CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

MAY 25

Betsy stays over for breakfast. Gray buys a Greensboro paper, which has an article about his bail hearing on the top of B1, along with a picture of Tree Lineberger and the two acquaintances who turned out to be cousins being led away from the courthouse. “Outburst follows alleged killer’s release,” reads the headline. They have a shot of Gray leaving the court building as well, looking old and tired rather than relieved.

Betsy wants to go with him “whatever comes next,” but he tells her he has to do this part alone.

“You want to do everything alone,” she says as she picks at her eggs and toast. “That’s kind of the problem, isn’t it?”

He reaches across the Formica tabletop and puts his hand atop hers.

“There is nothing I want more than to have you with me, but just not now. This could get dangerous.”

“And who’s going to be there with you if it gets dangerous? You’re sixty-seven years old, Gray. This isn’t some damn game.”

“It’s no game to me, I can assure you of that. I just want this to end. I’m tired of running and hiding.”

He squeezes her hand.

“Look, if I can’t get some kind or resolution by the end of the week, I promise you I’ll try to get the cops involved.”

She shakes her head and dabs at a tear.

“You’ve done more for me than anyone,” Gray tells her. “You had every reason in the world to cut your losses when all this crap came out, especially since I hadn’t told you about any of it. You’re the reason I’m free right now. I will make you glad you did all this, I swear.”

He hasn’t told her what Corrine Manzi told him about Bobby Wayne Hill. He does now.

“So you see why I think I can settle this, one way or the other?” he says.

She wonders if he will survive the “settling.”

“It’s going to be OK,” Gray tells her, with more conviction than he feels.

“I aim to spend the summer in Richmond,” he adds, and Betsy says she hopes so too.

They part like that, with Gray promising to keep her up to speed.

As he waves good-bye to her departing Lexus, he reaches into his left front pocket. He wraps his fingers around his high school class ring, which was wearing a blister on his finger, and goes back to his room to pack.

In his car, he first calls Corrine. Last night he asked her for one more piece of what he thinks could be very important information. This morning, she already has it.

“The Observer reporter gave me her number. She got married, then divorced, then married again. Never left Monroe, I guess.”

The next stop, before heading west to Annie Lineberger’s hometown, is a return visit to Lost Treasures. He parks a block away and walks down the deserted sidewalk. He is pleased to see that the fat man has opened his store on time. At 10:05, he’s the only other person there.

“I have a deal to offer you,” he tells the owner, who seems less than thrilled to see Gray Melvin in his store again. He goes over and hangs the “Closed” sign on the front door.

“What do you want?” he asks the man whose name he’s never known. “I told you what you needed. Leave me the fuck alone.”

When Gray explains it all to the fat man, he doesn’t want any part of the plan at first, but Gray eventually convinces him that failure to cooperate could lead to some serious jail time.

When they finally come to an agreement, Gray wants to shake on it.

“I’d rather touch a snake,” the proprietor says, then turns away.

“Just make sure you do what you’re supposed to do,” Gray says.

The fat man says yes with his back to him.

THE NEXT day, Isadora Goforth will be surprised to see a pickup come up her driveway with a disheveled, overweight man at the wheel.

He will explain to her that “someone” he’d never seen before brought the belongings now in the truck’s bed to his antique shop back in February and wanted to sell them. The man will explain to her that he had no idea that the goods were stolen, but that “an investigator” came to his shop looking for a stolen high school ring and suggested that he should give any other items sold to him at the same time back to their rightful owner.

If he did so, the inspector told him, he wouldn’t be prosecuted.

The fat man will apologize profusely to Isadora Goforth, who is astounded for the second time in four days to be reacquainted with items she had given up as gone for good.

Most of what he will return is relatively useless. The only stolen items she will be able to think of that aren’t in the truck bed are a couple of silver cups and Bobby Wayne Hill’s baseball card collection.

The fat man will assure her that he had never seen the seller before, that he must be from out of town.

She will thank him for his kindness.

“Wait a minute,” she’ll tell him as he starts to unload Nubby Quick’s ill-gotten gains. “I don’t have any use for any of this stuff. Why don’t you just keep it? Maybe somebody else can get some use out of it.”

And so the fat man will drive back to his shop with the same things with which he left. He will shake his head and wonder what the hell just happened. As glad as he was to see the old guy with the ring leave his sight, he will still wish that he’d found out a little more about why he was forced to do what he just did.

The bastard looked familiar, like maybe the fat man had seen his picture somewhere.

GRAY, MEANWHILE, heads west for what he hopes is the residence of Susan Carpenter, née Vanhoy.

The address Corrine gave him seems to be correct. The mailbox in front of the two-story redbrick Colonial reads “the Carpenter’s.”

He parks across the street and ponders his next move, drawing stares from a couple of women walking their dogs. Finally he gets out and walks over to the “Carpenter’s” house and rings the doorbell.

He rings again and finally hears a noise from within and then the metallic click of a lock being turned.

The woman who answers the door is not recognizable to him at first. Running into acquaintances he hasn’t seen in decades is usually a shock, a reminder of how damn old he himself has become. But time has not been kind to the former Susan Vanhoy.

She seems to have shrunk about half a foot, for one thing. The girl he remembers was at least five foot nine. He towers over the woman she has become. She is using a walker.

“Yes, what is it?” she asks from the other side of the half-open door.

Gray doesn’t know any easy way to introduce himself.

“You probably don’t remember me,” he says. She has the hint of a smile on her face at first, trying to figure out what ghost of her past is at her front door, trying to dredge up a name. And then she recognizes him, and the smile fades.

“I remember you, all right,” she says and she starts to slam the door.

“Wait. Please,” Gray says, sticking his foot in the narrow gap. “Please. I need some information, Susan. I didn’t do it, I swear to God. Just let me talk to you.”

She glares at him, trying to decide whether to leave the door and grab a phone before he can come inside, a hopeless task for a woman dependent on a walker, or maybe just to scream until one of the dog-walkers hears her.

“Look, I’m just here to get some information. I’ll take my foot out of the door, and I’ll call you from my cell phone. You can lock the door. Just let me talk to you.”

She doesn’t say anything. She seems to be equal parts fear and loathing. Gray doesn’t know what else to do. He removes his foot, and the door slams. He hears her turn the lock.

Still standing on her front steps, he takes out his cell phone and calls the number Corrine gave him.

The phone rings five, six times, then is picked up.

“Leave me alone,” the shaky voice on the other end says. “I’m calling the police.”

Gray begs her to give him just one minute to explain what he needs. When he hears nothing but silence on the other end, he starts talking.

He explains about the ring that showed up in a shop in Sykes, how he traced it back to a woman in Red Hill who was once married to a man from Monroe by the name of Bobby Wayne Hill who seems to have gone to the same high school as Annie Lineberger.

“I need to know,” he says, “how this Bobby Wayne Hill came to be in possession of my high school ring, when the last time I saw it, Annie Lineberger was trying to give it back to me.”

He wonders if she has hung up, or is frantically dialing 911 on her own cell phone.

Finally she speaks.

“Bobby Wayne Hill,” she says, almost in a whisper. “I haven’t heard that name in a long time.”

“Susan, I didn’t do it. I didn’t kill Annie.”

More silence.

“Can I talk to you about it? I just want to know who this guy is.”

“Why don’t you just call the police?”

He explains, in case Susan Carpenter doesn’t read newspapers, that he is not the favorite son of the criminal justice system at the present time.

“I’ll tell you what,” she says finally, “come back tonight, after seven. My husband will be back by then. And, I warn you, he’ll be armed.”

Gray sees that this is the best offer he’s going to get.

He gets lunch and then checks into the cheapest motel he can find, wondering just how much credit he has left on his VISA card. He calls Corrine Manzi to thank her again for her help.

“Do you need any more of my rusted-out reporting expertise?” she asks him. “This was kind of fun.”

“Not right now.”

At seven on the dot, he’s ringing Susan Carpenter’s doorbell again.

This time her husband answers. Jack Carpenter has a pistol in his right hand as he lets Gray in. He seems a little less apprehensive when he realizes that the man he’s letting in is an out-of-shape, gray-haired Medicare recipient who seems to not be packing anything except a wallet.

He isn’t exactly pleased to have Gray Melvin in his home, but he apparently hasn’t called the cops either.

He points Gray toward the couch, perpendicular to the easy chair where his wife reclines uneasily, then sits beside him.

“Say what you have to say,” he instructs his guest.

Gray reaches in his pocket, causing Carpenter to point the pistol in his direction. He slowly pulls out the ring.

“Remember this?” he says.

Susan Carpenter takes it and examines it. She seems to choke back a sob.

“Oh, my gosh,” she says. “Annie looked so ridiculous, wearing that big old clob-knocker on her finger.”

She turns the ring around, even holds it to her nose, as if she could somehow conjure Annie by smelling it.

“It just about killed me, when she disappeared. We’d been friends since we were little girls, and then, not knowing all those years. I went to Chatham because she went there. We were like sisters.”

She looks up at Gray. In her shrunken state, she reminds him not so much of an old woman as a strange little girl, still growing.

“We all knew you did it,” she says. “We hated you. We wished you could have suffered like she did. And then when they found her body, her bones …”

Gray thinks it unwise to tell her that he has suffered too.

She reaches down and moves the recliner forward, lifting herself to an upright position. She grimaces as she does it.

“Osteoporosis,” she says. “I’ve had both hips replaced. Old age isn’t for sissies.”

Her husband asks her if she needs any help.

She waves him away.

“I’m good. Now what do you need to know?”

He repeats the story of the ring’s strange trip.

“I don’t know if I can help you much, don’t even know if I want to. Bobby Wayne, I haven’t seen him since maybe a month or two after we graduated. I think he went into the army or marines or something like that, and if he ever came back here, I never knew it.”

She leans forward a little.

“It’s funny, because we were all pretty tight in high school. Good lord, it’s all coming back to me now.”

The former Susan Vanhoy then proceeds to give Gray the lowdown, as best she can remember it, on Bobby Wayne Hill.

When she’s through, neither she nor her husband offer Gray a cup of coffee or something stronger. He gets up to leave, thanking them for their time.

He is nearly out the door when he hears Susan speak. She’s standing now, leaning on her walker.

“You know, she did love you, there for a while. But Annie was kind of flighty. She was independent. She was young.”

She sighs and winces.

“Hell, we all were.”

BACK AT the motel, Gray pulls into the only available parking space. At eight thirty on a Wednesday night in Monroe, North Carolina, the place where he’s staying seems to be a hub of activity.

He soon sees the reason. There’s a lounge attached to the motel, and it’s karaoke night.

He walks toward his unit, the sound of an Elvis wannabe butchering “Heartbreak Hotel” fading in the background as he rounds a corner. He is unlocking the door to his room when he hears footsteps behind him.

Gray turns and catches the first blow to his stomach. He crumbles, gasping for breath. He sees the shoes of the two men now facing him as he tries to get up, and then one of them kicks him in the face. He can taste blood, and his nose feels like it’s been pushed back into his head.

“Stay the fuck away from here, asshole,” a voice above says. When he tries to look up, the other man kicks him in the ribs.

He’s in the fetal position now, taking a couple more kicks to his kidneys, then another to the head.

“We ought to kill your ass,” he hears the same voice say. “I’m depending on the state to do that, though, even if we do have to wait awhile. But don’t ever come snooping around this town again.”

Gray can hear a car drive by. “Come on,” he hears the other one say. “We better get the hell out of here.”

He is sure that his attackers were younger men, and he’s almost as sure that he’s heard those voices before.

He waits until their footsteps recede, then turns around, the pain in his ribs searing him like fire when he does. All he sees are a couple of heavy-set bodies headed back around the corner he just turned.

He manages to get up and into his room before anyone sees him. In the bathroom mirror, he examines his battered nose and split lip and determines that nothing seems to be broken. He spits into the sink and sees that the cap from a long-ago salvaged tooth has been knocked loose. He catches it before it can fall down the drain and jams it back on.

He isn’t so sure about his ribs. The pain doesn’t seem to be letting up.

He manages to get himself into his car and finds a doc-in-a-box clinic not three blocks away. His ribs are only bruised, according to the young physician assistant who sees him. She asks him if he’s been in a fight. He tells her he ran into a door. She shrugs and prescribes painkillers. He fills the prescription at an all-night drug store and is back at the motel by ten thirty, at which time he is able to get a parking space directly in front of his room.

Even with the drugs, he does not sleep well.

He wonders how the hell Tree Lineberger found out he was in Monroe.