A Quiet Belief in Angels

  Fermor’s voice was a blur of meaningless sound in my ears. I watched his mouth move, the way his expression changed as he spoke, and it meant nothing to me. All I could see was the white soles of Virginia’s shoes over the brow of the hill.

  “I’d see to it that you take stock of what’s happened here today, take it as fortunate that I was the one who came across you and not someone with a harsher view. Only reason I ain’t gonna book you is ’cause of this terrible thing up in Liberty County, and I gotta go up there and assist my contemporary, Sheriff Landis.” Fermor nodded, and then turned to his deputy. “Deputy Edgewood is gonna drive you back to your vehicle, and then I would ask you to be on your way, go on up to Waycross to the Community Hospital and attend to your affairs. That is all I gotta say, but I will pray for you come Sunday as is my predilection in such matters. I wish you well, but I’ll not be sorry to see you out of my county.”

  Fermor nodded one more time, and then turned to Edgewood. “You come on out to Fleming when you’re finished.”

  “Yes, Sheriff,” Edgewood said, and watched as Fermor strode out toward the front of the building. Moments later we heard the engine of his car gun into life.

  Deputy Edgewood stood there for a moment, nervous, perhaps uncertain of what lay ahead, and then he stepped forward and raised the key that would unlock my cell door.

  “Let the lady out first,” I said.

  He paused, looked at me, glanced back over his shoulder at Alex, and then said, “Yes, of course. The lady, sorry.”

  Alex came out, and waited patiently while Edgewood fumbled and dropped the keys, found the right one, unlocked my door and stepped back so I could gain the corridor between.

  Edgewood told us to walk out to the front of the building and wait for him. I took Alex by the hand, and once we exited the narrow corridor I put my arm around her shoulder and pulled her tight.

  “A lucky break,” I whispered, but I really wanted to say . . . another girl, they found another girl.

  She merely nodded, didn’t say anything, and while we waited for Edgewood I just held onto her as tight as I could.

  The drive was without conversation. I don’t imagine Edgewood would have known what to do if I had started speaking to him, but I was incapable of speech. Overwhelmed by the presence of a feeling I had tried so hard to forget.

  Edgewood dropped us off at Reilly’s pickup, turned around and headed back toward the junction where he could turn toward Liberty County.

  “I want to go up there,” I told Alex.

  “Where?”

  “Fleming.”

  She frowned. “Why, Joseph, why d’you wanna go up there?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know, Alex . . . hell, I don’t know, I just feel like I need to go up there.”

  “And see what? Some other little murdered girl?”

  We stood on either side of the pickup, looking at one another over the hood. I glanced down at the ground, at my shoes, and when I looked up I realized that there was no way for me to explain what I felt.

  I’d found Virginia Perlman. I’d made a promise to Elena Kruger, a promise to ensure no harm came her way, and I had failed. I’d been the one to stand and watch as unjustified bitterness and anger was directed toward Gunther Kruger and his family, and how that had indirectly resulted in not only the death of his daughter, but also the loss of my mother as I knew her. I was drawn to this thing, that’s all I could feel, but I knew there was no way I would make Alex understand that. I thought of the Guardians, where they were now . . . and I knew again that everything we had tried to accomplish had been nothing but the foolishness of children.

  “You really want to go?” she asked.

  I nodded. There was no hesitancy or uncertainty in my mind.

  “And your mother? When do you figure on seeing her?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, Alex, maybe on the way back . . . but if you don’t want to come with me I could take you home.”

  She shook her head. “I wanted to go see your mother,” she said quietly. “I sure as hell don’t want to go to Fleming.”

  “I need to go, Alex . . . don’t ask me why, for Christ’s sake, I don’t know why myself, but there’s something about this that just . . . ”

  “If you’re going, well then you’re going alone,” she said. “If you really have to do this then that’s the way it’s gonna be . . . I don’t want to be involved. I don’t want any part of this godawful thing.”

  “I understand,” I said. “I’ll take you home.”

  It took me two hours to get to Fleming. I drove northeast, took a route through Hickox, Nahunta, followed the Glynn-Brantley county line to Everett, and then headed north through Long County into Liberty. By the time I arrived, it was late afternoon, overcast and oppressive. The outskirts of Fleming gave no indication of police presence, but three hundred yards in I saw a gathering of black-and-whites, representatives from Charlton, Clinch, Camden, Liberty itself, and another car with the Tattnall County shield on the door. I pulled the pickup over and waited there for several minutes. I felt that I needed to know what had happened, and if it was attributable to the same killer. Over to the right of the highway was an embankment, with an outcrop of shrubs and low trees behind. I got out of the pickup and circumvented the rope marking the crime scene and crossed the line of trees about fifty yards farther down. I wished they’d been with me—Maurice, Michael, Ronnie, even Hans.

  From twenty yards away I could see Sheriffs Fermor and Dearing, and a third man I presumed was the Liberty County sheriff. Edgewood was there, standing back and to the left. He was rigid, and looked like he was having difficulty dealing with whatever was there. I slowed down somewhat, and even though I knew there would be trouble, even though I knew Fermor and Dearing would have words to say, I couldn’t help but approach.

  First appearances were of a confusion on the ground. From where I stood, in the handful of seconds it took for Fermor and Dearing to see me, to place who I was, to ask me what I thought I was doing there, whether I’d followed Edgewood, had Edgewood brought me, and the girl . . . where was the girl, and what the hell did I think I was doing coming out into the middle of a murder scene?

  In those few seconds I struggled to make sense of what was in front of me, and I hadn’t yet managed to correlate the evidence of my eyes with the procession of thoughts and questions before Edgewood and Dearing were standing over me at the edge of the highway.

  The girl had been cut in two right across the middle, with each part buried in a different shallow grave, but each grave no more than a couple of yards from the other, and in unearthing the two separate parts of her the appearance was of a grotesquely elongated body, the upper half protruding from the ground, the middle submerged, the lower half appearing some distance away. It was not an image that found any point of reference to anything. It was an illusion, a deception, a chimera.

  Once again I felt the blood draw from my face, my hands, my legs. I felt everything inside me draw back, in an attempt to retreat from the horror I had witnessed. I couldn’t make out the questions Sheriff Dearing barked at me one after the other.

  “—doing, and now you’re here—exactly is going on, and I better get some straight answers—some kind of—”

  I put my hands over my ears and dropped to my knees. It was then that I felt the handcuffs snap onto my wrists for the second time in the same day. A shadow closed around my heart. I looked up at them, all of them—Edgewood, Dearing, Fermor, Landis of Liberty County—and I opened my mouth to speak.

  “Don’t say a goddamned thing!” Fermor barked at me. “I don’t know what the hell is going on here, boy! Where’s the girl? Where’s the girl that was with you? What have you done with her?”

  I couldn’t speak.

  Dearing grabbed the chain between the cuffs and dragged me to my feet. I was still having difficulty breathing, and when he turned and started shoving me toward the road I felt my legs give beneath me once again.

  They bu
ndled me into the back of Sheriff Landis’s car. Landis and Fermor stayed behind, Edgewood was told to drive, and Sheriff Haynes Dearing of Charlton County, a man I had known for as many years as I’d been alive, climbed into the back of the car alongside me and told Edgewood to drive to the Liberty County Sheriff’s Office.

  “I don’t know what the hell is going on here, boy,” he said, his voice sharp, accusatory, “but before this afternoon’s out there’s gonna be some goddamned straight answers.”

  I started to say something.

  “Not a word,” he hissed. “Not a goddamned word there, boy.

  You’re in enough trouble as it is. You ain’t gonna do nothing but make it worse by telling me anything right now.”

  I felt my mind shut down. I thought of Alex, of my mother. I turned and looked out of the window. Thunderheads had gathered along the horizon. It had started to rain.

  Elena.

  You sweet, silent, lost little girl.

  I think of the woman you would have become. I wonder if somewhere there is a place that holds all these unfinished lives. Another plane, another world running parallel to our own, where the dead pick up their incomplete lives and live them out.

  And I recall times when I tried so hard to understand the kind of person who could have killed so many children.

  There were my mother’s imagined sins—terrible, even murderous; and there were my own sins—sins borne out of fear, a fear so great it made me believe that what I was doing was somehow justified. But this sin was so different. The sins we committed were driven by a sense of justice, of the necessity to see this thing ended.

  Even now I cannot bear to think of the mind that must have prompted such actions.

  I recall Sheriff Dearing’s face as we walked away from what we had done. The way he looked at me, the way he turned back and glanced over his shoulder.

  Perhaps he knew even then.

  Perhaps we both knew.

  And earlier, before everything changed, there was that day in Liberty, Fleming County, a day they believed that perhaps I was the guilty one. I believed that Virginia Grace had been the last one, back in August of ’42. But no, there were more, and not just the one that was found then.

  How I sat across from Dearing, a man who had walked through my childhood, and the way his face folded around the eyes, a sense of defeat in his tone as he said . . .

  THIRTEEN

  “ESTHER KEPPLER.”

  “Who?”

  “Esther Keppler,” Sheriff Haynes Dearing repeated.

  I sat facing him. I could tell from the way the cold had drawn in that the sun had already gone down, though I couldn’t see any windows from where I sat in the small back office of the Liberty County Sheriff’s Department. I’d been there two, perhaps three hours. Much of the time I’d been alone, wondering what the hell I was doing there. I’d asked at one point, to which Dearing had replied, “We have exactly the same question for you, Joseph, exactly the same question for you.”

  He then shook his head and left the room without requiring an answer from me. I was relieved because I did not have one.

  I asked how long I was going to be there; said I was hungry.

  “Don’t know how long,” he’d said, “could be a while yet . . . I’ll have someone bring some food for you.”

  An hour later Deputy Edgewood came into the room with a plate of sandwiches and a bottle of Coke.

  “Can you tell me what the hell is going on here?” I asked him. I figured there might be some slight hope he’d help me out.

  Edgewood shook his head. “No,” he said flatly. “I can’t tell you anything.”

  He backed up to the door, stepped out and closed it behind him. Locked it, as had been done every time before.

  I ate the sandwiches. I drank the Coke. After a while I needed to use the restroom. I approached the door, banged on it with the heel of my fist.

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Anybody out there?”

  There was nothing—no response, no sound. I banged again, louder, and was startled when someone banged the door on the other side.

  “Shut the hell up in there!” a voice came through, clear as daylight.

  “I need the bathroom!”

  “Well, you can goddamned wait!”

  “You can’t do this to me! I haven’t done anything! I have rights—”

  “Rights? What the hell are they then?” the voice came back, and then there was silence.

  I banged on the door again. Nothing.

  I returned to the plain deal chair and sat down.

  To wait another half an hour or more, before Dearing appeared, and he told me the name of the girl they’d found.

  “I don’t know anyone of that name,” I said. “She’s from here?”

  Haynes Dearing drew the chair out from beneath the table and sat down. “Yes, she’s from Fleming. Nine years old.”

  “She was murdered like . . . like the others?”

  Dearing nodded. “Seems that way . . . and there have been two others since the one you found in Augusta.”

  “Two others?”

  “Yeah, two others . . . making it a total of eight.”

  My mind stopped working, I felt my skin crawl. The hairs rose on the nape of my neck. My mouth was dry, bitter-tasting. Eventually I found my voice, and I said: “Nine, Sheriff Dearing . . . there have been nine.”

  Dearing frowned. “Nine?”

  “Elena Kruger, remember?”

  “Sure I remember, but she wasn’t killed by the same person. She was killed in the fire.”

  “Not by the same person,” I said, “but you can count her death amongst these, because it was directly caused by what happened.”

  “Be that as it may,” Dearing said, “I have eight killings, all of them young girls, this last one killed today, cut in half for God’s sake, and each separate part buried.” He paused and looked at me. “Is it true about this morning . . . that Burnett Fermor came across you and Alexandra Webber in the back of a pickup truck on the side of the road?”

  I nodded.

  “Jeez, what the hell is that all about? Whose truck is that anyway . . . sure as hell ain’t yours.”

  “Reilly’s.”

  “Reilly Hawkins?”

  “Yes, Reilly Hawkins.”

  “And what were you doing, Joseph? Where were you headed?”

  “See my mom at Waycross Community.”

  “And what did you stop for, eh? That’s not the sort of thing I’d expect of you, and certainly not of Miss Webber. She’s the schoolteacher, you know?”

  I smiled. “I know, Sheriff, I know she’s the schoolteacher.”

  “And how long has this thing . . . this relationship been going on between you and Miss Webber?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, better part of six months maybe.”

  “Six months?”

  “Yes, about six months.”

  “And you are how old?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And Miss Webber?”

  “She’s twenty-six, twenty-seven come February.”

  Dearing nodded slowly. “Twenty-seven come February, okay.”

  There was silence between us for a little while. I was aware of the pressure in the middle of my body. I still hadn’t used the bathroom. I believed I was concentrating on it in order to think as little as possible about what Dearing had told me. Two more girls. Eight in all. I wanted to ask him who they were, what had happened to them, why such information had not been communicated to us. I wanted to know why he and the combined sheriffs’ departments of several counties had accomplished nothing.

  “It’s hard to believe you got yourself arrested,” Dearing said. “But the fact that you were gives you a very substantial alibi, doesn’t it?”

  I frowned, shook my head. “What do you mean, alibi?”

  “That you were locked in a police cell when she got herself killed tells me that you couldn’t have done this thing—”

  “I couldn’t have d
one this thing? What in Christ’s name is that supposed to mean?”

  Dearing raised his hand and silenced me. “Do you have any kind of an idea how this would look to someone who didn’t know you? I mean, for God’s sake, Joseph . . .” His voice trailed away. He shook his head slowly, sat in silence for a little while, and then he said, “And how did this thing come about, this relationship? This is something that started six months ago, not any earlier?”

  “Earlier, Sheriff? Like did she seduce me when I was under the legal age for consensual sex?”

  Dearing looked a little surprised.

  “Is that what you’re asking, Sheriff? If you’re asking that, then hell, go on and ask. It’s not complicated. What you see is what you get as far as I’m concerned.”

  Dearing cleared his throat. “Well then, is that the case? Did she seduce you into some sort of sexual relationship before you were legally responsible for such decisions?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “That’s right,” I said. “No, she did not seduce me into anything. Miss Webber and I have known each other for many years—”

  “You were one of her pupils, right?”

  “Was one of her pupils, Sheriff. She and I were friends after I left school. We remained friends. Now we have a relationship, and we were on our way to see my mother in Waycross this morning when we—”

  Dearing raised his hand. “I know enough about what happened. I don’t need any further details.”

  “Okay . . . can I use the bathroom now, Sheriff Dearing?”

  “In a minute, son, in a minute. First I gotta ask you what the hell you’re doing out here in Fleming when there’s been another little girl murdered.”