A Quiet Belief in Angels (25 page)

I dreamed I was being hunted. Dreamed I was growing ever more tired with each step, a bone-deep exhaustion, a fatigue of the mind, the heart, the soul. Slowing down though, slowing and stumbling, until the thing behind was upon me, and I looked up into deadlight eyes, and screamed a scream of silence, and when the silence ended there was a deeper, greater silence, a silence that swallowed me whole and would never release me.

And then I was lifted to the back of a flatbed truck, and Kruger was there, and he wept over me, and his tears fell down and touched my skin. Lowell Shaner, Frank Turow, Reilly Hawkins . . . they were all there, and looking from the back of the truck as we dipped below the rise I could see my mother, behind her the ghosts of dead children. And they wept silently, and there was a sense of everything coming to an end . . . and a sense of knowing something, knowing who had been there, who was inside my invisible certainty as I ran across fields and through undergrowth, as my feet staggered heavy and slow through the edges of the Okefenokee Swamp . . . and there was music, music like they played in church.

And then I was buried, my expression frozen in terror for all time. I was lowered into the ground in my Sunday bows and brights, my shined shoes, my combed hair, and people stood around the hole as it grew deeper and deeper, and there was the sound of earth falling onto me, and I knew I would lie right there for eternity, and the grass would grow, and the seasons would change, and people I had loved would age and die, and there would be silence in my mind instead of voices . . .

I would be there, my thoughts forever touching on the edge of certainty . . . that I’d known who it was . . .

And he wasn’t a silhouette on a flyer pinned to a fence post. He wasn’t any kind of silhouette at all. He was a human being—a real flesh-and-blood, eating, breathing, talking human being.

And he was out there.

Somewhere.

FIFTEEN

C
HRISTMAS 1945. PATTON DIED FROM INJURIES HE SUSTAINED IN a car crash in Germany. The man who’d conquered Sicily in thirty-eight days, who had suffered two demotions as a result of his cantankerous attitude, was fatally wounded on a lonely stretch of road. It seemed the darkest irony, and in some way a perfect reflection of how the world deemed it necessary to treat us human beings. Alex went to see her folks in Syracuse two days after Christmas. She planned to be gone for a week or so. I drove her to the bus station in Augusta Falls, and I waited with her. When the bus pulled away I realized that I had no reason to go home and so I stayed in town for a while. I sat in a diner on Manassas Street and watched people walk from one place to another. Despite the season they all seemed eager to leave and unwilling to arrive, faces slow and expectant, their lives stretched out between ungrateful kids and senile parents. Little enough for themselves in the middle. Perhaps that’s just how it was. When I left I saw Sheriff Haynes Dearing across the street. He raised his hand and waved me over.

“Out and about?” he asked.

“I drove Alex up here to take the bus to Syracuse.”

“Seeing her folks?”

“Yes, she’s gone to see them for the New Year.”

“You didn’t want to go with her?”

I shrugged. “I don’t much care for the airs and graces necessary when you’re someone’s guest.”

“I’m the same,” Dearing said. “The wife has her sister and husband over, and though it’s our house she’s always fussing and minding things in such an irritating manner. I can’t be doin’ with such business myself.”

I nodded. I wanted to head home.

“You on the way back?” Dearing asked.

“I am, yes.”

“You’re in a hurry, right?” he asked, but the way he asked it wasn’t so much a question as a challenge to refuse his company.

“A hurry? Hell, no more than any other time, Sheriff. There’s things to be done, always things to be done, as you well know.”

“But you have a little time for me, time to share a cigarette and talk about some things?” Once again the question he asked was more a statement or an invitation to counter him.

“I never did get the hang of smoking cigarettes,” I said. “Tried a few times, made me feel rough. Talking I can do, never had much of a problem with that.”

“So walk with me down to my office, just social, and see if you can’t clarify some things for me, why don’tcha?”

“Is that really a question, Sheriff?”

Dearing smiled and shook his head. “Hell no, I don’t s’pose it is, Joseph.”

“I’ll come, and of my own volition. Wouldn’t want you thinking I had anything to hide.”

“Good enough, Joseph, good enough,” Dearing said, and he turned and led the way.

Sheriff Dearing’s office was like an outhouse for pieces of his personality he didn’t want to carry. Up on the wall he’d hammered some boards, nothing more than plain deal sheets, upon which he’d stabbed thumbtacks through photos, tickets, certificates of this and that, coupons, vouchers from Hot Shoppes and Howard Johnson’s, the side of a Cream of Wheat cereal box, a Betty Crocker recipe for apple pandowdy that looked like it’d been cut from a newspaper, a kid’s wax crayon drawing of “Sheref Derin,” a chart detailing the phonetic alphabet, a scale telling all kinds of weights and measures and distances, and other such things. Far right-hand corner was a printed legend headed U.S. Postal Service, beneath it their motto:
Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds
. Dearing noticed how it caught my attention.

“My father,” he said, “delivered the mail. Helluva thing. Forty-some years. Hang that up there to remind me of his persistence and resilience, and because it kinda fits with what I do.”

I frowned.

“Not delivering mail. More like delivering the facts, you know?” He smiled, sort of shrugged his shoulders, and sat heavily in his chair. The chair—wooden-slatted, wheels on its base—creaked uncomfortably beneath his weight. “Hell, I don’t know, Joseph, maybe there’s no similarity at all . . . maybe ‘To Protect and Serve’ didn’t seem important-sounding enough.” He laughed to himself. “Sit down,” he said. “You want some coffee or something?”

I shook my head.

“So, you finally get out to Waycross to see your mother?”

“Yes, we saw her last Sunday, two days before Christmas.”

“And?”

“I don’t know what to say, Sheriff . . . she isn’t my mother anymore. I have conversations with her . . . hell, they aren’t really conversations.” I shook my head. “Last visit, she told me she knew the identity of the child killer.”

Dearing raised his eyebrows, and then he looked concerned, sympathetic. He shifted in his chair and then leaned forward to look at me closely. “I’m sorry to hear that, Joseph, I really am. I don’t know what to say. What happens here . . .” He raised his hand and tapped his brow with his forefinger. “Damned if I know what makes people tick, you know?” He exhaled slowly and leaned back. “I’ve been out there to see her a few times,” he said.

“I know, Sheriff . . . I know you’ve been to see her and I really appreciate it.”

“Seemed the right thing to do. I’ve sat and talked to her and I don’t know that she even remembers who I am.”

“I don’t . . .” I looked down at the floor, shook my head resignedly. “Whatever they’re doing to her isn’t fixing anything. They’ve given her drugs and all manner of special treatments. Every time I go they got some new wonder cure cooked up but it all seems like snake oil and jimson weed to me. The doctor comes down, seventy-five-dollar suit, all sniptious and superior, and what he tells me has about as much use to anyone as so many parcels of chickenshit.”

“I’m sorry to hear it, Joseph. Though it don’t necessarily surprise me when it comes to medics an’ the like. Seems such people spend all their time lookin’ where folks has been instead of lookin’ where they’re going.”

I raised my hands and shrugged resignedly. “It is what it is, Sheriff.”

“What does Miss Webber think?”

I looked up, puzzled. “Alex?”

“Sure, she’s a schoolteacher, ain’t she? Smarter than three or four ordinary folks rolled together. She ain’t your regular punchboard, right?”

I laughed. Dearing’s words came out straight and blunt, a prize-fighter jabbing holes in the space between us. Words like that seemed made of something more physical than sound; bare-knuckle words, kind of bloody-nosed and ugly. That was a quality I could appreciate. “What does she think?” I replied. “I don’t know . . . I haven’t really asked her. This is the first time I’ve taken her out there. She spoke a little on the way, nothing much of anything really, but I’m not in the most talkative frame of mind when I’ve been out to Waycross.”

“What was the deal with Gunther Kruger?”

The question came out of left field with a curve. I ducked but it caught me sideways and hurt some. Tomorrow I would still feel it, maybe a bruise. “Gunther Kruger?” I parried.

“We see what we see, Joseph,” Dearing said. Seemed a simple enough statement, but the way he said it made it sound like something else. “You’re a writer ain’tcha?”

“Some.”

“Wanna know what I think about writers?”

“Fascinated.”

“You don’t think I read some? Read that Rider Haggard feller, Hemingway, people like that. Read
The Informer
by the Irisher, what was his name?”

“O’Flaherty,” I said. “Liam O’Flaherty.”

“That’s the man.”

“I’m surprised.”

“That I can read?”

“No, Sheriff, that you read things like that.”

“I have a cousin who works in the Georgia State Library in Savannah. Every year they clear out God knows how many books . . . she selects a couple dozen for me and sends them down.”

“You were gonna tell me what you thought about writers.”

“I was on my way,” he said. “Sometimes I like to make a journey of what I’m saying so it feels more like a destination when I get there.”

I sat silent and waited.

“Writers see things other folks don’t see.”

I raised my eyebrows.

“I’m right,” Dearing said. “Maybe more accurate to say they see things in a way that others don’t. You agree?”

I shrugged. “Figure that everyone sees what they see, and they all see it a different way.”

“Maybe so,” Dearing replied. “But a writer notices details and such that others don’t, and he sees those details because he’s looking with different kinds of eyes.”

“Perhaps,” I said. “And you’re telling me this because?”

“Because of what happened with your mother and Gunther Kruger.”

I didn’t reply.

Dearing smiled, something understanding in his expression. “We ain’t at school anymore, Joseph.” He leaned forward and rested the palms of his hands on the table. I figured he was gonna use the support to stand up but he just kind of leaned forward and looked at me. “I’m not of a mind to dredge through people’s personal lives. Don’t consider it’s any of my business, and don’t think I’d want it if it was offered. Your mother and Gunther Kruger made a habit of sharing one another’s company, that’s a fact. I know it. You know it. Sure as hell Mrs. Gunther Kruger knew it. Don’t know about the kids. Kids can be deceptive. Wide-eyed and innocent, but they hear every word.” Dearing paused, pushed himself back into his chair. The chair, perhaps reconciled to such punishment, merely groaned a little. “I remember a time, three, four years ago, a man said his wife was poisoned—” Dearing stopped mid-flight. “Hell, you don’t wanna be hearing second-hand stories about such things. Another time we’ll do that. Where the hell was I?”

“My mother and Gunther Kruger.”

“Right, right. So, like I said, I got an idea that maybe there were things that went on back then that you didn’t think to speak about at the time. Maybe they didn’t seem important. Maybe they weren’t, you know? Hindsight gives us a different slant and situation. I wondered if there was anything that you can remember that might give us something.”

“About the girls that were killed?”

“Sure, about the girls that were killed.”

“And you think I might know something about this because I lived next door to the Krugers.”

“No, not because you lived next door to the Krugers . . . because three of the girls were from here, another one from Fargo, but she was found on Kruger’s land—”

“Hold up,” I said. “I feel like I’m being given a ride somewhere, Sheriff.”

Dearing smiled and shook his head. “No one’s giving anyone a ride, Joseph.”

“So ask me what you wanna ask me and I’ll tell you the answer.”

Dearing cleared his throat. “I know I came and spoke to you afterwards, but I don’t know that I ever really understood about what happened with the Keppler girl.”

I frowned.

“Tell me the truth, Joseph . . . why did you go to Fleming that day?”

I smiled and shook my head. “This is a railroad train, right? You should’ve told me I’d won a ticket, I would’ve packed some things for the trip.”

“Ain’t no railroad ticket, Joseph. Tell ya something. Curiosity I have is about yay big.” Dearing held his hands wide as a measure. “I find it strange that you would hear about the death of a little girl, little girl you never heard of before, and drive all the way out to Liberty County. Got me thinking.”

“Thinking what, Sheriff . . . something about how a murderer might return to the scene of a crime?”

“Not only the murderer, Joseph, maybe someone who knows something about the murder.”

I didn’t reply.

“You’ve heard of such things before?”

I shook my head. “You think it was Gunther Kruger, don’t you? You think Gunther Kruger killed those girls back then, and he’s back to killing again, right?”

“What d’you think?”

“I don’t think anything, Sheriff Dearing.”

“He seem like the sort of man capable of murdering someone?”

“Capable of murdering someone? I think everyone is capable of murdering someone. You give them the right motive and opportunity, well, who the hell knows, eh? Maybe even you, Sheriff.”

“This isn’t a discussion about me, Joseph. This is about whether or not there was anything that happened back then that made you feel Gunther Kruger might have had something to do with these killings. There was a certain viewpoint at the time—”