A Quiet Belief in Angels

by R.J. Ellory

  The Sheriff’s Office was a low brick-built affair at the end of the main drag. It stood alone, evident in its purpose and significance, and when I stepped up onto the porchway and opened the screen door, I saw the sheriff himself through an open office door right ahead.

  “My name is Joseph Vaughan,” I told him, “and I’m a writer.”

  Sheriff Norman Vallelly was somewhere in his sixties. His face was three-quarters wrinkled and the last quarter scattered with crow’s feet, his eyes almost disappearing as he frowned. And those eyes were bright like pennies; eyes that had seen everything people could do, everything they thought. But there was something restful in his features, something that told me he would question a man, and that man would be unable to say anything but the truth.

  “The murdered girl?” he asked me. “And why the hell would you want to know about such a thing?”

  I leaned back in the chair. I had not realized how exhausted I was. Had Sheriff Vallelly kept his silence for a moment I could have closed my eyes and slept.

  “I’m working on a book,” I said. “A book—”

  “Like that Capote feller, right?” Vallelly nodded as if he now understood. “That Capote feller with his Cold Blood thing about that family in Kansas. My wife has read that darned book three or four times.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Like Capote.”

  “Well, hell, Mr. Vaughan, I don’t know that you’re gonna get any kind of book out of this thing, but if you do then you must send me a copy for my wife.”

  “Of course,” I said. “Of course I will.”

  “You know there was another feller came here asking about this murder?”

  “An elderly man, about sixty-two or three?”

  “Sure was,” Vallelly said. “Retired sheriff, name of Geary or some such.”

  “Dearing,” I said. “Haynes Dearing.”

  “That’s the man! You know him?”

  “Yes, I know him. He was the sheriff in Augusta Falls, my hometown.”

  “He came here almost as soon as it happened. Couldn’ta been in the newspapers more than a day and he was at the door asking all sorts of questions.”

  “Did he say that he was looking for someone?”

  “Sure did.”

  I raised my eyebrows inquisitively.

  Vallelly shifted forward in his chair and rested his forearms on the desk. “You want me to tell you who he was looking for?”

  “Could you?”

  “He didn’t know, son. He didn’t know who he was looking for, ’cept he said it might have been a German.”

  “A German?”

  Vallelly nodded. “That’s what he said. Said he was looking for a German.”

  “He mention a name?”

  “No, he didn’t give me any names. First I figured your man might have been drafted in to help us with this thing, but he stayed no more than an hour or two and then he was gone.”

  “He say where?”

  “Didn’t even say goodbye. In and out of here like rainfall.”

  “And the investigation?” I asked.

  Vallelly leaned back and frowned. “I can’t tell you where a current and ongoing investigation is headed, son. I just can’t divulge that kind of information.”

  “But no one has been arrested, right?”

  Vallelly paused for a moment, and then he smiled sardonically. “Let’s say that there haven’t been any headlines about it in the Stone Gap Herald and leave it at that.”

  “And you haven’t heard from Sheriff Dearing since?” I asked.

  Vallelly shook his head. “No, not a word. He said he’d let me know if anything came of his investigation. You say you were from Augusta Falls?”

  I nodded.

  “And he was the sheriff there?”

  “Yes he was, for quite a number of years.”

  “And you had the same trouble there?”

  “Ten of them,” I said. “Between ’39 and ’49. Ten little girls were murdered.”

  “All in the same town?”

  I shook my head. “No, some of them were from surrounding counties. By the end of it there were something like seven different sheriffs’ departments involved.”

  Vallelly whistled through his teeth. He reached for a pipe on the desk and started packing it with tobacco. “And this is the same person?”

  “We believe so.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Haynes Dearing.”

  “Yes, of course. And you’re trying to find this Dearing feller so you can investigate this thing together?”

  “Yes.”

  Vallelly squinted at me over the bowl of his pipe. “And you’re a writer, and he’s a retired sheriff.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have some kind of idea that you’re gonna do better than me and a whole bunch of other sheriffs through half a dozen counties?”

  I smiled. “No, of course not. This thing has been going on for thirty years. There’s been killings in Mississippi, Tennessee, in Alabama and South Carolina. Far as I can gather there’s been at least thirty in all, maybe more. Many of the original officers are no longer active. I imagine some of them are retired, some have died. I don’t think there’s been any real understanding of the nature of this thing. It’s spanned so many years and so many different places. Each town has had its own people and its own investigation, but they’ve never been coordinated.”

  “And you’re planning to write a book about it?”

  “First thing is to find Haynes Dearing, see what he knows, then perhaps try and instigate some kind of task force operation that will pool all the information and see if there’s a pattern, some kind of way to get everybody working on it in unison.”

  Vallelly was silent for a while. He lit his pipe, and the crackle of fired tobacco was the only sound in the room. Arabesques of smoke curled toward the ceiling, and the light through the window turned them into ghosts.

  “I don’t know what to tell you,” he said eventually. “I got a dead little girl. She was taken from right near her house in the middle of the day. No one saw anything out of the ordinary that they remembered. She was found literally hours later—”

  “How was she found, Sheriff?”

  He frowned. “How was she found? You mean who found her?”

  “No,” I said. “I mean what had he done to her?”

  Vallelly squinted at me again. “I don’t know that that’s something I’d want to share with anyone.”

  “I found one of them.”

  Vallelly looked taken aback.

  “When I was fourteen years old. I found one of them on the top of a hill near where I lived.” I felt the memory filling me, tightening my chest. “When I say I found her, it’s more precise to say I found most of her.”

  “Jesus,” Vallelly said, and the word was sharp and sudden.

  “I know what he does. I’ve seen it up close. I’ve read about it, talked about it, been carrying it for as long as I can recall . . .”

  “He cut her through the middle, Mr. Vaughan,” Vallelly said. “He cut her right through the middle like she was a sack of nothing and left her amongst some trees at the edge of the road where anybody could have found her. Never seen anything like it in my life, and hope to God I never do again.”

  Neither of us spoke for some moments, and then Vallelly looked up and said, “So what you gonna do now, son? You got any kind of a plan on how to find this friend of yours?”

  “Nothing specific,” I said.

  “Nothing specific ain’t gonna do it, is it?”

  “No, it’s not.”

  “You want I should put some kind of alert out for him for you?”

  I was surprised, suddenly hopeful. “You can do that?”

  Vallelly smiled. “I can do anything the hell I like. I’m the sheriff, ain’t I?”

  “What does that mean,” I asked. “An alert?”

  “I can send a teletype message to every sheriff’s department in the state. I can give the man’s name
, his description. I can tell them he isn’t wanted for any kind of investigatory purpose, but that he does need to be located. You want I should let them know to tell him you’re looking for him?”

  “Of course, yes,” I said. “If someone sees him they can let him know I want to speak to him.”

  “And they can give him your name?”

  “Definitely, yes. That would be very, very much appreciated, Sheriff.”

  “Consider it done, Mr. Vaughan. I got one hell of a lot of people who want to find out what happened to Rachel Garrett, and if there’s something that’s gonna help make that happen then it’s simply a matter of duty that I see to it, wouldn’t you say?”

  I thanked Sheriff Norman Vallelly profusely; so much so that I believed the man was embarrassed. I told him I would stay in Stone Gap for a day or so. He told me he would keep me informed of any information that came back, and that I should let him know my whereabouts if I chose to leave. He recommended the Excelsior Hotel on Fallow Road, three blocks down and to the right.

  “Sounds like the Ritz or some such, but it sure as hell ain’t anything like that. It’s clean enough, a fair price for a room, and I’ll know where to find you.”

  I thanked Vallelly again, shook his hand, and left his office.

  I walked three blocks down and found the Excelsior, a modest three-story building painted an off-white color. For the first time in as many years as I could recall, I really believed that there might be a chance. Thin and insubstantial, but a chance all the same. At that point I was grateful for anything, and chose not to question my hope.

  By Wednesday the fifth I was climbing the walls of my small hotel room. Twice I had walked down to Sheriff Vallelly’s office, the first occasion finding him absent with the outer door locked and the lights switched off; the second time he merely looked at me from behind his desk with those same squinting eyes, and shook his head.

  From the window of my room I could see the junction between Fallow Road and its neighboring street. To my right, slightly out of view, was the Stone Gap schoolhouse, a complex of small brick buildings with a field behind. At certain times I could hear the laughter and hubbub of children—first thing in the morning, around noon, and then in the middle of the afternoon when they were released for the day. A little after three on Tuesday I was lying on my bed, and the sound of girls laughing came drifting through the window. They were playing some skipping game, and as I moved closer I heard them. The sound of their voices chilled me unexpectedly.

  “Two-six-nine . . . the goose drank wine . . . the monkey chewed tobacco on the streetcar line . . . the line got broke . . . the mon-key choked . . . they all went to Heaven in a little rowboat . . .”

  “Clap hands . . . clap hands . . . clap hands . . .”

  I stayed there with my forearms on the sill and my eyes closed. Each time they sang through the chorus I felt the hairs rise on the nape of my neck. It was as if they knew I was there, and they were simply reminding me of my reason for being. Eventually, I could not have said when, I became aware of silence. I returned to the bed and lay down. My cheeks were wet with tears, but I could not remember having cried.

  Wednesday at five I called again at Vallelly’s office. I appeared at the screen and he called my name and waved me through.

  “I don’t have anything for you,” he said. “I know this must be frustrating, but right now I don’t know there’s a hell of a lot else I can do. Your friend is out there somewhere, and unless he’s already left the state someone’s sure to see him.” He smiled sympathetically. “Only thing we can’t predict is when that will be.”

  “I’m thinking of going back to New York,” I said, finding myself voicing something that I hadn’t even seriously considered. It was a fleeting consideration, and even as it passed I wondered why I had chosen to say anything.

  “Seems as good an idea as any,” Vallelly said. “You can call me soon as you’re there and let me know how to reach you. Maybe by the time you get back there’ll be some word of him.”

  I walked forward and sat down facing the sheriff. “I could be waiting forever,” I said resignedly. I realized that I’d spoken to no one for more than three days. I wanted to speak, wanted to hear the sound of my own voice, to hear someone respond and converse in return. Loneliness had taken residence and I did not like it. “It’s vitally important that I meet with him, and yet I feel that staying here is accomplishing nothing—”

  “’Cept to remind me that I haven’t got you what you wanted,” Vallelly said. He smiled, smiled like the Haynes Dearing I remembered from my childhood, and it hurt me to think of him, all we went through, and here we both were—so many years later—still chasing the same ghost.

  “Tell you something,” Vallelly said as he reached for his pipe and went through the laborious ritual of stoking and tamping. “You get to my age, all these years behind me in the sheriff’s department, and you start to wonder if there isn’t a percentage of the population that we’ll never understand. Something like this, the murdering of children . . . and not just murdering, but the way they’ve been butchered and assaulted . . .” Vallelly closed his eyes for a moment and shook his head. “You understand something like that, Mr. Vaughan?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t understand it, and I don’t know that I want to understand such a thing. Person like that—”

  “Is the sickest kind of individual you’re ever gonna come across,” Vallelly interjected. “That’s what I think.”

  I smiled and looked at the floor. “It seems to me it’s been there all through my life. It started when I was a child, and . . . hell, everything I’ve done since seems to have been tainted by it.”

  “And that’s the reason for the book?”

  I frowned. “The book?”

  “Sure, the book you’re writing. Seems to me writing everything down is gonna be like some kind of exorcism for you, right?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe,” I said. “We’ll see, won’t we?”

  “So tell me something,” Vallelly said. He leaned forward, squinted. “What does that do to a child, seeing something like that?”

  “It reminds you of the temporary nature of everything,” I replied. “There were a group of us. We called ourselves the Guardians. Haynes Dearing posted these flyers around Augusta Falls. They were warnings that reminded us to stay alert and look out for strangers. On the flyer they put this silhouette of a man. That’s what it was all about. That was perhaps the most important thing I ever did. I got those boys together, and we made an oath. We even cut our hands and did the whole blood brother thing. We promised that we would keep the other children safe, that we would look out for them, make sure no harm came to them.”

  “But it didn’t stop, right?”

  “No, it didn’t stop. And I went back to Augusta Falls just a few days ago, and I looked up some of those boys—”

  “And let me guess, they didn’t have the time of day for you.”

  “That’s right.”

  Vallelly smiled understandingly. “Would figure as much. They’re all grown up now, have kids of their own. Whatever happened back then isn’t happening now so it doesn’t have anything to do with them.”

  I nodded.

  “That’s human nature, Mr. Vaughan. Seems to me it never used to be that way, but it is now. The world has changed and people have changed more. Don’t necessarily know that I like the way it’s going, but I sure as hell ain’t gonna stop it on my own.”

  “So we do what we can do, and hope that it makes a bit of difference, right?”

  “Right,” Vallelly said. “Like you and your friend Haynes Dearing.”

  I started to rise from the chair.

  “Believe me, Mr. Vaughan, I want you to find him,” Vallelly said. “I want you to meet with him and see if there’s something that can be done to stop this going any further. I’ll do what I can. I’ll send out another teletype message, and as soon as you get back to New York you give me a call and let me know where I can reac
h you, okay?”

  “I will,” I said. I extended my hand, shook with Sheriff Norman Vallelly, and then I turned and left his office.

  I walked back to the Excelsior and packed my things. At the reception desk I made inquiries about buses, and was directed to take a connection to Atlanta where I could find a Greyhound that would return me to New York.

  I did not wish to leave, and yet I felt I could not stay. Rock and a hard place. Leaving seemed easier, and so I did.

  I left Atlanta for New York. Late afternoon, Thursday, April sixth, 1967. If I’d known then that everything would end within a few days, I wonder whether I would have delayed my journey. Strange to think now, but the question in my mind was what I would do when this thing was over. Whichever way it turned out, at some point it would be over, and then where would I go?

  I took the Greyhound and slept as best I could. We drove for eight hours, and then we stopped for a little while. I stepped from the bus and stood at the side of the road. My body ached. I looked at my fellow passengers: an overweight man in a porkpie hat who smelled of dime-store aftershave and thirty-cent cigars; a pregnant girl, no more than nineteen or twenty, carrying everything she owned in a worn-out Samsonite holdall; a shoe salesman, fifty-three and dog-tired, in his wallet a photo of the wife who’d left him, the son who hadn’t called for eleven years; beside him a blond-haired, big-toothed college quarterback with a doubtful knee, finally resigned to life without cheerleaders and locker rooms and rubbing alcohol. These people were phantoms, images of those who populated some other world, a world I seemed to have parted from, perhaps never to return. I tried to speak with them, but what could I say? “I have come from prison for a murder I did not commit. I have lost more people than I will ever gain. I am crossing America to find a man who will help me identify a child killer. As far as I can guess there are twenty-nine dead children. I can hear them all. When I close my eyes they are all I can see. Now what did you want to talk to me about?”

  We came into New York on Sunday morning. New York had changed, but, just as with Augusta Falls, the New York I remembered was still there beneath the surface. I remembered the first time I had seen it back in April of 1949. How it had pounded at me.