She kept her calm when she did it; this was the genius of Mrs. Mangano’s art. She didn’t look mad, but she had to’ve been furious, to sweep the day’s lesson plan aside just to recover an item that the school probably bought in bulk, that the supply closet probably held whole boxes of in reserve all year-round.
“Robert, did you take the pencil sharpener?”
“No.”
“Thank you, Robert. Christine, did you take my pencil sharpener?”
“No, Miss Mangano.”
“Mrs. Mangano. Thank you, Christine. Gage, did you take my pencil sharpener?”
I hadn’t, and I said so; it was Patrick Long who’d done it, and by the time she got to him, he was almost grateful to crack. He cried in front of the whole class, and his pranks never again attained the destabilizing character of their pre-confessional days.
So, when I decide it’s time to put the question to him directly, I do it in my best Mangano voice, hoping to harness some of her deceptive ease and confidence. “Hey, just because I have to ask,” I say: “Did you kill Evelyn Gates, and her client, the visitor—Marc Buckler, right?”
He fixes me with a cracked smile. “‘Her client,’” he says. “This case is your whole life right now, and you’re going to make money off of it like a lot of people have over the years, and Marc Buckler’s name is just slipping your mind sometimes, right? Right, OK. Well, Gage, I had a good time showing you around, and I hope I was able to help you a little; and also, I never killed anybody in my life, and I don’t know anybody who did, and I wish you all the best.”
We both stand up; the formalities of the interview have a sacred rhythm almost everybody respects.
“Sorry if that was a sore question,” I offer as he holds the front door for me.
I’m on the sidewalk; he could let the door close, but he waits.
“I’m not sore,” he says. Seth is a very believable guy, and I believe him. “But when I start to see which way something’s going, I usually check out if I think I’m not going to be able to control it. I spent a lot of my life not being in control. Now I know that if I want control, I have to take it. You know?”
He gives me an extra second to study his face; I feel like if there were a murderer behind those eyes, I’d see him now.
“Good luck,” he says, as the door swings gently shut.
DERRICK
“It was different, but it wasn’t a gigantic shock,” Derrick tells me when I ask him what he thought of North Carolina at first. “Pensacola right after Milpitas, now, that was something else. Can you even imagine?”
He’s the spitting image of everybody’s favorite professor: easygoing, good-humored, insightful, inviting. But the tenure track, he decided somewhere along the path to a master of arts degree in maritime history, wasn’t for him. Once you’ve spent enough time inside the academy, it can be hard to imagine life outside of it; but Derrick Hall has never been short on imagination.
“I was working on my thesis, working really hard, when I had this realization: I didn’t want to be talking about all this stuff in the abstract. I wanted to be next to it. I’d be revising a section on distinguishing between two types of anchors and there’d be doodles all up and down the margins. I realized I was most interested in the stuff I could see with my own eyes, this stuff I could really get close to.”
We’re standing on the dock out in front of the North Carolina Maritime Museum at Beaufort, a wooden-shingled building on the Beaufort Sound; it’s just a week or so into the off-season, the middle of the week. Derrick looks out at the docked catamarans and cruisers gently bobbing in the water; the calm of the view is intoxicating,
“Can’t get much closer than this,” he says.
* * *
BEAUFORT IS MY THIRD STOP; my trek to the heart of Devil House enters crucial waters here. Derrick had arguably the closest connection to the property, having frequented Valley News before its decadent days, and worked inside the building when it was still a functioning store; he spent many long afternoons within its walls after Anthony Hawley abandoned it wholesale as a kiss-off gesture to his landlord. When I asked Angela and Seth for information, there were several limitations already in place: they only ever knew so much, and neither ever stood at the center of the storm the way Derrick did.
“I’m not sure that’s true,” he says when I suggest he’s the best authority I have encountered so far. “Seth’s memory is amazing. He calls me up once a month, we have it on our calendars, and his recall for details—you met him, right? So you already know.”