Every Dead Thing

He glanced at Deputy Martin and the deputy stared right back at him. “Go on, Walt. There’s some things I know myself. You won’t say anything I haven’t thought or guessed.”

Tyler still looked uneasy but nodded once, more to himself than to us, and went on. “Deputy Earl Lee, he knew the boy wasn’t involved. He was with him the night Bobby Joiner was taken. Other nights too.”

I looked at Alvin Martin, who stared at the floor nodding slowly. “How did you know?” I asked.

“I saw ‘em,” he said simply. “Their cars were parked out of town, under some trees, on the night Bobby Joiner was taken. I used to walk the fields sometimes, to get away from here, though it was dangerous given all that was happenin’. I saw the cars parked and crept up and saw them. The Modine boy was…down…on the sheriff and then they got in the back and the sheriff took him.”

“And you saw them together after that?”

“Same place, couple of times.”

“And the sheriff let them hang the boy?”

“He wasn’t going to say nothin’,” Tyler spat, “case someone found out about him. And he watched them hang that boy.”

“And his sister? What about Adelaide Modine?”

“They searched for her too, searched the house and then the fields, but she was gone. Then someone saw a fire in the shell of an old house on the East Road about ten miles from town and pretty soon the whole place was ablaze. Thomas Becker, he used to store old paint and inflammables there, away from the children. And when the fire was out, they found a body, badly burned, and they said it was Adelaide Modine.”

“How did they identify her?”

Martin answered. “There was a bag near the body, with the remains of a lot of money, some personal papers, bank account details mostly. Jewelry she was known to have was found on the body, a gold and diamond bracelet she always wore. It was her mother’s, they said. Dental records matched too. Old Doc Hyams produced her chart; he shared a surgery with the dentist, but the dentist was out of town that week.

“Seems she had holed up, maybe waiting for her brother or someone else to come to her, and fell asleep with a cigarette in her hand. She’d been drinking, they said, maybe to try to keep warm. The whole place went up. Her car was found nearby, with a bag of clothes in the trunk.”

“Do you remember anything about Adelaide Modine, Mr. Tyler? Anything that might explain…”

“Explain what?” he interrupted. “Explain why she did it? Explain why someone helped her to do what she did? I can’t explain those things, not even to myself. She had somethin’, sure enough, somethin’ strong inside her, but it was a dark thing, a vicious thing. I’ll tell you somethin’, Mr. Parker: Adelaide Modine was as close to pure evil as I’ve met on this earth, and I’ve seen brothers hanged from trees and burned while they were hangin’. Adelaide Modine was worse than the people who did the hangin’ because, try as I might, I can’t see any reason for the things she did. They’re beyond explainin’, ’less you believe in the Devil and Hell. That’s the only way I can explain her. She was a thing out of Hell.”

I stayed silent for a while, trying to sort and balance what I had been told. Walt Tyler watched while these thoughts went through my head and I think he knew what I was thinking. I couldn’t blame him for not telling what he knew of the sheriff and the Modine boy. An allegation like that could get a man killed and it didn’t provide conclusive proof that the Modine boy wasn’t directly involved in the killings, although if Tyler ’s character assessment was right, then William Modine was an unlikely child killer. But the knowledge that someone involved in the death of his child might have eluded capture must have tortured Tyler all these years.

One part of the story still remained.

“They found the children the next day, just as the search had begun,” concluded Tyler. “A boy out hunting took shelter in an abandoned house on the Modine estate and his dog started scraping at the cellar door. It was built into the floor, like a trapdoor. The boy shot the lock off and the dog went down and he followed. Then he ran home and called the police.

“There were four bodies down there, my little girl and the three others. They…” He stopped and his face creased but he did not cry.

“You don’t have to go on,” I said softly.

“No, you gotta know,” he said. Then louder, like the cry of a wounded animal: “You’ve gotta know what they did, what they did to those children, to my child. My little girl, all her fingers were broken, crushed, and the bones pulled away from the sockets.” He was crying openly now, his large hands open before him like a supplicant before God. “How could they do those things, to children? How?” And then he seemed to retreat into himself and I thought I saw the woman’s face at the window, and her fingertips brushing the pane.

We sat with him for a while and then stood up to leave. “Mr. Tyler,” I said gently, “just one more thing: where is the house where the children were found?”

“About three, four miles up the road from here. The old Modine estate starts there. There’s a stone cross at the start of the track leading up to it. The house is pretty much gone now. There’s just a few walls, part of a roof. State wanted to knock it down but some of us protested. We wanted to remind them of what had happened here, so the Dane house still stands.”

We left him then, but as I was going down the porch steps I heard his voice behind me.

“Mr. Parker.” The voice was strong again and there was no quaver in it, although there was the lingering sound of grief in its tones. I turned to look at him. “Mr. Parker, this is a dead town. The ghosts of dead children haunt it. You find the Demeter girl, you tell her to go back where she came from. There’s only grief and misery for her here. You tell her that, now. You tell her that when you find her, y’hear?”

At the margins of his cluttered garden the whispering grew in the trees and it seemed that just beyond the line of vision, where the darkness became almost too dark to penetrate, there was movement. Figures drifted back and forth, skipping just outside the light from the house, and there was childish laughter in the air.

And then there were only the limbs of evergreens fa

24

ON THE Casuarina Coast of Indonesian New Guinea lives a tribe called the Asmat. They are twenty thousand strong and the terror of every other tribe near them. In their language Asmat means “the people, the human beings,” and if they define themselves as the only humans, then all others are relegated to the status of nonhuman, with all that that entails. The Asmat have a word for these others: they call them manowe. It means “the edible ones.”

Hyams had no answers that would have indicated why Adelaide Modine behaved as she did, and neither did Walt Tyler. Maybe she, and others like her, had something in common with the Asmat. Maybe they, too, saw others as less than human so that their suffering ceased to matter, was below notice apart from the pleasure it gave.

I recalled a conversation with Woolrich, after the meeting with Tante Marie Aguillard. Back in New Orleans, we walked in silence down Royal Street, past Madame Lelaurie’s old mansion, where slaves were once chained and tortured in the attic until some firefighters found them and a mob ran Madame Lelaurie out of town. We ended up at Tee Eva’s on Magazine, where Woolrich ordered sweet potato pie and a Jax beer. He ran his thumb down the side of the bottle, clearing a path through the moisture, and then rubbed his damp thumb along his upper lip.

“I read a Bureau report last week,” he began. “I guess it was a ‘state of the nation’ address on serial killers, on where we stand, where we’re goin’.”