Authors: Thomas H. Cook
WARFIELD
: And this was the day of her murder?
MADDOX
: The day of her murder, that’s right. And he said that she was standing along the road there when his truck broke down.
WARFIELD
: And what did he say happened at that time?
MADDOX
: Well, when the truck broke down, he said he pulled it over to the side there, and started to fix it, and while he was doing that, Ellie Dinker came over, and Overton told me that they’d had a little conversation, what you might say, a few words between them.
WARFIELD
: Did he indicate to you what the nature of that conversation had been?
MADDOX
: Well, nothing much to it, he said. She asked about the truck and that sort of thing, about what was wrong with it, how long it was going to take to fix it, that sort of thing.
WARFIELD
: Just what you might expect then?
MADDOX
: That’s the way I’d describe her, yes, sir.
WARFIELD
: Then what?
MADDOX
: He told her what he thought was wrong with it, how long it would take to fix it, and just in general answered her back.
WARFIELD
: And this innocent, everyday exchange, this was the full substance of their talk, is that right?
MADDOX
: That was all they had to say.
WARFIELD:
Then what, Sheriff Maddox?
MADDOX
: Then Ellie Dinker walked away.
WARFIELD
: Walked away?
MADDOX
: Up the mountain a little ways.
WARFIELD
: And that was the last Overton saw of her, according to his statement?
MADDOX
: According to him, that was the last he saw of her.
WARFIELD:
Just a little girl, heading on up the mountain, is that right, Sheriff?
MADDOX
: That’s how he described her, yes.
But that was
not
how Overton had described it, Kinley realized, as he glanced back over his notes, and was once again impressed with how important it was to copy the most relevant testimony verbatim, no matter how long it took or how unspeakably tedious it became.
Overton had never said that Ellie Dinker had walked on up the mountain. In fact, he’d said something entirely different from that. According to Sheriff Maddox, he’d said that Ellie Dinker had “gone up the road a little ways,” and Kinley knew that in common Southern parlance, such a phrase did not mean that Ellie Dinker had
continued up the mountain and finally disappeared around a curve in the road or something else of that sort, but that she had “gone up the road a little ways” …
and stopped
.
In his mind it was not difficult for Kinley to visualize what had happened at approximately twelve-thirty on the afternoon of July 2, 1954, and for a moment he concentrated on seeing it exactly as he imagined Overton had seen it. The truck grinding to a halt, he’d pulled over to the side of the road, glanced up the mountain and seen a girl in a green dress as she stood across from Mile Marker 27 on the mountain road. He’d gotten out of the truck, lifted the hood and discovered that his oil tank was leaking. By that time, she was upon him, asking questions about what was wrong, how long it would take to fix it. While gathering his tools from the back of his truck, he’d answered her, then done what any shade-tree mechanic would have done to check the cause and severity of the leak. He had pulled himself under the truck, glancing to the right as he did so, his eyes locking for just an instant on a little girl who had gone up the mountain a little ways …and stopped.
For the few minutes following that last glimpse, Overton had gone about his business, his eyes concentrating on the greasy innards of his dilapidated truck, until, giving up on it at last, he’d pulled himself out from under it again, glanced once more to the left, and seen no one at all across from Mile Marker 27, because by then Ellie Dinker was gone.
Kinley turned on his computer and typed in another code,
OVER:MYS
, by which he identified its future contents:
OVERTON:MYSTERIES
.
He was about to type in the first entry when he heard a soft knock at the front door. As he walked down the corridor toward the front of the house, he could see Dora standing on the front porch, its ghostly, bluish light washing over her eerily, giving her body an odd, vaporous look, as if she were slowly turning into steam.
“I don’t have a telephone,” she said as Kinley opened the door.
“Come in,” Kinley said softly, then stepped back and watched as she walked past him and into the living room.
“You can still smell them,” she said as she turned back to him.
“What?”
“The funeral flowers.”
Kinley nodded. He had not noticed it before, and for a moment that obliviousness struck him as a somewhat alarming observation, as if he had avoided the life of the senses for so long that they had grown numb with disuse, atrophied like bound limbs.
“It’s good to see you,” he said quietly.
She glanced over toward the hearth. “That’s where they put it, didn’t they?”
Again, he looked at her quizzically.
“Ray,” Dora explained. “His body.”
Kinley nodded. “Yes.”
She turned back to him. “I couldn’t come to the funeral. It wouldn’t have been right.”
“Probably not,” Kinley said. “Lois wouldn’t …”
“I wasn’t worried about Lois,” Dora said, cutting him off. “I was worried about Serena.”
“So was Lois,” Kinley said. “She wants to keep it all a secret from Serena.”
“You mean about Ray and me?”
“Yes,” Kinley said. “She thinks it would somehow make Ray look like …”
“A man,” Dora said, “a faithless man.”
“That’s about it, yes.”
She looked at him evenly. “Well, he was, wasn’t he?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
Dora took a deep breath, as if drinking in the last fading odors of Ray’s presence on earth. “I went to his grave, at least,” she said, “late at night. After everyone was gone.”
“So did I,” Kinley told her. “It seemed like the right
thing to do. It was his first night in the ground.” He smiled softly. “We’re primitive, you know. Primitive and superstitious. Magical thinkers. I guess we always will be.”
Dora smiled. “Ray said things like that. We were dancing once. Well, not so much dancing as just swaying together to some music, and he said, ‘You know why people love this?’ And I said, ‘No.’ And he said, ‘Because it’s an old motion.’”
“Like the rocking of the sea,” Kinley said.
“Swinging in the vines,” Dora said. “That’s how Ray described it.”
Kinley nodded. “Would you like a drink?”
She considered it a moment. “Yes,” she said finally, “I think I would.”
By then only gin was left. Kinley went to the kitchen, returned with the bottle and two glasses, and poured each of them a shot.
“Well, to Ray,” Dora said as she lifted her glass.
Kinley tapped his glass against hers. “To Ray,” he repeated.
They drank, then sat down, Dora on the sofa by the window, Kinley in the plain wooden rocker that rested across from it.
For a moment, a silence fell over them, and in that interval, as Kinley let his eyes absorb her face and body, he imagined her with his old friend, the two of them nestled together, naked, drowsy, spent. It was always the manner in which he imagined love, not in action, but in aftermath.
“Have you found it?” Dora asked suddenly.
For a moment, he thought she meant love, had he found love, and the “no” of his reply was almost past his lips before he realized that it was something else she was referring to, the proof of her father’s innocence Ray had also tried to find.
“Not exactly,” Kinley said, “but there are a few things
I want to follow up on. Things I noticed in the transcript, and from asking around a little.”
Dora took a slow draw on the glass, her eyes very dark and steady as they peered over its translucent rim. “What things?”
“I made a map,” Kinley said. “From the way it looks, Ellie Dinker wasn’t planning on going directly to Helen Slater’s place when she left her own house at the bottom of the mountain.”
“How do you know?”
“Because according to Martha Dinker’s testimony, she didn’t go in that direction,” Kinley told her. “And she left very early, hours before she needed to be at Helen’s.”
“Where was she going then?”
“I don’t know.”
“Unless they’d planned to meet,” Dora said. “That’s probably what some people thought.”
Kinley stared at her silently, an old technique which often forced the witness to elaborate upon his tale, to try harder to convince the mute, passionless observer that what he said was true.
Believe me. Believe me. Please, someone must believe me!
But with Dora it didn’t work. She only stared back at him, as sphinx-like as himself, the silence lengthening like a cord, stretching interminably, until Kinley felt the need to break it.
“Did you ever think that?” he asked, finally.
“That there was something between my father and Ellie Dinker?” Dora asked. “Absolutely not. He wasn’t that kind of man.”
“Faithless.”
Dora shook her head. “Weak is what he was. Frightened. Of everything.”
“How do you know that?”
“From his letters,” Dora said, “the ones he wrote my mother.”
“From prison?”
“No, from the war,” Dora said. “From the hospital in
Europe where he stayed after he was wounded. He never wrote her from prison.” She took another quick sip. “He was dead before they killed him.” A look of dreadful scorn rose in her face. “He died when I was still a baby,” she said, “but I think if he’d lived, I might not have gotten along with him very well.”
“Why not?”
“Because he was pathetic, and I don’t like pathetic people.”
It was a severe judgment, but she made no move to retract it.
“But he was also innocent,” she added. “He didn’t kill Ellie Dinker. He couldn’t have done that. He was too weak.” She took another quick sip from the glass. “If you read the letters,” she added, “you’d see what I mean.”
“Do you still have them?”
“Yes,” Dora told him. “Do you want to see them?”
Sometimes, in his work, character was all he’d had to judge a crime, a criminal, a victim, nothing but the separate elements of their emotions which he gleaned from them like scrapings from an ancient cave, bits of color, a certain density, traces here and there of cowardice or fortitude, decency or nefariousness, the glint in Iago’s eyes, Cassius’s hungry look, Cain’s uncertain step the day he slew his brother in the field.
“Yes, I’d like to see them,” Kinley said.
To his surprise, she took them from the bag that sat in her lap. “I thought you might,” she said as she handed them to him.
There were only a few of them, a slender stack crudely bound with rubber bands, military envelopes bearing the return address of a hospital in Belgium.
“Before the war, he might have been different,” Dora said as she drew her hand away from them. “My mother said he was.” She looked at Kinley. “Stronger. Braver.” She smiled. “Like Ray was.”
So that was it, Kinley thought as his eyes settled upon her face, the Eternal Father. He wondered why, bereft of
his own parents, he had never felt the need to look for them in others. But of course, there had been no need. His grandmother had swept into his life immediately, taking up the slack, filling in the empty space, nestling, cradling, providing.
“I was an orphan, too,” he said quietly, solemnly, at last, gratefully, “but not for long.”
Dora nodded crisply, her mind moving reflexively back to the matter at hand. “What’s your next move?” she asked. “More witnesses, things like that?”
“I want to walk the route Ellie Dinker took up the mountain,” Kinley answered.
“Why?”
“To time it,” Kinley answered matter-of-factly, though he knew that timing was only part of it. The rest was something he could not explain, a searching for the mood of the day, the feel of the air, the play of light and shadows, the tone of imminence and fatality, of people moving helplessly toward a single searing instant of cataclysmic ruin.
“So you’re going to walk the trail yourself?”
“Yes.”
“From behind the Dinker house to where?”
“To where your father saw her still alive.”
He could see something in her move toward him suddenly, as if a small piece of her spirit had crawled out of her body and floated toward him. She stood up quickly, as if to call it back. “I’d better be going,” she said.
He rose and walked her to the door, opened it and let her step out onto the porch. Once there, she turned back toward him, her face very grave, yet somewhat questioning. “You’re going to walk the trail tomorrow?”
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In the morning.”
She seemed to consider it a moment, before asking her next question. “Would you mind if I came along?”
“No.”
“I wouldn’t want to get in your way,” she added tentatively.
“You wouldn’t be.”