Soon I had forgotten the heat and the thumps from upstairs and old Gibbons’s wheezy snores. The thought of those little nine-year-old girls – their fluffy heads of blonde hair and their engaging Bobbsey Twins smiles – in connection with Coffey’s hulking darkness was unpleasant but impossible to ignore.
Given his size, it was easy to imagine him actually eating them, like a giant in a fairy tale. What he had done was even worse, and it was a lucky thing for him that he hadn’t just been lynched right there on the riverbank. If, that was, you considered waiting to walk the Green Mile and sit in Old Sparky’s lap lucky.
4.
King Cotton had been deposed in the South seventy years before all these things happened and would never be king again, but in those years of the thirties it had a little revival. There were no more cotton plantations, but there were forty or fifty prosperous cotton farms in the southern part of our state. Klaus Detterick owned one of them. By the standards of the nineteen-fifties he would have been considered only a rung above shirttail poor, but by those of the thirties he was considered well-to-do because he actually paid his store bill in cash at the end of most months, and he could meet the bank president’s eyes if they happened to pass on the street. The farmhouse was clean and commodious. In addition to the cotton, there were the other two c’s: chickens and a few cows. He and his wife had three children: Howard. who was twelve or thereabouts, and the twin girls. Cora and Kathe.
On a warm night in June of that year, the girls asked for and were given permission to sleep on the screen-enclosed side porch, which ran the length of the house. This was a great treat for them. Their mother kissed them goodnight just shy of nine, when the last light had gone out of the sky. It was the final time she saw either of them until they were in their coffins and the undertaker had repaired the worst of the damage.
Country families went to bed early in those days – “soon as ’twas dark under the table,” my own mother sometimes said – and slept soundly. Certainly Klaus, Marjorie, and Howie Detterick did on the night the twins were taken. Klaus would almost certainly have been wakened by Bowser, the family’s big old half-breed collie, if he had barked, but Bowser didn’t. Not that night, not ever again.
Klaus was up at first light to do the milking. The porch was on the side of the house away from the barn, and Klaus never thought to look in on the girls. Bowser’s failure to join him was no cause for alarm, either. The dog held the cows and the chickens alike in great disdain, and usually hid in his doghouse behind the barn when the chores were being performed, unless called … and called energetically, at that.
Marjorie came downstairs fifteen minutes or so after her husband had pulled on his boots in the mudroom and tromped out to the barn. She started the coffee, then put bacon on to fry. The combined smells brought Howie down from his room under the eaves, but not the girls from the porch. She sent Howie out to fetch them as she cracked eggs into the bacon grease. Klaus would want the girls out to get fresh ones as soon as breakfast was over. Except no breakfast was eaten in the Detterick house that morning. Howie came back from the porch, white around the gills and with his formerly sleep-puffy eyes now wide open.
“They’re gone,” he said.
Marjorie went out onto the porch, at first more annoyed than alarmed. She said later that she had supposed, if she had supposed anything, that the girls had decided to take a walk and pick flowers by the dawn’s early light. That or some similar green-girl foolishness. One look, and she understood why Howie had been white.
She screamed for Klaus – shrieked for him – and Klaus came on the dead run, his workboots whitened by the half-full pail of milk he had spilled on them. What he found on the porch would have jellied the legs of the most courageous parent. The blankets in which the girls would have bundled themselves as the night drew on and grew colder had been cast into one comer. The screen door had been yanked off its upper hinge and hung drunkenly out into the dooryard. And on the boards of both the porch and the steps beyond the mutilated screen door, there were spatters of blood.