County Line (18 page)

Interview, April 1989

A throng of starlings heckled from the roof as Nash led her into the municipal building. He stuck her in a second floor conference room. Not a cell, and not one of those small, airless rooms with the two-way mirror and the shackles welded to the steel table. Nash offered a perfunctory reading of her rights, Grabel rubbing his thin hands together during the recitation. She asked if she was under arrest, but Nash only glared sidelong at Grabel. She assumed he didn’t like being pushed around by a newcomer. Nash was local, raised in Germantown—a Valley View graduate five years earlier. He’d left the area for two years to get an associate’s degree in criminology from Wright State before returning to join the Farmersville police department. She knew all this because he told his life story at the beginning of every DARE presentation, as if being a hometown boy lent credibility to his message.
Bad news, bucko. Nobody’s listening
.

She sat at a long, veneered table and looked out the broad window, south into town and east over woods and open fields. The occasional car passed on Walnut Street. East Walnut, five blocks from her house on West Walnut. As if Farmersville was so big and complicated it needed to distinguish between cardinal points on the compass. Broadway crossed Walnut at the corner, a street named by a town with small man syndrome. The conference room was small as well, barely big enough for the table and chairs around it. She had to twist sideways to stand up. A sour tang hung in the air like spoiled cream. The worn carpet was the color of swamp water.

She watched the lights blink on a phone on the narrow credenza and wondered if she could make a call before anyone noticed. But Jimmie was in Bowling Green and had barely spoken to her in eight months. Huck would be at school. He wouldn’t cut on a dare—even claimed he’d show up on Senior Skip Day. The rules may have changed after Saturday night—for a while anyway—but that wouldn’t matter to Huck. He’d arrive on time, attend the memorial assembly and share shocked whispers in the corridors, sign up for a session with the grief counselor. He knew what he’d been doing when it happened, same as she did.

Through the closed door she could hear murmuring voices, too low to make out the words. Nash’s was pitched higher than the others, the chief’s a gravelly rumble, three decades of cigarettes doing the talking. Grabel spoke the most, quick and insistent. She went to the door, put her hand on the knob. Turned.

Click
.

She eased the door open half an inch, peeked out at a cluster of desks and steel chairs behind the chest-high counter, all awash in sickly overhead light. No way to pass undetected. But she could listen.

“—lieve some skinny little girl is going to pull one over on me.”

“You don’t know her, Coby.”

“I don’t have to know her. They’re all the same.”

“You need to understand some things about her and her family.”

“Background, sure. Background is good.” She heard pages shuffle. “This stuff helps, definitely.”

“Not just background.”

“Are you suggesting she’s some kind of wide-eyed innocent?”

“I’m saying you can’t assume you got this all figured out. This isn’t some East Dayton drug deal gone bad. Chief, help me out here.”

“Werth, we brought Coby on because of his experience. I’m inclined to let him follow his instincts.”

“Thank you, Chief. Now, come on, Werth. Time to watch and learn, my friend.”

She moved back to her chair and sat down. When the door opened, she was looking out the window as if she’d been sitting there all along.

“When do I get my bathroom break, city boy?”

“The name is Sergeant Grabel, young lady.”

She blinked innocently. “Bathroom?”

Grabel’s lips compressed. “Later. We’re going to talk first.” He squeezed into a chair. Nash closed the door after the chief took a seat at the head of the table. Ruby Jane could smell the chief from where she sat, two places away. Coffee, Camels, and sweat. Nash wrinked his nose and pressed himself against the wall, arms folded. Grabel arranged items on the table in front of him: thick manila folder, legal pad and pen, cassette recorder.

“Where’s Bella? You can’t just interrogate a minor.”

Grabel leafed through the folder. “We spoke to your mother. She gave us permission to ask you a few questions.” He waved a sheet of paper, as if she could read the fluttering page from across the table.

“Was she sober?”

“There’s no reason to be like this.”

She fixed her gaze on Grabel’s wattle. “I want a lawyer.”

Capillaries lined his cheeks and nose, a road map etched by alcohol. Her mother’s face carried the same red lace. Grabel put the sheet back in the folder and looked up. “Young lady, you listen here. If you want to make this difficult, you certainly can. You do have the right to an attorney, but we’re just talking here. You get all legal-eagle on me, I may start to wonder what you have to hide.” He turned his head, but didn’t take his eyes off her. “You got any secrets in there, missy?”

“You tell me. This is your peep show.”

“That lip is gonna sink you if you don’t fucking watch it.”

“Coby.” The chief cleared his throat. “I think we need to clarify our position here before we go any further.”

Nash shifted his weight from one foot to the other and stared into the empty chair between the chief and Ruby Jane. After a moment, Grabel grunted and leaned across the table. “Fine. We’ll clarify things. Miss Whittaker, I need you to state for the record whether you are invoking your right to counsel.”

“What happens if I do?”

Grabel balled his fists. The capillaries on his nose seemed to pulse. “We rain hell down around your ears, that’s what.”

“Coby.”

“What?” His head snapped around.

“Let’s do this right.” The chief inhaled, a sound with a day’s worth of exertion behind it. “Now, Ruby, what my sergeant is saying is if you invoke your right to counsel, we might get the idea there’s more here than meets the eye. But you can call your lawyer if you insist.” He looked at his fingernails. “Do you have a lawyer?”

“I’m in the eleventh grade.”

“So you are. And your mother already signed a waiver giving us permission to talk to you …” His voice trailed off.

Grabel’s fingers drummed on the table top. Nash frowned into his folded arms as the chief wheezed.

If she demanded a lawyer, what would her mother do? Bella had never worked, near as RJ could tell, but that didn’t mean a whole lot. She would vanish for hours with no account of her actions. For all Ruby Jane knew, Bella was sneaking off to Dayton to sell hand jobs on Wayne Avenue. Somehow she kept the roof over their heads, kept a semblance of food in the cupboards, kept the Jim Beam stocked. That didn’t mean there was money for a lawyer. Ruby Jane might get stuck with a public defender, assuming one was even available to a kid whose mother had signed away her rights. How much could she trust someone willing to work for free?

Clarice Moody wasn’t worth this much hassle. “Fine. Whatever.”

The chief exhaled stagnant air. “See, Coby. Ruby’s a reasonable girl. Aren’t you?”

She wasn’t promising anything, but they didn’t have to know that.

Grabel went back to the folder, sorted pages until he found what he was looking for. He read for a moment, then looked up. “I hope you’re right, Chief.”

“All right then.” The chief pushed away from the table. “You two think you can handle this?”

Grabel nodded sharply. “Of course I can.” Nash frowned, but didn’t say anything. It wasn’t his ball game.

The chief grunted as he rose from his seat, a sound less affirmation than raw effort, and wheezed his way out the door.

Ruby Jane wasn’t sure if the chief’s absence made things better for her or worse, but at least she didn’t have to smell him any longer. She looked at Grabel. “Now what?”

“Tell me about yourself. I’m anxious to learn what in fuck made you the way you are.”

- 18 -

Stormy Night, August 1988

“Where you going, Jimmie?”

The rain brought with it cool air and distant lightning, far enough off that Ruby Jane could sense the accompanying thunder in her bones. She drove with her headlights off, hands sweating on the steering wheel as she leaned forward to peer out the rain-washed windshield. The rushing wind through the half-open windows did little to cut the tobacco-and-mildew miasma rising from every surface of the car’s interior. She steered by the white line at road’s edge, a faint border between car and weed-choked ditch. Overhead, the sky hung low and gunmetal grey, threaded with tarnished copper.

“Where you going?” She breathed the words, repeating them in rhythm with the wipers. The two red pinpoints far ahead offered no answer.

Gratis Road was long and narrow, and for miles hardly went anywhere. Folks lived out this way, sure, people from school, even a few blockheads. But Jimmie didn’t behave like he was hooking up with friends. “Where you going?” She licked her lips. The dank air tasted of ash. The heater fought to control the condensation on the windshield. Between refrains, she caught herself breathing through her mouth, short loud gasps which made her head spin. Ahead, Jimmie’s car crept through the falling rain, too slow for mere caution. The road dipped before crossing a culvert over a noisy creek, then began climbing again. He stayed well below the speed limit. Whatever Bella had sent him to do, he was in no hurry.

They had been traveling fifteen minutes when the Vega’s brake lights flashed. She eased off the gas and coasted to a stop fifty yards back. The glow of his headlights illuminated a crossroad signpost. She was too far away to make out the words on the sign, but it could only be Preble County Line.

“Where you going?”

All she heard was the idling Caprice engine and the
tip-tap
of rain on the roof. Jimmie didn’t move. She wished she knew what was going through his mind. If he had a carload of blockheads with him, they’d be passing a bottle, or one of those fake-o leatherette wineskins filled with bottom shelf grain alcohol. But Jimmie, alone? He wasn’t a thinker. He didn’t sit and brood about his troubles. He wrestled and roughhoused, worked through conflict and stress with sweat and physical contact. She shared a measure of that physicality with him—tranquility realized through exercise and action. But for her, a long run was a chance to reflect. As her heart beat and her muscles strained, her mind would clear, her thoughts would re-order themselves. She could find answers in the slap of her feet against asphalt, in the whap of a basketball against a maple floor. But she could also spend hours beside an open window gazing across a gulf of air at a reflection of her deepest thoughts. The only time Jimmie sat still was when he was too drunk to stand.

She eased her foot off the brake and let the engine’s idle carry the car forward. The seconds ticked off as she closed the distance—seconds like minutes, minutes like hours. As she neared Jimmie’s car, she felt a growing uncertainty. A sensation flooded through her like she’d awakened in an unknown house surrounded by strangers. What was he waiting for? Surely he’d see her, a looming shadow in his rear view mirror. But the Vega didn’t move. She braked, close enough to see wisps of exhaust and the glitter of raindrops in the glow of his taillights. At that moment, Jimmie threw the Vega into gear. His wheels spun out and he fishtailed north onto Preble County Line Road. Reflexively, she hit the gas and followed. Doubt blossomed within her. Perhaps he’d seen the glow of her brake lights in the darkness, or caught the reflection of distant lightning on her windshield.

Whatever had happened, he’d reached a decision. At thirty, as fast as she was willing to go in the dark, she barely kept his shrinking taillights in sight. He passed Zack Wentz’s house near Chicken Bristle Road, and Saul Wentz’s place a quarter mile farther up. If he kept going, he’d reach Route 35 within a few miles. Then, if she intended to keep following, she wouldn’t be able to hide in the dark.

- 19 -