Toward midnight, still unable to sleep, he left the office and walked into the living room. The smell of the funeral flowers lingered all around him, now sickeningly sweet, like the smell of something gone to ruin. To get away from it, he quickly pulled on his clothes and walked to his car, edging it quietly down the nightbound street so as not to disturb his less troubled neighbors.
He turned left at the end of Beaumont Street, then right again when he reached the town’s main avenue. The shops and service stations were sleeping too, lights out, shades drawn, a world that looked as if it had been abandoned by everything but silence.
On a whim, he headed up the mountain, moving slowly along its narrow path, until he reached the top, then drove on until he found himself at the cemetery again. He walked across the flat green lawn to the little mound of earth where Ray slept through his first night in the ground.
He knelt down slightly, carefully edging himself away from the recently turned earth. If he’d had a prayer, he might have said it, but his long years of trailing the Colin Brights and Fenton Norwoods of the world had stripped him of any notion that a loving, guiding hand directed anything. If there was any hand at work, he sometimes thought, it was one that should have been severed before the world completed its first spin.
Still, it seemed a time for words, and so he said the only ones he could think of, the same ones he’d said that rainy afternoon as Ray ran alongside the train: “Bye, Ray.”
He felt his fingers curl up in that grasping motion Serena had noticed, and it seemed to him that in some way they were reaching for Ray, trying to grab a few strands of his red hair and pull him up out of the clay. It was an odd sensation, more powerful than anything he’d felt in a long time, and remarkably different from what he’d felt at his grandmother’s burial. A month before, as she’d been lowered into the ground, he’d felt a curious relief. With his mother and father dead, she had been the final depository of his early history, and in a sense her own death had completed his journey toward isolation, had released him forever from all bloodbased obligations. It was a feeling of liberation that Ray had been able to sense, Kinley remembered now, and as they’d walked out of the little cemetery together, Ray had glanced over, smiled his crooked, enigmatic smile, and said, “Well, it’s over for you, Kinley.”
Now, as he turned and walked back toward his car, Kinley found himself once again amazed at how intuitive Ray had been, and he wondered if Serena had inherited the same eerie skill, if perhaps her suspicions about the missing files were more than a distraction from her grief.
He was still considering it as he headed back along the winding mountain road that descended toward the valley. About halfway down, he stopped at the small scenic overlook the city fathers had recently erected for the benefit of Sequoyah’s occasional tourists. From the railing that lined the steep precipice, he could see all of Sequoyah, like a body lying faceup before him, its slender backbone of roofs and spires spreading for several miles up and down the valley. It had changed very little since his boyhood, and he could still remember his grandmother’s grim warnings about the kind of life that was lived there. “Not good for us,” she had always told him. If Serena were right, he thought now, perhaps it had not been very good for Ray Tindall either, and he wondered if, after so many years, Ray might pose the same question he’d asked once in Jefferson’s Drug Store: It’s better to know, don’t you think, Kinley? No matter what the cost?
SEVEN
As he sipped his coffee the next morning, standing thoughtfully over the sink in Ray’s small kitchen, he decided to go about it exactly as he would have if he’d decided to write a book about Ray’s death. He would rely on all the devices he’d learned through the years, and with a little luck, he might be able either to confirm Serena’s suspicions or put them to rest. He would begin with the most fundamental data that could be gathered about Ray’s death, see where it led, if anywhere, and then proceed to the next stage of investigation, or end it decisively, with no loose ends to flutter distractedly in Serena’s mind.
He arrived at the District Attorney’s office at nine sharp. It was on the third floor of the courthouse, but Kinley decided to take the stairs anyway, his old impatience driving him forward, invisible whips forever lashing at his back.
Warfield had not arrived at his office yet, but his assistant had, a small, very lean man, whose white bony hand felt like a clump of sticks when Kinley shook it.
“Bill Stover,” the man said by way of introduction. “I’m the Assistant District Attorney.”
Kinley nodded. “Jack Kinley,” he said. “I was a friend of Ray Tindall’s.”
“You’re the writer, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“Yeah, Ray talked about you once in a while.”
Kinley smiled thinly. “I was wondering if you’d mind my taking a look at the autopsy report on Ray.”
Stover looked surprised by the request. “Autopsy report?” he asked. “On Ray?”
“Yes,” Kinley answered, his voice a little more stern, playing the part of the reporter who knows his rights and will not be denied.
“Well, I suppose it would be okay to show you that,” Stover said hesitantly.
“I have Serena Tindall’s approval,” Kinley told him.
“Yeah, that’s fine,” Stover said. “I’ll get it for you.”
“And one other thing,” Kinley added, stopping him in mid-turn. “I’d like to see the police report.”
“Police report?” Stover said. “What do you mean? There was no investigation of Ray’s death.”
“Well, according to the paper, a couple of county deputies went to see the body,” Kinley said.
“Yes, that’s right,” Stover said. “But …”
“They would have written up a report, wouldn’t they?” Kinley asked. “It’s standard procedure.”
Stover shrugged. “Sure, but I don’t think there’d be much in it.”
“Photographs,” Kinley said. “Initial observations. There’s a place on the form for those, isn’t there?”
Stover nodded. “I see you know your way around police work.”
Kinley gave him a quick smile. “Cops always fill those lines in. Sometimes it’s no more than a weather report, but there’s always something. I’ve never seen it left blank.”
“Now that you mention it,” Stover said with a certain studied amiability, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it left blank either.”
“So, just those reports, and the autopsy,” Kinley told him. “Then I’ll leave you to your work.”
“No trouble at all, Mr. Kinley,” Stover said. “Come with me.”
Kinley followed Stover out of the office and into a small witness room off the main courtroom.
“Just have a seat,” Stover said. “I’ll bring everything to you.”
Kinley sat down behind the wooden table at the center of the room and waited. Outside the single small window to his left, he could see Sequoyah’s main street as it stretched westward, the dark wall of the mountain rising high above it, silent, immense, the “place of spirits,” as his grandmother had always called it, though whether she’d considered them good or evil had been a secret she’d taken with her to the grave.
“Here you are, sir,” Stover said as he walked back into the room. He pushed a small manila folder across the desk toward Kinley. “That’s all we have. As you know, there wasn’t really any need for an investigation.”
“Thanks,” Kinley said.
“Fine,” Stover said. “Take as long as you like. Court’s not in session this week, so nobody’ll be needing the witness rooms.”
Once Stover had eased himself back out of the room, Kinley opened the manila folder and drew its contents onto the table. He read the autopsy first, coolly going over the details, mindful as he always was of the way its language reduced a human life to pounds and ounces. The first line set the tone, describing Ray as a “middle-aged Caucasian” who measured a certain number of centimeters an
d weighed a certain number of grams, his old friend’s life reduced to its humble, nameless mass.
Still, the language had never bothered Kinley, and there were even times when he thought of it as being very much like himself, methodical, scientific, decidedly “matter-of-fact,” just as Lois had described him. There was no room in an autopsy report for love or grief or pity, although from time to time, he’d noticed, a hint of feeling did emerge from the otherwise passive language. Words like “brutal” or “devastating” replaced the more often used “traumatic,” as scientific objectivity fell away one adjective at a time.
Dr. Joseph Stark, the Sequoyah County Coroner, however, had shown no such lapses in Case Number 57343, JOE RAY TINDALL. His language had remained utterly controlled, and what it narrated was unquestionably a natural death. He had found no indication of external trauma on Ray’s body, not so much as a scratch other than the small red ones which had occurred as Ray’s face had slammed onto the ground. There were no puncture marks on his skin or “foreign substances” in his bloodstream or his stomach. By all appearances, he had died a healthy man, except for a problem with his heart, a massive infarction which had suddenly and solidly blocked the passage of blood from one chamber to the next and killed Ray Tindall as quickly and decisively as a shotgun blast to the chest. He’d only had enough time to fall to the ground and claw blearily at the earth for his few remaining seconds, a reflex that had resulted in a small deposit of reddish clay beneath his nails.
Kinley closed the coroner’s report, took a quick breath, then went on to the police report he found in the same envelope. It was a simple, one-page form, what the police called an Incident Report, and it catalogued the few facts that were ascertainable without further investigation. According to the report, the Sheriff’s Department had logged in a call at 3:30 P.M. It had been made by a man named Austin Phillips, who had told the operator that he’d found the body of a man in the canyon. The radio dispatcher had subsequently ordered Deputies Jerry Taylor and Herman Fitzgerald to the scene. It was Deputy Taylor who’d filled out the report.
According to Taylor, he and Fitzgerald had arrived at Sims Grocery at 3:39 P.M., where they had found Mr. Phillips waiting for them. Minutes later he had led them down into the canyon, where they’d found Ray Tindall lying face down, one arm at his side, the other stretched out over his head. Once on the scene, the two officers had radioed for an ambulance, then surveyed the general area while they waited for it to arrive. During those same few minutes, Deputy Taylor had taken a few photographs with a simple Polaroid camera. The fact that he had done so was the only notation in the “Comments” section of the form. It was a plain, forthright notation. “As Mr. Tindall was an officer of the court, Deputy Taylor took several pictures of the scene for later use should they be necessary.”
The pictures were clipped to the back of the report, and Kinley turned his attention to them immediately. There were five of them, each shot from a different angle. It was the usual way investigators moved, circling the body slowly, taking a shot every few steps, so that at the end of the process, the body had been photographed at 360 degrees.
The pictures showed exactly what the two officers had already described in their report. Ray’s body was sprawled out over the dark pebbly ground just as they had noted, one arm at his side, the other flung out over his head as if he’d been reaching for something in his final, desperate seconds. He was fully clothed, and all his clothes were intact, no rips, tears, or any other signs of struggle. His shoes remained on his feet, and his reading glasses were still in his pocket.
Kinley glanced through the pictures a final time. From their background he could easily recognize the spot where Ray had died. He could see the huge gray stone they’d sometimes rested upon after rambling for hours along the canyon floor. But then, he thought, as he clipped the pictures back to the incident report, it would have been hard to find any place in the canyon they had not been together. The only thing that made it different was that this time Ray had gone alone.
He returned the pictures and report to the envelope and walked back into the District Attorney’s office.
“Thanks a lot,” he said as he returned the envelope to Stover.
“Mr. Warfield’s in, if you’d like to see him now,” Stover said.
“Maybe for just a minute,” Kinley told him, “just to say thanks.”
“Sure,” Stover said. He pointed to an open door just across the room. “He’s in there. You can just pop your head in.”
Kinley did exactly that. “I just wanted to thank you for letting me read the report,” he said without coming fully into the room.
Warfield looked up from behind his desk. He was a medium-sized man with a thickish build and small, nearly bald head, and he had the beleaguered, overworked look that Kinley had noticed before in rural civil servants.
“No trouble at all, Mr. Kinley,” Warfield said. “Did you find what you were looking for?”
Kinley shrugged. “I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for.”
“Bill said you were interested in the autopsy and police report,” Warfield said. He smiled. “It doesn’t take a genius to figure it out.”
“Serena had some questions,” Kinley said.
“Really? What about?”
“She thinks a few things are missing from Ray’s office, the one he had at home. Some files.”
“What kind of files?”
“She doesn’t know,” Kinley admitted. “And neither do I.”
“But the fact that they’re missing, it’s raised suspicions about his death? Foul play, I mean.”
Kinley nodded silently.
Warfield leaned back in his seat. “Did you find any signs of that?”
“No.”
Warfield looked at him gravely. “I would certainly want to know if you did, Mr. Kinley,” he said. “I am the District Attorney after all.”
“You’d have been the first person I’d have told,” Kinley assured him, lying through his teeth, and yet not exactly sure who would have been the first person.
Kinley’s assurance seemed to lighten Warfield’s mood. “Well, that doesn’t change the tragedy of it, though, does it?” he asked.
“No, it doesn’t.”
“You were close to Ray, I understand.”
“We were old friends.”
Warfield nodded sagely. “Well, the way it is now, with everybody rushing around, most people don’t have old friends. They don’t have time for them.”
“Not many, that’s true.”
Warfield leaned back in his chair, now considerably more relaxed. “Well, if there’s anything else I can do for you, I hope you let me know.”
“I don’t think there’s anything,” Kinley answered.
Warfield gave him a sweet, avuncular smile. “Well, if you need anything at all,” he said, “we like to keep an open door to the public here in the office.”
After leaving the courthouse, Kinley drove across town to his old high school, parked in its cramped parking lot, and made his way inside the building. The same hallways greeted him like faces from his youth, the trophy box at the front, the school flag draped on the far wall, the brass statue of the school mascot, a snarling bobcat, fangs exposed, claws ripping fiercely at the air. He could remember the first day he’d walked into the building, a mountain boy whose only reputation was that he lived with a crazy old woman and possessed an inexplicable brilliance that a “bunch of Yankees” had somehow discovered, and which everyone thought terribly, terribly important. For a time, the other kids had shied away from him, as if his mind were a flailing electric wire they wanted to avoid. Ray had been the only one to approach him, and as he lingered for a moment outside the school’s office, he realized that the approach itself had happened in this very corridor, and that when he’d first glimpsed Ray’s hulking figure, he’d thought him the dim-witted school bully who’d been sent to beat him up. He’d even flinched at Ray’s first words: You’re the smart one, right?
“You’re Jack Kinley, aren’t you?”
Kinley turned to see a tiny woman with blue hair and thick glasses. It was Mrs. Potts, his old English teacher; now close to eighty, she seemed hardly to have aged at all since his high school days.
“Mercy, Jack, what are you doing here?”
“I’m in town for a few days.”
“Oh, of course you are,” Mrs. Potts said. “For Ray’s funeral, I bet.”
“That’s right.”
“Well, mercy, Jack, you sure haven’t changed much,” Mrs. Potts said. She grinned impishly. “You just reminiscing here, now?”
“Not exactly,” Kinley said, then realized that he had very little to reminisce about for all his four long years at Sequoyah High. There’d been no love to set his heart ablaze, nor even that first frenzied sexual encounter. Instead, he’d graduated a stone-cold virgin, almost the same aloof, unapproachable senior as he had been a shy, remote freshman. Only Ray had been able to pierce the wall he’d built around him, flinging himself over it heedlessly and shamelessly: You’re the smart one, right?
“Are you back for long, Jack?”
Kinley focused his attention on Mrs. Potts again. “No, I don’t think so,” he said. “Actually, I was looking for Serena Tindall.”
“Serena works up on the second floor,” Mrs. Potts said, “but if you’ll wait right here, I’ll go get her for you.”
“Thanks, I’d appreciate that.”
Serena came down the far staircase a few minutes later. She was wearing a light blue dress with a white collar, and reminded Kinley very slightly of Lois as she’d looked in high school, tall and willowy, but with something heavy about her, a figure slogging through the air, her fingers gripped brutally to a pencil as if it were a spike.
“I went to the District Attorney’s Office this morning,” Kinley told her. “I read the autopsy report. I read the police report, too.”
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