Cemetery Club (24 page)

Bud Marks froze with his coffee cup halfway to his mouth. A ten-thirty-three was a security alarm going off; two-eleven was the code for a robbery. Although he was only filling in for one of the officers who was out (he refused to say missing, even to himself), he knew the codes. He’d dispatched people for plenty of them.

Four-fifty East Main. That’s only two blocks from here.
His hand shook as he reached for the radio. He was about to respond to a potential violent crime for the first time in his career. He had to clear his voice twice before he thumbed the mike.

“Car zero-seven. I’m on it.”

Although he’d never seen an actual robbery in progress, it only took Officer Marks two heartbeats to know this wasn’t one. Four-fifty East Main had turned out to be the Pastry House, one of Rocky Point’s two bakeries. Marks arrived to find the front window was smashed in, a human arm draped over the ragged edges of the glass. As he was about to call for backup, terrified cries came from inside the building - shrieks, really, sounds human throats should never make. Pulling his gun, Marks stepped over the bloody limb and moved through the bakery, the slippery floors tempering his desire to rush forward at full speed. Whoever had broken in had left a trail of destruction behind, with smashed cakes and pastries littering the floor. Marks did his best to avoid stepping on any of the perps’ footprints but it was an almost impossible task. He quickly found himself trying to hop from one clear spot on the floor to the next.

Behind the glass counter a doorway led into the kitchen. The horrible cries ended while he was still only halfway across the room and he feared he was too late to save whoever had been the source.

Was it Mrs. DeAngelo, the hefty woman who’d owned the bakery for so many years? Or her equally-stout daughter, Maria? He hoped neither. Of course, he didn’t want it to be one of the kitchen or counter help either but he knew the DeAngelos personally, would hate to see anything happen to them.

Marks stopped at the doorway. Technically, he should wait for backup to arrive. Or at least call in and report on the situation. But using his radio would alert whoever was back there. And if he waited, someone might die.

Screw it.

Crouching down, he edged around the door frame, gun out and aimed forward. “Police! Stand still and put your hands...”

The rest of his words trailed away as Marks took in the scene before him. Three men, one of them wearing what looked like a police uniform, had Carmen DeAngelo pinned to a long metal table. At first glance it looked like they were licking strawberry sauce off her ample stomach.

Then he realized it wasn’t sauce and they weren’t licking.

Jesus! They’re...eating her!

Even as he thought it, his brain took in other details, things that made no sense but he couldn’t ignore.

One of the men was missing an arm.

Maria DeAngelo’s head was on top of the stove but her body was on the floor, a gaping hole where her stomach should be.

The man with the police uniform was Manny Salvo.

Marks was about to call out to Manny, ask him what the hell was going on, when something hit him hard from behind. His gun flew from his hand and he found himself face down on the cold ground, his nose and lips split and bleeding, before he had a chance to understand what had happened.

Rough hands grabbed his arms and legs, turned him over. Through tears of pain, he saw a face above him. An impossible face, with horrible red eyes that seemed to burn into his very soul.

The creature bent closer and an icy blanket of winter cold descended on Marks. Like a balloon deflating, the thing collapsed into a long, coiled shape and pushed itself into his throat. Bud Marks had time to wish he’d never offered to ride patrol.

Then everything that made Bud Marks human was consumed.

*  *  *

Cory arrived at Todd’s house the next morning with a box of donuts and three extra-large coffees.

“Nothing like sugar and caffeine to prime the engines for a long session of research,” he said, placing the food on the table.

“Or to keep you awake after a long night of it,” John replied, grabbing a chocolate glazed and a coffee.

“What?” Cory glanced at Todd. “You guys found something last night? Why didn’t you call?”

Todd gave him a tired grin as he spooned sugar into his coffee. “Well, considering we didn’t really hit pay-dirt until well after midnight, we figured you’d either be asleep or, um, otherwise occupied.”

“Asleep, thank you very much,” Cory said around a mouthful of jelly donut. “So, what’d you find?”

“I printed everything out.” Todd pointed at a pile of papers on the kitchen table. “But I can give you the highlights.”

Intrigued, Cory took a seat next to John, who was already well into his second donut. After grabbing milk from the refrigerator, Todd joined them.

“It seems that Rocky Point and the area in and around the Lowlands in particular, has a very nasty past. How old do you think Wood Hill Sanitarium is?”

“I know there are buildings on the property that are pretty old, the ones that aren’t used anymore. They go back to what, the forties?”

“Keep going.” A blob of jelly fell out of John’s donut and he scooped it up with his finger. “The original Wood Hill was built in nineteen nineteen.”

“Wow. I never knew.”

“Me either,” Todd said. “They called it a sanitarium but back then it was more like a concentration camp. A place where the feeble, the retarded and the insane were locked away in squalid conditions forever, by relatives who wanted nothing to do with them. Those poor people often ended up being used for medical experiments.”

“That’s terrible,” Cory said, well aware that at least part of Todd’s empathy was a result of his own experiences. “But what does it have to do with this Dr. Lillian fellow?”

“They say there are no coincidences in the world, only related incidents that don’t, at first, seem related.”

“Todd, get to the point.” John reached for a third donut, paused, and then muttered “what the hell” and took it.

“Okay. I’m just still a bit amazed by what we learned. Anyway, Dr. Grover Lillian was supposedly a brilliant scientist. A medical doctor and also a researcher who was trying to find a cure for polio.’”

“Don’t tell me he experimented on his patients.”

Todd shrugged. “Lillian was as immoral as he was brilliant. He injected patients, including children, with his own untested serums to see if they were lethal or not.”

“Oh, shit.” Cory didn’t like where the story was going. “What happened?”

“Many of them died. Too many to be covered up apparently. The police caught on to him and the FBI was brought in. Except instead of surrendering, Lillian killed his assistant and then himself.”

“And that’s not the half of it,” John said, taking up the story. “Turns out Lillian wasn’t just covering up the deaths. He was also secretly disposing of the bodies. Want to guess where?”

Cory was about to say he had no idea and then the articles he’d read about Wood Hill’s recent troubles came back to him. “Don’t tell me he buried them under the hospital?”

“Winner, winner, chicken dinner,” John said in his usual somber tone.

“Under one of the old buildings,” added Todd. “Listen to this.” He picked up one of the print outs and read from it.

Officer Shaun O’Haney, one of the first men on the scene, described it as something no sane person should have to experience. “Them bodies was piled on each other like fire wood. Even before we got to them, we could smell them in the tunnels. Like rotten meat in the summer. But as bad as they stunk, seeing them was worse. I’ll never forget what that maniac did, not for as long as I live.”

“Jesus.” Cory shook his head. “How many?”

“According to the newspaper accounts, forty-seven. But there may have been more. None of them had families - at least, none that came forward to claim them. They ended up buried in a Potter’s Field at the ass end of Gates of Heaven.”

“That section with the tiny iron markers that only have numbers, not names? We always wondered what those were.”

“And our parents always said they didn’t know. Except they had to have. A scandal that big in a small town like this?” John shook his head.

“That’s amazing. I’ll call Marisol right now. Maybe she can find something in the police files.”

“We’re not done yet.”

“What?” Cory looked from Todd to John and back again.

“Remember I said the town has a nasty past? It begins way before Grover Lillian.”

Cory leaned back and sipped his coffee. “I’m all ears.”

“Well, it seems the plot of land where Wood Hill sits used to be a leper colony back in the mid-eighteen hundreds. A leper colony that was burned to the ground by the townspeople.”

When Todd didn’t continue, John spoke up. “What Todd doesn’t want to tell you is that dozens of people died in that fire. And the man who initiated the burning was none other than Todd’s great-grandfather.”

“What?” Cory knew he was repeating himself but his two friends kept springing surprise after surprise on him.

“It’s true.” Todd’s face sagged, giving him the appearance of a man ten years older. “Apparently my family has a history as sordid as the rest of the town. My great-grandfather, Hollister Randolph, the first official reverend in town, together with Percival Boyd—”

“My great-grandfather,” John interjected. “Todd’s not the only family with issues.”

“—the mayor at the time,” Todd continued, “led the destruction of the leper colony because the physician in attendance refused to move the it outside town limits. They believed the disease would spread throughout Rocky Point.”

“Jesus Christ. Neither of you knew?”

“No.” Todd shook his head. “Just like I didn’t know that Hollister Randolph’s father, Nathaniel, was also crazy. A self-anointed preacher, he burned down a whorehouse in seventeen-seventy-nine. Killed himself in the process.”

“Want to guess where the brothel was?” John asked.

“Wood Hill?”

“Close enough. Near as we can tell, it was dead smack in the middle of where the cemetery is now.”

“Wow.” Cory rubbed his eyes. He’d had a good night’s sleep; Marisol had wanted to be fully rested for her first day back to work. But now he felt like he’d been up all night, as if his brain had exhausted its store of energy trying to take in too much new information in such a short period.

He could only imagine how tired John and Todd must be.

“So, we have a ton more information than we had before. But how does it tie in with what’s going on now and what happened when we were kids? Are there other episodes of killings or monster sightings? I didn’t find anything in the town records but I wasn’t looking back as far as you guys.”

Todd shook his head. “That’s the weird thing. We couldn’t find anything about mass murders or strange occurrences. But I can’t shake the feeling it’s all connected somehow, with the land between the cemetery and Wood Hill doing the connecting.”

“I think you’re right.” Cory tapped the papers. “Why don’t I read through these and you guys see if you can dig up anything else?”

John groaned and rolled his eyes. “More computer work. Great.”

Todd laughed. “Think of it as a work training program. When this is all over, you’ll have new job skills.”

“Ugh. When this is all over, I think I might go back to living on the streets. It’s less stressful.”

When Cory picked Marisol up after her shift, it was hard to tell which of them was more exhausted. Nine hours of reading printouts and performing fruitless internet searches had left Cory with a massive headache and dark circles under his eyes. Marisol wasn’t looking much better. As soon as she got into his car, her strained expression told him she was in pain.

“C’mon, let’s get you home,” he said, after a quick kiss hello. “Shower, food and bed.”

“Sounds good but there’s nothing in the house to make. We need to go shopping.”

“Shopping can wait. While you’re in the shower, I’ll grab a pizza. After that it’s straight to dreamland, do not pass go, do not collect two hundred dollars and do not think about jumping my bones.”

That drew a small smile from her. “Long day for you too?”

“Long and boring.” He’d called her at lunch and told her what Todd and John had found out the previous night. “We didn’t learn anything else today, which is pretty frustrating.”

“I’ve been thinking about that.” Marisol chewed her bottom lip, something she always did when concentrating. “Maybe you’re looking in the wrong direction. Maybe it’s not their connection to the town that’s important but their connection to us.”

Cory knew by ‘their’ she meant Grover Lillian and Effram Charles. “What do you mean?”

“Well, Todd’s ancestors were involved in two events: the burning of the brothel and the burning of the leper colony. What about the rest of us? We all have family that’s been in this area as long as Todd’s.”

“Hmm. That’s an interesting thought. I’ll hit town hall again tomorrow and look up our families in the records.”

“Why not call Todd tonight?”

Cory shook his head. “No way. Those two looked worse than us when I left. I doubt they’ve had more than a couple hours sleep the last two days. I think tonight needs to be a recuperation night for all of us.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Glancing over at her, Cory found himself smiling.

Snuggle and sleep sounding better than sex? Either I’m more tired than I thought or there really is something more between us than just a physical attraction.

*  *  *

If Chief Travers had been asked to predict where the next violent attack would occur, Restaurant Row would have been last on his list, despite its general proximity to the factory district and Lowlands. The two-block area on the west side of Main Street was one of the poshest parts of town, comprised mostly of high-end eateries and gourmet food shops. Not the kind of place where you’d expect a gruesome murder.

Yet here he was, standing in front of Martel’s Steak and Seafood, thinking the place resembled the aftermath of a mob hit.