The Ballad of Frankie Silver - By Sharyn McCrumb Page 0,164
executed. If he made any allegations about the Trail Murders, Charles Stanton would be asked to comment on them, of course, and Spencer had no doubt that the colonel would shred him with a few regretful, carefully chosen words. Stanton would not be cheated out of his long-awaited execution.
He could hear the colonel’s snide voice now. A few days ago, the sheriff was willing to believe that a recent homicide was committed by this mysterious killer. Now he wants to free a legally convicted man on the basis of this mythical evidence. I have every concern for the sheriff, who is a man injured in the line of duty, but I think the people of Wake County should ask themselves if he is still fit for the duties of his office.
No, he couldn’t fight Stanton, the master of the press conference. If Fate Harkryder had wanted him to oppose the execution, he would have tried, but he couldn’t fight both sides at once.
Spencer knew that he could expect no corroboration from the prisoner himself. Fate Harkryder had made it clear that he would say nothing on his own behalf, and he was right: a statement from a convicted killer would make no difference to the authorities. Even if the death penalty were set aside, Harkryder would not go free. He might not be a murderer, but he was not blameless. At best, he was an accessory after the fact, and Stanton would see to it that he never left Riverbend. If bringing the real killers to justice would have won him his freedom, he might have done it, but it wouldn’t—so, what was the point?
When Spencer reached the prison parking lot, television mobile units were already setting up their equipment in preparation for their coverage of the execution. The governor’s speech was probably already written, with neatly laser-printed copies in distribution to all the media people. Spencer could feel the tension in the prison, and the controlled excitement among the scrambling technicians in the parking lot. It’s going to happen,he thought. It has been gathering momentum for a long time, and nothing can stop it now. Not even the truth. The truth will be what they broadcast from this parking lot, not what happened on the mountain twenty years ago.
Knowing is one thing; changing is another.Nora Bonesteel was right about that.
He drove out of Cockrill Bend, right on Centennial, right on Briley Parkway, over I-40, and along White Bridge Road. He slowed down at Nashville Tech, thinking for one confused moment that he had reached another prison, but then he realized that it was a college. The prisons were all in his mind.
He saw a billboard for Opryland. Emblazoned across a picture of the amusement park’s roller coaster were the wordsRIDE THE HANGMAN ! Spencer looked away. The hangman. Death had even staked out the billboards.
Spencer had intended to drive around Nashville for a while, but the humid, stale air of the flatlands oppressed him, and when he saw the entrance to the Lion’s Head Mall on White Bridge Road, he turned in to the parking lot, finding a parking space near the theater. The movies were as good a place as any to kill the rest of the day. There was nothing he wanted to see, but at least the building was air-conditioned, and no one would expect him to make conversation. In the cool darkness of the theater, the sheriff stared up at the screen, registering color and noises, but afterward he could not say what film it was that he had seen. A comedy of some sort, he thought, or an action-adventure movie aimed at teenage boys. The
screen could not compete with his own thoughts. He kept running the possibilities through his mind as if they were alternate moves in a chess game. If I did this, then the governor would say that. . . .He could devise no scenario that would give him so much as a stalemate. Every hypothesis ended with the death of Fate Harkryder. Spencer began to wonder why he cared so much, in defiance even of the condemned man’s own intentions. Was it the condemned man who concerned him, or was he indulging his own desire to be blameless?
He remembered what Nelse Miller had told him long ago. You could have looked into Fate Harkryder’s cradle and told that he was going to end up in prison. If it wasn’t one thing, it’d be another.