The Bright Forever (20 page)

Mr. Dees

I
TOLD HIM
to look inside that book. “Tom,” I said, “you need to look in
Henry and Beezus.
Look underneath the front flap of the jacket, and you’ll see what I’m telling you is true. I couldn’t have been with Raymond Wright at the time of Katie’s murder because I was the one who brought that book back to the library.”

“We’ve looked at that book,” Tom Evers said. “I’ve got it down at the courthouse as evidence.”

“Then you need to look again, Tom. I’ll tell you exactly what you’ll find underneath that jacket.”

July 5

H
E MEANT TO
take the two library books back to the Heights and leave them on the Mackeys’ front porch so Katie would find them there once she was home. But as he walked up Fourteenth Street, past the public library, he saw Junior Mackey and Gilley on the courthouse square studying Katie’s bicycle. Junior lifted his head and looked all around him, and Mr. Dees slipped behind a pine tree on the library’s lawn, afraid that Junior would see him. He watched until Junior and Gilley had lifted Katie’s bicycle into the trunk of their car and driven away. He was afraid then to keep walking toward the Heights, afraid to try to leave the books on the Mackeys’ front porch. He was carrying too many secrets that might come out if the Mackeys happened to spot him.

So he did the only thing he could think to do: he dropped
Henry and Beezus
into the after-hours return bin. He couldn’t bear to let
The Long Winter
go because it had been one of the Little House books that Katie and Rene Cherry were anguishing over that first time he had come to tutor Katie. She had said the Ingalls children’s names with such love in her voice, and for that reason alone he couldn’t bear to put the book into the bin. He’d keep it just awhile simply because she had touched it, held it in her hands, and he wanted it, like the fluff of hair from her brush and the snapshot he’d stolen from her dresser, wanted it close to him.

He dropped
Henry and Beezus
into the bin, remembering only after the door had closed what he had left beneath the jacket, where he imagined no one would ever see it, and if by some chance anyone ever did, they wouldn’t think anything odd about it. Just some kid, they’d say, some kid having a lark.

July 9

A
T THE COURTHOUSE
, Tom Evers opened
Henry and Beezus
. He peeled back the tape that held the jacket flap in place, and beneath it, on the hard inside of the cover, he saw written in fountain pen,
Henry + Katie
. Whoever had written that had drawn a heart around it, the way a kid might who had a secret crush.

But it was clear that a kid hadn’t written it. The handwriting was too elegant, too precise. It was the penmanship Tom had seen many times and remembered well from words of encouragement written across his calculus exams in high school:
Excellent! Terrific!
He knew the handwriting he was staring at belonged to Mr. Dees.

Mr. Dees

I
T EMBARRASSED ME
to stand there in the courthouse and watch Tom Evers look at such a thing, to see him coming to the picture in his head of me secretly peeling back that cover to write a thing a kid with puppy love would have written. I’d done it that Wednesday evening before deciding I would take the books to the Mackeys’ house for Katie to find. It shames me now to say to you that I took pleasure from the thought that when she picked up that book, my secret pledge of love would be there just below where she held her thumb. It was a small thing like that, a thing I can barely stand to say for how foolish it makes me look, but what I hope is you’ll understand, despite how I’ve sometimes deceived you, how far a lonely man like me might go, how much he might risk.

Was it enough? I asked Tom Evers. Enough to prove that I was the one who put that book in the library’s return bin during the same time that Raymond R. was driving down Route 59 to Georgetown and then across the river to Honeywell? Didn’t it prove that I wasn’t with him?

“It doesn’t prove anything,” Tom said, “only that you wrote what you did inside this book. I can see that. But you might have written that any time, Mister Dees. Katie might have had her book laying out sometime this summer when you came to give her a lesson and you found yourself alone with it and you wrote what you did. Who’s to say?”

“All right then,” I told him. “Look in the back. Look in that pocket where they keep the card that they stamp when you check out the book.” I didn’t like to use my teacher’s voice, but that’s what I did. “You look there, Tom Evers, and then tell me what you know.”

That’s where I’d hidden the things I didn’t deserve, the things I’d meant to return to the Mackeys because I knew I had no right to them.

Gilley

T
OM EVERS
came to our house that Sunday afternoon, and for a while he talked only to my father, the two of them standing on our porch. From the entryway, I could hear them.

“I’ve got Henry Dees down at the courthouse,” Tom said.

“What for?” said my father, and I could tell from his voice that he was suspicious that Mr. Dees would tell what he knew about what he’d done to Raymond R.

“Questions. Things I had to know.” I heard the leather of Tom’s holster squeak. “Junior, I’m afraid I’m going to need to talk to Patsy.”

My father let him into our house, and he sent me upstairs to fetch my mother. She was in the bedroom sitting in the rocking chair she’d had since Katie was a baby. “I used to sit here and rock her,” she said. “Do you remember that, Gilley?”

I told her I did, and then I let her sit there a while longer before I told her that Tom Evers was downstairs and he wanted to talk to her.

Tom showed us that book, that
Henry and Beezus
, one of Katie’s books. There in our entryway, he showed us what Mr. Dees had written beneath the jacket, and he showed us what was in the manila pocket at the back of the book: a thin, gold bar broken from one of the clips that Katie had been wearing in her hair when she left for the library that Wednesday evening, and a check my mother had made out to Mr. Dees for the tutoring he’d done.

The sight of that broken hair clip nearly turned us all inside out. My mother reached her hand out for it, and I believe that might have been the moment that cost Tom Evers in the end, made him decide not to push my father for answers. We’d been hurt too much by that point; Tom could see it in the way my mother’s hand trembled, in the way my father took a sharp breath and said, with a break in his voice, “Good Christ.”

“Is it hers?” Tom asked. I could see he was sorry to ask the question. He had to clear his throat. “Is it Katie’s?”

My father turned away to the staircase and steadied himself by placing his hand on the newel post. My mother was turning that broken hair clip over and over in her hand, and to her, it must have seemed that no one else was in her house, that Tom Evers hadn’t just asked her that question.

Finally, I was the one to answer. “It is,” I said. “It’s one of my sister’s.”

Tom nodded. “And she was wearing it—”

I didn’t let him finish. “That night,” I said. “Yes, she was wearing it on Wednesday night.”

There was one more thing Tom Evers needed my mother to do. Could she please confirm that she had indeed written this check out to Henry Dees that Wednesday evening?

She found her voice. “I wrote it,” she said. “Right before he left here. I went out onto the porch where Mister Dees and Katie were having their lesson, and I said, ‘Your father will be home soon. We’ll have lemon sherbet for dessert.’ Then I wrote that check. I used Katie’s pen. Then I gave it back to her, and she clipped it to the neckline of her T-shirt, the way she’d taken to doing even though we said she’d end up losing it.”

“Her pen?” Tom Evers said.

“That’s right.” My father turned back from the staircase. “A fountain pen like the one Henry Dees carried. Katie admired it, so Henry got her one of her own.”

Tom Evers ran his hand through his hair. “What sort of pen did you say it was?”

“A fountain pen,” my mother said.

“A Parker,” said my father. “A Parker 51.”

Tom Evers looked at my father a long time. Then he said, “Junior, would you please come out to my car with me?”

I stepped out onto the front porch and watched them go down the walk to the street. There, in the shade, Tom opened the passenger-side door and stooped over to lean into the car. When he straightened, he had a plastic bag in his hand, and he showed my father what was inside it.

The wind was blowing through the trees, but from the porch I could hear bits of what Tom and my father were saying.

“This pen,” Tom said.

“Katie’s,” said my father.

I couldn’t hear enough then to tell that Tom Evers had found the pen in the grave with Katie. My father would tell me that later. All I knew at the time was that the pen in that bag wasn’t Katie’s. I knew because just before Tom came to show us that library book and the broken hair clip and the check my mother had written, I’d walked into Katie’s room, as I’d done countless times that week, and I saw it—her pen, the one Mr. Dees had given her—lying on her dresser.

My father would later claim that he’d genuinely believed that the pen in the bag was Katie’s. “How else,” he said, “would it have been there with her?” He said it in a way, with just enough bite to his voice, to make me wonder whether he’d been lying to Tom Evers because he knew Tom was on Mr. Dees’s trail, and my father was afraid something would come out about what had happened the night before at the glassworks.

That day on the street, Tom leaned in close to my father, and something about the way my father held himself—his shoulders stiffened, and his head went back—told me that Tom was saying something about Raymond R.

The wind died down, and I could hear him say, “Someone posted bond last night, and now I don’t know where Raymond Wright’s gone.”

My father had the nerve to say, “You couldn’t find my daughter, and now you don’t know where the man who killed her is. Tom, I feel sorry for you when this news gets out.”

Tom bowed his head. He stubbed the toe of his boot against the curb. Then he said to my father, “Junior, I hate to do this, but I’m going to have to ask to see your gun, that Colt.”

“That Colt?” my father said. “I threw that Colt in the river. Like you said, Tom, I didn’t have any business having that thing around. I might have hurt someone with it.”

“Who’s to say you didn’t? Where were you last night?”

“I was home with my family. Ask Patsy. Ask Gilley.” He turned and looked at me standing there on the porch. I was thinking how that Colt had gone into the glass furnace along with Raymond R.’s body, how everything had been broken down. “Where else would I have been,” my father said, a catch in his voice, “at a time like this but with my family? You’ve got kids of your own, Tom. Good Christ.”

For a good while, neither of them spoke. Finally, Tom said, “If you want the truth, this pen looks sort of beat up.” He held the bag up to the sunlight filtering through the tree branches above him. “Sort of worn to be a new pen.”

“Well, you know kids,” my father said. “They rough things up, don’t they?” Tom looked down at the pen. I could see his hand closing into a fist, the plastic bag bunching up in his palm. My father put the question to him again. “You know that, don’t you, Tom? Like I said, you’ve got kids of your own.”

Tom’s fist relaxed. “Yes, I suppose they do.” He opened the bag and took out the pen. He handed it to my father. “I can’t say what I’d do if someone did one of my children the way that Raymond Wright did your Katie. I imagine we’ll all be hurting for you and Patsy for a good long while. This whole town—I guess I can speak for myself, too—a good many of us, I imagine, wouldn’t mind if Raymond Wright turned up dead.”

I knew then, with a certainty that didn’t make me feel any way at all—didn’t make me happy or relieved or sad or full of guilt; it was, as so many things would be in my life from that moment on, a fact—I knew that we would get away with what we’d done.

Mr. Dees

T
OM EVERS
came back to the courthouse, where the fat-fingered policeman had been holding me, and he told me to go home.

“That wasn’t your pen,” he said.

“Tom, I can tell you the truth about that pen and how it came to be in that grave.”

I was prepared to tell him how when I found Katie, I covered her with my shirt and then realized I couldn’t be the one to go to the police. So I took the shirt off her and laid her back in that grave and shoved the dirt over her as if I’d been the one who’d done the killing. I’d thought it all out while I waited for Tom to come back to the courthouse, and I was ready to tell the story.

But he held up his hand. He told me again, his voice dead and sad, to go home. I could see how the life had drained right out of him, and I knew he’d barely slept since that Wednesday evening when the call about Katie had come. He’d done everything he could imagine to find her; he’d done everything by the book except the night Clare’s snapshot of the Mackeys’ house sent him there to do another search and he let it slip to Junior that Raymond R. was in the jail at Georgetown. How much guilt Tom carried with him over that I can’t say, but it still pains me to think about what that guilt may have caused him to ignore or the things Junior Mackey somehow forced him to overlook, a good man like Tom Evers, who finally knew the truth—I have no doubt of this—but never had the evidence to bring Junior Mackey or anyone else to answer.

Gilley

H
E CAME TO
the funeral, Mr. Dees, but he didn’t say a word to my mother or father or me, and we didn’t speak to him, as if he were a stranger. How could we ever look at him again without thinking of that night at the glassworks when my father killed Raymond Wright?

It broke us; I believe that. Not just the grief we fell into because Katie was dead, but also what my father had done and the way it became something we never spoke of, acting like it hadn’t happened while all along knowing it had.

You can pretend that your life is going on when really, all along, you’re trapped in a moment you’ll never be able to change. For me, it’s that Wednesday night at the supper table when I said,
Katie didn’t take back her library books
. For my father, it must be the recoil of that Colt Python—six shots, one coming steadily after another. And Mr. Dees? Well, I won’t speak for him.

He’s the one who found Katie. Even now, when I think of him in the woods that morning, digging with his hands, I don’t know how to feel. The only thing I know now is that we’re all connected, every one of us, even people we don’t know. Raymond Wright saw Katie riding that elephant at the Moonlight Madness Carnival and he said,
Look at that cowgirl
. A few minutes before that, he’d stepped up to me on the sidewalk and said,
Bub, I want to shake your hand
. I didn’t know him from Adam. I didn’t think he had anything to do with me at all. Not him or even Mr. Dees or the gaunt woman with them in front of the Coach House, sipping coffee from a wax cup—Raymond Wright’s wife, Clare, who, when I’m alone at night and I have to admit the truth, is the one I feel sorry for. She was just a woman, plain-faced and simple, who got in the way of trouble.

The day after the funeral, she came to our house. I can still see her on our porch, waiting there when I opened the door. She was wearing a plaid cotton dress, just a cheap wash-and-wear dress, the sort we sold to farmwives at Penney’s. The dress had a thin cardboard belt covered with fabric, and it was worn and crinkled. The top button, at the vee of her collarbone, was broken in half.

“It’s your mama I’d be wanting to see,” she said. For a moment, she looked me straight in the eye; then she bowed her head and stared down at her feet.

She was wearing new shoes, a pair of black pumps that were too elegant for the cotton dress. She didn’t have on hose, and when she brought her right foot up on her toes, letting her heel slip free from the shoe, I could tell that it had already rubbed a blister.

Even now, when I think of this, it’s the memory of those black pumps that breaks my heart. I imagine, as I did that day on the porch, Clare walking all the way from Gooseneck in shoes she hadn’t had the chance to break in. I think of her raw heels, and how she must have thought she needed those pumps to make her look respectable. By this time, people were already starting to talk about her and how surely she knew what had happened to her husband, the one who had a hand in kidnapping that little girl.

That morning on the porch, I wanted to tell her what we had done that night at the glassworks. I wanted to tell her not to hope too much, not to wait, not to pin her future on the chance that someday she’d hear footsteps and there he’d be, her husband. I wanted to tell her all of this, but, of course, I couldn’t.

What I did do was tell her to sit down on our porch swing. I even touched my hand lightly to her elbow and led her over to the swing. I wanted to get her off her feet, maybe even kneel down and help her slip out of those pumps.

“You’ve had a walk, haven’t you?” I said.

She took a handkerchief from a pocket of her dress and used it to dab at the tears that were running down her cheeks. “I have,” she said. “Child, I surely have.”

“You just sit here then while I get my mother,” I said. “It’s cool here.”

“It is that,” she said. “And lands, look at your mama’s flowers.” She reached a hand out to the pots of petunias. “Don’t they smell sweet? I’ve always thought a front porch about the best place to be on a summer day. You can just swing back and forth and watch the world go by. You can rest a bit.”

In the house, my mother was in the living room sorting through the cards from the flowers at Katie’s funeral. The church had been full of them, arrangements from people we didn’t even know, people in Kentucky and Ohio and Illinois and as far north as Michigan who had heard about what had happened and had sent flowers because, as they said in their notes and cards, it was all they could think to do.

“Who was at the door?” my mother asked me.

“It’s Clare Wright,” I told her. “She wants to see you.”

A jumble of cards slid from my mother’s lap. “I couldn’t, Gilley, really. What in the world would I say?”

When I stepped back out to the porch, Clare had her shoes off, but when she saw me, she quickly slipped them back on.

“My mother’s resting.” I sat down on the swing. “But I’ll be sure to tell her that you came.”

“Yes.” Clare’s lips pressed together in a tight line, and she gave a sharp nod of her head. “The burden she’s carrying. You tell her I understand. You tell her I’ll pray for her. I’ll pray for all of you.” She got up from the swing and she hobbled down the steps. Then she stopped and turned back to me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry I didn’t know enough soon enough. I’ll be hurting a long time because it’s all come to this. I’d change it if I could.”