The name on the tape was Walt Crenshaw, and I sat on the floor of my kitchen with the broken cassette player in my lap and said it out loud until it stopped sounding like anything at all. Walt Crenshaw. He had stood next to Stan at the altar of the Methodist church in Salina in the spring of 1979 in a rented gray tuxedo, with a ring in his pocket and a grin on his face. He had carried the coffin of my husband.
I put the cassette back together with my thumbnail and a piece of tape and played it again from the beginning. I heard the girl. I heard the horn. I heard the four minutes of nothing. At the end I heard my husband say, I can not ever tell you about tonight, and then, much lower, almost to himself, a thing I had not caught the first time. “Tammy Rae, I hope you got to Oregon.” I rewound it and played it six times. Oregon. And then I understood that the girl on that tape had not been lost. She had been sent somewhere.
I was a waitress for twenty six years, and I know how to find people. I called the Ellsworth County sheriff and asked for the file on Tammy Rae Voight, and a polite young deputy told me that it had been closed in 1996 as a probable runaway. I called a retired nurse who had worked at my truck stop, who gave me the name of the aunt of Tammy Rae, who gave me, after an hour of silence on the line, a telephone number in Bend, Oregon. I dialed it at nine at night with my heart in my throat.
A man who keeps every voice on the night channel will one day hold the proof that he was the one who answered.
A woman answered. Fifty something. A low, careful voice. “Hello?” I said, “Is this Tammy Rae?” The silence went on so long I thought she had hung up. “I have not been called that in thirty one years,” she whispered. “Who is this?” I told her my name, and the name of the truck stop, and the name of my husband. And I heard a sound come through the telephone that I will never forget, a sound like a dam breaking, and then she was sobbing, long deep sobs, and saying over and over, “The Polar Bear. Oh, God. The Polar Bear. Is he all right? Is he alive?”
I told her he had died in May. I told her I had found the tape. We cried on the telephone together, two women who had never really met, for the better part of an hour. Then she told me the rest. “He was behind me with his flashers on,” she said. “And that man came out of the cab with a tire iron, and your husband got out of his truck and walked straight up to him like he was walking up to a dog. He did not say a word. He hit him once, in the jaw. The man went down in the gravel and did not get up. Your husband picked me up like I was a doll, put me in his cab, and drove.”
“He drove all night,” she went on. “He bought me a bus ticket in Denver with his own money. He gave me a hundred dollars from his boot. He said, Tammy Rae, you can not go home. That man knows your name from the police radio and he knows the address of your mother, and he will come. He told me to take a new name and not call anyone. He took my car to a friend who ran a junkyard in Hays and had it crushed so it could never be found. He said, I will never tell. Not even my wife. And he never did.” She laughed through her tears.
Tammy Rae came to Salina on a Saturday in November, a slender woman in a green coat with white in her hair, and she stood at my door a long time before she rang the bell. She told her story to the sheriff and to an agent of the Kansas Bureau of Investigation, with the tape between them on the table. Walt Crenshaw was eighty, living in a trailer in Ellsworth. The agents got a warrant for his storage unit on the strength of that tape, and in a locked footlocker under a stack of tarps they found the kind of things that a man keeps when he cannot forget.
Seven driver licenses of women. Five purses. A shoebox of Polaroids. Two of the women had been waitresses on I 70, one in 1991, one in 1996, and their families had waited thirty years. The DNA on a scarf agreed with a cold case file in Colorado. Walt Crenshaw was arrested at his trailer on a Tuesday morning, in his bathrobe, and in the interview room he did not say a single word. At the trial in the spring, Tammy Rae took the stand in a navy dress and described the night of the fourteenth of November, 1994, to a hushed courtroom, and when she came to the part about the man who got out of his truck, she looked at me and smiled.
The jury found him guilty on every count. The judge sentenced him to three life terms. The families of the other women, who sat in the gallery in rows, with photographs in their laps, stood up when the sentence was read, and I stood with them. A woman in her seventies took my arm in the corridor and said, “Mrs. Haskell, your husband saved one of ours without ever knowing about the rest.” I said, “He knew enough. That was always Stan.” And I looked down the hallway where Tammy Rae was talking to the sister of one of the dead, the two of them holding hands.
That December, Derek, my son in law, drove me out to the county landfill with a pair of waders and a flashlight and a very pale face. He had not slept in a week, he told me. It took him five hours of digging in the cold. He found the black bag under a drift of frozen cardboard, and he carried it back to the truck in both arms like a baby. All 311 tapes were still there. On Christmas Eve, Tammy Rae and I sat at my kitchen table with a plate of chicken fried steak and coffee, and we put in the first one. Static. A downshift. The voice of a man, deep and calm: “Breaker one nine, this is the Polar Bear. Anybody got their ears on?” And the night came in around us like company.
