“Ain’t that the truth.” Blankenship took his hat off and tossed it onto an empty chair beside the desk. His gray hair was thin. “Here’s what you should know, at least in my judgment, before you talk to me about anything related to Sarah Martin. That girl haunts my dreams, Novak. She and her mother both.”
He’d been staring at his hat, but now he moved his eyes back to Mark.
“I knew Diane and Sarah and Richard — that was Sarah’s father — through church. Richard died in a car wreck when I was still working road duty. One of the worst I’ve ever seen. I drew the job of notifying the family.” His voice thickened and he cleared his throat. “I stayed in touch a little. But with distance, you know. There’s a job involved, and there’s a respect involved. Both of them mattered to me. Both still do.”
He seemed to be waiting on a challenge over that. Mark didn’t offer one.
“You mentioned Julianne Grossman,” Blankenship said. “I’ve never laid eyes on her. I know that Diane went to see her for help with insomnia after Richard was killed. I didn’t really like that, to tell you the truth. Whole thing just seemed strange to me. Maybe I’m not much of a modern thinker, I don’t know. But back then I didn’t have as close of a relationship with Diane, and so I didn’t say anything. Later... later I told her not to go back. I told her to go to a real doctor and get herself some pills. Same kind that eventually killed her.”
He made himself look Mark in the eye when he said that. All Mark could do was nod. Blankenship returned the gesture. “So you understand that part. Okay. Time went on; I started to see Diane a little more. I was always real conscious of Sarah because I’d known her daddy and I knew what she’d gone through and I didn’t want...” He hesitated. “I didn’t want to infringe on that, you understand? I felt like her father, dead or alive, still had some jurisdiction.”
He ran his big hand over his eyes. A quick pass.
“That cave opened up for business sort of in the middle of all this. People thought it was a big deal, there was some excitement around here about it. I’ve never liked tight places. But Sarah? She was fifteen at the time, and she was real interested. When they opened up the tours, we all went down and took one together. I wish you’d seen her that day.” He shook his head at the memory. “The way a place can affect two people so differently, it’s really something. I couldn’t get out of that cave fast enough. You’d have thought she wanted to move in.
“The next summer, she wanted a job but didn’t want to work at a restaurant or behind a cash register. I’d just heard this when I went out to talk to Pershing MacAlister about some issues at that cave. He had complaints about the locals, people vandalizing the cave, sneaking into it; he wanted me to cooperate with the newspaper and say we were watching the place. Spread the word. What I did then, well, I good-old-boy’d it, plain and simple. Asked whether there might be a summer job available. Man needed my help, and I asked him for a favor. You might not believe it, but I didn’t often do those things.”
Mark believed it.
“So Sarah got the job, and it was all my doing, ain’t that something to consider? She never applied for it, never knew it existed. Never would have been down there again, probably. People would say it was such a small thing, getting a teenager a job, but I knew what I was doing. Using my position to get Sarah what she wanted, because Diane was what I wanted. I wasn’t doing police work. Maybe you pay for choices like that. I just never could have imagined the ways.”
His phone rang and he silenced it with one touch and without a glance. He drank some coffee and cleared his throat again. He had stopped looking at Mark.
“Things went fast between Diane and Pershing. That’s all that need be said about that. It isn’t my business, what happened between them. I told Diane that then, and I’m telling you now. The engagement happened, and I... I had to get used to another change in jurisdiction then. Diane and Sarah, they weren’t...” He had to work to get the next words out: “They weren’t in mine anymore. And that... that was a hard summer for me. Then came September, and the call came in, and that was the worst day of my life. Because I knew. Even while I was arranging the searches and telling Diane not to worry, I knew we weren’t going to be finding Sarah alive. Don’t ask me how. Sometimes you know.”
He closed his eyes briefly, then opened them and spoke again.
“I sent Ridley Barnes in. You already asked me about it, and I walked out of here after you asked and drank whiskey for the first time in probably fifteen years. I sent Ridley in. Pershing tried to warn me that Ridley was not right, that he had mental issues, but I also had the caving people telling me they needed someone who knew the cave, and so I made the call. I believed it was the right thing, then. I’ve thought a lot about it, and I truly don’t think I was trying to overrule Pershing. I hope to God that I wasn’t. I couldn’t live with myself if I believed that. Hell, I don’t know, you can judge me how you want, and one day God will judge me in the way that counts, and I’ll know then, won’t I?”
He wiped at his right eye with his thumb, and Mark looked at the floor out of respect. He kept his eyes down until Blankenship spoke again.
“Now I’m going to tell you one last thing you should know,” he said. “When Sarah went missing, at first all anyone understood was that she was lost.”
“Right.”
“Back then, I didn’t know that Ridley believed that a hole in the ground was a supernatural place. That he told Pershing the cave made him stronger with each trip. Gave him power with each trip. Didn’t know he’d said he had to work alone because the cave wouldn’t talk to anyone else.”
He pulled himself up to the desk and faced Mark again.
“Now you’ve heard what I have to say, and you’re smart enough to understand how we go from here. You might want to talk to somebody else. Otherwise, whatever you disclose here, you’re disclosing it to an officer who was removed from that investigation for due cause. You want somebody else, I can point you to the state police.”
“I think I’d rather talk to you, Sheriff,” Mark said.
“All right, then. Let’s hear it.”
Blankenship didn’t say a word until Mark was through. Then he said, “Ridley confessed. On video, he confessed.”
“Yes. But it wouldn’t be worth a damn to the prosecutor. It would be blown up for coercion or false memory even if Julianne was accepted by the court as an expert, and that’s discounting Ridley’s options entirely. He might sit down with you and laugh in your face and tell you that he was putting on a show for her the whole time, and who could prove him wrong?”
“Do you think he was?”
“Not after this morning, I don’t,” Mark said. “I think she got him to tell the truth.”
Blankenship rose and went to the window and looked out at his little town. Someone was shoveling snow off the sidewalk and the rhythmic scraping was the only sound for a few seconds. Then he said, “She really thinks that Ridley will show her something if he gets the chance to be alone in that cave with her.”
“That’s what I’m told. She’s willing to do it, and she’s willing to wear a wire or a camera. She says he won’t allow anyone else along. It would be a damn difficult surveillance.”
“It would be impossible. Ridley would smell anything out of place down there, and you need light to move an inch. Or at least most people do.”
“Could put recorders in the cave, but you’d need a lot of them, since we have no idea where he’d take her. Not practical. Any device has to be on her.”