“You can have a Bible,” she said.
I shook my head and she went away, thinking that this was proof of my wickedness, perhaps even a sign that I am a witch. I did not tell her that I refused the Good Book because I cannot read.
I pass the time at the barred window, looking down on the muddy road that passes through the center of the town. There are more people here than I have ever seen in my life. Some of the women have velvet cloaks and bonnets with white feathers. I wish I could see their shoes. Sometimes the people pause and look up toward my window, and I step back into the shadows because I don’t want them looking at me. I wonder where they are going, and what the fine houses look like on the inside, and what fancy goods are to be had over there in the store. I had me a store-bought china bowl up home. Someone gave it to us for a wedding gift-one of Charlie’s kinfolks, that was. It didn’t get broke, in spite of all that happened there in the cabin. I remember it sitting on the pine table when I went away, down to Mama’s, not knowing for sure that I was leaving that place for the last time, but thinking I probably wouldn’t want to sleep there ever again. When Daddy got home from Kentucky, I’d make him take me back there to get my things, I thought, but that wasn’t to be. I wonder what happened to that bowl. It was white with three marks like blue feathers painted on one side. I would like for the baby to have it when she is grown.
THE MANILA FOLDER lay on the wrought-iron table, untouched but not unnoticed by the invalid in the lawn chair. While he drank his morning coffee on the deck overlooking the mountains, Spencer Arrowood stared at the thick manila folder that Martha had brought him the night before. He had felt too tired to tackle it on the previous evening, but now his curiosity about it was almost overpowering. He had not touched that file in nearly twenty years. Its contents would be strange to him, even though he had written most of the entries himself-and yet he hadn’t. The author of those police reports had been a swaggering young deputy, sure of his place in the world and of his superiority over his prisoners. He was the white knight upholding honor and justice in a tarnished world; they were cartoon bad guys, without excuses or families or feelings. He remembered how that young deputy had looked at life. He saw a world inhabited by only two kinds of people: criminals and cop groupies. He had viewed both types with suspicious condescension. It had taken Spencer a long time to learn how narrow the range of his experience was. Most people’s lives never touched the orbit of a police officer: they went through an entire existence as neither victim, nor devotee, nor perpetrator, and so he had never seen these folk.
Spencer could remember thinking like that, but he could no longer summon up the arrogance of youth that made such belief possible. He had perspective now. He had arrested a wife beater and recognized him as the skinny kid from sixth grade who used to show up at school with a black eye and bruises and mumbled excuses about how he got them. He arrested a pretty young cheerleader for drunk driving, only now she wasn’t the pretty young cheerleader: she was blowsy and forty-four, and sometime in the intervening years since high school she had turned into her own mother. Although he would seldom admit this, especially to himself, Spencer had felt inside himself the same rages and impulses that got people arrested, and now he thought that most law-abiding citizens were as fortunate as they were virtuous. Any one bit of luck-loving parents, a knack for getting good grades, enough money, a faithful spouse-could derail the kind of tragedy that happened to people less blessed.
He knew that Fate Harkryder had not been an upstanding member of the community, but he had not been lucky, either. Spencer looked again at the manila folder containing the biography of a killer, wondering how it would read to him now that he was no longer the arrogant young deputy who thought that his gold shield made him a knight.
He half remembered typing the final reports, two-fingered, on an IBM electric typewriter that at the time had seemed to be the last word in technological wonders. The machine was probably still down in the basement of the sheriff’s office, along with the broken staplers, the rotary-dial telephones, the boxes of old paperwork, and all the other detritus of previous administrations which they had always meant to discard but never quite got around to carting off to the landfill.
The first item in the folder was a yellowed newspaper clipping from theHamelin Record relating to the Harkryder case, with a photograph of the state’s key witness, a twenty-four-year-old deputy named Spencer Arrowood. Spencer stared at the picture of himself as an impossibly soft-faced kid. His cheeks were plump, his eyes unlined, and for all the air of menace he had tried to invoke, with his narrowed eyes and his mean-cop scowl, he looked like the rawboned adolescent he was, fresh out of the army but still looking for a fight. His sandy hair had brushed his collar in those days, fashionably long but a continual source of irritation for Nelse Miller, whose childhood impressions of masculinity had fixed on the close-cropped doughboys just back from the lice-ridden trenches of the First World War. Spencer had wasted many coffee breaks arguing the point of fashion and hygiene with the old sheriff, but it had been a waste of breath. A waste on both sides, he thought ruefully, for now he kept his graying hair as short as Nelse Miller could have wished for.
Had he ever been that young?
The thought worried him more than he would ever admit. That arrogant young deputy, the Spencer Arrowood of twenty years ago, had made decisions that would cost a man his life. What if he had been wrong?
He hadn’t thought so at the time, but back then he had been so angry, and so eager to see someone punished for what had happened to Emily Stanton, that he never paused to question his conclusions for an instant.
Her face smiled out at him from the faded newsprint. He had never seen her smile. The newspaper photo was a yearbook shot from her university. They couldn’t have used the crime scene photo in a family newspaper. No one would have wanted to remember her as she was when they found her. This was better. The picture was black and white, but Spencer remembered it in color: long red curls, clear green eyes. He remembered other colors, too, ones he would have liked to forget: streaks of mud across her left cheek, a purple bruise on her forehead, rivulets of blood, and a white splinter of bone poking through skin that should have been pink but wasn’t anymore.
The caption beneath the picture said: “Army Colonel’s Daughter Killed in Hiking Tragedy.”
To the right of Emily Stanton’s lovely face, the plain features of Mike Wilson looked out at him with the buzz haircut and the glazed stare of the student soldier. ROTC-a “Rotsy,” as the students in the university’s Reserve Officers’ Training Corps were called. Mike Wilson was headed for a hitch in the air force after college, but he never made it. He had fought a brief, private battle in a clearing in the Tennessee mountains, and he’d never had a chance. There had been defense wounds all up and down his arms, and nicks on his fingers that showed he’d tried to grab at the knife as it came at him. Those were the least of his injuries, of course, but at least they said something about how he had died. Bravely. Everyone clung to that. “Brave Mike Wilson” the news accounts invariably called him, as if that would make up for the waste of his life. Mike Wilson had died first that night. Quickly. At least, Spencer hoped it was quick.