by David Dean
Human contact and interaction almost always made him happy. He was grateful to have been blessed with an incurable cheerfulness, even though he was aware that some mistook this blessing for silliness.
Freed now by his passage, the worshippers each genuflected in their turn, following their little priest to the entrance. Father Gregory enjoyed the image of their approach, bathed as it was in the dappled colors of the stained glass windows. The morning sun painted his fellow Christians in blues, reds, greens, and golds taken from the Garden of Gethsemane, the Annunciation, and the wedding feast at Cana. Behind them all, a bloodied Christ watched their exit from His cross, flanked by Mary, his Virgin Mother, and Joseph, her earthly husband.
Most stopped long enough to take his hand, wishing him a good day, even as he returned their wishes and engaged in brief murmured conversations—he had only been visiting pastor for two years but knew almost all but the very shyest by name.
Father Gregory had not known what to expect when his application to Rome had finally resulted in this assignment, but had applied out of financial want for his own parish in Mumbai. The money he was to be paid to minister to the Americans so far outweighed the pittance he received in India that, eventually, it would allow him to build a school there, perhaps even a clinic. The commitment had been daunting, requiring as it did five years at Our Lady of the Visitation Parish.
What he had not expected was the warmth with which he had been embraced by his American wards. They were not as television had prepared him for: there had been no fistfights or shootings, and he had yet to encounter a cowboy or gangster that he recognized as such.
He stood framed in the large arched doorway watching his parishioners find their separate ways to their cars when he first noticed that something might be wrong. Several had discovered colored pieces of paper beneath their windshield wipers and were removing them with varying degrees of annoyance. The less observant drove off with the gaily colored papers fluttering in the relative wind of their departures.
He turned to go inside when something told him that things were not as they seemed—that all was not well. With one hand on the door handle he was stopped by the image of the antiquarian Mrs. Spenser blanching a shade whiter than was normal, even for her. The paper she clutched in her wizened fingers trembled with shock and with a small cry she flung it away like an unclean thing.
From the opposite side of the parking lot came a choked curse, “Sonofabitch!” Father Gregory turned in time to see Larry Seldon, normally the most restrained of gentlemen, wadding his flyer up with a shocking ferocity. Noticing that Father Gregory was watching him, he stuffed the offending paper into a jacket pocket and climbed into his car with a strained expression. Similar pantomimes were occurring at cars across the length and breadth of the lot. Father Gregory stood rooted in bewilderment as an unaccountable sense of dread crept over his heart like a cloud across the sun.
When the last of them had fled to work or home, Father Gregory shook himself into belated action, hurrying down the steps. The flyer he picked up was a garish shade of pink. Turning it over he was greeted by a crude rendering of a man in a priest’s cassock looming over what must have been meant to be an altar. The artist’s meager skill had failed him at this task, and rather than an altar and its hangings, he had only managed to draft what looked like a kitchen table with a ragged cloth thrown over it.
But the artist’s skill was hardly the issue with his creation as he had certainly accomplished his goal to shock and outrage. The malicious depiction of the towering priest was unquestionably intended to be Monsignor Mulcahy, with his mass of curly hair and thick brows, though the mouth was full of filed and sharpened cannibal teeth. Blood ran down his chin in dark rivulets and his eyes were crazed with primal lust. Yet even this was not what lay at the core of its creator’s travesty—that was cradled in the prelate’s giant blood-stained hands—a child ripped from sternum to pelvic cradle, its organs spilling out from its sprung rib cage—this was what the false priest feasted upon, a black Eucharist of murder.
Father Gregory just stopped himself from flinging the filthy paper away, but instead carefully folded it up and tucked it away beneath his vestment. Turning once more to his beloved church, he walked slowly across the empty asphalt, stopping only to retrieve those flyers that had been tossed down by his parishioners in their outrage. Trudging up the few steps to the massive oak doors of Our Lady’s, he found that for the first time since coming to America he felt truly afraid, and sick at heart at the thought of having to share this pornography with his desperately ill superior.
?
Becky raised a finely plucked eyebrow at her desk mate and asked, “He walked you to your door… that’s it?”
Fanny nodded while pretending to read through a catalogue she had received touting the latest technology in converting microfiche to PDF. The translation of the library’s ancient archives of film to electronic format was long overdue and a project Mrs. Cohansey had asked her to research. “Yes,” she murmured without taking her eyes from the page. She felt Becky’s skeptical gaze but resisted the impulse to look at her.
After a long pause Becky resumed, “So… you two shook hands and went your merry ways then?”
Fanny put the catalogue in her lap and glanced across at the mostly empty tables in the research reading area. No one was watching them, no one could overhear them. She felt her face grow hot nonetheless, but said nothing, just gave a curt nod of her head while pretending to return to her article with renewed absorption.
“You are such a little liar,” Becky announced loudly. “Look at you—you’re blushing! Oh my god! How old are you two anyway? You sound like a couple of school kids! Did he carry your books for you?”
Fanny turned to her with widened eyes. “Hush! You want everybody in the library to hear?”
Becky was not in the least dissuaded. “I bet he planted a good one on you, didn’t he? He looks like a good kisser. Believe me, I’ve had a little experience and I can spot a good one a mile off.” She leaned into Fanny, lowering her voice only a little. “Then what?—did you give him a tour of your home… or anywhere else?”
Fanny stood up, the catalogue sliding down her skirt to the floor. “I’m going to take my lunch break now if it’s all the same to you,” she stated. “I have a little research to do upstairs.” Turning for the elevator to the restricted third floor, she walked away from Becky’s provocative laughter.
Her work mate called after her in a stage whisper, “We don’t currently carry the kind of research material you and your policeman need, honey, but I will be happy to provide the material Warren and I use.”
Fanny poked the illuminated up arrow and the door slid instantly open. “I’m never sharing anything with you ever again,” she promised Becky.
“Sweetheart,” Becky returned with a broad smile, “when you two finally get down to business, you won’t have to. It’ll be written all over your sweet face.”
The door slid shut with a hiss and Fanny felt the slightest of jolts as the car began to rise to the top floor of the building. When it opened once more, she stepped out into a silence even more rarified than that of the public floors.
Fanny was glad that Becky had been distracted by her lusty curiosity and had not inquired as to the object of her current research. She would not have known how to explain it. All night she had tossed and turned in her bed, alternately replaying the moment of Nick’s hungry kiss and her own willing surrender with that of her father’s strange story, his vehement demand that she assist him in proving the existence of the feral boy. Now, here she was, exhausted with worry for the one even as her heart sang with the touch of the other.
It was an absurd task, she knew, but Fanny felt as if there were no alternative. Clearly, her father believed what he was telling her, but Fanny feared that he might have been speaking in some Freudian code of guilt, or complicity, that masked a darker, if more mundane, truth.
Yet her mind recoiled from this thought.
No one knew the faults of Preston Howard—and there were many—better than she. His arrogance and insufferable conceit, his alcoholic gluttony, and his preening hunger for adulation, were all things she had witnessed and endured.
But, she reminded herself, he had never been violent—even at the very worst of times between her mother and he, Preston had never laid a hand on his wife or child. And as to some sick obsession with children, Fanny knew both from her own experience growing up, as well as having lived with the man as an adult, that Preston virtually ignored their existence. He had never shown the slightest interest in children, his own or any others. Yet, his talk had deeply frightened her and she didn’t know what else to do but follow through on his bizarre request. Perhaps the research might shed some light on his thinking, and its deeper meaning, than was now apparent—he was her only family, after all, and she had to try.
Fanny walked across the slightly sagging floor to a research station. All morning she had pondered how she should proceed, finally arriving at what seemed a clear direction—she would research the newspapers for reports of missing, and murdered, children as far back as the library’s resources allowed. In keeping with the relative antiquity of the county’s history, at least by American standards, she knew that the local, and very parochial, newspapers had served the people of Wessex County for nearly three hundred years. It would be time-consuming, but she was determined to mine what information those that had been photographed onto microfiche might contain.
Fanny began with the Seth Busby case, as he was the only other child she knew of to have gone missing in recent times. The microfiche revealed a grainy photo of a child not more than seven, obviously a school portrait. Smiling at the camera in the artificial manner common to such sittings, he nonetheless managed to convey a beguiling humor, a certain engaging mischievous quality.
He was not a handsome boy, but healthy-looking even in the black and white of the reproduction, with full cheeks, and eyes that appeared clear and gleaming with intelligence. Fanny thought he could have used a haircut to manage his thick shock of light-colored hair. She knew, of course, from the police posters that he had been blonde-headed and had a small scar over his right eye from a fall into a rose bush as a toddler. The scar was hidden in the photograph by his long bangs.
There was nothing in the article that she did not already know and nothing in the past seven years had occurred to add to it. Seth’s life had simply stopped mid-page, as if the author of it had risen from his desk and never returned. Fanny thought of Seth’s mother still waiting after all these years, and how she would still be waiting for another seven, or perhaps until the end of her own time if she must—her story, too, suspended.
Sighing, Fanny flicked off the projector, swiveling round to the desktop computer. She clicked onto Wessex County Library Resources and chose Microfiche from the menu. This presented her with a table of contents for all those files and she clicked on “newspapers” and another array was displayed. Typing in the word “murder,” she hit enter, and was rewarded with hundreds of selections from the papers that covered the tri-county area. She typed in “Wessex County,” hitting enter once more. The selection became instantly more manageable.
Having lived in Wessex County her entire life, Fanny knew that murders here were extremely rare, averaging less than one a year. And with a population that had only recently exceeded one hundred thousand, every murder, or disappearance, was something to be remarked on and remembered. There was no such thing as casual violence in Wessex County; only the barrier islands with their sudden and large influx of visitors during the summer season offered anything like that, and then only briefly.
Fanny began making notes of the stories that she would subsequently, and laboriously, locate on the microfiche. When she had completed this task, she intended to do the same under the heading of “disappearances.” Glancing once around the empty aisles of the large room, she lowered her face to her work, the buzz of fluorescents and the soft cooing of pigeons on the windowsills providing her only accompaniment.
?
Commandeering an entire table to himself in the reference wing, Preston spread all of the books he had collected across its surface. Though the table was certainly large enough for four, no one contended with Preston for space. Hovering over his finds, he picked up one, then another, to examine its contents.
After several of these forays, his face grew suddenly still, and he began flipping pages rapidly, reading and absorbing the material as if in a race. The book he had seized upon was a locally published history of Wessex County that had been written in the 1970s. It claimed to have been drawn from sources, both written and oral, that went back to the early 1800s. Preston noted that the cheap paper of the pages was already yellowing and disintegrating near the binding, its stiff cover sporting a broken corner like a useless wing, the book’s title almost completely worn from the spine. Its title page revealed that it was the third of only one hundred published, and was dedicated, in a careful longhand, to the patrons of this same library in which Preston now read the work.
His large, dark eyes raced from page to page searching for any clue that might have been left by Gabriel’s long passage through history—an unsolved murder, tales of missing children, anything that might lend credence to what he knew, logically, could not be, yet was convinced existed.
Having almost reached the end of the book, Preston came across an account that made him stop. He began to read more carefully. It was a chapter dealing with the earliest of the European settlers.
The passage recounted an interview by a Methodist pastor and self-styled anthropologist with a “colored” man who had gone by the name “Lappawinsoe.” This fellow, it seemed, had been a farmer with a small holding in Wessex Township in 1824 and claimed to be a descendent of a great Lenape chief of the same name.
Even with so lofty a claim, the settlers of that period, having had little or no contact with the aborigines that had formerly hunted and fished the area, called him Winsloe, an obvious corruption of the name he had offered. They believed him to be of Negro stock. According to the Reverend, Winsloe was generally thought to be a man of dependable work habits and was often sought out for his skill at carving decoys for marsh hunting, as well as his uncanny and useful ability at locating lost objects.
It was also generally known, it seems, that Mister Winsloe did not have a head for strong drink but was happy to receive payment for his services in the same. He apparently lived alone without benefit of family, though it was rumored that a wife, whom no one could recall with any accuracy, had deserted him many years before during one of his tumultuous binges.
It was Winsloe’s claim to Indian heritage, however, that had brought the good reverend to the door of his cabin, as he had taken it upon himself to document the story of what might be the last of Wessex County’s red men. Winsloe, in support of his claim, had assured his learned visitor in no uncertain terms that he was indeed a descendent of a people now scattered as far west as the Susquehanna Valley, and even to the White River in Ohio.
The author of the current history, Preston read, noted that a Chief Lappawinsoe had, indeed, lived and ruled a band of Lenape, but that he had died in 1755, throwing Winsloe’s lineage into doubt. Were Winsloe a son of the great chief, he would have had to have been at least sixty-nine years old at the time of the interview, though probably older—a great, and improbable, age for those years.
Preston read on nonetheless.
Winsloe explained to the pastor that he had been raised to the north of Wessex County on the Brotherton reservation, until his people had decided to join with some Mahicans near Oneida Lake in New York. His mother had been ill at this time and he was loath to leave her alone, so he had remained behind until her death a few years later. By this time he had lost touch with the other members of his tribe in faraway New York and the reservation lands had been sold from beneath him by the New Jersey Legislature. For his part he received twenty dollars with which he bought a parce
l of land in Wessex County upon which to farm. He removed himself there, though with great trepidation that was only overcome by the cheap price of the land.
At this point in the narrative, the preacher expressed disappointment that Winsloe was not, indeed, a native to the county but a relatively recent migrant. He then pursued a line of questioning regarding Winsloe’s initial reluctance to relocate to a region that others (European settlers, to be exact) had found so wholesome and bountiful.
According to the curate, Winsloe grew restive and assured him that he was Christian and would not proceed without the reverend’s acknowledgement of this fact. Puzzled by this strange request, he reluctantly gave his assurance that he understood the Lenape to be a fellow Christian, though he had never seen him attend services at his own small church on Blue Creek Road.
Satisfied that he would not be viewed as a heathen, Mister Winsloe was at last persuaded to continue. Firstly, he had corrected his interrogator, the Lenape—more often referred to as the Delawares by the Whites—had never maintained permanent settlements in southern New Jersey in general, and Wessex County in particular. In fact, he assured the minister, had it not been for the abundance of shellfish available on the barrier islands, as well as the great numbers of shad and sturgeon to be caught in the Delaware Bay, they would have avoided the peninsula altogether. It was these food sources, in their dried and salted forms, that supplied much of the peoples’ protein through the cold, lean months of winter and were, therefore, indispensable despite the great risk in the taking of them in this haunted region.
The reverend gentleman, his curiosity aroused, insisted on knowing the meaning of Winsloe’s words, and of hearing the tribal lore that had been their inspiration. Then, after another protracted, and tiresome, declaration of his Christian status, followed by the minister’s equally tiresome assurances, Winsloe delivered himself of his knowledge.