Jerry smiled. “You had me convinced.”
“Did you talk with him?” she asked.
He nodded. “He took it well. I think he was a little pleased by the attention, if the truth be known. By the way, he was married for twenty-three years, and has three kids—all grown. His wife died just before I came here.”
“Oh,” said Charlotte. “Now what?” she asked.
“We wait,” he said.
Charlotte sat for a while listening to Jerry as he touched base with the policemen at the various stakeout locations, and then she got bored. Since she was easily bored, this took all of ten minutes. Then she decided to take a little tour of the crime scenes. “The crime scene is the mirror of the perpetrator,” was one of Jerry’s favorite sayings. He was full of stories about how a small detail at a crime scene had resulted in the solution of the crime. She remembered in particular a murder case that involved the “do not remove under penalty of death” tag on the cushion of a sofa. The tag had been left exposed when the cushion had been put back on the sofa—an oversight that was out of character for a victim who had been extraordinarily neat. Though Jerry had been present at the crime scene investigation, he hadn’t noticed this particular detail until he was studying the photographs later on. Somehow the recognition that the victim wouldn’t have left the cushion tag sticking out had led directly to the solution of the crime, though Charlotte couldn’t remember exactly how. Maybe if she went back to the scenes of the crimes, she would discover something equivalent to the tag on the sofa cushion. Besides, it was too nice a day to sit around inside.
She decided to visit the summer house first, and headed out in the direction of Archfield Hall, which, she had learned from Jerry, Dr. Louria had left to the town for a museum, just as Lily had wanted. It would be easier to reach the summer house from Archfield Hall than to park at the train station and walk along the tracks. After parking in the car park where she had parked as a patient on her first visit, she passed through the gate in the stone wall between the house and the music studio and crossed the lawn to the patio overlooking the river. Then she followed the path down the embankment to the summer house. The scene looked much different than it had only a short while ago: the trees were now fully leafed out, and the wisteria vines that overhung the half-open sides of the summer house were now in bloom, festooning them with a fringe of pale lilac. No longer did it look like the sinister Hudson River charnel house of the tabloids.
Ducking to avoid the blossoms, she entered the structure. The honey-like fragrance of the wisteria perfumed the interior, and bees buzzed around the long panicles of pea-shaped flowers. It was a lovely setting. Through the vines, she could see sailboats scudding across the wind-ruffled surface of the river. The presence of the railroad detracted somewhat from its appeal, but the comings and goings of the trains were confined mostly to commuter hours. She could easily imagine a servant in an earlier era serving an elegant tea here to the mistress of the house and her companions. But now the magic of this lovely place was spoiled forever by the memory of the horrible deeds that had been committed here. Though the smell was gone, the evidence could still be seen in the bloodstains on the worktable and on the cement floor.
She could easily see why the murderer had chosen this place to carve up his victims. It was isolated: tucked into the embankment as it was, it was well-hidden, despite the fact that the road above was lined with houses. And it was far enough away from the tracks that the murderer wouldn’t have been visible to the dog walkers, teenaged boys, or any others who might be walking along the tracks, especially with the wisteria vines covering the openings on the sides. Most appealing of all to the murderer would have been its proximity to the river. He would have had to haul the cut-up bodies only thirty yards or so in order to dump them, and the chances that he would have been seen in the act were very slim. A disadvantage was the fact that he would have had to carry the bodies from the parking lot at the railroad station, but this was mitigated by the fact that he could have left his car in the railroad station parking lot at virtually any time, and for however long he wanted, without its presence attracting notice.
Then there was the matter of the meat cleaver. Passing through the opening on the river side of the summer house, she continued on down the path leading to the tracks, and then walked along the tracks to the spot where Mrs. Snyder said her dog had discovered the meat cleaver. Or rather, rediscovered the meat cleaver. The spot was easy enough to find: she remembered Mrs. Snyder saying that it was just in front of an old canoe, which lay in the weeds about fifty feet south of the summer house. Why had the murderer thrown the meat cleaver away? Charlotte wondered as she looked down at a spot where the grass had been flattened, probably by the feet of Captain Crosby, who had come out here with Mrs. Snyder to investigate. Had he been afraid of being caught with it on him? But why would he have been worried about being caught? Unless the police had suddenly arrived, she thought. She made a mental note to ask Jerry if the police had been called to the area at any time immediately following Doreen Mileski’s disappearance. And if so, if they had noticed anyone unusual. Then there was the chance that he had simply dropped it, or it had fallen out of a bag. She remembered what Jerry had said when they found the extension cord, about it not being uncommon to find articles belonging to the perpetrator at the scene of the crime. Looking at the spot, she imagined the bloodied meat cleaver lying there. Then she imagined its blade coming down on a well-worn cutting board. But it wasn’t Jerry’s hands that she saw on the wooden handle, or even Sebastian’s, but a woman’s hands: hands with knuckles enlarged by arthritis, and dark skin roughened by constant immersion in dishwater. She had seen that meat cleaver before! she realized.
Her mind leapt nimbly from point to point, like a child crossing a brook on stepping stones. From the meat cleaver to the person using it to the room in which she had seen it being used. Finally, it alighted on the face of the murderer.
She hoped she wasn’t wrong, she thought as she scrambled back up the path. Jerry wasn’t likely to be as forgiving a second time. But she didn’t think so. This time, she had the gut feeling that she was right. All the psychological characteristics that Jerry had mentioned also described the new suspect, better than they had Jack Lister. But before she could go making accusations, she had to be sure. At the top of the embankment, she headed back across the lawn to her car. As she got in, she noticed that the clock on her dashboard said 11:15. Good! Connie would have some time before the lunchtime rush. Then she started her car and set out in the direction of Sebastian’s.
Arriving ten minutes later, she found Connie setting the tables in a dining room that was empty except for a couple of businessmen sitting at the bar. As before, they went out to the patio to talk.
“When we talked before, you told me that Lily made a practice of coming on to men,” Charlotte said. She was sitting with Connie at one of the umbrella-shaded patio tables.
Connie nodded. She lit a cigarette and tilted her long neck back to exhale. “I didn’t put it as politely,” she said.
“No, you didn’t,” Charlotte agreed. She continued: “I believe you also said that she took special pleasure in coming on to men who were unavailable.”
“Yes,” Connie said. “The more unavailable they were, the bigger the come-on. It was a game for her.”
“By unavailable men, I presume you mean married men.”
She nodded. “Married men, single men. You name it. The only men she didn’t go after were the ones she knew for a positive fact to be gay. And I’m sure she would even have gone after them had she thought there was any chance they’d sleep with a woman as well.”
“I presume that she’d have to find the”—Charlotte paused to pick a word—“the targets of her pursuits to be physically attractive to her. In other words, that she didn’t go after ugly men.”
“Not necessarily,” Connie replied. “In fact, she liked to go after men whom she assumed had never been with a woman, usually because they w
ere ugly or shy. She’d brag about their becoming her love slaves.”
“Is there anyone in particular you can think of who fits this description?” Charlotte asked. “Like a man of God, for instance?”
Connie looked at her closely. Charlotte could almost see the wheels turning. Finally, she answered: “If you’re asking if the pastor was one of the men she pursued, the answer is yes. Is he a suspect?” she asked, her big blue eyes wide with astonishment.
Charlotte took a deep breath. “Maybe,” she said. “At this point, we’re grasping at straws. Tell me about their relationship,” she said.
Connie leaned back in her chair and stretched her legs out in front of her. “Did you know her full name was Lilith?” she asked.
Charlotte shook her head.
“To distinguish her from her mother, Lillian. The Archibald sisters all had unusual ‘L’ names: Lillian, Lothian, Letitia. Anyway, Lilith was either a goddess or a demon, depending on the interpretation. I’m sure Lily’s parents named her after the goddess, but it was the demon that she identified with.”
“What kind of demon?” Charlotte asked.
“A succubus,” Connie said. “A beautiful young maiden with owl feet and wings like an angel, and hair ‘long and red like the rose’ and cheeks of white and red. It’s a quote that Lily used to recite.”
“What’s a succubus?”
“A temptress who’s sexually insatiable, and so beautiful that no man can resist her. Once she’s succeeded in seducing a man, she turns into a vampire, and sucks the lifeblood out of him.”
“Whew!” said Charlotte.
“Yeah,” Connie said, flicking her ash. “It’s pretty heavy stuff.”
Charlotte remembered the pastor describing Lily as being hypnotic, bewitching, reckless. “Why would she have wanted to identify with such an unpleasant image?” she asked.
“Because of the power of it. As I understand it, Lilith was the antithesis of Eve, the woman who is obedient, submissive, chaste. According to the Hebrew scriptures, she was Adam’s first wife, but he cast her out because she wouldn’t submit to lying beneath him.”
“The first feminist,” Charlotte commented.
“Something like that,” Connie agreed. “Lily used to say that Lilith was the symbol of the time when woman was not a slave.”
Charlotte had taken out a notepad, and started taking notes.
“Anyway, Lilith’s special targets were men of God. She would come to them in the night. Lily told me that medieval monks used to tie crucifixes to their genitals before going to sleep to keep Lilith away.”
Charlotte arched an eyebrow.
“If she succeeded in copulating with them, they would lose their immortal souls.” She paused for a moment, and then said: “I just remembered something else Lily told me about Lilith.”
“What?” Charlotte asked.
Connie fixed Charlotte with her big blue eyes. “The monks would wear amulets for protection against Lilith,” she said. “In the form of knives.”
Charlotte shook her head. This was getting bizarre.
Connie continued: “If you look at Lily’s life as a series of campaigns to corrupt men, Cornball—that’s what we used to call him—was her Holy Grail.” She smiled at the irony of the religious reference. “It began in—I don’t know—seventh or eighth grade. He was our religion teacher.”
“Was she already seducing men at that age?” Charlotte asked. If so, she would have been sexually precocious indeed.
“No, not physically. But she was already coming on to men. I imagine she’d been coming on to men since she was three. She would sit at the front of the class, and hike her skirt up above her knees. I remember him lecturing her at one point about not wearing such short skirts.”
“Did she eventually seduce him, then?”
Connie shrugged. “I don’t know. She claimed she did. As I said the other day, she claimed no man could resist her.” She rolled her eyes in disbelief. “But I suspect she was telling the truth as far as he was concerned. She said it happened only once, after a youth group party at the quarry pit.”
He said he had tied himself to the mast, Charlotte thought. But it appeared that he hadn’t knotted the rope tightly enough. “How old would she have been then?” she asked.
“It would have been the summer after our junior year. Seventeen, I guess.”
“Why only once?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know if he managed to resist her advances after that, or if she dropped him. Probably the latter: that would have been her style, to move on to fresh territory. Though that didn’t necessarily mean that she would have stopped coming on to him.”
“Did his attitude toward her change after that?”
“I don’t know about his attitude. I know her attitude changed.”
“In what way?”
She took a drag on her cigarette, and then spoke. “Before she seduced him, she was very adoring. She was always flattering his ego: telling him what a wonderful teacher he was, how much he had influenced her life, and so on.”
“And after?”
“After, she would still flatter his ego, but the flattery was interlaced with contempt. She would make fun of him when she thought he wasn’t noticing, but in fact he did notice.”
Charlotte remembered him telling her the story about how Lily had climbed out of the second-story window while he was writing on the blackboard, and then reappeared at the classroom door a few minutes later.
“She was the one who started the whole Ichabod thing.”
“What Ichabod thing?”
“He was always very sensitive about his appearance. Especially so back then, when he was even more gawky-looking than he is now. He took every whisper to be a derisive remark about the way he looked, every laugh a joke at his expense. Half the time he was right,” she said.
“Even paranoids have enemies,” Charlotte commented.
She nodded, and then said: “Because we’re next to Tarry-town, we studied The Legend of Sleepy Hollow in English class. One day, the English teacher asked Lily to read a passage describing the schoolmaster, Ichabod Crane. The passage talked about his nose looking like the arrow of a weather vane that was perched on his neck.”
“And she drew a comparison to Reverend Cornwall?” Charlotte asked. She remembered her first impression of him: that he should be wearing a tricorne hat and a frock coat. He did look like an old-fashioned schoolmaster.
Connie nodded. “The passage described him to a T: big ears, long legs, arms that hung down to his knees. ‘Sounds like Cornball,’ Lily said. After that, Cornball was known to one and all as Ichabod. In fact, there are still people in Zion Hill who refer to him as Ichabod—though not to his face.”
“If he was so sensitive about his appearance, the constant reminder must have been extremely unpleasant,” Charlotte said.
“Oh, yes,” Connie agreed. “Excruciatingly so, I’d say. ‘Cornball’ had been bad enough, but it was relatively innocuous compared to ‘Ichabod.’”
“What was her attitude toward him in more recent years?”
“You mean, since she married Victor Louria?”
“And before,” Charlotte said.
“I don’t think she saw much of him after she got married. But she used to see him a lot beforehand. She used him. If she didn’t want to go somewhere by herself, there was always Icky to go along with her. If she wanted help moving furniture or hanging a picture, there was always Icky.”
“Icky?” Charlotte said.
“Short for Ichabod,” Connie said.
“It sounds as if her attitude toward him became less contemptuous, then,” Charlotte said. “Except for the Icky part.”
“Not really,” Connie replied. “Only more subtly contemptuous. She would still taunt him, but she did it in a more sophisticated way. It was still very much a game of cat and mouse, and the mouse was still taking a beating. Except for one difference: he was a mouse who didn’t want to get away.”
&nbs
p; “He was under her spell,” Charlotte said. There were some people, Peter had said, who weren’t strong enough to resist the nasty demons—demons who knew just how to punch their buttons.
“Very much so,” Connie agreed.
15
She had led him on, and led him on. Then, when he had finally succumbed to her advances, she had spurned him, Charlotte thought as she drove back to the police station. Not only spurned him, but treated him with contempt. Ridiculed his nose, and probably, though no one would ever know, his sexual performance. But Icky, as she had called him, had kept coming back for more, like the lab rats who keep pushing the lever for more heroin, in spite of the electric shocks. How he must have hated himself for not having the backbone to stand up to her, and how he must have hated her for manipulating him. Then one day the object of his erotic obsession was swept away, literally, by a wave in Cozumel. She was out of his life, leaving a gap that was filled one and a half years later by the appearance of a young woman who looked exactly like her. Everything that they had considered with regard to Dr. Louria’s possible motives, namely the lashing out against the stand-ins for the fantasy he had lost, also applied to Cornwall.
How he had found out about Kimberly Ferguson, the first and most successful of the Lily look-alikes, Charlotte had no idea. Maybe he had seen her walking on the golf course early one morning, and then spied on her from the church tower. But found out about her, he had. And when he did, the rage against Lily that he had kept damped down all those years finally erupted. He could never find it in himself to take that rage out against Lily. Instead, he took it out on a clone who couldn’t control him the way Lily had. Instead of Lily pulling the strings, it was he who controlled her, or rather her look-alike. In the most brutal way imaginable. He had distilled her down to her pure essence, her skull, and then done what he wanted with her. Charlotte didn’t even want to think about what. Then, when he was through with her, he had discarded her, just as she had discarded him. But he was still a Christian, wasn’t he? A man of God. If only to prove it to himself, he gave her a Christian burial, laying her skull to rest on a cemetery gravestone, along with a bouquet of her favorite flowers. Having killed Lily once, he had then gone on to kill her again, and again, and again.
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