Evidence of Blood

  He remembered something Betty Gaines had told him, that Thompson, Warfield and others of the city fathers had had a place in the canyon, and he realized that this shrouded little house he and Ray had stumbled upon so many years before had been that place in its abandonment. AJ was Andrew Jameson. FM was Floyd Maddox. JS was Joseph Stark. It was here they’d come to drink the bonded liquor Snow had sold them, to tell their exploits and war stories. He thought of Ellie Dinker. The place they’d brought their women.

  His eyes bore in upon the tin box. He could remember seeing his grandmother draw it down from time to time, but always secretly, so that once, when he’d raced into the room, she’d slammed its top down noisily, her lips twisting rudely as she screamed at him:

  Getout!Getout!Getout!

  But all those days were behind him, and so Kinley shook his head against the voice’s harsh command, pressed his hands against the sides of the box and slowly opened it.

  He could see a small stack of papers, along with a single sprig of vine which rested on top of them like a grim adornment. As he drew it from the papers, Kinley recalled the almost identical strand that Ray had placed inside the book he’d told Serena to give him, and he realized suddenly that it was the one clue Ray had left behind to guide him into the canyon.

  He dragged the candle nearer to the box, lit it quickly, then lifted the papers from the box. The first was a single square of notepaper exactly like the one Ray had hung over his desk. This time, however, the message was different:

  Dear Kinley:

  I found these papers when I cleaned out Granny Dollar’s house. I’d planned to burn them along with everything else. But I couldn’t. I thought I’d bury them here, but I couldn’t do that either. So I left them in plain sight, in case you want to know. If you’ve found them, I know it’s because you’ve looked very hard.

  Ray

  Kinley laid the note aside, Ray’s voice still whispering softly in his mind, then put the other papers flat upon the table. For a moment, he hesitated, as if he were a suicide, the pistol barrel already at his head, the finger squeezing down upon the trigger until it reached that last lightning interval between the precipice and the void.

  It’s better to know, don’t you think? No matter what the cost?

  He leaned forward and stared down at the papers. He knew that Ray would have arranged them in the order in which he wanted them to be read.

  The first was a birth certificate which had been issued to George and Bertha Kellogg on May 7, 1900, in Waycross, Georgia. It was little more than a small square of crumbling yellow paper, and it recorded the birth of a daughter, Ludie Rae Kellogg.

  Kinley’s mind shot back to the jail log, to the short list of visitors who’d called on Edna Trappman, to the Ludie Rae who’d signed her name in that tiny, nearly indecipherable script which signaled, according to his own light acquaintance with graphology, an intensely powerful mind.

  He turned to the next page, his eyes moving intently over its brief contents. It was a marriage license, issued in Chattanooga, Tennessee, on September 5, 1927, to Samuel P. Dollar and Ludie Rae Kellogg, and it was bound by a rubber band to a second document, this one a death certificate which recorded the death by “locked bowels” of Samuel Dollar on June 10, 1929.

  Kinley’s hand clutched at the document, crushing it slightly before he willed his fingers to open and release it once again. So it was Granny Dollar who’d come down the mountain to visit Edna Trappman in her cell, he thought.

  But why?

  Quickly, he turned the page facedown on the table, then fixed his eyes on the yellowing paper which rested beneath it. It was a second birth certificate, this one also issued in Chattanooga, and dated August 9, 1932. It recorded the live birth of a female child whom its unwed parents, Ludie Rae Dollar and Ernest Trappman, had named Edna Mae.

  “Her daughter,” Kinley whispered, unbelievingly. He felt a blue, arctic wind rush over him, lost and frozen. In his mind he could see his grandmother as she sat rigidly in her chair with his own small body in her arms, staring down at him with eyes that were like his, passionless and aloof.

  You look like her.

  He heard Luther Snow’s words in his mind.

  You look like her.

  But he didn’t look like Granny Dollar, Kinley thought, defensively, imploringly, as if arguing the merits of some cause he couldn’t understand.

  You look like her.

  He stepped back from the table, his eyes darting about desperately. Suddenly, the room seemed to expand in all directions, the ceiling shooting up to a great height above his head, the walls reeling outward, turning the small room into a great chamber, as the air inside it thickened and grew warm with summer heat.

  He could feel his own body shrinking as the room swelled to its former immensity, and he knew his mind was returning him to his earliest years. He could feel his small lungs struggling painfully for breath as he searched the face that hung above him, so much younger than all his other visions of it, still unlined, the hair only slightly streaked with gray. Granny Dollar.

  He was in her arms now, his eyes moving urgently over the contours of her face. Voices sounded softly around him, and he knew that they were not alone. He could sense shadows all about, feel his own tiny body twisting in his grandmother’s arms, always afraid, always watchful, but trying to see, hungry for every detail, his ravenous mind working desperately even then to order and retrieve, while his eyes locked on the shadows that danced around him.

  A face swam toward him from the maze of shadows, a white dot perched on a tall green hill, with a voice that was more like a bark, harsh, bitter, animal-like: This your little boy?

  He did not hear an answer, but only saw her mouth jerk down, as if repulsed by the sight of him, then another face draw near him after hers had retreated, a different face, young and brown and warm, peering at him softly from the black tangle of her hair.

  You look like her.

  “Mother,” Kinley breathed. He could feel her as he had felt her then, as he had felt her that day in the small house, while still in Granny Dollar’s arms, but reaching out to his mother needfully, his small, white fists clutching at her hair while his eyes clung to her fiercely, trying to draw her more clearly into view.

  But she drew away again, dissolved into the smoldering summer haze, even as he fought to get her back, his eyes shooting left and right frantically as he worked to locate her among the shifting shapes and voices, men, Women, a clutter of forms.

  The voice barked again: Did you tell your precious little boy about this, Mr. Warfield? Huh? Did you tell Billy?

  A column of white swept over to the small green mound, its voice softer, deeper, male: I don’t think that’s necessary, Ellie.

  Be a good joke though, wouldn’t it? Just to spring it on him while he’s getting ready to go off to college. Just say, “Hey, Billy, you know that little tramp you screwed in the canyon? That Dinker girl? Well, I found out you knocked her up, but don’t worry, I handled it for you.”

  Billy will never know anything about this.

  Yeah, well, that’s the way it is with you people. You can always fix things up. But I …

  Silence!

  It was his mother’s voice, rising from the welter of the others, harsh and commanding as he sometimes heard it. Then silence, until her face swept up to him, her eyes on the old woman who held him tightly to her arms. “Take him up to the house, Mama. We’ll be up when it’s over.”

  Then she floated away from him languidly, her hair a dark, ragged sail. But he could still smell her skin like warm bread, and his hands reached out for her achingly as she grew small in the vast distances of the smokey room, and he realized that he was moving away from her, toward the open door, then down the stairs and through the encircling vines in a rush of green that led him upward steadily, his breath loosening as he rose, until he felt himself mounted on a high gray shelf, the tops of the trees stretching up from the ground below him, his grandmother’s arms cradli
ng him gently as she spoke:

  Long time ago, in the canyon, there was this house surrounded by vines.

  Kinley grasped the edges of the table in front of him, his fingers clutching at it in quick, uncontrollable spasms as his mind hurled him backward, groping through its lightless chamber for that slender ribbon of nerve and tissue that still bore the shadowy image of what his eyes had seen and his ears heard so many years before. It was as if he could feel the actual, physical churning of his brain inside his skull, its wild, electric pulse, building ominously, heedlessly, explosively, until, in a single, miraculous instant, it opened like a dark bud, and he was in his mother’s arms, his face nestled sleepily in her hair despite the hard, frantic pace of the rocker as it slung him Back and forth, its harsh, rhythmic squeak orchestrating his mother’s low, murmurous chant, her words like drops of rain in the humid, summer air:

  I need more time, more time, more time.

  We don’t have more time, Edna. Creedmore’s gone. It’s up to us.

  Good riddance. Makes me ashamed I ever used his name.

  We got to do something soon, Edna. She’s dead, and it’s just a matter of time before Warfield finds out about it.

  It’s the way he always wanted to settle things. Get rid of it. Get rid of it. He wanted me to do it, too.

  He felt her arms tighten around him, her voice in his ear: Never.

  That’s passed. Now we have to do something else.

  I need more time, Mama, to find a way out.

  It passed like a flock of birds, the hours like black shadows sweeping across the weedy yard, until, from the depths of his sleep, he heard the grind of the engine as the old truck staggered into the yard, its dusty cab shuddering as the motor died.

  From over his mother’s shoulder, he could see Granny Dollar as she talked to the ragged, dusty figure who crouched brokenly beside her, groaning pitifully, his arms wrapped around his stomach.

  He was gone in only a little while, the remedy given, the money exchanged, and as the old truck departed, he’d seen his grandmother move toward him through the hot, suffocating air, move like a phantom glimpsed beyond the black tangles of his mother’s hair, heard her voice sound firmly over the rocker’s dreadful, aching cry:

  You heard him, Edna. He seen that girl on the road this afternoon, before you and Warfield picked her up. People must have seen him with her.

  You know him?

  He works with Luther. I could find out about him.

  The old woman continued forward, her hand moving up under her dress, drawing a long, black snake from beneath her apron, curved, but unbending, a dark, frozen shape. She waved it softly in the thick night air. I got this from the back of his truck while you were giving him the treatment.

  The black curtain of her hair shifted softly as she nodded.

  We have a way out now.

  He felt her rise from her chair, then his body float forward into his grandmother’s wiry grasp, his place in his mother’s arms now taken by the black rod she nestled at her breast.

  He was moving again, his eyes searching the darkness, trying to keep his mother’s shape in view, his hands grasping for the shifting tangles of her hair until she finally stopped again, the great room spreading out around her. Her face turned toward him. He reached for it, but she drew back.

  Leave him in here.

  He was on the floor now, his hands pressed down upon the bare floor, as he watched the door to the other room open, then close. He leaned backward, his tiny hands grasping at the table leg as he pulled himself up, then tottered forward uneasily, his ears tuned to the odd, hollow sound he could hear beyond the door: Fump. Fump. Fump.

  Suddenly the door shot open and he felt himself soar upward into his grandmother’s arms, his eyes staring over her shoulder and into the room, where his mother’s shadow danced on the wall, the slender bar falling a final time upon the shapeless mass which lay on the bed beneath it: Fump.

  And it was morning again, the long night remembered as no more than a passing shadow as he rested in his mother’s arms, the two of them together on the porch, the other woman dissolving into the green woods, the even greener dress folded in her arms.

  After that, there was only rain in great thundering sheets, falling with the night, battering at the roof while they wrapped it all in quilts, the slender white arms already tied with a strip of white cut from the mound of green, a pillowcase drawn over the blackening face before they lugged it heavily to the waiting car.

  Do it right, Edna. Just plant the stuff in his truck, then take the body across the state line. And don’t come back here until I tell you.

  The engine groaned to life, loud as the hard drum of the rain upon the hood and windshield.

  I’ll be back to get him, Mama.

  The rain swept across his face, slapping at his eyes. They closed tightly against it, and when they opened again, she was gone. But all through the passing hours his hands still reached for her, grasping frantically for the vanished face, its wreath of thick black hair, while the long night stretched numbly into day, and the air along the canyon rim so clogged his lungs with smoke and dust and loss that the old woman finally took him up in terror and amazement: My God, Kinley, you’re turning blue.

  Kinley drew in a long, unencumbered breath, then let his eyes wearily descend to the last document Ray had left for him.

  It was a newspaper clipping about a fiery automobile accident which had occurred during the rainy, early morning hours of July 4, 1954. It had happened at the southern end of the canyon where its dark, jagged tip stretched into the neighboring state of Alabama. The car had exploded on impact with the canyon floor, the charred remains of two women found inside, burned black and unrecognizable.

  “Mother,” he said softly.

  Beneath the last of the documents, there was a single yellow envelope, slightly bloated with its secret contents. Kinley opened it wearily and drew out the stack of dusty papers Ray had placed inside, the final revelation.

  Kinley read the first of them, then the second, then down through the long years of their steady accumulation, the whole story unravelling before him until it came to rest, entirely revealed. “At last,” he whispered exhaustedly as the last bit of paper drifted from his fingers.

  FORTY

  She was beautiful in the dawn light that swept over her from the eastern rim of the mountain.

  Her eyes widened, as if alarmed. “Kinley, you look …”

  He raised his hand to silence her. “I know now.”

  “Everything?”

  “Yes.” He turned and walked out to the edge of the cliff. Below, Sequoyah remained shrouded by a bank of gently floating haze. Within a few hours, he knew, the last gray wisps would be burned away.

  She came up to him softly. “Well, are you going to tell me?”

  “Yes,” he said, his eyes still trained on the valley’s clouded depths. He drew the envelope he’d found in the canyon from his pocket and gave it to her. “Everything.”

  Dora took the envelope, opened it and pulled out the large stack of cancelled checks Ray had put inside. “They’re all made out to your grandmother,” she said wonderingly. “All from Thomas Warfield?”

  “Yes.”

  “So much money,” Dora said as she continued going through the checks. “Over so many years.”

  “All the years I was growing up,” Kinley told her. “All the years I was in those expensive special schools, then Harvard after that.”

  “He was paying her during all that time?”

  “Yes, he was,” Kinley answered.

  “Why?”

  Once again, Kinley heard his mother’s voice: Never. “Because he had no choice,” he said. “At least, not after I was born.”

  Dora looked at him quizzically.

  “He was my father,” Kinley told her.

  Dora started to speak, but he raised his hand to stop her, his mind moving through the list of people he would have to tell about all he’d discovered: Lois, Ser
ena, Talbott, Stark, Warfield …Dora.

  “It’s better to know, don’t you think?” he asked her.

  She nodded determinedly. “Yes.”

  He looked at her a moment longer, glad she didn’t live in the town, but far above it, on the mountainside, certain that when he returned from his mission in the valley, she would still be there.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  THOMAS H. COOK is the author of thirteen novels, including Breakheart Hill and Mortal Memory. His most recent novel, The Chatham School Affair, won the highest award given by the Mystery Writers of America, the Edgar Award for Best Novel of 1996. Two other novels, Sacrificial Ground and Blood Innocents, were Edgar Award nominees, as was a true crime work, Blood Echoes. He lives in New York City and on Cape Cod, where he has just finished his fourteenth novel, Instruments of Night.

  Looking out over the city, imagining its once coal-blackened spires, he knew that he did it to keep his distance, that he set his books back in time because it was only in that vanished place, where the smell of ginger nuts hung in the air and horse-drawn water wagons sprayed the cobblestone streets, that he felt truly safe.

  It was nearly dawn, and from the narrow terrace of his apartment, Graves could see a faint light building in the east. He’d been up all night, typing furiously, following Detective Slovak through the spectral backstreets of gaslight New York, the two of them—hero and creator—relentlessly pursuing Kessler from one seedy haunt to the next, the groggeries of Five Points, the whorehouses of the Tenderloin, its boy bars and child brothels, watching as Kessler’s black coat slipped around a jagged brick corner or disappeared into a thick, concealing bank of nineteenth-century fog. Together, they’d questioned bill stickers and news hawkers and a noisy gaggle of hot-corn girls. They’d dodged rubber neck buses and hansom cabs and crouched in the steamy darkness of the Black Maria, For a time, they’d even lingered with a “model artist” who’d just come from posing nude for a roomful of gawking strangers, Slovak mournfully aware of the woman’s fate, his dark eyes watching silently as her youth and beauty dripped away, her life a melting candle. They’d finally ended up on the rooftop of a five-story tenement near the river. Slovak teetered at the brink of it as he searched the empty fire escape, the deserted street below, amazed that Kessler had done it again, disappeared without a trace. It was as if he’d found some slit in the air, slipped through it into a world behind this world, where he reveled in the terror he created.