Evidence of Blood (32 page)

WARFIELD
: Did you actually see Ellie head up the mountain?

DINKER
: Yes, sir.

WARFIELD:
Do you remember what she was wearing?

DINKER
: A pair of black shoes and a green dress.

WARFIELD
: What was it made of?

DINKER
: Cotton.

WARFIELD
: Was it dark green or light green?

DINKER
: Dark green. And it had a little white lacy collar that I made for her.

WARFIELD
: Mrs. Dinker, did you ever see your daughter again?

DINKER
: No, sir.

At that moment, Warfield had walked to his desk and displayed the dress Ben Wade had found hanging like a headless, limbless body in the trees above the mountain road.

In response, Mrs. Dinker had stared silently at the dress for a moment, then mumbled something the court reporter had found inaudible.

But as Kinley could sense now, Martha Dinker had no longer been in the courtroom as Warfield fired his questions. Her mind had been whirling, as her eyes bore down upon the dress. And as the seconds of her unexpected silence lengthened, the court reporter had finally had no choice but to write into the bleak history of the trial that to the prosecutor’s insistent question Martha Dinker had given no answer whatsoever. Instead, she had stared mutely at the dress hanging limply from Warfield’s long white fingers, until, under the barrage of his insistent demands, she had finally responded: I
ain’t seen it since that day
.

Kinley held his eyes fixedly on Martha Dinker’s final, explosive response to Warfield’s question, then got up, poured himself a scotch from the bottle he’d bought the day before and walked out onto the front porch.

The feel of the wooden swing against his back was firm and reassuring, something hard and steady in a world that seemed to be dissolving, the old Sequoyah with its rooted notions of how the world should be, how people should behave within it, of where a human should stand amid the
swirling chaos of the years, all that ancient, solid ground seemed to be shifting subtly beneath his feet.

He took a sip from the glass and leaned back, his mind returning to the courtroom, to Martha Dinker’s stunned silence as she’d gazed at her daughter’s dress. She had seen something which had silenced her, stopped her completely in the onward rush of her testimony, stopped her as fully and completely as if a hand had suddenly pressed itself against her mouth.

But what?

He was sure it was in the transcript somewhere, on that single page somewhere. By now he had read it a sufficient number of times for his mind fully to have recorded it, and as he sat on the dark porch he replayed it in his mind, once again moving to the abrupt halt in Mrs. Dinker’s testimony as Warfield had lifted the dress to display it before her.

What had she seen at that moment?

With the dress gone, he realized that he might never know. It was one of the worst kinds of dead ends for an investigation, a solid, black wall that seemed beyond penetration. The dress was gone, and he had no way of knowing where it was, or even what it might have looked like, other than that it was dark green with a lacy collar Mrs. Dinker had made herself.

He took another sip of scotch and let his legs press back against the wooden floor, swinging himself gently in the dark air, his mind wandering amid the welter of accumulating detail, as he always allowed it to do when he confronted what appeared to be an insurmountable difficulty. At times it had been a productive maneuver, and suddenly, out of nowhere, a lost item or misspoken word flared up from the mound of ashes and sent him whirling again. At other times, however, it had come up empty, and there were moments when those failures rose to haunt and disconcert him. He had never found Billy Flynn’s little plastic ring, and for all he knew Mildred Haskell had swallowed it the day she murdered him. The
strange girl in the red bell-bottoms whom Daphne Moore had seen with Willie Connors only minutes before he kidnapped her remained a black, featureless silhouette. Why Colin Bright had lied about coming north toward the Comstock farm remained a mystery, as did the reason Alley Short had called the police to report a murder she had herself committed.

He pushed back roughly, almost angrily, his feet once again flying out, sending the swing further back, so that when he swept forward again he could feel a breeze riffle through his hair. It was cooler than the air had been only seconds before, and because of that Kinley knew that a layer of high air had suddenly descended from the mountain’s heights, moving in a broad wave down its steep slopes, rustling through the leaves, branches, vines.

His eyes opened quickly as the idea struck him, the single slant of light which might still pierce the dark wall that separated him from Ellie Dinker’s dress.

He stood up, walked back to Ray’s office, opened the bottom drawer of the file cabinet and drew out the file marked “O,” the one which Lois had returned to him several days before, and which had contained only a series of newspaper articles and photographs about the case.

Meticulously he went through the contents of the file across the desk, staring at each photograph. After a moment, he leaned back again, his eyes moving randomly across the desk, the energy of their earlier mission now lost in failure. There had been no photograph of Ellie Dinker’s dress.

But as his eyes shifted from article to article, Kinley noticed that the entire case had been covered by a single reporter, the same one who’d journeyed to the state prison and written so evocatively of Overton’s execution. The name appeared at the top of every article and at the bottom of every picture the paper had published about the case.

Kinley glanced up at the still illuminated computer screen and wrote in the name under
CONDITION UNKNOWN
.

It was number 4: Harry Townsend.

Then he did what he’d learned to do first in trying to track someone down. It was an entirely obvious strategy, and it had always surprised him how often it paid off. He pulled the Sequoyah Telephone Directory down from its place on the shelf above the desk and looked Townsend up. He was there, complete with home address.

Kinley wrote both into his notebook, then returned to the computer screen and made the necessary adjustment, erasing the name under Condition Unknown, and typing it out again, as if, with Godlike power, adding Townsend’s name to the Book of Life.

The computer screen was still shedding its blue light into the room when, several hours later, he heard a soft knock at the door, rousing him from the sleep that had finally overtaken him. He pulled himself up, blinked the remaining slumber from his eyes, walked into the foyer and opened the door.

“I’m sorry,” Dora said quietly.

Kinley nodded.

“May I come in?” she asked.

He let her pass in front of him.

In the living room, she eyed the bottle of scotch, now about a third empty. “Be careful,” she said, as her eyes drifted back to him.

“I’ve always kept everything under control,” Kinley said, a little stiffly.

“Are you leaving soon?”

“No, why?”

“I thought that because of …”

“It’s not that simple, once you start.”

“Have you found anything?”

“Nothing of importance.”

“You don’t have to keep going, you know.”

He looked at her determinedly. “Yes, I do,” he said.

“I came to say I’m sorry,” Dora said, “and to let you
know that if you wanted to drop everything, it would be …”

“I don’t,” Kinley told her.

She nodded curtly, then started toward the door, moving briskly past him, as if in flight.

He wanted desperately to let her go, but he found that he could not. “There’s some scotch left,” he whispered, without turning around to see her.

She stopped. “Yes, I know.”

He turned toward her slowly, the sudden admission like a revelation, something known for years, but never fully revealed before. “I don’t want to be alone,” he told her.

She did not seem convinced, but for the moment at least, she appeared willing to put aside her bitter doubts. “I guess, in the end, no one does,” she said.

“Will you stay?”

She shook her head. “No,” she told him. “Not in Ray’s bed. But if you want, you can come with me.”

He was up early the next morning, once again staring at the fog. Dora lay beside him, equally awake, but her eyes focused differently, as if on a separate world.

“How did you get out?” she asked as she turned toward him, propping herself up on her elbow, her lips nearly touching his.

“Didn’t Ray tell you?” Kinley answered with a slight smile. “The Yankees rescued me.”

“They didn’t make you leave,” Dora said. “You did that.”

Kinley shook his head. “I always wanted to leave.”

“Even when you were young?”

“For as long as I can remember.”

“Why?” Dora asked. “Ray always said you had it pretty well.”

“My grandmother loved me,” Kinley said. “That’s what Ray meant.”

“But you left her, too.”

Kinley nodded. “There was always something driving me,” he said, remembering it as a heated rod, or a whip at his back. In his youth, it had even taken the form of a harsh, determined voice:
Getout!Getout!Getout!

He sat up. “I have to leave early.”

She made no effort to stop him but simply watched silently as he dressed himself.

“I’ll call you tonight,” he said as he opened the bedroom door.

She smiled at him indulgently. “For a genius, you don’t have a very good memory.”

“What?”

“Don’t you remember, Kinley?” she asked. “I don’t have a phone.”

As he glanced down at his notebook, then up again at the matching address on the old tin mailbox, Kinley hoped that he hadn’t arrived too early to expect a decent welcome. His experience had long ago taught him that dragging people from their beds was not the best way to get their cooperation. Even Colin Bright had preferred the afternoon, his eyes always faintly clouded in the morning light.

It was a small, wooden house on a street that looked as if it had seen better days. Still, it was neat, and freshly painted, the typical retirement home, Kinley thought, of an old-age pensioner. The life inside the house was not difficult for him to imagine. There’d be empty soup cans in the kitchen waste basket, an orange hot water bottle hung over the shower stall, and in the medicine cabinets and scattered across the bed night tables, scores of pills, ointments, mentholating creams. His grandmother had been the only old person he’d ever known who’d managed to avoid such indignities.

He returned the notebook to his pocket, got out of the car and walked toward the door.

He knocked lightly when he reached it, heard a small groan from a distant room, then saw an old man lurch ponderously toward him, his ghostly white hair luminous in the surrounding shadows.

“Coming,” the old man said, but without the gruffness Kinley had often encountered in old people, the pains of age working insidiously to undermine even the most determined manners.

Within seconds, he was at the door, his white face pressing close to the screen. “Everything I need, I got,” he
said, though not irritably, but merely as a point of information, as if to save the traveling salesman the energy of his pitch.

Kinley offered a quick-smile. “I’m looking for Harry Townsend,” he said.

The old man nodded. “That’s me.”

“You used to work for the Sequoyah
Standard, I
believe,” Kinley added.

“’Til I retired,” Townsend said. He brought his face still nearer to the rusty screen and squinted harshly. “Lost my sight just about,” he said. “No place in this world for a blind reporter.”

He was a reporter all right, and Kinley had seen quite a few of them in his time. The old man who stood before him seemed almost made from the original mold, small and wiry, with a thin mouth and restless eyes, a young man now grown old in that way which made age seem more the product of too much experience than the listless passing of the days.

“I’m a reporter, too,” Kinley told him, “not with a newspaper, though.”

The old man nodded, unimpressed. “Magazine features?”

“Books.”

He nodded again, still unimpressed. “What you want me for?” he asked, his voice as direct as Kinley imagined it had been years before when he’d sat in Judge Bryan’s courtroom, his pencil scratching across his notebook as Warfield marched before him, or Overton slumped defeated in a chair six feet away.