BY FOUR P.M., I’d arrived at the University of Georgia campus and parked in a lot off Sanford Drive.
Candy Mellar had been a friend of my mom’s and oversaw Special Collections at the university library. She’d been there since 1983. She was an expert on the occult, and we’d worked together on a previous case.
My phone dinged with a text from Remy.
Taking a couple days off. Rain check on joining you.
The message spooked me.
My partner balking at finishing an investigation?
Could this be about Virgil Rowe’s murder? Or IAD?
I knew a picture of me leaving Rowe’s house had been turned in and a sketch of me drawn. Could there be more to IAD’s investigation of me still going on? Could Remy have been lying to me at the hospital when she said I had nothing to worry about? Was she told by IAD to keep me at arm’s length?
I moved past LeConte Hall and toward the library.
At the time of my poisoning, Remy had been suspended for pulling her piece on church grounds. But at the hospital she’d had her badge clipped to her waist.
I thought about what I’d do if I ran Internal Affairs and was hunting a cop. I’d go to the suspended partner, make her a deal that put her back onto the detectives’ squad—and all she had to do was keep an eye on me. And touch base regularly with IAD.
I texted Remy back, asking what she was up to.
Heading out to Dixon in 15.
Dixon was where Remy’s grammy lived, and the woman had been good to me. She’d literally moved into my house for two weeks after my wife and son died.
I rang my partner up. “Is everything okay with Grammy?”
“She’s fine,” Remy said. “It’s her cousin. He’s a minister, and there’s some issues with his granddaughter. She’s sixteen and was dating a college guy.”
“The girl run off with him?”
“That’s what it looks like,” Remy said.
I hesitated. Could this be a bullshit story?
“Why didn’t they call the locals?” I asked. Meaning the Dixon police.
“It’s unincorporated, P.T.”
“So the sheriff then?”
“You know how people up there feel about police,” Remy said. “They called Grammy. Who called me.”
I did understand. The locals in the hills didn’t call the cops, and for good reason. They’d been the victims of police abuse too many times.
“Keep me posted,” I said and hung up.
I knew the campus at the University of Georgia well. My mother had taught in the Humanities Department when I was younger.
I found the library and asked for Candy.
“P.T.,” she hollered a minute later. Candy was over seventy, and her ash blond hair was tied back in a ponytail. She met me in the library lobby, a giant expanse of a room. Gave me a hug.
“I read your email,” she said. “Couldn’t tell if you’re investigating some old fraternal order or some contemporary Nazi group.”
“That’s what I’m hoping you’ll tell me,” I said.
Candy smiled. “Well, c’mon then.” She moved ahead of me up a set of stairs to where her office was. She was slender, always wore a loose dress, and ducked her six feet and three inches under low door frames. I remember my dad saying she could hunt geese with a rake.
I sat in Candy’s office, and she punched away at her keyboard. All around her were quotes and affirmations, tacked up on corkboard. Trust the Universe and Have an Attitude of Gratitude.
“There’s a whole mess of occult groups that sprung up in the late nineteenth century,” Candy said. “Golden Dawn, OTO, SRIA. We call ’em Freemason rejects.”
“So you’ve heard of the Order?”
“No,” she said. “And just looking one more time to be a hundred percent sure, the answer’s still no.”
I slumped in my chair.
“What case is this related to?” Candy turned to me.
I explained about Kendrick. I even told her about the lynching.
“I had this theory that the murders were recurring,” I said. “Same race. Age. The broken elbows.”
Candy sat forward. “What do you mean, broken elbows?”
“Both kids had their olecranon process broken. In both arms. I imagine they were tortured. Their bodies posed backward or something.”
Candy stood up and flipped open a cabinet. Took out a laptop that looked like it had seen better days. She started searching through it, this time not in the university search system. “There’s a book,” she said. “A ledger of sorts.”
“From the Order?”
“I don’t know about the Order,” she said. “Maryanne, who had this job before me—she’d request donations from old Southern families.”
“Donations of books?”
Candy nodded. “Some guy’s wife shipped us a crate after he died. Maryanne called this one book the Southern Marquis de Sade. Lunatic ravings. Horrible pictures. We couldn’t put it into circulation.”
Candy got up, and I followed her, moving eight stories down the back stairwell into what she called “the stacks.”
“There’s drawings of girls with their hands behind their backs, P.T. Their elbows broken.”
The bowels of the building smelled like dirt, and a handful of lights were turned on. Candy unlocked a door that read Private Collections and found a cardboard box. Grabbing a large leather-bound book from the box, she paged forward at her usual ninety miles an hour.
She stopped on a page covered in graphlike vertical and horizontal lines, and I stared at a symbol hand-drawn in a box. It was the all-seeing eye from the one dollar bill. The same symbol I’d found carved into that tree by the irrigation ditch.
Instead of a pyramid below the eye, there was a plantation house.
And above the eye, in a curving shape, was a single word.
RISE.
The same word as on the money. And the sculpture at the Hester house.
“Shit,” I said.
Candy paged forward. “Looks like the group was some fraternal order, made up of men from twenty-five Southern families.” She pointed. “The ledger isn’t just one guy’s diary either. There’s entries from his great-great-grandfather. Look at the year, P.T.”
I read the entry marked June 23, 1868.
I brought in a bucket of well water and poured it on Rowen’s dead body, laid out on the fine linen of the dining table. I used a sponge to wipe away the dirt, watching as the homespun linen below him took on the color of burnt hay and the smell of mud.
After cleaning his skin, I took Rowen’s body out to the back garden.
The War for Southern Independence had ended, and I stuck my shovel into the ground to bury my son.
Lately when I spoke to the earth, a voice came back, echoing in the air around me.
If I concentrated hard, I could make it rain some days. Focus even harder, and locusts would cover the sky.
“Tell no one,” Annis had warned me. “Whatever you’re learning out there in the dark from that slave woman you’ve captured—desist from it.”
But as I stood alone, I couldn’t help but close my eyes and concentrate.
“Rise,” I said to Rowen’s dead body.
But nothing happened. Not yet.
The entry ended, and I looked at Candy.
“Creepy,” she said.
“No kidding,” I agreed.
She turned to the next page, and we saw a scrawl of words . . .
Andine Emphavuma
Endibweret Serenee Mdima
Below it read other words, this time in English. I couldn’t tell if it was a translation of the above or not.
Bring me the Power
Bring the Darkness to Bear
“You said twenty-five families?” I asked.
Candy nodded.
And crimes twenty-five years apart, Purvis’s voice echoed in my head.
She paged farther into the diary, and we saw some of the founding members’ last names.
“Looks like some guy named Bayard Oxley was the founder,” Candy said. “There’s other names in here. Stover. Hennessey. Kane. Granton.”
“Kane?” I blinked.
“That name mean something?” Candy asked.
“It’s the same last name as some crazy drunk we had locked up. He was innocent, but knew about Kendrick’s elbows being broken. Told me it’s how they always do it.”
“You think he’s part of this?”
“He’s dead, Candy. He hung himself in his cell.”
Candy turned a page. In one of the drawings, I saw an illustration of a girl with her hands bound behind her back. In another, there were notes about animal sacrifice.
“Deer heads cut off,” Candy said. “Lambs on altars.”
I told Candy about the beheaded lamb remains that Unger found in the fire. Of Dathel Mackey’s vision of a lamb being sacrificed.
Candy handed me the book. Pointed at an entry dated November 9, 1968. Fifty years ago.
The two names were given to us today. Sheila Jones and Jerome Twyman. We will send the boys after them, and life will begin to improve again. Amen and Rise, Olde South, Rise.
The entry was short and was the last one written in the ledger. I wondered what that meant—the two names were given to us.
“Let’s say I wanted to see if these were real people,” I said to Candy, motioning at the mention of Sheila and Jerome. “And if anything happened to them in November or December of ’68. You got old newspaper records?”
“We’re digital back to 1975,” Candy said. “Before that—microfiche.”
She brought me two flights up, to an old microfiche station. I’d used one of the machines years ago—these giant ancient devices that read negatives from old newspapers.
Candy placed a film cartridge into the machine, and I sat down. Into focus came a newspaper from the ’60s, the Marietta Daily Journal. I turned the dial, and images of old dailies zoomed past us—day after day—big reproductions from November of 1968.
As I moved faster, the pages became a blur of black and white.
I stopped at a page that listed a story about Sheila Jones. She was black, seventeen, and had gone missing. The date was November 16, 1968.
“Page forward, and see if they find her,” Candy urged.
I swiveled the knob forward. Stopped at a front-page article.
A fire in a sewing machine factory two days later. Sheila’s body had been found in it.
“Arson-murder,” I said. “Fifty years ago.”
Within the same day’s news, Jerome Twyman went missing. We looked around more, but couldn’t find any evidence of his body being found—either alive or in another fire.
I hesitated a moment, talking out loud. “So two kids in 1968. A boy and girl. Then twenty-five years later, in ’93, Junius Lochland.”
“And now Kendrick,” Candy finished my thought.
I moved the dial back and forth to find more about the lost boy in ’68, but found nothing. I stopped at an entry in the newspaper.
“You went too far,” Candy said.
I stared at the lead article. It was a day after the fire in November of 1968.
Freak Snowstorm Leaves Cliff Monroe Sole Candidate
The article was about a debate between two gubernatorial candidates in December of 1968. Halfway through the event, the roof of the building collapsed under the weight of an unexpected snowstorm, killing both candidates.
The situation left the third-party candidate sitting pretty to win governor.
He was an unknown from a rich family, and his name was Cliff Monroe. The father of the current governor, Toby Monroe.
“Toby Monroe is the same guy who met with my boss,” I said. The guy who had his eye on me.
“And something fortuitous happened to his family,” Candy said. “Around the same time two kids went missing.”
I turned to Candy, who still held the ledger. “When you said influential families who started the Order,” I asked. “Was the name Monroe on that list?”
Candy opened the ledger and paged back and forth. She stopped on a particular page.
“It is.”
I stood up from the microfiche. The Hesters. The Monroes. People in positions of power and wealth were sprinkled all around this case. People I couldn’t bring in.
And in the middle of it—powerless black teens.
My mind flashed to that first night in Shonus County. The local coroner was telling me about a girl who had gone missing the same week in 1993 as Junius Lochland.
“Look earlier than 1968, Candy, will ya?” I asked. “See if there’s other kids mentioned.”
Candy found another page: 1943.
Twenty-five years earlier.
One boy and one girl. Again, a description about receiving two names, and sending “the boys” after them.
I stood up. “This case isn’t about neo-Nazis, Candy. It’s something older, deeper.”
Candy stared at the ledger, paging through it to different sections. “These last names, P.T. They’re heads of industry in this state. Big corporations.”
“I know,” I said.
“Big library donors.”
“I never got it from you,” I assured Candy.
But there was something else. Something moving through the machinery of my mind.
“Two kids in ’43. Two in ’68. Two in ’93 per the coroner in Shonus. But now we just have Kendrick.”
“You think there’s a girl out there?” Candy said. “That someone already grabbed?”
“There’s missing kids reported every day, Candy.” I shrugged. But then I thought of something else.
I called up Remy on her cell. “You get ahold of that boyfriend?”
“An hour ago,” Remy said. “But, God, P.T., he’s got no idea where Delilah is. Says she left his place two days ago and was headed home. He’s gotta be lying, right?”
“Rem,” I said. “This girl Delilah—did you say she’s the daughter of a minister?”
“Granddaughter,” Remy said. “Why?”
I thought of the words in the ledger.
The two names were given to us today.
“Stay where you are, Rem. I’m coming to you.”