The Secrets on Chicory Lane: A Novel(3)
Perhaps the real truth of why I don’t like going home is the feeling of melancholy—and fear—that hovers over me whenever I am back. Dark clouds of pain and sorrow. They continue to haunt me even now. Bad things happened on Chicory Lane, the street where I grew up. I truly believe that Evil—with a capital “E”—visited my neighborhood that summer of 1966. It slithered inside at least three houses that I know of, and set about destroying lives and delivering misery. In the end, it affected so many of us. Sadly, I think it did the most damage to Eddie Newcott, the boy who lived across the street.
2
There is much to consider. Do I really want to see Eddie again? Why does he want to talk to me? What will he have to say? Does he think I owe it to him? There is no question that there exists a unique bond between Eddie and me. A lifelong connection. At one time, we were closer than salt and pepper shakers—and that’s a pretty apt metaphor for what Eddie and I were, especially when we were kids on Chicory Lane. In the later years when he and I became … well, I’m not sure what to call it … it was something else. A madness, perhaps.
After our last encounter in the mid-nineties, we mutually parted ways and never spoke again. This was about a decade before he committed the crime. I would have responded to Eddie had he reached out during his legal ordeal, and in fact I contacted his lawyer—the same Robert Crane—myself to see if Eddie might want to talk to me. My inquiry was politely declined. Later, during the penalty phase of the trial, I once again offered to provide a character witness in the hopes that he wouldn’t get death. And again, my willingness to help was dismissed, Crane told me, expressly by Eddie himself.
Eddie received the death penalty for capital murder. It was the charge the DA went for and got, because that’s the only classification in Texas for which one can receive the death penalty. The defense raised some legal brouhaha, saying the crime wasn’t really capital murder because it was a domestic situation, but the prosecutor and judge didn’t buy it. Eddie still had a shot at an insanity appeal, but he gave up and refused to pursue one. His lawyer did it for him as a matter of course. Still, it was as if Eddie wanted to die.
We all knew that Eddie was guilty of murdering the woman he was living with at the time, along with their unborn child. Unfortunately, the original jury didn’t believe the defense’s contention that he’d done it because he was off his meds, so the verdict didn’t swing in Eddie’s favor. The shocking revelations about his childhood made good live television, but the twelve jurors held them against the accused. Eddie apparently resigned himself to his fate, and he deliberately provoked the jury when the verdict was announced. He actually stood, pointed at the twelve men and women, and, as the media put it, “cursed them with a Satanic spell.”
That was the real reason Eddie had received the death penalty. He was an outspoken atheist. The woman he killed, Dora Walton, was a fellow atheist who lived with Eddie in his childhood home, where for years they produced and distributed a newsletter about Satanism. Naturally, his neighbors didn’t like it. Even in the eighties, Eddie had already received national notoriety amid pressure against him to leave his old neighborhood, which he vehemently fought, claiming his and his mother’s rights to stay in their house. Dora Walton’s murder was described by the media as a Satanic ritual.
The truth is that Eddie went off his meds.
When he was arrested, the press elevated the story to international status and even gave him a nickname that caught on—“EVIL EDDIE.” “SATANIST IN GRUESOME RITUAL.” “SUSPECT CLAIMS TO BE THE DEVIL.” “EVIL EDDIE GOES TO TRIAL TODAY.” “EVIL EDDIE FOUND GUILTY!” The more salacious tabloids spelled it out with repugnance—“WOMAN SLAIN IN DEATH ORGY.” “RITUAL MURDER!” “DEATH IN BLACK MASS.” “WITCHCRAFT!—LIMITE’S SHOCKING SATANIC SEX CULT.”
In this day and age, practicing witchcraft isn’t supposed to be considered a crime if that’s what a person does in private. Obviously, Eddie crossed the line into something far more serious. The way Eddie murdered his girlfriend was so shockingly heinous that the jury thought the convicted killer was the devil himself. Eddie had become an infamous celebrity smack dab in the middle of the Bible Belt. In the minds of that West Texas jury of good ol’ conservative boys and girls, he was Evil Eddie. It was best to simply execute him.
It was a tragedy.
I stare at Crane’s letter, debating whether I should call his office or not. Crane, a good man who has always done all that he can for Eddie, took on the case pro bono. Why would Eddie break his silence just days before he is scheduled to die? To apologize for not accepting my help? I don’t need an apology, but I admit part of me wants one. I believe Eddie refused to contact me during the trial because he didn’t want me involved in his sensational story—after all, at that time in the early 2000s, my career as a well-known romance author was on a solid, steady plateau. The media never connected Eddie and me as childhood friends who grew up on the same street, though I don’t think it would have bothered me—or hurt my sales, I dare say—if the tabloids had tied us together.
There is only one thing that makes sense: Eddie simply wants to see me before he dies. Surely that’s all there is to it. Christ, I think I do owe it to him. I have to do it. I am going to have to visit him. Otherwise, I’ll regret it. I’m already a member of the AARP; I don’t want to spend the precious years I have left with the guilty feeling that I’d done him a disservice.