Page 139 of The Reformatory

Haddock slowed his pace, holding his arm out to bar Boone from moving so quickly. In the small room, Haddock realized how they both reeked from the fire. He could only hope he had no ash on his face as he forced a grin. “Someone left a burner on and we got some smoke,” he said. “Everything’s fine now. The boys are eating dinner as usual.”

Doris’s shoulders sagged with relief. She relied on this job to put food on her family’s table, like all of the Reformatory’s employees. That was the thing none of the Tallahassee blowhards wanted to consider: Without the Reformatory, where would the town get its corn? Who would run the printing press? He wasn’t just trying to protect himself: the Reformatory was like a town unto itself, and his town could perish. It could perish today.

He shook the woman’s hand and apologized for being tardy, asking if she wouldn’t mind coming back on Monday. He even assured her the job was probably hers, and the way her face lit up put his mind even more at ease. As he reached for his main key ring to unlock his office door, Haddock heard Doris offering appointment times, so he gave Doris a warm smile over his shoulder and she smiled back at him, her ears turning pink at his rare affection.

But his smile died as soon as he opened the door. “Come in,” he whispered to Boone, and he quickly closed the door behind him. Something was wrong, but at first glance Haddock couldn’t have said what, even at gunpoint. He scanned every corner, trying to spot it.

“Stay here,” Haddock said to Boone, leaving him standing close to his photo with Lucy.

When Haddock walked closer to his desk, he saw that his screen had been removed from his window and propped against the back wall. The curtains swayed enough to remind him that he’d left his window wide-open. He usually closed his window when he left his office for long periods, but not always. And not if he didn’t expect to be gone long.

Haddock ran behind his desk and saw the specter that had dogged his nightmares for thirty years: his bottom drawer yawned and the space behind his bottle crate was a dark, empty maw. He leaned over and felt inside to make sure it was empty. Quickly, he tugged on the other drawers to check them. Had a haint only moved his things around to scare him?

No. Nothing. The haint jar was gone. Even worse: his photographs were gone.

“Boss?” Boone finally said, worried.

“Someone broke into my office,” Haddock said. “Stole the haint jar.”

“Jesus, help,” Boone said, more frightened than outraged. Ordinarily, he’d come up with a plan to flush out the thief and how to punish him—but, like Haddock, Boone wasn’t assuming the burglar was living. What did you do if the burglar was a haint?

“Jesus ain’t got nothin’ to do with this, Boone,” Haddock said. He went to his window and looked outside at his limited view: he could see only the cornfield fence and a small swath of the campus that included the shed, about thirty yards down.

The shed! Crutcher said he had seen Robert Stephens near there.

Boone had walked closer behind him. “Came in through the window!” Boone sounded relieved when he saw the discarded screen. A window screen probably wouldn’t matter to a haint. “Let’s go see what’s outside.”

Boone’s mind was working more quickly than Haddock’s, and why not? He didn’t know the whole of it, the terror in the missing photographs. Haddock trusted Boone with many of his secrets, but not the worst of them. Nervous perspiration stung Haddock’s eyes, so he mopped his brow with his shirtsleeve and followed his most trusted man outside.

The thief had obviously hidden in the hedges, with fresh footprints—They look like a grown man’s!—between the first three rear windows, leading to Haddock’s. A few leaves had fallen from the shrubs, and scuff marks on the bricks showed how he’d climbed inside.

“I’m gonna call and get you bars for that window, boss,” Boone said, still not understanding that there would be no need for bars across the windows if those photos were made public. If a child had stolen the photos, he had a better chance of finding them, but a grown man might be long gone. Boone was crawling under the hedges like a detective, but Haddock’s rib cage constricted so hard around his lungs that he had to think to breathe.

“These look to me like boot prints, boss, and I bet I know who’s wearing these boots,” Boone said, like a miracle. “Robert Stephens. Just like you were saying before.”

“This big? He’s only twelve—”

“Naw, suh, he had brand-new boots when he came in, so we didn’t have to give him no shoes. They looked big, just like these. Nobody can’t find him, right?”

“Right,” Haddock said, and his lungs opened for a flood of oxygen. “And Crutcher said he was out by the shed! So he can’t be far.”

With his panic receding, Haddock leaned over to examine the soil beneath his window in the patch of sunlight evading the hedges. A scoop of soil was missing near his window, with a lumpy pile of dirt beside it that didn’t look natural. It might be nothing, but—

“Boone,” he said. “Back up. Let me see if something’s buried.”

“Good eye, boss,” Boone said, noticing the apple-sized lump. He gave Haddock room to kneel beside him. Haddock knew better than to pray to God for his photographs, but he prayed just the same to whatever spirit ruled over the Reformatory and fueled the voice that had told him to set the fire: Please let it all be buried here. But whomever he was praying to spat his prayer back at him, because he unearthed only an empty jar of Vaseline with a blue label.

“Stephens!” Boone said. “Crutcher said he was covered in this. What’d he do, grease himself up to slide through your window like a pig at a county fair?”

Slowly, Haddock shook his head. Quick as he was, Boone still didn’t see. It couldn’t be a coincidence that Stephens had broken in at the same time he’d run off to see about the fire.

Haddock’s earlier panic was replaced with rage: this little son of a bitch had somehow staged a distraction while he invaded his private chamber and stole from him. You better make him pay, the voice that had told him to set the 1920 fire rumbled, a voice very much like his own. Make him watch while you spill out his guts. Don’t leave it to somebody else: you better kill this one yourself.

“Ring the big bell and rouse the dog boys,” Haddock said. “Time to hunt.”

5:45 p.m.

“Ladies and gentlemen, this program is for you, not your children,” Jack Webb’s voice said gravely on the radio between the crackles on Miz Lottie’s old receiver in the truck. “The subject is of vital importance to you as parents. This is the story of a vicious man…” The familiar dramatic horn music came on, and then an announcer’s voice: “Fatima cigarettes, best of all cigarettes, brings you… Dragnet.”