‘Yes,’ she said, a bit uncertainly.
‘How old, exactly? Do you know?’
‘Pardon me?’
‘How old was she?’
She pushed back in the booth. Something crazy must have been showing on his face. ‘Sev… sev… seventeen,’ she stammered.
He’d frightened her with his rapid-fire words. ‘Born in 1965, probably?’ he asked, more conversationally. He hadn’t had to do fast math; he’d already known.
‘I don’t know, Mac. Jeez, why does it matter?’
He took a breath. ‘It doesn’t; I’m sorry. Sometimes I ask too many questions, is all.’
Her face relaxed. ‘Last place Betty Jo Dean was seen alive was leaving your restaurant.’
He remembered, then. The wife-half of the couple that sold him the restaurant, called the Wren House at the time, had taken him aside after the real estate closing. Glancing nervously at her husband, who was talking to their attorney down the hall, she’d taken a folded tan envelope from her purse and pressed it into his hands.
‘It wouldn’t be right, you not knowing about Betty Jo,’ she’d said, talking low like she was passing on state secrets.
He’d asked what she meant. The woman had murmured something about a young girl and her date being murdered after leaving the Wren House. ‘But some say she comes back.’
‘I thought you said she was dead-’
‘Shhh.’ The woman had looked down the hall. Her husband was walking toward them.
‘Betty Jo Dean,’ the wife whispered. ‘She comes back.’
The husband must have recognized something in his wife’s eyes. ‘Don’t be filling Mac’s head with old nonsense,’ he’d said, working a smile onto his face.
Mac had jammed the woman’s tan envelope in with the rest of his closing papers and wished them both a happy retirement in Florida. Within minutes, he’d forgotten all about Betty Jo Dean.
‘The people I bought the restaurant from mentioned something about her,’ he said now.
‘She and her date, a man named Pribilski, left the Wren House and drove south the half-mile to Poor Farm Road.’
‘A lovers’ lane back then also?’
‘Yes. Pribilski was dragged from his car, shot and left by the side of the field. Betty Jo was driven away in his car by one of the killers, who left it in your parking lot across the street. She was found dead in the tall grass along the Devil’s Backbone, two days later.’
That road, too, was only a half-mile from his restaurant, though west instead of south.
‘There were all kinds of leads,’ Pam went on. ‘Before Betty Jo and her date went to the Wren House they’d been drinking at Al’s Rustic Hacienda.’
‘Never heard of it.’
‘It’s that abandoned, dirty stucco place with the peeling, painted red roof shingles, on the east bank of the Royal.’
Mac knew the building. It was an eyesore. He’d hoped to get it torn down after he got elected, liked he’d hoped to do all kinds of things.
‘All the town’s honchos used to drink there,’ she said. ‘That night, Pribilski and Betty Jo got into some hassles in the parking lot. There were several couples hanging around out there and being confrontationaclass="underline" a woman with a man, who yelled at Betty Jo; two brothers, one from Iowa and one who used to be from here; and another two men in a beat-up old car who’d been hassling another couple. All this couple stuff is important because the theory has always been that two people had to be involved to drive away the two cars – Pribilski’s and the one belonging to the killers – from Poor Farm Road.’
She was talking about killings that had occurred decades before. He needed to order his eggs.
‘There were other suspects, too,’ she droned on. ‘Old boyfriends, old girlfriends, men Pribilski beat at dice that night, right there in that basement of your place, Mac.’
He took an obvious look at his watch, hoping to hurry her along. ‘They never caught the killers?’
‘Some folks wonder if anyone really tried.’
‘How can you know that? You said there were all kinds of leads. Certainly they were chased down.’
‘Maybe there were just too many of them.’
‘Someone was deliberately trying to mislead the investigators?’
‘Not “someone”; maybe some people.’
‘More than one?’
‘Maybe those big shots from the Hacienda, together.’
‘A conspiracy?’ Pam’s story was getting wilder by the minute.
‘Could be.’
Voices came from near the door. Early lunchers were starting to arrive. It was almost eleven o’clock.
It was too late to order breakfast now. ‘What do you want me to do, Pam?’
She looked across the dining room at the people coming in. One of the other waitresses glared back at her.
‘Last week, I went to the library here in Grand Point, trying to find information they might have about the crime.’ She bit her lower lip. ‘The librarian asked why I wanted to go digging around in that old case. I said it was just curiosity. She said, fine; microfilms for the Rockford Register were in the basement. And they were, only not for 1982.’
‘Misplaced?’
‘Every other year was there, just not 1982.’ She nudged the manila folder across the table. ‘I went to my own library. This ran in 2007, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the killings.’
He flipped it open and saw a photocopy of a DeKalb newspaper article. ‘This crime is so old. Why are you so interested?’
She gestured slightly toward the other side of the room. ‘See that door?’
He knew the door, and the banquet room behind it. He’d been in there several times when he was running for mayor. ‘The banquet room,’ he said. ‘It can hold a hundred people.’
‘Except on Tuesdays and Fridays, at eight in the morning. Then it holds only a handful – the people that run this town. I’ve never much paid attention to them; one of the other girls takes their breakfast orders, so I don’t know if it’s always the same exact bunch. Always, though, the door is kept shut, and no one – and I mean no one – is supposed to go near it. They like their privacy, is what we’re told.’
‘How does this fit with that murdered girl?’
She glanced across the restaurant. The manager was staring at her, obviously willing her to get up and work the tables.
She slid out of the booth. ‘One morning, a couple of weeks ago, the restaurant was especially quiet. I was passing near that door. Except that morning, someone had left it open, more than a crack. And I heard them.’
‘Heard them?’
‘They were saying her name: “Betty Jo Dean.”’
The manager had had enough. He was walking over.
‘Pam, people are coming in,’ he called from a few tables away.
She nodded. The manager turned back around.
‘Listen,’ she said, ‘I asked some of the regulars here about the crime. Nobody wants to talk. I’m new here, barely getting by. I can’t be pushing this.’
‘What’s to push?’
‘It’s not right.’
‘What isn’t right?’
‘They weren’t just saying her name. They were laughing.’
She tapped the manila folder she’d left on the table.
‘I think one of them in that room killed Betty Jo Dean.’
TWENTY-TWO
Driving south to the Bird’s Nest, biting at an Egg McMuffin – an abomination, but fast, filling and on his way – Mac told himself he didn’t need to add a waitress’s fantasy about an overheard laugh and the mention of a dead girl to the vile stew of things that kept him up at night. At fifty, his life was cluttered enough, verging as it was on total collapse.
Front and center, of course, was the nightmare of the grand jury indictment.
Not much more than a year earlier, he’d been a good Republican, county board trustee and head of the judiciary committee in neighboring Linder County, and getting along well enough by running a dinner theater out of his converted barn. But then he’d been out-politicked and defeated for reelection.