CHAPTER EIGHT

MAY 15

Gray parks on the side street next to the Prestwould. The cathedral’s church bells serenade him as he locks the rental.

He stopped on the way back to Richmond for a fast-food breakfast. He saw that the early edition of the Richmond Sunday paper was in the rack outside. He recognized his picture on the front from thirty feet away and decided, after buying a copy with all the change he had in his pocket, to use the drive-through instead of eating inside.

He saw Willie’s byline and read the headline (“Who killed Annie Lineberger?”) and the first few paragraphs. At least Willie didn’t seem to be convicting him before the trial. He set the paper beside on the seat and drove on.

HEADING NORTH yesterday on an unnaturally warm mid-May afternoon, Gray realized he was exhausted, laid low by the previous twenty-four hours. He nearly rear-ended a slow-moving pickup just south of Portman. He pulled over at a convenience store and bought a can of Red Bull, but fifteen miles farther down the road, on the four-lane US highway, he found himself nodding off again.

A motel, sad remnant of the time when the road was a route for Florida-bound tourists, appeared out of the woods on his left. He made a U-turn and pulled into the gravel parking lot, struck by how much it resembled the one where he meant to spend a weekend of lust and love with Annie Lineberger so long ago.

Some construction workers were sitting outside some of the stand-alone cottages in cheap folding chairs. A couple of them had a cooler between them. Three others leaned over a hibachi, grilling hot dogs. A CD player was booming country music.

Inside, the manager might as well have been that woman from forty-eight years ago, the one who warned Gray against indulging in cohabitation, or at least told him he’d have to pay extra if he did.

The room cost $39.20 a night “with tax,” her 2016 apparition said. “Weekly rates are on the wall behind you.”

Gray gave her two twenties; she said she had to go get the key to unlock the safe.

“Place down the road got held up last week. We don’t keep no cash in here.”

Gray told her to keep the change.

He planned to nap a couple of hours and then head back to Richmond. Before he lay down, he gave Betsy a call.

“Where the hell have you been?” is how she answered.

He had turned his cell phone off, tired of the endless calls he was getting from friends, strangers, and, mostly, people working for newspapers and TV networks.

He explained that to her.

“I didn’t know what to think,” she said. “I was worried about you. I am worried about you. How’d it go?”

He brought her up to speed on the day’s events, including the ambush prepared by the district attorney.

“Bastards.”

“Have the news vultures killed all the grass in your front yard yet?”

She laughed.

“Not quite, but they’re working on it.”

“I’m sorry. I never meant …”

“I know. I know. Don’t worry. It’s getting better. A couple of the TV trucks have driven off. Looking for you somewhere else, I guess.”

He told her that he probably would stay over at Willie Black’s at least one more night.

“Willie reminded me about the news media’s short attention span. He said they were like a bunch of two-year-old Labrador retrievers. Pretty soon, he said, they’ll spot another squirrel and go chasing it.”

“Is he calling you a squirrel?”

‘Just metaphorically, I guess.”

“Well, I want you to get your metaphorical ass back over here as soon as you can. This bed is too big with just one person in it.”

“As soon as I can,” Gray said. “I hope I don’t have bedbugs next time I see you.”

Before he drifted off, he called Willie’s cell and told him what had happened.

“What the hell did I tell you?” his friend said. “Those guys, they don’t mean you anything but harm.”

“I know. I know. You’d think I’d be more cynical of human nature by now.”

“Get back up here, soon as you can.”

Gray said he would, after he took a little nap.

“You OK?”

“Just tired. I gotta go now.”

His head was already sinking toward the pillow as he said it. He saw that, while he was talking to Willie, he’d had four other callers. He turned the cell off again.

HIS OWN snoring woke him up. The room was dark, and he had a few panicky seconds of disorientation. Was he dead? If so, apparently heaven’s harpists were fond of loud, bad, redneck music. He turned on the bedside lamp and looked outside, where it was now pitch dark. The parking lot was littered with people drinking and dancing around the glow of a couple of charcoal grills.

He looked at his watch. Nine thirty.

Betsy answered on the second ring.

“You’ve got to stop turning that thing off,” she said.

He told her that he would reset the alarm for seven a.m. and drive back in the morning.

“But everything’s OK?” she asked. “I mean, when you didn’t answer …”

He realized that she, and probably others as well, could think he might have done something a little more drastic than rent a cheap motel room for the night. It was the kind of fear, he thought, that indicated a certain amount of doubt as to his innocence in Annie’s death.

He really couldn’t blame them. He had felt it, even in his own family, in the months and years after it happened, the doubt eventually rubbed smooth by time.

He told her to stop worrying. He was just tired was all.

Then he called Willie Black and told him not to wait up. Still groggy, still feeling sleep-deprived but also hungry, he wandered out the door of his unit.

Two men in overalls wearing tattoos instead of shirts greeted him as if he was a long-awaited guest. They pushed a hot dog on him, which he gratefully devoured, along with a couple of cheap beers.

“What the fuck are you doin’ here, anyhow?” the one with the ZZ Top beard asked him. It wasn’t so much a challenge as bewilderment. Gray saw that he was the only man in the parking lot who was not only wearing a shirt, but one with a collar. The women, from what he could tell, were heavy on makeup and light on teeth.

“I’ve got some legal issues,” he said, sensing that this would be an area in which he and his newfound friends had common ground.

“I hear you there,” a heavyset man who’d joined the conversation said. “Man, when the fuckers decide it’s you, they got you, no matter what.”

He scratched at a tattoo on his bare shoulder. Underneath the skull and crossbones, it read, “Jesus was a pussy.”

Gray agreed with the man’s assessment of the judicial system. He gradually slipped away, opting not to titillate the crowd by telling them he was a murder suspect. It would just lead to more questions he didn’t feel like answering.

Inside, he fell back into a sleep that could not be disturbed by any amount of music, screaming, or free-range fights.

When the alarm woke him, all was quiet in the parking lot. One of the men who’d given him a beer the night before was snoring gently in one of the cheap folding chairs outside the unit two doors down, a bottle cradled on his ample gut. One of the grills was still in the middle of the lot, surrounded by discarded cans and other trash.

He returned the key to the same woman who’d rented him the room the day before.

“I hope the noise didn’t bother you none,” she said. “The boys get right rowdy sometimes.”

She grinned at him, and he realized she was one of the women he’d seen in the lot the night before.

He told her he’d never slept better in his life. He thought she seemed disappointed at that.

NOW, AS he gets out of his rental, he’s thinking about the arc his life has taken. Driving solo does that to him. Normally he can push parts of his past to a place where it only escapes after a four a.m. trip to the bathroom. But this is not a normal time, and he wonders if there ever will be any normal time again.

He hasn’t exactly carried a torch for Annie Lineberger for forty-eight years, but there is a tug.

Whatever happened to Annie has damaged his life, diminished it, made him cringe and feel a guilt that has no logical basis. But how can he feel sorry for himself? He is alive, “free, white and twenty-one,” as his father had so bluntly put it. Annie, as the weeks and months and years went by with no word, was almost surely dead, it was silently conceded, even by her family. Worse than dead really. Unaccounted for. Neither here nor there. She was like those MIAs from Gray’s Vietnam days, a ghost in need of closure. Finding her bones should have been a kind of sad relief. It would have been, even for Gray, if he hadn’t been the one suspected of murdering her.

He makes his way up to Willie Black’s apartment.

Cindy is the only one stirring. She lets him in and tells him Willie is in the shower. Abe Custalow has spent the night with a girlfriend.

“I see you’ve already read the paper,” she says, pointing to the edition tucked under Gray’s right arm.

“Not all of it.”

“Well, it’s not so bad. And at least the TV crews and the out-of-town papers haven’t found out where you are.”

He tells her about his ambush in Colesville.

“Yeah, I heard. Willie said somebody told him they’d already played a tape of the interview on that network, the one that sent those people down there. I wouldn’t know. It’s not one I ever watch.”

Gray cringes when he thinks about how he must have come across, about what amusement that cluster-fuck scene must be giving viewers all over the country.

He’s had time to read the whole article by the time Willie comes into the living room.

“Late night,” he says, then picks up a pack of cigarettes off the coffee table and heads to the study.

“Camel break,” Cindy says. “He thinks that if he smokes at the open window, Kate won’t notice next time she springs a surprise inspection on us. Fool’s errand, but what the hell.”

Gray thinks how strange it must be to have an ex-wife as a landlady. He admires his old friend’s willingness to jump back into the ring after being floored three times. He definitely admires Cindy’s courage for taking him on as a reclamation project.

As if she’s reading his mind, she says, “I don’t even try to stop him anymore. I find that he makes more of an effort not to get lung cancer if I just let Willie be Willie.”

“So,” his host says when he comes back, smelling faintly of tobacco. “Did I do you right?”

“As right as was possible, I guess.”

“Well, I couldn’t get everything about your history in there. The bastards would only give me eighty inches to work with.”

Gray grimaces.

There’s a lot of his history he’d just as soon didn’t see the light of day.

GRAYSON MELVIN got his college degree at last in 1979. He’d spent eleven years first as a soldier and then, on again and off again, as a different kind of college student than the one he briefly was before April of 1968. He also had blown through a marriage.

The school he chose, Virginia Commonwealth University, was full of people like Gray, people who had drifted off the traditional track to higher education, or never got on it. Veterans. Local kids whose families couldn’t afford to send them away to college. Former dropouts trying to get a degree one course at a time, showing up for night classes still wearing their work clothes. Middle-aged women indulging a midlife crisis or trying on a new, post-marriage life. A poster in one of the dean’s offices said, “If you want ivy, bring your own.”

He worked some and took classes when he could, usually a couple at a time. He still wanted to be a journalist, and VCU had what was now called “mass communications.” He worked at the student paper. He even managed to get an internship at the city’s morning daily newspaper. When he graduated, he was hired full-time. The next year, he met Willie Black. Gray was thirty-one and Willie was twenty-one, but they found that they had things in common. Drinking, mostly.

With his marriage up in smoke, Gray had time on his hands.

HE HAD met Hannah Coble in 1973, two years after moving from his father’s house to Richmond. Gray realized that his only chance at anything resembling a normal life would have to take place some distance from East Geddie, where everyone knew who he was and what he allegedly did.

Plus it was obvious to him that one of them wasn’t going to make it out of that little house alive if they both stayed there. Gray’s father had never been much on self-control and tact, and Gray found that two years in the wartime army had depleted whatever reserve he ever had.

The night the inevitable happened, Jimmy came in drunk and wasn’t in bed yet when Gray got back twenty minutes later, drunker.

Jimmy said something about his son’s drinking, which had gotten somewhat out of hand. Gray said he came by it naturally. Then Jimmy said, “Well, at least I ain’t killed anybody yet.”

Kaycee had just left for college, so they had the place to themselves. Gray staggered over to his father, who was sitting at the kitchen table. He had never hit him before, although he’d often wanted to. He punched Jimmy in the nose, knocking him back against the side of the refrigerator.

Jimmy lay on the floor, his legs tangled in the chair.

Gray stood over him.

“You son of a bitch. You never believed me, did you?”

“Well,” Jimmy laughed, wiping a trickle of blood off on his sleeve, “I reckon you’re a son of a bitch, too, don’t you think?”

Gray kicked him. When his father pulled out the switchblade, he backed away.

“Oh, I can see how it happened,” Jimmy said. “You get a little nooky and think you’re in true love. Then she shits on you. A man’s got to do something about that.

“You just let it get out of hand. Didn’t know when to stop, did you?”

Gray reached behind him and pulled a butcher knife out of the drawer.

Jimmy laughed and worked his way up, first to his hands and knees and then full upright.

“Yeah, why don’t you go ahead and use that thing? Come on. Fuck, I bet you killed plenty of them gooks over there. And we both know what you did to that girl. But you ain’t killed a full-grown white man that brought a knife to a knife fight, have you?”

Looking at his father, now standing not three feet away, tossing the knife from one hand to the other and grinning like a maniac, Gray was pretty sure he could take him, and he was pretty sure he wanted to. What the hell. Everyone, including Jimmy, already thought he was a damned murderer. He might as well live up to expectations.

Neither of them moved for a good ten seconds.

Then Jimmy laughed and set down the knife.

“Hell, you ain’t worth the damn trouble,” he said. “And you ain’t got the balls to finish what you started.”

Gray just stared at him. He knew Jimmy was drunk, but he knew his father meant what he said about his killing Annie.

He had told Jimmy the whole story, that first weekend after he came back. His father had looked at him for a while, like he was sizing him up for the first time.

“Well,” he had told Gray, “just don’t say anything if you don’t have to.”

After that, they had kept away from the subject, until tonight.

“So that’s it,” Gray said at last as they stared at each other across the small kitchen, the night’s dirty dishes piled in the sink behind him. “That’s what you think.”

Jimmy shook his head and smiled.

“What I think,” he said, “is that you need to get your ass out of here. You never know what I might do some night when you’re asleep.”

He grinned as he picked the knife back off the table.

Gray stayed with an old friend for a week. That’s how long it took him to find employment out of state. He knew a guy from Nam who lived in Richmond, and he said he could get Gray a job, working for a roofer.

He had already taken everything he wanted from Jimmy’s house. He called his sister at school in Greenville and told her he was leaving, but he didn’t tell her why right then. He promised to stop and see her on the way north.

He kept his promise. Kaycee, who had borne the brunt of her father’s moods since Gray left for college, hugged him and cried. He promised to get her up to Richmond for a visit as soon as he could get settled. He had thought of himself as her protector all the years they endured first their parents’ fights and then Jimmy’s anger. Now, looking down on his little sister, feeling the warmth of her head and the dampness of her tears against his chest, he knew he was abandoning her again, no matter what he said about visits.

When he told her what happened in the kitchen, she said she wasn’t going back home, ever. She kept that vow for quite a while, even when Jimmy threatened to cut off her tuition money. She dropped out of East Carolina after two years and never lived under Jimmy’s roof again. She did spend a couple of summers in the extra bedroom of Gray’s cheap apartment in the Fan, but then Hannah came into the picture. Gray’s girlfriend and sister never got along well enough to share small living quarters. Soon enough, Kaycee moved back to a place not five miles from where her father still lived. She has never left.

Over the years, Gray sometimes wished he had moved farther away from all the trouble. On a few occasions, Richmond was too close for his comfort. People knew people, and parts of the story about Annie would come out. What people heard was often worse than the truth.

BY THE time he met Hannah, he had decided that he did want a college degree after all. The kind of jobs he got as a veteran with a high school diploma helped convince him.

She was an incoming freshman that fall, six years younger than he was. He’d had sex with more than a dozen women by that time, none of whom made him forget Annie. He still dreamed about her, although the dreams were seeming less and less real.

When he showed Kaycee the weather-beaten photo of Annie he still carried in the deep recesses of his wallet, a year after he and Hannah were married, Kaycee looked at it, then looked at Gray. She had seen Annie’s picture, years ago, in various newspapers, but this was the first time Gray had shown her the now-faded photograph.

“You do know who this looks like, don’t you?” she had said.

Gray had to admit that, yes, he did.

Hannah didn’t have Annie’s wit, and she didn’t have her pure animal passion, something Gray forced himself to overlook while he convinced himself that he loved Hannah for Hannah, period.

They dated for two years before they got married. Hannah, a Richmond girl who was commuting to VCU when they met, moved in with him six months beforehand. Her parents weren’t that fond of him, even before they heard the rumors and checked them out.

Three nights before their wedding, her father begged her not to do it. He took her out to dinner and showed her the clippings from the Raleigh paper from 1968. Gray later came to think that she went ahead with the wedding anyhow as much to prove her parents wrong as anything. She told her father she already knew about Annie Lineberger, but she didn’t really know everything. Gray hadn’t told her as much as he should have. When she confronted him about it later that night, he told her pretty much everything about Annie, except for the ache he still felt sometimes for her. He offered to exit Hannah’s life for good.

“No,” she’d said, “we’ve already gone this far. I love you, and that’s all I need to know.”

Hannah was, as her mother said, “a tad anal.” She liked to have things mapped out. Gray would come to wonder, in the four years they were married, if her driving force that night wasn’t a refusal to cancel all the wedding plans.

He had to give her credit though. She never gave any indication that she didn’t believe what he told her about Annie Lineberger’s disappearance, and her parents never mentioned it to him, although there was a certain chill between him and them.

On the day of the wedding, Hannah’s father pulled him into the men’s room at the little Methodist church.

He put his hands on both Gray’s biceps and looked him in the eyes. He seemed to be on the verge of tears. He was a short man who had to look up to Gray.

“You bastard,” he whispered, although they were alone, “you better treat my little girl right.”

Gray said he would. And, in the sense of not murdering her and burying her in an unmarked grave, he kept his word.