Four hours into sitting at the sheriff’s office waiting for detectives to return from the scene, Calvin Hooper was stir-crazy. The room wasn’t much bigger than a closet and he’d memorized every detail: the slate-colored level loop carpet; the blank white walls; a round-face clock centered above the door with its red second hand ticking away the last of twelve o’clock; the rough texture of the gray plastic tabletop where he sat in a metal folding chair, staring at a small video camera mounted against the ceiling in the corner of the room.
He was convinced they were watching him. He tried to stay calm, but the truth was he was losing his mind. The fluorescents overhead were blindingly white, their reflection against the walls surrounding him with light. It was like being snow-blind sitting there, the room so bright he could feel it physically touching him, beating against his arms and his face. Four hours he’d been sitting there. Four hours and no one had come in to say a word. He couldn’t take it any longer. He knew if he sat there one more minute he was going to lose his mind.
Calvin stood and peered through the small shatterproof window in the door. No one appeared to be standing guard outside. He expected the door to be locked, but to his surprise it opened to an empty hallway, not a soul outside to stop him. Pulling his pack of smokes from his pocket, he headed back the way they’d brought him in. The front lobby was around the corner to the left.
He passed an open doorway and peeked into an office where a woman wearing too much makeup sat behind a desk pecking away at a keyboard. She glanced up at him and he could see the line where her foundation ended along her jaw, her face a darker shade than her neck. Tight curls streamed over both shoulders, her dark hair teased in the front. She squinted hard and started to stand. “Sir?”
Calvin sped up and didn’t answer.
“Sir,” she said again, now behind him in the hall. “Sir, where are you going?”
He turned around and showed her the pack of cigarettes in his hand. “I’m going to go outside and grab a smoke.”
“No, I need you to go back down the hall and have a seat in that room.” She came toward him, the pants suit she wore shushing as she walked.
“I’ve been sitting in there four hours and there hasn’t been a soul come in there and say one word to me. Ain’t said boo to a goose.” Calvin was getting angry. “Now, I’m going to go outside and smoke a cigarette and when I’m through I’ll come back in here and sit down.”
“No, sir. You’re going to go back to that room like I said and you’re going to sit there and wait patiently.” When she reached him, she latched ahold of his arm and Calvin jerked away from her.
“Get your goddamn hands off of me.”
She swiped for him again and he leaned back. The woman was yelling that he was going to go back and sit in the room and Calvin was telling her he was going outside to smoke a cigarette, and they were at each other’s throats when Detective Michael Stillwell came around the corner and pulled them apart.
“Hey,” Stillwell stammered. “Hey. What’s going on?”
The woman started to speak and Calvin cut her off. He’d known Michael Stillwell all his life, the two of them having played baseball together in high school, and though they’d never really been friends, Calvin was glad to see a familiar face. “I’ve been sitting in that goddamn room for four hours, Michael, and nobody’s come in there to say a word to me. Now all I’m wanting is to go outside and smoke a cigarette.”
“Not right now,” Stillwell said. He had gray eyes and dark hair same as he always had, but there were bags under his eyes now and he’d softened up in the middle. He wore a cheap navy blue suit, one of those buy-two-get-the-third-free Belk jobs that wasn’t fit for shit but minimum-wage job interviews and caskets.
“What do you mean? All I want to do is go outside and smoke a goddamn cigarette. Am I under arrest?”
“No, you’re not under arrest.”
“Then why can’t I go outside?”
“I was on my way in to see you,” Stillwell said. “Come on. Let’s go back here and talk.” Stillwell put one hand on Calvin’s shoulder and opened his other to gesture down the hall. He led Calvin back to the interrogation room, opened the door, and held it for Calvin to enter. “Have a seat right there and I’ll be back in a second.”
Calvin walked into the room and plopped into the folding chair. He rubbed at his eyes with the heels of his hands, opened his eyes wide to the brightness of the room, and clenched his teeth.
In a minute or two Stillwell came into the room carrying two styrofoam cups. “Brought you some coffee,” he said, setting both cups on the table. He took off his jacket and hung it around the back of his chair.
“I don’t want any coffee, Michael. I told you I want a cigarette.”
“Go ahead and smoke.”
“They told me I couldn’t smoke in here. Said nobody’s allowed to smoke inside the building.”
“And that’s about the least of my worries, Cal,” Stillwell said. “Ash into that coffee cup if you don’t want it.” He slid a steaming cup a little closer toward Calvin.
Calvin leaned back in his chair and dug around in his pocket. He shook a cigarette out of his pack and struck his lighter, took a long drag and blew the smoke overhead. The cloud broke against the ceiling and came down around them as he set his pack on the table, then centered the lighter on top.
“I looked through the written statement you gave when you got here, but I’m going to ask you some questions and I need you to be completely honest with me, Cal.”
The cigarette dangled from Calvin’s lips and he squinted his eyes to block them from smoke. He leaned back in the chair and shoved his hands into the front pocket of a dirty black hoodie with the HOOPER EXCAVATING logo on the chest.
“This is an official statement just the same as the written one and that means what you tell me better not change from here on out, you understand?”
Calvin nodded and the cigarette glowed from his lips.
“This is being recorded.” Stillwell flicked his eyes toward the camera in the corner of the room. “So I need you to answer everything I ask as honest as you can. Tell me everything you can think of even if it doesn’t seem all that important.”
Again, Calvin nodded. He took his hand out of his pocket to ash the cigarette, flecks of burning tobacco hissing as they hit the coffee.
“So what time did you get over there to Darl’s this morning?”
“About seven,” Calvin said. “Maybe a little before.”
“And what were you doing there?”
“I’d come over to try and help him with his tractor. He busted the boom. Wanted me to see if it was something we could fix or if he needed to buy a new one.”
“So why’d you get there so early?”
“Seven ain’t early,” Calvin said. “Me and Dad got a big job going right now. I’m busy as hell at work and so was Darl. That’s the only time either one of us had. I was going to take a quick look at it and head on to work. He was going to do the same.”
“He was expecting you to come by this morning?”
“Well, yeah.” That question seemed stupid to him. “Darl had some work this weekend and he needed to get the tractor fixed.”
“When’s the last time you talked to him?”
“I don’t know. A day or two ago.” Calvin took a long drag and tapped a fingernail of ash into the coffee. “I guess a couple days ago. I told him I’d be by there this morning.”
“And you talked on the phone?”
“No.” Calvin closed his eyes and shook his head. “No, I ain’t talked to him on the phone since sometime last weekend.”
“Then how’d you talk to him?”
“I ran into him at Ingles. He was sitting in his truck eating Burger King and I stopped by Ingles to pick up some milk and happened to see his truck.”
“Was anybody with you?”
“No.”
“Anybody see you?”
“I don’t reckon.” Calvin was starting to get confused. The questions Stillwell was asking made it seem like he was a suspect. “What’s it matter if somebody saw me talking to him or not?”
“I’m trying to help you, Cal. That’s all. If somebody tells me they were at the Ingles, it’s my job to figure out whether or not that’s true. So if somebody can tell me they saw you there, that helps all of us.”
“I told you I was there.”
“I know you did.”
“Then why else would I have said it?” Calvin dropped the cigarette into the cup, the yellowed filter spinning where it floated.
“Tell me about this morning.”
“What about it?”
“What’d you find when you got there?”
“I pulled up to the house and the door was standing open so I figured he was awake. When I got on the porch, I hollered for him and didn’t get a response and so I went on in. I saw some blood there by the dining room table, but I didn’t really think much of it right then—”
“You didn’t think much of it?”
“No. A man works with his hands, he busts something open every day.”
“So . . .”
“So I went on around the house thinking he might’ve been in the shower and I hollered back there in the bedroom, and when I never could find him I walked down to the barn figuring he might already be working on the tractor and that’s when I found him.”
“What did you find?”
Calvin Hooper slammed his fists against the table. The coffee cup rattled, but neither toppled nor spilled. “What the fuck do you mean what did I find?” His green eyes were wide and his bottom jaw jutted out in anger.
“I need you to tell me what you saw.”
“You know what I saw! I saw Darl tied to that goddamn hay bale.” Calvin fought hard to keep from crying. He could feel his eyes frosting with tears. “And I saw the blood. I saw all of that blood and him hanging there.”
“And what did you do then?”
“Are you dumb or something? I called you!” Calvin started to sob and he buried his face in his hands. Stillwell reached over and set his hand on Calvin’s shoulder and Calvin jumped away startled before crying harder when Stillwell squeezed onto him. “He was my best friend,” Calvin stuttered. “Darl was like a brother to me.”
Calvin hadn’t slept or eaten in days, and over the past few hours he’d reached his threshold, the place deep inside that no man can point a finger to until he buckles. The place where he could take no more had come and gone in the blink of an eye and now here he sat little more than a husk of what he was a week before. The only sound now was their breathing and the slow tick of the second hand working its way around the clock face. Neither moved, and finally, in a few minutes, Calvin Hooper lifted his head, reached for his pack of smokes on the table, and lit another cigarette. He spun the lighter around on the tabletop a half turn at a time, staring blank and emotionless.
“What I’m going to ask you now is probably the most important thing I’m going to ask, Calvin.”
Calvin looked at Stillwell from the corners of his eyes. He bit at a hangnail on his thumb and then took a long drag from his Winston.
“Who hated Darl enough to do that?”
“Nobody,” Calvin said.
“You sur—”
“I’m sure,” Calvin interrupted. “Darl Moody never met a stranger in his life. He never had a cross word with anybody that wasn’t settled right then and there.”
“Had he gotten into drugs? He owe anybody any money that you can think of?”
“No,” Calvin said. “Darl drank a few cold beer, but that was it. Look, I don’t know what you want me to say. Darl Moody was the same kid we went to high school with. He worked his ass off all week, loved to get in the woods, and usually tied one on come Friday. About the worst thing I ever knew him to do was to put that raccoon in Donald Ray’s little gay-ass Miata when we were in eleventh grade. Outside of that, he was about as good a man as I ever knew.”
“What happened was personal,” Stillwell said. “What happened in that barn ain’t the kind of thing somebody just up and decides to do.”
“I don’t know what to tell you.”
“What happened to your eye?” Stillwell leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms over his chest.
The question caught Calvin off guard and for a short second he looked puzzled. “What?”
“I said what happened to your eye right there?” Stillwell gestured with the back of his hand to the side of Calvin’s face.
Calvin lifted his left hand and patted gently beside his eye almost having forgotten what was there. He took a few quick puffs from his cigarette to finish and twisted the cherry off the filter before dropping it into the coffee. “I was cutting wood.”
“When did you do that?”
“Yesterday,” Calvin said. “I was felling a few trees and a limb come out of the top of one of them and smacked me in the back of the head. I got knocked down and landed on a rock.” He kept his hand at the side of his face.
“Where were you cutting trees?”
“Up behind the house.”
“Let me see the back of your head.” Stillwell leaned to the left to try and get a better view and Calvin tilted his head forward and showed the egg-shaped knot. Stillwell grunted. “That looks like it hurt.”
Calvin patted tenderly around the wound, grabbed his pack of cigarettes from the table, and shoved them into his pocket. “The way you’re asking all these questions seems like you’re saying I might’ve had something to do with this.”
Stillwell didn’t answer.
“Is that what you’re saying? Am I a suspect?”
Stillwell made a fist with his right hand and fit his left overtop of it. He stared at his hands and squeezed his knuckles. In a moment he looked up. “It’d be naive to think that you weren’t.”
“So do I need to talk to a lawyer?”
“I don’t know,” Stillwell said. “Do you think you need to get a lawyer?”
“Look, am I under arrest here, because I—”
“No, no, you ain’t under arrest,” Stillwell interrupted him.
“Well is there anything else?”
“You got your phone on you?”
“Yeah.”
“Then pull it out and put my number in it.”
Calvin slid his cell phone from his pocket and entered the number Stillwell gave.
“You think of anything else, you call me.”
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Calvin said. He stood and Stillwell looked up and nodded, not another word spoken as Calvin left the room.
In the front lobby, a wall was lined with brass plaques engraved with the portraits and names of past sheriffs. Calvin didn’t know why, but he walked over and studied the portrait of Sheriff Griff Middleton, who was killed in a holler up Little Canada in 1953 while he was hunting down some Woods boy for assaulting Norvella McCall. Sixty-three years later, having happened three decades before he was born, Calvin knew the story the same as everyone else to ever come out of Jackson County. Things had a way of never leaving these mountains. Stories took root like everything else. He was a part of one now, part of a story that would never be forgotten, and that made bearing the truth all the more heavy. Just as Dwayne told him the night before, a man’s mind is its own kind of hell.