My heart skipped a beat. The guy was beautiful. He had a square jaw, thin nose, full lips, and beautiful blue eyes. “Hi,” I said.
“Can I help you with something?” he asked.
For a moment I completely forgot why I’d come into the store. “Um…” I said, swiveling in a small arc as I looked around the store. “I need wine.”
“We’ve got plenty,” he said, coming down the ladder. He was dressed in a white button-down shirt and great ass-hugging jeans. He was tall, with slightly olive skin and blond hair. “Over here,” he said, moving past me to the back of the store.
I followed dumbly behind, the way a dog will follow anybody with a big, juicy bone. He stopped in front of a large wall and looked back at me. “Red or white?”
“Huh?” I said. Sometimes I am so sophisticated.
“Wine,” he said. “Do you drink red or white?”
I blinked rapidly. “Red,” I said.
“Dry or sweet?”
“Little of both.”
“We have this great Shiraz,” he said, moving over to a rack near the bottom of the shelving. “Comes from this little orchard in Australia.”
“I’ll take it,” I said quickly.
He gave me a startled look. “Okay,” he said, and pulled the bottle from the rack. “Did you only want the one bottle?”
About then the fog of endorphins the sight of him had invoked lifted and I said, “One bottle should be fine. But the other thing I need is a little information.”
“About what?” he asked.
I crossed my fingers, really hoping that when I asked him this next question he didn’t react the way everyone else in this town had. “I need to know about Hatchet Jack.”
His head pulled back in surprise. “Was there another sighting?” And even before I could respond he followed up with, “Yeah, it’s June. That bastard always shows up around now.”
I let go of the little breath I’d been holding and followed him back to the counter, where he began wrapping my wine. “My name is M. J. Holliday,” I explained. “Your aunt Amelia sent me and I’ve been hired by the family of a girl who was chased by him last week. My expertise is getting rid of…well, things like Jack.”
Lance gave me another curious look. “You’re a ghostbuster?”
I smiled, relieved he seemed so open to the idea. “Yes,” I said. “I’ve got a pretty good practice going in Boston.”
“You don’t say?” he said, leaning back against the wall behind him and crossing his arms. “Are you a medium or a techie?”
It was my turn to be surprised. “A medium. My partner is the techie.”
Lance nodded. “I’ve been on a few ghost hunts myself.”
“You’re kidding,” I said.
“No, it’s true,” Lance said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “I had an encounter with Jack when I was fifteen, and it nearly did me in. I was scared outta my mind for years after that. I couldn’t sleep without a light on, and every little noise made me jump. Finally my mom suggested that I either get therapy or look for a way to overcome my fear.
“I had a college girlfriend who was really intuitive; she could sense stuff that other people couldn’t. Her grandmother lived in this haunted house, and one night we spent the night over there. We heard noises, and a door closed right next to us, but I survived the evening. After that I wasn’t so afraid of things that went bump in the night.”
“Tell me what happened with Jack,” I said.
Lance paused, collecting the memory before he spoke. “I was a sophomore at Northelm. I was on the cross-country team, J.V., and I really wanted to make the varsity team, so the week after school let out I ran the trails around the school every morning and every evening. The fourth day of this routine I kept feeling like someone was running along behind me, but when I looked back there was nobody there.
“About a quarter mile into the run I swore I heard something like a scream or someone yelling. I stopped and looked back and I heard these footsteps running straight at me, even though there was no one on the path but me. There was this sense of fear that hit me like a fist right in the chest. I started running as fast as I could, and the footsteps behind me got closer and closer.”
Lance paused again, and I could tell all these years later it was still a difficult memory for him to recall. “Then what happened?” I asked.
He took a breath and continued. “I glanced over my shoulder, and ten feet behind me was a man with this crazy, wild look in his eyes. I’ll never forget it,” he said, shaking his head. “He was holding a bloody hatchet over his head, and I knew he was going to kill me. I screamed and probably ran faster than I’d ever run before—or since.”
“How long after you saw him did you notice he was no longer following you?”
“About the time I passed Hole Pond,” Lance said. “I was nearly completely out of breath by then—like I said, I’m a long-distance man, not a sprinter—and I looked over my shoulder and he was just gone.”
“And you reported that to the police?”
Lance nodded. “Yeah. They were really great at first, and they sent a big patrol out there to search the area, but there was no trace of him. He just vanished.”
“Do you remember any specifics, Lance, like the day of the week and the time this happened?”
“It was Friday evening around six. Why?”
“If we know when Jack becomes active, we can try and pinpoint his location.”
“Makes sense,” he said with a nod.
“And what year was this?”
“The summer of 1978.”
Mentally I did a little arithmetic, and I had to admit I was mighty impressed at how trim and fit and damned good-looking Lance was for someone in his midforties.
“You just did the math, didn’t you?” he said, breaking into a grin.
I felt my cheeks grow hot. “No,” I said quickly.
“Sure, sure,” he said with a look that said he wasn’t buying it. “I look young for my age.”
I cleared my throat and searched for a way out of the embarrassing moment. “When the police didn’t find any evidence of Jack, what happened next?”
“Nothing much,” Lance said bitterly. “I mean, when they went to the cross-country trail to investigate, they only found my footprints. No one else’s.”
“No one else’s on a running path?” I asked, amazed that only one set of footprints was found.
“It had rained that morning,” Lance explained. “The path was still a little soggy, and it had washed away any prior footprints. I showed the police exactly where I’d first heard someone chasing me; then I showed them the point where I’d looked back and seen him almost on top of me, waving the hatchet.”
“So they didn’t believe you,” I said, more statement than question.
“Nope. My aunt did a sketch anyway, and it was a great rendition, but no one came forward to claim knowing him.”
“Does she still have the sketch?” I asked.
Lance rubbed his chin. “Probably. You can ask her; she rarely throws them away.”
“I will, thanks,” I said, making a mental note. “Can you tell me if you know of any other sightings of Jack in the area?”
Lance scratched his head thoughtfully. “I learned through my aunt that these sightings started a little earlier. She had a good friend who worked as the police dispatcher, and she told Aunt Amelia that an anonymous call came into the station late one night, and the caller said that they had seen a guy running after a kid near Hole Pond. The caller said she thought the guy was waving some kind of weapon while he was chasing the kid. The cop who responded said he couldn’t find anything suspicious, and no calls of missing or injured children followed. The cops assumed it was some local dad who’d caught his kid up to no good and was chasing him home, so it was dropped.”
A chill ran down my spine as I remembered Gilley’s recounting of the police blotters. “That was, what, 1977 then?”
“No,” said Lance. “Tha
t was July of 1976.”
“Great. Listen, could you show me where this cross-country trail is around Northelm?”
Lance shuffled his feet and looked uncomfortable for the first time since I’d started talking to him. “I can’t, M.J.,” he said softly.
“Why not?”
Lance looked up at me, and his eyes were haunted. “I may have overcome a lot of my fears since that encounter with Jack, but risking another one with him is not a demon I’m willing to conquer.”
I smiled reassuringly. “I get it,” I said. “How about drawing me a map, then?”
I left the liquor store a little later with a detailed map and the beginnings of a plan forming in my head. I drove back over to the station and told the receptionist that I needed to speak to Detective Muckleroy as soon as possible. He came to get me from the lobby a bit later. “I’m glad you came back,” he said soberly. “I’m afraid we’ve come up with a dead end on this kid Eric.”
“His picture didn’t match?”
“No,” the detective said. “The red hair is the clincher. None of the kids reported missing had red hair.”
“Can I see the pictures?” I asked as we walked back down the long corridor I’d come down earlier.
Muckleroy brightened. “Sure, if you think it will help.”
He directed me into a small office just off the main hallway and into a chair in front of a grossly overcluttered desk. “Sorry about the mess,” he said, scooping Styrofoam cups and plastic wrappers into a waste can before handing me a folder.
I opened the folder and pulled out the pages, sorting through them one by one. Midway through I stopped on the face of a young boy with black hair, dark eyes, and a great big smile. The name on the page read, Hernando Rodriguez, and it gave a birth date of 1964. I sucked in a breath as I read the date he’d gone missing: July ninth, 1976.
“Did you find something?” Muckleroy said, looking intently at me.
I swiveled the paper around and showed him the photo. “I’m pretty sure this is one of the young ghosts I saw in the classroom at Northelm,” I said. “He was with Eric the first night I encountered them.”
Muckleroy took the paper and studied it himself. Then he turned around to his computer and began typing into it. “Says here Hernando was last seen by his father when he returned him from his weekend visitation with him. José Rodriguez says he dropped Hernando on the front porch of his mother’s home the evening of July ninth, 1976. Mother and father were having a bitter custody dispute. Hernando’s mother believed strongly that her ex-husband kidnapped their son and smuggled him back home to Brazil.”
“What was the father’s story?”
Muckleroy was quiet for a moment as he read the report.
“Says here that police took a preliminary interview, and when the son failed to show up, the father disappeared too. They assumed he also went back to Brazil.”
“Is the mother still alive?”
“Not sure,” said Muckleroy. “I can try and hunt her down if you’d like.”
I nodded. “See if she ever heard from either of them again,” I said.
“You think this Hatchet Jack guy killed the boy?”
I felt a tingle of energy in the ether, and something hit my consciousness like a bolt of lightning. “Detective,” I said urgently. “Lance Myers told me about the very first sighting of Hatchet Jack. He said an anonymous call had come into the station about a man chasing a little boy near Hole Pond. Can you look up the exact date of that incident?”
The detective turned to another file on his desktop. He rummaged through a few papers, and as I watched I saw his face drain of color. “Holy shit,” he said softly. “That call came in around eleven thirty p.m. on July ninth, 1976.”
I wasn’t so surprised. “It was no ghost that night running along the pond,” I said. “That was the real deal.”
Muckleroy wiped a beefy hand down his face, then sat back in his chair to regard me. “How the hell did we miss this?” he said.
“Were you on the force back then?”
He shook his head. “No, I didn’t come on board till the mideighties. Still, I knew a lot of the guys who would have been on patrol back then, and they weren’t likely to miss something big like this. I mean, you said you saw three little boys, right?”
“Yes. If you’re asking for my opinion, it’s that Jack murdered at least three.”
“Why can’t we find any word about the other two?”
“I don’t know, Detective. Maybe their parents never reported them missing.”
Muckleroy scowled at that thought. “They’d have to be really shitty parents,” he said. “Besides, wouldn’t neighbors or relatives or friends or teachers say something? I mean, it’s just so odd.”
I held up my hands in surrender. “I’m afraid I don’t have the answers.”
“Okay,” Muckleroy said, sitting forward again and grabbing a piece of blank paper and a pencil. “Let’s break this down into known and unknown. What do we know so far?”
“Do you want to include my intuitive information as known or unknown?” I asked, testing him a little.
“No, I trust you,” he said to me with an encouraging smile. “You’ve definitely proven your abilities, M.J. I’m willing to take the info you give me as fact.”
“In that case, we know that sometime between the years of 1976 and 1977 a child serial killer was loose here in Lake Placid. He preyed upon young boys and involved them in some sort of psycho game of tag, but if he tagged you, he did it with a hatchet.”
“Sick bastard,” Muckleroy mumbled as he wrote my thoughts down.
I continued on. “We know that Hernando might very well have been one of his last victims.”
“How do we know that?” Muckleroy asked.
“Because two years later Lance Myers was chased by the ghost of Hatchet Jack, not the real thing.”
“Still, two years is a long time. There could have been more victims in that time.”
I sat with that for a moment, feeling it out intuitively. Finally I shook my head and said, “Detective, you’ll have to trust me on this. I know Jack died the same summer as Hernando.”
“Do you think he was a local?” he asked, pushing me a little.
“That I don’t know,” I said. “But he seems so connected to the property around Northelm and Hole Pond that I’d say he probably lived here, at least for a period of time.”
“Wish I knew how to identify him,” Muckleroy said.
“Might help a lot to solve this riddle.”
“There may be a way,” I said. “According to Lance, Amelia drew a sketch of Jack shortly after Lance was chased by Jack’s ghost. Maybe we could pull that from the files and compare it to any criminals in the area from the seventies.”
“Good idea,” Muckleroy said, jotting that down. “I’ll give her a call and see if she’s still got the sketch. Maybe I can also post it around town, and someone might recognize him.”
“Terrific,” I said.
“Are you going to try to make contact with this Eric kid again?”
“Yes,” I said, glancing at the clock on the wall. “In fact, I may have an in on that front.”
“An in?”
“There’s a janitor who works at Northelm who might be the key to finding out more about what happened all those years ago,” I said.
Muckleroy looked at me in surprise. “You mean Nicky?” he said. “How could Nicky know anything about this?” I told him about what I’d seen and sensed the night before. His look of surprise never wavered. “Wow,” he said when I’d finished. “I had no idea Nicky could do what you do. He’s so shy, and usually scared of his own shadow.”
“Well, he must not have been too scared,” I said, recalling when he’d all but attacked Gilley in the van. “He can wield a bat when he has to.”
Muckleroy laughed. “Yeah, I heard about that. That was rare for Nicky. Usually he leaves stuff like that to his brother.” I noticed a tiny hint of sourness in the
way Muckleroy mentioned the dean.
“What’s up with Dean Habbernathy?” I asked carefully.
“He seems pretty uptight about all this.”
Muckleroy sighed. “You could say that,” he said. “Owen’s not a bad guy. He’s just a bit rigid. Except, of course, when it comes to his brother. I will say that about the man—he’s made sure to look out for Nicky all these years.”
“But he forces Nicholas to live in the basement of the school,” I pointed out. “I would think the least he could do would be to find a proper home for him.”
“Oh, he tried,” Muckleroy said. “But Nicky has lived on that property ever since he was adopted by their father and the former dean of Northelm, Winston Habbernathy.”
“The boys are adopted?”
“Yeah, although Owen would never admit to it. I only know because my wife was the estate attorney for Winston when he passed away.”
“Are Owen and Nicholas even blood related?” I asked.
Muckleroy shrugged. “Not sure,” he said. “Word has it that the old man wanted to pass on his family’s legacy, and since he didn’t have children of his own and wasn’t likely to produce any…if you get my drift,” he said, looking carefully at me.
I cocked my head, trying to follow. “Sorry?” I said.
Muckleroy shuffled some papers around on his desk and mumbled, “Winston was a bit…er…light in his loafers.”
“Ah,” I said. “He was gay.”
Muckleroy cleared his throat. “That was the rumor. Anyway, he adopted the two boys around the same time and brought them up on the school grounds. That was before Winston bought his new house on Church Pond.”
“There sure are a lot of ponds and lakes around here,” I remarked.
Muckleroy grinned. “Church Pond is a stone’s throw from Hole Pond and the school. And yes, there is a lot of water around here.”
“Does the family still own that home?” I asked.
Muckleroy nodded. “Owen lives there now.”
I took another glance at the clock. “Well, I think I’ve taken up enough of your time, Detective.”
“Will you stop with the formalities?” he said warmly. “It’s Bob, okay?”