The museum tapes had also shown that on the evening of the gala, among the handful of casually dressed nonpaying guests, in attendance no doubt thanks to the museum’s free Tuesday night policy, one stood out: a young man wearing navy-blue work pants and a stained Carhartt jacket. His face was never fully visible under the shadow of his baseball cap, but his stance and his gestures and his gait were unmistakable.
“We have no idea how Claremont, the good twin, may have influenced your killer’s thinking in the hours before their deaths.” Dr. Katz’s familiar voice brought her back to the present. “This is not a straightforward profile, Christine. It’s as much about a man’s soul—two men’s souls—and the search to fill a void inside as it is about a twisted psyche.”
“Maybe you’re right.” Christine sighed.
Katz made a spitting sound—Prusik figured he’d chewed off a piece of the ragged end of another ballpoint. “Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong,” he said between spits. “I explain nothing. I can only put to you possibilities for what might be at work here. This is a strange case, sure. Genes alone can only explain so far. Claremont’s adoptive parents prove that a good environment does make a difference. Of course, we know very little about your killer’s childhood experiences. You must rest, Christine. Congratulations for proving to them all what a fine forensic scientist you truly are.”
“Thank you for saying that, Doctor.” She said good-bye to Katz, but her mind continued to whir. The thought of Holmquist pushing a charm stone inside her body made her queasy. Was her scar what he had meant by her “little surprise”? Did he think they shared something in common? The idea was revolting.
And Claremont. His anguish as he had followed his brother into the night had been so palpable that remembering it, Christine could almost feel it in her own body. Had he felt his own life draining away as well? Losing a synaptic link that had existed since before birth, since the womb, since a cleft in a single egg had split them into two? It all represented a planet of grief Christine could not fathom. And then Claremont’s ending up in the thorns, just like his brother? Christine shuddered. Had poor Claremont found the thorns, or had the thorns found him? She had read how confounded and despondent one identical twin could become upon learning of the sudden death of the other. The loss of someone who truly understands, knows what you are going through without having to be told anything at all would be a devastating blow. Even if the someone was a monster. Poor David Claremont. He’d tried his best, but he’d never stood a chance. She ached in her gut at the thought.
A nurse entered and adjusted her IV drip, and soon, mercifully soon, Christine closed her eyes as the sedative took hold.
Sometime later, McFaron whispered, “Hey, partner,” his fingers tapping the top of her hand. “What are you doing?” The sheriff placed his trooper hat at the foot of her bed. “Sleeping the whole day through?”
“There’s enough room for the both of us in this bed,” she said, inching over as best she could. Suddenly there was nothing she wanted more than the feeling of his solid frame next to hers.
He leaned over and they kissed. “You’re not just saying that because of these drugs?” He jiggled the metal IV stand.
“Probably, but since when does that ever stop a big sheriff from taking advantage?” He leaned back down and cradled her as best he could with his one good arm. She wrapped her free arm around his chest, holding him close.
“I was so afraid of losing you, Christine,” he said softly. “I don’t ever want to lose you.”
“Oh, Joe, I don’t want to lose you, either. I know I’m not always a very nice person. And I’m sorry for not being straightforward with you, and for doing something that could compromise you, and…”
“Shhh,” he said. “That’s enough of that kind of talk.” He pulled back and kissed her fingers gently.
“Joe.” She gazed at him and couldn’t imagine a kinder, truer man. Tears were beginning to spill down her cheeks. “I’ve been wrong about so many things. What I said about our galaxies colliding? I think…I think maybe they can. If you still want them to.”
“I still want them to, Christine,” he whispered, and his smile suffused her entire being with a sense of contentment.
She sighed and nestled into him, drowsy again. Today was a reprieve, a welcome one. She was thankful to be alive. She had survived, and so had Joe, and so had whatever future was in store for them together. And for the moment, that was good enough.
EPILOGUE
A shriveled leaf twisted on a stalk in the unobstructed breeze over a vacant field of corn stubble. Rain fell in dribs and drabs. The air surrounding the Blackie Nursing Home was acid to the taste though the Lincoln strip mines were a good five miles away.
The tip-off had come from the day nurse, who’d overheard Earl Avery, one of the Blackie home’s patients, chuckling and talking about his two boys being famous while watching a TV news story on Claremont and Holmquist. The nurse later confirmed it by poking around Avery’s bureau drawer and finding four old letters addressed to him from a Bruna Holmquist pleading for him to send her money to support his two sons—Donald and David.
A cable TV van jerked to a halt across the road from the visitors’ parking lot. A WTTX TV news team scuttled across the back lawn toward a side door the alert day nurse held open. The video cameraman handed her a hundred-dollar bill for her troubles. A tall newswoman wearing a sharp-looking tan pantsuit with a bright-turquoise silk scarf followed in next. Last through the door was the backup grunt carrying an extra tape player in case something went haywire with the direct-link satellite feed.
Silently, the nurse led them down the hallway, and they slipped unnoticed into room 29. The cameraman flicked on the bright halogen lamp, aiming it squarely at the eyes of the sixty-one-year-old bedridden coal miner. Avery’s eyes fluttered open.
The newswoman began her routine—“Testing, one, two, three, testing”—and the cameraman gave her a nod.
“Lights are good. Sound’s ready,” he said. “You’re on in three, two, one…”
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Marguerite Devereux reporting to you live from the Blackie Nursing Home in Blackie, Indiana. We are in the room of Earl Avery, a bedridden coal miner recently confirmed to be the biological father of both David Claremont and Donald Holmquist. Holmquist is the serial killer of three girls that we know of, and is also responsible for the death of a psychiatrist who had treated Holmquist’s identical twin brother, David Claremont. Police shot Holmquist in a cornfield a week ago, later finding his corpse caught by thorns, in what appeared to be an attempt to escape. In a macabre twist, Claremont, the twin, was found dead a day later, his body similarly entangled in a thornbush.”
The newswoman turned her attention to the miner. “Mr. Avery?” She shook the old man’s arm. “Can you hear me?”
Avery’s head was propped on several large pillows. His eyes opened and he gazed straight ahead. The newswoman leaned over his bed.
“Marguerite Devereux from WTTX TV Indianapolis. I’d like you to answer a few questions for our audience.”
With his pronounced cheekbones and bushy eyebrows, the old man had the same pronounced cheekbones and bushy eyebrows of Claremont and Holmquist. Take away the white color of his hair and a few extra lines and it was the same lump of clay.
“I understand, Mr. Avery, that you are the father of David Claremont and Donald Holmquist. Is that true?”
A faint smile revealed the worn edge of deeply yellowed ivories.
“Jenny Sprade, age eleven, disappeared almost ten years ago from the coal-mining camp where you once worked. Penny Simons, age thirteen, disappeared two years before that.” Devereux’s intuition was on overdrive. She had no proof against Avery other than guilt by genetic association—if his son Donald Holmquist was a vicious killer, so could he be. “Could you please tell the girls’ still-grieving families and the rest of our viewers whether you know anything about their murders? Mr. Avery?”
Aver
y began a cough he couldn’t stop. He stared at a glass on his bedside table.
The newswoman noticed. “You’d like a drink?”
She steadied the man’s hand as he slurped down water. “What about it, Mr. Avery? Do you know the police just found their remains in an abandoned shaft on the Lincoln Mines properties?”
The newswoman had his attention. Avery’s eyes were locked on the svelte figure under her suit jacket. Another coughing spasm erupted, black lung disease in its final stages. She gave him more water.
“Mr. Avery, what about Jenny Sprade and Penny Simons, the dead girls? For the sake of their families—they have a right to know what happened to their loved ones.” She leaned in closer to him.
Avery’s mouth sagged wide. He was barely able to take in air through lungs scarred from years of inhaling coal dust. His eyes brightened as the cameraman shifted position for a closer shot.
Frustrated, the newswoman let the mike dangle. In a whisper, she said to her technician, “You said he’d talk. What’s the deal?”
Avery’s head suddenly came off the pillow. “Sure as a vein of coal pissing gas will blow,” he said and slumped back, heaving for air in great rasping gulps.
The newswoman didn’t blink an eye at the man’s pained expression. She was too perturbed.
“I take it you’re admitting you know something about these killings? It’s only a matter of time before police forensics will prove it.”
The old miner grinned, showing off his teeth to the camera.
The newswoman looked frazzled. “Cut,” said the cameraman, stopping the shoot.
Devereux heard a button clicking—Earl Avery was signaling the nurses’ station with a remote device.
“I’m sorry. This is in violation of home policy.” The head nurse filled the doorway, and her tone left no room for disagreement. “You must all leave immediately.”
The nurse took Avery’s pulse. An oxygen mask dangled from a nearby hook. She repositioned it over the patient’s nose and mouth and adjusted the flow gauge on the tank.
After the nurse and the TV people had left the room, Earl Avery sank back deeper into his pillows and let his mind wander. Bruna—he could remember picking her up at a bar in Chicago. A big girl she was, with a Scandinavian accent. Plain, but with a body on her that immediately made him hungry for it. And right after she’d swallowed the last of her suds, he’d done the gentlemanly thing and asked if she’d like him to walk her home, and she’d said that she would. He’d taken her down a deserted side street and shoved her up against a brick wall, having his way with her. He’d been surprised to wake up later with a lump on his head. Bruna was gone, and that was the end of it. Until the letters began arriving from her in her broken English. Ridiculous, whiny letters begging him for money so she didn’t have to give up one or both of their sons for adoption. The letters stopped, and he’d more or less forgotten about her. Why he’d bothered to keep any of the letters he wasn’t sure, but he’d liked the idea of having sired sons.
With a trembling hand, Avery reached for the glass of water on the bedside table. He gulped a mouthful, spilling it down his chin, his thoughts drifting further back. It was late summer, just like now, and he was seventeen. It was hot. He liked that, even though he worked on a farm and spent long hours stacking hay. He was laying up bales for the winter in a three-story loft. From the open bay where the chain pulley swung to hoist the pallet, he saw her—the nubile young daughter of a neighbor farmer in a flower-print dress that flowed prettily. The tight-fitting bodice showed off her slim waist. The way her body moved inside the frock sent him tumbling down the wooden steps and out into the hazy August air.
Avery smiled, the pleasure of the memory never failing him.
She wandered into a cornfield, slapping the long green leaves of a second planting tasseled in full bloom, and disappeared down a row, taking a shortcut home. He followed her into the corn as if pulled by a ring in his nose, pushing aside the leaves and thick stalks in the fading heat of the day. Walking faster, two rows over, he caught glimpses of her flowery dress. For several minutes he trolled behind, waiting till she was farther along into the maize. Gradually, he drifted deeper into the sweet-smelling crop abuzz with bees going from tassel to tassel.
His skin began to crawl as if covered in a swarm of ants. Breathing shallowly, he was stricken, his eyesight shrinking. He dropped to one knee. Everything had gone dark. He scratched at the ground, as if searching for his lost sight there, heaving on all fours with his face in the soil, sucking up dirt. Then slowly the light returned, and with it a new craving.
Clumsily he crashed down stalks, fearing he’d lost her for good. He jogged madly, crisscrossing the rows, crushing the corn, until, fifty feet away, still ambling with her hands outstretched, gently catching the broad-curled leaves, there she was. He could hang back no longer—the hunger had rooted in him. He ran recklessly, and she let out a cry as she turned and saw him thrashing behind her. He lunged, tackling her, punching out her air. Circled his arm around her face. She bit him hard, and still he felt nothing but joy, searching and finding the smooth seam of her jawbone. With the same tremendous force that he used to jerk the hoist chain, he snapped her neck sideways, hearing it pop. Becoming all his. He felt so alive lying over her still-warm body, with the smells of the corn and the deep black soil effervescing.
He carried her body a great distance, into a forest, to an old limestone cave he had discovered. Carefully, he climbed down the steep entrance. Hunched over her body in the dim light of the passage, he opened out the blade of his pocketknife with barely enough strength, he was trembling so. He worked the thin carbon steel below her rib. And he feasted. With each bite, he grew stronger, enabling him to lift her afterward to the edge of a deep vertical shaft in the cave. Seconds passed after he’d tossed her before he heard the dull thud of her body hitting rock.
When he’d emerged from the darkness empty-handed, the daylight had been too much. He’d stumbled, fracturing his ankle. The memory of it now, in his hospital bed, pained his leg immensely. But oh, the pain had been worth it. The pain had been very much worth it.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to my wonderful agent, Elisabeth Weed, for taking me on and investing her time and patience in me, and never losing enthusiasm believing in this book. She kept the project moving forward and got me to the finish line. Thank you so much, Elisabeth! And thank you, Stephanie Sun, for your cheerful assistance. I cannot thank enough my dear editor, Nan Gatewood Satter, for getting me to Elisabeth and for her keen eye and commonsensical judgement; she challenged my plotting and rooted out awkward expression, and minded those p’s and q’s in the otherwise silent world of authorship.
Senior Acquisitions Editor Andrew Bartlett’s enthusiasm for my writing made it happen. And thanks to the whole Amazon Publishing team: Jessica Fogleman, Jacque Ben-Zekry, Leslie LaRue, and Reema Al-Zaben, who deserve high praise for their professionalism, competence, courtesy, and, above all, for making me feel like a true partner on their team. Particular praise is due Kate Chynoweth for her fresh laser eyes that scrubbed the book while helping lift the story to a better place. Thank you, Kate!
Pat Sims and Chris Noel gave much-needed feedback in the book’s early stages and challenged me to reach to a higher place.
To my sister, Susan Richards, a gifted author herself, who believed in my writing from the get-go with all her heart and cheered me on to never give up. I am deeply grateful, Sooz! To Nathaniel, Marguerite, and Evan: I am privileged as their father because they have taught me so much about myself; without them I would have been denied my greatest gift—to demonstrate to my children what dogged determination, love of work, and believing in one’s self can bring.
And above all to my wife, Cameron, who never doubted me or had a cross word all those hours I spent writing in the attic; I am forever blessed.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Robert C. Price, 2010
Lloyd Devereux Richards was born in
New York City and traveled extensively in Europe, Africa, and Central America before attending law school. He previously served as a senior law clerk for an Indiana Court of Appeals judge, researching and writing drafts for dozens of published opinions, including the appeal of a serial killer sentenced to death. A father of three, he lives with his wife, Cameron O’Connor, and their two dogs in Montpelier, Vermont. Stone Maidens is his first novel.
Stone Maidens Page 30