THE HOUSE DR. HOUSEMAN HAD OFFERED THEM AS A TEMPORARY place to stay sat on fifteen acres along the southern border of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation. It belonged to Mark’s in-laws, who were wintering in Arizona. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to let you stay here sooner,” Mark told Erin as they stood on the porch step waiting for David to emerge from the house. “I could tell you I wasn’t able to get in touch with my wife’s parents until a few days ago, but the truth is that they took some convincing.” He looked down at the yellowed grass in the front yard before looking up again. “They’re good people,” he said, “but they don’t know you the way I do.”
Erin reached out and put a hand on his forearm. “I appreciate everything you’ve done for us,” she said. “I arrived in town to find that we had fewer friends in Wolf Point than I remembered. I’m so grateful that you’re among them.”
In the days that followed, Erin and her father settled into the place and began to establish a new sense of normalcy. The house was six miles west of the city, giving them enough privacy that they could walk the grounds without being seen from the road or adjacent farmland. David took to it well enough, although Erin could tell that he missed the farm. He was a man who was used to getting things done, and idle time seemed like wasted time. The restlessness got him up and moving, though, and his strength returned faster than she’d expected. It had been two weeks since he’d been discharged from the hospital, and he could now walk the property—once in the early morning and again just before sunset—for forty minutes at a stretch.
Now that they had some space and a place of their own, Matta had returned Diesel, who joined David on his walks and provided advance notice of any approaching visitors. “The dawn and dusk patrols,” David called them, referring to their walks around the property, and Erin began to think of them that way as well, standing on the porch and waiting for their return whenever they took longer than she expected.
Jeff Stutzman had allowed David time to recover before asking for a statement. Erin had insisted upon hiring a lawyer, a fellow named Bill Casings who had flown in from Missoula. He’d been out to the house on several occasions already, but today he was there to be present at the questioning, and the kitchen was full of people. Lieutenant Stutzman was there, as well as Ronald Irving, who’d taken over the position of chief of police at the age of twenty-eight following the death of Martin Ward twenty years ago. There was the lawyer and a stenographer, as well as Erin herself. At the table sat her father, sipping coffee and looking more composed than any man should look when facing potential charges of multiple homicides.
“Let’s get this show on the road,” he said, and they took their places at the table.
The lawyer had a yellow legal pad in front of him. He’d introduced himself to Lieutenant Stutzman and Chief Irving already, but he did it again for the record. “My client, Mr. David Reece, is prepared to make a statement,” he said. “In accordance with his rights under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, I have advised him not to answer any questions. The statement should not be taken as an admission of guilt, but merely a telling of the facts surrounding the focus of your investigation. We reserve the right to amend and modify his statement at a later date to ensure accuracy.” He looked at each of them in turn. “Are there any procedural questions before he begins?”
They were all quiet, waiting.
“Okay,” Bill said. He turned to David. “You can begin when you’re ready.”
“Thank you, Bill,” her father said. “That was very formal.”
The two police officers smiled, but Erin didn’t. She knew what was coming and how it would change his life forever. David would return to prison and he would die there, surrounded by people who saw him only in the context of the crimes he’d committed.
“My wife went missing in October of 1998,” he said. “They found her abandoned car on Indian Highway. Two of its tires were ripped apart.” He looked up from the table, but he was looking past them, at a place he hadn’t visited for a very long time. “I’ve never lost anyone like that before,” he said. “We searched for her, my daughter and me, for four months. We covered every road and talked to anyone who might have seen her. I was out of my mind with worry. I kept telling myself . . . if we looked hard enough . . .”
He closed his eyes, and the stenographer stopped typing. David’s hands were on the table, his fingers interlaced in front of him. Erin looked at them. The skin was weathered and marked in a few places by scars he’d collected over the years, but they were still the hands she remembered from her childhood: strong and capable, the vessels dividing and connecting just beneath the surface.
“I knew from the beginning that she was probably dead,” he said. “Still . . . I kept looking. Because I needed to find her. I needed to know what had happened. Not knowing . . . that’s the worst thing, I told myself. But I was wrong. Knowing is worse. Knowing is always worse.”
Erin looked up at her father’s face. He was older now, but here were the parts of him that had sat in the truck with her during the time when he was still looking, before he had given up on her mother.
“It took me eight months to find her,” he said. “It was only a hunch, really, the way I sometimes caught him watching me during the Sunday service.”
“Who?” Jeff Stutzman asked.
The lawyer raised his hand. “Please,” he said. “No questions. Remember?”
David looked across the table at the lieutenant. “Abel Griffin. The man you found buried on my farm. I put him there. I’m sure you know that already.” He opened and closed his hands, the parts of his body that had held the shovel. “I didn’t know for certain that he was the one who had taken my wife. Not at first anyway. But I suspected. It was the kind of suspicion that defies reason but builds slowly. I became more and more certain with time.”
“How did you—”
“I never liked the boy. It wasn’t because he was slow. He had a strangeness about him, a giddiness that made me uneasy. I would catch him studying me—not in the way that other people looked at me after Helen disappeared, but in a fascinated, emotionally detached way that made me feel like I was a bug in his collection. And that got me thinking: Does he have a collection?”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” Jeff asked, and the lawyer scowled at him.
“Tell them what?” David asked. “A feeling’s not enough, Lieutenant. You of all people should know that. I needed evidence, something tangible. I needed to know that when I went to the police they would arrest him for the murder of my wife and all those others who went missing. The evidence needed to be strong enough to make the charges stick. I didn’t want to give him the opportunity to get away.”
He looked from one face to the next before lowering his eyes to the table.
“I skipped the nine-thirty service one Sunday and went to his house instead. The place was locked, but forcing open the back door was easy. It didn’t take long for me to go through the place, opening dresser drawers and cabinets. Eventually I found Helen’s necklace, the one she was wearing on the day she went missing. I walked out to the backyard and found the spot where the ground was soft. There was a shovel there, too, leaning against the back of the house. It didn’t take long for me to dig her up, the loose dirt filling the blade of the shovel over and over as I worked. When I struck bone—when I uncovered her forearm—I should’ve stopped what I was doing and called the police. Instead, I pulled her out of the earth and sat with her for a while, rocking what was left of her body. Then I filled the hole back in, went to my truck, and retrieved a large blanket from the cab. I wrapped her body in the blanket and brought Helen home that day—back to the farm—and gave her a proper burial.”
“Why didn’t you call the police?” Chief Irving asked.
“Officers, please,” Bill Casings said, placing his pen down on his legal pad.
“It’s okay,” David said. “It’s a fair question, and I’ll answer it.” He looked at the chief. “I considered contacting the police,” he said. “It’s what a sane man would’ve done. But no, my mind kept returning to the things he must’ve done to her.”
Erin stood up from her chair and went to the window. She did not want to hear this. It was too much like the truth.
David was quiet for a moment before continuing. When he did start speaking again, his voice was calm and reflective, like a man recounting the details of a dream he could only half remember.
“I went back there later that night,” he said. “I wanted to talk to him, to understand why he had killed her. I wanted to tell him about Helen, about how much we still loved her. He wasn’t home yet, and so I sat in the living room . . . and waited.”
The lawyer put a hand on David’s forearm. “A point of clarification if I may, Mr. Reece. Did you go there intending to kill him?”
“No, I was going to talk to him, and maybe beat him to within an inch of his life.”
“That’s an expression,” Bill Casings said. “Would it be more accurate to say that you were aware of the potential for violence, but that your intent was not to kill Mr. Griffin or even to render severe bodily injury? In fact, you didn’t bring a weapon, did you?”
“Who’s giving this statement?” Jeff asked the attorney. “Him or you?”
“I’m just trying to clarify for the accuracy of the record that Mr. Reece did not intend to kill Mr. Griffin that night. He was seeking verbal discourse. He wanted to understand—”
“He came home at nine o’clock,” David said, interrupting him. “He was actually humming to himself when he opened the door.” David looked over at his daughter. “I’m not a murderer,” he said. “I wasn’t intending to kill that man, but he attacked me as soon as he saw me sitting there.”
“He attacked you,” the lawyer reiterated, “and you did what you had to do to defend yourself.”
“He grabbed a knife from the kitchen,” David said, “and I realized what a fool I’d been to confront him alone.”
“What happened next?” the attorney asked.
“I ran,” he said. “I ran out the back door. But I tripped on the shovel that I’d left lying on the ground.”
The lawyer nodded. “And he came after you, intending to kill you?”
“Yes. Yes, I think that’s what he intended.”
“And then?”
“I got to my feet just as he was closing the distance.”
“And he had the knife in his hand,” the lawyer said. “You could still see that.”
“Yes, but there was something in my hand as well. I was holding the shovel, and I swung it with everything I had.”
“To knock the knife away.”
“To defend myself and what was left of my family. I knew he would come after Erin next. A man like that wasn’t going to stop with just the two of us.”
“Mr. Reece, I know this is difficult for you, but if you could just—”
“The blade of the shovel struck him in the head,” he said. “It sliced into his skull and became stuck there. He fell down immediately. I think he was dead before he hit the ground.”
“A single unpremeditated blow to the head,” the lawyer said, “in the act of defending yourself against a man who had murdered your wife and was clearly trying to do the same to you.”
David nodded. “He lay there on the ground without moving. And the shovel, it was still sticking out of his head. I had to put my foot on his chest to yank it free.”
Bill put a hand on his arm. “I think it’s clear now,” he said. “You were in a state of severe emotional distress. You were concerned that the police might not believe that you acted in self-defense. In your mind, there was a perceived risk that you might go to prison or that your thirteen-year-old daughter could be taken away from you. For these reasons, you decided not to contact the police. You brought the body back to your farm and you buried it there.”
“I’d been in prison before,” he said. “I’m an ex-convict. Even if the situation was different, I don’t think the police would’ve believed me.”
“And so you buried him on your property.”
“Yes,” he said. “I buried him in the back. It wouldn’t have been right to bury him next to Helen.”
“And you’ve kept this secret for all these years. You didn’t even tell your daughter.”
“No,” he said, “I never told Erin. I was afraid of what she might think of me.”
They turned to look at her. She had backed herself against the wall by the front door. Erin shook her head, the tears flowing freely now. “No,” she said. “I can’t . . . I won’t listen to this any longer.”
Jeff rose from his chair. “Erin,” he said, but she bolted from the room, flinging the door open hard enough for the knob to smack against the wall.
They heard footsteps on the front porch, the sound of the truck starting, the churn of the tires on the driveway.
“Someone should go after her,” Jeff said, but David shook his head.
“Let her be,” he told them. “It’s a shock to her, I know. I haven’t told her the truth of it until now.”
The chief leaned forward in his chair. “You sure about that, sir? All these years and you never told her?”
David looked at the man. His eyes were clear, his voice as steady as the table between them. “I protected her as best I could,” he said. “Tracking down her mother’s killer was part of it. Keeping it a secret was the rest.”
“You did this town a favor,” the lawyer said. “Who knows how many more people he would’ve killed in the end.”
David lowered his eyes to the table. “I went looking for answers and I found them,” he said. “It’s harder to know something than to not know it. It sits with you, and it never leaves. I’ve paid my price for the killing of Abel Griffin. I reckon there’s not much more they can do to me now.”