Authors: Barbara Fradkin
He slid the note out of view casually. “Did he ever try to purify anyone else? His brothers, for example?”
“I remember he drove his brothers crazy. He prayed over them, confiscated their things. He stole cigarettes and porn magazines the boys had hidden in their rooms. He spied on their girlfriends.”
All of which could create a powder keg in the household, Green reflected. “Did he himself have a girlfriend?”
Sandy's eyebrows shot up and a smile broke his taut features. “Good Lord, no. Lawrence would never know how to handle a real live girl.”
“Could there have been a girl he loved from afar? Or imagined he had a relationship with?”
“It's possible, I suppose. But why...?” Sandy's voice trailed off as his gaze travelled from the tin can to the tangled brush. “The body is Lawrence, isn't it?”
“Possibly.” Green picked up the evidence bag containing the love letter. “Do you remember a girl named Sophia?”
Sandy looked sad as he studied the letter. “There was a girl in our grade, who lived in Richmond. Pretty girl with long black hair.”
“Last name?”
He shrugged. He'd been scrutinizing the letter, turning it over. “I seem to remember she was Tom's girl, though. I don't think Lawrence wrote this.”
Green handed him the scrap of paper with the fingerprint. “This is another handwriting, maybe to the same girl. Could that be from Lawrence?”
Sandy stared at the simple note. “Holy crap,” he whispered.
Green waited, but Sandy didn't elaborate. Simply shook his head as he handed the note back. “What?” Green prompted, wondering if he'd recognized the smudge for what it was.
“I...these shreds of the past, they seem to speak volumes.”
“What volumes?”
Sandy shrugged and pulled his gloves back on his hands vigorously. “I was just a kid, but it makes you wonder what all was going on. All those horny boys, pretty girls, secret liaisons, the father going on about sinâ”
“And Lawrence wandering around in the middle of it, crazy as a loon,” Green finished grimly. More than ever, he was convinced that Lawrence's return, and his death, were linked to events long ago. “Where might I find this Sophia?”
“I haven't seen her in years. Not since high school.”
Green scooped up the evidence bags and returned them to the car. “Then let's check your high school year book. That will give us a name.”
When they arrived at Sandy's house, they discovered the real estate office open and Edna McMartin firmly ensconced behind the desk. She was holding forth on the phone, arguing with someone about pies for the church bake sale. Sandy had to wait while she cast her vote for pumpkin, then she signed off and turned to her son with a smile. Which, Green noted, he didn't return.
“Church business again, Mom? On my business phone?”
Her jaw thrust out. “Sandy, you won't make any money if you never have anyone in the office to answer inquiries. I've taken three calls already this afternoon.”
“That's what the answering machine is for, Mom.”
“People don't like talking to machines,” she countered. “I made one appointment for you, which I'll take if you don't have time.” She fixed her gaze on Green pointedly, and her smile vanished. “Buying a country house, Detective?”
Sandy glanced at Green. “Perhaps we should do this upstairs.” Edna was instantly alert, her shrewd eyes narrowing. Ready to protect yet another of her babies from my intrusion, Green thought, even if this baby was nudging forty and clearly unappreciative of her efforts. Yet the friction might be interesting, and many a secret inadvertently slipped out in the heat of a family dispute. Besides, no one in the village was likely to know more about the Pettigrew secrets than their long-time neighbours.
Green dropped into the client's chair and looked up at Sandy casually. “Why don't you bring all your yearbooks down here, and I'll keep your mother out of trouble.”
Sandy opened his mouth to protest but thought better of it. Flushing, he turned around and clumped upstairs.
“Yearbooks?” Edna's lips pursed warily.
“We're trying to gather some background on Lawrence Pettigrew.” He smiled amiably. “I understand Sandy was a good friend of Lawrence growing up, but at some point you forbade your son to go over there anymore. Why?”
Her eyes grew shuttered, and she folded her arms over her chest. Green held up a soothing hand. “Not being critical, just wondering.”
“Because the boy was a dangerous lunatic.”
She was still bristling, so Green cast about for a means to soften her. “I know he was schizophrenic, and I'm not questioning the family's decision. I'm sure his illness was very hard on them. But I'm wondering if you know what happened. Perhaps Lawrence's mother confided in you?”
“What does all this matter now? Lawrence is dead. That's what you're saying, isn't it? He's thrown himself off that old church tower, and as far as I'm concerned, good riddance.”
Green kept his expression friendly with an effort. “Why did you forbid your son to go over there?”
She pressed her lips together stubbornly, but he waited her out with his notebook poised and his gaze steady. Finally she seemed to relent. “Even Katherine was afraid of him. And afraid for Robbie, who was only a young lad. She told me one day Lawrence threw out all the knives in the house because knives were evil. Another time he cut up Derek's sheets because, well, frankly, they were dirtied. But the final straw was Tom's centrefolds. Tom had them taped on his wall, and Lawrence slashed all the girls' bodies with a razor. Would you want your small child growing up with that?”
Dismayed, Green stopped writing. The deeper he dug in this family, the more sinister the picture became. Edna was watching him as if daring him to come to the madman's defence.
“No, I wouldn't,” he replied truthfully. “Do you recall the circumstances surrounding the fire that destroyed the shed?”
She had just begun to relax, but now she stiffened in surprise. “What the dickens has the shed got to do with anything?”
Green explained about Lawrence's recent visit to the place where the shed had been.
“They burned it down,” she said. “That shed was Lawrence's special hideout. And after they shipped him off, they got rid of all his things. Clothes, books, belongings. Burned every last one of them, like they were contaminated by the devil.”
There was a thumping on the stairs, and Sandy burst back into the room with a slim volume open in his hands. “I found her. Sophia Vincelli.” He handed Green the book and jabbed his finger at the photo of a beautiful, porcelain-fine girl with long black hair falling in a sheet below her shoulders. The same girl who had been clinging to Tom in the photo Robbie Pettigrew had shown them.
“Tom's girl,” Edna said without hesitation.
“One of Tom's girls,” Sandy amended. “Come on, Mom, they usually only lasted a week.”
“Oh, but she was a beautiful girl. I remember her from that school play in your Grade Eleven year. She played Ophelia. I'm surprised you don't remember her, dear. All you boys were cross-eyed over her.”
Sandy rolled his eyes so quickly that Edna didn't notice, but Green smiled to himself, suspecting Edna rarely missed the chance to remind her son of all the ones who got away. Sandy parried the thrust with practised ease. “For all the good it ever did any of us,” he replied. “If she was dating Tom Pettigrew, she was way out of our league. He'd already dropped out of school by then and was working. Tom always picked off the best ones, only to break their hearts and dump them when the next one came along.”
His mother leaned over to peer at the yearbook. After a moment, she tapped the picture thoughtfully. “I know Tom was a ladies' man, but I seem to remember this one was different. Katherine Pettigrew told me it ended badly for Tom. The girl simply vanished one day, probably ran off with someone else. Broke Tom's heart. That's why he left town. Of course, she was Italian.”
She made the pronouncement as if it explained everything, but Green's thoughts were already running ahead. To another person who had also inexplicably vanished, to the bloody note in the elegant hand “S. Bus 4:30, meet me 3:00 our place”. To a crucifix that had ended up in Lawrence's hands twenty years later.
He had an idea how they might all fit together, but only a vague, uneasy idea what they might mean. First, he had to see the crime scene for himself, to try to put himself in Lawrence's mind. Then he needed a long talk with the most sensible, psychologically insightful person he'd ever known.
The sun had almost dipped to the horizon, casting a searing orange glare over the barren field. The autumn chill was already stealing in, and Isabelle's breath formed frosty swirls as she bent over the ground. She swore at the gathering darkness, which would cut short her efforts long before she felt she'd done justice to the task. Rationally, she knew the pond could wait, but her frustration needed an outlet, and shovelling was as good as any.
After Green had left that afternoon, she and Jacques had had a pitched battle over what to do with the tangled eyesore at the edge of the yard. He'd been spooked by the story of decapitated birds and bizarre blood rituals and had wanted to raze the site at once and pour a slab of concrete over the whole mess. She was not inclined to disagree, but in his vision of their future home, he saw a double car garage on that spot, whereas she did not want to look out the window at the backside of a garage and favoured instead a lush garden complete with pond, water lilies and exotic fish.
But before she knew it, Jacques had Sandy Fitzpatrick's buddy on the phone and was arranging for the foundation to be poured next week. “Fine,” he had snarled when she protested, “if you want your damn pond, you have one week to dig it yourself, but if that mess is still there next week, the garage goes up.” Isabelle had been so fired up with adrenaline and fury that she had snatched up the shovel and crowbar and marched straight out to the yard.
By the time the sun finally slid out of sight, she had accumulated a vast pile of raspberry canes and charred timbers and was plunging her shovel deep into the sandy soil. Time and time again, her shovel thudded against rock or hit a wayward root from a distant tree, so she thought little of it when it struck something hard once more. She shifted her position a few inches and tried again. This time the shovel sank deep but became stuck underneath something. Swearing, panting and drenched in perspiration despite the cold, she wrenched the object free.
It was a long shaft with bulbous ends, brown and pitted beneath the dirt. She turned it over, straining to see it in the failing light. A bone. She shivered a little as the sweat ran cold down her back. Probably a cow or moose long buried in the dirt, she told herself as she tossed it onto her pile and retrieved her shovel. She probed more carefully this time, almost reluctantly, and was rewarded with nothing but dirt and sand. She was just beginning to return to her former vigour when her shovel clanged against something hard again. She probed the length of it, dug and pried as she explored an unmoveable object only three inches wide but over three feet long. Far too long to be a bone. Cautiously, she knelt by the hole and explored by touch. Felt the cold, hard surface of metal. Relieved, she began to tug and twist. Finally, she had freed it enough to reach down and pull it out. The long shaft broke in her hands, rotten from years underground, but the end, heavy and covered with rust, had retained enough of its shape to be recognizable.
It was a huge axe, pointed at one end and brutally blunt at the other. A peculiar fear crawled over her. Glancing up sharply, she saw how dark the night had become. How full of shadows. She swallowed and tossed the axe aside with disgust. Not one goddamn axe anywhere on the farm, not even a hatchet in the tool shed, and here's this thing, cast aside and forgotten as if it were of no use whatsoever.
What other buried treasure am I going to find in this dilapidated, mistreated heap of junk we bought?
She told herself it was too dark to see any more, so she wiped off her tools, returned them to the shed and headed towards the house, steeling herself for Jacques' mood. Instead, the scent of cinnamon and apples hung in the chilly air, and when she walked in, Jacques greeted her with a cup of hot cider, a strong, warm embrace, and a kiss that reminded her why she'd married him in the first place. And chased away the taste of fear from her throat.
T
he
Mobile Command Post was gone, but a squad car was still parked on the square outside Ashford Methodist Church. The patrol officer guarding the scene was nowhere in sight, however, and the heavy oak door to the church was still padlocked shut. Carrying the evidence bags containing the contents of Lawrence's tin can, Green ducked under the yellow police tape and mounted the stone steps to the door. Brown leaves had accumulated along the base of the door, and an intricate network of spider webs clung to the corners. No one had opened this door in a long time.
As a precaution, he slipped on nitryl gloves before stooping to examine the lock with his magnifying glass. Rust had caked around the hole, suggesting no one had tried to insert a key in quite some months. But the size of the hole looked about right. He took the brass key from its evidence bag and inserted it into the keyhole. It was stiff and balky, but with some gentle coaxing, he was able to work it in all the way. He was about to turn it when he heard a shout.
“Hey! What the hell do you think you're doing?” He spun around and spotted a uniformed constable striding around the corner of the bell tower, bunching a stream of discarded yellow tape in his hands and scowling at Green from beneath thick black brows. A cop's scowl, honed to intimidate and control. When Green identified himself with his badge, the scowl rapidly gave way to alarm.