Strowe didn’t believe a word of it. Without proof, Hope Knight’s accusation amounted to nothing. Only Sheriff Strowe seemed to sense other clues.
The next afternoon, while Hope Knight was in class, he made another trip out to the Knight farm.
“You can’t really expect to learn anything of Julie’s murder in Hope’s room,” said her incredulous father, as he left off studying a catalog listing the best bulls for sale in the county. “If Hope found out her room has been invaded without her permission...”
“You know it wouldn’t take me an hour to get a warrant,” Strowe told Paul Knight.
“Hope will be home in an hour,” Knight warned him.
“I’ll be finished and gone long before that, Paul.”
Paul Knight closed the catalog and pushed back from his desk. “I’ll take you upstairs,” he said.
To confirm the portraits of opposites Sheriff Strowe already had in his mind, he asked Paul Knight to first show him Julie’s room. Since her death, nothing in it had been changed or moved, Paul Knight told him.
Julie’s room was dominated by the lively orange and black of Zachary High. Pom-poms, wall pennants, snapshots, pep tags, dance programs. It was a room oddly still alive with her and Strowe couldn’t keep himself from the eerie sensation that at any moment, Julie Knight would come bounding in the door, put a Three Dog Night record on her phonograph, and then flop down on her bed to do homework or to make her daily brace of afterschool telephone calls.
There was really no describing the opposite effect Hope Knight’s room had on him.
So gray and unremarkable was it, Strowe might as well have been standing in the middle of a rented room in a two-floor hotel. Except for books, five shelves of them, Hope Knight had no special love of objects and artifacts. On a bare, pink wall above her bed hung a bulletin board and on another wall, a calendar.
It was in the neatly organized closet of clothes and shoes that Sheriff Strowe found the shoebox of letters. And contrary to anything he would have suspected, several of them appeared to have been written to Hope Knight from Lonnie Davenport. Their color was decidedly purple and the sexual language as explicit as the dialogue in a blue movie. The handwriting was bold, sprawlish and definitely male compared to the slanting, delicate hand of Hope Knight found by Strowe in class themes and test papers done by Hope in a previous school year.
The letters seemed genuine, all right. And yet it seemed highly unlikely that Lonnie Davenport should even know Hope Knight that well. The difference between senior and sophomore was vast, as were their special differences in Lonnie’s sports activity and Hope’s literary passivity. And further, it seemed improbable that an affair of this kind in a town as small and circumspect as Zachary would totally escape the eyes of everyone. Sheriff Strowe wished then that he had a sample of Lonnie Davenport’s handwriting.
He glanced again at the cork bulletin board, identical to the one in Julie Knight’s room, except for its sad lack of personal mementoes. A few small snapshots of the Zachary High newspaper and annual staffs. Two of what appeared to be the assembled members of the drama club, one staged against the backdrop of a rustic cabin, the other a street scene.
Across the top of the first photo were scribbled the words, “Drama Club production Huckleberry Finn, Fall 1972. Hope Knight as most two-faced, used-car-dealing Duke as ever trod the boards.” The second photograph’s caption read, “Spring Drama Club production of Othello. Hope Knight plays First Senator. ‘Adieu, brave Moor. Use Desdemona well’. She overcomes this and other innocuous lines with strikingly dignified senatorial stage presence.”
The photographs only temporarily deflected the Sheriff’s main preoccupation: a sample of Lonnie Davenport’s handwriting. He knew where that sample might be found.
Leaving Hope Knight’s room, he returned to Julie’s and attacked the contents of the drawers of her writing desk. In a lower right-hand compartment he found a bundle of personal letters, bound with blue yam; letters, notes and holiday cards from Lonnie Davenport. The manner in which they had been signed by Lonnie Davenport was unvaried and so he selected one randomly for handwriting and took it with him back to Hope’s room.
Even a cursory inspection revealed Hope’s letters to be forgeries, all of them, signed ‘Lon’, a nickname he apparently used only in Hope Knight’s fantasies.
Replacing the box of letters in the darkened corner of Hope Knight’s closet, a large cardboard box now made its shadowy presence known. Strowe stretched into the closet’s far recesses, hooked a finger onto a corner of it and pulled it out into the light.
It contained old clothing. Not the discarded skirts and sweaters and out-of-style blouses a whimish teenaged girl usually discarded.
The box held male clothing: two button-down dress shirts, some neckties, a pair of flare jeans and two pair of doubleknit slacks, even jockey-briefs and T-shirts. Rummaging deeper, Strowe’s fingers struck wool with a familiar feel. And two bulky objects, the canvas quality of which also felt familiar.
He knew their identity even before he resurrected them into better light. The objects were Lonnie Davenport’s basketball warm-up sweat shirt and warmup pants and his size-10½ basketball shoes.
Explaining to Paul Knight about a sensitive, confused daughter’s transvestism was, for Sheriff Strowe, a hairsbreadth easier than telling him she was a murderess.
More strictly, Strowe felt sure a psychiatrist would find not a murderess but a murderer. Hope Knight’s dream of ever having Lonnie Davenport as her genuine lover had already slipped beyond reach. But the next best thing was well within her reach; she could, by wearing street clothing stolen from Lonnie Davenport in the privacy of her own room, capture some vague sense of his closeness.
Had she not been the Duke in the Drama Club’s production of Huckleberry Finn?
And a very stately, very masculine Venetian senator in their Othello?
For Hope Knight, it was a natural act and inclination to slip into another person’s skin by slipping into his clothing. To wear his clothes, to feel them touching her body, transported her completely.
The thought of murder had risen in her brain, Strowe thought. Playing the role of Lonnie and then alternately playing herself as his lover was more frustrating than fulfilling. Hatred took the place of love. But which one to injure? Not Lonnie Davenport, certainly. She loved him. Then toward whom should her rage be directed?
Toward her sister, of course. She already knew she had the imbalanced ability to become Lonnie Davenport anytime she wished. It was simply another plane of play-acting.
“Good Lord,” said Paul Knight, startling Strowe out of his revery. “What’s all that?”
“Lonnie Davenport’s clothing,” Sheriff Strowe replied simply. “And I think you know what it means. Hope must have lured Julie to the lake and then...” The unfinished image was clear to both men.
With her height and gangliness, Hope Knight would even have resembled Lonnie Davenport a little when she came down Cottage Grove Road where Julie’s car was parked, with Julie waiting impatiently behind the wheel or standing somewhere nearby.
The darkness, the lateness of the hour, her anticipation to see her boy friend; all these factors would have temporarily clouded Julie’s perception of things until it was too late to defend herself or shake her younger sister from her terrible trance.
“But her poetry,” said a visibly shaken Paul Knight. “And the Herald-Talisman. Wasn’t she making every honest attempt to expose Julie’s murderer?”
“Of course,” said Strowe. “To eventually expose herself. Poem by poem, she was slowly pulling herself back into the horrible reality of it all. It would have taken time for her to move from the voice of her sister speaking from her grave, to the voice of Lonnie Davenport, and finally to herself. But a total transformation would have come to pass.”