The Siren's Tale

  Who or what killed Harry Drake? Onlookers reported to the police there was a shouting match between the two men, and Thomas shot Harry at close range.

  However, the bullet from Hawker's gun did not kill Harry Drake. In fact, it missed him entirely and was found lodged in a nearby tree.

  The sirens will attribute Harry Drake's death to the ancestral curse. He has paid the ultimate price for consorting with a siren.

  Dr. Ron Huddleston has another theory. As he examined Drake, he found clear evidence of a catastrophic heart attack. Drake's valet would later say that his employer had been complaining of chest pains earlier in the day. Unfortunately, Harry attributed the fluttering sensations not to cardiac symptoms, but rather to “being stressed.”

  In the future, Marlena will always wonder if her lover's dying thought was that his death was her fault.

  When Marlena is told of Letty's death, she is too dazed by the loss of her lover to think of anything else. However, the next day she begins to imagine an alternative set of circumstances. They give her more to worry about.

  She has already proved her powers are strong enough to stop the mill wheel in its tracks. What if she had been with her mother at the pond, taking the brunt of Letty's lambasting instead of hiding out upstairs in her bedroom? She might have saved Letty's life in any number of ways, including stopping the winching action of the wheel before it strangled her.

  The question she continues to ask herself is this one: would she have saved Letty's life, or would she have willed her to die?

  Marlena suspects there is a bloodthirsty aspect to being a siren in human form, a characteristic not covered in the owner's manual that was delivered to her as a bedtime story.

  Chapter Forty-Two

  What They Said

  January, 1978

  New Gillette, Wyoming

  The deaths of Harry Drake and Letty Brown-Hawker quickly become front-page news. Not since 1901 have such strange events occurred in concert and in such an apocalyptic context. However, there is disparity among the stories, reported and otherwise, circulating in the new year.

  The version in the monthly district newspaper, the Homesteader, reports Mrs. Letty Brown-Hawker lost her life as the result of falling off balance at a pond's edge and plummeting to the bottom; drowning was the cause of death. Not reported but tacitly understood by readers is that the weight of her heavy clothing and her flesh may have kept her at the pond's bottom, despite valiant attempts by Dr. Ron Huddleston and Apollo Nelson to save her life.

  From his jail cell in New Gillette, Thomas Hawker tells anyone who will listen to him that his wife was the victim of a supernatural attack orchestrated by a siren, Marlena Bellum. He claims the sorceress came to Alta to thwart Letty from opening a Pentecostal church among the heathen tribe. According to Hawker, Letty's head was spun on its axis by evil forces and snapped from her spine. He also says Marlena receives protection from an invisible source, that black magic kept him from delivering on his promise to end the red-haired siren's life.

  Some believe a different version to be closer to the truth, that Letty was a crazy publicity hound who got her just deserts when she was strangled by the turning motion of a mill wheel in which her turban accidentally got tangled. Letty's bullying tactics, voodoo channeling, and hand-me-down curses have been going on for too long, sings the chorus of reason. But they are few in number and do not prevail.

  There is another story that was never reported: the true story of the unhappy life and inglorious end of Letty Brown-Hawker, aka Lester Brown, who grew up in the coal mining town of New Gillette, Wyoming.

  Lester Brown was a troubled teen with an attraction to homosexuality that was treated by frequent parental beatings. Lester's gender confusion and his family's repression resulted in a powder keg of explosive emotions. They also led to his eventual fascination and strong identification with a distant ancestor, old Widow Brown of Alta.

  The controversial family matriarch was not in full possession of her mind, many said. Her supposed hexing powers were considered by some to be supernatural and others to be a fraud or a nuisance. Widow Brown was put away in a madhouse and died in 1935. Lester, who took up her cause some forty years later, didn't consider her to have been deranged. To the contrary, Lester felt Widow Brown had been correct in singling out morally loose, redheaded women and broadcasting the truth about their pernicious influence on stalwart Christians.

  The world would be safer without sirens; Lester was convinced this was true.

  Thomas Hawker III and Lester Brown first got together in public school in New Gillette. Both, they soon realized, had Alta ancestors.

  Thomas had a family tree that included Mayor Theodore Hawker and his youngest son, pious Thomas. The first Thomas was too timid to marry, but in his long life he did manage to produce a single progeny. A drunken barmaid, on a dare, dragged him to her cabin one Fire Night and had her way with the forty-year-old virgin. The resulting child was a boy no one cared to claim, a pitiful creature who worked as a stable boy and was called Bastard Hawker until he got big enough to fight, and then he was called Bubba Hawker. Bubba grew up, got work at the electric company in New Gillette, and married a Pentecostal Christian. Bubba's wife wanted to name their son Thomas Hawker III because she thought it looked distinguished. She set about posthumously legitimizing her husband by changing his legal name to Thomas Hawker, Jr. Therefore in her eyes (and her eyes alone), when she baptized their son Thomas Hawker III, the family tree had been scrubbed clean.

  Thomas and Lester were loners. Girls of the same age instinctively shied away from Lester and made him the butt of their jokes, which only compounded his unexpressed rage. If it were not for Thomas, who was as reedy as Lester was mountainous, Lester would not have had any friends.

  Lester confided to Thom his abiding interest in exposing to the public “a dangerous kind of creature who looks like a beautiful woman, but is masquerading for the devil, like the ancient sirens who lured sailors to their deaths.” As punishment for bullying girls, Lester had been assigned to write a report on alleged instances of witchcraft and related persecutions. He had come upon a story that made his case, springing from the old homesteading days in Alta, after Wyoming became a state.

  In looking through newspapers from the early 1900's, he came upon a story in the Casper Star-News about a young, red-haired woman named Cassandra Vye. She was said to have vanished after her bewitched lover was killed under mysterious circumstances on Hatter's Field. There was a charge voiced by natives, Widow Brown being foremost, that Cassandra was a female form of the Evil One and that she caused not only the demise of innkeeper Augustus Curly Drake, but also the deaths of her estranged husband and his sainted mother, Mrs. Zelda Brighton. On her deathbed, Widow Brown's last words were that “vigilance against the sirens must continue. We need a champion of rectitude.”

  In Widow Brown, Lester saw an uncanonized saint. He felt a new sense of manly purpose when he began to fancy himself as her modern-day champion of rectitude. Discovering in his mother's attic an old trunk that contained the Widow's moldy dresses, he dressed up in them and put on a show for Thomas.

  Finally there was an avenue for funneling his antagonisms. But, when Lester followed the trail of Cassandra's descendants straight to the door of Mill's Creek, there his mission hit an early snag. Dr. Chloe Vye was an upstanding, beloved member of the community, a spinster who championed the cause of children. Reluctantly he gave up the chase, but he never abandoned the cause, feeling duty-bound to carry on the Widow's and God's work in alerting the populace to the dangers that exist when witches or sirens suddenly appear in their midst. Though the creatures are fiendishly devious, he told Thom, he was sure to spot them by the coloration of their hair.

  Lester tried dying his hair in a fiery red-gold shade to see if any magic resulted, but the effect was more Clarabelle than siren. Within six months, he became entirely bald, which made him all the more convinced of the terrible power sirens wielded.

  Af
ter high school, Lester Brown and Thomas Hawker III moved together to San Francisco, away from the prying eyes of those who would not understand their affection for each other and their fascination with the past. In the Examiner one day, Lester saw a picture that riveted his attention, a young woman whose photograph exactly matched the old press photo of Nevada Carson he kept in his closet. The young woman had the same lips, cheekbones, and hair. Her name was Marlena Dimmer, nee Marlena Bellum. She was an up-and-coming architect who had just been given the baton to lead the charge on a huge hotel project in Alta, Wyoming.

  Lester (who now was “Letty” at home) began to focus laser-like attention on Marlena and her career. Both Lester and Thomas had a theatrical bent. They signed a pledge in blood and anointed themselves the Knights of GibrAlta, Defenders of the Sacred Ways of the Natives. Otherwise, they led a fairly ordinary life. Lester worked as a bouncer in a Castro bar. Thomas was amassing a customer base in an insurance agency; people mistook his close-set eyes as evidence of reliability. The pair were devastated when their Dirty & Gerty act was booed off the stage in tryouts for the Gong Show.

  Back in Wyoming, the talk was all about a rival to the Biltmore and the Broadmoor hotels being built in their state. The groundbreaking for the Alta Hotel took place with great fanfare and extensive press coverage, making a splash even in the San Francisco newspapers. There was a photo of Lester's nemesis, Marlena Dimmer, standing with the hotel's owner before a massive oaken bar that she was credited with procuring and naming. A private lounge off the lobby was to be called B. L. Zebub's Poolhall Saloon.

  “The nerve of her!” cried Lester. “That's pure Satanism! Alta must be warned!”

  Lester and Thom agreed this was their moment to pursue their mission from God and Widow Brown. In 1971 they moved to Alta, twenty miles from New Gillette, and began passing themselves off as a married couple, Letty Brown-Hawker and Thomas Hawker. They were quickly accepted because of their family connections and loudly professed piety. In his role of head-of-household, Thomas started up his own insurance agency. With the Hawker shingle, he was able to glean a decent share of business from the old line of natives. The pair thrived and prospered, all the while watching Marlena do the same.

  There was a small, but strong-minded element of the citizenry who resented Harry Drake's gobbling up all the prime real estate through his goons at the bank. His showpiece hotel also had loud detractors among the very religious. Both groups needed leadership, at which no one was more vociferously effective than Letty Brown-Hawker. Decked out in her vintage turban and pioneer-era clothing, Letty volunteered for the job of reviving the local WCTU chapter presidency. Then she got herself on network television by chaining herself to a tree and demanding that Harry Drake do something about the satanic operation at the core of his famous hotel.

  Things did not really get out of hand, some would say, until Letty got into spiritualism. By the end of 1977, she was channeling not only Widow Brown, but also Crazy Horse. The Indian spirit, so Letty said, was plenty pissed off by what land developers such as Drake had done to the Native Americans over the years. The Crazy Horse monument and its colorful mountain-man sculptor had been featured by CBS on 60 Minutes in October. Letty wanted in on that action as well.

  As soon as she ruined Drake in Wyoming, Letty planned to tackle his land-grabbing schemes in the Dakotas. Unaware Marlena was not at all involved in that part of Drake's complex life, Letty mistakenly assumed Marlena was in on the fix.

  Some would also say it was only a matter of time before things came to a head between Letty Brown-Hawker and Marlena Bellum, that delusion lay on both sides. Marlena believed she was the best thing that ever happened to Harry Drake, and Letty believed that “she” was Widow Brown returned to life.

  However, as one disenchanted follower of the psychic witch-hunter pointed out, “if old Widow Brown had seen her self-appointed champion of rectitude, with his bald head showing, his dress hiked up, and his hairy balls exposed, the Widow would have come screaming out of the grave and strangled the madman herself!”

  Chapter Forty-Three

  All's Well That Ends Well

  December 31, 1977

  Bulette, Wyoming

  After the events of December 25, Marlena spends time grieving for her lost love and digesting the family history as best she can. Because of the home schooling she has received, the young siren is now better prepared (her elders hope!) to make her decisions. Indeed, over the next few days, Marlena Bellum makes some of the best decisions of her entire life.

  As a result of all she has taken in from the solstice story—not the least of which is a clearer understanding of her own nature—Marlena finds reserves of strength and good judgment within herself that she never knew she had. There is much for the elder sirens to be proud of. Marlena has managed not only to reject temptation from Harry at the critical moment, but also to take on the big risk of single motherhood.

  When she attends Harry's funeral on December 31, she stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Lila Coffin Drake. Their image of defiant solidarity is not lost on the local nay-sayers.

  As the months go by, Marlena will find the necessary courage not only to carry her pregnancy to term, but also to save her ancestral home from the wrecking ball. She will dedicate herself to moving forward while staying put. She will live in the pink house and fight the developers at their own game, saving as much historic architecture as she and Bryce Scattergood can afford to buy, barter, or steal.

  The elder sirens are relieved. However, the joy Chloe Vye feels over Marlena's redemption is tempered by an anomalous feeling of apprehension. She first becomes aware of it at Harry Drake's funeral, in the Scottish Presbyterian Church of Bulette.

  As Chloe is leaving the burial mound, she tastes something unpalatable, as though she has bit into a bitter orange. The sensation is simultaneous with her noticing a tall, young Native American standing at the gate to the graveyard. Clearly he belongs with Bates Funeral Home, as he wears one of their cheap, long-sleeved white shirts and a purple armband.

  Business is brisk for Bates Coffins, LLC. Now that district mining operations are booming, about once a week, an employee gets careless and pays the ultimate penalty. Bates has hired a half-breed Indian to assist in his coffin customizing operation.

  As Chloe follows the mourners past the young man, he takes off his feathered, felt hat and tosses back a mass of long, curly, black hair. Dust-like sparks of red-gold flame arise like an ethereal mist, a vision that disappears as abruptly as it arose.

  “Are you all right, Chloe?” Marlena asks her cousin in a murmur.

  “Just thought I saw a ghost,” whispers Chloe. “I think it very odd that the young man over there with Bates has my mother's eyes.”

  Marlena says nothing, but Chloe notes the young man continues to focus those topaz eyes like radar on all the mourners as they leave, as if he were memorizing their faces.

  Afterward, Chloe teases a conclusion from her hunches.

  She reasons that if the young man were indeed a long lost relative, there would be only one reason for him not to come forward and make himself known. It would be because he does not know of the family connection.

  Perhaps there is a remaining, undisclosed secret in her mother's past. Cassandra always said she had no further knowledge of her firstborn after his birth and adoption, but was she telling the truth? Chloe decides not to mention her suspicions to anyone, least of all to Marlena, who has enough to absorb.

  All's well that ends well. Or is it?

  In a quirk of fate, both the faithless lover and the false prophet are now dead. Through powerful storytelling, my daughter and I have cajoled Marlena into making the decision we hoped she would make. Despite the family curse, Marlena will go through with her pregnancy, and our line will continue.

  I must admit, though, I am left with a slightly galling perspective.

  I went through a lot of trouble and pain. I learned life's lessons the hard way, but I have had to endure the added
pain of having my skeleton dragged from the closet, inspected, and exploited, all for the benefit of teaching our young cousin what she might have figured out for herself, if only she had confided in us earlier. Harry Drake's life might have been spared, and my private life might have remained shrouded in mystery, if my young cousin had been more shrewd and less sentimental.

  Is Marlena mindful of how I sacrificed my privacy for her? Sufficiently respectful of her powerful gifts? I doubt it. Has the young siren proved herself worthy of the mantle I bestowed upon her when I yielded our traveling cloak to protect her from the gunman? Not to me she hasn't, not yet.

  Indeed, thanks to Marlena Bellum, our troubles are far from over. The deadly curse has been re-ignited in modern times and will follow us wherever we go. We must be vigilant against the malignant forces of fear, bigotry, and superstition, as well as from evildoers who may lurk within the family. Our little ones must be protected.

  Marlena assumes her pregnancy will automatically yield a girl, one graced with our special gifts. However, there are no guarantees; DNA rules. I (and I alone) possess the gift of second sight. It falls to me to reveal glimpses into the future. My visions are no longer the stuff of dreams, as they were when I inhabited human flesh.

  I can predict with confidence Marlena will get her wish and have her baby girl; a new siren will be born to the line, exactly ten months after conception. But that is not the whole picture. So I have tried to tell Marlena, only she did not choose to hear me.

  On December 31, 1977, when Marlena stood over her lover's grave in the Bulette churchyard where Curly and I first met, she wept inconsolably for her lost love. She was too consumed with grief to be pondering her siren lineage, but that big head of hers was swimming with pious resolutions: to make good on her better instincts, do more for the community, stick by her extended family, and be a good mother. Blah, blah, blah.