“In the summer of 1952, we came to Parr’s Landing to excavate the site of the St. Barthélemy mission to the Ojibwa,” Billy Lightning began. “My father was writing a book about the history of the Jesuit settlements and the long-term effects of Christianization on the native population since the seventeenth century. My father brought two graduate students and me. It was my first trip with him.
“I hadn’t yet decided on either archaeology or anthropology as a career, but my father felt it was important that I be part of this particular project because of my native ancestry. When my parents adopted me, they took me to Toronto and placed me in an expensive, progressive private school, one that was respectful of my heritage. Money can buy you almost anything,” Billy said, the trace of bitterness not entirely disguised by his professorial delivery. “Even respect from other people. At St. Rita’s in the Soo, the priests had done everything possible to beat the Indian out of me. My father and mother wanted to try to heal some of that, and they believed that an excellent education was the best way to undo some of the damage.
“One of my father’s students on the dig was a young man named Richard Weal. Dad described him as the most brilliant student he’d ever had. His IQ was in the highest percentile, and he had an academic history that was stellar, as well. I think Dad saw him as second son.”
“How did that make you feel?” Thomson asked.
“It didn’t make me ‘feel’ one way or another, Sergeant Thomson. My parents took a twelve-year-old orphan boy out of a church-run hellhole and into their homes and their hearts. They gave me the best education money could buy. Their love for me wasn’t a question in my mind. My father’s pride in Richard wasn’t a threat to me at all. It wasn’t that sort of relationship. I was Dad’s son, not Richard.”
“Just establishing the facts, Dr. Lightning. Please go on.”
“The second student was a young man named Emory Greer. He and Richard barely knew each other at the time they agreed to join my father on this dig. They were both students of his, but from very different backgrounds. Emory was very quiet and self-effacing. He was deeply studious, even by post-graduate standards. Richard, on the other hand, was a star in and out of the classroom. As an undergraduate, he’d been on the varsity track team—as I recall, his event was the decathlon. He was popular with everyone.
“The dig had been intended as a three-month project. We’d made two teams—I was assisting my father, and Emory and Richard were the second team. My father had arranged with the Parr family for us to work in and around the region of Bradley Lake between June and August. Everything had been going relatively smoothly. Even the black flies were manageable that spring, which, the locals told us, was unusual. It had been cold, so maybe that’s what kept them at bay.
“In any case, we were making a bit of progress—some arrowheads, bits of utensils. Some coins. Nothing particularly remarkable, at first. We also found what we thought might have been an altar chalice of some sort. That was a banner day. As I recall, Richard found that particular item.
“After about the second week, we noticed that Richard was acting strangely. He would go silent for hours on end, almost like he couldn’t hear us. I remember on one occasion, early on, we were five miles into the bush from Bradley Lake, and Richard was on his knees brushing something—a patch of rock, or something—to clean it. He suddenly looked up and said, ‘What?’ No one had spoken to him, or said anything for that matter. It was a completely quiet day.”
Elliot asked, “Echoes, maybe? From in town? Sound plays funny tricks up there on that escarpment sometimes.”
“No, not that day,” Billy replied. “There wasn’t even any wind. Richard got very angry with us. It was completely out of character for him to get angry like that, especially with my father. Richard actually cursed—again, very odd. He was quite a Christer, you understand. He was never pushy about his religion. He kept it to himself most of the time, but I know he was a fairly devout churchgoer, and I never heard him swear. He stormed off into the bush and said he needed to clear his head. He took off in the direction of the cliff where the Ojibwa pictographs are located.”
“I’m sorry—the what?”
“The Indian paintings,” Thomson explained without turning to look at Elliot. “Go on, Dr. Lightning. We’re listening.”
“When Richard didn’t come back for lunch, Dad went out to look for him. Dad spent about two hours, and then came back without him. He said he couldn’t find him anywhere. He was pretty worried—like I said, he was very fond of Richard. At five, we were just about to drive into town and report him missing when he came wandering back to the site. His face was scratched and dirty. There were bits of branches in his hair. His clothes were filthy.
“My father’s first thought was that he’d been hurt in some way. Richard stumbled a bit, like he was drunk. He tripped and fell, then lay there for a moment. We rushed over to help him up. He seemed disoriented.”
Thomson said, “Was he drunk? Did he have a bottle back out there in the bush?”
“No, he wasn’t. In fact, the first thing he did when we picked him up off the ground was down an entire canteen full of water. He drank it like he was trying to put out a fire in his throat. Dad told him to slow down and take it easy, but Richard just brushed him away and kept drinking till he’d drained the entire canteen dry.
“My father asked him where he’d been. Richard seemed confused by the question. He believed it was just before lunchtime. My father told him it was close to five p.m. and he’d been gone the entire afternoon. He thought we were joking until Emory showed Richard his watch. Richard said he’d gone for a walk—he’d been very angry, he said. He was convinced that we were playing tricks on him before.
“He said he heard a man say his name, practically right beside his ear. My father told him he must have imagined it, but Richard said he hadn’t imagined it. He said he heard it clearly. Then he’d heard it a second time, fainter, but no less clearly. When he’d looked up, there had been no one there except us. He hadn’t believed us when we said we hadn’t heard anything, which was why he stormed off.”
“Did he say where he’d gone?” Thomson asked.
“He said he’d gone for a walk. He said he didn’t remember anything else.”
“But you say he was gone for—what, five hours? And he didn’t know where he’d gone?”
“As I said, he thought he was only away for about twenty minutes. He said he’d walked in the general direction of the cliffs where the pictographs are located. He said he didn’t know why he’d left the site, or how far he’d walked.”
Thomson said, “You say he was scratched up? Dirty? Did you ask him how he got that way?”
“Yes, sergeant, of course we did.” Billy said. “Richard looked down at himself like it was the first time he’d seen the dirt and the scratches. He actually seemed surprised. He said he must have fallen. My father asked him if he’d maybe hit his head and had been unconscious the whole time, but Richard said, ‘No, I’d have remembered that.’ He didn’t remember anything, but he said he would have remembered the pain of falling down. Dad checked his head—no bumps, no cuts, nothing. He was drenched in dried sweat, Dad said, which was odd considering that it was a cool day and he hadn’t really done much work that morning. But my father said his clothes were stiff with it.”
“What happened then?” Elliot had abandoned any pretence of disinterest in Billy’s story at this point. He leaned forward in his chair, elbow on a knee, chin cradled in his knuckles.
“We drove him to the one doctor in town. On the way, he drank a second canteen of water, more slowly this time, but again—all the way down. I don’t remember the doctor’s name.”
“Probably Doc Oliver,” Thomson said, more by reflex than anything else. “He died in ’69. Good man. Smart fella, even for a doctor.”
“As I said, I don’t remember. It was more than twenty years ago. In any case, the doctor checked Richard over and said he couldn’t find anything wrong with him. Nothing broken, obviously, no evidence of any concussion. The doctor actually suggested that it might have been a mild form of heat stroke, but that it would be hard to tell because of all the water he’d drunk as soon as he came back to the site. He told us to take Richard back to the motel and put him to bed so he could sleep it off.
“Richard was sharing a room here at the Nugget with Emory. That night, Emory woke up to find the door to the motel wide open. It was a bright night. There were a lot of stars. Richard’s bed was empty. Emory put on his bathrobe and his shoes and went to the doorway. Emory saw Richard kneeling in the middle of the road leading to the motel. He was completely naked. According to Emory, although Richard’s back was to him, he looked like he was praying. His hands were folded in front of his chest and he was staring off towards the edge of town, looking in the general direction of Bradley Lake with his head slightly bowed.
“Emory pulled a blanket off his bed and ran over to Richard. As he got closer, he could tell that Richard was fast asleep. He’d obviously been sleepwalking. Emory said it was a miracle he hadn’t been hit by a car or a truck down there in the road. He put the blanket around his shoulders and tried to get him to stand. He told my dad that Richard struggled at first but that he eventually came along with him. Emory said Richard was muttering in his sleep.”
“What was he saying?” Elliot asked.
“Emory said he couldn’t really make it out, but that it sounded like Latin.”
“Latin? You mean, the language?”
“More specifically, Ecclesiastical Latin.”
“What’s the difference?”
“Ecclesiastical Latin is a form of Latin that deviates from classic Latin in that it’s marked by certain lexical variations. It’s also the form of Latin used in the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church. It can be found primarily in theological works and liturgical rites.”
Thomson looked doubtful. “All of that from some muttering in the middle of the night? In the middle of the road outside this motel?”
“Emory’s undergraduate and Master’s degrees encompassed religion, history, and ancient languages, sergeant. His PhD work with my father was an extension of the work he was doing on his studies of the early Church in Canada and its cultural impact. Also, he was a devout Catholic.”
“Assuming it really was Latin—and I’m sort of doubting it, to be honest—did this fella know what Richard was saying? Could he make anything out?”
“Oddly,” Billy said, “he did think he caught one phrase—he thought Richard said ‘Abyssus abyssum invocat.’”
“Which means what, exactly?”
“It’s from Psalm forty-two, verse seven. It means ‘Deep calleth unto deep.’”
“You said he was a regular ‘Christer,’” Elliot said. “Maybe it was something he heard in church sometime?”
“Richard was a Methodist, constable. His undergraduate degree was in English Literature. He didn’t speak Latin at all.” Billy paused. “He said something else, according to Emory. It sounded like ‘Suscito me.’”
“Sorry, Dr. Lightning—this means what?”
“Roughly translated, it means ‘Wake me.’”
“He wanted Emory to wake him up?” Elliot said. “So he asks in Latin?”
“It didn’t appear that he was speaking to Emory, based on what Emory said about it the next day, when he told my father and me what had happened.”
“All right, never mind all that,” Thomson said impatiently. “It doesn’t signify one way or another, does it? Did he remember anything about the sleepwalking the next day?”
“No. He said he’d had some peculiar dreams, but he had no memory whatsoever of the sleepwalking. He also laughed when Emory asked him if he knew Latin. He said the only Latin he knew was Pig Latin. He said he felt a lot better than he had the day before. So we went to the site and went back to work. It was a good day—bright, sunny. Not hot, but pleasantly warm. Richard seemed to be in a terrific mood, at least to start with.
“As the day progressed, though, Richard became a bit listless and irritable. He snapped at Emory a couple of times for no good reason and, at one point, threw a shovel. It didn’t hit anyone, of course, but it was so out of character for Richard that we all noticed it. I think at one point my father may have wondered if Richard had been malingering the previous day—you know, storming off and pretending to have gotten lost because he was angry about something he wasn’t being honest about—but he was mostly concerned about Richard’s behaviour being so out of character for such a good-natured young man.”
“Drugs? Could it have been that he was doing drugs? It sounds to me like he might have been on some kind of dope,” Thomson said.
“I already told you, sergeant,” Billy said, “Richard was a straight arrow.”
“OK, this is all very interesting, Dr. Lightning, but I’m going to have to ask you to get to the point. Why are you telling us about something that happened twenty years ago to some graduate student who doesn’t live here in Parr’s Landing? And what in the name of sweet biscuits does any of this have to do with why you’re here? Or with your father?”
“Let me finish the rest of my story, sergeant, and I’ll tell you.”
Thomson sighed deeply. “Very well,” he said. “Go on. But please, get to the point soon, Dr. Lightning.”
“Do you know why we had to leave Parr’s Landing, sergeant—I mean, we, the crew?”
“Some sort of medical problem, I recall hearing. Some sort of accident?”
Billy said, “There was indeed an accident, but it wasn’t the sort of accident one normally associates with a dig. Richard attacked and nearly killed Emory a week later.”
Elliot glanced at Thomson as if to say, Do you believe this? But Thomson’s expression was neutral, and his eyes on Billy betrayed nothing.
“After the sleepwalking incident,” Billy said, “Richard became more and more withdrawn. Emory told my father that he slept badly. He tossed and turned all night, and occasionally spoke in his sleep.”
“What did he say?” Thomson asked. “Do you remember?”
“Emory said that not much of it made any sense. Except one night, Richard woke up screaming that he was buried alive. Emory said he was drenched in sweat. He had apparently thrown his covers all over the floor of the motel room and was flailing his arms like he was trying to dig himself out of a hole.
“The next morning—again—Richard had no memory of the event at all. He got very angry with Emory. Richard accused Emory of lying just to confuse him. By that time Emory had started to be afraid of sharing the motel room with him. He told my father he wanted his own room. My father was initially reluctant to accede to Emory’s wishes, not only because it wasn’t in the budget, but also because he was afraid that such a drastic action would just make it worse. Richard, you see, didn’t believe any of this was happening. I think on some level, he believed we’d all been playing a joke on him since that first day he wandered off.”
“So, what finally happened?” Elliot asked. “You said he almost killed the other fella, this Emory?”
“We’d been out on the site all day, that last day,” Billy said. “Richard had apparently had another bad night and not a lot of sleep. He was sullen and withdrawn. It was a hot day, too, that day—really hot, very humid. There were a lot of bugs, black flies and the like, that we hadn’t had to deal with over the course of the dig up till that point. The sort of weather that makes people jump out of their skin at a moment’s notice when someone looks at you the wrong way. Everyone’s shirts were plastered to their backs before noon, but there was no wind and the bugs were a nightmare, so we kept them on and just . . . well, endured.
“When my father announced that we were breaking for lunch, Richard gathered up his things, as he had been doing since the first day since his bizarre experience with the quasi-amnesia, and prepared to go off and eat his lunch alone. My father objected. He insisted we all eat together as a group.”
“Why?” asked Thomson. “After all that had gone on? Why would he antagonize him like that?”
“Dad might have been trying to see what sort of a reaction it would provoke in Richard. I know my father was growing increasingly concerned about Richard and had spoken to both Emory and me privately about sending Richard back home to Toronto to get some help, and finishing up the dig as a trio.”
“What was Richard’s reaction?”
“He became furious. He accused my father of overstepping his bounds and taking advantage of his status as Richard’s professor in order to ‘control’ him. His rage was completely out of sync with either my father’s request, or anything else, including how irritable we all felt in that heat. My father insisted again, and for a moment Richard looked at my father as though he wanted to murder him. It looked to me as though Richard would attack him. Emory and I both stood up at the same time. Richard looked at all three of us, and then stalked away into the bush, towards the cliffs, without looking back.
“Emory said, ‘I’ll go after him. Let me see if I can talk to him.’ My father said, ‘No, I’ll do it. It’s my responsibility.’ But Emory insisted, saying that it was obvious that Richard was furious about my father taking a paternalistic role in this situation, and that perhaps talking to someone closer to his own age would be less threatening. So he took off into the bush looking for Richard.”
“What happened when he found him?” Elliot asked. “I mean, I’m assuming he did?”
Billy took a deep breath, and then exhaled slowly. “Yes, he definitely found him. But first, we found Emory. When he wasn’t back in half an hour, both my Dad and I had a bad feeling about it, so we went to find him. We did, about half a mile from the camp. It wasn’t hard—we just followed the sound of his screaming.”
Again, Elliot found himself asking, “What happened?” But this time, he sounded less like an interrogating policeman than he did a young boy listening to a ghoulish campfire story. Dave Thomson caught the subtle tonal shift and glanced at the younger officer. Elliot didn’t notice. Billy held his full attention.
“We found him,” Billy continued. “Emory had collapsed against a boulder about a hundred yards away from where the path veered sharply upward to the hill that led to the cliffs. At first, we thought he had fallen and maybe broken his arm, but his screaming was too obviously the sound of someone in terrible, terrible pain. His knees were pulled up and he was clutching his shoulder and writhing in agony in the dirt. My father ran to him. Emory kept screaming. Dad gently pulled his hand away from his shoulder to see what had happened. His shirt was soaked in blood that was gushing out of a severe, deep wound in his shoulder. Emory’s face was paper-white—he was obviously in the early stages of shock. My father asked him what had happened, and he was able to say just one word before he passed out. He said, Richard.
“Dad tore off his own shirt and tied it around Emory’s shoulder in a clumsy tourniquet. He said, ‘We need to get Emory to the hospital right away.’ We picked him up as gently as we could, then carried him, half running, all the way back to the camp. Once there, we lay him across the back seat of the van and drove down the hill as fast as possible to the doctor’s office. Thank God he was in. The doctor said it looked like Emory had been hit with an axe, or some sort of ice pick, in the shoulder.
“By that time, Emory had regained consciousness, though he was in terrible pain. The doctor gave him a shot of something strong— morphine, maybe? My father asked him what had happened, and Emory said that Elliot had been hiding behind one of the rock walls, and had jumped out and attacked him with the chisel end of an archaeological hammer. Emory said something else before the drug knocked him out cold. He said that Richard drank his blood.”
“Drank his blood?”
“Yes, that he’d attacked him with the hammer, and drank the blood from the wound. That he’d pressed his mouth against it and sucked it. He also said that Richard had told him that ‘the voice’ had told him to do it, and that the voice was coming from ‘the caves.’”
“The caves?” Thomson said. “What caves?”
“He claimed there were caves in the cliffs,” Billy replied. “Are there?”
“Well, yes. There are caves. Parr’s Landing is a mining town. The ground underneath it is full of tunnels. Some came about when the mine opened a hundred years ago, but one of the reasons the mine opened was that there were caves and gorges there in the first place. Combined with the gold they found, it made for ideal conditions. But that’s something that Richard could have discovered all on his own, without a ‘voice’ guiding him. So—he was plain crazy the whole time? Some kind of breakdown?”
“Emory was picked up by an ambulance plane and taken to hospital in Sault Ste. Marie. In addition to the blood loss, he’d suffered severe nerve damage from the wound. The RCMP caught Richard a couple of days later. He’d been living outdoors in the area around Bradley Lake. I saw him when the cops brought him in. He looked like a monster out of a horror movie. His clothes were torn and filthy. His face and hands were scratched, and his face was smeared with Emory’s dried blood. His eyes looked like an animal’s eyes, but even wilder. He didn’t seem to recognize either my father or me. He claimed he didn’t know who Emory was.”
Billy stood up and walked across the room to where his suitcase lay open at the end of his bed. He rummaged through his clothes, and then withdrew a thick manila file folder encircled with a plastic band. He brought it over to where the two policemen sat and put it down on the table between them.
“What’s this, then?” Thomson said. He looked down at the file and read the handwritten label. It said Richard Weal case: Clippings and Notes in faded blue ink.
“It’s the story,” Billy said simply. “It’s what happened. They arrested Richard and charged him with assault and attempted murder. He was still raving about voices in the rocks when they took him away under police guard. He was declared unfit to stand trial and was incarcerated in a mental institution outside of Montréal for fifteen years.” Billy tapped the folder. “It’s all here—everything. My father’s notes. Newspaper clippings. The arrest, the trial, everything. My father made a copy of this before he died, and mailed it to me. He said he was working on a book about what happened—and what had happened before.”
“What do you mean, what had happened before? Before what? You mean, with Richard?”
“Not just with Richard,” Billy said. “There’s a history of violent incidents associated with this place. That history stretches back almost two hundred and fifty years. What happened with Richard and Emory has happened before, and right around here.”
“Again, Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said in a pained voice, this time not even trying to cover up his impatience, “this is all very interesting. I’m sure your father’s book would have been fascinating. Forgive me for repeating myself again, but you still haven’t answered my question about why you’re in Parr’s Landing now.”
“Because I think Richard Weal murdered my father in Toronto six weeks ago, Sergeant Thomson.”
“Do you have any evidence of that, Dr. Lightning?”
“Nothing that would likely convince you, Sergeant.” Billy sighed. “It didn’t convince the police in Toronto.”
“Humour me,” Thomson said. “Why do you think he killed your father?”
“My father was killed with a hammer blow to the head. The police say he may have known his killer, because there was no sign of forced entry, but the house had been ransacked, from top to bottom. Nothing of any apparent value was taken—things like my mother’s Georgian tea service and some fairly expensive art was left where it was. Given that the vast majority of valuable objects were left behind, the police concluded that it was likely some sort of drug-related break-in.”
“You said ‘the vast majority of valuable objects’ were left behind. Were the police able to ascertain what was taken, if anything?”
“The originals of these notes,” Billy said, picking up the folder, “were missing from his study. What was also missing was a translation from the French he’d been working on. An obscure document from the Jesuit Relations—the letters written by the Jesuit missionaries to New France and sent to the Society of Jesus in Rome in the seventeenth century.”
Thomson looked dubious. “These papers were ‘missing,’ you said? I doubt they considered that a motive for murder. Was any money taken?”
“My father had always kept some emergency money locked in his desk,” Billy said. “The desk was unlocked when the police went over the place, but the money was still there. He might have kept some money elsewhere, but I couldn’t confirm or deny that to their satisfaction. The case is still open, technically, but they seem to have made up their minds. They said that there’s no evidence that it was anything other than what they said it was.”
“It sounds like a tragedy, Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said. “But the police were likely correct. Had Richard Weal been in touch with your father? Had he made any threats?”
“No,” Billy admitted. “Nothing he shared with me. But the missing documents—”
“Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said, rising, “we’re sorry to have bothered you at this difficult time. You’re, of course, welcome to travel anywhere and do anything. I don’t think I would have chosen Parr’s Landing as a place to recover from the death of my father, personally, but to each his own. Constable McKitrick and I will be on our way. Thank you for your time, sir.”
“I’m telling you, Richard Weal killed my father. And he’s coming here. I know it. He has my father’s papers. He believes something is speaking to him in the rocks.”
“Afternoon, Dr. Lightning,” Elliot said. He opened the motel door and held it open. Before stepping through, Thomson turned to Billy again.
“Dr. Lightning,” Thomson said. “You never told us what happened to Richard Weal. Did the police ever find him to question him?”
“No,” Billy replied. “They didn’t. He’d been released from the institution a few years back, according to the information I was able to acquire on my own. If he was getting outpatient treatment somewhere, there weren’t any records immediately available, and since he wasn’t seriously considered a suspect, no one looked very hard to find him.”
“I see. Well, that settles it, as far as we’re concerned, I think. Thank you again for your time, Dr. Lightning. We’ll be on our way now, I think.”
And they were on their way. Billy Lightning closed the motel room door behind them. The silence of the motel room embraced him. He sighed, as much in relief as in frustration. Eventually the relief overtook the frustration. He hadn’t expected them to believe him, but he realized that he’d bought himself a bit of time, if nothing else.
Billy picked up the file folder of his father’s notes and went back to the bed. He sat down, opened the file, and began to read what he’d already read hundreds of times before. Maybe this time, it would say something new. He felt a pang of sharp longing at the sight of his father’s handwriting on the smudged carbon. The unfathomable sense of his loss returned to him like a plaintive, restless ghost.
Elliot McKitrick and Dave Thomson rode in silence for the first few minutes of the ride back to the police station. Then Elliot spoke.
“What did you make of that?” he asked. “That was some story. Do you think he’s telling the truth?”
“Easy enough to check it out,” Thomson said. “At least the part about his father’s murder. The rest of it happened more or less the way he said it did, but I think it was pretty much an open and shut case back then of a guy who had a nervous breakdown and got locked up for it.”
“What about the Doc? Do you think this Lightning might have had anything to do with it?”
“I’ll run his name by the RCMP and see if anything comes up,” Thomson replied. “But I don’t think it’s going to add up. I think what we’re looking at is a series of tragedies, starting with this poor Weal kid going off his rocker and being packed off to the bughouse. Then the old man gets murdered years later, and his son connects the two worst events of his life and comes up with an answer he can live with. No more, no less.”
“What about the rest of it? The spirit voices and the weird stuff?”
Thomson shrugged. “You grew up here. You know how many stories there are. Those Wendigo stories, for one. Local legends. Every town has some. As for the rest of it, well, life was tough here a couple of hundred years ago. Winters were long. Things happened. People probably did go crazy, as much from the isolation as anything else. If this Weal fella read about this stuff in some history textbook in school, it’d be in his head already when he went off his head.”
Elliot looked doubtful. “So, you don’t think Weal might have anything to do with what happened up in Gyles?”
“On the say-so of Dr. William Lightning, he of the crazy story we just heard? I don’t think so. As far as anyone knows, Weal could be dead.” Thomson snorted. “I think Chief Bill’s headdress is on a bit tight. He’s a bit cocked-up about his father’s death, that’s all. That’s got to be hard for anybody. But do I think some possessed crazy hobgoblin has driven thousands of miles from God knows where just to come back here to live out of doors by Bradley Lake and eat people?” This time, Thomson laughed out loud. “No, I don’t think so.”
“It’ll be Halloween in a couple of weeks,” Elliot said. If he were an older man, and more seasoned, let alone more secure in himself, he likely would have been readier to admit to being more relieved than disappointed to hear Thomson dismiss the Indian’s story. “Maybe we’re due for a new spook tale to add to all that Wendigo bullshit we’ve been hearing for years up here in God’s country since forever.”
“God’s country,” Jeremy Parr said wistfully to Christina. He closed his eyes and breathed deeply. The air was wonderfully cool, but not too cold for comfort. It smelled of autumn—fallen leaves, the scent of cooling earth and the flowering of benign rot, the sleepy prelude to winter. The morning had started out cold, but the day had warmed again. They had parked the car a few miles out of town, past Bradley Lake, on the old logging road. They sat on a red flannel blanket. Above them, the sunlight streamed down through the cathedral of orange-leafed trees, turning everything around it the colour of caramel apple glaze. “Elliot always called it ‘God’s country,’” he said by way of clarification. “Today I can see what he meant.”
Christina’s eyes were closed, her face in the sun. She sighed. “What are you going to do, now that you’ve seen him? And he probably saw you, too. If he didn’t see you, he’s heard that you’re back. Are you going to go see him?”
“What would be the point? It was ten years ago, and the way it ended, it was like a bad dream that we had ten years ago. He’s probably married, probably has kids. It was one of those things that was never meant to happen at all.”
“But it did happen,” Christina said kindly. “He was your first love.
And it didn’t end the way it was supposed to end.”
“Maybe it did end the way it was supposed to end. Have you noticed that love doesn’t flourish in this town? You have to leave it in order to keep it. Especially,” he added bitterly, “my kind of love.”
Christina started to say something conciliatory in reply, something to suggest that Jeremy was being melodramatic or unnecessarily dour, but she didn’t. It occurred to her that her own story more or less proved his point, and she couldn’t think of any love stories off the top of her head that had blossomed and flourished in Parr’s Landing. Her own parents more or less tolerated each other, focusing the love they’d obviously once had for each other on their children. The house where Christina grew up was full of pictures—her jubilant parents on their wedding day, photos of the two of them on picnics, her mother sitting on the back of her father’s motorcycle, the two of them on a Ferris wheel at a country fair.
In those pictures, their love for each other had been nearly tangible, but once Christina and her brother entered the montage of images on the walls, a certain steeliness had set in. In later photographs, her mother seemed detached, her father more stoic than loving. It was as though the diffusion of that young love, its dispersal into the larger world of children, mortgages, church, work for subsistence wages in a northern mining town—survival, really—had damaged the love in transit, alchemically transforming it at a cellular level into something else, something greyer. Christina tried to remember her parents ever embracing, but nothing came to her.
The cancer had taken her mother when Christina was fourteen. Christina tried to remember her parents ever embracing before her mother got sick, but nothing came to her. She wondered if that gradual distancing would have eventually happened to her and Jack, and even as she wondered it, she had her answer: No, of course not. Because, as Jeremy said, they’d gotten away.
To change the subject from her own memories, as well as to distract Jeremy from his, she asked, “How do you think it’s going with your mother?”
Jeremy shrugged. “So far so good, I guess. I don’t think she’s all that happy to see either of us, but she seems happy to see Morgan, at least. Did you see her last night? She couldn’t keep her eyes off her. And this morning, she was quite testy when you said you wanted to drive her to school yourself.”
Christina laughed. It was not a happy laugh. “I think that had everything to do with her not wanting me to be seen around town with Jack Parr’s daughter—even if she is my daughter, too—more than it did any great grandmotherly love, don’t you?”
“Not sure,” he said. “I hadn’t realized how much Morgan actually looks like Jack—I mean really looks like Jack—until I saw all the pictures of him as a kid that Adeline has around the house. For her, it must be like having his ghost come back to haunt her. I think that’s why she’s trying too hard to make friends with her. The rest of us are just an inconvenience to be dealt with.”
“I don’t know,” Christina said. “I have a bad feeling about it somehow. Then again, when it comes to your mother, I’ve only ever had bad feelings. So this is nothing new.”
“I wonder how Morgan is doing in school today? First day in a new school—hell, and not just any new school. Our old school.” Christina sighed. “I’ve been trying very hard not to think about it, Jeremy. Thanks so much for bringing it up.”
“Sorry.”
“No, it’s all right.” She picked up a yellow leaf beside her and held it between her fingers, examined it, and then flicked it away. “This is probably the hardest part. I can protect her from almost anything else but this. In Toronto, at Jarvis Collegiate, she had her friends and her routine. She wasn’t anything special. Here, God only knows.”
“Hey, she’ll be fine,” Jeremy said in a soothing voice. “This is Morgan you’re talking about. Also, besides being our wonderful girl in her own right, she’s Jack’s daughter.”
“Everyone used to worship Jack, but it wasn’t because he was a Parr, it was because he was—well, Jack. Morgan isn’t Jack. She doesn’t have the experience of growing up here with that name and getting used to what it means. She doesn’t have the . . . the . . .”
“The antibodies?” Jeremy said, suppressing a smile. “Is that what you mean? She hasn’t been inoculated against being a Parr in Parr’s Landing? She doesn’t have the antibodies to the virus?”
Christina threw a pile of the yellow leaves at Jeremy. He laughed, covering his head. He threw a handful of the leaves at Christina, provoking answering laughter in return.
“Yes,” she said, brushing the leaves out of her hair. “That’s what I mean. Exactly. She doesn’t have the antibodies for this town. Morgan is a city girl.” She grew serious again. “These kids can probably smell it on her. They always could smell difference. They’re terrible when they find it, too. You know that better than anyone.”
“Yep,” he said quietly. “I do.”
“See, that’s what I’m worried about. We don’t belong here—either of us. And Morgan really doesn’t belong here. She belongs at home in the city, with me there for her every afternoon when she gets home from school and wants to cry over her dead father, or talk about how she feels about it.” She began to cry, at the same time thinking, Jesus, enough with these waterworks, already. I can’t keep doing this. “I’m failing her. This isn’t what Jack would have wanted. I just know it.”
Jeremy rolled towards Christina. His expression was so sad that she instinctively reached for his hand and squeezed his fingers before he even had a chance to speak. When he did, his own voice was thick. “Christina, I’m so, so sorry,”
She wiped her eyes with her sleeve. “About what?”
“About—all of this,” he said. “About not being to be able to take care of you both. About letting things get to the point where we had to come back here. I was so busy making my own life that I didn’t have a contingency plan. I’ve been beating myself up about it since we arrived here. I’m so sorry.”
“Hey,” she said softly. “Shut up. OK? It wasn’t your job to take care of us. Jack didn’t expect it from you, and neither did I. All three of us moved away from here to get on with our lives, and to get away from all the . . . the bad shit here.” Christina propped herself on one elbow and looked Jeremy in the eye. “Jack always took care of everything. I guess, in a way, we were still kids in our own minds. Not smart of us, I know. But he would have hated to hear you blame yourself for this. If he were around, he’d be busy blaming himself for not taking out insurance because somewhere in the back of his mind he still thought of himself as a rich boy. And I’d be busy blaming myself for not making it a priority myself, and for not reminding him that he lost that ‘rich boy’ status when he married me.” Jeremy said dryly, “You two were always ideally matched.”
“You know what? There’s no one to blame, and it’s a waste of time.
It’s nobody’s fault. We couldn’t have predicted what happened. And,” she added, “nothing would have stopped Adeline from simply offering to help me out when I called to tell her about Jack’s accident. All she had to do was say, ‘What do you need, Christina? What does my granddaughter need? It’s yours.’ But she didn’t. She let me beg, like some sort of sharecropper instead of the mother of her son’s only child. Then she condescended that I could come back here with Morgan and live off her charity. “You on the other hand,” she said, squeezing his hand, “offered to come back here to this place in spite of all the terrible memories it holds for you. You did it for Morgan and me. Which makes you the one person in this whole sad story who offered to step up to the plate. We’ll never forget it, either of us. So let’s not hear any more about blame, OK?”
Jeremy squeezed back. “OK,” he said. “Thanks, love.”
“Now, what are you going to do about Elliot McKitrick? You’re going to meet up with him sooner or later. It’s a matter of time. How’s that going to be for you?”
Jeremy was silent for a moment. The he spoke. “It’s going to hurt like hell,” he said. “One way or another, it’s going to be a killer.”
Morgan’s new homeroom at Matthew Browning Memorial High School smelled like chalk, wet wool, some sort of disinfectant, and old wood to her. It didn’t smell like Jarvis Collegiate back home. It wasn’t that it smelled bad, it just smelled foreign and fundamentally inhospitable. It wasn’t just that the ceilings seemed too high, or that the architecture of the place made her think of the 1950s—an era she didn’t know, but had read about in magazines, and could picture. It wasn’t that the contrast between the wild autumn northern light coming through the arched windows contrasted sharply with the fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling threw an industrial pall over the scene.
It wasn’t just that everything looked even older than it was, or that the Queen looked preternaturally girlish in the yellowed picture hanging in the wooden frame on the wall adjacent to the blackboard (as opposed to the more matronly representation of Her Majesty on the wall of her homeroom at Jarvis), or that in the brand new black-and-white picture next to it, Prime Minister Pierre Elliot Trudeau looked like a French movie star.
It was all of these things and none of them, rolled into a tight ball of dislocation. She was an alien in an alien place, where none of her markers of familiarity lined up.
Being an intelligent girl, Morgan was able to recognize that her response was an emotional one. Being a confident girl, it didn’t throw her as much as it might have thrown someone less sure of herself. Her mother would have been surprised at just how much of her father’s daughter Morgan Parr actually was.
Some of the boys had looked at her with frank interest. A smaller number of the girls had assessed her as a sexual threat, and she felt a chill drift of hostility coming from them. But the majority of the students, both male and female, regarded her with the curiosity reserved for the interjection of something brand new, even foreign, into their social ecosystem.
When the teacher, Mr. Churchill, had introduced her as “Morgan Parr who has transferred to our school from far-away Toronto,” she wasn’t sure what had caused them to raise their eyebrows more—the fact that she was from someplace as far away as Toronto and therefore, by definition, exotic, or her last name, which was as familiar to them as their own.
But if she’d had any real doubts or fears about fitting into a new school, they’d been dramatically allayed by her visit to the principal’s office when she had arrived at the school that morning before the start of classes. She’d opened the door to the outer office and found that she was expected. The sixtyish woman with a mauve-rinsed marcel wave and the kindly face sitting at the desk had smiled warmly at Morgan.
“Welcome to Matthew Browning Memorial, dear,” she’d said. “We’re so glad you’ve made it here safely. Your grandma told us you were coming. We’ve been expecting you. We’ve all been looking forward to it.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Morgan said shyly. Privately she tried to picture the adamantine Adeline Parr as anyone’s “grandma,” least of all her, and suppressed a fit of spontaneous giggling with effort.
“My name is Miss Quinn. I’m the secretary,” the older woman said, beaming. “Why, you look just like your father, dear. He was one of my favourite students. He was always so polite, with a smile for everybody. I knew him ever since he was a little boy.” A pained look crossed her face. “We were all so sorry to hear that he’d passed. So very sad.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Morgan said again, charmed by the older woman’s familiar and loving evocation of her father. She was unused to the feeling. Usually, mentions of her father by strangers distressed her. But there was something soothing and motherly about Miss Quinn, and Morgan was surprised at the sense of comfort she experienced in hearing her father mentioned by the older woman. She caught a whiff of Evening in Paris as Miss Quinn crossed the floor to knock on the door marked Mr. R. Murphy, Principal.
“I’ll just let Mr. Murphy know that you’re here,” Miss Quinn said.
She opened the door and stepped inside. A few minutes later she came out and said, “Go on in, dear. Mr. Murphy wants a few words with you. I’ll get your papers all filled out for you in the meantime.”
Morgan stepped into the office. The principal rose from his chair when she entered. He gestured to the chair in front of his desk. “Hello, Morgan, I’m Mr. Murphy, the principal. Please sit down. We’re all very glad to have you joining us here at Matthew Browning, even this late in the season. We all wish it could have been under different circumstances, of course. But still, we’re delighted to have you.”
“Thank you, sir,” she replied.
She waited for Mr. Murphy to continue. “I don’t need to tell you that I don’t usually invite the new students in here for a chat before they start school. Heck,” he added with a good natured, avuncular chuckle. “I’ve known most of them, one way or another, since they were boys and girls. But your grandmother, Mrs. Parr, met with me and discussed your . . . ah . . . specific circumstances.”
“You mean the fact that my dad is dead?”
“Yes,” he said. “That, in addition to the fact that you’ve come to us from Toronto, although both your parents were originally from here. Your father was one of the star pupils of this school, in addition to being from our finest family—your family, now.”
“Yes,” Morgan said sweetly. “Mine and my mother’s. My mother drove us here. She and my Uncle Jeremy, of course. We all came back to town together. Well, they ‘came back.’ I’ve never lived here. Did you know my mom when she lived here? Her last name used to be Monroe. Christina Monroe. Before she married my father and became Christina Parr.”
Mr. Murphy flushed deep scarlet. “Yes, of course, your mother is also from here,” he said. “I remember her well. Your grandmother told me that she was coming back. I’m sorry about her loss, as well.” Morgan waited silently for Mr. Murphy to get to the point, which he promptly did. “Morgan, your grandmother wanted me to make sure that you understand that whatever . . . uh . . . choices your parents made sixteen years ago about how to . . . uh . . . comport themselves . . .”
“Sir,” Morgan said, politely. “If you mean that my parents were in love and ran off to Toronto to have me, they both told me the story. I grew up knowing it.”
“Well, you’re a very self-possessed and liberal-minded young lady, Morgan, aren’t you?” He chuckled again. “You sounded just like your father there, for a minute. That’s the sort of thing he would have said, and he would have said it just like that, too.”
“Thank you.”
“Anyway, to get to the point, Morgan, you grandmother wanted me to make sure that you felt welcome here at Matthew Browning, and that you knew that we were behind you one hundred percent. If you have any problems with any of the kids, you just come and let me know.”
“What sort of problems, sir?”
“Well,” he said. “Some of them are . . . well, not as liberal-minded or as modern as you and your mother. And your father, obviously. They might . . . say things. Things that aren’t necessarily very nice.”
This time Morgan’s puzzlement was genuine. “Things like what?”
“There are some . . . unfortunate names for children whose parents haven’t gone the conventional route to . . . uh, matrimony. Names that aren’t used by polite people, and while we’re very proud of our student body, occasionally, in the heat of the moment, people say things they . . . ah, regret later. Parr’s Landing can be conservative in some ways. You do know what ‘conservative’ means, don’t you?”
The flush had returned to Mr. Murphy’s face, and now Morgan felt sorry for him. She had a vague idea that he was trying to allude to illegitimacy, but since he wouldn’t come out and say it, there was no way for her to address it directly. The notion caused her no particular distress. There had been children of hippies at Jarvis, and some of their parents weren’t formally married. As non-churchgoers and de facto nonconformists in their own right, Jack and Christina Parr had been very careful when it came to inculcating their daughter with the sort of prejudices that would be taken for granted in a town like Parr’s Landing. Also, growing up with Uncle Jeremy, those prejudices would have been hard for her parents to reinforce, even if they’d wanted to.
“Mr. Murphy,” she said, gently, “my parents were married before they had me. My mother was pregnant when she was married, but she was married when I was born. They’ve talked about this with me since I was a little girl. I don’t know what my grandmother told you, but we were a pretty normal family. My mom and dad loved each other very much. And names aren’t going to bother me, anyway. I’ve been called names before. But thanks for worrying about it. It’s nice of you.”
Mr. Murphy sighed with obvious relief. “Well, that’s good,” he said. “But, as I said, your grandmother asked me to speak with you, and to make sure you understood that she . . . that is to say Matthew Browning Memorial won’t tolerate any shenanigans from other students when it comes to you. Mrs. Parr is a very valuable member of our school board, and her . . . your family has very deep, very valuable roots in our community. We want you to feel welcome here. And,” he added, almost hesitantly, “I’d very much appreciate it if you’d share with your grandmother that we had this little chat, and that you understand that my door will always be open if you have any problems at all. Anything. Just let her know I said that.”
My God, Morgan marvelled. He’s afraid of me. He’s afraid of my grandmother, so he’s afraid of me, too. He wants me to make sure she knows he did what she wanted him to do. He wants her to know he did her bidding.
What sort of family is this that I’m a part of? What, am I royalty all of a sudden?
“Yes, sir,” she said aloud. “I’ll make sure to tell Grandmother we talked, and how nice and helpful you were about all of this. I’m sure everything’s going to be just fine.”
“Well,” he said, puffing up his chest. “Good, good. Very fine indeed. All right, Morgan, Miss Quinn will give you your class schedule and show you where to go. And you have a good day, Morgan!”
“Thank you, Mr. Murphy.” She stood up and shook his hand. This time, he did not rise in his chair, and Morgan was relieved to have the balance of power restored to a more traditional paradigm, with the principal acting like a principal again instead of acting like her grandmother’s lackey. In the same way Morgan was fascinated by her apparent newfound—and entirely alien—importance by virtue of her last name, it also disoriented her and made her uncomfortable.
She thought briefly of taking it up with her mother later tonight when she got home, but instinctively understood that it would only cause more tension. Her grandmother, she already knew, would be the wrong person to speak to about this for reasons she couldn’t articulate, but understood clearly nonetheless. Maybe Uncle Jeremy would be able to shed some light on it, Morgan thought. Uncle Jeremy always seemed to know what was going on, even when no one else did. She realized suddenly that Uncle Jeremy was, like Morgan herself, a Parr by blood. It was something that had never occurred to her at home in Toronto, but out here in this wilderness, it seemed to count for something. What, exactly, it counted for, she wasn’t sure. But she was sure she would find out sooner or later.
She left the principal’s office. Miss Quinn handed her a sheaf of papers, including her class list.
“Follow me, dear,” she said. “I’ll show you where your homeroom is.” When they got to the classroom door, Miss Quinn offered to introduce her to her homeroom teacher, Mr. Churchill, but Morgan politely declined. She already felt like she was dancing on the surface of Saturn and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. Miss Quinn patted her hand, understanding that Morgan had already had enough of standing out. The first bell of the day rang. She took a deep breath and walked into the classroom, smelling chalk, wet wool, disinfectant, and old wood.
At lunchtime, playing truant from the grounds of Parr’s Landing Public School with his dog-eared copy of Tomb of Dracula issue #3 placed carefully in his durable orange canvas book bag, Finn caught sight of the girl with the long dark hair sitting by herself under the elm tree in front of the high school down the street. He promptly fell in love the way that only a twelve-year-old boy can.
Not since Finn laid his eyes on Tomb of Dracula issue #1 had he seen anything as beautiful as Morgan Parr—whose name was still a mystery, and would remain so for a time yet.
She ate alone, which puzzled him. How could admirers not surround anyone that beautiful? Parr’s Landing’s population was 1,528 (give or take) so new faces were easy to spot, and he’d never seen this girl before. His eyes reverenced the way the sunlight brought out the bands of honey and cinnamon-red in her dark hair. She ate her sandwich with a lack of self-consciousness that he’d never seen before in a girl of her age.
His short life to date had been spent entirely within the precincts of his hometown. While he’d dreamed of what life must be like outside of its boundaries, certainly he’d never seen any evidence of it other than what he’d gleaned from television, magazines, movies, or, of course, his beloved comic books. The girl across the street was clearly not a local, so she became the screen upon which he projected his vision.
She looked up suddenly, as though she realized he was watching her. Her eyes scanned the street across from the school where he was standing. Instinctively, he ducked behind another elm tree and prayed she hadn’t spotted him and found him creepy.
He didn’t care a whit about being caught off the school grounds— he never had been caught before. Finn had learned to close his eyes and pretend to transform into mist, like Dracula did when Rachel Van Helsing, the glamourous blonde vampire huntress from The Tomb of Dracula, shot an arrow at the Lord of the Undead with her crossbow. Finn wasn’t crazy; he knew he didn’t turn into mist. But he also knew that whenever he pretended he turned into mist, he was somehow never caught doing anything he didn’t want to be caught doing. And right now, what he wanted was for the girl not to catch him staring at her. He closed his eyes and . . . transformed into mist.
Her eyes passed over where he stood behind the tree without registering him at all, as far as he could tell.
He breathed a sigh of relief and stepped back out from behind the tree. He took one more longing look at her eating her sandwich. He imprinted the image on his memory like a photograph, promising himself he’d see her again—soon.
Then he turned and jogged back to school, all thoughts of both lunch and his comic book momentarily forgotten, as old loves so often are when a rival first appears.
At two in the afternoon, Elliot McKitrick realized that he needed desperately to be alone to think, so he told Thomson that he was going to take the cruiser and do a loop of the town and the area around Bradley Lake. He told the sergeant that he’d be on radio if he needed him and that he wouldn’t go far, but he wanted to patrol the town line in light of what had happened in Gyles Point the previous night.
“Good idea,” Thomson said without looking up. “I think the tank is a bit low, so fill her up on the way back, would you, McKitrick? I’m going to stay here and make some calls. I want to check out a couple of points of Dr. Lightning’s story.”
“Sounded fishy to you, too, Sarge?”
“Not necessarily,” Thomson said, not looking at the younger man. “Just . . . well, there are some things I want to check out.”
Elliot stood in the doorway for another moment, waiting for more. When it was not forthcoming, he opened the door and went to where the cruiser was parked. He turned the key in the ignition and headed towards the road that led out of town.
He smoked as he drove. He wasn’t supposed to, but he realized he had been in a state of suppressed anxiety ever since he’d seen Jeremy Parr on the road earlier that morning. His heart was beating like a triphammer and his mind was cloudy with memories he’d been suppressing for a decade—memories that were sharper than he’d ever dreamed possible, given the time that had elapsed since that last terrible night before Jeremy had been sent away and Elliot’s father had beaten him till he bled.
Through the windshield, the town looked as it always did, except for the fact that someone had ripped a hole in the airtight zone of security and comfort he had come to rely on over the last ten years. Suddenly his world, usually as well ordered as a soldier’s sock drawer, seemed dangerously askew.
What Elliot wanted to know was how askew, and why. He had learned as a very young boy that self-examination was called “navel gazing” and that real men didn’t do it. And Elliot was a real man. His entire life— with one notable deviation from the straight and narrow—had been dedicated to being a real man. He had spilled a great deal of sweat and blood to assure that end.
But until Elliot was sure in his own mind that the only thing that was fucking him up about Jeremy Parr’s return to Parr’s Landing was the possibility of bad gossip being stirred up again, he wasn’t going to be at peace in his own mind.
Suddenly Elliot felt as though he were suffocating, as though he were buried alive. The car felt like a coffin with metal sides and no air. He pulled over to the side of the road and half-stepped, half-fell out the door into the cold fall air. He drew in great gasping breaths, filling his lungs with oxygen as though he had just broken the surface of a pit full of quicksand, his lungs full of mud and silt and filthy water.
For a moment, he felt as though he might vomit, but he closed his eyes and concentrated on his breathing until the nausea passed and his mind cleared.
Goddamn you, Jeremy, why the fuck did you have to come back here? Why didn’t you stay away?
Of course there was no answer except for the sound of the wind and the distant squawk of crows circling somewhere high above Spirit Rock. Elliot shaded his eyes and followed the sound of the crows, but he couldn’t see them. He scanned the cliff, looking for the birds, but to no avail. A cloud passed over the sun, shattering the rock face into a diorama of light and shadow. And then something did move up there on the ledge. Even before his eyes caught the blur of motion, his brain registered motion. Something upright, pacing carefully. And then it was gone.
Elliot stared at the spot where he’d seen the shape, then shouted out, “Hello? Is someone up there?” His voice sounded abnormally loud to him in the late-afternoon sunlight. The echo mocked him and, of course, there was no answer. But he had seen it. Something that ought not to have been up there, something entirely out of place, something out of the natural order.
He thought of Thomson’s description of the murder scene at Gyles Point. There’s blood all over the upstairs bedroom, but no body anywhere. He thought of the Indian, Billy Lightning, who had just arrived in town the morning after the murder with (in Elliot’s opinion) a preposterous story and no good reason for being in Parr’s Landing at all. By his own account, madness and death seemed to follow the Indian around.
Elliot privately flattered himself that he had natural-born police instincts, even when he knew he was only burnishing his self-image for the sake of his own ego, but he still felt the hair rise on the back of his neck, and he instinctively reached for the holster of his gun and withdrew it.
And yet there was nothing to see now. No movement, not even a shadow, which is probably what it was to begin with. He shook his head to clear it and rubbed his eyes, then looked again. There was nothing but the cliff’s edge and the daubed smudges of the Indian paintings of the mythical Wendigo of St. Barthélemy. What the fuck had that been up there? And why did he reach for his gun? Elliot McKitrick had rarely been spooked by anything in his life, and never by Bradley Lake or Spirit Rock. Everyone in Parr’s Landing had heard the stories. Those stories were for scaring children and for getting chicks to cuddle up closer. He thought of the years he’d spent out here, swimming, whiling away his summer nights on blankets, in front of bonfires. He’d lost his virginity here when he was fourteen, and yes—he’d even brought Jeremy Parr here that first night when they’d gotten drunk and had . . . well, what had happened, happened.
He pushed that memory down brutally. His head throbbed with the beginnings of a headache that he knew was going to be one for the record books.
Elliot sighed. He re-holstered his gun and walked slowly back to the car. He needed a drink in the worst way. He’d always felt that Parr’s Landing was the beginning and the end of his world, that everything he ever needed was here and his for the asking, but as he turned the ignition, he wondered for the very first time whether Jeremy had been the smart one, the one to leave Parr’s Landing and make a life for himself somewhere where no one knew him, and no one cared who—or what— he was.
He turned the cruiser around and headed for the road back to town, kicking up gravel in the car’s wake that smacked against the metal like the sound of caps exploding. Elliot automatically checked his rearview mirror as he tapped the accelerator. In the mirror, he saw the lake, occluded by dust devils and exhaust from the car.
What he could not see was the shadow moving again, high up on the ridge where he had stared, so long and so hard, trying to identify the source of his sudden and unaccountable sense of dislocation and— though Elliot would never have admitted it, even to himself—fear.
From his perch high up on the ledge, Richard Weal watched the police cruiser drive away towards town. He’d briefly considered killing this one if he’d come too close, but he’d decided to allow him to live—for now. Instead, Weal had remained completely motionless, willing himself into invisibility, not moving a muscle until the policeman had left of his own accord. Lucky for him, Weal thought. Cops are so stupid.
Still, he reasoned, the policeman’s blood might have been useful, and it would certainly have spared Weal the pain he knew was coming. But another killing, now, when he was so close to his destination, would only serve as a dangerous distraction. After leaving a string of bodies between Toronto and Parr’s Landing, it would be a cruel and pathetic ending for him to be caught killing some small-town yokel of a cop at this point.
He’d consulted the sheaf of papers in his hockey bag a thousand time or more. He could practically recite the text by heart. This was the place. This place—here, now. His friend’s voice had never been this clear, this compelling and demanding. And when he closed his eyes, he saw visions of blood and bones and smoke. He saw the path through the caves of rock and stone as though it were lit by torchlight.
Weal’s heart soared with love and pride and yearning. He laid his face reverently against the wall of rock and said, “I’m coming, Father. I’m coming for you now. Tonight, we’ll be together. I swear.”