The Summer House

Chapter 15

Even with his rental car’s air-conditioning, Special Agent Manuel Sanchez has sweated through his suit coat, shirt, and trousers, and his miserable day out in rural Georgia is not even close to being over. Following the tour of The Summer House — now forever to be known in their official paperwork as the murder house — Major Cook and Special Agent York headed off to Hunter Army Airfield. Lieutenant Huang and Captain Pierce were sent to the nearby town of Ralston to interview the four jailed Rangers.

Cook said to Sanchez, “The sheriff said a woman witness was out walking her dog the night of the killings. That means she’s around here. Go find her and talk to her.”

But as Sanchez quickly learned, around here is a pretty wide swath of mostly empty land.

The nearest two dirt roads off the main road led to nothing but dead-end turnarounds, sprinkled with empty beer cans, broken cardboard boxes, and plenty of shot-up targets and broken bottles.

The third dirt lane led to an empty house.

The fourth dirt driveway ended at a worn and sagging gray house, where a heavyset, tattooed, bearded man wearing cut-off jean shorts and rubber boots up to his knees — and no shirt — came out onto the leaning porch with an old couch taking up most of it, eyed Sanchez as he identified himself, and then said, “You’re not one of those Jehovah’s Witness types, are you?”

“No, sir,” he said. “Like I said, I’m a special agent in the US Army, conducting an investigation.”

“About what?”

“The people who were murdered up the road, at the place called The Summer House.”

The man scratched at his hairy belly and said, “Don’t know nothing about that. But if you do see any Witnesses in your travels, tell ’em not to bother knockin’ on my door. My soul ain’t worth saving.”

Now he’s at a third house, going down a short but wide dirt driveway that has a campaign sign at its entrance — REELECT SHERIFF WILLIAMS — and when he gets out of the silver Ford sedan, he hears a dog barking from inside the single-story ranch-style home, with yellow clapboards, black shutters, and peeling paint.

A good sign.

He walks up to the wide front porch, taking everything in. There’s a parked Volkswagen Beetle — a new model, though rusted and battered some — and a sagging clothesline, and an old washer-dryer combo dumped to the side. He takes a step up onto the porch, the dog barking even louder, and knocks on the door. The porch has two chairs whose upholstery is torn, letting some stuffing dangle out. There’s a water bowl on the wooden planks, and the door leading into the house has deep gouges, like a dog is used to scratching it, begging to come inside.

He knocks twice more before a woman cautiously opens the door. “Yes?” she asks.

The woman is in her late forties or early fifties, face worn and tired, her gray-black hair pulled back in a ponytail. She’s wearing a floral housecoat that she’s grasping around her neck, and she’s keeping the screen door closed.

“Ma’am, sorry to bother you, but I’m Special Agent Manuel Sanchez of the US Army.”

Her tired eyes widen. “The Army? For real?”

“Yes, ma’am,” he says. “Here’s my badge and identification.”

He holds his leather wallet up to the screen, and the woman gives it a quick glance and says in a voice that’s almost a hoarse whisper, “What’s the Army doing around here?”

“I’m part of a team investigating the murders of seven civilians who lived up the road, at The Summer House,” he says. “Four Army personnel have been arrested.”

The woman looks uneasy, and Sanchez says, “I’ve talked to Sheriff Williams about her investigation. She said a woman walking her dog saw a Ford pickup truck leave the house right after the shootings. It was you, correct?”

He waits.

Behind the woman the barking dog is louder and louder.

Sanchez wonders if he should press her when she says, “That’s right.”

Finally, he thinks, and he opens the screen door and gently presses himself into the house. “I promise, this will only take a few minutes.”

Inside the house, a large dog that looks to be a brown mongrel with large floppy ears leaps up and nearly knocks Sanchez on his ass. He backpedals as the woman says, “Toby, Toby, you knock that off, right now!’

A large smear of dog drool hits Sanchez’s pants leg as the dog barrels past him and bursts through the open front doors, howling and barking in apparent joy after breaking free.

She closes both doors and says, “That Toby. He sure has a spirit ’bout him. When he wants to run, he runs. When he don’t want to come in, he don’t come in.”

Sanchez quickly takes in the house. Before him and to the left is a kitchen area, and to the right is a small living room. Behind him is a small coatrack with a light jacket, a raincoat, and an umbrella hanging from pegs. There’s another water bowl and a half filled dog bowl below the coatrack.

He’s still looking around when he says, “Ma’am, I’m sorry, I don’t recall your name.”

“Oh,” she says. “Wendy. Wendy Gabriel. Would you like to sit down?”

The interior of the house is relatively cool after spending the last couple of hours traipsing outside in the hot Georgia sun, but Sanchez isn’t sure how to reply. The interior of the house is so crowded and cluttered that he can’t believe it’s still standing. There are piles of newspapers, magazines, stuffed cardboard boxes, folded-up clothes, more newspapers, and more magazines, and mail... hundreds of pieces, it looks like. A hollowed-out area in the living room reveals a worn couch and a television set, and a nightstand piled with bags of dog treats and candy.

A hoarder, he thinks, but he gives the woman credit: she’s a neat hoarder. Everything seems to be in its place, though there are lots of places.

“This way,” she says, and they go into the kitchen, where there’s a lonely uncluttered chair. Wendy picks up thick piles of Newsweek magazines — the top one has a photo of Ronald Reagan on the cover — and he sits down.

“Thank you, ma’am. I promise I won’t stay long.”

She sits down, too, hand still holding the housecoat closed. “Those killings... horrible, simply horrible. My God. Is the Army going to arrest them, too?”

“The crimes were committed off post, ma’am, so it’s under civilian police authority,” he says, taking out a small notebook and pencil. “But the Army still wants to know what happened, the how and the why.”

She says, “But how come you’re not in uniform?”

Which is approximately the nine hundredth time Sanchez has been asked this, and he says, “I’m with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division. We usually wear civilian clothes because it helps us blend in while we’re doing our job. Now, if I may...”

He flips open to a blank page in the notebook and says, “Sheriff Williams told me that you witnessed a Ford F-150 pickup truck leaving the residence sometime Wednesday night. Do you recall what time it was?”

She says, “Oh, yes, without a doubt. A bit after 8:00 p.m., right after Jeopardy! was over. I was taking Toby for a walk.”

“Along the main road, then, right?”

“That’s right,” she says.

“And what did you see?”

She shifts in her chair. “We were heading home. We were on the side of the road where the dirt path leads into that place where the college kids were stayin’. The one everyone calls The Summer House. Is it true, they was all shot? And a baby girl, too?”

He nods. “True, I’m sorry to say. What did you hear? Or see?”

Wendy wipes at her eyes. “So sad. So very, very sad... Well, it wasn’t sad then, it was just strange, that’s all. I was with Toby, and I heard a loud bang, like a truck was backfiring. Then a bit of gunfire... not loud, but like... well, like they were shooting from the bottom of a well. Now, I know what regular shooting sounds like, but maybe it sounded different because it was inside, not outside? You know what I mean?”

“That I do,” he says. “And did you hear anything else?”

“Well, before the shooting happened, a helicopter flew over. And after the shooting stopped, we walked another minute or two, and just by that dirt road, this Ford pickup is driving real fast and nearly runs me and Toby down. They stopped for just a second, and then they sped off, went north.”

“Did you see who was driving?”

“This real angry-looking black man, and there was another fella sitting next to him. They both looked at me, and, Christ, I was scared. I don’t know why, but the way they looked at me, they frightened me some.”

“Had you ever seen those men before?”

“Nope.”

Sanchez is taking notes, mind dancing along, knowing that when this case comes to trial, she’s going to be one hell of a witness for the county.

“Ma’am, Sheriff Williams says you remembered the license plate of the truck. Is that right?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, excuse me for saying this, but did you write it down?”

“Nope.”

“Had you seen the truck before in the area?”

“Nope.”

“Then...”

The first smile of his visit appears. “You’re asking me how I remembered what I saw? Easy. I like doing them puzzle books, you know, fill in the blanks and the crossword puzzles? Letters and numbers, they stick with me. I remembered the first three letters and the first number... afraid I didn’t catch the rest.”

“And what was that?”

“The letters T-B-B, followed by the numeral 3. The sheriff later told me, when she thanked me for being a witness and picking those photos of those two fellas, she said she was able to trace down the letters and number and match it to that angry black guy driving the truck.”

“But the letters and the numeral 3? Why did you remember that?”

“Easy,” she says. “T for Toby. And B-B because I call him Baby all the time. And the number 3 — that’s how old he is. Toby Baby 3.”

Sanchez writes that down, as Toby Baby remains outside, howling and running.

“Ma’am, when did you learn about the murders?”

“When Deputy Coulson, when he came by the next day, asking me if I saw anything in the area the night before. I told him and gave him the license plate letters and number, and a few hours later, I was at the county building, talking to the sheriff.”

There you go, Sanchez thinks, and he says, “Ma’am, is there anything else you can tell me? Anything else at all?”

She shakes her head, the smile fading, still looking tired and discarded. “No, I can’t think of anything.”

Sanchez takes out his business card, passes it over. “Ma’am, thanks so much for your help. I greatly appreciate it. This card has the number for my cell phone and my office. You think of anything, anything at all, call me at any time.”

He gets up, and the woman looks at both sides of the card and says, “Is there a reward?”

Sanchez says, “If I find out there’s one, you’ll be the first to know.”

He gives the place one good last glance, from the piles of dirty dishes in the sink to the endless piles of mail and other junk to the two coats and umbrella hanging from the coatrack to the water bowl and bowl of food. There are also three doggie chew toys, neatly lined up. Two covered plastic bins neatly filled with dry dog food. A shelf that holds a grooming brush and small boxes of dog vitamins and pills.

Wendy opens the door, leading the way out, and yells, “Toby! Toby Baby! Come back home now! You come!”

He goes to his car, gives the woman a pleasant wave, gets into the car, and starts up the engine, letting the cold air just wash over him.

Sanchez makes a turn and then heads away from the woman’s home, wondering why Wendy Gabriel lied to him.