by J-F. Dubeau
Slowly, Penny turned to look at her. Her face was a visage of impossible distress. Seeing such despair, Venus broke from her trance. She took a step, then rushed forward to take her friend in her arms.
The girls remained entwined for a long time. Venus stroked her friend’s hair while Penny cried herself into near senselessness. Before long, the younger girl broke down too. Gabrielle LaForest had cooked for her, had welcomed her for sleepovers, had driven her and Penny to school. In the last year and a half, the dead woman had been more present in her life than Venus’s own parents.
Eventually both girls pulled away from each other. Penny, who had always been more practical, was the first to break the silence.
“Can . . . Can you get Abraham?” asked Penny between sobs. Venus quickly nodded and walked to the door. “I just want to hang out here for a little while with you guys.”
The big teenager walked in, his head held low. He was surprised when Penny leaned against him. The three friends sat in silence. Periodically, Penny would break down in fits of tears. This lasted perhaps two hours before Penelope would weep herself to sleep, exhausted by the emotional toll.
“Where’s Ms. Hazelwood?” whispered Venus. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”
“She said she had to go. She asked if either of us could take Penny for the night since she has no one in the village to take care of her. There’s room at the farm and Pa won’t mind, but . . .”
“No,” she said. “Penny’s slept over dozens of times. I’ll take care of her.”
“All right. I’ll call your mom to pick you guys up,” Abraham announced, standing to get to the phone.
“Is that necessary?” she asked, remembering her fight with her mother.
“Yeah,” he said, picking up the receiver. “There’s still a killer out there.”
DANIEL
DAN HAD FIGURED it out. It had taken the better part of an afternoon, tearing through the house like a madman, but he’d finally remembered where he’d seen the strange symbol on Chris Hagen’s business card before. He hadn’t seen the winged hourglass since he was a child, but once he remembered where it had come from, it took him but a minute to find the artifact.
He pulled a large trunk out from underneath his father’s bed. It was an unusual piece of furniture for a practical person like Stephen Crowley to own. An ornate and weathered antique carved out of several different essences of wood to create what was more a work of art than a storage container.
A chill went up Daniel’s spine as his fingers traced over the inlaid design on the cover of the chest: an hourglass with stylized wings. The symbol and the chest were holdovers from a long time ago. From a time when father and son weren’t the house’s only occupants. The box didn’t fit with Stephen Crowley’s tastes, but it would have easily caught the eye of Dan’s mother, Margaret Crowley.
What could be hidden inside the trunk? Maybe it was the souvenirs that his father had elected to keep from his ex-wife. Maybe the box itself was the only souvenir. Maybe it had nothing to do with Dan’s mother at all. The teenager knew he would never find out by just looking at the lid. Somehow this trunk and Chris Hagen were connected. So after another moment’s trepidation, he opened the box.
Inside were stacks of documents. Files, photos, letters, all sorts of information that had been tossed pell-mell into the chest. The papers were yellowed and delicate, the pictures faded. The whole thing smelled of salt and mothballs.
“Sandmen?” Dan whispered to himself.
One of the first papers to grab his attention was a list of names. It was scrawled hastily in what was unmistakably his father’s handwriting. There were two rows of names, though one was almost completely blacked out with a marker.
The names in the first column were all familiar to him—members of his father’s social club. Bergeron, LaFrenière, Parcs, all people who held influence in Saint-Ferdinand.
In the second column, only one name remained unmarred: Harry Peterson. At the top of the list, in big block letters was the word CRAFTSMEN.
Dan set the list aside and picked up the next piece of paper, a yellowed letter signed by William Bergeron. The letterhead bore the winged hourglass symbol, the word SANDMEN below it in a fancy serif typeface. All very official looking. The letter itself was barely legible, but before he could make sense of it, Dan’s attention was drawn to something else. A photograph. From the looks of it, the picture was taken twenty years ago. It showed a carnival or circus that must have been on a field somewhere, as evidenced by the farmhouse in the background on the edge of the photo. In front of a popcorn cart stood a familiar young woman, holding the hand of a little boy. He was about five, with oddly familiar features. Next to the boy was a young and dynamic Stephen Crowley.
As his mind struggled to process what he was seeing, Dan was startled by the sound of the front door opening. Immediately he closed the trunk and slid it back under the bed. With quiet haste, he made his way to the bathroom and started the tap, splashing water to make it seem like he had been washing his hands.
“Dan?” his father’s voice called out as he came up the stairs.
“Just a minute!” the teenager replied as he ripped a hand towel from a hook on the wall. He stepped out of the bathroom, making a show of drying his hands. “What’s up?”
Stephen Crowley looked like he’d walked to hell and back barefoot. His eyes were sunken, and his short graying hair was tousled badly, having been tilled by nervous fingers. With his undone tie and soil-stained shirt, the man appeared as if he might have forgotten how to care for himself at all.
“Look, buddy,” he said apologetically. “You’re gonna have to have dinner without me. I’ve got work tonight.”
“What happened?” Dan was smart enough to recognize that there was a particular tension in his father’s voice, an urgency that signaled something important was going on.
“There’s been another murder. A bad one.” Crowley’s haunted look confirmed the truth of the statement. “There’s a . . . monster out there. I want you to stay in, all right?”
Being raised in Saint-Ferdinand meant living in the shadow of the Saint-Ferdinand Killer, a beast that had taken at least one life per year for almost two decades. Before Finnegan was caught, people had accepted that a handful of them would most likely disappear at the hands of the murderer. Property values had plummeted and remained low. A slow exodus had drained the town of a third of its residents. Yet Dan couldn’t remember a day when his father, the man most aware of the area’s danger, had so emphatically demanded that he avoid the outdoors. If Dan hadn’t known his father better, he would have sworn the man was terrified.
“All right. Where are you going?”
“Following a lead.” Crowley quickly changed into civilian clothes: denim pants and a plaid shirt. He did, however, keep his police belt and sidearm.
“Dad . . . who died?”
“Gabrielle LaForest.”
“Oh.”
Dan hadn’t known Gabrielle. But his own friend Bernard’s father had disappeared two summers ago and was only found the previous week in one of Finnegan’s freezers. Yet the tone in which his father said the name couldn’t help but make Dan feel as if this particular murder was something of a different nature. Something alien. It hit Dan that he, and probably all of Saint-Ferdinand, had gotten used to the killings because, despite their obvious horror, they were familiar. It was the devil they’d known, but now it seemed there was another on the loose.
As Stephen finished buckling his belt, the phone on his night-stand rang. Dan started walking across the room to answer it, but his father cut him off, answering it himself.
“Crowley,” he said. “Hey, Will . . . I don’t care. This is important.”
Stephen Crowley’s temper rose quickly as he listened. Dan could see the skin on his father’s neck turn crimson. As quick as Crowley succumbed to anger, there were only three things that could frustrate him quite this fast, and Dan had spent the greater par
t of his teenage years learning what they were: being disobeyed, being contradicted, and personal failure.
“Listen to me very carefully, Will. You will drag your drunk carcass to this meeting, and you will drink coffee and sober up every step of your way there. If you don’t, I will personally tie you to a tree for the night and use you as bait.” Crowley wasn’t exaggerating. Dan knew it, and Will probably knew it too. “You knew what you were getting into; we don’t get sick days!”
He hung up and turned to his son once more. No one in Saint-Ferdinand wanted to mess with Stephen Crowley when he was in this kind of mood, especially not the boy who knew him best.
“You!” He pointed at Dan while walking to the stairs. “Not a foot out of this house!”
“Yes, sir!” Dan saluted, but the attempt at mirth fell flat. His father walked out the front door and loudly locked it behind him, leaving Daniel alone to contemplate what was going on.
Briefly, he considered looking online for more information on Gabrielle LaForest’s murder. Knowing his father’s pathological hatred of the media, though, he figured no information would hit the television or papers for a long while. Then he contemplated going back upstairs to take another look at the trunk under the bed. Maybe discover who the boy in the picture was, or what the man who had called his father had to do with it.
“Will,” Dan mused out loud. “William Bergeron.”
Why would his father, hot on the trail of a dangerous murderer, need to meet with Bergeron? Why would he threaten a grieving father and family friend?
Before common sense could overcome his decision, Dan ran downstairs, grabbed his car keys, and rushed outside.
It wasn’t difficult for Daniel to figure out his father’s destination. The original plan was to follow his old man discreetly. It wouldn’t have been that hard in such a rural area. He knew the roads well enough to drive without headlights, and there were no streetlamps except on Main Street. At this time of night, even his white Civic would be almost invisible.
Even that was too much of a risk, though. Dan knew the fury he’d unleash for this level of disobedience, and after a bit of thinking, he realized there were only three places his father might go: the station, which was improbable, as he’d just changed out of his uniform. The cave on Finnegan’s property, since he seemed so obsessed with it. But in the end, the most likely place was the church.
If Dan’s father was meeting with Bergeron at this time, it surely related to the village’s welfare; the two of them never met officially without the rest of the congregation. Whether it was Mrs. Bergeron going into early labor, someone disappearing because of the Saint-Ferdinand Killer, or even simply when there was an unusually large snowfall, Stephen Crowley always went to church to meet with his peers. It’s simply what they did in emergencies.
Gabrielle LaForest’s death certainly qualified.
During the quiet, nervous drive to the village proper, Daniel contemplated his choice in turning down membership to his father’s social club. How much more would he know about what was going on if he’d simply said yes?
Main Street was empty. The only business still open at this hour was Kelsey’s Tavern, and that dive was far down the road, in the opposite direction of the church. Daniel made a point of parking on a side street and walking the rest of the distance to the steps of the Jonathan Moore Church. Stephen’s familiar black SUV, along with the cars of several other important villagers, was parked in front, confirming his suspicions. Every step he took, Dan felt like eyes were watching him. Between the bright white sneakers he wore and the echo each of his steps made on the stone stairs, he expected someone to shout at him at any moment.
Thankfully, there was no one to call him out. Only the moon and the impeccable silence kept him company as he snuck to the large oak doors that dominated the front of the building.
Daniel had been inside a few times. He also knew a fair bit about the structure’s history. Originally called the Saint-Ferdinand Church, after the same saint for whom the village had been named, it had been rechristened the Jonathan Moore Church in the mid-1870s, after a prominent member of the congregation. It was the largest building on Main Street, but not the oldest in the village. That honor belonged to Pascal Begin’s farmhouse, which, while having been renovated extensively, had kept most of its stone facade for over two centuries.
An interesting feature of the church was a little-known secret about its front doors. Most villagers assumed that the large oak panels were kept unlocked to offer a more welcoming atmosphere and be an example of what kind of village Saint-Ferdinand wished to be. The truth was, the lock was broken. It had been for decades, and the pieces required to repair it were too expensive and difficult to obtain. So Dan was able to enter quickly and quietly.
Inside, the teenager made a point to ignore the conversation echoing through the vast ceiling of the main chamber. He knew all the voices and could have made sense of the words had he paid attention, but his focus was on the second-floor mezzanine. It was designed for the choir and offered both a good view of the altar and wonderful acoustics. In that sense, it might have been the worst place to quietly hide and observe, but Daniel had been in the choir as a child. He knew that there was a spot in the corner where sound didn’t carry at all. It was meant for the choir director to stand and give instructions without his words interrupting the church services.
It was in this spot that Dan settled to watch as his notion of the Sandmen was shattered.
Eyes unblinking, the police inspector’s son observed as an assembly of the village’s most distinguished, most-respected individuals stood in a circle around the altar. There, where every child baptized in Saint-Ferdinand had lain, the elite were bent down over a large flailing ball of fur. It was one of Ms. Livingston’s rabbits. Almost every kid in town had owned one at some point or other, but this one was not intended to be a pet.
Instead Mrs. Bergeron held it down while the ancient Gédéon LaFrenière plunged a thin blade into the animal’s neck. Blood erupted from the wound, but it wasn’t enough to silence the dying animal. Shrieks resonated on the church’s walls, similar sounds to what a child being burned alive might make.
This mockery of a holy choir lasted only a minute longer before LaFrenière, his wrinkled face painted with disgust and annoyance, plunged the knife into the animal’s heart. Once the unsavory task had been completed, he put the knife down with reverence, onto a plate covered by a clean white linen sheet decorated with an embroidered winged hourglass. Flowers of crimson red erupted where drops of blood had fallen.
“What now?” The gruff and unpleasant voice of Hector Alvarez had pierced the fresh silence. As the owner of a slaughterhouse just outside of town and the meat shop and deli on Main Street, he was accustomed to blood and the cries of animals.
“Now we hope that a fresh kill will bring Finnegan’s prisoner forth,” LaFrenière said.
He sliced open the belly of the rabbit, playing the tip of his fancy ceremonial knife in the animal’s entrails. As disgusting as the sight was to Dan, there was nothing in the old man’s behavior that came as a surprise. Gédéon had long ago lost his family, bitterly outliving everyone he’d ever known and loved. If a soul had an expiration date, his was long past.
“Hmph,” Stephen Crowley scoffed. “For once, I’m glad you’re all such idiots.”
If the inspector was trying to get a rise out of his peers, it was a success. Considering what he’d just witnessed, Dan silently cheered his old man on.
“Pardon?” Beatrice Bergeron asked, the insult having bitten deep.
“You think killing a rabbit is going to bring a god of hate and death to our doorstep? You’re all morons. Animals like that die by the hundreds in the woods no more than twenty yards behind this church.”
“A sacrifice to attract a god,” LaFrenière explained, vitriol dripping from his voice like the blood on his knife. “What’s so hard to understand about that, Crowley?”
“That ain’t no sacrifice
.” Stephen thrust his chin toward the baptistry. “The Craftsmen knew what sacrifice meant. Finnegan knows what sacrifice means! It means loss! It means giving up something important. That? That’s just a dumb animal. This is why we’ve always been a step behind them and always will be! Besides, what if this had worked? Have you thought of that? Have you?”
The old man frowned, and the butcher stepped beside him in support. Beatrice’s face was also getting darker, her mannerisms more agitated.
“Listen, you incompetent moron!” Beatrice exploded with anger. “This god is the key to getting my daughter back. If you think I’m worried about a little collateral damage getting in the way, you are sorely mistaken!”
“Come now. No reason to lose our tempers,” William interceded. His voice still maintained a hint of a slur.
“Weren’t you listening?” Crowley spat out, volatile and angry. “If that stupid ritual had worked, we’d all be like Gabrielle right now. All of us! Guts, blood, and bones, everywhere in this church! This is why we have McKenzie!”
Stephen waved his arms, pointing around him for emphasis. Daniel ducked down, making sure no one noticed him.
“Well, maybe if you’d been able to bring Randy here tonight, things would be different, Crowley,” LaFrenière said, his own anger rising to match the inspector’s.
“You think I didn’t ask?” Crowley stepped forward, his mass and height casting a shadow over the frail old man.
“Ask? And you call us idiots, Stephen? If you were half the man you pretend to be, McKenzie would be here whether he wished to or not. No! If you did your fucking job, we’d have the god by now!”
The old man didn’t have time to blink before Stephen Crowley’s massive fist rammed the words back into his mouth. Blood sprayed as LaFreniere’s lip split. The speed and might of the assault made Daniel gasp. The teenager stifled his breath, convinced the entire group had heard him. However, the assembled villagers were more focused on Stephen Crowley’s handling of LaFrenière. A second punch, to the old man’s gut this time, had already been delivered.