A Quiet Belief in Angels (52 page)

I walked back to the Excelsior and packed my things. At the reception desk I made inquiries about buses, and was directed to take a connection to Atlanta where I could find a Greyhound that would return me to New York.

I did not wish to leave, and yet I felt I could not stay. Rock and a hard place. Leaving seemed easier, and so I did.

I left Atlanta for New York. Late afternoon, Thursday, April sixth, 1967. If I’d known then that everything would end within a few days, I wonder whether I would have delayed my journey. Strange to think now, but the question in my mind was what I would do when this thing was over. Whichever way it turned out, at some point it would be over, and then where would I go?

I took the Greyhound and slept as best I could. We drove for eight hours, and then we stopped for a little while. I stepped from the bus and stood at the side of the road. My body ached. I looked at my fellow passengers: an overweight man in a porkpie hat who smelled of dime-store aftershave and thirty-cent cigars; a pregnant girl, no more than nineteen or twenty, carrying everything she owned in a worn-out Samsonite holdall; a shoe salesman, fifty-three and dog-tired, in his wallet a photo of the wife who’d left him, the son who hadn’t called for eleven years; beside him a blond-haired, big-toothed college quarterback with a doubtful knee, finally resigned to life without cheerleaders and locker rooms and rubbing alcohol. These people were phantoms, images of those who populated some other world, a world I seemed to have parted from, perhaps never to return. I tried to speak with them, but what could I say? “I have come from prison for a murder I did not commit. I have lost more people than I will ever gain. I am crossing America to find a man who will help me identify a child killer. As far as I can guess there are twenty-nine dead children. I can hear them all. When I close my eyes they are all I can see. Now what did you want to talk to me about?”

We came into New York on Sunday morning. New York had changed, but, just as with Augusta Falls, the New York I remembered was still there beneath the surface. I remembered the first time I had seen it back in April of 1949. How it had pounded at me.

I remembered how New York had taken my breath away, and had not returned it for two days.

Eighteen years had passed. I felt like an old man.

Brooklyn pulled me, and I followed the pull.

I stood there on the corner of Throop and Quincy. Aggie Boyle’s house had gone. It was no longer the same street, nor the same junction, but I felt Bridget’s memory there. She too was a ghost that haunted me.

It seemed fitting to be here. To be right back in my own personal nightmare. For catharsis, or maybe tempting fate, I took a hotel room no more than two hundreds yards from where I had turned the corner and started running that day of my return from Manhattan, running headlong into the worst day of my life. Or perhaps not—it seemed there had been so many. How had I deserved such a life? What crime had I committed that had given me such justice?

I did not know. I did not dare to ask. I let my mind fall silent, and sat at the window of my room and watched Brooklyn through different eyes.

In the morning I would call Sheriff Vallelly and tell him where I was.

THIRTY-THREE

“
W
E HAVE WORD OF HIM,” VALLELLY SAID AS SOON AS THE LINE connected.

“Dearing?”

“The very same. One of the people in Baxley saw him.”

“Baxley?” I asked. Baxley was no more than an hour from Augusta Falls.

“Someone I know over there. We used to work together when I was in Macon.”

“Jesus,” I said through clenched teeth. I stood at the reception desk of the hotel. Behind me and through the front window I would have been able to see the Quincy junction. I turned my back to the receptionist in an effort to maintain some slight degree of privacy.

“Mr. Vaughan? You there?”

“Yes, sorry . . . I’m here. Okay, so he was in Baxley. How come they spoke to him?”

“He was pulled over with a flat. My friend, he’s the deputy sheriff there, well, he stopped to give him a hand and they got to talking. He told him that he should contact me, that I had news of an old friend who wanted to look him up.”

“Did they give my name?”

“No, I didn’t give your name out. I’m hoping that your man will call me, make some contact, and then I can give him your whereabouts.”

“He didn’t say where he was going?”

“Said he was heading out of Georgia, going north I think he said. He didn’t say much apparently, but he did say he would call me.”

I was silent for a while.

“This has come as somewhat of a surprise for you, Mr. Vaughan.”

I took a deep breath, held it for a moment. “Yes,” I said. “It was a slim chance at best. Christ, I don’t know what to say.”

“Well, there ain’t a helluva lot to say until Dearing contacts me, and then we’ll see where we go from there. Okay?”

“Yes. And thank you. I really appreciate everything you’re doing to help.”

“Hell, Mr. Vaughan, like I said before, if it brings this thing to an end any faster I’m more than happy to help. So you stay there, all right? And if Haynes Dearing calls me I’ll make sure he gets in touch with you.”

“Thank you. Yes, as soon as you hear anything, call me here.”

“You take care now, Mr. Vaughan, and hopefully I’ll have some news for you soon.”

I thanked Sheriff Vallelly again and hung up. I told the receptionist to make sure that he fetched me down as soon as any calls came through.

The receptionist—a short, balding man named Leonard—peered at me over half-moon glasses. “Trouble?” he asked suspiciously.

I smiled, shook my head. “A little excited,” I said. “A very old friend. We haven’t spoken for a lot of years and there’s a chance I might find him.”

Leonard smiled, relaxed. “Good luck,” he said. “I’ll make sure to get you if a call comes through.”

I returned to my room, sat on the edge of the bed. My head felt too heavy for my shoulders, and I lay down, tugged a pillow behind me and tried to think.

Augusta Falls. Sheriff Haynes Dearing. The Guardians versus the child killer. I retraced my steps through everything I could remember. I thought of Dearing’s lecture in the schoolhouse, the way he looked at every one of us in turn, never mentioning our names but making it all too obvious who he was referring to. The violation of the curfew. The words of warning. My mother. The way she had slipped irreversibly into the depths of something terrifying. Elena Kruger. My failure to protect her. The oaths we had made as children, and how we had broken them.

And I thought of the killer, the little girls that had suffered at his hands. I tried to understand what would drive a man to such things. Anger. Hate. Jealousy. Some indescribable sense of madness that came from deep within the soul and could never be exorcised. A madness that Laurence Gabillard, irrespective of the number of letters after his name, could never hope to comprehend.

And then I thought of Georgia, of all that had been. Of Reilly Hawkins, Frank Turow, one-eyed Lowell Shaner who walked with the seventy-man line and cried for a girl he’d never known. The smells and sounds of the Krugers’ kitchen, of Mathilde and the children.

Of the question in Haynes Dearing’s file:
Where did the boy go after Jesup?

Where
did
the boy go?

The sudden hammering at the door startled me. I lost my balance on the edge of the bed. I stood suddenly, the blood rushing to my head and for a moment I was thoroughly disoriented. I walked to the door, snatched it open, and Leonard stood there—flustered, excited.

“Your call,” he said. “Your call downstairs, your friend I think.”

I hurried past Leonard and bolted down the stairwell. I reached the desk and snatched the receiver from it.

“Joseph,” Haynes Dearing said.

“Sheriff Dearing?”

He laughed. “Christ, no one’s called me that for as many years as I can remember. Hell, son, how are you?”

I started laughing. I felt emotion flood through me. I felt dizzy, almost sick, and it was some time before I could find anything at all to say.

“I’m . . . I’m okay. Yes, okay, Sheriff. I’ve been looking for you.”

“So I hear,” Haynes Dearing said, and with the sound of his voice everything I remembered about him came back as if we’d spoken only the day before. I had everything to tell him, and yet I could barely string a sentence together.

“So where are you?” he asked.

“New York,” I replied. “In Brooklyn.”

“Jesus, Brooklyn of all places. I’d have figured you might have had enough of that place . . . you know, with everything that happened back then.”

“Everything in my life, Sheriff,” I said. “I was hoping—”

“That we could meet up?”

“Yes, yes, that we could meet up. Where are you?”

“Christ, all over the place. But I can come and see you,” Dearing said. “I can come to New York and see you, Joseph. If that’s what you want?”

“Yes,” I said, barely able to believe what was happening. “Could you?”

“Sure I could. It would be good to see you again after all these years.” He paused for a moment. “I heard about everything that happened. The girl in New York . . . the trial—”

“Enough,” I said. “I don’t want to talk about that. I want to talk about—”

“I know what you want to talk about, Joseph, and that’s why I called you. I should come to New York. I think that’s the best thing under the circumstances. I could leave almost immediately. If I take a train I could be there tomorrow perhaps?”

“Yes,” I said. Every nerve in my body was jangling with anticipation. I felt fear, exhaustion, a sense of overwhelming anticipation. I would see Haynes Dearing. Between us we would make sense of this thing and bring it to closure. I knew it. I believed it.
Had
to believe it.

“Okay then, we’re settled,” Haynes Dearing said. “I’ll come to New York. Tell me where you are.”

I gave him the address of the hotel. I told him I wouldn’t go anywhere, that I’d stay right here and see him when he arrived. I thanked him for calling, for agreeing to come, for the possibility that we could at last speak and take some steps closer to the truth.

Haynes Dearing wished me well, and then he hung up.

I stood there with the receiver buzzing in my hand until Leonard took it from me and set it back in its cradle.

“Everything okay?” he asked.

I turned and smiled like a fool. “Couldn’t be better,” I said. “Couldn’t be better.”

A half hour later I went out and bought some provisions—some bread, cheese, some slices of ham, a couple of apples. I wanted no reason to leave the hotel. I carried them back to my room and set them on the table near the window. I sat in one of the two chairs that were against the wall.

I could not sit still for long. I started to pace the room. I walked to the window and closed the drapes. I wanted it to be evening. I wanted to sleep, to think of nothing, to be already in tomorrow and seeing Haynes Dearing walking down the street toward the hotel.

I went back downstairs and called Sheriff Vallelly to tell him that Dearing had called, to thank him once again for his help. The phone rang out at the other end. No one home.

Back in my room I paced between the window and the door to the small bathroom. I felt as if I were in Auburn again, counting steps to take my mind off everything. I believed I would explode, perhaps spontaneously combust right there in that room. The feelings that assaulted me were indefinable, but close, closer than anything. I tried to think of things I had read, movies I had seen. I tried to think of Alex, of Bridget, tried to see their faces to remind myself of why I was doing this. They did not come, almost as if they sensed my disturbance and wished to be no part of it.

Eventually I lay down on the mattress. I closed my eyes, and sleep pulled me down; I resisted, but it was strong; my body was tired, and my mind believed there would be nothing gained by fighting. And as I lay there I imagined the years Dearing had spent traveling this country looking for his redemption. He had killed Gunther Kruger, that much I knew to be true, and I wondered how much it had haunted him.

I am lost, he would say. I have been walking for twenty years and still I am lost. And I don’t understand this thing now anymore than I did back then.

It’s okay, I would tell him. It’s okay, because between us we will make this thing end once and for all. I want you to tell me what you’ve seen and heard, what you believe, why you think these things never stopped. You can do that much, can’t you?

And Dearing would sit in the chair by the window, and behind him the late afternoon sunlight would make a halo of his hair, and I would think of angels, and those thoughts would bring their faces back to me, and I would shudder in that moment of recognition, and realize why I had let this thing consume me.

So speak, I would tell him. Tell me everything and I will listen.

And we would spread the newspaper clippings out across the coverlet of the bed, and we would look down at their faces together, and he would tell me why he believed they’d died, and why Bridget had been murdered no more than a hundred yards from where we now sat. And I would try to understand the conclusions he had drawn during all these years we’d been apart, and he would speak of how he too was haunted by the ghosts of the past, that he too could close his eyes and hear their laughter and catcalls and childish games. And perhaps we would cry, and in crying together we would share some degree of fraternity, and know that we had lived this thing together despite being apart. And then we would speak of what to do, of where we would go now, of how this thing would end.

We would speak of fear and frustration and anger. We would speak of the nights we’d found ourselves facing this man in our dreams, and how we had killed him. Killed him a thousand times over. And how we had woken, and realized that the sense of justice we believed we’d earned was only a phantom . . . like the child killer.