I pretended indifference. “Go ahead and ask her, then,” I said.
Luke gave me a penetrating look, a gaze that always went right through me. He asked, “You’re afraid of her, aren’t you?”
I bristled. “Afraid? Why would I be afraid?”
Luke looked at me almost tenderly, as if teaching something to a child. I have never forgotten what he said. “We’re always afraid of the girl we’re in love with, Ben.”
It was a statement that astonished me. For the idea of being in love was so distant from anything I had previously thought about that I found myself entirely unable to respond. I knew that when I took Kelli home in the afternoons, I wanted to sit in the car and talk to her until dawn broke, and that when I made some small mistake in her presence, I felt a keen sense of exposure and embarrassment, as if I’d shrunk a bit in her eyes. I also knew that when I heard her body rustle beneath her skirt, or felt her shoulder touch mine as we leaned over the small table in the basement office, at those moments I felt a piercing tension overwhelm me, as if my body had suddenly received a slight electric shock. More than anything, I knew that everyone else paled before her, that whatever interest I had previously had in other girls had entirely withered. But was that love? Even if from the beginning I had known that what I felt for Kelli Troy was love, it still would have seemed inconceivable to me that at such an early age one might feel the grip of so powerful an emotion and be marked forever by the imprint that it made.
Luke said nothing more about Kelli that afternoon, and now when he mentions her, it is no longer within a context of teenage love. Other things haunt him, questions that will not let him go, and which he continually approaches, sometimes from one angle, sometimes from another, but always closing in on the many things that still trouble and elude him when he thinks of Kelli Troy.
There are times when he will suddenly blurt out a question, as if it had just occurred to him, but which I know has come only after a lengthy rumination, rising like a body long submerged.
“Why didn’t Kelli call you that day, Ben?”
It is a bright summer day, not unlike that other bright summer day thirty years before, when he dropped Kelli off on the mountain road.
“Call me when?”
“When she needed a ride up to Breakheart Hill that afternoon. You were always giving her a ride, weren’t you?”
“Yes, I was.”
“So why didn’t she call you that day? I’ve never been able to figure that out.”
I settle my eyes on the dark spire of a distant steeple. “Maybe she did try to call me.”
“You mean, you weren’t home that afternoon?”
“No, I wasn’t.”
“Where were you?”
I cannot help but wonder if, after years of plotting, he is about to spring the trap. “Just riding around,” I tell him.
He watches me doubtfully. “Why?”
I shrug. “I guess I had things on my mind.”
“What things?”
I can feel him drawing me closer to that moment. There is a whiff of violets in the air. I escape into a lie. “Nothing particular. The play, maybe.”
Although my answer does not seem to satisfy him, he has no way to contradict it. He has nothing but his long suspicion, nothing but his memory of my face as he stood before me in his bloody trousers, trying desperately to describe what he’d seen on Breakheart Hill. And yet, through all the years, it has been enough to drive him forward, one question at a time.
“Did you know she was going up there that day?” he asks.
I shake my head.
For a moment, he looks at me evenly, then turns away. “She was upset about something. But she didn’t tell me what it was.” He falls silent for a moment, then adds, “Why would she have wanted to go up there in the first place?”
“She told you that, didn’t she?”
“Just that she needed to think. That’s all she said.”
“Maybe she did.”
“But what could have been so important for her to think about that afternoon?”
“Maybe she wanted to study her lines. The play was set to open the next night.”
“If that were why, she’d have brought a copy of the play with her,” Luke insists. He looks at me significantly. “Sheriff Stone had another idea. He thought she was planning to meet somebody up there.”
“Why did he think that?”
“Because she hadn’t made any arrangements for somebody to pick her up later,” Luke answers. “That always bothered Sheriff Stone. He asked me if she’d mentioned anything about my coming back for her. I told him that I’d offered to come back for her, but that she had told me not to. And you know what Sheriff Stone said? He said, ‘There’s something wrong. There’s something wrong with all this.’ ”
I say nothing.
Luke shakes his head slowly. “Why would Kelli not have wanted me to come back for her, Ben?” he asks softly.
“Well, maybe she intended to walk back,” I answer lightly, making nothing of the question.
“I don’t think so,” Luke says. “Hell, it’s over two miles back down to Choctaw. She wouldn’t have been planning to walk that far, would she?”
“Probably not,” I admit. “But back then there was that little store right near where you let her out. Grierson’s, remember?”
“What about it?”
“Well, she might have been planning to call somebody from there.”
“To pick her up, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“No way, Ben. It was a Sunday. That store was closed.”
“How do you know?”
“Because that’s where he was. That’s where I saw him. Remember?”
I instantly recall the moment when I’d first heard Luke describe what he’d seen that afternoon. The courtroom had been jammed with spectators, my father and I crammed in with all the others. Not far away, I could see Miss Carver sitting stonily on the front bench, her eyes trained on Luke as he walked to the witness box.
A hush had come over the room as Mr. Bailey had begun to question him.
