Chapter 6
Finch laid the spark plug on the oily wooden shelf of his roll-away toolbox. "You’re the fellow from Columbus Martha Cleary called about."
"I am."
"Looking into that dead boy at the lumber mill."
"Yes."
Finch reached into his bib pocket, pulled out a plug of Lancaster tobacco, and sawed off a corner with a thumb-worn Barlow knife. He tucked the wedge into his cheek, his rheumy blue eyes drifting toward the open bay door, where the rain was turning the gravel red.
"That boy wasn't killed by no fire," Finch said. "We didn't wash down that mill floor. Calloway wouldn't let the tankers within half a mile of the yard. Said it was a crime scene. Preserving evidence."
"I know," Wesley said. He stepped closer, resting his boot on the pumper’s heavy steel tow hook. "The fire department didn't respond to the mill. But your logbook says you tripped the roof horn at nine-twelve that night. An All-Call. Sixty-five volunteers responded in the middle of a torrential downpour."
Wesley leaned down, his voice dropping into the quiet between the rain-clatter.
"What were sixty-five men looking for in the dark, Cappy?"
Finch’s throat worked as he swallowed tobacco spit. His jaw moved once, twice, three times. The sound of his teeth grinding against the leaf was loud in the stillness of the bay.
"The horn wasn't for the mill," Finch whispered.
"I know it wasn't. The boy at the mill didn't break down until midnight." Wesley pulled out his legal pad, flipping to the carbon transfer. "What happened at nine o'clock, Cappy? Why was the whole county awake?"
Finch closed his Barlow knife with a wet *snap*. He held the knife in both hands, turning it over and over between his thick, oil-blackened thumbs.
"It was the Bell girl," he said.
Wesley stopped. "Who?"
"Little Katie Bell. Eight years old. Her daddy, Tom Bell, farmed the lower fifty acres down where Old Logging Road intersects the state route." Finch looked up, his faded eyes suddenly bright with an old, cold terror that hadn't faded by a single watt in twenty-six years. "Her mama went out to the screen porch at eight-thirty to call her in for supper. The thunder was rattling the dishes in the cupboard. The sky was black as a cast-iron stove."
Finch’s breath hitched, the whistle in his hearing aid giving off a thin, high-pitched shriek.
"Katie wasn't on the porch," Finch said. "Her yellow slicker was gone. Her red rubber boots were gone. And down by the cattle gap on Route 9, Tom found her little plastic umbrella crushed in the gravel, right next to a set of fresh tire tracks that didn't belong to no tractor in this valley."
Wesley felt the room tilt beneath his feet.
The hair on his arms stood straight up against the wool of his sweater.
*An eight-year-old girl.*
"A snatched child," Wesley breathed.
"We thought so," Finch said, his voice trembling now, the rehearsed calm that had blanketed Pete Settle cracking open to reveal the raw, bleeding meat beneath. "God almighty, we thought so. We’d had three girls taken over in West Virginia that spring—some trucker snatching them off rural bus stops and dumping them in the strip pits. When Tom Bell came flying into the square in his truck, laying on the horn, screaming that somebody took his baby girl into the timber..."
Finch gripped the Barlow knife until the brass bolsters cut into his palm.
"Every man in this county who owned a four-wheel drive and a flashlight was out on Route 9 within fifteen minutes," Finch said. "The sirens were screaming. The church bells were ringing down at Mount Zion. Sixty, seventy men. We had shotguns. We had spotlight rigs. We had timber hooks and tire irons from our trucks because we didn't know what we were running into. It was raining four inches an hour. You couldn't see the hood of your own truck. We were screaming her name into the river-bottoms until our lungs bled."
Wesley listened, his chest tightening with every word.
The timeline was shifting. The neat, simple box he had built around Wayne Thorne and a routine cover-up was disintegrating, fracturing into something monstrous and chaotic.
"And Julian Vance?" Wesley asked, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Where was Julian Vance?"
"Nobody knew who Julian Vance was," Finch rasped. "All we knew was that around eleven-thirty, while we was wading through the creek bottoms looking for an eight-year-old child in a yellow slicker, someone saw headlights down in the St. Jude timber cut."
Finch looked right through Wesley, staring into the dark corner of the pole barn where the old hoses hung from the rafters like hanged men.
"A strange car," Finch whispered. "Out-of-county tags. Franklin County. Sitting in the dark behind the dry-kiln shed with its hood up and its engine smoking."
***
Wesley sat in his car half a mile up Old Logging Road, the engine idling, the wipers beating their monotonous rhythm against the glass.
The rain was coming down harder now, washing yellow mud down the ruts of the abandoned lane. Ahead of him, through the dripping canopy of second-growth scrub oak and black-gum, the rusted corrugated roof of the St. Jude Lumber Mill loomed like the skeleton of a beached whale.
He had Katie Bell’s current address in his notebook.
He hadn't needed to use police databases. Finch had given it to him without hesitation. Katie Bell hadn't been murdered. She hadn't been kidnapped. She was thirty-four years old now, married to an ag-extension agent, living in a brick ranch-style house four miles out on the ridge.
Wesley had driven out to the house twenty minutes ago.
He hadn't shown her the autopsy. He hadn't asked about Julian Vance. He had simply asked about the night of July 14, 1998.
Katie Bell Palmer had stood in her doorway, drying her hands on a flour-sack dish towel, looking out at his state sedan with eyes that were hollow, haunted, and deeply, terribly ashamed.
"I fell asleep," she had told him, her voice small, cracking like dry pine under snow. "The thunder scared me. My brother had told me that if lightning hit the house, it would run through the water pipes and kill whoever was inside. So I ran out to the big barn. I climbed up into the hayloft behind the square bales where it was warm, pulled an old horse blanket over my head, and I fell dead asleep."
Wesley had stood on her concrete porch, the wind whipping rain against his trouser legs. "You were in the barn the whole time?"
"The whole time," she whispered. Her chin had trembled, an involuntary spasm of twenty-six-year-old guilt that had clearly poisoned every day of her adult life. "I didn't hear the horn. I didn't hear my daddy screaming. I woke up around midnight when the rain stopped pounding so hard. I walked out of the barn into the kitchen. My mama was on her knees on the linoleum, screaming at God to strike her dead."
Katie had looked up at Wesley then, her eyes swimming with unshed tears.
"When I walked in," Katie said, "my mama grabbed me and squeezed me till my ribs cracked. She was laughing and crying. But then my uncle came through the back door. His boots were covered in red mud. His coat was torn. He took one look at me standing there in my yellow slicker, and he dropped his shotgun right onto the floor."
