A Quiet Belief in Angels

  “Took them all to Hell,” she hissed.

  I felt suddenly and intensely overwhelmed. I glanced sideways at Alex. She looked as nervous as I felt.

  I reached out and took my mother’s hand.

  Her eyes were clear blue and fixed, like a light shone in back of them. “They’re all out there,” she said. “Alice and Laverna, Ellen May, Catherine . . . the one you found, Joseph, what was her name?”

  I shook my head. “You know her name, Mom.”

  “Virginia, right?”

  “Right, Mom, Virginia Perlman.”

  “I hear them all, and your father too, and sometimes I can hear Elena. She says she’s waiting for me, and she’ll wait as long as it takes, and when I get there I can hold her hand and show her the way.”

  “Mom . . . please.”

  She paused for a moment, perhaps offended by my interruption, and then she nodded, winked as if we were engaged in some unspoken collusion. “It’s okay, Joseph, not another word. But you must promise me something, Joseph.”

  “What, Mom, what do you want me to promise?”

  “That you’ll speak with Sheriff Dearing, and tell him what I’ve said. Tell him to come and see me. Tell him that I know the truth. Tell him that I know who this child killer is.”

  My heart was closed like a fist. “Yes,” I said, and even as the word left my lips I wondered if I would ever really speak with my mother again. Ever speak with the woman who had raised me, the woman who’d loved my father, the woman who’d buried him and carried on living for no other reason than her son. “I’ll tell him,” I whispered, my voice cracking with emotion, my fists clenched, every ounce of will I owned required to hold back my tears. “Soon as I get back I’ll tell him.” I smiled as best I could. I hoped beyond hope that she wouldn’t say such things to the doctors, to the other patients. God knows what they would have done to her had she told them she was talking with dead husbands and murdered little girls, that she knew the identity of a child killer who’d evaded the police of several counties for so many years.

  And it was then that she spoke about Oysters Rockefeller and blueberry slump, about the banquet she would prepare for us, for her nurse, for the elite of Georgia. She became the vague and distant woman I had come to expect, and there was no light behind her eyes, and there were no words about the dead.

  We stayed a while longer, as long as I could bear to sit with the woman who’d once been my mother, and then we wished our good-byes.

  “So sad,” Alex whispered. She took my arm and sort of pulled me close as we walked away. “Such a cultured and intelligent woman, and now . . .” Her voice trailed away into a fragile silence.

  We found Nurse Margaret, my mother’s nurse. She was painfully thin; her features seemed almost vague, like a watercolor painting. Her eyes were pale gray and washed-out, as if she’d spent the vast majority of her life in tears. A Southern spinster I guessed, her lips thin and pursed, her manner tied up tight like a corset, the kind of woman that longed for love but would never find it.

  “She told you that . . . that I was a nun?” she said. “Lord almighty . . . I can imagine I’d be the last person in the world to be considered for such a thing.” She shook her head. “No, I’m just Margaret, straight and simple, nothing more complicated than that.” She smiled warmly, and then steered Alex and me away from the people who sat waiting in the room beyond the sun lounge.

  “She manages somehow,” Margaret said. “Every once in a while you can see something, like there’s a light behind her eyes, and that’s the real Mary that must have existed before the illness.”

  “What is wrong with her?” Alex asked. She glanced at me, almost as if she was afraid I’d be offended by her asking.

  Margaret smiled sympathetically. “I’m no psychiatrist, dear,” she said. “If you want an opinion then you should speak with her doctor. All I know is what I hear, and what I hear doesn’t make a great deal of sense. I don’t know that anyone really understands what happens when people . . .” Margaret looked at me, then at Alex. “No one really knows what happens when people turn.” She sighed and shook her head. “I wish I did know, then at least I’d feel like I could do something to help.”

  Alex turned to me. “We should see her doctor.”

  I shook my head. “I’ve seen him numerous times. They don’t know what’s wrong with her, never have, probably never will. All they’re trying to do is keep her quiet.”

  “It’s the voices she hears,” Margaret said, and she glanced at both of us in turn, something fearful in her gray, washed-out eyes. “The little girls?” she added, and then looked directly at me as if I would elucidate for her.

  I said nothing.

  “She can speak about the weather, about flowers in the gardens, about other patients.” Margaret was fussing with the edge of her dress pocket. “Seems she’s all there, you know? Can sit and talk for an hour, sometimes more, and you think she’s mending fine, making sense and then suddenly, out of nowhere she’s talking to someone else, someone you can’t see. So I say to her, I say ‘Mary? Who are you talking to dear?’ and she turns and looks at me like I’m the crazy one, and she says, ‘Why, Margaret, I’m talking to’ and then she says some little girl’s name as far as I can gather, and off she goes, telling whoever she sees something about her day, talking to someone called Earl.”

  I nodded. “Earl was her husband. He died back in ’39.”

  Margaret smiled, like she’d been asked a question and got it right. “Yes, Earl,” she repeated. “Talking about something she did with Earl, and even when you walk away she’s still there talking away, talking like there’ll not be any time to talk tomorrow.” Margaret stopped suddenly. She looked awkward, looked like she’d said too much. “I’m sorry,” she blurted. “It’s not my place to be speaking about such things. I do apologize. It’s just that you’re the only ones who’ve visited with her in such a long time. There’s the other gentleman. He’s been a few times, but he never stays long . . .”

  “Haynes Dearing,” I said.

  Margaret shook her head. “I don’t know his name. He never told me and I’ve never asked.”

  I reached out my hand and touched her arm. “It’s okay,” I said. “You’ve been real helpful, Margaret. It’s been very good speaking with you. Please don’t feel as though you’ve said anything out of turn.”

  Margaret smiled. With her washed-out eyes she glanced back and forth as if expecting someone to appear. I wondered how long it would be before Margaret was having conversations with people who weren’t there.

  We left without seeing Doctor Gabillard. I didn’t even ask if Gabillard was still attending to my mother. There was no purpose in speaking further.

  “You really think there’s nothing else that can be done?” Alex asked me as we drove away from Waycross Community Hospital.

  “She’s been there nearly four years, Alex.”

  Alex opened her mouth to say something, perhaps to ask another question, but nothing came forth. She looked at me, seated there in the passenger seat as we drove in Reilly Hawkins’ pickup toward the highway. I glanced back at her and there was nothing in her expression, a simple statement of nothing. Her eyes were empty, as if she’d seen all there was to see and little else remained.

  I reached out and gripped her hand for a moment. “I’ve been coming out here for an awful long time. After a year, eighteen months, it stopped feeling like I was visiting my mother. Now I just come out of duty, more for the memory of my father than anything else.”

  “You remember telling me about the angels?” Alex asked.

  I smiled. “Don’t remind me of that.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I was very young at the time, and you were most definitely my schoolteacher, and that makes what we’re doing now awful strange.”

  “You feel that way?”

  I shook my head. “Not until you start talking about angels and the Atlanta Short Story Competition, and giving me a book by Ste
inbeck for my birthday.”

  “You should write a book about all of this,” she said.

  I frowned. “All of what?”

  “Your life. Your father, the little girls that were killed, what happened to the Krugers, what happened to your mother, us . . . all these things. You should write your autobiography.”

  I started laughing. “I’m eighteen, Alex, eighteen years old. You make it sound like I haven’t got a great deal more life to live.”

  “Do you think she knows?”

  “Eh?”

  “Your mother? Do you think she knows who did it?”

  I shook my head. “Alex, my mother is crazy. She’s in the psychi atric wing of the Waycross Community Hospital. She has conversations with my father, and he’s been dead since July of 1939. I am sure she has absolutely no idea who was responsible—”

  “Is responsible, Joseph. The killings are still going on.”

  “Okay, okay . . . I am quite certain that she has absolutely no idea who is responsible for these things.”

  “But what if she does know? What if knowing this and not being able to do anything about it is what has made her this way—”

  “Made her crazy, Alex. What if knowing this thing has made her crazy. Let’s say it how it is. We know each other well enough not to walk in circles around this thing. She’s crazy. She’s bughouse, nuts—”

  “Stop it!” Alex snapped. “Enough!”

  “And enough from you, Alex. Jesus, I don’t wanna hear anymore about this thing, okay? She does not know who killed these girls . . . sorry, who is killing these girls. She does not know. She has never known and I am sure she never will. She will go on living at Waycross. She will probably be there for the rest of her life, and I will keep on visiting her until I can’t take it anymore, or until she doesn’t even recognize who I am. Then I will be sorry, but at the same time I will feel a tremendous burden lift from my shoulders, because you have no idea, no idea at all, how it is to go out there and listen to your own mother holding rapt conversations with dead people, especially when one of them happens to be your own father.”

  “I’m sorry—” she started.

  I looked at her. I reached out my hand and touched the side of her face. “Alex, I love you. I love you more than anything or anyone in the world. I’m not mad at you. I’m not even slightly angry at you. I’m upset about the situation. There’s nothing I can do about it except get upset every once in a while, but it’s not about you. If anything, it’s directed at the people at Waycross, the ones who said they would do something to help her and seem to have made her worse. That’s all there is to it. What happens to my mother, who she is, how she behaves . . . these are not things that you should concern yourself with. They’re certainly not things that I want to have come between us.” I paused to catch my breath. “That’s all there is to it, nothing more, nothing less, and really, really, I don’t want to talk about it anymore, okay?”

  “Okay,” she said quietly. She reached up and held my hand, kissed my palm. She smiled, and in the vague light of a Georgia evening, with the warm breeze coming through the open window of the pickup, she looked like more than I could ever have wished for.

  She closed her eyes, squeezed my hand once more, and then let it go.

  I looked back toward the empty road ahead of us.

  We did not speak for a long time, and when we did the words we shared were of no lasting consequence.

  After the killing in Fleming of the Keppler girl, after visiting my mother and listening to her talk her own special kind of crazy, I wondered if I was destined to carry the weight of these ghosts for all time. If I, somehow, could have done something to stop these killings, and in doing nothing I had consigned myself to carrying a burden of guilt for the rest of my life.

  After the Keppler girl the dreams came more frequently.

  I dreamed I was murdered. Dreamed I had run like the wind through trees and fields with the awareness of something behind me, something I could not see but could perceive with as strong a sense of certainty as my own name.

  I dreamed I was being hunted. Dreamed I was growing ever more tired with each step, a bone-deep exhaustion, a fatigue of the mind, the heart, the soul. Slowing down though, slowing and stumbling, until the thing behind was upon me, and I looked up into deadlight eyes, and screamed a scream of silence, and when the silence ended there was a deeper, greater silence, a silence that swallowed me whole and would never release me.

  And then I was lifted to the back of a flatbed truck, and Kruger was there, and he wept over me, and his tears fell down and touched my skin. Lowell Shaner, Frank Turow, Reilly Hawkins . . . they were all there, and looking from the back of the truck as we dipped below the rise I could see my mother, behind her the ghosts of dead children. And they wept silently, and there was a sense of everything coming to an end . . . and a sense of knowing something, knowing who had been there, who was inside my invisible certainty as I ran across fields and through undergrowth, as my feet staggered heavy and slow through the edges of the Okefenokee Swamp . . . and there was music, music like they played in church.

  And then I was buried, my expression frozen in terror for all time. I was lowered into the ground in my Sunday bows and brights, my shined shoes, my combed hair, and people stood around the hole as it grew deeper and deeper, and there was the sound of earth falling onto me, and I knew I would lie right there for eternity, and the grass would grow, and the seasons would change, and people I had loved would age and die, and there would be silence in my mind instead of voices . . .

  I would be there, my thoughts forever touching on the edge of certainty . . . that I’d known who it was . . .

  And he wasn’t a silhouette on a flyer pinned to a fence post. He wasn’t any kind of silhouette at all. He was a human being—a real flesh-and-blood, eating, breathing, talking human being.

  And he was out there.

  Somewhere.

  FIFTEEN

  CHRISTMAS 1945. PATTON DIED FROM INJURIES HE SUSTAINED IN a car crash in Germany. The man who’d conquered Sicily in thirty-eight days, who had suffered two demotions as a result of his cantankerous attitude, was fatally wounded on a lonely stretch of road. It seemed the darkest irony, and in some way a perfect reflection of how the world deemed it necessary to treat us human beings. Alex went to see her folks in Syracuse two days after Christmas. She planned to be gone for a week or so. I drove her to the bus station in Augusta Falls, and I waited with her. When the bus pulled away I realized that I had no reason to go home and so I stayed in town for a while. I sat in a diner on Manassas Street and watched people walk from one place to another. Despite the season they all seemed eager to leave and unwilling to arrive, faces slow and expectant, their lives stretched out between ungrateful kids and senile parents. Little enough for themselves in the middle. Perhaps that’s just how it was. When I left I saw Sheriff Haynes Dearing across the street. He raised his hand and waved me over.

  “Out and about?” he asked.

  “I drove Alex up here to take the bus to Syracuse.”

  “Seeing her folks?”

  “Yes, she’s gone to see them for the New Year.”

  “You didn’t want to go with her?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t much care for the airs and graces necessary when you’re someone’s guest.”

  “I’m the same,” Dearing said. “The wife has her sister and husband over, and though it’s our house she’s always fussing and minding things in such an irritating manner. I can’t be doin’ with such business myself.”

  I nodded. I wanted to head home.

  “You on the way back?” Dearing asked.

  “I am, yes.”

  “You’re in a hurry, right?” he asked, but the way he asked it wasn’t so much a question as a challenge to refuse his company.

  “A hurry? Hell, no more than any other time, Sheriff. There’s things to be done, always things to be done, as you well know.”

  “But you have a little time fo
r me, time to share a cigarette and talk about some things?” Once again the question he asked was more a statement or an invitation to counter him.

  “I never did get the hang of smoking cigarettes,” I said. “Tried a few times, made me feel rough. Talking I can do, never had much of a problem with that.”

  “So walk with me down to my office, just social, and see if you can’t clarify some things for me, why don’tcha?”

  “Is that really a question, Sheriff?”

  Dearing smiled and shook his head. “Hell no, I don’t s’pose it is, Joseph.”

  “I’ll come, and of my own volition. Wouldn’t want you thinking I had anything to hide.”

  “Good enough, Joseph, good enough,” Dearing said, and he turned and led the way.

  Sheriff Dearing’s office was like an outhouse for pieces of his personality he didn’t want to carry. Up on the wall he’d hammered some boards, nothing more than plain deal sheets, upon which he’d stabbed thumbtacks through photos, tickets, certificates of this and that, coupons, vouchers from Hot Shoppes and Howard Johnson’s, the side of a Cream of Wheat cereal box, a Betty Crocker recipe for apple pandowdy that looked like it’d been cut from a newspaper, a kid’s wax crayon drawing of “Sheref Derin,” a chart detailing the phonetic alphabet, a scale telling all kinds of weights and measures and distances, and other such things. Far right-hand corner was a printed legend headed U.S. Postal Service, beneath it their motto: Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. Dearing noticed how it caught my attention.

  “My father,” he said, “delivered the mail. Helluva thing. Forty-some years. Hang that up there to remind me of his persistence and resilience, and because it kinda fits with what I do.”

  I frowned.

  “Not delivering mail. More like delivering the facts, you know?” He smiled, sort of shrugged his shoulders, and sat heavily in his chair. The chair—wooden-slatted, wheels on its base—creaked uncomfortably beneath his weight. “Hell, I don’t know, Joseph, maybe there’s no similarity at all . . . maybe ‘To Protect and Serve’ didn’t seem important-sounding enough.” He laughed to himself. “Sit down,” he said. “You want some coffee or something?”