I did so that I noticed a slip of paper beneath the chair where I’d sat. I leaned down to retrieve it, and turned it over. There, printed in Haynes Dearing’s unmistakable script, was a single question:
Where did the boy go after Jesup?

I held it out to Stroud. “You know what this means?” I asked.

Stroud took the slip of paper, read the question, shook his head.

“Wouldn’t have a clue, Mr. Vaughan.” He put it in the file along with the newspaper clippings. “Didn’t the Kruger family end up in Jesup?”

I didn’t reply. An image came to me. Gunther Kruger standing on the road that night, his long coat, the ominous sense of fear that had assaulted me when I saw him. And then he’d turned and hurried back to the house. Could I have been mistaken? Had it not been Gunther Kruger at all?

“I think so,” I said brusquely. “I think they did, yes.” I wished Sheriff Stroud goodbye and left his office. I hurried back to the motel and into my room. I sat on the edge of the bed. I took a piece of paper and wrote down the names of the towns from Stroud’s file. Union Springs, Heflin, Pulaski and Calhoun. My mind was spinning. Everything I’d considered was suddenly upside down and back to front. Had it not been Gunther Kruger at all? Had it been someone else wearing Gunther’s coat? And why had my mother been so convinced that the child killer was in the house that night she set the fire?

I stayed motionless for some time. I could hardly breathe. I lay down and tried to close my eyes but image after image invaded my mind and made me nauseous. Eventually I crossed the narrow room and opened the door. I stood there taking deep breaths, trying my best to remain grounded. But the ground was unstable, and I had to step back and sit down again. I held onto the edge of the bed as the walls buckled and swayed awkwardly.

An hour passed, perhaps more. I opened my eyes and realized that I’d lain back on the mattress and fallen asleep. The motel cabin door was still half open, and I stood up and closed it. I sluiced my face in the cupboard-sized bathroom, and dried my hands on a towel that was mottled gray and worn through in places.

I wanted to leave Augusta Falls. Everything that I’d imagined was here was now gone. It was not the buildings, it was not roads or landmarks, it was the spirit of the place. Perhaps because I was no longer a child, and thus I did not see these things the way I once had.

A little later I took the newspaper clippings from my bag and put them in my jacket pocket. I locked the motel cabin door, walked past the reception office toward the center of town. There was a laundromat on the corner, and here I asked a woman if she knew the Fricker house.

“Maurice Fricker? Sure I know where he lives. Out of here, turn right, on past the Sheriff’s Office to the end of the street. At the crossroads take a left, and down there about a quarter mile there’s a house on your left. You can’t miss it. It’s got blue window frames, and in the front yard there’s a mailbox with a weather vane on top.”

I thanked the woman and left. Following her directions, I stood before the Fricker house within a matter of minutes. There was a mailbox with a weather vane on top, and sitting on the porch steps was a girl that couldn’t have been more than eight or nine years old with her hair tied back with barrettes. She used her hand to shield her eyes from the sun.

“Your daddy home?” I called out.

The girl squinted at me, and then suddenly she turned, ran up the steps and banged her way through the screen door.

Moments later the inner door swung open, and through the mesh of the screen I could see someone standing there. “You got business here?” he shouted, and immediately, without a doubt, I recognized Maurice Fricker’s voice.

“Maurice?” I called back. “Is that you, Maurice?”

The man hesitated, his hand reaching out to open the screen, and I started walking toward the house.

“Christ al-fucking-mighty,” he hissed through his teeth. “Jesus. It’s you, isn’t it? Joseph Vaughan.”

Maurice Fricker swung the door wide and came down the steps. I came to a stop in the front yard. He’d always looked like his father, Gene, but now—at age forty—Maurice was a living, breathing image of the man.

Maurice hugged me until I was breathless, clapped my back enthusiastically. He stepped back, held my shoulders with his hands, and then he hugged me once more.

“My God, Joseph, I honestly believed I’d never see you again. Hell, come up onto the porch, we’ll get some beers and have a drink. Goddarn lucky you caught me here. I’m on a day’s layover before I go back to the job in White Oak.” He turned, started walking, and then he stopped and faced me once again. “God, man, this is one helluva thing. I honestly believed I’d never see you again. Hell, I don’t even know what to say to you.”

I followed him to the porch, and through and to the left was a veranda with some high-backed wooden chairs.

Maurice asked me to sit down, and then he backed up, opened the inner door, and called through to the darkness of the house. “Ellie, be a sweetheart, go in the icebox and get daddy a couple of beers!”

The little girl with the barrettes appeared within a few moments.

“Ellie, this here’s Joseph,” Maurice said.

“Hey there, Ellie,” I said. I smiled.

Ellie looked uncomfortable, but tried to smile back. She set the bottles of beer down on the porch, then ran back into the house.

“She’s the shy one,” Maurice said. “I have another girl, Lacey. She and her mom are over at the grandma’s place in Homeland. You remember Bob Gorman, tri-county coroner?”

“Sure I do, yes.”