“What about his knife?”
“Claimed somebody stole it out of his truck a couple of weeks ago.”
“He’ll never confess,” J.B. said. “He never owned up to anything he done in his entire miserable life.”
Doc said mildly, “A man’s innocent until proven guilty.”
“You standing up for Tully now, Doc?”
“No. Just stating a fact.”
“Well, I don’t see much doubt. He’s guilty as sin.”
“They haven’t found Mary yet, have they?”
“Not yet,” Cody said, “but a team of deputies has already started hunting on Tully’s property. If they don’t find her or what’s left of her there, sheriff’s gonna organize a search with cadaver dogs.”
Well, they didn’t find Mary on Tully’s property and the search teams and cadaver dogs didn’t find any trace of her in the surrounding countryside. They were out combing the hills and woods five days before they gave up. Sheriff’s men did find one other piece of evidence against Tully, though. More bloodstains, small ones in the back of his pickup. All the blood was the same — type AB negative, Mary’s type and not too common. They knew that on account of she’d given blood once during a drive at the county seat.
Meanwhile, Tully stayed locked in a cell hollering long and loud about how somebody was trying to frame him. According to Cody’s brother-in-law, he threw out the names of just about everyone he knew, J.B. Hatfield’s number one among them. But it was just a lot of noise that didn’t get listened to. Nobody liked Tully worth a damn, but who’d hate him enough to frame him for murder?
None of us went up to the county jail to see him. None of us would have even if he hadn’t been throwing accusations around, trying to lay the blame on somebody else. Plain fact was, life in Ridgedale was a lot more pleasant without Tully Buford around.
There was a lot of speculation about whether or not the county district attorney would prosecute him for first-degree murder. “Bet you he won’t,” Earl said. “Not without a whatyoucallit, corpus delicti.” Doc Dunaway pointed out that corpus delicti meant “body of the crime,” not an actual dead body, and that precedents had been established for first-degree homicide convictions in no-body cases. Even so, the D.A. was a politician first and a prosecutor second, and he didn’t want to lose what in our small county was a high-profile trial. Most of us figured he’d play it safe. Try Tully on a lesser crime, like manslaughter. Like as not there was enough circumstantial evidence for him to get a conviction on that charge.
Turned out that’s just what he did. The trial lasted about a week, with a parade of witnesses testifying against Tully’s character and nobody testifying in his favor. The public defender didn’t put up much of a defense, and Tully hurt himself with enough cussing and yelling in the courtroom to get himself restrained and gagged. The jury was out less than an hour before they brought in a guilty verdict. First-degree manslaughter, ten to fifteen years in state prison.
There wasn’t a soul in Ridgedale didn’t believe justice had been served.
Well, that was the end of it as far as I was concerned. Or it was until this morning, nearly a year after the trial ended. Now all of a sudden I’ve got a whole different slant on things.
It was Al Phillips gave it to me. Al is Soderholm Brewery’s delivery-man on the route that includes Ridgedale; he stops in once a month to pick up empty kegs and drop off full ones. I went out to talk to him and lend a hand, as I usually do, and while we were unloading the fresh kegs he said, “I was up in the state capital last weekend. Took my wife to the outdoor jazz festival up there.”
“How was it?” I asked.
“Oh, fine. But a funny thing happened afterward.”
“What sort of funny thing?”
“Well, believe it or not, I think I saw Mary Dawes.”
My first reaction was to laugh. “You must be kidding.”
“No, sir,” he said seriously. “Not a bit.”
“Must’ve been some woman looks like Mary.”
“Could be, but then she’d just about have to be her twin,” Al said. “I stopped in at the Blue Moon for lunch enough times to know Mary Dawes when I see her.”
“Al, she’s been dead a year. You know that.”
“All I know is what I saw last Sunday.”
“You talk to this woman?”
“I tried to, but she hustled off into the crowd before I could.”
“Did she see you?”
“I don’t know. Might have.”
“If she did, why would she avoid you like that?”
Al shrugged. “Your guess is as good as mine.”
“Mary,” I said. “Mary Dawes.”
“Yes, sir. Mary Dawes.”
I didn’t believe it then. I’m not positive I do even now. But after Al left I couldn’t get rid of the notion that Mary might still be alive. I was still chewing on it when Doc Dunaway came in. It was early afternoon then and there weren’t any other customers. I drew him a pint of lager, his only tipple, and when I set the glass down in front of him, he said, “You’ve got a funny look, Luke. Something the matter?”
“Well, I don’t know,” I said, and I told him what Al had told me.
He drank some of his beer. “It couldn’t have been Mary,” he said. “A woman who looks like her, that’s all.”
“That’s what I said. But Al sure sounded convinced. If he’s right, then Tully’s innocent like he claimed and somebody really did frame him — for a murder that never happened.”
“Then how do you explain Mary’s sudden disappearance? Where did the blood in her room come from, the blood on her clothes and Tully’s knife and in the bed of Tully’s pickup?”
“Well, I’ve been thinking about that. Suppose it was all part of a plan. Suppose whoever wanted to frame Tully paid her to disappear the way she did. Paid her enough so she wouldn’t mind having herself cut and spilling some of her blood.”
“Sounds pretty far-fetched to me.”
“Not if whoever it was hated Tully enough.”
“You don’t mean J.B?”
“Well, he’s the first one I thought of,” I said. “Only J.B. doesn’t have much money and it would’ve taken plenty to convince Mary. And he’s not too smart, J.B. isn’t. I just can’t see him coming up with a plan like that.”
“Who else could it be?”
“Somebody with both brains and money. Somebody who was sick and tired of Tully and his bullying and carousing and killing of defenseless animals—”
I stopped. Of a sudden, the back of my scalp started to crawl.
Doc? Doc Dunaway?
No, it couldn’t be. But then I thought, yes it could. He was a vet for forty years and he loved animals and he was smart as a whip and he had a nice fat nest egg put away from the sale of his veterinary practice. Old and arthritic, sure, but a man didn’t have to be young and hale to steal a knife out of an unlocked truck or help mess up a cabin and sprinkle some blood around or hide a box under a porch or make an anonymous telephone call. And a vet would know exactly how and where to make a surgical cut on a person’s body that would bleed a lot without doing any real damage...
Doc sat watching me through his spectacles. His eyes have always been soft and kind of watery; now they seemed to have a hard shine on them, like polished agates.
Pretty soon he said in his quiet way, “Won’t do to go around speculating, Luke. That’s how ugly rumors get started and folks get hurt.”
“Sure,” I said, and my voice sounded funny. “Sure, that’s right.”
“Chances are it wasn’t Mary Al Phillips saw. And even if it was, why, she might not be in the capital for long. Might decide to leave the state entirely this time, move back East somewhere.”
“Why would she do that?”
“For the sake of argument, let’s say your theory is correct. The person who conceived the plan might have kept in touch with her, mightn’t he? Might offer her more money now to move away so far she’ll never be seen again by anyone from this county. Then there’d be no proof she’s alive. No proof at all.”