The Vindication Gala

Chapter One: Nine Hours of Tape

Mildred Roach could get from her wedding day to the satanic panic in thirty-eight seconds. Alan Tuttle had timed it on his phone, more than once, the way other men timed their miles.

"The dress was borrowed," she said. "Ivory, not white, because my mother said white on a farm girl was a lie told in fabric. We had the reception in the Grange hall. My cousin played the accordion badly and nobody stopped him, which I have always thought says something about Indiana."

Alan nodded and watched the little red needle on the recorder twitch.

"There were forty guests. There was ham. There was a punch bowl that had been stolen from the Methodists in 1948 and never returned." She folded her hands. "And do you know, that same punch bowl was in the courthouse basement in 1987, because they used it at the prosecutor's Christmas party the year they tried to put your father in prison."

Thirty-four seconds. A personal best.

"That's interesting," Alan said, because that was what he said.

Mildred was ninety-three and had typed for the Cleary County prosecutor's office for thirty-one years, and her memory was a beautiful, ruthless machine attached to a body that had mostly quit. She lived in Room 214 of Harvest Glen Senior Living, in a wing they called The Orchard, in a building with no orchard and no glen and, as far as Alan could tell, no harvest. She had a recliner, a window facing the parking lot, and a photograph of a man named Elmer who had been dead since the Ford administration.

Alan sat across from her four afternoons a week with a digital recorder and a backup digital recorder, because Harvest Glen's Legacy Voices program promised the families nine hours of audio, professionally captured, transcribed, and bound in a leatherette volume with the resident's name stamped in gold. The gold was not gold. The leather was not leather. The nine hours were real, and Alan had come to believe they were the only real thing in the whole arrangement, because nobody — not one family member, not ever, in six years — had listened to them.

He had asked once. A woman in Fort Wayne whose mother had just died had said, "Oh, we're saving it," in a tone that meant forever.

"You're not writing anything down," Mildred said.

"I don't have to. It records."

"I like to see a man write. It suggests he's paying for something." She reached over and adjusted the afghan across her knees. "Where were we."

"Your wedding."

"No we weren't. We were at the punch bowl." She settled back with the satisfaction of a woman who had steered a conversation into a ditch on purpose. "You know what nobody ever asks me about that whole business? Nobody ever asks me what else was going on. Everybody wants the candles. Everybody wants the goat. Nobody asks what was in the other drawer."

"What was in the other drawer?"

Mildred looked at him for a long moment with the flat, appraising expression of a person deciding whether a thing was worth spending. Then her eyes slid toward the window, and she said, "They had a punch ladle with a chip in it, and I always thought that was a shame."

Alan let it go. He always let it go. Letting things go was, according to his ex-wife's written statement of grievances — eleven pages, single-spaced, produced at mediation and never, in Alan's opinion, sufficiently praised as a piece of writing — "somehow the most aggressive thing about you."

Paula had underlined somehow.

---

He lived above a Sears.

It had been closed for nine years. The sign was still up, because taking a sign down costs money and leaving it up costs nothing, and Mount Cleary, Indiana, had a long and distinguished record of choosing the nothing. The apartment had been a manager's office once. It had industrial carpet, a window that looked out on the loading dock, and a bathroom door that would not shut in humidity, which in Indiana is June through September.

Alan was forty-four. He had a futon, a folding table, a good pair of headphones, and eleven hundred hours of dead people's voices on a hard drive he backed up twice, because he was careful about other people's things.

He had a daughter, Lucy, sixteen, who stayed with him every other weekend and most Wednesdays and who had recently informed him that his apartment had "a real hostage-video energy, and I mean that supportively."

He had a brother in Burbank.

He had a mother twelve miles away in a strip mall.

He had a father in Tampa.

And he had, like everyone else who had been a child in Cleary County in the spring of 1987, a thing that had happened to him that he did not discuss, the way you don't discuss weather that has already destroyed the house.

Here is what the rest of the world knew, because the rest of the world had known it for thirty-six years in a steadily degrading form:

In March of 1987, twenty-two children told the Cleary County Sheriff's Department that the high school band director held rituals in the band room at midnight. There were candles. There was a goat's skull on the podium. There was, in several accounts, a cassette of the Mount Cleary fight song played backwards through the room's speakers, which the children described in a variety of ways, all of them worse than what backwards fight songs actually sound like, which is to say a tuba falling downstairs.

The band director was Warren Tuttle. He was forty-three. He wore a windbreaker with a cardinal on it. He had taken a middling marching program to state finals twice, which in that county made him a minor deity in a polyester jacket.

The case against him fell apart in eleven weeks. It fell apart the way those cases fell apart everywhere that decade: the interviews were a disaster, the timeline was impossible, the goat skull had no provenance, and one of the children, under gentle questioning by a defense attorney from Indianapolis in a suit nobody in the courtroom could afford, described the band room as having a staircase, which it did not, and a window over the door, which it did not, and a man with horns, which — the attorney noted, kindly, devastatingly — he had first seen in a drawing shown to him by a deputy.

Charges were dropped in May. The prosecutor gave a statement that used the word "nonetheless" four times.

But the town did not fall apart. The town hardened. Warren Tuttle left in 1988. The high school hired a band director from Ohio who lasted five months. Time ran a sidebar. There was a television movie in 1991 with a title that used the word "Whispers," starring a man who had been fourth-billed on a detective show, and for the rest of the century, whenever a national correspondent needed a place where the ordinary people had lost their minds, they drove to Mount Cleary and filmed the water tower.

It became a civic smell. You couldn't see it. You could smell it on your clothes at conferences.

Alan had gotten very good at the moment where somebody heard his last name and did the arithmetic behind their eyes. There was a specific face. He could have drawn it.

---

That night he ate cereal standing up over the sink, which is a thing divorced men do because sitting down implies a meal.

His phone buzzed. Lucy.

LUCY: have you seen this

LUCY: dad

LUCY: DAD

LUCY: have you seen this

She sent a link. Alan clicked it with the specific dread of a man who already knew, because his brother had called eleven days ago and been unusually warm, and Russell was only ever warm when something was already loaded.

The streaming service's title card resolved on his cracked phone screen.

DEVIL IN THE BAND ROOM.

Underneath, in the confident sans serif that streaming services use to indicate that a true story is about to be improved: THE TOWN THAT BURNED AN INNOCENT MAN.

And under that, smaller: A Series Produced by Russell Tuttle.

Alan put the cereal bowl in the sink. He did not wash it, which was, for him, the emotional equivalent of putting a fist through drywall.

Then he sat down on the futon, and he pressed play, because he was a man who had never in his life declined to be told a story about himself.