Ghost Dance (18 page)

They had feared a cold telephone call might provoke a false response, so they had gone to the homes or businesses of sixteen of the possible journal holders in the past twenty-four hours, all of whom lived in the southern half of the state, and all of whom had greeted their questions about a journal and a crucifix with blank stares and, in several instances, incredulous laughter. Four didn’t even know they had relatives who hailed from Lawton.

Nyren was possibility number seventeen.

His dirt driveway was almost a quarter of a mile long. They drove through a dense spruce forest and Gallagher’s mind drifted back, as it had so often in the past few days, to Monsignor McColl and his work for Father D’Angelo. His nervousness when questioned about the soon-to-be-venerable priest nagged at Gallagher.

They broke through the forest. Nyren’s house, yellow with a gambrel roof, was set on a manicured lawn. The lime sprouts of tulips showed along a brick walkway. A late-model white Honda Accord was parked in a turnoff under a white pine.

When they got out, Gallagher grunted at the stiffness in his thighs, but knew the crutches were no longer necessary. He left them in the truck.

The storm door to the front porch napped open against the shake-shingle siding. Rain puddled on the warped, wide-planked porch floor. Spirals of violet and blue twisted on the dappled water surface and ran downhill toward the interior door, which was also ajar. The air reeked.

‘Gas?’ Gallagher said.

Andie nodded. She pushed the interior door open another couple of inches. The fumes became even stronger. ‘Mr Nyren?’ she called.

At the far end of the short hallway, a grandfather clock struck the quarter hour. From upstairs came a squeaking noise, as if a piece of furniture, possibly a chair, had been pushed across the wood floor. Andie took several steps inside, with Gallagher right behind her taking inventory of the decor. Sprays of baby’s breath highlighted the light blue wallpaper in the hallway. A maple drop-leaf table covered with a white doily rested against the wall below a gilt overmantel mirror. Queen Anne chairs in faded chintz braced the table.

‘Welcome to Grandma’s house,’ Gallagher murmured.

‘Quiet, he might hear you!’ Andie hissed. Then she called out, louder this time, ‘Mr Nyren? I’m Sergeant Andie Nightingale with the Vermont Bureau of Criminal Investigations. Hello?’

The clock ticked. The steam register knock-knocked. Light rain splatted against the windows.

Andie’s lips pursed. She drew her pistol. She went up the staircase with a powerful grace. Gallagher trailed three feet behind, listening to the amplified roar of blood at his temples. When he stepped on the fourth stair, it whined. Andie twisted, nostrils flared, and motioned with her toe that he should come up the inside of the riser.

Above them, the floor broke around to the right and she craned her neck to see up over the landing. Gallagher wondered what he’d do if there was gunfire. Running like hell seemed the obvious choice, but to his surprise, he knew he wouldn’t. Not while Andie was there.

On the landing, the drawers of two legal-size filing cabinets had been tugged open, the files and papers within thrust up in disarray. One cabinet sprawled on its side. Thousands of pieces of paper were strewn across the green carpet.

Andie came to the landing in a crouch. The door on the left opened into an office. The burled walnut desk had been turned over. The computer screen still radiated blue despite its cracked housing. Files and papers from three more cabinets were tossed about the room. The bookcase was toppled. Nyren’s framed diploma in library science from St. Michael’s College and two honorary plaques from the Vermont Historical Society hung askew on the white wall beyond the desk. A floorboard was propped against one of the standing files. A hole gaped in the floor below.

Andie brushed by Gallagher and, over the gas scent, he smelled the good, clean autumn odor of her that had surrounded him the morning after he was shot. A pleasant feeling came over him, only to be washed away in the next instant by a surge of dread, for him and for her; and he wanted to tell her they should leave the librarian’s house before they looked in that other bedroom.

But Andie was already sideslipping across the blizzard of paper on the landing. She pressed against the jamb, reached out and turned the mock crystal doorknob. It turned easily. She motioned to Gallagher to stay back. In one movement, Andie used her left hand to push open the door while looping around and into the room with the gun leading.

Her breath came in a snap, and a whoosh. Gallagher stepped in behind her and the first flares of disbelief and revulsion mutated to vertigo. The floor seemed to float away underneath him.

The linen on the sleigh bed lay a-tangle. Green drapery billowed free in the dank breeze coming through the open window. Nyren was on his knees, his white terry-cloth robe hoisted up over his fat, naked back. Two leather belts strapped his legs around the chair legs. Sash from the drapery bound his wrists to the arms of the chair. A second sash was wound around his neck and tied to one of the chair slats. An orange washcloth jutted from his mouth. The index finger on his left hand was gone at the second joint. Blood from a series of brutal oblong wounds to his upper torso drenched the terry-cloth robe. A similar blow cleaved triangularly into the side of his head above the right ear. Dried snot and tears streaked those portions of his cheeks not bloodstained.

Pinned on the left arm of the mutilated corpse was a third drawing.

Andie waved her left hand at Gallagher, but did not take her eyes off the librarian. ‘Go … go back downstairs to the hallway,’ she said. ‘I saw a phone. Call nine-one-one.’

Gallagher moved as if in a trance. Over the years he had witnessed many disturbing things—an exorcism in western Africa, a circumcision puberty rite in Papua New Guinea—but never a ritualistic killing like this. By the time the brutality of it broke through the protective shock that had cradled him in the librarian’s bedroom, he had reached the head of the landing and began to choke.

Suddenly, the air in the hallway below gusted unnaturally and a six-foot incendiary wave of reddish blue heaved up, hungry, hot and explosive, across the saturated rug, gorging on the gasoline fumes. The flame stumbled at the bottom of the stairs, then garnered hellish strength and came on.

The entire house breathed asthmatically as the blaze sought vapor and the oxygen pouring through the open window in the librarian’s bedroom.

‘Fire!’ Gallagher bellowed. ‘Fire, Andie! Get out!’

He sprinted back across the sea of paper, tripped and went headlong into Andie as she appeared at the door. They crashed together at the dead librarian’s feet, then scrambled up as the incandescent cloud sniffed the gas-soaked paper behind them and the fire’s breathing became the labored rumbling of freight cars at night.

Gallagher had Andie by the upper arm, dragging her toward the window. A metal climbing piton jutted from the sill. A blue rope fell away into space. ‘Go down the rope!’ he yelled.

But she jerked away just as the flame billowed in the doorway, went back and fumbled at the corpse. She got the note, then looked around.

‘What are you doing?!’ Gallagher screamed.

‘Looking for the journal!’ she yelled. ‘The crucifix! Anything!’

‘They’re not here,’ he bellowed, grabbing her tighter this time. He hauled her to the window and forced her through even as the flames sawed furiously across the royal blue carpet, enveloped Nyren and set the drapes and Gallagher’s gas-dampened pant cuffs afire. He dove out onto the steep roof, clawed for the rope, missed, tumbled twice and then, still burning, twisted into space.

‘I
F I DON’T GET
a straight answer on how you two came to be in a burning house with a dead librarian strapped to a chair, I’ll arrest you both, trooper or no trooper, big-time filmmaker or no big-time filmmaker,’ Lieutenant Brigid Bowman fumed.

Andie and Gallagher huddled with blankets around their shoulders on a gurney in the back of an emergency response van. The EMT said two of Andie’s ribs were bruised. Gallagher had minor burns on his calves. Outside, a crew of volunteer firemen soaked down what little remained of the antique Cape. The rest of the yard was already taped off. Troopers were scouring for evidence.

‘I’d like to hear this, too,’ Chief Kerris said, appearing from behind the ambulance door. He looked like he hadn’t slept in days. He had scratches on the backs of his hands and one large scratch across his cheek. His fourteen-inch rubber boots were coated in mud.

Bowman’s focus wavered. ‘How did you get here so soon, Chief? Lawton’s an hour away.’

Kerris reached up to adjust the brim of his baseball cap. ‘The family has a camp on a lake about ten miles from here. I was clearing some brush, getting it ready for summer, when I heard the call on my scanner. Is it him again? Charun?’

Bowman nodded, then said to Andie, ‘I’m still waiting, Sergeant.’

Andie examined the stitching of the blanket around her shoulders with the sort of lost facial cast Gallagher used to see on his father when Seamus was preparing to pick up the bottle again after one of his intermittent layoffs. She took a deep breath as if to prepare herself for the long fall into the abyss.

‘It’s my fault,’ Gallagher blurted. ‘I found a crucifix on a gold chain in the meadow down by the barn at Olga Dawson’s and I should have shown it to you right away, but after seeing the drawing, I forgot.’

Bowman glared at Gallagher and then at Andie. ‘Crucifix? Olga Dawson? Out with it. I want it all and I want it now.’

Gallagher lied straight-faced, saying he’d brought the gold chain to Andie the night after the search of his cabin. Andie hesitated, glanced at Gallagher, then haltingly spoke of her shock at seeing the cross, of the story of her mother and the pouch and the journal and something horrible that had happened in Lawton one hundred years ago; and how she and Gallagher had gone looking for Olga Dawson’s piece of the journal and found it in a cave on Lawton Mountain. Gallagher broke in with another bald fabrication, saying that both sections of the journal were stolen from Andie’s house while they were at Hank Potter’s trying to determine whether he’d had a portion of it or not.

Together they explained the logic of going to see Monsignor McColl and how eventually that had led them to the librarian’s house. The killer had been upstairs when they knocked at the front door. He bailed out the window on a climbing rope, then torched the place just as they were finding the librarian’s corpse.

Even through the sacklike jacket Chief Kerris wore, Gallagher could see his rib cage rising and falling quicker and quicker as he and Andie wove their web of truths and falsehoods.

‘This is bullshit,’ he said when they finished. ‘I don’t believe a word of it.’

Andie held up the killer’s latest drawing and missive. ‘This was pinned to the librarian’s chest when we found him. What don’t you believe?’

Kerris gaped at the drawing as if he were hypnotized. Charun’s head was fully turned now. The sliver of white in his eyes had become a quarter moon. A third of the stitches along the lips had been sliced open to reveal a single sharp tooth; the left corner of the mouth was arched in a sneer. The phallus was bigger and bloodier than on the drawing he’d left at Olga Dawson’s house. There was a noose tied around the tip of the penis.

Andie nipped the paper over so Kerris and Bowman could read the note:

Angel said there were many ways to go and return. My Persephone said we could get closest through the shaman’s mixture and the rope. She swelled deliciously tight around me. She bucked and gasped, ‘Vida!’

The mushroom took my head and I came up, arms spread wide, hard and strong with the rope. Persephone has left me behind. Blind and deaf and mute.

But now my mouth opens to taste the mystery. And the light reaches my eyes.

‘Satisfied, Chief?’ Andie asked.

Kerris cranked his head around. Beads of sweat dripped off his nose, but his jaw set tense and determined.

‘I still don’t believe these killings are linked to something that happened in Lawton a hundred years ago,’ he said. ‘My family goes back a hundred and fifty years in this town. I’ve never heard of anything about an “abomination” or whatever your mother called it, Andie. Until last week, there’ve only been two recorded murders in Lawton and those were close to thirty years ago.’

Andie gripped the edge of the wool blanket. ‘C’mon, Mike, you know better than most that it’s not hard to bury things if you know how.’

For an instant pure hatred crossed Kerris’ face, but he kept control. ‘I still don’t buy it.’

‘What’s going on with you two?’ Bowman demanded.

‘It’s personal, Lieutenant,’ Andie said, never letting her eyes leave Kerris. ‘But Mike knows what I’m talking about. Lawton’s always kept secrets. It’s part of the code among certain families in town.’

‘I don’t know what she’s talking about,’ Kerris said evenly.

‘Old habits die the hardest, don’t they?’ Andie responded.

Bowman pointed at the two of them. ‘Whatever it is between you two, I won’t have it cloud this investigation. I—’

An older trooper in a black rain slicker came across the lawn. ‘Sorry to interrupt, Lieutenant, but we’ve got a few things you should know. We found the Explorer about two miles from here, pulled off into the ditch. We ran the dog on the scent, but he lost it not far from the truck. Killer must have gone to water and then out into a swamp. We’ve got troopers working all the roads, but it’s wilderness up in there for twenty miles in every direction.’

The mist had lifted. And for the first time they all felt the forbidding presence of the mountains and the vast hardwood forests that soared above Nyren’s property. A man could hide from himself in there for weeks, Gallagher thought. And then he had the creepy-crawly sensation that they were being watched. He scanned the forest, but saw nothing.

‘Anything in the truck, Harry?’ Bowman asked the trooper. ‘Files? Maybe an old leather pouch or something?’