Chapter twenty

“Nathan Jersey was the town idiot,” Yardley said. “I don’t know any other way to put it.”

We were in the diner now, the three of us. The sight of McGill’s by-line had hit Sue hard. She would not stay in the office. Yardley offered to buy us coffee: He said he could save us the trouble of reading the entire clip file, and fill us in on the basics of the case himself. He didn’t seem to want to let us go.

We sat at a linoleum table, by a curtained window that looked out on Main Street. Our coffee cups sat before us, untouched, sending up steam, then less steam, then even less. Yardley kept a cigarette pasted in his face as he talked. It bobbed up and down, sending a shivering line of smoke toward the ceiling. Susannah watched him, her hands folded on the tabletop. She never took her eyes from his face.

“Every small town has someone like him, I guess. About twenty, twenty-five years old, did odd jobs, swept up stores, made deliveries, loaded trucks, stuff like that. Had a little room over by the railroad tracks, managed to take care of himself pretty well. That worked against him at the trial, in fact. His lawyer tried to prove he was retarded, and the prosecution kept harping on that: that he always managed to take care of himself pretty well.”

He plucked the cigarette from his craw, flicked the ash to the floor and replanted the butt between his lips again.

“Well, anyway, Robert Turner was kind of an outsider around here, as I understand it. Came from a wealthy family out west somewhere, California, I think. Left all that behind, decided to live the simple life, you know the type. Ran a kind of country inn and restaurant in what we call the backlands: it’s sort of a … a little valley surrounded by hills. Lots of forest, Jackson Lake is there, lots of little streams, you know: good hunting, fishing area, that sort of thing. So Turner did all right.”

He waved his hand toward the window as if to indicate the general direction of the backlands. I thought again of the house with the tire swing. I now pictured it surrounded by woodland hills. Yardley went on.

“But the point is: Turner was what you might call a do-good type, or anyway that was his reputation. Kind of guy who’d take in all kinds of strays, and always at the town board meeting agitating for, I don’t know what, better conditions at the jail or stricter dumping laws to protect the river. Not a troublemaker exactly, but you have to understand: this used to be Ku Klux Klan country, Hickman. He wasn’t what you’d call a welcome guy.

“So, of course, according to anyone you ask, Turner was just as nice as you could want to Nathan Jersey, all right? I mean, the way they tell it it was like: he always had work for the guy; he overpaid him, and Jersey, man, he just followed Turner around like a dog, okay? I mean, Turner hired all kinds up there at the inn at one time or another—juvenile delinquents, ex-cons, you name it—and some of them ripped him off and took advantage of him and all that. But Jersey, as far as anyone could tell, was just devoted to him, okay? So that’s the background on that part.

“Then came the rape.”

I nodded, calmly as I could, trying to take it all in. I took a cigarette from Yardley’s pack and lit it. Images were coming into my mind too fast for me to assemble them. They were vague. I couldn’t tell what I was remembering and what I was. imagining from Yardley’s story. I had to struggle to concentrate.

“Now, the information on this part is kind of skimpy. You know, I’ve read a lot of the clippings from the time, but I never got around to reading the trial stories. You might want to look at those, there’s probably a lot more detail in them. Anyway, I don’t know the girl’s name, but apparently she was part of one of these huge redneck clans, used to be all there was up in the backlands before the tourist trade. So, anyway, she cries rape, okay, that’s all I know. Now, before long, everyone’s looking for Nathan Jersey, who I guess had been seen mooning around the girl or something. The Sheriff—the county Sheriff—he wants Jersey for questioning. Every man in this girl’s family wants him for hanging. Jersey knows every body’s after him, so he runs to the Turner inn for protection. Turner has the good sense to call the Sheriff. Unfortunately, the clan gets there first. They come storming up to the Turner inn like the last reel of a Frankenstein movie, okay? ‘Give us the monster.’ A real old-fashioned necktie party. They get right up to the door of the Turner inn and out steps Mr. Turner himself. No gun. No baseball bat. Nothing. Just walks out the door and stands in front of it. Get the picture?”

I nodded. Sat up straight.

“Now it goes from Frankenstein to a classic western. One man against the lynch mob. The way I understand it, Turner was the kind of guy who commanded respect, whether people liked him or not. He was a gentleman, you know, very quiet and refined.” He put his nose in the air as he said it. “It carried a lot of weight. So, he stands there …” Yardley laughs. “He stands there for about ten minutes discussing the United States Constitution with fifteen guys who think it’s a baseball team, all right? At which point, with a blare of bugles, up shows the Sheriff with the cavalry. Jersey is saved. Okay, now get this: the Sheriff takes Jersey in, Turner gets him a lawyer. The Sheriff questions Jersey, questions the girl, questions everybody at the inn and so on. The upshot is: Jersey’s got an alibi—I can’t remember—oh yeah, he was helping out, delivering chickens or something, but anyway, the point being he was out of town at the time. So he’s released. This is fine with the lynch mob, right, because they’re planning a private hanging anyway. Jersey—wisely—went up to stay at the Turner inn. About two days later”—he shrugged to represent the slaughter of my family—“a state patrol car is driving by, cop thinks everything looks too quiet, you know, goes to check on it, finds the bodies, and the kids, and so on.”

I took a long drag of the cigarette. I glanced at Susannah. She was staring at Yardley, her lips pursed, her eyes far away.

Yardley said: “Well, when it dawned on everyone that Jersey was not among what the newspaper called ‘the slain,’ they brought out the dogs. It took a while, going through the backland woods, but eventually, Mr. Jersey is discovered at his new address, which I think was a cave or an overhanging rock or something. He confesses after a couple of hours, lawyer present, all perfectly legal. The rifle is proven to be his. Then he stands trial without testifying. Then he’s condemned to death.”

He stopped speaking suddenly. I had to yank my mind into the present. I stuttered for a second.

“Weren’t there any witnesses?” I said then. “I mean, it was an inn.…”

“Yeah, it was an inn,” Yardley said. “But it was November, early on. The good fishing and hiking and stuff were over; the gun hunting hadn’t started yet. Most of the places up there are usually empty then. Anyway, Jersey confessed … like I said … lawyer present, perfectly legal. They had to try him anyway cause it was a capital case.…”

“Was there any corroborating evidence?”

“I don’t know that. Like I said, I’m not all that up on the trial.”

“All right. He gets death.”

“He gets death. Which, about three years later, the Supreme Court overturns. Which, about ten seconds later, the sovereign state of Indiana repasses. Which is besides the point, because Jersey’s off the hook. Except that he then is so kind as to vindicate everyone’s good opinion of him by killing a guard. Beat him to death with his bare hands no less.”

“Jesus.”

“Back to trial, back to death row, back to the dust from which he came, all things being equal.”

There were other things I wanted to ask him, but not just then. So we sat and watched each other, he and I. He squinted at me through a screen of smoke. I could almost hear him thinking.

“I’ve told you a lot,” he said quietly after a moment. “Now how about you tell me who you are?” My mouth was forming around the lie when he added: “Or better yet, why don’t you tell me why you’re here, Mr. Turner.”

I looked up quickly. “You’re awfully damn good,” I said.

“The resemblance is there. I’ve seen pictures of Turner. They never released any pictures of the children, but the resemblance is there. When you said you worked for Carl McGill, I figured you were here to pick up some clippings. Then I saw your faces when you looked at his by-line. You didn’t even know he covered the story, did you?”

“No.”

“Why?” said Susannah suddenly. It was the first word she had spoken. “Why did he cover the story?”

Her gaze bore into Yardley. He looked down at the tabletop as if her eyes were too bright for him. “He worked here, for the Chronicle,” he said. “He was like twenty-five or something. Got out of the service, went to college in Richmond, worked on the Chronicle part-time. Before my day, but it’s sort of become a newspaper legend. Even then, everyone knew he’d head east when he graduated. But actually, he stayed a whole year after that. And the murders happened, so he got some good clips. And the rest … is history.”

“So it is,” I said.

Yardley seemed grateful to be able to look at me again. “Only you didn’t know it. So it made me” think maybe you were here for personal reasons. And the more I looked at your face …” He shrugged.

I tilted my coffee cup. I swirled the black surface, examined the ripples. I was reliving that moment in the alley, the moment when the scarred man stepped out of the shadows. The moment when the gun went off. The sound of the shot seemed to reverberate in my head, echoing back into the past. If the wrong person found out where we were, I’d hear that gunshot again. It would be all I’d hear.

I felt Yardley watching me, looked up, looked in his eyes. I could almost hear his heart beating, beating hard. He was onto a big story. The Turner kid comes back. We both knew it—and I knew it was bigger still than he thought. He was good enough for it, that was certain. And good enough to be gone from this one-horse town if that’s what he wanted.

“This is, like, deep off the record,” I said. “I mean, deep.”

He nodded.

I set the coffee cup straight. “I don’t think Nathan Jersey killed my parents.”

I watched it go through him. I watched the ambition flare up in him like a flame. It was a big story, all right. In this town, it was The Big Story.

He cleared his throat. “You have proof?”

“I can convince you.”

“Convince me.”

“I need help. I won’t know who to call, where to go.…”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”

“We need someplace to stay. Someplace safe.”

“My house. I live alone, outside of town. It’s secluded. No one comes there. No one will know.”

“That’s the other thing,” I said. “No one knows. We’re deep off until it’s over. Then it’s all yours.”

He hesitated over that one, chewing on his cigarette. But he finally went for it. “Right,” he said.

He leaned toward me. He wanted the rest. He wanted it now. But my head was still crowded with images, memories, sounds. It was like being in the subway at rush hour. I needed to get out, I needed some air.

I said: “Tell me how to get to your place. I’ll explain the rest this evening.”

He wrote out the directions for me on a napkin. I took it, slipped it into the breast pocket of my shirt. We stood up. He was still staring at me. So was Susannah now. She seemed concerned.

We shook hands all around. We walked out onto the sidewalk. Yardley went back to the office. Sue and I headed for the car. I went around to the passenger side to open the door for her. But I didn’t. I stood there, staring up Main Street at the rising white steeple of the church. Susannah stood beside me. When she spoke, it seemed to come both from far away and from inside my head.

She said—she just stated it in that way she had: “You remember.”

And without thinking, I answered her: “Yes. I remember everything.”