by R.J. Ellory
I wanted someone to be responsible. I wanted someone to pay for what had happened.
In that moment I tried to believe, tried to believe so hard that it hurt.
I stood at the kitchen window and looked out. I could see the old Kruger site, and with it came the image of Elena being carried beneath her shroud to the back of Frank Turow’s waiting flatbed. Death had been there that night, neither walking nor floating, for He’d been in the shadows of men that had walked with Elena, in the sound of heavy boots as they’d crushed wet leaves and broken sticks, in the mist that had issued from their mouths as they’d cleared throats and whispered words, as they’d hoisted the body upwards and laid it on the truck. He had been there. I knew He’d seen me, and He knew I’d been watching Him.
I asked myself if Death had come in the form of Gunther Kruger.
I knew I should walk over and see Sheriff Dearing, but I could not face it. I decided I would visit with him the following day.
Had I gone he might have said something, might have done something that would have changed what happened. Later, hindsight casting a twisted reflection and showing me what might have been, I understood that I was viewing things just as I’d discussed with Gunther. I had told him how he was in no way responsible, that there was nothing he could have done. How quick we were to advise others, and then fail to apply the same advice to ourselves.
The truth was the truth, no matter how hard it was to face.
By the time I spoke with Dearing, reality was irreversible. I told him what Gunther Kruger had said. I told him what I had thought, perhaps what I had imagined. I see now that I told him what he wanted so much to believe. Reality, so much harder to face than imagination or conjecture, had driven home its point without mercy.
It was then that everything would change, and I—so accustomed to the worst that could be—found it hard to believe that my life would change for the better.
The wheels had turned. They ground between them the lives of people, and once their revolutions were complete there seemed to be nothing left at all.
It was a life, but so distant from what I’d wished.
Am I guilty for what I did?
Did I say what I believed to be true, or what I wanted to believe? Did I say what I thought Sheriff Dearing wanted to hear, or did I say what I wanted him to hear?
Did I do this thing because I believed that everything would stop, that somehow the past would fade away quietly, never to haunt me again?
I cannot answer these questions. Even now, after all these years, I am still unable to answer these questions.
My sin. My crime. My torment.
I remember Dearing’s face as I spoke to him, the way he raised his eyebrows but said nothing, the way his eyes widened, the glint of realization that I somehow lit inside of him. And I should have justified my words, I should have tempered them with doubt, with reservation, but I did not. I tempered them with fear and anger and grief; with the pain I felt for what had happened between Gunther Kruger and my mother, for the death of his daughter . . . for all the things I believed him guilty of.
I made him somehow responsible for the dissolution of my life. I made him carry the burden of my loss. I judged him for the death of my mother, the death of Elena, whom I had vowed to protect.
I was judge and jury and witness for the prosecution. I did not review the facts. I did not receive a plea for the defense. I determined guilt and considered no possibility of innocence.
I wanted someone to pay for what had been done.
TWENTY
IT WAS STILL DARK WHEN I HEARD THE ENGINE AT THE FRONT OF THE house.
I stood naked at the edge of my window and peered down. The black-and-white vehicle was unmistakable. Haynes Dearing eased himself wearily out of the driver’s seat, and reached back for his hat, which he set like a punctuation mark atop his head, and I knew.
I knew.
I stepped back and reached for my pants and shirt. I dressed slowly, figuring that Dearing would take his time making his way to the door despite the short distance. I even sensed that he paused below me, as if considering the reasons behind his action.
I was downstairs before he knocked.
I opened the door and said nothing. His expression was blank. Beyond him the sky still slept; too early for weather.
“I figured you could take a ride with me,” Dearing said.
“Now?” I asked.
He nodded. “Now,” he echoed, and turned to walk away.
“Where’re we going?” I called after him. Dearing didn’t slow or turn or respond. I went back into the house for my shoes and an overcoat.
On the way I spoke twice. Both times Dearing merely shook his head. I figured on a third attempt but gave up before I resolved what to say. He took a route through Hickox, Nahunta and Screven. I knew where we were going, and I guessed why. I watched Dearing’s hands on the wheel, his skin like tanned hide, the scars and marks, the nicotine stains on his middle finger and the ball of his thumb. Once or twice looked sideways at his profile—much of it in shadow, little more than a silhouette, the way the muscles tensed and swelled along his jawline. The man was wound tight. I looked back at the road and kept my thoughts quiet.
The roadside was littered with low-roofed shacks and weather-vanes. Mailboxes every ten or fifteen yards, all of them hungry for something that would more than likely never come. A stack of tires stood like a wide, black column, on it hung a sign that read—FRESH EGGS—and an arrow pointing down a meandering, rutted path. A mile away from Jesup a burned-out tractor sat on the junction like a patient dog pining for a fallen master. Windows without glass, colors long since eaten by rust and corrosion, grill at the front like an angry mouth chock-full of bitter words, unable to speak.
The country of my childhood seemed a sad and desolate country. A country of the past.
“They ain’t here,” Dearing said as he pulled to a stop at the side of the road. We were fifty yards from the Kruger place. Already I had seen the lights, the flashing cherry bars, sensed the hubbub and commotion that awaited us over the brow. I knew he was speaking of Mathilde and the boys.
Seven cars I counted. Faces I saw, recognized one or two. One of them was Burnett Fermor, remembered the little run-in we’d had Christmas of ’45. Felt like a ghost, sitting in the front of Sheriff Dearing’s car and watching the living through the windshield.
“They’re all here,” Dearing said at one point. “Ford Ruby, Landis, John Radcliffe, Monroe from Mclntosh County . . . all of them. Seven counties.”
I said nothing.
Later, hours behind me, only then possessing some slim hope of understanding what had happened, I would think of him like a jack-o’ lantern. Head all swelled, eyes kind of lit up. Tongue turned blue and protruding from his mouth like a Halloween party balloon. Trick or treat, I thought, and understood it was neither.
“I want to go down there,” I said to Dearing.
Dearing shook his head. “No you don’t.”
I considered arguing, but knew anything I said would fall on deaf ears.
“Hung himself,” Dearing said.
For a moment I tried to see nothing, but then I thought of him swinging by a rope, turning back and forth as the rafter that held him creaked and strained with the weight.
“Sometime this morning, we think,” Dearing said. “Walter . . . you remember Walter?”
I nodded.
“Walter found him.”
I didn’t reply. I watched silently as the tri-county coroner left his car and started walking toward Gunther’s barn.
“He had a pink ribbon in his hand,” Dearing said.
I closed my eyes, tried to breathe deeply. I felt emotion welling in my chest.
“There was other stuff we found . . . a shoe, a necklace that we think belonged to the Keppler girl . . .” His voice trailed away into silence.
After a while Dearing spoke again, something about guilt, about his concern that Gunther’s suicide might upset f
olks all over again, stir everything up that they’d tried to forget. I heard nothing but the sound of my own frightened heart.
My mother, my sad and crazy mother, had lain up close and personal with a child-killer.
Ten little girls, all of them beaten and abused, many of them dismembered and scattered to the four winds.
Gunther Kruger—my friend, my neighbor, my mother’s lover . . .
Gunther Kruger had walked out here to speak with Death and Death had hung him from the rafters.
I lost all strength at one point and started to cry.
“Enough,” Dearing said, and it was as if I heard his voice from some extraordinary distance.
“Finally it’s over.” His voice like a whisper, and then he reached forward, started the car, and turned back the way we’d come.
Within a week Haynes Dearing told me to leave Augusta Falls.
“This is not a good time for any of us,” he said. He sat at the kitchen table, his hat in his lap, his expression indecisive, almost nervous. “This thing with Gunther Kruger has . . .” His awkward words fell away into silence and he looked away from me. “There are some that think you might have had something to do with what happened out there.”
“You what?”
Dearing raised his hand. “Don’t get me wrong. This isn’t coming from any official source, Joseph. We have a situation here, obviously the worst since I’ve been in Charlton County. Folks are scared. More from the shock than anything else. Gunther Kruger was a well-known, respected member of the community. A thing like this people find hard to understand, and they get to believing that—”
“Believing what, Sheriff? What do people believe?”
“Hell, Joseph, this doesn’t make any more sense to me than it does to you. I shouldn’t have sent you over there. I shouldn’t have asked you to go and see him. All well and good to look at what I might have done better. Fact of the matter is that I’ve placed you in a vulnerable situation. People would like to think this thing had more to do with your visit than any other reason.”
“You can’t be serious. Christ, Sheriff, what the hell is this? They still think I had something to do with these murders?”
Dearing shook his head. “Hell no, I don’t think so.”
“Then what? What on earth do they think I might have done?”
“Maybe something to do with what happened to Kruger—”
“That I killed Gunther? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I’m not saying anything directly, Joseph.” Dearing set his hat on the table and leaned forward, hands together, fingers interwoven. His expression was intense and serious. “Maybe it’s nothing more than the Kruger boys. Maybe it’s nothing more than a rumor they’ve started. You imagine how they must feel? They don’t want to think that their daddy’s a child killer for Christ’s sake. They don’t want to believe it—”
“So they’re telling people it was me, that I killed those girls and made it look like their father did it.”
Dearing said nothing. His silence was all the confirmation I needed.
“You can’t possibly think that there’s any—”
“I don’t,” Dearing stated emphatically. “I know you didn’t have anything to do with this. We found things in the house, things that were hidden beneath the floor in the barn. We found things that belonged to pretty much all of those girls.”
“So why don’t you tell people . . . why don’t you tell people the truth of what happened?”
“Because Kruger is dead and he can’t refute any accusations.”
“You what?” I was incredulous. I could not believe what Dearing was saying.
“The law is the law, Joseph. We have a man hanged, committed suicide, no doubt about it. We find things that belonged to these girls in his house. There ain’t gonna be any trial, no lawyers, no judges, no more police investigations. Whatever the hell nightmare this is, well, it’s over. There ain’t gonna be any more little dead girls in Georgia, at least not by the hand of Gunther Kruger. He’s gonna go wherever the hell he goes and face his own justice. All I got is a lot of scared and upset people, and in a situation like that you do your best to remove any reminders of the terrible things that have happened.”
“And I’m one of those reminders, right?”
“People know you found the Perlman girl. They know you went out to see Kruger in Jesup. Twenty-four hours later he hangs himself. Whichever view you take of this thing, you’re part of it, Joseph. You’re an unwitting player in this theater—”
“Don’t get poetic, Sheriff. This is just so much bullshit.”
“I think it best you make a move, Joseph. There’s nothing for you here in Augusta Falls. You’re a young man. You’ve had your difficulties here. You ain’t never fitted in with slow country people. Go somewhere and make a fortune for yourself. Use the gift you’ve been given. Write some books, make yourself some money. Get yourself married and start over again. You could sell this place. I could have someone take care of that for you . . . sell up and take the money, make a new beginning. Leave all this bad stuff behind. I’ll take care of what’s here and you go get yourself the life you deserve.”
“And what life would that be, Sheriff?”
Dearing shook his head. “Hell, Joseph, I don’t know. It seems it’s about time you got yourself some happiness.”
Later, Sheriff Dearing long since gone, I sat on the edge of my mother’s bed and cried.
I cried for her, for Gunther Kruger; I cried for the ten little girls who perhaps deserved happiness more than any of us; I cried for Elena, for Alex, for the child I’d lost. I did not cry for myself. There was no point. Now I carried something inside of me, and it was not the ghosts of these children. I carried the truth of what had happened, and this was perhaps most terrifying of all.
I thought about leaving. I was not afraid of what people might say or do, not afraid of what they might think of me. I thought about leaving because it made sense to begin again. I thought of New York, of the book I had promised Alex I would write. I made believe I could survive such a change, and tried to convince myself that everything happened for a reason.
I wondered if the girls’ parents had ever tried to believe the same thing.
“Go,” Reilly said.
It was the beginning of March. Reilly had come to eat with me, stayed for the night, much of the following day. We sat on the porch stoop, Reilly smoking, the late afternoon light reminiscent of every previous spring in Georgia. Winter did not leave indelible footprints on this land. There was an element of bleakness and solitude that was present regardless of season.
“Go to New York,” he pronounced, and there was an insistence in his tone that reached me, even through my absentminded wanderings.
“Like Dearing said, there ain’t a whole handful of nothing for you here, Joseph. How old are you?”
“Twenty-one.”
He smiled awkwardly. “That ain’t even getting started.”
I turned and looked at Reilly Hawkins. “You say there’s nothing for me here. What makes you think there’s anything more in a place like New York?”
Reilly smiled and looked down. “Hell, I don’t know. A place like this you get born in and move away from, ’cept of course you got family or something.”
“You don’t have family and you stayed here.”
Reilly laughed, something resigned and slightly sad in that sound. “Me? I’m the best reason you got to get away from here. I’m you thirty years on if you don’t do something, you know? Besides, you were the one who started this talk of New York.”
I looked toward the horizon. An ocean of low shrubs, chickweed, wintergreen, stunted cottonwood and willow that had sucked too much water from the swampland and grown short and ugly; all of it punctuated by the low roofs of houses, houses that seemed to crouch across the earth, avoiding discovery, waiting to surprise whoever came visiting. I wondered if I was just afraid, afraid of the unknown, afraid of the future. I wondered what my lif
e would come to if I stayed where I was. I’d marry some half-minded farm girl, rear some children, grow old resentfully and die from regrets and shortness of breath. New York beckoned like a loud and welcome noise at the end of a long, uncomfortable silence. I paid no mind to the Kruger boys, wasn’t even certain there had been rumors, and figured Sheriff Dearing had his reasons for considering me better gone. I believed that he was the one who didn’t wish to be reminded of Gunther Kruger. I didn’t see people often enough to know if they were looking at me strangely. I’d long since known that the only reason to stay was my mother, and that duty I’d hidden from for the better part of two years, since the visit I’d made just before Alex and I were married. I wondered how old she would look.
“Maybe I should go,” I said, and my voice carried out toward the trees and was lost amongst them.
“I think you should,” Reilly replied, and we didn’t speak of it again.
In hindsight my life appears as a sequence of connected incidents. Like a line of derailed boxcars, each one individual and yet coupled to the next. One car left the tracks—perhaps the death of my father—and everything from that point followed it swiftly, resolutely. I got to believing that I was connected too, and if I failed to disengage myself I would hurtle over the edge of someplace into nowhere.
That, and the Poles, were the reasons I finally left.
His name was Kuharczyk, Wladyslaw Kuharczyk, and he came to the house in the first week of April 1949.
“Your sheriff,” he said, in remarkably good English. “I come here because your sheriff says you are perhaps to sell this house and land and leave this town.”
Wladyslaw Kuharczyk was a good six and a half feet tall, but despite his size there was nothing intimidating about him. His features spoke of something gentle and sensitive.
“I have come with my wife,” he said. “We have three children.” He bowed his head and closed his eyes. “I had seven children, now only three. I had parents, my wife too, and she had grandparents. All of them killed by Nazis. We are just five people now and I come to America. We have money. My brother, he is dead too, but he make much money in Poland before the war. I have money now to buy this house and this land . . . also this land where this other house was burned.” Kuharczyk glanced over his shoulder to the Kruger lot. “So I come here with you and speak about this because your sheriff is telling us that you maybe go away from here and not come back. I come to see if this house is for sale.”