But he didn’t. Instead, as he sat down on the sofa by the window, he thought about something else entirely, a place about as far from Maine as he could imagine, the northern Appalachian foothills of Georgia in which he’d been brought up by Granny Dollar, the maternal grandmother who’d taken him in after his parents had been killed in an automobile accident.
Granny Dollar had died only two months before, and since then he’d noticed his tendency to drift back to his past from time to time, quietly, unexpectedly, in those dead moments when his work left him, and he found himself alone in his apartment, wifeless, childless, with only Granny Dollar to remind him of the texture of family life he’d once known.
That texture had been very dense, indeed, it seemed to him now. She’d raised him in almost complete solitude, the two of them perched on an isolated ridge overlooking a desolate canyon, with nothing but the sounds of crickets and night birds to break the silence that surrounded them. Since that time he’d been a loner, and over the years, he’d come to believe that for people like himself, the true solitaires, it was better to have no one to answer to, wonder about, no one whose affections mattered more to him than the esteem he expected from the little Chinese woman who did his shirts: Goo to see you, Missur Kahnley.
He was working at his desk when the phone rang. He looked at the clock. It was just nearly seven-thirty, so he suspected it might be Wendy, still chewing at her idea. It could not be Phyllis, his old-time drinking buddy, because she was on assignment in Venezuela. As for the type of woman other men spent so much time searching for, or trying to figure out, Kinley had long ago admitted that the Mythical She had either eluded him or he had eluded her. Instead, he dwelt in harmony with the dark-eyed murderesses of his work, admiring their coldly calculating eyes, the edge of cruelty and dominion which clung to their false smiles, their minds even more intricate, limitless and unknowable than his own.
The phone rang a third time, and he glanced at the message machine. He’d turned it off when he’d started to work, and now regretted it. There was no choice but to pick up the phone.
“Yes?” he answered curtly.
“Hello, Mr. Kinley?”
“Yes.”
“It’s Serena Tindall.”
He thought it was odd that she’d said her last name, but he made nothing of it. “Hello, Serena,” he said. “Are you in New York?”
“No, I’m at home,” Serena said. “For summer break. I’ve been working at the high school.”
“Your father’s old stomping ground.”
He heard her breath catch in that tense, briefly suspended way he’d often heard others pause before making the great plunge into their tragic tales. “It’s about Daddy,” she said.
“Ray? What? What is it?”
Her voice broke as she told him. “He died this afternoon.”
He tried to continue with his transcription of the Spinola interview after talking to Serena, but found he couldn’t, so after a while, he poured himself another scotch and sat down at the small desk by the window. On the hanging shelf just above it, he’d arranged all his books, as if he still needed solid, physical evidence of how far he’d come from where he’d started. Up north, he sometimes referred to his native region as “Deliverance country,” but in his own mind, it had always remained “Ray’s country.” Joe Ray Tindall.
Kinley turned on his computer as if, with Ray gone, it was now his only completely reliable friend, and wrote out Ray’s name. Including it among the body of data he’d accumulated in his work seemed to give it an honored resting place, and for a moment, Kinley stared at the name, his mind conjuring up the face that went with it. It was a large, broad-boned face, and Kinley could clearly recall the first time he’d seen it. He’d been standing in the crowded corridor of Sequoyah High, small, timid, aloof, not only the new boy in school, but the one who’d been singled out by a group of Yankee IQ researchers, branded “very superior” by their tests, and reported, almost like a dangerous alien, to the Sequoyah County Board of Education. The Board had subsequently pulled him from his mountain grammar school and rushed him down into the valley to join, at mid-year, the more advantaged freshman class of Sequoyah High School.
Ray had been the first person to speak to him there, an oversized boy clad in blue jeans and a checkered shirt, staring at him from across the hail, his eyes, as they always were, motionless and intense, as if taking aim before finally speaking to him.
You that freshman from up on the mountain?
Yes.
The one that’s supposed to be a genius?
I guess.
Special tests and everything, you must be a whiz. My name’s Ray Tindall.
Jackson Kinley.
Sounds like two last names. You give them to me in the right order?
Yeah.
You ever go hunting?
Yeah.
Maybe we’ll go up to the canyon sometimes, shoot something.
Okay.
How about this Saturday? I’ll meet you on the road to Rocky Ridge. Then we’ll just head into the woods up there.
Okay.
Kinley peered at the name on the screen. He typed something else under it: ROCKY RIDGE. That’s where they’d gone that first time. And as it turned out, it was also where they’d found Ray face down on the forest’s leafy floor. It was the only question he’d asked Serena beyond the usual ones about the funeral: “What was he doing down in the canyon?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who found him?”
“Some old man who lives up on the ridge.”
“Was Ray on a case?”
“He was always on a case. That’s just the way he was.”
“What was it anyway?”
“I don’t know. Something in the District Attorney’s Office, I guess.”
“No, Serena. I’m sorry. I meant, what killed him?”
“Oh. Well, it was probably his heart.”
It had not been a soft heart, in the sense of great compassion or an infinitely extended understanding, Kinley thought as he continued to sit at his desk, still watching the computer screen, but it was a rich, difficult, complicated heart. There was something about Ray that could never be figured out exactly. Even the way he looked led you slightly off the mark. He had had wiry reddish-brown hair and a sallow complexion that easily burned in the summer sun. He had not been an intimidatingly large man, but when he came into a room, he seemed to shrink it just a bit. He had liked the woods but hated the water, loved fast cars but avoided planes, talked religion but never gone to church, read but rarely spoken of what he read. There had been something mysterious about him, something Kinley had noticed even that first day in the canyon, the way his eyes seemed to focus on something far away, unreachable even when he spoke of something near at hand, perhaps no further than a short walk into the woods.
There’s an old house down here, but nobody lives in it anymore.
In the canyon? Where?
Not far from here. You want to see it?
I guess.
It’s the perfect place. You can only find it if you really look hard.
Even now, it was impossible for Kinley to know why he’d followed Ray down the narrow, granite ledge and into the dark labyrinth of the canyon. He could remember the frothy green river that had tumbled along the canyon bottom, the sounds of its waters moving softly through the trees, even the unseasonably cool breeze that shook the slender green fingers of the pines, then swooped down to rifle through the leaves at his feet. It was his one great gift. He could remember everything.
And now he remembered that as they’d advanced on the house, the going had gotten rougher, the sharp claws of the briers grabbing at his shirt, low-slung limbs suddenly flying into his face like quick slaps to warn him back. The last hundred yards had seemed to take forever, as if the air had thickened, turned to an invisible gelatin which had to be plowed through as ardously as the bramble. It had taken them almost an hour to make it to the general vicinity of the
old house Ray had spoken of, and by that time, Kinley remembered, the trek had begun to exhaust him, his legs growing more feeble with each step, his breathing more labored and hard-won, the old plague of his asthma snatching at his breath. It had been enough to rouse his new friend’s concern.
Kinley, are you all right? We don’t have to keep going.
How far is it?
Not far. Just through those last trees. Then we hit the vines.
What vines?
The ones around the house. Like a wall almost. You want to keep going?
Yes.
Okay, let’s go.
The wall of vines had been exactly as Ray described it, a tall impenetrable drapery of coiling green that hung from the trees and sprouted from the ground simultaneously, its sticky shafts so covered with the dry husks of thousands of insects that in certain places the vines themselves appeared like lengths of tightly knotted rope. The very look of it, Kinley remembered now, had unnerved him so much that he’d actually drawn back, his breath now coming in short, agonized gasps.
I think we’d better stop, Kinley.
Why?
You need to get back. I think you may need a doctor.
No.
You can’t really get to the old house anyway. There’s no break in the vines.
But I want …
No.
Ray had said it just that firmly. There was to be no argument in the matter. They would go no further. Then he’d taken Kinley by the arm and led him away, the great wall of green disappearing behind him forever.
“Forever,” Kinley whispered now, realizing that they’d never tried to find the old shack after that, but had simply let it sink, first from their conversation, then from their boyhood plans, and finally from their remembered hopes.
The phone rang again around ten. It was Serena again.
“I just wanted to tell you about the autopsy,” she said. “My mother called to let me know, and I thought you might want to hear about it, too.”
“Yes, I do.”
“It was a heart attack,” Serena said. “Massive. That’s what the doctor said. Massive.”
“So he died quickly,” Kinley said before he could stop himself.
“And so young,” Serena said. “I guess that’s why they wanted an autopsy.”
“Who did?”
“Mr. Warfield,” Serena said, “the District Attorney, the man he worked for.”
“Ray was working for the District Attorney’s Office?”
“Yeah. He didn’t run for Sheriff again. Didn’t he tell you that?”
“No.”
“Well, I guess he just got tired of it, decided not to run. That’s when he took this job with the District Attorney.”
“I see.”
“Anyway, Mr. Warfield wanted an autopsy.”
“It’s probably a good idea.”
“You know about this kind of thing, I guess. From your work, I mean.”
“A little.”
“He was a good man,” Serena said. “I’m just sorry he had to die alone, way down in the canyon.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “Looking for something, I guess. What do you think it was?”
Kinley shook his head silently. Maybe just a way through the vines, he thought.
THREE
By mid-morning his travel service had made all the arrangements for his flight to Atlanta late that night. A rental car would be waiting for him there, and by midnight he expected to be back in Sequoyah, his hometown.
In the meantime, there was work to be done, and he spent the better part of the day doing it. First he transcribed his interview with Maria Spinola, reading it carefully once again as he typed it out. There was always a chance that something might be missed, a small detail that could bring a human touch to otherwise inhuman events.
As he read, he could hear Spinola’s voice again as she’d said her last words to him: Is he sorry? She meant Norwood, was he sorry for what he’d done to her. He’d known what she wanted to hear, that Norwood was racked by nightmares, that his screams of remorse echoed through the cells and catwalks of Walpole CI, that his suffering was as Dante might have imagined it, burning skin, boiling eyes. Instead Norwood now munched sandwiches, watched television, and probably masturbated from time to time while feverishly remembering the pleasure he’d taken in raping her.
At the time, he’d wanted to give her the answer she needed, but found he couldn’t, no matter how much it might have soothed her. It was a curious holding back of natural sympathies which he had long ago accepted as part of his character. For a time, he’d believed that it was his work that had drained them from him, the long trail of blood he’d followed, the pictures he’d seen, the even more desperate ones he’d imagined. He remembered a time early on, when a police sergeant had pulled out a carousel projector to try to find the slides that had been taken of the Comstock murders. He’d routinely aimed the lens at the opposite wall, projecting one picture after another onto it while he looked for the ones Kinley needed. What had flashed before him during the next ninety seconds was the whole terrible story of man’s unspeakable misdeeds, a vision of random carnage so shocking that Kinley had actually glanced away, his eyes lighting on the old detective’s face. It was a motionless, passive face, the large eyes blinking listlessly as the red-tinted light from the wall swept over it, went black, then swept over it again, until the carousel had finally whirled to the slide he’d been looking for, and Wilma Jean Comstock’s ravaged body hung from the white wall of the squad room, face-up, naked, arms outstretched across the barren field, eyes open, glaring, her mouth pulled down in a tortured grimace, and nothing but the old detective’s voice to orchestrate her suffering. “Yeah, yeah, here we are, Mr. Kinley,” he’d said as he handed him the small black remote with which he could turn the wheel himself. And he had taken the little black button and pressed it, moving through the slides, each image sinking in as the black wheel turned obediently, and the skin on his fingertip grew a bit more insensitive with each touch. As his heart had finally done, he suspected now, so that fifteen years later he could reply truthfully to Maria Spinola’s agonized question without blinking an eye: Unfortunately, I think Norwood probably loves prison. For some people, it’s not a punishment at all.
The plane was almost an hour late in departing La Guardia, but after the initial tension he always felt on actually leaving the ground, Kinley was able to peer out the window and enjoy the lights of the city as the plane made its long, lazy circle before turning southward into the rural night.
Once the city had disappeared behind him, he ordered his nightly scotch and leaned back into his seat. The soft hum of the engines lulled him gently, but the nap he’d hoped for insistently eluded him. Instead, he found himself drifting back toward his youth, as if the plane were returning him to the granite cliffs and pine breaks in which he’d wandered, the little house perched at the canyon wall, the long afternoons of sitting on the old porch swing while Granny Dollar read to him from the only magazine she ever bought, the Police Gazette.
The tales had been gruesome, he remembered, and the accompanying photographs had been even worse, but his grandmother had always ended her reading with a decidedly reassuring remark. “What some people do,” she’d always said, as if it were only “some people” who did such things, and that the house beside the canyon was far away from them, well beyond their deadly reach. It was only later he’d realized that it was her love that had somehow wrapped him in a strangely unthreatening atmosphere, despite the horror of the tales she read.
She had seemed such an irreducible part of his early life that even now it was hard for him to imagine her dead. It was Ray who’d brought him the news, the telephone ringing urgently only a month before, while he had been busily typing up his first interview with Norwood.
Hello, Kinley? It’s Ray, Listen, I have some bad news for you. It’s about Granny Dollar. She’s dead. She was sitting on the porch, they said. Just sitting in her old rocker. Bolt upright, like
she was tied to it.
He’d taken a plane home immediately, and now, after only two months, he was taking another one, his mind shifting anchorlessly from Ray to his grandmother, as if together they formed the single, tenuous line that still connected him to some part of life that was not drenched in blood.
• • •
The plane circled the Atlanta airport for over half an hour before touching down. It was an enormous terminal, but Kinley knew it well. His first trip had been almost fifteen years before, when he’d been writing his book on Colin Bright, the itinerant con-man who’d stumbled upon a farm family in southern Georgia one afternoon and killed all seven of them one by one over the next three days. It had been Kinley’s first prison interview, and he could still recall how Bright had talked about the murders. He’d expected a dull, plodding mind, lumpishly stupid, with hooded eyes and slurred speech, a look and manner he associated with an earlier form of man. Instead, Bright had talked energetically and with immense detail about the final days of the Comstock family, how they’d wept and pleaded for themselves and each other while he moved among them with godlike power and demonic arbitrariness. “I discussed it with them,” Bright said. “Who to do first, and how to decide. Maybe I should kill them in alphabetical order, I said, or maybe according to size, or, hey, maybe something even weirder than that, you know, like hair length, longest or shortest first, or who could keep their eyes open the longest without blinking, kill that one last, you know, or some crazy thing like that.” The intelligence and cunning in his eyes, along with the boyish gleam which remained despite the fact that Bright was nearly fifty, was what had struck Kinley most powerfully about Colin Bright, the killer as a playful clown, murder as the ultimate prank.
In a way, Kinley thought now, as he lingered beside the moving conveyor belt of the baggage claim, Colin Bright had never completely left him. He suspected that, other than Granny Dollar, Bright had probably done more than anyone else to give shape and direction to his life. It had been Bright’s eyes, their terrible intelligence, that had captured him, the pale light-blue irises and dark, bottomless pupils, the way they’d shot over to him at the very last minute, just as the black hood had been drawn over them seconds before his execution: I would tell you everything, if I had the time.