The name in that line was Raymond Cates. I read it three times in the failing light of the pickup, and each time it said the same thing. Judge Raymond Cates, the probate judge of Houston County, silver haired and soft spoken, who had stood under the oak behind our church on a bright Saturday in May of 2016, and read the vows of my marriage, and kissed me on the cheek, and told my husband, Marcus, to take good care of me. In 1995 he had been the new sheriff. Young fella. The man who said there had never been a witness. I put my hand over my mouth.
“I am sorry, Becca,” Willie said. “I would have told you sooner, but your granddaddy made me swear. He said you were a child. Then you were a young woman with a husband. Then you were a paralegal in that very courthouse, bringing coffee to the man. He said, Willie, wait until I am gone. She will know what to do.” He turned off the engine. “Well, he is gone. And I am seventy six. And I would like to do one honest thing before I follow him.” He reached across me and opened the glove box. A ring of keys. “The records room. Tonight.”
At eleven that night, Willie unlocked the back door of the county courthouse with a key that had hung on his belt for forty one years. We walked through dark corridors that smelled of floor wax and old paper. I had walked those halls a thousand times in daylight, in heels. In the dark they seemed to lean toward us. The records room was in the basement, behind a steel door. Willie shone his flashlight along the shelves and stopped at row fourteen. Of course, I thought. Fourteen. “Third box from the left,” he said. “Coal Severance Tax Rolls, 1971. Nobody has opened it since Nixon.”
A man who pays the same small debt every day for twenty nine years may be the one keeping an entire town honest.
Inside the box, under a layer of brittle ledgers, lay a manila folder gone soft with age, with a typed label: HAYNES, DANIEL AND MARY, 231 INCIDENT. I sat on the cold floor with it in my lap. There were the photographs of the car, folded like an accordion against a pine tree. There was the report, six pages, in the hand of a clerk. And there was a single sheet of lined paper in a round, careful script: the statement of a witness named Loretta Dill, who had been working the night shift at the Gulf station on the Ozark road on the thirteenth of October, 1985.
I could not stand. I sat on the floor of the basement with the statement in my hands and read it six times. Loretta Dill had seen a county truck follow my parents out of town with its lights off. She had seen the deputy get out of it afterward, at the pump, in the dark, with his hands shaking, buying a can of kerosene and a rag. She knew his name. She had told the sheriff of that day, who wrote it down and filed it. Ten years later Raymond Cates became the sheriff, and in a month the folder disappeared. Willie put a heavy hand on my shoulder. “Your granddaddy found her in 2003,” he said. “She is alive. She is eighty four. She has been waiting.”
I did not take the folder to the local sheriff. I did not take it to the district attorney, whom Cates had helped elect. At eight the next morning I drove to Montgomery with Willie beside me in his work shirt, and I walked into the Alabama Bureau of Investigation, and I laid the folder on the desk of an agent named Priscilla Hobbs, a tall woman in a gray suit. “My name is Rebecca Haynes,” I said. “I am a paralegal. I know how to read a chain of custody. And I know what happens to a file in my county when it is in the wrong hands.”
They found Loretta Dill in a nursing home in Ozark, in a recliner by a window, with a crocheted blanket on her knees. Agent Hobbs sat beside her and read her the statement she had given in 1985. The old woman listened with her eyes closed. At the end, she opened them. “That is what I said,” she said, “and it is what I saw. Forty years I have kept that. Nobody ever asked me again.” She gave a new statement in a clear, steady voice, with the dates and the number of the truck, and she looked straight at the camera in the corner and said, “Raymond Cates, I know it was you.”
They arrested the judge on a Friday afternoon, in his chambers, in his robe, with the American flag behind his desk. I did not see it, but the clerk told me that he did not argue. He only sat down heavily, put his face in his hands, and said, “Thank God.” In the interview room he confessed to everything. He had been a deputy of twenty five, drinking and running pills for a man in Dothan. My father, who drove a school bus and knew every road in the county, had seen the boxes in the bus barn and told Cates he would go to the sheriff. “I only wanted to scare him,” he whispered. “The car went into the trees.”
He pleaded guilty to two counts of murder and one of evidence tampering, and a judge from Birmingham sentenced him to life. I sat in the second row, with Marcus on one side and Willie on the other. When the sentence was read, I did not feel triumph. I felt very quiet, and very old. Outside on the courthouse steps, Loretta Dill, in a wheelchair, with a pink scarf around her head, took my hand in both of hers. “Honey,” she said, “your mama and daddy would be so proud.” I put my forehead on her knuckles.
The county took out Meter Number Fourteen in the spring. They did it with a small ceremony, a brass band from the high school, and a folding table with lemonade. In its place the city council set a granite bench with a small plaque: Parked here every weekday for twenty nine years, Otis Haynes. Nobody pays to sit. On my lunch hour I take my sandwich to that bench, and sometimes Willie joins me, in his navy shirt, with a thermos. We do not say much. Before I go back to work I always put a quarter on the arm of the bench, and by evening somebody has taken it, and I like to think it is Granddaddy, buying one more hour.
