You met Stacey Norton as the second member of Bluebell’s Top Ten but I didn’t get a chance to dig into his story very deeply. In today’s Character Confession though, digging deeper is exactly what I intend to do.
Scott: Thanks for joining me today Deputy Norton.
Stacey: It’s my pleasure Scott, but please, call me Stacey.
Scott: Ok…Stacey it is. Let’s jump right into what happened the day Charlotte Watkins was beaten. You received a call from a telephone operator, yet it was Tog Ericson who found Charlotte. Why didn’t he call you?
Stacey: There was already too much on his plate.
Scott: So he relayed this critical information through a telephone operator?
Stacey: She wasn’t just an operator, but someone he could trust. Being “considerably less interested in gathering or spreading gossip than most of Drewsport’s party line wags; Mary Lou Trimmer was a competent, conscientious operator. Having read the urgency in Tog’s voice,” I imagine “the line was ringing before he had finished speaking.”
Scott: Good thing he had someone like that to lean on. So what did she tell you?
Stacey: I don’t know how she did it but it was like Tog was speaking to me. This is the transcript of what I recorded that day. “There were two men close enough to have done it. They were both strangers to me. One was a big white man, dark bushy hair. He was wearing light colored overalls, same as railroad people wear. The other fella was a Negro, medium size, uh, plaid shirt… red and black, and, um… blue overalls…it looked as though the colored man was trying to help Charlotte, but he ran when I got here.”
Scott: Wow…so it fell on you to investigate. How did that work out?
Stacey: Well, as you can imagine, “when Mary Lou had called, she was extremely distraught, and it had taken several minutes…to unravel the story.” My “first reaction had been to call up a posse, but a second, less dramatic, thought persisted.”
Scott: Less dramatic?
Stacey: Yes…a “quiet, personal reconnaissance had been the result.”
Scott: Boy…I’m so glad I write for a blog rather than have to do work like that. I think that’s all the questions I have at this time, but perhaps we can speak more later. Thank you again for taking time out of your day to speak with me. This is something people need to hear about.
Stacey: You’re welcome Scott. And about people needing to hear this…if you’d get your dad’s book, Bluebell, published, more people would have the opportunity to know the whole story.
Scott: Uhhh…thanks for the encouragement?
Something else I learned from my investigation into this story. A woman who saw him coming back to town after his initial investigation into Charlotte’s beating, said “a thoughtful frown bunched the inner reaches of Deputy Stacey Norton’s brow, and he exercised greater than normal care guiding his old Dodge along Main Street. Beyond that, however, there was nothing to denote the tension building within him.”
You have to admire people who do this type of work on our behalf.