Sacrifice (17 page)

“Okay, okay,” Ken said. “It’s yours. I didn’t know how serious this was. It’s in the garage.”

Constable Pickney gave a smug smile. He released Ken’s wrist. Ken massaged some life back into it as he approached the garage. He pulled open the overhead door and entered the shadows.

He returned carrying a small metal sign, about the size of a notebook. The constable looked confused. Ken handed it to him. The red letters on the white sign read: DO NOT FEED THE DUCKS—Sagebrook Village Code 143A

The Half Dozen had liberated the sign from its duties a few months ago, one of those random acts of prankdom that was their gift.

“Officer, I don’t know what I was thinking. I thought it would look cool on my dorm room wall in the fall. The bolts were already loose…” Ken spit the words out rapid fire and remorseful.

Constable Pickney’s jaw hung open. He’d intimidated the wrong confession out of the suspect.

“Please don’t tell my parents about this,” Ken pleaded.

The constable struggled for a moment. Then he squared his shoulders and straightened his cap. “It’s fine for now. But I don’t want to see you again.”

Ken figured that now wasn’t the time to tell Constable Pickney the feeling was mutual. “No sir, Officer.”

The cruiser rolled away and Ken returned inside. His mother sat at the kitchen table, brow knit in consternation.

“It’s cool, Mom,” Ken said. “It was someone else’s car. The license plate was one digit off.”

“Really? Well it’s a damn good thing,” his mother said. “I’d have grounded you for life if that had been true.”

Ken wondered what her punishment would be for felony burglary.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

There was no way Marc could know the whole senior class. There were over eight hundred of them this year.

That night, Marc pulled his new yearbook off his bedroom shelf. Maybe the thing would be of value after all. The thick book’s dark green leatherette cover still smelled of some chemical that was no doubt toxic. The binding cracked as he opened it for the first time. The purchase had been more of a rite of passage than anything else. He couldn’t imagine asking people to sign it. Most of the kids at school were passing acquaintances, even the kids he’d taken band with for three years. And the Half Dozen? They were all so close the idea seemed trite.

Marc flipped past the first twenty pages until the senior pictures began. He laid out the list of names Ken had given him. He cross-referenced the names on the list with birth dates near his. There were dozens of vaguely familiar faces, all part of the moving between period background scenery, kids he’d seen but did not know. There were also a good number he’d never seen: boys with shoulder-length hair and wispy moustaches, girls with Cleopatra-quality eyeliner. Where were these kids all day?

He checked off some familiar names on the list: Chip Fletcher, Don Van Buskirk, Veronica Parker. Veronica was in the woodwinds section of the school band. Flute if he remembered correctly. He added two more that he didn’t know. That made five descendants of the founders. Well, six including himself. A bumper crop based on the birth year distribution on the family tree. Of them all, only he didn’t have a star by his name.

The other five didn’t share anything in common. Three boys, two girls. Two jocks, one geek, one drama club member destined for a life in Greenwich Village, and one with no affiliations, part of the overlooked high school middle class. Since they’d attended different junior highs, they did not even live in the same area.

Whatever club they had joined, Marc hadn’t been invited. From her lack of a star, he guessed Josie Mulfetta hadn’t been invited either. She was dead and Marc had a close call on the dock at age three. The other five were all alive and kicking.

He paged back through the family tree sheets. Almost everyone with a star had lived to a ripe old age. Many without did not.

He flipped past the last page of the senior pictures to a section titled “The Way We Were.” There were rows of baby pictures. Katy had talked Jeff into submitting one of his. In it he wore a red cowboy hat and a pair of plastic six-shooters. He looked like an idiot. There were times when it paid to not have a steady girlfriend.

Chip Fletcher had a picture there. The lacrosse team captain didn’t look much different at age three. Same blond crew cut, same head like a block of ice. He was at the beach in a Hawaiian print swimsuit leaning on a kid-sized surfboard. A small silver charm hung from his neck. Even in preschool the kid oozed cool.

He looked over to Veronica. Her picture looked like it was taken at her baptism. She wore a white lace smock and she couldn’t have been more than a month old, with peach fuzz hair and huge, inquisitive eyes. Marc had to check twice when he saw her wrist. She wore a silver charm, a dead ringer for the one around Chip’s neck, a simple, half-inch oval with a blurry inscription.

Marc searched for the next two founders’ kids. One was blowing out candles at his seventh birthday party. No chain evident, but if it was under his clothes, no one would know. The next kid had a shot from summer day camp, circa 1969. She wore a halter top and shorts. Nowhere to hide a chain there.

Don Van Buskirk’s shot was on the last page. He sat in a metal pedal car, one of the fire truck versions. He had on a red plastic fireman’s hat. He wore an open-necked shirt and while a charm wasn’t visible, there was a single-strand chain around the back of his neck that disappeared beneath his shirt.

Since small boys and jewelry weren’t a common mix, Marc assumed Don was wearing a charm. That was three out of five and no coincidence. Maybe the others had aged out of the Woodsman’s range by the time those pictures were taken.

The jewelry had to do something special for parents to make little boys wear them and wrap them around the wrists of newborns. Was this some sort of protection? The equivalent of lamb’s blood on Jewish lintels Passover night?

If his theory was correct, it explained a hell of a lot. He’d have to confirm it though. Dropping by to ask Ms. Childress wouldn’t be much help, though he was sure she knew the answer. He thought of another way.

He closed the yearbook and put it on his stack of school books. It would actually come in handy after all.

Chapter Thirty-Eight

On the other side of town, Ken delved into
A Century of Sagebrook History
. The dry and archaic prose made the process a chore. He remembered complaining about reading Dickens in English class and felt remorse. He skimmed whole sections on agricultural minutiae and the details of who built the first dock in the harbor.

The author was local and assumed his audience was as well. Items and locations long gone were alluded to as if they were common knowledge. Community members were invariably heroes, hinting that the work had been a Sagebrook commission.

Some chapters had woodcut illustrations, like the ones that peppered
Harper’s Weekly
during its Civil War heyday. They were quite a bit less detailed than the ones in
Harper’s,
and the perspectives were regularly a bit skewed. The local author had enlisted a local artist who apparently matched his caliber.

Whatever indigenous population the first settlers displaced didn’t warrant mention. Perhaps imported disease had done them in before the first families arrived. By 1730 the town had coalesced into the form still frozen in time around the village green, including St. Andrew’s Episcopal, the mill for crushing grains into something edible, an early version of the Village Green Inn and commercial shops around the harbor. The town council ran the show and the founder’s last names populated the list: Reed, Wollam, Fletcher, Parker. These same names still graced a variety of local businesses, and a Parker descendent was still Head Selectman.

All this stirred vague memories from history classes and local lore. But whatever important event had occurred was no longer common knowledge. It was something shoved under the carpet by the founding families. There had to be something in this little book that got it pulled off the shelf and stuck in a display case.

Ken found it in 1740. A chapter about that year carried the headline “The Great Trial.” For something the author treated as such a monumental event, Ken was certain he had never heard a word about it.

The author broke style in this chapter as if he personally relished the details, and the story came alive as Ken read it.

That summer, one of the children in town went missing. Charles Reed, age six, went into the village for a few measures of salt. When he did not return, his father Hiram saddled his horse and rode in to find him. It wouldn’t be the first time Charles had lost himself to daydreams and diversions.

But Charles never made it to the dry goods store. The shopkeeper hadn’t had a customer all afternoon. Hiram scoured the harbor, the pond and any other place that might spur the interest of a curious boy, but to no avail.

Hiram returned home and convinced his distraught wife Elizabeth to give the boy a few hours to make his way home, but as dusk fell, neither of them could be consoled. Long Island wasn’t the Alleghenies. There were no large predators, no hostile Indians. The boy had to be nearby. They guessed he might have stumbled and hit his head on the way to the store. He’d have to be somewhere along the route. Hiram contacted the Town Council. As the moon rose, they began a torchlight hunt of the route from their home to the village.

At midnight they suspended the search and closed with prayers that daylight would make a difference and that the boy would be found alive.

But the next day’s results were no better. All the men who could be spared searched the route and the forest around. There wasn’t a trace.

For days Hiram and Elizabeth held out hope that their only son would return, alive and well. The rest of the village thought their optimism foolish. The two rebuffed Pastor Jenkins’ offer of a memorial service. By the weekend, the villagers had settled on a theory of accidental drowning for poor Charles. But a new development shot that theory down. That Monday, Dolly Jamison disappeared.

Eight years old with bright red tresses, the precocious girl had been out gathering blackberries for preserves. Her mother went to the patch when Polly was late to midday dinner. A half-filled inverted bucket lay at the edge of the thicket. Berries were strewn everywhere like the field had exploded. Whatever had taken her, Dolly had put up a fight.

The town repeated the search process. This time all other activity ground to a halt. Again the search was fruitless.

A few of the more creative townsfolk offered up witchcraft-oriented explanations, as the stories from Salem had a stubborn hold on the New England psyche. But the more level headed knew there was a predator among them. The question was who.

The village selectmen were in an anguished meeting when Nell Parker broke in breathless with news. The body of little Charles Reed had been found, partly submerged in the millpond. Men were pulling it out.

The selectmen rushed to the pond. Elizabeth Reed was in hysterics, held back by some men to keep from cradling her son’s bloated, fish-eaten corpse in her arms. Ropes still bound the boy’s waist and arms. His head was crushed like a ripe melon. The boy hadn’t drowned. He’d been dumped, weighted to hold his body under.

It was Ezra Fletcher, searching in the deep muck at the pond’s center, who found the damning evidence. He waded ashore with a chunk of stone in his hand, rope still tied around its center. The frayed end matched the ropes that bound the late Charles. The gray granite was a broken millstone.

Tom Silas had been the miller for just over a year, buying the mill when the previous owner fell ill. Single and solitary, Silas seemed happy with a routine with limited human contact. It was only in the last month he’d even hired help, a Dutchman from New York City. Silas’s lack of church attendance had raised some eyebrows, but it was not enough to raise suspicions that he could be evil. Until now.

No further evidence was necessary. The assembled crowd, which now numbered in the dozens, surged from the pond’s perimeter. Selectman Jonas Parker led his townsmen across the street to smash the mill’s locked door. The crowd surged inside to find the mill empty.

But Jonas remembered working once in the narrow crawlspace under the main floor, where the great spindle of the mill’s drive cog was anchored. He led the crowd to the half door at the base of the mill’s north wall. He yanked it open to a horrible scene.

The crawlspace had been excavated to standing height, no easy task in the rocky soil. Candles lit the space in an eerie flickering light. Tom Silas stood over the limp body of Dolly Jamison, her copper hair streaked with the richer red of fresh blood. Silas held a heavy brass seal in one hand, one of the ones he used to certify wax-sealed documents. Blood dripped from the base.

The crowd dragged Silas out from under the mill. He professed his innocence and said he had just found Dolly’s body. While several of the women tended to the cooling body of Dolly Jamison, Silas was roundly beaten by the mob. Someone brought out a length of rope to better have justice served.

Jonas Parker took charge of the throng. He stood atop the mill wheel sluice and shouted for order. He called forward the other council members to create the façade of civilization. He appointed them jury and asked, given the evidence presented, what verdict they had on two charges of murder. The members declared Silas guilty in unison.