The Bright Forever (15 page)

The Searchers

B
Y NIGHTFALL
Friday we’d come up with nothing. We’d put ourselves out in the rain, and then the blazing sun, and we’d come back into town covered with mosquito bites, our arms and faces scratched from blackberry briars.

We went home and stood in showers for a long time, lay down in hot baths and closed our eyes, and when we did, we saw her. All slender arms and legs and a round face and that brown hair. We’d seen her earlier that summer riding an elephant at the Moonlight Madness Carnival. We’d seen her at the public library sitting cross-legged on the floor, reading a book. Sometimes in the afternoon she’d be in the Coach House with a friend, sipping cherry Cokes through paper straws.

It was amazing what we remembered about Katie—small things you wouldn’t think would stick in your head. Her hair smelled like strawberries, and the girl at the Rexall said yes indeed, Patsy Mackey would come in every so often and buy a bottle of herbal shampoo. That Friday night, when we came downstairs after our showers or baths—after we scrubbed our heads with Head & Shoulders or Prell—we swore we could smell that strawberry shampoo.

We’d seen her at the city park. One night, a group of kids on the bleachers started singing a song about her and a boy:
Katie and Bobby sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
We’d seen her at the Super Foodliner pushing the shopping cart for her mother, and those of us who went to the First Baptist Church still recalled seeing her in the children’s chorus on Easter Sunday, her white-gloved hands clapping smartly together as she sang “If You’re Happy and You Know It.”

How many of us would admit now that sometime that week we drove to the Heights and parked along Shasta Drive and took snapshots of the Mackeys’ house? We got those pictures developed at Fite Photography, and we spread them out on our kitchen tables and looked at them again and again, allowing the neatly trimmed yew hedges and the blue grass that Spitler’s Lawn Service had mowed and edged and the bright house paint (Sherwin-Williams Latex Satin in a shade called Snow White, the paint man at the Western Auto told us) and the fishpond on the patio, its waterfall trickling down over blue limestone, to convince us that no harm had come to Katie. Soon we would find her.

Then that night, that Friday, a woman from Gooseneck—we didn’t know this then, but it was Clare Mains, the widow who had married this Raymond R. Wright—told Tom Evers she had a photograph she thought he should see.

Our telephones kept ringing that night, the word spreading. It was hard to know what was rumor and what was fact. The story was that this woman from Gooseneck had taken her own pictures of the Mackeys’ house after Katie disappeared. She had carried them to Tom Evers, telling him if he looked through this magnifying glass—she brought her own down to the courthouse for his handy use—he would see through an upstairs window a figure that could only be Katie herself, her back to the camera, her hair fanned across her shoulders.

Tom said later that he only meant to humor Clare by taking a look through the magnifying glass (“She was eat up with what was happening,” he told us years later when he finally started to talk about that summer. “You should have seen her. She’d been blindsided, poleaxed. I felt sorry for her. Still do”), but to his surprise, when he did, he saw what she meant: there seemed to be a figure behind the lace curtains of that window that looked enough like Katie that he had no choice but to drive over to the Mackeys’—it was nearly ten-thirty by this time—to speak to them about it. “I was just doing my job,” he told us later. “My God. We were desperate.”

At the house, Junior Mackey opened the door, a gun in his hand. It was a Colt Python, a .357 Magnum with a two-and-a-half- inch barrel. “I knew that gun right away,” Tom will tell you now. “It was no cap pistol. I’ll say that. It could have let in some air.”

Junior hadn’t shaved, and his hair, normally well-groomed, was mussed. A television was on somewhere in the house. The volume was very low, but occasionally the sound of an audience laughing swelled, and Tom knew that Junior had Johnny Carson on, the way he would on any ordinary Friday night. “That television just about did me in,” Tom said. “That laughing, and a couple of times I heard Ed McMahon punching up Johnny’s jokes with that thing he did, that
Hi-yooooo
. ‘Junior,’ I said, ‘I need to look through the house again.’”

By this time, Tom and his officers had been in and out of that house more than once: first to take the Mackeys’ story that Wednesday evening when Junior called the police to say that Katie hadn’t come home, and then again later that night—and on Thursday—on the off chance that they might find something that would turn out to be a clue. “It was SOP,” Tom told us. “Standard operating procedure. A kid turns up missing, the first thing you do is check the home. I stand by that. Even if the kid was Katie Mackey and most everyone in Tower Hill thought Junior and Patsy hung the moon. I was just doing things by the book.”

The book told Tom that a grief-stricken father, who was more than just a little pissed off—and didn’t he have a right to be?—shouldn’t be sporting a .357 Magnum.

“You ought to let me have that gun, Junior,” Tom said. “You wouldn’t want there to be an accident.”

Junior let the Colt lie across his palm, and for a moment Tom thought he was going to hand it over. Then he closed his fingers around the grip and said, “I’ve got a permit. I’m not breaking any law. Tom, if I have to use this, I guarantee you it won’t be an accident. I want you to let me see that son of a bitch, that Raymond Wright. If you can’t make him talk, I will.”

“Junior, you know I can’t do that. You’ve got to let me do my job. Like I said, I need to have another look around.”

Tom couldn’t bring himself to tell Junior about Clare and that photograph because once he was in that house, the notion that Katie was there and her kidnapping a hoax—a cover-up for something more hideous (here, we could only speculate, and we did so with great shame at the fact that we couldn’t stop ourselves from imagining it)—seemed ridiculous, the sort of
National Enquirer
tabloid crap we saw while standing in the checkout line at the Super Foodliner. All right, we can say it now: more than one of us bought a copy now and then and took it home and got a kick out of stories about alien abductions, bigfoot sightings, and women having monkey babies. We thought they were good entertainment, the sort of stories we talked about over after-work beers at the Top Hat Inn or after eighteen holes at the country club, never admitting that yes, sometimes in our most private moments, we got sucked in and could believe that almost anything might be true.

We were reading those tabloid stories when we should have been paying attention to what was really happening in the world. When we look back through newspapers from that time, as we’re all apt to do on occasion (we frequently see one another hunched over microfilm readers at the public library, looking again at the news articles about Katie’s disappearance), we note what we didn’t then—the catastrophes of nature that were all over the globe: the thousands and thousands of people dying (100,000 in North Vietnamese floods; 300,000 in a Bangladesh cyclone; 5,000 in an earthquake in Managua; 4,000 in a blizzard that ended a four-year drought in Iran). We hadn’t thought that we were part of that world, this planet bursting and convulsing with calamity, until that summer when Katie vanished.

“What is it you think you’re going to find out?” Junior asked Tom.

“I’m just covering all the bases,” Tom told him.

Junior stepped back and let Tom come through the door. “All right. You have a look.” Junior waved his arm about, the Colt heavy in his hand. “Why don’t you invite the whole town? Maybe even sell tickets. That’s what folks want, isn’t it? A good look? I’ve seen them driving by, taking pictures. Peeping Toms.” It was here that Junior broke down. He laid the Colt down on a table by the door. He put his hands over his eyes, and his shoulders shook.

Tom described for us how he put his hand on Junior’s back, and when we listened, we imagined ourselves doing the same, forgiving Junior for calling us Peeping Toms, forgiving him for that Colt Python, forgiving him for his rage.

Tom didn’t find Katie anywhere in that house, of course. It couldn’t be that simple, could it? But Junior and Patsy, who had come downstairs in her robe, let him look. He looked through all the rooms upstairs, searched the closets. He went from room to room downstairs, and by the time he was done, Patsy had gone back upstairs.

Junior was waiting by the door, calm now, and that’s when he showed Tom that book,
The Long Winter
, and he told him what Henry Dees was claiming—that Raymond R. Wright had showed up at his house late Wednesday night, and that this book had fallen out of his truck.

“You’ve got your man,” Junior told Tom. “Now, you better get something done.”

Tom held out his hand, and Junior gave him the book. “Don’t worry,” Tom said. “I’ll get Raymond Wright to talk. I’m on my way to Georgetown right now.”

These days, he comes into the Top Hat Inn toward evening and he orders a highball, and if someone gets him talking about that summer, he’ll tell this story of the Friday night he went to the Mackeys’ house. Just before he finishes that highball, he’ll say, in a small, ghostly voice, “I showed that book to Raymond Wright, and I said, ‘All right now.’ He still wouldn’t tell me squat. ‘Prove it,’ he kept saying. Then I went to Henry Dees, and I asked him why he hadn’t told me about that book and how he got it when I questioned him that first time. He said, ‘Tom, I .  .  .  I didn’t want to let it go.’ I didn’t know what to make of the way he felt about Katie, but I could tell he was hurting. His voice was trembling, and I could see the tears in his eyes. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘I knew you had the man who took her, who took’—and he paused, his lips working to get out the name so hard for him to say—‘who took Katie, and I knew what I had to tell you wouldn’t make any difference, you already had your evidence, and I just wanted to hold onto that book because it meant something to me. You see, it was hers.’”

Without fail, someone always asks Tom who it was in that snapshot Clare took. Who was sitting at that window?

“It was just the light making a shadow,” he says. “That’s all. Just too much light.”

Then someone will say, “I remember we used to talk about coming down to the courthouse some night and getting that Raymond Wright and making him talk.”

“He wasn’t there,” Tom tells us. He shoves his highball glass back at the bartender and orders another. “He was down in Owen County, locked up in Georgetown. I thought he’d be safe there.”

SATURDAY MORNING
, the heat was back. The heavy, damp air closed around us when we stepped out of our houses. It was still, and there were dark clouds in the west and the distant rumble of thunder. As much as we wanted to go back inside and pretend this thing wasn’t happening, we were still a town, and Katie Mackey was one of ours, so we got in our cars and trucks and we drove down to the courthouse, where each morning the search parties formed, and we hoped that this might be the day we found her.

The rain came. We tromped through it down by Georgetown, stepping over rows of soybeans, mud sucking at our boots. By the time we came to woods, our feet were heavy with the mud. We scraped our boots on stumps and fallen limbs. We shaved away mud with the blades of our pocketknives. Then we went on through the woods, and when we came out of them, we could see the White River, and beyond it the smokestacks they were building at that power plant near Brick Chapel. We saw boats on the river and men dropping grappling hooks into the water. We stood there a moment, frozen. We were foremen at the glassworks, sales managers for the local beer distributor, insurance agents, Realtors, owners of all manners of business. We
were
this town; we made things run. We were members of the chamber of commerce, the Jaycees, the school board, the city council. We got things done. But now all we could do was look down on that river and the men in the boats, and imagine those grappling hooks and what they might bring up to light and air.

The rain quit, and all afternoon airplanes flew low in the sky. Pipers and Cessnas and Beechcrafts, and there were helicopters, too, and Army planes with infrared sensors. Their noise burrowed into our skulls and stayed with us that night when we tried to sleep.

We kept going over what we knew, what we’d read in the
Evening Register
and overheard from the police officers and sheriff’s deputies and court clerks. There was enough evidence to hold Raymond R. Wright, to charge him with aggravated kidnapping, and set his bail at a quarter of a million dollars. We knew that someone—though we didn’t know then that it was Henry Dees—had told Tom Evers that he’d seen Katie that evening, that Wednesday, in front of Penney’s, talking to Raymond R. Wright. We knew that the state crime lab in Indianapolis had found charred pages from Katie’s library books in his burn barrel. We knew that there had been mud on his truck tires, mud mixed with shale. He’d been at the American Legion that Wednesday, the VFW, the Top Hat Inn. Folks came forward and said so. He claimed he was a retired Air Force colonel, that he’d been in WWII, Korea, Vietnam. He was drinking a lot that day; some folks saw him popping pills.

Later, there would be witnesses, come forward to retrace his path.

Monk Stevens, who ran into him that morning at the Top Hat Inn: “It was probably around eleven o’clock. I was at the bar, drinking a Coca-Cola. Mind you, I never have a highball before noon. This fellow, this Raymond Wright, he moved over onto the stool next to me, and he said, ‘Friend, I can’t help but notice you got some infection in that cut on your hand.’ It was true; I’d jabbed myself on a fishhook, and I hadn’t seen to it. ‘Peroxide,’ this fellow said. ‘Douse it with some peroxide; that’ll do the trick.’ He told me he was always getting his hands nicked up with cuts and that’s how he doctored them to keep the infection out. He laid his hands on the bar. ‘Lookit,’ he said. ‘See how that one’s healing up? Peroxide.’ His hands were clean. I took note of that. His fingernails, too. A polite fellow. And he was right about that peroxide. Fixed me right up.”