Mr. Dees

TOM EVERS came back to the courthouse, where the fat-fingered policeman had been holding me, and he told me to go home.

“That wasn’t your pen,” he said.

“Tom, I can tell you the truth about that pen and how it came to be in that grave.”

I was prepared to tell him how when I found Katie, I covered her with my shirt and then realized I couldn’t be the one to go to the police. So I took the shirt off her and laid her back in that grave and shoved the dirt over her as if I’d been the one who’d done the killing. I’d thought it all out while I waited for Tom to come back to the courthouse, and I was ready to tell the story.

But he held up his hand. He told me again, his voice dead and sad, to go home. I could see how the life had drained right out of him, and I knew he’d barely slept since that Wednesday evening when the call about Katie had come. He’d done everything he could imagine to find her; he’d done everything by the book except the night Clare’s snapshot of the Mackeys’ house sent him there to do another search and he let it slip to Junior that Raymond R. was in the jail at Georgetown. How much guilt Tom carried with him over that I can’t say, but it still pains me to think about what that guilt may have caused him to ignore or the things Junior Mackey somehow forced him to overlook, a good man like Tom Evers, who finally knew the truth—I have no doubt of this—but never had the evidence to bring Junior Mackey or anyone else to answer.