David Cartwright told me the rest sitting on the bumper of his old sedan, with the cane across his knees and the leaves blowing over our shoes. He said the two girls were Janet Ruiz and Carol Ann Doyle, both twenty, both seniors at Ohio University in Athens, both driving home to Columbus on a Saturday in August of 1971 and never arriving. Their car was found a week later in a quarry. The case went cold. Everybody said they had run off to California.
He said he knew where they were. He had watched from the ridge above the river road that night. He saw the deputy, Raymond Pike, put the two girls into the trunk of his own cruiser. He followed on foot, nineteen and terrified, through the dark, as far as the abandoned stone cistern on the back forty of the old Pike farm. He stood behind a sycamore and watched an officer of the law lower two bodies into the cistern and fill it with rock.
“I ran home,” David said. “I told my father. And you know the rest. For fifty five years I have carried that cistern in my head like a stone. I was a boy, Amy. I thought nobody would believe a boy against a deputy. When I got older I thought nobody would believe an old man against a sheriff. Your grandmother believed me, and that was all that kept me alive.” He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
A plate set for fifty four years is not a superstition but a promise, and the right person finally sat down at it.
I called the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation from that parking lot, with my grandmother still lying in the church. I have been a social worker for twenty two years and I know how to make a call that cannot be set aside. An agent named Teresa Nolan picked up on the third ring. I told her that I had a witness, a location, and a man of eighty nine who was at that moment shaking hands in the vestibule of a church.
She was there in forty minutes, in a plain car, with a colleague. She introduced herself to David, and then to Raymond Pike, who was standing under the portico in his black suit with his cane, saying goodbye to mourners. I will never forget his face when she showed him a badge and asked, politely, whether he would care to step into the study of the pastor. He did not argue. He did not look at the plate. He looked at the ground, as if he had known for fifty five years that this afternoon was on its way.
The excavation of the cistern took four days in October. They worked under a white tent in the rain, with the old Pike farm cordoned off and a deputy stationed at the road. David sat in a folding chair at the edge of the field, in his good suit and his old coat, and watched every shovel. On the third day, a young technician in a white suit looked up from the pit and raised one hand, and the field went so quiet that I heard the creek.
The families of Janet and Carol Ann were found within a week. Janet had a younger brother, a retired schoolteacher in Dayton. The mother of Carol Ann, ninety three, was alive in a care home in Zanesville and had never taken down the photograph on her dresser. They came to the field on a gray morning, together, holding each other by the arms, and stood at the yellow tape. Fifty five years, one of them said. It was all anyone said. It was all that anyone needed to say.
Raymond Pike pleaded guilty in January to two counts of murder, at a hearing that took eleven minutes. He was eighty nine. The judge, a stern woman who had been born the year of the crime, sentenced him to life, and she said, in the clearest voice I have ever heard from a bench, that a badge is a promise and that he had broken it twice. He did not speak. He was taken out through the side door in a wheelchair, and his wife, whom I had known all my life, did not look up.
My mother drove to the farmhouse on the day David came to dinner. She is seventy one. She had not seen her brother in fifty five years and did not recognize the old man in the doorway until he took off his hat. Then she said, “Davey,” in the voice of a little girl, and he said her name, and she walked straight into his arms. I stood in the kitchen with a dish towel and could not stop crying. Grandma, I thought, you kept your promise.
On the first Sunday after that, we set the table in the farmhouse as we always had, with the blue willow plate at the end, by the window. David walked in with his cane at noon. My mother pulled out the chair for him. He sat down, slowly, for the first time in his life in that place, and lifted the fork. The iced tea had a slice of lemon in it. He looked out the window at the road for a long moment. Then he said grace.
