Evidence of Blood

  Within an hour, the lights of Atlanta and its far-flung suburbs were well behind him, and he could lean back in the seat of the rental car and enjoy the darkness of the countryside. It was a thick, almost palpable darkness, dense, silent, the sort he remembered from his youth. The long nights on the canyon rim had been made strangely rich and lovely by Granny Dollar’s voice as she’d read to him from the Police Gazette: The fiendish plot was conceived in the diabolical imagination of Mrs. Mildred Bell, the simple Iowa schoolmarm whose evil deeds have now been unearthed by Sheriff Davies (left) and Deputy Stowe (pictured above as they stand beside the excavation site).

  There was something in that voice, he thought now, that had wound its way into him. It had been soft, hypnotic, musical, turning the most lurid words into a haunting and mysterious refrain. She had made crime a siren call, dark, alluring, irresistible, its roots ancient, marvelous and fabled, the ultimate quest for the ultimate detection.

  He was still thinking about her as he crested the southern slopes of the mountain and headed on across its wide plateau. This was the land he knew best, the broad fields of corn that spread out in all directions, the swirling green rills and shallow, kudzu-choked ravines where he’d gone on his solitary rambles.

  There was hardly a road or trail he didn’t know, hardly a path he hadn’t wandered down. And yet, there was also something that continued to distract and disorient him. He could never remember a time when he hadn’t felt it, a sense of being an outsider, of yearning to get away. “You were born on the road,” his grandmother had once told him. “It got into your system.”

  • • •

  On the outskirts of Sequoyah, just before the mountain road took its long dive into the valley, he made a slow left turn and headed down a narrow dirt road to the small churchyard where his grandmother lay. It was a bright, cloudless night, and he had no trouble finding her stone. It was a short granite slab, pale blue in the moonlight.

  As he stood over it, Kinley thought of what she must have looked like the day she’d been found, sitting straight up in the old wooden rocker on the porch, her long, iron-gray hair draped over her shoulders like a thick cotton shawl, her black eyes staring straight ahead, stricken and amazed, as Ray had described them when he’d called to tell him of her death.

  She was just sitting there, Kinley, looking out over the canyon.

  I see.

  Anything I can do?

  I don’t think so.

  What about her stuff, Kinley?

  Stuff?

  Well, word’ll get around pretty soon about her being dead. And you know how it is with some of those people in the sticks up there—they might get into her things.

  What do you think I should do?

  Well, I could get everything boxed up this afternoon, put it all in storage at my place.

  All right, Ray, thanks. I’d appreciate that.

  Now she lay in the rocky earth, and Kinley could imagine the look of her body as it rested in the wooden casket. He’d seen enough pictures to know the full assault of decomposition. He knew that her eyes were now shrunken like raisins in the great crater of their sockets, that her lips had dried and blackened and turned to leather, that her scalp had cracked, allowing wisps of white hair to tumble softly to her chest. Ghosts were lithesome, graceful, beautiful compared to the truth of life’s decay, the gradual desiccation of the flesh that Kinley had observed at every imaginable stage in its journey back to dust.

  • • •

  The Cherokee Hotel still stood at the center of Sequoyah’s long main street, and from the dusty front window of his room, Kinley could see the old stone courthouse. Set on a sloping hill, it had towered over the town for decades, one great symbol of reason and self-restraint. Somewhere in its offices, Ray had worked through his last days.

  After a while he turned from the window and began putting away his things. On top of the short chest of drawers by the closet, he deposited the laptop computer he’d brought along to fill up any idle time, then pulled his suitcase to the bed, and unpacked, carefully hanging his shirts and the one black suit he’d brought to wear at the funeral, before finally pulling himself into the bed.

  He fell asleep almost immediately, and the dream settled over him a few minutes after that. He was moving through the woods, his small body plowing desperately through the heavy undergrowth, plunging blindly and at terrific speed into the impenetrable darkness. Someone was pulling him along, jerking his hand violently as he stumbled through the grasping bramble. He could feel the snare of the vines as they tangled around his bare legs, but the hand continued to wrench him forward mercilessly, dragging him toward the dark stone cliff. He could hear his own heart pounding frantically as he neared its jagged edge, pounding just as Maria Spinola’s must have pounded, he thought suddenly, as his eyes shot open and the icy breeze swept over him from the open window, and he saw her dark, stricken eyes fixed on the glimmering blue-green pond, felt her small hand squeezed painfully in Fenton Norwood’s merciless grip as if it were his own.

  FOUR

  He’d closed the window, as well as the faded wooden shutters, but the morning light penetrated the uneven slats anyway, filling the room with a hard, bright light.

  In the bathroom, his face looked a bit drawn when he glimpsed it in the mirror, cheeks slightly hollow, the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes a shade deeper. As for the eyes themselves, others had noticed that they sometimes took on a strange, animal urgency and inward penetration, as if they were looking backward rather than forward, the pupils aimed in the wrong direction, staring into the dark cavern of his skull. It was a peculiarity he’d inherited from his mother. Doll’s eyes. That’s what Granny Dollar had always called them. Doll’s eyes. Like your mother’s. It was the only comparison his grandmother had ever made between him and his dead mother. Except for the day he’d left for New York, when she’d stood at the train, gray and silent, until she finally spoke: You’re like her.

  As to his father, Granny Dollar had never made any bones about him. She’d labeled him a “no account” drifter and left it at that. If there’d ever been any pictures of him, he was sure his grandmother had long ago fed them to the fire in her stone hearth.

  He took a quick shower, dressed and headed out onto the street. The morning air was cool and brisk, and as he made his way down the town’s narrow main street, he remembered how he’d loved the fall best of all. In the mountains, early frosts had sometimes covered the ground with an eerie crystalline sparkle, and walking out into it, he’d often felt as if he’d been transported to another planet, a shimmering world where the grass was made of diamonds and the wind sang in a high, keening voice to the icy sky. Everything was cold and clear and gave off a feeling of utter isolation. It was a desolate, inhuman look that he’d never seen again until, many years later, he’d stared into Colin Bright’s implacable blue eyes.

  Was it a conscious decision?

  You mean, did I think, “Okay, now, Colin, you’ve got to kill some people”?

  Yes.

  It never entered my mind one way or the other. Before I met them, they were dead. After I left them, they were dead.

  Then it wasn’t a decision at all?

  No, Mr. Kinley. Just a way of life.

  He had never forgotten those last five words, and in the end, he’d used them as the title for his first book: Just a Way of Life. Now, as he continued down the street, his eyes fixed on the small restaurant at the end of the block, he thought of the miles he’d traveled since that first interview, the cities he’d visited in his work: everything from the mean streets of Boston, Chicago and New York; to the flat rural byways of Indiana, where Mildred Haskell had finally, after many hours, strangled Billy Flynn; to the terrible desert wastes east of Los Angeles, arid little towns that squatted among the stones and cacti like something waiting for its prey. They were all alike, the places he knew. They had all been rocked by those sudden, instantaneous surges to “find a way out,” as Colin Bright had described it
, to soar for just one orgasmic moment on the broad red wing of your desolation. Ray had put it best: Inside, Kinley, deep, deep down, everybody’s always loaded for bear.

  The restaurant seemed to drift toward him, as if on a small gray cloud, and before he had even been able to calculate the distance to it, he found himself inside, seated comfortably in a booth by the window. A tiny, red-haired waitress approached him. She had a thin, bony face that made her look as if she’d already died and been buried hastily in a shallow grave.

  “What can I gitcha this morning?” Her voice was homey, but with an edge, a drawl that looped around you like a noose.

  “You have a menu?”

  “Coffee, eggs, bacon, sausage, hotcakes. That’s about it.” She blinked rapidly, as if trying to bat a cinder from her eye. “Oh yeah, toast, buttered toast. With jelly, if you want it.”

  “Just coffee.”

  “Okay.”

  She streaked away from him, and while he waited for her to return, Kinley peered out at the deserted early morning street. Across the way, he could see the faded sign of Jefferson’s Drug Store, the old soda fountain hangout where he’d often met Ray in the afternoon while the rest of the high school gathered at the more fashionable burger joint at the other end of town called Sally’s-To-Go-Go, and which featured Sally’s own specialty, something called Freetoe Pie, a mixture of soggy Fritos and canned chili that the varsity players particularly liked.

  Ray had been a varsity player, too, but he’d never hung out with his teammates. Instead, he’d sometimes visited Warren Peacock, a ham radio operator who’d enlivened his day by listening to insurrectionary broadcasts from Castro’s Cuba, and Dolly Pitts, a blonde whose slenderness bordered on anorexia, and who’d later moved to California to be remembered as Sequoyah’s first and only hippie. Dolly was the last girl Ray had dated before he met and later married Lois Renshaw, a vaporous brunette from Minnesota who, Ray said, had come home from school one afternoon when she’d still lived in Minneapolis and found her mother hanging naked, like a slab of beef, in the coat closet by the front door.

  I know it sounds like a yarn, Kinley, but she told me all about it.

  Does she know why?

  She says she has no idea. And you know, Kinley, this is the really weird part—and Lois told me this herself, so you know I didn’t make it up—the weird part is that sometimes Lois wonders about the whole thing, you know, like maybe it wasn’t really a suicide at all.

  You mean that her mother was murdered?

  Yeah, murdered. And get this, Kinley. Lois thinks maybe it was her father who did it.

  It was precisely at that moment, Kinley remembered now, that Mrs. Dinker had walked into the drugstore, dressed, as always, in her long black coat, the lacy white handkerchief fluttering in her fist like a small bird she was squeezing brutally to death. He’d nodded toward her, and Ray had shifted slightly in his chair to see her, then returned his eyes to him, his face unexpectedly empty and forlorn. “It’s better to know, don’t you think, Kinley?” he’d asked. “No matter what the cost?”

  Mrs. Dinker had never been granted the relief of knowing what had happened to her daughter, Ellie. Ellie had simply disappeared from the wooded path she’d taken up the mountainside that Friday morning, disappeared in her dark green dress, like something too well camouflaged to maintain its own identity within the dense, consuming foliage.

  It’s like she just dissolved, Kinley. Can people just dissolve?

  Kinley had never answered Ray’s question, but now, as the waitress returned with his coffee, and he watched the steam rise from it, dance its diaphanous, mystery dance for an instant, and vanish from the air, he thought he had an answer. No, they can’t. Something has always happened to them. His mind recited the long list it had accumulated of the “disappeared.” Riley Parker from his dry goods store. Shelia Benson from a park bathroom in Twenty-two Palms. Eliza Manchester from her crib, with nothing to reveal her fate but the two fragments of chipped paint they found on her windowsill. And Ellie Dinker, whose mother haunted the streets of Sequoyah, eyes vacant, rarely speaking, a presence wrapped in black, the terrible, tragic stand-in for her daughter’s sleepless ghost. Always, always, always. Something has always happened.

  He took a sip of coffee, hardly felt it as it went down, took another and another until the cup was empty and the waitress returned.

  “Like a refill?”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  She returned with it shortly, along with a newspaper. “Comes with breakfast,” she said as she plopped it down on the table.

  Kinley was not surprised to see Ray’s picture on the front page. In a town like Sequoyah, any man who’d been County Sheriff as long as Ray would have become a locally prominent figure.

  In the photograph, he looked younger than Kinley remembered him. The deep lines that had begun to gather around his eyes and cut through the sides of his face were hardly visible, and his red hair had managed to conceal the gray that was sprinkled throughout it, but which could only be seen when the light was exactly right. It was hard to imagine him dead, even harder to think of him at the moment of death, stumbling through the brush, his hands clutching at his chest, his eyes popped in terror, the birds watching all of this from the bare limbs that streaked above him.

  A short article accompanied the photograph. It was written matter-of-factly, and for anyone who might not have known, it detailed Ray’s tenure as a Deputy Sheriff under Floyd Maddox, his later election as Sheriff after Maddox’s death in 1974, and his decision not to seek reelection in 1990.

  According to the article, Ray had died late on the afternoon of September 1. His body had been found by a resident of the canyon area. District Attorney William Warfield had subsequently ordered an autopsy.

  Kinley folded the paper, returned it to the table in front of him and eased himself back in his chair. Outside, the town’s one main street remained sleepy, perhaps comatose, compared to the noise and movement of New York, and he marvelled that Ray could have endured it for so long.

  “That’ll be fifty cents,” the waitress said as she stepped up to the booth. “Do you want a receipt?”

  Kinley thought of his tax records and decided that his trip home could not be counted as a business expense. “No,” he said.

  FIVE

  He arrived at Ray’s house at exactly eleven. He’d beer there many times since they’d first met, the two of them sitting through the night in the wooden swing on the from porch and talking about everything under the sun. He’d spent so much time in and around the house during his last four years in Sequoyah that he’d finally come to think of it nearly as fondly as his grandmother’s place on the mountain.

  As a house, it wasn’t much—small, wood-framed, with two tiny bedrooms and a living room not much larger But it was as close as the Tindalls had ever gotten to an ancestral home, and because of that, Ray had given Lois just about everything else he had, all his savings, am much of the farmland he’d accumulated over the past fifteen years, in order to keep it in his family’s name. Since the divorce, he’d lived there alone, wandering down it short, dimly lit corridors, or burrowing into the small of fice he’d fixed up for himself in what had once been Se rena’s bedroom.

  Serena, herself, opened the door. She was now twenty with Ray’s red hair and penetrating green eyes. Even from behind the rusty screen, her skin gave off a soft whit light.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said quietly, as she swung open the screen door, stepped back and let him walk inside. “I’m glad you could come. You were the closest thing Daddy had to a brother.”

  Kinley drew her into his arms. She stood silently within them, her posture determinedly erect, unbending, a woman who’d fully inherited her father’s rock-ribbed sense of dignity and self-containment.

  He released her, and she stepped from his arms. “He’s in here,” she said as she directed him out of the small square foyer and into the living room. Sprays of flowers stood on green metal legs througho
ut the room, their sweet aroma almost suffocating in the enclosed space. The casket rested in front of the tiny brick fireplace, a massive metal vault which seemed to shrink the room around it.

  “I decided to keep it closed,” Serena said. “I think Daddy would have wanted it that way.”

  “Yes, I think so, too.”

  “Around here, people open them, but …”

  “No, you’re right,” Kinley told her. “I did the same thing with my grandmother,” He fixed his eyes on the casket. It was hard to imagine Ray inside, alone in the dark.

  “I was here only a month ago,” Kinley said. “We had a nice talk.”

  “When your grandmother died.”

  “Yes.”

  Serena kept her eyes fixed on the casket, but with a look that appeared slightly puzzled, as if she were trying to figure out exactly what lay inside.

  Kinley looked at her solemnly. “You were the daughter he wanted, Serena,” he told her softly. “He always felt that way about you. You know, that you were independent, ready to go it alone, the daughter he wanted.”

  Serena turned toward him. “We were always close. Very close. Except for the last few weeks. Something changed between us.” She shook her head. “No, something changed in him.”

  Kinley shrugged lightly. “Well, a divorce, something like that, it always …”

  “It wasn’t just the divorce,” Serena insisted. “It was Daddy. Something about him.”

  “He was always a little unusual, Serena.”

  “Something happened to him,” Serena said firmly. “He didn’t talk about it. But something definitely happened.”