What happened to me. In the vast number of letters he’d received since writing his first book, it had never been a war wound which had done the devastation. Instead, his nameless correspondents spoke of kidnappings, tortures, murders, of lost relatives found at last floating in the estuary, curled in the ravine, hanging from the trees. They wrote of the sudden, inexplicable rages that still swept over them without warning or relief, the terrible winds that blew forever across the desert wastes of crime.
Charles Overton’s letters were different from these, very different. And Dora had caught their substance without compromise. They were the letters of one who had lost the will to live, who had been wounded so critically that more than his body had been devastated. The energy of life, its resilience and vitality, had been blasted from him, so that little remained but flesh in motion, a man going through the days until death came, like a friend, to take him to the oblivion he already desperately craved.
Now Kinley knew why Overton had crumpled at the first accusation and had finally trudged across the room to where the electric chair waited for him, like a mother with her arms outspread.
TWENTY
She was waiting for him when he pulled up to the old Dinker place at the base of the mountain. She was wearing dark-blue pants, and from a distance, appeared almost like a soldier in uniform, erect, as if on guard against the enemy’s advance.
“I’m off today,” she said as Kinley approached. “That’s why I can do this.”
Kinley nodded, his eyes moving over the curve of Dora’s shoulder, where he could see the old house’s charred remains, a dark ruin amid a grove of pine.
“It wasn’t much even then,” Dora said as she turned toward it. “At least, that’s what my mother told me.”
Kinley stared at the house, its cement steps leading upward into nothing, the pile of black rubble jutting harshly from beneath a collapsed tin roof which looked as if it had gone to seed long before the fire.
“This is where we met,” Dora said, as she continued to look at the devastated house. “Ray and I.”
“Here?” Kinley asked.
“I had just come down one day,” Dora went on, “following an urge, you might say. I was standing in the yard, and he pulled over. He was in his Sheriff’s Department car.” She smiled quietly. “He said, ‘If you’re thinking about buying this place, don’t do it.’”
“Did he say why?”
“Because it’s haunted, that’s what he told me then,” Dora went on, “haunted by Ellie Dinker.” She turned toward Kinley. “I told him no, not by Ellie Dinker, by Charles Overton.”
“Did he know what you meant?”
Dora nodded. “Yes, he did,” she said. “His face got very serious. He’d been smiling before, you know, the way he could, like a kid. But he got very serious.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s when it started.”
Kinley smiled quietly. It was a soft romantic tale, and he wondered why such a moment, leading as it did to such an experience, had never come his way. Perhaps, in the end, something his grandmother had once said to him was sufficient to explain it: You give off a chill …like your mother.
He felt his hand grasp for that invisible something which always seemed just beyond his reach, and he started to walk toward the house.
“Ellie left from the backyard,” he said as Dora stepped up beside him. “That’s what Mrs. Dinker said.”
Moments later they stood in the backyard. It was a field of bare, muddy ground broken by small islands of gently undulating weeds and grasses which finally disappeared into the dense mountain forest that surrounded it like a huge green wall.
It was into that forest that Ellie Dinker had disappeared at around noon on July 2, 1954.
“She took that trail,” Kinley said, his arm rising almost involuntarily, the lean index finger pointing toward a narrow break in the dense underbrush. He looked at Dora. “That’s the first question,” he said. “Why did she go in that direction, if she were heading for Helen Slater’s house?” His arm drifted far to the left of the trail’s entrance, then rose toward the distant crest of the mountain. “Helen Slater lives over there, beyond that hill. Ellie Dinker didn’t go in that direction at all when she left that morning.” He looked at her. “Why?”
Dora made no effort to answer him but followed along as Kinley moved further into the yard, his eyes doing the studied and precise inventory he had taught them to carry out, noting the scattering of wood, the broken metal swings, the covered well, the small smokehouse, its door hanging from a single rusty hinge, all the tiny, incidental items whose importance lay in the mood they set, the sense of loss or abandonment that rose from them like a barely whispered song.
“She took this trail,” Kinley said when he and Dora reached the forest wall. He looked at his watch. “Seven-twenty-four,” he said. “All right. Let’s go at a reasonable pace, and see how long it takes to get to the mountain road.”
They entered the forest together, walking side by side until, as they continued on, the surrounding woods drew in upon the trail, narrowing it to a slender brown thread. The green shadows crouching in the distance seemed almost palpable, not so much areas of deepened color as breathing, watchful presences, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, the legions of the night whose snarls and groans Kinley remembered hearing as he tossed sleeplessly in his small room overlooking the canyon, his child’s mind as fierce and wild as any of the creatures it invented.
After a moment, the slope of the mountain suddenly grew more radical, and he could feel his heart beating heavily in his chest, the breath in his lungs thickening, as it seemed, to the consistency of water, and he felt like a creature submerged in the suffocating, green slime which rested, heavy and motionless, on the surface of stagnant waters.
“Let’s stop here,” he said when the trail broke into an unexpected clearing.
“City boy,” Dora said with a small smile. “You’re not used to this.”
Kinley glanced at his watch and made a mental note of the time, seven-forty-two, and fifteen seconds. “We’ll go on in a minute,” he assured her.
“She might have stopped here, too,” Dora told him.
Kinley’s hands reached for a slender, low-slung limb, as if grasping for it desperately to save him from a fall. “Yes, she might have,” he said. “She’d have been walking for twenty minutes by then,”
“And almost straight up,” Dora added. Her eyes crawled up the mountainside. “To where my father waited.”
“Except you don’t believe that,” Kinley reminded her.
“I know he couldn’t have had anything to do with Ellie Dinker, if that’s what you mean,” Dora said. She looked at him pointedly. “Did you read the letters?”
“Yes.”
“And?”
“He was broken, like you said,” Kinley told her. “Did your mother ever tell you what the wound was? He never gives any details.”
“His legs,” Dora said. “That’s where he was hit. Both legs, she said. He walked with a limp.”
“More a shuffle,” Kinley told her.
She looked at him curiously. “How did you know that?”
Kinley hesitated, wished he’d kept it to himself. “Well, I read a description of his …of his death.”
“You mean, his execution.”
“The writer mentioned how he walked,” Kinley added.
Dora’s face suddenly took on an attitude which entirely contradicted what she’d previously said about her father, his weakness, his cowardice, the natural role he had assumed as spineless victim. In an instant, all of that was swept away, and amid the deep green shadows, her face miraculously grew even deeper, as if suddenly enriched by the love she still felt—would always feel—for her unknown father. Her eyes lifted toward Kinley, glistening slightly despite the shadowy light. “Why can’t I let him go?”
“Be glad you can’t,” he told her.
“Why?”
He was not sure why, he realized, but only sensed that certai
n feelings should be a part of every life, and that if you never achieved the full range, certain losses were incurred, although he could not calculate exactly what they were.
“Why should I be glad?” Dora repeated.
Kinley thought of his own parents, dead, dead, dead. “Because you’ve come to know him a little,” he said. “I never learned much of anything about mine.”
She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Ray told me. A car accident when you were three years old.”
Kinley felt his old uneasiness rise again, the uncomfortable sense that he was about to whine about his orphan state as he’d seen so many others do, using it to justify the things they’d later done: If I hadn’t been abandoned, I wouldn’t have robbed, raped, killed. It was an excuse he’d heard too often to feel anything for it but contempt.
“We’d better head on up now,” he said, avoiding any further discussion of his own early life.
They began the long trudge up the mountain once again, Kinley in the lead, Dora close behind. He could hear her breathing almost as if it were his own, feel the shift of her feet on the ground behind him, and for a moment he thought that this must be what Ray had wanted most in his life, a companion in the forest, someone with you on the trail.
They reached the mountain road a half-hour later, and Kinley glanced at his watch. It was now seven minutes after eight, and after subtracting the brief pause on the way up, he calculated the approximate length of time it would have taken Ellie Dinker to make it from her house to the road.
“About half an hour,” Kinley said as he looked up from his watch. “Which means that she would have gotten here at about twelve-thirty in the afternoon.”
Dora nodded.
“And according to witnesses, your father left the courthouse at twelve-thirty on the dot,” Kinley added. “Which means he would have gotten here at around twelve-thirty-five.” He glanced up toward the mountain’s crest, where he could nearly see the rim where he’d stood with Helen Slater only the day before, the two of them staring down toward Sequoyah, their eyes fixed on the great gray face of the courthouse. “It would only take another hour or so to climb the rest of the way up,” he said. “It couldn’t possibly take any longer than that.”
Dora glanced up toward the mountain, but said nothing.
“She was supposed to meet Helen Slater at five in the evening,” Kinley said. He looked at Dora. “Why would she have left her house so early?”
Dora shook her head. “I don’t know.”
“But she didn’t go on up the mountain,” Kinley added. “Or anywhere else for that matter.”
“What do you mean?”
“If she got here by twelve-thirty, and your father didn’t get here until twelve-forty-five or so …”
“Then she must have waited,” Dora blurted.
“That’s right,” Kinley said. “For a good five or ten minutes. Standing along the roadside, like your father said she was.” His eyes settled on a slender white column. “By that mile marker right there.”
Dora looked at the marker. “Just standing there,” she said, almost to herself, then glanced back at Kinley. “Why?”
Kinley shook his head. “That’s what we have to find out.”
She looked at him doubtfully. “Do you think you can?”
“I don’t know, Dora.”
“Ray couldn’t.”
“Maybe he just ran out of time.”
She shook her head determinedly. “No,” she said firmly, “he told me he’d come up with nothing, that there were no more leads to follow.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“The day before he died.”
“Did you believe him?”
Dora stared at him pointedly. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “I had the feeling he’d given up.”
“Why?”
She shrugged slightly. “Maybe he got tired.”
“Did he seem tired?”
“No.”
“How did he seem?”
She considered it a moment, searching for the right word. “Lost,” she said finally, “like he didn’t know what to do.”
TWENTY-ONE
Kinley took his seat at Ray’s desk, turned on his computer and typed in the relevant code: OVER:MYS.
Then he typed in the first series of questions under the heading:
QUESTIONS CONCERNING ELLIE DINKER
1)Why did Ellie Dinker want to meet at the Slater house instead of her own, which would have been much closer to their ultimate destination, the courthouse in Sequoyah?
2)Why did she leave for Helen’s five hours before she needed to?
3)Why did she move in a direction opposite to the one she should have taken if she’d been planning to go directly to the Slater house?
4)Why did she stop on the mountain road?
Once the questions had been recorded, Kinley returned to the only account he had of Ellie Dinker’s whereabouts after leaving her house at the base of the mountain, Overton’s initial statement to Sheriff Maddox.
He read it over carefully, then read it again, his eyes moving slowly from word to word, waiting for something to emerge that might give him a clue. Sheriff Maddox had been dead for several years, but as he went through the statement the Sheriff had given of his talk with Overton, he noted one particular reference to a third person in Maddox’s testimony at Overton’s trial:
WARFIELD: Now, Sheriff, did you have occasion to talk to Charles Overton after his arrest?
MADDOX: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: When was this, Sheriff?
MADDOX: Well, I got in the backseat of Patrolman Hendricks’s car, and he drove the two of us down to the Sheriff’s Department.
WARFIELD: So you were in the backseat with Overton at that time?
MADDOX: Yes, sir.
WARFIELD: And Deputy Hendricks was driving?
MADDOX: Yes, he was.
Deputy Hendricks had been driving the patrol car as Overton and Maddox spoke about Ellie Dinker in the backseat.
According to Ben Wade, Hendricks had retired not long after the Overton trial, and now worked at South Side High School. Kinley glanced at his watch, his mind calculating the probable times for class breaks if things hadn’t changed drastically since he’d been in high school.
He arrived at South Side High a few minutes later, walked into the office, and asked for Riley Hendricks.
“He’s in class right now,” the woman behind the desk told him.
“When will he be out?”
“That would be lunch period, at eleven-thirty.”
“Could I leave a message for him?”
“Why sure,” the woman said cheerfully. “I’ll take it myself.”
“Just tell him that someone would like to talk to him,” Kinley said. “I’ll be waiting in the faculty parking lot.”
“You want to leave your name?” the woman asked.
“That’s okay.” He moved to the office door, then turned. “By the way, so I don’t miss him, what kind of car does he drive?”
“It’s a Chevrolet, I believe,” the woman said, “a light green station wagon.”
Kinley nodded. “Thanks.”
Kinley walked out of the school, made a hard left and headed into the faculty parking lot. He could see the green Chevrolet sitting beside a large orange dumpster, and for the next few minutes he watched it casually, his eyes only occasionally glancing up toward the mountain, as if drawn there involuntarily.
After only a short time, he saw Riley Hendricks walk energetically out the back door of the school and head toward his car. He was smaller than Kinley had expected, leaner too, as if he’d been careful to keep his fighting weight despite the onslaught of late middle age.
From his position a few yards away, Kinley advanced toward him slowly, coming up from the right, just as Hendricks was opening the door to his car.
“Excuse me,” Kinley said. “You’re Riley Hendricks, aren’t you?”
Hendricks turned to face him. “Yes, I
am.”
“I left a message for you at the school office,” Kinley told him.
“You did?” Hendricks asked. “Well, I didn’t go back to the office.” He smiled sheepishly. “To tell you the truth, I stay out of the office as much as I can.”
“I wanted to talk to you in private for a minute,” Kinley said.
Hendricks gave him a wary, apprehensive look. “You do? What about?”
“An old murder case.”
“Murder case?” Hendricks asked doubtfully, adding nothing else. “Well, who are you, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“My name’s Jack Kinley.”
“Are you with the Justice Department or something?”
Kinley shook his head. “No, I’m a writer,” he said. “I was a friend of Ray Tindall’s.”
Something seemed to catch in Hendricks’s mind. “I see.”
“Ray was working on the same case.”
Hendricks said nothing.
“The Dinker case,” Kinley added.
Hendricks stared at him stonily. “I didn’t have much to do with that,” he said. “That was Sheriff Maddox’s doing.”
“Doing?”
“He handled it,” Hendricks said quickly, “not me.”
“You mean the questioning?”
“I mean everything,” Hendricks said flatly. “I was just a rookie in those days.”
Kinley slowly drew the notebook from his coat pocket and opened it to Sheriff Maddox’s testimony. “You drove the car when Maddox questioned Overton.”
Hendricks nodded slowly, with a strange reluctance, as if the admission made him culpable.
“At the trial, Sheriff Maddox testified about what Overton said to him while you drove them down the mountain,” Kinley told him. “Did you hear that testimony?”