Bad Men

It was the Wabanaki killer known as Crow.

The hunters tracked the party beyond the Dead River, where the natives were handed over to the care of more soldiers. After resting for three days, the French soldiers, ten of them in total, prepared to make the journey east once more in order to winter in Acadia, with Crow as their guide.

By now, the hunters were more accomplished killers than the soldiers, and they had no love for the French. One day into their journey, when the soldiers stopped to make camp for the night, they were attacked as they sat around their campfire. Tired, and unprepared for fighting, the first five died in the glow of the flames. Three more were taken in the woods, and two escaped to tell of what had occurred.

The hunters trapped Crow by the banks of the river. He held a knife in one hand, and an ax in the other. His musket, its shot wasted in the confusion of the initial attack, lay at his feet. He watched silently as the three men emerged from the trees, their faces hooded, their bodies draped in furs. They stopped when they were some twenty feet from him, and their leader raised his hands and dropped the hood that hid his features.

“Do you know who I am?” he said.

Crow merely shook his head.

“My name is Dupree. You killed my wife.”

“When?” said Crow.

“Four years ago, on an island called Sanctuary.”

For a moment, Crow did not move. It seemed almost as though the tension in his body dissipated as he realized that the hunt was now over, and that the time to join his ancestors had come at last. Then his hands tightened on his weapons, and he opened his mouth wide as he ran toward his pursuers, his last great scream echoing through the night as the first snows of winter fell upon him.

The muskets roared, and Crow fell backward into the water.

The river carried him away, and his name was never spoken again.

According to Amerling’s history, Buer, the one Crow knew as the “White Leader,” and his lieutenant, Barone, evaded capture. There were those who said that Buer was not his real name, and that a man fitting his description but with the name of Seera was wanted in Massachusetts in co

Amerling went on to cover the abduction of a woman in 1762, the disappearance of the men who had taken her to Dutch, and the subsequent discovery of one of them buried in the forest. The Dupree name cropped up again and again, and it was one of Joe Dupree’s ancestors who had made the stone cross that still stood amid the sunken remains of the old settlement and the graves of those who had died there. There was no mention of George Sherrin, who was found entangled in tree roots.

It was Amerling’s final paragraph that most intrigued Macy. It read:

To those looking in upon the island from outside, its history may appear bloody and strange. Yet those of us who have lived here for many years, and whose fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers lie buried in the island’s cemetery, have grown used to the strangeness of Dutch Island. Here, paths through the forest disappear in the space of a single week, and new paths take their place, so that a man may one day walk a trail familiar to him, yet find himself directed toward new surroundings by the end of it. We are used to the silences and we are used to the sounds that are native only to this small patch of land. We live in the shadow of its history, and walk by the gift of those who have gone before us.

Macy closed the slim volume and returned to the desk, the names encountered in Amerling’s history still rattling around in her head. Church. Lunt. Buer. Barone.

Barone. Barron.

It was probably just a coincidence, she thought, although it would explain why Barron was such a creep if his unpleasantness was part of a proud family tradition.

“You find what you were looking for?” asked the librarian.

“No,” said Macy. “I was hoping for answers.”

“Maybe you’ll have better luck on the island.”

“Maybe,” she said.

Out on Sanctuary, Joe Dupree was also finding himself short on answers. He had taken a ride out to Doug Newton’s house, as he had promised Berman. Newton and his mother lived near Seal Cove, close to the southernmost tip of the island. Their house was one of the oldest on Sanctuary, and one of the most carefully maintained. Doug had given it a fresh coat of paint the previous spring, so that it seemed to shine amid the trees that surrounded it.

The old woman wasn’t long for this earth. Dupree could see it in her face, could smell it in her room. When she died, the doctors would find some complicated way to explain her demise, but for Joe and Doug, and perhaps for the old woman herself, there was nothing complicated about it. She was just old. She was in her late eighties and her body was losing its final struggle to keep her alive. Her breathing was shallow and rasping, and the skin on her face and hands was almost translucent in its pallor. She was in no pain and there was nothing that a hospital could do for her now, so her son had taken her home to die. Debra Legere, who had some nursing experience, dropped by for four or five hours each day, sometimes a little longer if Doug had some work to do, although he was pretty much retired by now. Dupree figured that there was an arrangement between Debra, who was a widow, and Doug, who had never married, but he wasn’t about to pry into it. In any case, they were both strict Baptists, so there appeared to be a limit to the amount of arranging that they could do.

Dupree stood at the window of the old woman’s room and looked down to the yard below. It was a sheer drop. This side of the house was flat. There was a kitchen below, but since Doug had never found the need to extend it farther, it remained flush with the main wall. The way Dupree saw it, there was just no way that a little girl could reach the topmost window in the house.

“Did she have a stepladder, Doug?” he asked softly.

Doug’s mother had awakened briefly when they entered the room but had now slipped back into her troubled sleep.

Doug seemed to think about bristling, then decided that it wasn’t worth the trouble.

“I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “It’s nothing that I haven’t asked myself: how did she get up here? The answer is that I don’t know. I’m just telling you what I saw.”

“The window was locked?” Dupree tested the sash with his hand. It seemed solid enough.

“As far as I remember. It could be that I didn’t close it properly and the wind might have blown it open, except that there was no wind that night and, anyway, who ever heard of a wind that could blow a heavy sash window upward?”

Dupree stared into the forest. The window faced northeast. He could see the island’s central watchtower from where he stood, and part of the border of sunken trees that marked the boundary of the Site.

“You think I’m crazy?” asked Doug.

Dupree shook his head. He didn’t know what to think, except that it still seemed unlikely that a little girl could magic her way twenty feet off the ground in order to attack an old woman in her bedroom. “You always seemed pretty levelheaded to me,” he said at last. “What can I say? Keep the windows locked, the doors too. You got a gun?”

Doug nodded. “More than one.”

“Well, for crying out loud, don’t use any of them. The last thing I want to do is to have to haul you in for shooting someone.”

Doug said that he would bear it in mind. It wasn’t exactly a promise that he wouldn’t shoot anybody, but it was better than nothing.