My name's Deputy Wade Kessler, and I'm the one who's supposed to explain how a nineteen-year-old girl ended up in the Muskingum River on a Tuesday night in August, and why three of my former colleagues are never going to work in law enforcement again as long as they live.
I'll start with what I did, since that's the part I can't put down.
I grew up outside Zanesville, Ohio, in a stretch of Muskingum County where the roads turn to gravel past the old feed store on Route 9. My mother's people were Melungeon — mixed blood, dark-eyed, the kind of family that got looked at twice at the grocery store and never invited to the church potluck. My grandmother, Ada Sizemore, raised me most of my growing-up years while my mother worked double shifts at the plastics plant in Newark. Ada kept a garden of things nobody else grew — mullein, boneset, yarrow — and half the county came to her back door after dark for tinctures the doctor in town wouldn't give them, and the other half crossed the street when they saw her coming.
I became a deputy sheriff in 1987 because Ada told me to. "Get inside the fence," she said. "Somebody in this family needs to be able to open a door instead of getting kicked through one." I believed her. I was twenty-four, I had a new badge, and I thought I could do some good from the inside.
That's the part of the story I have to live with — because on the night of August 15th, 1989, I was the one standing at the end of the hall.
We'd picked up a girl named Junie Cardwell for what Sheriff Boyd Renfro called "loitering with intent," which in that county mostly meant being related to Ada Sizemore and standing too close to the Kroger parking lot after ten p.m. Junie was Ada's goddaughter, seventeen years old, quick-tempered, and she'd made the mistake that spring of telling Renfro's oldest boy no when he cornered her behind the Dairy Queen. Renfro didn't forget things like that.
They brought her in around eleven. I was on the overnight desk. I heard raised voices down in the holding cell — Renfro, Deputy Cole Pruitt, and a reserve officer named Harlan Betts, a man who kept a Confederate flag decal on his truck window and made no secret of what he thought people like Junie and me were worth. I heard a chair scrape. I heard Junie say, clear as anything, "I didn't do nothing, I didn't do nothing to your boy" — and then I heard the sound a body makes when it hits a concrete floor.
I stood up. I got as far as the hallway. And then Renfro came around the corner, filled the doorway with his shoulders, and said, "This isn't your business, Kessler. Go check the parking lot." And God help me — I went and checked the parking lot. I told myself I'd go to the sheriff's office in the morning. I told myself there'd be a morning to go to.
There wasn't, not for Junie. They put her in the back of Pruitt's truck sometime after one a.m. and by the time I came back in from the lot, the cell was empty and Renfro was writing something in the log that didn't match anything I'd heard. Three days later they found her in the river, six miles downstream, near the low bridge by Blue Rock. The coroner — a man named Doc Ferris who owed the county commissioners his job — wrote it up as accidental drowning, intoxication, no further investigation warranted. Junie didn't drink. Everybody in three counties knew that. Nobody wrote that part down.
I went to my grandmother two nights later. I couldn't say the words straight out, so I just sat at her kitchen table and put my head down on my arms like I was ten years old again. Ada didn't ask me what happened. She already knew — she'd known before I got there, the way she always seemed to know things before the phone rang.
She got up without a word and pulled a cedar box down from the top of the pie safe. Inside were bones — not human, she always swore, though I never asked whose they'd started as — worn smooth and marked with old symbols burned into the surface, symbols her own grandmother had carried up from Virginia before that, and her grandmother before her, back to a time nobody in the family talked about out loud. Ada called it "the reading," never anything fancier than that. She laid the pieces out on the oilcloth under the one bare bulb over the table, and the kitchen went cold enough that I could see my breath, even though it was ninety-one degrees outside and the window unit had quit working in July.
"Four of them," she said, eyes shut, voice flat like she was reading off a grocery list. "Four men who wear a badge like it means something. Fire's coming for one. Water already took its due. Earth is going to open for one of them, and the last one — the last one's going to lose his breath in a way he'll feel coming and won't be able to stop." She opened her eyes. They were the pale gray-blue they'd always been, but for a second I could've sworn they didn't have any bottom to them at all. "It isn't me doing this, Wade. I never asked for this and neither did my mother, and neither did whoever started it. It just travels. It goes where the wrong was done, and it doesn't stop till the account's settled."
I want to tell you I didn't believe her. I was a sworn deputy. I'd been to the academy in Columbus, I'd sat through the classes on evidence chain-of-custody and reasonable force. But I'd also grown up watching a woman cure a man's shingles with a jar of spiderwebs and goose grease when the VA hospital in Chillicothe couldn't touch it, so I didn't have the luxury of calling it nonsense.
What I did next, I did on my own, no ritual, no bones — just fifteen months of paperwork.
I started keeping a second set of notes. Every shift Renfro pulled Pruitt or Betts aside, I wrote down the time. Every time evidence went missing from the property room — and it did, three separate firearms and a bag of cash from a burglary case — I logged it in a marble composition notebook I kept taped under the driver's seat of my own truck, a '78 Ford F-150 the color of rust that Renfro used to make fun of in the parking lot. I got a cassette recorder from Radio Shack in the Colony Square Mall in Zanesville and I started carrying it in my shirt pocket, because I'd learned the hard way that a man's word isn't worth much against a sheriff's, but a tape is.
The reading, though, didn't wait on my paperwork. It didn't wait on anything.
Betts went first, that October. Grass fire out past the old feed store, dry season, nothing unusual about it — until it jumped the firebreak and cut off the section of Route 9 he was driving down at two in the afternoon. Volunteer fire department pulled his truck out of the ditch three hours later. He lived, barely, with burns over sixty percent of his body and a face the county paper wouldn't print a photograph of. He never came back to the department. Last I heard he was in a care facility outside Cambridge and didn't speak much anymore.
Pruitt's turn came in March of the following year. He'd bought himself forty acres out toward Adamsville with cash nobody could account for, and he was out there running a backhoe, digging a new septic line, when the bank gave way. They didn't get him out for six hours. Broken pelvis, crushed ribs, and — this part the paramedics told me themselves, off the record, at the Waffle House on the bypass — he kept saying her name the whole time they were digging, over and over, Junie, Junie, like it was the only word left in him.
Doc Ferris, the coroner who'd signed off on "accidental drowning," went in his sleep that June — heart just stopped, no warning, forty-nine years old, healthy as a horse according to his own last physical. I won't pretend I know for certain that had anything to do with anything. I've stopped pretending I know where the line is.
That left Renfro. And Renfro is the one I finally had to face myself, on a night I didn't see coming any more than he did.
By July of 1990 I had eleven months of tape, the marble notebook, and a state investigator out of Columbus named Denise Okafor who'd taken my call seriously after the third county deputy tried to laugh her off the phone. We arranged to meet at the county building after hours — Renfro was supposed to be at a commissioners' dinner in Cambridge, out of the building, out of the way.
He wasn't. He came back early, and he found me in the records room with the property log open and Okafor's card in my shirt pocket.
He didn't yell. That was the worst part — Renfro had a low, flat voice he used when he meant it, and he used it then, standing in the doorway the same way he'd stood in the doorway of the holding cell fourteen months before. "You want to go digging around in my department," he said, "you'd better be ready for what you find when you're the one buried in it." He had his hand on his sidearm. Not drawn. Just resting there, so I'd know he knew where it was.
I had the recorder running in my pocket. I'd learned that much, at least. "I already know what's buried," I told him. "Question's whether you're going to make it two of us."
He might have done it. I've thought about that night more than any other night of my life, and I believe there was a version of it where he pulled that weapon and it was my name in the river report instead of hers. What stopped him wasn't me, and it wasn't a badge, and it wasn't the tape recorder. It was that his hand started shaking — not from fear of me, I don't think, but the way Ada's hands used to shake sometimes over the bones, like something was moving through him he didn't have the strength left to hold onto. He went gray in the face. He sat down hard in the county's one good office chair like his legs had quit on him, and he put his head in his hands, and for a long minute the only sound in that records room was him breathing wrong.
Okafor arrived nine minutes later with two state troopers. Renfro didn't fight it.
He was indicted that October — obstruction, evidence tampering, and eventually, after Okafor's people leaned on the county for an exhumation order, involuntary manslaughter in Junie Cardwell's death. He served six years at the Southeastern Correctional Institution in Lancaster. I heard, secondhand, that he came out of prison with a heart condition that put him on oxygen by the time he was fifty-five. Whether that traces back to anything Ada set loose at her kitchen table, or just to what six years inside does to a man built the way he was built — I've quit trying to draw that line too neatly. Some things you don't get a clean answer on. You just get the outcome.
I resigned from the sheriff's department the week Renfro was arraigned. I couldn't wear that badge anymore, not after what it had let me stand next to in a hallway. Ada died in 1994, in her own bed, at the kitchen table earlier that same evening, cup of chicory coffee going cold in front of her — the doctor called it a stroke, and maybe that's exactly what it was. I don't ask for more of an answer than that anymore either.
What I did do, the last thing I'll tell you, is the thing I could actually put my hands on. In 2003, using money I'd saved from thirteen years working private security in Columbus, I bought the parcel of land along the low bridge at Blue Rock where they'd pulled Junie out of the water — four acres, eleven thousand dollars, cash, no bank involved. I had a stone bench set into the bank there with her name cut into it, and I signed the deed over to the Muskingum County Historical Society the following spring, on the condition — written into the transfer papers themselves, a lawyer in Zanesville drew it up — that the land could never be sold, built on, or dammed for as long as the county holds a charter. I keep the folder with the recorded deed in a fireproof box in my hall closet, next to Ada's cedar box of bones, which nobody in the family has opened since the day she died.
I go out there most Augusts, on the fifteenth, and I sit on that bench for a while. Renfro's still alive, last I heard, in a nursing facility over in Guernsey County, tank of oxygen at his elbow. I don't go see him. I don't need to. The water still runs the same way it always has, past the bench with her name on it, and some accounts, once they're opened, just keep settling themselves whether you watch them do it or not.
