Evidence of Blood

by Thomas H. Cook

  For a long time, Kinley watched them as they dug further and further down, their heads disappearing beneath the dry grass, until nothing at all could be seen of them except the tools of their trade and the large clumps of reddish earth they tossed in all directions as they continued down.

  Suddenly, they stopped, and Kinley heard Warfield suck in his breath and hold it tensely until the word came, a voice out of the pit.

  “Mr. Warfield, could you come over here?”

  Kinley looked at Warfield knowingly. “They’ve found her,” he said.

  The two men moved over to the pit, both of them staring down at the men inside, red with clay.

  “We’ve hit solid rock,” one of them said, “and we ain’t found nothing yet.”

  Kinley stared, thunderstruck, into the red mouth of the pit, his eyes fixed on the granite slab upon which the workmen stood.

  “Well, Mr. Kinley,” Warfield said pointedly. “Satisfied?”

  Kinley felt his shoulders slump.

  Warfield continued to gaze at him irritably. “Well, what now?”

  Kinley shook his head distractedly. “I don’t know,” he said.

  He met Dora late in the afternoon, the first blue shade falling around them as they sat together on her front steps.

  “I can’t prove anything,” he said. “I know Ellie Dinker was pregnant. And I know that Thomas Warfield left the courthouse with an abortionist named Edna Trappman. I even know they headed up the mountain road to where Ellie Dinker was waiting for them by that road marker.” He shook his head. “But I can’t get any farther than that.”

  Dora thought a moment. “Maybe you should start from the other end,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe you should work back from Ellie Dinker’s death.” She paused, her eyes concentrating on his. “Or from Ray’s,” she added.

  “In the canyon, you mean?”

  She nodded.

  “But there’s nothing down there,” Kinley said. “At least not where they found him. I know that place. It’s just in the woods by the river. There’s nothing that …”

  “But he must have been down there for some reason,” Dora told him insistently.

  Kinley recalled his old friend, the strength he’d used up in the long haul down to the canyon floor, his heart pumping against its own frail walls as he’d struggled forward through the undergrowth.

  “Yes,” he said finally, “there must have been a reason.”

  Minutes later he was in the car, driving the rest of the distance across the mountain’s broad plateau, toward the most desolate stretches of the canyon. He could feel his old exhilaration building as he continued on. In part, it was the sense that he wasn’t finished yet. But there was something else as well, a feeling that he could soon make good his escape from the confines of something he’d never understood, but had always felt each time he’d returned home to Sequoyah. It was the same feeling he’d had when he’d left Sequoyah the first time, heading north for his education, the same feeling he’d had every time he’d left from one of his brief visits to his grandmother’s after that. It was even the same feeling, he understood now, that he’d had on the train that day as he’d looked down at Ray’s face in the rain.

  Kinley, are you …?

  He pressed Ray’s question from his mind, crowded it out, first with thoughts of New York, then of Boston, and finally of Walpole CI, the prison where Fenton Norwood remained, waiting for him, his latest specimen. Repulsive as Norwood was, with his fat face and reptilian eyes, Kinley realized that he could hardly wait to get back to the little green room where they’d faced each other, his tape recorder whirring softly as he watched Norwood’s pudgy, pink face. In a sense, he thought of it as a haven, one of those Old Testament cities of sanctuary his grandmother had read to him about. He remembered her eyes on those occasions, the irises shaded so faint a blue that in a certain light the shading had seemed to disappear entirely, leaving her eyes blank and lusterless, two pale orbs with nothing but the black hole of their pupils peering down at him.

  He was still thinking of her as he drove toward the rim of the canyon. He passed the turn that would have taken him to Ray’s grave, but found he couldn’t do the same as he approached a second turn a few minutes later, this one to the left, a narrow dirt road that few people ever ventured down anymore, but which he knew better than any other area around the canyon.

  In his own distant way, he’d already said good-bye to Ray and his grandmother, but with both of them now gone, he felt compelled to add one last good-bye to the old house he’d lived in for almost his entire childhood.

  He made the turn slowly, then nosed the car through the thickening brambles that stretched out from along both sides of the road. Long, green tendrils reached toward him like bony, rotting fingers. He could hear them slapping against the sides of his car until they slowly drew back as the road widened once again, and he pulled into what was left of his grandmother’s frontyard.

  As he got out of the car, peering across the weedy lawn, he was not sure why he’d decided not to sell it himself after his grandmother’s death. Instead, he’d simply left the whole business to Ray, along with all the old woman’s things, to do with as he saw fit. “Don’t you want anything?” Ray had asked him, and he’d answered with nothing more than a crisp, “Just whatever you get for it.” A check for seven thousand dollars had come not long after that, part from the sale of the property, part from some cash Ray had found in a biscuit can on a high shelf in the kitchen. That had been the last of it, and Kinley had gladly turned the rest of Granny Dollar’s modest possessions over to Ray, all her papers and artifacts, even down to the great moldering stacks of the Police Gazette she’d piled into the potting shed behind the house, and which he assumed Ray had tossed, with almost everything else, into an open fire.

  The old house was still standing as sturdily as it always had, though the weeks since her death had already begun to give it a look of abandonment. A scattering of fall leaves dotted the once-pristine front porch, and a fallen branch rested diagonally across the front stairs, so that, overall, his childhood home already looked as if it were now inhabited by nothing but spiders and field mice. And yet it had been his home for many years, the place where Granny Dollar had rocked him through one asthmatic night after another, her voice dark and sinister as it moved through the grisly tales of the Police Gazette. He could still hear that voice as he had heard it then:

  The earth that covered her body was loose and from its shallow covering Detective Fletcher could see a single white hand as it rose from the dark earth, half-eaten by animals but still bearing upon its ravaged fingers the jade rings of Madame Poissant.

  He allowed himself a short laugh at the weirdness of it all, then walked out to the canyon’s edge. Far below, and several miles to the north, Ray Tindall had clutched his heart, stumbled forward and died on the canyon floor. He had fallen facedown, his fingers grasping at the ground in that way Kinley could feel his own fingers grasping, first at his trousers, then at thin air, the way they often did, as if reaching for an invisible hand.

  To stop them, Kinley lifted his hands to his face, then curled his fingers forward, closing them into a fist, before, in a single, shivering instant, he froze, his eyes riveted on his own fingernails.

  dark earth

  His memory was his great ally, faithful in everything, beyond escape once a fact or impression had entered it.

  dark earth

  He remembered the exact words of Dr. Stark’s autopsy report. “Fingernail scrapings revealed the presence of a moist reddish clay.”

  But now, as he stared down into the canyon, his eyes riveted on the wildly rushing river, he realized that there was no red clay along its winding, churning banks. As far as it stretched along the canyon floor, the river cut instead through a dark, pebbly earth. The red clay of the area lay further back, perhaps half a mile from the river’s edge. With the kind of heart attack Ray’d had, it would not have b
een possible for him to have walked more than a few feet from where he had been stricken.

  As he stood on the rim of the canyon, poised motionlessly above it, Kinley tried to recall the pictures Deputy Taylor had taken of Ray’s body as it lay, with one arm outstretched, as if reaching for an invisible treasure. His shirt and trousers had been fully in place, no violence done to them either before or after death, his hair neatly combed, his reading glasses had still been tucked into his pocket.

  Reading glasses, Kinley thought. In Ray’s case, that had been exactly what they were. Quickly, Kinley recalled all the times he’d ever seen Ray in the open since he’d first gotten his glasses almost ten years before. Since that time, they’d hunted a few times, fished and rambled the woods together. On none of those occasions, Kinley remembered, had Ray ever taken his glasses. Instead, he would drop them in the little wooden tray beside the door. But on the day of his death, Ray had taken them with him. What, in the middle of the forest, beside a tumbling stream, at the bottom of a distant canyon, had Ray Tindall needed to read not long before he died?

  He glanced back at his car, then at the old house, his eyes concentrating on the porch where Ray had found his grandmother, bolt upright in her chair, her gray hair draped across her wide, unbending shoulders. Suddenly, a wild array of images began to swirl chaotically in his mind, Ray’s reading glasses tumbling in space, but not alone, the sprig of vine Ray had pressed into a book tumbling with it, along with a swarm of faces: Granny Dollar’s, stone dead on her porch; Ray’s, breathless in the rain; Ellie Dinker’s, stern and inflexible, demanding to be rid of her unwanted child; Charlie Overton’s, ashen and disoriented as he shuffled toward his death.

  He felt his hands again, twitching in their spasmodic dance. Reflexively, he moved to stop them, then released his grip, as if compelled to do so by deeper and more urgent needs.

  Kinley, are you …?

  Suddenly he felt as if his mind had released some strange grip it had had upon him for as long as he could remember, a sense of being held back, closed off, as if some part of him had been shut up in a box or strapped down in a chair. For an exhilarating moment, he felt unbound, and he sensed it as an entirely new experience.

  He moved forward effortlessly, as if carried by an immense, invisible hand, down the bleak, wintry trail that led into the canyon. He did not know where he was going, except that it was toward where Ray’s body had been found, his new starting point. He could feel the earth turn smoothly beneath him, as if he were suspended in air, the globe rotating under him, waiting for his appointed destination to roll into position at his feet.

  When he reached it, he touched the ground, then lifted himself again. He knew he was exactly there, standing between the same trees he’d seen in the police photographs of Ray’s body. He’d recognized the place the first time he’d glimpsed it in Taylor’s pictures, and even at that moment, it had seemed to him that he and Ray had been there many times, though actually it had been only once, a late summer day only a week before he’d left for college.

  Now, as he stood beside the river, he could see the large stone they’d rested on, hear the conversation they’d had:

  Well, Kinley, you may not be back down in the canyon for a long time.

  No, I guess not.

  Maybe never.

  Maybe.

  That’s what you want, in a way, isn’t it?

  What?

  To leave forever. To be rid of it.

  I think so.

  Kinley, are you sure?

  The stone was bare now, and as Kinley watched it from the bank, the river seemed to churn madly, tossing its white foam, as if beneath the green roof of its surface millions of angry spirits clamored to be free.

  He turned away and glanced at the dark earth beneath his feet, the same that should have been beneath Ray’s fingernails, instead of the red clay Dr. Stark had found there.

  For a moment, Kinley tried to reorient himself, to use as his final destination that unknown place where Ray’s fingers had clawed the ground. Dr. Stark had told him that Ray’s clothes had been clean except for the forest debris they’d gathered when he fell. There’d been red clay beneath his nails, but none of it on his clothes. The shovel, he thought, remembering the night he’d gone down into the well. He’d looked for all the necessary tools before his descent, but had not found a shovel. His mind shifted instantly into its trusty logic: He took a shovel. He was going to bury something. No. He did bury something. He buried it in red clay.

  He turned away from the river and moved deeper into the surrounding woodlands, toward the nearest stretch of indigenous clay, so red, moist and malleable that he’d often thought of it as the flesh of earth itself. In death, Ray had lain facing south, and if he’d been returning from whatever mission had sent him into the canyon, forced him down into it at the risk of his own life, his heart no more than a clogged and sputtering chamber of tubes and valves, then he’d accomplished his task to the north of where his strength had finally deserted him.

  Walking northward, then, still the servant of his mind’s relentless logic, Kinley moved rapidly, his pace increasing his velocity with each step, his eyes fixed on the ground, meticulously searching it for the subtlest changes in color and texture.

  Slowly the ground began to give up its darker hues, growing brown beneath Kinley’s feet, then, as he continued on, lighter still, but with the first thickening orange that he knew would turn to a moist and glistening red.

  Within half a mile, the last hints of the orange had been leached from its bed of dark, engulfing red, and Kinley stood, as if on a distant but disturbingly familiar beach, his mind reeling within the transformation of the scene, pictures reverberating like echoes in his mind. The shadows were now darker as the canyon wall hung over him, and the trees seemed to fling themselves upward from the depths of an even denser foliage, gray and leafless, but consuming nonetheless, as if it were a tropical forest that had gone to ruin, leaving nothing but its gray, contorted skeleton behind.

  He headed north again, his mind now moving backward, as if in opposition to his body. He could feel the atmosphere thickening, as it had in the well, and he stopped for a moment, breathed in a long, hard breath and let his eyes lift tremblingly toward a light he hoped for, but could no longer see beyond the bony tangle of the trees.

  He dropped his eyes again, resigned to the canyon’s choking air, then moved on, more slowly now, apprehensively, as he thought Ray must have moved as well, the old legends of the canyon coming to life in his mind, gory tales his grandmother had spun as she’d rocked him through the night, and which had seemed even more grisly than the ones she’d read from the Police Gazette.

  Long time ago, in the canyon, there was this house …

  He stopped, cocked his head to the right, as if listening to her voice as it filtered through the trees, his mind diving further and further back, like a creature struggling breathlessly through thick black water.

  Long time ago, in the canyon, there was this house surrounded by vines.

  He glanced around, his eyes searching for some way out of the suffocating air. He could feel his lungs heaving in that aching, airless way he remembered from his asthmatic childhood, his ribs like a vise pressing in upon his life.

  The vines were green and thick, and there was no way to get through them.

  He remembered the sprig of vine Ray had pressed into the book, his only gift to him, presented, it seemed to Kinley now, like a twisted legacy.

  No way to get through them but to slash and slash and slash.

  He started moving again, straight ahead, northward, as if in defiance of the earth’s unfeeling tilt, north against the eternal flight of migratory birds, the bankless channels of the wind and the unbending sway of rivers, mountains, ice, north as he had always gone, against the course of nature.

  He speeded up, hurrying like a panicked child, desperately toward home, his feet scurrying over the flat red earth, the limbs slapping at his face and chest, the thi
ckening vines twining their reptilian tentacles along his feet and legs.

  Getout!Getout!Getout!

  He slammed against a tree, breathing now in short, painful gasps, the choking asthma of his childhood clogging his lungs with the same terrifying fury he could remember through all his stricken nights.

  He spun around the tree, his hands at his throat, and stopped, his eyes fixed on the place before him.

  It was there, like a vision, but real. A small house in its solitary ruin, surrounded by a dense circle of vines, thick and barbed, but their grim geometric perfection now broken by a crude, jagged rift.

  The shovel Ray had used to slash his way through the vines lay like an arrow in Kinley’s path, the sharp point of its red-caked scoop pointing to the house a few yards beyond it, silent in the gray light, its door flung open and half-unhinged. At the bottom of the front stairs, he could see a shallow hole, a mound of red clay poised beside it. As he stumbled toward it, he saw that the hole was empty, as if Ray had changed his mind at the last minute.

  He glanced up into the house, his eyes lighting on the solitary table at the center of the room. He could see a small box on top of it, and he realized that it was the tin biscuit box his grandmother had kept on a high shelf, beyond his grasp, and that Ray must have retrieved it when he’d cleared out the old woman’s things.

  He moved up the stairs, and as he passed through the door, he could feel his breath miraculously returning to him, as if he were entering a less constricted atmosphere.

  He stopped just inside the door, then paused a moment to take in the room. It was furnished with only a few dusty chairs and the single wooden table that rested at its center. The walls were blank and unadorned, except for a few hanging lanterns which seemed to cling to them like the dried husks of gigantic insects. There was no back entrance to the house, but to the right a single closed door led to an adjoining room.

  As he walked to the table, Kinley felt his body tighten, as if his skin had suddenly contracted, squeezing in upon his bones. He glanced toward the door to his right, felt an odd shudder, and let his eyes drop toward the table, as if aimed with a terrible precision upon the little tin box and the small white candle that rested beside it, half-burned, but still erect, its slender white shaft now turned yellow by long years of disuse. Initials were carved in the wood of the table: WT, AJ, TW, FM, JS.