“Yes, ma’am.”
She continued to watch me closely. “You were just a little boy when I saw you last,” she said.
It was then that it all came back to me, the sleek, well-dressed woman who’d spoken in a strange accent, introduced herself to my father as “Miss Troy,” then tugged a dark, curly-haired little girl down the grocery aisle.
“You were about six years old,” Miss Troy added. She glanced at Kelli. “Do you remember us going into Mr. Wade’s store?”
Kelli shook her head.
Miss Troy turned back toward me. “Well, tell your father I said hello.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She headed back to the house, leaving Kelli still standing beside the car.
Kelli leaned forward and stretched her hand toward me. “Well, thanks again for the lift.”
I reached over and felt the thrill of her hand in mine, the first cool touch of her flesh.
She drew her hand from mine almost immediately. “See you tomorrow,” she said.
I did not want her to leave. Or at least, I wanted to make some kind of impression upon her before she did.
“We’re going to make the
She had already pulled herself from the window when she tossed back, “Yes, I think so, too.”
It was the way she often spoke, with a casualness that seemed innocent and untroubled. Her first words to me had carried the same inconsequential air. But what later struck me with excruciating force was the fact that her last words had carried the same light, almost musical ring. Her voice at that final, fatal moment had been as full of trust as ever.
CHAPTER 7
WHEN I HEAR KELLI’S VOICE IN MY MEMORY, IT TAKES ON an astonishingly real presence and immediacy, as if her lips were poised at my ear. Other voices come from a great distance. My father’s, for example, and Miss Troy’s. But Kelli’s voice always sounds so clear and near at hand that when I hear it, I almost glance reflexively to the right or left, half expecting to see her face. Sometimes I hear it at night as I sit alone in the front porch swing, at other times while moving through my hospital rounds with a nurse or doctor at my side. But no matter where or when I hear it, the tone and clarity are always the same, as rich and vital as if she were still fully alive and standing beside me, a voice so physically present that at times it seems as if my memory has become her ghost.
I never see her, though, never glimpse an eerie, disembodied shape as it retreats down a darkened hallway or vanishes into a hazy wood. When she comes to me, it is down the long tunnel of the years, never as a specter floating outside my bedroom window, or a figure drifting toward me over the still waters of a dark lake. There are times when I almost wish that she did return to me in such melodramatic form, a mere phantom that I could sweep away with a quick wave of my hand.
Instead, she rises invisibly and without warning from a vast assortment of familiar things. I will notice a footprint in moist earth, a length of rope dangling from a limb, a young man trudging absently up the mountain road, and suddenly all these things will take their place within the mystery that Sheriff Stone worked so hard to solve.
He died almost fifteen years ago, an old man eaten to the bone by cancer. He hadn’t chosen me as his doctor, but when I heard that he was dying, I dropped by his hospital room to see him. He was lying on his back, fully lucid, but very weak. I said hello as I stepped up to his bed, but he didn’t answer me, and after a while I turned to leave the room. It was then I felt his hand. He had reached over and grabbed my sleeve, tugging at it as insistently as he could with the little strength left to him.
I reached down, took his hand, placed it firmly on his chest and gave it a soft, consoling pat. “Are you comfortable, Sheriff Stone?” I asked him gently.
His eyes suddenly flared up, as if, coming from me, the question had filled him with contempt. “No, I’m not,” he said in a harsh, rasping voice. “Are you?”
I started to give him a casual reply, but he’d already turned away.
Sheriff Stone was not always so abrupt, and when he first came to talk to me that day, he gave off a great sense of self-control and composure. He was a large man, round and bearish, but he carried himself with unexpected grace. Rarely armed, he generally relied on the strength of his character to get what he wanted from the people who came within his authority. “The last of his kind” was what my father called him, and I think that he was right.
He’d already been sheriff of Choctaw County for over thirty years by the time he first questioned me, and he possessed the impressive serenity of a man who knew a great many secrets but who also had the will to keep them to himself. He nodded gently, touched the brim of his hat and introduced himself. “I’m Sheriff Stone,” he said. He shifted his great weight in the doorway. “I understand that you knew Kelli Troy.”
Much time has passed since Sheriff Stone first questioned me, but on occasion, when I drive past the town cemetery, I will glance up toward the large gray stone that marks his place, feel a wave of intense heat sweep over me and realize that his grave has joined that vast collection of other things in Choctaw that can, in a sudden feverish rush, bring Kelli back to me.
And yet, even more than such wrenching physical reminders, it is my memory itself that keeps her near me, forever playing back the time that was left to her, revealing each moment in turn, her days falling from the stem of life like small white petals.
THE SHEER VIBRANCY OF THOSE DAYS STRIKES ME MOST powerfully when I think of them, how alive she was, the sparks that seemed to fly from her, particularly as she neared the end. She threw a great deal of effort into the
I am old enough now to know that fiery personalities sometimes consume themselves prematurely, and that those people who appear the most spirited when young are not necessarily the ones who later make a great mark. Life remains a card shark, after all, with many tricks to play, and when I consider that Eddie Smathers is one of Choctaw’s wealthiest and most respected citizens, that Todd Jeffries is already in his grave, that Sheila Cameron’s life is wrapped in an unrelievable grief, I am struck by how easily it can throw down an unexpected card. Perhaps Kelli, too, would have fallen into one of the many traps that cripple and misdirect us, altering our early dreams, turning passionate beginnings into modest ends. As time passed, Kelli might have proven no better at improvising her way out of the common snares of life than most of us have proven.
But that was not a possibility that Mr. Bailey wanted the jury to consider when he spoke to them for the last time. He began his summation by handing a photograph of Kelli to the foreman and telling him to pass it down the line. From my seat near the front of the courtroom, I could see that it was the one that had been taken early that spring, a school photograph that showed Kelli’s face wreathed in dark curls. “From everything we know about this young girl,” he said, “we have to conclude that Kelli Troy would have lived a good, and perhaps even a remarkable life.”
Miss Troy was sitting only a few feet from me when Mr. Bailey said that, and I remember that it was precisely at that moment that she broke down for the one and only time during the long ordeal of the trial, lowering her face into her hands, her shoulders trembling as she wept.
It is the curse of memory to dwell on possibility, to consider not only what was, but what might have been. Sometimes in the evening, when I am returning from a patient’s house, and find myself on the road that leads from Choctaw to Collier, I will see the little square lights of Kelli’s house, and suddenly I will be unable to pass by, but will edge my car onto the shoulder of the road, stop and stare for a time at the small glowing windows, the old wooden porch, the unused brick chimney. Sometimes on these occasions, I will see her as she was, rushing down
