Chapter nineteen

In the bright, cold, clear Ohio morning, we saw where we were for the first time. We drove toward Indiana through the hills, rolling away from us, pale green, to lines of trees stark and bare against the hazy sky. The long grass laced with highway, the decaying barns with the ads for chewing tobacco fading from their sloping roofs, the silos rising tall and somber out of the fields: all of it made us feel, after the blind night driving, that we had been thrust suddenly into another country; more like another world, or dimension; that we had gone to sleep on a planet called Manhattan and awakened in orbit around the Midwest.

We kept the windows open. Susannah kept her eyes on the view. The cold wind blew her mop of red hair all over. Her thick lips were parted. Her nose flared. Her eyes were wide, even in the rushing air. Her face seemed open and wild and receptive to everything. I had to pull my gaze from her—again and again—to focus on the road.

“It’s so pretty here,” she said.

We crossed into Indiana. The land did not change. The exits were few and far between. We seemed to approach Hickman by inches.

Finally, at the Rushville exit, we rolled off the interstate into the farmlands. Following the map, we went from the big green snake of the superhighway to the big red line with the state shields, then we were on the smaller red lines, and then the broad white spaces laced with thin scratches of blue. The land did not change, but now the grass and the cornfields lapped at the edge of the pavement, and sometimes the branches of the trees hung down above us.

We came into Hickman gradually. First there were houses—hardly more than nailed-down trailers—sitting on the hill. After that came the gas stations, the steak house, the bar. Then Main Street sort of grew up around us. The cluttered porches of two-story frame houses drew closer together, gave way to the gleaming white diner, the long, faceless five-and-dime, the quainter gift shops and clothing stores run, you could tell, by widows and divorcees, and the houses with the signs on them—professional buildings with lawyers and doctors and dentists inside. Things got more important then. There was the courthouse with the town police station, the library, the post office, and the church, which was the culmination of the thing, its white spire rising above the rest. Behind that the markers of a cemetery lifted on the wave of a single hill. They dropped again against a backyard fence. Behind the fence, laundry fluttered on a line over a corroded swing set and a broken bike.

As the street seemed to have risen to the church spire, it now seemed to fall away. We drove past a residential cross street and found ourselves passing a row of low-lying barracks-like offices: real estate, insurance, the town newspaper, Laundromat, army recruitment. After that came the junk shops, or antique dealers, as they were called, and then I saw the red-brick federal-style high school about a block away, with its clock stopped beneath the white dome.

We parked the car in front of the newspaper office. We got out and stood together for a moment on the sidewalk.

“Anytown, U.S.A.,” I said.

“Look at the big sky,” said Susannah, craning her neck. “I’ll bet the stars are incredible at—What is it?”

She had lowered her eyes to me. I shrugged.

“You remember something,” she said.

I made a dismissive sound. “I had a mental picture for a second.”

“Tell me.”

I sighed.

“Tell me,” she said.

“If you want. I saw a tire swing. I don’t know. I saw a tire swing out in back of a house with a porch. Water running by it, like a creek or something. A tree, some kind of. spreading tree, a sugar maple, maybe. I don’t know. Let’s go into the newspaper office.”

She glanced back over Main Street.

“None of it looks familiar to me.”

“It’s probably changed some in twenty years.”

She shivered. I moved toward the office. She followed.

It was a little box of a place. The Hickman Chronicle. A glass front with the words spelled in electrical tape on the door. As we came in we saw two rows of gunmetal desks, three desks in each row. The walls were bulletin boards covered with papers. There were filing cabinets in the back near the bathroom door.

One look around gave me the layout. The people in the three desks in front of me were ads and circulation. The divorcee on the phone at the last desk in the row to our right was church notices. The fat-bellied middle-aged guy typing on the next desk down was sports. The guy at the front desk to the right, the guy with his feet up and the Indianapolis paper open on his lap and the cigarette dangling from his lips: he was the news operation, editor and reporter both most likely, with occasional help from some high school kid stringer. I told the lively housewife who greeted us that he was the guy we wanted.

His name was Ben Yardley. He was about thirty years old, tall and thin, a bullet-headed man with short sandy hair and squinty eyes set in the folds of a granite face. He looked like he’d seen things: the same things, over and over, until he’d learned not to be surprised.

I stuck out my hand and introduced myself. He did the same. I introduced Susannah, and I saw him look her over, once, shyly. She was wearing a man-size shirt, yellow with black marks, which ended where her dress ended, just above her knees. The sight of her made him pull his eyes away quickly. His pale cheeks reddened and he cleared his throat.

I wanted to deck him. I was her big brother, after all.

He leaned back again, put his feet on the desk, put his hands behind his head. He said: “I take it you want to know about Nathan Jersey.”

“How’d you guess?”

“Well, Wendell Willkie’s dead, and I can’t think what else would bring you out of the city. What city is it, anyway?”

“New York.”

“Paper there?”

“No.”

He waited. I let him wait. But he was too smart. He looked at Susannah again.

“Did you say McGill?” he said.

“I work for her father, Carl McGill,” I said.

He snorted. “Christ, why didn’t you say so? Come on back.”

He led us up the aisle between the rows of desks. He opened one of the standing file cabinets.

“You’ll be interested in seeing our latest equipment,” he said, and pulled open the drawer. He withdrew a manila folder, set it down on the edge of Church Notice’s desk. He flipped open the cover on the first clipping.

I hissed between my teeth. Susannah let out a little cry.

There was a headline, a banner headline. It read: THREE MURDERED IN HICKMAN INN.

Under it was the by-line: Carl McGill.