The man behind the wheel in the fourth print, lit by the yellow glow of the dome light, was Calvin Dutton, who had been the sheriff of Natrona County for twenty six years, and whose funeral I had attended in 2016. I put on my reading glasses and leaned over the table in the laboratory in Denver, and I felt the whole room go very quiet. Bryce, beside me, had stopped breathing. The detective, a heavy gray man named Shaw, said gently, “Mrs. Ochs, do you recognize him?” I said that I did. I said he had eaten at our table at Christmas.
Bryce could not speak. He stared at the picture as if it might change. Then he asked in a cracked voice how his father could possibly have photographed the sheriff on a gravel road with a missing girl. I told him I did not know, but that his father was a lineman, and a careful man, and that he did nothing without a reason. I turned over the print. On the back, in the square hand of Kenneth, was a single line. Cal says it is the only way. I promised. K.
The detective took that sheet from my fingers as if it were glass. He read it twice, his lips moving. Then he sat down on the edge of a stool and said, slowly, “Mrs. Ochs, I think I need to make a telephone call to the state of Oregon.” He explained that there had been a rumor for years among the older officers about the Kessel case. The stepfather of Jodie, a man named Ray Pollard, had been investigated and released for lack of evidence. Several deputies had always believed the sheriff had steered the case away from him.
The hardest promise a good man can keep is the one that makes him look guilty to everyone but the people he is trying to save.
The call took most of the afternoon. Shaw reached a retired detective in Eugene who remembered an odd report from 1994, a woman named Joanna Lee who had arrived in a small town on the coast that September with a worn duffel bag and no history, sent by a church. She had worked in a bakery. She had married a fisherman. She had never been in trouble. Shaw faxed a photograph from the Casper files to the Eugene detective. The reply came back within the hour. It was a single word. Yes.
We learned the full truth over the following week, in pieces. Jodie had been sixteen and living in terror in her mother house. The stepfather was a violent man, and the girl had gone twice to the sheriff department to report him, only to be turned away by a deputy who was his drinking friend. Finally she had told Sheriff Dutton himself. He had believed her. He had known that if he arrested Pollard the case would collapse without a witness willing to testify, and that the girl would be returned to that house.
So he arranged a different kind of rescue. On the night of August twelfth, he picked her up on the gravel road outside town in his own truck and drove her north to a safe house arranged by a church in Montana, and from there to Oregon. He told her mother nothing, because the mother was still married to Pollard, and might have betrayed the plan.
He gave his word to the girl that he would find a way to make it right. Kenneth, a lineman on a night crew, had seen the truck on the road and photographed it. He had always loved a good picture.
The next morning, when the girl was reported missing, Kenneth had gone to the sheriff department with the film in his pocket. Cal Dutton had taken him into a back room and explained everything. He had asked Kenneth to keep the rolls undeveloped. Kenneth had agreed, and for thirty one years, he carried the secret in an ammo can on the top shelf of his den. He never told me. I think he was afraid that the truth might be dangerous for the girl. I think he was right.
Jodie, who was forty seven years old and a grandmother, flew to Casper on a clear morning in November. I met her at the airport with Bryce. She stepped off the plane, a slender woman with silver blonde hair and her mother blue eyes, and she looked at me for a long moment. Then she said, “You must be Ramona. Your husband took the best picture of me I have ever seen, and I never got to thank him.” I put my arms around her. Neither of us said another word.
We drove together to a little house on the east side of Casper where an old woman of seventy nine was waiting at the window. I did not go in. Bryce and I sat on the porch steps, and through the open door I heard a sound I will never forget, a cry like a bird released from a cage, and the low murmur of a mother and daughter holding one another. The photographs from roll nine hang now in the Natrona County courthouse, framed, with a small plaque beneath them. I took the Nikon down from the coat rack that night and loaded a new roll.
