The dying man hesitated.
‘Go on!’ Cornelia cried again.
‘Give us a puff first,’ he croaked.
In hoarse starts, through puffs and choking fits over the course of an hour, the whole shameful story came out. Terrance Danby arrived at Hennessy House in late 1968. Ten years old, with the frozen look a deer gets in headlights and kids get when they’ve gone through a shocking loss. But behind the look lay a deep and abiding craftiness.
‘Spider eyes,’ Cornelia said.
‘That’s enough spider talk!’ Stubbins choked.
‘Just the same,’ she retorted smugly, ‘that’s what they were.’
Terrance found the library and started to read. Two, sometimes three books a day. Science, novels, biographies, newspapers, magazines. Anything that was printed. By the time he was twelve, he had read all of Shakespeare and the Bible, and was studying Latin and Greek. He had also developed a fearsome reputation in the house. One of the boys, a bully named Alan Haig, picked on Terrance because he was reading all the time. Terrance took it and took it—‘waiting in his web for the fly,’ as Cornelia put it.
Then one night as he was making his rounds, Stubbins found Haig strapped to a chair in an empty office. Haig was gagged with duct tape. The foreskin of the boy’s uncircumcised penis had been stapled to the chair seat. Haig refused to tell anyone what had happened.
‘But ya could see after that that he was terrified of Terrance, this kid half Haig’s size,’ Stubbins said. He stopped to consider his hands. There were dark blotches of purple on his skin.
‘You ain’t done by a long shot,’ Cornelia said. ‘Tell him.’
Stubbins took a deep, garbled breath. ‘We don’t know what happened for sure, sweetie. Maybe it’s best to let the story die.’
‘That ain’t right, Oscar, and you know it,’ his wife protested. ‘You don’t tell, it’s all a lie.’
‘What’s a lie?’ Gallagher asked, confused.
Stubbins waved one of his skeletal fingers at him and croaked, ‘We had nothing to do with it. We tried to tell people back then. … but no one would listen till it was too late.’
Stubbins said that the year Danby turned thirteen, the diocese appointed a young priest as headmaster in an effort to turn around an institution in chaos; six of the boys at Hennessy House had been expelled from school for one infraction or another in the prior semester. The priest was an authoritarian, bigger, stronger, faster and meaner than any boy in the orphanage.
‘If a kid got out of line, he’d haul the little shit off into his office,’ Stubbins said, men started coughing. He gestured wildly at his wife to continue.
‘He’d spank on ’em, even the biggest boys,’ Cornelia said. ‘Not that I’m against a good spanking when it’s done right, but—’ She paused and tongued her tusk again. ‘I don’t know how to say this, but after a while you got the feeling he liked it. Hitting ’em, I mean.’
‘And God only knows what else he liked,’ Stubbins gasped, then went on to say that the priest played favorites. And the biggest favorite was Terrance Danby. By the time Danby was fifteen, he was often overheard talking about books and languages with the priest, who was a Jesuit, a learned priest.
That same year, while Stubbins was making his nightly rounds, he found the beds of Danby and another boy empty. He rushed down to tell the priest, only to find Danby leading the crying boy back to the sleeping dormitory. Danby said the boy had been bad and the priest wanted to see him.
Over the course of the following two years, Stubbins had many nocturnal encounters with Danby and other boys who had been bad. While Hennessy House boys no longer got expelled from school, the orphanage became, in Cornelia Stubbins’ words, ‘dark and nasty. A loveless place.’
One day in the summer of 1975, Cornelia overheard Danby’s old nemesis, Alan Haig, telling another boy that he ‘was tired of it all. I’m going to the bishop or the police or something unless it stops.’
A week later Haig’s body was found in the woods north of Burlington. His throat had been slit. Danby was an immediate suspect, but the priest gave the teen an ironclad alibi. They had been hiking all day on the back side of Mount Mansfield.
During the course of the murder investigation, detectives got several of the boys to talk about life at Hennessy. Within months, the diocese decided to close the orphanage. Terrance Danby was seventeen and forced into the Army. The priest was quietly sent off to Central America to work as a missionary.
‘A missionary?’ Gallagher said, flashing on a memory of a photograph. ‘What was his name?’
‘McColl,’ Stubbins croaked. ‘Timothy McColl.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
‘LAWTON’S BECOME THIS FESTERING wound,’ Andie fretted. ‘I don’t know who to trust any more, Pat.’
It was nine o’clock on Wednesday night. She and Gallagher had lowered the blinds on all the kitchen windows. They sat at the kitchen table with her notes from the Lamont Powell file at the Waterbury hospital between them. She wore faded denim overalls, a white jersey embroidered with purple flowers, and makeup—the first he’d ever seen her use—to cover the bruising from the stitches.
‘You can trust me,’ Gallagher said.
‘Can I?’ she asked.
‘I’ve stuck by you, haven’t I?’
Andie nodded, reached over and squeezed his hand. ‘I’m sorry. I’m scared.’
Gallagher squeezed back ‘Apology accepted. What else happened to Powell?’
She turned the page in her notebook. ‘Listen to this: “Patient Powell was admitted after being found in his office tearing his upper canine teeth from his head with a pair of pliers.
‘ “Patient has spent the last three months alternately in a straitjacket and in a four-point restraint system in C Ward for the violently insane,” ’ she continued. ‘ “Patient Powell suffers prolonged periods of severe dementia where he claims to be visited by a Sioux squaw that he says haunts him because he helped murder her.
‘ “Powell claims the squaw hovers in front of him and tells him he is damned because”—and this is evidently a quote from Powell himself—“she was eaten not by fire, nor water nor earth, but by man.” ’
Gallagher spilled his coffee across the table. He stood up, stunned. ‘Say that last part again.’
‘ “She was eaten not by fire, nor water nor earth, but by man,” ’ she repeated.
Gallagher felt like he was going nuts and he had to tell someone. ‘I heard that in a dream the other night.’
Andie stared at him. ‘A dream?’
‘That’s right,’ Gallagher said, flushing at the idea. ‘I keep having these dreams of Many Horses and she talks to me.’
Andie allowed herself a smile. ‘Here I thought you were an atheist who didn’t believe in ghosts.’
‘I am an atheist who doesn’t believe in ghosts!’ he snapped. ‘And besides, it wasn’t like Casper came to call. It was just a dream, a coincidence, or maybe my mind’s trying to convince me that that’s what I heard in my dream. Déjà vu. I … I don’t know.’
Her amusement turned to concern. ‘I hate it when people ask me, but are you feeling all right?’
‘Yes,’ Gallagher insisted. ‘I’m … just keep reading.’
Andie watched him for several moments, then returned to her notes. ‘Here’s another quote: ‘Subsequent interviews with Patient Powell’s son, Lamont Jr. and two daughters—June of Glens Falls, New York, and Lenore of Poultney, Vermont—indicate he has been in a continually weakened mental condition since the passing of his wife, Katherine, in 1891. June and Lenore said Patient Powell dabbled in spiritualism and other tangents of the occult, as have many in recent years. But they assert that Patient Powell has never been west of Albany, much less to Indian territory.
‘ “Discussions with Lawton Police, while cursory, indicate no recent slayings of Indians. And indeed, no record of any Indian having lived in the town since the last Abenaki family left in 1874—” ’
�
�We know that’s not true,’ Gallagher interrupted.
‘The police must have been lying,’ Andie agreed. ‘Do you think Powell helped kill Many Horses?’
‘If he did, he didn’t do it alone,’ he replied. ‘If he was a single loony, they would not have covered up the killing. So there had to be several people involved. And the killing had to have been brutal. I mean, the guy digs out his teeth, cuts off his tongue and then hangs himself because of it, right?’
Andie picked up her pistol off the table and checked the safety. ‘And because of it, someone tries to run us off the road. I think Kerris, the mayor, Bernie Chittenden and God only knows how many others know some of this. At least about the fact that Lamont Powell went insane claiming he’d helped kill an Indian woman.’
‘Fits the cover-up theory,’ Gallagher agreed. ‘But is it enough motivation to hunt down and kill three people? I mean, I wouldn’t want to be known as the descendant of a murderer, but would I care enough to kill people who might reveal that knowledge to the world?’
‘I don’t know,’ Andie said. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing: no one in Kerns’ family has a cabin on a lake down near Cartersburg. Remember? That’s what he told Lieutenant Bowman outside Nyren’s house—that he’d gotten to the scene because a relative had a camp nearby and he heard the dispatch calls.’
‘Yeah, so?’
‘So I ran into Gavrilis, Kerns’ deputy, this afternoon on the way back from Waterbury. Phil doesn’t know anything about a cabin down south. The story Kerris gave Gavrilis is that he went fishing. Gavrilis also let me know that the chief’s marriage is on the rocks. His wife’s got a restraining order on him and he’s been away fishing, out of radio contact, two or three times the past few weeks, including the morning Olga’s house burned.’
‘And Kerris has a history of sexual violence,’ Gallagher said softly.
Andie tightened, but nodded. ‘I don’t think we’re close to having the whole story on this.’
‘You got a good chunk of it today, but not all,’ he said, then pondered something bothering him. ‘The Waterbury records say Mayor Powell dabbled in spiritualism and the occult. The Danbys?’
‘In Lawton, who else?’ Andie replied. ‘So we still can’t rule out Terrance.’
‘Or Monsignor McColl,’ he said.
‘Monsignor McColl!’ Andie cried. ‘What are you talking about?’
Gallagher related the details of his conversation with the Stubbinses, including the fact that the priest had run the orphanage while Terrance Danby was a resident and had been suspected of brutality and possibly of accessory to homicide.
‘He’s been our parish priest for nearly ten years,’ Andie said, stunned. ‘He said my mother’s funeral mass. She thought he was some kind of saint.’
‘Some kind of saint,’ Gallagher repeated, thinking about Father D’Angelo for the first time in many days. There was something about his earlier meetings with the monsignor that was still nagging at him, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.
‘I’m going to have a talk with Monsignor McColl tomorrow morning,’ Andie promised.
‘I can’t tell you how much I’d love to be there for that little chat,’ Gallagher said. ‘But I think I’m better off going to Washington.’
The second Gallagher left the Stubbins house, he’d used his cellular phone to call Jerry Matthews, his partner. It had been nearly two weeks since they had talked, two weeks since he’d turned forty and Emily had remarried. The second Jerry answered, the image of Gallagher’s ex-wife lying on some beach with her new husband played in his head, but he forced himself not to ask about her or the wedding. Those kind of answers threatened almost as much as the killer stalking Vermont.
Instead, he gave Jerry a rough outline of what had happened since their last conversation, including the bodies, the journal, the drawings of Charun and the story of Danby. Jerry had covered the military for the old Washington Star before joining Time in a similar position. Like Gallagher, he had an undergraduate degree in anthropology and had tried to cover the arcane world of the Defense Department as a culture to be deciphered. That had led to the writing of books and, eventually, film scripts, which was how they had met.
Jerry was furious at first that Gallagher had done so little work on the D’Angelo story, but the more he heard about the Lawton killings, the more intrigued he became.
‘The hell with a documentary!’ he advised. ‘You write the story as a book, make a million, then sell the film rights.’
‘The American way,’ Gallagher cracked.
‘C’mon, be cynical,’ Jerry replied blithely. ‘But be rich cynical. If you let this one get away, you’re more far gone than I thought.’
‘I’m not letting it get away,’ Gallagher assured him. ‘Right now, I need everything you can find out about Terrance Danby’s military history.’
‘It might take a couple of days.’
‘Fast as you can,’ he said. ‘People are dying up here.’
‘Okay. Pat?’
‘Yeah.’
‘It’s good to have you back. Working, I mean.’
An hour and a half later, just as Gallagher passed through the covered bridge that led into Lawton, his cell phone rang. Jerry sounded shell-shocked.
‘Partner, you set off some big alarms with that name. I dropped Terrance Danby in the hopper with a couple of my old sources in the Defense Intelligence Agency, figuring they could track the guy quicker than anyone else. I just got a call back—out of the blue, fifteen years since I’ve last seen him—from one of the spookiest guys I’ve ever met.’ Gallagher gripped the phone tighter. ‘Tell me.’
‘Uh-uh, no way. Not on a cell phone,’ Jerry said. ‘You get yourself down to D.C. pronto. Harold wants to talk to you in person tomorrow afternoon.’
‘Who’s Harold?’ Andie demanded after Gallagher had related the story.
‘Jerry refused to say anything more,’ he replied. ‘But I know my partner. He’s got a lot of faults, but being scared isn’t one of them. He’s covered four wars and been through three divorces, and this was as shaken as I’ve ever heard him. I’m flying out of West Lebanon first thing in the morning.’
Andie was silent for almost half a minute, then she blurted out, ‘All the way back from Waterbury I wanted to stop and have a drink, Pat. I don’t know if I can see this through. It’s like we’re chasing bits of something so terrible that I—’
‘You’re going to be okay.’ He leaned across the table to rub her forearm. ‘Remember who you’re doing this for: for Olga and your mother and Nyren and Hank Potter. And Sarah. Right?’
‘I know, but it’s like we’re spinning in the middle of this nightmare that no one else sees. Or wants to see.’
Andie looked at Gallagher with her pained brown eyes. He wanted to go inside them and hide for just a while from all the killing and the dirty, violent history they were uncovering. He wanted her to hide inside him as well.
Gallagher took Andie’s hand and they went upstairs. It was their second time together and it was like waking up all over again, each of them showing the other how to give and receive pleasure without restriction.
Afterward they lay in the darkness clinging to each other.
‘Will you leave when it’s all over?’ Andie asked.
Gallagher could hear the yearning in her voice, but then he had an image of Emily and he was paralyzed. ‘I don’t know, Andie.’
There was a silence before she said, ‘Even though we haven’t known each other a long time, I feel good with you, Pat.’
Gallagher closed his eyes, trying to fight off the cornered feeling. ‘I do, too. I just need a little time to figure out exactly what that ‘good’ means, Andie.’
‘Oh,’ she said, and she rolled over with her back to him. The bed, which had been a warm refuge, became exposed and windswept. Another man might have reached over to embrace her, to reassure her. But Gallagher could not.
He stared into the darkness, seeing a swift-running st
ream in upstate New York. It was October, nineteen months before. The maple leaves were brilliant red. The brown trout were breeding and rising to his dry flies. Emily and Gallagher had finished the documentary on Lebanon’s war children, and another on the supernatural life of the Australian Aboriginal tribes. They had been on vacation for nearly two months, trying to figure out what project to take on next. It was a year after the abortion in Paris, and Gallagher believed they had moved on.
Emily sat on a rock behind him. She flipped a smooth, round stone in her hand. She had not said a word in almost an hour, and neither had he.
Suddenly, she announced, ‘I’m tired of films, Pat. I’ve decided I’m going to do that book in Mexico. I’ll be gone six months.’
Gallagher’s stomach dropped. They had not discussed that project with any seriousness. He managed to rally with a cutting barb. ‘An intimate look at the culture of a tortilla factory?’
Emily whipped the stone into the pool he was fishing. ‘Always hiding behind the joke, the fly rod and the quick, snide comment, aren’t you, Pat?’
‘They’ve always gotten me through the hard times before,’ Gallagher replied. ‘But how’s this: you’re going to Mexico just to hurt me.’
‘It’s always about you, isn’t it?’ Emily cried. ‘This time it’s about me. What I want.’
He stared at her. ‘You said you were okay with our decision in Paris. You agreed.’
Tears streamed down her cheeks. ‘I’m thirty-four, Pat. This is not an abstraction any more.’
‘You trying to say it was an abstraction to me?’ Gallagher demanded.
‘Life is an abstraction to you!’ Emily shouted. ‘You’ve spent all this time studying and filming cultures and religions, but you don’t believe a word of it. You haven’t found meaning in any of it, or in anything, for that matter—life, God, death, souls … me!—we’re all abstractions to you!’
‘That’s not fair!’ he shouted back.
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