Chapter twenty-five

I stopped off at the courthouse on my way back to Yardley’s. I asked for a transcript of Nathan Jersey’s trial. The court clerk told me he’d have one ready by Monday. I left him some cash for costs.

It was late afternoon before I came down the dirt road, through the bank of hickories and into the valley again. The sun was still bright. The mist had burned away. The little stream that wove among the elms had the blue sky in it. Yardley’s cottage did not seem as shabby as it had at twilight.

The Chevy was not in the drive. I parked beside the cottage door and went in. At first I could not tell what was different about the place. Then I saw how clean it was. The rust and stains were gone from the kitchen, the torn curtains gone from the living room. The sun poured through the window and there was no dust floating in it. Upstairs, new sheets had been put on the bed.

I heard a car pull up outside. I looked out the window and saw them get out of the Chevy. They were carrying bags of groceries. They were laughing.

I heard them come into the kitchen. I started down the hall and heard their voices.

Yardley was telling a story about an elephant that had thrashed his trainer during a two-bit traveling circus. Susannah was flushed and laughing. The peals of it tailed off as I came in. She looked down at the floor. Yardley ran a hand up through his hair shyly.

“So anyway,” he said.

I grinned. I chuckled.

We had drinks outside in the fading light.

Susannah said: “It looks like … I don’t know. It looks the way things look when you remember them.”

I watched her gaze run over the twilight valley. Her eyes were soft, wistful.

“I went out to the inn today,” I said. I told them about it and about my meeting with Marks.

As I spoke, Susannah stared at her drink. Yardley was silent. He smoked his cigarette. He watched her, his eyes narrowed, through the haze of smoke. Even when I finished speaking, he went on, studying each feature of her face while the silence dragged on and on. Finally, she lifted her face to him. He smiled and she smiled back slightly. He cleared his throat, glanced at me, started talking.

He’d found out about the rape, he said. The Sheriff—the old Sheriff, now retired—had remembered. The victim had been a woman named Louisa Campbell. Her father, Fred, ran a tavern near the Turner inn. Louisa waited tables there sometimes, and sometimes she did other things, and sometimes nobody knew what she did. She had been nineteen or so.

The night of the rape, she came in drunk. Her hair was messed, her clothes disheveled but not torn. She said, “I’ve been raped by that retard nigger: Jersey.” She said it angrily, throwing her purse down on the bar. Fred and his son Marvin got up the lynch mob.

The old Sheriff had his theories about the case. He told Yardley he’d seen rape victims before, and Louisa wasn’t one of them, not by his lights. He said he wasn’t sure Jersey hadn’t had sex with her, but she was the sort of woman who might have done that on a bet. Maybe she was ashamed afterward or just afraid it would get around, maybe she was ticked off about something, or maybe it was her idea of fun. In any case, the Sheriff said, there was something wrong with the girl, something mean about her. Guilty or not, he said, if Nathan Jersey burned next week, Louisa Campbell would be the one who pulled the switch.

“Is she still around?” I asked.

Yardley polished off one cigarette and lit another. The butts and matches were piling up in the patch of dead grass between his feet. He shook his head. “Moved away. Years ago. Sheriff didn’t know where.”

“Are any of them still around?”

“Marvin, the brother. The father died of a stroke quite a while back. Marvin runs an RV camp out where the tavern used to be.” He went on with a smirk. “Interesting fellow, this Marvin. He was sixteen at the time he led the good people of Hickman on a lynching raid. Not long after that he joined a motorcycle gang. He spent two years in prison for assault with a deadly weapon, said weapon being a tire iron, said assault being on a motorist who had accidentally run said Marvin’s bike off the road. While in the slammer, he discovered Jesus—who was doing time, I think, on a traffic offense. When he returned to his native soil, he turned his back on his pappy’s sinful gin mill and set up the first Church of God, which answered the musical question: What if they gave a religion and nobody came? Anyway, pappy Fred died soon after that, so Marvin closed down the tavern and opened the RV place. He apparently still holds Sunday services for the faithful out of a trailer set up for the purpose.” He held his cigarette out before him. He turned it this way and that, watching it glow in the growing dark. “Something else you ought to know about old Marvin too,” he said.

“All right.”

“He has a scar.”

“Everybody has a scar.”

“On his cheek, from a prison knife fight.”

“Then he wouldn’t have had it at the time of the killing.”

The dusk was deep now, but I could see Yardley’s shrug. “Just thought you ought to know,” he said.

Susannah made dinner that night. She worked on it a long time and it was very good. Afterward, I called Marks at home. He told me he had to go to Indianapolis for the weekend to plead Jersey’s case. He said he and Susannah and I could visit Jersey in prison on Monday.

I hung up. I meant to rejoin Sue and Yardley outside, but I paused on the threshold. Their voices drifted to me on the still night air. They were speaking quietly, about the stars probably. I saw the glowing tip of his cigarette pointing them out to her, like he was drawing pictures on the sky.

I didn’t go out. I started upstairs to my bedroom. On the way I stopped by the phone again. I called American Express and left another message for McGill at the Lima office:

Now I know. Who is the scarred man?