“Did you talk to him about his work? His cases?”
“Some. I went out with him on calls near the end. He needed help, and I wanted the experience.”
“What about Jet Black?” Stride asked. “Did Tom ever talk about what happened at the Novitiate?”
“No, he was pretty sensitive about it.”
“How so?”
“Well, Percy was his friend. I think he was protecting him. The feeling around town was, let’s get past it. Pin a medal on Percy’s chest and get on with life, you know? Tom handled everything himself. When you needed somebody in town to get things done, Tom was the guy. He even arranged for Black’s ashes to be buried in the cemetery of his own church, because Ginnie didn’t want anything to do with Jet at that point.”
“Understandable.”
“Why does any of this matter?” Gandy asked.
“It may not matter at all, but Percy is dead, and Kelli’s a suspect in a murder. Everything that happened to them started at the Novitiate. I thought Tom may have had insights about it that no one else did.”
“If he did, he didn’t share them with anyone.”
“I talked to Anna,” Stride said. “She told me that Tom kept personal files. Notes and copies of work he did for the county. She said that the sheriff wanted them transferred over here.”
Gandy nodded. He poked his thumb at a wooden door behind him. “They’re still in the storage closet. Banker’s boxes. They’re not official, so I didn’t think they belonged in the regular files. I keep meaning to write to the county attorney to see if we should have them destroyed.”
“Can you do me a favor, Neal? Can you check on something? I’d like to know if there’s a file on Jet Black in those boxes.”
The coroner shook his head. He didn’t get up from the chair. “The sheriff would kill me if I let you see anything like that, but it doesn’t matter. I can tell you right now that there’s not.”
“You’ve checked?”
He nodded. “Yeah, Percy came here to see me not long after Tom died. He was looking for the same thing. Wanted to know if Tom kept notes about Jet and the Novitiate. He said he was afraid the media might get hold of them or that county employees might try to cash in by selling crap on e-Bay. He thought we should secure the records. We took a look through the boxes together.”
“And?” Stride asked.
“And nothing. There wasn’t anything to find. Tom didn’t have anything in his personal files about Jet Black. If you ask me, Percy looked relieved.”
19
Stride called his uncle’s number as he left the county courthouse. He’d parked four blocks away near the river. “Richard, it’s me. Do me a favor, will you? See if there’s a police car in front of your house.”
He waited as his uncle put down the phone. A few seconds later, Richard was back on the line. “In fact, there is. What do they want?”
“Me,” Stride said.
“Any particular reason?”
“I think Sheriff Weik wants to give me a personal escort to the county line. I’ve overstayed my welcome.”
“I guess that’s my fault,” Richard replied.
“Don’t worry about it. You were right. I was a part of this thing as soon as Percy pulled out that gun in front of me.” He climbed into his truck and headed south on the back roads. He stayed clear of Main Street. “I’m on my way over there. I think it’s better if I don’t use the front door this time.
His uncle chuckled. “Come through the back. I’ll leave the door open.”
Five minutes later, Stride parked in a dead-end turnaround at the base of Smalley Street, where a walking trail led away from the river. He tramped through a snowy, fenceless yard and reached the back of his uncle’s house from the west. The gray afternoon was losing light. He let himself inside and followed the shadowy hallway.
Richard waited in the living room with a tumbler of brandy. The curtains were closed. Stride pushed the heavy fabric aside and glanced at the street, where a Shawano police car sat with its engine running. He didn’t have a lot of time.
“So what do you think?” Richard asked.
Stride sat down. “I don’t think Kelli murdered Hamlin, but if I were on a jury and a prosecutor laid out everything I know so far, I’d vote to convict.”
“It’s that bad?” his uncle asked.
“It’s worse,” Stride said. “She told me something that no one else knows. She wanted to convince me she was innocent, but most people would say it makes her look guilty.”
“What did she tell you?”
Stride shook his head. “I can’t say. Sorry.”
His uncle shrugged. “Yeah, I get it. You got me thinking today. I was remembering Greg Hamlin back in school. I feel guilty that I missed what kind of a person he was. He always showed the world this big smile, but smiles can be deceiving.”
“Don’t blame yourself.”
“Well, I knew he had a ferocious temper when someone crossed him. I knew he was contemptuous of anyone who was weaker than he was. Those were red flags. I should have pushed harder to find out how he treated his students.”
His uncle frowned and sipped his brandy. He put down the tumbler and picked up an old vinyl-clad volume from the coffee table. It was a Shawano middle-school yearbook from his teaching days. He flipped through the pages. “Twenty years ago. Crazy.”
“They go by fast,” Stride said.
Richard propped open the book and gestured for Stride to take it. “See that picture on the left page? That’s Hamlin with Jet Black and Ginnie Porter. They look fine, don’t they? You’d never know what was really going on.”
Stride studied the photo, which was part of a collage of typical yearbook memories. Greg Hamlin stood on an athletic field. He was tall and handsome, with buzzed hair, a trimmed mustache, and the kind of lean, muscular physique you built with hours running track and chasing a tennis ball. His arrogance wafted like a bad odor out of the paper. His long arms were slung around two children, with his big hands pinching their shoulders. Ginnie was on the right; he recognized her face, which had changed little over time. And Jet Black. He was a spitting image of what his son Mike looked like now. Same long, greasy hair. Same scrawny features.
Two kids. One adult teacher. Plastering grins on their faces for the camera.
This was the first intersection. School. Their paths collided back then and would collide again in a way that neither Jet nor Hamlin could have anticipated. Two decades later, they would both be dead, tortured, with the word TEUFEL carved into their skin.
“Poison gets passed down,” Richard said.
“Yes, it does.”
“Honestly, I worry about Jet’s son.”
Stride looked up from the yearbook. “Mike seems like a good kid. Ginnie seems to be working hard to give him different values.”
“Maybe so, but Jet had him under his thumb for a decade. That’s a hard legacy to get past.” Richard retrieved his brandy and swirled it, watching the amber liquid cling to the side of the crystal. “I remember something that happened a few years ago. I was having a drink in one of the local bars. Things got out of hand.”
“What happened?”
“Jet happened. He was a mean drunk, and he was hammered. Small squirt, but he made up for it by fighting dirty. He got into it with a guy who was wearing a T-shirt Jet didn’t like. Jet started hurling slurs. Homophobic stuff. It got physical, and the two started breaking chairs. Jet jumped the guy and poured hot pepper sauce into his eyes. Nearly blinded him.”
“That sounds like Jet,” Stride said.
“Me, I was watching his son Mike the whole time. The kid was transfixed. He saw everything Jet did, couldn’t take his eyes away. What does it do to a boy to see his father act with that kind of perpetual cruelty? And God knows what Jet did to the kid and his mom when they were at home. I saw a policewoman take Mike away, and I was hoping the court would strip the kid from his parents once and for all. That’s not a slam against Ginnie, but if s
he didn’t have the courage to walk away herself, I hated to think of her son in that environment.”
Stride shook his head. “Jet brought Mike to the bar with him?”
“Yeah, it was like he wanted an audience. Pretty sick.”
Stride studied the yearbook photograph again, drawing a mental line from the child with Greg Hamlin’s arm around his shoulder to the predator kidnapping and torturing Kelli for days at the Novitiate. Kelli had said that Jet wanted her to be impressed. He wanted to dominate her. That was what Jet wanted from the entire world, including his wife and son.
He heard his uncle’s voice in his head. It was like he wanted an audience.
“Son of a bitch,” Stride murmured.
“What is it?”
He didn’t answer, but he realized that he’d been wrong. Kelli, Percy, and Tom weren’t the only ones who knew what had happened at the Novitiate. There was one other person who’d been there the whole time. The person who started it. The person who died there.
Jet Black. Jet was there, too.
What if Jet hadn’t come alone to the Novitiate each night?
What if he’d forced his son to watch?
Kelli Andrews sat in her car. She was parked in a grove of evergreens on a dirt road near the Wolf River. No one could see her. Darkness had begun to fall. Every few minutes, she turned on the engine to warm the interior, and then she turned it off and sat in silence until the chill crept inside her clothes again.
She was angry at Percy. Angry that he’d lost faith. Angry that he’d left her alone. Even so, she’d run out of blame for what he did. She hated to think what he had gone through these past weeks—to stare at his own wife and believe she was a serial killer. To cover up her gruesome crime and then break under the weight of his guilt. If only he’d had the courage to confront her and ask for the truth. She would have told him that what had happened in the ruins of the Novitiate was an aberration. It would never happen again. She would never kill again.
She wondered if that was true. In reality, she didn’t understand the animal she’d become then. She had no way of knowing whether the same beast was still inside her. Abuse had a way of re-shaping the mind. The unthinkable became possible, and then it became the only way out. Even when she’d gone to therapists, she had never admitted what really went on inside the ruins. Nightmares plagued her. So did flashbacks. She would spend days—weeks—withdrawing inside herself and shutting Percy out, leaving him to wonder what was happening inside her head.
The fights. The shouts.
Why won’t you let me in?
She had no answer for him. The more he pushed, the more she withdrew. He knew she was still tormented. He’d seen it. There had been that time when she’d discovered a ghost spider climbing the wall of their bathroom. He’d awakened to her screams and found her destroying the bathroom—wall, sink, toilet, mirror—with repeated blows from a baseball bat. Out of control. Unreachable. She’d terrified him.
There was nothing in her eyes, he said. Her eyes were stone.
It was a short leap for him to believe that she was capable of another episode of psychotic violence. She imagined him climbing inside the camper. Seeing the body. The blood. The same word carved into a man’s chest. He would have known in his heart that she was guilty. Greg Hamlin pushed her over the brink, back into the arms of the Devil.
But that wasn’t what had happened. Was it?
She couldn’t freeze something like that out of her consciousness. She told herself that she was innocent. She had never met Hamlin. Never talked to him. Never killed him. This was someone else’s crime.
If not her, then who?
Kelli eyed the phone on the seat beside her. There was one call she could make, but she didn’t dare open that door. Not after all this time. They’d made a pact between them—a blood promise—and sworn never to break it. Some secrets had to stay buried forever.
And yet. If not her, then who?
She stared at her phone again. Before she could reach for it, the phone rang, making her jump. When she went to answer it, she saw a local number, but no name on the caller ID. She hesitated. This was her business phone. Only clients had this number for her.
“Hello?” she said.
“It’s me.”
Kelli recognized the voice and relaxed. “Oh, hi. How are you? Are you okay?”
“I don’t know. Not really.”
“What’s going on?” she asked.
“People are saying bad things about you.”
Kelli took a breath. “I know. I’m sorry about that.”
“I don’t like it. None of it’s true, is it?”
“No, of course not.”
“Good. I knew it. I didn’t believe any of it.”
Kelli knew there was more; she could hear it in the voice. “You don’t sound happy. Is something wrong?”
“Oh, you know. It’s the usual stuff. My Mom was going on about my dad again. How bad he was to her. The things he did. I get it, but I wish she’d just stop. It doesn’t help me.”
“I understand.”
“I really need to talk. Could we meet? Could I see you?”
Kelli closed her eyes. “It’s not a good time for me. I’m sorry.”
“Please. I need you.”
She knew she had to say no. Stride had told her to stay put until she heard from him. Even so, she couldn’t stop herself, because she needed to be a counselor again. That was what she loved to do; it was the only thing that had kept her sane. That was how she could forgive herself for what she’d done.
“Yes, all right,” Kelli said.
“The usual place? Half an hour? No one will see us.”
Kelli thought about driving back into Shawano, where people were hunting for her. She could avoid the north-south highway and stick to the country roads. The arts center was deserted at this time of year. They’d be alone. Counselor and patient. Adult and teenager.
“I’ll be there,” she said.
20
“Where’s Mike?” Stride asked.
Ginnie Black stood breathless in the middle of her menagerie. She’d been dusting and vacuuming the small house in a frenzy, as if it would never really be clean. As if no matter what she did, the dirt and germs would always be there. Dogs howled and rampaged around the house at the arrival of a stranger, but she did nothing to stop them. Seven sets of green cats’ eyes studied Stride suspiciously from perches on the furniture. The iguana warmed its leathery body under a heat lamp, as if Shawano were the same climate as a desert.
“He’s out,” she said.
“Where?”
“He said he was meeting a friend,” Ginnie replied. Her face was flushed.
“Who?” Stride asked.
“He didn’t tell me.”
Stride sat down without being invited. He had the old school yearbook from his uncle in his hands. The black fur of a cat on the same sofa pricked up at his presence. “Tell me something, Ms. Black. Does Mike speak any German?”
Ginnie rubbed an invisible stain on the coffee table with the heel of her palm. “He’s taken a couple years in school. So what?”
“I was wondering if he’d ever heard the word Teufel.”
She stopped rubbing long enough to stare at him. Then, looking away, she took a soft cloth and worked it around a glass vase filled with multi-colored beads. She held the vase high in the air, watching it sparkle. “It means Devil. So? Ich spreche Deutsch auch, Herr Stride. All these years after school, and I remember bits and pieces of a language I never need to use. I find that ironic.”
“Does the word mean anything to you?”
“Nothing at all.”
“What about to Mike?”
“Of course not. Why should it?”
“Whoever murdered Greg Hamlin carved the word Teufel into his chest,” Stride told her.
Ginnie dropped the vase.
It fell to the table and shattered into dozens of sharp pieces. Beads flew like a rainbow. Animals ran.
Stride jumped to his feet to help her. Three of the cats crept in to investigate, but she shooed them away. Ginnie retrieved a small cardboard box, and the two of them gathered shards of glass and colored beads from the carpet. She was careless, and one of the fragments cut her finger, drawing blood. She sucked the fingertip between her lips. Her eyes were wet with tears. She slid to the floor with her back against an old armchair and breathed loudly through her nose.
“What do you want from me?” Ginnie asked, her voice drained of life. “Go away. Please. I don’t know anything.”
Stride finished finding all the glass he could, and he put the box on the table. “I remembered something you said to me. You said Jet used to take Mike everywhere. Like a prisoner. He made him watch when he hunted and killed things.”
“So what?”
“So I need to know. Did Jet have two prisoners at the Novitiate? Was Mike there, too?”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“He was just a boy. He’s not in any trouble. But if there are things he saw—”
“He wasn’t there!” she snapped, with a sudden wildness bursting out of her throat. “He was here with me every night that week. Not with Jet. He doesn’t know a thing. Neither of us knew what was happening until Sheriff Weik came and told me that my husband was dead. That one of his cops had shot him. And you know what my reaction was? I was finally free.”
She was still bleeding. Stride grabbed a tissue and held it out to her. She pressed it against her skin, and a red stain bloomed through the soft cotton. He let her sit in silence.
“I understand how hard this is for you,” he said finally.
“No, you don’t understand anything.”
He held out the yearbook. “Do you remember this picture?”
She took the book from him and studied the old photograph of herself, Jet, and Greg Hamlin. Her eyes grew angry and hard. She slapped the yearbook shut and forced it back into his hands. “Our smiles were fake. Jet and I hated Hamlin. He was a son of a bitch who loved humiliating little kids.”
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