The page from October 1995 was in the handwriting of my father, a blocky print with a heavy hand, and I read it again at the kitchen table until the words stopped looking like words. Dad had written, Job at Kunkle house, 14 Spruce. Found a rifle and a wallet on the smoke shelf behind the damper. The wallet belongs to Roy Kunkle. The rifle is a Winchester model 70, registered to Gene Hollis. I believe Gene put them there. I do not know why. God help me, I do not know what to do. I will keep them until I do.
Gene Hollis was the best friend of my father. They fished together every Saturday on the Delaware for thirty years, in the same green boat, with the same thermos. Gene had been the man at the funeral who held my arm and told me my father was the finest person he had ever known. I read the line again. I read it nine times. Then I put the book on the table and went to the sink and ran water over my face. I could not call Michael Kunkle yet. I needed to think, but there was nowhere in my mind to put it.
I called the state police barracks in Bethlehem and asked for the cold case unit. A corporal named Reyes, a calm, soft spoken man, drove up that evening and read the page in my kitchen with a pair of gloves on. He asked about the rifle. I told him it was in a paint can in my garage, wrapped in the old moving blanket of my father. He asked about the wallet. I said it was in my safe deposit box at the bank. He nodded and looked at me with real gentleness. “You did the right thing,” he said. “Both of you.”
A good man who keeps a terrible secret may not carry it well, but he leaves behind the pages for his child to finish the work.
It took three weeks. The rifle was tested and matched to the registration, which was in the name of Gene Hollis, as my father had written. The wallet contained a driver license, a photograph of a young boy on a bicycle, and a folded bill of sale for a used boat, signed by Roy Kunkle and dated August 11, 1995. The boat was sold to a buyer who signed in a hand the lab expert said matched samples from the old files of Gene. It was the same boat I had sat in as a little girl, with the green hull and the dented bow.
Corporal Reyes took the evidence to the county prosecutor, who obtained a warrant for the property of Gene. In a locked shed behind his house they found a rusted trailer hitch, a fishing rod with the name of Roy scratched on the handle, and a tarpaulin. Cadaver dogs worked the ground behind the shed in a cold November rain. On the second day, in a hollow beneath a stand of hemlock beside the creek, the dogs lay down. Michael Kunkle, who had been invited to watch from the road, drove away before they brought the remains up. He did not want to see.
Gene Hollis was eighty one. He lived in a trailer at the edge of a lake with a bad hip and a cough. They arrested him on a Tuesday at dawn, and he went without a struggle. In the interview room, he told the whole story in an hour. In August of 1995 he and Roy had argued over money, a loan Roy refused to repay. They were drinking. Roy swung at him on the dock. Gene hit him with an oar, and Roy went into the water and did not come up. Gene panicked and buried him. He had spent twenty eight years terrified of his best friend.
He had hidden the rifle and wallet because he believed my father would find them. When my father did, in October, he had come to confront Gene. They sat on the dock, side by side, and my father said, “Tell me it was an accident.” Gene said it was. My father said, “Then tell the police.” Gene begged for a month. My father gave him his month. Then the month became a year, and then ten, and my father, who was a gentle man with a gentle conscience, was never able to break his friend. But he never let it go either.
Michael Kunkle was fifty one when the sheriff called him in. He came to my house in a work jacket with a cap in his hand, and he sat in my kitchen, in the same chair where the corporal had sat. I gave him the page from the book. He read it twice, holding it in both hands. He said, quietly, “Your father found him, and he kept the wallet for twenty eight years.” I said yes. He said, “I used to wonder why your father always sent me a card on my birthday.” His voice shook. “Now I know.”
Gene Hollis pleaded guilty to third degree murder and concealment, and was sentenced to eight to fifteen years, which for a man of his age is a final answer. He wrote me a letter from the state prison, three pages long. I did not read it for a month. When I did, there was only one line I could remember afterward. He wrote, Your father was braver than me, and he never once said so. Michael came with me to the cemetery that Sunday. He stood at the grave and put his cap on the stone.
We buried Roy Kunkle in the Bangor cemetery on a bright blue morning in December, a tall flag at the gate and a hundred people in attendance. Michael spoke. He said a boy of eleven learns to stop asking where his father went, and a man of fifty one learns that someone, somewhere, never did. At the end, he laid on the casket the photograph of the boy on the bicycle from the wallet. Then he came and found me, and he did not say anything. He just took my hand.
I have kept the book. It sits on a shelf in my office, among the work records that nobody else needs, and sometimes I open it to the last page of 1995. At the bottom of the entry, under the line I know by heart, my father drew a small chimney, one single stroke of a pencil. Beside it, in his heavy print, he wrote, Done, but not finished. I think he meant that he had cleaned the flue, but had not cleaned the world. I think that is what we are all supposed to do.