Cruel Doubt by Joe McGinniss Page A

had ever before lived outside the county, much less the state. Her parents kept urging her to come back. After six months, she did.
    She’d saved $500 in Decatur and used it to buy her first car, a Mercury Monterey, the first car that was not a Ford and the first with an automatic transmission ever owned by a member of her family. In her own quiet way, Bonnie was expanding her horizons.
    Her big leap, however, was to enroll in an IBM keypunch course at the Lexington Business College. This led to a job with the Integon insurance company in Winston-Salem. Suddenly, Bonnie Lou Bates was a commuter, driving back and forth to a big-city office job every day.
    She was an exceptional worker. Reliable, intelligent, and always looking to learn more. Strange, she’d never known she had ambition, but there it was. She stayed at Integon for fifteen years, moving into data processing when the field of data processing came into being. By the time she left, married by then to Lieth Von Stein, she was supervisor of Property and Casualty Systems, the only person in the office at that level of management who didn’t have a college degree.
    But back in late fall of 1965, another event of great importance occurred. Driving down Winston-Salem’s Main Street, Bonnie looked into a car showroom window and spotted a brand-new teal green ‘66 Chevy Chevelle SS 396 with four on the floor and a 360-horsepower engine. Much to her surprise, it was love at first sight.
    She knew it wasn’t appropriate. She knew it was a
boy’s
car, not a
girl’s
car, but she also knew she had to have it, and right away. Her father was horrified, her mother embarrassed. But Bonnie Lou Bates, twenty-one years old now and gainfully employed, insisted on something for the first time in her life.
    The dealer didn’t want to sell it to her. He said she was too much of a lady for that car. In fact, the dealer said, he didn’t want to sell it to anyone. It was a great attention-getter and he wanted to keep it on the showroom floor.
    But Bonnie would not be denied. She worked out a deal with her father whereby he traded his ‘56 Ford, which, like every other object he’d ever owned, he’d kept in impeccable condition, and she traded him her Mercury Monterey, and he cosigned the car loan and Bonnie zoomed off in her brand-new Chevelle. It was the hottest car that Welcome had seen in years. The car made heads turn when it passed. And then . . . when they saw who was driving it! Was that really . . .? Could it be . . .? Bonnie Lou Bates?
    The next summer, she and Ramona were cruising along the main street of Lexington in her Chevelle, trying to be noticed. Being noticed in Lexington—population 15,000—was considerably more gratifying than being noticed in Welcome—where everybody already knew you anyway.
    The cruising section was generally considered to be that six-block area bordered on each end by a drive-in restaurant. After making several passes up and down this boulevard, you’d pull into the parking lot of one restaurant or the other (in Lexington, in 1966, it was either the Old Hickory or the Bar B Que Center) and park next to the neatest-looking car you could spot and then place your order by speaking into a little microphone attached to a pole that stuck up from the ground.
    While waiting for your order to be delivered by the high school girl who was working as a waitress, you’d strike up a conversation with whoever was sitting in the neat-looking car you’d parked next to.
    Since Bonnie’s teal green Chevelle SS 396 with the 360-horsepower engine was by far the neatest-looking car in the lot of either the Old Hickory or the Bar B Que Center, she found that, even being shy and plain, she had a lot of conversations struck up with her.
    On this July night, she saw a car she liked almost as much as her own and pulled in next to it at the Old Hickory.
    There were two high