I slid the rifle into the oven, which was cold, and shut the door. Then I put the page of Earl and the brass shell into the pocket of my apron, took a breath, and walked out to the porch with my hands folded. Ray Fortney Junior stopped at the bottom step with his thumbs in his belt. He was fifty one years old, thick through the middle, with the jaw of his father and a smile that came on like a porch light. “Good morning, Missus Dunleavy,” he said. “I hear Clyde brought you something of Earl. I would like to take a look.”
I said, “Sheriff, I would be glad to show you anything, as soon as you show me a warrant.” His smile stayed exactly where it was. He said, “Margaret, I am the sheriff. A warrant is what I carry in my pocket.” I said, “Then you will not mind taking it out, because I typed the bulletin for every funeral in this county, and I know the difference between a thing being legal and a thing being done.” He took one step up. Behind him, at the end of the lane, I heard an engine, and then a second one.
Two cars turned in and stopped nose to nose across the gravel behind his cruiser. They were gray sedans with state plates and no markings, and a white van came last. A tall man in his forties got out of the first car in a dark suit and a campaign hat, and he took off the hat when he saw me. “Missus Dunleavy,” he said. “I am Captain Aaron Lewis, West Virginia State Police. Your husband wrote me a letter in May. I am sorry I am late.” He looked at the sheriff. “Ray. I believe you can step off the property.”
A truth can wait forty years in a hollow rifle stock. It only needs one stubborn widow to open it.
Ray Junior did not step off at once. He looked at the captain, at the two troopers in the second car, and at the evidence van. I watched the porch light go out of his face, slowly, like a small town at midnight. He said something about jurisdiction, and Captain Lewis answered quietly that the governor had signed the assignment that morning, and that the Randolph County sheriff had been recused from this matter until further notice. Ray Junior got into his cruiser. He backed out the lane without a word, kicking up gravel, and was gone.
I took the troopers into the kitchen. A woman in white gloves, a technician named Dolores, laid out a clean sheet of paper on the table and photographed everything as I took it out of my apron. The page from the notebook of Earl. The brass shell in its sandwich bag. Then I opened the oven and lifted the old rifle out, and the captain thanked me for being careful. I told him it was no trouble, that I had been cooking in that oven for fifty years and it had never held anything more important.
Captain Lewis sat down across from me and told me what he knew. His grandmother, Opal Mullins, had died in 2009 still insisting that her son Danny never owned a gun. She had left her grandson a box of newspaper clippings and a cheap photograph of a nineteen year old boy in a church suit. “I became a policeman because of that box,” he said. “For eighteen years I have been waiting for someone to say what really happened on Pocahontas Road. Your husband did. He could not live to see it. I can.”
The troopers drove two miles down the hollow with a warrant that afternoon. I did not go. Clyde sat with me on the porch, stiff on his cane, and neither of us said much. At dusk the phone rang. It was Captain Lewis. Ray Fortney Senior had been sitting in a rocking chair on his porch, eighty six years old, with a blanket on his knees, and when the troopers walked up, he stood slowly, went inside, and returned carrying a cedar box. Inside the box was a thirty eight revolver. He had kept it since 1986. He said he could never bring himself to throw it away.
The state lab had the match in six days. The shell I had found in the stock of Earl came from the revolver that Ray Fortney had kept in a cedar box for forty years. On the seventh day they put the old man in a wheelchair and took him to the hospital in Elkins, and he told them what he had told no one. Danny Mullins had run. He had a flashlight in his hand, not a gun. Ray panicked. He fired twice. Then he took the cheap pistol from his own ankle holster and put it in the hand of the boy.
The charge was murder, which has no end date in West Virginia. He was too ill to stand trial, and he died in the spring before a jury could be seated, but the court entered the finding all the same. Danny Mullins had been killed without cause. Ray Junior resigned as sheriff in January and moved away. A committee of the state police went through every file of the office for the previous forty years, and the Mullins case was only the first reopened. By the end of the year there were four.
On the first Sunday in April the whole town came to the cemetery on Davis Avenue, three hundred people in their church clothes, and Captain Lewis laid a new stone on the grave of Danny. I had typed the bulletin myself. It said, in plain letters, “In loving memory of Daniel Mullins, 1967 to 1986. The truth has been told.” Clyde stood next to me on his cane. When the pastor finished, I took the brass shell from my pocket one last time, in its little bag, and set it on the stone beside a bunch of daffodils.