Evidence of Blood (22 page)

It was always like that, a quick, spontaneous breaking through of the more cautious bonds of silence. He’d seen it happen in witnesses, in public officials, in victims, even in those who’d done the dreadful things he’d recorded in his books. Mildred Haskell had begun to talk when he’d agreed to bring her a bag of freshly parched peanuts, and she had then sat in her chair for hours, reeling off the details of her gruesome inner world while popping the shells open one at a time in a gesture which Kinley thought must have resembled the way she’d snapped apart the spine of little Billy Flynn. He’d glimpsed this same release in Colin Bright, at first so silent and withdrawn before the emergence from the mute and guarded chamber of his solitude. It had happened in an instant, the miraculous reversal of his former reticence for which he’d given only the slimmest and most arbitrary of reasons:
Because it’s you that’s here
.

“I know it’s been a long time,” Kinley said, gently easing any of Helen Slater’s remaining fears, “but sometimes a lot comes back all of a sudden.”

“Not much ever left,” Helen said. She rose laboriously, pulling herself up by grasping at the small stump beside her chair. “If it wasn’t for a little bump on the mountain,” she said, “you could almost see her house from here.”

Kinley got to his feet. “Ellie Dinker’s house?”

“Yeah,” Helen said as she moved ponderously toward the edge of the mountain, raised her hand and pointed sharply to the left, angling down the mountain at what Kinley calculated as approximately forty-five degrees. “You go through those woods way down toward the bottom
of the mountain, and if you went over that little hill, there, that’s where you would have found Ellie’s house if it hadn’t have burned down.”

“What happened after the fire?” Kinley asked.

“Well, Mrs. Dinker didn’t have much of a place to go,” Slater told him. “Ellie was her only child, and Mr. Dinker was long gone. Ora Fletcher took her in for a while, but she took to wandering off.” She turned to the right and nodded down the long, narrowing road which finally disappeared over the mountainside. “They found her wandering around that old mine down there.” She turned back toward him, her face oddly stricken, as if in embarrassment for her old friend’s mother. “I even saw her hanging out behind my house once,” she added, “just standing out there by the well.” She shook her head at the thought of it. “Anyway, she was wandering around the town so much, they finally just took her off to the asylum. That’s where she died.”

Kinley nodded silently.

“She never showed up, you know,” Slater added. “Ellie didn’t.”

“You mean, her body?”

“No, I mean that day she was supposed to come up here,” Slater explained, “the day she died.” She smiled sadly. “It was a Friday, and they’d let summer school out for the parade. The town was full of kids that day. We watched the parade, then a lot of us went up to the courthouse. They were about finished with it, and old Mayor Jameson was making a speech.” The smile nostalgic. “Everybody was there. All the big cheeses in town. The mayor, like I said. And Sheriff Maddox. The police chief and all the old courthouse crowd.”

Kinley offered her his best professional smile, unwilling to halt the flow of memory, afraid that it might stop her tongue as well. “It must have been quite a celebration that day,” he said.

“Oh, it was, it was,” Slater said excitedly. “They were taking pictures in front of the courthouse. You know, for
the paper. It was really something. Everybody was on the courthouse steps.” Her eyes swept to the left and settled on the great gray edifice of the courthouse whose construction the town had been celebrating that day. “They’d just about finished all the work on the courthouse,” she recalled. “There was still a lot of brick and wood and bags of cement scattered around, and the flagpole wasn’t up yet, and the parking lot was full of old trucks, but otherwise, it looked real nice that day.”

Kinley nodded, a bit impatiently. He was used to tangents, to the hard, steady pull of memory, but he also knew that there was a time when every witness had to be nudged back.

“And you were planning to go to the parade with Ellie,” he said. “She was coming up here that morning.”

Her eyes shot over to him. “Morning?”

“Yes.”

She shook her head. “No, Ellie wasn’t planning on coming up that morning,” she said. “She was coming up late in the afternoon, and then we were going to go into town that evening for the fireworks.”

“But you were already in town, weren’t you?”

She nodded. “I came down early, to help with things,” she said, “and Daddy was going to drive me back up so I could meet Ellie.”

“Then you were going to walk back down to Sequoyah?”

“On foot,” Helen said. “Because Daddy needed the truck.”

“Carl Slater,” Kinley said, a follow-up response which he routinely used as a lubricant to keep the flow of conversation going.

But the mention of the name had seemed to have an opposite effect, stopping her suddenly like a blockage in the heart. “My Daddy,” she said quietly.

Kinley waited for more, but Helen continued to stare out over the rim of the mountain, her eyes fixed once
again on the town below, the courthouse at its center, resting like a great gray tombstone on a rounded hill.

“Where was your Daddy that day?” Kinley asked finally.

She seemed to snap out of a trance. “After we came back up from Sequoyah, he went back down again,” she said. “I guess he was headed down the mountain about the same time as Ellie was coming up it.”

“But Ellie was walking,” Kinley reminded her. “Wouldn’t he have passed her on the road?”

“I guess so.”

“He never mentioned that?”

“Mentioned?” Helen asked. “To who?”

“To Ben Wade, the deputy who questioned him,” Kinley said. “He said he took the mountain road down toward Sequoyah, but he never mentioned seeing Ellie Dinker.”

“Other people saw her,” Helen said. “I remember hearing about other people who saw her.”

“Yes, they did,” Kinley told her. “I’m just trying to put a few things together that would help me figure out exactly where Ellie was at any given point on her way up here.”

Helen shrugged. “Well, I don’t know about where she was,” she said. “I just know she never made it up here. So, after a while, I headed on down.”

Kinley hesitated a moment, then decided to go ahead with the only question he’d actually had in mind at the time he’d decided to find Helen Slater. “Mrs. Foley, why would she have come up here at all?”

Helen looked at him oddly. “What do you mean? We were friends.”

“But the plan was to meet up here, and then for both of you to go down to Sequoyah for the fireworks that night?”

“Yes.”

“All the way back down the mountain?”

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“Well, wouldn’t it have been more likely for you to meet at Ellie’s house at the bottom of the mountain, than for her to walk all the way up here, then both of you go all the way back down the mountain?”

Helen’s face took on a look of intense concentration, but she did not answer.

“Do you remember if there was any particular reason to meet at your house?” Kinley asked.

Helen continued to think about it. “Well, it was because Ellie wanted to do it that way.” She seemed to be replaying the whole scene in her mind. “I said, ‘Well, I’ll come by your house around five, and we’ll go to the fireworks.’ That’s what I told her.”

“But she didn’t want that?”

“No,” Helen said. “No, she didn’t. She said, ‘I’ll come up.’ She said it real firm-like. ‘I’ll come up.’ You know, like it’s settled. There’s no argument. ‘I’ll come up.’ Just like that.”

Kinley quickly wrote the words in his notebook, then glanced back up at Helen. “It’s an awful long walk from the Dinker house to yours, isn’t it?”

Helen nodded slowly. “Awful long,” she said, almost to herself.

“And all uphill,” Kinley added quietly.

“All uphill,” Helen repeated thoughtfully, as if replaying the whole day in her mind.

Kinley hesitated a moment, then asked his final question. “And if you weren’t supposed to meet until five, why did she leave the valley so early?”

Helen shook her head slowly. “I don’t know,” she said. “Ellie was a strange girl.” Her eyes swept over to him. “And she was so mad,” she added, “like something was eating her up.”

In every case, the need finally emerged. As the data accumulated, one profound or incidental fact at a time, the mind lost its way, became entangled in the mesh of detail, and it became necessary to apply the first strategy ever invented to aid a finite intelligence.

He drew it slowly on one of the pieces of unlined paper he found in Ray’s desk. Under the bright light of the desk lamp, he could see the lines as they merged or ran off in opposite directions, the simple wave of the mountain, a few parallel lines to indicate its sharp incline and rounded hills, a single curving thread to trace the course of the mountain road. At its zenith, Kinley drew in a simple square for the house of Helen Slater, and at its nadir another square, this one for the house of Ellie Dinker. After that, it was only a question of filling in the relevant times and people.

When finished, it was as plain and unadorned a map as Kinley’s limited artistic ability could make it, and yet it was sufficient to point out the oddities and contradictions which the mind sometimes failed to see in a jumble of words and numbers.

Now carefully adding the details he’d accumulated from the trial transcript, Kinley tried to establish a time frame which would incorporate everything that had happened between the time Ellie Dinker had left her house, until the moment when, according to Mrs. Overton, her husband had returned home.

Once he’d established the times, he carefully printed the added information on the map, then studied it silently, listing one anomaly after another, first in his mind, then in his notebook under the same heading he’d used during all the years since he’d first established the practice by meticulously mapping out the house in which Colin Bright had slaughtered the Comstock family:

Once Kinley had recorded these observations, he added the further questions which they suggested:

Kinley turned back to his notebook and flipped to the pages where he’d recorded the critical elements of Sheriff Maddox’s trial testimony. Following Warfield’s lead,
Maddox had answered the questions precisely and in the logical order Warfield’s examination had demanded:

WARFIELD
: Now, Sheriff, did you have occasion to talk to Charles Overton after his arrest?

MADDOX
: Yes, sir.

WARFIELD
: When was this, Sheriff?

MADDOX
: Well, I got in the backseat of Deputy Hendricks’s car, and he drove us down to the Sheriff’s Department in Sequoyah.

WARFIELD
: And you were in the backseat with Overton at that time?

MADDOX
: Yes, sir.

WARFIELD:
And Deputy Hendricks was driving?

MADDOX
: Yes, sir, he was.

WARFIELD
: All right. Now, Sheriff Maddox, can you tell the court what transpired by way of conversation between you and Mr. Overton at that time?

MADDOX
: Overton was denying everything, but he admitted that he had seen Ellie Dinker on the road. He said he didn’t know her name. He said it was just a little girl in a green dress. He didn’t know her name. He said as far as he could recollect, he’d never seen her before. They’d had a little talk, he said, and after that she’d left him and gone up the road a little ways.