Sharyn McCrumb - The Ballad of Frankie Silver

Besides, physical evidence deteriorates. Even if the Wake County Sheriff’s Department had managed to keep the samples, the results from a retesting would not be reliable, and surely they would not be accepted as new evidence by the court. There was no DNA testing at the time of the Trail Murders. Perhaps then he would have known for sure; now he must investigate with only uncertainty to guide him-that, and his will not to let any mistakes be made.

Spencer leafed through the rest of the contents of the folder. He had the crime scene photos-that was encouraging, but beyond them, he had only his notes to go on, and a short list of witnesses. He wondered how many of them were still alive, and if their memories of that night had faded with time. He would have to find out.

Spencer took out the photos. Some of them had been taken with the department’s Polaroid, a state-of-the-art camera back then, and an excellent device for producing fast shots of the crime scene. Had he known then of their impermanence? He could barely make out the images in the faded prints. Heat and age had long since neutralized the developing chemicals of the instant camera, making the prints as imperfect as memory. The 35-millimeter shots were better preserved, but the exposures were inexact, a testament to the inexperience of the photographer, who had been himself.

He had been called to the crime scene by Willis Blaine, the forest ranger for their district. The sequence of events was all there in the witness statement that he’d typed himself so long ago but now could only dimly recall. Spencer scanned the lines of faded type.

The call came in well past midnight: two hikers found dead, but not on the Appalachian Trail, which was federal land. A couple of firemen from Alabama had decided to spend their two weeks’ vacation hiking the North Carolina/east Tennessee section of the Appalachian Trail. They were nearly at the end of their journey, and that night they had gone off the trail to spend Friday night at a beer joint. At 11:20 P.M. they were making their way back through the fields to their campsite when they stumbled over something soft and sticky in a moonlit clearing.

Emily Stanton.

The startled firemen had stopped just long enough to determine that the victim was past any efforts at rescue. That decision had taken only a few seconds. They checked for breathing and a pulse, but really they had known it was useless the moment they touched her. “Dead people’s skin doesn’t feel like flesh,” one of them said at the trial. “It feels like lunch meat wrapped in plastic.” The journalists had omitted that comment from their stories out of consideration for the families, and because it served no purpose to make a good guy sound silly in the newspaper when they already had a surfeit of villains: the Harkryders.

The two hikers hadn’t lingered to investigate further. They ran down the path in the moonlight, back to the beer joint to call the forest ranger.

A body? he’d said, a little disbelieving. It wouldn’t be the first time anyone tried to play a telephone prank on a forest ranger. Where?

In the woods at the edge of a field, they told him. Just down from the Appalachian Trail, across the dirt road from the white frame church. The snake handlers’ church.

Yes, he told them. He knew the place. It wasn’t a snake handlers’ church, of course, but the trail has its own mythology, and it wasn’t important that he should correct their theology. He knew the place they meant. Would they wait for him in the parking lot and lead him to the scene of the accident? No point in calling it murder, yet. It wasn’t his call anyhow. If the hikers had described the site correctly, that clearing was a couple of hundred yards west of the Appalachian Trail, not federal land. It was in Wake County.

He got in his truck and drove to the roadhouse. The hikers were easy to spot. They were slender young men in their early twenties, huddled together in a pool of light beneath an electric pole, shivering in flannel shirts, although the night was warm. When he parked in the gravel lot and began to walk toward them, they backed away, darting glances toward the open door of the roadhouse, where jukebox music spilled out into the darkness. At last they noticed his ranger’s uniform, and they rushed toward him, both talking at once. We’re not armed, they told the ranger. Whoever did that might still be there. The ranger nodded. He showed them his pistol and told them that there was a shotgun in the truck. They could bring it along if it would make them feel any easier. Then they were willing to lead him to the site. They were trained to handle emergencies, and they were already getting over the shock of their find.

Willis Blaine took his flashlight out of the truck and followed them down the road to the church, and then up the dirt road, past the field, and into the woods.

When he aimed the spotlight at the clearing, his mind registered several things at once. Homicide. Not a fight or a failed robbery, this one. A very sick individual was loose out here. Young adult victims, one female, one male-their clothing indicated that they were probably hikers from the trail, but they were no longer on it.

I have to secure this crime scene, he told the young firemen. They nodded. They knew about crime scenes. You need to go back to the roadhouse and make another call. Wake County Sheriff’s Department. Tell them Willis Blaine sent you. Tell them where I am. Tell them it’s murder.

Spencer remembered the call. He wasn’t supposed to be in the office at all, because they were a two-man department in those days, and after eleven, calls were forwarded over to Unicoi County, whose sheriff’s department had twenty-four-hour patrols. But Spencer was a hotshot in those days. He would have worked twenty-hour days if Nelse Miller had let him, and that night Nelse Miller wasn’t there to send him home. Where had the sheriff gone? On vacation to Wrightsville Beach? To a bureaucrat’s meeting in Nashville? To a cousin’s wedding in Ohio? Spencer couldn’t remember anymore. The whereabouts of the sheriff was not a detail included in the official report on the case, but it was duly noted that the officer in charge of the investigation was Wake County sheriff’s deputy Spencer Arrowood.

He had been sitting at the oak desk in the darkened office. Only the paperwork and a white china coffee mug were illuminated by the desk light. He had been up since six, and he was so exhausted that the letters were beginning to wiggle on the page, so that he could no longer make out what he had just written. He might lay his head down on the desktop and catch an hour or two of sleep before finishing the reports. The soothing monotony ended with the ringing of the telephone. A calm steady voice with a Deep South drawl delivered the message with only a tinge of emotion shading the words. The fireman told him where they were and what they had found. Spencer made the caller say it twice so that he could be sure he had heard him right.

Murder on the Appalachian Trail. Well, not on it. Near it. In his jurisdiction. Mr. Blaine, the forest ranger, was there with the bodies, waiting to turn the investigation over to him. Did he know where the clearing was? Spencer shook himself to clear his head and to banish the weariness from his muscles. Wait by the phone, he told the hikers. You can save me time by showing me where to go. And I’ll need statements from you.

He had called Alton Banner and asked him to meet the patrol car at the roadhouse. The caller had assured him that the victims were dead, but Spencer wanted to take every precaution.

He took both cameras, the Polaroid and the 35-millimeter; the notebook; and all the paraphernalia that had to be carried to a crime scene. Spencer knew the drill: he had done it often enough before; he had even been in charge of investigations in the past, but they had been trifling occurrences of no real consequence. Murder itself was uncommon enough in this rural mountain county. A case like this was almost unheard of. You would have to go back decades to find another one. God help him, had he been eager? Had he been excited to have a terrible case dumped in his lap after weeks of routine and paperwork?