The Killing Kind

Someone had tied Jake by the neck to a nail set into the floor of the shed. The rope was only two or three inches long and the kitten was lying almost flat on the floor. There were spiders all over it, Lena, little brown spiders just the size of a quarter like no one had ever seen before. They were crawling over the kitten's mouth and eyes and the kitten was scratching and mewing and damn near choking itself on the rope. Then Lyall said the kitten went into convulsions and died, just like that.

Lyall swears that he saw the boy Adam hanging-around that shed where he had no business being and he told the Preacher so. But the Preacher spoke the commandments to him and warned him of the punishments of bearing false witness against his neighbor. The menfolk supported Lyall and the Preacher warned them not to set their hearts against him. All the time the boy Adam just watched and didn't speak a word but Lyall says the boy smiled at him and Lyall thought that maybe if the boy could have found a way to tie him to a nail and let the spiders feed on him as well then he would have.

I don't know what will happen here, Lena. Winter is coming on and I can only see things getting harder for us, but with the Lord's help we will prevail. I will pray for you and yours. My love to you all.

Your sister,

Elizabeth

P.S. I enclose a newspaper clipping. Make of it what you will.

VICTIM OF DROWNING TRAGEDY TO BE BURIED TODAY

Edie Rattray, who died at St. Froid Lake, Aroostook, Wednesday, will be buried today. The body of Edie, 13, was found floating in the lake by Red River Road, close to the town of Eagle Lake. The body of her puppy was found nearby.

According to the only witness, Muriel Faulkner, 15, Edie got into difficulties attempting to rescue the dog when it fell from the bank, and drowned before Muriel could summon help.

Edie was a prominent member of the choir of St. Mary's Church, Eagle Lake, and the choir will sing at her funeral mass. Muriel is a member of the small religious community known locally as the Aroostook Baptists. Her father, Aaron, is the pastor of the community.

State police say they are treating the death as accidental, although they remain puzzled as to how Edie drowned in comparatively shallow water.

This week, candles will remain lit in every house in the town for the girl whose beautiful singing voice led her to be called the “Nightingale of Eagle Lake.”

(from the Bangor Daily News , October 28, 1963)

III

To the legion of the lost ones, to the cohort of the damned…

– RUDYARD KIPLING,

“GENTLEMAN-RANKERS”

17

THE NEXT MORNING I AWOKE to a throbbing at the back of my hand, a souvenir of my encounter with Deborah Mercier. I was no longer working for her husband, but there were still calls to be made. I checked in once again with Buntz in Boston, who assured me that Rachel was safe and sound, before calling the Portland PD.

I wanted to see the place in which the Aroostook Baptists had been interred. I could, I supposed, have been accused of morbid curiosity, but it was more than that; everything that had occurred-all of the deaths, all of the tainted family histories-was tied up with these lost souls. The burial ground at St. Froid was the epicenter for a series of shock waves that had affected generations of lives, touching even those who had no blood co

I had a vision of her, scared and miserable, standing on Higgins Beach while a selfish young man cast stones on the water, concerned only for the opportunities that would be lost to him if he became a father at such an age. I blamed her, I knew: for wanting me, for allowing me to be with her, for taking me inside her. As the stones fell I sank with them, dropping slowly to the seabed, where the rush of the waves drowned out her voice, and the sound of her tears and the adult world, with all its torments and betrayals, was lost in a blur of green and blue.

She must have known, even then, about her family's past. Maybe she felt a kind of kinship with Elizabeth Jessop, who had departed for a new existence many years before and was never seen again. Grace was a romantic, and I think she would have wanted to believe that Elizabeth had found the earthly paradise for which she had been searching, that she had somehow remade her life, sealing herself off from the past in the hope that she could start afresh. Except that something inside her whispered that Elizabeth was dead: Ali Wy

Then Deborah Mercier fed Grace the knowledge that Faulkner might still be alive, and that through him the truth of Elizabeth Jessop's disappearance might be revealed to her. It seemed certain that Grace had then approached Carter Paragon, who, through his own weakness and the sale of a recently created Faulkner Apocalypse, had allowed the possibility of the preacher's continued existence to be exposed. Following that meeting, Grace had been killed and her notes seized along with one other item. That second item, I suspected, was another Apocalypse that had somehow come into Grace's possession. How that had come to pass would require renewed pressure on the Beckers to find out if their daughter, Marcy, could fill in the blanks. That would be tomorrow's work. For today, there was Paragon, and St. Froid Lake, and one other visit that I had chosen not to mention to Angel and Louis.

PIs don't usually get access to crime scenes, unless they're the first to arrive at them. This was the second time in less than eighteen months that I had asked Ellis Howard, the deputy chief in charge of the Portland PD's Bureau of Investigation, for his help in bending the rules a little. For a time, Ellis had tried to convince me to join the bureau, until the events in Dark Hollow conspired to make him reconsider his offer.

“Why?” he asked me when I called him and he eventually agreed to talk to me. “Why should I do it?”

“Don't even say hello.”

“Hello. Why? What's your interest in this?”

I didn't lie to him. “Grace and Curtis Peltier.” There was silence on the other end of the line as Ellis ran through a list of possible permutations and came up cold. “I don't see the co

“They were related to Elizabeth Jessop. She was one of the Aroostook Baptists.” I decided not to mention the other blood link, through Jack Mercier. “Grace was preparing a thesis on the history of the group before she died.”

“Is that why Curtis Peltier died in his bath?”

That was the trouble with trying to deal with Ellis; eventually, he always started to ask the difficult questions. I tried to come up with the most nebulous answer possible, in an effort to obscure the truth instead of lying outright. Eventually, I knew, the lies I was telling, both directly and by omission, would come back to haunt me. I had to hope that by the time they did I would have accumulated enough knowledge to save my hide.

“I think that someone may have believed that he knew more than he did,” I told Ellis.

“And who might that person be, do you think?”

“I don't know anything but his name,” I replied. “He calls himself Mr. Pudd. He tried to warn me off investigating the circumstances surrounding Grace Peltier's death. He may also be co