A Quiet Belief in Angels (31 page)

At one moment, kneeling there in the dirt, he even reached out and touched her fingers. Fingers attached to a hand. The hand wasn’t attached to much of anything at all. The body was in more pieces than he cared to count, and they were spread across the ground, though the blood that lay thick on the ground between them gave the appearance that they were all still connected. The little girl was all of twelve pieces, they later confirmed, but looked like she was still one.

It was then that he vomited.

So awkward Jacko Delancey ran like a hare the half mile to his house, where he untied a mare and rode straight as a rigging line to his cousin’s house. Darius Monroe was home, had set his mind to showing for work after lunch. Jacko brought him to the front with a thunderous hammering on the door, and in staggered breaths got the message delivered.

Sheriff Darius Monroe took the car, sent Jacko home with the horse, called on his radio and told Deputy Sheriff Lester Ellis to meet him out there.

Sheriff Monroe arrived a little before nine. He saw what he saw and was grateful he’d had the foresight to skip breakfast. He brought tapes and poles from the trunk and set a perimeter and waited for Ellis to arrive. He smoked a cigarette and looked away. Perhaps nothing more than premonition, hearsay, something else, but he’d been there when the Leonard girl was found back in September of ’43 and had wondered when his time would come again. It had. But forewarning, whatever it might have been named, had done nothing to prepare him for the dreadful reality of what Jacko Delancey had found.

Ellis appeared within twenty minutes, took one look and heaved his breakfast and three-square from Thursday over the fence. He thought of his own girl, four years old two weeks before, and wondered if what they taught at Sunday school was true. God is merciful, God is just, God is all-seeing and protective of the innocent and the meek. God had sure been busy someplace else the night before, and he’d let another young soul pass into the hereafter. Ellis called the Sheriff’s Office and had the desk call the tri-county coroner. At ten-thirty he came, rolling down the road in a beat-to-hell station wagon. Robert Gorman was responsible for McIntosh, Wayne and Pierce counties. He had been there for Rebecca Leonard in September of ’43, Sheralyn Williams in February of ’45; stood beside Sheriff George Burwell when Mary Tait’s body was discovered in October of ’46. Jurisdictions, both for police and coroner duties, were confused. Victims from one county had been found in another, and no one knew exactly where to draw the lines.

By eleven the word was out. A meeting was arranged in Eulonia for three that same afternoon, and present were all concerned parties. Seven counties, seven sheriffs, their respective deputies and assistants, a gathering of seventeen men, all of them sober, all of them stunned.

Haynes Dearing from Charlton led the proceedings, asked questions, waited for answers. Few were forthcoming. None of those present had ever been engaged in such a thing. What they had was a mass murderer, because no one thought there was more than one guilty man.

“It’ll take a task force,” Burnett Fermor ventured.

“A task force can only be comprised of citizens from the different counties,” Ford Ruby said, “but you get that kind of thing going and we’re gonna have a witch hunt on our hands.”

“So what’s your suggestion?” Fermor asked.

“Suggestion?” Ruby said, in his voice a tone of defiance. “My suggestion is that we each take responsibility for our own counties and our own citizens. Break them all down into groups and take the men aged between sixteen and sixty, excluding no one, and go house to house asking questions.”

“Good enough,” Dearing said. “That seems as good a start as any. And we have to establish a central location, somewhere where all files and records can be based so we all have access and can coordinate on this together.”

No one had the gall to suggest that such a thing was long overdue.

Radcliffe from Appling suggested Jesup; the previous meeting had been there in October of ’46.

“Suits me,” Dearing said, aware now that this thing had been going on for ten years. First girl was Alice Ruth Van Horne in November of ’39. A war had intervened. God knows how many millions of lives had been lost, hundreds of thousands of Americans amongst them on the other side of the world, and yet such an event seemed somehow insignificant in the face of this thing. This was an invasion of an entirely different nature.

“So that’s where everything goes,” Dearing continued. “Every file, every coroner’s report, every document, every interview, all of it goes to Wayne County Sheriff’s Office by tomorrow morning.”

“You think Gus Young is gonna have an issue with that?” Radcliffe said, referring to Jesup’s town councilman, a man renowned for his irascibility and short temper.

Dearing shook his head. “I’ve known Gus Young since I was a kid. Gus Young is gonna want to do everything within his power to help us.”

“Gus Young is Jesup’s councilman,” George Burwell interjected. “I’m Wayne County Sheriff. Gus Young is gonna do just exactly what I tell him.”

The meeting was closed. Each man returned to his car. Lester Ellis took a message on the radio. The girl had been identified.

“Oh, for the love of God,” Darius Monroe said quietly. “Not the Bradford girl.”

“You know the family?” Ellis asked.

Monroe nodded his head. He looked more beaten and exhausted than ever. “Oldest boy is my godson,” he said.

“You want me to go over there?” Ellis asked, hoping against hope that he wouldn’t have to.

Monroe was silent for a moment, and then he turned to face his deputy. “Now what kind of a man would I be to let someone else do this?”

Ellis didn’t reply.

NINETEEN

T
HE FIRST I HEARD OF THE KILLING WAS LATE THE FOLLOWING DAY. I heard it from Sheriff Dearing, and it was then—in my house, right there in the kitchen—that he told me how he’d wanted to come and see me when he’d heard about Alex.

“It’s not easy,” he said. “Such things are never easy.”

I raised my hand and he stopped. “It’s over,” I said. “She’s gone. She died, and that’s all there is to it. I’ve done enough thinking and talking for a lifetime, Sheriff. Seems to me I talk about it and it all comes back to haunt me. If you don’t mind I’d really rather not go there today.”

“That’s the way you want it?”

I nodded. “That’s the way I want it, Sheriff. Nothing personal.”

He conceded; sat there for a while, and his thoughts almost audible, and then he told me about Lucy Bradford, the meeting that had taken place the previous day, the decision to give each sheriff responsibility for their respective counties.

“And I am on your list of suspects?” I asked.

Dearing smiled knowingly. “Joseph,
everyone
is on my list of suspects.”

“But I am the first person you’ve come to, right?”

Dearing shook his head. “As a matter of fact, no, you’re not. Why, do you think you should be?”

“I’m not playing any games with you, Sheriff.”

“This is not a game, Joseph, this is a serious business. Children have been murdered.”

“I’m well aware of that fact, Sheriff. And you want me to do what?”

Dearing leaned back in the chair. He had his hat in his lap and he nervously rotated it, fingering the brim. “We had a discussion before—”

“We did?”

“No games, Joseph, if you set a rule then it applies to both of us.”

I fell silent.

“We had a discussion before, back at Christmas after the war ended, a few days after the Keppler girl was found.”

I remembered, the day I’d seen Alex off to visit with her parents.

“I asked you some questions. I told you some things. I asked you to keep your eyes and ears open, as best as I can recall.”

“You did, yes, and you also suggested that I might be in amongst people’s thoughts when they were thinking about who might have done these things—”

“I said what I said. What I said needed saying. I haven’t spoken to anyone who’s suggested such a thing.”

“So what’re we talking about?”

“About the fact that another girl is dead. I don’t even wanna give you an idea of the state she was in . . . all I have is another dead girl and a county full of suspects. Three of them were from right here in Augusta Falls. Alice Van Horne, Catherine McRae—”

“And Virginia Perlman,” I interjected.

Dearing nodded. “And Ellen May Levine from Fargo . . . found no more than a half mile from this house.”

“And what d’you want me to do, Sheriff?”

Dearing cleared his throat. “I want your help.”

I leaned forward, raised my eyebrows. “My help?”

Dearing nodded. “Yes, Joseph, I want you to do something for me.”

I said nothing.

“I want you to go up to Jesup and visit with the Krugers.”

I didn’t speak for quite some time.

Sunday I went to Alex’s grave. I read the words inscribed on her stone, and as I reached out to touch the smooth marble surface it started to rain. It came like a curtain and the force of it pounded my head and my shoulders mercilessly. The flowers I had brought and set against the headstone were battered into handfuls of waterlogged petals. I stayed there until my clothes were almost too heavy for me to stand, and I thought about Alex, about the child we would have raised, and I shed no tears. I believed the sky was crying for me.

The previous evening I had walked to Reilly’s house and told him what had happened. I told him about the Bradford girl from Shellman Bluff, the visit from Dearing, the request he’d made.

“Ten girls?” he asked.

“Ten girls, yes.”

“And Dearing has his eye on Gunther Kruger for these things?”

“I think Haynes Dearing is a man adrift in an ocean of questions. He doesn’t know anything, but he’s the law, and it’s his job to do everything he can to end this.”

“And they had a meeting, all the sheriffs?”

“Yes. They’ve set up a coordination point in Jesup.”

“Why Jesup?”

“It’s a central point, as close as it gets anyway. You’ve got seven counties involved, and that doesn’t include the areas where bodies were found. Dearing explained it as best he could, said it was madness. There are case files coming from all over, more men involved than they can organize, and they need all the help they can get.”

“And you’re gonna go and speak with Gunther Kruger?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know, Reilly, I just don’t know.”

“How can you not go, Joseph?”

I smiled. “Easy. I just don’t.”

“But what if it is him? What if he killed all these girls?”

I sighed. I felt my mind and my emotions were stretched to their limit. “Reilly, you know him as well as I. You were there when he used to come over and sit with us in the kitchen. His wife, his kids . . . Jesus, you really think he’s the sort of man who could do something like that?”

Reilly Hawkins shook his head. His face was somber. “All I know for sure is that you never really know anyone, Joseph.”

We didn’t speak of it again, but the following day, as I knelt before the grave of my wife and child, a child I never saw, a child who was never named, I decided that I would do what Haynes Dearing had asked of me.

I would go to Jesup, Wayne County; I would speak to Gunther Kruger; I would see if his eyes reflected the faces of ten little girls as their lives had been extinguished.

Had I known at that point what would come, had I been aware how February of 1949 would signal the end of my time in Georgia, I might have made different decisions. I didn’t see the signpost then, not along the banks of the Crooked River, or on Jekyll Island or Gray’s Reef; no indication amidst the flooded swell of islands, creeks, salt marshes or river inlets; nothing pinned to the trees, upon their coats of Spanish moss; no word in the grain of split logs bound together to navigate the corduroy tracks across deeper swamps. Perhaps I longed to be a child once more with a mother and father, a child possessing a quiet and unspoken love for Miss Alexandra Webber. Perhaps I was merely manufacturing enough compelling reasons for departure, for in leaving Georgia I could almost imagine that life would change sufficiently for memories of the past to be lost. They would not, and I knew it, but I believed that trying was better than nothing.

Morning of Tuesday the fifteenth I went to see Haynes Dearing. I told him I would go up to Jesup and see Gunther Kruger.

Dearing neither smiled nor thanked me. He sat behind his desk and looked at me for some seconds. “You understand that I’m gonna need as much as you can get from him?”

“I understand what you want, Sheriff. I’m not sure you’re going to get it.”

“I want you to do everything you can to determine his whereabouts, his movements. I want you to ask him about the girls that have been murdered. I want to know his reactions to questions, what he remembers of when they were found. I want to know what he heard and what he thought about it.”

“And you can’t go because?”

“Because I’m the sheriff. Because any time I ask anyone a question people consider it their duty to withhold everything from me.”

“And you think he’ll let something slip?”

Dearing shook his head. “I think nothing, Joseph . . . I just hope.”

“Scarecrow,” I said, and smiled as Mathilde Kruger hugged me.

“Sceercraw!” she echoed, and laughed exuberantly. She had changed a great deal. Only six and a half years had passed since the Krugers left Augusta Falls, and yet she seemed to have aged more than twenty. But their house, the one they now occupied in Jesup, Wayne County, was the same as the Kruger house in Augusta Falls. It smelled of sauerkraut and bratwurst and dark coffee, of generous hearts and the welfare of others. The Kruger house embodied the memory of my mother as she had been and the way these people had helped her. I could not imagine that Gunther Kruger knew anything of ten little dead girls and the terrible things that had been done.

I arrived in the late morning of Wednesday the sixteenth. I had driven up from Charlton in Reilly’s pickup.