A Quiet Belief in Angels (54 page)

Dearing didn’t respond. I felt my heart hammering relentlessly in my chest.

“You feared him, and you wanted to find him too, didn’t you? And you feared me as well, what I knew, what I might say. I think that you came to kill both me and Bridget that day, and as I wasn’t there you just killed her. I believe you spoke to the police, that perhaps you made them think I was not only responsible for Bridget’s death, but that the Augusta Falls killings had never been solved, that they had continued and therefore Gunther Kruger could not have been the one. I think you put doubt in their minds and made them hate me enough to do anything. You convinced them to look no further, and they didn’t, and because of that I lost nearly fourteen years of my life . . . a life you had already as good as destroyed.”

Dearing raised the gun and pointed it at my face. “Enough,” he said. “I don’t want to listen to you anymore—”

“And the little girls,” I said, my voice faltering as I stared at the barrel of Dearing’s gun. “So many of them. And you took them all in broad daylight. You kept your uniform, didn’t you? Put your uniform on and drove from town to town, and people saw you and paid no mind because you were a police officer. Even the little girls never suspected who you were. I’m right, aren’t I, Sheriff Dearing? That’s what happened, didn’t it?”

I sensed his hand tighten on his gun, and I raised my own gun from down beside the chair and pulled the trigger.

The shots were almost simultaneous. Even as I saw the impact of the bullet in Haynes Dearing’s chest I felt the sudden and intense pain across my shoulder, my chest, my heart. As though I’d shot myself.

I dropped my gun, as did Dearing, and for a moment we sat there staring at one another.

Dearing opened his mouth to speak, but already his eyes were closing. He mumbled something unintelligible, and then his head lolled forward.

The room was silent except for my faltering breathing, as I felt myself slipping toward something from which I believed I would never return.

Darkness came then—gray waves and scarlet flashes of pain, and beneath that some well of blackness that seemed to swallow me. I slipped in and out of consciousness, and I heard the sound of my own heart, and beneath that the sound of breath shuddering through punctured lungs, and I knew that I wouldn’t be there for long.

I forced myself to stay awake, to concentrate, and I looked at Haynes Dearing and started talking to him.

“I am an exile,” I said, and my voice was frail, little more than a whisper.

“I take a moment . . . to look back . . . across the span of my life . . . and . . . and I try to see it for what it was . . .”

I spoke to him for a long time, and then I could not speak anymore.

At one point a cooling breeze came through the window and seemed to fill the room, and then I closed my eyes and felt nothing at all.

My mother was there, my father; Elena and Alex and Bridget. They were all there, and they watched for me to take the first step toward them.

And then there was light, and there were voices, and people were shouting, and for a moment I believed I opened my eyes and saw Reilly Hawkins standing over me laughing about the fool that I was. And when he opened his mouth he started screaming at the top of his voice, and what he said made no sense at all . . .

“Someone call an ambulance! He’s alive for Christ’s sake! Get a fucking doctor!”

For the life of me I did not know who they were talking about, and for some reason it did not matter.

EPILOGUE

NEW YORK TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT
Monday, August 15, 2005

Reclusive Author Enchants New York

Yesterday evening, before a packed Brooklyn Academy, Joseph Vaughan (77)—reclusive author and literary enigma—gave a reading from his latest publication, a companion work to his controversial 1965 novel
A Quiet Belief in Angels
. Entitled
The Guardians
, the book tells of Vaughan’s life subsequent to his release from Auburn State Prison in February 1967. His first work, a novella entitled
The Homecoming
, was published in June 1952, and then nothing further was heard of Vaughan until his wrongful arrest for murder in November of the same year. Vaughan was tried, convicted, and subsequently sentenced to life imprisonment. With the aid of a friend, Paul Hennessy, Vaughan’s autobiographical work
A Quiet Belief in Angels
was handwritten in prison, smuggled out and typed for publication. Its release sparked an outcry which resulted in Vaughan’s case being heard before the United States Supreme Court. His conviction was overturned and he was released after having served more than thirteen years.

Upon his release Vaughan committed himself to identifying the perpetrator of more than thirty-two known child murders spanning five states and more than three decades. Vaughan’s investigation resulted in the eventual discovery and shooting of a retired Georgia sheriff, Haynes Dearing, an action taken in self-defense as Vaughan himself was also shot. Vaughan then disappeared once more, and did not surface until last fall when rumor had it that another book had been written. The capacity Brooklyn Academy audience was present for the first reading from this work. Before speaking, Vaughan dedicated the book “to Elena, to Alex and to Bridget . . . and also to my mother who would have told me that I’d waited too long to write this.”

The Guardians
is due for release next Monday, and is already tipped to be the number one bestseller of the year.