She sits near the back, staring into space. She came to church today hoping, I am sure, to find some peace of mind on the anniversary of her daughter’s death.
Just a few rows in front of her sits Vaughn Doane. They do not acknowledge each other. He is alone today, as alone as Carmen. His wife, Jill, refuses to come to church. The death of her son a year ago shattered whatever faith she once had. Vaughn has told me that she’s angry at God, though I suspect it’s truer to say that she’s angry that her husband keeps on believing in a God who has failed them so utterly.
Vaughn must believe, though. He is one of those people, bless him. He must believe or surrender to the deep. His faith is the only buoy keeping him afloat in his despair.
I ask for anyone to come forward if they would like to accept Christ as their savior or to rededicate their lives to Christ.
There are no new converts or rededications, which is a bit of a disappointment because I liked my sermon, but I am not terribly surprised. People rarely get saved at an Easter service. Most people just want to go home and eat.
But when I ask if anyone would like to pray with me for any other reason, Vaughn steps out from his pew, his suit wrinkled, his tie askew. He wants to pray with me. I knew he would. Most of the people in attendance today already know why he’s walking up this carpeted aisle with tears glistening in his eyes. They lean forward in their seats.
His son died one year ago. In the early hours of Easter morning, Vaughn and Jill were awakened when their son left their car in the driveway and then rode away with his girlfriend, Sarabeth. Over the next hour, Vaughn and Jill both tried calling Gary several times. After getting no response, they called the county sheriff’s office. The police didn’t regard this as an emergency but promised to be on the lookout for Gary and told Vaughn to stay home. Vaughn didn’t listen. He got in his car and headed for the center of downtown. As he neared the bridge, the bridge not far from this church where I am now holding out my arms to receive Vaughn, he saw flashing blue lights scattered along the Little Red River.
“I just knew,” he told me later. “When I saw those lights, I just knew that he was dead.”
Of course, that morning, as the terrible reality made itself clear, he couldn’t know how or why his son had died. The police would piece together the story over the coming days: how Gary Doane, Sarabeth Simmons, and Brian Harten had conspired to steal from Tommy Weller, how Harten had set fire to Tommy’s statue while Sarabeth stayed in the front of the bar and Gary snuck into the back. Tommy Weller, having discovered what happened, first confronted Harten, and then forced Harten to help him find the young lovers. During the confrontation, however, Harten shot Weller and bludgeoned him to death with his baseball bat. When the trio were disposing of the body at the bridge, apparently Gary turned on Harten with the bat, fractured his skull, and pushed him into the river to drown. Then, apparently panicking, Gary and Sarabeth drove down to the river, perhaps to pull one or both of the bodies out of the water. In her panicked state, Sarabeth ran off the road, killing both of them.
Evidence came together quickly and clearly. Police questioned Harten’s ex-wife, who confirmed that he’d borrowed her car to go see Weller, only to return the vehicle several hours late reeking of gasoline. Two waitresses at the bar witnessed an argument between Harten and Weller over money. Police spoke to a station owner in Birdtown who remembered selling Harten a curiously small amount of gas just before the fire. Patrons at the bar placed Sarabeth there when the statue burned down, and they reported that she left before law enforcement arrived to investigate. Not long after the fire, the sheriff himself pulled over Weller for speeding and discovered that Harten was his passenger. Weller admitted to the sheriff that he had already been in a physical altercation with Gary and Sarabeth just after the fire, and text messages between Weller and Sarabeth confirm that he was trying to recover his money from the couple. Investigators found drops of Harten’s blood on the railing of the bridge. Although the current carried Weller’s corpse more than a mile down the river, Harten drowned just below the bridge and his body swept ashore shortly thereafter, allowing the forensics team to uncover traces of gunpowder and Weller’s blood beneath his fingernails. Both Weller’s gun and the missing money, nearly twenty thousand dollars in small bills, some of it containing blood residue from both Weller and Harten, were found on the floorboard of Sarabeth’s crushed car.
Most of the people in church today know some, if not all, of these details. Most of us knew one or more of the deceased, and the Doanes have been members of this congregation for years. I was able to help police piece together the frame of mind of both Gary and Brian, since I spoke to both of them on the day they died. I was saddened to confirm for investigators that Gary was indeed a depressed young man involved with a girl of low character, and that Brian, realizing that his attempt to turn the county wet was doomed, seemed desperate and incoherent.
People still ask me about these terrible events all the time, and I tell them what Paul told the church in Rome: “The wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is life everlasting.”
When Vaughn, poor man, reaches me, he weeps in my arms. The church knows why. No one fidgets, not even the children, and this Easter crowd is no longer hungry for lunch, no longer restless to get back to their televisions. Nothing on television can compete with the live theater of a church service operating at its highest level. Deep down, though many of them don’t know it, this is why they come to church in the first place. It isn’t for the neutered music or the creaky theology. It is for the possibility of seeing genuine human frailty laid bare, the same frailty that all the food, beer, and football cannot help them deny. They know what this grief is. We all know what this grief is.
Vaughn’s weeping, his public confession of powerlessness, is the only redemption available to any of us. No invisible deity worries over us; no ancient text can save us. This man has been broken by life’s cruelty, brutalized by the universe’s utter indifference to his suffering. He needs something to hold on to, needs someone to hold him up so that he does not disappear into the darkest regions of human despair.
He needs me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, I need to thank my agent Nat Sobel. Your insights into this book and your efforts on its behalf were invaluable. Sincere thanks to the whole team at Sobel Weber Associates.
Thanks to my wonderful editor Katie McGuire and the team at Pegasus Books, especially Andrea Monagle, Dan O’Connor, and Sabrina Plomitallo-González.
To the great Oliver Gallmeister, merci beaucoup. And thanks to everyone at éditions Gallmeister, particularly my brilliant translator Sophie Aslanides.
To Heather Brown, Lindsey Muller, Jay Varner, Chris McSween, and Patrick Culliton, my deep gratitude for your love and friendship.
To all the Hinksons, my continuing thanks for your love and forbearance.
DRY COUNTY
Pegasus Crime is an imprint of
Pegasus Books, Ltd.
148 West 37th Street, 13th Floor
New York, NY 10018
Copyright © 2019 by Jake Hinkson
First Pegasus Books hardcover edition October 2019
Interior design by Sabrina Plomitallo-González, Pegasus Books
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in whole
or in part without written permission from the publisher, except by reviewers
who may quote brief excerpts in connection with a review in a newspaper, magazine,
or electronic publication; nor may any part of this book be reproduced, stored in a
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
ISBN: 978-1-64313-223-5
ISBN: 978-1-64313-298-3 (ebk.)
Distributed by W. W. Norton & Company
Table of Contents
Part One Saturday Morning One Richard Weatherford
Two Brian Harten
Three Sarabeth Simmons
Four Richard Weatherford
Five Brian Harten
Six Richard Weatherford
Seven Penny Weatherford
Eight Gary Doane
Nine Sarabeth Simmons
Ten Richard Weatherford
Part Two Saturday Evening Eleven Brian Harten
Twelve Richard Weatherford
Thirteen Sarabeth Simmons
Fourteen Gary Doane
Fifteen Brian Harten
Sixteen Richard Weatherford
Seventeen Penny Weatherford
Eighteen Brian Harten
Nineteen Richard Weatherford
Twenty Sarabeth Simmons
Twenty-One Brian Harten
Twenty-Two Richard Weatherford
Twenty-Three Brian Harten
Twenty-Four Richard Weatherford
Twenty-Five Brian Harten
Twenty-Six Richard Weatherford
Twenty-Seven Brian Harten
Twenty-Eight Richard Weatherford
Twenty-Nine Sarabeth Simmons
Thirty Gary Doane
Thirty-One Sarabeth Simmons
Thirty-Two Richard Weatherford
Thirty-Three Penny Weatherford
Part Three Sunday Morning Thirty-Four Richard Weatherford
Acknowledgments
Copyright