Graven Images

by Jane Waterhouse

  I watched Jeff Turner, flanked by the two guards, walk to his seat looking sheepish and a bit disoriented, as though surprised once again to see all these people here, on account of him. He had on the same navy blazer, pale shirt, yellow tie, pleated khakis, and loafers he’d worn for most of the trial. His freshly washed hair stuck up in wavy little corn-colored flips around his ears where it had been towel-dried. The faint scent of Johnson’s baby shampoo wafted toward me. After a moment, he twisted around in his chair. His handsome face brightened when our eyes connected.

  I gave him a nod.

  Nick Shawde turned to the witness. “Now I grant you, Jeff’s scholastic record’s mighty impressive, Miz Nadine,” he said, blithely exchanging his New York accent for something softer, more comfortable, as though it were as easy as stepping out of three-hundred-buck loafers into warm, fuzzy slippers. He smiled benignly at the woman. “But, apart from that, what was he like?”

  “Well, I’d say he was jest about the perfect all-American boy,” Jeff’s high-school guidance counselor told the attorney.

  Darla Tate, who had met Turner when they volunteered together at the ASPCA, testified that he was compassionate, gentle almost to a fault. “And it wannit just the animals he was good to, either,” Darla told the courtroom. “Why, Jeff Turner kept friendly with every girl he ever dated, even the homely ones.”

  Turner’s former art teacher, a tiny, concave-chested woman of about sixty with the shrewd, sunken gaze of a rhesus monkey, declared Jeff to have the “pure, innocent soul of an artist.” “I give private lessons, and take on very few chil-dren,” she said, separating the syllables as if one was more distasteful than the other, “but in Jefferson’s case, I just had to make an exception.”

  None of this was news to me, of course. During my early research, I spent a whole month in Turner’s hometown trying to get somebody to say something bad about him. No one ever did. I took it with a grain of salt. The way I figured, so what if he drew pretty pictures, and his neighbors said he was nice? John Wayne Gacy’s second favorite hobby was painting; and just about everybody I interviewed for Dust to Dust swore Harold Beech—the monster who buried little Dierdre Purdy alive, and left her to die—was an all-around stand-up fellow. Jefferson Turner might have been the proverbial boy-next-door. But in the neighborhoods I frequented, the boy-next-door usually turned out to be an axe murderer.

  It took me a long while to think he was any different.

  FIVE

  That first day, visiting him in jail, there wasn’t a shadow of a doubt in my mind that Jeff Turner was the Holy Ghost.

  He sat on the other side of the plate-glass window looking even younger than he had in the lineup. “Can I get you anything?” he asked. “A Coke, maybe, or a glass of wine?” For a split second I thought, Oh great, here comes the insanity plea. But then he laughed, and his body realigned itself—head bowed, shoulders slumping—as though the sheer humiliation of this situation were weighing him down.

  “Jeff, my name is—” I began, stiffly.

  “I know who you are.” He smiled. His teeth were straight and white. “I try never to miss the New York Times book section. Pretty lame, huh? Reading your reviews but not your books?”

  “I get partial royalties for that sort of thing,” I said, still trying to digest the fact that this farmboy in prison blue read the New York Times Book Review.

  He seemed to relax. “You may not know this,” he said, “but you and I once had a pretty heavy relationship goin’ for, oh, I’d say, almost two weeks.”

  I decided he was loony-tunes after all.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Jeff continued, easily. “After I read that People article they did on you a few years back, I decided you were just about the most beautiful, fascinating female in the world. I imagined us meeting, get this, at one of your book signings. As you might expect, it was love at first sight. Yeah, we were quite an item for a while, in my head, at least—” The look on my face stopped him cold. “Ever do that?” he asked, a little sheepishly.

  “Can’t say that I have.”

  “You should try it sometime. See, that way, if you say something dumb, why, you just go back and replay the scene in your mind till you get it right. Like I wish I could now—” He ended with another embarrassed laugh. “No offense, but meeting you was a lot better in my dreams. At least I wasn’t in prison.”

  “Do you often dream of meeting women you don’t know, Jeff?” I tried to finesse the question.

  “If you’re asking me whether I live in a fantasy world,” he replied, “the answer is no.” He leaned closer to the glass. “Look, I’m not used to people putting a sinister spin onto everything I say, okay? All of a sudden, I tell you I had a crush on Chrissie Evert in the third grade, and it proves I’m some kind of psycho stalker.”

  He looked down at his hands. “It probably wasn’t too smart of me, going off about you and that article, and my dumb fantasy. So I’m not smart. That doesn’t make me a criminal. It was just my clumsy way of saying…I admire you.”

  “So what happened?” I asked. He looked puzzled. “You said our relationship lasted only two weeks.”

  “Oh. It was the age difference,” he said, so naturally I was charmed in spite of myself. “You told me I had some growing up to do, then you kissed me and got into your big black limo and drove off into the sunset”—he smiled at this imaginedmemory—“and I went back to thinking that Jolie Brenner—who I happened to be dating at the time—was just about the most beautiful, fascinating female in the world.”

  We lapsed into an oddly comfortable silence. “Well, since we go way back, I guess you know why I’m here,” I said finally.

  “Yes, ma’am.” He nodded solemnly. “I guess I do. But I didn’t kill anybody. It wasn’t me.”

  I pulled out the standard line. “I’m not a lawyer, Jeff, and I’m not a judge. I’ve got no more loyalties than that fly over there on that wall.” Of course there was no fly, but he didn’t look. They never did. “I’m just someone who’ll listen to all sides,” I told him, “and draw my own conclusions.”

  “Sounds fair, Miz Quinn,” he said.

  I said, “Look, I’m Garner. Or Quinn. Or hey, lady. Just drop the Miz, and don’t ever call me ma’am again, okay?”

  “Lady’ll do.” He smiled. “I’m Jeff. Bird to the folks at home.”

  “Where’d that come from?”

  “Probably had something to do with the fact I was skinnier than all get out as a kid.” He grinned. “That, and the way I am with animals.”

  “You have a lot of pets?”

  “Used to. Most were just bad-off critters people dropped by. Sparrows. Kittens. Dogs with three legs, that couldn’t see, that kind of thing. I’d find them in shoe boxes, or wrapped in bloody blankets on the porch.

  “See,” he went on, “back home, there’s still pretty much a rural mentality. You know, animals are there to do something—to work, to produce, be useful. If they can’t, then, well, the general thinking is, just kill ’em.” A flicker of sadness passed over his handsome face. “But after a while, it got around about me, so folks’d leave ’em in the middle of the night over at our place.”

  “And you took care of them?” I asked.

  “I took care of them”—he nodded—“the best I could.”

  The guard lumbered toward us, about as subtle as a digital watch alarm playing “Dixie.” Jeff looked panicked suddenly. “One more thing—” He was imploring with his eyes.

  “Yes?”

  “Anybody you write about ever turn out to be innocent?”

  “Not yet,” I told him.

  He flashed his dimples. “Y’all believe there could be a first time?”

  “I’ll do my best to keep an open mind,” I promised, watching as the guard cuffed him roughly on the shoulder and led him away.

  SIX

  Myrna, North Carolina, the town where Jeff Turner had spent the first twenty years of his life, was ninety miles south of Raleigh, and a million miles
from nowhere. Whenever I picture it in my mind, the images I call up are always sepia-tinted, the hue of tobacco leaves hung too long to dry, of burnt fields, and paint-peeled barns. Even the sky, as I remember, seemed devoid of color.

  Instead of booking a room at the Holiday Inn on the highway, I’d opted to stay with Turner’s mother, Varlie. The minute I pulled the rental car into that dusty driveway, I regretted my decision. Jeff said his grandfather had once eked out a living farming tobacco here, but the fields that stretched before me hadn’t been tended in years. Two curing barns appeared on the verge of falling down, and the farmhouse itself was a monument to neglect, as though decades of relentless sun and wind had dried up all the life inside, had just dried it up and blown it away.

  Several chapters of All Through the Night are devoted to Jeff Turner’s childhood, to Myrna, and the people I met there. But many of the most vivid impressions I have about that particular time, the month I spent with Varlie while doing my initial research, would never make it into the book. More than the interviews, more than anything anyone who knew Jeff said, I remember those long evenings at the Turner farmhouse—the sealed quiet of the place; the interior of rooms lit haphazardly by the cool, blue glow of an open refrigerator, by the flicker of a television, by yellow slices of lamplight under doors. I remember walking with Varlie at night, out past the chicken coops, to the small cemetery plot where Jeff’s grandaddy was buried. I also remember reading Jeff’s letters at the desk in his old bedroom, surrounded by his pen-and-ink drawings, his posters and pennants, the long, linked row of his Sunday school pins. And I remember feeling strangely touched.

  I’d asked him to write, and every day the letters arrived, mine and Varlie’s, postmarked from the Richland County Jail.

  Lady,

  Thanks for those art supplies. I’ve already done pastel portraits of Bobby and Jimmy Harold, and the new guard wants me to copy a photograph of his fiancée. I keep flashing on how things’ll change if I’m shipped off to some penitentiary. I don’t want to have to spend the next forty years drawing tattoos on a long line of lifers just so they won’t rape me.

  The people here have been very patient with my somewhat meager talents. I might not do so well with some dude who’s serving time for shooting six people in a liquor store. Wonder how you tell one of those guys that the pen-and-ink of his mother isn’t done yet? Very tactfully, I reckon.

  I’d begun to like Jeff Turner, and that made me very wary, very guarded. The truth was, I wanted him to be guilty. I’d allowed the book to get ahead of me: All Through the Night was taking on a life of its own, with Jeff Turner as an integral part of the plot.

  Even so, it bothered me that no forensic evidence linked him to the crimes. The Holy Ghost was into latex: latex gloves, latex condoms. Except for a residue of greasepaint and the presence of some black threads (the kind used to make priests’ cassocks, the lab report said), he might just as well have been a real ghost, for all he’d left behind. Nor could I explain Jeff’s apparent alibis for the murders. But whenever I was plagued by a misgiving, I reminded myself that Susan Trevett’s identification of the boy was the ultimate clincher.

  And yet it was Susan Trevett who troubled me the most.

  Since the attack, she’d become tabloid journalism’s flavor of the month. To the prosecutor’s dismay, she appeared on a dizzying round of talk shows and sensational news programs, telling her story to whomever would listen, and—what worried me—changing it with every telling.

  I asked Jack to keep track of her while I was in Myrna. “She whipped off her blouse during the Howard Stern pay-per-view,” he told me during one of our phone conversations. “She let Howard run his fingers over the scars.”

  “Oh God,” I sighed.

  “Yeah.” Jack’s voice turned pensive. “It was quite a sight.”

  When I called the defense attorney’s office, Nick Shawde got on the horn, ecstatic. “I love this girl!” he crowed. “I couldn’t do a better job of discrediting a witness myself!” Then he sobered, adding, “When you gettin’ back from the boonies, Garny? I miss you.” I told him, in the most ominous tones I could muster, that in a few weeks he’d be anxious to get rid of me.

  The Ghost’s first victim, a nineteen-year-old French major at the University of South Carolina named Janna Mayer, had been murdered in the bedroom of her ground-floor apartment in the early-morning hours of September 17, 1993. Officers on the scene mentioned hearing an eerie sound emanating from the bedroom. Apparently a music box had fallen off the dresser during the struggle. The melody of a child’s lullaby filled the room with false brightness, playing on and on, just inches from where the dead girl was found—

  Sleep my love

  And peace attend thee

  All through the night

  Guardian angels

  God will send thee

  All through the night—

  At first, I’ll admit, the music box thing was nothing more to me than a creative hook: the perfect title for the book. It wasn’t until the very end of my stay at the Turner farmhouse that the lullaby began to haunt me. Just before sleep, I’d give in to it. I’d sit by the window in the boy’s darkened room, and let it play through my mind—

  Sleep my love

  And peace attend thee

  All through the night

  I thought about Jeff, vehemently insisting that he couldn’t have killed Janna or the other girls, that he’d been working in the printing plant all through those nights.

  Guardian angels

  God will send thee

  All through the night—

  I thought about Janna Mayer’s last moment, when the terrible realization hit—that there’d be no guardian angels this night. I pictured the scene over and over again, until I was there with her, until I was her, and it was happening to me: the cold flash of blade…the clean tear of nightgown…the crosses etched deeply into flesh…the words roaring through my head—

  in nomine Patris, et Filii,

  et Spiritus Sancti…

  I stared out into the darkness at the moon, willing it into a waxy, greasepainted face and then I squinted, trying desperately to see Jeff Turner’s fine features somewhere just beneath its cratered surface.

  One night I returned to the farmhouse quite late. I let myself in the front door and found Varlie asleep in front of the television, stockinged feet up on the old recliner. Her legs were a knotted purple network of veins. Before I could tiptoe down the hall to my room, she sensed my presence and sat up, nearly upsetting the bowl of soup in her lap.

  “Didn’t hear y’all come in,” she apologized.

  I looked at her, wondering if this could’ve been my face, after poverty and despair cracked it into a thousand broken eggshell pieces. I said, “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

  She moved her legs heavily off the chair. “Just restin’ my feet.” She held up her bowl. “There’s some more Campbell’s on the stove, if you like.”

  “Thanks, I already ate.” I sat down on the sagging sofa, Varlie’s abject loneliness reeling me in. For the first time I had a sense of how it must have been for her, living here after Jeff left for Columbia. His presence would have added color to these rooms. I imagined him walking down the long hall, toward his bedroom, whistling maybe, turning on lights as he went, unsettling the dust on the furniture with the steady clomp of his shoes.

  Varlie picked up the remote, switching from a syndicated sitcom to Inside Edition.

  Susan Trevett’s face flooded the small screen. It took me a moment to recognize her. For one thing, her hair was different, big and blown out, like pale cotton candy, and she was wearing thick, spiky false eyelashes. Oddly enough, this made her appear even more waifish than she had before.

  The reporter asked, “How would you say the attack changed your life?”

  Susan tilted her head, as though all that hair was suddenly too heavy. “We-eell,” she replied, very carefully, “all in all, with the TV, and the magazine offers, I’d say it was posit
ive.” She was speaking much too slowly. Shit, I thought, the girl’s loaded. I felt ashamed to be sitting here with Mrs. Turner, watching Susan Trevett make a spectacle of herself.

  Trevett looked into the camera and smiled. “I always knew I’d be famous,” she said. “If it wannit for this trial, it’d have been for something else.”

  Varlie zapped the picture from the small screen. “I reckon I’m goin’ to bed.”

  “Me too,” I said quietly. “Tomorrow I’m going to head down to Columbia to see Jeff.”

  Jeff’s letters were always so upbeat and positive, it was that much more of a shock when I saw him again. He’d lost a lot of weight, and there was a new listlessness in his voice.

  “I keep having these dreams about Grandaddy,” he told me.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “Well, he just about raised me up after Daddy disappeared, and Mama started having to take on jobs. I suppose he was what people mean when they say salt of the earth.” A flicker of a smile played over his lips. “Taught me everything I know about carpentry and machinery. Animals, too. Farmed tabacca with his own hands till he was seventy and never once took a puff off a cigarette. Wouldn’t allow it in the house. Alcohol, neither.

  “There aren’t any more left like him now,” he sighed. “His sort of small farmer. They’re a dyin’ breed.”

  “When exactly did he pass on?” I asked, pulling out the all-purpose euphemism as though it were the one I usually used, instead of cooled…kicked…bought the big one.

  “I was twelve, I guess,” he said.

  “So from then on, you were the man of the family?”

  “Yeah.” He tossed his head back, as if trying to force the tears back into their allotted slots. “Botched up that job pretty good, didn’t I?”

  “I don’t know. Did you?”

  “Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped in an old movie, you know, The Wrong Man, and I’m Jimmy Stewart, and nobody believes me. Not even you.”

  I let that go by. “Tell me about your dreams,” I prompted.