A Quiet Belief in Angels (16 page)

They got them out—Gunther and Mathilde, Walter and Hans.

She didn’t make it: Elena Kruger, with her bruised arms and her seizures. Eleven days from her twelfth birthday, and she died somewhere on the basement stairs, heading down into darkness to escape the heat.

I remembered the promise I’d made, standing on the hill where I’d found Virginia Perlman, the promise to watch over Elena and ensure no harm came to her. Broke that promise like it had never meant a thing. I knew . . . knew deep inside, that somehow I had made this happen.

My mother was there, her voice cracked from shouting, her clothes filthy, her hands and knees caked in wet charcoal and mud. Reilly Hawkins had to drag her back when the roof finally gave, for they all knew that the girl was lost. Before that moment there had been hope—misguided, optimistic, but hope nevertheless. When the upper timbers shuddered down one after the other, when those huge, roiling arcs of flame billowed out through each door and window aperture, they all knew there was nothing they could do. Elena Kruger was still inside, and then the walls hitched sideways and leaned inward drunk enly, and anyone venturing beyond the limits of the plot would have burned from inside out before they’d even reached the blackened brickwork.

I stood and watched, my heart red and hot, a bloody stampede of rhythm, my fists clenched tight, my teeth gritted until they hurt, and tears running down my face, tears from smoke and painful breaths—and devastation, as I realized what had happened.

Someone had fired the Kruger house.

It was later that I saw Death. Nothing more than a shadow, a specter, but He was there. The same one that took my father.

All of us were awake until the early hours of Monday morning, delirious from the heat and grief. The flames were dead, the Kruger house nothing more than a black shadow, here and there studded with the memories of walls like broken teeth jutting from the gums of the earth. I could see where the kitchen once stood, could almost smell the wienerwurst and potato salad Mrs. Kruger had made to feed the sceercraw.

They brought Elena up then. Her father, Sheriff Dearing, one-eyed Lowell Shaner and Frank Turow. They found her lying on the steps of the basement, her body burned beyond recognition. They wrapped a blanket around her, carried her up into the thin shadows of impending dawn. Mrs. Kruger stood back and watched, beyond all hope, beyond emotion, incapable of crying anymore. At some point she seemed to fold effortlessly into the ground, and my mother was there, and Reilly Hawkins, and they held her up and guided her away to the back of our house and into the kitchen.

I watched from the window of my room that overlooked the Krugers’ yard. I saw Him then, alongside the crude funereal procession that ghosted its way between the trees and down toward the River Road. Frank Turow had a flatbed truck, and there they would lay the body of Elena Kruger for the drive to Dr. Piper’s house. Death was there, neither walking nor floating, for He was in the shadows between the trees, the shadows of the men that walked with Elena, in the sound of heavy boots crushing wet leaves and broken sticks, in the sound of gravel on the hot top, in the mist that issued from their mouths as they cleared throats and whispered words, as they hoisted the body upward and laid it on the truck. He was there. I knew He could see me, that I was watching Him. For some strange reason I felt He was as afraid as I.

It was then, the moment before they carried her away, that I felt the tension and disturbance of my own worst fears.

Just as had occurred with Virginia Grace, the thought came.

The thought that
He
knew what we were thinking, that
He
knew what had passed through our minds, and in allowing Elena to know of us, in promising I would protect her, I had consigned her to this terrible, terrible fate.

He was taunting me.

He was as good as inside me, and I shivered uncontrollably and could not still myself.

The engine started. The truck pulled away with Frank Turow and Sheriff Dearing up front. Gunther Kruger knelt in back beside the dead body of his only daughter, his head bowed, his spirit broken. Lowell Shaner stood at the side of the road. He didn’t move until the truck had vanished from sight, and then he sat down in the dirt, right there at the side of the road, his forehead on his knees, and he didn’t move for a long, long while.

Had I known, I would have called out Mr. Kruger’s name, even though he would not have heard me. Had I known that Gunther Kruger would be gone for so long, I would have shouted something, some word of comfort, of hope, something that might make him feel that the world and all it owned was not against him. But I did not know, and was silent.

Mrs. Kruger and her two sons stayed with Reilly Hawkins that night. The following day Mr. Kruger came to collect them, and took them and the clothes they had slept in, for that was all they possessed, and Frank Turow drove them north to Uvalda in Toombs County. There was a farm up there, a farm owned by Mathilde Kruger’s cousin’s wife, a widow, but still maintaining some land, some pigs, and a modest livelihood.

I did not ask after the Krugers. Perhaps they had been cursed, and I was afraid it was contagious. Their land, the footprint of their house, was washed clean by rain and the shift of seasons. The basement was filled in and covered over with deep sod and the tramp of feet. Someone planted a tree, a small thing no more than three or four feet high, but it shifted in the breeze and made me think of Elena and the terrible sufferance of her brief, extinguished life.

The Krugers were there, as much a part of our lives as anyone we knew, and then they were gone.

Sheriff Dearing did not ask questions about the fire. He did not want to know. I felt he too was afraid of what he might discover. There was talk, as there would be, and people’s minds turned to explanations and justifications as to why such a thing might have happened.

Rumors began about Elena’s bruises, and some said that her father might have inflicted them on her, that she’d been abused, violated maybe, and that such things had taken place over many years, before finally her father was forced to do something to stop her from speaking. I remember Sheriff Dearing visiting my mother. I did not hear the words they spoke, but I sensed the atmosphere. He was warning her, telling her that he had suspicions, that Gunther Kruger was gone and that she should refrain from making any contact with him.

Why had all the Krugers survived, all of them but Elena?

Why had she been found in the basement when all the others had been upstairs?

Was Gunther Kruger guilty of the things that had been suggested? Were Elena’s bruises caused by his hand after all?

Was there any possibility that Gunther might have killed his own daughter to stop her talking?

I remembered the night I had seen Mr. Kruger standing on the road, standing silent and unmoving, his long coat like a shroud, the fear I had felt when I’d imagined who he might have been.

How I’d seen him as nothing more than a shadow.

I heard the things that people said, but tried my best not to believe them; dark minds always generated darker thoughts. Possibly because it was easier than thinking that someone set the Kruger fire motivated by prejudice. Maybe because the human mind sets things to rights any which way it can, and if Kruger himself was guilty, that would make it all the easier to categorize and resolve. Besides, he was a foreigner, a
German
, and if the Germans were in fact responsible for the atrocities in Europe, then surely it was in their blood, some hereditary affliction that prompted acts of violence and abuse. Augusta Falls was a small town. The Krugers left behind nothing but the memory of their daughter.

The Guardians, once six, were now five. Hans Kruger was gone, and in some way I was relieved. I did not believe I could have faced him each and every day.

The rest of us didn’t meet for a month, and when we did the mood was somber and reserved.

“You think the killer set the Kruger fire?” Michael Wiltsey asked.

We sat in a line, backs to the old stone wall at the edge of Lowell Shaner’s field. It was the last day of September 1942, a Wednesday, and while the rest of the world would remember that month for the killing of fifty thousand Jews and Hitler’s offensive against Stalingrad, the five of us would remember that day for another reason entirely.

I shook my head. “No.”

“What makes you so sure?” Ronnie Duggan said. He wiped his bangs out of his eyes and squinted at me.

“Maybe it was someone who thought Gunther Kruger was the child killer.”

“You think?” Daniel asked. His sister had been dead a little more than six months, but he carried her shadow wherever he went. From a distance he looked like he was being followed. Sometimes I caught Miss Webber watching him when he wasn’t looking.

It had been eighteen months since the Guardians had first met, and I recalled that day as if it had been no more than a week before. Already we had lost Ellen May Levine, Catherine McRae and Virginia Perlman. Elena was gone too, and despite being the one to find Virginia, it was the death of Elena that had hurt me the most. Perhaps she followed me. Perhaps I too looked like I was carrying a ghost. Perhaps such things were visible only to others.

“I think,” I said. “I think that’s what happened.”

“My dad has a gun, you know,” Maurice Fricker said.

“Everyone’s dad has a gun, Maurice,” Ronnie said. “My dad stands out back in the yard and shoots stupid kids. Maybe you better walk home a different way.”

“I’m serious,” Maurice said.

“I . . . I could get one too,” Michael said.

“Christ, no,” Daniel said. “Give you a gun, hell, the way you fidget you’d kill anyone standing.”

“Enough already,” I said. I stood up, buried my hands in my pockets. “This is just crazy talk. No one’s getting hold of any guns, all right?”

“So what’re we going to do?” Daniel asked.

“We’ve got to arrange some kind of system,” I said.

“System?” Maurice said. “A system for what?”

“To patrol the town and make sure that we see everything that’s going on.”

“Remember what happened last time?” Ronnie interjected. “Dearing came to the school. My dad was so pissed he could barely breathe. I sure as hell ain’t doing that again.”

“I don’t mean like that,” I said. “I’m not talking about sneaking out in the dark. I’m talking about arranging some way to keep track of people’s movements.”

“The five of us?” Michael asked. I could see he was nervous. His fidgeting was even more pronounced at such times. “How the hell are five of us going to watch a whole town?”

I stepped forward, turned and looked at the four of them sitting there against the wall.

“Who’s got paper?” I asked. I took a pencil from my pocket.

“I have,” Ronnie said. He stood up, pulled a wad of small pages from his back pocket.

“What the hell is that for?” Daniel asked.

Ronnie looked awkward, glanced at me as if I might have some answer for him. I shrugged.

“You know,” Ronnie said. He wiped his bangs out of his eyes. “If I’m out . . . you know?”

“Out?” Daniel asked. “Out where? What are you talking about?”

“Goddammit,” Maurice said, and started to laugh. “It’s if he needs to take a shit when he’s out.”

Daniel briefly tried to hold himself together, but with another look at Ronnie erupted into sputtering hysterics.

Ronnie threw the bundle of paper at me and I caught it. I held it for a moment and then dropped it, almost involuntarily.

“Christ, it’s only paper,” Ronnie said.

“But it’s shit-paper!” Daniel shouted, and I stood and watched the three of them—Maurice, Michael and Daniel—as they fell sideways in fits of laughter.

Ronnie just stared at me through the curtain of bangs. “Darn it, Joseph . . . will you tell them to stop, please?”

I leaned down to retrieve the paper.

“Don’t touch it!” Maurice howled. “Don’t touch the shit-paper!”

I stood looking at them. I wanted to laugh but I couldn’t. For Ronnie’s sake, but more for the sake of why we were there. I sat cross-legged on the ground, held the paper and my pencil ready, and waited for them to settle.

“Like darn children,” Ronnie said, and he sat down as well.

Not so far from children, I thought. I was a month from fifteen. The Guardians were all I had. It seemed that Augusta Falls was not the town where I had grown up. This town was a shadow of itself, its own darker half, and I sat in that field with a wad of paper on my knee and I looked at the only real friends I had that were still alive. Ronnie, Michael, Maurice and Daniel. I had wound up the unelected leader and spokesman. I was perhaps more afraid than any of them, and as I watched them laugh I knew their laughter was an escape, a release, a brief respite from the onerous burden that was burying us all.

“So who do we know for sure?” I said. “Who do we know that couldn’t possibly be the killer?”

My words stilled them.

“My dad,” Daniel said.

“And mine,” Maurice echoed.

“And mine,” Michael and Ronnie added.

I wrote down the names. If my father had been alive his name would have gone down on the list as well. If my father had been alive there would never have been a second girl. I wanted to believe such a thing, and so I did.

“Sheriff Dearing, Lowell Shaner, Reilly Hawkins,” I went on. “And Dr. Piper.”

“Dr. Piper is weird,” Daniel said. “He gave me a medical check one time. Made me drop my pants and he held my balls and told me to cough.”

I smiled at him. “That,” I said, “is one of the very unfortunate duties of a doctor.”

“Seriously,” Michael said. “Who else do we know that couldn’t be doing this?”

“All the family members of the murdered girls,” Maurice replied. “Their fathers, brothers, any of those people. I mean, for Christ’s sake, you just don’t go murdering your own kin, do you?”

I wrote down the surnames of the ones, besides Catherine McRae, that we’d lost—Van Horne, Stowell, Levine and Perlman.

“Frank Turow,” Ronnie said. “Clement Yates, Gene Fricker.”