A Quiet Belief in Angels

  I looked at Dearing. His question brought me suddenly down to earth. I had been speaking of Alex, defending my situation. I had almost forgotten where I was, and then there it was—the reason for my presence in Fleming. Another girl had been murdered. Before her, another two.

  “You said that two others had been murdered?”

  Dearing nodded. “Seems that way. One down in Meridan back in September of ’43, another in Offerman, Pierce County last February. Those are the ones we know about.”

  “So whoever killed the girls in Charlton and Camden left after the Kruger fire—”

  “We’re not jumping to any conclusions, Joseph. We don’t know for sure that all these killings were carried out by the same man.”

  “But the way in which these girls were found, are there enough similarities to connect them?”

  Dearing shook his head. “I’m not saying anything . . . I can’t say anything, and I wouldn’t even if I could. Fact of the matter is that another girl has been killed, and we want to know what you’re doing here, Joseph. You live in Augusta Falls, your ma’s in the Community Hospital in Waycross, and yet you’re all the way north in Fleming because you heard a girl had been murdered. Tell me something that makes sense, will you? You’re from my jurisdiction. You’re one of my people. I know you, I’ve known your ma for I don’t know how many years . . . tell me something I can make sense of, huh?”

  I sat silent for some moments.

  “Joseph?”

  I looked up at Haynes Dearing. I shook my head. “I don’t have an answer for you, Sheriff.”

  Dearing nodded. “How did you know about this?”

  “Sheriff Fermor told us. Well, he came and got Deputy Edgewood to let me and Alex out because he had to come to Fleming.”

  “So you overheard him telling his deputy?”

  I smiled, shrugged my shoulders. “I wouldn’t say I overheard him, Sheriff. He didn’t exactly make it a secret.”

  “Okay,” Dearing said thoughtfully. He glanced toward the door, more an involuntary reaction to something, as if a thought had occurred which made it difficult for him to face me.

  “What?”

  Dearing shook his head.

  “No, what?” I asked again. “What are you thinking?”

  “I’m thinking coincidences, Joseph. Four of these girls have been from Augusta Falls—”

  “Three,” I said. “Three from Augusta Falls. Alice Ruth Van Horne, Catherine McRae and Virginia Perlman.”

  “Ellen May Levine as well.”

  I shook my head. “Ellen May was from Fargo in Clinch County. She was found in Augusta Falls, but she wasn’t from there.”

  “You seem to know more about this than me, Joseph.”

  I laughed, and realized the sound I made must have come across as a nervous response. It had not been intended that way. “It’s my home town,” I said. “These things upset me, Sheriff, especially after I was the one who discovered Virginia’s body.”

  “Right, of course you were,” Dearing interjected. “I’d forgotten that you were the one to find her.”

  “No you hadn’t,” I stated matter-of-factly. “What the hell is this? What’s happening here, Sheriff? You got some kind of idea that I had something to do with these killings?”

  Dearing smiled. It was a genuine smile. He seemed the model of avuncular authority he’d always appeared to be from my distant and awkward childhood. “I have no such idea, Joseph. If anything, you’ve created this situation for yourself.”

  “What situation? What are you talking about?”

  Dearing leaned back and folded his arms across his ample stomach. “You have hair grown almost to your shoulders. You have a damned beard of all things. You got yourself arrested for cavorting with a twenty-six-year-old schoolteacher in the back of a pickup truck, Joseph. You live in the same town as three of the victims, and the fourth was found there as well. You lived next door to the Krugers, and if the fire at the Krugers did anything it gave everyone some kind of idea that maybe Gunther Kruger had something to do with what had happened. And then . . . damn it, Joseph, then there was this thing with your mother and Gunther Kruger, something it was very hard for a lot of folks to ignore, and as soon as he left Augusta your mother wound up at Waycross Community, and everyone’s thinking that maybe she knew something, something big enough to feel real bad about, and it turned her mind, and now she’s in the care of these special doctors up there—”

  “Everyone?” I asked, interrupting Sheriff Dearing as he disgorged his awkward monologue. “This is what everyone thinks?” I thought of him visiting her, that he’d never told me, didn’t seem set to tell me now.

  Dearing laughed. “It’s an expression, Joseph, a turn of phrase. You know what I mean.”

  “I do? You’re sure that I do, Sheriff?”

  “Okay, enough already. This isn’t meant to be confrontational, Joseph. This is one concerned member of the county sheriff’s department following a line of inquiry.”

  “A line of inquiry about who? Me? Whether I was involved in any of these killings? Or maybe about my mother and why she went crazy . . . hell, Sheriff, maybe she killed all these girls. What d’you think about that? How about following that as your line of inquiry?”

  Sheriff Dearing smiled understandingly. “You’re tired, Joseph. You’ve had a long day. I’m gonna have someone take you back to your pickup. Figure you should make your way back home tonight. But this I need you to understand.” Dearing leaned forward. “I might trust you. I’ve known you long enough to consider it unlikely that you’re involved in these things, but Burnett Fermor, the others here, they don’t know you from Adam. They want to keep you here. Despite the fact that this little girl died while you were in Burnett Fermor’s lockup, he still doesn’t have to let you go. Your alibi is circumstantial, that’s what he said. He said that the medical examiner could be wrong, that the estimated time of death is estimated. He wants to ask you some questions, to start looking at whether or not you have an alibi for the others.”

  I was horrified, stunned that anyone could even consider such a thing. I opened my mouth to speak but Dearing raised his hand. “You take Reilly Hawkins’s pickup and drive it straight back to Augusta Falls. Don’t go anyplace but home. Be there when I come to see you in the next day or so.”

  “And where the hell would I go, Sheriff . . . oh yes, of course, some other town where there’s little girls being murdered, right?”

  Dearing nodded patiently. “I’m gonna grant that comment the importance it deserves, Joseph.” He eased back his chair and rose to his feet. “I’ll have Deputy Edgewood take you back to your vehicle. I will be speaking to you in the next couple of days, and you will be answering my questions truthfully, understand?”

  Dearing rose from his chair.

  “Sheriff?”

  He turned and looked down at me. For a brief moment I felt like the child I’d been. He knew what I was going to ask him; I could read it in his eyes.

  “Why is it still happening? How can this still be going on after all these years?”

  Dearing stepped back and sat down once again. “You can’t ask me that,” he said quietly. “That is a question we’ve been asking ourselves for a little more than six years.”

  “And you have nothing?”

  He made a sound like he was going to laugh, and I recognized the utter desperation in his eyes. “Nothing? We have eight dead girls, Joseph . . . I wouldn’t call that nothing.”

  “You know what I mean, Sheriff.”

  Dearing bowed his head. He placed his hands together, palm to palm. A man praying. “We have had our suspicions,” he said. “We have gone house to house through numerous different counties. We have requested assistance, but there’s been a war going on in case you hadn’t noticed. The people we need are needed elsewhere, you understand? These things have crossed town limits, county limits.” He stopped suddenly. “I don’t even know why I’m telling you this.” He smiled weakly, shook his head. “L
et’s just say that I make believe I’m going to step out one day and see him, and even though I have no idea what he looks like I’m just going to know it’s him, and—” He paused for a moment, looked away thoughtfully. “I’m not going to ask questions, Joseph . . . I’m not going to put handcuffs on him and drive him to the Sheriff’s Office. I’m just going to shoot him right where he stands, and then it will all be over.”

  “Six years,” I said. “Eight girls, if we don’t include Elena Kruger. And these last two, the ones in Meridan and Offerman?”

  “What about them?”

  “The same thing . . . the same manner of death?”

  “Yes, exactly the same . . . like he’s trying to bury what he’s done. Like he’s trying to break everything up and cast it to the four corners of the earth, but he can never bring himself to do it. He just leaves them lying there where they can be found . . .” Dearing stopped talking. “Enough,” he said. He rose from his chair once more, and for a moment he looked awkward, as if he realized he’d been speaking overlong. If ever I’d seen someone who needed to talk their heart out, it was Haynes Dearing.

  “The first ones were all connected to Augusta Falls, weren’t they?” I asked. “But now they’re spread out, right?”

  Dearing shook his head. “Time for you to go home, Joseph, time for you to go home.”

  “Don’t talk to strangers,” I said. “Don’t go with strangers. Stay alert. Stay safe.”

  Dearing looked at me closely. “You remember that?”

  “You remember the Guardians?”

  He frowned.

  “Me and Hans Kruger and the others. Daniel McRae, Ronnie Duggan, Michael and Maurice. That’s what we called ourselves. The Guardians. And the flyers you posted all over the place. You remember those, right?”

  “I remember catching a crowd of you out one night,” Dearing said. “Often wondered what the hell you thought you were doing.”

  I smiled. “We were doing something, Sheriff, that’s all. We were just trying to do something to help catch him.”

  “Jesus, you kids could have gotten yourselves into a whole heap of trouble.”

  “We were already in trouble, Sheriff. Someone was out there murdering children. Seems to me that that would classify as trouble enough, don’t you think?”

  Dearing nodded, and then he turned toward the door. “I have to go,” he said. “I have this thing to handle. Someone has to go and tell her parents.”

  “This is Fleming County. Shouldn’t Sheriff Landis be doing that?”

  Dearing looked down at me, and once again I felt like a child. “These days,” he said quietly, “we go in twos.”

  Fifteen minutes after Sheriff Dearing left the room, Deputy Edgewood came to drive me to Reilly’s pickup. I said nothing for the entire journey.

  FOURTEEN

  “FRIED CATFISH,” MY MOTHER SAID. “WE COULD HAVE OYSTERS Rockefeller to start, and then Country Captain with hush puppies, sweet potato pie and some fried catfish.” She laughed, flicked her hair back from her brow. “I do so love fried catfish, don’t you, my de-ah?”

  Alex glanced at me. I nodded. Alex turned back and smiled at my mother.

  “And then I could make pies. I make a mighty fine pie. Black bottom, or even honey walnut or blueberry slump. We could make hand-crank ice cream too, you know. My nurse could come. She loves a good pie. Her name’s Sister Margaret. She used to be a nun. The Holy Order of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Mary, see? Like my name. I do hear a lot of nuns like pie . . . you’ve heard that, Joseph?”

  “Yes, Mom, I’ve heard it,” I replied, consigned to the fact that my mother was of the belief that she would be entertaining Alex, her family, perhaps the better minority of Georgia at some sumptuous Southern banquet.

  “A brain fever,” she whispered to Alex. “I was taken with a brain fever last summer. Such an affliction, and I was overcome with such malaise and enervation. You’ve never seen the like of it. Anyway, I do hope everything works out fine with you and Joseph. Lord, I am so proud, just so proud of you both. You’re going to be married, of course?”

  I looked at my mother. Her hair was white and fine, flyaway grandmother hair. She was forty-one years old. She looked the better part of sixty. The skin on her face and hands was swollen, that was the only way I could describe it. Apparently the medication she took caused such a side effect. I couldn’t bear to think what they were giving her, and so I did not ask.

  It was Sunday. The previous night I had returned from Fleming. I’d stopped at Alex’s house and explained what had happened, that Sheriff Dearing had been there, that I’d spent some time with him.

  “Why?” she’d asked.

  “He had some questions, Alex, nothing important.”

  “Questions? Questions about what, Joseph?”

  “About the Krugers, that was all. They lived next door to us, we knew them well, perhaps better than anyone, and he wanted to know if there was anything that happened back then that might help him.”

  “And?”

  “Nothing,” I’d replied. “I couldn’t tell him anything.”

  I did not tell her about the other two girls, the ones from Meridan and Offerman.

  I’d stayed the night, slept beside her, aware that she’d lain awake for some considerable time, but I’d said nothing.

  Eventually she drifted away. I waited until the sound of her breathing was deep and even, and then I crept from the room, padded bare-foot along the upper landing, and stood looking through the narrow window at the end. The fields were flat and blue, the mist crawled in from the Okefenokee and hovered ghostlike above ground. Somewhere amongst those ghosts were the children we had lost. Walking now, their breath visible in the mist, hand in hand, each step leaving a footprint in the moist earth—and in back of them, bringing up the rear, watching them and making sure no harm came their way, was my father. My father, the angel.

  For a time I held my breath and thought about Alex. Thought about my mother. Thought about the life that had come running at me and caught me off guard. There were times I felt I’d had no time at all. Eighteen years in the beat of a heart. Other times it seemed that every emotion I could experience had been crammed into those years, handfuls jammed in one after the other until the very seams of my being were stretched and distended. And what did I have? My parents were gone—my father physically, my mother in spirit and mind. I had Alex, and even as I considered this I knew that the time would come when it could no longer exist. It was not so much the years between us, certainly not my viewpoint about such a difference, but the viewpoint of the world.

  A relationship was a trade-off: companionship against control of one’s life. There was no doubt in my mind that I loved Alexandra Webber, and even as I considered the events that had brought us together it still seemed unreal to me. I did not think of her as a schoolteacher, and perhaps never had. She had been a friend, that first and foremost, and I seemed to have lived my life with few friends. Reilly Hawkins, the Kruger children, Mathilde and Gunther themselves, for a time and in some particular way, the Guardians. Aside from such people there seemed to have been no one but Alex Webber, the woman who forced my hand and made me write.

  I walked back after a while, stood at the side of the bed and watched her as she slept. I listened to the sound of her breathing, even reached out and placed my hand above her breast so I could feel her heart. She was all I had. She meant so much to me; and yet I knew that whatever I might gain I would somehow lose.

  Later, I slept—restlessly, fitfully—and I dreamed of dead children walking through the fields of Georgia.

  The following morning, rising before Alex, I went out and bought a newspaper. I cut the clipping from it, a small two-inch column about a dead girl in Fleming. I placed it with the others—six in all—and thought of the two that were missing.

  “We should go and see my mother,” I said. “Her birthday was the nineteenth. Christmas is the day after tomorrow. I should go, Alex, I really should, and I wan
t you to come with me.”

  “So we go.” Like that, so matter-of-fact. “Reilly will let us use the pickup?”

  “Sure he will . . . but this time we don’t stop on the way.”

  She smiled, reached out toward me. I stepped toward her, took her hand, drew her close and held her. “I think we should cut your hair and shave your beard,” she said. “Make you look less like the crazy mountain man come down to scare up the villagers.”

  “Not now. Now we go see my mother.”

  Which is what we did, and we arrived without incident, and once we found my mother—in the sun lounge at the back of the building—I told her that Alex was my girlfriend.

  “Such a modern word,” she said. “Girlfriend.” She laughed. The sound was of someone else, not the woman who’d raised me. “You can stand in the sunlight,” she went on, raising her hand and indicating the lawns behind the building through the high windows of the sun lounge. “You can stand in the sunlight . . . feel the warmth of the sun. Feels like the fingerprints of God on your soul.” She turned and smiled at Alex, seemed to look right through her, like there was no recognition. I wondered if my mother even remembered her name. “And you can hear the voices of angels.” She looked at me directly. The sensation of something moving across the back of my neck made me shudder. Fleeting, like the shadow of a cloud on a field.

  “Angels?” I asked.

  My mother nodded, smiled again, but this time there was a heartbeat of connection, like she was looking at me and she saw her son. For real, she saw her son.

  “Angels,” she whispered. “Voices of angels . . . like those little girls, Joseph, the ones that went with the Devil, remember?”

  I nodded. I felt uncomfortable.

  She leaned closer to me. “Come,” she whispered, her tone con spiratorial.

  I leaned closer.

  “I know who took them,” she said.

  I frowned.

  “The little girls, Joseph . . . I know who took them.”

  “Took them?” I asked. I wondered what had really happened to my mother. I wondered about the mind, the way it worked, the manner in which it could malfunction and close down with such finality.