“I’ve been calling him all day,” she said, “but he hasn’t answered.”
“Momma I have to show Sheriff Halsey the letter now.”
The sheriff looked at him. “Letter—?”
“Danny wrote a letter Sheriff Halsey and told me to give it to you if he didn’t call first to say he was OK it’s upstairs in my room. I’m sorry Momma he made me promise not to tell you—” And he’d begun to go but Rachel held him in place by the hand.
“It’s not in your room, Marky, it’s in my purse.” Then to the sheriff she said, “Sheriff, do you want to come inside out of the cold?”
53
THE LIGHT WAS blinking again and she hurried to it, and once again it wasn’t him, it wasn’t Danny; it was the sheriff who’d come in behind her.
She erased the message and slipped the handset into her coat pocket. She put the kettle on the burner and got down the mugs, then she walked out of the kitchen and went upstairs to the bathroom. Took off her coat to sit down, and put it back on again after, checking her face in the mirror, white as a ghost, frightened old woman, slapping her cheeks a little and then coming back down the stairs and by the time she walked back into the kitchen the sheriff had given the last page of the letter to Marky, and Marky was reading it slowly as the sheriff sat staring at the white square of cloth where it lay before him on the table. He’d taken off his hat when he walked in but he still wore his jacket, and Marky wore his too.
“I forgot to light the burner,” she said, and the sheriff said, “Don’t bother with that,” and his voice startled her—loud in the kitchen in a way she hadn’t noticed outdoors. As if he’d decided she might be hard of hearing.
She sat down across from him. She took the handset from her coat pocket and set it on the table next to Marky’s cell phone. One of the two would ring any second now. One of them would.
They waited for Marky to finish reading the letter. His lips moved when he read and the small noises his lips made were the only sounds. Finally he put the last sheet of stationery down and sat looking at the square of cloth. She could see him shuffling the parts of the story around and around in his head, how he wanted to fit them all together before he’d say anything.
The sheriff ran his hand through his hair slowly, front to back, and returned his hand to the table. He looked at the sheets of stationery and after a while he tapped them with his fingertips and said to her, “You didn’t show this to anyone else besides Gordon Burke?”
“No, sir.”
“And he handled this piece of cloth?”
“He touched it. Just a little.”
“And you’ve handled it?”
“Yes.”
“And so has Danny,” said the sheriff.
“And so has the person who put that girl in the river,” she said weakly.
“Yes, if that is, in fact, the pocket from her blouse.” He shook his head. He blew the air from his lungs as a smoker would. “I had a bad feeling about all this the second that girl stepped into my office.”
“What girl?”
“Audrey Sutter. Tom Sutter’s daughter. The girl who—”
“I know who she is. She came to talk to me too.”
“Me too,” said Marky, and they both looked at him.
“What did she say, Marky?”
“She wanted to know did I know where Danny was Momma. She said she wanted to help him.”
“That’s all?” Rachel said.
“She asked me to give Danny her number when he called.”
“She didn’t say anything about Katie Goss?”
“No Momma I don’t think she knows Katie Goss.”
“Katie Goss?” said the sheriff. “What’s she got to do with this?”
“That girl,” Rachel said, “Audrey Sutter, she went up to Rochester to talk to her.”
“And why did she do that?”
“Because someone told her to.”
The sheriff looked at her. “Someone told her to.”
“Yes.”
“And what did Katie Goss have to say?”
Rachel glanced at Marky and turned back to the sheriff. “Something I think you already know about,” she said.
He looked at her darkly and for a long time. Then he said, “Tell you what I know about Katie Goss. I know some friend of hers told a story got back to Sheriff Sutter, back then ten years ago, but when he went out to talk to her, to Miss Goss, she had no idea what he was talking about. I know her story doesn’t even qualify as a story, legally speaking, unless she’s all of a sudden changed her mind about telling it. Is that what you’re telling me?”
“No,” said Rachel. “But she might change her mind, if the Holly Burke case were reopened.”
“And why would the Holly Burke case be reopened?”
“Because of this!” she all but cried, picking up the sheets of stationery. “Because of that pocket.”
“That,” said the sheriff, nodding at the letter, “is one humdinger of a story, but that’s all it is, at the moment. And as for the pocket, even if it does match the blouse, it’s ten years old and has been handled by half the county by now. I don’t mean to be harsh about it, Mrs. Young, but those are the facts of the situation here. So far it’s your son’s story against the sheriff’s, with no other witnesses and only this piece of cloth, which your son has kept hidden all this time—an unfortunate move on his part, I’m sorry to say, as even the world’s sorriest prosecutor would point out that that is a practice consistent not with innocent men but with guilty ones.”
“Danny didn’t have nothing to do with Holly Burke going into the river Sheriff Halsey,” Marky said, and the sheriff nodded, as though he’d understood.
“You’re right, Marky. In the eyes of the law, right now, that is absolutely true: Danny is altogether innocent of Holly Burke’s death. But it’s also true that he was never formally charged and never stood trial.”
Though he looked at Marky as he spoke, watching carefully to see that he was understood, Rachel knew he was speaking to her. He said, “Now along comes this new piece of evidence here, and this new testimony—and possibly even the testimony of some third party like Miss Goss—and suddenly you are placing that boy into the hands of a system that may just find him guilty whether he had anything to do with her death or not. Do you understand? He’s free now. He might not be afterwards.”
“He’s free?” said Rachel. “Sheriff, he hasn’t been free a day in his life since you all took him into custody ten years ago. And you knew. You all knew about that—deputy, back then, and you protected him.”
“Momma…”
“Mrs. Young.” The sheriff looked at his hands on the table, then looked up again. “I can’t even imagine what you’ve gone through. Or what you’re going through right now. But I would ask you to ask yourself one thing.”
She waited. She was trying not to tremble.
“Why didn’t Danny tell his story ten years ago?” the sheriff said.
“He was just a boy, Sheriff. He was confused. He was terrified.”
The sheriff scratched his jaw and cocked his head. “He was nineteen, Mrs. Young. And I wouldn’t say he was terrified.”
She stared at him. “What does that mean?”
“It means I watched his interview, with Sheriff Sutter, and I wouldn’t say he was terrified. I’d say he handled himself pretty well, actually.”
She just stared at him. No idea what to say to that—was that supposed to be a compliment?
When he said nothing more she tapped her finger on the table and said, “Maybe that’s not the right question, Sheriff.”
“Ma’am?”
“Maybe the question isn’t why didn’t he say anything back then. Maybe the question is why would he say anything now? I mean, why would he do that?”