The Hawley Book of the Dead (37 page)

My mind was bent on rambling so to Ireland I did fly

I stepped on board a vision, I sailed out with a will

Until I came to anchor at the cross of Spancil Hill
.

I paid a flying visit to my first and only love

She’s fair as any lily and gentle as a dove

She threw her arms around me, crying “Johnny, I love you still”

She is a farmer’s daughter, the pride of Spancil Hill
.

Well I dreamt I hugged and kissed her as in the days of yore

She said, “Johnny, you’re only joking as many the time before”

The cock crew in the morning, he crew both loud and shrill

And I woke in California, so far from Spancil Hill
.

Alice reached up and pulled his head to hers, stared into his eyes. “See. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

But it was bad. A month later she was dead, and he was gone away to a new and terrible life. He never did sing a lullaby to their baby.

After he’d tendered his resignation, Voss went out every day as if he still were heading to work, to the university. He dressed carefully in his good suit, tied his bland tie precisely. He kissed Alice, took the packed lunch she never failed to make for him, leftover grilled chicken legs that he could eat cold, chunky potato salad, homemade chocolate chip cookies. He didn’t eat the lunch, he wasn’t hungry, but he made sure he threw it away before he got home.

He thought it could all be set right if only he could discover how the trick was accomplished, how the girl had disappeared from the photos, from out of his grip in the research lab. He could bring Hunter evidence that he was not lying, was not crazy. Then he would be reinstated, and Alice would never have to be worried with it all.

At first he thought his good luck had returned. The day
after he’d tossed Maggie’s apartment, it had been easy to track her, going in the same old loops all Bay State students made. All he had to do was wait in Amherst Center for her to show up. And then, miracle of miracles, the red-haired girl showed up, too. She and Maggie got into a huge old Chevy Impala, fawn colored with a white top, Mass plates 403-XLC. Voss followed them easily all afternoon. They drove down Route 9, then back to Amherst. They walked around, talked to Field Agent Evelyn Wilson, who’d taken their photograph (good luck, Evelyn). They drove to Maggie’s apartment, then to the bus station in Springfield. Maggie toted a black garbage bag, got on the bus to New York City. He tried to follow the red-haired girl, but lost her somehow in the not-very-crowded weekday afternoon bus station. He loped out to the car, knowing he’d catch her there, which would be better, after all, than the station. But in place of Chevy Impala 403-XLC was a brand-new navy blue Honda Civic. Voss kicked the tire savagely, then leapt around swearing, his maroon tie swooping and jigging like a new kind of bird.

He ran back to the station, found out Maggie’s bus stopped in Hartford, New Haven, and Stamford. Got in his car and drove hell for leather to Hartford. He passed the bus on I-91 just outside Enfield, Connecticut. He thought he glimpsed Maggie’s profile. In Hartford, though, she did not leave the bus.

In New Haven, he waited while blue-haired old women and beer-bellied men got off the bus. Maggie was the last off. He’d had time to scope out his options and found the ladies’ room was only a few feet from the exit to the parking lot. He’d positioned his car as close to that door as possible. Another bit of good luck was that Maggie went straight to the ladies’ and did not linger to buy coffee or a magazine. When she came out, Voss had only to place a firm hand on her neck so the vein popped up, jab the tiny needle in he’d readied beforehand. She slapped her hand to the place as if she’d been stung by a bee,
swung around. By the time her eyes met his, they were glazed over. He held her as she fell against him, frog-marched her inert body out to the car, tucked her into the passenger seat, and drove away.

He drove carefully until dark. He finally stopped at a rundown motor court in the Berkshire foothills, with small cabins, poorly lit. Maggie hadn’t stirred at all. A good thing, he thought. Then as he unstrapped the seat belt, he knocked her arm from her lap, heard something jingle. He grabbed her wrist, felt the medical alert tag. He placed her hand in her lap very gently, turned the tag so he could see. But some deep part of him already knew. She was allergic to two things. Penicillin and barbiturates. Thiopental, a barbiturate, was the tranquilizer he’d shot her up with. It had been used effectively as a truth serum, and he wanted the truth from her. Now he’d never get it. Her lips were swollen, her neck bulging. He grabbed her wrist again, then her neck, feeling blindly for a pulse. It was too late. Maggie Hamilton was dead. A sick horror washed over him. He knew that nothing would ever be the same. He wished he could turn back time.

But Rigel Voss kept himself moving, knowing what he had to do.

The motel he’d chosen was the kind of place agents used when they wanted there to be no questions asked. He carried Maggie’s body into the room, drew the curtains and set up the photos he knew he would need, to coerce the red-haired girl when he found her again, to get her to talk, to tell. Then, at the darkest time of night, he carried the body to the car, this time zipped in a big duffel he’d bought at an outlet store nearby. He drove to a lake he’d only heard of. A lake that was said to have no bottom. The girl’s body was curiously light, not difficult to deal with at all. Or maybe that was the adrenaline. On the edge of the water, he placed weights he’d also bought on her ankles. He found some round, smooth, heavy stones to put in the
pockets of her jacket, where he found five twenties, folded in three. He put them back where he’d found them. Even with the weights, she was light enough for him to swim her body out to the middle of the moonlit lake, then let her sink, which she did quickly, leaving no trace.

When Rigel Voss read about the horse found in Savoy, and how the search was widening, moving out of Hawley, he knew it was time to return. With any luck, most of the searchers and law enforcement and weird guys with bows and arrows would be gone from the forest. He would execute the rest of his plan, just as he’d dreamed it, every step.

But now here he was, trapped by a thousand-pound moose, hiding in his cellar hole. Just a few miles from the very lake in which he’d sunk Maggie’s body.

Jolon’s distraction began with a smell. It was a smell that shouldn’t have been in the forest in October. A sweet smell, a fragrance. Jolon knew it wasn’t coming from the man he’d been tracking. The only smell wafting back to Jolon from the man was Dial soap and sweat. Not even a hint of bug juice. Jolon stopped, sniffed the air. It was lilacs he smelled. As unlikely as that seemed in autumn. He was near an old cellar hole on Hell’s Kitchen Road.

Jolon worked in concentric circles around the site. Anyone seeing him from a distance might think he was a bear, crouching on all fours, then standing, snuffing, peering at the trees and sky, then slowly moving his eyes back to the ground.

He’d worked this ground before, and he didn’t really anticipate finding anything. But one of Brother Thomas’s first lessons was never to expect or anticipate, as if he
was
a bear, without the strange obsession with the future humans have. His second lesson was to keep on where instinct led him. Bearlike again. And instinct led Jolon to search for the source of the
flowery smell. He forgot about the man he’d been tracking. Forgot the man might be Reve’s Fetch. The smell had enchanted him. A line from a Robert Frost poem came to him then. “The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,” he muttered to himself.

The lilac smell persisted. It might be shampoo or perfume, although the searchers were nowhere near him, so there was no woman nearby whose hair could waft that scent on the air. At least no woman alive. People in a forest inevitably made some noise, gave themselves away. Unless they were quiet because they would never make a sound again. Hair could retain scent for much longer than anyone would rationally think, even after death. He remembered the mourning necklace Brother Thomas had worn, made from his dead grandfather’s hair. The grandfather who had been a Mohawk tracker. The one who had taught Brother Thomas, telling him the old stories. The snake woman and the creation of the world, the wolf’s dance and the moon phases. The animals had come to him, Grandfather Sintum, the foxes lay by him, the birds nested in his hair. Which looked and smelled alive, Jolon remembered, shining black and reeking of wood smoke and bear grease, tied in strong knots on Brother Thomas’s neck, long after Sintum was with his ancestors. He hadn’t thought of that necklace, or of the stories Brother Thomas told, for a very long time.

Then he stopped still. Slipped thin deerskin gloves on his hands, felt for his knife, reached it out of his pocket. His eye had caught a fleck of dirty white on the ground. Someone else might have taken it for a stone or even a discarded bit of tissue. Jolon knew it was bone. He scraped carefully at the earth, until the domelike shape revealed itself. It was a human skull.