Fourth Person No More

by John Gastineau

  I was more than happy to oblige. Sometimes I don’t take notes so I won’t discourage a source from talking, but when I don’t, the urge to run off and write down what they’re telling me is almost overwhelming.

  “Prostate, huh?” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me give you some advice, young fellow.” I opened the door to Poteet’s garage. “You know you’re getting old when you spend time worrying about whether what’s in your underwear hurts.”

  I was halfway across the garage before the door snapped shut behind me.

  It was not so hard. As soon as I entered the “stairway,” I heard the organ playing something doleful, so I knew the service was beginning, and most people would be seated.

  The door at the end of the “stairway” leads to Poteet’s main office, which is on the front side of the building. The door was open, and no one was in the office. It is obviously a man’s office, with dark wainscoting, pheasants on the wallpaper, and old, English, hunting prints, but Poteet keeps fresh flowers on the table between the wingback chairs that face his dark, maple desk to soften it up. Staying at the rear, away from the windows, I could see the clans milling outside behind the barriers. No one was coming in.

  I tiptoed as well as a fat man can back down the “stairway” to the double doors that lead to the viewing rooms. A hallway runs parallel to the “stairway” on the other side of the doors. Three doors, each leading to a viewing room, set at equal distances from each other along the hallway.

  Through a crack in the doubles, I could see Poteet standing in the door of the viewing room to my right, looking in. He stood like Adam, his hands folded over his crotch, and he wore his best public face, watchful, benign, but impervious. When the organ stopped, he stepped forward into the room, pulling the door closed behind him.

  The partitions that separate the viewing rooms fold along a track in the ceiling so that they can be opened to accommodate large crowds. Given the number of cars in the lot and the nature of the deaths, I assumed that as with the Crawford boy’s funeral Poteet had opened the partition between the front two rooms.

  I made for the door on the left and opened it just a crack. It was possible that with two people to bury Poteet would have opened up all three rooms.

  The room was dark, and I thought empty, at first. When my eyes adjusted, I saw a closed casket on a cart along the back wall. Maybe it was empty or maybe it contained the body of the woman I’d seen on Poteet’s table. I wasn’t thrilled about sharing, but if you’re going to skulk around funeral homes, sharing space with stiffs must be expected.

  At the end of the partition farthest from door, I used my pen to widen ever so slightly and slowly the crack between the partition and the wall.

  Funerals we hold for the living, but this one, unlike Timothy’s, was at least about the dead. The copper-colored caskets had been placed near the partition I peeked through in the shape of a V that opened out to the audience. Both were closed. Saddles made up primarily of yellow and orange flowers and other plant life in fall colors rode both caskets. Obviously used toys—stuffed animals, dolls, models, and baseball equipment—had been placed on and around them. To one side were shelves on which school pictures and family portraits were arrayed. Among the photographs were children’s artwork: crayon drawings, water color paintings, collages made from magazine photos. I saw nothing that had to do with Halloween; probably the cops held it as evidence.

  The immediate family occupied just two of the six chairs on the front row. No one sat with Bobbie and Ruth Russell. Each was rigid and hunched, crammed in an iron cylinder of will. Maybe it was the stiff, new dress clothes; they might not have owned black before. They held hands. They looked poleaxed.

  Bug-eyed and salty, another drunk at a Meeting once called the physical sensation of grief. In the week after his wife died, he said, he drank because he’d cried all he could cry and he was sick of feeling bug-eyed and salty.

  The rest of the room was SRO with family and friends. A few of the same cops, including Wood, had positioned themselves in the same seats they had occupied at the Crawford boy’s funeral.

  A young man stood between the caskets reading Scripture aloud. When he was done, he explained the Russells were of the Quaker faith and that this would be a Quaker service. For those who did not know, he was not a minister, merely a member of the congregation who had been asked to lead the service. Anyone who wished could come forward now to say what was on their minds about these children who had been taken from this Earth.

  And so they did for about an hour, the adults first, then, after they saw how it was done and worked up their courage, the children. An uncle told of Bobbie Russell racking up a $50 phone bill calling relatives on the night the oldest was born. A great aunt spoke of how the children were polite because that was how they were “trained up.” A piano teacher praised Emily’s progress in learning a piece by Bach. A baseball coach recited the Kyle’s outstanding plays at second base. A neighbor farmer spoke of how good it made him feel to see the children working on their parents’ farm. A classmate talked about Kyle’s favorite games. Another revealed that Emily did not eat the apple her mother packed in her lunch each day, but instead gave it to some poor kid who never had lunch. A half-dozen other kids told stories that seemed to have no significance or offer any point about the character of the dead other than to show that the speakers had known them.

  I watch people and write about what they do. That is my job. Until the Russell funeral, I could not tell you the last time I felt the voyeur’s twinge.

  Still, I wrote down every damned word. It has taken me a long time to learn and sometimes I forget, but Dill was right. The news is not always new; it is, as often as not, mere variations on old, old themes.

  The paper publishes funeral stories because we know people read them. They are stories about redemption, by religion or recollection, and people read them over and over again. Whether they read them repeatedly because they want to believe or they already believe, I cannot say.

  “You son of a bitch,” Janelle hissed.

  She nearly gave me a heart attack. I was still tense from sneaking out of my hiding place during the closing hymn and stealing back across the hallway to the “stairway” just as Poteet opened the door to the other viewing room. I hadn’t seen anyone when I looked out the garage window. Moze was gone, probably to direct traffic or something. Janelle came up behind me while I was trying to quietly close the door to the garage. A good offense seemed to be in order.

  “What’re you doing around here anyway?”

  Janelle was standing with her fists clenched at her side.

  “You bastard,” she said, petulantly.

  “Ah, I see. TV cares only about pictures, not words, so you decided to go where TV wouldn’t, somewhere where there aren’t any good pictures, i.e., the back of a funeral parlor, in search of words. Good idea, but if you’re going to sneak around, I’d ditch the pumpkin coat.”

  She looked down at her coat before she realized I was distracting her.

  “I’m going to report you, asshole.”

  “Please. Call me Clay. To whom will you report me?”

  “The cops, the family, the funeral home owner, I don’t know.”

  “For what?

  “Breaking and entering, invasion of privacy.”

  Invasion of privacy. That was the kettle calling the potbellied black. I pursed my lips. “How do you know I didn’t have permission to enter, to attend that funeral?”

  “Why don’t we go see?

  “Fine,” I said, starting to walk to the front. “While we’re at it, you can explain what you’re doing back here.”

  “Wait.” She held up her hand with her head bowed while she worked it through. “You’re telling me I’ve been homered.”

  “By that, I take it you think I caught a break because I know people here.”
r />   “You know what it means.”

  I pursed my lips again and tossed in raised, bushy eyebrows. She stared at me for a moment, then ran her hand through her bowl-cut hair.

  “God, I hate the burg beat,” she said, “You’re all so goddamned insular.” She shook her head. “Well, maybe I can get into the cemetery.”

  “The burial will be private and unannounced to avoid just that sort of thing,” I told her.

  By that time, she was trotting away toward her brightly colored, little car. Over her shoulder, she said, “Pardon me if I don’t take your word for it.”

  To some extent, Janelle was right. I could homer her. I knew, for example, that at about 5:30 p.m. every day, regardless of whatever else was going on, Wood Modine could be found at a farm six miles southeast of town. The farm had been in his family for two, maybe three generations. Wood, his wife, and his family had lived there before the good people of Austin County elected Wood sheriff and required that as part of the job he and his family move into the apartment at the rear of the jail.

  The two horses and half a dozen steers Wood kept on the farm had to be fed twice a day, and to my knowledge, they were his only hobby. Wood did not suffer intrusions into this private time well. That’s probably why he threw a hay bale at me when I stuck my head in the barn door and called his name.

  From up in the hay loft, Wood looked down at me for a long moment, then said, “Make yourself useful.”

  “How?”

  “Bust the bale and put the flakes in that manger.”

  He pointed to a wooden tray that ran waist high along an interior wall. The horses and steers, separated by a wood-slat fence that divided the long room into two, stood on the other side, making guttural noises and moving restlessly with anticipation.

  I had to look at the bale for a minute before I figured out I could put my knee against it and pull off the twine that bound it. It split into flat, square clumps of pleasantly fragrant, dried grass, the flakes.

  When Wood climbed down from the loft to pick up a couple of flakes, I said I had heard he was looking for an older, boxy car with plates from an adjoining county. Wood pulled up short.

  “You heard that,” he said.

  He didn’t seem surprised that I knew, just put out.

  I told him that wasn’t all I’d heard. I named the county.

  “And you want me to confirm that,” Wood said.

  I took the hay flakes to the manger and tossed them down toward one end. The cattle charged in that direction.

  “And tell me anything else you got,” I said, turning back to Wood.

  “Why the hell would I do that?” he said.

  All the J-school arguments automatically ran through my head: Because the public has a right to know. Because how else are we able to measure whether the police are doing their job. Because the community is afraid and needs reassurance that something is being done to catch guys who would kill children.

  But those arguments do not persuade cops, so I said: “Because maybe somebody’ll read it. Because maybe somebody knows something about somebody who owns that car and they’ll call you. Because it’ll look like you guys are out there hustling up leads and probably it doesn’t make much difference whether I run it or not since you or McConegal’ve already talked to the owner.”

  A dozen or so poster-sized, red-checked plastic sacks sat in a row against one wall. Wood untied a string at the neck of one sack. He grunted as he hoisted it onto one knee and poured what looked like half-inch long, brown-green pellets into a five-gallon plastic bucket.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “Are we on the record or off?” Wood said.

  “Over that stuff in the bucket?”

  “No, Clay, over this car.”

  “I’d prefer on.”

  “I wouldn’t,” Wood said.

  He nodded toward the bucket.

  “It’s a nutritional supplement for the cattle.”

  He picked up the bucket and carried it toward the manger.

  “Frankly,” he said, as he passed, “I’d prefer we just leave it without you saying where you got it.”

  “You mean background?”

  “If that’s what you call it. I was thinking of it more as a leak.”

  “Which leaves my ass hanging out if the information’s libelous or no good.”

  “Well, it’s a big ass to keep tucked.”

  Wood grunted again as he lifted the bucket over the back lip of the manger and poured it in a line as far as he could reach.

  He said, “I reckon that’d be the price of a good story,”

  I pulled out my notepad and pen. “Done.”

  The car had been identified, Wood said. It had been reported stolen the day after the murders by its owner, a single mother of four. The cops were looking for it. He gave me the make and model.

  “I need a name and address,” I said.

  Wood hesitated. I don’t think he wanted this woman to come to any reputational harm.

  “It’s my big ass,” I said.

  He gave it and watched me write it down. When I was done, he said, “The woman’s got a boy. Her oldest. 15.”

  Wood looked away like maybe he wanted me to think the next bit wasn’t important. “Nobody’s seen him since the day of the murders.”

  “You think?”

  “Do I think he’s involved? Don’t know. Let’s say I’d like to ask him.”

  “The boy know the kids that were killed?

  “Don’t know. I’d like to ask him.”

  “Name and description?” This time Wood did not hesitate.

  When he saw that I had it, Wood said, “You can’t use his name. He’s a juvenile.”

  Like it wouldn’t be hard, I thought, for people to figure out the kid’s a suspect and who he is once I reported the mother’s name and the fact the cops were looking for him. But for appearances’ sake, I said, “Always helps to know who you’re talking about.”

  Wood knew we were heaving sandbags at each other. He shrugged.

  “You probably want to leave now ’cause you got to write that up.”

  He walked me out the barn door. It being November, it was well after dark. The full moon I had seen as Moze and I drove to Aunt Lotty’s had begun to wane. I figured I could still make it to the Pug for some chicken and noodles before it closed, then maybe make some calls to find out about the kid.

  There was a light on in Wood’s farm house. “Timer,” Wood said, when I stopped to look at it and think about whether it had been on when I arrived. “How trashed you think the sheriff’s place’d be without timers and alarms?”

  He put a hand on my arm. It was the same spot he had used to make my arm go numb at Aunt Lotty’s. Tonight, he did not squeeze, just steered me toward my car and opened the door for me. The hinges’ creak echoed in the crystalline air.

  “You ought to do something about that barn,” I said through the window. “Smells like shit.”

  Wood laughed, probably too easily now that I’ve thought about it. He can be a lot slicker than he lets on.

  Jake Danvers’ mom wanted to like him, but she didn’t know how anymore and anyway she’d run out of time.

  I’d called Marlene Thomas Sunday night after I talked to Wood. She’d already talked to McConegal; she didn’t want to talk to me. I suggested maybe it would be a good idea if she did, you know, with the cops looking for her boy. The cops were pretty upset about these kids being killed, and they could go overboard if they found the guy who did it. So maybe if her kid was involved and if the public knew the cops were looking for him, maybe the cops would think at least twice before they did anything drastic to the boy. It was plausible; who knew if it was true?

  Marlene sighed. I think she decided that at this late stage in her boy’s upbringing talking to me was the least sh
e could do.

  Marlene worked two jobs: packing lubricants at a factory and cashier at a convenience store. She got off the first at 7 a.m. and started at the second at 8. I offered to buy her breakfast at 7:15. We agreed to meet at a place in Salem County not unlike Hack’s, one of a host of fine Wabash Valley diners with which I am acquainted.

  Marlene filled the door when she lumbered into the diner and stopped to look around. She was way bigger than me. She had short, mousy brown, lank hair that hung around a pudgy face and sunken, tired, BB eyes. We were well on our way to winter, but she wore a sleeveless, smudged, flower-print blouse over a pair of thin, beige, cotton pants. Her upper arms were the shape and nearly the size of zeppelins and the color of peeled potatoes. She would not let me rise to greet her. She placed her massive frame at the end of the booth where I sat, and demanded, “You the reporter?”

  I said I was, gave her my name again, and stuck out my hand. She ignored it.

  “They gonna hurt him, Jake?”

  I could only shrug.

  “They’ve got to find him first and then probably not if they find out what they want to know. Sit down and tell me about him.”

  She drove the table into my gut when she shoved it away to make room on the booth bench across from me.

  Marlene was 31 years old, which put her at the same age as Jake when she conceived. She was single and raising three younger children. Only two of the kids had the same last name, and none of the names were hers. She worked graveyard at the factory, went home to get her kids to school, then cashiered for another four, five hours at a convenience store. After that, she slept until 3 when her kids got home from school.

  Marlene talked between bites of a double western omelet and toast. She ate like a woman in a hurry or maybe somebody who hadn’t seen food in a day or so.

  Marlene didn’t know the Russells, the Crawfords, or Aunt Lotty, and neither did Jake. Well, she admitted, least not so far as she knew.

  The kid only had about two real friends, but she wasn’t even sure about them anymore. Jake’d taken to not coming home after school in the last few months. She didn’t know where he went or who he went with. She asked. He wouldn’t tell her. She didn’t like it necessarily, but it wasn’t like she didn’t have other kids to look after and she’d already given him his shot at mother love. But he wasn’t a violent boy, she said.