A Quiet Belief in Angels (49 page)

“I married his youngest daughter, Annabel. You ever meet her?”

I shook my head. “No, I don’t think I did.”

“Helluva girl, Joseph, just one helluva girl.” He twisted the cap off a bottle of beer and handed it to me.

We sat in silence for a little while, and I could sense it around Maurice—the certainty of why I’d come, and beneath it the wish that I hadn’t.

“So things went to shit, didn’t they?” he said. “Out in New York.”

I smiled, looked out over the veranda railing toward the fields in the distance. My childhood was out there, running through shoulder-high maize and wheat, carrying books from Miss Webber’s class, listening to Reilly Hawkins tell tall tales in his kitchen. “You could say that,” I replied.

“And that thing . . . with the girl . . .”

“Bridget,” I said, and it felt so strange to be speaking with Maurice Fricker about something that he could never know anything about. “You read my book?”

Maurice shrugged. “Some,” he said. “Never been much of a reader, you know?” He smiled, and he seemed tired, worn at the edge. “My wife, she read it. But hell, she never knew you, so for her it was like reading a novel. Seems to me that those who weren’t here could never understand what it was like.” He drank his beer. “You heard about Reilly Hawkins?”

I nodded.

“My dad too. He was killed by some drunk-driving asshole out in Camden County. I have my wife and my two girls.” He laughed. “They keep me on my toes. Sometimes think there’s so much of the present that I have no time to think of the past.”

“The others?” I asked. “You ever see them?”

Maurice frowned. “Others?”

“Daniel McRae. Ronnie Duggan. Michael Wiltsey, remember, the King of Fidget?”

“Hell yes, I remember him. He’s still here, Joseph, but Daniel’s long since gone. Joined the Army back in . . . hell, when was it? Must’ve been ten years ago. Wanted to see the world and figured it was best to do it on Uncle Sam’s ticket.”

“The Guardians,” I said, and I felt the air suddenly chill and grow cold.

Maurice laughed, at least tried to laugh, but there was anxiety in the sound. “That was an eternity ago. We were kids, Joseph, nothing but scared little kids. We figured we could do something, but—”

Maurice Fricker turned to face me and there were tears in his eyes. “There hasn’t been a year gone by when I haven’t thought of those little girls, Joseph. I got my own kids now, Annabel tells me I worry all the time, that I fuss around them too much. She tells me they have to learn their independence, have to make their own way in the world, but she wasn’t there, right? She wasn’t there when those girls were murdered. Her father was the coroner. I wonder if she wasn’t somehow hardened to it, but she’s the kind of person who sees good in everything and everybody. I make her drive our girls to school, make her collect them when they’re done. Other kids’ folks don’t do that. They let them walk half a mile there and back, even in the winter when it’s dark in the afternoon. And sometimes I see things that remind me of how scared we all were. When they built all those extensions to the schoolhouse there was no one who was happier than me. Before that the place used to remind me every time I went past it.” Maurice’s voice trailed away into silence.

“I think it’s still happening,” I said.

Maurice shook his head. “No, it’s not, Joseph. You’re mistaken. They found out who it was and he hanged himself. The German. Gunther Kruger. He was the child killer, right? Everyone knows that he killed those little girls and that’s all there is to it. It’s been and gone. It’s over. That’s all I’ve got to say about it, Joseph.”

I took another sip of my beer and set the bottle down on the ground. I rose slowly from the chair and looked down at Maurice Fricker. “It’s okay,” I said, knowing that any attempt I made to involve him in this thing would only serve to make him feel guilty for doing nothing. “You’re probably right, Maurice, you know? It’s over. It ended all the way back there.” I smiled as best I could. “Maybe it’s all been a bit too much for me. I spent a great deal of years in prison. Maybe it made me a little crazy, eh?”

Maurice didn’t get up. He looked at me as I made my way to the porch door.

“You have a beautiful daughter,” I said. “You did the right thing, Maurice. Believe me, you did the right thing. You did what I should have done. Should have stayed here and gotten myself married, got some kids like you. Never should have gone to New York.”

Maurice shook his head slowly. “You weren’t the same as anyone else, Joseph Vaughan. You never were and you never will be. You got Miss Webber to fall in love with you, right?”

I nodded, “Sure I did.”

“You were always the odd one out,” Maurice said. “You were always asking questions about things no one else had a mind to find out about. Writing stories. Writing books that got published. Seems to me you’re the one who’s lived more life than all of us put together.”

“Don’t have one helluva lot to show for it though, do I?” I said, and I reached out my hand and pushed the door open. “I’m gonna go now,” I said. “You take care of yourself, Maurice, and your wife and your daughters. And don’t worry what she says, it seems to me you can never take too much care of children, even these days.”

Maurice raised his hand. “Maybe I’ll see you again, Joseph. I’d ask you to stay for dinner, but—”

“Ghosts don’t come to dinner, Maurice,” I said, and then I turned and walked away.

I glanced back when I reached the end of the yard, and there—just behind the screen door—I could see Ellie watching me through the mesh. She could have been any of them, Laverna, Elena, Virginia Grace. My breath caught in my chest, and then she raised her hand and waved once before disappearing into darkness.

I found Ronnie Duggan standing outside what was once the Falls Inn. It seemed his bangs had finally conceded defeat. His hair was thinning, swept back from a still youthful face, but there was a bitterness around his eyes that his smile could not disguise.

“I heard you were here,” was his greeting, and he sort of leaned back against the railing at the front of the building. “Dennis Stroud gave me a call and said you’d come back.”

“Hello, Ronnie,” I said, and knew that my return was not welcomed.

“Hey there, Joseph,” he said. “I called Michael, said he should come down and say hi, but he’s got to drive his wife over to some bridge class or some such.”

“The Falls Inn,” I said, looking up at the building behind him.

“Not for many years. Frank Turow died, you know, and then there was a guy called McGonagle. Now it’s owned by some company in Augusta and they serve warm beer and white wine spritzers. It ain’t the place it was . . . hell, Augusta Falls ain’t the place it was.”

“I gathered that.”

“It’s good to see you,” he said. He tucked his thumbs in the belt of his jeans.

“I don’t think it is, Ronnie.”

“Shee-it, no one calls me Ronnie now, Joseph. That was my kid name. Everyone calls me Ron. Just Ron, nothing more than that.”

“I spoke to Maurice—”

“Maurice is a good man, Joseph. He has a wife and two daughters and a dog and a cat. He has a good job with the sanitation department out in White Oak. The man’s made a place for himself here, gonna stay here until he dies. He’ll see grandkids, maybe even more, and I figure the last thing in the world he wants to see is you.”

I looked down at the ground. I remembered the Guardians. It seemed I was the only one that did.

“I won’t be staying, Ron,” I said, “but I wanted to ask you a couple of things before I left.” I looked up at him closely, and despite the thinning hair, despite the wary expression, I could still see Ronnie, bangs in his eyes, always fussing with something—a stone, a marble, a piece of wood.

“What started here ended here, Joseph. That’s the way I feel and I think that’s the way most people around here want it to stay. I’m sorry for your troubles. I heard about Alex Webber losing the baby an’ all, and then that trouble you had in Brooklyn . . . you know, the fact that you spent all them years in prison—”

“Do you think it was Gunther Kruger?” I interjected.

Ron Duggan snorted. “Gunther Kruger hanged himself. I figure that’s as good an admission of guilt as you’re ever gonna get from anyone.”

“You think he did that, or you think he was hiding? Do you think maybe he knew who it was and he was covering for them?”

Duggan stepped forward. His thumbs came out from his belt and he stopped there, his fists clenching and unclenching. “Seems it’d have to be a pretty tight arrangement for someone to kill themselves on behalf of someone else, Joseph.”

“Someone like family?”

“Family? What the hell’re you talking about?”

“I’m saying that maybe it wasn’t Gunther at all. Maybe—”

Ronnie Duggan raised his hand. “Maybe nothing, Joseph. Maybe it ain’t nothing at all. That’s what I’m trying to tell you but it seems you’re selectively deaf. That thing ended in 1949. That’s the better part of twenty years ago.”

“I don’t think it ended, Ronnie. And I think Sheriff Dearing felt the same way.”

“Enough now. This is a conversation I’m not having, not now, not ever. We aren’t children anymore, Joseph. We have lives to get on with. There are people here who decided to leave the past behind, and I think it’d be real smart if you did the same thing. No one wants all these memories stirred up again. It’s 1967. The world has changed. Augusta Falls isn’t your hometown anymore. You should go back to New York, Joseph. For God’s sake, let this thing lie.”

“We were the Guardians,” I said. “We made an oath, a promise—”

“We were kids, for fuck’s sake! That’s all we were. We were never going to stop what happened, and we knew it. We were frightened and desperate, and we made believe that we could do something about it, but we couldn’t—we couldn’t then, and we can’t now.”

“Now? What d’you mean, now! You know it never stopped, don’t you?”

There was a flicker of anger in Ronnie’s eyes. He took a step toward me and I could see the muscles twitching along his jawline.

“Look at me, Ronnie. Look at me and tell me you know it was Gunther Kruger.”

Ronnie Duggan stared back at me with a fierce and unrelenting gaze. “I know it was Gunther Kruger,” he said. “Are you happy now? That’s what you want me to say, then there you have it. I know it was Gunther Kruger, and the evil bastard hanged himself in his own barn, and they found a ribbon in his hand, all kinds of things that could only have come from those poor little girls. He killed them. He raped and abused them and killed them and cut them up. He threw bits of them around the fucking countryside, and then he died and went to Hell where he damn well belonged. That’s what I’m saying because that’s what I believe.”

“That’s what you believe, or that’s what you want to believe?”

He was silent for a moment, and then he looked away toward the horizon and smiled. “I’m gonna go now, Joseph. I can’t say that it’s been a pleasure seeing you again, but for politeness sake I’m gonna say that it was. I’d appreciate it if you’d do whatever you have to do and move on out of here soon as is convenient. I’ll pass on your best wishes to Michael, any of the other folks that you know, and I’ll say goodbye.” He stepped forward and held out his hand. I took it, and he gripped my hand too firmly and looked me in the eye. “So it’s goodbye, Joseph, and I figure this is the last time we’ll be speaking to one another.”

He released my hand, and then turned to walk away.

“What if it didn’t stop, Ronnie? What then?”

Duggan turned back. “Then it’ll be someone else’s kids, Joseph, not mine, not Michael’s or Maurice’s. The nightmare visited Augusta Falls, and then it moved on. I ain’t calling up the ghosts just to see if they came back.” He smiled once more. “You take care now, Vaughan, okay?”

I nodded and watched silently as Ronnie Duggan walked away. The Guardians—whatever we might have believed ourselves to be—had died with the murder of Elena Kruger, the one I’d promised to protect, the one that had proved to the Guardians that whatever we did we could not make a difference.

I stayed there for some minutes, and then I turned back the way I’d come and returned to the motel.

Thinking back to that moment I cannot help but smile to myself. What had I expected? Who was I fooling?

We were the Guardians. Me and Michael Wiltsey, Ronnie Duggan, Daniel McRae and Maurice Fricker. All these years later, what made me even think they would be pleased to see me?

We were frightened back then, each and every one of us, but time had passed and the kind of fear they’d felt had changed. Now they were afraid to be wrong. Afraid that the nightmare of the past hadn’t ended. Afraid that if they stirred up the ghosts it would all come back to haunt them. They hadn’t forgotten. They would never forget.

I had assumed, and I assumed wrong. I walked away from the Falls Inn, and I knew who I was looking for. I thought of Gabillard, of Lowell Shaner, others that had been there, and I wondered whether they would want to know what had happened. I sat in that cheap motel cabin, the door ajar, a thin breeze making its way inside, and I realized that the end of this thing wasn’t so far away. There would just be the two of us: Joseph Vaughan versus the child killer. Like some old-time B horror movie. And if I died . . . well, if I died there would be no one behind me. There would be no second strike. There was no doubt that I was afraid, but the sense of closure I perceived outweighed the fear. I would find some backstreet army surplus store and buy a gun.

I decided to head for Columbus, a big enough city to find such a place, and then I would cross the county line into Alabama. I would visit Union Springs, the first of those places about which Dearing had kept newspaper clippings. October of 1950 another little girl had died. Perhaps there would be people who remembered. Perhaps they would be able to tell me something to point me in the right direction.

I closed the cabin door and lay down and slept in my clothes. I did not dream, and for that small mercy I was grateful.

The chill of early morning awoke me. I gathered my few belongings together and checked out.