Cruel Doubt Read online

  Young had to concede that the National Spinning theory was not entirely lacking in logic, though early investigation there had turned up nothing to support it.

  Indeed, the only disturbing documents his examination of the contents of Lieth’s office desk had turned up were letters from a young woman with whom Lieth had apparently become acquainted on a business trip. The letters suggested that at the very least an affectionate friendship had been formed. The letters had been written just one year ago, in the summer of 1987, soon after the woman, a North Carolina native, had moved to California.

  In one letter, the woman had mentioned that she’d soon be returning to North Carolina for a visit, and she had seemed to be hinting at the possibility of meeting Lieth, at least for a night, in Wilmington, a coastal town about a hundred miles south of Little Washington.

  There was no evidence that any such rendezvous occurred, but several weeks later, the young woman wrote that as midsummer approached she found herself thinking about North Carolina and about Lieth. “These summer days bring back some good memories—that is for sure,” she wrote. Then, after asking if he’d been to the beach, she wrote, “I am sure a wild guy like yourself took the weekend once or twice and hit the vacation spots.”

  She also mentioned she was sorry that Lieth had gone through so much stress concerning his mother, a comment that indicated he had at the very least discussed his personal life with her in some detail. And saying she was anxious to speak with him, she asked him to keep her updated on his travel plans. “I know for a fact that we will see each other in the near future,” she wrote.

  Only last Christmas she’d sent a card to his office, asking how things were in Washington and whether he was ready to come to Los Angeles. If so, she wrote, “please let me know,” adding, “May 1988 be a year of prosperity and travel! (i.e., LA . . . ha ha ha).” She said she’d like very much to see him over the Christmas holidays and gave him dates when she would be visiting family in Raleigh.

  Nothing in this correspondence suggested adulterous behavior on Lieth’s part, but what did come through clearly was that this isolated, gruff, and taciturn man who had so few friends in his own community, and—according to a number of sources—whose relations with his stepchildren had grown so strained, had succeeded in charming to no small degree a young woman he had met while out of town.

  At forty-two, with more than a million dollars he felt confident he could successfully manage by himself, why not a life in L.A. instead of Washington?

  As for Bonnie’s notion that the trust department of the state’s biggest bank might have engineered the killing in order to avoid losing an account, this again struck Young as preposterous.

  Indeed, he came away from this second talk with Bonnie feeling that either she was still far more hysterical as a result of the attack than she appeared on the surface, or else that she was desperate to do anything to shift his attention away from her family and herself.

  * * *

  On Monday, August 1, eight days after having been admitted, Bonnie was discharged from the hospital.

  The doctor who prepared her discharge summary wrote:

  This is a 44-year-old white female admitted through the emergency room following an attack in which she was beaten about the head and stabbed in the right chest. The emergency-room physician did the initial resuscitation and work on her, including insertion of a thoracotomy tube in the right chest for hemopneumothorax, and also sutured multiple lacerations of her forehead. She was placed in Intensive Care . . . subsequent workup revealed a fracture of the base of the first metacarpal, which required a cast. The patient has done very well. Her chest tube was removed after three days. The lungs have remained clear. The lacerations and contusion of her forehead and her right chest wall are resolving nicely. Chest X ray this morning showed complete resolution of the pneumothorax with some mild reactive pleural changes at the base. She is on a regular diet, ambulatory, and doing very well.

  She moved into the double room at the Holiday Inn where her mother and father were staying, and for the next two nights she slept there with them, taking the bed farther from the door and repeatedly asking her father if he was certain the locks had been secured.

  On Wednesday, she went to police headquarters to be fingerprinted. It seemed pointless. She was still so weak she could barely walk unassisted and so stunned emotionally that even the slightest conversation required a major effort of the will. Why were they fingerprinting her? What good would that do? Why hadn’t they yet found the killer?

  Lewis Young asked her again about the weekend of the murder. She told him again there had been absolutely nothing unusual about it. Just a typical family summer weekend. One note Young made during this brief talk was of Bonnie’s recollection that Chris had spent the early part of Saturday evening “cooking some hamburgers with his sister.”

  On Thursday, she returned to the police station to pick up a key to her house. Then, in the company of her parents, she returned to 110 Lawson Road.

  Some people in Bonnie’s situation might have needed to sit for a long time, staring at the house from the security of a parked car, before working up the courage to enter it. Others undoubtedly never would have gone near it. But Bonnie had always believed—with the sort of stoicism that caused some to wonder, on occasion, if she had any feelings at all—that if there’s something unpleasant you have to do, then you’d just better go ahead and get it done.

  So, with her mother and father at her side, she got out of the car and approached the house. Her clothes were in the bedroom. She needed her clothes. She unlocked the front door. She walked straight to the stairway. She felt nauseated. She felt she might faint.

  But leaning on her father’s arm, and with her mother close behind her, Bonnie climbed the stairs to the bedroom. She had to pause for breath going up. These were the first stairs she’d climbed since she’d been stabbed.

  She did not flinch, she did not turn back. Gulping down air, she moved forward. She walked into the bedroom and went straight to her closet without looking either right or left. With her mother and father helping, she took the clothes she needed. Then she turned and left the room and left the house. Her mother and father loaded the trunk, then drove her back to her childhood home in Welcome.

  * * *

  On the same day, Lewis Young interviewed Chris for the second time. He was “a cocky little college kid,” in Young’s opinion. Having obviously located his car keys, Pritchard arrived for the interview in his white Mustang with the loud muffler. Like his sister, he acted as if the whole business of answering questions designed to help find the person who’d murdered his stepfather and had almost murdered his mother was just a bit much of an inconvenience on a day when he would really rather have been at the beach. The first time he’d met him, Chris had been so fidgety and so obviously strung out that Young had felt kind of sorry for him. The second time, he just didn’t like him.

  Chris repeated that as far as he knew, Lieth hadn’t had any problems or enemies. He was aware that some stocks had been inherited but had no idea how much they were worth. “I did not know about that stuff,” he said as he had earlier.

  He described looking for his car keys for “fifteen or twenty minutes” before running out to call the campus police. He said his roommate had eventually found the keys under the cushion of a chair. Again, he described his last visit home as routine. He and his sister had barbecued hamburgers for the family. Then he’d gone back to school, intending to work on his term paper.

  In Raleigh, however, he’d run into a friend of his, James Upchurch, at the Fast Fare convenience store, and the two of them had wound up in Upchurch’s room, drinking beer. Yes, he’d drunk beer and played cards Sunday night, too. But honest to God, he said, if this hadn’t happened, he would have been up at seven A.M. Monday to finish the paper.

  Young did not mention the knife and burnt clothing and map
that had been found at the scene of the fire.

  Nor did he mention the blood-spattered pages found next to the bed—pages in which a young hero named Christopher, and his companions, had slain an evil overlord with knife, club, and sword.

  Nor the fact that Chris’s own uncle suspected that Chris was involved in the murder.

  7

  Later, Bonnie would not be able to recall precisely how many days went by with her doing nothing but sitting in the house she grew up in. She slept downstairs, in a room next to her mother and father’s.

  At least, that was where she tried to sleep. The hours of sleep—as they would be for many nights to come—were far outnumbered by the hours during which she lay awake in the dark, cringing each time a floorboard in the old house creaked.

  “She was so petrified,” her mother said later, “that she wouldn’t even turn over in bed. She kept her lamp burning all night. She was trying to put on a good front, but we knew she was dying inside.”

  During the days, she’d sit in her father’s easy chair with blankets wrapped around her, gazing at the television set and having chills. She’d watch game shows, soap operas, anything that filled the void with motion and sound.

  Her mother was constantly trying to make her eat or drink, but Bonnie had neither hunger nor thirst. People stopped by to see her and she received many telephone calls. In Little Washington she may have been a stranger, but in Welcome she was Bonnie Lou Bates and she was suffering, and in Welcome one did not suffer in solitude.

  During these first weeks of her recovery Bonnie grew closer to her father than ever before. He may not have been able to articulate the love he felt for his wounded daughter, or the anguish that her suffering caused him, but his daily and nightly presence at her side was enough. “Steady and solid as a rock,” was one description offered of George Bates, Sr., and Bonnie felt that from his strength she might be able to replenish hers.

  He was a handsome man, tanned from working outdoors, and sturdily built. Even in his sixties, his hair remained dark and full. And to say that he shared and passed on the family trait of not displaying or discussing emotion was not to suggest that he was taciturn or withdrawn. On the contrary, George Bates was known throughout Welcome as a man with a quick sense of humor; a good-spirited and talkative man who loved to tell stories, make up limericks, and sing songs as he walked around the house.

  If Bonnie’s mother tended to focus on the business of life, her father seemed more attracted to its potential for merriment, enjoying its simple pleasures.

  For example, George Bates loved sweets. He could not walk past a candy counter without buying something. He even had a candy machine beside his bedroom easy chair. It said, “George’s Goody Machine,” and his children were always filling it with treats.

  Though a bricklayer by trade, his real love was working with wood. It seemed to be in his genes. He was, after all, the son of a carpenter, born in a log cabin hewn from trees that had grown on family land.

  During the infrequent chances he’d had for play in his boyhood, George Bates’s favorite pastime was to walk the forests of Welcome with penknife in hand, often carving poems into young trees, so that the words and the tree could grow together. He would never speak of the pleasure this form of communing with nature gave him: it was too private. But years later, family members would, in a back section of woods, come upon a tree in which young George Bates had carved a message years before.

  At the time he’d met Bonnie’s mother, he was working as a bricklayer on an Army barracks at Fort Bragg.

  On December 7, 1941, upon hearing the news that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor, he said nothing to anyone, but simply disappeared into the forest behind the house that he shared with his young bride.

  There, on a tree that would still stand fifty years later, he carved the last two lines of the Joyce Kilmer poem “Trees”:

  Poems are made by fools like me,

  But only God can make a tree.

  With his wife pregnant with their second child, Bonnie, George Bates was drafted. He got a furlough from boot camp so he could come home when she was born, but then left almost immediately for Europe, where he was an infantryman, trudging and fighting through France and Germany.

  In his letters home, he would say nothing of the fighting, but would tell little stories, such as how one night it had been so cold he’d climbed into a bam and had slept among the pigs to stay warm. On another occasion, with his whole unit having been on short rations for days, he’d spotted a field of sweet potatoes and had dug them up and eaten them raw, while his ravenous city-bred comrades had stood by laughing—somewhat enviously—at this country boy able to eat roots.

  Home on furlough and awaiting reassignment, he had his first chance to get acquainted with Bonnie, a small and somewhat introverted toddler.

  One afternoon in August 1945 they were in the backyard, barbecuing chicken and hot dogs over an open fire, when the news came over the radio that the war was over. George Bates was so overjoyed that he jumped up and tossed the straw hat he was wearing in the air. After retrieving it, still unable to contain himself, he threw the hat in the fire as an act of celebration. It may have been the most uninhibited emotional outburst of his life.

  He settled quickly and happily into domestic life. He owned twenty-eight acres of land and set about building a home for himself and his growing family. It was a one-story brick house, with an attic that eventually came to be a bedroom for Bonnie and her three sisters.

  Bonnie had grown up listening to her father’s stories and hearing his songs. His favorite, which she never forgot, was one he called “The Geography Song”:

  Maine is an island in Asia,

  France is a river in Spain.

  Coconuts grow on a mountain of snow,

  Deserts are covered with rain.

  Crocodiles come from Chicago,

  Silver is mixed in a mill,

  Grass is quite rare,

  The equator is square,

  And Kansas is south of Brazil.

  He preached and practiced the simple virtues—honesty and fairness and charity—and there wasn’t one person in all of Welcome who wouldn’t say, “George Bates is as nice as the day is long.”

  Like almost all other North Carolina families who owned land, the Bateses considered theirs an active resource, not just empty space to gaze across. They grew corn, sweet potatoes, watermelon, cantaloupe, and field peas. To a large extent, in order to supplement George’s modest earnings, they lived off their land. At any given time, up to five hundred quarts of canned food would be in their basement.

  They raised a few cows, pigs, turkeys, and chickens, which they would then kill and eat. They churned their own butter, made cherry pies from fruit picked from their own trees, and made preserves from their strawberries.

  In summers, Bonnie’s mother would start making ice cream in late afternoon, so it would be fresh and waiting when George came home, hot and tired from a day of laying bricks. He would sit on the porch and eat that ice cream and tell Polly how it cooled him to the bone. There seemed nothing he wanted that he didn’t have. Indeed, his wife would later describe him as the most contented man she’d ever known.

  Back in this childhood home, filled with these memories, and sheltered not only by the roof her father had put over her head years before, but by the steadiness and durability of his love, Bonnie struggled to keep her panic under control.

  Nothing bad could befall her in Welcome, she told herself. In the aura of her father’s goodness, she was safe. All around her were objects he had fashioned from wood: tables, chests, cabinets, bookcases, all made, from trees George Bates had cut from his own land.

  Most days, and most nights, through early August, it was just the three of them: Bonnie, her mother, and her father. She was grateful for the concern of friends and neighbo
rs, but she wasn’t up to seeing many visitors.

  * * *

  The people most conspicuous by their absence—as they’d been from Bonnie’s first hours in the hospital—were her children. Day to day, no one seemed quite sure where they were. In Washington, in Greenville, at the beach, down to see Ramona, who lived in South Carolina—everywhere, it seemed, but with their mother.

  Her father finally spoke to them about it. He said their apparent lack of concern disturbed him greatly. He told them they were being inconsiderate, unloving, and even cruel.

  They said they didn’t mean to be, it was just that they were upset and frightened and needed to be with their friends. Besides, there wasn’t anything they could do for their mother, now. She was back home in Welcome, getting better. But Welcome wasn’t their home, they weren’t going to sit wrapped in blankets all day long, staring at the television set. They needed noise and motion and the distraction provided by friends.

  And what was the big deal about the hospital? They had stopped by. They’d spent some time there. But it wasn’t as if Bonnie had been dying or anything. She’d been well cared for. She’d had lots of other company.

  Besides, it upset them to see her with a tube in her chest and with her head all swollen, just lying there asking the same question—who could have done this?—over and over again.

  Bonnie seemed less bothered by their absence than was her father. Both children, she could tell, were as grief stricken as she was, but being young and physically unharmed, they were restless, at loose ends, still too shaken to settle in one place for very long.