Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 3, February 1974

Soundings From the Grave by Jerry Jacobson

Hate drove Julie’s sister, hate and an unleashed urge to expose Julie’s murderer. The police didn’t know where to start, but she did. And she would follow through to the violent end... her own, if necessary.

It had been a cold, raw night in Zachary, and throughout the entire county the curse of a freeze looked down upon its residents.

Sheriff Quinn Strowe could feel a freeze as well as anyone, because he was too close to these farmers and he was close to the land. Dairy farmers, his neighbors were, and the Holsteins would be inside this night, where there was warmth.

There was also warmth at the Zachary High Gym, where the Zachary Tigers and the Forks Seahawks were battling to break away from each other in a two-way first-place tie.

Strowe listened to the game on a portable radio in his office. Lonnie Davenport, a kid with firepower and talent, was making a serious assault on Strowe’s own musty Zachary High individual game scoring record. Strowe hated to see his record fall because he’d sweated and practiced himself to exhaustion to set it.

To a kid like Lonnie Davenport, everything came as easily as a stroll in a park. Good student, solid social mixer. 12-letter sports star. That ease of acquisition and accomplishment overlapped to include the steady companionship of Zachary High’s most sought-after coed.

Julie Knight was bright, beautiful and tenacious when it came to acquiring her own special feminine honors: head cheerleader, vice-president of the girls’ club, secretary of the student council, and chief organizer for the Tiger Pep and Rally Club. It all made Quinn Strowe feel suddenly older than he’d felt in his lifetime.

The announcer and the crowd were in a frenzy. Forks had knotted the game at 60–60. Lonnie Davenport had 31 of those. And Quinn Strowe had 41 for the record. A record that would be his not much longer than a few minutes of a final quarter of basketball.

The lead see-sawed, as Lonnie Davenport’s total continued to creep in on Strowe’s. It was tied again at 76–76. And Lonnie Davenport was moving in at 39.

Forks held the ball for the last shot to break the tie as seconds vanished. And then the fluke happened. A Forks pass went astray and Lonnie Davenport smelled it like a wolf smelling out the chicken house. A Forks player had Davenport in his sites, but Davenport had him on his hip, all the long race down the floor.

Strowe could sense it coming. The trailing Forks player would purposely foul Davenport long before he reached the basket, giving him two free throws for the flagrant foul and pray for two misses, like lightning miraculously striking twice.

Davenport didn’t have a chance. The Forks player submarined him, cutting the star Zachary guard to the floor. Both players skidded across maple into a heap at the feet of the Zachary band. Both benches emptied. Punches filled the air. Whistles screamed for order. Strowe had four patrolmen at the game for crowd and traffic control. He hoped his men were on the job.

Slowly order was restored and the players untangled. Lonnie Davenport, surprisingly, was awarded three free throws: two for being fouled in the continuance of a shot and a third as a technical for the flagrant foul.

He made all three with automatic ease, blood streaming from his nose, the announcer said.

Sheriff Strowe felt something go out of him. His record was gone. They keep pushing you out, he sighed to himself, though without malice. They keep pushing you out and farther into history. What the hell. Records were made to fall and Lonnie Davenport was a good kid, one who never lost his cool and in this situation he could have lost it very easily. He was an all right kid.

Soon the town was alive with horn honking and cheers. Strowe didn’t think there would be related trouble over the game’s tense ending, but wasn’t going to take the chance. He radioed two of his day-shift deputies and instructed them to head out on a four-hour emergency patrol of town. They had both been listening to the game and didn’t need to be informed why.

The emergency passed without serious altercations. There was a strong rivalry, no one needed to be told that. Forks was beef cattle country, and Zachary dairy oriented. A thing could have developed. But it didn’t.

At twelve-thirty, Sheriff Strowe tumbled into bed. The lost record ached a little inside him, until his wife woke and kissing him on the cheek said, “Records were made to be broken, Quinn.”

And then he was all right with it, felt all right about having it for twenty years, and he dropped off to sleep. He could sleep until eight a.m. now, he was sure.

It wasn’t eight a.m. when he woke, however. And it wasn’t to the bedroom alarm clock. He woke to an incessantly ringing extension telephone on the nightstand. It was Patrolman Storey.

“What is it, Storey?” he asked.

“It’s bad, Quinn, out at Lake Loon. I went down there for a routine check of the picnic grounds. Down Cottage Grove Road from the highway. I found fresh tire tracks leading down to the lake’s edge, but no overlap of a car backing away. Lot of footprints. Ground’s frozen now. They’re perfect frozen casts.”

“Where’s the car?” Strowe asked.

“My opinion? The bottom of Lake Loon,” said Storey, mincing no words.

Lake Loon was the deepest in the state, a crater bed. It had never been sounded to its depth, but fishermen had tried with weighted lines which came up free of sand. Oregon’s Crater Lake at over 1,900 feet deep was the nation’s deepest. Lake Loon was easily a close second.

By the time Strowe arrived on the scene three other patrol cars had spotlights cast on the lake edge where Patrolman Storey believed a car had gone over and down.

Over and down was the only way a car entered Lake Loon at this spot. No public bathing, only picnics, softball and tennis. About three hundred feet down, the lake was collared with a fifty-foot sloping ledge. From there the black waters ran off into oblivion.

Patrolman Storey had read the auto tracks correctly. A car had drawn itself to the lake’s edge. But the perfect, unobliterated tread told them it didn’t back or swing out. And that left straight down.

“Foreign job, or economy compact,” said Storey to Ev Strowe. “Footprints only on the passenger side here,” he pointed out to Strowe with a flashlight. “Might indicate the driver went down in the car.” Storey involuntarily shivered.

“Or that the driver didn’t go down in the car, was alone, and pushed it over the edge like off a cliff to rid himself of an economy clunker.”

Storey escorted the sheriff around to where the back of a car would have come to rest and re-trained his flashlight. “More footprints. One set. Where he pushed it in from the rear. Then they trail off, back up Cottage Grove Road about two hundred yards until the road becomes grassy. At that point they disappear.”

The prints were large. Male footprints, very likely. And something else about them were instantly familiar to Sheriff Strowe. “You played a little basketball for Zachary High, didn’t you, Storey?” the sheriff asked.

“Second-string, ’61. I got into the game around garbage time.”

“Those prints mean anything to you?”

Storey knelt and examined them more closely. He rose nodding. “Athletic shoes; basketball shoes.”

“Step into one of them, Storey,” Strowe said. “You can’t damage it. The ground’s frozen like a board.”

Patrolman Storey did so, with a little room to spare all around. “I’m a ten. Size-ten basketball sneakers.”

“Add a whisper for your street shoes and what would you guess?”

“Size-10½,” said Storey. “Couldn’t be size-11’s and basketball sneakers only come in even and half sizes. Yes, 10½’s.”

“In the morning we’ll get one of those cherrypickers from Zeldenrust’s Machinery Rentals. You’ve had driver training, haven’t you, Storey? You and Phil Groat and Carl Ritzer?”

Storey nodded. “I’ll arrange for the cherry picker,” said Sheriff Strowe. “Get on the radio and tell Groat and Ritzer to go home and grab a couple hours sleep and be down here with wetsuits and oxygen tanks at nine in the morning.”

Storey turned and cast his glance at the dark lake, where a thin sheet of ice showed a glaze for twenty-feet out. “Think it’s hung up on the ledge?”

“If it didn’t roll, or land on its nose and topple.”

“Hope it’s empty,” Storey said. It went without saying.

It was a 1964 economy compact and the ledge had held its offering. The body of the dead girl inside, on the floor below the front seat, was the body of Julie Knight. Two large bruises on her right cheek and a third on her forehead made the pretty, almost perfect face now imperfect and puffy.

The car was Julie Knight’s, bought for her by her parents less than five months earlier. Not a new car, not an old one. Just something a teenage girl adores and perhaps names Snoopy and knocks around town in with her friends. It was funny — or perhaps not so now that he thought about it — but the only face Sheriff Strowe could see seated next to Julie Knight on the passenger side was the handsome, athletically rugged face of Lonnie Davenport.

The county autopsy surgeon placed the time of death at 1:20 a.m., a full hour before the ground had frozen the killer’s footprints from mud to hardened casts.

Death not from drowning, but from blows delivered with a blunt object on Julie Knight’s face and forehead.

Sheriff Strowe allowed the funeral to take place and a week’s gossip to pass and then he began asking questions.

He asked his most important questions of Lonnie Davenport, who had been seen by scores of classmates and townspeople after the Forks basketball game, in the company of Julie Knight.

“I met her in the student parking lot next to the gym after the game, Sheriff Strowe,” Davenport told the sheriff at his home on a subsequent weekday after school. “I mean, she always met me after the games. Football, basketball, baseball.”

“Whose car did you leave in?” Strowe wanted to know.

“Her little economy job. The Atomic Clock, she called it. Atomic clocks use vibrations to run. It was the most vibrating clunker on the face of the earth. I left my car parked in the lot, like I always do when we hit the main drag to celebrate a victory.”

“Where did you and Julie go on the night of the Forks game?”

“Let me see—” the boy hesitated.

“We already have statements from witnesses,” said Sheriff Strowe, indicating it might be wise of Lonnie to display honest, total recall.

“Well, we stopped in at the Burgerama. Two dozen kids must have seen us there plus the waitress, Mink Elingson. She’s a Zachary High junior.”

“What time did you leave the Burgerama?”

“Around eleven o’clock. After that we dropped into the Tiger Den on South Commercial, four blocks from the school. It’s a jock hang-out. We left there about twelve, maybe a little before. Julia drove me back to the student lot near the gym. Add about a half-hour for getting-to-know-you time, Tactility Sessions, we call them. Touch. About 12:15 a.m., we said goodnight. I drove home in my car and Julie left in hers. That’s the last I saw of her.”

“You didn’t drive in her car down to the picnic grounds on Lake Loon,” Sheriff Strowe wanted made clear.

“Cold as it was that night? No way. I remember that distinctly. It was the first freeze of the new year. We had all we could do to keep from freezing that half hour we were parked in the school lot. Her heater is a real turkey.” He dropped his head then, suddenly: “Was.”

“I’m curious to know why you didn’t sit in your car for that Tactility Session?” Sheriff Strowe rushed on, to get them past the word Was. “You’ve got a ’70-model fastback, haven’t you?”

“A fastback with a broken-out wing window. Probably done by some Forks fan right after the-game. It wasn’t hit and run, either. Somebody stayed long enough to heist my athletic grip from the back seat.”

“With your basketball shoes inside, I suppose.”

“I had to borrow a pair for a pick-up game at the field house that next afternoon, on Saturday. Stretch Ulrich’s Size 11½’s. I’ve still got the blisters.”

“No one saw you leave the parking lot in your own car?”

“No one but Julie. The lot was deserted. There were a few cars parked around. But no students in them, or around them. And if you want me to establish what time I got home, you’ll have to take my word for that, too. I’ve got a room in the basement of my folk’s home, rear entrance. Private. No one heard or saw me come in at that hour.”

“But they — your parents — might have heard your car as you pulled up into the driveway.”

“Dad’s car was parked in the driveway,” said Lonnie Davenport, with unblinking eyes. “And he leaves for work on Saturdays before I’m up. I parked out on Cypress Street.”

The boy fell silent.

Sheriff Strowe said nothing.

“What about fingerprints on Julie’s car?” asked Davenport. “The killer must have left some, or on the weapon.”

“The killer wore gloves. It was a cold night. And Julie’s killer took the murder weapon with him.”

“So where does that leave everybody?” Lonnie Davenport said.

“It leaves Julie Knight dead. And it leaves you as a paramount suspect.”

“I didn’t kill Julie Knight.”

“I’d like more than anything to believe you, Lonnie.”

“Sorry to drop you back where you started, Ev, but I don’t buy Lonnie Davenport as a killer.” Carl Dunlap, editor of The Zachary Herald-Talisman, had dropped by Strowe’s office on the pretext of a cup of coffee that was four hours old and strong enough to walk on its own two feet over to the Herald-Talisman if Dunlap really wanted some.

Strowe knew it wasn’t coffee Carl Dunlap wanted. What he wanted was a bit more serious in nature. What he desired was to go on record to Strowe with his own theory, for whatever it was worth. And a man of the intelligence and instincts of Carl Dunlap was a man whose theories demanded listening to seriously.

“You must have some strong feelings for thinking that way, Carl — or some strong reasons.”

“Just one,” Dunlap told Sheriff Strowe, pretending a sip of his coffee. “I attended the Zachary-Forks basketball game that night, Ev. You recall the near brawl at the end? When that Forks forward dropped Lonnie Davenport, and everyone became a participant?”

“What are you driving at, Carl?”

“Precisely this,” said Carl Dunlap. “In all that bedlam — the cops, the referees, the ballplayers, the students, the flailing fists, and the flying tackles... What was Lonnie Davenport doing? He was keeping cool and he was trying to separate the brawlers and he was trying to keep a bad situation from becoming a bloody free-for-all.

“And I ask myself, as you should seriously ask yourself, Ev, would a boy like that be capable of excessive jealousy, or rage, or hatred, or vindictiveness? Ev, I think you’ll get the same answer I’m getting. No, he wouldn’t be.”

“I have to agree with you, Carl. I suppose it’s better to have no suspects at all than the wrong one.”

“Well, cheer up, Ev. You may be receiving more assistance in this town than you know.”

“How do you mean, Carl?”

“Assistances from voices in the Zachary High Soundings.”

The Soundings had not been around in Ev Strowe’s day. It was the high school’s small literary magazine, a slender bimonthly publication put out by Zachary High’s English and Journalism students and advisored by Matt Hemphill, the head of the English Department. At 25¢ per copy, it was sold all over town, from the Bi-Rite Drugs to the book department of Chaney’s Department Store. It sold well. It also mildly surprised Strowe for its quality and adultness.

Carl Dunlap now presented Strowe with the current number of The Soundings. He had it folded open to a middle page, a red circle drawn around a four line poem on the lefthand side.

Sheriff Strowe handed the volume back. “Julie Knight’s kid sister,” he said to Dunlap.

“Stalking a killer’s conscience and trying to smoke him out into the open,” said Dunlap. “She called me from the high school this morning.”

“Don’t tell me, let me guess. She wants you to print the poem in the Herald-Talisman. On the front page, in a black-bordered box.”

“Nothing so melodramatic. But she does want it printed on the editorial page in tomorrow evening’s edition.”

“What did you tell her?”

“That I’d think about it. I have a hunch there will be more poems, Ev. And if she knows something about her sister’s death, and her sister’s murderer...”

“...she’s setting herself up to be murdered as well,” Ev Strowe finished. “Which means I’d better drop out to the Knight place after school lets out and have a talk with Hope Knight.”

The Knight dairy farm was a family operation, though Strowe suspected Paul Knight at times wished he’d fathered two sons instead of two daughters. Two hired hands working three days a week helped to take up the slack, and the daughters and Paul’s wife, Betty, took up the rest.

Paul Knight had developed his 200 acres into one of the best dairy spreads in the valley. He had 165 prize Holsteins and his herd annually produced over 30,000 pounds of milk per animal, from a spotless milking parlor of thirty stalls and vacuum-operated milking machines.

Sheriff Strowe found Paul Knight in the milking parlor. He was between milkings, cleaning the aseptic tubes through which the milk ran from the parlor into stainless steel holding tanks at the end of the room. He had lost some weight and his blue eyes were ringed with sleeplessness and the continuing sadness of loss.

He smiled valiantly and gave Strowe a beefy hand. “Cleaning these things twice a day now. Been milking until eight in the evenings. I feel a little guilty about driving Betty and Hope and the part-time hands so hard. But then we’ve been hit with hard times.”

“I’d like to talk with Hope, Paul.”

“Up in her room changing. She got home from school about ten minutes ago.” He looked at Strowe significantly. “Your timing is too perfect not to want to see her for good reasons, Ev.”

Ev Strowe nodded and showed him the four-line poem in the Zachary High Soundings. Paul Knight read it carefully.

“Hope write this?”

“With a hinted promise to Carl Dunlap at the Herald-Talisman of more. She wants them published in the paper. I think she knows or suspects who killed Julie. And now she’s battering at the killer’s conscience through poetry.”

“She could make him tip his hand,” said Paul Knight.

“And she could follow her sister to an early grave,” Sheriff Strowe warned.

Paul Knight’s eyes reflected the same fearful possibility. “You better get on up to the house, Ev,” he said sternly.

If all of nature’s positive aspects of a young girl’s life had been bestowed upon Julie Knight, the imbalance reflected itself in her younger sister. There was no ignoring her excessive height, the big-bonedness, the eyes set too widely apart, which gave her face a sense of open space and a certain nonidentification.

A sophomore, she worked on the staffs of the school newspaper, yearbook and the Soundings. She’d struck her separate peace early. If, to many Zachary girls, to be a song leader or cheerleader was to realize the dreams of girlhood, then the dreams of Hope Knight had been dashed as completely as the face of a small pocket mirror dropped from fifty building stories onto concrete pavement.

As Ev Strowe headed for the house, he spotted Hope Knight emerge from the kitchen on the house’s north side. She wore blue jeans and a heavy plaid shirt and watching her loping, irregular strides, Strowe’s mind caught a flash of not a young girl coming from the house, but a young man.

“Sheriff Strowe! You come to help me and Dad milk those two parlors of cows tonight? We could sure use two extra hands to help scrub udders and teats. My fingers are so stiff I can’t even make them snap.”

“I came to talk to you about your poetry,” Sheriff Strowe said as they walked for the milking parlor. “Your new poetry.”

“Oh, you mean Over Your Shoulder. The one two weeks from now will make that one as tame as Mother Goose. It’s called Soundings Front the Grave. Ten sticks of pure dynamite.”

Sheriff Strowe halted her. He took her by the shoulders and stared into the spaced eyes, once again being struck with an illusion of maleness. “Hope, this poetry could get you killed. In fact, the instant any definite clues or hint of the identity of the killer show up in print in Soundings, he’s liable to come after you.”

Hope Knight twisted a smile and shrugged out of Sheriff Strowe’s grasp. “You don’t believe in poetic justice, Sheriff Strowe? Well, your system isn’t working any better. It’s been almost two weeks now, you know.”

“We’re doing everything we can, Hope.”

“But it’s a pretty sad situation, you must admit. You have no clues, no witnesses, no fingerprints, no murder weapon. And if it hadn’t been for that crater ledge of slag and rotted timber at Lake Loon, you wouldn’t even have a car or a corpse. I’m going to expose Julie’s murderer, put my poetry and myself on a collision course with him. I’m going to do it. Now, if there isn’t anything else, I have to clean two holding tanks before the six o’clock milking.”

“There is one other thing, Hope. For your own safety, I’m recommending to Carl Dunlap at the Herald-Talisman that he not print any of your poetry. And I intend to make the same recommendation to Matt Hemphill, your advisor.”

“You do that, Sheriff Strowe,” came the deadly voice, “and I’ll run you through so many courtrooms you’ll begin to feel like re-processed sausage no one can make come out right. And in case you think I’m sellin’ wolf tickets, Sheriff, let me remind you that I’m very well-versed on this state’s laws on libel and censorship. My holding tanks aren’t cleaning themselves, Sheriff Strowe. Please excuse my rudeness, but Dad has a funny idea about an hour’s work for an hour’s pay.”

Hope Knight’s first poem left all of Zachary aghast and edgy. By morning, not a single one of the 3,000 copies could be found for sale anywhere. Leaving Sheriff Strowe to wonder whether Julie Knight’s killer had his.

“The town isn’t going to sit still two weeks for the next issue of Soundings,” Carl Dunlap told Strowe over the phone that same day, “so I’m running Soundings From the Grave on the editorial page of tomorrow evening’s Herald-Talisman, with a press run of 10,000. And those will be whisked out of our hands before the ink is dry. I can’t help it, Ev. The town wants it, and I serve the town. You don’t bite the hand that feeds you — or kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

But there would be killing, Strowe felt. He wasn’t sure he and his men could prevent it.

The following evening, as promised by Carl Dunlap, Hope Knight’s second poem, Soundings From the Grave, appeared on the editorial page of the Herald-Talisman.

He ran it without any commentary of his own, leaving his readers as sole judges.

“Yeah, it’s stout stuff all right,” agreed Lonnie Davenport over a coke with Sheriff Strowe in the Tigers’ Den the next afternoon. “I’d put old Hope’s pen up against any sword in the land, any day of the week.”

“I particularly like the reminder to the killer about those basketball shoes,” Sheriff Strowe said to Davenport. “I’m curious. Did yours ever turn up?”

“A smart apple like that isn’t suddenly going to turn unclever and return the shoes to my car, especially when it is also generally agreed I didn’t kill Julie. He’ll pin Julie’s murder on somebody else who’s a size 10½, not me.”

It was puzzling about the basketball shoes. Of what importance could they possibly have been in this act of brutal murder?

On the next Friday the third poem appeared in the Herald-Talisman. It was chronologically titled:

“Very rambling and disconnected,” said Carl Dunlap to Ev Strowe, “a kind of free association babbled under some sort of influence or trance. Two quarters of college psychology is doing the talking now, Ev. I want you to understand that. But the poetry is strange, very strange.”

“You can’t be seriously thinking of printing any more of it, then. Hope Knight is shooting in the dark now and her sister’s killer knows it.”

Hope Knight’s poetry was still selling papers for Dunlap, but Strowe knew when a dying horse was being whipped. And Carl Dunlap had more honest journalist in his blood than tabloid pitchman.

“I’ll consider them on merit alone from here on out,” he told Sheriff Strowe. “The Soundings is due out again tomorrow. Perhaps Hope is building up courage to present some real clues in print. And perhaps tomorrow is the day.”

If there were clues in the short, six-line poem, they were exposed as bluntly as the force which had killed Julie Knight from first to last line.

Strowe didn’t believe a word of it. Without proof, Hope Knight’s accusation amounted to nothing. Only Sheriff Strowe seemed to sense other clues.

The next afternoon, while Hope Knight was in class, he made another trip out to the Knight farm.

“You can’t really expect to learn anything of Julie’s murder in Hope’s room,” said her incredulous father, as he left off studying a catalog listing the best bulls for sale in the county. “If Hope found out her room has been invaded without her permission...”

“You know it wouldn’t take me an hour to get a warrant,” Strowe told Paul Knight.

“Hope will be home in an hour,” Knight warned him.

“I’ll be finished and gone long before that, Paul.”

Paul Knight closed the catalog and pushed back from his desk. “I’ll take you upstairs,” he said.

To confirm the portraits of opposites Sheriff Strowe already had in his mind, he asked Paul Knight to first show him Julie’s room. Since her death, nothing in it had been changed or moved, Paul Knight told him.

Julie’s room was dominated by the lively orange and black of Zachary High. Pom-poms, wall pennants, snapshots, pep tags, dance programs. It was a room oddly still alive with her and Strowe couldn’t keep himself from the eerie sensation that at any moment, Julie Knight would come bounding in the door, put a Three Dog Night record on her phonograph, and then flop down on her bed to do homework or to make her daily brace of afterschool telephone calls.

There was really no describing the opposite effect Hope Knight’s room had on him.

So gray and unremarkable was it, Strowe might as well have been standing in the middle of a rented room in a two-floor hotel. Except for books, five shelves of them, Hope Knight had no special love of objects and artifacts. On a bare, pink wall above her bed hung a bulletin board and on another wall, a calendar.

It was in the neatly organized closet of clothes and shoes that Sheriff Strowe found the shoebox of letters. And contrary to anything he would have suspected, several of them appeared to have been written to Hope Knight from Lonnie Davenport. Their color was decidedly purple and the sexual language as explicit as the dialogue in a blue movie. The handwriting was bold, sprawlish and definitely male compared to the slanting, delicate hand of Hope Knight found by Strowe in class themes and test papers done by Hope in a previous school year.

The letters seemed genuine, all right. And yet it seemed highly unlikely that Lonnie Davenport should even know Hope Knight that well. The difference between senior and sophomore was vast, as were their special differences in Lonnie’s sports activity and Hope’s literary passivity. And further, it seemed improbable that an affair of this kind in a town as small and circumspect as Zachary would totally escape the eyes of everyone. Sheriff Strowe wished then that he had a sample of Lonnie Davenport’s handwriting.

He glanced again at the cork bulletin board, identical to the one in Julie Knight’s room, except for its sad lack of personal mementoes. A few small snapshots of the Zachary High newspaper and annual staffs. Two of what appeared to be the assembled members of the drama club, one staged against the backdrop of a rustic cabin, the other a street scene.

Across the top of the first photo were scribbled the words, “Drama Club production Huckleberry Finn, Fall 1972. Hope Knight as most two-faced, used-car-dealing Duke as ever trod the boards.” The second photograph’s caption read, “Spring Drama Club production of Othello. Hope Knight plays First Senator. ‘Adieu, brave Moor. Use Desdemona well’. She overcomes this and other innocuous lines with strikingly dignified senatorial stage presence.”

The photographs only temporarily deflected the Sheriff’s main preoccupation: a sample of Lonnie Davenport’s handwriting. He knew where that sample might be found.

Leaving Hope Knight’s room, he returned to Julie’s and attacked the contents of the drawers of her writing desk. In a lower right-hand compartment he found a bundle of personal letters, bound with blue yam; letters, notes and holiday cards from Lonnie Davenport. The manner in which they had been signed by Lonnie Davenport was unvaried and so he selected one randomly for handwriting and took it with him back to Hope’s room.

Even a cursory inspection revealed Hope’s letters to be forgeries, all of them, signed ‘Lon’, a nickname he apparently used only in Hope Knight’s fantasies.

Replacing the box of letters in the darkened corner of Hope Knight’s closet, a large cardboard box now made its shadowy presence known. Strowe stretched into the closet’s far recesses, hooked a finger onto a corner of it and pulled it out into the light.

It contained old clothing. Not the discarded skirts and sweaters and out-of-style blouses a whimish teenaged girl usually discarded.

The box held male clothing: two button-down dress shirts, some neckties, a pair of flare jeans and two pair of doubleknit slacks, even jockey-briefs and T-shirts. Rummaging deeper, Strowe’s fingers struck wool with a familiar feel. And two bulky objects, the canvas quality of which also felt familiar.

He knew their identity even before he resurrected them into better light. The objects were Lonnie Davenport’s basketball warm-up sweat shirt and warmup pants and his size-10½ basketball shoes.

Explaining to Paul Knight about a sensitive, confused daughter’s transvestism was, for Sheriff Strowe, a hairsbreadth easier than telling him she was a murderess.

More strictly, Strowe felt sure a psychiatrist would find not a murderess but a murderer. Hope Knight’s dream of ever having Lonnie Davenport as her genuine lover had already slipped beyond reach. But the next best thing was well within her reach; she could, by wearing street clothing stolen from Lonnie Davenport in the privacy of her own room, capture some vague sense of his closeness.

Had she not been the Duke in the Drama Club’s production of Huckleberry Finn?

And a very stately, very masculine Venetian senator in their Othello?

For Hope Knight, it was a natural act and inclination to slip into another person’s skin by slipping into his clothing. To wear his clothes, to feel them touching her body, transported her completely.

The thought of murder had risen in her brain, Strowe thought. Playing the role of Lonnie and then alternately playing herself as his lover was more frustrating than fulfilling. Hatred took the place of love. But which one to injure? Not Lonnie Davenport, certainly. She loved him. Then toward whom should her rage be directed?

Toward her sister, of course. She already knew she had the imbalanced ability to become Lonnie Davenport anytime she wished. It was simply another plane of play-acting.

“Good Lord,” said Paul Knight, startling Strowe out of his revery. “What’s all that?”

“Lonnie Davenport’s clothing,” Sheriff Strowe replied simply. “And I think you know what it means. Hope must have lured Julie to the lake and then...” The unfinished image was clear to both men.

With her height and gangliness, Hope Knight would even have resembled Lonnie Davenport a little when she came down Cottage Grove Road where Julie’s car was parked, with Julie waiting impatiently behind the wheel or standing somewhere nearby.

The darkness, the lateness of the hour, her anticipation to see her boy friend; all these factors would have temporarily clouded Julie’s perception of things until it was too late to defend herself or shake her younger sister from her terrible trance.

“But her poetry,” said a visibly shaken Paul Knight. “And the Herald-Talisman. Wasn’t she making every honest attempt to expose Julie’s murderer?”

“Of course,” said Strowe. “To eventually expose herself. Poem by poem, she was slowly pulling herself back into the horrible reality of it all. It would have taken time for her to move from the voice of her sister speaking from her grave, to the voice of Lonnie Davenport, and finally to herself. But a total transformation would have come to pass.”

Paul Knight sighed with incredible sadness.

Out beyond the living room window, past green rolling lawns, a yellow and black school bus pulled to a halt at the Knight front gate. A young girl stepped from it and began the long walk up to the house.

“I hope the matter is resolved long before any public trial,” said Sheriff Strowe. “And I’m sure it will be. No one wants Hope to endure any more embarrassment and pain. Her young life has been a stifling nightmare of it. She deserves a long rest from it.”

And then Hope Knight was standing in the open doorway, smiling valiantly, if a little in terror at noticing Sheriff Strowe’s unexpected presence. “How many milkings this afternoon, Dad? The thirty in the east pasture? Hey! do I smell apple pie and fresh cheese?”

“The milking can wait for later, Hope,” said Paul Knight’s breaking voice as he tried to find his daughter’s wide-set eyes, already glistening with moisture. “Sheriff Strowe wants to have a little talk with you. About the contents of the box there on the sofa, and other matters.”

Hope Knight dropped to her knees then. Her sobbing brought her mother out from the kitchen. “God, it’s like standing in a room and watching yourself being painted into a corner,” said Hope. “Backing up, backing up and waiting for your shoes to get painted. You can hardly stand the waiting. But you know it’s going to come. All over your very best new pair of shoes.”

“How about talking in the kitchen, Hope?” her father suggested. “Over warm apple pie and cheese?”

But Hope Knight had already turned and raced out of the front door.

Ev Strowe let her go. When he went out into the massive Knight front yard, she was a distant figure sitting cross-legged with her back turned to the house in symbolic shame.

Hope Knight had not gone anywhere, Sheriff Strowe thought. She had taken her first small step back from somewhere.