“Mom?” he pleaded. “Please don’t go.”
His mother leaned into him, holding him close, and kissed him on the forehead.
“Love doesn’t die, Tommy. Trust in that.”
And then she was gone. Again. Tommy, who was still a man even though he was blind (again), who never used to cry, wasn’t weak, found himself crying for the dozenth time this month. But it wasn’t despair that drove the tears; it was simply missing her, wanting her, loving her. And as he clung to the rungs of that ladder, immersed in icy water from the depths of hell, he felt hope rising in his breast. Love doesn’t die, he heard her say again. Trust in that.
“Tommy!” Beth shrieked. “Tommy! Please come up!”
Relief flooded in. He was crying and laughing all at the same time as he floated to the top. Laura Cooper still loved him only now she was whole and healthy again. And Beth waited above. He was heartbroken and giddy all at the same time. He didn’t even feel the ladder rungs as he ascended.
“Tommy!” Beth cried, when she saw him at last. “You’re almost here now.”
And indeed he could smell the fresh air washing in, could feel the warm summer night all around him. He knew exactly when his head emerged from the top of the well. He’d done it! He was still hanging on to the ladder but he knew that he was out of the well and above the rock rim.
“Thank God,” Beth exclaimed. Her voice came from his left side.
He leaned into the ladder, letting it support him, and he let go of the rung. Reaching into the sling, he retrieved the skull and made to hand it off to Beth. But he was blind, and in the darkness she was nearly so. He felt the resistance of her hand touching the skull and he let go of it. And just as it had the night the Jack Daniel’s bottle broke the glass, the damned thing rolled out of his hand, dropping immediately to the rock rim of the well. There, it hit the rock, splitting neatly into two separate chunks of Nathanial.
Tommy heard the whump of the skull hitting the rock, heard the chink of bone splitting, and then he heard Jesse wailing. His stomach heaved.
“Damn you to hell, Tommy Cooper!” Jesse screamed.
Tommy had just time enough to note that Jesse had used his own voice this time, when another sound broke the night.
Crack! Craaa-ackkk!
He felt the rung under his feet give way, heard Beth scream in terror. He grabbed with everything he had, and, for just a moment, he caught hold of the side of the ladder. Pain shot through his broken arm as he labored to hold on with both hands.
CRACK, CRACK, CRACK! One by one, in slow motion, the rungs under his feet were rent in half and dropped away into the depths. With the first two, he landed easily and naturally on the rung beneath it, but when the third rung snapped and went down, Tommy went with it. The last sound he heard was the cracking of his own neck as his head slammed into the rock wall.
Laura Cooper was waiting for Tommy at the bottom, and this time when she wrapped her arms around him, she did not give him back.
“Love doesn’t die,” she repeated. “Welcome home, baby.”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
When Officer Wheldon arrived moments later, he found a hysterical Beth at the bottom of the well. She was screaming and crying and determinedly trying to pull Tommy’s water-logged body back onto the ladder. He called for an ambulance on the handheld and quickly scrambled down himself. When he got close to the bottom, Beth swung herself into the water to make room for him. Lowering himself in, he wrestled Tommy’s body over his shoulder in a firefighter’s carry and made his way back up. Beth followed.
Too late! He thought. Too late again!
And for Tommy, it was too late. Officer Wheldon, having gotten him up and out, worked desperately, pumping his chest and applying mouth to mouth resuscitation to no avail. The ambulance arrived and Tommy’s body was whisked away. They would also try to resuscitate him, but they’d end up calling his death long before they reached the hospital.
It may not yet be too late for Beth, though. At least he had arrived before she’d gone under too. The two of them were alone now, the half-drowned girl standing there before him. She looked pathetic, covered in oily goo, tears streaming down her face. He’d see her home safely. That was at least something he could accomplish.
But sometimes, just when one thinks that life cannot possibly shovel on anything more, well, that’s exactly the time that it does, and the Perkins place was not quite finished with either of them that night.
“Beth?” Jack asked softly. “You okay, Beth?” Something about the way that she was staring off behind him.
“We have to go,” she said. “They want us to go.”
She spoke in short, slow sentences as if she was in a daze, and she wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. Was she in shock? Of course she was, but there was something else there too. And then he knew!
“You can see them, can’t you, honey?”
“I can see them,” she answered. “They’re right behind you. They’re saying they’ve been with you for days now.”
“What do they wan—?” Jack was interrupted by Topo Gigo’s sharp barking coming from the edge of the forest. It sounded like he was near the stream.
“We have to go,” Beth answered, wiping her face with one greasy, muddy fist.
“Go?” Jack asked.
“Down there.” She pointed in the direction of the stream. “They want us to dig.”
She didn’t wait for an answer but turned and headed off into the darkness.
“They’re going to show us… ” Her voice trailed off.
Jack couldn’t see Chris and Johnny, but he knew that they had been there, could sense that they’d moved on ahead, could see that Beth was clearly following some invisible (to him) lead. She didn’t look at the ground as she walked; she had, in fact, forgotten the flashlight that now hung limply at her side. Instead, she looked straight ahead, shaking her head and nodding at times, deftly stepping over downed branches and through the underbrush. He followed as best he could, the light of his own flashlight cutting through the evening. He tried to see what it was that she followed, but the beam fell on nothing.
He quickly caught up to her, and, minutes later, they broke through the underbrush and onto the gentle slope of grass that led to the stream. Topo bounded up to them, excitedly wagging his tail.
“Drop it,” Beth commanded.
The St. Bernard, sensing the seriousness in her tone, immediately lay down and dropped something at her feet. It was a bone! Officer Wheldon suspected it was a femur and it looked too large to be that of any animal one might expect to find out here.
“He killed them there,” Beth said and pointed to the stream. “That’s why you couldn’t find any evidence. The water washed the blood away. It washed everything away.”
And then she cocked her head as if she was listening to something.
“Okay,” she said to someone Jack could not see. And then to Jack: “They were not the only ones. We have to go up there. They want us to follow them.” She pointed to the tree-line above the stream.
“Hold on just a minute,” Jack said. He shined his flashlight around until he saw what he was looking for. He didn’t have far to go, nor did it take him long to gather a handful of branches roughly the thickness of his thumb. Bringing them back, he dug into the soft mud by the bank of the stream and planted two of them in an X configuration.
“I’ll come back tomorrow,” he explained. “When it’s light enough to see better.”
But Beth was already off, heading for the tree-line. Topo followed anxiously.
In this way, Chris and Johnny in the lead, followed by Beth and Topo Gigio, Jack was led to seven separate locations in the woods. Each of them was within a hundred yards of the other. Jack marked each of them with the same X made out of branches. He prayed they’d remain in place throughout the night but he’d dig up every inch of this forest if he had to.
Finally, they arrived at an eighth location. This was obviously the place where Topo Gigio had bee
n digging. There was already a hole about two feet deep in the soft earth of the forest. Jack prepared to plant his X at the head of the spot. Beth looked off to the left and nodded.
“Here?” she asked. And then, “Okay.”
Turning around, she faced Officer Wheldon.
“No,” she said, indicating the sticks. “You have to dig here. Do it now. They’re saying it’s not deep.”
“Here, hold this,” he answered, offering up the flashlight. “Shine it on the ground so that I can see what I’m doing.”
Officer Wheldon dropped to his knees and began scraping the dirt to the side, gently, so as not to miss anything. As he sifted through the earth, he began to feel something hard beneath his hands. Gently, gently he continued to dig until he had unearthed several more bones.
“Keep digging,” Beth commanded. “But not there. Over here.” She pointed just to the north of where he had been digging.
Jack shifted slightly and resumed digging. A moment later, he unearthed something that felt like metal. It was metal! It was a fine silver chain with a pocket watch attached to it. Having freed it from the earth, he pulled his handkerchief out of his pants pocket and used it to scrub at the dirt-encrusted casing.
“There’s something engraved on this!” he said excitedly.
He left the gravesite and stepped over to where Beth was.
“Give me the light,” he said. “Let me—” and then he stopped dead, incredulous.
The inscription on the watch was there, plain as day:
Awarded to Jeff Spencer
With grateful appreciation
For fifteen years of service.
First Federal Bank of Goshen.
1965
That son-of-a-bitch! He must have dropped it when he was digging this grave! But if these were all graves, who were the people buried here? He sat in stunned silence and went over in his mind the list of children gone missing through the years. There was the Reynolds child, a fourteen year-old boy, thought to have run away with his girlfriend. Jack’s stomach churned. And then Kenneth Hubbard, who they figured for having washed down the river just after the ice broke up that year. And then there was… His mind was reeling! Son-of-a-bitch!
It would take days to dig up these graves and process the contents, let alone to identify the bodies, but Officer Wheldon had his evidence. At last he could push forward with some sort of filing, and this monster would be off the streets. In the end, it had been Beth Riley who had saved him that night instead of the reverse. Jack felt a rush of gratitude flooding in. He looked at Beth, intending to express just that and realized that, having finished this infernal task, she’d gone back to quietly weeping. Good Lord, what she had been through on this night! Enough was enough.
Quickly he finished marking the shallow grave, and then, taking her hand, led her back through the underbrush toward the house. When they were nearing the well, she stopped.
“They’re gone,” she said matter-of-factly. “All gone.”
“I know that,” he soothed, and he guessed he did know. He no longer felt any energy of any kind.
“Chris and Johnny… have moved on. Jesse’s not here anymore either.”
“Jesse?” Officer Wheldon asked.
“Tommy’s gone too.” The pain in her face hurt his heart. This was the frustration of his life. Too many times he’d had to look into the face of some hopeful parent and inform them that their loved one was gone. Too many times he had struggled to find the words and to provide the kind of answers that rarely brought comfort or closure but were all he had to offer. And tonight, he’d do it all over again. He still had to make a visit to the Cooper house. It would be a long night.
“Let’s get you home,” he said quietly, tugging at her hand. But she made no move to go.
“There’s one more thing,” she answered.
And then she did something that Jack Wheldon thought was impossible after all he’d seen tonight. She shocked him yet again.
Walking over to the well, she retrieved the pieces of the skull. She brought them back and delivered them into his keeping.
“I did it,” she said. “It was an accident, but I broke the window. I was scared. I didn’t want my father to find out, so I dropped it down there.”
“Beth?” Officer Wheldon was incredulous. He didn’t believe this story for a minute!
She planted her feet and looked him square in the face.
“Tommy was helping me get it out.”
“Beth! Are you sure that’s the story you want to go with?”
“I’m sure,” she answered, and he could see by the set of her chin and the steel in her eyes that she meant it. “Tommy Cooper was a good person and I want everyone in this town to remember him just that way.”
Officer Wheldon winced, but he got it just the same. He understood. He didn’t know exactly what had happened, but he had a good idea and if this was what she felt she had to do to make it right, he’d make it as easy on her as he was able.
“Come see me in a day or two,” he answered. “And I’ll take your confession.” In the meantime, he had plenty to do. He’d be a much older man by the time Beth arrived in his office later that week.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The following weeks passed by in blur as they dug the forest gravesite and collected the evidence they needed to put Jeff Spencer away for good. Much of the evidence was circumstantial but, when seen as a whole, painted a very damning picture. All those years the place had lain empty. All those years that, as the President of the bank that owned it, Jeff Spencer had doubled as overseer. He had the means and the opportunity. When they’d brought forward enough to convince the District Attorney, the charges were filed and Jeff Spencer had been arrested. And now that Mr. Spencer had been exposed, there had been a string of young men who’d come forward with allegations of sexual abuse at his hands. Where were they all these years? Why had they remained silent? It was confirmation of the motive, though.
And why had Mr. Spencer changed his M.O.? Eight shallow gravesites revealed eleven bodies, but Chris and Johnny had been carelessly tossed in the well. Jack reasoned that at that point, he’d wanted to be caught. That was often the way it was with this type of case. He suspected that Mr. Spencer had wanted to be sure that he received full credit for his grizzly career and had perhaps been afraid that, given his age, he might die first if something weren’t done to speed up the process. It made sense, given how quickly he’d confessed after his arrest and his seeming inability to stop talking about it ever since. He bragged about it to anyone that would listen, cellmates, press, attorneys—even the judge. It was as if he’d gotten tired of NOT talking about it all those years.
He’d been convicted of thirteen murders and twenty-three counts of lewd and lascivious acts committed against minors. The judge sentenced him to life and one day in Riker’s Island, up with the big boys, the hard-core criminals. Jack thought justice would be done in there. It never happened, though. On the day that he was to be moved from the county lock-up to Riker’s, someone put a bullet in his head. The shot slammed into him just as they were loading him in the car. It came from the woods next to the complex. Hell of a shot, really, straight and true. Jack couldn’t blame anyone for wanting to kill Jeff Spencer, but he lamented the fact that the bastard never served one day in Riker’s.
Jack Wheldon resigned the next day. Let someone else straighten this mess out. Let someone else have to press charges against whatever parent had pulled the trigger. He was tired. Besides, in the past few months, he’d pretty much tied up all the loose ends of the case, and it was the case of his lifetime.
All of the bodies had been identified, all of the parents informed. Each and every one of the victims was given a proper burial and the well had been filled in. It had claimed its last victim.
Kathy Spencer had been oddly quiet throughout the entire process. She was rarely seen outside of her house and she had refused to speak to the press. Later on that same year, she’d filed for divor
ce from Jeff Spencer Jr. and moved back into her parent’s house. She’d come full circle, from the caretaker’s daughter, all the way up to being the reigning Queen of the royal family of Goshen, and back to being the caretaker’s daughter once again. Poor, poor Kathy.
Nathanial’s skull was returned to his tomb and the window replaced. Once again, the sun’s rays filtered lazily in every morning. And sometimes… just now and then, the pinwheels in front of the tomb could be seen spinning brisk circles, even though the air was calm, not a breeze to be felt.
For her part in all of this, Beth had served six months in a psychiatric hospital upstate. The diagnosis was Schizophrenia along with an unhealthy obsession with death. She served her time, took the prescribed medicines, and told the doctors what they wanted to hear. She had also returned to live with her parents for a time.
Nathanial's Window- The Wrath of Jesse Eades Page 10