‘What was her name, Mr Tyler?’
‘Her name was Etta Mae Tyler and she was nine years old.’
I could hear the trees whispering in the wind and the boards of the house creaking and settling. In the yard, a child’s swing moved back and forth as a gust caught it. It seemed that there was movement all around us as we spoke, as if our words had awoken something that had been asleep for a long time.
‘Two other children disappeared three months later, black children both, one within a week of the other. Cold it was. Folks thought the first child, Dora Lee Parker, might have fallen through some ice while playing. She was the very devil for ice, that child. But all the rivers were searched, all the ponds dredged, and they didn’t find her. The police, they came and questioned me again, and for a time even some of my own neighbours looked at me kinda funny. But then the police’s interest all died away again. These were black children and they saw no reason to go connectin’ the two vanishings.
‘The third child didn’t come from Haven, he came from Willisville, about forty miles away. ’Nother black child, little boy named . . .’ He stopped and put the palm of his hand to his forehead, pressing lightly, his eyes closed tight. ‘Bobby Joiner,’ he finished quietly, nodding slightly. ‘By then, people was getting scared and a deputation was sent to the sheriff and the mayor. People started keeping their children inside, ’specially after dark, and the police, they questioned every black man for miles around, and some white folks too, poor men they knew to be homosexuals, mostly.
‘I think then there was a waiting period. Those people waited for the black folks to breathe easy again, to get careless, but they did not. It went on and on, for months, till early in nineteen seventy. Then the little Demeter girl disappeared and everything changed. The police, they questioned people for miles around, took statements, organised searches. But nobody saw a thing. It was like the little girl had disappeared into thin air.
‘Things got bad then for black folks. The police figured there might be a connection between the disappearances after all, and they called in the FBI. After that, black men walking around town after dark were liable to get arrested or beaten, or both. But those people . . .’ He used the phrase again and there was a kind of mental shake of the head in his voice, a gesture of horror at the ways of men. ‘Those people had a taste for what they were doing, and couldn’t stop. The woman tried to snatch a little boy in Batesville but she was alone and the boy fought and kicked and scratched her face and ran away. She chased after him, too, but then she gave up. She knew what was coming.
‘The boy was a sharp one. He remembered the make of the car, described the woman, even recalled some of the numbers on the license plate. But it wasn’t till the next day that someone else recalled the car and they went looking for Adelaide Modine.’
‘The police?’
‘No, not the police. A mob of men, some from Haven, others from Batesville, two or three from Yancey Mill. The sheriff, he was out of town when it happened and the FBI men had gone. But Deputy Earl Lee Granger, as was, he was with them when they arrived at the Modine house, but she was gone. There was only the brother there and he shut himself in the basement, but they broke in.’
He was silent then and I heard him swallow in the gathering dark, and I knew that he had been with them. ‘He said he didn’t know where his sister was, didn’t know nothing about no dead children. So they hanged him from a beam in the roof and called it suicide. Got Doc Hyams to certify it, though that basement was fourteen feet from floor to ceiling and there was no way that boy could have gotten up there to hang hisself ’less he could climb walls. Folks after used to joke that the Modine boy wanted to hang hisself real bad to get up without help.’
‘But you said the woman was alone when she tried to snatch the last child,’ I said. ‘How did they know the Modine boy was involved?’
‘They didn’t, at least they weren’t sure. But she needed someone to help her do what she did. A child is a hard thing to take sometimes. They struggle and kick and cry for help. That’s why she failed the last time, because she had no one to help her. At least, that’s what they figured.’
‘And you?’
The porch was quiet again. ‘I knew that boy and he wasn’t no killer. He was weak and . . . soft. He was a homosexual – he’d been caught with some boy back in his private school and they asked him to leave. My sister heard that, when she was cleaning for white folks in the town. It was hushed up, though there were stories about him. I think maybe some people had suspected him for a time, just for that. When his sister tried to take the child, well, folks just decided he must have known. And he must have, I guess, or maybe suspected at least. I don’t know but . . .’
He glanced at Deputy Martin and the deputy stared right back at him. ‘Go on, Walt. There’s some things I know myself. You won’t say anything I haven’t thought or guessed.’
Tyler still looked uneasy but nodded once, more to himself than to us, and went on. ‘Deputy Earl Lee, he knew the boy wasn’t involved. He was with him the night Bobby Joiner was taken. Other nights too.’
I looked at Alvin Martin, who stared at the floor nodding slowly. ‘How did you know?’ I asked.
‘I saw ’em,’ he said simply. ‘Their cars were parked out of town, under some trees, on the night Bobby Joiner was taken. I used to walk the fields sometimes, to get away from here, though it was dangerous, given all that was happenin’. I saw the cars parked and crept up and saw them. The Modine boy was . . . down . . . on the sheriff and then they got in the back and the sheriff took him.’
‘And you saw them together after that?’
‘Same place, couple of times.’
‘And the sheriff let them hang the boy?’
‘He wasn’t going to say nothin’,’ Tyler spat, ‘case someone found out about him. And he watched them hang that boy.’
‘And his sister? What about Adelaide Modine?’
‘They searched for her too, searched the house and the fields, but she was gone. Then someone saw a fire in the shell of an old house on the East Road about ten miles from town and pretty soon the whole place was ablaze. Thomas Packer, he used to store old paint and inflammables there, away from the children. And when the fire was out, they found a body, badly burned, and they said it was Adelaide Modine.’
‘How did they identify her?
Martin answered, ‘There was a bag near the body, with the remains of a lot of money, some personal papers, bank account details mostly. Jewellery she was known to have was found on the body, a gold and diamond bracelet she always wore. It was her mother’s, they said. Dental records matched too. Old Doc Hyams produced her chart – he shared a surgery with the dentist, but the dentist was out of town that week.
‘Seems she had holed up, maybe waiting for her brother or someone else to come to her, and fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand. She’d been drinking, they said, maybe to try to keep warm. The whole place went up. Her car was found near by, with a bag of clothes in the trunk.’
‘Do you remember anything about Adelaide Modine, Mr Tyler? Anything that might explain—’
‘Explain what?’ he interrupted. ‘Explain why she did it? Explain why someone helped her to do what she did? I can’t explain those things, not even to myself. She had somethin’, sure enough, somethin’ strong inside her, but it was a dark thing, a vicious thing. I’ll tell you somethin’, Mr Parker. Adelaide Modine was as close to pure evil as I’ve met on this earth, and I’ve seen brothers hanged from trees and burned while they were hangin’. Adelaide Modine was worse than the people who did the hangin’ because, try as I might, I can’t see any reason for the things she did. They’re beyond explainin’, ’less you believe in the Devil and Hell. That’s the only way I can explain her. She was a thing out of Hell.’
I stayed silent for a time, trying to sort and balance what I had been told. Walt Tyler watched while these thoughts went through my head and I think he knew what I was thinking. I couldn’t blame hi
m for not telling what he knew of the sheriff and the Modine boy. An allegation like that could get a man killed and it didn’t provide conclusive proof that the Modine boy wasn’t directly involved in the killings, although if Tyler’s character assessment was right then William Modine was an unlikely child-killer. But the knowledge that someone involved in the death of his child might have eluded capture must have tortured Tyler all these years.
One part of the story still remained.
‘They found the children the next day, just as the search had begun,’ concluded Tyler. ‘A boy out hunting took shelter in an abandoned house on the Modine estate and his dog started scraping at the cellar door. It was built into the floor, like a trapdoor. The boy shot the lock off and the dog went down and he followed. Then he ran home and called the police.
‘There were four bodies down there, my little girl and the three others. They—’ He stopped and his face creased but he did not cry.
‘You don’t have to go on,’ I said softly.
‘No, you gotta know,’ he said. Then louder, like the cry of a wounded animal: ‘You gotta know what they did, what they did to those children, to my child. They raped them and they tortured them. My little girl, all her fingers were broken, crushed, and the bones pulled away from the sockets.’ He was crying openly now, his large hands open before him like a supplicant before God. ‘How could they do those things, to children? How?’ And then he seemed to retreat into himself and I thought I saw the woman’s face at the window, and her fingertips brushing the pane.
We sat with him for a time and then stood up to leave. ‘Mr Tyler,’ I said gently, ‘just one more thing. Where is the house where the children were found?’
‘About three, four miles up the road from here. The old Modine estate starts there. There’s a stone cross at the start of the track leading up to it. The house is pretty much gone now. There’s just a few walls, part of a roof. State wanted to knock it down but some of us protested. We wanted to remind them of what had happened here, so the Dane house still stands.’
We left him then, but as I was going down the porch steps I heard his voice behind me.
‘Mr Parker.’ The voice was strong again and there was no quaver in it, although there was the lingering sound of grief in its tones. I turned to look at him. ‘Mr Parker, this is a dead town. The ghosts of dead children haunt it. You find the Demeter girl, you tell her to go back where she came from. There’s only grief and misery for her here. You tell her that now. You tell her that when you find her, y’ hear?’
At the margins of his cluttered garden the whispering grew in the trees and it seemed that just beyond the line of vision, where the darkness became almost too dark to penetrate, there was movement. Figures drifted back and forth, skipping just outside the light from the house, and there was childish laughter in the air.
And then there were only the limbs of evergreens fanning the darkness and the empty jangling of a chain in the wreckage of the yard.
Chapter Twenty-Four
On the Casuarina Coast, at the delta area of Irian in Indonesian New Guinea, lives a tribe called the Asmat. They are twenty thousand strong and the terror of every other tribe near them. In their language Asmat means ‘the people – the human beings’, and if they define themselves as the only humans, then all others are relegated to the status of non-human, with all that that entails. The Asmat have a word for these others: they call them manowe. It means ‘the edible ones’.
Hyams had no answers that would have indicated why Adelaide Modine behaved as she did and neither did Walt Tyler. Maybe she, and others like her, had something in common with the Asmat. Perhaps they, too, saw others as less than human so that their suffering ceased to matter, was below notice apart from the pleasure it gave.
I recalled a conversation with Woolrich, after the meeting with Tante Marie Aguillard. Back in New Orleans, we walked in silence down Royal Street, past Madame Lelaurie’s old mansion where slaves were once chained and tortured in the attic until some firefighters found them and a mob ran Madame Lelaurie out of town. We ended up at Tee Eva’s on Magazine, where Woolrich ordered sweet potato and a Jax beer. He ran his thumb down the side of the bottle, clearing a path through the moisture, and then rubbed his damp thumb along his upper lip.
‘I read a Bureau report last week,’ he began. ‘I guess it was a “state of the nation” address on serial killers, on where we stand, where we’re going.’
‘And where are we going?’
‘We’re going to Hell is where we’re going. These people are like a virus. They’re like bacteria spreading and this country is just one big Petri dish to them. The Bureau estimates that we could be losing five thousand victims to serial killers each year. That’s fourteen people every day. The folks watching Oprah and Jerry Springer, or subscribing to Jerry Falwell, they don’t wanna know that. They read about them in the crime mags or see them on the TV, but that’s only when we catch one of them. The rest of the time, they don’t have the least idea what’s going on around them.’
He drank a deep draught of Jax. ‘There are at least two hundred of these killers operating at the present time. At least two hundred.’ He was reeling off the numbers now, emphasising each statistic with a stab of the beer bottle. ‘Nine out of ten are male, eight out of ten are white and one in five is never goin’ to be found. Never.
‘And you know what the strangest thing is? We’ve got more of them than anywhere else. The good old US of A is breeding these fuckers like fucking Elmo dolls. Three-quarters of them live and work in this country. We’re the world’s leading producer of serial killers. It’s a sign of sickness, is what it is. We’re sick and weak and these killers are like a cancer inside us: the faster we grow, the quicker they multiply.
‘And you know, the more of us there are, the more distant from each other we become. We’re practically livin’ on top of each other but we’re further away from each other spiritually, socially, morally, than we’ve ever been before. And then these guys come in, with their knives and their ropes, and they’re even further removed than the rest of us. Some of them even have cop’s instincts. They can sniff each other out. We found a guy in Angola in February who was communicating with a suspected child-killer in Seattle using Biblical codes. I don’t know how these two freaks found each other, but they did.
‘Strange thing is, most of them are even worse off than the rest of humanity. They’re inadequate – sexually, emotionally, physically, whatever – and they’re taking it out on those they see around them. They have no . . .’ He shook his hands in the air, searching for the word. ‘. . . no vision. They have no larger vision of what they’re doing. There’s no purpose to it. It’s just an expression of some kind of fatal flaw.
‘And the people they’re killing, they’re so dumb that they can’t understand what’s happening around them. These killers should be a wake-up call, but nobody’s listening, and that widens the gap even more. All they see is the distance and they reach across it and pick us off, one by one. All we can do is hope that, if they do it often enough, we’ll spot the pattern and put together a link between us and them, a bridge across the distance.’ He finished his beer and raised the bottle up, calling for another.
‘It’s the distance,’ he said, his eyes on the street but his gaze beyond it, ‘the distance between life and death, Heaven and Hell, us and them. They have to cross it to get close enough to us to take us, but it’s all a matter of distance. They love the distance.’
And it seemed to me, as rain poured down on the window, that Adelaide Modine, the Travelling Man and the thousands of others like them who roamed the country were all united by this distance from the common crowd of humanity. They were like small boys who torture animals or take fish from tanks to watch them squirm and gasp in their death throes.
Yet Adelaide Modine seemed even worse than so many of the others, for she was a woman and to do what she had done went not only against law and morality and whatever other titles we give to th
e common bonds that hold us together and prevent us from tearing each other apart, it went against nature, too. A woman who kills a child seems to bring out something in us that exceeds revulsion or horror. It brings a kind of despair, a lack of faith in the foundations upon which we have built our lives. Just as Lady Macbeth begged to be unsexed so as to kill the old king, so also a woman who killed a child appeared to be denatured, a being divorced from her sex. Adelaide Modine was like Milton’s night-hag, ‘lured with the smell of infant blood’.
I cannot countenance the death of children. The killing of a child seems to bring with it the death of hope, the death of the future. I recall how I used to listen to Jennifer breathe, how I used to watch the rise and fall of my infant daughter’s chest, how I felt a sense of gratitude, of relief, with every inhalation and exhalation.
When she cried, I would lull her to sleep in my arms, waiting for the sobs to fade into the soft rhythms of rest. And when she was at last quiet, I would bend down slowly, carefully, my back aching from the strain of the position, and lay her in her cot. When she was taken from me it was like the death of a world, an infinite number of futures coming to an end.
I felt a weight of despair upon me as the motel drew closer. Hyams had said that he had seen nothing in the Modines that would have indicated the depths of evil that existed within them. Walt Tyler, if what he had said was true, saw that evil only in Adelaide Modine. She had lived among these people, had grown up with them, perhaps even played with them, had sat with them in church, had watched them marry, have children and then had preyed upon them, and no one had suspected her.
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