The Purity of Blood: Volume I (18 page)

“No, just a
practical one.”

“No, I don’t
think that’s it.
 
You’re a very defensive
person.”

A little pissed,
I turned to face him, my brow furrowed.

“I don’t mean
that in a bad way” he added.

“Is there a good
way to mean that?”

“
Humm
… It’s like you don’t take compliments well, because
if you did, you would make yourself vulnerable.
 
You protect yourself by thinking the worst of yourself.”

I didn’t
respond.
 
I didn’t think it was true, but
wasn’t sure how to say it wasn’t when it might contain some nugget of truth I
wasn’t aware of.

“I don’t know.”
I added after a pause. “My parents raised me differently than my friends were
raised by their parents.
 
I had different
… expectations on me.
 
I think maybe it
changed me into someone I wasn’t supposed to be.”
 
I wasn’t sure why I was telling him this.

“Now who’s being
the cryptic one?
 
I guess we all have
secrets we’d rather not bring out into the light.”

We stood there
for a few more minutes in comfortable silence staring out at the lake

“So does this
lake have a name?” I asked.

“Mirror
Lake.
 
Look down.”

I leaned over
and peered down at the waters only to see the reflection of the house and sky
above me.

“It’s the angle”
he said looking down with me.
 
“You can
only look straight down at the water since it’s surrounded on all sides by the
cliffs, and since so little wind makes its way all the way down to the bottom
it usually looks like that.
  
You should
see it at night when it reflects the stars.”

“There’s no way
down?”

“Well, there is
a rather treacherous route down on the far side over there.”
 
He pointed off to the right. “It’s really
more for an experienced climber, but it could probably be done without any
equipment.
 
I’ve been down there a few
times.
 
The water is nice and there’s
even a few fish as well.
 
There’s also a
cave.
 
You can’t see it now because it’s
directly under the house.
 
We lowered a
canoe down there some time back.
 
But I haven’t
gotten around to taking it out since we stowed it in the cave when we first
moved in.”

I leaned over a
little farther to see if I could spot the cave entrance, but only succeeded in
spotting the reflection of my red hair in the lake.

“Your clothes are
dry,” he said.

“How do you
know?”

“I heard the
buzzer on the dryer.”
 

I must have been
out of it.
 
I hadn’t heard a thing.

I followed him back inside then headed to his room to change
and gather up my things.
 
A few minutes
later I strolled into the living room with my bag, all ready to head back to
campus.
 
Before we left, he sat me down
and re-wrapped my ankle.
 
This time it
was as if he was purposefully trying not to touch me, like I was some poisonous
thing to stay away from.
 
I really didn’t
understand him.
 
But I guessed that was
alright since I probably wouldn’t have to spend time alone with him like this
ever again.

We drove down the mountain in
silence.
 
It wasn’t until we were
approaching town that he finally opened his mouth.

“So have you decided
what you’re going to tell your friends?
 
I kind of get the impression you don’t want to tell them you were with
me.”

I wasn’t sure
how to answer him.
 

“Well, you are
my teacher.
 
I’m not sure how it would
look.”

“Substitute
teacher.”
 
He corrected me as if somehow
that sounded any better.

I didn’t say
anything.
 
What did it matter?
 

After he pulled
up behind Capen Hall, he walked around and opened my door for me.
 

“I’d like to say
let’s do it again sometime, but considering …”
 
He looked down at my ankle. “Perhaps we’d better not.”
 
Then he smiled that smile that made me go
weak at the knees.
 
Why did he have to do
that?

“Yes, well I
think I’ve hiked enough for a while,” I answered as I got out of the car.
 
My words lacked emotion.
 
I honestly had no idea how I was supposed to
feel.

I’d turned to
start up the walkway when heard him say, “Perhaps –”
   

Turning back to
face him, I stared into that amazing pair of sky blue eyes.
 
I could see they wanted to say something but
weren’t.

“Yes?”

He paused for a
moment, hesitating as his eyes darted around nervously.
 

“Well, I was
just wondering … that is if you’re not busy … if you’d maybe like to do
something else together?”
 

He was staring
at the tops of his shoes now.

“Like what?
 
A date?” I asked hesitantly.

“No, not
really.
 
Just maybe go do something
together.”
 

His shoes must
be more interesting than they looked to me.

I thought for a
moment then answered.

“There’s that
Harvest Festival in town next weekend.
 
I
was thinking about going.”

Instantly he
looked up, dazzling me with his expression.
 
I couldn’t help but smile back at him, although I couldn’t understand
why.
 

“I’ve never been
to a Harvest Festival before,” he said with a forced calmness and a smile.

“Well, then it
will be a first for both of us.”
 

I turned, hobbled up the sidewalk and into the dorm.
 
I didn’t look back.
 
I was too afraid of what I might see.
 
I was almost more afraid of Daniel liking me
than of him not liking me.
 
The one thing
I knew with absolute certainty was that, under no circumstances should I be
interested in him.
 
I could offer no
rational reason why, but some unconscious part of me knew he would bring me
nothing but unhappiness.

I lied to my friends.
 
I wasn’t happy about it.
 
I hated lying.
 
Fortunately, I’d been right and no one had
noticed my absence.
 
It was just easier
for me to say I’d gone hiking and fallen down the stairs later on that evening
when I went to the basement to do laundry.
 
It was uninteresting and other than garnering me some sympathy for my pain,
no one seemed to comment or question my story.
 

That night I had
dinner with Ryan and Mike.
 
Tabitha
didn’t join us as she wasn’t going to be back until later in the evening.
 
They were sweet, carrying my tray for me.
 
I had to admit this was the one activity I
didn’t turn away help with.
 
Carrying a
drink on a tray over to our table required more coordination than I was capable
of at the moment.
 

When they asked
about my hike, I gave a vague description that sounded like a variation of our
trip into the woods the previous week.
 
In the end, I tried to say as little as possible on the subject and kept
changing the topic back to their weekend activities.

Occasionally I
found myself scanning the room for Daniel, but I knew I wouldn’t see him.
 
It was Sunday, and as far as I’d observed, he
had taken to eating here only on weeknights.
 
But still I looked, not really knowing why, or at least not wanting to
give my motivations any closer scrutiny.

I tried to
escape by ducking out of the dining hall early, but the boys insisted on
walking me back to my room.
 
They wanted
to be sure I got up the stairs alright, and it wasn’t until I was inside the
door that I was finally able to get rid of them.
 
I was thankful for their kindness, but I
really just wanted to be alone at that point.

Settling down at
my desk, I pulled out my backpack and found my pad with the notes I’d made on
the headstones Daniel had shown me.
  
After popping open a can of soda and turning on my laptop, I returned a
few emails.
 
Once I’d reassured my mother
that I was still alive, I logged on to a genealogy site I used regularly and
started punching in what info I had on Sophronia Hood.
 
There wasn’t much to be found, but I did find
a few old census records and an incomplete family tree that someone had started
to build.
 

Daniel had been
right; most of the other names from the cemetery were in the family tree.
 
Aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings.
 
Sophronia seemed to have been the matriarch
of the family.
 
Pulling out a legal pad, I
started to write out all the information I was collecting into my own hand
written tree.
 
She had six children, two
boys, two girls including a baby boy and girl who sadly seemed to have died
very young.
 
For the other four, I wrote
out the names of their spouses next to each one in turn.
 
Two of the four never had children.
 
That left a son Harvey who married an
Isabella May Avery, and a daughter Anna who married Isaac Bennett.

Harvey and
Isabella May had five children, but moved out of Ulster County to settle in
Ohio where I soon lost their trail.

Anna and Isaac
Bennett stayed here in Ulster County.
 
Seems they’d lived just this side of Kingston, a nearby town to New
Paltz I’d visited once or twice with Tabitha to do some shopping.
 
Anna and Isaac had four children, three boys
and one girl who were Phineas, John, Daniel and Sophia.
 
According to the 1880 Census Sophronia was
living with the Bennett’s and the two children who had been born at the time in
Kingston.
  
There being no 1890 census
for me to consult, I next found the family in 1900.
 
Isaac Bennett was now listed as a widower
living in Kingston with all four children but, no Sophronia.
 
According to her headstone, she’d already
died by then.
 

I was able to
trace Phineas and John but could find nothing on Daniel or Sophia past the 1900
census.
 
Sophia probably wasn’t old
enough to have been married by then, but since her father was a widower, it was
possible she might have been shipped off to live with relatives elsewhere.
 
She would take more work, but this Daniel
should have been easier.
 
Leaning back in
my chair, I stared at my computer and frowned.
 
All I could think at the moment was perhaps he’d died.
 
Even if he had, he probably died between 1900
and 1910.
 
The latest burial in the
cemetery was 1912, so you’d have thought I’d have seen him up there on the
mountain with the rest of his family.

I switched gears
to another website that was better for searching birth and death records.
 
After a little coaxing of the database I
found a death record for a Daniel Bennett in 1905.
  
This got me to wondering.
 
I switched again to another website with
archives of old newspapers.
 
It was a
shot in the dark, but I’d been able to find some incredible newspaper articles
on my family in Rhode Island from way earlier than 1905.
 
I’d been fortunate that several local Rhode
Island papers had allowed their archives to be scanned and put on the
site.
 
I didn’t know how many, or if any
Ulster county papers had been scanned and archived, but it was worth a
look.
 
If nothing else, this site had a
good obituary listing that if searched properly might give me some more modern
day descendants of Sophronia’s that could help me fill in the gaps going
backwards.

I entered ‘
Daniel Bennett 1905 Kingston New York’
in my search box and sifted through the results.
 
About 100 articles came back.
 
At least there seemed to be a couple of
Ulster county newspapers from the time period here.
 
I patiently looked through about thirty or
forty articles with no success.
 
It
didn’t look like I was going to find anything, but once I get started on a
puzzle; it’s hard for me to stop.
 
I’d
already poured through almost half of them, might as well be thorough and go
through them all.

About an hour and a couple of cans of Diet Coke later, I
finally found it.
 

May 16, 1905:
 
The Kingston Telegram.
 
Unexplained series of deaths continue.
 
The latest victim of Ulster’s unknown killer
was Daniel Bennett, a young man of good prospects and family of seventeen years
of age, who was found dead in the woods near his family’s home last Tuesday
night.
 
His family grievously feel the
loss of such a fine young man and pray fervently that the cause of his death
may be determined in as speedy a manner as possible.
 
As with the five previous unexplained deaths,
the bodies were all mutilated in a fashion that would suggest an animal as the
culprit.
 
However, because each of the
bodies appeared to have been hidden from view, the town constable suspects that
a killer may be trying to throw suspicion off of himself and onto an
unsuspecting wild beast.