Evidence of Blood (47 page)

When he reached it, he touched the ground, then lifted himself again. He knew he was exactly there, standing between the same trees he’d seen in the police photographs
of Ray’s body. He’d recognized the place the first time he’d glimpsed it in Taylor’s pictures, and even at that moment, it had seemed to him that he and Ray had been there many times, though actually it had been only once, a late summer day only a week before he’d left for college.

Now, as he stood beside the river, he could see the large stone they’d rested on, hear the conversation they’d had:

Well, Kinley, you may not be back down in the canyon for a long time
.

No, I guess not
.

Maybe never
.

Maybe
.

That’s what you want, in a way, isn’t it?

What?

To leave forever. To be rid of it
.

I think so
.

Kinley, are you sure?

The stone was bare now, and as Kinley watched it from the bank, the river seemed to churn madly, tossing its white foam, as if beneath the green roof of its surface millions of angry spirits clamored to be free.

He turned away and glanced at the dark earth beneath his feet, the same that should have been beneath Ray’s fingernails, instead of the red clay Dr. Stark had found there.

For a moment, Kinley tried to reorient himself, to use as his final destination that unknown place where Ray’s fingers had clawed the ground. Dr. Stark had told him that Ray’s clothes had been clean except for the forest debris they’d gathered when he fell. There’d been red clay beneath his nails, but none of it on his clothes. The shovel, he thought, remembering the night he’d gone down into the well. He’d looked for all the necessary tools before his descent, but had not found a shovel. His mind shifted instantly into its trusty logic:
He took a shovel. He was going to bury something. No. He did bury something. He buried it in red clay
.

He turned away from the river and moved deeper into the surrounding woodlands, toward the nearest stretch of indigenous clay, so red, moist and malleable that he’d often thought of it as the flesh of earth itself. In death, Ray had lain facing south, and if he’d been returning from whatever mission had sent him into the canyon, forced him down into it at the risk of his own life, his heart no more than a clogged and sputtering chamber of tubes and valves, then he’d accomplished his task to the north of where his strength had finally deserted him.

Walking northward, then, still the servant of his mind’s relentless logic, Kinley moved rapidly, his pace increasing his velocity with each step, his eyes fixed on the ground, meticulously searching it for the subtlest changes in color and texture.

Slowly the ground began to give up its darker hues, growing brown beneath Kinley’s feet, then, as he continued on, lighter still, but with the first thickening orange that he knew would turn to a moist and glistening red.

Within half a mile, the last hints of the orange had been leached from its bed of dark, engulfing red, and Kinley stood, as if on a distant but disturbingly familiar beach, his mind reeling within the transformation of the scene, pictures reverberating like echoes in his mind. The shadows were now darker as the canyon wall hung over him, and the trees seemed to fling themselves upward from the depths of an even denser foliage, gray and leafless, but consuming nonetheless, as if it were a tropical forest that had gone to ruin, leaving nothing but its gray, contorted skeleton behind.

He headed north again, his mind now moving backward, as if in opposition to his body. He could feel the atmosphere thickening, as it had in the well, and he stopped for a moment, breathed in a long, hard breath and let his eyes lift tremblingly toward a light he hoped for, but could no longer see beyond the bony tangle of the trees.

He dropped his eyes again, resigned to the canyon’s
choking air, then moved on, more slowly now, apprehensively, as he thought Ray must have moved as well, the old legends of the canyon coming to life in his mind, gory tales his grandmother had spun as she’d rocked him through the night, and which had seemed even more grisly than the ones she’d read from the
Police Gazette
.

Long time ago, in the canyon, there was this house …

He stopped, cocked his head to the right, as if listening to her voice as it filtered through the trees, his mind diving further and further back, like a creature struggling breathlessly through thick black water.

Long time ago, in the canyon, there was this house surrounded by vines
.

He glanced around, his eyes searching for some way out of the suffocating air. He could feel his lungs heaving in that aching, airless way he remembered from his asthmatic childhood, his ribs like a vise pressing in upon his life.

The vines were green and thick, and there was no way to get through them
.

He remembered the sprig of vine Ray had pressed into the book, his only gift to him, presented, it seemed to Kinley now, like a twisted legacy.

No
way to get through them but to slash and slash and slash
.

He started moving again, straight ahead, northward, as if in defiance of the earth’s unfeeling tilt, north against the eternal flight of migratory birds, the bankless channels of the wind and the unbending sway of rivers, mountains, ice, north as he had always gone, against the course of nature.

He speeded up, hurrying like a panicked child, desperately toward home, his feet scurrying over the flat red earth, the limbs slapping at his face and chest, the thickening vines twining their reptilian tentacles along his feet and legs.

Getout!Getout!Getout!

He slammed against a tree, breathing now in short, painful gasps, the choking asthma of his childhood clogging his lungs with the same terrifying fury he could remember through all his stricken nights.

He spun around the tree, his hands at his throat, and stopped, his eyes fixed on the place before him.

It was there, like a vision, but real. A small house in its solitary ruin, surrounded by a dense circle of vines, thick and barbed, but their grim geometric perfection now broken by a crude, jagged rift.

The shovel Ray had used to slash his way through the vines lay like an arrow in Kinley’s path, the sharp point of its red-caked scoop pointing to the house a few yards beyond it, silent in the gray light, its door flung open and half-unhinged. At the bottom of the front stairs, he could see a shallow hole, a mound of red clay poised beside it. As he stumbled toward it, he saw that the hole was empty, as if Ray had changed his mind at the last minute.

He glanced up into the house, his eyes lighting on the solitary table at the center of the room. He could see a small box on top of it, and he realized that it was the tin biscuit box his grandmother had kept on a high shelf, beyond his grasp, and that Ray must have retrieved it when he’d cleared out the old woman’s things.

He moved up the stairs, and as he passed through the door, he could feel his breath miraculously returning to him, as if he were entering a less constricted atmosphere.

He stopped just inside the door, then paused a moment to take in the room. It was furnished with only a few dusty chairs and the single wooden table that rested at its center. The walls were blank and unadorned, except for a few hanging lanterns which seemed to cling to them like the dried husks of gigantic insects. There was no back entrance to the house, but to the right a single closed door led to an adjoining room.

As he walked to the table, Kinley felt his body tighten, as if his skin had suddenly contracted, squeezing in upon his bones. He glanced toward the door to his right, felt an
odd shudder, and let his eyes drop toward the table, as if aimed with a terrible precision upon the little tin box and the small white candle that rested beside it, half-burned, but still erect, its slender white shaft now turned yellow by long years of disuse. Initials were carved in the wood of the table: WT, AJ, TW, FM, JS.

He remembered something Betty Gaines had told him, that Thompson, Warfield and others of the city fathers had had a place in the canyon, and he realized that this shrouded little house he and Ray had stumbled upon so many years before had been that place in its abandonment. AJ was Andrew Jameson. FM was Floyd Maddox. JS was Joseph Stark. It was here they’d come to drink the bonded liquor Snow had sold them, to tell their exploits and war stories. He thought of Ellie Dinker. The place they’d brought their women.

His eyes bore in upon the tin box. He could remember seeing his grandmother draw it down from time to time, but always secretly, so that once, when he’d raced into the room, she’d slammed its top down noisily, her lips twisting rudely as she screamed at him:

Getout!Getout!Getout!

But all those days were behind him, and so Kinley shook his head against the voice’s harsh command, pressed his hands against the sides of the box and slowly opened it.

He could see a small stack of papers, along with a single sprig of vine which rested on top of them like a grim adornment. As he drew it from the papers, Kinley recalled the almost identical strand that Ray had placed inside the book he’d told Serena to give him, and he realized suddenly that it was the one clue Ray had left behind to guide him into the canyon.

He dragged the candle nearer to the box, lit it quickly, then lifted the papers from the box. The first was a single square of notepaper exactly like the one Ray had hung over his desk. This time, however, the message was different:

Kinley laid the note aside, Ray’s voice still whispering softly in his mind, then put the other papers flat upon the table. For a moment, he hesitated, as if he were a suicide, the pistol barrel already at his head, the finger squeezing down upon the trigger until it reached that last lightning interval between the precipice and the void.

It’s better to know, don’t you think?
No
matter what the cost?

He leaned forward and stared down at the papers. He knew that Ray would have arranged them in the order in which he wanted them to be read.

The first was a birth certificate which had been issued to George and Bertha Kellogg on May 7, 1900, in Waycross, Georgia. It was little more than a small square of crumbling yellow paper, and it recorded the birth of a daughter, Ludie Rae Kellogg.

Kinley’s mind shot back to the jail log, to the short list of visitors who’d called on Edna Trappman, to the Ludie Rae who’d signed her name in that tiny, nearly indecipherable script which signaled, according to his own light acquaintance with graphology, an intensely powerful mind.

He turned to the next page, his eyes moving intently over its brief contents. It was a marriage license, issued in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on September 5, 1927, to Samuel P. Dollar and Ludie Rae Kellogg, and it was bound by a rubber band to a second document, this one a death
certificate which recorded the death by “locked bowels” of Samuel Dollar on June 10, 1929.

Kinley’s hand clutched at the document, crushing it slightly before he willed his fingers to open and release it once again. So it was Granny Dollar who’d come down the mountain to visit Edna Trappman in her cell, he thought.

But why?

Quickly, he turned the page facedown on the table, then fixed his eyes on the yellowing paper which rested beneath it. It was a second birth certificate, this one also issued in Chattanooga, and dated August 9, 1932. It recorded the live birth of a female child whom its unwed parents, Ludie Rae Dollar and Ernest Trappman, had named Edna Mae.

“Her daughter,” Kinley whispered, unbelievingly. He felt a blue, arctic wind rush over him, lost and frozen. In his mind he could see his grandmother as she sat rigidly in her chair with his own small body in her arms, staring down at him with eyes that were like his, passionless and aloof.

You look like her
.

He heard Luther Snow’s words in his mind.

You look like her
.

But he didn’t look like Granny Dollar, Kinley thought, defensively, imploringly, as if arguing the merits of some cause he couldn’t understand.

You look like her
.

He stepped back from the table, his eyes darting about desperately. Suddenly, the room seemed to expand in all directions, the ceiling shooting up to a great height above his head, the walls reeling outward, turning the small room into a great chamber, as the air inside it thickened and grew warm with summer heat.

He could feel his own body shrinking as the room swelled to its former immensity, and he knew his mind was returning him to his earliest years. He could feel his small lungs struggling painfully for breath as he searched
the face that hung above him, so much younger than all his other visions of it, still unlined, the hair only slightly streaked with gray.
Granny Dollar
.

He was in her arms now, his eyes moving urgently over the contours of her face. Voices sounded softly around him, and he knew that they were not alone. He could sense shadows all about, feel his own tiny body twisting in his grandmother’s arms, always afraid, always watchful, but trying to see, hungry for every detail, his ravenous mind working desperately even then to order and retrieve, while his eyes locked on the shadows that danced around him.

A face swam toward him from the maze of shadows, a white dot perched on a tall green hill, with a voice that was more like a bark, harsh, bitter, animal-like:
This your little boy?

He did not hear an answer, but only saw her mouth jerk down, as if repulsed by the sight of him, then another face draw near him after hers had retreated, a different face, young and brown and warm, peering at him softly from the black tangle of her hair.