He asked Katy when she’d last seen the money.
“Day before last. I got ten dollars off the golf course and stuck it in there.”
The Wallers had six children, four girls and two boys. Their house, made of two cabins joined together, had three small bedrooms for the six kids, and one shared bathroom for all six. Virgil guessed those rooms and half of a long living area had been one cabin, while the dining room, kitchen, master bedroom, and another bath had probably originally been in another cabin with a common wall.
On their way to Katy’s bedroom, Jim Waller explained to his wife that Virgil was a cop. To that she started saying, “Oh, geez,” and didn’t stop until Virgil was inside the girls’ room. The bedroom had two beds, a wooden chair, and a chest of drawers, with a window that looked out the back of the cabin toward a line of trees that hid the trout stream.
Virgil, Johnson, Katy, and her parents all crowded into the bedroom and Katy pointed at the bottom drawer of the chest. It contained a couple of flannel nightgowns, winter wear, some shirts, a couple of belts, and a dozen pairs of socks rolled into balls. Three pairs of white athletic socks had been unrolled. Two pair were lying on top of other clothing in the drawer and one pair was lying on the floor.
“I put the money in a pair of white socks. That’s where I always keep it,” Katy said. “It’s gone. It’s mostly in one-and five-dollar bills, so it makes a big lump. I couldn’t believe it when it was gone. I checked all the socks, even the black ones.”
Virgil dug around in the drawer for a moment, then turned and asked Ann Waller, who was watching from the doorway, “Could you get me a little wad of toilet paper?”
“You find something?” Katy asked.
“Dunno.”
He was kneeling by the chest, and a moment later, Ann Waller reached over and handed him the toilet paper. He touched his tongue to it, then dabbed at the side of the drawer.
He asked Katy, “When you were digging around in here, did you cut yourself? Cut your hands?”
She examined her hands, front and back. “No, I didn’t. Why?”
He held up the toilet paper. “There’re some spots of blood in the drawer, and it’s fairly fresh.” He then approached the window and saw that it was unlocked. “You lock this?”
“All the time, when it’s down. It’s always down, unless it’s a really hot night, but then, we’re always here when it’s up, me’n my sister, Liz. The screen’s always hooked, though, all the time. It should have been locked.”
He pushed the window fully open and checked the nylon screen, which had a hook lock at the bottom. The hook was undone and when he pressed his finger against the screen, he found a slit right along the bottom of it.
“The screen’s been cut, to get at the hook,” he said.
Jim Waller was astonished. “Son of a bitch. Somebody broke in? That doesn’t happen around here.”
Virgil said, “You really need to report this.”
Jim Waller said, “To who? Katy’s right about the deputy. Couldn’t you do something?”
“Out of my jurisdiction by about two states,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. How about if Jim and Ann come and sit on my porch for a few minutes. And then Katy, separately. To talk. Johnson can wait in the bar.”
Back on the cabin porch, Virgil said to the Wallers, “I don’t want to embarrass anybody, but with this kind of thing the money is usually taken by somebody in the family. Do you think somebody in the family, maybe one of the kids, might have borrowed it?”
The Wallers looked at each other and then Jim Waller blurted, “No way.”
Ann said, “We don’t have much money, but we’ve been harder up than we are now. Katy was saving that money for school clothes and makeup and things. She’s getting to be that age. We wouldn’t take it.” A lean woman with springy blond hair and big eyes, she was nearly a foot shorter than her husband. She looked tough. Tanned, a little weathered, not an ounce of fat on her. She stood in front of him, arms folded under her breasts, faded blue work shirt tucked into equally faded jeans.
“What about one of the other kids?”
They both shook their heads.
“Never,” Ann said. “We go to church and the kids never miss Sunday school. Even little Nate knows his bible.”
Virgil doubted a three-year-old could quote much out of Proverbs or St. Mark, but kept his opinion to himself. He also did not mention that the church might frown on a fifteen-year-old serving alcohol.
He was told that the four daughters were “good girls” and the only one who’d ever given them any trouble was Katy, the oldest. Liz, Ellie, and Lauren were model children, did well in school, obeyed their parents. As to the boys, eight-year-old Jimmy was “a bit of a handful” but Nate, the baby, near perfect. In fact, that boy had slept through the night at two months and to this day rarely cried.
They talked for a few more minutes, but the Wallers were adamant.
Nobody in the family took the money.
Jim and Ann wanted to stay and listen to Virgil talk with Katy, but Virgil insisted that he speak to their daughter alone, and unhappily they shepherded the rest of their brood inside and closed the door. The girl was still angry as she settled into the chair across from him on the porch, one thin leg bouncing in agitation, rain still drizzling from the sky and gurgling in the leaky gutters.
“Here’s where we have the problem, Katy,” Virgil said, leaning forward, elbows on his knees. “Somebody cut the screen, which means he or she probably entered the room from outside the house. But you say the window is always locked, and it’s not broken, which means somebody from the inside had to unlock the window. Why would somebody cut that screen to push the screen hook out, if he or she could open the window from the inside? It doesn’t make any sense. So here’s my question, do you know if somebody was in your bedroom, who might have unlocked the window without your knowing it, and who then might have come back some other time and cut the screen to get in? Maybe while you were tending bar last night?”
Her eyes went sideways, a hand went to her throat. “Oh, no.” She was slowly shaking her head, almost as if she were trying to convince herself.
“That’s probably the person who took it,” Virgil said. “Who was it? A friend?”
She didn’t say anything for a long time, then, “You can’t tell my dad or he’ll kill me. I mean it. Besides, nothing happened. But he won’t believe it.”
“Tell me.”
She hesitated, then sighed and looked away.
The night before, she said, the rest of the family had gone into town to shop. A boy who lived up the road had come over and they’d sat in her bedroom to talk.
“Like I said, nothing really happened. We were just hanging out.”
She was looking at Virgil directly, nodding, her blond curls bobbing around her face. She seemed earnest.