Behind the Bonehouse (29 page)

I picked Jack up in Cincinnati that same Wednesday evening, and we started out talking about him seeing Carl by Alan's car. I told him Alan's doors had been unlocked like always, and Jack said Carl had been standing by the car, and had then bent down beside the driver's door. It could've been to keep from being seen. But it certainly made it possible that he'd dumped dirt on the floormat.

I talked for a long time about what it'd been like going through the arrest and the rest of it, and Jack listened, and asked questions, and I felt better when we finished.

Then we talked about what he'd done in France, and it was good to get lost in something else. To hear how he'd found Camille, and how well they'd talked, and how glad he'd been to be with her, and how he'd confronted the jerk who'd set him up, who actually stood right there in front of them and justified what he'd done. It was so good to see Jack happy, and then watch while he blushed bright red telling me Camille had said she'd come visit this fall.

I said, “You know one thing you can count on, she's bound to like your house. I mean who wouldn't like a Cotswold Cottage on a piece of land like that?”

Jack looked kind of panicked then, and said, “I need to clean better than I've been. And I might paint the upstairs too. I also ought to get the lease renewed early. I don't want to have to move.”

He looked mightily embarrassed, and I laughed, and it felt really good. Normal. The way life used to. Before I'd started imagining Alan behind bars.

Jack had a long talk with Earl Peabody on Thursday morning. And amazingly enough, Earl called that night. I answered the phone, and he sounded mighty awkward, but he told me he really did wish Alan well, and could he have a word with him. He told Alan he was glad to get Jack's statement about seeing Carl by Alan's car.

Alan asked Earl what locksmiths and hardware stores they'd taken Carl's picture to to find out if he'd gotten duplicate keys made, and Earl was willing to tell him. So that was kind of encouraging. That there was some sign that Earl was after the truth, and not completely set against us.

That same day, of course, another escape route collapsed around us. The lab supplier who'd blamed Carl for him losing his business and had looked like a possible suspect, Garner tracked him down in Louisville, and there's no doubt whatsoever that he was in the hospital when Carl died, having just had a hernia operation that kept him there for a week.

Then yesterday, Friday, the 22nd, I finally got Carl's doctor's son, Winston, on the phone. It seems that after his dad retired and sold the practice, he bought a pickup truck and had it modified as a camper. His wife died last summer, and he had no intention of hanging around home. He'd read Steinbeck's
Travels With Charlie
, and he'd decided to do what Steinbeck had done—travel the country in a compact camper, with only his dog for company, wherever he felt like going with nothing planned ahead.

The son had just spent two weeks with him in the mountains of western Virginia, but he didn't know where he'd gone from there. He's on his way to Maine, but how far he'd gotten, Winston didn't know. His dad did phone him from time to time, and when he called next, Winston said he'd tell his dad about us, and find out where we could meet him, or phone at the very least.

So all we can do is wait to hear how Carl took the news of his cancer, and if anything he said seemed consistent with planning to kill himself, and blame Alan for his death.

Emmy's foot isn't getting better and we're changing antibiotics.

Sunday, May 24th, 1964

W
hen they got home from church, Jo rode Maggie for the first time, having lunged her for two weeks and watched for any sign of lameness. She decided she was sound, but needed to be brought back slowly and carefully, even though finding the time to ride her wasn't going to be easy.

Jo and Alan spent the rest of the afternoon working away at the ultimate obstacle to proving Carl had set Alan up: How had Carl gotten the keys, and spent time in the lab unseen?

It was Jo thinking about how sometime early in the fall she'd seen Carl having lunch with Jean Nagy, that got them headed in the first direction that seemed to have potential.

Jean was a lab tech at Equine who'd worked for Carl, and who by then had a new key to the lab. Alan didn't think Jean would've deliberately given it to Carl to copy, and she only had a key to the lab anyway, not the front door, or Alan's office, which Carl would've needed to steal his pen.

But what if she'd gone to the restroom, or spoken to someone else at the Wagon Wheel, and left her purse on the table? Carl could've pulled out her keys and made an impression that would've allowed him to get a copy made at any locksmith's anywhere.

And if he had just that one key? How could he manage the rest?

Alan and Jo picked at it for an hour more, and the eventual scenario they worked out began to make some sense.

Carl would've known the receptionist's schedule, and he could've stood in the trees at the end of the front parking lot during the afternoon and used binoculars to see when she left her desk to go to the restroom, or stepped away on her coffee break.

The way the building was laid out, if he'd come in the front door, between 3:15 and 3:30 or so, and he'd gotten past the receptionist's desk when she was away, he could've taken a quick left down the short side hall where the lab's side wall was on the right, and the janitor's supply room was opposite the lab door on the left. There was an office storage room next door to the janitor's, and Carl could have hidden in that storage room (where they kept brochures and labels and paper supplies) till he was sure the plant people were gone. They got off at 3:00, so if he'd gotten there sometime around 3:30, if he was very careful, between then and 4:00 (when Vincent, the janitor, came in), he could've gotten out to the plant and climbed up the metal stairs to the open mezzanine storage area where no one went for weeks on end. He could've hidden behind the old files and furniture and stayed there until after midnight, when Vincent would've gone home.

He could've gotten into the lab with his copy of Jean's key and taken everything he needed—the syringes, the font ball, the paper, the Dylox, the vinyl gloves too—except for Alan's pen. Then, if he'd gone back to the storage room, across from the door to the lab, he would've heard Alan come in at 5:00 or a few minutes after, and been able to stay there and listen till he heard Alan go out to the plant between 6:30 and 7:00 to discuss the day's batches with the new production manager.

The plant people couldn't have seen him leave the storage room, and at that hour of the morning, no one would've been in the lab, or in the reception area. Bob Harrison came in early most days, but his office was down the long hall from reception at the far end of the building. The week the Selectric ball was switched, he'd been out of town too, which Carl could've learned from Jean the lab tech, or from Brad Harrison.

So if he'd waited in the storage room till Alan went out to the plant, he could've snuck in the lab and into Alan's unlocked office, and taken impressions of the keys to his office, his desk and the front door, which Alan would have left in the pocket of his sport jacket hanging on the back of his door. While Alan was in the plant, Carl could've snuck out the fire door, halfway up the long hall toward Bob's office from the receptionist's desk, which was always unlocked from the inside. The plant people, who started at 7:00, came in the plant door, and no one would've unlocked the front door until shortly before 8:00, when the receptionist went to her desk.

That same night, using the keys he would've had made that day, Carl could've come back after midnight, when Vincent had finished cleaning, and put the ball back on the Selectric, and taken Alan's pen.

Of course, he could've sat down and typed something there in the lab the first night instead of stealing the ball and having to bring it back. But maybe he hadn't wanted to risk more time in the lab than he could help. Because what if Vincent forgot something and came back? Or Alan came in even earlier? And he did sometimes, by 3:00 or 4:00.

Alan and Jo thrashed it out, with “what ifs?” and “that wouldn't work,” till they wrote this version down, thinking that if anyone could've seen Carl, it would've been the receptionist—seeing him, in the trees in front, watching her desk. Or Vincent, making his rounds, maybe even hearing someone in the storage room next to his supply room.

Vincent had just spent three weeks with his parents in Virginia, and his first day back would be Tuesday, the 26th. Alan told Jo he'd talk to Vincent as soon as he came in and see what he could find out. Hearing about Carl's death would've been traumatic for Vincent, before he went on vacation. And then learning that Alan had been charged, once he got back, must've upset him too. So figuring out how to talk to Vincent would be even harder than normal.

Jo said she'd tackle Jean Nagy after work on Monday, since she'd been the one who'd seen her at the Wagon Wheel with Carl in the fall. If Alan talked to her she might feel pressured and decide to take offense. Jean was touchy. A chronic complainer in sensible shoes who seemed to resent most of what she faced in life, and criticized whoever wasn't standing in front of her.

Excerpt from Jo Grant Munro's Journal:

Friday, May 29th, 1964

It's been another week of living on nerves and caffeine. It's 1:00 in the morning now, and Alan hasn't come home from the office. He came home for dinner, and played with Ross for awhile, but then said he had to go back and get some more work done.

Monday I talked to Jean Nagy. It wasn't easy to get her talking, but she did admit that she'd had lunch with Carl more than once, the last time probably in January, or maybe early February. She was incensed at what she took as an implication that she might've given her key to Carl to make a duplicate, but she did acknowledge that she'd left her purse on the table in the booth on more than one occasion when she went up to the counter to chat with the waitress she's known since high school. Whether he did make an imprint of her key she had no way of knowing.

Alan tried to talk to Vincent Tuesday night, but he was working in a blind panic after having been gone, and he said he couldn't concentrate on his work and talk to Alan too. Alan could see he wouldn't get anything out of him that night, and he also felt even more sorry for him than normal because he seemed so flustered, partly because of the poor job done by the cleaning service while he was gone. Consequently, Alan decided to give Vincent a couple more days before he tried again.

Spencer called Wednesday night. He's been working so hard trying to get the buyout of Everett Adams's van business organized we haven't seen him hardly at all.

But he called to say he's had an idea he thinks might help. He didn't tell us what it was, because he “doesn't want to get our hopes up,” but he is “pursuing a line of inquiry” (which he said in an English accent as though he were Sherlock Holmes).

I was telling him about trying to track down Carl's doctor, waiting for his son to hear from him and tell us where he's gone, and Spencer said, “When you do, I'll drive wherever he is and get a written document.”

I was speechless—before I thanked him. I'd been worrying about what we'd do, because Alan can't leave the county. And it'd be hard for me to travel very far with Ross.

On Thursday, Alan and Bob Harrison went to Vincent Eriksen's house to see if they could talk to him. Vincent was there, but he didn't come out. His sister said he was having “emotional difficulties”—perhaps from being away from work, and feeling unsure of accomplishing the work as well as normal, though she said she thought there was more to it than that, but what she didn't know.

Bob explained that it was very important that he or Alan speak to Vincent soon to see if he knows anything that might help Alan. She said she'd talk to him, and see what she could do. But that timing was very important with Vincent. If you waited till he was ready, the outcome was always better.

So. We wait. It makes sense, but it makes me crazy. I've been praying for patience most of my adult life, because I was born wanting to move at a hundred miles an hour and when I can't I fume. Life inside this bonehouse can feel like an endless obstacle course to someone as restless as me.

Mom used to say that the way a prayer for patience gets answered is that you're put through a string of situations that make you really impatient, and then you're made to wait. I see why that works. I just wish there were another way.

Emmy's paw isn't getting any worse, but not much better either, so we're doctoring three times a day. Sam sliced his flank on a split fence board in his paddock too (which we found with some difficulty and replaced), and when the vet stitched him up, Sam turned his head and looked him in the eye in a considering sort of way, but stood stock still till he was done.

Monday, June 1st, 1964

Friday night the phone rang, and a thin wavery male voice asked to speak to Alan. When Alan got to the phone, the other person hung up. Which made Alan and Jo begin to worry. Though whoever it was sounded so unsettled it didn't seem like a threat.

Unlike the calls Alan was getting from Butch once or twice a week. They'd gotten more and more vindictive, and he'd begun to sound unhinged.

Then Saturday morning at eight Jo got a call from Dr. Frazier's son, Winston. His dad had called from Williamsburg, Virginia, and the son explained what had happened to Alan, and got his dad to agree to stay there, and visit the Williamsburg Inn for messages until someone appeared.