John Connolly - Every Dead Thing

THE SKY WAS GRAY and dark the next morning, heavy with impending rain. My suit was wrinkled from the previous day’s travel, so I abandoned it for chinos, a white shirt, and a black jacket. I even dug out a black silk-knit tie, so I wouldn’t look like a bum. I drove once through the town. There was no sign of a red jeep or the couple I had seen driving it.

I parked outside the Haven Diner, bought a copy of the Washington Post in the gas station across the road, and then went into the diner for breakfast. It was after nine but people still lounged around at the counter or at the tables, mumbling about the weather and, I guessed, about me, since some of them glanced knowingly in my direction, directing the attention of their neighbors toward me.

I sat at a table in the corner and scanned the paper. A mature woman in a white apron and blue uniform with Dorothy embossed at her left breast walked over to me carrying a pad and took my order of white toast, bacon, and coffee. She hovered over me after I finished ordering. “You the fella who whupped that Six boy in the bar last night?”

“That’s me.”

She nodded in satisfaction.

“I’ll give you your breakfast for free, then.” She smiled a hard smile, then added: “But don’t you go confusin’ my generosity with an invitation to stay. You ain’t that good lookin’.” She strolled back behind the counter and pinned my order to a wire.

There wasn’t much traffic on Haven’s main street, or much human activity in sight. Most of the cars and trucks seemed to be passing through on their way to someplace else. The town seemed to be permanently stuck in a grim Sunday morning.

I finished my food and left a tip on the table. Dorothy slouched forward over the counter, her breasts resting on its polished surface. “Bye now,” she said as I left. The other diners briefly looked over their shoulders at me before returning to their breakfast and coffee.

I drove to the Haven Public Library, a new single-story building at the far side of the town. A pretty black woman in her early thirties stood behind the counter with an older white woman whose hair was like steel wool and who eyed me with obvious distaste as I entered.

“Morning,” I said. The younger woman smiled slightly anxiously while the older one tried to tidy the already immaculate area behind the counter. “What’s the local paper around here?”

“Used to be the Haven Leader,” answered the younger woman after a slight pause. “It’s gone now.”

“I was looking for something older, back issues.”

She glanced at the other woman as if for guidance, but she continued to shift pieces of paper behind the counter.

“They’re on microfiche, in the cabinets beside the viewer. How far back do you want to go?”

“Not far,” I said, and strolled over to the cabinets. The Leader files were arranged in date order in small square boxes in ten drawers, but the boxes of files for the years of the Haven killings were not in their place. I ran through them all, in case they had been misfiled, although I had a feeling that those files weren’t available to the casual visitor.

I returned to the counter. The elderly woman was no longer in sight.

“The files I’m looking for don’t appear to be there,” I said. The younger girl looked confused but I didn’t get the impression that she was.

“What year were you looking for?”

“Years. Nineteen sixty-nine, nineteen seventy, maybe nineteen seventy-one.”

“I’m sorry, those files aren’t”-she seemed to search for an excuse that might be plausible-”available. They’ve been borrowed for research.”

“Oh,” I said. I smiled my best smile. “Never mind, I’ll manage with what’s there.”

She seemed relieved and I returned to the viewer, idly flicking through the files for anything useful with no return other than boredom. It took thirty minutes before the opportunity presented itself. A party of schoolchildren entered the junior section of the library, separated from the adult section by a half-wood, half-glass screen. The younger woman followed them and stood with her back to me, talking to the children and their teacher, a young blonde who didn’t look long out of school herself.

There was no sign of the older woman, although a brown door was half open in the small lobby beyond the adult section. I slipped behind the counter and began rifling through drawers and cupboards as quietly as I could. At one point I passed, crouching, by the entry door to the junior section, but the librarian was still dealing with her young clients.

I found the missing files in a bottom drawer, beside a small coin box. I slipped them into my jacket pockets and was just leaving the counter area when the office door outside slammed and I heard soft footsteps approaching. I darted beside a shelf as the senior librarian entered. She stopped short at the entrance to the counter and shot an unpleasant look in my direction and at the book in my hand. I smiled gamely and returned to the viewer. I wasn’t sure how long it would be before the dragon behind the counter checked that drawer and decided to call for backup.

I tried the 1969 files first. It took some time, even though the Haven Leader had been only a weekly newspaper in 1969. There was nothing about any disappearances in the paper. Even in 1969, it seemed that black folks didn’t count for much. The paper contained a lot about church socials, history society lectures, and local weddings. There was some minor crime stuff, mostly traffic offenses and drunk-and-disorderlies, but nothing that might lead a casual reader to suppose that children were disappearing in the town of Haven.

Then, in a November issue, I came upon a reference to a man named Walt Tyler. There was a picture of Tyler beside the piece, a good-looking man being led away in handcuffs by a white deputy. Man Held in Sheriff Attack, read the headline above the picture. The details contained in the piece below were sketchy but it seemed Tyler had come into the Sheriff’s Office and started busting the place up before taking a swing at the sheriff himself. The only indication of a reason for the attack came in the last paragraph.

“ Tyler was among a number of Negroes questioned by the Sheriff’s Office in connection with the disappearance of his daughter and two other children. He was released without charge.”

The 1970 files were more productive. On the night of February 8, 1970, Amy Demeter had disappeared after heading out to a friend’s house to deliver a sample of her mother’s jam. She never made it to the house and the jar was found broken on a sidewalk about five hundred yards from her home. A picture of her was printed beside the story, along with details of what she had been wearing and a brief history of the family: father Earl an accountant, mother Dorothy a housewife and a schoolteacher, younger sister Catherine a well-liked child with some artistic potential. The story ran for the next few weeks: Search Goes On for Haven Girl; Five More Questioned in Demeter Mystery; and, finally, Little Hope Left for Amy.

I spent another half hour going back and forth through the Haven Leader but there was nothing more on the killings or their resolution, if any. The only indication was a report of the death of Adelaide Modine in a fire four months later, with a reference to her brother’s death buried in the piece. There was no description of the circumstances of the death of either, but there was one hint, once again in the last paragraph. “The Haven Sheriff’s Office had been anxious to talk to both Adelaide and William Modine in their ongoing investigation into the disappearance of Amy Demeter and a number of other children.”

It didn’t take a genius to read between the lines and see that either Adelaide Modine or her brother William, or possibly both, had been the main suspects. Local newspapers don’t necessarily print all the news; there are some things everyone knows already and sometimes the local press merely prints enough to throw outsiders off the scent. The old librarian was giving me the evil eye so I finished printing off copies of the relevant articles, then gathered them and left.