“She’s run,” Griffin said. “She’s wherever they took Helena Matthews.”
“You think she’s still in Massachusetts?”
“I do. Where in Massachusetts, I don’t know. But I do think that it goes back to the Puritan days, to Ezekiel Martin, and the words he originally wrote in the earth. I believe it’s important that whatever is supposed to happen takes place in the original colony. Whether we have a crazy person or a manipulator, I think that all the history behind the ‘Satan is coming’ mantra of Ezekiel Martin is of tremendous importance,” Griffin said. “I have a hard time accepting the fact that someone may really think that a few enchantments will bring Satan to earth, but we’ve seen a lot of strange concepts that rule men’s minds. You have your copies of all the reports we acquired from Merton, Magruder and Oakley, right?”
“Came through clearly this morning, thank you. Oh, and we’ve had tech working around the clock on Alex Maple’s cell phone. At first, they lost the trail right where he was taken. The phone had been turned off. But the cell provider was on notice and they called through this morning. Apparently, Alex had some kind of an alarm system set to remind him when he had scheduled consultations with his students. The phone was set to go on, even if he’d powered it off. It didn’t last long, but they did get a ping.”
“It wasn’t over here, in this area, was it?” Griffin asked hopefully.
“No, sorry. Somewhere in western Massachusetts. I’ll have something more for you on that soon,” Barnes said.
“Jehovah,” Griffin said.
“Jehovah doesn’t exist anymore,” Barnes said.
“Not as it once did, no. But the land is still there.”
“The cell was probably tossed,” Barnes said. “But when I have an exact location, I’ll get it to you. Naturally, my guys are still working all the angles.”
“Yeah, thanks. What about the picture of Helena? Did the calls generate anything on Helena?”
“Some, yes, of course, just not as many. None of them helpful—and not many of them real, either. Not in the opinion of our people working the lines. You know, someone saw her in this club or that club, and most of the sightings occurred after the blood was thrown at Vickie.”
“What about our Jane Doe in the hospital?”
“Nothing yet. You know that I’ll call you the minute we have a lead, or the minute she wakes up.”
“Thanks,” Griffin said.
“We’re on it. We’ll keep pressing.”
They finished their conversation, and Griffin put a call through to Jackson at headquarters; there was nothing new learned on that end.
“Pursue it until you find the truth,” Jackson told him.
“Will do,” Griffin said quietly.
He headed back inside. Conversations about Lizzie Borden’s guilt or innocence were still going on, but breakfast was over.
They weren’t going to stay another night; Griffin was pretty sure that they’d gotten what they could from Fall River. But they had an appointment with Charlie Oakley to go out to the site where Sheena Petrie’s body had been found. They had records; they’d had their conversations with the people involved. And if Alex Maple’s phone had been found in the west of the state, it was time to return to Boston and check out what leads had been generated by the pictures in the media, and then to head out to Jehovah—or, as best as had ever been fathomed, where Jehovah had been.
* * *
By ten o’clock, they were checking out and ready to head out, and they were due to pick up Charlie Oakley at eleven.
“We found out in conversation this morning that Sheena Petrie is buried in Oak Grove Cemetery. She’s not far from the Borden graves. I thought we might stop by,” Vickie said.
“Not a bad idea,” Griffin determined. He was driving now; Rocky and Devin were pouring over files in the back seat. “Has anyone had a sense of anything?” Griffin asked pointedly.
“No,” Devin said.
“No. Which isn’t a bad thing, is it?” Vickie asked. “I mean, I’m sorry, it always seems so sad when someone is lingering years after a horrible event.”
Griffin nodded, smiling at her. “But then,” he reminded her, “you have those incredible souls like Dylan Ballantine. He’s strong, he stays to help.”
“He saved my life,” Vickie agreed. “And he and Darlene...love after death. Very nice, I...guess?”
“The cemetery is quite pretty, anyway,” Devin told them. “And, Vickie, I know you love the history in cemeteries. This one is lovely and intriguing.”
The cemetery was beautiful. Griffin drove through gates that informed them they had reached Oak Grove.
Devin pointed out the building that once been the “ladies’ comfort station” where Mr. and Mrs. Borden had received their second autopsies—and had their heads removed—prior to their burial.
“Death, and the investigation of it, has never been pretty,” Griffin commented.
“Crazy, though, huh? They kept the bodies in the house all night and the first autopsies were done on them there—with Lizzie in the house!” Vickie said. “It seems...barbaric.”
Griffin thought of many times he’d watched during an autopsy.
There was just no way to nicely rip up the human body.
“Maybe, years to come, there will be all new science—and they’ll look back at us as barbaric,” Griffin told her.
“Maybe we are barbaric,” she murmured.
Devin knew exactly where the Borden family was buried. They respectfully went to the graves; there, they talked about the fact that the wife of a Borden ancestor—years prior to the murders of Andrew and Abby—had gone into a terrible depression and tried to drown her children before killing herself. Two had drowned in the well; one had survived.
Naturally, the children were rumored to haunt the Borden house, next door to where their home had once been.
“So sad!” Vickie sad.
“The poor woman might have had help today. Those in the know seem to believe that she had postpartum depression. Medicine might have helped her.”
“Maybe,” Vickie murmured.
Griffin noticed the way that she looked out across the graveyard, as though she was expecting to see someone else there.
Vickie had discovered her own talent, curse, gift or ability when she had nearly been the victim of an escaped serial killer when she had been a teenager. The ghost of Dylan Ballantine, watching over his baby brother when Vickie was babysitting, had saved her life. And, in doing, opened a new world for her.
The world of the dead.
And now Vickie often saw the dead.
She had told him that the hundreds-of-years-old cemeteries of Boston weren’t actually all that haunted, but sometimes she did come upon a lively discussion between spirits, or, now and then, an old-timer complaining about the way the world had gone.
He did, of course, know the dead himself. He’d learned to deal with it as a child.
And Devin and Rocky had their experiences, as well.
But that day, he didn’t sense anything in the cemetery. He watched the others; Rocky noticed the way that he was looking at him and just shook his head.
Rocky had been a teenager, too, just about to graduate high school, when he’d heard a call in the night.
And found that a friend had been murdered, and that her cries had led him right to her.
Devin had grown up in what the neighbors had always considered to be a “witch” house, but she had actually been an adult when she had discovered what she was capable of seeing—who and what.
Vickie shielded her eyes from the sun looming above the cemetery.
She frowned and started walking.
“Vickie?” he murmured, starting after her.
Rocky caught his arm gently. He looked a
t his friend and fellow agent and nodded. He needed to let Vickie follow her own path.
They passed by an odd assortment of tombstones. Angels and cherubs.
The cemetery had been founded in the Victorian era; the art tended more toward the beautiful and ornate than the dire and horrible.
Vickie kept moving and they all followed at a distance, none of them seeing what she saw.
Then she stopped. She turned back to him, shaking her head.
“I don’t understand. I saw...someone. Someone beautiful and blonde hurrying this way. She turned and looked at me. She was so sad! And then...she was gone. Just gone.”
“Have you seen her before?” Devin asked.
“I think so. Yes. But...” Vickie said.
“But what?” Griffin asked her.
“This sounds crazy. I don’t know. They all seem to be beautiful blondes with heart-shaped or oval faces. Am I seeing one woman, or more than one woman? I don’t know!”
“Look where we’re standing,” Rocky said.
There was a beautiful marble angel in the center of the little hillock Vickie had come to, but the graves were all different, modern; none of them were ornate.
“Read the plaque,” Devin said dryly.
And they did. The angel was watching over victims. She had been purchased by the law officers of Bristol Country, Massachusetts.
A very simple grave with nothing but a name and dates lay before them.
The name upon it was Sheena Petrie.
* * *
Griffin stood a slight distance away from the others, watching the river roll by. He kept thinking about Vickie’s dreams.
Water seemed very important in the dreams. A large body of water.
The river was a large body of water, of course.
And Sheena Petrie had died here.
“A long time has gone by, but there are things you never forget,” Charlie Oakley told them. They were down on the bank of the river. The highway wasn’t far off; they could see bridges in the background, hear the rush of traffic from every direction. “Sheena Petrie lay right there. You can still see some of the landmarks in the crime scene photos. But if you couldn’t, well, I’d know where she was found. And the writing...they’ve widened the highway since she was killed, but we’re walking now where the words were written.”
Griffin held up the crime scene photos and compared them to the landscape that they saw. He could well imagine that Charlie Oakley had been haunted all his life by the scene he had encountered.
Devin, Rocky and Vickie looked over his shoulder, studying the photos, and then the landscape.
“Even now, with the highway widened, with cars here and there,” Rocky said, hunkering down where the letters had once scarred the earth, “this isn’t a bad place to leave a body. The trees along the embankment are still thick in places. We’re at a slope, and I think we’re about a mile out of town. By night, he could easily manage all this without being seen.”
“And the report says no blood,” Griffin noted, looking at Charlie Oakley.
He shook his head. “She was in the water at some point, and all the blood was washed away. Whether it all washed into the water or if it was taken for...some reason, we don’t know. But it wasn’t in her when she was found. She was white and cold and...so white. Drained of blood. Excuse me.”
Charlie Oakley walked back to the car.
Griffin watched the water. He thought of the dead. He imagined Sheena Petrie, and Helena Matthews, and nothing came to him.
He walked back to the others.
“Does anyone get anything here?” Griffin asked quietly. “A sense of her spirit, anything?”
They all looked at one another.
And then at Vickie.
“Nothing,” she said softly. “But we’ve all talked about this. If anything of Sheena Petrie does remain, it just doesn’t seem likely that she’d be here, where her life ended.”
“But you saw her today,” Devin said. “You did see her at the cemetery. She is here...somewhere. She’s trying to help. She’s been dead years now, but I think she hates seeing this happen to anyone else.”
Griffin considered Devin’s words. “The dream that plagues Vickie over and over again is always about a woman on an inverted cross, her throat slit,” he said. “It’s certainly possible that Sheena Petrie died in such a manner, but not at the hands of those young adults playing at Satanism. I think we need to seriously consider that whoever killed Sheena was just getting started back then.”
* * *
There seemed to be a lot of silence during the day.
Alex had received his breakfast—a tray with cornflakes, milk, a banana and coffee—and the tray had been picked up. He had received his lunch—ham and cheese on rye with an apple—in much the same way.
Breakfast and lunch had been dropped off by a red-cloaked figure.
Breakfast and lunch had been picked up by a red-cloaked figure.
He didn’t know if the same person had brought the tray and picked it up; they had both looked pretty much the same.
He knew he was supposed to be reading. Perfecting the incantation that would bring forth the devil.
It wasn’t that he hadn’t looked at the massive and ancient tomes brought before him.
He had; he had admired every book, awed by the preservation.
He had to admit, too, that since he was a scholar, there was a certain thrill—almost euphoric, when forgetting to panic—to be reading books that had been handwritten by Ezekiel Martin himself.
The books declared that the devil was as real as God. As he had so nearly been a minister, Ezekiel knew about God. God, however, was destined to lose out to Satan. Worshiping Satan was much better than worshipping God; Satan enjoyed the pleasures of the flesh—through his priests, of course, except at such times when he came to earth himself, and his flock was then well-rewarded.
Alex did a lot of paraphrasing in his own mind, but basically, to Ezekiel Martin, it was ridiculously obvious that Satan would win the day. God was terrified of people turning to Satan. People were terrified of other people turning to Satan. Satan wasn’t terrified at all. He was amused. He didn’t care if people went to God, because he knew that he would be the supreme ruler in the end.
God had sent down His Son.
That hadn’t worked out terribly well.
It was Satan’s turn. And he was ready. He had whispered in the night to Ezekiel, and he was ready and waiting for the signs to be right, the ceremony to be performed. Satan had high expectations from his servants on earth; Ezekiel meant to see that they were fulfilled.
Despite his fascination, Alex began to feel a creepy sensation, as if he was being watched. He wasn’t, of course—he was in his cell. A cell once meant for someone criminally insane. There was a little slot—food trays or other such materials could be passed through it—and there was a little door, head-height. Of course, it could only be opened from the outside.
But it was open.
He left his book and hurried over to the door and looked out.
She was standing there. She was tall and slim and ethereal, beautiful and blonde.
She looked like an angel.
He thought at first that she was in the hall alone. But she wasn’t. A red-clad figure was at her side.
She started to fall.
The figure quickly swept her up into his arms.
There was a sudden, hard bang against his door and he jumped back; he realized that someone was just outside the door.
Watching him.
The door opened, nearly sending him flying back. He caught his balance.
The red-cloaked figure walked in. He was alone. Alex wondered if he had imagined the woman—if she had been real.
If she had been a
n image from the past.
“Have you already found out everything that I need to know? You’re supposed to be reading,” the red-clad figure told him.
“I have been reading. I’m learning quite a bit.”
He couldn’t see the figure’s face; it was the high priest, though. The guy calling the shots. Head honcho of Satan, or whatever. Strange thing, though. He wasn’t always there. Or, at the least, he didn’t always come to talk to Alex. When he did, Alex somehow knew. The others...they were lackeys. This guy was the main guy.
“Curiosity killed the cat, you know,” red-cloak said. “You really should watch that.”
“If I weren’t curious, I wouldn’t be such an amazing researcher,” Alex said. He was scared, so scared, in fact, that it startled him that he wanted to try to hold his own.
Idiot! he told himself. Right or wrong, cool or coward, none of it matters if you’re dead.
And he’d already seen one headless body!
Alex, of course, had no idea what reaction he had drawn from his masked jailor. At least it wasn’t fury. It might have even been amusement.
“I like you, Alex,” the man said. “Since I do like you, let me warn you. Don’t think you can outsmart us. There is nothing that you can do. I actually like you so much that I’m considering the fact that maybe you’ll come around to where you get to live. You should come around,” he added huskily. He threw out an arm dramatically. “Satan is coming.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Alex said. “‘Hell’s afire and witches are real.’”
Okay, now he was really an idiot. What the hell was wrong with him?
“Hey!” Alex added quickly. “Maybe he is coming. The more I read, of course, the more sense that it makes. I mean, it is his turn, right? Satan’s turn, that is.”
“You don’t believe.”
“I haven’t really believed in much of anything—other than man’s inhumanity to man,” he said. “As you know, I’m a historian. You can’t help but get a lot of that.”
“And most obviously,” the man said, “you were not an English major.”