‘I’ve shared with Mr. Parker only a little of what you’ve told me,’ said Aimee. ‘I felt that it was better if he heard the rest of it directly from you.’
Haight swallowed hard. The office was warm, and there was a sheen of sweat on his face. He seemed about to remove his jacket, but as he shifted it from his shoulders he noticed the sweat patches beneath his arms and instead shrugged it back on. He did not want to feel more vulnerable than he already did, so he resisted the lapse into informality, even at the cost of his own comfort.
There was a mini-fridge beside a filing cabinet in the office. Aimee removed two bottles of water from it and handed one to Haight. I took the second, even though I wasn’t thirsty. Haight drank deeply until he noticed that neither Aimee nor I was doing the same, and I saw in his face that he was simultaneously grateful to her for seeking to alleviate his distress and embarrassed at even this small demonstration of weakness on his part. A little of the water dribbled down his chin and he wiped it away with his left hand, frowning at himself and at us as he did so. He gave me another sideways glance. He knew that I was sizing him up, taking in every small movement.
‘Clumsy of me,’ he said.
He removed a padded manila envelope from his leather satchel. Inside the envelope was a series of photographs, probably printed from a home photo printer. There were five in total. He spread them on the desk so that all the images were visible. In each case, the subject matter was the same, even if the specific object was different in every photo.
They were all photographs of barn doors. Two were red, one green, one black, and the other was a reproduction of a black-and-white photo from a newspaper, but the door in question looked so weathered and old that it was impossible to tell if it had ever been painted any color at all. The grain reminded me of wrinkles on skin, an effect aided by two holes in the upper portion of the barn doors, and the way that the lock bar hung lopsidedly like a half smile, so that the whole was reminiscent of an ancient face. This photo Haight set slightly apart from the others, using the tips of his fingers. The sight of the image seemed to pain him more than the rest.
‘They began arriving four days ago,’ he said. ‘The red one came first, then the green. There was nothing on the third day, then another red one arrived along with the black, each in separate envelopes. That one’ – he pointed at the gray door – ‘came this morning.’
‘Mailed or hand-delivered?’ I asked.
‘Mailed. I kept the envelopes.’
‘Postmarks?’
‘Bangor and Augusta.’
‘I assume these images have some significance for you?’
Haight’s body tensed. He reached for his water and drank some more. He started speaking slowly, but only at first. His tale had its own momentum, and once he began telling of what he had done it moved beyond his control, almost like the killing he was describing.
‘In 1982, when I was fourteen years old, Lonny Midas and I took a girl named Selina Day into a barn in Drake Creek, North Dakota. She was fourteen too, a little black girl. She wore a white blouse and a red-and-black checked skirt, and her hair was styled in cornrows. We’d spotted her around, Lonny and I, and we’d talked about her some. There was a church outside town, barely bigger than a regular house, and its congregation was all colored. Lonny and I would go by there sometimes and watch them through the window. They had services during the week, and we’d hear them talking about how Jesus was their Lord and Savior, and they’d be amening and hallelujahing. Lonny said it was funny that all those coloreds believed they were going to be saved by a white man, but I didn’t think it was funny at all. My mother told me that Jesus loved everyone, and it didn’t matter what color their skin was.’
At this point in his narrative he pursed his lips primly and looked to us for approval.
But we didn’t speak, because the questions were only in his eyes, and so he resumed his tale.
‘I’d never even kissed a girl. Lonny had. He’d once gone into the woods with one of the Beale girls, and he told me later that she let him touch one of her breasts, except he didn’t call them breasts, of course. He called them “titties.”’
And there was that prim look again. Nasty old Lonny Midas, with his crude speech and his white man’s Jesus.
‘But we’d never seen a girl naked, and we were curious, and everyone said that Selina Day wore nothing under her dress. So we waited for her when she was walking home from the poor kids’ school, and we walked with her for a time, and then we took her to the barn. It wasn’t hard. We told her there was a cat in there that had given birth to kittens and we were going to take a look at them and maybe give them some food. We just asked her if she wanted to come along, like it was nothing to us if she did or not, and she thought about it, and she came. When we got to the barn she started to look worried, but we told her that it was okay, and she believed us.
‘And when she found out what we wanted she fought back, and we had to lie across her to keep her from getting up and running away. We kept touching her, and she said that she’d tell the police what we’d done, and her uncles – because she didn’t have a father, he was gone – and they and their friends would come for us and they’d cut our balls off. She started to scream, and Lonny covered her mouth with his hand. He pressed down real hard, so that her nostrils were blocked too. I told Lonny that we ought to let her go. I could see her eyes growing wide, and she was having trouble breathing, but Lonny wouldn’t take away his hand after I told him to. I tried to pull him off her but he was bigger and stronger than I was. Eventually Selina started bucking, and Lonny sat on her chest, and then she stopped moving at all, even though her eyes were still open and I could see my reflection in them.
‘I started crying, but Lonny told me to quit it, and I did. We covered her with rotten straw, and we left her there. It was an old barn on an abandoned farm. We figured it would be a while before she was found. We swore, Lonny and I, that we wouldn’t tell what we’d done, not ever, not even if the cops came for us and put us in separate rooms and interrogated us, like they did on the TV shows. If we both agreed not to speak, then they couldn’t do anything to us. We just had to stick to our story: We never saw Selina Day and we didn’t know anything about any old barn.’
All of this came out in a rush, like pus from an infected wound. It was spoken by an adult’s voice, but with the words and emphases of a child’s narration.
‘But somebody had seen us with her. He was a farmworker from out of state, an itinerant laborer. He heard that a black girl had gone missing, and he recalled the two boys he’d seen with a little black girl that day, a black girl in a red-and-black checked skirt, just like the description that the police had passed around. He went to the cops and told them what he’d seen. He had a good eye: He remembered what we looked like, what we were wearing, everything. Drake Creek wasn’t a big town, and they had us figured before he even stopped talking. They came for us, and they put us in separate rooms, just like on those shows, and a big detective told me that Lonny had put the blame on me, that it had all been my idea, that I’d tried to rape Selina Day and he’d wanted to stop me, and it was me who had suffocated her. He said that they’d have me tried as an adult, and they’d ask for the death penalty. He said I’d get the needle for what I’d done, and that I shouldn’t think it would be like going to sleep, because it wouldn’t be. I’d feel everything – the poison seeping into my veins, the pain as my organs shut down – and I wouldn’t be able to speak or cry out because the other drugs would have paralyzed me. And there would just be me in there, all alone, without my momma or my poppa. And he said that, sometimes, they deliberately screwed around with the drugs so it would hurt more, and maybe they’d do that to me to punish me for what I’d done, for trying to rape a little girl, and for killing her when she fought back.
‘But that wasn’t true. It had been Lonny’s idea all along, and he was the one who tried to take it too far, and he was the one who closed her nostrils and pressed his hand hard against her mouth so that she couldn’t breathe. I wanted to let her go, but he was scared of what she’d say, scared that he’d have his balls cut off.’
Haight had now regressed fully. His voice was higher, and he had slipped lower in his seat so that he appeared smaller. Even his suit looked too big for him. There were tears in his eyes, and he didn’t try to brush them away as they began to roll down his cheeks. He stared only inward, and I think that he had forgotten about our presence in the room, had forgotten even about the room itself and the reason he was there. Instead, he was fourteen years old, and back in a place that smelled of sweat and urine and vomit, and a big policeman with food stains on his tie was whispering to him of the pain that he was going to endure when they put the needle in.
‘I was so scared of dying, I forgot that North Dakota had abolished the death penalty in 1973.’ The ghost of a smile haunted his mouth, then fled back to the place where he kept all of his old specters. ‘So I told him what we’d done, but I wanted him to know that it wasn’t my idea. I’d gone along with it at first, but I was sorry now. I should
