Evidence of Blood (21 page)

Kinley was up early the next morning, the dawn light still filtering dustily into the single small window of Ray’s back-room office as he sat down at the desk and began to assemble a preliminary guide for his investigation.

From his book on Colin Bright, he had learned that a true crime writer must gather and organize materials less like a journalist than a lawyer. The arrangement was critical to the final product. It had to be logical, sensible, each small element adding incrementally to the overall design.

Most critical of all, he’d learned that random interviews were fruitless, that scores of questions would be lost if the order of the interviews was flawed. Just as a good lawyer arranged the order of witnesses, a true crime writer had to order the list of sources he intended to contact. After a reading of the transcript, establishing what Kinley had come to think of as a “witness list” was the immediate order of business.

He placed the laptop computer on Ray’s desk, opened it and turned it on. The soft blue light from the screen merged with the yellow dawn to give the room a strange greenish tint. It was a pleasant light, and for a moment Kinley felt as if he’d been swept into a forest grove, silent and primeval. As he continued to consider it, it struck him that at some point along the continuum of man’s development, the first investigator must have appeared within that ancient forest, wrapped in animal skins, his hair filled with dried leaves and sprigs of vine, but an investigator
nonetheless, probing the unfamiliar depths of some fellow creature whose death he was driven inexplicably to explain.

He blinked hard and returned to his senses, dismissing his own literary and philosophical fancies. The allure of such notions still struck him as the gravest pitfall which yawned before true crime writers such as himself, and he fought willfully to regain his mental balance against the aura of mystery and occult devotion which he could sometimes feel hovering about his work.

It was the actual work of writing which saved him from falling victim to his private ravings. Whatever the nature of his own fleeting exaltations, the work was not exalted, and after a single deep breath, he concentrated his attention on the notebook which lay open beside the computer, and the mythical Stone Age Sherlock Holmes vanished like the last frame of a B-movie dream.

Methodically, his mind now on a kind of professional autopilot, Kinley typed all the notes he’d taken in the courthouse vault, carefully arranging them in the same order in which the witnesses had been called and noting the date and time of the testimony.

It was nearly noon by the time he’d finished retyping the last of his transcript notes, then paused, his eyes lingering on the last entry.

It was Judge Bryan’s remarks on the morning he pronounced sentence in the case:

COURT:
Mr. Overton, do you have anything to say before the court pronounces sentence upon you?

OVERTON
: No, Your Honor.

COURT
: All right, sir. Well, Charles Herman Overton, the jury in the above entitlement has found you guilty of first degree murder. Accordingly, it is the judgment of this court that you be transferred to the Georgia State Prison in Reidsville, and that at that facility on January 4, 1955, and at an hour and in a
manner prescribed by the laws of the State of Georgia, you suffer death by means of electrocution.

Then the gavel had sounded, Kinley knew, the hard knock of wood on wood echoing through the silent chamber, as the condemned man was led from the great hall, always led, the bailiff’s hand upon his elbow, in a gesture Kinley considered more of comfort than restraint.

After a brief lunch made from the peanut butter and white bread he found in Ray’s refrigerator, Kinley continued with his notes. For him, this tedious transcript always made for the most lackluster of his working days, the excitement of discovery already drained from the activity.

Now it was time to make a witness list, all the names that had emerged in the investigation so far, beginning with the actual trial witnesses, then expanding it to include every name that had been mentioned, no matter how peripheral the person’s involvement might have been.

Once the names had been categorized, Kinley could decide on the order in which he thought it best to seek them out for questioning. Over thirty years had passed since the trial, and it had been his experience that such a span of time drew a long, dark line between the living and the dead. By the time he’d interviewed the surviving members of the Comstock family, only a scattering of aged aunts and adolescent cousins had remained to render the first shock of the murders as it had reverberated down the family line. His research for the second book had hit similar dead ends, with Mel and Cora Flynn dead within three years of the day Mildred Haskell had invited their little boy into the smokehouse by the creek.

So it was biology more than logic which played the key role in setting up interviews, and as his eyes went down the witness list again, focusing particularly on those whose current fate he did not already know, they settled
finally upon the witness who was most likely still alive despite the grim undertow of years: Helen Slater.

At the time of the trial, she’d presumably been the same age as her sixteen-year-old schoolmate, Ellie Dinker. In addition, Ben Wade had not only told Kinley that she was still alive, but precisely where she lived. His trial testimony had told him even more, and to renew his acquaintance with it, he called up the trial transcript file and scrolled down to the relevant passage:

WARFIELD
: So, you went up to Carl Slater’s place, is that right?

WADE
: Yes, sir.

WARFIELD
: And that would have been on July 3, the day after Ellie Dinker’s disappearance?

WADE
: Yes, sir. I drove up from the Sheriff’s Office. It took about ten minutes, because Carl’s place is way up yonder on Foster Road.

Kinley’s mind recorded the spare detail of this part of Wade’s testimony. For now, he had little else upon which to base his discussion with Helen Slater, but in the past he had discovered that the amount of information going into an interview was not necessarily indicative of the amount that could be gained during it. The interview itself was a subtle prying open of dark chambers, the light spreading in all directions once the door had been forced open.

He inserted his notebook in his jacket pocket and headed for his car. The sun was still high over the mountain, and as he glanced up at it, he recalled Foster Road very vividly. It was on the brow of the mountain, a slender dusty line, which skirted the edge of the mountain before it finally plunged over it and disappeared into the undergrowth that had covered its final few hundred yards since the last ill-fated iron mine had gone bust over ninety years before.

Foster Road, Kinley repeated silently in his mind. He and Ray had walked it many times.

•    •    •

To his surprise, the road had been paved since he’d last gone down it, and along its once isolated borders a few dilapidated house trailers and unpainted tract houses now stood in the surrounding woods. The old Slater place was at the very end of the road, and it seemed almost to totter uneasily at the brow of the mountain. As he approached it, he could see a long line of thick, gray clothesline cord as it dropped heavily beneath a weight of shirts, towels and plain white boxer shorts. A large woman in a floral house dress sat wearily on a washtub beneath the gently flapping clothes, her eyes following the path of Kinley’s car until he brought it to rest only a few feet from her.

“Hi,” Kinley said as he stepped out.

The woman nodded, a single beefy hand rising to shield her eyes from the mid-afternoon sunlight.

Kinley closed the door of the car and headed toward her slowly. “My name’s Jack Kinley,” he said. “And I was hoping you might help me out a little.”

As he came nearer, Kinley focused on her face. It was unusually red, and her features were so puffy and rounded they seemed to close in on her eyes, squeezing them together until they finally appeared as little more than small slits.

“Back in 1954,” Kinley said, “this was the Slater place.”

The woman stared at him expressionlessly, with the kind of curious deadpan face he’d learned to expect from rural women, their features as shaved down as their lives.

“It still is the Slater place,” she said.

Kinley looked at her closely, his mind comparing the face before him with one of the photographs from Ray’s newspaper clippings collection on the case. It had shown a tall, strapping young girl in a loose summer dress, her hair tied in a wide ribbon. He could even remember the caption beneath it, a dramatic quotation from the girl herself:
She never made it to my house
.

“Are you Helen Slater?”

“Used to be,” the woman said. “Until I got married. Name’s Foley now.” She let her head loll gently to the right, as if to take in the gusty mountain breeze that had swept over the brow of the mountain, driving a low scattering of fall leaves and forest debris before it.

Kinley smiled softly as he looked at her. The vibrant young girl in the photograph survived as little more than a shadowy after-image in the face before him now.

“Do you remember Ellie Dinker?” he asked.

The woman’s eyes drifted back toward him as the breeze passed by and the little strand of graying hair it had pressed across her forehead came to rest. “Ellie Dinker?” she said, almost in wonderment, as if the name was a conjurer’s command, an abracadabra which summoned back her youth. “Oh, yes, I sure remember Ellie.”

“You went to school with her, didn’t you?” Kinley asked.

“Yes, I did,” Helen said without hesitation, almost brightly. She smiled. “Remember Ellie Dinker?” she asked rhetorically. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about Ellie.”

Kinley leaned into the slender pine that stood beside him, his hand already inching upward slightly toward the notebook in his jacket pocket. “Why is that?” he asked. “It’s been a long time since she died.”

“Because she was just the sort of person you don’t forget,” Slater said. “On fire, that girl. A real pistol.”

“On fire?” Kinley asked, coaxing her along.

“Sort of wild,” Helen said. “She had a tongue on her. She used to give people hell sometimes.” The eyes drifted away a moment, lifting toward where a small wooden birdhouse hung idly in the trees. “She was mad sometimes,” she added. “There was something in her that kept her steamed up.”

Kinley indicated a small lawn chair, some of its loose folds flapping like the clothes above it. “Mind if I sit down?”

“Go ahead,” Helen said. “I just sat down myself. Doing the clothes, that always gets me down.”

Kinley drew the notebook from his jacket, his eyes still studying the woman before him, the devastation which time, work and long, uneventful hours had wrought. He had seen it before, of course, but it was always more poignant when a transcript or police report spoke of a vibrant, raw, perhaps rebellious young girl, and minutes later she was before you, old, or getting there, wearing down, all the glow smothered beneath unseemly layers of skin, the web of wrinkles, the wiry nest of gray hair, everything changed, inevitably and irrevocably changed, as it were, in an instant of tragically accelerated time.

“Did you ever get any idea about what she was mad about?” Kinley asked.

Helen thought a moment, her hands pressing the rounded folds that had gathered in her dress. “Not exactly,” she said, “but I know that just before …” She stopped, as if suddenly stricken mute, then continued, “Just before the murder, she was real mad. She was boiling over.”

Kinley quickly scribbled the description into his notebook. “But you don’t know why she was feeling like that?” he asked.

Helen leaned back slightly, so that Kinley suddenly caught a more youthful profile, sharp and strong and vigorous, Helen Slater in her awesome youth. “Ellie was more grown-up than the other girls,” she said, as her eyes returned to Kinley. “She was in a hurry to grow up even more, and when you’re like that as a girl, people sometimes don’t like it much.”

Kinley nodded. “Was there anyone in particular who didn’t like her?”

Helen’s eyes fell toward the notebook. “Why are you interested in knowing things like that?”

“I’m looking into her murder,” Kinley told her. “I’m a writer.”

“You’re going to write about Ellie?” Helen asked, surprised,
yet delighted, as if in writing about her, Kinley was returning her, however fleetingly, to life. “You’re going to write about her after all these years?”

“Maybe,” Kinley said. “If there’s something to write about.”

Helen stared at him silently for a moment, as if evaluating a secret set of options. “Well, I guess I could tell you what I know,” she said at last.