The Missing Chapter

“That’s a fool question, a fool question,” she snapped, her face still expressionless. “Of course not. As I just got done telling you, if you were bothering to listen, Charles hadn’t lived in these parts for years. If someone did kill him, and I can’t imagine why anyone would want to, the answer must be in your New York, where people murder each other every day for no good reason and don’t give a second thought about it. Now I’ve got work to do,” she huffed, taking a step back. The door was shut firmly. So much for Mercer’s vaunted Hoosier hospitality.

As I went to the car, I looked over my shoulder. The white face of the younger woman peered out behind lace curtains at a first-floor window. It disappeared when I smiled and nodded my good-bye. I drove back along the gravel road after consulting the map again. Charles Childress’s other aunt, who, I had learned from Barbara, also was a widow, lived another mile farther out of town. Her name was Louise Wingfield, and like Melva Meeker, she was a sister of Childress’s mother.

The Wingfield farm was in far better shape than the Meekers’. The two-story brick-and-white-frame house, which hunkered on a knoll several feet above the main road, boasted a front porch that ran the full width of the house. The yard was green and neat, with tulips and other flowers I couldn’t identify lining the base of the porch and two shade trees flaunting their new leaves. And the barn, unlike most of its neighbors, wore paint that looked like it would last through several more Midwestern winters.

I climbed the steps and was eight feet from the front door when it swung open and a tall, elegant-looking, gray-haired woman in a white, open-collared man’s shirt, blue jeans, and brown cowboy boots tilted her head at me. She was not smiling.

“Mr. Goodwin — stop right there.” The voice made it clear that there was no room for discussion. Her index finger was aimed at my navel. “Melva just called. She told me you had been there — and the reason why you were there. Hear me now — I have nothing, nothing at all, to say to you. If you do not leave my property immediately, I will call the sheriff, who is a personal friend, and has been for more than twenty years.”

“Mrs. Wingfield, I—”

“Enough! I told you to git, and I mean it.” With that, another Indiana door was slammed on me. What would the Mercer Chamber of Commerce say about this treatment of a visitor?

I took the motel clerk’s advice and was glad that I did. The fare at Bill’s Old-Fashioned Steak House — or at least the prime rib I ordered for dinner — was more than tolerable, it was first-rate, and at prices that New Yorkers haven’t seen for at least twenty years. While I feasted in a booth in one corner of the dimly lit, half-filled dining room, I read Gina Marks’s two-year-old feature story on Charles Childress and also the Mercury’s obituary on him. Barbara Adamson had photocopied both for me before I left the newspaper offices. Neither piece told me anything important that I hadn’t already known, although the Marks feature quoted Childress as saying that “I have never — not for one minute — lost sight of my roots in Mercer. The experiences I had growing up in this area affect and color every thought that I have, every word that I write. Gilmartin County imbued me with the values I continue to live by, even though my home today is as far removed from these green hills and quiet roads as one could conceive.”

I don’t doubt that Gina Marks set down the words just as Childress said them. Whether she did it with a straight face is another matter.

I got back to The Travelers’ Haven a few minutes before nine and peeled off my suitcoat and necktie. What had I accomplished today? I asked the face that stared back at me in the bathroom mirror. Damn near nothing, that’s what. I’d flown across parts of five states and driven close to a hundred miles through the Indiana countryside for the privilege of having two widows tell me to mind my own business and slam doors in my face. The local newspaper editor, although cordial and engaging, obviously thought I was on a fool’s errand, and his star reporter pegged me as a scandalmonger from Gomorrah on the Hudson.

I sat on the side of the bed, rereading both the feature story on Childress and the obituary, trying to find something — anything — that would justify this trip. But I didn’t, and I threw down the photocopies in disgust, wishing I had a scotch and soda.

What I got instead was a soft tapping at the door. I was on my feet in an instant, turning off the nightstand lamp, the only light on in the room, then moving to the door in three noiseless strides. I had no gun — the airlines frown on passengers who carry pieces — so I braced the door with one foot as I eased it open a few inches.