“Jesus H. Christ. How’d you hear about this up there? Jesus Christ.”
He looked at the receptionist, then back to me, as if we’d collaborated. Then he motioned to me to follow. “Hold my calls, Ruth.”
The receptionist rolled her eyes.
Bill Vickery walked ahead of me down a wood-paneled hallway checked with cheap framed photos of trout and horses, then into his office, which had no window, which was in fact a tiny square lined with metal files. He sat down, lit a cigarette. Didn’t offer me one.
“I don’t want this to get out, Miss. I have no intention of letting this get out.”
“I’m afraid, Chief Vickery, that there’s not too much choice in the matter. Children are being targeted. The public should be aware.” It’s the line I’d been mouthing on the drive down. It directs fault to the gods.
“What do you care? They’re not your kids, they’re Wind Gap kids.” He stood up, sat back down, rearranged some papers. “I bet I’m pretty safe to say Chicago never cared about Wind Gap kids before.” His voice cracked at the end. Vickery sucked on his cigarette, twisted a chunky gold pinky ring, blinked in quick succession. I wondered suddenly if he was going to cry.
“You’re right. Probably not. Look, this isn’t going to be some sort of exploitive story. It’s important. If it makes you feel any better, I’m from Wind Gap.” There you go, Curry. I’m trying.
He looked back at me. Stared at my face.
“What’s your name?”
“Camille Preaker.”
“How do I not know you?”
“Never got in trouble, sir.” I offered a slight smile.
“Your family’s Preaker?”
“My mother married out of her maiden name about twenty-five years ago. Adora and Alan Crellin.”
“Oh. Them I know.” Them everybody knew. Money was none too common in Wind Gap, not real money. “But I still don’t want you here, Miss Preaker. You do this story and from now on, people will only know us for…this.”
“Maybe some publicity would help,” I offered. “It’s helped in other cases.”
Vickery sat quiet for a second, pondering his paper-bag lunch crumpled at the corner of his desk. Smelled like bologna. He murmured something about JonBenet and shit.
“No thanks, Miss Preaker. And no comment. I have no comment on any ongoing investigations. You can quote me.”
“Look, I have the right to be here. Let’s make this easy. You give me some information. Something. Then I’ll stay out of your way for a while. I don’t want to make your job any harder. But I need to do mine.” It was another little exchange I’d thought up somewhere near St. Louis.
I left the police station with a photocopied map of Wind Gap, on which Chief Vickery had drawn a tiny X to mark where the murdered girl’s body was discovered last year.
Ann Nash, age nine, was found on August 27 in Falls Creek, a bumpy, noisy waterway that ran through the middle of the North Woods. Since nightfall on the twenty-sixth, when she went missing, a search party had combed the forest. But it was hunters who came across her just after 5 a.m. She’d been strangled close to midnight with a basic clothesline, looped twice around her neck. Then dumped in the creek, which was low from the long summer drought. The clothesline had snagged on a massive rock, and she’d spent the night drifting along in the lazy stream. The burial was closed coffin. This was all Vickery would give me. It took an hour of questions to get that much.
From the pay phone at the library I dialed the number on the Missing poster. An elderly female voice identified it as the Natalie Keene Hotline, but in the background I could hear a dishwasher churning. The woman informed me that so far as she knew, the search was still going in the North Woods. Those who wanted to help should report to the main access road and bring their own water. Record temperatures were expected.
At the search site, four blonde girls sat stiffly on a picnic towel spread in the sun. They pointed toward one of the trails and told me to walk until I found the group.
“What are you doing here?” asked the prettiest. Her flushed face had the roundness of a girl barely in her teens and her hair was parted in ribbons, but her breasts, which she aimed proudly outward, were those of a grown woman. A lucky grown woman. She smiled as if she knew me, impossible since she’d have been a preschooler the last time I was in Wind Gap. She looked familiar, though. Maybe the daughter of one of my old schoolmates. The age would be right if someone got knocked up straight out of high school. Not unlikely.
“Just here to help,” I said.
“Right,” she smirked, and dismissed me by turning all her interest to picking the polish off a toenail.