Cruel Doubt (7 page)

He asked her one more question about the book she'd been reading in bed. She could not remember the title, she said, but she assured him it had not been
A Rose in Winter
.

 

4

It was shortly after six
P
.
M
. on Tuesday, July 26, the day he'd had his first talk with Bonnie in the hospital, that Lewis Young received a call from the Little Washington police informing him that, in the excitement surrounding the murder of Lieth Von Stein, this had been forgotten, but a hog farmer named Noel Lee had called to report that at four-thirty on the morning of the murder he'd seen a fire burning at the edge of State Road 1565, the Grimesland Bridge Road, just across the Pitt County line.

Young called Lee, but he was out. At eleven
P
.
M
., Lee returned the call. By eleven-thirty, Lewis Young was standing at his front door.

It was only a quarter mile from Noel Lee's house to the site of the fire. Just beyond a curve and a dip in the road, at the edge of a wooded, swampy area. With a flashlight, Lee pointed out where the fire had been. About eight feet off the shoulder of the road was a burned area, not large, no more than three feet in diameter, and shaped more like an oval than a circle.

Using his own flashlight and crouching at the edge of the oval, Young saw what looked to be ashes. Digging a bit, he detected a faint odor of gasoline. He also found scraps of burnt clothing, a partly burnt shoe, and a burnt hunting knife with a six-inch blade. He placed each of these items into plastic evidence bags.

Then Young played his light out beyond the edge of the burnt area. He spotted a singed and crumpled piece of paper about two feet past the ring of ashes. This, too, he placed in an evidence bag.

It was dark and it was late. He thanked Noel Lee for his help. He said yes, by all means, calling had been the right thing to do. He apologized for the fact that it had taken so long for anyone to respond. Lee said no problem, no need for apology, he wasn't even sure it had been worth bothering anyone about, but then, after seeing on the TV about the murder, he figured, what the heck, might as well call.

* * *

Early the next morning, Young received a call from George Bates, who said his fears about Chris's involvement were growing worse. The day before, he told Young, he had driven Chris back to his dormitory at NC State in Raleigh. Chris's roommate had apparently found the missing car keys under a chair cushion, and Chris had wanted to get his car.

All the way up, George Bates said, Chris had continued to act jittery. “Boy, was he nervous. He was shaking.” He had not expressed the slightest sorrow about the death of his stepfather or concern about his mother's condition, or even curiosity about what might have happened. Instead, he'd rambled on about how deeply involved he'd gotten in the drug scene on campus, and about how he would have to “get off that junk.”

But the really strange thing, George Bates said—and this was what had prompted the call—was that after retrieving his car keys from the dorm room, Chris hadn't seemed to know where the car was.

He had said he thought it was parked in a “fringe lot,” about a quarter mile from the dorm. But as George Bates had driven him to the lot, Chris had kept saying he wasn't sure he'd be able to find the car right away.

He'd said, “I was at a party all night and got stoned out of my head.”

“But you weren't stoned out of your mind when you parked the car before the party started,” his uncle had told him. “What do you mean, you don't know where it is?”

As it turned out, Chris's white Mustang was just about the only car in the whole lot, and so he had been able to spot it right away. But it had struck him as strange, and it troubled him, George Bates said, that Chris had worried that he wouldn't be able to find his own car. It might mean nothing—in fact, all of his talk about Chris might be way off base, George Bates acknowledged—but it was one more thing he thought he should pass along.

* * *

Later that morning, at Washington police headquarters, with the young detective John Taylor standing at his side, Young, having already examined the partly burned hunting knife and partly burned shoe and the scraps of burnt clothing, opened the last plastic bag.

He removed the crumpled and singed piece of paper and exercising great care, slowly unfolded it.

He saw lines and squares and drawings of four-legged animals. The word LAWSON was printed above the longest line.

The lines appeared to denote streets, the blocks looked like symbols for houses, and the animals appeared to be dogs. Unlike the lines and blocks, the dogs were not just stick-figure representations, but had been drawn as if to illustrate a medieval fairy tale.

“That's Smallwood!” Young exclaimed.

Although only the word LAWSON indicated a specific street, Young quickly recognized that the other lines, crisscrossing at various angles, represented roads in and adjacent to the neighborhood. There was the Market Street Extension. And behind the line that had the word LAWSON printed above it was another, which would be Marsh Road, and then the one behind that, which was Northwoods.

Of the little square blocks drawn along the line that represented Lawson Road, the fifth from the top was surrounded by more detail than the others. Even with a portion of the map burned away, Young and Taylor could see markings that indicated a fence, a drainage ditch, and a small shed in the backyard.

The drawings of two medieval mastiffs placed them in yards on either side of the fifth house on the block.

The fifth house, Lewis Young knew, from the time he'd already spent at the scene, was the house in which Lieth Von Stein had been murdered.

John Taylor photographed the map. Young sent the hunting knife to the pathologist who'd done the autopsy on Lieth Von Stein. The doctor's findings were what Young had expected: the blade was consistent with the type of instrument used to inflict the stab wounds on Von Stein.

Why the map hadn't been consumed by the flames was something neither Young nor Taylor, nor later, the Beaufort County district attorney, Mitchell Norton, nor anyone else who came to be involved in the Von Stein murder investigation, was ever able to explain.

Had it been just casually tossed at the edge of the pile of bloody clothing, then been blown clear of the flames when the gasoline that was poured on the clothing had ignited?

Or had it been tossed toward the already burning blaze as an afterthought, as the person who'd set the fire hurried back toward a waiting car?

Or was the fact that it had survived the fire nearly intact—survived a blaze hot enough to partly melt a hunting knife—no more, no less than an act of God, as the district attorney would eventually argue to a jury?

For some facts, there are no explanations. But that doesn't mean there are not consequences. It would be many months before the consequences of the map's survival would be felt. But when they were, they would be drastic and everlasting.

 

5

Welcome, North Carolina, where Bonnie Lou Bates was born, was the sort of small Southern town where the church was the center of all social life; where a mother, over her lifetime, would make dozens of quilts and hundreds, if not thousands, of chicken pies, and where even a shy, plain girl such as Bonnie would grow up knowing everybody for miles around.

Although it was only about ten miles south of Winston-Salem, one of the leading industrial cities in the state, Welcome was not merely in another county: it seemed to be in another world. Driving those ten miles south from the city, one abruptly left behind all traces of urbanization and entered an almost fairy-tale land of Southern farm-country America. If you wanted to go anyplace from Welcome, it would most likely not be Winston-Salem (unless you worked there), but Lexington, a town of fifteen thousand, which was five miles farther down the road.

There may have been about three thousand people in Welcome, or maybe even four thousand. No one was quite sure, since the town was unincorporated. It was the kind of town where the gas stations advertised “Clean Restrooms and Ice Water,” and where, if you stopped by Elwood Blackmon's barbershop (Elwood, as a matter of fact, had been in Bonnie's high school class), you could actually hear someone say, “Welcome is so small, it's just a wide place in the road.”

Most of the barbershop talk tended to be more specific: whose road just got tarred, how long it took, whose tractor wasn't working, or where the newest patch of dewberries—a cross between raspberries and blackberries—had been found.

There wouldn't be a whole lot of political talk, since almost everyone already felt the same way: Davidson County, of which Welcome was a small part, was more than three-quarters Democratic, and the Republicans, even when in need of a haircut, had the good sense to stick to tractors and dewberries when they spoke.

There were only two ways into town, and either way, you'd pass a sign that said, “Welcome to Welcome.” Otherwise, there were no street signs because it was presumed that if you were there, you already knew where you were going. If the Mayberry of television's old “The Andy Griffith Show” wasn't really based on Welcome, it might as well have been.

The townspeople had always been known for three traits: being hardworking, friendly, and religious (as well as for voting Democratic, which was not so much a trait as a reflex).

It was the friendliness that gave the town its name. Back at the turn of the century, the settlement was called Hinklesville, because so many people named Hinkle lived there.

But in 1910, when the Southland Railroad proposed to run its first train through the community and a station was built to receive passengers, the townspeople decided that enough among them were
not
named Hinkle that the town should have a new name. Thinking that the first word a stranger would like to see when disembarking from a train would be “Welcome,” they decided to call it that.

Trains still passed through Welcome—one in the daytime, and two at night—but they had long ago stopped carrying passengers, hauled only freight, and no longer stopped. The farmers got up early, raised their corn and wheat for grain, which the flour mill ground for horse feed and glue, and also grew soybeans, tobacco, and fruit. You could also find a lot of livestock in Welcome, mostly cattle, chicken, and pigs.

There was no police department. On the rare occasions when law enforcement was required, the Davidson County Sheriff's Department would do the job. If you were looking for the center of town, the post office would probably be the place to go.

Welcome always had two restaurants—both of them featuring traditional North Carolina barbecue (smoky and vinegary shreds of pork, not to be confused with the gluey, tomatoey concoction consumed in Texas). First, there were Pope's and Dan's; later, Andy's and Kerley's. The Bateses always favored Kerley's.

Only eight hundred feet above sea level, surrounded by low, rolling hills and lots of streams, and a tough, five-and-a-half-hour drive from the beach, Welcome had never fancied itself a tourist attraction. Like Little Washington—though much more of a classic rural, small town—Welcome was not a place in which you'd be likely to find yourself unless you already had relatives living there.

* * *

There had been Bateses in Welcome as long as there had been a town, most of them living along Hoover Road, which you got to by turning off Center Church Road (not that there were any signs to point the way).

Bonnie's grandfather Baxter Bates had been a carpenter. The family well remembered the story of how he bought his first car. It was, of course, a Model T Ford. A man drove it into the front yard and Baxter Bates stepped right up and paid cash.

The woman Baxter married, Zealla Sowers, had been born in a log cabin right there on Hoover Road. The family was still living in the cabin when Zealla gave birth to her second child, George, who would become Bonnie's father.

Baxter not only believed, but would state with frequency, “An idle mind is the devil's workshop.” He'd go off to do his carpentry in the morning and leave his five children to tend the fields. Zealla died when George was eleven years old, but that only made the Bates children work harder because it meant one less person to keep the home.

The children would sing as they tended the crops of tobacco, sweet potatoes, corn, and even cotton. “When we worked,” one of Bonnie's aunts would later say, “the hills echoed with the sound of music.”

They might have sung, but they didn't talk. At least not about anything that mattered. For as long as anyone could remember, it had been a Bates family trait not to display emotion. This was something that Baxter Bates taught his children, maybe so he wouldn't have to hear a lot of wailing and keening as their mother slowly sickened and died of stomach cancer.

“You kept your emotions inside,” Bonnie's aunt said. “There was no time to talk about how you felt about something, or to cry. There was just too much work to get done.”

As a grown man, George Bates, Sr., Bonnie's father, would pass this trait on to his five children. “It is better to be still and be thought a fool,” he would tell them, “than to speak and remove all doubt.”

In 1941, George had married a tiny eighteen-year-old girl named Annie Erris Moose, from Stony Point, North Carolina. She wasn't even five feet tall, but she was pretty and smart and was made of strong stuff. He had met her at a Methodist church camp. She fell in love with his blue eyes, if not his way with words.

George Bates was a mason. With his own hands, he built the town's Methodist church—the Center United Methodist Church—brick by brick. In Welcome, such an accomplishment brought a man lifelong renown. He sang in the church choir, and Bonnie's mother, who came to be called Polly Bates, was the church organist for many years.

They were good people, the Bateses; solid, reliable, respected, and liked. Bonnie was the second oldest of five children, with one older sister, Sylvia, two younger sisters, Kitty and Ramona, and a younger brother, George Jr.

Welcome was too small to have its own high school, so Bonnie attended one in nearby Lexington, graduating in 1962. The adjective most widely used to describe her by classmates who wrote inscriptions in her yearbook was
nice
. In later years, she came to realize that she must not have made much of an impression.

After high school, she started nurse's training in Winston-Salem. In her first month on the hospital floor she came upon a girl she'd just graduated with, now dying of leukemia. Then there was the dying old man with the high fever whom she had to pack in ice. And the two infants, joined at the tops of their heads. Depressed by it all, she quit in less than six months.

Her next job was as a salesclerk at the Raylass Department Store in Lexington. Here, her mother noticed, she started to bloom. Bonnie was never going to be an extrovert, but at least she developed enough self-assurance to carry on a conversation with a stranger.

Briefly, with a girlfriend who had relatives in the town, she moved to Decatur, Illinois, where she worked as a ward clerk in a hospital. For a member of the Bates family, this was daring: none of the children had ever before lived outside the county, much less the state. Her parents kept urging her to come back. After six months, she did.

She'd saved $500 in Decatur and used it to buy her first car, a Mercury Monterey, the first car that was not a Ford and the first with an automatic transmission ever owned by a member of her family. In her own quiet way, Bonnie was expanding her horizons.

Her big leap, however, was to enroll in an IBM keypunch course at the Lexington Business College. This led to a job with the Integon insurance company in Winston-Salem. Suddenly, Bonnie Lou Bates was a commuter, driving back and forth to a big-city office job every day.

She was an exceptional worker. Reliable, intelligent, and always looking to learn more. Strange, she'd never known she had ambition, but there it was. She stayed at Integon for fifteen years, moving into data processing when the field of data processing came into being. By the time she left, married by then to Lieth Von Stein, she was supervisor of Property and Casualty Systems, the only person in the office at that level of management who didn't have a college degree.

But back in late fall of 1965, another event of great importance occurred. Driving down Winston-Salem's Main Street, Bonnie looked into a car showroom window and spotted a brand-new teal green ‘66 Chevy Chevelle SS 396 with four on the floor and a 360-horsepower engine. Much to her surprise, it was love at first sight.

She knew it wasn't appropriate. She knew it was a
boy's
car, not a
girl's
car, but she also knew she had to have it, and right away. Her father was horrified, her mother embarrassed. But Bonnie Lou Bates, twenty-one years old now and gainfully employed, insisted on something for the first time in her life.

The dealer didn't want to sell it to her. He said she was too much of a lady for that car. In fact, the dealer said, he didn't want to sell it to anyone. It was a great attention-getter and he wanted to keep it on the showroom floor.

But Bonnie would not be denied. She worked out a deal with her father whereby he traded his ‘56 Ford, which, like every other object he'd ever owned, he'd kept in impeccable condition, and she traded him her Mercury Monterey, and he cosigned the car loan and Bonnie zoomed off in her brand-new Chevelle. It was the hottest car that Welcome had seen in years. The car made heads turn when it passed. And then . . . when they saw who was driving it! Was that really . . .? Could it be . . .? Bonnie Lou Bates?

The next summer, she and Ramona were cruising along the main street of Lexington in her Chevelle, trying to be noticed. Being noticed in Lexington—population 15,000—was considerably more gratifying than being noticed in Welcome—where everybody already knew you anyway.

The cruising section was generally considered to be that six-block area bordered on each end by a drive-in restaurant. After making several passes up and down this boulevard, you'd pull into the parking lot of one restaurant or the other (in Lexington, in 1966, it was either the Old Hickory or the Bar B Que Center) and park next to the neatest-looking car you could spot and then place your order by speaking into a little microphone attached to a pole that stuck up from the ground.

While waiting for your order to be delivered by the high school girl who was working as a waitress, you'd strike up a conversation with whoever was sitting in the neat-looking car you'd parked next to.

Since Bonnie's teal green Chevelle SS 396 with the 360-horsepower engine was by far the neatest-looking car in the lot of either the Old Hickory or the Bar B Que Center, she found that, even being shy and plain, she had a lot of conversations struck up with her.

On this July night, she saw a car she liked almost as much as her own and pulled in next to it at the Old Hickory.

There were two high school boys in the car. One of them, Steve Pritchard, knew Bonnie's younger sister, Ramona. He was sixteen and about to start his junior year at Lexington West. Bonnie, though twenty-one, had done very little dating in her life. In Winston-Salem, no men paid attention to her. In Welcome, there just were no young men.

Steve Pritchard had already lived a hard life, involving an alcoholic father and foster homes and the sort of turmoil that the emotionally sheltered Bonnie Lou Bates had never known. Even at sixteen, he had developed a smooth-talking veneer to deal with the world at large and with women in particular.

He was no virgin and Bonnie was. He was good-looking and Bonnie wasn't. And he could, in the words of Bonnie's mother, “charm the horns off a billy goat and the skin off a snake.”

Everybody Bonnie knew from high school was already married and having children. She had a good job and a hot car, but it looked as if she'd still be living with her parents when she was forty.

Ramona introduced Bonnie to Steve Pritchard, and the two of them began to date. The following summer, a month after Bonnie had turned twenty-three, and when Steve was still seventeen, they got married. Everybody in Bonnie's family told her they thought Steve was no good and she was crazy. She responded that Steve was wonderful and she wasn't crazy, only lonely. Besides, she said, she was in love.

Although they lived only a few miles apart while dating and saw each other almost every day, she would, on occasion, write letters to him, such as this one from January 1967:

 

Hi Tiger,

 

Don't expect too much from one of my letters 'cause I'm not quite all right at the moment. You see, I've met this wonderful person whom I love very much. Because of him, I can't quite keep my brain and heart clicking in the same direction. I don't remember his name but they call him Steve Pritchard, or something almost like that.

Hey, do you know him? He has big beautiful brown eyes and lots of cute little freckles on the handsomest nose in the Junior class at West!