We must sanctify the ground where your father rests, his mother had told him, two weeks after his father’s body had been buried below the house. Perhaps it had taken that long to find a Mary statue with just the right level of eeriness, or it had taken that long for the illusion of her final plans for this place to take hold. She propped the statue onto the old card table which had been covered with a large square of velvet and scattered a half dozen votive candles—which she’d likely bought at the same place as the statue—around it.
Pray with me, she said, pulling him down to his knees beside her. Pray that God keeps him in Hell forever. Lucy Pallasso had looked upon the rest of her life as a burden ordained by God to stop a man who had become pure evil. It had been a burden she accepted, but never recovered from.
In those long ago days his father had kept a half dozen boxes of miscellaneous stuff in the cellar. After he was dead Will’s mother was afraid to look through them, terrified at what she would find. The kinds of souvenirs that killers kept. She had no desire to learn any more of her husband’s repulsive secrets. Nor did Will, although from what he had been able to see, the boxes seemed to be filled with the kinds of appliances and old radios his father had liked to take apart down here. She burned everything that could catch fire in a metal garbage barrel later that fall, along with most of whatever clothes she hadn’t already left to Goodwill—after checking all the pockets for unexpected horrors. She found none, at least none she mentioned.
Neighbors saw this activity as poor Lucy Pallasso’s way of dealing with her abandonment. Everyone knew Jacob had been a strange sort of man, and they eagerly believed anything she told them about his departure.
More importantly, and surprisingly, nobody looked into her story, tried to find Will’s father or for that matter ever asked if he’d made contact. It seemed to Will that the world had simply forgotten he’d ever existed. Even Jacob’s victims, none of which were ever found in the years that followed, started getting less press. No one came to the house. No one asked. Aside from Jacob’s long-dead father from Florida, they’d never known of any other family from his side, none living at least. There was simply no one left in the world to question his disappearance.
Within a month there was no remnant of Jacob Pallasso, no scrap of his existence left. Except the necklace. The night she’d sealed her husband’s grave, Lucy had pressed a nail into the still-damp concrete. It locked into place when the new floor hardened. The chain was then wrapped loosely about it, untouched by anyone for thirty years. If his mother’s ramblings that night after the murder were more than simply mad musings of the bereaved, the necklace had supernatural qualities, some kind of mystical protection bordering on insanity. It had protected him, she’d explained, prevented Jacob from being caught all those years while he killed those poor children, hiding their bodies someplace so remote no one ever found them. All those years, never had he been caught or questioned. Never had he been seen, a too-tall man in nightmarish greasepaint dumping bodies of missing children from the back of his car. At least, that was what she’d always assumed.
Will was never as certain. When he’d finally summoned the nerve to search out that elusive place in the woods again, Will could never locate the same spot. He’d found glades, clearings in the woods behind their house that might have been the spot, but there were too many trees, even accounting for the time passed, or not enough trees. He’d invariably come upon the neighboring roads well before the place he’d seen his father.
And never a sign of the murdered boy. Had his father disposed of him before coming to bed, or did Will’s mother take care of that too? He had never had the courage to ask.
That night, watching his father with that other boy, it had felt as if Will had stepped into another version of the woods. A version that could only be accessed with the necklace.
Maybe it had all been a dream after all.
Of course, that would mean they’d murdered him for nothing…no. Will spent years rationalizing what he’d seen, or not seen, where he’d been that night or not been. His mother had no such qualms.
He wanted you to find him, William, she’d said. He could have prevented us from learning the truth as much as he prevented the rest of the world. It was a cry for help—she positioned the card table over the cement grave—and we did what any loving family would do. We helped him.
We stopped him.
From that point on, the necklace with its dark power to conceal, and the shrine with its sanctified blessing had become interlocked, inseparable; one an instrument of hell and the other of heaven. Like two angels guarding forever the lost Eden with flaming swords. Protecting the Pallasso family from the sins of their father.