Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss

Church Road (not that there were any signs to point the way).
    Bonnie’s grandfather Baxter Bates had been a carpenter. The family well remembered the story of how he bought his first car. It was, of course, a Model T Ford. A man drove it into the front yard and Baxter Bates stepped right up and paid cash.
    The woman Baxter married, Zealla Sowers, had been born in a log cabin right there on Hoover Road. The family was still living in the cabin when Zealla gave birth to her second child, George, who would become Bonnie’s father.
    Baxter not only believed, but would state with frequency, “An idle mind is the devil’s workshop.” He’d go off to do his carpentry in the morning and leave his five children to tend the fields. Zealla died when George was eleven years old, but that only made the Bates children work harder because it meant one less person to keep the home.
    The children would sing as they tended the crops of tobacco, sweet potatoes, corn, and even cotton. “When we worked,” one of Bonnie’s aunts would later say, “the hills echoed with the sound of music.”
    They might have sung, but they didn’t talk. At least not about anything that mattered. For as long as anyone could remember, it had been a Bates family trait not to display emotion. This was something that Baxter Bates taught his children, maybe so he wouldn’t have to hear a lot of wailing and keening as their mother slowly sickened and died of stomach cancer.
    â€œYou kept your emotions inside,” Bonnie’s aunt said. “There was no time to talk about how you felt about something, or to cry. There was just too much work to get done.”
    As a grown man, George Bates, Sr., Bonnie’s father, would pass this trait on to his five children. “It is better to be still and be thought a fool,” he would tell them, “than to speak and remove all doubt.”
    In 1941, George had married a tiny eighteen-year-old girl named Annie Erris Moose, from Stony Point, North Carolina. She wasn’t even five feet tall, but she was pretty and smart and was made of strong stuff. He had met her at a Methodist church camp. She fell in love with his blue eyes, if not his way with words.
    George Bates was a mason. With his own hands, he built the town’s Methodist church—the Center United Methodist Church—brick by brick. In Welcome, such an accomplishment brought a man lifelong renown. He sang in the church choir, and Bonnie’s mother, who came to be called Polly Bates, was the church organist for many years.
    They were good people, the Bateses; solid, reliable, respected, and liked. Bonnie was the second oldest of five children, with one older sister, Sylvia, two younger sisters, Kitty and Ramona, and a younger brother, George Jr.
    Welcome was too small to have its own high school, so Bonnie attended one in nearby Lexington, graduating in 1962. The adjective most widely used to describe her by classmates who wrote inscriptions in her yearbook was
nice
. In later years, she came to realize that she must not have made much of an impression.
    After high school, she started nurse’s training in Winston-Salem. In her first month on the hospital floor she came upon a girl she’d just graduated with, now dying of leukemia. Then there was the dying old man with the high fever whom she had to pack in ice. And the two infants, joined at the tops of their heads. Depressed by it all, she quit in less than six months.
    Her next job was as a salesclerk at the Raylass Department Store in Lexington. Here, her mother noticed, she started to bloom. Bonnie was never going to be an extrovert, but at least she developed enough self-assurance to carry on a conversation with a stranger.
    Briefly, with a girlfriend who had relatives in the town, she moved to Decatur, Illinois, where she worked as a ward clerk in a hospital. For a member of the Bates family, this was daring: none of the children