The Smoky Corridor (8 page)

He had examined many faces this way at the start of each new school year.

He had done so for more than one hundred years.

Searching for the One. The child irresistibly lured there by his magic voodoo spell.

“This year. This year he will come.”

He needed to find a child who was flesh of his flesh, blood of his blood. A relative, no matter how distant. It was why he had buried, in the front yard of his mansion, an urn filled with powders, herbs, feathers, and an incantation written in his own blood on parchment—a spell guaranteed to one day attract a family member to this place.

For Horace Pettimore needed to find a descendant in order to rise from the dead.

Yes, it could be done!

He could live forever!

He had known that orchestrating his own resurrection was possible ever since the nine-year-old girl had come to him in 1866, a year after the Civil War had ended, when he’d still lived in New Orleans. He, a Yankee carpetbagger, had just ascended to the position of supreme voodoo king after the unexpected death of Queen LaSheena.

Well, unexpected by everyone but him.

Pettimore had been plotting how to kill the old witch for months.

Anyway, that morning, he had been in the captain’s quarters of his paddle wheel steamer.

The little girl gently rapped her knuckles on his door.

He immediately recognized the child as Queen LaSheena’s granddaughter, the young girl he had seen playing in the back room of Queenie’s voodoo shrine in the French Quarter. The girl had caramel-colored skin. Her hair was piled up high under a bright yellow head scarf, the same style her grandmother had always worn.

She had a small doll clutched in her hand.

A cloth doll dyed a deep navy blue, the color of the Union army’s uniforms in the Civil War.

“Good day, Captain Pettimore,” the young girl said with a sly smile. “What a pleasure it is to see you again.”

Then she proceeded to tell him things only Queen LaSheena would know.

“You may think you have taken over my throne, King Pettimore,” the little girl went on, “but you are sadly mistaken. For you will never have a child or a grandchild
or even a niece or nephew to carry your soul forward into future generations. I have made certain of that!”

She showed him her doll.

There were pins stuck into it.

It was a voodoo doll. The little girl with the soul of Queen LaSheena dug one needle deeper into the doll’s leg and the captain could’ve sworn he’d just been wounded by a musket ball.

“I know, for you have told me that you have no brother or sister. No cousins, aunts, or uncles.” She jabbed a new needle into the doll. “You will see no children of your own.” She held up the doll so he could see a likeness of his own face stitched into its head. “When you die, as all men must, your soul will find no blood of your blood nor flesh of your flesh, no earthen vessel to carry it forward. I have won.
Joc-a-mo-fee-no-ah-nah-nay
, Captain Pettimore. Enjoy your reign as the voodoo king of New Orleans. It shall be brief.”

She twisted the needle in the doll’s leg.

Now he could still remember the searing pain in his thigh.

But Queen LaSheena wasn’t half as smart and cunning as she so arrogantly imagined.

Unbeknownst to her, there was one member of the Pettimore family he had never spoken of and, therefore, Queen LaSheena could not hex.

A beloved sister who had so disgraced the family that she’d fled Boston and disappeared. Pettimore had learned
of her whereabouts, quite accidentally, from a soldier he’d met in an army hospital outside Vicksburg.

“Captain,” the dying man had cried out faintly from his filthy cot, “will you kindly do me the service of informing my wife that I met an honorable end in service to my country?”

In truth, Pettimore couldn’t have cared less about comforting the dying soldier’s widow. He had only come to the hospital to steal antiseptics, to make certain none of his zombies infected him with diseases their corpses had carried up from the grave. But the sickly soldier, weak though he was, forced a weathered photograph with curled edges into his hand.

It was Pettimore’s long-lost sister!

In the tintype, Mary was wearing a bell-skirted bridal gown and a white laurel wreath in her black hair.

“She lives with our daughter,” said the dying man, mustering up just enough strength to speak, the death rattle already sounding in his chest. “In a small mill town. North Chester. Connecticut.”

The soldier, of course, died.

It was fate that had decreed he should reveal what he knew about Pettimore’s only family, moments before wheezing out his final breath.

So after the meeting with Queen LaSheena’s granddaughter, Captain Horace P. Pettimore packed up all his belongings, his gold, and his army of zombie slaves and moved back north.

He did not find his sister or his niece.

Or any trace of them.

But he heard rumors of Mary Jane Hopkins, for that was her new name.

The bloodline lived on and he knew that despite Queen LaSheena’s best efforts to thwart him, he would one day find his rightful heir.

Inspired by the pharaohs of old who had stored their treasures inside the tombs of the pyramids so they might have use of their wealth in the next life, Pettimore had his slaves construct a labyrinth of tunnels beneath his home. He created an impenetrable hiding spot for his cache of stolen Confederate gold, which would be waiting for him when he came back to life inside the body of his blood relation.

His minions, the troop of sixty-six dead Union soldiers whose souls he had stolen, used every scrap of lumber, every piece of equipment, every lamp off his old steamboat when building the captain his underground fortress.

And then he killed all the zombies.

He burned them while they slept in their tents.

All save one.

He used their deaths as an excuse to erect his war memorial cemetery, the underpinnings of which had been designed to feed fresh corpses to his one remaining zombie.

Cyrus McNulty.

The man who, without his soul, became the most ferocious beast of them all. The cemetery would give the zombie sufficient, if meager, food to tide him through the waiting.

Next, after burying the voodoo lure charm out front, Horace Pettimore generously donated his home, his land, and a substantial sum of money to the town of North Chester for the specific purpose of building a school near his burial site.

He needed children, lots and lots of children, a fresh crop every year, if he hoped to snatch the One he so desperately needed to live again.

Perhaps Pettimore would become the new boy in the front row, the skinny child with the thick glasses who kept staring back at him whenever his airy spirit slid inside a portrait.

Zack, they called him.

His family tree had deep roots in North Chester.

He might be the One.

A descendant of Mary Jane Hopkins!

Horace Pettimore could not help smiling.

29

Judy parked
outside the North Chester Public Library, a two-story red brick building topped with a small schoolhouse steeple.

Her good friend, the librarian, Jeanette Emerson, a feisty lady with curly white hair and bright purple reading glasses, saw her come in the front door.

“Judy! Hello, dear!”

“Hi.”

Mrs. Emerson arched an eyebrow. “Did you remember to wipe your feet?”

Judy backtracked to the welcome mat. Swiped her shoes clean.

“Now then,” said Mrs. Emerson, “to what do we owe the pleasure of a visit from our favorite children’s author and critically acclaimed dramatist?”

“Research.”

“Wonderful. You can help me reshelve these books while we chat.”

Mrs. Emerson pushed a rolling cart into the stacks.

Judy dutifully followed.

•   •   •

“Okay, here’s my question,” said Judy as she slipped a neon pink murder mystery back into its proper slot on the shelf. “Actually, it’s from Zack. Another paranormal research project.”

“Has he seen …?” Mrs. Emerson peered over the tops of her reading glasses. “An apparition?”

Judy nodded. “At the middle school.”

“Oh, my.”

“It was the two boys,” whispered Judy. “The Donnelly brothers.”

“Fascinating. What did they want?”

“For Zack to become their ‘Kit Carson.’”

“I’m sorry. Their what?”

“Kit Carson. Don’t ask me what it means.”

“Very well. I won’t.”

“The older brother …”

“Joseph.”

“Told Zack they were ‘sons of Daniel Boone.’ But then his little brother …”

“Seth.”

“Said he was Johnny Appleseed.”

Mrs. Emerson nodded contemplatively. “A very interesting and yet confusing family tree. Perhaps the two boys were just playing at being famous frontiersmen. It was quite the thing to do in 1910. Not that I was around back then. Almost, but not quite.”

“Well, more importantly, I want to learn as much as we can about the Donnelly brothers. How exactly did they die? Was the fire their fault? Were they good kids or bad kids? Are they …”

“Good ghosts or bad ghosts?”

“Exactly.”

“Come along,” said Mrs. Emerson. “These books can wait. My curiosity, however, much like that of a certain cat I know, is demanding that I feed it some answers!”

30

It didn’t
take long for Judy and Mrs. Emerson to find the facts about the Donnelly brothers and the fire at Pettimore Middle School.

It was all in the
North Chester Weekly Chronicler’s
account of the terrible tragedy of Tuesday, January 11, 1910.

TWO DONNELLY BROTHERS AND
HEROIC TEACHER DIE IN SMOKY CORRIDOR
AT PETTIMORE SCHOOL

Joseph and Seth Donnelly, orphans, ages twelve and ten, along with their arithmetic instructor, Mr. Patrick J. Cooper, perished last night, all three having suffocated inside a cramped and smoke-filled corridor on the first floor of The Pettimore School for Children.

Mr. Cooper, the teacher, had gone into the smoky hallway in a valiant attempt to rescue his two charges who, according to firemen at the scene, had been playing with matches, attempting to ignite an “indoor campfire” with sheets of paper and wooden rulers. The fire quickly spread to a nearby bulletin board as well as the wood-paneled walls. The doorknobs at both ends of the corridor had been locked by the boys to prevent their antics being discovered.

However, Mr. Cooper, a newly arrived genteel Southerner, who had quickly established himself as a guardian to the wayward and neglected children at the Pettimore school, was grading papers in his classroom, one of two off the narrow hallway leading to the school’s woodworking shop. He apparently rushed into the corridor when he smelled smoke. The door to the classroom, firemen state, “accidentally locked behind him,” denying the three victims their only possible escape route, as the door to the classroom across the hall had already been locked at the close of the school day.

“The Donnelly brothers were both members of the Sons of Daniel Boone,” Pettimore School Principal John Broadwater told reporters. The Boone society is the largest boys’ organization in America. The group teaches camping, conservation, and outdoor pioneering skills. “I wish they had stuck to indoor games, such as treasure hunting, this winter,” added Principal Broadwater.

Firefighters responding to the incident reported that the boys and their teacher were dead when they arrived on the scene. The blaze was quickly doused and contained to the one hallway.

“It was a good thing this happened after school hours,” said North Chester Volunteer Fire Brigade Commander Samuel J. Morkal.

The coroner has ruled that both Donnelly boys and Mr. Cooper succumbed to smoke inhalation, having been trapped inside the corridor with the fire, which quickly consumed all the available oxygen. Their bodies were burned beyond recognition.

“Building a campfire indoors, especially in such a confined space, is never a very bright idea,” Morkal said.

Patrick J. Cooper, the heroic teacher who lost his life trying to save the boys, was a recent arrival to the North Chester area.

Originally from Fort Oglethorpe, Georgia, he came to Connecticut last fall to teach mathematics and volunteered to serve as the faculty advisor for the Daniel Boone scouting group. His fellow teachers say Mr. Cooper always went out of his way to help “the weak and the orphans.”

Another member of Mr. Cooper’s family had also, in the past, migrated north to live in the North Chester area. In something of an ironic twist, Mr. Cooper’s grandfather John Lee Cooper is buried in the “potter’s field” section of the Riverside War Memorial Cemetery on the riverbank behind the school.

Funeral services for Joseph and Seth Donnelly will be held this weekend at Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church, North Chester.

Mr. Cooper’s body will be transported by railcar to Georgia for interment in the family plot.

Judy sat back in her chair and shook her head.

“How could those two boys be so stupid? An indoor campfire? They were scouts, for goodness’ sake.”

Mrs. Emerson nodded. “Perhaps this Sons of Daniel Boone organization no longer exists because their handbook failed to point out the obvious hazards of such foolish behavior!”

“Is that hallway still such a firetrap?”

“No, thank goodness. They rebuilt it completely. Put in a fire exit. Used brick instead of wood. Replaced one classroom, put in newfangled bathrooms—indoor plumbing being quite the rage in 1910. It’s very safe back there now. Unless, of course, the two Donnelly boys turn out to be ghosts of the more dangerous sort.”