August 2014
On the night Willard Shoat killed his parents, he walked barefoot to the edge of town with a can of red spray paint, out to the sign that said, “Entering POSTON, pop. 924.” He shook the clicking can, raised on his tiptoes, and opened fire. First he slashed out the number. Then he painted a new total to account for the subtraction of Mom and Dad: 921.
Willard never was much for math.
But it took the police a while to figure that out, and for two days running they dug holes all over the family farm in search of a third body. They ran backhoes and unleashed sniffer dogs, going after anything that hinted at rot or decay. Being a farm, there was plenty of both. The manure heaps alone kept them busy for an entire afternoon, and they tore up the better part of an acre before concluding, as almost everyone else in town already had, that Willard had simply gotten his sums wrong.
Henry Mattick, new to Poston and living in a small frame house less than a block from the scene, took a contrary view. Dumb as the boy was—an unkind word, perhaps, for a twenty-four-year-old whose mind never made it past kindergarten—Henry believed Willard was simply counting himself out of the game as well. For what better way to negate yourself than to do away with the two people who brought you into the world?
Henry got wrapped up in the story almost from the moment he first heard the sirens.
It wasn’t as if he had much else to do, marooned in a rural village on the Maryland Eastern Shore. He was between jobs and romantically unattached, quartered in a spartan rancher owned by a distant relative who’d offered temporary refuge at a bargain rate. Or so Henry told the neighbors on the few occasions they induced him to talk. They knew he was from Baltimore by the stickers on his car, but when they asked about that he only nodded.
His only companion was a brindled, underfed mutt left behind by the previous tenant, a dog so accustomed to neglect that he would disappear for days at a time, showing up only to eat, accept a scratch or two on the head, and poop in the grass by the porch before again wandering off. Henry, deciding not to take it personally, gave the dog a name—Scooter—and accommodated his unpredictable schedule by keeping his bowl filled at all hours.
Watchful by nature, Henry kept an eye on the house down the street as the police came and went. He followed the saturation media coverage almost minute by minute, and when the cable networks began to lose interest he switched to the Internet.
By the lurid and violent standards of the age, the case struck Henry as fairly run-of-the-mill. And with only two fatalities it probably would have attracted little media attention if not for Willard’s strange sojourn to the sign at the edge of town. Otherwise, the basics were simple. The murder weapon was a hunting rifle, a .30-06 bolt action Ruger American that Willard’s dad had bought him for his fourteenth birthday. Up to then he’d used it only for shooting at deer. He shot both his parents in the face—Dad first, Mom second. Investigators settled on that order of events partly by reading the spatter of blood and gore, but also because his mother’s body was found sitting upright in bed, meaning she had probably awakened after the first shot.
Neither the boy nor his parents had been drinking in the hours beforehand. Toxicology tests weren’t yet complete, but none of the three had a history of drug use, and Willard had been reasonably lucid, all things considered, at the time of his arrest. Both deaths were almost certainly instantaneous. Estimated time: Between 4 and 4:30 a.m.
Based on the blood trail, Willard had dropped the gun on the bedroom floor and proceeded immediately out of the house, pausing only to pick up a spray can of tractor paint, which he’d apparently set by the front door before the shooting.
As for motive, the family’s oft-interviewed friends and neighbors offered no plausible theories, despite the best efforts of the reporters who saturated the town. (Henry himself turned away six of them, and for three days they went door-to-door with the fervor of Jehovah’s Witnesses.)
The townspeople’s accounts were almost identical in tone and content. In the weeks leading up to the event, Willard had exhibited no apparent anger, no violent tendencies, no signs of mental illness. He was just “slow,” everyone said. Slow and sweet and impressionable, with a special fondness for fried chicken, cotton candy, fireworks, and marching bands. And although he went hunting with his father every deer season, no one could remember the last time he’d bagged one—or, indeed, if he’d ever even hit one.
A few people raised a history of bullying as a possible instigator, although everyone said the problem had mostly disappeared years ago, when his contemporaries went off to jobs or to college. And by then Willard had grown large enough to make picking a fight with him seem like a bad idea.
There was no suggestion of parental abuse. His father, Tarrant, sixty-three, was known as a hard worker and devoted parent, and was well thought of in the community. His mother, Helen, fifty-nine, although a bit chilly and aloof, had always been fiercely protective of his interests. No one had ever heard her raise her voice to him. In fact, people said, as if suddenly awakening to the realization, for years no one seemed to have heard her say much of anything to anybody. In a way, she had become as much of a closed book as her son. Those who thought about it the longest dated her withdrawal to the year the Shoats’ daughter, Anna, went off to college—six or seven years ago, they guessed, before inevitably realizing on second thought that it had been more like a dozen, a calculation that left everyone shaking their heads at the fleeting nature of time. Anna, who now lived in Baltimore, wasn’t quoted anywhere. Apparently she’d gone into seclusion, and wasn’t expected in town until the day of the funeral.
Deprived of any obvious answers, some of the more pious citizens of Poston finally concluded that the Shoats’ failure to find a church home must have contributed to their downfall. A boy of unshakable faith, they said, never would have done such a thing. That body of opinion, quoted most prominently on Fox, provided Henry with a welcome moment of comic relief. Typical, he mused, and yet another reason he wouldn’t be sticking around Poston any longer than he had to.
Yet, he, too, believed there had to be more to the story, if only because his most recent employments had taught him that, even for the simple-minded, motive is often buried deep within a welter of complexity. And as he searched for answers from his amateur’s perch, the one aspect of the murders that he kept returning to was the same one that had captured the public’s imagination: Willard’s half-mile walk to the edge of town. Henry was so haunted by the image of the boy’s lonely, purposeful stroll that he decided late one night—or, rather, very early one morning—to retrace Willard’s steps, if only to share in the sensory cues that the young man must have worn like a second garment as he strolled out to correct the town’s population total, as single-minded as a census taker.
Henry began at the head of the Shoats’ driveway, where the front flap of their empty mailbox hung open like the tongue of an exhausted dog. The neighboring houses were dark. No one stirred. It was that hour before dawn when shooting stars still tumble dimly across the sky, farm ponds smoke with morning mist, and the acrid smell of skunk floats across fields of corn and soybeans. Crickets and tree frogs offered the night’s final chorus. Soon the songbirds would begin to stir. Henry was barefoot, just as Willard had been. The pavement was still warm from the previous day, but its roughness soon forced him onto the grassy shoulder, cool with dew.
He inhaled the scent of the dying night—pine resin and moist earth, that slight essence of skunk—and as he proceeded he pictured Willard just ahead, rumpled and blood-spattered, and gripping a can of paint. He imagined the boy passing these silent houses, the hems of his denim overalls rasping in the wet grass.
Henry rounded the curve of Willow Street and turned onto Highway 53, the narrow slab faintly aglow in the last wash of moonlight. Off in the distance, the red lights of a radio tower flashed like a homing beacon.
The boy’s weight, girth, and sedentary lifestyle must have made his breathing labored by this point, Henry thought, as he passed the Basnight place on his left, a brick rancher with a triple garage and a satellite dish sprouting on the lawn like a giant mushroom. On the pavement just ahead was a blackened splotch of road kill—a flattened squirrel, crusty enough to flip with a spatula.
Next Henry overtook the playground, where it seemed every kid in town had laughed at Willard as the oaf who couldn’t read, couldn’t add, couldn’t do much of anything but shake his head and say “I dunno” whenever anyone asked him a question. Finally, breaking free of the houses, he reached the welcome brigade of signs from the Ruritans, the Civitans, the First Baptist Church, the Farm Bureau, and the VFD, their rusting posts twined with trumpet vine.
Then, just beyond, the Poston sign, where Willard had stopped to complete the task at hand.
Why?
Henry considered the question yet again, but had no answer. The walk, for all its heightened awareness, had tuned him to a blank signal, a hiss of dead air.
Willard had then walked home, straight back the way he’d come. Two hours later the paperboy had found him, curled up and snoring on the concrete deck of the Shoats’ front porch. Seeing that the door was ajar, and noticing enough blood to make him uneasy, the paperboy had promptly swerved his bicycle around to pedal straight to the office of the town cop, who arrived with gun drawn to find Willard still asleep and the house already abuzz with flies.
It took only two days for a Maryland state highway crew to replace the sign, which must have set some sort of record for bureaucratic efficiency. But in a macabre twist the boys from the DOT went with Willard’s revised total of 921. They toted away the old sign for evidence, and within hours of its departure the story began making the rounds that Willard had actually painted the number in blood.
Henry returned to his house feeling more foolish than enlightened. He climbed into bed as the birds began to chirp, and the last thing he heard as he fell asleep was the slap of the newspaper on the porch—same paperboy, same bicycle. When he finally awoke to retrieve the copy, the funeral procession was passing down Highway 53 with its sad assortment of vehicles: two hearses, a courtesy limo, three cars of friends and family, five TV vans.
A story on the front page told him over a late breakfast that the service was closed to the public. Accompanying it was the first photo he’d seen of Willard’s sister, Anna. Her face surprised him. Compared to the rest of the family, she looked cosmopolitan and aware, seemingly the product of a wider world. The set of her jaw lent her a certain fierceness, yet there was also a touch of the demure. Henry’s most recent boss would have described it as the kind of face juries loved—guileless and open, the very picture of honesty and sincerity.
She was thirty, the second-in-command of some do-gooder outfit that lobbied on behalf of children and the poor, which made Henry wonder what her relationship with her brother had been like. Had she taken the job out of sympathy with his plight, or out of guilt for leaving him behind?
A gloomy choice.
After a dinner of takeout fried chicken—Willard’s favorite, it belatedly occurred to him—Henry swore off any further coverage. He shut down his laptop and flipped on the television to watch a baseball game. It would soon be time to leave Poston, anyway.
In the fourth inning he opened a bottle of rye whiskey he had vowed to ration until October. By the ninth he had downed more than half. He switched off the game just as a pop-up settled into the shortstop’s glove for the final out. Then he shut his eyes and dreamed of Willard on his nocturnal walk, alone yet not alone, stepping resolutely while some presence loomed just behind him in the roadside shadows, watchful and knowing.