CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

MAY 24

Gray is led into the small, musty courtroom at ten a.m. There are only a dozen rows of seats on each side of a center aisle, with two more rows to the right side for jurors. Marcus Green is with him, along with a tall, thin North Carolina lawyer by the name of Flint Massey. Green, Massey, and a deputy accompanied him from his cell, Marcus complaining about the crappy night he spent in the nearest chain motel he could find.

Betsy is seated two rows back, surrounded by a crowd that seems to be mostly news media. Two rows behind her, he spies the grim countenance of Tree Lineberger, along with a couple of other men who appear to be relatives of his.

Betsy is able to come up, squeeze his shoulder, and wish him luck before she goes back to her seat.

“You’re a lucky SOB, to have a lady like that covering your back,” Green told him.

“I can’t believe she came all the way down here for this,” Gray says.

The lawyer laughs.

“You don’t know the half of it.”

The judge comes in. He appears to be in his forties, young enough that his robes seem like a party costume, a send-up of serious jurisprudence. The fact that he is no more than five feet four adds to the effect. Gray figures he wasn’t even born when Annie Lineberger disappeared.

Gray has assumed that pretty much everyone in the Byrd County judicial system is on the same page, the one that has him convicted already. It becomes apparent very quickly, though, that the judge and Towson Grimes are not on friendly terms.

When the district attorney asks that Marcus Green’s request for bail be denied, the judge ignores him and sets bail at three hundred thousand dollars.

This causes the kind of uproar that no doubt gladdens the hearts of the reporters who are present. Their only sorrow is that no cameras were allowed at the proceedings. Tree Lineberger and his cronies stand and begin shouting profanities, causing the judge to have them hauled out of the room.

“Your honor,” Grimes says, in a way that hints at air-quotes around “honor,” “surely you can’t let this suspected murderer walk out of here.”

“I can,” the judge replies, “if he can come up with bail. And, unless I’m missing something, he hasn’t been charged with murder, at least not yet.”

“But he could flee the country.”

The judge sighs.

“Well, Towson, I guess we just confiscate his passport then, if he has one. Do you have a passport, Mr. Melvin?”

Gray shakes his head.

“No, your honor.”

The judge turns back to the district attorney, whose skin tone indicates he is either flustered or furious.

“Tell you what, Towson. We’ll forbid him to leave the state of North Carolina until the trial. How’s that?”

Grimes mutters, loudly enough that Gray can hear him but the judge can’t, “Better than nothing.”

“What’s that, Mr. Grimes?” the judge asks. The way he says the DA’s last name seems to indicate that Grimes is on thin ice.

“That’s fine, your honor,” he says. “But I still say that he is a risk for flight …”

The judge shakes his head and interrupts.

“Towson, you don’t exactly have this one nailed down. Now I’m not going to have this man, who might or might not have committed a heinous crime here forty-eight years ago, sit in our clean, modern, but somewhat cramped jail for nine months, which is how long it’s going to be until I can clear off the two weeks this trial is going to take.”

Towson Grimes looks back at Gray, shakes his head, and lifts his arms in resignation.

Marcus Green stands and addresses the judge.

“Your honor, we will be able to post bond at the nearest convenience.”

He winks at Gray, whose life savings are a tiny fraction of the bond.

“What I was saying,” Green tells his client later, “about her having your back.”

And so Gray learns that Betsy Fordyce has put up the home she’s almost paid for to post the bond that will free him.

The judge calls for Gray to stand.

“Mr. Melvin, you heard what I said, about not leaving North Carolina. Now, that might be an inconvenience, having to live down here in such a wild and uncultured place after enjoying the urbane comforts of Richmond, but you’ve got a whole state to pick from. Surely you can find somewhere to get comfortable until we try you.”

Gray nods his head.

After the judge dismisses them, Gray retrieves his valuables, and Marcus Green leads his client out into the sunlight, where the cameras await.

The reporters start throwing questions at him.

Green puts a hand on his shoulder.

“Let me handle this,” he says.

Marcus is in his element. There are camera crews there from three states, plus a Fox News team.

The lawyer runs a hand over the nonexistent hair on his shiny ebony head and assumes what Willie Black calls his “fuck with me” look, a scowl that screams Angry Black Man.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, “you are witnesses today. You are witnesses to a gross miscarriage of justice, or at least to an attempted miscarriage. Nine months from now, if not sooner, you will see that the state’s attempts to abort justice will have failed. Our client, who has done nothing more egregious than be the unfortunate last person to see his beloved Annie Lineberger alive, will be exonerated.”

The North Carolina lawyer, a younger man who appears to be recently out of law school, stands at his side and nods.

Green answers a few questions before the Lineberger contingent shows up.

Tree walks up to Gray, who is happy that the camera crews and reporters are still there as witnesses.

“You think you’re gonna get away with this, don’t you?” Lineberger says, moving in close and saying it low enough that it can’t be heard by anyone more than five feet away. He and his accomplices close around Gray as a couple of sheriff’s deputies move in on them.

“Well, you won’t get away with this. Nothing you or your nigger lawyer does is going to change that.”

One of the camera crews picks up Lineberger’s use of the “n” word, and it will make him temporarily infamous on various TV networks and the Internet. The nightly news also will be treated to Marcus Green telling the world that “we all see now what kind of people we are dealing with down here.”

Tree turns on one of the cameramen and shoves him before the deputies intervene. When he realizes the extent to which he’s stepped in it, he and his posse turn and leave. He gives Gray the finger, and the cameras record that too.

Betsy catches up with Gray and his lawyers. She kisses him.

“You didn’t have to do that,” he tells her. “It’s your house, for God’s sake. But thank you.”

“I know I didn’t have to do it. I did it because I wanted to.”

Marcus Green, seeming more pleased than daunted by being the recipient of a racial slur, asks Gray what he’s going to do for the next nine months.

Gray tells him that he doesn’t intend for it to take that long. When his lawyer asks him what he means, he tells him that he’ll keep him abreast.

“Well,” Marcus says, “tread lightly. And if I were you, I’d wait until those goons leave before you set off to wherever the hell you’re going.”

BESTY HAS taken two days of leave. She drives Gray back to Sykes, where his car still sits in the motel parking lot. He is amazed to find it there, not towed or otherwise violated.

On the way down, he filled her in on his recent adventures.

“Jeez, you think this woman, this Manzi person, can help you out? I mean, why is she doing this?”

Gray shrugs his shoulders. He doesn’t know himself, but he suspects that Corrina Corrina’s old reporter instincts made an old friend’s dilemma irresistible.

Betsy cuts to the chase.

“She doesn’t have the hots for you, does she?”

Gray shakes his head.

“I’m pretty sure she’s playing for the other team.”

“Well, good. Just so she doesn’t go switching sides.”

Gray manages a smile, a rare one these days.

“Thank you for having so much faith in my animal magnetism. Seriously, though, what lust I can muster these days, I’m saving it all for you.”

“You’re too hard on yourself,” Betsy says. “Speaking of hard, do you think this damn place might have a room with a nice king-size bed.”

She reaches down and strokes him.

“I’ll see what I can do,” Gray says.

Two hours later, his cell phone buzzes. He rolls over, trying not to wake Betsy, lying in the tangled sheets beside him.

“Gray? I didn’t wake you up, did I? Where the hell are you?”

Corrine Manzi has been busy.

“That lawyer of yours said you might need some help. I gather you’re not in jail, unless you smuggled a cell phone in.”

Gray brings her up to speed, and then she does the same for him.

AS SOON as Marcus Green called and told her Gray had been arrested, she went to work. On Sunday afternoon, she drove over from Charlotte to Red Hill and found the residence of Isadora Goforth.

The teacher had returned home from a weekend with her sister in Durham just a couple of hours before Corrine knocked on her door.

“I didn’t exactly lie to her, but maybe I bent the truth a little.”

Corrine told Isadora that she was investigating a criminal case involving a stolen ring. The ring, she said, had turned up in a pawn shop, and there was reason to believe that it was a clue in a crime.

Isadora, a stately woman with gray hair and the kind of demeanor and piercing eyes that struck fear in many a past student, asked what that could possibly have to do with her.

Corrine told her that the ring was in a batch of property, some of which seemed to have belonged to her.

The teacher, who had not had much hope of recovering the items stolen from her home, expressed shock.

“We can’t tell you anything else right now,” Corrine said, “but we have located some of the items, and they will be returned to you. Right now, though, we just need to know a couple of things about the ring.”

“I was talking out my ass,” Corrine tells Gray, “but I figure you can find a way to get whatever hasn’t been sold already back to her.”

Gray isn’t sure at all that he can do that and keep his promise to the hapless Nubby Quick, but as Corrine talks, he thinks of something.

“So what did you find out?”

“I found out where the damn ring came from, if that’s what you want to know.”

Gray Melvin’s high school ring, it turns out, was the property of Isadora Goforth’s former husband. He was a serial hoarder, and when he up and left one day, running off with the real-estate saleswoman who’d sold them their home, he left a bunch of crap behind.

Isadora threw a lot of it away, but there were boxes of things she just never got around to pitching.

“He didn’t have a lot that was worth saving,” she told Corrine, and Corrine tells Gray that she doesn’t think she was just talking about material possessions.

“But why … ?”

Corrine cuts him off.

“I’m getting to that. Don’t interrupt.”

ISADORA GOFORTH was, for a rather long time, Isadora Hill. She married Bobby Wayne Hill in 1977. She thought she had found the love of her life, but Bobby Wayne was a much better suitor than he was a husband. According to Isadora, he had a tendency to want what he didn’t have and disrespect what he did have.

He begged her to marry him. She was a teacher, making a decent salary working at the same school from which she later would retire. He was a salesman who yearned to be his own boss. He was, by Isadora’s account, handsome.

“She said that the first two years weren’t so bad, but then she found out secondhand that he had been seen with one of his female coworkers, at a time when he was supposed to be out of town, shilling for whatever the hell company he was with then.”

He begged her forgiveness, but a blind woman could have seen that Bobby Wayne was not the type to get all obsessive about the marriage vows.

He went into business for himself three times and failed three times. Isadora told Corrine that he would be excited and energized every time he took off on his own, but as soon as he got his new business off the ground, he lost interest.

“She said he was about as unfaithful in his business life as he was at home.”

He had a temper too. Isadora said he never struck her, but he would “blow a gasket” over small things, and he did get in a couple of bar fights over the years.

Still she put up with Bobby Wayne. She would have been just as happy never to have married at all, but she told Corrine she was a creature of habit, and marriage had become a habit.

Plus Bobby Wayne always came back to her.

Until 2009.

That spring, not long before their thirty-second wedding anniversary, she came home from school one day to find a note on the dining-room table.

She saw Bobby Wayne Hill only twice after that. She managed to usually be somewhere else when he came around to collect what items he considered worth having. She had been wise enough to have her own savings account and investments through most of their marriage. She said she figured she was better off than her ex-husband after they split. “And better off than I was before he left too,” she added.

When the divorce was final, she was more than happy to revert to her birth name. Other than a few things that he didn’t bother to put in the U-Haul he rented for his last trip to Red Hill, she was rid of just about anything to remind her of those thirty-two years.

“The weird thing is, she said she still loved him, in a way. She said he just couldn’t help himself. You men are such dogs.”

Corrine said Isadora couldn’t shed any light on why Gray’s high school ring was in the box that got stolen.

“She said she didn’t know why he didn’t take the ring, but she guessed it was down there with a lot of other junk in the box that got stolen. She said she never even knew it was there until she went through everything after he left.”

Gray has been listening, trying not to butt in. Now, though, he can’t restrain himself any longer.

“But why the hell did he have my ring? What was he doing with it?”

Corrine Manzi seems to be relishing the tale she’s spinning. He can imagine her getting the same kind of buzz she used to get when she would break a story for publication.

“Well,” she says, “I did a little more digging.”

Isadora told her that Bobby Wayne had moved back to Lexington after he left her. And, as far as she knew, he was still living there.

“So I checked some records. I haven’t lost all my journalistic skills in my dotage. And I found out that he was indeed still a resident of Lexington, North Carolina. I found out he was divorced from the woman he left Isadora for. He’s on Social Security, retired, and living in some neighborhood that looks like it might be what you’d call lower-middle class.”

Gray tells her how impressed he is.

“And I assume you have his address.”

“Of course. But wait; there’s more.”

Gray waits.

Bobby Wayne Hill moved to Lexington right after a stint in Vietnam. But he wasn’t from that town originally.

“I found out where he’s from,” Corrine says. “And I even found out what high school he went to.”

More silence.

“Don’t you want to know where Bobby Wayne Hill went to high school?”

“I want to know just about every damn thing about Bobby Wayne Hill.”

And so she tells him. To Gray, she seems sad to have to finally let go of the nugget she’s been hanging on to all through the conversation.

Gray is silent for a few seconds.

“Son of a bitch,” he says when he can speak again.