by Nick Scorza
With a dramatic sigh, she left me to my work. I was sorry to see her go. Beneath all the theatrics, I liked her—she was nicer than anyone else in this town who wasn’t dead or related to me, and she seemed to think I was doing a good job.
The old man came in at noon, still smoking his cigarette. He ordered his coffee, paid, and left with barely a word, only a brief nod by way of goodbye. My only other customer was the pregnant woman from the New Again shop, the same one who tried to throw me out of her store. She seemed not to recognize me, or to pretended she didn’t, at least. I made her decaf coffee with low-fat vanilla syrup without complaint, though I thought about secretly using the full fat. I imagined Zoe whispering for me to put something even worse in it.
I kept looking up at her, expecting her to glare at me, or look at the floor, but she genuinely seemed to not remember me, or she just didn’t care that she’d been rude. Thankfully she decided to take her coffee to go.
Ash came in a little later for her shift. She walked in gazing at the floor the whole time, not looking me in the eye once.
“Hey,” I said. I don’t know why I forced the issue, I probably shouldn’t have, but after the smoking man and the New Again lady, I was desperate for someone to at least acknowledge my existence, and both of us could definitely use a friend right now.
“Hey.”
She looked up for half a second, then went back to get her apron on and pin her hair up. All this was hard for her, I knew. At least she didn’t seem to hate me anymore, or blame me for throwing the town out of balance. She didn’t have anything more to say, but we actually got into a pretty good rhythm working together, cleaning everything up and making new batches of the drip coffees. When my shift ended, I hung up my apron, let my hair down, and headed out. I made sure to wave to her, and she gave me a tiny ambiguous hand motion that might have been a wave in return.
Deputy Harry was parked near the café again. I could feel his eyes on me as I left. I had to seriously restrain myself from flipping him off.
I was done with work, but not ready to go home yet. Reading those passages my father hadleft next to the computer gave me an idea. I might not be able to read his book, but nothing was stopping me from doing my own research. There was a little public library not far from the sheriff’s station—I noticed it when they brought me in for questioning. It was a good place to start. I was tired of all the secrets, and books at least couldn’t change the subject or ignore my questions.
The library was a plain little brick building. Inside it had the same musty smell every other library had. The librarian was an old man with a bushy gray thatch of a mustache and eyebrows to match. He glared at me, squinting his eyes behind a pair of reading glasses, but he didn’t say anything.
Someone else sat in the library’s little reading area, hard at work behind an impressive stack of books. I tried to sit down without disturbing them.
I stopped short when I saw the face behind the wall of books belonged to Hector. He looked up at the same moment, surprise and what I hoped was guilt flashing across his face, before he recovered and gave me his usual aloof, cocky look.
“What the hell?” I said. “You won’t help me, but you’ll spend your time studying over summer vacation?”
“Shhh,” said Hector, “this is the library.”
I almost punched him, I swear. He dropped the smirk when he saw the look in my eyes, which was lucky for him.
“Okay, it’s not for school. I’m trying to launch my baseball stat app.”
“Right, you mentioned you were a big baseball fan before you had to take a phone call in the middle of a party.”
He bit his lip, looking genuinely ashamed.
“Yeah, sorry. I’m used to everyone just ignoring me anyway. I was expecting some stuff I ordered to be delivered. To make up for it, I’ll tell you an embarrassing secret: I’m not actually that big of a baseball fan. I’m more of a math fan. Baseball has all these stats and percentages that interact in interesting ways—but it’s a lot easier to just tell people you’re a baseball fan.”
“I never would have guessed,” I said. “Now everyone will know you’re a huge nerd.”
His smirk was back.
“What will become of my popular reputation? Wait, before you keep making fun of me, what are you doing here?”
The old man from the library desk was glaring at both of us, clearing his throat every so often. We lowered our voices.
“I’m going to learn what’s really going on here any way I can,” I said.
Hector was suddenly very interested in the reams of baseball statistics he was poring over. So much for second chances. It looked like I really was on my own.
I went over to one of the computer terminals and typed “Redmarch Lake” into the search field. Not a lot came up: a few regional guides and books on local ecology. Scrolling down a little further, I found hits for the name Redmarch in a few local histories. One of the titles stuck out: Black Widows: A History of Women Who Poison—that sounded like something I’d read just for the fun of it. It had a hit for the name Redmarch; I didn’t know if they were the same family, but it was worth a shot.
It had a lurid cover with a glass of wine and a bottle sporting a skull and crossbones, and it seemed like something in between serious history and trashy true crime. I skimmed the index until I found the right passage.
Cordelia Redmarch, of the upstate New York town that bears her family’s name, was similar in that no poisoning was ever proved conclusively. She was an only child, her mother having died giving birth to her, and the family name was expected to die with her. She had two children with her first husband, a prominent industrialist, before he passed away of a mysterious wasting illness. There were wild rumors of slow poisoning, torture, and a number of wilder things involving hexes and evil spirits, this all having occurred during the nineteenth-century revival of Spiritualism. No charges were brought, however, until Cordelia’s second husband succumbed to an identical wasting illness shortly after she gave birth to her third child.
According to the crude medicine of the day, both men died of profound and sustained stress to the heart and nervous system, with no telltale signs of poisoning. It was put forward by the defense that both men had suffered from weak hearts, despite the fact that Cordelia’s second husband had been a decorated cavalry officer in the Civil War. In a trial that caused considerable scandal, Cordelia was found innocent. Newspaper accounts portray her as the very picture of a beautiful, heartbroken widow, evoking pity from all, though apparently there was much whispering behind her back. Later she quietly petitioned to have all her children’s names changed back to Redmarch, which the judge granted without complaint—an almost unprecedented occurrence given the era.
When I looked up, Hector was staring at me. He seemed surprised and a little nervous. He quickly lowered his eyes and went back to his book, pretending it was the most fascinating thing in the world.
“You’ll never believe the stuff I’m learning,” I said.
He pretended not to hear me. What a jerk, Zoe whispered in my head.
“Is it really this bad?” I asked him.
“What?”
“This town—it’s got to be bad if you’re spending your summer in the library.”
He was silent for a moment, his mouth a hard line. I’d found a crack in his sarcastic exterior.
“Don’t you dare feel sorry for me,” he said. “I don’t need this town. I won’t be here forever, and when I leave, I’m going to do great things.”
“What things?”
“I don’t know. . . . Save the world. Whatever I do, I won’t get there by poking this hornet’s nest. You should learn from me. I’m serious. I’ve seen things . . .”
“What things?”
He got quiet again, realizing he said too much. I could tell he wanted to talk—if for no other reason than no one else would talk to him here. Things must have been bad if he was still maintaining the code of silence. It wasn’t jus
t that, though. I could tell he was mad at how much he wanted companionship—and stubbornly determined to stay quiet just for that reason.
You two have a lot in common, I imagined Zoe whispering to me.
“Shut up.”
Hector looked at me with a raised eyebrow, and I realized with horror I just said that out loud. The embarrassment on my face finally made him crack a smile.
“See, you’ve only been here a few days, and you’re already talking to yourself.”
The librarian glared at us again. I went back to get another book from the list, still cursing my lack of inner monologue. The next book was a much more conventional history of the local Native American reservations. Paging through the index, I found a reference to a petition signed by leaders of the Oneida, Onondaga, Seneca, Cayuga, Mohawk, and Tuscarora nations to rename the town of Redmarch Lake, due to “. . . the perpetration of atrocities on nations of the Haudenosaunee in the aftermath of the American Revolution by one Captain Broderick Redmarch, founder of the town of Redmarch Lake, which greatly exceeded in both frequency and viciousness even the other historical crimes committed against the Six Nations by both unauthorized settlers and agents of the United States Government at the time and in the region.”
The book didn’t go into detail on any of these atrocities, which was a relief. The petition itself had been summarily dismissed by the state assembly, which made me ashamed but not exactly surprised. The book did include a portrait of Captain Redmarch, though, and the statue in the town square wasn’t far off. There was a wild look in his pale blue eyes, and something cruel in his smile. He had the same dark blonde hair as Keith.
“You’re really doing this, aren’t you?” Hector said suddenly.
“What made you think I wasn’t serious?”
He scrunched up his eyebrows, giving me a look of profound unease and frustration.
“Damn it, I can’t do this anymore. What happened to Neil bothers me—it makes me sick and it freaks me the hell out, and of course I want to do something about it, but the only reason people even tolerate my family in this town is that we don’t ask questions.”
The old man at the front desk raised a bushy eyebrow at this.
“Keep it down, you two. Miss, I’ve never seen you before, so I doubt you have a library card. If you don’t stay quiet, I might have to ask you to leave.”
We had been whispering. How he even heard us I had no idea.
“See what I mean?” whispered Hector. “I’ll help you, but we’ve got to be quiet about it, okay?”
I tried not to smile. I was glad he was helping me, but it shouldn’t have taken this long.
“Sure, I’ll help you with your school project,” Hector said louder. The librarian shook his head and went back to surfing the internet behind his desk. “Once I snuck a look at what he reads all day,” Hector whispered. “It’s a message board for people who think world leaders and CEO’s are secretly lizard men from another planet.”
“If you ever meet my dad, don’t tell him about that one,” I whispered back. “He reads enough of that paranormal stuff.”
“Around here we just call it normal stuff,” said Hector with a lopsided grin. He was really cute when he wasn’t driving me up the wall. I told myself this wasn’t the time to think of stuff like that, but I couldn’t help sneaking quick glances at him as we pulled books from the shelves, and once I thought I caught him doing the same to me.
I showed Hector the two passages I’d found already, and he went to work on the search database. He had the layout of the whole place memorized. I wished he’d been on board sooner.
“If it weren’t for the library and the café, I don’t know what I’d do in this town,” he said.
We took out a few more local history books, but Hector also wanted to check the town’s birth and death records, business registry, and regional crime data, which hadn’t even crossed my mind.
“I remember looking into this myself once,” said Hector. “I . . . I don’t know why I stopped, I just remember getting really nervous about it. I felt like I was doing something wrong.”
“Do they make you sign a pledge or something? ‘I promise not to ask too many questions?’ Because I sure as hell haven’t signed anything.”
Hector paused for a moment, thinking. His expression was worried.
“I-I don’t know. It’s not like me to not want to learn something, I just . . . it’s hard to explain. I remember being interested in it when I first moved to this town, but the longer I lived here, the more I felt, I don’t know, worried . . . afraid? It’s like there’s this voice in my head that says, ‘You don’t want to know.’”
He shivered.
“My dad’s a mechanic at the quarry,” he said. “He specializes in the kind of heavy machines they have out there. They approached my parents with an offer, back when we lived in the city. They already had a house picked out for us and everything. If we’d just tried to move here randomly, I don’t think anyone would have sold to us. If we piss everyone off, who knows, maybe they’ll kick us out. I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t some shady clause in the mortgage we signed. It’s that kind of town.”
We split up the books we’d pulled from the shelves and started poring over the indexes. As we read, one disturbing fact after another emerged.
The Redmarch family really did own most of the lakefront property, along with the quarry, known for its rosy-hued marble, and the Redmarch Savings Bank. But they’d been rich for a long time, before starting either business. Before the Revolutionary War, Broderick Redmarch had been a fur trapper, starting a company with a merchant named Wallace Clyburn. The two had made a fortune, even when the fur trade was drying up in the region. Through all the ups and downs of history, the Redmarches always seemed to come out on top, always one step ahead of a downturn, or primed to take advantage of a boom.
Redmarch Lake also had dramatically higher rates of violent death and disappearance than the surrounding area. Most of this was attributed to things pretty common to small towns throughout America: alcohol, the collapse of local industry, and the rise of drugs like methamphetamine and heroin. But that didn’t explain why it was so much worse here than anywhere else.
“This is crazy,” said Hector. “There’s more unexplained deaths in this town than anywhere for miles, and it’s constant across time. It doesn’t seem to be related to national trends at all.”
“You mentioned human sacrifice back at the party,” I said.
“That’s an old story. I was just trying to freak you out, I’m sorry.”
He didn’t sound convinced, though. In fact, it sounded like he was the one freaked out right now.
There was more. We found cause to tie at least some of that violence to the Redmarch family; besides founder Broderick Redmarch and the infamous Cordelia, there was a Lyman Redmarch hanged for a series of grisly murders in the region. This was in the late 1800s, before people really knew anything about serial killers. Still, one of the local papers had given him the wildly original title of Finger Lakes Ripper.
It took me a moment to realize Lyman was Cordelia’s youngest child. Given what she got away with, his crimes must have been spectacularly bad if he was actually executed for them. The anecdote I found about him only mentioned a “chamber of horrors” beneath the Redmarch manor that “dismayed many a stouthearted lawman normally unfazed by man’s inhumanity to man.”
What’s more, Lyman Redmarch was widely suspected to have two accomplices from the two other most prominent families in the town. I caught my breath when I saw their names: Wendell Clyburn and Theodore Morris. Both men were cleared due to lack of evidence, but a cloud of suspicion hung over them their whole lives—rumors of “black magic and blasphemous native rites.” I winced at the vintage racism, but I couldn’t help but wonder what that gruesome threesome had been up to, even if I didn’t want to know the gory details.
That made me think of something else. There were obviously ruins here, but no matter ho
w hard I looked, I couldn’t find anything on the tribe that built them and when they lived here. The tribal history I’d read just made a vague remark about the Six Nations of the Iroquois staying well away from Redmarch Lake and its surrounding woods. They’d called the lake Otkon Okàra, which means the Spirit’s Eye.
There was one passage, the statement of a Seneca war chieftain after he’d surrendered, claiming the Americans fought with “a viciousness not seen since the fearsome Two-Shadows,” but I could find no other reference to this name anywhere. Just as I was about to mention this to Hector, the old librarian heaved himself up from his desk.
“Library’s closing,” he said, “if you’re actually going to check any of that out, do it now.”
“Your mother was a lizard person,” Hector said under his breath.
“What was that?”
“Nothing, sir, we’re on our way.” He turned to me, whispering again, “I feel like he closes up earlier every day.”
Our houses were in the same direction, so we walked back for a ways together as the sun set and the shadows deepened in the trees around us.
“Thanks for helping me,” I said. “It can’t be easy living here.”
“Now I’m mad at myself for not doing it sooner,” said Hector. “I don’t like the idea that this town is messing with my head that much. What if I can’t readjust to normal life?”
“That might not be the town’s fault,” I said, giving him a playful punch on the arm.
I was nervous for a second—he didn’t know me well enough to know I said stuff like that even to my good friends—or pretty much only to my good friends. Luckily, he laughed.
“I’ve got an idea for what we do next,” he said. “No promises, it might not work, but if it does, I think it’ll really help.”
“Don’t keep me in suspense,” I said. “What is it?”
“Uh-uh, it’s a surprise. I don’t want to look lame if I can’t pull it off. If it works, I’ll let you know at the café.”