by Jen Blood
I kept walking.
Diggs and Einstein caught up to me somewhere along the line. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck and my t-shirt clung to the small of my back. The forest got thicker, as did the mosquitoes and blackflies. The trail of beer cans and butts dried up. I could hear water rushing somewhere nearby.
“You’re sure it’s out here?” Diggs asked.
“It should be,” I said.
When it was clear that Erin Lincoln’s grave wasn’t among the ones we’d found so far, I followed a path deeper into the woods. Einstein ran on ahead, while Diggs lingered behind. We’d gone about fifty yards beyond the first graveyard when the path opened up again. I came out of the woods to find myself at the edge of another overgrown field, this one on a hillside. A single crumbling headstone was planted halfway down the hill. Through a grove of spruce at the bottom, I could see and hear white water rushing past. I stopped and crouched to read the stone.
Wallace Lincoln
1925 – 1972
Jeff and Erin’s father. Erin Lincoln’s headstone wasn’t there, but I didn’t have to look far before I found it. At the bottom of the hill were two immaculate gravesites overlooking a waterfall that dropped into a clear, peaceful stretch of the Aroostook River. The cemetery plot had been mowed recently, and fresh wildflowers decorated both graves. The headstones were made of marble. Both were elegant, oversized, and undoubtedly expensive.
The stone to the left belonged to Willa Lincoln—my grandmother, or so the theory went. According to Erin Lincoln’s obituary, Willa had died of pneumonia in ‘68. The inscription said simply, Taken too soon. The second stone belonged to Erin Rae Lincoln. Below her name, etched in an elegant script, were the words, A better world awaits.
Diggs came over and stood beside me silently.
“You okay?” he asked.
I didn’t trust my voice, so I just nodded. There was no evidence of Jeff Lincoln here—no sign that anyone mourned his passing, or missed him in his absence… No sign that he’d existed at all.
“Someone’s been taking care of it,” I noted when I could finally speak.
Diggs pointed into the woods to our left. It took me a second before I saw what he was pointing to: a cabin, just barely visible from our vantage. A quick look around revealed a path leading straight to it.
“It doesn’t seem vaguely creepy that there’s a house out here in the middle of nowhere, and the only neighbors for twenty miles are…”
“Dead?” Diggs finished for me. “It’s a hell of a lot more than vaguely creepy, but I don’t see a lot of choices here. If you want to talk to the crypt keeper, this looks like the best bet.”
I hated it when he was logical. “Right. Absolutely right.”
I whistled for Einstein, who came galloping toward us a few seconds later, delirious at his newly-earned freedom after almost eight hours on the road. I started down the path to the house. When I realized I was alone, I glanced over my shoulder.
“Are you coming?”
Diggs grimaced. “I don’t know how I keep ending up in situations like this with you.”
“Suck it up,” I said. “Do you know how long I tagged after you on your undercover stories from hell? How many creepy freaks I distracted with my feminine wiles while you got your scoops?”
That nostalgic gleam I’d been seeing so much of lately resurfaced. “Ahh… The good old days.” He nodded, resolute, and hurried to catch up. “You’re right. Let’s do this thing.”
The cabin had a garden out back and flowers out front and three goats and a lame donkey in a fenced area off to the side. Deep-throated barking came from within the second my feet touched the doorstep. Diggs put Einstein’s leash back on and held him a few steps back while I knocked.
A tall, sturdy man who could have been thirty or could have been eighty answered. His eyes were dark and his beard freshly trimmed. When he saw me, he took a step back and just stared, an unmistakable simplicity in his eyes. He wore a meticulously pressed, peach-colored dress shirt beneath a pair of equally well-pressed overalls. He remained in the doorway staring at us with his mouth open before he suddenly turned his head and shouted over his shoulder.
“Sarah!”
I looked at Diggs, who just shrugged. A huge, shaggy white dog peered out at us from behind the man’s left hip. Einstein whined behind me. The man shouted the same name again—twice—without ever making a move to let us in. Or shut us out, for that matter. The shaggy dog pushed past him and padded out to meet us with tail wagging. Einstein took one look at her and his dogged heart was a goner. While we waited for this mysterious Sarah to appear, the two dogs did a quick sniff test before Diggs unhooked Stein and they took off for the wild blue.
Eventually, a woman as tall and twice as broad as the man at the door appeared from the back, spitting what was either pig Latin or pissed-off French.
She stopped the second she saw me, blinked once or twice, then pulled the man away from the door and took his place, her hands on her wide hips.
“What you want here?” She had the voice of a lifetime smoker, an impressive growth of crisp black hairs sprouting from her fleshy chin, and a much thicker version of the same Acadian accent I’d heard from Bonnie.
“We were just up at the cemetery there,” I said, pointing over my shoulder. “We saw the path leading here. I thought you might be able to answer some questions.”
“Non,” she said briefly. The man was standing behind her with his arms crossed over his chest, still staring at me. “We have work, oui? No time for tourists.” She started to close the door.
I stuck my foot in the door without a moment’s hesitation. “I’m here about Erin Lincoln—she was my aunt. Or she would have been, anyway. You knew her, didn’t you?” I addressed the man directly. “That’s why you’re looking at me that way; you can see the resemblance?”
“We don’t have nothing to say about it,” the woman insisted.
“Jeff was ton pere?” the man asked. He took a step toward me.
“He didn’t use the name Jeff when he had me, but I think so, yes. I came here to find out more about him. About what happened here.”
“We don’t know about what happened,” Sarah said. “And we have work.”
The man touched her shoulder and said something in rapid-fire French, his eyes on me the whole time. I didn’t need to speak the language to know he was pleading my case.
“Please,” I said. “I won’t take that much of your time.”
She looked like she’d rather have lunch with a rabid mountain lion, but she finally opened the door again and stepped aside.
We were in.
I’d been expecting slasher-movie chic when Diggs first pointed out the cabin, but what we found inside was anything but: a mud room that opened into a sunny, spacious great room with oversized windows and plants on every surface. Matted black and white photos—a few landscapes, but most of wildlife—hung on the walls. Diggs looked around in wonder.
“Did you build this?” he asked Sarah.
She pointed at the man. “My brother did everything. Furniture, art, pis la maison.”
The man nodded, his face shining with pride. He dug his hands into his pockets. “Sarah showed me, and then I built it. We worked together.”
Diggs ran his hand reverently along the pale, wooded walls. “I built a place a couple of years ago,” he said. “It’s good work—peaceful. A good way to get your head together. Mine didn’t come out anything like this, though,” he added.
I looked at him in surprise. Diggs had returned to Maine after his third marriage failed a little over three years before, resolutely sober and uncharacteristically celibate, but that was about all I knew—he’d never shared any details beyond that. Sarah softened at his words, maybe seeing a glimpse of the vulnerability I’d somehow missed up to that point.
“Luke has a gift for it,” she said, nodding toward her brother. “Pis c’est vrai—anything you can do with your hands that gets you out of your head
c’est tres bien.” She waved toward a handmade table with matching chairs in the kitchen. “Sit if you like. I’ll put on coffee.”
I glanced back out the window. Einstein and his new girl were chasing each other through a field of goldenrod. Sarah followed my gaze.
“They’ll be fine, chere. She was raised to be maman to everything in these woods—she looks out for everybody. She can keep him from trouble.”
Despite her reassurance, I took a seat facing the window—just in case Stein decided to make a break for it, or his woolly sweetheart decided she’d had enough.
Luke made himself some tea, moving carefully around the kitchen—like he’d broken one too many things over the years, and was afraid of repeating past mistakes. Sarah set two mugs of steaming coffee in front of us, and sat down with tea for herself.
“She was tres jolie, you know? Pretty,” she said as soon as she sat down. I looked at her in surprise. “We might as well get to it, non? The reason you’re here.”
A woman after my own heart. “What do you remember about her?” I asked.
“Oh… I remember everything,” she said immediately. “She was a good girl. But very…” She paused, like she was trying to find the English for what she wanted to say. “Fiery, non? Always fighting for something. Helping people, all the time. It’s why Luke took to her.”
Luke nodded. He was sitting at the edge of his chair, which he’d pushed as close to me as possible without actually landing in my lap.
“You look like her,” he said. “But not so much as I thought when Bonnie said you was coming, oui? You have her hair. Et la bouche, non?” He tapped his own lips. “But not the same smile. She smiled with all her teeth.” He demonstrated. “She was sad, sometimes. Mais tu est plus triste.”
I looked at Diggs, whose francais was far superior to mine. “He says you are more sad,” he said.
“Oh.” I felt the heat rise in my cheeks as I tried to think of a graceful way out of that one. “Wait—Max Richards’ Bonnie? Hank Gendreau’s sister? You know her?”
“Oui,” Sarah said. “She married our brother—he est gone now. Mais we are all Sauciers.”
“She told us about la reve,” Luke said. Whatever la reve was, based on the wild look in his eye, it had freaked the hell out of him. “What she saw. She says it’s pas bien, you coming here. Not safe.”
Diggs looked at me, baffled. “What are they talking about?”
“Bonnie is un taweille,” Sarah said. “Same as her memere. She has the Sight. We learned many years ago not to ignore that.”
“She said something about G,” I said before Diggs could get in on the act, hoping to get us back on track. “How she saw someone named G, or being able to see… into them,” I finished, feeling like an idiot.
“Il est mal to talk about what Bonnie sees,” Sarah said, glancing at Luke. Based on the rocking and the clenched fists, he wasn’t handling the conversation well. I understood how he felt.
“What about her brother, then—Jeff. Can you tell me anything about him?”
“He was un monstre,” Luke said, his fists clenched on the table. The rocking sped up, his breathing along with it. I’ve been accused before of lacking empathy, but even I could tell this was a bad sign. Sarah touched her brother’s hand; he stopped almost instantly.
“Jeff was one of the more popular kids in Black Falls,” Sarah said. “On the basketball team, always in the paper for something. But he…” She hesitated.
I leaned back in my chair and attempted a reassuring smile. “It’s all right. You can say whatever you want. I’m just after the truth.”
She looked at Diggs for confirmation. He nodded.
“D’Accord,” she said. She looked me dead in the eye. “He was mean. Smart, but cold. Cruel.”
I thought of my father and me in the greenhouse when I was a kid—tending the plants, wondering at every caterpillar and earthworm that crossed our path.
“Can you give us an example of what you’re talking about?” Diggs asked. His eyes never left mine.
“He locked me in the cellar,” Luke said immediately. His eyes clouded. “He told me nobody would come for me because I was stupide. Il m'a laissé dans le noir.”
“He left him in the dark,” Diggs translated for me.
I swallowed past a knot that lodged itself halfway down my throat.
“It was just overnight,” Sarah said, like that somehow made it better. “Only a few hours. But Jeff slipped and told Erin… She came back and let Luke out.”
“I didn’t think nobody would find me,” Luke said. “I prayed on my knees and I tried to dig myself out. Bloodied my fingers. Hurt my head. Who would do something like that? I never did nothing to Jeff Lincoln.”
“What happened when you got out?” Diggs asked, saving me the trouble of coming up with an apology for the demon my father had apparently been as a kid.
“His pere was tres important in town,” Sarah said. “He owned a mill that shut down soon after Erin… ” She stopped. “Apres tout. But then, nobody did nothing because Mr. Lincoln would have their jobs. Jeff didn’t get away with it at home, though.”
Luke looked troubled.
“That bothers you?” Diggs asked.
“Erin told me things,” Luke said softly, like he was revealing a long-kept secret.
I looked at him curiously. “What things?”
“About home. What son pere would do to Jeff when nobody was there. I was trying to be his amis …”
“And that’s when he locked you in the cellar?” Diggs asked.
“He was tres fache. Angry. He told me to shut up. Hit me in the face.” Luke looked down at his hands, twisting his callused fingers together. “He said I didn’t know nothing about it because I was stupide. He told me I shouldn’t talk about him again. Jamais.”
“When did all this happen?” I asked.
Sarah looked at Luke. “It was after Mrs. Lincoln died, oui?”
He nodded. “Dans l’ete. In summer.”
“Oui,” she agreed. “Not long before they found Erin.”
So, mere months before Jeff Lincoln dropped out of sight and his sister was found murdered, he’d been beating up mentally challenged neighbors and locking them in the cellar. I couldn’t imagine any of it. The man I’d known—the one who raised me and kept me safe for the first nine years of my life—might as well have never existed.
I took out the photo I had of the two of us out on the island together and slid it across the table to her.
“Do you recognize him?” I asked. “The boy you’re talking about—Could this be him?”
Sarah and Luke both leaned over the photo, looking at it closely. After a minute or two, they both eased back. The look on their faces was enough.
“He looks nicer, there,” Luke said. “Un bon pere, oui? A good father?”
“Oui,” I agreed softly.
“How did Jeff get along with his sister?” Diggs asked. He glanced at me to see if I was still in the game. I managed a naked smile, but nothing more.
“He never left her side,” Sarah said. “They were like magnets, non? Opposites, but they fit. There was three, four years between them, but that didn’t matter. Il est tres…” she hesitated again, looking for the word. “Protective. Very protective”
I held on tight to that tenuous lifeline. “And no one thought it was a little weird that he would do... well, everything that was done to Erin Lincoln before she died? Given that she was the only one he ever actually seemed to like?”
“She was afraid of him,” Luke said. “He didn’t want her to have no other friends. Jamais.”
“It wasn’t affection,” Sarah agreed. “He owned her. She was his pet. It was okay when she was younger. By the time she died, she didn’t like it no more.”
“You knew her, then,” I said.
Her eyes clouded. She didn’t say a word.
“Sarah and Erin were amis. Best friends. Together always. Sarah even went dancing avec Jeff. It wasn’t a good
date, though,” Luke said. “She came back crying, pis cried for two more days.”
She took a long sip of tea and set the mug down carefully. The look in her eye was all I needed.
“How old were you?” I asked. My voice was barely above a whisper.
“Thirteen,” she said. She held herself carefully upright. “He was handsome. Very charming, when he wanted to be.”
She put a hand over Luke’s and nodded toward the door, issuing an order in French. Luke got up without any fuss, said a quick goodbye to Diggs and me, and headed for the door. Sarah waited until he’d gone before she said anything more.
“I am sorry I can’t tell you better things about your father,” she said.
“He raped you,” I said. I couldn’t seem to get my voice back.
“It wasn’t like that,” she said quickly. “He didn’t beat me, nothing like that. He gave me beer. Was nice to me—and careful, so there wasn’t no worry about un bebe. But then when it was over, he wouldn’t talk to me no more. He drove me home, pis then he stayed away from me. He tried to make Erin stop spending time with me and Luke, mais non. She never did listen to him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. The apology hung in the air, grossly inadequate considering the damage Jeff Lincoln—my father—had inflicted on this woman more than forty years ago. I stood numbly. “We should probably go.”
Diggs got up and took our dishes to the sink.
“You should talk to Red Grivois,” Sarah said, just as the dogs came bursting through the door with Luke on their heels. “He was with the state police for many years. He found Erin, and investigated the case. He’s been fishing, but he’s back maintenant. I’ll call and tell him to expect you.”
“Wasn’t he the same one who was first on scene when they found Ashley Gendreau?” I asked.
“We don’t have many police up this way—every mal thing that happened here for many years, Red was the one had to pick up after it. It wasn’t a good job.”