Jeremy arrived twenty minutes later, dropped off by a Woslee cop.
“What happened with Krenkler?” I whispered. “What’d you tell her?”
“I’m a retired psychologist who specialized in dysfunctional psychology. Thus it made sense for you and Miz Cherry to have invited me along.”
I relaxed a half-degree. My fear had been Krenkler’s running some form of check on Jeremy while he sat before her.
“No in-depth questions?”
“I gave her all my fictional accomplishments, then begged to be put on the case as a consultant. Said I’d be by her side night and day, all for free.”
“What!”
He grinned. “It got the intended results: She couldn’t push me out the door fast enough. The Krenklers of the world don’t want consultants, Carson. It means sharing the spotlight.”
My noggin finally got X-rayed and pronounced solid. Cherry had arranged for an off-duty ambulance driver to return us to the hollow, where we arrived at half-past eight in the evening. On the way back, Jeremy had ceaselessly grilled me on every aspect of Sonny Burton’s abuse and the perpetrator, prying from my aching head pictures I hadn’t recalled earlier: the bat-wielder’s curious gait toward the corpse, halting, like a man walking a plank. I recalled the tic in his cheek and the ferocity of his attack on Burton’s face, as if the batter’s very life depended on destroying the visage.
Jeremy coaxed the memories from me with a quiet hypnotist’s voice, pausing as he absorbed the information, analysing. We stepped from the vehicle, thanked our driver, watched the taillights flee from the dark and quiet hollow. I turned to walk the last section to my cabin, to soak in the peace before falling into bed. I paused before my brother closed the door to his cabin, turned to him in the twilight.
“The man with the bat, Jeremy,” I said. “He’s the killer we’re after, right?”
“No, Carson,” my brother answered. “He’s simply an opportunist.”
Sometime in the wee hours, my battered head woke me up. Or maybe it was the picture in my mind, a snippet: the elderly woman who passed by the attacker. She didn’t do a double-take, it was more like a take and a quarter, but I’d forgotten to mention it to anyone. I wrote it down so it wouldn’t slip my mind, and in the morning called Cherry about it.
“Tell me again what the woman looked like,” Cherry said.
I gave my description. “You know anyone like that?”
“Miss Ida Minton,” Cherry said. “She’s an institution, the librarian at the high school for something like eight hundred years. She retired when I was a sophomore.”
“What you gonna do?”
“Got an hour to spare?”
Miss Ida Minton lived in a small retirement home near Campton. Her room was pin-neat and smelled of lilacs and baby powder. She wore a pink polyester pantsuit and a thick white sweater, blue slippers on her feet.
“Miss Ida goes in and out,” Cherry had warned, referring to the elderly lady’s memory. “Sometimes she remembers the tiniest details, the next minute she forgets where she is.”
I wavered on a loose-legged chair, fearful of its solidity, as Cherry asked the retired librarian about her seeming recognition of our mad batter.
“Who?” Miss Minton said.
I leaned closer. “I noted you looked twice at a gentleman at the church, Miss Ida,” I said, recounting the description as best I could.
“I don’t recall. What day was that?”
“Yesterday, Miss Ida,” Cherry said, taking the woman’s fragile hand. “At Sonny Burton’s visitation.”
The woman paused, frowned. “I remember Sonny Burton. He didn’t like to read. A lost cause.” She looked at Cherry. “Wasn’t there some sort of commotion later? At the visitation?”
“Yes, ma’am. And Mr Ryder is asking about that. And another gentleman you might have recognized.” She repeated my description.
Nothing. Then a light seemed to dawn behind the woman’s glasses. “Didn’t I see a student named Willie Taithering from maybe twenty-two or -three years back?”
“I don’t know, Miss Ida,” Cherry said. “Did you?”
She paused, tapping her chin with a quivering digit. “Or was that later, at the grocery?”
Cherry looked at me. I closed my eyes. “The church, Miss Ida,” Cherry said.
But Miss Ida was drifting fast. “I wanted some fresh peaches from the store, but they were all hard as stones. I brought them home and put them in a paper bag. Would you like some peaches, children?”
“Thank you, Miss Ida,” Cherry said. “But we have to go.”
We walked to the door. Miss Ida’s eyes were bright as diamonds. She waved.
“Come and see me anytime, Laura. You were always a very good reader.”
Cherry returned me to the cabin. Mix-up and I hiked in the woods for an hour and a half. I discovered a house-sized boulder in the creekbed and practiced several climbing moves until missing a hold and falling a dozen feet, into sand, luckily, only then recalling Gary’s admonition that Those who climb alone, die alone. I brushed off my clothes and returned to the cabin.
Cherry was parked in the drive, reading through case materials.
“Is this where you’re hiding from Krenkler?” I asked.
“I stopped by the FBI’s digs earlier. They were all swarming like bees and Krenkler made me feel like some kid trying to play with the grown-ups.”
“Condescending?”
“She did everything but pat my head and tell me to run along. So I did.”
“Did you mention Miss Ida?”
Cherry laughed without mirth. “Tell Krenkler my lead is a name from twenty years back from a ninety-year-old woman who only occasionally remembers who I am?”
“I see your point.”
“Didn’t keep me from searching on my own. I went to the school, cross-checked between twenty-year-old records and the state phone directory. There’s a William J. Taithering living in Augusta, up on the Ohio River, about an hour away. You up for a ride? Charpentier’s going along. I stopped and asked. He said he feels healthy and would love some fresh air.”
“He wants to go?”
“He seems fascinated by the case.”
I drove on the way up, Cherry on the phone, checking with various local bureaus. Jeremy sat in back, seemingly deep in professorial thought. Cherry discovered that Taithering had lived at the same address for fifteen years, was unmarried, a self-employed accountant and notary public, and had no police record.
“I got the background from Bob Murray,” she said. “Bob used to be a Statie, retired last year as a part-time deputy with the Augusta force. He says once a year – June twenty-third – the Augusta cops get called to a local bar after Taithering drinks himself into a stupor. It’s like a ritual. They drive him home and make sure he gets inside safely.”
William Taithering didn’t sound like a corpse-basher, but did seem a man with a problem or two.
We