Alone in a Cabin

by Leanne W. Smith

  The man’s eyebrows raised with interest. He leaned an elbow on the counter, his demeanor now conspiratorial. “You’re a writer?” That made them kindred spirits.

  “This will be my first book,” Maggie confessed.

  That tidbit didn’t appear to diminish the man’s admiration. “What’s it about?”

  Ah…the million-dollar question…the one Maggie was sure to be asked every time she had the courage to tell someone she was working on a book. She’d read about pitches and log lines—had written this one out and practiced it in her mind—but this would be the first time she said it aloud. “It’s about a man who was convicted of killing his wife and whether he was really guilty of her murder.”

  Brad Bybee looked genuinely interested, which Maggie took as a hopeful sign. “Like Shawshank Redemption?”

  “A different angle,” said Maggie, heartened by Bybee’s comparison. She leaned in from the other side of the counter. “Last month I rented a cabin in Marston and met a gentleman named Oliver—”

  Bybee snapped his fingers. “Thompson. The old caretaker of the Patterson cabin.” His eyes lit up. “Your story about his son, Zeke?” He was quick to add, “He did kill his wife.”

  “Yes. But I wonder if he was really guilty of her murder.”

  Bybee’s brows lifted, then his forefinger. “I see where you’re going.” He nodded as if to say he and Maggie were both writers. It was their job to question these things.

  “I want to tell the Ezekiel Thompson story.” That was probably all Maggie needed say here in Marston County.

  Bybee pulled back and looked at her appreciatively before leaning in again. “That there is an interesting story. Sad story. You know, I been covering every event that’s happened in this county that was newsworthy—and frankly an awful lot of events that aren’t—for the last thirty years, and that one was memorable. In part, because I had just come to Marston to run this paper weeks before it happened. Thompson killed his wife and that other man—the man from…”

  Bybee snapped his fingers three times looking for it, then snapped harder when he found it. “Trenton! What was Thompson’s wife’s name?”

  “Tandy Wilkins.”

  “That’s right!” He snapped his fingers again. “The Wilkinses.” Bybee got a knowing look that said there’d been more Wilkins stories over the years. “Then his escape, a few years after that, was big news. And that tragic death.” Bybee wagged his head. His glasses were so large on his face, and his nose so angled down, he reminded Maggie of an owl. “Poor old man.”

  He leaned both elbows on the counter this time. “Word was, the son froze to death and his father found him.” Bybee dropped his voice another notch, though he and Maggie appeared to be the only two in the news office. “Canon asked me not to put any official notice of the son’s death in the paper, but…” Bybee glanced over the black frames of his spectacles, “…word got around. You don’t have to put a story in the paper in this town for folks to know.”

  News would travel fast in a small town, and speculations even faster. Maggie really needed to talk to Ollie. She didn’t want him to hear from someone else that she was doing a story on Zeke before he heard it from her. Canon, Shirley, Becky, Amos and now Brad Bybee all knew.

  Maggie hoped she could convince Brad Bybee to keep her secret if he was willing to keep Canon’s all these years. “I haven’t talked to Mr. Thompson about this yet. I’d like to get a handle on what happened first.”

  Bybee nodded. “You’ve come to the right place, then.” He waved her back behind the counter, toward a large open room behind it.

  “Forgive the mess.” The space was indeed cluttered. Papers from the past weeks, months, years, covered every table top and each corner of the floor. “Now I came in the summer of ‘82, that would make his trial…”

  “February of ‘83,” said Maggie.

  Bybee snapped his fingers. “The eighties are in that south corner.”

  He pointed, stepped in that direction, and was soon pulling papers from a stack. “We’re just a bi-weekly paper, so that’s a hundred and four issues a year, fifty-two weeks in a year. That makes it a little easier to find things. The murders happened…yep…August of 1982! Here it is.”

  He pulled out one, two, three—Maggie lost count of the issues.

  “Looks like the trial started in February like you said.” Bybee was into the stack beside it now. “It was always front page news, of course. That makes it easier to find. There will be some repetition of the facts, but I’ll include each issue in case there’s new information. How long was he in before he escaped?”

  “Almost four years. It was in December of—”

  The snap of Bybee’s fingers again. “Eighty-six.” He thumbed until he found the desired papers and started pulling issues again. “Just walked right out, if I’m remembering right. Turney had a skeleton crew that night.”

  Maggie stared at the growing stack, marveling at the richness of the opportunity to learn more. First the sheriff’s case files, now this. Court reports still coming. Her head was reeling.

  Bybee pointed at the papers. “You’re welcome to take those with you, if you promise to bring them back. One of these days I’m going to get all this online. But it’s not that day yet. We put the new issues online, of course.” Bybee looked around the cluttered room. “I’m sure I have a box around here somewhere you could put these in.”

  Maggie couldn’t believe her luck. “I promise to take good care of these and get them back to you by the end of the week.”

  Bybee waved a hand. Maggie was grateful he didn’t snap his fingers. “Take your time! No rush. Not a lot of folks coming in here wanting to read news from the eighties.”

  Maggie piled the papers in the box he offered and started to lift it when she had a sudden thought. “Mr. Bybee, there’s another news item I’m curious about. It doesn’t have anything to do with the Zeke Thompson story, but do you remember an interstate exit stand-off about twenty years ago?”

  “The one that killed Sheriff Dale?”

  Maggie suddenly felt like a snoop, there was no other name for it. An astute, finger snapping man like Brad Bybee was going to see right through her. “Sheriff Dale mentioned it briefly in passing, and I hated to pry, but was curious to know what happened exactly.”

  Bybee had already moved to another stack of papers—the nineties, evidently—and began thumbing through the headlines. “Here it is.” He pulled out three issues. “You want the trial on that one, too, or just the event, itself?”

  “Just the event.”

  “These three should cover it, then.” He pointed. “That second one includes a nice insert on the Dale family. They have a long history in the county. Dickson County deputies finally found the man who shot Sheriff Dale—the senior Dale, Canon and Shirley’s father.”

  “Shirley?”

  Bybee pointed in the direction of the sheriff’s office. “Shirley Weems. She was a Dale before she married.”

  Shirley was Canon’s sister? Of course…she had his same coloring and solid build.

  * * *

  Maggie didn’t get to the stack of eighties papers until Wednesday. She spent the rest of Tuesday poring over, then pondering, the articles in the three papers from 1996.

  Robbie and Cal had been six years old as ‘96 came to a close. The day, month and year were seared into Maggie’s mind because the twins got the flu, one right after the other.

  Cal came down with it first, two days before he was supposed to be Jack Horner in the kindergarten play. While Tom took a rare day off early to take Robbie to play her part in the Mother Goose production—Little Miss Muffet—Maggie sat rocking Cal in the La-Z-Boy. She remembered protecting his hot, fevered ears from his sister’s peels as Robbie practiced her screaming run from the spider—over and over through the living room, Maggie’s own head throbbing—while Tom seemed to take forever to change his clothes.

  The same day Cal’s fever broke and he crawled down from her lap, Rob
bie came crawling into it. Then, as Robbie’s fever broke after nearly two weeks of continual rocking in the La-Z-Boy, the flu finally claimed Maggie. She hadn’t quite recovered when Tom’s parents arrived from Michigan. It was the only time Tom’s parents ever drove down to stay with them.

  Maggie could still feel the criticism in their eyes for the condition of the house and how unprepared Maggie seemed for the holiday and their arrival. She actually overheard Tom’s mother say, when Tom made some effort to defend her, “It’s not as if she didn’t know we were coming, Tom. Christmas has been on the calendar all year.”

  And that was Maggie’s memory of December, ‘96. She had felt so sorry for herself…thought she had it so rough. But Canon—and Shirley, she realized now—felt the bite of that bitter week on the calendar harder than she did.

  The same day as the nursery rhyme play, and at nearly the same hour, three men on a crime spree that started in the southern tip of South Carolina and curved its way northward through Georgia then Alabama stopped at a gas station off Interstate-40 at the Marston County exit in Middle Tennessee. They shot and killed the older gentleman who only worked on Fridays, and took two customers hostage who happened to be inside the Handy-Mart.

  A trucker pulling up to the gas station heard the shots and called it in on his radio. From his high vantage point inside the truck, he could see the waving guns and terrified patrons inside.

  Sheriff Dale was on the scene within moments. Maggie pictured an older version of Canon throwing his patrol car into park, opening his driver’s side door, planting a large boot on the concrete, his blue eyes taking it all in, his hand reaching for the radio to give more details and call for back-up.

  Other truckers, a few of them armed, also having heard the “10-31” on the airwaves began to peel off at the exit and pull into the asphalt lot.

  When one over-eager trucker ran up to Sheriff Dale’s patrol car from behind, brandishing his pistol, the sheriff barked, “Drop to the ground! Drop to the ground now! Hands where I can see ’em!”

  Maggie could easily imagine that part, the memory of Canon barking his order to her, Stay here! Don’t get out, when he squealed into the parking lot at the Ron-dee-vu on New Year’s Eve.

  With screams coming from inside the Handy-Mart and truckers blaring their horns and yelling to let the sheriff know the guy on the ground was trying to help, Sheriff Dale exposed the right side of his neck from behind the bullet proof glass of his patrol car door as a fugitive inside the station shot.

  The bullet cut through the sheriff’s carotid artery.

  When his son, Deputy Canon Dale, pulled into the station only moments later, his father was already slumped over the seat of his patrol car, his lifeless hand having let go of the radio.

  Maggie was as familiar with the carotid arteries that lined either side of a neck—the major vessels that took blood to the brain—as any ex-wife of a throat specialist could be. It would have taken a body less than two minutes to die with a wound like that, with no one there to stop the bleeding.

  The truckers and hostages likely sat as stunned as she did now with her eyes glued to Brad Bybee’s words in the twenty-year-old newsprint, tears streaming down her cheeks for a man she never knew.

  Deputy Canon Dale, the sheriff’s son, was the first to arrive after Sheriff Dale was shot. Two of the fugitives inside the station were killed and one of the hostages wounded when the incensed truckers who witnessed the shooting joined the deputy and ensuing shots were fired. The fugitive who shot Sheriff Dale fled out a back door and into a wooded area behind the station. Dickson County Sheriff’s deputies apprehended him three days later.

  Maggie’s eyes scanned through the rest of Bybee’s first article but there was no more mention of Canon…how he felt…whether it was he who cradled his father’s body and laid it on the ground until the ambulance…or hearse…arrived.

  Maggie only took one journalism course in her short college career. She knew a reporter’s job was to record the facts—only the facts—but this was the very reason newspaper articles frustrated her. They never included enough information to help the reader stand in the hero’s shoes…see what he saw…feel what he felt.

  No criticism intended toward Brad Bybee personally.

  From the special section on the Dale family in the next issue Maggie learned more. Bybee must have been a history-lover, because this was where he really shone.

  There was a whole page of black and white photos: Buchanan Dale, who was shot and killed. Buchanan with his family, when Canon and Shirley were teenagers. Canon was nice-looking then, too, both he and Shirley thinner. A photo of the sheriff’s office crew, with Canon as a younger man, no graying at his temples. Pictures of Canon’s grandparents. Great-grandparents.

  The Dale family has the longest line of law enforcement service in Marston County’s history.

  The pictures began with a grainy photograph of the first Thomas Buchanan Dale, born in 1837, who fought for the South in the Civil War. He returned to the family farm in Marston County after his parents both died “as casualties of the conflict.” Maggie wondered what that meant. This first Dale, known as Buck, married late in life and fathered his only son, called Tom, at the age of sixty-two.

  Tom Dale, born in 1899, became the first Marston County sheriff in 1934, the same year his son, Buchanan, was born. Then that son, Canon’s father and the third namesake, became sheriff when Tom died prematurely in a tragic house fire in 1967—the same house the first Buck Dale returned to after the war. Buchanan rebuilt on the family farm, and continued his father’s legacy as sheriff until the tragic stand-off at I-40 Interstate Exit 159.

  By the time Maggie went to bed that night, pictures of the four generations of Dale men—all looking like they could have shared genetics with Sean Connery—were seared into her mind. It took a test of her will over the next several days to leave the nineties papers lying to the side so she could focus on the tragedy that sent her to the news office in the first place.

  This was Zeke’s story, after all. Maggie needed to concentrate on it. She didn’t know if it was the cabin or the county, in general, but stories suddenly seemed to call from all directions and every decade.

  Maggie spent the next day immersed in Brad Bybee’s articles from the 1980s about Tandy Wilkins’ murder and the subsequent Ezekiel Thompson trial and conviction, taking notes as fast as she could write them.

  * * *

  On Friday morning Maggie resisted the urge to bake Canon something—a cake, some muffins, a pie. Why do I want to bake him something? Because she’d learned that twenty years ago he had lost his father in the line of duty? And Canon had arrived only moments too late to stop the bleeding?

  Maggie felt she ought to acknowledge what she knew. But what would Canon read into it if she did? The sheriff was a scrutinizer. He was likely to probe into why Maggie played the role of a busybody. Why would Maggie poke her nose into a past Canon obviously didn’t enjoy talking about? She wasn’t writing a book about his family, after all. And hadn’t a cloud settled over him the last time Maggie pried open his memories?

  Canon had been a great help to her. He didn’t consider her a suspect in the death of a man found behind her cabin, and he didn’t act like she was completely crazy for telling him a ghost had spent two days with her. Maggie didn’t want to betray Canon’s trust. Betrayal was the last weapon she wanted to wield on anyone, knowingly or otherwise. So Maggie made banana bread for Brad Bybee instead. His articles, after all, provided her with the newly inscribed reams in her notebook.

  “You’re an excellent writer, Mr. Bybee,” she said, setting the cardboard box on his counter. He was the sole human in the office again. “Are you the only one who works here?”

  He nodded. “Maybeline was helping out, but she had back surgery.”

  “Who’s Maybeline?”

  “Old woman who lives across the street. She used to come in here and sit at the counter while I was out covering stories.”

  “
When did she have back surgery?”

  Bybee cocked his head to think. “Eleven years ago.”

  Maggie bit her lip to keep from smiling and pulled his wrapped banana bread from the box.

  “What’s this?” Bybee’s eyes lit up behind his round frame glasses.

  “I wanted to show my appreciation for you letting me borrow the papers.”

  Bybee’s mouth dropped open, reminding Maggie once again of an owl. It was the crook of his nose under the tortoise frame lenses.

  “It’s homemade?”

  Maggie nodded. “Banana bread. I hope you’re not allergic to nuts.”

  Brad Bybee shook his head and looked at her as if seeing Maggie for the first time. “The whole thing’s for me?”

  “Why, yes! Take it home to your family.”

  “I don’t have a family,” he mumbled, putting his hands around the Saran Wrap, peeling a corner of it back, smelling. “Oh, my. That was mighty nice of you, Ms. Raines.” He smiled shyly. “And it was nice of you to say I was a good writer. That means a lot to me coming from you. I guess you’re the real deal. I’ve always to wanted to write a book, but can’t imagine taking on such a long project.”

  Maggie looked past him into the room with stacks and stacks of papers. Hadn’t Brad Bybee written all those articles? It was enough to fill a library.

  When Maggie came out of the newspaper office, she looked down the street toward the sheriff’s office feeling a powerful pull to stop in and say hello. But after that, what? I read about your family, all the tragedy. I’m sorry.

  She couldn’t say that. Was she looking for a reason to see him again? Hadn’t she told Robbie and Cal only weeks ago that the ink was barely dry on her divorce papers? The last thing she needed was to put her heart in jeopardy so soon after getting it shattered. Maggie was already disappointed Canon hadn’t found a reason to come back out to check on her at the cabin. Didn’t he have her phone number? Why hadn’t he used it? Mightn’t Maggie look desperate if she showed up at his office again? Shirley and Becky would have another chance to exchange their glances. Maggie already read the case file. Shirley might have those court documents ready by now…that could be Maggie’s excuse.