Breakheart Hill

CHAPTER 7

WHEN I HEAR KELLI’S VOICE IN MY MEMORY, IT TAKES ON an astonishingly real presence and immediacy, as if her lips were poised at my ear. Other voices come from a great distance. My father’s, for example, and Miss Troy’s. But Kelli’s voice always sounds so clear and near at hand that when I hear it, I almost glance reflexively to the right or left, half expecting to see her face. Sometimes I hear it at night as I sit alone in the front porch swing, at other times while moving through my hospital rounds with a nurse or doctor at my side. But no matter where or when I hear it, the tone and clarity are always the same, as rich and vital as if she were still fully alive and standing beside me, a voice so physically present that at times it seems as if my memory has become her ghost.

I never see her, though, never glimpse an eerie, disembodied shape as it retreats down a darkened hallway or vanishes into a hazy wood. When she comes to me, it is down the long tunnel of the years, never as a specter floating outside my bedroom window, or a figure drifting toward me over the still waters of a dark lake. There are times when I almost wish that she did return to me in such melodramatic form, a mere phantom that I could sweep away with a quick wave of my hand.

Instead, she rises invisibly and without warning from a vast assortment of familiar things. I will notice a footprint in moist earth, a length of rope dangling from a limb, a young man trudging absently up the mountain road, and suddenly all these things will take their place within the mystery that Sheriff Stone worked so hard to solve.

He died almost fifteen years ago, an old man eaten to the bone by cancer. He hadn’t chosen me as his doctor, but when I heard that he was dying, I dropped by his hospital room to see him. He was lying on his back, fully lucid, but very weak. I said hello as I stepped up to his bed, but he didn’t answer me, and after a while I turned to leave the room. It was then I felt his hand. He had reached over and grabbed my sleeve, tugging at it as insistently as he could with the little strength left to him.

I reached down, took his hand, placed it firmly on his chest and gave it a soft, consoling pat. “Are you comfortable, Sheriff Stone?” I asked him gently.

His eyes suddenly flared up, as if, coming from me, the question had filled him with contempt. “No, I’m not,” he said in a harsh, rasping voice. “Are you?”

I started to give him a casual reply, but he’d already turned away.

Sheriff Stone was not always so abrupt, and when he first came to talk to me that day, he gave off a great sense of self-control and composure. He was a large man, round and bearish, but he carried himself with unexpected grace. Rarely armed, he generally relied on the strength of his character to get what he wanted from the people who came within his authority. “The last of his kind” was what my father called him, and I think that he was right.

He’d already been sheriff of Choctaw County for over thirty years by the time he first questioned me, and he possessed the impressive serenity of a man who knew a great many secrets but who also had the will to keep them to himself. He nodded gently, touched the brim of his hat and introduced himself. “I’m Sheriff Stone,” he said. He shifted his great weight in the doorway. “I understand that you knew Kelli Troy.”

Much time has passed since Sheriff Stone first questioned me, but on occasion, when I drive past the town cemetery, I will glance up toward the large gray stone that marks his place, feel a wave of intense heat sweep over me and realize that his grave has joined that vast collection of other things in Choctaw that can, in a sudden feverish rush, bring Kelli back to me.

And yet, even more than such wrenching physical reminders, it is my memory itself that keeps her near me, forever playing back the time that was left to her, revealing each moment in turn, her days falling from the stem of life like small white petals.

THE SHEER VIBRANCY OF THOSE DAYS STRIKES ME MOST powerfully when I think of them, how alive she was, the sparks that seemed to fly from her, particularly as she neared the end. She threw a great deal of effort into the Wildcat, but I could tell that even after working on it all afternoon, there was still energy left over that she could not use. “I want to do something,” she once told me as we drove toward her house one evening, “but I don’t know what.” She shivered slightly. “It’s like your skin is wrapped too tight around you.”

I am old enough now to know that fiery personalities sometimes consume themselves prematurely, and that those people who appear the most spirited when young are not necessarily the ones who later make a great mark. Life remains a card shark, after all, with many tricks to play, and when I consider that Eddie Smathers is one of Choctaw’s wealthiest and most respected citizens, that Todd Jeffries is already in his grave, that Sheila Cameron’s life is wrapped in an unrelievable grief, I am struck by how easily it can throw down an unexpected card. Perhaps Kelli, too, would have fallen into one of the many traps that cripple and misdirect us, altering our early dreams, turning passionate beginnings into modest ends. As time passed, Kelli might have proven no better at improvising her way out of the common snares of life than most of us have proven.

But that was not a possibility that Mr. Bailey wanted the jury to consider when he spoke to them for the last time. He began his summation by handing a photograph of Kelli to the foreman and telling him to pass it down the line. From my seat near the front of the courtroom, I could see that it was the one that had been taken early that spring, a school photograph that showed Kelli’s face wreathed in dark curls. “From everything we know about this young girl,” he said, “we have to conclude that Kelli Troy would have lived a good, and perhaps even a remarkable life.”

Miss Troy was sitting only a few feet from me when Mr. Bailey said that, and I remember that it was precisely at that moment that she broke down for the one and only time during the long ordeal of the trial, lowering her face into her hands, her shoulders trembling as she wept.

It is the curse of memory to dwell on possibility, to consider not only what was, but what might have been. Sometimes in the evening, when I am returning from a patient’s house, and find myself on the road that leads from Choctaw to Collier, I will see the little square lights of Kelli’s house, and suddenly I will be unable to pass by, but will edge my car onto the shoulder of the road, stop and stare for a time at the small glowing windows, the old wooden porch, the unused brick chimney. Sometimes on these occasions, I will see her as she was, rushing down the stairs toward my car with a bundle of schoolbooks in her arms, all youth and energy, with most of the journey still before her. But at other times, I will see her as she might have become, older and wiser, her hair threaded with gray, her character shaped by a deeper and longer experience of life, moving more slowly toward me, opening her arms, rich and beautiful in the fullness of her womanhood. Then I see her not as she might have become but as she was left that day on Breakheart Hill. I see the devastation that was done to her, see her as Luke did before he raced up the hill for help. I see her blood glistening on my hands as it glistened on his trousers. But I do not dash away as he did. For I know, as Luke could not have known, that there is no help for her, no way to mend her wounds. And so I do the only thing I can. I kneel down beside her, gather her broken life into my arms, and say her name.

“KELLI,” I SAID, “WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THIS?”

We were sitting in the little basement office late one afternoon only a week or so after we started working together on the Wildcat. She was at her desk, a small wooden one that had been pushed up against the room’s back wall.

I handed her the paper. “It’s one of those gossip things Allison used to put in every issue,” I added. “June Compton gave it to me this morning.”

Kelli took it from me, brought it under the lamp on her desk and read it out loud. “Trouble in paradise. Be on the lookout for a breakup.” She looked at me. “Who’s it about?”

I shrugged. “Some Turtle Grove couple,” I said. “That’s all June knows about, the people out there.”

I was right, as it turned out, and no more than fifteen minutes later Mary Diehl appeared at the door of the basement office. She was wearing a navy blue blouse and a black skirt, and thrown into silhouette by the light from the corridor she looked like a charred figure, motionless and silent until Kelli finally looked up from her desk and caught her standing there.

“Hi, Kelli,” Mary said softly. Her eyes swept over to me. “Hi, Ben. Ya’ll working on the Wildcat?”

“Yes,” I said.

Mary struggled to smile, clinging to that iron charm her mother had taught her to maintain in all circumstances. “Well, I just wanted to ask if June Compton gave you something to put in it.”

“Yeah, she did,” I answered.

“Well, do you think you could give it to me, Ben?” Mary asked. She glanced self-consciously at Kelli, then back to me. “It’s sort of personal, and I don’t want it put in the Wildcat.”

For some reason, I hesitated. Perhaps because I wanted, no matter how briefly, to feel a certain delicious power over Mary Diehl, who, under other circumstances, would hardly have noticed me at all. “Well, I’d like to give it to you, Mary, but I should probably read it first.”

“I wish you wouldn’t, Ben.” Mary’s voice trembled slightly. “It’s private, you know?”

“I know, Mary,” I said. “But as the editor of the paper I have to …”

I heard Kelli’s chair scrape against the cement floor, then saw her body sweep past my desk.

“Here it is, Mary,” she said, handing her the paper. “June gave it to Ben this morning. We haven’t even had a chance to read it yet.”

Mary snapped the paper from Kelli’s hand with an almost frantic motion. “It’s nothing bad, really,” she explained hastily. “But June’s just such a busybody, you know, and—” She stopped, her voice suddenly less tense, relief sweeping into her face. “Well, anyway, thanks for giving it back,” she said. She folded the paper, sunk it into the pocket of her skirt and stepped back into the corridor, now suddenly herself again, fully a girl from Turtle Grove, all her grace and poise regained.

“Bye,” she said, then vanished.

Once Mary had gone, I tried to make light of the whole thing. “That breakup stuff must have been about her and Todd. They must be having trouble.”

Kelli had already returned to her desk, but she looked up at me pointedly, her eyes cold and stern. “You should have given it to her right away,” she said.

“What do you mean?” I asked, though I already knew.

“You made her beg, Ben,” Kelli said. “Why did you do that?”

I had no answer for her. “You’re right,” I admitted. “I should have just given the paper back to her.”

Kelli watched me evenly, her face so grave it appeared almost stony. Her eyes were nearly motionless, two black pools, but I could sense her mind moving rapidly behind them, remembering, evaluating, coming to judgment.

For a moment I feared she might never speak to me again, but suddenly the severity broke, and she smiled. “It must be nice though,” she said almost airily.

“Nice?” I asked, now completely thrown off by the abrupt change in her attitude. “What must be nice?”

“To love someone like that,” Kelli answered. “The way Mary loves Todd.” She smiled quietly. “To feel desperate about losing someone.”

It seemed the right moment to make a cautious inquiry. “Have you ever felt that way about anybody?” I asked.

She shook her head. “No. But I hope I do someday.”

I started to say something else, but she turned away, returning to her work, closing off any further discussion.

For the next hour we worked silently. Then suddenly she demanded, “Would you have run it?”

So much time had passed that I didn’t know what she was referring to. “Run what?”

“That note June gave you. Would you have put it in the Wildcat?”

I turned to face her. “I don’t know. I might have.” I shrugged. “But I hope that if I had run it, I would have been disappointed in myself later. That’s the worst thing you can do, right? To disappoint yourself.” I looked at her quietly for a moment, then added, “Or disappoint someone else. Someone you admire. That’s the worst thing, don’t you think?”

Kelli shook her head. “No, the worst thing is for someone you love to disappoint you,” she said with a sudden, unexpected vehemence. “That’s what’s really bad.” Her eyes narrowed, and I could see an odd tumult in them, though it was also clear that the cause of it was not something Kelli wanted to reveal. She glanced away quickly, then turned back to me, her eyes calm again. “Anyway, I’m glad we gave June’s note back to Mary,” she said.

“Me, too,” I said.

We closed the office a few minutes later, then strolled out to the parking lot. Kelli did not have a car, and so on the days we worked late, I drove her home to Collier. It was dark when we reached her house, and outside the car I could hear the whistle of a chill fall wind.

“Better wrap up,” I said, nodding toward the checked scarf that now dangled loosely from Kelli’s throat.

She looked at me oddly, as if surprised by my care. “Yes, I will,” she murmured. Then she leaned forward, reached over and took my hand. “Thanks, Ben.”

It was a small gesture of affection, nothing more, and yet I can still recall the tingling sense of her flesh on mine, the way it seemed to linger on my skin long after she’d drawn away her hand. And I know that with every day that passed from that moment on, my longing for her steadily increased, along with the troubling sense of my own physical awkwardness and lack of experience, my “virginity” no longer merely a vaguely regrettable and embarrassing fact in my mind, but a subtle accusation of unmanliness and inadequacy, the first seed of my self-loathing.

But that was something Kelli could not have known, and so, as the days passed, she continued to act toward me as any young girl might, casually touching me from time to time, no doubt thinking me as harmless as I thought myself, but by each touch turning up the heat one small degree.

Feeling that heat, but unable to act upon it, I began to construct my mask and hide behind it. I gave her no indication that she was becoming anything more to me than a friend. I made small talk with her and occasional jokes. I gave her quick tips on southern speech and sometimes made fun of her northern accent. From time to time, I would even talk about some other girl, making up feelings that I did not have, pretending to desires that were far more commonplace and manageable than those I had actually begun to feel.

Because of that, our conversations on those rides to her house during the next few weeks continued to be more or less routine, mostly composed of the usual high school trivialities. We talked about Luke and Betty Ann, joking about how they already seemed so settled with each other, like an old married couple. Sheila Cameron’s name came up occasionally, along with a teacher here and there.

But from time to time, we also talked about things outside Choctaw High, particularly the years after graduation, our futures.

“I’ve never asked you this,” I said on one occasion toward the end of November, “but what do you plan to do when you finish high school?”

The days had become very short by then. The evening shade already covered us as we made our way down the walkway to my car, and I remember that even in that deep afternoon haze I could see a strange perplexity drift into Kelli’s face.

“I don’t really have any plans,” she said.

It was an answer that surprised me. “Well, I mean, what college are you going to?” I persisted.

She shook her head. “I don’t know that either.” She thought a moment, then asked a question of her own. “Do you think everybody has to go to college?”

“It seems like the next step.”

“In what?”

I had no answer for her.

“The next step in life, you mean?” Kelli asked.

“I guess you could call it that,” I admitted. “I don’t know any other step.”

“Lots of people just get jobs, or get married,” Kelli said. “They have children and settle into life.”

“But not you,” I told her. “You wouldn’t settle for a life like that.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“Because you wouldn’t be happy with it, Kelli. Because you’re so … different.”

I remember hearing the emphatic, almost passionate tone of my voice as I said it, and I also remember that it was followed by a sudden, fearful retreat, as if I’d exposed the outer membrane of something infinitely tender and carefully guarded in myself, something I rushed to put back in its shell.

“I mean, you’re so smart and everything,” I added hastily. “You should definitely go to college.”

The momentary perplexity dissolved from Kelli’s face, replaced by the more familiar airiness of her manner. “Well, if I can get the money,” she said as she opened the door and slid inside the car.

I pulled myself in behind the wheel. “Can your mother afford to send you?” I asked casually as I hit the ignition.

Kelli shook her head.

I hesitated a moment, then added, “Is there anybody else who could help you?” By which, of course, I meant some other family member, and even hinted at the absent father.

“There’s no one else,” she said crisply.

We drove all the way to Collier in complete silence. Kelli sat motionlessly, her hands in her lap, her eyes trained on the road ahead. From time to time I would glance toward her, trying to think of something that might draw her out of the trouble I could see in her face. But everything that occurred to me seemed callow and mundane, and so I lapsed into silence.

It was nearly dark by the time I pulled into Kelli’s driveway, and a deep shadow had fallen over the valley.

“Well, see you tomorrow,” I said weakly.

For a moment, Kelli didn’t move. Then her eyes shifted over to me. “I don’t have a father, Ben,” she said in a voice that was absolutely resolute.

I had no idea how to respond to such a statement. I had heard people speak of bad fathers, drunken fathers, fathers who had vanished, but I had never heard anyone declare so forthrightly that she had no father at all.

Kelli’s eyes bored into me. “Let’s just leave it at that, okay?”

I nodded. “Sure,” I said. “Okay.”

She continued to stare at me fiercely, as if waiting for a challenge. Then she said, “Well, good night, then,” and got out of the car.

I turned on the headlights and watched as she walked through their yellow beams to her house. She went quickly up the wooden stairs and just as quickly disappeared into the house itself. Normally, I would have pulled out of the driveway immediately, but something in the sudden, unexpected intensity of our final exchange clung to me determinedly so that I didn’t actually leave until I’d gotten another glimpse of her, this time merely as a form passing a lighted window, but unmistakably Kelli’s form, her long arms delicately unwrapping the scarf from around her neck.

I thought of her all the way home that evening, though I can’t remember in what way I thought of her, and because of that I can only surmise that I had begun to feel her around me in a way that was not only sensuous and full of yearning, but shadowy and mysterious as well, and that this mysteriousness was also oddly seductive. For compared with Kelli, the other girls at Choctaw High seemed simple and transparent, predictable products of the world that had produced them. They spoke in familiar accents about familiar things, and their futures were as open as their pasts. Of all the girls I knew, Kelli alone possessed the allure of something unrevealed, a mystery that drew me toward her as steadily as the touch of her flesh.

IT WAS DURING THE NEXT FEW WEEKS THAT I BECAME SO preoccupied with Kelli that other people actually began to notice it. Luke even went so far as to mention it to me.

“You must have a thing for Kelli Troy,” he said as we drove toward Cuffy’s one afternoon.

I retreated into denial. “Bullshit,” I said.

“You talk about her all the time,” Luke said. “It’s always ‘Kelli and I went here’ or ‘Kelli and I are working on this or that.’ ” He gave me a knowing look. “And you’re always down in that little office with her. Either that or driving around with her.”

“We have to work on the Wildcat after school,” I told him hotly, as if defending myself from an accusation. “The buses have left by the time we finish, so I have to take her home.”

Luke offered a piercing stare. “Have to?” He laughed. “Like it’s a job or something?”

I retreated into silence.

“You should ask her out, Ben,” Luke said. “That’s what boys do when they like girls. They go out with them. Like on a date. They don’t just work together at school and drive home together. They go out to a movie, or maybe roller skating, something like that.”

I shook my head.

“Why not?”

I shrugged.

“She’s not going to be the new girl forever,” he warned. “Eventually somebody’s going to ask her out, and you’ll have lost your chance.”

I stared straight ahead, not wanting to look him in the eye, afraid of what he might see, a gesture I have increasingly resorted to in the years since then.

“I don’t get it,” Luke said. “If you like her, just ask her out. It’s simple.”

I searched for a reply until I found one. It was flimsy, but the best I could do. “There’s no point in asking Kelli out,” I said. “Because she lives in Choctaw now, and she likes it here, and I’m not going to come back after college.… So there’s no point in getting … you know … involved with her like that.”

Luke looked at me, utterly puzzled by such reasoning. “So you’re just going to delay your whole life until you leave Choctaw?” he asked wonderingly. “You’re just going to stay in neutral for the next year and a half?”

“I’ll be busy,” I answered. “It’s not easy getting into medical school.”

Luke’s faintly derisive laugh stung me. “You know what your trouble is, Ben? You have to have everything in a certain order.”

I said nothing.

Luke stared at me teasingly. “Well, maybe I’ll ask her out then,” he said. “You think she might go?”

My eyes shot over to him. “I thought you were going steady with Betty Ann.”

“Betty Ann’s nice,” Luke said dismissively, “but I’d like to get to know somebody a little different. Like a girl from up north.”

I pretended indifference. “Go ahead and ask her, then,” I said.

Luke gave me a penetrating look, a gaze that always went right through me. He asked, “You’re afraid of her, aren’t you?”

I bristled. “Afraid? Why would I be afraid?”

Luke looked at me almost tenderly, as if teaching something to a child. I have never forgotten what he said. “We’re always afraid of the girl we’re in love with, Ben.”

It was a statement that astonished me. For the idea of being in love was so distant from anything I had previously thought about that I found myself entirely unable to respond. I knew that when I took Kelli home in the afternoons, I wanted to sit in the car and talk to her until dawn broke, and that when I made some small mistake in her presence, I felt a keen sense of exposure and embarrassment, as if I’d shrunk a bit in her eyes. I also knew that when I heard her body rustle beneath her skirt, or felt her shoulder touch mine as we leaned over the small table in the basement office, at those moments I felt a piercing tension overwhelm me, as if my body had suddenly received a slight electric shock. More than anything, I knew that everyone else paled before her, that whatever interest I had previously had in other girls had entirely withered. But was that love? Even if from the beginning I had known that what I felt for Kelli Troy was love, it still would have seemed inconceivable to me that at such an early age one might feel the grip of so powerful an emotion and be marked forever by the imprint that it made.

Luke said nothing more about Kelli that afternoon, and now when he mentions her, it is no longer within a context of teenage love. Other things haunt him, questions that will not let him go, and which he continually approaches, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another, but always closing in on the many things that still trouble and elude him when he thinks of Kelli Troy.

There are times when he will suddenly blurt out a question, as if it had just occurred to him, but which I know has come only after a lengthy rumination, rising like a body long submerged.

“Why didn’t Kelli call you that day, Ben?”

It is a bright summer day, not unlike that other bright summer day thirty years before, when he dropped Kelli off on the mountain road.

“Call me when?”

“When she needed a ride up to Breakheart Hill that afternoon. You were always giving her a ride, weren’t you?”

“Yes, I was.”

“So why didn’t she call you that day? I’ve never been able to figure that out.”

I settle my eyes on the dark spire of a distant steeple. “Maybe she did try to call me.”

“You mean, you weren’t home that afternoon?”

“No, I wasn’t.”

“Where were you?”

I cannot help but wonder if, after years of plotting, he is about to spring the trap. “Just riding around,” I tell him.

He watches me doubtfully. “Why?”

I shrug. “I guess I had things on my mind.”

“What things?”

I can feel him drawing me closer to that moment. There is a whiff of violets in the air. I escape into a lie. “Nothing particular. The play, maybe.”

Although my answer does not seem to satisfy him, he has no way to contradict it. He has nothing but his long suspicion, nothing but his memory of my face as he stood before me in his bloody trousers, trying desperately to describe what he’d seen on Breakheart Hill. And yet, through all the years, it has been enough to drive him forward, one question at a time.

“Did you know she was going up there that day?” he asks.

I shake my head.

For a moment, he looks at me evenly, then turns away. “She was upset about something. But she didn’t tell me what it was.” He falls silent for a moment, then adds, “Why would she have wanted to go up there in the first place?”

“She told you that, didn’t she?”

“Just that she needed to think. That’s all she said.”

“Maybe she did.”

“But what could have been so important for her to think about that afternoon?”

“Maybe she wanted to study her lines. The play was set to open the next night.”

“If that were why, she’d have brought a copy of the play with her,” Luke insists. He looks at me significantly. “Sheriff Stone had another idea. He thought she was planning to meet somebody up there.”

“Why did he think that?”

“Because she hadn’t made any arrangements for somebody to pick her up later,” Luke answers. “That always bothered Sheriff Stone. He asked me if she’d mentioned anything about my coming back for her. I told him that I’d offered to come back for her, but that she had told me not to. And you know what Sheriff Stone said? He said, ‘There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with all this.’ ”

I say nothing.

Luke shakes his head slowly. “Why would Kelli not have wanted me to come back for her, Ben?” he asks softly.

“Well, maybe she intended to walk back,” I answer lightly, making nothing of the question.

“I don’t think so,” Luke says. “Hell, it’s over two miles back down to Choctaw. She wouldn’t have been planning to walk that far, would she?”

“Probably not,” I admit. “But back then there was that little store right near where you let her out. Grierson’s, remember?”

“What about it?”

“Well, she might have been planning to call somebody from there.”

“To pick her up, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“No way, Ben. It was a Sunday. That store was closed.”

“How do you know?”

“Because that’s where he was. That’s where I saw him. Remember?”

I instantly recall the moment when I’d first heard Luke describe what he’d seen that afternoon. The courtroom had been jammed with spectators, my father and I crammed in with all the others. Not far away, I could see Miss Carver sitting stonily on the front bench, her eyes trained on Luke as he walked to the witness box.

A hush had come over the room as Mr. Bailey had begun to question him.

Now, Luke, you dropped Kelli Troy off on the mountain just up from Breakheart Hill on the afternoon of May twenty-seventh, isn’t that right?

Yes, sir.

And about what time would you say that was? Around three-thirty.

And after you dropped Kelli off, did you come on down the mountain by yourself?

Yes, sir.

All the way back in to Choctaw, is that right, son?

Yes, sir.

And on the way back down the mountain, did you have occasion to see anybody else up on that ridge?

Yes, sir, I did.

And where did you see that person?

In front of Grierson’s Store.

What was he doing?

He was walking up the mountain road.

Toward where exactly?

Toward Breakheart Hill.

How far would you say Grierson’s Store is from Breakheart Hill, Luke?

About a mile, I guess.

It would take about thirty minutes to walk that, wouldn’t it?

About that, yes, sir.

Now, Luke, if you saw him again, would you recognize the person you saw walking up toward Breakheart Hill that day?

Yes, sir.

Is that person in the courtroom today? Yes.

Could you point him out and say his name?

Luke had pointed with a firm, steady hand as he’d said the name: Lyle Gates.

At the mention of his name, I could remember glancing over to see Lyle as he sat beside his lawyer. He was wearing a gray suit that was too small for him, the cuffs of his shirt extending well beyond the sleeves of his jacket, his white socks stretching up toward the legs of his pants. His hands were clasped in front of him, and I remember noticing how the cuts and scrapes Sheriff Stone had found upon them when he’d first questioned him had healed during the period between his arrest and trial. I studied his slumped shoulders, the way he kept his head slanted, as if dodging an invisible blow. His eyes shifted about, unable to light on anything in particular, until they suddenly swept over toward me and locked there, as if he were studying me now, just as I had been studying him. I looked away, concentrating on Luke, until, after a few minutes, my eyes drifted back toward Lyle. He’d sat back in his chair by then so that I could see only his face in profile, but even so I knew that his eyes were still ceaselessly moving in quick, nervous jerks.

Mr. Bailey was finishing up with Luke.

Now, when you saw Lyle Gates, he was on foot, is that right?

Yes, sir.

Was there a car or truck anywhere around?

I didn’t see one.

You only saw Lyle Gates walking, is that right?

Yes, sir.

Now, son, I have to ask you one more time, because so much rides on your answer. Are you absolutely sure you saw the defendant, Lyle Walter Gates, walking up toward Breakheart Hill at approximately three-thirty on the afternoon of May twenty-seventh?

Yes, sir.

You saw him with your own eyes?

Yes, sir. I saw him with my own eyes.

I believe that despite all the years that have passed since then, Luke still sees Lyle Gates at times when he closes those same pale blue eyes. But does he see him exactly as he saw him that day on the mountainside, a slender young man trudging wearily past Grierson’s Store, the radiant afternoon sunlight glinting in his slick blond hair? Or does he see Lyle the way I so often see Kelli Troy, as a runner racing up a torturous slope, her body plunging through a brutal undergrowth of vine and briar?