46

“WHAT HAVE YOU GOT?” Mike looked up at Professor Dye and the papers he held in his right hand. He seemed anxious and excited at the same time.

“I know where the old settlement is,” the professor announced. He was shaking and Mike wondered if it was with excitement at his discovery or something else.

“How did you find it?” Mike asked. “I thought we were going to have to hunt down the old-timers that hang out at the Moose Lodge and try to find someone that might have some idea how to get there.”

Dye shook his head. “Aerial surveys,” he said cryptically.

“Excuse me?”

“Sorry,” the professor said. “Sometimes I get a little ahead of myself. No wonder my students call me the absent-minded professor. Anyway,” he said, holding the crumpled papers triumphantly in front of Mike’s face like the world’s shabbiest-looking trophy, “the state pays engineering firms to do survey work by air. The engineers go up in small planes, flying back and forth over predetermined areas, covering grids, mapping out whole sections of land. Running lines, they call it.”

Mike nodded, starting to get the picture. “And you’ve accessed the maps?”

“That’s right,” Ken said. “But it’s even better than that. They don’t draw maps by hand like they used to. They actually take digital photographs and then splice them together to form images, sometimes of areas miles wide.”

“And you found the photographs of the area surrounding Paskagankee,” Mike interrupted, feeling excitement begin to ripple its way through his body like a million tiny bolts of lightning.

“Exactly,” replied Professor Dye, “but it’s not all good news.”

“It never is. Go ahead, hit me.”

“Well,” Dye said hesitantly, “the old settlement is relatively close to the farmer’s field from which Sharon disappeared last night. If, as I suspect, the spirit’s body is using the old settlement as a base of operations, so to speak, it is entirely possible, perhaps even likely, that she was taken.”

Mike lowered his gaze to the desk, not even seeing the clutter. “So that means she’s dead.”

“Not necessarily,” the professor answered, shaking his head for emphasis.

“Listen,” Mike said, exasperated. “You’ve seen, like I have, what happened to the other two people this . . . thing . . . attacked. The other two that we know about, that is,” he corrected himself. “It’s entirely possible there are more victims we haven’t discovered yet. But are you trying to tell me you think Sharon could have survived dismemberment? Is that what you want me to believe, Professor Dye?”

“No, no, of course not.” The professor waved his hands like he was trying to ward off Mike’s anger and pain. The wrinkled papers he held in his left hand crackled and swished through the air. “I have a theory that, if it’s correct, might mean there is at least a small chance Sharon is still alive.”

Mike stared at Ken Dye, then shook his head and sighed. “Okay,” he said. “In for a penny and all that. What’s your theory?”

The professor sat on the edge of Mike’s desk and stared at him with an almost feverish intensity. “I’ve studied this legend, this phenomenon, if you will, for decades. I’ve made it my life’s work, and I‘ve suffered enormous personal and professional ridicule for it. I believe there is every chance I am the most knowledgeable person alive concerning this Abenaqui legend.”

“I believe you,” Mike told him kindly. “And I’m sorry for jumping down your throat. I just feel . . . ”

“Helpless,” the professor finished.

Mike paused for a moment, reflecting. “Yes,” he said simply.

“I understand. It’s how I feel, too. But I’m not telling you this because I’m fishing for an apology. My point is this: I don’t believe the spirit’s reign of death and destruction is entirely random.”

Mike shook his head. “Why wouldn’t you think that? Random death and destruction is all it’s managed so far.”

“Perhaps not,” Dye corrected. “So far the victims have been men.”

“What difference does that make?”

“Think about it. If my hypothesis is correct, and as you know I’m certain it is, the essence of this spirit is the energy of an agonized young woman, built from hopelessness and despair, which has been trapped on Earth for hundreds of years due to a curse resulting from a brutal murder committed by men—I repeat, by men—against her baby daughter. Despite her seemingly limitless rage against the males she has encountered, she would have no reason to harm a female, or at least no motivation to kill her.”

“Then why would she have taken Sharon in the first place?”

“That I couldn’t tell you,” answered the professor, “I’m flying by the seat of my pants here. Maybe I’m completely off base. But it would make sense based on the Abenaqui legend, and it provides us with at least a thread of hope to hang on to. Isn’t that better than nothing?”

Mike nodded, almost to himself. The man had a point, as crazy as it sounded. He absolutely had to believe Sharon was still alive. He needed that slim possibility to hang on to, like a drowning man clinging to a floating log. He couldn’t bear the thought that he was responsible for the death of another innocent human being, not after the tragedy in Revere. That had been an accident, sure. He had been cleared of any wrongdoing, sure; it was a crazy ricochet they said, an absurd one-in-a-million accidental tragedy, sure.

To Mike McMahon, though, none of that mattered. He had fired his gun and a little girl had died. End of story.

Except it wasn’t really the end, was it? Now he had made another bad decision, and there was a pretty damned good chance another person was dead. It didn’t matter that she was a full-grown adult and a cop, too; that she had known the risks of the job when she signed on. The fact, as Mike McMahon saw it, was that his poor judgment had resulted in the situation they were now in—a situation where Sharon Dupont was in grave danger or already dead.

Mike looked out his office window at a parking lot beginning to fill with the vehicles of arriving day shift officers. The daylight was weak and barely winning the battle against the night’s darkness and the fog, but it was likely as bright as it was going to get. “We’ve got work to do,” he said to Professor Dye. “Let’s get moving.”