Slow Dance in Purgatory(18)

Maggie thanked the nice lady and waited until she climbed the stairs before she started clicking through the newspaper articles that might help her unravel the mystery of Johnny Kinross.

She found articles that talked about the construction of the school. She saw a picture of Aunt Irene’s father-in-law, Mayor Clayton Carlton, with a shovel in his hands at the ground breaking. He was a handsome enough man, if a guy in his forties could even be handsome, which Maggie wasn’t convinced he could.

She clicked ahead until she found a headline that caught her attention. “Tragedy at Honeyville High,” it shouted in bold print. There were several pictures below the article. One picture had a shot of what looked to be Mayor Carlton, his wife, and a young Roger Carlton exiting the school. They all looked harried and upset, and the caption read “Roger Carlton shown leaving the scene of the terrible accident of which he was a witness.”

Another picture was of a pretty woman who was clearly distraught being led from the school on the arm of a policeman. The caption identified her as Dolly Kinross. Johnny’s mother.

Maggie scrolled down farther, and her breath caught in her throat. The two brothers, in what were clearly yearbook shots, stared back at her from the screen. Billy Kinross, the caption indicated his name below his photo, wore thick black glasses not unlike hers, and he was smiling shyly into the camera. His hair was buzzed short, and it appeared several shades darker than his brother’s. He looked young and innocent, and Maggie felt a stab of something very close to grief when she looked at him. Life really sucked sometimes.

The other picture was of Johnny Kinross. She would have known it was Johnny without the caption. After all, she’d seen him before. He was the boy who had saved her from falling. In the picture, he was smirking at whoever was behind the camera, and one eyebrow was slightly raised, telegraphing his disdain for the photo shoot. He was so handsome it almost hurt to look at him. His hair was the same, down to the unruly curl on his forehead. He was dressed in a black suit and tie with a white dress shirt. She guessed all the other senior boys would have worn the same thing, just like they had done for senior pictures a couple months ago. That much hadn’t changed much in 50 years.

He looked exactly the same. He hadn’t aged at all. Maggie shook her head in disbelief. How could that be? She supposed it would make sense if he were just a ghost, but she had clasped his arms in her hands and felt the warm skin and the strength of the sinewy muscle beneath when he had pulled her from the shaft. He wasn’t a ghost.

Maggie painstakingly read article after article speculating on Johnny’s whereabouts. She wasn’t a good reader, and it took her a while, but the story held her transfixed. Someone had let it slip to the newspaper reporter that there hadn’t been a blood trail, though there had been significant blood thought to be Johnny’s found at the scene. The reporter quoted an officer Parley Pratt who said “the kid just up and vanished.”

There was an article about the gun Billy Kinross had allegedly brandished against Roger Carlton, and it was thought that Johnny Kinross had most likely stolen it out of the back of a car passing through Honeyville. The owner had stopped for some service on his vehicle at Gene’s Automotive where Johnny had worked. The owner of the gun hadn’t noticed the gun was missing for a couple of weeks. Maggie wondered why Johnny would need a gun. The fact that he was suspected of stealing the gun reinforced his bad boy reputation and fueled the argument that maybe he had run off after his brother was killed. Some speculated he had pushed his brother over the balcony, though the evidence would indicate otherwise. Roger Carlton fed that rumor and was quoted as saying, “I know Johnny Kinross would have killed me too, if he’d had the chance.” Maggie felt a spark of anger at the smarmy comment. Roger Carlton apparently hadn't taken any responsibility at all for the part he'd played in the tragedy.

Roger's inflammatory statement created quite a buzz for several weeks as possible ‘sightings’ of Johnny Kinross popped up all over Texas and surrounding states. There had reportedly even been sightings in Mexico, and the editor of the Honeyville Crier suggested that Johnny Kinross was most likely hiding out south of the border.

A significant amount of time later, there was a sighting at the school, and the paper was jam-packed once more with several articles about the case. “Gus Jasper, a janitor at the high school claims to have seen Johnny Kinross inside the school and alerted local officials,” one article stated.

Eventually there were no more articles about the Kinross brothers. No more sightings, nothing else to report. A couple of years after Billy’s death and Johnny’s disappearance, Dolly Kinross married the Chief of Police. His name was Clark Bailey, and he looked like a nice man. There was a picture above the announcement in the paper, and Dolly Kinross looked a little worn around the edges. But she and the Chief looked good together, and they looked happy. Maggie was glad Dolly had found someone to love. Nobody should lose her whole family in one day. Maggie knew how that felt.

She clicked through a couple more years of microfiche records – pausing only once to look at the wedding announcement of Miss Irene Honeycutt to Roger Clayton Carlton, III. Irene looked young and beautiful in an off-the-shoulder wedding gown and a lacy veil. Roger stood stiff and unsmiling beside her. Maggie was surprised at how much she looked like her aunt. She never would have guessed they resembled each other so closely. It pleased Maggie that she would have that connection with Irene; it increased her sense of belonging.