by Lee Martin
He nodded his head. “You’ve got the facts right, but that doesn’t prove you were the one who found her. I hate to say this, Mister Dees, but it could be you know those things because you were there when they were done.”
“It’s not like that,” I said. “Surely you don’t think it is.”
“For your sake, I hope not, Mister Dees. Now tell me, where were you on Wednesday night between eight-thirty and nine?”
“Is that the time it was done?” I asked. “Is that the time Raymond R. had Katie down that shale road?”
“You need to be able to account for yourself during that time.”
“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Katie. Tom, I can tell you exactly where I was.”
July 5
HE WAS UPTOWN at the public library. There he put a book, Henry and Beezus, into the after-hours returns bin. The book had been checked out on Katie Mackey’s library card. It was nearly dark. He put the book in the bin and then he went home, not knowing that only a few minutes before, Tom Evers had gone to the home of the head librarian and asked her to please come with him to the library and open it up so they could see whether Katie had returned her books.
They hadn’t been checked back in, the librarian said, and Tom asked her to please look in the after-hours return bin to see if they were there.
The bin was empty. It was 8:33. Tom looked at his watch and jotted down the exact time in his notebook. He ran through the facts: Katie Mackey hadn’t come home, her bicycle had been left on the courthouse square, and now he had proof that she hadn’t even made it to the library. Something, or someone, had stopped her. That was when he first knew, with a certainty that chilled him, that he had a kidnapping on his hands. A little girl gone.
He asked the librarian to stay there awhile, to do another search for the books just to make sure they hadn’t been returned and perhaps shelved incorrectly. He had to run back to the courthouse to talk to the dispatcher, but he promised he’d be back shortly to see whether she’d been able to find them.
When he came back to the library, it was 9:07; again, he jotted down the time. Inside, the librarian was waiting. She slid a book across the counter to him: Henry and Beezus.
She’d already checked the records, the librarian said, and yes, that was one of the books that Katie Mackey had borrowed. She couldn’t say with any accuracy when it had happened, but somewhere between the time that Tom Evers left to go to the courthouse and when he returned to the library, someone had put that book in the after-hours return bin.
“I checked again,” she said. “Just to make sure. You know how it is when you’ve lost something? You look everywhere you can think to look, and then you start over? I looked in the bin, and there it was, that book.”
The odd thing was, she said, Katie had checked out two other books, The Long Winter and On the Banks of Plum Creek. They were nowhere to be found, and Tom Evers didn’t know what to make of the fact that Henry and Beezus was in the bin when it had been empty the first time the librarian checked, and he didn’t know what it meant that the other books weren’t with it. Above all, he didn’t know who had put Henry and Beezus in the bin or how to go about finding the answer.
July 9
BUT NOW he had it, or at least a possibility, if Henry Dees was telling him the truth.
“I’m the one,” Mr. Dees said. “I put that book in the bin.”
“Where did you get it?”
“From Katie.”
“So you were with her? You saw her after you left her house that evening?”
“Yes.”
“You lied about that, Mister Dees. You said you didn’t see her after her lesson. You said you were at home all night. That’s what you told Burt when he came to question you. I’ve got it here in the record.”
“Yes, I lied,” Mr. Dees said, and he knew he would have to explain why.
It was a hard thing to say to Tom, this man Mr. Dees still thought of as the boy from his class. Tom, who was decent and aboveboard and kind. It was all Mr. Dees could do to confess that he had harbored a love for Katie Mackey, that he was a lonely man who knew he would never have a family of his own, and that in his dreams he fantasized that Katie was his daughter. His voice got small, but he looked right at Tom, met his eyes, and told him all of this.
“So you were fond of her?” Tom said.
“I loved her, Tom, but not like you might be thinking. I loved her so much it scared me. I’d never known I had a right to love someone that much.”
“When did you get that book from her? Where were you at the time?”
“Around five-thirty that night. Wednesday. I was walking home from the Heights and I’d stopped to rest on the courthouse lawn. That’s when I saw her over in front of Penney’s. She was having trouble with her bicycle. The chain had slipped off. She said she had to get her books to the library. I said I’d walk them over there, and then I’d come back and I’d help her. I got to the library and I turned back to see how Katie was doing with that chain. Tom, her bicycle was still there, but she wasn’t anywhere to be seen. Well, I didn’t know what to do. I thought maybe she’d ducked into one of the stores. I walked around the square looking for her. Then I sat down on a bench to wait awhile. When she never came back, I didn’t know whether to take those books back to the library or not. Finally, I decided I’d take them home, and the next day when I went to her house for our lesson, I’d bring them to her. But later, I noticed that they were due that day. Tom, that’s when I took those books to the library. I’ve already told you I couldn’t bear to let The Long Winter go. But Henry and Beezus? That one, I put in the bin.”
“Mister Dees, there was another book that Katie had checked out, On the Banks of Plum Creek. We’ve found pages from it in Raymond Wright’s burn barrel. You told Junior Mackey you had The Long Winter because Raymond Wright came to your house around midnight and the book fell out of his truck. Now it sounds like you’re telling a different story. Mister Dees, something still doesn’t add up.”
Mr. Dees
I TOLD HIM to look inside that book. “Tom,” I said, “you need to look in Henry and Beezus. Look underneath the front flap of the jacket, and you’ll see what I’m telling you is true. I couldn’t have been with Raymond Wright at the time of Katie’s murder because I was the one who brought that book back to the library.”
“We’ve looked at that book,” Tom Evers said. “I’ve got it down at the courthouse as evidence.”
“Then you need to look again, Tom. I’ll tell you exactly what you’ll find underneath that jacket.”
July 5
HE MEANT TO take the two library books back to the Heights and leave them on the Mackeys’ front porch so Katie would find them there once she was home. But as he walked up Fourteenth Street, past the public library, he saw Junior Mackey and Gilley on the courthouse square studying Katie’s bicycle. Junior lifted his head and looked all around him, and Mr. Dees slipped behind a pine tree on the library’s lawn, afraid that Junior would see him. He watched until Junior and Gilley had lifted Katie’s bicycle into the trunk of their car and driven away. He was afraid then to keep walking toward the Heights, afraid to try to leave the books on the Mackeys’ front porch. He was carrying too many secrets that might come out if the Mackeys happened to spot him.
So he did the only thing he could think to do: he dropped Henry and Beezus into the after-hours return bin. He couldn’t bear to let The Long Winter go because it had been one of the Little House books that Katie and Rene Cherry were anguishing over that first time he had come to tutor Katie. She had said the Ingalls children’s names with such love in her voice, and for that reason alone he couldn’t bear to put the book into the bin. He’d keep it just awhile simply because she had touched it, held it in her hands, and he wanted it, like the fluff of hair from her brush and the snapshot he’d stolen from her dresser, wanted it close to him.
He dropped Henry and Beezus into the bin, remembering only after the door had closed wha
t he had left beneath the jacket, where he imagined no one would ever see it, and if by some chance anyone ever did, they wouldn’t think anything odd about it. Just some kid, they’d say, some kid having a lark.
July 9
AT THE COURTHOUSE, Tom Evers opened Henry and Beezus. He peeled back the tape that held the jacket flap in place, and beneath it, on the hard inside of the cover, he saw written in fountain pen, Henry + Katie. Whoever had written that had drawn a heart around it, the way a kid might who had a secret crush.
But it was clear that a kid hadn’t written it. The handwriting was too elegant, too precise. It was the penmanship Tom had seen many times and remembered well from words of encouragement written across his calculus exams in high school: Excellent! Terrific! He knew the handwriting he was staring at belonged to Mr. Dees.
Mr. Dees
IT EMBARRASSED ME to stand there in the courthouse and watch Tom Evers look at such a thing, to see him coming to the picture in his head of me secretly peeling back that cover to write a thing a kid with puppy love would have written. I’d done it that Wednesday evening before deciding I would take the books to the Mackeys’ house for Katie to find. It shames me now to say to you that I took pleasure from the thought that when she picked up that book, my secret pledge of love would be there just below where she held her thumb. It was a small thing like that, a thing I can barely stand to say for how foolish it makes me look, but what I hope is you’ll understand, despite how I’ve sometimes deceived you, how far a lonely man like me might go, how much he might risk.
Was it enough? I asked Tom Evers. Enough to prove that I was the one who put that book in the library’s return bin during the same time that Raymond R. was driving down Route 59 to Georgetown and then across the river to Honeywell? Didn’t it prove that I wasn’t with him?
“It doesn’t prove anything,” Tom said, “only that you wrote what you did inside this book. I can see that. But you might have written that any time, Mister Dees. Katie might have had her book laying out sometime this summer when you came to give her a lesson and you found yourself alone with it and you wrote what you did. Who’s to say?”
“All right then,” I told him. “Look in the back. Look in that pocket where they keep the card that they stamp when you check out the book.” I didn’t like to use my teacher’s voice, but that’s what I did. “You look there, Tom Evers, and then tell me what you know.”
That’s where I’d hidden the things I didn’t deserve, the things I’d meant to return to the Mackeys because I knew I had no right to them.
Gilley
TOM EVERS came to our house that Sunday afternoon, and for a while he talked only to my father, the two of them standing on our porch. From the entryway, I could hear them.
“I’ve got Henry Dees down at the courthouse,” Tom said.
“What for?” said my father, and I could tell from his voice that he was suspicious that Mr. Dees would tell what he knew about what he’d done to Raymond R.
“Questions. Things I had to know.” I heard the leather of Tom’s holster squeak. “Junior, I’m afraid I’m going to need to talk to Patsy.”
My father let him into our house, and he sent me upstairs to fetch my mother. She was in the bedroom sitting in the rocking chair she’d had since Katie was a baby. “I used to sit here and rock her,” she said. “Do you remember that, Gilley?”
I told her I did, and then I let her sit there a while longer before I told her that Tom Evers was downstairs and he wanted to talk to her.
Tom showed us that book, that Henry and Beezus, one of Katie’s books. There in our entryway, he showed us what Mr. Dees had written beneath the jacket, and he showed us what was in the manila pocket at the back of the book: a thin, gold bar broken from one of the clips that Katie had been wearing in her hair when she left for the library that Wednesday evening, and a check my mother had made out to Mr. Dees for the tutoring he’d done.
The sight of that broken hair clip nearly turned us all inside out. My mother reached her hand out for it, and I believe that might have been the moment that cost Tom Evers in the end, made him decide not to push my father for answers. We’d been hurt too much by that point; Tom could see it in the way my mother’s hand trembled, in the way my father took a sharp breath and said, with a break in his voice, “Good Christ.”
“Is it hers?” Tom asked. I could see he was sorry to ask the question. He had to clear his throat. “Is it Katie’s?”
My father turned away to the staircase and steadied himself by placing his hand on the newel post. My mother was turning that broken hair clip over and over in her hand, and to her, it must have seemed that no one else was in her house, that Tom Evers hadn’t just asked her that question.
Finally, I was the one to answer. “It is,” I said. “It’s one of my sister’s.”
Tom nodded. “And she was wearing it—”
I didn’t let him finish. “That night,” I said. “Yes, she was wearing it on Wednesday night.”
There was one more thing Tom Evers needed my mother to do. Could she please confirm that she had indeed written this check out to Henry Dees that Wednesday evening?
She found her voice. “I wrote it,” she said. “Right before he left here. I went out onto the porch where Mister Dees and Katie were having their lesson, and I said, ‘Your father will be home soon. We’ll have lemon sherbet for dessert.’ Then I wrote that check. I used Katie’s pen. Then I gave it back to her, and she clipped it to the neckline of her T-shirt, the way she’d taken to doing even though we said she’d end up losing it.”
“Her pen?” Tom Evers said.
“That’s right.” My father turned back from the staircase. “A fountain pen like the one Henry Dees carried. Katie admired it, so Henry got her one of her own.”
Tom Evers ran his hand through his hair. “What sort of pen did you say it was?”
“A fountain pen,” my mother said.
“A Parker,” said my father. “A Parker 51.”
Tom Evers looked at my father a long time. Then he said, “Junior, would you please come out to my car with me?”
I stepped out onto the front porch and watched them go down the walk to the street. There, in the shade, Tom opened the passenger-side door and stooped over to lean into the car. When he straightened, he had a plastic bag in his hand, and he showed my father what was inside it.
The wind was blowing through the trees, but from the porch I could hear bits of what Tom and my father were saying.
“This pen,” Tom said.
“Katie’s,” said my father.
I couldn’t hear enough then to tell that Tom Evers had found the pen in the grave with Katie. My father would tell me that later. All I knew at the time was that the pen in that bag wasn’t Katie’s. I knew because just before Tom came to show us that library book and the broken hair clip and the check my mother had written, I’d walked into Katie’s room, as I’d done countless times that week, and I saw it—her pen, the one Mr. Dees had given her—lying on her dresser.
My father would later claim that he’d genuinely believed that the pen in the bag was Katie’s. “How else,” he said, “would it have been there with her?” He said it in a way, with just enough bite to his voice, to make me wonder whether he’d been lying to Tom Evers because he knew Tom was on Mr. Dees’s trail, and my father was afraid something would come out about what had happened the night before at the glassworks.
That day on the street, Tom leaned in close to my father, and something about the way my father held himself—his shoulders stiffened, and his head went back—told me that Tom was saying something about Raymond R.
The wind died down, and I could hear him say, “Someone posted bond last night, and now I don’t know where Raymond Wright’s gone.”
My father had the nerve to say, “You couldn’t find my daughter, and now you don’t know where the man who killed her is. Tom, I feel sorry for you when this news gets out.”
Tom bowed his head. He stubb
ed the toe of his boot against the curb. Then he said to my father, “Junior, I hate to do this, but I’m going to have to ask to see your gun, that Colt.”
“That Colt?” my father said. “I threw that Colt in the river. Like you said, Tom, I didn’t have any business having that thing around. I might have hurt someone with it.”
“Who’s to say you didn’t? Where were you last night?”
“I was home with my family. Ask Patsy. Ask Gilley.” He turned and looked at me standing there on the porch. I was thinking how that Colt had gone into the glass furnace along with Raymond R.’s body, how everything had been broken down. “Where else would I have been,” my father said, a catch in his voice, “at a time like this but with my family? You’ve got kids of your own, Tom. Good Christ.”
For a good while, neither of them spoke. Finally, Tom said, “If you want the truth, this pen looks sort of beat up.” He held the bag up to the sunlight filtering through the tree branches above him. “Sort of worn to be a new pen.”
“Well, you know kids,” my father said. “They rough things up, don’t they?” Tom looked down at the pen. I could see his hand closing into a fist, the plastic bag bunching up in his palm. My father put the question to him again. “You know that, don’t you, Tom? Like I said, you’ve got kids of your own.”
Tom’s fist relaxed. “Yes, I suppose they do.” He opened the bag and took out the pen. He handed it to my father. “I can’t say what I’d do if someone did one of my children the way that Raymond Wright did your Katie. I imagine we’ll all be hurting for you and Patsy for a good long while. This whole town—I guess I can speak for myself, too—a good many of us, I imagine, wouldn’t mind if Raymond Wright turned up dead.”