Blood Echoes (6 page)

Nearly a hundred miles to the west, at the Riverside Restaurant in Elba, Alabama, Mrs. Birdie Kieth saw a blue and white Chevrolet Impala pull into the restaurant's parking lot. Two men got out of the car, a tall man in his mid-twenties and a black man with thick, dark-rimmed eyeglasses. The black man seemed to position himself by the door while the white one sauntered up to the counter and ordered coffee and barbecue sandwiches. After a time, the black man stepped over and played the jukebox, while his friend remained at the counter, eyeing the cash register each time Mrs. Keith opened it.

While the black man swayed to the music of the jukebox and the white one waited for the sandwiches he'd ordered, Mrs. Kieth disappeared into the back of the restaurant, retrieved the pistol she always kept there, and gave it to Mrs. Jacobs, one of her employees. “Stay behind the curtain,” she told her, “and keep an eye on those guys.”

A few minutes later, after joking with one another boisterously for a while, the two men paid the bill, left the restaurant, and disappeared down the road, leaving nothing behind but the money they'd paid the bill with. But like the two men themselves, that was odd, too. She could not remember ever having been paid such a substantial bill with nothing but coins, especially these coins, all of them the same, all of them Kennedy half-dollars, the sort you expected to find in a little household bank.

Chapter Seven

A
t about the same time Inez Alday was returning with her son from the empty fields, Ernestine was also beginning to worry about her family. She had long ago gotten used to the long hours the Alday men kept during planting season. And when that planting season came late, as it had this year because of the incessant and unseasonably late rains, the hours grew even longer, stretching into what rural people call “can see to can't see” working days.

On the Alday farm, just as in industry, time was money. What could not be planted could not be harvested and later brought to market. Because of that, much had to be done to ensure that the 552 acres of Alday land were fully planted, and to do it required that the men work from dawn to dusk to make up for the valuable time the rains had stolen. At the noon meal, Ned had even warned her that he and the boys might well be working late into the night.

Consequently, for the first few hours, as supper grew cold on the table and she continued with her other chores, Ernestine had allowed for the lateness by reminding herself of what Ned had told her. By nine o'clock, however, with the late-spring air pitch-black outside, she could not imagine that the Alday men were still at work, and she began to talk to Fay about what they might do to find out where the men were.

Nor was Ernestine the only Alday woman who had begun to grow concerned. At nine-thirty Shuggie's wife, Barbara, came over to ask if Ernestine had seen or heard from any of the men.

Ernestine shook her head. “I haven't heard from any of them,” she said.

Barbara then told Ernestine that earlier she'd become sufficiently concerned to take a drive down River Road in search of Shuggie. She'd driven by Jerry's trailer and seen something that made her worry even more.

“There were lots of cars there,” Barbara said, “just about everybody. Jerry's jeep and Jimmy's pickup truck, along with the family tractor.”

But the one vehicle that should have almost certainly been there was missing.

“Mary's car was the only one that wasn't there,” Barbara said.

The fact that Mary Alday's car was not among all the other vehicles Barbara had seen around the trailer caused the women to theorize that something might have happened to one of the men, a sudden illness or a farming accident that would have caused everyone to pile into Mary's car and head for the nearest hospital.

As a theory, it sounded plausible enough, so Ernestine began calling the hospitals in the area. The results were disheartening. None of the hospitals had listed any Alday as having been either treated and released or admitted as a patient. It was as if they had all disappeared into thin air.

Something was wrong, but Ernestine could not imagine what it was. She knew that wherever the Aldays were, they were certainly together. Other than that, she knew only the places where they would not be found. Since the Aldays did not drink, they would not be off drunk somewhere. Nor would they be apt to lose themselves in the nearby tourist traps of Panama City. There were no church, town, or Democratic Club meetings scheduled for that Monday evening.

In light of all this, only one conclusion seemed possible.

Something was wrong.

But what?

Repeatedly Ernestine called other members of the family in the hope of locating Mary and the missing Alday men, but none of them had heard or seen any of them since earlier in the day. Throughout the night she, Barbara and Fay continued to discuss the various possibilities, one by one dismissing each while hoping that at any moment they might hear the familiar sound of the jeep or the tractor, or Man's missing blue and white Chevrolet Impala, the one the rest of the Aldays seemed to have packed themselves into late the preceding afternoon, before disappearing without a trace.

Finally, at approximately 2:30 in the morning, Ernestine gave up. She had called everyone she knew, exhausted every avenue in her search for her missing family. Fay and Barbara had gone back to Jerry's trailer and knocked at both back and rear doors, but no one had answered. In addition to the calls and visits to the trailer, various members of the family had meticulously searched very inch of the Alday land, moving into the fields and woods, endlessly driving the many roads that skirted around and through the farm, everything from county highways to obscure wooded paths. But all of this searching had turned up nothing, not so much as the faintest suggestion of where Mary and the Alday men might be.

It was time to take the next step.

With Fay and Barbara still at her side, though growing more frightened every minute, Ernestine called the only son she still had of whose whereabouts she was absolutely certain, Bud Alday, who'd seen Jimmy pull into the driveway of the trailer many hours before.

He arrived at Ernestine's a few minutes later. By then his son-in-law, Roy Barber, and his nephew, Andy Alday, had also arrived. Together with Barbara and Fay, the five Aldays drove to Jerry's trailer on River Road, determined once and for all to find out what had happened to their missing relatives.

The area surrounding the trailer was completely dark when they arrived. The yard lights had not been turned on, and inside the trailer they could see only a soft, yellowish glow, as if a single small light were burning somewhere in one of its tiny rooms.

In the driveway and around the trailer itself, the jeep, tractor, and truck remained as they had been on the afternoon of the previous day. Nothing appeared to have been moved during the ten long hours which had passed since Bud had first seen Jimmy steer his tractor into the driveway. Everything was the same. Except the eeriness of the dimly lit trailer, and the hollow silence.

Slowly, Bud and the others got out of Bud's truck and moved to the trailer's back door. It was very still, the wide, recently planted fields a smooth, black slate all around them, the atmosphere utterly motionless until Jerry's dog suddenly rushed around the corner, whimpering softly as it turned and followed them around the edge of the trailer to where they gathered at the back door.

Roy reached for the door and turned the aluminum knob slowly. It rotated smoothly. The door had not been locked. He tugged it open partially, then drew back. Bud stepped over to it, opened it a bit further, and silently peered inside.

What he saw, although innocent enough on its face, sent a wave of terror over him. It was a single Pabst Blue Ribbon beer can sitting upright on the kitchen counter, and the very sight of it stunned him nearly speechless. Because the Aldays did not drink and so never kept liquor in the house, he knew that people very different from them had found their way into Jerry Alday's trailer, and he felt instantly that something terrible had happened to Mary, his father, his uncle, and his brothers. For Bud Alday, a beer can resting on Jerry's kitchen cabinet was as alien and incongruous a sight as a severed head might have been, or a rock brought from the moon.

“What is it?” someone asked.

Bud did not answer. He let his eyes drift downward and saw a rumpled pair of white panties lying loosely under the kitchen table. He took a quick, shallow breath, then drew his eyes to the right, where, in the bedroom at the north end of the trailer, he could see four legs dangling motionlessly from a bed, all in farm work clothes, all dusty from the very fields that surrounded him at that moment.

He stepped back instantly and closed the door. “We got to get some help,” he said. “Something's happened.”

The Aldays returned immediately to the homestead, where Bud called Seminole County Sheriff Dan White, and a neighbor, Hurbey Johnson.

“There's something happened up at Jerry's trailer, Hurbey,” Bud said. “Mary's car is missing, and there's a light on in the trailer. Can you meet me at Ned's?”

“Yeah, Bud.”

“And bring a gun with you,” Bud told him.

Johnson hung up, dressed as quickly as he could, and made his way toward the front door. On the way out he picked up a twelve-gauge shotgun.

Bud was waiting in Ned and Ernestine's driveway when Johnson pulled in.

“Something's happened up at Jerry's trailer,” Bud repeated. “Everybody's missing.”

Johnson looked at him, astonished. “Everybody? Who?”

“Everybody,” Bud answered. “Daddy and Shuggie and Chester. Jerry. Jimmy. Mary. Everybody.”

“Missing?”

“Nobody's heard from them since yesterday afternoon,” Bud went on, “and all the cars, the tractor, Jerry's jeep. They're just sitting in the driveway. Mary's car. That's the only thing that's not at the trailer.”

Johnson felt his hand tighten around the shotgun. “Have you been in the trailer yet?”

Bud shook his head. “Not all the way in,” he said, unable to add anything else.

Johnson glanced around at the large assembly that had gathered in Ned's driveway. Ernestine, Fay, and Barbara were there, their faces ghostly white in the moonlight, along with a neighbor, Eddie Chance, the long stock of a shotgun cradled in his arm.

“Roy and Andy are up at the trailer,” Bud said. “They're watching the front and back doors in case anybody tried to come out.”

Johnson nodded.

“And I called Dan White, too,” Bud added. “He said he'd be there in a minute.”

“Okay,” Johnson said. “Let's go.”

The men drove the short distance to the trailer and got out of the truck. Roy Barber and Andy Alday converged on them, their shotguns at the ready.

It was now 2:45 on the morning of May 15, 1973, and as the men advanced on the trailer, they could feel a thick and terrible dread coagulating in the air around them. In response, they fell completely silent.

“There was not a sound,” Johnson recalled, “not a word spoken. We just got out and headed toward the trailer. On the way, you could hear us racking shells into our shotguns.”

Once again, as he had done only a few minutes earlier, Bud Alday made his way to the back door of the trailer, shoved the door open, and stepped back, unable to go in.

Johnson stepped around him and headed into the trailer. To the right, he could see a beer can on the kitchen countertop. Across the room, he noticed a few items that appeared to have been scattered across the small dining room table, and which looked like the general contents of a woman's purse, a compact, a mirror, hair brush, tube of lipstick.

His eyes drifted downward, lighting on the white panties beneath the kitchen table, then further to the right into the trailer's north bedroom, where he saw four legs hanging off the side of the bed.

“We knew something real bad had happened in there,” Johnson recalled, “and we didn't want to mess anything up. Roy and Andy had already took up positions to guard the back and front of the trailer. We just waited, then, for the sheriff to get there.”

Dan White pulled into the driveway five minutes later, and taking Johnson and Eddie Chance with him, moved decisively into the trailer.

What they saw during the next five minutes as they trudged from room to room inside the trailer was unimaginable.

In the bedroom to the right, just off the kitchen at the south end of the trailer, Ned and Shuggie lay facedown on the bed. Shuggie's face was pressed deeply into the bed, while Ned's was turned slightly to the side, revealing what appeared to be several wounds running in a jagged line down the right side of the face.

Following White, Johnson and Chance headed back through the kitchen and into the living room. On a sofa by the window, they found Jimmy Alday lying facedown, one long leg slumped off the edge of the sofa so that the left foot touched the floor.

White then proceeded back toward the far end of the trailer, while Johnson and Chance remained in the living room. They could see him standing in the doorway, staring down. “Here's Aubrey and the other one,” he called, the only words spoken in the trailer.

By the time Sheriff White and the others made their way out of the trailer, all the missing Alday men had been accounted for.

Except for Mary.

Under other circumstances, she might have become a suspect in the murders, a distraught woman who'd suddenly snapped, shot several members of her family, and fled in her own car from the scene of the slaughter.

But then there were the panties, plain and white and lying where Mary, a very neat and very modest woman, never would have left them, crumpled and exposed beneath the kitchen table.

Wherever the killer or killers were, the men outside the trailer reasoned, if she were still alive, she was with them.

It was now past three in the morning, and as he stood beside the closed trailer door, Johnson could see Sheriff White talking to Bud Alday.