Evidence of Blood by Thomas H. Cook Page B

do with you?”
    She did not seem at all surprised by the question. “No, I don’t think so,” she said. “There wouldn’t be anything in the canyon that had anything to do with …” She stopped.
    “Anything to do with what?”
    “Ray was strange. He had his own way of doing things.”
    “But he was working on something, wasn’t he?” Kinley asked urgently. “I mean, for you.”
    She nodded slowly. “Yes.”
    “What?”
    “He was trying to find out what happened to my father,” Dora told him. She paused a moment, and in those few seconds, the stony features of her face gave a bit, grew softer and more pliant as Mildred Haskell’s never had. “Have you ever heard of Ellie Dinker?” she asked.
    Ellie Dinker, Kinley thought, the lost daughter of the woman in black. “Yes, I’ve heard of her,” he said. He remembered the afternoon in Jefferson’s Drug Store, Mrs. Dinker’s ghostliness, Ray’s young eyes staring at her.
    He shook his head. “Surely, after all these years, Ray wasn’t trying to …”
    Dora nodded determinedly. “Yes, he was,” she said.
    “But why?”
    Dora smiled delicately. “To finally get some sleep, I guess.”
    Several hours later, as he lay awake in his bed, thinking back over everything Dora had told him during the preceding hours, he remembered a passage he’d written in his first book, and which, despite the academic archness of the language, still struck him as not too bad for a kid who still had a lot to learn:
    The deepest of all human motivations are also those that move toward murder. They are buried in those contingencies of existence where the oldest and most rootless impulses still hold sway. In essence, murder is the radical insistence that the other is an obstacle it is permissible to remove. What follows is the most extreme and presumptuous claim one life can make upon the integrity of another.
     
    Ellie Dinker
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    His mind shot back to her from the lofty aerie of his more windy philosophical pretensions, and he heard Dora’s voice once again. It was low and husky, and he imagined Ray lying in her bed, listening to that voice, as he stared sleeplessly at the ceiling overhead while she narrated the story of her father’s execution.
    In the case of Charles Herman Overton, it had been by means of electrocution, and Kinley had had no trouble imagining how he had been strapped into the chair and assaulted with a searing jolt of electric power. He had seen the same thing happen to Colin Bright, and at Dora’s very mention of electrocution, his mind had returned in full and excruciating detail to the only execution he’d ever witnessed. As if in a slow-motion reel, he saw Bright’s body suddenly jerk forward and grow extremely taut, the skin drawing back along the bones, as if Bright’s soul were trying desperately to escape the body in which it wasimprisoned. The eyes popped out beneath their taped lids, a white froth gathered over the mouth, and a strange bluish smoke rose around him, danced for a moment in the light-green room, then vanished when the electricity was suddenly turned off. After that, Bright’s body had slumped down, his head drooping very deeply, the muscles and tendons letting go, so that he appeared miraculously stricken with unbearable remorse, his head bowed heavily, as if weighed down by shame.
    They executed Charlie Overton on January 4, 1955
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    That was all she’d said before adding the fact that she’d been born only a few months before. He’d nodded quietly, then said:
And so you never knew your father?
To which she’d replied:
Only that he was innocent
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    But as he thought about it, Kinley was not so sure that Overton was innocent. The evidence against him, even as Dora had gone on to describe it, struck him as unbreakable in its thoroughness, much as he’d seen before in murder convictions, one detail piled on another until the mound of accumulated evidence was so great no jury could fail to see it. It rose like a mountain,