I stood in the doorway of that little room for a long time before I could make myself go in. The recliner was the same brown corduroy recliner that Roy had owned since our second year of marriage, the one I thought he had thrown away. The space heater, the lamp with no bulb, the typewriter. And on the back wall the yellow clippings, perhaps sixty of them, taped in orderly rows, every one from the winter of 1977. I walked in and sat down in his chair. It still held the shape of him.
On the card table beside the typewriter, there was a stack of paper, a hand worn ledger, and a thin envelope with my name on the front. I opened the envelope. The letter inside was typed, which was how Roy wrote everything he did not wish to say aloud. “Dear Marlene. If you are reading this, I did not find the courage to tell you in life. I am going to try to tell you now.” I held the paper under the beam of my flashlight. My hands were shaking so hard that the words swam, and I had to read each line twice.
He wrote that in February of 1977 he was nineteen years old and working nights at the Skateland on Main Avenue in Fargo, sweeping the floor, mending skates. On the night of the nineteenth, a girl of sixteen named Linda Voss had stayed late. She was a friend of his from school. She was waiting for her ride. “She told me a man in a blue Ford pickup was going to take her home. I thought nothing of it. I locked the doors at midnight and I went home to bed. In the morning, she was gone. They never found her.”
The man who sits alone in the dark with a sorrow he cannot share is often the one who has kept faith the longest.
I put the letter down. I looked up at the clippings on the wall and I saw them differently. They were not the work of a morbid man. They were the work of a man who had carried a stone in his chest for forty seven years. Roy wrote that he had told the police everything he remembered, but that nothing came of it. A blue Ford pickup was as common as grass. For nearly half a century, every Tuesday and Thursday at twilight, he came to that garage to read the file and write letters to the cold case unit. He had mailed two hundred and six.
He explained why he never told me. “I was ashamed. I thought if I had stayed one hour more, she would have lived. I locked the door. I let her wait alone. I thought you would look at me differently.” I wept. I wept for Roy and for the boy he had been, and for a girl in a skating rink in 1977, and for the forty seven years of silence. Then I read the last page. It said, “There is a ledger in the box. Every plate number I ever matched, every man I ever followed. The last name is the one I am sure of. Give it to Detective Anders. He knows.”
The ledger was a school notebook with a green cover, gone soft with handling. Every page was dated. I found the last entry and read it by flashlight. It said, in the small, tight hand of Roy, Gordon Pryor, 74, retired grain elevator foreman, Moorhead. Blue 1975 Ford F150, since sold. Seen at Skateland 3 times in January 1977. Drove the girls home. Admitted to a coworker in 1991, in my hearing, that he had known the Voss girl. I did not dare tell. I was afraid no one would believe a janitor. I sat in the dark with that page in my lap for a long, long time.
I called Detective Anders the next morning. He is a gray haired man near retirement, and when I told him who I was, he said nothing for a moment. Then he said, “Mrs. Lindahl, I have been waiting for that call for twenty years.” He drove out to the house himself. He stood in the little room and read every clipping, and he took the ledger in both hands and said that he would see it through. Within the month, a search warrant was served on the home of Gordon Pryor in Moorhead.
They found it in a cistern behind his house. They found what remained of Linda Voss, and her class ring, and a key chain from the skating rink. The old man did not resist. He confessed in the interview room in a single afternoon, as though a weight had been lifted. The trial was short. He was seventy four, and he died in prison before the year was out, but not before the courthouse steps were crowded with the people of Fargo who had remembered the girl all those years.
The sister of Linda, Carol, came to the house a week after the funeral. She is eighty one. She stood on my porch in a navy coat, holding a small package, and said, “I came to thank the man who never stopped.” I told her he had passed. She said she knew. She said she had received two hundred and six letters from Roy over the years, unsigned, that she had never known who sent them, only that on the anniversary every year one arrived that said, Somebody is still looking. She put her arms around me. We stood on that porch like two old schoolgirls.
I have kept the garage. I painted the walls pale yellow and took down the clippings, all but one. The recliner is still there, and the typewriter. On Tuesdays and Thursdays at twilight I go and sit with a cup of tea. Sometimes Carol comes, and we play cards. We do not talk much. We have a third chair for Roy, and the lamp, which has a bulb in it now, shines on the table, and the whole little room is warm.