Late One Night

1

Ronnie swore it was talk and nothing more. Jesus. Just the hasty words of folks eager to blame someone. They’d wanted answers ever since the news first broke and then traveled across the southern part of Illinois and as far north as Chicago, where the AP wire service picked it up and sent it all over the country. News from a house trailer along a blacktop road ten miles east of Goldengate in the dark of a winter’s night. News the like you’d never want to hear if you could help it.

“You really think I could do something like that?” Ronnie said to the sheriff, Ray Biggs. “You think I’m that kind?”

Biggs was a tall man with dark hair that came to a widow’s peak. He squinted his eyes, the worry crease above the bridge of his nose furrowing into his brow. “Motive and opportunity.” He slapped his hand down on the table twice, the heavy gold band of his Masonic ring making a sharp clacking noise. “Doesn’t take a blind man to see you had both.”

Ronnie watched out the window as snow fell on the courthouse lawn. Half rain, with just enough snow mixed in to add to the cover already on the ground. Through the bare limbs of the giant oaks, he looked down onto State Street. Lights were on in the windows of the J.C. Penney store, and the Mi Casita Mexican restaurant, and the Reasoner Insurance Agency. A man came out of Penney’s, a blue scarf wrapped around his face, his shoulders hunched up against the frigid air. He leaned into the wind as he hurried down the sidewalk. Ronnie wished he could be that man, making his way through the cold, making his way home to his family.

“You better start talking.” Biggs leaned back in his chair. “You better tell me something I’ll believe.”

“So it’s a story you want?” Ronnie kept staring out the window, thinking how pretty that snow was on the grass and the boughs of the evergreen trees on the courthouse lawn.

“A true story,” Biggs said. “A story so real it’ll save you. A story as real as that.”