by R.J. Ellory
Praying in her mind perhaps.
On the vic-tory side, on the vic-tory side, no foe can daunt us, no fear can haunt us—
Words going round in her mind. Eyes closed tight like winter shutters.
Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning, give me oil in my lamp, I pray—
The smell of something like something dead. Smell of shoe leather, or something that smelled like leather, and after the sudden shock of being snatched, after the moment’s expectation of laughter, that this was a game, just a game, just a fun game.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death I shall fear—
Like hide-an’-seek, catch-as-catch-can, ollie ollie oxen freeeeee . . .
But realization dawned sudden like a door slam. Bang! One thing, now another, and then understanding that the pressure she felt around her neck, the fact that the other hand went beneath her skirt and touched her where she wouldn’t have dared to touch herself, was never part of any game she remembered.
And then her breathing faltered.
Hitching, catching in her throat, and understanding that whatever was happening wasn’t supposed to happen in any kind of world she’d imagined.
The feeling of hands—one around her throat, one beneath her skirt, and the smell of liquor, the smell of tobacco, the smell of leather . . .
Give me oil in my lamp, keep me burning . . . keep me burning ‘til the break of day—
And everything inside her screaming that she had to get away, run away, run like the wind, run like lightning across the field to home.
But the arms around her, holding her ironbound, unrelenting, and the sensation of pressure increasing against her chest, her throat, finding it harder to breathe, and wanting to scream like a fire siren, like a great, swooping bird of prey descending . . . like a little girl terrified for her life . . .
Eight years old. A quarter mile from home.
She opened her eyes a fraction and could see the dip and sudden rise of the hill, the way the road wended east then northeast then east again, and in back of the rise to the right was her house.
Had it not been for the dip and rise she could’ve seen the house, her house, from where she’d been walking when he came from out of nowhere.
He smelled dark and deep and older than God and baseball.
It smelled like Jesus was nowhere to be seen.
A man behind her with arms like tree trunks, a man who smelled like he’d done this before.
And then she started crying, and that’s when he hit her hard and the sound was like a whip, and the pain that lanced through the side of her head was like the time she fell from a tree and bloodied her nose and bruised her cheek, and felt the sound of the earth colliding with her head for three weeks in her right ear.
She started crying, and he smacked her, and she knew it was a he because no one but a man could have held her so tight, and no one but a man had such iron muscles and rough skin and callused hands.
Her crying sound was swallowed by the darkness of evening, and every thought she had was more terrifying than the previous one, and when she realized what he was going to do it felt like her blood ran quiet and still in her veins.
Down on the ground now, one hand across her throat, his other hand tearing at her clothes, rending cotton and lace and satin trim, tugging the bowed pink ribbons from her hair, and she felt the press of cool air on her skin, and she breathed the smell of dead leaves and broken twigs, and heard the labored breathing over her, her eyes screwed shut in the make-believe wish that if she didn’t see it then it couldn’t happen.
He hit her again. A stinging redness on her cheek, and through her tears seeing the light in his eyes—deadlight, redlight—and white teeth, and smelling his rancid, fetid breath, and feeling the roughness of stubble as he pressed his face against her stomach, as his hands buried themselves, as fingers pushed inside her and made her hurt like she’d never imagined anyone could be hurt.
And then deciding to lie still, barely breathing, barely hoping anything at all now, as he does things . . .
There is pain within like her insides are being pushed up into her throat. Sensation of choking, and then the hand across her throat starts to increase its pressure, and feeling her eyes swelling inside their sockets, eyes fit to burst, and the sound of blood like those galloping horses across night fields.
As she struggles the weight and pain increase, and then she knows she’s going, slipping away into somewhere cool and safe, where such things can’t be felt any longer, and she welcomes the silence, the mo tionlessness, the feeling of calm that invades every inch of her body.
She senses the man standing over her with a single pink ribbon in his hand. He pauses, and then he buries the ribbon in his pocket.
And then it all goes away.
All of it.
A feeling of nothing, of emptiness, a breeze like summer.
Figured she would have been a child a little longer.
That much at least
McIntosh County sheriff’s name was Darius Monroe. His father was a sheriff, and his father before him, and before that their lineage went back to horse rustlers, thieves, drunkards and jackrollers. All of them on the muscle, tough men. Great-grandfather Monroe had sired the better part of twenty children out of four different women. Less a family, more a dynasty. Never married one of them. Earned a living playing cards on the steamers. Lothario glint in his gambler’s eyes, a life filled with shameful acts but never a shameful thought in his mind. Darius Monroe was fifty-three and tired. Never married, never would. The family line would stop with him, dead in its tracks, a deer with a headshot. His face was like a crumpled paper bag, his mouth tight like a widow’s purse. His eyes were like his gambler ancestors’, sharp and quick, saving everything until the moment came when he’d spread his hand and take the pot. Due to his station people had to trust him, but felt they shouldn’t.
Darius Monroe’s cousin on his mother’s side, Jackson “Jacko” Delancey, was an awkward-looking man, all knees and elbows with something in his color that spoke of a dalliance with Indians—plumbline-straight hair, black like a crow, nose almost Roman, features too proud for a man so humble. What Jacko found that Friday morning humbled him further. He spoke about it for months afterward—in bars, leaning on fences, walking horses to pasture, watering the herb beds his wife insisted on maintaining despite the taint in the earth that came from the swamp. What he found that Friday morning made him turn cold and quiet, broke a sweat across his skin despite the unseasonably chill air, made him stand back and walk away, made him turn around and keep on going a good thirty or forty yards, and then return to make sure he wasn’t hallucinating. He had known he wasn’t. But the unreality of what was before him would’ve made any sane man think twice.
At one moment, kneeling there in the dirt, he even reached out and touched her fingers. Fingers attached to a hand. The hand wasn’t attached to much of anything at all. The body was in more pieces than he cared to count, and they were spread across the ground, though the blood that lay thick on the ground between them gave the appearance that they were all still connected. The little girl was all of twelve pieces, they later confirmed, but looked like she was still one.
It was then that he vomited.
So awkward Jacko Delancey ran like a hare the half mile to his house, where he untied a mare and rode straight as a rigging line to his cousin’s house. Darius Monroe was home, had set his mind to showing for work after lunch. Jacko brought him to the front with a thunderous hammering on the door, and in staggered breaths got the message delivered.
Sheriff Darius Monroe took the car, sent Jacko home with the horse, called on his radio and told Deputy Sheriff Lester Ellis to meet him out there.
Sheriff Monroe arrived a little before nine. He saw what he saw and was grateful he’d had the foresight to skip breakfast. He brought tapes and poles from the trunk and set a perimeter and waited for Ellis to arrive. He smoked a cigarette and looked away. Perhaps no
thing more than premonition, hearsay, something else, but he’d been there when the Leonard girl was found back in September of ’43 and had wondered when his time would come again. It had. But forewarning, whatever it might have been named, had done nothing to prepare him for the dreadful reality of what Jacko Delancey had found.
Ellis appeared within twenty minutes, took one look and heaved his breakfast and three-square from Thursday over the fence. He thought of his own girl, four years old two weeks before, and wondered if what they taught at Sunday school was true. God is merciful, God is just, God is all-seeing and protective of the innocent and the meek. God had sure been busy someplace else the night before, and he’d let another young soul pass into the hereafter. Ellis called the Sheriff’s Office and had the desk call the tri-county coroner. At ten-thirty he came, rolling down the road in a beat-to-hell station wagon. Robert Gorman was responsible for McIntosh, Wayne and Pierce counties. He had been there for Rebecca Leonard in September of ’43, Sheralyn Williams in February of ’45; stood beside Sheriff George Burwell when Mary Tait’s body was discovered in October of ’46. Jurisdictions, both for police and coroner duties, were confused. Victims from one county had been found in another, and no one knew exactly where to draw the lines.
By eleven the word was out. A meeting was arranged in Eulonia for three that same afternoon, and present were all concerned parties. Seven counties, seven sheriffs, their respective deputies and assistants, a gathering of seventeen men, all of them sober, all of them stunned.
Haynes Dearing from Charlton led the proceedings, asked questions, waited for answers. Few were forthcoming. None of those present had ever been engaged in such a thing. What they had was a mass murderer, because no one thought there was more than one guilty man.
“It’ll take a task force,” Burnett Fermor ventured.
“A task force can only be comprised of citizens from the different counties,” Ford Ruby said, “but you get that kind of thing going and we’re gonna have a witch hunt on our hands.”
“So what’s your suggestion?” Fermor asked.
“Suggestion?” Ruby said, in his voice a tone of defiance. “My suggestion is that we each take responsibility for our own counties and our own citizens. Break them all down into groups and take the men aged between sixteen and sixty, excluding no one, and go house to house asking questions.”
“Good enough,” Dearing said. “That seems as good a start as any. And we have to establish a central location, somewhere where all files and records can be based so we all have access and can coordinate on this together.”
No one had the gall to suggest that such a thing was long overdue.
Radcliffe from Appling suggested Jesup; the previous meeting had been there in October of ’46.
“Suits me,” Dearing said, aware now that this thing had been going on for ten years. First girl was Alice Ruth Van Horne in November of ’39. A war had intervened. God knows how many millions of lives had been lost, hundreds of thousands of Americans amongst them on the other side of the world, and yet such an event seemed somehow insignificant in the face of this thing. This was an invasion of an entirely different nature.
“So that’s where everything goes,” Dearing continued. “Every file, every coroner’s report, every document, every interview, all of it goes to Wayne County Sheriff’s Office by tomorrow morning.”
“You think Gus Young is gonna have an issue with that?” Radcliffe said, referring to Jesup’s town councilman, a man renowned for his irascibility and short temper.
Dearing shook his head. “I’ve known Gus Young since I was a kid. Gus Young is gonna want to do everything within his power to help us.”
“Gus Young is Jesup’s councilman,” George Burwell interjected. “I’m Wayne County Sheriff. Gus Young is gonna do just exactly what I tell him.”
The meeting was closed. Each man returned to his car. Lester Ellis took a message on the radio. The girl had been identified.
“Oh, for the love of God,” Darius Monroe said quietly. “Not the Bradford girl.”
“You know the family?” Ellis asked.
Monroe nodded his head. He looked more beaten and exhausted than ever. “Oldest boy is my godson,” he said.
“You want me to go over there?” Ellis asked, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t have to.
Monroe was silent for a moment, and then he turned to face his deputy. “Now what kind of a man would I be to let someone else do this?”
Ellis didn’t reply.
NINETEEN
THE FIRST I HEARD OF THE KILLING WAS LATE THE FOLLOWING DAY. I heard it from Sheriff Dearing, and it was then—in my house, right there in the kitchen—that he told me how he’d wanted to come and see me when he’d heard about Alex.
“It’s not easy,” he said. “Such things are never easy.”
I raised my hand and he stopped. “It’s over,” I said. “She’s gone. She died, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve done enough thinking and talking for a lifetime, Sheriff. Seems to me I talk about it and it all comes back to haunt me. If you don’t mind I’d really rather not go there today.”
“That’s the way you want it?”
I nodded. “That’s the way I want it, Sheriff. Nothing personal.”
He conceded; sat there for a while, and his thoughts almost audible, and then he told me about Lucy Bradford, the meeting that had taken place the previous day, the decision to give each sheriff responsibility for their respective counties.
“And I am on your list of suspects?” I asked.
Dearing smiled knowingly. “Joseph, everyone is on my list of suspects.”
“But I am the first person you’ve come to, right?”
Dearing shook his head. “As a matter of fact, no, you’re not. Why, do you think you should be?”
“I’m not playing any games with you, Sheriff.”
“This is not a game, Joseph, this is a serious business. Children have been murdered.”
“I’m well aware of that fact, Sheriff. And you want me to do what?”
Dearing leaned back in the chair. He had his hat in his lap and he nervously rotated it, fingering the brim. “We had a discussion before—”
“We did?”
“No games, Joseph, if you set a rule then it applies to both of us.”
I fell silent.
“We had a discussion before, back at Christmas after the war ended, a few days after the Keppler girl was found.”
I remembered, the day I’d seen Alex off to visit with her parents.
“I asked you some questions. I told you some things. I asked you to keep your eyes and ears open, as best as I can recall.”
“You did, yes, and you also suggested that I might be in amongst people’s thoughts when they were thinking about who might have done these things—”
“I said what I said. What I said needed saying. I haven’t spoken to anyone who’s suggested such a thing.”
“So what’re we talking about?”
“About the fact that another girl is dead. I don’t even wanna give you an idea of the state she was in . . . all I have is another dead girl and a county full of suspects. Three of them were from right here in Augusta Falls. Alice Van Horne, Catherine McRae—”
“And Virginia Perlman,” I interjected.
Dearing nodded. “And Ellen May Levine from Fargo . . . found no more than a half mile from this house.”
“And what d’you want me to do, Sheriff?”
Dearing cleared his throat. “I want your help.”
I leaned forward, raised my eyebrows. “My help?”
Dearing nodded. “Yes, Joseph, I want you to do something for me.”
I said nothing.
“I want you to go up to Jesup and visit with the Krugers.”
I didn’t speak for quite some time.
Sunday I went to Alex’s grave. I read the words inscribed on her stone, and as I reached out to touch the smooth marble surface it started to rain. It came like a curta
in and the force of it pounded my head and my shoulders mercilessly. The flowers I had brought and set against the headstone were battered into handfuls of waterlogged petals. I stayed there until my clothes were almost too heavy for me to stand, and I thought about Alex, about the child we would have raised, and I shed no tears. I believed the sky was crying for me.
The previous evening I had walked to Reilly’s house and told him what had happened. I told him about the Bradford girl from Shellman Bluff, the visit from Dearing, the request he’d made.
“Ten girls?” he asked.
“Ten girls, yes.”
“And Dearing has his eye on Gunther Kruger for these things?”
“I think Haynes Dearing is a man adrift in an ocean of questions. He doesn’t know anything, but he’s the law, and it’s his job to do everything he can to end this.”
“And they had a meeting, all the sheriffs?”
“Yes. They’ve set up a coordination point in Jesup.”
“Why Jesup?”
“It’s a central point, as close as it gets anyway. You’ve got seven counties involved, and that doesn’t include the areas where bodies were found. Dearing explained it as best he could, said it was madness. There are case files coming from all over, more men involved than they can organize, and they need all the help they can get.”
“And you’re gonna go and speak with Gunther Kruger?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know, Reilly, I just don’t know.”
“How can you not go, Joseph?”
I smiled. “Easy. I just don’t.”
“But what if it is him? What if he killed all these girls?”
I sighed. I felt my mind and my emotions were stretched to their limit. “Reilly, you know him as well as I. You were there when he used to come over and sit with us in the kitchen. His wife, his kids . . . Jesus, you really think he’s the sort of man who could do something like that?”
Reilly Hawkins shook his head. His face was somber. “All I know for sure is that you never really know anyone, Joseph.”