CHAPTER SIX

MAY 14

Gray stares into the mirror. He’s naked, just out of the shower. These days, he has to force himself to look. He figures he’s gained an average of a pound each of the forty-eight years since 1968, maybe shedding ten now and then on some half-assed diet or short-lived jogging binge, then gaining back eleven when the thrill was gone.

His hair is mostly an eponym for his first name. The contact lenses his earlier self used out of vanity have long been discarded for glasses that aren’t much more stylish than the black-framed beauties he wore as a teenager.

The good things (youth, fitness, hope) were casualties along the way. The things he wanted to shed (the glasses, a mindset dominated by insecurity and introversion) are still there, joined by new issues like stratospheric PSA numbers and the fear that he’ll soon be paying for twenty years of smoking.

He thinks about Jimmy, now twenty-three years gone. His father made it almost to seventy. He told Gray once, not six months before he died, “Seventy is enough.”

Gray, looking at the wreckage before him, thinks Jimmy might have been right for once.

HE HAS a chance to glance at the Saturday paper before heading south. Cindy has stashed it away under the coffee table, perhaps thinking it’s the last thing he wants to see this morning.

He fishes it out as she hands him a cup of coffee.

The city’s newspaper has become more flashy in recent years, apparently in a belated attempt to lure millennials who long ago gave up reading print publications. Where in past years the Annie Lineberger story might have rated a dry-as-toast, one-column headline below the fold on A1 (Girl’s body/ found; local/man suspect), now the top of the page screams, in all-cap letters an inch high (JUSTICE AT LAST?) with a subhead underneath (Local teacher implicated in 48-year-old murder). Below that are a mug shot of Annie, which Gray recognizes as her senior high school yearbook picture, and one of him, apparently obtained from the community college, along with a locator map for readers who don’t know where North Carolina is.

Gray would have been just as happy if the paper had kept to its sedate, boring, past practices.

“Jesus,” Willie says, looking over his shoulder, “they really spread it on thick, didn’t they?”

Willie’s dressed, more or less. Last night, before they went to bed, he and Gray realized that Gray would need a car to get to North Carolina, and that it wouldn’t be the wisest thing to go back to Betsy’s house and get the one registered to him.

The plan, then, is for Willie to drive Gray down to the Enterprise place on Main Street and rent a car in his name, then turn the keys over to Gray as soon as they’re out of sight of the office.

Willie assures his old friend that the story in Sunday’s paper will be a bit more balanced than this.

“They gave this one to somebody else before I got in,” he says. “Son of a bitch Baer never lets facts get in the way. This’ll be the last he sees of this story if I have anything to do with it.”

The reporter seems to have gleaned a lot of his information from the TV news of the night before. In the sidebar that accompanies the (mostly) factual lead story on the front page, he comes rather close to opinion, in Gray’s opinion. His time as a full-time reporter and then as a freelancer taught him to keep his own feelings out of the story, but the man assigned to tell readers about Gray Melvin seems to have drifted away from that a bit.

The story wonders a lot. An “unnamed official” wonders why “the alleged perpetrator” never tried harder to find the real murderer “if, indeed, another suspect exists.” The same anonymous source wonders why James Grayson Melvin has been so secretive about his past. The source wonders if authorities in North Carolina aren’t already preparing to “bring the suspect in” and whether Melvin has gone on the lam.

“No need for a trial here,” Willie says. “Start building the gallows. Sorry, Gray. If we couldn’t laugh …”

“Yeah. We’d all go insane.”

He finishes the coffee and thanks Willie and Cindy for keeping him.

“I hope I don’t get you in trouble.”

“Just about every story I’ve ever stumbled on that was worth reporting has caused a shit storm. No problem.”

On the way out of Willie’s building, Gray makes brief eye contact with an old man ensconced in one of the chairs in the condominium building’s lobby.

The man looks at Gray, then looks down at the paper he’s holding.

“Yeah,” Willie says, “that’s him. He’s killed before, and he’ll kill again. Wanna do something about it?”

ON THE road in the rental car, Gray decides to eschew the interstate and take the perfectly good US highway that runs across Southside Virginia. By nine, he’s out of the city, past the declining 1970s suburbs and then the newer ones farther out. It always amazes him how fast you can leave Richmond, something he doesn’t do very often anymore.

The local NPR station is asking for money again, and it’s starting to fade out anyhow, so Gray turns off the Ford Escort’s radio and lets his mind wander as the Virginia woods and dairy and tobacco farms roll by.

HE HAD never been anywhere much when he met Annie. Until the trip to the Virginia foothills that ended his virginity, the only place he’d been outside North Carolina was Myrtle Beach.

His parents would pack him and Kaycee up every year for a week at the beach, back when Myrtle wasn’t all country music halls and high-rises shading out the kind of places where Gray and his family used to stay. When he and his friends turned sixteen, they started going there on their own.

He had planned to take Annie, once the weather got warmer, maybe after final exams. She’d been there with her family a few times.

A church message board alongside the four-lane highway reminds motorists to “Remember Your Mother.” Mother’s Day is six days past, but no one has changed the sign yet.

Gray isn’t one to let guilt take up a permanent place in his chest, at least where his mother is concerned. Most of his reservoir of guilt has already been expended elsewhere. But he does have his regrets.

When Cora died four years ago, in the kind of central Pennsylvania town where fracking was seen as a blessing, he came for the funeral. It was the first time he’d been there in seven years. Betsy kept after him to visit her (his mother was long past being able to make the trip down to Virginia), and he kept putting it off. He hasn’t visited his mother’s grave and can’t imagine ever doing so.

As a child, he didn’t think the four of them had such a bad life. It was the only life he knew.

If he and Kaycee sometimes heard shouts from the other side of their parents’ bedroom door, they never seemed to last long. Cora went to stay with her sister for a few days from time to time, leaving Gray and Kaycee to more or less fend for themselves. Jimmy wasn’t much on cooking. But their mother always came back.

She explained to them one time, after their father had taken the baseball bat they’d given Gray on his birthday and smashed it to splinters because Gray had accidentally run over the garden hose with the lawn mower, that his father had had a hard life, and sometimes they just had to give him some room.

Even at fifteen, Gray could see that drinking didn’t make things any better, a lesson he fears he unlearned as an adult. His father had been in the Battle of the Bulge. Unlike some fathers, he talked about it, especially when he came home late after happy hour had turned into happy hours.

And so Gray and Kaycee came to view their father as someone heroic rather than a strong contender for town drunk. They had seen their mother forgive him a hundred times and felt they could do no less.

But one day Cora decided she had had enough. Maybe, as their father claimed, she was just “whoring around” with the minister of their little Baptist church. Maybe she just saw that there was nothing ahead for her except more abuse.

What she came to describe as the last straw, in the spring of 1965, was when Jimmy went on a worse bender than Gray had ever seen. He disappeared for three days, greatly imperiling his future as foreman of a roofing crew.

He came back past midnight on a Tuesday night. He kicked the front door in and wanted to know why the fuck it was locked. It was locked, his wife told him, because there was no one there to protect them.

“Well,” he’d said, “I’m here now.”

He struck her across the face, with his son and daughter watching. Gray tried to intervene, and Jimmy hit him hard enough to drive him into the cheap wallboard, putting a permanent dent there. Cora and her children ran out into the yard in their nightclothes. They walked to a neighbor’s house where they were allowed to sleep in the den.

In the morning, when they cautiously returned, Jimmy was in remorse mode, begging their forgiveness.

Cora patted his head as he knelt before her and told him he’d better get dressed or he’d be late for work.

Jimmy was called out of class shortly after eleven that morning. His mother was waiting for him in the school lobby. That’s when she told him she was leaving.

“When?” he had asked her.

She looked out across the parking lot through the big plate-glass school front.

“Right now.”

She left it to him to tell his little sister, a task that had to wait until they both were at home that afternoon. And then he had to tell Jimmy when he came home from work, not stopping at some bar for once.

Cora told Gray she’d explain it all to him when he was older, but she never did. He never really forgave her for leaving it to him to tell his eleven-year-old sister that her mother had decided to cut her losses, which they came to assume included them.

When it became known that their church’s minister had left town the same day as Cora Melvin, Gray remembered where he’d seen the car in which he had watched his mother leave East Geddie for the last time.

Jimmy never talked about it much either. Amazingly he became a better father after his wife left him, maybe because he finally got some of the counseling Cora had begged him to get for years. Even so, the two siblings were uneasy any time he came home later than usual, relaxing only when they saw the demons that had possessed him on more than one occasion were not to be seen that night.

By the time Gray left for college, his father, though no saint, was at least not an apparent physical threat to what was left of his family. Still Gray felt like a deserter that morning, promising his teary-eyed sister that he’d be home soon and that he would always be there for her.

GRAY TURNS off on a state highway just north of the North Carolina line. His route takes him through Portman, a dot on the map that seems to consist of mostly a volunteer fire department, a couple of churches, a Hardee’s, a used-car dealership, a shuttered factory building of some kind, two convenience stores, and a smattering of houses in little unpaved streets leading off the two-lane road he’s on.

He passes the site where work on the new Food Lion has been halted. He sees the yellow crime-scene tape signifying the gash in the earth where Annie Lineberger’s bones were discovered. The enormity of it all is strong enough to cause him to pull off the road at one of the stores, where he leans out the car door and throws up on the pavement. A dark part of him has believed that this day would come, but it still hits him hard. He goes inside to buy a Diet Coke with which to wash away the bile. He imagines that the local people recognize his face. Surely they have daily newspapers delivered even to Portman, Virginia.

It’s only twelve miles farther, just over the state line, to Chatham, where the district attorney has agreed to meet him. He drives past the college. He hasn’t been there since 1968. He had hoped never to see this town or the school again. He has trouble locating the site of the long-shuttered bar where he first met Annie, and he couldn’t tell you for sure which dorm was hers. Somehow all that adds to his sense of loss.

Towson Grimes is waiting for him at their arranged meeting spot, a barbecue joint on the edge of town. He seems surprised when Gray walks into the overcooled building a couple of minutes past noon.

Gray sees a slightly overweight man who waves to him and gets up from the booth he’s cornered.

“You must be Grayson Melvin,” he says, extending one hand and wiping some coleslaw off his upper lip with the other. “Thank you so much for coming down here.”

Gray follows him back to the booth. He orders a pork barbecue sandwich, which comes with hush puppies and french fries. The tea, Gray knows, will be sweetened to diabetic levels whether he asks or not. Betsy calls the area from southern Virginia down and around to Louisiana the stroke belt and says the sweet-tea line starts somewhere around Petersburg. Gray grew up on this food, but at this point in his life, he loves it more than it loves him.

The DA manages, between shoveling in mouthfuls of what the menu calls “The Big Boy Special,” to make small talk about everything from ACC basketball to the upcoming elections.

Gray has eaten about half his sandwich when Grimes pushes his plate away, now empty save one french fry, which stands as a lonely and futile testament to self-control.

“Well,” he says, “I reckon we’ve got some things to talk about.”

“I guess we do.”

He asks Gray if he’ll come with him to his office in Colesville, five miles away. He offers to drive them both, but Gray demurs, telling him he’ll just follow him over.

“No sense in that,” Grimes says. “No need to take both cars over.”

Gray says he’d rather drive himself. The DA frowns briefly but gets up and pays for both their lunches.

The county seat is smaller than Chatham, really only a village. Its sole reason to exist seems to be as a government center. Gray follows Grimes into a lot beside the courthouse, not noticing the number of vehicles parked there on a Saturday afternoon.

“It’s a one-horse town,” the DA says, with what seems to Gray to be forced joviality, “but we like it.”

He leads his guest back through a corridor and into his office suite, where the door is unlocked. They walk past the receptionist’s desk and into another room, a long expanse with a large conference table in the middle. The district attorney sends his guest in first.

Gray, expecting a one-on-one interview, stops short as he enters the room.

Seated at the table, amply filling one of the chairs, is a figure from Gray Melvin’s past. In another chair, across the table, is a well-coiffed woman whom Gray vaguely recognizes from the cable news network whose emblem is on the camera that a fat guy in shorts and T-shirt is holding in the corner of the room.

Despite his considerable girth, Tree Lineberger looks like he might fly out of his chair.

He smiles up at Gray, or at least shows his teeth.

“Been a long time, asshole.”

“I’m sorry,” Towson Grimes says, hitting himself in the forehead in mock apology. “I forget to tell you that I invited another party that has some interest in Annie Lineberger. You all have already met, I reckon.

“And I didn’t think you’d mind if we brought some of the fourth estate here, just to get the whole picture, you know.”

Gray can see that the camera is live and knows he’s been ambushed.

“Now, we don’t want to go making any charges or anything just yet,” the DA says. “We thought it’d be better if we just had a chat.”

“With the camera on? How about you get me a lawyer.”

“Aw, now, Mr. Melvin, this isn’t anything official. Just trying to get to the bottom of it all.”

The TV reporter cuts in.

“We’ve just heard so much about this. The whole country’s fascinated by it. And we knew you’d want to get your side of the story out there. We’ve certainly heard enough of the other side.”

She looks toward Tree Lineberger when she says this.

“And when Mr. Graves …”

The DA clears his throat.

“Grimes.”

“Grimes. Sorry. When Mr. Grimes here called and told us you’d be coming in for a chat, we rounded up a cameraman and chartered a flight right down here from Washington.”

The woman seems to be trying to sound Southern, without much luck.

The big man looking up at Gray pulls out a chair and pats its seat.

“Yeah,” Lineberger says. “Stay a spell. I know we’re all dying to hear what you have to say this time.”

Gray has been in the same room with Annie’s brother on several occasions since her disappearance, none of them pleasant and none of them in the last thirty years. Tree has taken up the cause of his late father: to see that Gray Melvin pays the full price for what happened to his sister. Gray knew that Tree, like Annie herself, would one day, somehow, resurface.

If Gray has gained a pound a year, his nemesis seems to have put on two. Tree Lineberger now must weigh more than three hundred pounds. His face is red enough that Gray can imagine him, like Tree’s father, bursting a blood vessel and departing this mortal coil in spectacularly abrupt fashion. He can’t believe the man is still alive really. He figures he must be sixty-nine years old with a body that looks like it should have hit its expiration date a good decade ago.

Gray knows through Google that Lineberger is mostly retired now, and that he was himself district attorney for his home county. He supposes that’s where he came to know Towson Grimes, and that this surprise party is Grimes’s idea of professional courtesy.

Lineberger stands up and points at Gray, who hasn’t sat down and steps back a foot.

“They found her bones, you piece of shit. You thought she’d stay buried forever, but you were wrong. Annie’s come back from the grave to nail your ass.”

Gray can see the camera’s still on, catching every delicious moment for the network’s viewers to savor later.

“I didn’t do it,” is all Gray can say.

“Yeah, you said that back then too. They had to take your word for it, with no body and all. Although nobody really believed you then, either, did they?”

No, Gray would have to admit. Mostly they didn’t.

He wishes he were smarter, smart enough to have listened to Willie Black and to Betsy and not to have come down here in the naive belief that he could have a face-to-face with Towson Grimes, who stands between him and the door looking rather pleased with himself.

Gray turns toward him.

“You said you and I would talk.”

Grimes spreads his arms.

“I just thought you’d want to get it all on the record. Here’s your chance to go face-to-face with your accuser. This ain’t going to be legally binding or anything.”

No, Gray thinks, it’s just going to be on everybody’s TV from coast to coast. He can’t imagine that he looks like anything other than a guilty man caught unawares, facing the righteous wrath of his victim’s brother. He wishes he had dressed better.

“You set me up,” he says, stating the obvious.

“Well,” the DA says, smiling with just his mouth, “maybe just a little. But we’ve been waiting a long time for this one, you have to understand.”

Gray also understands something else. It’s an election year, and he’s going to be the vehicle to get Towson Grimes reelected. He has always had a fairly respectful attitude toward the forces of law and order. After all, the system worked for him forty-eight years ago. He was not railroaded over Annie’s disappearance. He might have been found as guilty as OJ in the court of public opinion, but the law didn’t let him down.

He is reminded, now, of something a lawyer acquaintance of his told him years ago. The friend had defended more than his share of criminal cases before going to the “other side” and working for the commonwealth’s attorney in Richmond.

They’d had more than a few drinks when the conversation turned to a man who had just recently been exonerated by DNA after serving more than twenty years for a rape he didn’t commit.

The lawyer leaned toward Gray and spoke in a low voice.

“Now, if you quote me on this, I’ll say you’re a damn liar and sue you for slander.

“But,” and here he held his right forefinger up, “if you think for one minute that the prosecution is any less willing to bend the rules to win than the defense is, you’re sadly mistaken. We are in it to win. Period. Anyhow.”

They call them commonwealth’s attorneys in Virginia and district attorneys in North Carolina, but Gray can see now just how right his old friend was. His demise will make this overweight elected official who lured him down here a hero to the voters. And he can see for the first time clearly that Towson Grimes is no more interested in hearing his side of the story than Tree Lineberger is.

“Fuck you,” he says. “I’m going home. Charge me or get the hell out of my way.”

He is knocked forward onto the table by a blow to the back of his head and feels Lineberger’s considerable weight on top of him, feels his hot breath. He hears the reporter give a little gasp. He can see the red eye of the camera. He can hear Grimes say, “Come on, now, boys. This is supposed to be a civil conversation.”

Lineberger lets him up, shouting his desire to see him executed by the state “so I don’t have to do it myself.”

Gray feels a little light-headed as he heads toward the door.

“You lied to me,” he says to the DA, who seems only mildly shaken by the assault he’s just witnessed and appears to have no plans to call in any of the sheriff’s deputies whom Gray saw hanging out in the hall on the way in.

Grimes tells the cameraman to turn his camera off.

“Lied? Not really,” he says. “We’re just interested in justice around here. You know what the good Dr. King said about justice delayed being justice denied. And when it’s been denied this long, well, it just makes us all the more eager to see that it gets delivered.”

He leans closer to Gray.

“Long and hard.”

Gray leaves, with the reporter and cameraman chasing after him, along with Grimes. Lineberger has stayed behind.

“We’ll be talking with you real soon,” the DA calls after him. “You all have a safe trip back to Richmond. And don’t be plannin’ any long trips in the near future.”

The reporter and her cameraman follow him all the way to his car. He asks them to leave him alone, but she just keeps asking him questions she knows he won’t answer. He wonders just how guilty he looks right now.

He rolls the window up, catching the microphone she’s stuck inside. As he drives off, she runs a few steps, then lets go. He goes a few yards down the road, stops briefly, and flings the mic into the rose bushes alongside.

“Well,” he says to himself as he turns back north toward Virginia, “that went well.”