The Chatham School Affair (37 page)

He was nearly finished playing back the interview with Maria Spinola when the phone rang. It was Wendy Lubeck, his agent, and for the next few minutes, Kinley listened as she related the details of a series of murders that had occurred in the Maine woods along the Canadian border. A publisher had asked if he might be interested in doing a book on the case, Wendy told him, and in response Kinley promised to think about it.

But he didn’t. Instead, as he sat down on the sofa by the window, he thought about something else entirely, a place about as far from Maine as he could imagine, the northern Appalachian foothills of Georgia in which he’d been brought up by Granny Dollar, the maternal grandmother who’d taken him in after his parents had been killed in an automobile accident.

Granny Dollar had died only two months before, and since then he’d noticed his tendency to drift back to his past from time to time, quietly, unexpectedly, in those dead moments when his work left him, and he found himself alone in his apartment, wifeless, childless, with only Granny Dollar to remind him of the texture of family life he’d once known.

That texture had been very dense, indeed, it seemed to him now. She’d raised him in almost complete solitude, the two of them perched on an isolated ridge overlooking a desolate canyon, with nothing but the sounds of crickets and night birds to break the silence that surrounded them. Since that time he’d been a loner, and over the years, he’d come to believe that for people like himself, the true solitaires, it was better to have no one to answer to, wonder about, no one whose affections mattered more to him than the esteem he expected from the little Chinese woman who did his shirts:
Goo to see you, Missur Kahnley
.

He was working at his desk when the phone rang. He looked at the clock. It was just nearly seven-thirty, so he suspected it might be Wendy, still chewing at her idea. It could not be Phyllis, his old-time drinking buddy, because she was on assignment in Venezuela. As for the type of woman other men spent so much time searching for, or trying to figure out, Kinley had long ago admitted that the Mythical She had either eluded him or he had eluded her. Instead, he dwelt in harmony with the dark-eyed murderesses of his work, admiring their coldly calculating eyes, the edge of cruelty and dominion which clung to their false smiles, their minds even more intricate, limitless and unknowable than his own.

The phone rang a third time, and he glanced at the message machine. He’d turned it off when he’d started to work, and now regretted it. There was no choice but to pick up the phone.

“Yes?” he answered curtly.

“Hello, Mr. Kinley?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Serena Tindall.”

He thought it was odd that she’d said her last name, but he made nothing of it. “Hello, Serena,” he said. “Are you in New York?”

“No, I’m at home,” Serena said. “For summer break. I’ve been working at the high school.”

“Your father’s old stomping ground.”

He heard her breath catch in that tense, briefly suspended way he’d often heard others pause before making the great plunge into their tragic tales. “It’s about Daddy,” she said.

“Ray? What? What is it?”

Her voice broke as she told him. “He died this afternoon.”

He tried to continue with his transcription of the Spinola interview after talking to Serena, but found he couldn’t, so after a while, he poured himself another scotch and sat down at the small desk by the window. On the hanging shelf just above it, he’d arranged all his books, as if he still needed solid, physical evidence of how far he’d come from where he’d started. Up north, he sometimes referred to his native region as “Deliverance country,” but in his own mind, it had always remained “Ray’s country.”

Joe Ray Tindall.

Kinley turned on his computer, as if with Ray gone, it was now his only completely reliable friend, and wrote out Ray’s name. Including it among the body of data he’d accumulated in his work seemed to give it an honored resting place, and for a moment, Kinley stared at the name, his mind conjuring up the face that went with it. It was a large, broad-boned face, and Kinley could clearly recall the first time he’d seen it. He’d been standing in the crowded corridor of Sequoyah High, small, timid, aloof, not only the new boy in school, but the one who’d been singled out by a group of Yankee IQ researchers, branded “very superior” by their tests, and reported, almost like a dangerous alien, to the Sequoyah County Board of Education. The Board had subsequently pulled him from his mountain grammar school and rushed him down into the valley to join, at mid-year, the more advantaged freshman class of Sequoyah High School.

Ray had been the first person to speak to him there, an oversized boy clad in blue jeans and a checkered shirt, staring at him from across the hall, his eyes, as they always were, motionless and intense, as if taking aim before finally speaking to him.

You that freshman from up on the mountain?

Yes.

The one that’s supposed to be a genius?

I guess.

Special tests and everything, you must be a whiz. My name’s Ray Tindall.

Jackson Kinley.

Sounds like two last names. You give them to me in the right order?

Yeah.

You ever go hunting?

Yeah.

Maybe we’ll go up to the canyon sometimes, shoot something.

Okay.

How about this Saturday? I’ll meet you on the road to Rocky Ridge. Then we’ll just head into the woods up there.

Okay.

Kinley peered at the name on the screen. He typed something else under it: ROCKY RIDGE. That’s where they’d gone that first time. And as it turned out, it was also where they’d found Ray face down on the forest’s leafy floor. It was the only question he’d asked Serena beyond the usual ones about the funeral: “What was he doing down in the canyon?”

“I don’t know.”

“Who found him?”

“Some old man who lives up on the ridge.”

“Was Ray on a case?”

“He was always on a case. That’s just the way he was.”

“What was it anyway?”

“I don’t know. Something in the District Attorney’s Office, I guess.”

“No, Serena. I’m sorry. I meant, what killed him?”

“Oh. Well, it was probably his heart.”

It had not been a soft heart, in the sense of great compassion or an infinitely extended understanding, Kinley thought as he continued to sit at his desk, still watching the computer screen, but it was a rich, difficult, complicated heart. There was something about Ray that could never be figured out exactly. Even the way he looked led you slightly off the mark. He had had wiry reddish-brown hair and a sallow complexion that easily burned in the summer sun. He had not been an intimidatingly large man, but when he came into a room, he seemed to shrink it just a bit. He had liked the woods but hated the water, loved fast cars but avoided planes, talked religion but never gone to church, read but rarely spoken of what he read. There had been something mysterious about him, something Kinley had noticed even mat first day in the canyon, the way his eyes seemed to focus on something far away, unreachable even when he spoke of something near at hand, perhaps no further than a short walk into the woods.

There’s an old house down here, but nobody lives in it anymore.

In the canyon? Where?

Not far from here. You want to see it?

I guess
.

It’s the perfect place. You can only find it if you really look hard.

Even now, it was impossible for Kinley to know why he’d followed Ray down the narrow, granite ledge and into the dark labyrinth of the canyon. He could remember the frothy green river that had tumbled along the canyon bottom, the sounds of its waters moving softly through the trees, even the unseasonably cool breeze that shook the slender green fingers of the pines, then swooped down to rifle through the leaves at his feet. It was his one great gift. He could remember everything.

And now he remembered that as they’d advanced on the house, the going had gotten rougher, the sharp claws of the briers grabbing at his shirt, low-slung limbs suddenly flying into his face like quick slaps to warn him back. The last hundred yards had seemed to take forever, as if the air had thickened, turned to an invisible gelatin which had to be plowed through as arduously as the bramble. It had taken them almost an hour to make it to the general vicinity of the old house Ray had spoken of, and by that time, Kinley remembered, the trek had begun to exhaust him, his legs growing more feeble with each step, his breathing more labored and hard-won, the old plague of his asthma snatching at his breath. It had been enough to rouse his new friend’s concern.

Kinley, are you all right? We don’t have to keep going.

How far is it?

Not far. Just through those last trees. Then we hit the vines.

What vines?

The ones around the house. Like a wall almost. You want to keep going?

Yes.

Okay, let’s go.

The wall of vines had been exactly as Ray described it, a tall impenetrable drapery of coiling green that hung from the trees and sprouted from the ground simultaneously, its sticky shafts so covered with the dry husks of thousands of insects that in certain places the vines themselves appeared like lengths of tightly knotted rope. The very look of it, Kinley remembered now, had unnerved him so much that he’d actually drawn back, his breath now coming in short, agonized gasps.

I think we’d better stop, Kinley.

Why?

You need to get back. I think you may need a doctor.

No.

You can’t really get to the old house anyway. There’s no break in the vines.

But I want
…

No.

Ray had said it just that firmly. There was to be no argument in the matter. They would go no further. Then he’d taken Kinley by the arm and led him away, the great wall of green disappearing behind him forever.

“Forever,” Kinley whispered now, realizing that they’d never tried to find the old shack after that, but had simply let it sink, first from their conversation, then from their boyhood plans, and finally from their remembered hopes.

The phone rang again around ten. It was Serena again.

“I just wanted to tell you about the autopsy,” she said. “My mother called to let me know, and I thought you might want to hear about it, too.”

“Yes, I do.”

“It was a heart attack,” Serena said. “Massive. That’s what the doctor said. Massive.”

“So he died quickly,” Kinley said before he could stop himself.

“And so young,” Serena said. “I guess that’s why they wanted an autopsy.”

“Who did?”

“Mr. Warfield,” Serena said, “the District Attorney, the man he worked for.”

“Ray was working for the District Attorney’s Office?”

“Yeah. He didn’t run for Sheriff again. Didn’t he tell you that?”

“No.”

“Well, I guess he just got tired of it, decided not to run. That’s when he took this job with the District Attorney.”

“I see.”

“Anyway, Mr. Warfield wanted an autopsy.”

“It’s probably a good idea.”

“You know about this kind of thing, I guess. From your work, I mean.”

“A little.”

“He was a good man,” Serena said. “I’m just sorry he had to die alone, way down in the canyon.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “Looking for something, I guess. What do you think it was?”