A Quiet Belief in Angels (5 page)

She read my story to the class. I wish she hadn’t. My heart, thundering like a traction engine, could have powered a steamboat all the way from Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico. It was a feeling I would never forget, and it almost served to dissuade me from pursuing my dream to write.

When she was done there seemed to be a small chasm of silence into which I fell. No one said a word. Miss Webber reached out her figurative hand and rescued me from that chasm.

She did not compliment the story, nor negate it. She did not hold it up as some sort of example to the other children in the class. She merely asked who had been able to see Red Grange as he struck out on his broken-field run.

Ronnie Duggan raised his hand.

So did Laverna Stowell. Virginia Grace Perlman. Catherine McRae, her brother Daniel.

I kept my head facing forward and my eyes inside it. The color swelled in my cheeks.

Soon there were more children with their hands up than those without.

And then Miss Webber said, “Good, good indeed. That is called
imagining
, and imagining is a vital and necessary ability in this world. Every great invention came about because folks were able to
imagine
things. You should nurture and cultivate your ability to imagine. You should let your head fill up with pictures of the things you think about and describe them to yourself. You should
make believe
. . .”

I listened to her. I loved her. Years later, a very different time, I would think of stopping my work, and then I would remember Alexandra Webber and let my head fill with pictures.

I would make believe, that’s all, and somehow things would seem less dark.

February came. The weather turned. Gunther Kruger visited with my mother, told her that they were driving the length of St. Mary’s River to spend a day at Fernandina Beach.

“We would very much like it if you would both accompany us,” he said, and my mother—barely glancing at me—explained to Mr. Kruger that she was most grateful, but unfortunately would not be able to come.

“Joseph, however, would be thrilled,” she said. “I have promised Mrs. Amundsen that I would do the butter-churning with her, and if we miss it today the milk will turn—”

Mr. Kruger, ever the gentleman, raised his hand and smiled widely. He saved my mother the embarrassment of explaining her refusal. “Perhaps next time,” he said, and then told me that they would be leaving from the Kruger house at six in the morning.

“Do not send any food,” Mr. Kruger told my mother. “Mrs. Kruger will make enough to feed the five thousand and most of their relatives.”

The following morning it was raining, lightly at first, and then heavier. Nevertheless, we drove along the edge of St. Mary’s River all the way to Fernandina Beach, and by the time we arrived the sun had broken forth and the sky was clear.

It was a rare day. I watched the Kruger family and they seemed to represent some ideal, some standard against which all families should have been judged. They did not fight or argue, instead they laughed frequently, and with no clear reason to laugh. They appeared as some symbol of perfection in an indiscriminately imperfect world.

By the time we left the sun had softened its temper and was considering retirement. The haze of late afternoon hung like a ghost of warmth around us, its arms wide and embracing, and when we carried the baskets and blankets to the car Mr. Kruger walked beside me and asked if I had enjoyed the day.

“Yes, sir, very much,” I said.

“Good,” he said quietly. “Even you, Joseph Vaughan . . . even you must have some memories to cherish for when you grow older.”

I did not understand what he meant, and I did not ask.

“And Elena,” he said.

I turned and looked up at him.

He smiled. “I want to thank you for your patience with her. She is a delicate child, and I know you spend time with her when perhaps you would rather be roughhousing with Hans and Walter.”

I felt awkward and embarrassed. “I-it’s okay, Mr. Kruger, no trouble at all.”

“You mean a great deal to her,” he went on. “She speaks of you often, Joseph. She has found it difficult to make friends, and I thank you for being there for her.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, and set my eyes straight to the road ahead.

For more than nine months I had watched the wound heal. I believed there would always be a scar, right there beneath my skin, invisible to anyone but myself, and the scar would remind me of what had happened to Alice, that winter of 1939—the things I’d overheard from the landing as Reilly and my mother spoke in the kitchen.

For more than nine months Augusta Falls had made believe that what had happened was a dark and awkward dream. Something had happened somewhere else, not here in their own town, and they had heard rumor of this terrible thing and thanked God that it had not happened to them. They had dealt with this thing in such a way, and they had survived. They had made it through the shadows and come out the other side.

For nine months they told themselves everything was going to be okay.

But it was not.

Laverna Stowell was found murdered in the late summer of 1940. She was nine years old, would have been ten on August twelfth, three days after the discovery of her body in a field near the outskirts of Silco, Camden County. She was found on a Friday, just like Alice Ruth Van Horne. She was naked, nothing but her socks and a single shoe on her right foot. I knew this because I read a newspaper report the following Wednesday. I cut out her picture and the article beneath.

CHARLTON COUNTY JOURNAL

Friday, August 9th, 1940

Second Girl Found Murdered

On the morning of Friday August 9th, the citizens of Augusta Falls were once again witness to a terrifying discovery. The naked body of Laverna Stowell, daughter of Silco couple Leonard and Martha Stowell, was found naked but for her socks and a single shoe on her right foot. The second murder follows the November death of Alice Ruth Van Horne. Camden County Sheriff Ford Ruby refused to comment, but did allow that a dual-county operation would be established by himself and Charlton County Sheriff Haynes Dearing. Miss Alexandra Webber, teacher at the Augusta Falls School where Laverna Stowell was a student, said that Laverna was a bright and outgoing child who had no difficulty making friends. She said that the children had been informed of this situation, and prayers would be said at each morning roll call for the forthcoming week. Already citizens of Augusta Falls and Silco have met, and a town meeting to discuss the possibility of united action will be arranged. Sheriff Haynes Dearing once again stressed the importance of citizens in both towns and surrounding areas remaining calm. “There is nothing worse than panic in such situations. I am here to reassure everyone that there is a police procedure employed in any murder investigation, and it is the duty of the police to establish and carry out this procedure. If people wish to assist they can be alert to any strange or unfamiliar individuals, and also take care to ensure the safety and welfare of their own children at all times.” When asked if any progress had been made in the investigation of the killing of Alice Ruth Van Horne, Sheriff Dearing refused to comment, saying that “all details of an ongoing investigation need to remain confidential until the perpetrator has been arrested and charged.”

I held the cutting in my hands and felt my eyes fill with tears. I imagined how I would feel if it had been Elena. I cried again, but this time there was something else beneath the sense of loss: fear. A bone-deep jag of fear that pierced me, and around it was a sense of anger, of near hatred for whoever had done this thing. Laverna had come each day from Silco in Camden County, and though I’d shared no more than half a dozen words with her outside of Miss Webber’s class, I still believed that somehow I had failed her. Why, I did not know, but I believed that both of them—Alice Ruth and Laverna—had been my responsibility.

“You can’t blame yourself,” my mother told me when I explained my feelings. “There are people out there, Joseph, people who do not see life the way that we see it. They grant it no importance, no value, and they are almost incapable of stopping themselves when it comes to such terrible things.”

“There must be something we can do.”

“We can be watchful,” she said. She leaned closer to me as if imparting a secret not to be shared with the world. “We must take to watching for ourselves, and watching for everyone else. I know you feel responsible, Joseph, that is your nature, but responsibility and blame are not the same thing. You should be responsible if you feel it is your duty, but you must never blame yourself. You cannot punish yourself for the crimes of another.”

I listened. I understood. I wanted to do something, but I did not know what.

Two men came. They wore dark suits and hats. My mother told me they were from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, that they had been assigned to assist Sheriff Dearing. They crisscrossed the state asking forthright, indelicate questions, and from what I overheard from the kitchen it seemed that people quickly began to resent their presence. Dearing had apparently requested that he accompany them, but agents Leon Carver and Henry Oates declined his request, said it was Federal business, that objectivity was the key. I saw Carver once, a tall and imposing man, whose nose looked like a clenched fist scattered with purple veins. With eyes set back far into his head beneath heavy brows, he appeared to be squinting out of a permanent shadow. I did not speak to him, nor he to me. He watched me like I could not be trusted, and then turned his back. They stayed in Augusta Falls for three days, then they headed south, made a wide clockwise circuit through the surrounding towns, and then disappeared. We heard no more, and they were never mentioned.

Later I spoke to Hans Kruger.

“Boogeyman,” he said. “There’s a boogeyman out there and he comes to eat children.”

I snorted in contempt. “Who told you that?”

“Walter,” he said defensively. “Walter told me it was a boogeyman, someone who’s come back from the dead and needs to feed off living people to stay alive.”

“And you believe that horseshit?”

Hans hesitated for a moment.

“And he says these things to Elena?” I asked.

Hans shook his head. “No, he doesn’t say these things to Elena. I have to tell Elena so she knows—”

I grabbed him suddenly by the collar of his shirt. He tried to step back but I held on tight. “You don’t say anything to Elena!” I snapped. “You leave Elena alone. She’s frightened enough as it is without you telling her horseshit stories about things that don’t even exist!”

Walter appeared around the corner of the house. “Hey! What is this here? You boys should not be fighting!”

Hans ducked away, wrenched himself free of my grip and ran back to the front of the house.

I stood there feeling ashamed, a little frightened by Walter.

“What’s happening here?” he asked.

“I told him not to tell boogeyman stories to Elena,” I said. “I don’t want her to be frightened. Hans said he was going to tell Elena about the boogeyman.”

Walter laughed suddenly. “He did, did he? Let me sort that out, okay?”

“Don’t hurt him, Walter.”

Walter placed his hand on my shoulder. “I won’t hurt him, Joseph. I’ll just teach him a lesson.”

“It’s not a boogeyman. It’s a person who’s doing these things, a terrible person.”

Walter smiled understandingly. “I know, Joseph, I know. Let the police take care of it, okay? The police will find out who is doing these things and stop them. You let me take care of Hans and Elena.”

I said nothing.

“Okay?” he prompted.

I nodded. “Okay,” I said, but I did not mean it. Walter was out with his father, working the farm, earning keep for the family. I had decided to look after Elena, and nothing would change my mind.

“Now go,” he said. “Home with you. I will speak to Hans and make sure he doesn’t frighten his sister.”

I turned and ran back to my house. I said nothing to my mother. I stood at the window of my bedroom and looked across at the Krugers’ house. I believed that if anything happened to Elena I would never be able to forgive myself.

After the Federal people left, sheriffs from each county—Haynes Dearing, a man in his mid-thirties, already looking older than his years, and Ford Ruby—had a sit-down meeting at the Quinn Cumberland Diner, a respectable and clean establishment on the north side of Augusta Falls owned and run by two widows.

Haynes Dearing was a Methodist, attended Charlton County Methodist Church. Sheriff Ford Ruby was Protestant Episcopal and frequented the Communion Church of God in Woodbine, but despite their differences regarding John Wesley and scripture interpretation, they considered that the death of a little girl was more important than religious distinctions.

The death of a second little girl brought them together, and they pooled their resources. There was even talk of a man coming from Valdosta, a government man with a lie machine and a female assistant, but no one ever showed. Sheriffs Dearing and Ruby, deputizing pretty much every man that could walk a straight line unaided, searched the woods and banks around Silco, even went back and searched the far end of the High Road once more, just to see, just to be sure. Of what, I did not know, and I did not ask, for once again there were hushed conversations in the kitchen of my house.

Nothing ever came of the searches, and finally, inevitably, Haynes Dearing and Ford Ruby went back to arguing about John Wesley and the scriptures, kept on arguing until they concluded it had been a mistake to work together, to even think they could work together, and they vowed such a thing would never happen again. By the end of August I no longer heard mention of Laverna Stowell. Perhaps she was an angel too, she and Alice Ruth Van Horne, and maybe my father, if he’d managed to keep his hands clean and worked hard enough to make the grade, was sitting right alongside them. Perhaps I convinced myself that the nightmare had now really ended. Perhaps I believed that some itinerant vagabond, crazy and brutal and vicious, had passed through our lives and now had disappeared. For some unknown reason he had visited twice, but this I did not consider. The truth and what I imagined might be the truth were not the same thing. I wondered if some other county, some other state, was now losing its children to this boogeyman. I kept my eyes wide and my ears alert, even at night; the sound of animals moving between our house and that of the Krugers sometimes woke me, and I would lie there chilled and afraid. After some time, steeling myself for what I might see, I would slip from beneath the covers and make my way tentatively to the window. I saw nothing. The night unfolded before me in a cool, static monochrome, and I would wonder if my imagination wasn’t feeding my mind with small and fragile lies. I hoped with all I possessed that the nightmare had passed, but deep down, right there inside my heart, I knew it had not.