CHAPTER NINE

1968

He was in Wisconsin when the letter was forwarded to him.

“We feel it is in your best interests at this stressful time to take a sabbatical. The university will be glad to entertain an application for readmission at a future date.”

It went on a bit longer, but the whole message was contained on one sheet of paper. With the cloud of Annie Lineberger’s death hanging over him as the search for what was now presumed to be her lifeless body continued, he was not welcome to return to his college.

He had been outside all that hot, early July day, trying to sell what seemed to him to be the unsellable. The Midwesterners with whom he spoke were almost uniformly polite but also nearly unanimous in their belief that the “great books” Gray was selling were not worth the sizable investment.

He had gotten pretty good at worming his way inside the front door. He took along the same egg timer he had used to woo Annie, and at least some of his potential buyers were charmed enough by his entreaty (“Just give me three minutes; when the sand runs out, you can kick me out.”) and his earnestness to let him inside, but mostly they politely sent him on his way. In the first three weeks, he’d had two potential sales.

He’d never been anywhere, so the trip to Wisconsin, a couple of weeks after exams ended, had been an adventure. Mostly, though, it was an escape from the nightmare of the past spring. He and the Valiant made the rounds in places like Oconomowoc and Ashippun. He rented a room with a family and even babysat their kids. He drank cheap beer at night with his fellow student salesmen, all from other schools and all with no knowledge of Gray’s recent, unpleasant history.

Until the letter arrived, he’d reached a point where he could go for hours sometimes without thinking about Annie.

He knew his grades were disappointing, but he hadn’t flunked out, and he’d made a promise to himself to do better in the fall. The idea that his university might deep-six him without so much as a hearing came as a surprise.

The letter mentioned the possibility of military service in the interim before he was allowed back in the school’s good graces. Even Gray, who didn’t laugh much that summer, could see the humor in that. The Vietnam War was ramping up. Draft boards eagerly awaited boys who no longer could hide behind student deferments. Military service would be more than an option.

“Man,” one of the other boys out selling books told him, when Gray told he’d been kicked out of school—without telling the boy exactly why—“you’re gone.”

He sleepwalked through his summer job for another week, awaiting the inevitable. Ironically, it was his best week, sales-wise.

The call from his father came eight days after he received the letter.

“Got something here from the draft board,” he said. “It’s addressed to you. Want me to open it?”

Gray had not yet told his father the bad news, although he did let Kaycee know, calling her one afternoon when he knew she’d be home and his father wouldn’t be.

Jimmy did not take the news well, alternating his anger between the university “where I sent my hard-earned money” and his son, who obviously had squandered it.

Gray packed up that night. He said good-bye to his host family, who would never know about Annie Lineberger, had a few beers with the other boys, then got up the next morning to drive back to East Geddie.

His lawyer had been getting in touch with him every week or so to tell him that nothing new had been unearthed, an unfortunate verb. The district attorney really wanted to take it all before a grand jury, but without a body or any evidence of foul play on the part of Gray or anyone else, he knew he was hogtied.

“If you would tell him what you know,” the lawyer said, “I’m sure something could be worked out. You know, her family just wants closure.” Gray was more sure than ever that his court-appointed lawyer owed more allegiance to the DA than to him, and that he was convinced he was defending a guilty client.

The district attorney and the sheriff of Byrd County assured the news media and the public that the case was far from closed. They had a “solid suspect,” the DA said, and were building their case.

Their biggest weapon was what Gray couldn’t prove. He could not account for his whereabouts between the time Annie walked away from his car and the next morning.

He had talked to no one, hadn’t stopped anywhere on the way back to Chapel Hill. He never returned to the motel where he had booked a room for two nights. The manager there told the deputy who talked to her that “the boy” had seemed kind of strange when he checked in. Gray wished, for once, that he had made some sort of contact with the leering, chatty clerk at the country store in Mason’s Mill, who always seemed to remember him.

Nobody recalled seeing the weather-beaten Valiant parked in the football stadium lot that night. The first time anyone could vouch for Gray’s whereabouts was ten o’clock Saturday morning, when he stumbled into the coffee shop in Chapel Hill for breakfast.

The investigators made Gray repeat his story a dozen times before the case eventually cooled to the point that the DA wasn’t worried about losing his job if he didn’t find somebody to pin Annie Lineberger’s murder on. Each time, Gray told them the same story. If he said he drank two-thirds of a fifth one time and half a fifth the next, they hopped on that. They had him show them the exact intersection where he stopped and threw up on the way back, the precise place where he parked his car in the stadium lot. There was no way he could remember the exact spot, and they hounded him about that.

They tried to get him to admit that he did something out of rage and despair that “a good boy like you” never would have ordinarily done, but, “you know, shit happens.” Gray stuck to his story.

And then there was Annie’s family. He first encountered Hayden Lineberger II at one of the seemingly interminable meetings he had with the investigators before, during, and after his final exams that spring. Annie’s father wasn’t supposed to be there, but he had somehow managed to be in a position to waylay Gray as he left after a ninety-minute grilling.

Gray, having met the man’s son, more or less knew who was bearing down on him in the hallway outside the interrogation room up in Byrd County. Then he saw, bringing up the rear, Annie’s brother.

He instinctively took a step back as the big man approached him.

“You did it, you little son of a bitch,” the man said. “We’re going to barbecue your ass, and then you’re going to spend all eternity frying like bacon, in hell.”

He spit in Gray’s face as Gray was protesting to the man that he was innocent.

“Tell us where she is,” he said. By now, Annie’s brother and two deputies were holding him back but not taking him away. He was still in spitting distance. “Tell them what you did with her. For God’s sake, tell them.”

Gray could see that the man was crying, and he knew he was too. Hayden Lineberger looked like he hadn’t shaved or slept recently. When Gray told him he was sorry, it only made things worse.

“Sorry? You’re sorry? You’re gonna be sorry, you piece of shit.”

Gray really was sorry for the man’s loss—and Hayden Lineberger looked like a man who had accepted the fact that his daughter, by then missing for five weeks, was lost for good—but the Linebergers, father and son, heard it as contrition, even a confession.

The older man lunged. He managed to bloody Gray’s lip with a wild swing before they finally ushered him out. Gray knew that he had not seen the last of the Lineberger family.

“Come on,” Tree Lineberger said to his father. “The son of a bitch ain’t worth it. Let the court take care of him.”

Then Tree turned back.

“But if it doesn’t,” he said, pointing a finger at Gray, “you can bet your ass we will.”

In the end, though, neither Annie nor her body appeared, and nothing could definitively tie Gray Melvin to her disappearance. As the summer wore on, the story eventually starved like a forest fire deprived of fuel. Nobody could place Annie Lineberger after she left Gray’s car. Nobody could place Gray between the time she slammed the door and the time he staggered into the coffee shop the next morning.

“It’s kind of like a tie, like in baseball,” the half-assed attorney told Gray. “You know, when the runner and the ball get there at the same time.

“In this case, the tie goes to the defendant.”

He was pretty clear in his unspoken opinion that Gray was damn lucky to manage a tie.

GRAY HAD called his lawyer when he got back to East Geddie and told him he was going to be drafted.

“Well,” the lawyer said, “that might be for the best, all things considered.”

Best for whom, Gray wanted to ask him. If Anne Lineberger’s body turned up, they’d yank him out of whatever hellhole the army sent him to. If it didn’t, he’d be cannon fodder for the Viet Cong.

He could have enlisted and maybe gotten a better assignment. He could have joined the air force or navy, or tried to get into one of the National Guard units where so many boys who could get in were choosing to sit out the war.

By this time, though, Gray was ready to run up the white flag. If the world wanted his ass, it could have it. After all, Jimmy had been to war, had risked death and seen enough bad shit to mess him up for life. Why should Gray expect any better treatment? The truth, he realized later, was that he wanted punishment, even if he had done nothing to warrant it. Somehow he should have protected Annie. She was his date, the love of his young life, and he let her run off into the dark. If she never arrived at her destination, whose fault was it?

The last day before he went away to basic training, a letter arrived at his father’s house, addressed to Gray. He had gotten a few letters, and more phone calls, until the Melvins had to get an unlisted number, from people who wanted Gray and his family to know that justice had not prevailed and that he should rot in prison.

This one had a Monroe postmark.

Gray opened the envelope to find a sheet of notebook paper, folded carefully with six words typed in the center:

“We will never forgive or forget.”

It never occurred to Gray that they would do otherwise. The hell of it was, he knew that if he were in the Linebergers’ position, he would probably be doing the same thing.

And so, on July 26, 1968, he left for basic training, alongside the farm boys and inner-city kids who knew they were never going to college and the fuckups who were given a choice of war or jail.

“Make me proud,” Jimmy had told him when he dropped him off at the bus station for the long trip to Fort Dix, New Jersey.

Gray told him he would. His father hugged him, a unique experience. Until his son got too old to accept beatings, Jimmy’s physical contact with Gray had not included hugs.