by R.J. Ellory
I shook my head.
“So, you finally get out to Waycross to see your mother?”
“Yes, we saw her last Sunday, two days before Christmas.”
“And?”
“I don’t know what to say, Sheriff . . . she isn’t my mother anymore. I have conversations with her . . . hell, they aren’t really conversations.” I shook my head. “Last visit, she told me she knew the identity of the child killer.”
Dearing raised his eyebrows, and then he looked concerned, sympathetic. He shifted in his chair and then leaned forward to look at me closely. “I’m sorry to hear that, Joseph, I really am. I don’t know what to say. What happens here . . .” He raised his hand and tapped his brow with his forefinger. “Damned if I know what makes people tick, you know?” He exhaled slowly and leaned back. “I’ve been out there to see her a few times,” he said.
“I know, Sheriff . . . I know you’ve been to see her and I really appreciate it.”
“Seemed the right thing to do. I’ve sat and talked to her and I don’t know that she even remembers who I am.”
“I don’t . . .” I looked down at the floor, shook my head resignedly. “Whatever they’re doing to her isn’t fixing anything. They’ve given her drugs and all manner of special treatments. Every time I go they got some new wonder cure cooked up but it all seems like snake oil and jimson weed to me. The doctor comes down, seventy-five-dollar suit, all sniptious and superior, and what he tells me has about as much use to anyone as so many parcels of chickenshit.”
“I’m sorry to hear it, Joseph. Though it don’t necessarily surprise me when it comes to medics an’ the like. Seems such people spend all their time lookin’ where folks has been instead of lookin’ where they’re going.”
I raised my hands and shrugged resignedly. “It is what it is, Sheriff.”
“What does Miss Webber think?”
I looked up, puzzled. “Alex?”
“Sure, she’s a schoolteacher, ain’t she? Smarter than three or four ordinary folks rolled together. She ain’t your regular punchboard, right?”
I laughed. Dearing’s words came out straight and blunt, a prize-fighter jabbing holes in the space between us. Words like that seemed made of something more physical than sound; bare-knuckle words, kind of bloody-nosed and ugly. That was a quality I could appreciate. “What does she think?” I replied. “I don’t know . . . I haven’t really asked her. This is the first time I’ve taken her out there. She spoke a little on the way, nothing much of anything really, but I’m not in the most talkative frame of mind when I’ve been out to Waycross.”
“What was the deal with Gunther Kruger?”
The question came out of left field with a curve. I ducked but it caught me sideways and hurt some. Tomorrow I would still feel it, maybe a bruise. “Gunther Kruger?” I parried.
“We see what we see, Joseph,” Dearing said. Seemed a simple enough statement, but the way he said it made it sound like something else. “You’re a writer ain’tcha?”
“Some.”
“Wanna know what I think about writers?”
“Fascinated.”
“You don’t think I read some? Read that Rider Haggard feller, Hemingway, people like that. Read The Informer by the Irisher, what was his name?”
“O’Flaherty,” I said. “Liam O’Flaherty.”
“That’s the man.”
“I’m surprised.”
“That I can read?”
“No, Sheriff, that you read things like that.”
“I have a cousin who works in the Georgia State Library in Savannah. Every year they clear out God knows how many books . . . she selects a couple dozen for me and sends them down.”
“You were gonna tell me what you thought about writers.”
“I was on my way,” he said. “Sometimes I like to make a journey of what I’m saying so it feels more like a destination when I get there.”
I sat silent and waited.
“Writers see things other folks don’t see.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“I’m right,” Dearing said. “Maybe more accurate to say they see things in a way that others don’t. You agree?”
I shrugged. “Figure that everyone sees what they see, and they all see it a different way.”
“Maybe so,” Dearing replied. “But a writer notices details and such that others don’t, and he sees those details because he’s looking with different kinds of eyes.”
“Perhaps,” I said. “And you’re telling me this because?”
“Because of what happened with your mother and Gunther Kruger.”
I didn’t reply.
Dearing smiled, something understanding in his expression. “We ain’t at school anymore, Joseph.” He leaned forward and rested the palms of his hands on the table. I figured he was gonna use the support to stand up but he just kind of leaned forward and looked at me. “I’m not of a mind to dredge through people’s personal lives. Don’t consider it’s any of my business, and don’t think I’d want it if it was offered. Your mother and Gunther Kruger made a habit of sharing one another’s company, that’s a fact. I know it. You know it. Sure as hell Mrs. Gunther Kruger knew it. Don’t know about the kids. Kids can be deceptive. Wide-eyed and innocent, but they hear every word.” Dearing paused, pushed himself back into his chair. The chair, perhaps reconciled to such punishment, merely groaned a little. “I remember a time, three, four years ago, a man said his wife was poisoned—” Dearing stopped mid-flight. “Hell, you don’t wanna be hearing second-hand stories about such things. Another time we’ll do that. Where the hell was I?”
“My mother and Gunther Kruger.”
“Right, right. So, like I said, I got an idea that maybe there were things that went on back then that you didn’t think to speak about at the time. Maybe they didn’t seem important. Maybe they weren’t, you know? Hindsight gives us a different slant and situation. I wondered if there was anything that you can remember that might give us something.”
“About the girls that were killed?”
“Sure, about the girls that were killed.”
“And you think I might know something about this because I lived next door to the Krugers.”
“No, not because you lived next door to the Krugers . . . because three of the girls were from here, another one from Fargo, but she was found on Kruger’s land—”
“Hold up,” I said. “I feel like I’m being given a ride somewhere, Sheriff.”
Dearing smiled and shook his head. “No one’s giving anyone a ride, Joseph.”
“So ask me what you wanna ask me and I’ll tell you the answer.”
Dearing cleared his throat. “I know I came and spoke to you afterwards, but I don’t know that I ever really understood about what happened with the Keppler girl.”
I frowned.
“Tell me the truth, Joseph . . . why did you go to Fleming that day?”
I smiled and shook my head. “This is a railroad train, right? You should’ve told me I’d won a ticket, I would’ve packed some things for the trip.”
“Ain’t no railroad ticket, Joseph. Tell ya something. Curiosity I have is about yay big.” Dearing held his hands wide as a measure. “I find it strange that you would hear about the death of a little girl, little girl you never heard of before, and drive all the way out to Liberty County. Got me thinking.”
“Thinking what, Sheriff . . . something about how a murderer might return to the scene of a crime?”
“Not only the murderer, Joseph, maybe someone who knows something about the murder.”
I didn’t reply.
“You’ve heard of such things before?”
I shook my head. “You think it was Gunther Kruger, don’t you? You think Gunther Kruger killed those girls back then, and he’s back to killing again, right?”
“What d’you think?”
“I don’t think anything, Sheriff Dearing.”
“He seem like the sort of man capable of murdering
someone?”
“Capable of murdering someone? I think everyone is capable of murdering someone. You give them the right motive and opportunity, well, who the hell knows, eh? Maybe even you, Sheriff.”
“This isn’t a discussion about me, Joseph. This is about whether or not there was anything that happened back then that made you feel Gunther Kruger might have had something to do with these killings. There was a certain viewpoint at the time—”
“The viewpoint that set fire to his house and killed his daughter?” I asked. I was starting to get angry.
“A terrible thing,” Dearing said. “What happened back then, no question about it. It was a terrible, terrible thing, and I, for one, feel a tremendous sense of responsibility—”
“Why would you feel responsible? You didn’t light the fire, did you? Or did you, Sheriff? Was that a situation where there was sufficient motive and opportunity—”
Dearing raised his hand. “There are lessons to be learned in life, Joseph. You can try something once and learn a lesson from it. Kind of lesson you need to be taught twice says you’re nothing but plain dumb.”
I frowned.
“You upset me once, heading on out there to Fleming. Hell, the last person in the world I expected to see out there was you. I don’t want you to be upsetting me another time, Joseph.”
I raised a conciliatory hand.
“Gunther Kruger was a suspect back then. I don’t mind telling you that. You know something? I’ll tell you this for a nickel and dime and you don’t gotta pay me straight away. There was nothing, not one thing anywhere that said his little girl had the spasms—”
“She was an epileptic, Sheriff—”
“Was she now?” Dearing leaned back in his chair. He tucked his right thumb in his belt and looked pleased with himself.
“You’re saying she wasn’t?”
Dearing shook his head. “I’m saying there was no record anywhere that that little girl had the grand mal or anything like it.”
“So the bruises I saw . . .”
“Were simply the bruises you saw, nothing more or less than that. Hell, Joseph, whichever way you dress it up and take it out there was something awry with that family. Me, I’m a Democrat, and I don’t know that I’m in favor of selling up Georgia land to foreigners and the like, but I got a basic respect for my fellow man and no ill will toward him. However—” Dearing paused melodramatically. He leaned forward to emphasize his position and the importance of his viewpoint. “When it comes to killing little girls I have no opinion about anyone, ’cept that they might or might not be involved. I ain’t one of these ignorants that hates folks just ’cause they’re from someplace else. Don’t matter who they are, what color, what language they speak, they all get the same degree of interest when it comes to the law. Fact that your ma, God bless her, makes like Lana Turner in that Postman picture with Mr. Gunther Kruger . . . fact that she was a decent and God-fearing woman . . . well, hell, Joseph, I can’t take the fact that your ma got personal with Gunther Kruger as any kind of reference for his character. I . . . we . . . figured him for beating the little girl, me and Ford Ruby, and Sheriff Fermor . . . he’s the one you had the pleasure of meeting that afternoon with Miss Webber, right?”
I nodded. “I remember him, yes.”
“So the three of us had a couple of meetings, and we did what we did, we asked our questions and followed our clues, and we didn’t come back with anything for the show-’n’-tell. Nothing ’cept the coincidence of where the little girls were found. That and the fact that we took Gunther Kruger for a child beater.”
“Which ain’t one helluva lot to hang a murder rap on someone.”
“True, true, but bright you may be, all full of ten- and twenty-dollar words, and I might be slow and methodical, and have no more sparks in my head than a damp firecracker, but I’ll tell you something I have got, Joseph Vaughan . . . I’ve got persistence, you see? Persistence. I’m the sort of man who gets ahold of an idea, and I ain’t gonna let go of it ’til it’s been wrestled off of me, and even then whoever’s doin’ the wrestling knows they’ve been through a fight.”
“So what’re you saying?” I asked.
Dearing leaned back. He took on the resigned, philosophical aspect of someone attempting to solicit information by nonchalance, almost as if whatever I might say really didn’t matter a great deal. “What I’m saying is that I got Alice Ruth Van Horne, Laverna Stowell, Ellen May Levine, Catherine McRae and Virginia Perlman all dead between November of ’39 and August of ’42. Then this thing happens with the Krugers. The fire. The little girl dies in the fire, right? The Krugers are gone out to wherever—”
“Uvalda, Toombs County,” I interjected. “Apparently one of her cousins had a farm up there.”
Dearing nodded. “That’s where they went,” he said, “but that’s not where they stayed.”
I frowned. I had lost track of the Krugers, and never asked of their fortune. Perhaps, in some way, it had been a relief to see them go. Their continued presence would have reminded me of Mr. Kruger’s infidelity and the death of Elena.
“They wound up in Jesup.”
“Where?”
“Jesup,” Dearing said. “Right in Wayne County.” He opened one of his desk drawers and pulled out a map. He unfolded it across his desk, stood up, and motioned for me to come look. He stabbed his finger on a spot and I peered down at it. “The sixth girl, Rebecca Leonard, found September tenth, 1943, right here in Meridan, Mclntosh County. Put your finger there.”
I complied.
“Seventh girl, Sheralyn Williams, found February tenth, 1945, right there in Offerman, Pierce County.” Dearing took a nickel from his pocket and put it on the spot. “And then the eighth girl, as you know, found right here in Liberty, Fleming County. Esther Keppler. That was just days ago, December twenty-first.” Dearing looked up at me, the two of us on opposite sides of the table, leaning over this map with our fingers on it like we were Blücher and Wellington at Waterloo. “So whaddya see?”
“I see three locations, with Jesup right in the middle.”
“I see the same thing. From Jesup all of them are no more than thirty miles by crow.”
“Which doesn’t mean a great deal.”
“But at the same time doesn’t mean nothing.”
“And just because those three locations make a triangle with Jesup right in the middle tells you that Gunther Kruger did these killings.”
Dearing snorted contemptuously and folded up the map. “No, shee-it, it don’t tell me nothing of the sort.”
I was puzzled. I didn’t know where Dearing was going with his implications and innuendos.
“I got eight dead girls, Joseph, nine if you count the Kruger girl. She doesn’t figure in this thing in my mind. Kruger wouldn’t have set fire to his own house. That fire was set by someone who figured Kruger had it coming. Either that, or an accident. So, like I said, I got eight dead girls, youngest seven, oldest eleven, and four sheriffs from four different counties unable to answer any questions from the victims’ respective parents about what might have happened and who might have done this. I got one suspect, maybe two, and nothing on either of them. That’s where I am, and this thing started all of six years ago—”
“We think,” I interjected.
“You what?”
“Six years ago, we think,” I repeated. “This could have been going on an awful lot longer, we could have just been unaware of it.”
Dearing shook his head. Up close I realized how much he had aged. His face was striated with fine creases, not so much wrinkles as points of collapse, where the invading force of time had usurped the territory of youth. He looked like a crumpled picture, unfolded, that would never lie straight again. “I don’t know that I wanna hear such a thing,” Dearing said quietly. He sounded tired, a little overwhelmed.
“I’m sorry, Sheriff, I didn’t mean to—”
Dearing raised his hand and shook his head. “Forget about it. I’m just of a
mind to talk, and I’ve known you since you were yay high, and this thing with Miss Webber . . .” Dearing paused and looked at me. “How old is she, Joseph?”
I sat down and looked up at him. “She’s twenty-six. Sheriff, I told you that before.”
Dearing sat down also, pushed the map to the edge of the desk. “Sure you did, sure you did. It’s just that—”
I smiled at Dearing. “You know something? I don’t think in anything but straight lines and right angles, Sheriff. You got an opinion, I’m gonna hear it. Ain’t any real issue of whether we agree or not. People think what people think, always have done, always will. I’m sure there are people that find some solace in leveling a criticism here or there. Such people, as far as I’m concerned, are full of bitterness and schadenfreude.”
“Sharda-what?”
“Schadenfreude . . . it’s a word that describes the sort of person who gets a kick out of other people’s miseries. You know what I mean, right?”
“Hell, do I know what you mean,” Dearing said. “That about sums up my wife’s sister, twisted old bitch that she is.”
I laughed at Dearing’s facial expression, like he’d taken a mouthful of copper filings.
“Anyway, you got something to say then you can say it. I’m not the easily offended type.”
Dearing shrugged. “Dammit, Joseph, you look like . . . Christ, I don’t know what the hell you look like. Rasputin or something, right? Your hair’s too damned long, and this beard you seem so intent on wearing makes you look like a crazy person. And now this thing with the schoolteacher. You were damned near up ahead of the circuit court for exposing yourself in a public place, for lewd and lascivious conduct . . . you were lucky that was all, lucky that Burnett Fermor didn’t strip your hide raw out there. That kinda thing, along with the way you look . . . well, hell, Joseph. Burnett Fermor wasn’t the first one to look in your direction for these killings.”