by John Manning
Even if what had happened to her on campus was surely horrendous enough.
But now…there was Sue Barlow’s name again. Perry couldn’t help thinking that there was something about her that he needed to find out. But what?
“Okay, Marj,” Miles was saying, pushing back his plate. “It’s time for us to start our shifts. Thank Wally for another superlative high-calorie breakfast.”
Marjorie cleared away their plates. “I’m just glad to see you cleaned up for a change, Miles. That scruffy look went out with Don Johnson.”
Miles clapped Perry on the back. “The boy here is keeping me in shape.”
Perry smiled. He was pleased that his father seemed back to his old self. He was eating better, taking care of himself. Working together on this case seemed to have galvanized him. Without telling the state cops in charge of the investigation—big lard-asses who were doing nothing to find Bonnie Warner—
Perry and Miles had trudged down to the basement of the town hall and begun pouring over old death records.
It hadn’t taken them long to find something. “Lookee here,” Miles had said, his voice low. “Millicent Berwick. October 18, 1887. Cause of death, multiple stab wounds. Found on the Wilbourne campus.”
“And here,” Perry had said. “Just a week later. Phoebe Singleton. Wilbourne student. Cause of death.” He’d gulped. “Severed head.”
“Every twenty years or so,” Miles had said, awed.
They had been right.
But what did it mean?
They headed out of the diner. Perry zipped up his nylon jacket. A sudden cold wind had whipped up, swirling leaves in the street.
“Early winter this year,” Miles observed, shivering.
The trees were a riot of color, mostly oranges and yellows. There was nowhere more beautiful than upstate New York in autumn, Perry’s mother used to say. The morning sun sparkled through openings in the leaves.
“I’m going back to the station to make a few calls,” Perry told his father.
Miles nodded. “I’ll take the first patrol around town. Make sure nobody’s robbing the bank or slaughtering any more pretty co-eds.”
Perry smiled. “I’m glad you’re feeling better, Dad.”
Miles shrugged. “It’s been good spending these last few days with you, son. And I think your mother is happy about it, too.”
“You never stop thinking about her, do you, Dad?”
Miles’s smile faded. “No, I don’t. But lately…” His smile flickered again. “Lately, it’s been getting easier.”
Perry gave him a thumbs-up. He watched as his father slid behind the wheel of his patrol car and drove off. They exchanged a wave. Then Perry hopped into his own car and drove back to the station. He nodded at the secretary, checked to make sure he had no messages, then closed the door to his office and sat down on his desk.
He looked down at the file marked BARLOW, MARICLARE.
He opened it and read it again. It still had the power to sicken him.
He’d found a number for her parents in New York. They’d be Sue Barlow’s grandparents. He’d thought about just calling Sue herself and asking her a few questions about her mother, but he suspected she didn’t know what had happened to her mother on campus twenty years ago.
So he picked up the phone and called New York.
“Hello?”
“Mrs. Barlow? This is Deputy Sheriff Perry Holland from Lebanon, New York.”
The line went quiet.
“Mrs. Barlow?”
“Has something happened to Sue?” the woman asked in a small voice.
“No. ma’am. Your granddaughter is fine, as far as I know.” He could understand the woman’s fear when she heard his voice. Had she gotten a similar call twenty years ago?
“Then why are you calling?”
“Mrs. Barlow, you may be aware that a girl has gone missing from Wilbourne. In fact, three girls are missing, although that hasn’t been publicly acknowledged yet.”
Perry knew that within a day or so the state police were planning on holding a news conference to disclose the names of Joelle Bartlett and Patricia Lewis. The families were exerting pressure, and word had leaked out on the Internet. He decided telling Mrs. Barlow about it now wouldn’t matter—in fact, it could only help to explain the reasons behind his call.
“So I’m looking back into the files of the department, and I’d like to ask you a few questions about your daughter Mariclare.”
“But Mariclare came home.” The woman’s voice was icy.
“Yes, I know, but I thought she might be able to tell me a little about what happened while she was missing—”
The woman on the other end of the phone line made a clucking sound in her throat. “She simply ran away from the school. There was no kidnapping or anything like that! She ran away and came home to us.”
“Still, I’d like to talk with her,” Perry said. “I mean, about what happened to her on campus…” His voice trailed off, unable to articulate the words. “There was some thought here in the department at the time that it might be related to the other girls who went missing and then were killed. That the same perpetrator who—”
“You’ll need to talk with my husband, and he’s not home,” Mrs. Barlow said tersely.
“Well, actually, it’s your daughter Mariclare I’d like to speak with…”
“Mariclare is dead!”
Perry was silent for a moment. “I’m very sorry, Mrs. Barlow. I didn’t know that. Could you tell me when she died?’
“Years ago. Many years ago.”
“When your granddaughter was very young?”
“Right after she was born.”
Perry was doing subtraction in his head. A horrible thought came over him.
“Mrs. Barlow,” he said. “If you can’t speak with me, maybe you’d give me a number where I can reach your husband?”
“He’s a very busy man. He doesn’t have time—”
“Mrs. Barlow,” Perry interrupted. “Did you hear what I said? Three girls have gone missing from the campus where your granddaughter is living. We suspect there may be some kind of pattern going on. Every twenty years—”
“That is absurd!”
Perry was losing his cool. “Are you not the least bit concerned about your granddaughter, given that twenty years ago your daughter was brutally raped on the very same campus?”
There was no hesitation in the old woman’s reply. “Wilbourne takes good care of its girls,” she said.
Perry couldn’t believe his ears. “I’m sorry to have bothered you, Mrs. Barlow. I’ll be calling your husband at another time.”
She hung up on him.
She might call the state police and complain, Perry knew. But at the moment, he didn’t care. He knew now his father was one hundred percent right.
They were indeed on to something.
Perry’s eyes dropped back down to the file spread out on his desk. He read again the paragraph at the top of the report.
Screams were heard from Room 323 in Bentley Hall repeatedly, but the girls on the floor did nothing because of ghost stories about the room. It’s campus lore that the room is haunted. At ten minutes past midnight, Mariclare Barlow emerged from the room, according to three eyewitnesses, girls who lived on the same floor of the dorm. She was naked, bleeding profusely from the vagina, and her face and arms were battered and scratched. She seemed in a state of shock. She told the three eyewitnesses that she had been raped, but did not say by who. No intruder was seen either entering or leaving the room. The eyewitnesses called for the dorm monitor, Mrs. Annette Oosterhouse, but by the time Mrs. Oosterhouse arrived, Mariclare Barlow had locked herself back in her room, telling the other girls she had to “go back to him.” But when Mrs. Oosterhouse opened the door, there was no one in the room.
38
“Hey, Danny,” Miles called from his police car window. It was Saturday, and the kids were riding their skateboards on the sidewalk in front of the post
office. “Careful you don’t run that thing out into the road.”
The boy nodded. He was probably eight years old by now, Miles reckoned. The sheriff could remember when Danny was born, and when his older brothers and sisters were all born. He had a good memory. That’s why he was a good sheriff.
“Whatcha gonna be for Halloween?” he asked Danny.
“Spider-Man,” Danny shouted.
“Good for you,” Miles said. “He was always my favorite.”
Halloween. Miles couldn’t believe it was almost here. How fast time went. He rolled up his window and continued his cruise down Main Street. He’d put an extra deputy on for Halloween night. There was occasionally some vandalism—soaping car windows, smashing pumpkins, that kind of thing. Nothing too bad. Lebanon was a quiet, well-behaved town.
Except every twenty years or so.
Why hadn’t anyone made a big stink about this pattern before? One of the selectmen, one of the town officials? There were ladies over at the Lebanon Historical Society who made it their life’s business to know every scrap of history that happened in this town. They could rattle off statistics for every presidential election back to Lincoln—but no one had ever mentioned that every twenty years, a handful of college girls went missing or were found brutally murdered. Of course, every time it happened, there was a big fuss, with a town meeting being held the last time it happened, with feminists rallying against the rape of Mariclare Barlow and pressuring Wilbourne to beef up security. Miles remembered the rally—his wife had taken part, in fact—and the newspaper coverage was still there, for anyone to read, on micro-film. But within a few weeks, the town stopped talking about it, and then it all just seemed to slip from collective memory. Even Miles’s memory—at least for a time.
“Not anymore,” he whispered to himself as he drove, his eyes gazing out at the golden trees that lined his vision. “I’m not forgetting anymore.”
He turned down Laurel Grove Road, a narrow, winding, mostly dirt road that cut from the center of town through the woods to the Wilbourne campus.
What was it? What went on at that college? Some kind of ritualized killings? Some secret group? Some kind of sect?
And why did everyone forget?
Who had the kind of power to cause that?
“State cops would call me nutso,” Miles said out loud.
But he wasn’t crazy.
He knew that much.
Even as he saw the figure on the side of the road, he remained convinced of that.
It was a girl, riding a bike—except she had no head.
“Dear God,” Miles breathed, slowing the police car to a stop.
Then he heard the roar. He bolted from the cruiser, gun drawn. The sound came from behind him. He turned to see what it was—
And a hand—more like a talon—gripped his throat. It lifted the sheriff off the ground.
Miles, in excrutiating pain, looked down to see his assailant.
What he saw was indescribable.
Not human.
Not animal.
Not—of this world.
It was darkness—darkness come to life—that was the only way Miles could perceive it.
Miles screamed.
“Scream all you want,” the demon told him. “It is music to hear.”
But there was another sound, too. That same roar. The creature that held him seemed concerned by it. Miles was able to see in the periphery of vision what it was—
A lion.
Dear God…
And a woman beside it, armed with a sword.
The thing holding Miles hissed, snapping the sheriff’s neck before disappearing.
The last conscious thought Miles had before plunging to the earth was that he was dead—but that the lady with the lion had saved him.
And brought him home to be with his wife.
39
Among the materials that Sheriff Miles Holland had assembled as part of his investigation over the last few weeks were various accounts of the history of Wilbourne College, culled from newspapers, catalogs, and school yearbooks.
He had suspected that none of them told the full story.
He was right.
The Wilbourne School for Young Women was founded in the fall of 1879. The brainchild of Sarah Wilbourne, the college was established to educate young Lutheran women—in order for them to make contributions not only to American society, Mrs. Wilbourne explained to her church benefactors, but also to the world community. The college’s motto, penned by Sarah Wilbourne herself, was Service with integrity, courage, and intelligence. It would all be wrapped in a devout Christian theology, which, Mrs. Wilbourne told her students, was what allowed them to serve at all.
Sarah had originally come to Lebanon by train from Manhattan in 1877, scouting locations for the school she was determined to found. She was favorably impressed by Lebanon’s location, its access to the railroad, and the acres of apple orchards surrounding it. Even more impressive, she told town leaders, were Lebanon’s deep Christian traditions. After she purchased a huge plot of land just outside of the city limits—Mrs. Wilbourne was a wealthy society widow from Manhattan—the architects and contractors began building. Local children often gathered to watch the majestic marble and brownstone buildings rising up from the verdant hills.
The school opened in 1879 with just thirty students, but with many more high hopes. Miss Wilbourne instilled impeccable standards. Students were required to maintain at least a B average, or they were asked to withdraw. The faculty consisted of a few Lutheran ministers and many more devout laymen whom Sarah herself had personally recruited. When Sarah died forty years later, she left her considerable fortune to further endow the school and to ensure its growth and continued excellence.
Since then, thousands of young women had walked past the bronze statue of Sarah that had been erected on the main lawn. Few of them ever even glanced at the image of the woman who started it all, who made it possible for them to be at Wilbourne College. When Wilbourne’s board of trustees voted in 1921 to go sectarian, leaving the Lutheran theology in the past, Sarah’s legacy seemed outdated to some. Still, her name was always invoked at graduation ceremonies with the reverence generally reserved for the holy saints in Catholic churches.
Yet Sarah Wilbourne had been anything but a saint—and the notion that she might be would have made her laugh scornfully.
Her origins were murky, lost in the mists of time. One would-be biographer, a woman named Kathryn Lang, had done her best to track down Sarah’s past, and although her notes were donated to the Lebanon Historical Society and therefore preserved for Miles and Perry Holland to see, Lang herself had died in an automobile accident before she was ever able to write the book. Lang had been unable to discover where or when Sarah had actually been born, but found newspaper articles that documented her marriage, when Sarah was just nineteen, to the widower and wealthy financier Silas Wilbourne. She was described as an orphan and quite beautiful, with porcelain skin, wide blue eyes, and thick silky blond hair that she wore long. Silas Wilbourne, thirty years Sarah’s senior, had discovered her working in a jewelry shop in Brooklyn when he came in to buy a diamond bracelet for his daughter. He was entranced by the girl’s beauty, and returned to the shop the next day to purchase a pocket watch for himself. He returned a third time the following day, he said, for a very special jewel: Sarah herself. He invited her to join him for dinner.
Before long, New York society tongues wagged about the beautiful young nobody with whom Silas Wilbourne was smitten. He escorted her to plays, parties, and fancy society dinners. He bought her expensive clothing and jewelry. Some society ladies presumed Sarah had become Silas’s mistress, but Kathryn Lang believed Sarah’s devout Christian faith would have prevented her from sexual relations with Silas, and that she was holding out to become the next Mrs. Wilbourne.
Kathryn Lang was right about the facts, wrong about Sarah’s reasons.
For, in fact, there was no evidence that Sarah was a Luth
eran—or any kind of religious woman—until she began soliciting the church for money for her school. Wilbourne was a high Episcopalian himself, and they married in an Episcopal church. But Silas had little interest in religion, rarely attending services, and Sarah, as the dutiful wife, simply followed his lead. Indeed, in everything, Sarah seemed to subjugate herself to her husband’s will. She seemed determined to prove that those who were skeptical about their marriage were wrong. She had managed to overcome the objections of her husband’s children (both of whom were older than she was) and New York society, all of whom warned Silas against this mésalliance. It was only a matter of time, everyone reasoned, before Sarah tired of her older husband and the marriage descended into the depths of Shakespearean tragedy.
But they underestimated her—a mistake many made throughout Sarah’s lifetime.
Sarah Wilbourne was no one’s fool. She was very well aware that her entire future depended on how she conducted herself in her marriage. She didn’t care about being snubbed by the Astors or other society women. If she and Silas weren’t invited to dinners or parties by the so-called “best” people in New York, she’d put up with it. She didn’t care if her stepchildren openly despised her and slandered her all over the city. Their treatment of her turned their father against them, which was perfectly fine with Sarah—but she also understood her own conduct must be above reproach. No minor flirtations with any man, nothing that could possibly be misconstrued or built into something more serious. Her husband was madly in love with her and denied her nothing. Sarah intended to keep it that way.
And so Silas showered his young wife with gifts, and eventually he liquidated his business—at a huge profit—in order to spend more time with her. They toured Europe, Egypt, and India—and everywhere they went, observers couldn’t help but notice their devotion to each other. Men tried, from time to time, to seduce the pretty Sarah, but she cut them off with scarcely veiled contempt. As the years passed and she continued to be a devoted wife, the women who disapproved of her slowly started to come around. When Silas died, leaving her a very wealthy woman, Sarah grieved very publicly, and those around her took notice. His two children, horrified to discover they’d been cut off without a penny in his will, tried fighting her in court, desperate to wrest some of the family fortune away from her, but by now, society had rallied around Sarah. “Had my husband wanted them to have something,” Sarah told a reporter, “he would have provided for them. But he wanted them to have nothing, and simply because he is now dead does not mean I will cease abiding by his wishes.” A story circulated that Sarah, after the court ruled in her favor, approached her stepchildren, opened her purse, and handed each of them each a quarter. “That is the last cent of your father’s you will ever see,” she said before turning on her heel and walking away.