The Ballad of Frankie Silver (13 page)

The caption beneath the picture said: “Army Colonel’s Daughter Killed in Hiking Tragedy.”

To the right of Emily Stanton’s lovely face, the plain features of Mike Wilson looked out at him with the buzz haircut and the glazed stare of the student soldier. ROTC—a “Rotsy,” as the students in the University’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps were called. Mike Wilson was headed for a hitch in the air force after college, but he never made it. He had fought a brief, private battle in a clearing in the Tennessee mountains, and he’d never had a chance. There had been defense wounds all up and down his arms, and nicks on his fingers that showed he’d tried to grab at the knife as it came at him. Those were the least of his injuries, of course, but at least they said something about how he had died. Bravely. Everyone clung to that. “Brave Mike Wilson” the news accounts invariably called him, as if that would make up for the waste of his life. Mike Wilson had died first that night. Quickly. At least, Spencer hoped it was quick.

Mike Wilson and Emily Stanton had met at college, the article said, and they had become good friends—the newspaper of twenty years ago would not have said “lovers,” but most of its readers would figure it out for themselves. They had decided to hike the Appalachian Trail together as a chance to get to know each other better, and to see if they could work well as partners. Mike liked the idea of roughing it in the wilderness to toughen himself up for the military. He had not been armed, though. Back in those days no one thought that the Appalachian Trail was a dangerous place. Hikers knew to give snakes a wide berth, and they were assured that black bears were not really a threat to people, as long as you didn’t menace them or try to approach the cubs. No one gave much thought to human predators in those innocent days.

She was only nineteen that night. She had been dead for twenty years. Spencer tried to picture Emily Stanton growing old, fading from a radiant beauty into an aging woman. Either way, he reasoned, that pretty young girl would not exist any longer, but at least she would have had a chance to become somebody else. He wondered if she had been robbed of a happy future or spared a more protracted tragedy.

At least he could try not to compound the tragedy by letting an innocent man go to his death. But how could he investigate the case at such a remove? The fading documents in this manila folder were all he had to go on. The physical evidence had long since been destroyed. A few months or years after the trial, the blood samples, the hair and fiber evidence, the clothing exhibits, and all the other mementos of the tragedy would have been incinerated in the interest of space management. After all, a small sheriff’s office could not keep everything, just on the off chance that it would someday be needed again. The state had won its conviction. Clear out the detritus of that investigation and move on to the next. Don’t look back.

Besides, physical evidence deteriorates. Even if the Wake County Sheriff’s Department had managed to keep the samples, the results from a retesting would not be reliable, and surely they would not be accepted as new evidence by the court. There was no DNA testing at the time of the Trail Murders. Perhaps then he would have known for sure; now he must investigate with only uncertainty to guide him—that, and his will not to let any mistakes be made.

Spencer leafed through the rest of the contents of the folder. He had the crime scene photos—that was encouraging, but beyond them, he had only his notes to go on, and a short list of witnesses. He wondered how many of them were still alive, and if their memories of that night had faded with time. He would have to find out.

Spencer took out the photos. Some of them had been taken with the department’s Polaroid, a state-of-the-art camera back then, and an excellent device for producing fast shots of the crime scene. Had he known then of their impermanence? He could barely make out the images in the faded prints. Heat and age had long since neutralized the developing chemicals of the instant camera, making the prints as imperfect as memory. The 35-millimeter shots were better preserved, but the exposures were inexact, a testament to the inexperience of the photographer, who had been himself.

He had been called to the crime scene by Willis Blaine, the forest ranger for their district. The sequence of events was all there in the witness statement that he’d typed himself so long ago but now could only dimly recall. Spencer scanned the lines of faded type.

The call came in well past midnight: two hikers found dead, but not on the Appalachian Trail, which was federal land. A couple of firemen from Alabama had decided to spend their two weeks’ vacation hiking the North Carolina/east Tennessee section of the Appalachian Trail. They were nearly at the end of their journey, and that night they had gone off the trail to spend Friday night at a beer joint. At 11:20
P.M.
they were making their way back through the fields to their campsite when they stumbled over something soft and sticky in a moonlit clearing.

Emily Stanton.

The startled firemen had stopped just long enough to determine that the victim was past any efforts at rescue. That decision had taken only a few seconds. They checked for breathing and a pulse, but really they had known it was useless the moment they touched her. “Dead people’s skin doesn’t feel like flesh,” one of them said at the trial. “It feels like lunch meat wrapped in plastic.” The journalists had omitted that comment from their stories out of consideration for the families, and because it served no purpose to make a good guy sound silly in the newspaper when they already had a surfeit of villains: the Harkryders.

The two hikers hadn’t lingered to investigate further. They ran down the path in the moonlight, back to the beer joint to call the forest ranger.

A body?
he’d said, a little disbelieving. It wouldn’t be the first time anyone tried to play a telephone prank on a forest ranger.
Where?

In the woods at the edge of a field, they told him. Just down from the Appalachian Trail, across the dirt road from the white frame church. The snake handlers’ church.

Yes
, he told them. He knew the place. It wasn’t a snake handlers’ church, of course, but the trail has its own mythology, and it wasn’t important that he should correct their theology. He knew the place they meant. Would they wait for him in the parking lot and lead him to the scene of the accident? No point in calling it murder, yet. It wasn’t his call anyhow. If the hikers had described the site correctly, that clearing was a couple of hundred yards west of the Appalachian Trail, not federal land. It was in Wake County.

He got in his truck and drove to the roadhouse. The hikers were easy to spot. They were slender young men in their early twenties, huddled together in a pool of light beneath an electric pole, shivering in flannel shirts, although the night was warm. When he parked in the gravel lot and began to walk toward them, they backed away, darting glances toward the open door of the roadhouse, where jukebox music spilled out into the darkness. At last they noticed his ranger’s uniform, and they rushed toward him, both talking at once.
We’re not armed
, they told the ranger.
Whoever did that might still be there.
The ranger nodded. He showed them his pistol and told them that there was a shotgun in the truck. They could bring it along if it would make them feel any easier. Then they were willing to lead him to the site. They were trained to handle emergencies, and they were already getting over the shock of their find.

Willis Blaine took his flashlight out of the truck and followed them down the road to the church, and then up the dirt road, past the field, and into the woods.

When he aimed the spotlight at the clearing, his mind registered several things at once. Homicide. Not a fight or a failed robbery, this one. A very sick individual was loose out here. Young adult victims, one female, one male—their clothing indicated that they were probably hikers from the trail, but they were no longer on it.

I have to secure this crime scene
, he told the young firemen. They nodded. They knew about crime scenes.
You need to go back to the roadhouse and make another call. Wake County Sheriff’s Department. Tell them Willis Blaine sent you. Tell them where I am. Tell them it’s murder.

Spencer remembered the call. He wasn’t supposed to be in the office at all, because they were a two-man department in those days, and after eleven, calls were forwarded over to Unicoi County, whose sheriff’s department had twenty-four-hour patrols. But Spencer was a hotshot in those days. He would have worked twenty-hour days if Nelse Miller had let him, and that night Nelse Miller wasn’t there to send him home. Where had the sheriff gone? On vacation to Wrightsville Beach? To a bureaucrat’s meeting in Nashville? To a cousin’s wedding in Ohio? Spencer couldn’t remember anymore. The whereabouts of the sheriff was not a detail included in the official report on the case, but it was duly noted that the officer in charge of the investigation was Wake County sheriff’s deputy Spencer Arrowood.

He had been sitting at the oak desk in the darkened office. Only the paperwork and a white china coffee mug were illuminated by the desk light. He had been up since six, and he was so exhausted that the letters were beginning to wiggle on the page, so that he could no longer make out what he had just written. He might lay his head down on the desktop and catch an hour or two of sleep before finishing the reports. The soothing monotony ended with the ringing of the telephone. A calm steady voice with a Deep South drawl delivered the message with only a tinge of emotion shading the words. The fireman told him where they were and what they had found. Spencer made the caller say it twice so that he could be sure he had heard him right.

Murder on the Appalachian Trail.
Well, not on it. Near it. In his jurisdiction. Mr. Blaine, the forest ranger, was there with the bodies, waiting to turn the investigation over to him. Did he know where the clearing was? Spencer shook himself to clear his head and to banish the weariness from his muscles.
Wait by the phone
, he told the hikers.
You can save me time by showing me where to go. And I’ll need statements from you.

He had called Alton Banner and asked him to meet the patrol car at the roadhouse. The caller had assured him that the victims were dead, but Spencer wanted to take every precaution.

He took both cameras, the Polaroid and the 35-millimeter; the notebook; and all the paraphernalia that had to be carried to a crime scene. Spencer knew the drill: he had done it often enough before; he had even been in charge of investigations in the past, but they had been trifling occurrences of no real consequence. Murder itself was uncommon enough in this rural mountain county. A case like this was almost unheard of. You would have to go back decades to find another one. God help him, had he been eager? Had he been excited to have a terrible case dumped in his lap after weeks of routine and paperwork?

He locked the office and headed down the steps toward his patrol car, wondering if in his grogginess, he had forgotten some crucial point of police procedure.
Oh shit
, he thought, as his hand touched the car-door handle.
The TBI.

He was running now. Unlock the office—his fingers seemed to have grown two sizes in as many minutes as he fumbled with the lock, swallowing the urge to kick in the door. A few more minutes wouldn’t matter. The real pros wouldn’t be there for another three hours at least, because Knoxville was 120 miles away. The Tennessee Bureau of Investigation. You called them out for any serious crime, because they had all the toys. The TBI had a fully trained death squad of officers who did nothing but crime scenes, and who knew how to check for fingerprints, hair and fiber evidence, bloodstains. They also had the lab to process the evidence, which meant that they would get it all anyway, so he might as well let them collect the samples themselves so that there would be no question about tainted evidence when the case came to court.
When
the case came to court. Spencer wouldn’t even consider the possibility of a stalemate.

He checked the county map before he made the call, because he would have to give directions to someone unfamiliar with the county back roads. He couldn’t say, “Turn left at the Evanses’ place, and go past that field where the white horse is usually grazing.” No. He located the church and the roadhouse on the map, noted down the road numbers, approximated the distances from the main road. Then he made the call.

The officer from the TBI would meet him at the crime scene in a couple of hours. Say, 3
A.M.
Spencer would secure the area and do the photography and the site mapping while he waited. When the sun came up, they would be better able to determine what they were dealing with. Nobody was getting any sleep that night. That much was a given.

He left the office with the taste of cold coffee still in his mouth. He found an all-night country station on the radio and turned it up as loud as he could stand it, so that the noise would keep him awake. He was hoping for happy songs that would drive away the darkness outside and the darkness to come.

One of the vacationing firemen was waiting for him at the crossroads beside the church. When he recognized the patrol car, he stepped out of the shadows of an oak tree and flagged him down. Spencer parked in the church’s gravel lot and followed the young man down the road and through the field toward the dark woods beyond.

The fireman’s name was Al Hinshaw, and he said that his buddy Neil was waiting at the site with the ranger. He explained about their hiking vacation, and how they’d stumbled over the bodies on their way back to the shelter. Hell of a way to end your vacation, he’d said, shaking his head. The trail was supposed to be a peaceful place, wasn’t it?

“It usually is,” said Spencer. Now he saw the glow of a Coleman lantern, and he knew they were within hailing distance of the crime scene. He had met Willis Blaine a couple of times, when their paths had crossed in other investigations, but he couldn’t remember anything about the man that would be fodder for small talk during the long wait for the pros from Knoxville.
How’s the wife and kids, Willis?
Who knew if he even had any? Spencer wasn’t much good at small talk anyway, in those days. The demands of the job seemed to overshadow all the rituals of everyday life for him, leaving him without anything ordinary to say.