Evidence of Blood (17 page)

Lois arrived at the house on Beaumont Street only a few minutes after Kinley returned from the courthouse. She was wearing a gray suit, and looked more like a woman who’d just rushed up the streets of Manhattan than someone who’d lived in Sequoyah for almost thirty years. She had never lost her midwestern accent, and because of that, Kinley found her voice refreshing, a sudden reminder that other places existed beyond those he’d been reading about all day—narrow, tree-lined streets and forest paths, woods, canyons, a green churning river.

“I wasn’t sure I’d catch you here,” she said.

She was standing on the small front porch, still separated from him by the screen door, her face webbed by its slender metal squares, and for a moment she reminded him of Dora Overton, the same dark eyes and determined face, the same resilience and firmness that Ray had no doubt found attractive in both women.

“Since you’ve gotten so into whatever it is Serena’s worried about, I wanted to show you what I took from Ray’s file cabinet,” she added matter-of-factly. She lifted a large manila envelope toward him. “This should do a little to get her off that particular kick.”

Kinley opened the screen door and took the envelope from her hand. “Thanks, Lois,” he said as he drew the door closed again. “I’ll read it tonight.”

Lois did not move. “Well, I don’t want to be pushy,”
she said, “but would you mind if I came in?” It was not a request.

“Of course,” Kinley said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you’d come by for a visit.”

“I’m not mad at you, Jack,” Lois explained. “I just want things laid to rest.”

“I understand,” Kinley told her as he stepped back to let her pass.

Lois walked directly into the living room and sat down on the sofa by the window.

“Want something to drink?” Kinley asked as he joined her there. “Not that I know where Ray kept his liquor.”

“Over the kitchen sink,” Lois said. “But, no thanks.”

Kinley sat down in the small chair across from the sofa. “So, how are you doing?” he asked idly.

Lois drew in a quick, faintly irritated breath. “I won’t be long, Jack,” she said. “I just wanted to give you those files and tell you again that I don’t want Serena to spend her life wondering what happened to her father. At least, as far as his death is concerned. As far as this other matter, I …”

“She won’t hear about that from me,” Kinley assured her. “I know how to keep things off the record. I’m sure Dora would want it that way, too.”

Lois’s eyes narrowed intently. “You talked to Dora Overton?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say?”

“Nothing unusual,” Kinley said.

“About her and Ray? The affair, you mean?”

Kinley nodded. “Yes,” he said, then shifted awkwardly in his seat. “I don’t know whether it matters to you or not, Lois,” he told her. “But I think she cared a great deal for Ray, and he probably felt the same way about her.”

Lois stared at him icily.

“Whatever it was between them,” Kinley added. “It had to do with love.”

“And that makes it okay?”

“I don’t know about that.”

“It’s me. I’m the problem. Is that what you think, Jack?”

“About what?”

“About Ray and Dora,” Lois said.

“I don’t know about these things, Lois,” Kinley said, “but I do think there was something between Ray and Dora that was …well, that wasn’t just a …”

“Roll in the hay?” Lois interrupted sharply.

“That’s right.”

“And you know something, Jack, that makes it worse, not better,” Lois told him. “It makes it a lot harder to take.” She shook her head wearily. “You always think that love cancels out betrayal. All men think that. But it’s bullshit.”

Kinley shrugged. “People change, that’s all I know. It happens all the time.”

“Yes, it does,” Lois blurted, “and more’s the pity.” Her eyes fled to the window and settled on the graying late-afternoon air beyond it. “Is that why you never married?” she asked after a moment. “Because people change?”

“I don’t know.”

Her eyes shot over to him. “Ray always denied it, but I never believed him. He said Dora was …” She smiled grimly. “Just a friend.”

“He talked about her?” Kinley asked. “To you?”

She nodded. “Yes, he did. But not the real stuff. He said he was working on something for her, an old case. He made it sound like a job.”

“He was working on something.”

“What?”

“An old murder case.”

She looked at Kinley questioningly. “Is that why he was down in the canyon?”

In his mind, Kinley saw Ellie Dinker’s body rolling in the green waters of Rocky River, then sinking down, dissolving into an indistinguishable mass as the years passed, a condition Ray would no doubt have understood and
thus found no reason whatsoever to search for her along the pebbly banks of the river.

“I don’t think he would have expected to find anything about the Overton case in the canyon,” Kinley said. “So far, I haven’t found much of anything that would have led him down there.”

“Found?” Lois asked. “You’re working on it, too?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it was his last case,” Kinley said. “That’s the only reason I can think of.”

“Can you talk about it?”

“I don’t know very much,” Kinley said. “So far I’ve just read the transcript of the trial. As far as I can tell, the case against Overton is pretty strong.”

“Overton?”

“Yes, Charles Overton, Dora’s father.”

Lois sat back slightly. “He was a murderer?”

Kinley found himself giving in to the weight of evidence. “He might have been,” he said.

“Who did he kill?”

“A young girl,” Kinley said. “It was back in 1954.”

“And they convicted him?”

Kinley nodded. “They executed him.”

“Executed, yes,” Lois said thoughtfully. “There was an article about that.”

“Where?”

“In with all those clippings I found in one of Ray’s files.”

“Was there anything else in the file about the case?”

“Just what was in the O file,” Lois said. “And to tell you the truth, Kinley, I was a little relieved. I didn’t want to find love letters from Dora Overton. I mean, divorce or no divorce, you always feel a certain way.”

“Yeah,” Kinley said.

“Anyway, it’s all in the envelope,” Lois added, dismissing any further discussion of the case, her mind shifting
back to Dora. “What’s she like?” she asked. “What did Ray see in her?”

“I don’t know her very well.”

“But you’re going to,” Lois said. “I can see that in your face.” She smiled. “I must say, I’m a little surprised in you, Jack.”

“How?”

“Well, I wouldn’t have expected you to come home and take up where Ray left off quite so …literally.”

Kinley stared at her silently, and after a moment, she stood up and walked back out onto the porch. Kinley followed along behind her, the screen door closing softly behind him.

At the front steps, Lois paused and turned back toward him. “So, you’re going to see Dora again?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“Tell her I despise her,” Lois said.

Kinley said nothing.

Lois glared up toward the mountain. “She knew him better, didn’t she? Better than I did?”

“I don’t know.”

“He talked to her.”

“Yes, I think he did.”

Her face took on a strange resignation, as her eyes returned to Kinley. “The lover always gets the best of someone,” she said quietly. “The dregs come home and go to sleep.”

Kinley ate a quick dinner made up of what had been left behind in Ray’s kitchen, a can of pork and beans and a few Vienna sausages, all of which he washed down with one of the three beers he found in the refrigerator.

While he ate, he watched the small black-and-white television which Ray had balanced precariously on one of the kitchen counters. It was tuned to Channel 3, a local access station which carried the latest news from Sequoyah and its surrounding communities. At the moment,
a man dressed in green fatigues was tromping through a wooded area, glancing back toward the camera from time to time, as he commented on the local landscape.

As it turned out, Kinley finished his meal at the same moment the man on television brought his program to a close with a broad smile and a parting bit of homestyle instruction: “So, friends, this is Bob Burbank saying, “Hey, look around you.’”

Kinley snapped the television off, washed the dishes, then walked down the short corridor to Ray’s office, where he’d deposited the envelope Lois had given him an hour or so before.

The three files were arranged alphabetically, one on top of the other, a tribute to Lois’s orderliness, and he opened D first, found it empty, just as she had said it was, then moved on to O.

It was a thick file, though not bloated, and Ray had arranged the papers inside it chronologically, beginning with various newspaper accounts of Overton’s arrest on July 4, and ending with his execution at the state prison six months later, an event which was sufficiently newsworthy, Kinley noted, for the Sequoyah
Standard
to send one of its own reporters to cover it.

His name was Harry Townsend, and he’d covered the whole case, his byline under every story published by the
Standard
, from Dinker’s disappearance to Overton’s execution several months later. And in Kinley’s estimation, he’d done a good job, not only in his individual pieces, but in the accompanying pictures he’d also taken while covering the case.

Ray had assembled the pictures in a kind of “order of appearance” format, beginning with Ellie Dinker and ending with a final photograph of Charles Overton as he was led away from the courthouse after he’d received his death sentence. All the incidental characters were present in the collection. Maddox and Wade posed in their recently pressed uniforms, Warfield and Talbott in dark, conservative suits beside the flagpole. Mrs. Overton, her
head bound in a dark scarf, dodging Townsend’s camera as she darted down the courthouse steps. Unlike Mrs. Overton, Dr. Stark and Mr. Coggins seemed grateful for the attention. As for Luther Snow and Betty Gaines, they appeared as direct human opposites: Gaines shy, looking away; Snow staring straight into the lens, as if daring it to expose him.

At the end, almost as a coda, Ray had clipped the last report on the case, Townsend’s description of Overton’s execution. To Kinley’s surprise, as he read it, Townsend was no country hack. He’d read enough back-country journalism by then to know that “reporters” for such papers were often little more than town gossips with a literary itch. Townsend, however, was nothing like that, and his account of the execution of Charles Overton was fittingly solemn, with just enough graphic detail to evoke the scene without allowing it to cross the line into morbid titillation:

Not bad, Kinley thought, as his mind shifted suddenly to his own description of the death of Colin Bright. It had been very academic, it struck him now, a writing style that had been meant to please the English professors who would never read it, and which had adroitly stressed clever ideas over the terrible feeling of a carefully orchestrated and predetermined death, its grim mechanics of seared nerves. Harry Townsend, whoever he was, had done better than that, particularly in the lovely understatement of his last line.

His eyes did not open again in this world
.

As he allowed himself to read the line again, Kinley had the sense that something was being loosened up in him, as if, against his will, he were being made to feel Overton’s death as he thought Dora must feel it, and perhaps as Ray had come to feel it too, dark and tragic and unjust.

He stopped himself instantly, drew the cord tight again, shoring himself up. Dark and tragic, that much still remained true of Overton, as it was probably true, it seemed to Kinley, of every human fate. But that left the final adjective intact. And so, Kinley wondered, as he closed the O file and turned to the S, flipping quickly through the irrelevant assortment of old town photographs Ray had assembled there, could it also be said that
the death of Charles Herman Overton had been entirely unjust?

When he could answer that question yes or no, he thought as he turned off the desk light and headed for his bed, his work in Sequoyah would be done, and he could return to New York, to the small apartment which overlooked the upper reaches of Broadway, to the gentle rapture of untroubled sleep.