July 5

DARK WAS coming on when Don Klinger, manager of the Georgetown Big John Grocery Store, saw Raymond R.’s truck pull into the lot. He parked at the far end by the Salvation Army drop-off box. He got out and walked through the glow from one of the lot’s sodium lights, and he took a minute to look at a couch someone had left. He sat down on it and crossed his legs.

“I couldn’t see into that truck,” Don says to this day. “Like I told you, it was nearly dark—must have been after nine—but I know it was that Ford pickup, the one with the black circles on the doors, and I know the man who got out of it was that Raymond R. And I’ll tell you what else. I could see that truck had wet mud on it. I could sure as shooting see that.”

Lois Treadway was working the cash register that night. “He come through my line,” she says when someone asks her for the story. “He bought a box of Hostess cupcakes—the orange kind, not the chocolate. That’s why I took note of him. ‘Not many people like these orange ones,’ I said to him, and he said he liked them just fine. When I give him his change, he held out his hand and I saw it was dirty. That’s when I noticed. He smelled like wet leaves, like river water, like mud.”

Mrs. Mavis Childs was standing at the front door of her house trailer on the south side of Georgetown where Route 59 angles to the east along the White River. “I was looking out for my husband. He was working across the river, building that power plant in Brick Chapel. He was putting in overtime and I was watching for him, hoping pretty soon I’d see his truck coming across the bridge. It was just after eight-thirty. That’s when that Raymond R.’s truck went by. I remember thinking what a funny-looking thing it was, that old truck with those black circles on it. I thought, Well, there goes someone down on his luck. I just got a peek as he went by. A little girl? I couldn’t tell you. Only that it was that truck, and it went across the river toward Brick Chapel.”

Danny Ginder, of Ginder’s Farm Service, was on Route 59 north of Georgetown, heading back to town. He’d been out to a farm to fix a tractor tire. “Must have been a little after nine-thirty. Yes, it was dark, but I was sitting up high in that winch truck, and when my headlights caught that Ford pickup, I could see good enough. There was one man in that pickup. One. That’s all. And he was driving slow, drifting over the centerline. I had to blow my horn at him to get him back in his lane. I’ll swear to it now just like I did then. It was that crazy-looking truck all right, and it was headed north toward Tower Hill.”

Tom Evers has long ago retired as chief of police, but even now when he walks into the Top Hat Inn or the Super Foodliner or the Coach House, no one can look at him—even folks who weren’t around back then—without thinking of that summer and Katie Mackey.

“We could trace him,” Tom says whenever someone convinces him to tell the story. “That Raymond Wright. We had him every move he made except for that time between when Mrs. Childs saw him cross the river and when he showed up at the Big John and then that Ginder boy saw him going back north. About a half an hour or so we couldn’t account for, like he just up and disappeared.”