The screen went dark. That was all.
‘What was Selina Day wearing when she died, Mr. Haight?’
He took a moment to answer.
‘A white blouse, a red-and-black checked skirt, white stockings, black shoes.’
The details of her attire would probably have been included in the newspaper reports of the case. Even if they weren’t, they would have been known in the area, given that she had died in her uniform. Either way, it wouldn’t have been difficult for someone to put together a facsimile of what she had been wearing simply by doing a little research. Specialist local knowledge would not have been required.
‘You know, I think I will have a cup of coffee after all,’ I said.
He asked me how I took it, and I asked for milk, no sugar. While he was in the kitchen, I watched the video again, trying to find any clue to the location of the barn that I might have missed: a feed bag from a local supplier, a scrap of paper with an address that could be enlarged, anything at all, but there was nothing. The barn was a stage set with an absent player.
Haight returned with my coffee, and what smelled like a mint tea for himself.
‘Tell me about Lonny Midas, Mr. Haight,’ I said.
Haight sipped his tea. He did so carefully, even daintily. His movements were studiedly effeminate. In everything that I had seen him do so far, he seemed to be trying to communicate the impression that he was weak, inconsequential, and posed no threat. He was a man who was doing his best to fade into the background so as not to attract the attention of others, yet not so much that his desire to blend in would become overpowering, and thus mark him out. He was a youthful predator turned old prey.
Because in all that followed, in all that he told me that afternoon, the fact remained that he and Lonny Midas had acted together in stalking, and then killing, Selina Day. Midas might have been the instigator, but Haight had been beside him right until the end.
‘Lonny wasn’t a bad kid,’ said Haight. ‘People said that he was, but he wasn’t, not really. His mom and dad were old when they had him. Well, I say “old,” but I mean that his mom was in her late thirties and his father in his late forties. His brother, Jerry, was a decade older than him, but I don’t recall much about him. He’d left home by the time – well, by the time all the bad stuff happened. Lonny’s mom and dad weren’t just old, though; they were old-fashioned. His dad had wanted to be a preacher, but I don’t think he was smart enough. Not that you have to be smart to be a preacher, not really, but you need to be able to bring folk along with you, to convince them that you’re worth following and listening to, and Lonny’s father didn’t have that touch with ordinary people. Instead, he worked in a warehouse, and read his Bible in the evenings. Lonny’s mom was always in the background cooking or cleaning or sewing. She doted on Lonny, though. I guess with her older boy gone, and her husband lost in the Good Book, Lonny was all she had left, and she gave him the kind of love and affection that I think she craved for herself. In that way, she was a lot like my mother, though she took what we did a lot harder and was less forgiving. Had she lived, I don’t know how welcoming she would have been once he was released. I think it was better for him that they both died while he was inside.
‘But she was always so grateful when I came over to play with Lonny, or when she saw us together on the street. Her face would light up, because it seemed as if there was someone else who liked Lonny almost as much as she did.’
‘Are you implying that there were those who didn’t care much for Lonny?’ I asked.
‘Well, when you’re young there will always be some kids that you get along with, and others that you don’t. With Lonny, you could say there were more of the latter than the former. Lonny had a temper on him, but he was intelligent with it. That’s a bad combination. He was curious, and adventurous, but if you got in his way, or tried to stop him from getting what he wanted, then he’d lash out. He used to tell me that his father would beat on him for the slightest infraction, but that just made Lonny want to spite him more. He couldn’t control Lonny. Neither of them could. In the end, I guess Lonny couldn’t even control himself.
‘I wasn’t like that. I wanted to toe the line. No, that’s not true: My instinct was to toe the line, but like a lot of quiet, shy kids I secretly envied the Lonny Midases of this world. I still do. I think we became friends because I was so unlike him in action, yet I believed that I was a little like him in spirit. He would draw me out of myself, and sometimes I managed to keep him in check, to talk him down when it seemed like his tongue and his fists were going to get him into trouble. Man, but he got me in hot water I don’t know how many times, and my parents weren’t like his. They weren’t much younger than his mom and dad, but compared to them they were kind of laid-back. Lonny’s dad beat him when he did wrong, but my dad was always in my mom’s shadow, and she just went back to reading parenting books after I started getting in trouble, as if they were at fault and not me. They thought Lonny was a bad influence on me, but it wasn’t that simple. It never is.’
‘How long had you known each other before you killed Selina Day?’
For the first time, he didn’t wince at the mention of her name. He was partially adrift in a reverie of the past. I could see it in his eyes, and on his face. He had even begun to relax into his chair a little. He was back in a time before he was a murderer, when he and Lonny Midas were just kids getting into scrapes that would have been familiar to generations of kids before them.
‘We were friends from grade school. We were inseparable. We were brothers.’
He smiled, and there was a dampness to his eyes. William and Lonny, the little killers.
‘What about girls?’ I asked. ‘Were either of you seeing anyone?’
‘I was fourteen. I could only dream of girls.’
‘And Lonny?’
He thought about the question. ‘Girls liked him more than they liked me. I don’t think it was so much that he was better looking than I was, but he just had that way about him. I think I told you back in Ms. Price’s office that he’d kissed a couple of girls, and maybe copped a feel or two, but nothing more serious than that.’
‘And before Selina Day, had you or Lonny ever suggested finding a girl and taking her off somewhere?’
‘No, never.’
‘So why Selina Day?’
He sipped his tea again, delaying his response. Somewhere upstairs, a clock struck the half hour. Outside, the light began to change, and the room grew darker. The alteration was so sudden that, for a second or two, Randall Haight was lost to me, or so it seemed, just as the camera had struggled to adjust to the darkness of the barn, and I knew with a cold certainty that a game was being played here, but a different game than the one I had earlier assumed. No truth was absolute, especially when it came to a man who, in his youth, had killed a child, and Haight was consciously constructing a narrative that he believed would satisfy me. But it was a narrative that was always open to change and adaptation, just as he had held on to facets of his youth that he could expand into his performance as an adult, allowing him to fade into the background and become Randall Haight.
‘Because she was different,’ he said at last, and there was a flash of the grit that must have drawn Lonny Midas to him as a boy, the possibility that, deep down, they shared a common soul. ‘She was black. There were no black girls at our school, and there were boys who said that black girls were easy, and Selina Day was easier still. Lonny said that his brother knew a boy who raped a black girl and got clean away with it. Maybe those were different times, but not so different. The law had one ear for the blacks and one ear for us, and the hearing wasn’t the same in each ear.