I tapped Daddy on the shoulder and pointed. He asked the man if he would turn the sound up but the woman beat him to it and she turned it up about as loud as it would go.
“. . . being described by local police as a person of interest in this baffling case that has scarred this West Virginia community like a strip mine,” the reporter said.
While the reporter talked, a skinny fellow in a white T-shirt was being led inside the building. When he saw the camera he put his hands over his face and looked the other way.
“Though national attention has been drawn to this small West Virginia hollow, the residents here still speculate about what happened to a young girl who went missing seven years ago.”
The camera showed a tree with some flowers surrounding a picture. Underneath it said
Natalie Anne Edwards,
and it just about made me sick to my stomach.
The old man shook his head. “It’s a shame what this world is coming to.”
Daddy got up and turned down the volume just as the reporter showed an older woman with white hair talking and waving her hands. Daddy stood in front of the TV and leaned back against the table. “That’s the town I’m from. Didn’t ever think it would make the national news.”
“Well, I hope they caught the fellow who kidnapped that poor little girl,” the woman said as she put a bowl of pie and ice cream in front of me.
“Why can’t we watch the rest?” I whined, trying to move and see.
“There are some things little girls shouldn’t have to worry about,” Dad said.
“You got that right,” the old man said.
The woman put her hand on my back and patted it. “Your daddy’s going to take care of you. He’s not going to let anything happen. Is that what you’re afraid of?”
“No,” I said quickly, and from the reaction in the room I guessed I said it a little too loud and angry. “I mean, I’m interested in what’s happening there.”
Daddy spooned in a few bites of pie and ice cream. “Maybe I ought to call Mrs. Linderman and find out if she’ll see me. Then we’ll get out of your hair.”
“Now you’re no problem; you know that,” the woman said, rustling through some papers and finding a yellow address book. She wrote a number down on the edge of an old newspaper and tore it off.
He walked into the living room, and I moved my ice cream around until it made a little ice cream pond on the pie. Cherry is one of my favorites, though I like the turtle pie at Denny’s the best. But I just couldn’t eat anything after what I’d seen on TV, and it made the whole thing jumble in my head.
Dad laughed in the other room as he talked on the phone, and the old woman asked if I wanted to take a piece of pie with me. I shook my head because I wasn’t really hungry anymore.
“She said to come right over,” Daddy said. “I suppose we ought to head out.”
The woman said something about keeping rooms open for us, but I think she knew we weren’t coming back. I walked over and hugged her and she hugged me back. I did the same to the old man who was standing like a statue by the door. He hugged me and said, “You take good care of your dad.”
The two were standing on the porch waving as we drove away. Dad turned around in their driveway and headed up the road.
13
Sheriff Hadley Preston was not pleased at the media’s knowledge of the arrest of Graham Walker. He asked Mike why he had ignored his pleas not to discuss the case. The young man’s face had turned redder than the Ohio State practice shirt he wore under his uniform. There was a cute young thing from Channel 13 who had camped out by the cruiser, a young lady with a short skirt and long eyelashes, and Preston figured she had pried the information from him.
“You beat all; you know that?” he said.
“I didn’t tell her much, Sheriff.”
“You told her all she needed and now look at it out there.”
Walker was in the same interview room where Dana had been, fiddling with a Styrofoam cup of coffee. He wasn’t much to look at, just skin and bones and hair that reached his shoulders and covered one eye. The man had a severely pockmarked face, scars from unattended acne, Preston guessed. From the looks of him, the 165 pounds was being generous. Preston could see the man’s ribs through his tight T-shirt. His arms were small and spindly like broomsticks. Either a drug addiction or a metabolism that was higher than he deserved.
“You want a lawyer?” Preston said as he pulled a chair back and sat, plopping his hat on the table.
“What do I need a lawyer for?”
“You don’t. They just make me ask that.”
“I haven’t done anything wrong.”
“For how long?”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s not true that you haven’t done anything wrong. I took a look at your record.”
“That was a long time ago, Sheriff. You can’t hold that against me. I’ve changed.”
Preston nodded. “That’s good to hear. You still working at the Tire Works?”
“I quit a couple months ago. Still looking around for something.”
“You quit or you were fired?”
Walker paused. “I’d say the parting was mutual. I wanted different hours, and my boss wouldn’t give it to me.”
Preston poured himself a cup of coffee. “From what he said, you didn’t want to show up on time. Ever.”
Walker didn’t answer.
Preston stood by the door, leaning against it with one arm. “There’re a few things in that report and a few things I’ve heard that made me bring you down here. You remember working at the mini golf?”
Walker shifted in his chair. “Yeah.” He looked away and then back at the sheriff. “What about it?”
“You got fired from that job too.”
“It was a dead end. Just something I did to make some spending money.”
“I hear you made advances on a young girl and the manager got wind of it. Is that fair to say?”
Walker opened his mouth, ready to speak. But nothing came out.
“She was thirteen,” Preston said.
“Sheriff, that girl did not look thirteen. I can guarantee you that. And all we did was talk.”
“In your car?”
“Look, I don’t know what that has to do with me now. Is that girl accusing?”
“Just trying to put the pieces together.” Preston stared at the man. “It was about that time you moved away to Ohio. Akron, wasn’t it?”
“I have a brother who lived up there. Worked for Goodyear. He let me stay with him and his wife.”
“And you were in Hartville about a month when the neighbors started complaining.”
“How did you . . . ? Is this what the fuss is about? Something that happened in Ohio?” Walker’s face was a sunken mixture of neglect and incomprehension.
“Not really.” Preston moved back to the chair and sat, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “I just like to get things in order. It helps to know the whole story. Where a person has come from. Know where they sit before you find out where they stand.”
Walker scrunched up his face, as if the sheriff were speaking a foreign language.
“I’d encourage you to level with me on what you say. Shoot straight.”
“I am being straight.” His eyes shifted away from Preston, like a dog ashamed of something he did on the carpet.
“From what I hear, you agreed to leave that area because they caught you looking in windows, scaring people. Young women.”
Walker shrugged. “I liked to take walks at night. I wasn’t a Peeping Tom, if that’s what you mean.”
“The search warrant we have for your home covers anything electronic, like computers. We found a laptop there.”
Walker locked eyes with Preston, his arms tensing. He finally leaned back with a nervous smile.
“We going to find anything we don’t want to see on that hard drive?”
“Nothing that’s probably not on every one of your computers here,” Walker said.
“We’ll see about that,” Preston said, picking up his hat and rolling it. “You like looking at pictures?”
Walker stared at the sheriff’s hand. “You been married how long, Sheriff?”
“Almost thirty years to the same woman.”
Walker shook his head. “Thirty years. It’s been thirty years since you dated a woman. Let me tell you something. Things are different now.”
“I suspect they are.”
“No. There’s no way you could understand. Women today . . . it’s like they’re waiting for you to make some mistake. Say one thing wrong. Do something that hacks them off. Then they get up and walk away. That’s pressure, especially if you have to pay for both dinners.”
“You tried those online dating things?”
Walker scoffed and pointed at his own face. “No matter which side I take of this, it always looks like a mug shot. They take one look and keep clicking the mouse. I saw this one guy the other day in a pool next to a dolphin. Said he was a nature lover and liked to read books and take long walks. And he had this baby face that made him look like some retired Backstreet Boy.”
Preston laughed. The guy was weird, but at least he had a sense of humor.
Walker leaned forward and jabbed a finger at the tabletop. “Women today don’t even give you a chance to make an impression. They’re looking for guys with looks and the six-figure income. Last thing they’re looking for is a guy like me. I got a good heart, Sheriff.”
Preston nodded and stared at him. “Is that why you favor the young ones?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Some of the pictures we found on the computer. We haven’t gone through it all, but Mike found some stuff that’s not good for your public image. And some conversations you had in chat rooms. You want to explain that?”
“First of all, there’s nothing illegal about talking with people on the computer. How am I supposed to know how old they are?”
“When they say they’re twelve, that’s a pretty good indication —don’t you think?”
“Maybe so, but people lie. You know that.”
Preston nodded. “True, but pictures don’t lie.”
Walker put up his hands. “I didn’t have anything to do with that. Honest. I had a friend staying with me a couple of weeks, and when I found out he was downloading stuff, I told him to delete it and he said he did.”
“You might not want to blame other people, Gray. Be straight with me.”
Walker sat back and pulled his hair into a ponytail. “I admit I’m a little stuck. Back in high school or whatever. I don’t get along with older women. I’ve tried. The younger ones don’t have all that resentment and pain. You know?” He cursed. “I didn’t know this was going to be a counseling session.”
Preston tried hard to make it seem like he was just a good old boy sheriff who was uncovering rocks to see what he’d find, but there was a method to his approach. When he was talking with some slick lawyer from Charleston or a media hound from New York, he could say the things they wanted to hear. But he felt most at home with his own people. Those whose faces had been slapped time and again by life. People like Walker.
“You had that mini golf job back in 2001. Is that right?”
Walker looked away in thought. “Yeah, that was the summer before 9/11.”
“And the next year toward the end of June, you were at a bar, the Dew Drop.”
“Sheriff, I’m not going to lie to you. I’ve been in a lot of bars over the years, so it might be a little hard to pinpoint.”
“You were in that bar the night that baby girl disappeared. You remember that?”
Walker cocked his head slightly. “The lady whose kid went missing?”
“That’s the one.”
He laughed. “I can’t believe this.”
“Have you seen the news?”
“I saw they found the car in the reservoir.”
Preston nodded and looked at him.
Walker crossed his arms, his elbows sticking out like the ends of matchsticks. “Well, I don’t know what I can do for you.”
Preston studied his hands. “Somebody came to us and told us about a conversation you had.”
“Who?”
“Not important. They said you were talking not long after the child went missing.” He unbuttoned his shirt pocket and fished for a piece of paper. Unfolding it, he held it a little farther away, almost a full arm’s length. “‘I think somebody stole that little girl and dropped her in some lake. They’ll never find that girl.’ That’s what you said.”
Walker’s arms tensed and his face creased like a dried apple. “I never said anything of the sort. How would I know where that little girl went? Whoever told you that is lying through their teeth.”
“She seemed pretty sure of herself.”
“She? It was a woman?” He shot up from his chair and put his hands on the table. “Then you might want to check her story out. Maybe she’s the one who nabbed that kid.” He walked to the rear of the room, near the refrigerator, turning his back and running a hand through his hair. “I swear, Sheriff, I’ve done a lot of stupid things in my life, but I did not have anything to do with that girl’s death.”
Preston stared at the back of Walker’s head.
Then Walker turned, a look of surprise and horror on his crimson face. He looked like a trapped animal in a cage. “I didn’t mean that. I don’t know if she’s dead or not. But I didn’t have anything to do with it.”
“So you know more than you’re telling me. Is that what you’re saying?”
Walker paced, his shoelaces flopping as he walked. The ends of his jeans were nothing but loose strands. “Look, when I get drunk, I can say a lot of things. I’ve been in fights I don’t even remember. Maybe a long time ago I was trying to figure it out like everybody else and I said something like that. I don’t know.”
“Why would you choose to mention the part about the bottom of the lake?”
“Sheriff, that wasn’t me. That was the Jack Daniel’s talking. I was just guessing, probably, if that’s what I said. People have opinions about stuff all the time, and they don’t get arrested for it.”
Preston looked at the paper again and waited. Just sat there. Like a pause in a musical score meant to bring out the longing for completion. Clouds had gathered outside and the room darkened.
Preston finally spoke. “She also said you knew that lady’s car was at the bottom of a lake. Not that you
thought
it was there, but you
knew it.
”
“That’s not true. How would I know where that car was? I was sitting in the back of that bar having a couple brews.”
“So you admit you were at the Dew Drop that night.”
“No, I don’t admit that. I’m just saying whoever told you this could have been some woman I was trying to impress in a bar.”
“You didn’t say this at a bar, Gray. You were stone sober.” He folded the paper and stuffed it back in his pocket. “A relative of yours reached out to us. Told us about the conversation. She thought it—”
“Relative?”
“—might help us. At first she said—”
“Who?”
“—she didn’t think anything about it, but when the car came up so did the memory of the—”
“Who told you that?” Walker shouted.
“—conversation.”
“What lying skank told you that?”
“Just calm down.”
“Don’t tell me to calm down. Some lowlife is trying to pin this on me, and I want to know who it is.”
The door opened slightly and Preston waved Mike away. He leaned forward and looked up at Walker. The man’s face was tight, the pockmarks drawn and quartered.
“I swear, Sheriff, you need to tell me who told you that because they’re lying to you.”
“It was your mother, Gray.”
Walker’s eyes became dead pools. His shoulders slumped, and he fell into the chair as if a bullet had just crashed through his brain. Preston had seen men felled by gunfire before. An old boy who had abused his wife and daughter holed up in a hog pen with a shotgun. It was clear he didn’t want to come out alive. And he didn’t. He’d fallen among the hogs, just dropped like a stone after a well-placed shot. Walker acted the same.
“My mother?” he said, whining.
For a moment, Preston thought he could see into his life, the neglect and fear. She was a big woman with a face every bit as hard as Gray’s. The woman had to be brutal, both in her words and actions. He could tell that by the way she talked about him during the interview. Preston actually felt a bit of pity for the guy, knowing what he’d come from.