Mr. Dees

SO I DID, and now I’ll tell it to you. I told Tom Evers that yes, I was the one who called to tell Junior Mackey that he’d find Katie buried near a junk heap—the letter J, Margot Cherry had said—in a wooded area off a shale road near Honeywell. I’d said there were footprints in a cornfield and they led back into the woods. How did I know it? I told Tom Evers I’d been the first one to find Katie, but I’d been afraid to come to him myself and say so.

When he asked me why, I told him I was a shy man. I lived a quiet life. I didn’t think it was my story to tell. It belonged to Junior Mackey. He was her father. I gave the news to him.

I said that Clare Wright had been the one to tell me where to look for Katie. “It came to her in a dream,” I said, and then I told Tom how one evening that summer she and Raymond R. had driven down to Honeywell and he had used his binoculars, claiming he was trying to see the smokestacks they were building at that power plant across the river in Brick Chapel. “She was too embarrassed to tell you she might have a clue after that mess with the snapshot of the Mackeys’ house, the one with Katie supposedly at the window. So she told it to me, and I went down there. People like Clare and me, we’ve never been anything. Now our lives are too much for us. We don’t know how to act.”

Then I explained that yes, I’d driven to Honeywell that morning, and I’d seen those footprints in the cornfield and a bit of Katie’s black T-shirt. I’d left my own prints in that field. “I won’t deny that, Tom.” I told him how I’d found the grave underneath a piece of rusted tin—that was the detail that made him start to believe that I might be telling the truth.

“Katie’s body,” he said. “What do you remember?”

I knew he was looking for the facts that someone would only know if he had been there.

“Her throat was cut,” I said, and I could barely get the words out of my mouth. “It was horrible, Tom. You’ve seen. Her throat was cut, and the tips of her fingers were gone.”

He nodded his head. “You’ve got the facts right, but that doesn’t prove you were the one who found her. I hate to say this, Mister Dees, but it could be you know those things because you were there when they were done.”

“It’s not like that,” I said. “Surely you don’t think it is.”

“For your sake, I hope not, Mister Dees. Now tell me, where were you on Wednesday night between eight-thirty and nine?”

“Is that the time it was done?” I asked. “Is that the time Raymond R. had Katie down that shale road?”

“You need to be able to account for yourself during that time.”

“I didn’t have anything to do with what happened to Katie. Tom, I can tell you exactly where I was.”