CHAPTER ELEVEN

“Got damn! Why don’t you just tie a pork chop around your neck and let ’em throw you to the dogs? The last place in the world you need to be right now is the great state of North Carolina. Make ’em come and get you.”

Gray explains to Marcus Green why he thinks he has to find out what he can about his high school ring. His lawyer has to agree that it might not be the best plan to take what he now knows to the authorities.

“But we can hire a private detective. I know one down there that owes me a favor or two. Let the professionals handle it.”

Gray thanks him for his advice and silently hopes he isn’t going to be charged for it. He explains that he believes he himself has to make this trip. He has been hiding in plain sight for almost half a century, most of his life now, hoping for nothing more than obscurity. He has thought often in the past about finding some way to clear his name, but he always backed down, preferring to let the past fade into forgetfulness.

Except, of course, it hasn’t.

“You’re an idiot. But keep me posted,” Green says. “When, not if, you wind up in some jail down there and you get one call, make sure it’s to me.”

Gray tells Betsy he’ll wait and leave in the morning. It’s already nearly dinnertime. When she offers to go with him, he thanks her but declines her offer.

He tells her things might get ugly. In reality, he would just as soon face the ghost of Annie Lineberger by himself.

That night, they make love for the first time since Annie’s bones were discovered. Gray still finds it somewhat miraculous that people actually have sex at the tender age of sixty-seven. When he was twenty, he couldn’t have imagined it. At forty, even, he assumed that the embers that had always burst into flame at the slightest provocation would eventually turn to dead ashes. That hasn’t happened yet. Maybe that’s why, according to his urologist, he’s in denial about his PSA numbers. Gray knows too many men who have been rendered boner-free as the result of prostate surgery. And he wonders what use he will be to Betsy, whose libido seems to grow more hungry with age, when and if he suffers that small death. She tells him it won’t matter, but still …

Lying there in the dark, staring at the bathroom nightlight, while she snores softly beside him, he is thankful for what he has. For a few moments, his mind was free of Annie and his dubious future.

Now, though, the relentless carnivores that have been chewing up his recent nights return.

THE SUMMER of 1968 was unlike anything Gray had even imagined he might experience.

No sooner had the initial fruitless investigations into his role in Annie’s disappearance gone away than he was kicked out of his university and welcomed against his will into the United States Army.

He wasn’t against the war in Vietnam, although he would later come to see it as a monstrous folly. In 1968, the antiwar movement had not yet blossomed in North Carolina. The wakeup call of Kent State was still two years away. Boys whose fathers had fought in World War II were inclined to believe it was only right that they should serve as well. The minority who went to college were glad for the respite and either secretly or openly hoped the whole mess would be over before they had to face the draft board, but if you had asked them, in the spring of 1968, most would have said the war was a necessary evil. The Tet Offensive that January had brought home the reality of Vietnam to some, but the enormity of the war was still in the distance.

There was already talk of a civil suit on the part of the Lineberger family. Nothing would come of it, in the absence of enough evidence to even bring the case to trial in a criminal court. It did, however, add to the load Gray was carrying that summer.

His feeling about Annie seemed to change with the wind. He had never really had a chance to roll in the grief of a nineteen-year-old whose first love has dumped him. It seemed untoward to brood over something that was overshadowed into insignificance by the great cloud that towered over him now. What right did he have to mourn lost love when the girl herself appeared to be lost forever, especially since he was the prime suspect in her disappearance?

He still felt it, though, in his gut. He had lost twenty pounds by the time a bus, a train, and a taxi transported him from Port Campbell to Fort Dix. Kaycee, the only one in his father’s house who seemed to notice his anguish, worried about him. She was young enough to appreciate romance. He could pour out his despair to her. In his selfishness, the fact that Annie was lost to him overshadowed the fact that she was lost, period.

Kaycee didn’t have much to contribute to the conversation she had with her older brother when she mentioned his weight loss one afternoon and he broke into tears, but Gray was grateful to have a listener. Most of the people who had listened to him lately seemed to be using notepads and tape recorders, and they assured him he would feel better once he confessed.

In the one interview Jimmy gave to the News & Observer, he was quoted as saying, “Young people do crazy things, you know.” Jimmy said he didn’t mean it the way it sounded.

In truth, going away to war didn’t seem like the worst thing. What friends he’d had in high school avoided him now, some because they doubted his innocence and some because they were embarrassed by his presence. He went back only once to the Methodist church of his childhood. The unspoken accusations hung like bad air in the sanctuary. When the preacher spoke of “the mercy of Christ to forgive even the most craven sinners,” Gray felt the man’s eyes were on him alone. Once, on the grounds afterward, he turned suddenly when he heard his name and saw people with whom he had grown up quickly avert their eyes.

He got through basic training and infantry AIT with few bumps along the way. The weight he’d lost actually worked in his favor. He found out that firing an M16 was hardly rocket science, especially since Jimmy had shown him, more or less against Gray’s will, a thing or two about guns back when he still thought his son might be the kind of boy who one day would go deer hunting with him.

His company captain called him in, midway through basic training. Somehow he had heard about Annie Lineberger.

“Melvin,” he said, “we know about that girl. We don’t give a shit what you did, but you damn well better not fuck up again. We don’t have room for fuckups here.” Since Gray’s company was full of young men who had wound up there by dint of fuckups, large and small, he didn’t take the captain too seriously.

It seemed like a fool’s errand to tell the man, a tall, hollow-eyed African American who seemed especially unkind to white college boys with Southern accents, that he was innocent.

Before he left for Vietnam, he spent his last furlough mostly in New York City with a friend he’d made in AIT. He returned home then, but after a couple of days in East Geddie, he kissed Kaycee good-bye and shook hands with Jimmy, and then he was gone.

Gray was lucky. They all told him that. He wasn’t one of the twelve thousand or so Americans who died in Vietnam in 1969. He was given a Purple Heart for being close to a 122mm rocket that killed three of his platoon mates in their shithole bunkers in a place Gray can’t and doesn’t want to remember, but all he brought home physically was a six-inch scar halfway between his right elbow and shoulder. Today, he can still see the white ghost of that wound, to remind him of other, invisible ones.

For years he would have nightmares centered on that explosion and its aftermath. He emerged from the blast half-deaf, unsure if he was dead or alive. Feeling something wet and warm on his chest, he quickly wiped away matter that recently had been part of a live human being with whom he was playing poker when they heard the scream of “incoming” and the bomb hit. One of the cards, the seven of hearts, also had gotten caught up in the shreds of his fatigues. He kept it for years, a talisman that didn’t seem to ward off much of anything. He doesn’t know where he lost it.

Kaycee wrote him every week or so when he was in Vietnam. Jimmy even wrote twice. Gray heard from one of his friends from high school. And he got, to his amazement, several letters from Corrine Manzi.

She had talked with him before he left school after exams. She told him he had real talent, and that she believed him and believed in him. He thanked her for that, and they exchanged addresses. On a whim, he wrote her in basic training, and she wrote back. They continued their correspondence throughout his army time. She already was on the fast track in journalism, at a time when many newspapers still consigned female journalists to the society pages.

“Get the hell out of there in one piece and get that damn degree,” Corrina Corrina wrote in the last letter before he came back home.

He got back in time for Christmas of 1969. He was out of the army by the middle of 1970. Everybody told him he had his whole life in front of him. It didn’t feel that way though.

In the loose-ends days after his discharge, Gray visited Corrine once. She was an assistant editor at a newspaper in Akron, Ohio. She seemed more buttoned-down. She said she had a roommate, another woman who worked in the newsroom. Gray felt awkward, as if she were on some train that was slowly pulling away while he stood at the station waving good-bye.

She wrote him again, and he wrote her. When she wrote again, he didn’t reply. By then, he had moved on after falling out with his father, and he didn’t give Corrine Manzi his new address in Richmond.

He did get one other letter in Vietnam. It came from Monroe, North Carolina, with no return address.

“We hope you are in hell by now, but if you aren’t, we will be waiting when you come back to help you get there.”

Like the earlier one, it wasn’t signed.

He was visited, upon his brief return to East Geddie, by detectives from Byrd County. They seemed half-hearted in their questioning, as if they had been force-marched there by the district attorney but knew they were pissing in the wind.

They asked the same questions Gray had answered so many times before. He had played that last night over in his mind so often, in sleepless barracks nights and in fortified bunkers, that he had little trouble staying on script. He declined to have a lawyer present.

“When we find that girl’s body,” one of the men said as they left, “we’re going to be back.”

But they didn’t, and they weren’t.

And, in those drifting days, Gray drank.

He had come late to alcohol. He had drunk exactly three beers in his life before he went away to college. At Carolina, he stepped up the pace somewhat. Drinking gave him Dutch courage in social settings, made it easier for a shy kid from a small school to blend in. Without beer, he might never have gotten to know Annie Lineberger.

In the army, and especially in Vietnam, alcohol was how he got through the days and weeks. And marijuana, still an exotic substance on his campus in 1968, was everywhere. “Purple Haze” was more or less an anthem, dark and foreboding like the jungle they were supposed to somehow conquer.

Back home, as the weeks turned into months, he felt almost duty-bound to get shit-faced on nearly a daily basis. That was when Jimmy, no piker himself, expressed concern.

There were other boys back home from Vietnam, and they found each other. Plus the military base next door meant a healthy population of young men either going to war or coming back, guys with “Nothing to Lose” stamped on their foreheads.

They would cruise around Port Campbell, hitting the hangouts, sometimes picking up women, sometimes paying whores. They sat in their cars at the drive-in restaurants and watched the teenage girls, free-range housewives, and hookers drive by in twos and threes, a parade leading nowhere. Sometimes there was eye contact, followed by a slow-speed chase to some less-crowded spot.

He found that he excelled at drinking, in that he could “hold his shit” after his friends were well on the way to wasted. He was progressing toward being what he now thinks of as a functioning alcoholic before he realized that he was drinking for need instead of pleasure.

One night, when he was well beyond what the state of North Carolina defined as drunk, Gray and two other young veterans followed three African American girls back to their cinder-block house. They charged not much more than the men had spent on beer and burgers. Gray’s whore was spectacularly unattractive. A combination of her greasy hair and bad teeth and the ten beers he’d already consumed rendered him impotent. He paid her and pretended to his new buddies that all was well.

Their spiral took them next to a tattoo parlor. Gray had eschewed any tats up to that night, but he thought he should have something to show for the evening.

When he woke up the next morning, sore and hung over, he prayed that he had only dreamt what he had done. Looking at his right bicep, though, there it was: the blood-red heart, with “Annie” running through it. The one thing he wanted most to forget was now embedded in his skin.

Jimmy saw it soon enough.

He shook his head.

“You,” he said, “are one dumb son of a bitch.”

He and Jimmy had their big falling-out not long after that, and Gray was gone to Richmond.

Gray would tell his wife and any other woman who stumbled on the tattoo, no more than two inches square, that it was the name of an old girlfriend. Betsy knew more than anyone what it meant, but she didn’t know everything. It had faded over the years, like Gray himself, but when he looked at it now, it shined out like a beacon, demanding to be seen.

If anyone else who had seen him at the beach or in the shower over the years had made the connection since Annie’s bones were found, they hadn’t said. He wondered how long it would be until the people who wanted to lock him up for the rest of his life found the evidence of his long-ago anguish, and what they will make of it.