Gotta remember to burn these notes before I leave town. Don’t want to get pulled over at some later date and be carrying around a list of people who have been found dead or missing.
He found a table at the edge of the library where the sun shone through the filtered glass. He found the previous months’ worth of copies of the local newspaper, The Morning Sentinel. Scott had hoped that the paper would be a weekly, but found it was published seven days a week.
Damn. Weekly papers are a lot more concise with their reporting. Gotta cram a whole week’s worth of news into one issue. Daily papers like this have a lot more filler. I don’t even know what I’m looking for, but I guess I’ll know it when I see it.
He developed a system. He scanned the first section of the paper, which had a mix of local, regional, and national news. He skipped the Sports and Classified sections, but looked carefully through the Local section. That was where the police blotter was, and small stories like car accidents and break-ins were reported.
By noon, he had scanned through three months’ worth of papers without finding a mention of any member of the Jenkins family. He stood, stretched the kinks out of his back and returned the papers.
For his three hours of effort, he had written exactly one note—the Jenkins’ address and phone number.
He walked to a café downtown for lunch, then went into the Chamber of Commerce Visitor’s Center. He wasn’t interested in the Colby Museum of Art, or the Fort Halifax State Historic Site, but he got what he was interested in—a map of the local area.
Scott found where he was on the map, then located the Jenkins’ address, which was on Greenbrier Lane. Initially, he thought that Greenbrier wasn’t on the map, but then he saw it—a small street in a wooded area northwest of the city proper.
It was hard to judge distances on the map, which didn’t seem to be drawn to an accurate scale. He guessed it might be three or four miles to get to the street they lived on. He decided to put that trip off until the next morning and returned to the library for more searching.
He made it through another three months’ worth of The Morning Sentinel that afternoon. He still didn’t find any mention of the Jenkins family.
I guess that’s not too unusual. How often does a family get their name in the paper, anyway? Besides, I’m not even sure what I was looking for. Maybe something to convince me that I need to do this. Sitting in the library an entire lifetime ago, this all seemed so black and white. A bad man in Maine killed his family. I should kill him, so his family can live. It was easier then.
He picked up the stack of papers and returned them to their proper place. The young librarian behind the desk smiled at him for being a good citizen, but Scott didn’t notice.
I know I can kill someone. I did it before. But, that was with a rifle, at a great distance, or with my handgun, when they were rushing at me, intending to kill me first. Can I be the instigator of violence? Can I look someone in the eyes and kill them?
Scott walked out of the library and toward his new home in a residential neighborhood half a mile away.
He looked around as he walked, soaking in the feel of the town.
Just another All-American town. Feels like it could be the setting for a Jimmy Stewart movie, not a Stephen King novel.
Chapter Nineteen
The next morning, Scott woke up, grabbed a coffee and donut from the bakery downtown, and set off to walk to Greenbrier Lane. It was a perfect summer day in Maine, with a few wispy clouds and temperatures heading for a high near eighty.
Scott had a tough time deciding what to take with him on his exploratory jaunt to the Jenkins place. He would have been more comfortable with his collapsible baton and karambit with him. At the same time, he knew that walking through strange neighborhoods with weapons was not a great idea. Sometimes local cops like to have conversations with guys they see walking through a residential area they have no business being in. In the end, he left his backpack and jacket in his motel room and set out wearing nothing but his Levi’s, walking boots, and a light shirt.
He tucked his hands into his pockets and whistled as tunelessly as his Gramps ever had as he walked through one comfortable neighborhood after another. As he got further away from the downtown area, the houses were more spread out and tended to sit on larger lots.
By the time Scott finally found Greenbrier, the sun was high in the sky and he had beads of sweat on his forehead. It was the most rural area he had walked through yet. All the houses sat on acre-plus lots, and most of them had long driveways with the house well back from the road. His only chance to figure out the address of the house was by checking the numbers on the mailbox.
He walked along the opposite side of the road he knew the Jenkins house would be on, doing his best to look like just another guy out for a stroll on a sunny day. After walking half a mile along Greenbrier, he saw the house he had been looking for. It turned out he didn’t need the address after all.
He had read about the Jenkins murders in a book that featured shorter compilations of famous crimes. Stuck in the middle of the book were a few pages of black and white photos. The Jenkins family murders were famous enough to have warranted a book of their own, but the lack of drama in the capture of Brock Jenkins and the overwhelming lack of motive, relegated it to a smaller story.
One of the pictures in that book, which Scott had dissected like it was the Zapruder film, was a medium-distance shot of the house that was now in front of him in living color.
That photo had shown a conventional two story home with a series of objects neatly lined up in the front yard. Those objects were four tarps covering Sylvia Jenkins and her children. The oldest two children were girls—Annie and Alicia. The youngest was a boy, Danny. The kids had ranged in age from eleven to only two years old.
It’s generally established that when family members kill someone close to them, they often arrange or cover them in a lifelike pose, hoping to minimize the damage they’ve done. Not Brock Jenkins. After taking hours to kill his whole family, he had stacked them like cordwood in his front yard.
After he committed the murder, he had run. Because he had left his family’s bodies out in the open, it wasn’t long before a horrified neighbor saw them and reported it to the Waterville Police. An all-points bulletin was put out for Brock Jenkins and his green 1970 Dodge pickup.
He was taken into custody at a rest area fifteen miles short of the state line by an alert Vermont State Policeman, trolling license plates for numbers he recognized. He was literally arrested with his pants around his ankles in the bathroom.
Vermont had eliminated the death penalty in 1972, so Jenkins had been sentenced to life in prison. He had originally been sent to Windsor Prison, the oldest prison in Vermont. That old pile of rocks was closed two years later, but he was transferred a few miles away to the new Windsor prison. He had still been there the last time Scott had checked on him in his previous life.
He never accepted visitors, and never gave a reason for why madness overtook him and he killed his entire family. By all reports he was a model prisoner.
And now, that same house was in front of Scott. He walked past it, trying not to be too obvious about paying attention to it. There was a neighbor on one side, an open field behind the house, and a stand of trees that ringed the property on the other.