Evidence of Blood (24 page)

For a moment, their eyes rested silently upon each other’s before Dora’s darted away, diving down toward the letters Kinley still clutched in his hands. “And when will you read those?” she asked.

“Tonight, probably.”

She looked at him solemnly. “You work long hours,” she said. “Don’t you ever get tired?”

“Sometimes.”

“What do you do then?”

Even before he answered her, he knew that for all its truth, his answer would strike her as absurd. “I work until I’m not tired anymore,” he said.

Once she’d gone, Kinley returned to Ray’s office, untied the letters Charles Overton had written to his wife during the war, and read them.

They were exactly as Dora had described them, the letters of a broken man, the sort Kinley had read by the hundreds, his “fans” reaching out to touch his shoulder, get his attention.
I read your book, Mr. Kinley, and I just had to write and tell you about what happened to me
.

What happened to me
. In the vast number of letters he’d received since writing his first book, it had never been a war wound which had done the devastation. Instead, his nameless correspondents spoke of kidnappings, tortures, murders, of lost relatives found at last floating in the estuary, curled in the ravine, hanging from the trees. They wrote of the sudden, inexplicable rages that still swept over them without warning or relief, the terrible winds that blew forever across the desert wastes of crime.

Charles Overton’s letters were different from these, very different. And Dora had caught their substance without compromise. They were the letters of one who had lost the will to live, who had been wounded so critically
that more than his body had been devastated. The energy of life, its resilience and vitality, had been blasted from him, so that little remained but flesh in motion, a man going through the days until death came, like a friend, to take him to the oblivion he already desperately craved.

Now Kinley knew why Overton had crumpled at the first accusation and had finally trudged across the room to where the electric chair waited for him, like a mother with her arms outspread.

She was waiting for him when he pulled up to the old Dinker place at the base of the mountain. She was wearing dark-blue pants, and from a distance, appeared almost like a soldier in uniform, erect, as if on guard against the enemy’s advance.

“I’m off today,” she said as Kinley approached. “That’s why I can do this.”

Kinley nodded, his eyes moving over the curve of Dora’s shoulder, where he could see the old house’s charred remains, a dark ruin amid a grove of pine.

“It wasn’t much even then,” Dora said as she turned toward it. “At least, that’s what my mother told me.”

Kinley stared at the house, its cement steps leading upward into nothing, the pile of black rubble jutting harshly from beneath a collapsed tin roof which looked as if it had gone to seed long before the fire.

“This is where we met,” Dora said, as she continued to look at the devastated house. “Ray and I.”

“Here?” Kinley asked.

“I had just come down one day,” Dora went on, “following an urge, you might say. I was standing in the yard, and he pulled over. He was in his Sheriff’s Department car.” She smiled quietly. “He said, ‘If you’re thinking about buying this place, don’t do it.’”

“Did he say why?”

“Because it’s haunted, that’s what he told me then,” Dora went on, “haunted by Ellie Dinker.” She turned
toward Kinley. “I told him no, not by Ellie Dinker, by Charles Overton.”

“Did he know what you meant?”

Dora nodded. “Yes, he did,” she said. “His face got very serious. He’d been smiling before, you know, the way he could, like a kid. But he got very serious.” She shrugged. “I guess that’s when it started.”

Kinley smiled quietly. It was a soft romantic tale, and he wondered why such a moment, leading as it did to such an experience, had never come his way. Perhaps, in the end, something his grandmother had once said to him was sufficient to explain it:
You give off a chill …like your mother
.

He felt his hand grasp for that invisible something which always seemed just beyond his reach, and he started to walk toward the house.

“Ellie left from the backyard,” he said as Dora stepped up beside him. “That’s what Mrs. Dinker said.”

Moments later they stood in the backyard. It was a field of bare, muddy ground broken by small islands of gently undulating weeds and grasses which finally disappeared into the dense mountain forest that surrounded it like a huge green wall.

It was into that forest that Ellie Dinker had disappeared at around noon on July 2, 1954.

“She took that trail,” Kinley said, his arm rising almost involuntarily, the lean index finger pointing toward a narrow break in the dense underbrush. He looked at Dora. “That’s the first question,” he said. “Why did she go in that direction, if she were heading for Helen Slater’s house?” His arm drifted far to the left of the trail’s entrance, then rose toward the distant crest of the mountain. “Helen Slater lives over there, beyond that hill. Ellie Dinker didn’t go in that direction at all when she left that morning.” He looked at her. “Why?”

Dora made no effort to answer him but followed along as Kinley moved further into the yard, his eyes doing the studied and precise inventory he had taught them to carry
out, noting the scattering of wood, the broken metal swings, the covered well, the small smokehouse, its door hanging from a single rusty hinge, all the tiny, incidental items whose importance lay in the mood they set, the sense of loss or abandonment that rose from them like a barely whispered song.

“She took this trail,” Kinley said when he and Dora reached the forest wall. He looked at his watch. “Seven-twenty-four,” he said. “All right. Let’s go at a reasonable pace, and see how long it takes to get to the mountain road.”

They entered the forest together, walking side by side until, as they continued on, the surrounding woods drew in upon the trail, narrowing it to a slender brown thread. The green shadows crouching in the distance seemed almost palpable, not so much areas of deepened color as breathing, watchful presences, the stuff of dreams and nightmares, the legions of the night whose snarls and groans Kinley remembered hearing as he tossed sleeplessly in his small room overlooking the canyon, his child’s mind as fierce and wild as any of the creatures it invented.

After a moment, the slope of the mountain suddenly grew more radical, and he could feel his heart beating heavily in his chest, the breath in his lungs thickening, as it seemed, to the consistency of water, and he felt like a creature submerged in the suffocating, green slime which rested, heavy and motionless, on the surface of stagnant waters.

“Let’s stop here,” he said when the trail broke into an unexpected clearing.

“City boy,” Dora said with a small smile. “You’re not used to this.”

Kinley glanced at his watch and made a mental note of the time, seven-forty-two, and fifteen seconds. “We’ll go on in a minute,” he assured her.

“She might have stopped here, too,” Dora told him.

Kinley’s hands reached for a slender, low-slung limb, as if grasping for it desperately to save him from a fall.
“Yes, she might have,” he said. “She’d have been walking for twenty minutes by then,”

“And almost straight up,” Dora added. Her eyes crawled up the mountainside. “To where my father waited.”

“Except you don’t believe that,” Kinley reminded her.

“I know he couldn’t have had anything to do with Ellie Dinker, if that’s what you mean,” Dora said. She looked at him pointedly. “Did you read the letters?”

“Yes.”

“And?”

“He was broken, like you said,” Kinley told her. “Did your mother ever tell you what the wound was? He never gives any details.”

“His legs,” Dora said. “That’s where he was hit. Both legs, she said. He walked with a limp.”

“More a shuffle,” Kinley told her.

She looked at him curiously. “How did you know that?”

Kinley hesitated, wished he’d kept it to himself. “Well, I read a description of his …of his death.”

“You mean, his execution.”

“The writer mentioned how he walked,” Kinley added.

Dora’s face suddenly took on an attitude which entirely contradicted what she’d previously said about her father, his weakness, his cowardice, the natural role he had assumed as spineless victim. In an instant, all of that was swept away, and amid the deep green shadows, her face miraculously grew even deeper, as if suddenly enriched by the love she still felt—would always feel—for her unknown father. Her eyes lifted toward Kinley, glistening slightly despite the shadowy light. “Why can’t I let him go?”

“Be glad you can’t,” he told her.

“Why?”

He was not sure why, he realized, but only sensed that certain feelings should be a part of every life, and that if you never achieved the full range, certain losses were incurred,
although he could not calculate exactly what they were.

“Why should I be glad?” Dora repeated.

Kinley thought of his own parents, dead, dead, dead. “Because you’ve come to know him a little,” he said. “I never learned much of anything about mine.”

She nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Ray told me. A car accident when you were three years old.”

Kinley felt his old uneasiness rise again, the uncomfortable sense that he was about to whine about his orphan state as he’d seen so many others do, using it to justify the things they’d later done:
If I hadn’t been abandoned, I wouldn’t have robbed, raped, killed
. It was an excuse he’d heard too often to feel anything for it but contempt.

“We’d better head on up now,” he said, avoiding any further discussion of his own early life.

They began the long trudge up the mountain once again, Kinley in the lead, Dora close behind. He could hear her breathing almost as if it were his own, feel the shift of her feet on the ground behind him, and for a moment he thought that this must be what Ray had wanted most in his life, a companion in the forest, someone with you on the trail.

They reached the mountain road a half-hour later, and Kinley glanced at his watch. It was now seven minutes after eight, and after subtracting the brief pause on the way up, he calculated the approximate length of time it would have taken Ellie Dinker to make it from her house to the road.

“About half an hour,” Kinley said as he looked up from his watch. “Which means that she would have gotten here at about twelve-thirty in the afternoon.”

Dora nodded.

“And according to witnesses, your father left the courthouse at twelve-thirty on the dot,” Kinley added. “Which means he would have gotten here at around twelve-thirty-five.” He glanced up toward the mountain’s crest, where he could nearly see the rim where he’d stood with Helen
Slater only the day before, the two of them staring down toward Sequoyah, their eyes fixed on the great gray face of the courthouse. “It would only take another hour or so to climb the rest of the way up,” he said. “It couldn’t possibly take any longer than that.”

Dora glanced up toward the mountain, but said nothing.

“She was supposed to meet Helen Slater at five in the evening,” Kinley said. He looked at Dora. “Why would she have left her house so early?”

Dora shook her head. “I don’t know.”

“But she didn’t go on up the mountain,” Kinley added. “Or anywhere else for that matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“If she got here by twelve-thirty, and your father didn’t get here until twelve-forty-five or so …”

“Then she must have waited,” Dora blurted.

“That’s right,” Kinley said. “For a good five or ten minutes. Standing along the roadside, like your father said she was.” His eyes settled on a slender white column. “By that mile marker right there.”

Dora looked at the marker. “Just standing there,” she said, almost to herself, then glanced back at Kinley. “Why?”

Kinley shook his head. “That’s what we have to find out.”

She looked at him doubtfully. “Do you think you can?”

“I don’t know, Dora.”

“Ray couldn’t.”

“Maybe he just ran out of time.”

She shook her head determinedly. “No,” she said firmly, “he told me he’d come up with nothing, that there were no more leads to follow.”

“When did he tell you that?”

“The day before he died.”

“Did you believe him?”

Dora stared at him pointedly. “No, I didn’t,” she said. “I had the feeling he’d given up.”

“Why?”

She shrugged slightly. “Maybe he got tired.”

“Did he seem tired?”

“No.”

“How did he seem?”

She considered it a moment, searching for the right word. “Lost,” she said finally, “like he didn’t know what to do.”