The name on the tape was Marcy Lynn Dunham, and I played the last ten seconds four times to be sure I had heard it right. I sat on the bucket in my shop with the little silver recorder in my fist while the afternoon sun came through the dirty window, and I thought of her picture on the wall of the truck stop on Highway 65, the one with the long blonde hair and the crooked smile and the word MISSING in red letters above it, that I had passed every Sunday for twenty years on my way to church. I had never once stopped to read the date.
I did not take the tape to the county. The note said the next sheriff, not the one I knew, and Elmer Sprague had been a careful man. But the sheriff after Corbin had retired in 2008, and the one after him in 2016, and the third was a woman I had never trusted or distrusted because I had never met her. Her name was Janet Whitcomb. I drove to the courthouse in Sedalia with the recorder in a freezer bag on the seat beside me and asked the clerk at the desk whether the sheriff had a minute. “Is it about a car?” she asked. I said, “It is about a girl.”
Sheriff Whitcomb was a tall woman in her fifties with a gray crew cut and reading glasses pushed up into her hair. She did not say a word while I told her how I had found it. She did not touch the recorder. She put on a pair of blue gloves, slid it into a paper bag, and asked me to wait in the hall. She was gone twenty minutes. When she came back, she had a young deputy with her, and the face of the deputy was the color of paper, and the sheriff said, in a low even voice, “Mr. Haverty, I need you to not tell anyone about this. Not your wife. Not your pastor. Not the judge.”
An honest farmer who whispers into a recorder in the dark has already begun to bring a lost daughter home.
They kept me in the loop, which I did not expect. On Monday, two investigators from the Missouri State Highway Patrol sat down in my shop office and asked me to describe every step I had taken since Friday, and a technician photographed the car from every angle. The tape went to a lab in Jefferson City. Carol Anne Sprague, who had been sitting on a bench in the hall at the patrol headquarters with her purse in her lap, told them that her father had said one thing only, the week before he died: Do not sell the car until it is found.
The lab confirmed the voice, the date, and the sound of a pond. The Patrol drained the Shaw pond in the second week of October, on a gray morning with a steady cold drizzle, and I stood at the fence with Carol Anne, in a borrowed raincoat, watching the pumps run. It took nine hours. At half past four, a diver in a black suit came up out of the mud with a small bundle in his arms, and a murmur went through the little crowd of officers, and a woman among them began to cry quietly into her sleeve.
They found her wrapped in a tarpaulin and chain, in the silt at the deep end, with long strands of hair still caught in the links. They found a bullet. And two feet from her, buried in the clay, they found a revolver, a .38 service weapon of the sort that the county had issued to its deputies until 1989. It bore a serial number. The Patrol checked the number against the equipment logs in the basement of the courthouse, which had not been purged, because nobody had thought to purge a dull old book. The revolver had been issued, in March of 1986, to a deputy sheriff named Curtis Mahan.
The judge. I remembered him from the court records I had read for a lawsuit over a combine, a silver haired, soft spoken man of sixty seven, with a reputation for fairness that people in Pettis County mentioned the way they mentioned the weather. They arrested Curtis Mahan in his chambers on a Thursday morning, in the middle of a hearing about a property line, in front of a bailiff and a stenographer and two lawyers. He did not say a word. He took off his robe, folded it over the back of his chair, and held out both hands.
He did not plead. The trial lasted six days. The jury heard the voice of Elmer Sprague, recorded thirty seven years before and dead only since August, whispering in the dark from the small speaker of a tape recorder, naming the sheriff, and naming the pond, and naming the girl. They heard the diver. They heard the clerk from the basement of the courthouse, reading from the log. They heard the mother of Marcy Lynn Dunham, ninety years old, in a black dress, say the name of her daughter in a voice that carried to the back of the room. The jury was out an hour and ten minutes. Life, without the possibility of parole.
Ruth Dunham buried her daughter on the first Saturday in November, in the cemetery behind the Baptist church in Sedalia, under an oak tree in full red leaf. Three hundred people came. Women who had waited tables with her. Truckers who had tipped her five dollars. A man in his seventies with a trucker cap, who stood at the back and wept without a sound. I wore a clean shirt and my one good tie. When the pastor finished, Carol Anne Sprague stepped forward with a plastic sandwich bag in her hands and laid it on the casket, among the flowers.
In the bag was a yellow note on the back of a feed store receipt, in the pencil handwriting of an old man. Whoever finds this, play it for the sheriff. Not the one I knew. The next one. E.S. 1988. I stood with my hat in my hands and looked at that little scrap of paper on the wood. A salvage man. Thirty one years of rusted trucks and wrecked minivans, and the best thing I ever found in an old car was the name of a girl. Ruth Dunham took my hand in both of hers. “Thank you for the back seat,” she said, and I could not answer her at all.
