Murder Among the Angels (32 page)

Charlotte took a deep breath. “Maybe,” she said. “At this point, we’re grasping at straws. Tell me about their relationship,” she said.

Connie leaned back in her chair and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Did you know her full name was Lilith?” she asked.

Charlotte shook her head.

“To distinguish her from her mother, Lillian. The Archibald sisters all had unusual ‘L’ names: Lillian, Lothian, Letitia. Anyway, Lilith was either a goddess or a demon, depending on the interpretation. I’m sure Lily’s parents named her after the goddess, but it was the demon that she identified with.”

“What kind of demon?” Charlotte asked.

“A succubus,” Connie said. “A beautiful young maiden with owl feet and wings like an angel, and hair ‘long and red like the rose’ and cheeks of white and red. It’s a quote that Lily used to recite.”

“What’s a succubus?”

“A temptress who’s sexually insatiable, and so beautiful that no man can resist her. Once she’s succeeded in seducing a man, she turns into a vampire, and sucks the lifeblood out of him.”

“Whew!” said Charlotte.

“Yeah,” Connie said, flicking her ash. “It’s pretty heavy stuff.”

Charlotte remembered the pastor describing Lily as being hypnotic, bewitching, reckless. “Why would she have wanted to identify with such an unpleasant image?” she asked.

“Because of the power of it. As I understand it, Lilith was the antithesis of Eve, the woman who is obedient, submissive, chaste. According to the Hebrew scriptures, she was Adam’s first wife, but he cast her out because she wouldn’t submit to lying beneath him.”

“The first feminist,” Charlotte commented.

“Something like that,” Connie agreed. “Lily used to say that Lilith was the symbol of the time when woman was not a slave.”

Charlotte had taken out a notepad, and started taking notes.

“Anyway, Lilith’s special targets were men of God. She would come to them in the night. Lily told me that medieval monks used to tie crucifixes to their genitals before going to sleep to keep Lilith away.”

Charlotte arched an eyebrow.

“If she succeeded in copulating with them, they would lose their immortal souls.” She paused for a moment, and then said: “I just remembered something else Lily told me about Lilith.”

“What?” Charlotte asked.

Connie fixed Charlotte with her big blue eyes. “The monks would wear amulets for protection against Lilith,” she said. “In the form of knives.”

Charlotte shook her head. This was getting bizarre.

Connie continued: “If you look at Lily’s life as a series of campaigns to corrupt men, Cornball—that’s what we used to call him—was her Holy Grail.” She smiled at the irony of the religious reference. “It began in—I don’t know—seventh or eighth grade. He was our religion teacher.”

“Was she already seducing men at that age?” Charlotte asked. If so, she would have been sexually precocious indeed.

“No, not physically. But she was already coming on to men. I imagine she’d been coming on to men since she was three. She would sit at the front of the class, and hike her skirt up above her knees. I remember him lecturing her at one point about not wearing such short skirts.”

“Did she eventually seduce him, then?”

Connie shrugged. “I don’t know. She claimed she did. As I said the other day, she claimed no man could resist her.” She rolled her eyes in disbelief. “But I suspect she was telling the truth as far as he was concerned. She said it happened only once, after a youth group party at the quarry pit.”

He said he had tied himself to the mast, Charlotte thought. But it appeared that he hadn’t knotted the rope tightly enough. “How old would she have been then?” she asked.

“It would have been the summer after our junior year. Seventeen, I guess.”

“Why only once?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if he managed to resist her advances after that, or if she dropped him. Probably the latter: that would have been her style, to move on to fresh territory. Though that didn’t necessarily mean that she would have stopped coming on to him.”

“Did his attitude toward her change after that?”

“I don’t know about his attitude. I know her attitude changed.”

“In what way?”

She took a drag on her cigarette, and then spoke. “Before she seduced him, she was very adoring. She was always flattering his ego: telling him what a wonderful teacher he was, how much he had influenced her life, and so on.”

“And after?”

“After, she would still flatter his ego, but the flattery was interlaced with contempt. She would make fun of him when she thought he wasn’t noticing, but in fact he did notice.”

Charlotte remembered him telling her the story about how Lily had climbed out of the second-story window while he was writing on the blackboard, and then reappeared at the classroom door a few minutes later.

“She was the one who started the whole Ichabod thing.”

“What Ichabod thing?”

“He was always very sensitive about his appearance. Especially so back then, when he was even more gawky-looking than he is now. He took every whisper to be a derisive remark about the way he looked, every laugh a joke at his expense. Half the time he was right,” she said.

“Even paranoids have enemies,” Charlotte commented.

She nodded, and then said: “Because we’re next to Tarry-town, we studied
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
in English class. One day, the English teacher asked Lily to read a passage describing the schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane. The passage talked about his nose looking like the arrow of a weather vane that was perched on his neck.”

“And she drew a comparison to Reverend Cornwall?” Charlotte asked. She remembered her first impression of him: that he should be wearing a tricorne hat and a frock coat. He did look like an old-fashioned schoolmaster.

Connie nodded. “The passage described him to a T: big ears, long legs, arms that hung down to his knees. ‘Sounds like Cornball,’ Lily said. After that, Cornball was known to one and all as Ichabod. In fact, there are
still
people in Zion Hill who refer to him as Ichabod—though not to his face.”

“If he was so sensitive about his appearance, the constant reminder must have been extremely unpleasant,” Charlotte said.

“Oh, yes,” Connie agreed. “Excruciatingly so, I’d say. ‘Cornball’ had been bad enough, but it was relatively innocuous compared to ‘Ichabod.’”

“What was her attitude toward him in more recent years?”

“You mean, since she married Victor Louria?”

“And before,” Charlotte said.

“I don’t think she saw much of him after she got married. But she used to see him a lot beforehand. She used him. If she didn’t want to go somewhere by herself, there was always Icky to go along with her. If she wanted help moving furniture or hanging a picture, there was always Icky.”

“Icky?” Charlotte said.

“Short for Ichabod,” Connie said.

“It sounds as if her attitude toward him became less contemptuous, then,” Charlotte said. “Except for the Icky part.”

“Not really,” Connie replied. “Only more subtly contemptuous. She would still taunt him, but she did it in a more sophisticated way. It was still very much a game of cat and mouse, and the mouse was still taking a beating. Except for one difference: he was a mouse who didn’t want to get away.”

“He was under her spell,” Charlotte said. There were some people, Peter had said, who weren’t strong enough to resist the nasty demons—demons who knew just how to punch their buttons.

“Very much so,” Connie agreed.

15

She had led him on, and led him on. Then, when he had finally succumbed to her advances, she had spurned him, Charlotte thought as she drove back to the police station. Not only spurned him, but treated him with contempt. Ridiculed his nose, and probably, though no one would ever know, his sexual performance. But Icky, as she had called him, had kept coming back for more, like the lab rats who keep pushing the lever for more heroin, in spite of the electric shocks. How he must have hated himself for not having the backbone to stand up to her, and how he must have hated her for manipulating him. Then one day the object of his erotic obsession was swept away, literally, by a wave in Cozumel. She was out of his life, leaving a gap that was filled one and a half years later by the appearance of a young woman who looked exactly like her. Everything that they had considered with regard to Dr. Louria’s possible motives, namely the lashing out against the stand-ins for the fantasy he had lost, also applied to Cornwall.

How he had found out about Kimberly Ferguson, the first and most successful of the Lily look-alikes, Charlotte had no idea. Maybe he had seen her walking on the golf course early one morning, and then spied on her from the church tower. But found out about her, he had. And when he did, the rage against Lily that he had kept damped down all those years finally erupted. He could never find it in himself to take that rage out against Lily. Instead, he took it out on a clone who couldn’t control him the way Lily had. Instead of Lily pulling the strings, it was he who controlled her, or rather her look-alike. In the most brutal way imaginable. He had distilled her down to her pure essence, her skull, and then done what he wanted with her. Charlotte didn’t even want to think about what. Then, when he was through with her, he had discarded her, just as she had discarded him. But he was still a Christian, wasn’t he? A man of God. If only to prove it to himself, he gave her a Christian burial, laying her skull to rest on a cemetery gravestone, along with a bouquet of her favorite flowers. Having killed Lily once, he had then gone on to kill her again, and again, and again.

But how to prove it? He was cunning, she thought, remembering how he had subtly directed suspicion first at Dr. Louria, and then at Peter. Putting Kimberly’s skull on the Leatherman’s grave was a clever touch, as were his efforts to raise Peter’s bail money. He had even cast suspicion on the Catholics, that favorite whipping boy of the Protestant denominations, with his observation that the votive candles of the type left with the skull in the church undercroft were used at Immaculate Conception. Though he had used a meat cleaver from the Parish Hall kitchen, had probably even used one of Tina’s stockpots, he wouldn’t have been so careless as to leave evidence of his brutal obsession around his place of residence, especially when the Manse was used for church functions. So where was it that he had carried on the private skull worship that had given him so much pleasure that he had been compelled to kill again and again for the sake of it? Then the answer occurred to her. When they had found the extension cord at the country club dump, Jerry had said that the Quarry Road ended at an old church retreat house. Later, the pastor had mentioned the sign for the Retreat when he was giving them directions to the glass shop, and Charlotte had noticed the small wooden sign in the shape of an arrow at the Quarry Road turnoff. It sounded like a place where a member of the clergy might go to get away from it all, an isolated place where Cornwall (as she now thought of him—the honorific “reverend” seeming entirely inappropriate) would be free to pursue his monstrous obsessions in secrecy.

Though Jerry had mentioned a retreat house, he hadn’t said anything about it. Was it still in use? Charlotte wondered. Or was it a derelict building? She didn’t want to go all the way over there to find out that it was abandoned. Noticing a convenience store coming up on the left, she turned off into the parking lot and pulled up to the public telephone booth. She would ask Lothian Archibald. As the daughter of Zion Hill’s founder and an active member of the church, Lothian should be able to tell her about it.

Lothian picked up right away.

Charlotte identified herself, and then asked: “Do you know a place called the Retreat? It’s on the Quarry Road, behind the church.”

“I know it very well,” she replied. “It’s one of my favorite places.”

“What is it?” Charlotte asked.

“It’s a small house, a cottage really. My father built it for himself as a place to get away from it all. With his many activities in Zion Hill, his businesses, and his eight children, he needed a place like that. We used to go there for family picnics when I was a child.”

“What’s it used for now?”

“I guess you’d say it’s an annex to the Manse. The pastor uses it as a retreat. He goes there when he wants some peace and quiet: to write his sermons, and so on. He really has no privacy at the Manse. People are in and out of there all day long for one thing and another.”

“I see,” said Charlotte. “Is it very private? What I mean is, are there other houses around?”

“Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “It’s all woods and fields. It’s part of the eight-hundred-acre parcel my father left to the church. There’s a barn nearby that’s rented to the same farmer who leases the fields, but that’s it. In fact, my father was so fond of the view that he insisted on being buried there.”

Charlotte gasped. “There’s a cemetery?” she said.

“Not a cemetery, exactly. The New Church isn’t big on cemeteries. A small family plot in the woods. My mother’s buried there too, and my sister Lorraine, who died of rheumatic fever when she was eight, and my sister Letitia who died two years ago. I guess I’ll be buried there one day myself.”

“Where is this family plot in relation to the cottage?”

“It’s kind of hard to find,” she replied. “There aren’t any headstones. Just boulders marking the graves. They don’t even have names on them. Though we know which boulder marks which grave, of course.”

“Tell me exactly how to find it,” Charlotte ordered.

“Okay,” Lothian said. “Do you know where the turnoff is? By the old glassblowing shop? There’s a sign there.”

“Yes,” Charlotte said.

“Just proceed on the Quarry Road for about a mile and a half; it follows the valley of Zion Hill Creek. You’ll pass the old quarry pit where the stone for the church was quarried. It’s filled with water now. We often have youth group parties there in the summer.”

Yes, the quarry pit parties, Charlotte thought: the scene of Cornwall’s seduction by the evil red-haired temptress.

Lothian continued: “The road dead-ends in a turnaround at the Retreat. The side of the cottage will be directly in front of you, and the pond will be on your right. If you go to the left, you’ll see stone steps leading to a path that heads off into the woods.”