Cruel Doubt (8 page)

I'll go to the next page now and change the tempo a little. Maybe it'll make a little more sense.

I sat by the fire but it was too lonesome without you there to help keep me warm. The fire could only warm me Outside. Steve, you worry me. You work too long and get too little rest. Hope you're strong enough to take it because we'll never make it if you are forced to take a year or two out to recuperate in a psychiatric ward. I love you too much to lose you that way, so please take it easy and don't worry so much.

You and I will probably have to prove ourselves to our parents before they can really accept our attitudes. You know I love you and I know you love me, but it'll be hard to convince them that we can really make it work for a lifetime. I guess it goes back to the same old solution—time. I just get so tired of waiting for everything. I know anything that really means a lot to me is worth waiting for but it's so hard. Much harder than waiting for anything before.

Smile for me now and let's face the future together . . .

Till Friday—

Love always,

Bonnie

In retrospect, what's most surprising is that the marriage lasted almost five years. During the first year, Steve was still in high school. They lived in a rented mobile home. Once he graduated, Steve jumped quickly from job to job, working first for an oil company, then for a dry cleaner, then for a photographer.

As time passed, Bonnie came to suspect that Steve was also jumping from girl to girl, but it was not until the summer of 1972, when Chris was three and a half years old and Angela almost two, that Steve walked out of the new house they'd bought in the Winchester Downs section of Lexington (even though they couldn't nearly afford it), and into the arms of the newest girl he had waiting on the side. The divorce was the first in Bates family history, and as sympathetic as everyone was, there was the whiff of a certain “I told you so” in the air.

At first, Bonnie wouldn't even admit to anyone that it had happened. But her father, whose instinct told him a lot about his children, came over one day and wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help. Bonnie broke down and cried her heart out.

In the years that followed, she proved she wasn't just nice, but tough. She paid every bill Steve left her with and even kept up the mortgage payments on the house. Much later, in her understated way, she would say that the period after Steve abandoned her was “a very lean couple of years.”

Steve Pritchard paid neither alimony nor child support. Seldom did he return to see his children. Though surrounded by her family, Bonnie was too proud ever to ask for help. She was a divorced mother of two preschoolers, in rural North Carolina, at a time when women in such circumstances were rarities and viewed with mistrust at best.

She also was not the sort to leave a debt unpaid, even those incurred by her ex-husband. Bonnie worked extra hours and studied at night, trying to master this new field of data processing, all the while telling everybody things were fine. They were eating a lot of beans and potatoes, she said, but they were eating.

Her mother believed her until the night she stopped by—knowing Bonnie was sick with flu—and found little Angela asleep inside the open refrigerator, where apparently she'd gone in a futile search for food.

* * *

When you're a girl from a small town such as Welcome and you take the first big risk of your life by marrying a junior in high school when you yourself are twenty-three and then he leaves you for another woman, in addition to all your other problems you have to deal with the fact that in the eyes of many you've made a damned fool of yourself.

For a while, this made Bonnie bitter. For a while, she felt sorry for herself. She had loved him, in her own way, which was no less real for being not the way of others. She had loved him in the way she'd later love stray cats. People had thought she was strange about Steve. Later, people would think she was strange about cats. But that was Bonnie. If you seemed the least bit helpless or downtrodden, her heart went out. If she could feed you, care for you, give you a warm bed to sleep in, she would. True, her emotions were somewhat inaccessible, not only to others but to herself, but an element of essential kindness was at her core. To many who focused more of their energies on themselves, this made her seem a bit peculiar.

Bonnie had wanted a way to love and still be safe. In Steve Pritchard, she'd thought she'd found it. She hadn't yet had enough experience to recognize that hers was an impossible goal, nor to sense that, at best, Steve was just a restless adolescent with his eye on the main chance, which was always just over the next hill, or in the bar a little farther down the street.

She'd gambled and lost was what it came down to, and it would be some time before she'd gamble again.

For four years, she had almost no life of her own. So much was demanded by her children and her job, and there seemed never enough money or energy. She had refused to sell the house in Lexington because she hadn't wanted Chris and Angela to lose their home just after losing their father—and because she was too proud and too stubborn to give it up.

But that meant leaving at seven every morning for Winston-Salem, dropping the kids off at Salem Baptist, which ran a day-care center and elementary school, then going to Integon and working all day and sometimes far into the night.

Too often, she'd pick up Chris and Angela hours after all the other children had left, then drive home exhausted, feed them whatever cheap starch she could find, and collapse into bed by herself.

Quite a shock, then, to discover that one of Integon's financial executives—the highly regarded and industrious Lieth Von Stein—was expressing an interest in her.

* * *

Toward the end of the Depression, Lieth Von Stein's uncle Richard moved to Winston-Salem from New York City. For almost no money at all, he bought a storefront dry-cleaning establishment called Camel City Dry Cleaners & Laundry. The camel was a reference not to any nearby desert, but to the brand of cigarette that had become the mainstay of the Winston-Salem economy.

Through the war and after it, the business grew. Richard added a second location, then a third. He realized he needed someone to run bookkeeping. He convinced Lieth's father—a graduate of Brown University who had lost everything in the stock market crash of ‘29—to leave New York and join him in Winston-Salem. Together, they built Camel City Dry Cleaners into a regional chain, and Lieth Von Stein, who should have grown up in the borough of Queens, grew up instead in Winston-Salem.

He was an only child and convivial. He played a little football in high school, despite being only five foot six, and got on well with classmates and teachers.

After high school, he enrolled at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, intending to major in engineering. He fared poorly, dropped out, served in the Army (Europe, not Vietnam), and finally earned a degree from a small but well-regarded North Carolina college named Guilford. Then he returned to Winston-Salem and went to work. He was twenty-six, a year younger than Bonnie, but on a considerably faster professional track, when he first became aware of her.

Despite her circumstances, Bonnie had developed into an appealing young woman, with long hair, strong features, a quick mind. She'd come to believe, however, that she would always be just a little country girl who liked hard work: someone of interest only to her parents and her children, and maybe to her brother and sisters. She understood that some men might wish to keep company with her—though she hadn't run into many since Steve had left—but never one as worthy as Lieth Von Stein.

Lieth not only was going places professionally that Bonnie, no matter how hard she worked, could never reach, but he came from much higher social strata. If you grew up in Welcome as a bricklayer's daughter, then the heir to the largest dry-cleaning chain in Winston-Salem seemed like a prince of the realm.

She'd seen him at work but had never considered that she might be of romantic interest to him. She'd just assumed, she said later, that “classy young ladies would interest him.” And with her lonely children waiting for her every night at Salem Baptist, and after four years of isolation, exhaustion, and semistarvation, Bonnie Von Stein did not consider herself a classy young lady.

It wasn't until late October of 1976, after Lieth had already decided to take a job with Federated Department Stores in Cincinnati, that they had their first social encounter. Bonnie was thirty-two and Lieth thirty. Angela Pritchard was six and Chris was about to turn eight.

Bonnie needed a pair of boots for a Halloween costume. A friend suggested a good place to find them. Lieth overheard the conversation. The working day was almost over. He said to Bonnie, “I'll ride out with you to find the boots and then you can stop by my apartment for a drink.” When they got there, they talked, and then he asked her if she'd like to have dinner. She said she couldn't, she had to pick up her two children at day care.

“Well, pick them up, and then we'll all go out to eat,” Lieth suggested. She explained that the children would be tired and shy and not good company at a restaurant. Then, out of politeness—but feeling some spark—she said that if he didn't mind the drive, he could dine with her at her house in Lexington.

And that's what happened. The kids were in bed by eight-thirty and Lieth and Bonnie watched TV.

He was leaving for Cincinnati in two weeks, but he drove down to Lexington again for Halloween, and then another night the following week, and then once the weekend after that. Then he was gone. He took her address and home phone number, out of politeness, but it was obvious to Bonnie that she'd never see him again.

To her astonishment, he began calling from Cincinnati. He even wrote an occasional letter. His parents were still in Winston-Salem, and every couple of months he'd come to visit. When he did, he'd spend time with Bonnie. They shared an interest in music. Bonnie's grandfather had crafted violins and mandolins out of wood. Lieth's father had earned spending money at Brown by playing saxophone in jazz bands and later (according to family legend) had performed briefly with a Glenn Miller orchestra. But there was getting to be more to the relationship than a mutual appreciation of music.

One Friday, about six months after he'd moved, Lieth said he was coming for a visit and told Bonnie that his parents would like to meet her and her children. He suggested that they have dinner at the Red Lobster on Peter's Creek Parkway, in Winston-Salem. That's when she knew something serious was under way.

Lieth's parents took to Chris and Angela from the start. They told Bonnie they'd always been eager to have grandchildren. They even watched Chris play the role of Pinnochio in a play at the Salem Baptist school.

After that, Lieth visited almost every weekend. He began staying at Bonnie's house. The kids were thrilled. After not hearing from Steve Pritchard for years, they had a father again. They'd spend quiet Saturdays at Finch Park in Lexington, lying by the edge of the pond, watching the swans. Then they'd drive to Kerley's for what its partisans claimed was the best barbecue in North Carolina.

They began to vacation together, traveling to Ocean Isle Beach, on the coast. Bonnie's mother, a staunch member of the old school, did not approve of this intimacy outside of marriage. But she liked Lieth and liked even more seeing her daughter happy again.

Actually, ecstatic would be a better description of Bonnie's state. All week long she'd keep telling herself that this was too good to last, that one Friday Lieth would call and tell her he wasn't coming. Or maybe he'd write her a letter, explaining, as graciously as possible, that he'd met someone else. Someone of his own social class. Someone not saddled with two kids. It was as if he had dropped down from the heavens to rescue her from a life of toil and sorrow, and she couldn't help but fear that one day, without warning, the heavens would consume him again.

How could anybody be as good to her as he was? One day he called from Cincinnati and told her that on her lunch hour she should go shopping at Montaldo's, a department store she'd always considered too expensive. She explained that she couldn't afford to. He told her that for once she was wrong: he'd opened a charge account in her name and had put $500 in it.

One Saturday, they went to Welcome to visit Bonnie's parents. Lieth, of course, was too much the gentleman to comment, even to Bonnie, about certain basics that were lacking at the house. But within two weeks he'd ordered the Bateses a washing machine and an air conditioner.

That could have been a tricky business. Bonnie's parents had as much pride as she did. But Lieth was so gracious and humble and sincere as he explained to Bonnie's mother and father that it would make
him
feel so good to know that they wouldn't have to swelter through the summers, and to know that Bonnie's mother could have more time to tend her orchids if she didn't spend so much doing wash, that they wound up feeling they couldn't disappoint this fine young man by turning away his generosity.

Besides, they saw how much he loved their daughter. They saw how good he was to Chris and Angela. And they saw character beneath the surface. This was no Steve Pritchard, gussied up with a college degree. This was a man they felt privileged to know.

Slowly Bonnie's fears of rejection subsided. In August 1979, Lieth said he was taking a new job with a finance company in South Bend, Indiana. He asked her to marry him. She said yes.

6

The newspaper headline said, “Interview With Wife No Help . . . Woman Is Unable to Give Description.” The story quoted a police spokesman as describing an interview with Bonnie as “not fruitful,” and said, “She told police nothing that they had not been able to discern from other evidence.” The attack was still said to have been “the work of intruders” who had broken into the home, but already burglary was losing credibility as a motive. “Police have said that apparently nothing was taken from the house,” the story said.

Bonnie said later that she was never able to untangle her confused impressions of those first days. Lieth was dead. She would live. Angela had not been hurt. Nothing else mattered. She just wanted to be left alone. And she wanted the police to catch whoever did this. Already, she was impatient. Why did they keep asking her questions? Why didn't they just catch him, whoever he was?

And she was tormented by the question of why this had happened at all. The police told her that little, if anything, had been taken from the house. It had not been a robbery gone awry. It appeared to have been premeditated murder. But who would want to kill Lieth—or her?

True, they were not a sociable couple. They'd made few, if any, friends in Little Washington. But neither did they have enemies, unless there was someone at work who hated Lieth, or feared him. Someone he'd never talked about. But she could not imagine even that. Her head still hurt, it was still hard to breathe, and the tube in her chest hurt most of all.

Her mother and father and her brother and sisters and their respective wife and husbands had come to Washington. It seemed to Bonnie that they should be fearful for their own lives, as well as for hers and for Chris's and Angela's. A madman was out there somewhere. A madman who, for some reason, had singled out Bonnie and Lieth.

A uniformed policeman remained stationed outside Bonnie's door. The killer might not know she couldn't describe him. If he learned she was still alive, what assurance was there that he would not try to silence her?

A representative of the funeral home came. Bonnie told them to cremate the body. Lieth had always said that's what he wanted.

A minister came. He would be conducting the funeral service. He asked questions about Lieth. Neither Bonnie nor Lieth had attended church in Washington, so no minister knew anything about them.

The ex-president of the Humane Society came. Bonnie didn't want to see her. She didn't want to see anyone. But the ex-president of the Humane Society just had to tell Bonnie what she'd heard. Her neighbor had been at the annual summer festival and had seen Angela there with two friends. It seemed strange, she said, that Angela, whom one would have expected to be deep in grief, had been at the summer festival in the first place, but what was even more peculiar, and what the ex-president of the Humane Society just had to rush over to the hospital to tell Bonnie right away, was that a “very, very reliable person” had overheard Angela saying to one of her friends that “Lieth deserved to die.” She didn't want Bonnie to get upset about this—Lord knows, Bonnie had been through enough—but it was the sort of thing she felt she had a duty to pass on.

That evening, when Angela visited, in the company of her friend Donna Brady, Bonnie asked what she could possibly have said that would have been so misinterpreted. Donna Brady spoke right up. What Angela had said, Donna explained, was, “Whoever did this to Lieth deserves to die.”

Bonnie realized that after any murder in any small town—especially with the murder still unsolved—there would be gossip and rumor. The visit from her Humane Society colleague made her aware for the first time that after this murder, in this town, some of the rumors could get ugly.

* * *

The service was held on the gray, drizzly morning of Thursday, July 28, three days after the murder. By afternoon, the drizzle had become a hard rain.

Bonnie's brother and his wife had brought her a black nightgown and black bathrobe and black slippers to wear. It occurred to her that such items must not have been easy to find in Little Washington in July.

Chris had an even bigger problem. At Scott's, in the mall, he'd picked out a lot of fine new clothing to wear to the service, but when he tried to pay with his credit card, a machine rejected it as being overdrawn. Instead, he had to borrow funeral clothes from his friend Jonathan Wagoner.

A black car from the funeral home picked up Bonnie at the emergency-room door. At the home, shielded by a screen, she sat out of the view of press and public.

Despite his having asked her so many questions about Lieth, the minister got many things wrong, such as describing him as a Vietnam veteran. But what did it matter? Her head hurt, she still couldn't breathe right, the pressure in her chest had not diminished, and Lieth was just a pile of ashes.

She returned to her hospital bed, where she remained for another four days. Her mother and father and sisters and brother continued to visit. Chris and Angela stopped by much less frequently—so seldom, in fact, as to cause comment both from hospital personnel and from other members of Bonnie's family.

Her apparently quick recovery was causing comment, too. Bonnie had never been a complainer. She had a nearfetish about keeping her emotions to herself. To observers, this could easily be mistaken for indifference and could lead to awkward questions about why she wasn't more upset.

The nursing notes for the day of Lieth's service said, “Preparing to leave for husband's memorial service. Patient shows no outward emotion.” Upon her return, she was described in the notes as “cheerful and alert, talking with visitors.” At least to some, this behavior, combined with the fact that nobody in town knew anything about her, and the fact that her husband's death had enriched her by $2 million, caused a great deal of talking behind her back.

To Bonnie, unaware of the reaction, only three things seemed to matter anymore: Who could have done such a thing, why hadn't the police yet made an arrest, and might the killer return?

If the days were long, the nights were longer. No matter who was with her, she felt alone and terrified. She was afraid for herself and for her children. Angela, though seeming tranquil, said she was scared. She told her mother she was afraid the attacker had left her alive only because he hadn't known she'd been there, and that now he might come back to kill her, too.

Bonnie did not know how to respond. She felt incapable of offering reassurance. Above all, Bonnie was a rational person, and reason offered little solace in this instance. Violence had never been part of her world. Since she didn't know where it had come from, she couldn't be sure it was gone.

“Police Say No New Information in Probe,” the newspaper headline said. The chief said the department was treating the Von Stein murder as “our number-one priority” and promised that despite a lack of progress, the investigation “will not be put on a back burner.”

No motive had been established, and nothing had been reported missing from the house. Further questioning of Mrs. Von Stein had proven fruitless, as she remained unable to describe the assailants or to tell police how many people had beaten and stabbed her. Questioning of neighbors had proved equally unproductive.

* * *

On Friday, four days after the murder and one day after the memorial service for Lieth, Bonnie's ex-husband, Steve Pritchard, paid a visit. He was balding now and had a beard and, as always, was very well-spoken. He could use the phrase
symbiotic relationship
and seem to know what it meant. Also, despite much talk of financial difficulty, he drove a BMW.

For many years, he'd lived out west: South Dakota, Wyoming, someplace like that. He'd been a truck driver. Now he was back in North Carolina, in the western part of the state, working in some other aspect of the trucking business. She didn't know, didn't care.

He'd come to see the kids a couple of times since they'd moved to Washington. Angela treated him as if he were a total stranger, which, to her, he was. Right to his face, she'd tell him she did not consider him her real father. Lieth Von Stein, she would say, was her father.

Chris was more hospitable. Chris apparently still yearned for some sort of relationship with Steve. For Chris's sake, Bonnie had tolerated the visits. As had Lieth. Lieth, in fact, got along surprisingly well with Steve; said he liked the man, said he seemed like a nice guy, the kind of fellow you could sit down and talk to about all sorts of different subjects. Lieth had even insisted that when he visited, Steve sleep right there in the house, in Chris's room. Bonnie herself would just as soon have let him sleep in his car, but she worked hard at not being vindictive.

Now, however, she was not about to act glad to see her ex-husband. In the sphere of existence she presently occupied, there was no room for pretense.

Steve sat on the edge of her bed and told her he was so sorry about the way things had turned out. He said that if he'd never left her, then none of this would have happened.

“Don't apologize,” Bonnie said. “You did me the biggest favor of my life.”

He looked at her, not comprehending.

“If you hadn't walked out, I never would have had the opportunity to know and love Lieth. I
thank
you for what you did to me.”

“Well,” Steve Pritchard said, “I guess that's one way to look at it.”

Then she asked him please not to sit on her bed. “They don't allow people to sit on hospital beds,” she said. And that was the end of his visit.

* * *

Bonnie's other visitor that day was Lewis Young. He did not tell her about the fire. He did not tell her about the map. He did not tell her about the suspicions her brother had expressed. He did not tell her about the blood-spattered pages from
A Rose in Winter
.

He was still talking to her for “background,” he said later, but he was aware that, despite his own impression of the severity of her injuries—an impression supported by the physicians who were treating her—nine out of ten people in Little Washington already seemed certain that Bonnie had planned the murder of her husband and that her children had helped carry it out.

He'd been hearing a lot about life among the Pritchard children and the Von Steins, very little of it consistent with the picture that Bonnie had painted for him in their first conversation, three days earlier.

He'd been told by high school classmates that Chris was “a tad bit weird,” always trying out a strange new hairstyle, and driving a noisy car, in an attempt to draw attention to himself. He'd also had “very little luck with the ladies.”

Angela had “hung out with a wilder crowd,” including, Young was told, boyfriends who had served time in prison.

Regarding Bonnie, he'd already been asked several variations on the same basic question: How could someone kill a man so quick, but couldn't kill a woman?

And this was a woman who had become, literally overnight—with Lieth's $700,000 life insurance added to his original inheritance of $1.3 million—one of the wealthier women in eastern North Carolina.

For someone who'd spent much of her adult life in a state of financial and perhaps emotional deprivation, and whose domestic life on Lawson Road gave rise to so many tales of worsening strain between her husband and her children, it could have seemed an immeasurable fortune—a bonanza for which Lieth's death, and even her own serious injuries, might have seemed a small price to pay.

Lewis Young was gentle and restrained in talking to Bonnie, but he pressed her just a bit about the relationship between her husband and herself, and between her husband and her children.

Again, she assured him that theirs had been a loving, if private, family, and that if he ever heard anything to the contrary, it could be only from people who did not know them well.

Young could see he'd make no progress in that area, so he asked again about the assailant. Bonnie said she was terribly nearsighted without her glasses, and that all she really had was this
impression
of someone very strong, with broad shoulders, who had acted “methodically,” rather than as if in a frenzy.

She added that if she hadn't fallen out of bed, she was sure she would have been killed, too.

She also said that after the assailant had gently closed her bedroom door, she'd heard “three loud whacks,” and that she knew, from the sound, that Angela was being murdered, too.

When he asked her again if she had any thoughts as to who might have been responsible for the murder, she suggested, in addition to the Trust Department of the North Carolina National Bank, some disgruntled or frightened employee of National Spinning. As internal auditor, Lieth might have discovered embezzlement, theft, or some other misappropriation of funds. Maybe somebody there had learned that he intended to go public with evidence of wrongdoing and had murdered him before he could.

Young had to concede that the National Spinning theory was not entirely lacking in logic, though early investigation there had turned up nothing to support it.

Indeed, the only disturbing documents his examination of the contents of Lieth's office desk had turned up were letters from a young woman with whom Lieth had apparently become acquainted on a business trip. The letters suggested that at the very least an affectionate friendship had been formed. The letters had been written just one year ago, in the summer of 1987, soon after the woman, a North Carolina native, had moved to California.

In one letter, the woman had mentioned that she'd soon be returning to North Carolina for a visit, and she had seemed to be hinting at the possibility of meeting Lieth, at least for a night, in Wilmington, a coastal town about a hundred miles south of Little Washington.

There was no evidence that any such rendezvous occurred, but several weeks later, the young woman wrote that as midsummer approached she found herself thinking about North Carolina and about Lieth. “These summer days bring back some good memories—that is for sure,” she wrote. Then, after asking if he'd been to the beach, she wrote, “I am sure a wild guy like yourself took the weekend once or twice and hit the vacation spots.”