Halloweenland (11 page)

The toneless voice did not go with the face, the hands, the wool suit, the black shoes. The accent was overly formal.

“Are you here about the permits?” Dickens continued, before Grant could speak. “I told that man in Mayor Gergen’s office, what’s his name—”

“I’m not here from the mayor. I’m just a curious cop.”

Dickens’ face went blank, and then, studying Grant closely, he said, “Ahh. Curious about what?”

Grant shrugged, feigning a loss for words.

Dickens’ face slowly changed, softening the tiniest bit, but he didn’t quite smile.

“You read the newspaper article, and couldn’t resist.”

Grant nodded. “That’s right. After all, I may be . . . assigned to this place, and I just wanted to see what it looks like.”

Dickens spread his hands out. “Well, what do you think?”

“It’s bigger than I thought. And farther away from town than I thought it would be.”

“We want nothing to do with that Ranier Park business,” Dickens replied, not hiding his disdain. “I made that very clear to the mayor before we signed the contracts that this is a completely separate attraction.” Now self-satisfaction replaced scorn. “I wouldn’t doubt that we take quite a lot of business away from the so-called Pumpkin Days Festival.”

“That’s fine with me,” Grant said.

Now the other did smile—but it was an ugly, small gesture, the thin lips hardly parting to reveal what looked like chiseled small teeth.

Grant thought to himself,
My God, more Weird Shit?

“Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Grant,” Dickens said, sounding as if he didn’t care one way or the other. “That town celebration is all well and good, in a . . . pedestrian sort of way. The people come, they see demonstrations of pumpkin carving, and buy a few trinkets, and see”—here the man sniffed—“demonstrations of commercial products which they are told will enhance their lives. Rug cleaners and such. And they might listen to music of one sort or another”—here again he did not hide his disdain—“and then they go home. All very good for the mayor, for the selling of pumpkins, for the shopkeepers.

“But here we will offer something different.” He put out his hands and swept them in an inclusive motion. “There will be rides, yes, and attractions, and gewgaws to win for the pretty girls. But there will be . . . more.”

When Dickens didn’t offer, Grant said, “Such as?”

Dickens smiled without showing his teeth. “That would be cheating! And I, an impresario, am no cheater!”

Grant said nothing.

“Have you seen quite enough?” Dickens asked, his tone not encouraging Grant to say, “No.”

“I suppose so,” Grant said, conceding the dismissal. “But let me ask you: will you really be ready for Halloween?”

Dickens threw his head back and barked a laugh. Again the slightest look at those tiny white pointed teeth.

“I should say so! I have excellent help. I hope to see you here then, yes?”

Grant locked eyes with the strange little man for the briefest moment, before nodding.

“Perhaps.”

“Good. Until then.”

Dickens bowed curtly and then put out his hand, which Grant felt obliged to take. It was moist, as he had feared—like the flipper of a seal.

Dickens removed his hand as abruptly as he had offered it, and turned and walked away, his steps short and precise.

“Auf Wiedersehen, Detective Grant!” Dickens called, without turning around.

Grant thought he heard the tiniest of chuckles.

The door to the trailer opened, closed.

There was the click of a lock.

After a moment, Grant turned and walked back to his car.

His thoughts were not on the moist handshake or the mocking laugh, or even on the bizarre appearance of the carnival impresario.

Grant thought instead:
How did he know my name, if he didn’t look at my badge?

Three hours and twenty minutes later found Grant in front of the rectory door of St. Bart’s Church in Newton, Massachusetts. Behind it he heard the unmistakable sound of a televised football game. As he rang the bell the sound disappeared, and there was the sound of a shuffling gait approaching the door.

It opened, and Grant blinked—the man facing him was much older than he had sounded on the phone.

He was also obviously blind.

“Detective Grant, I presume?” the priest said, putting out his right hand.

Grant shook it. “Thank you for seeing me, Father.”

“Was that a blindness pun, Detective?”

For the first time in a long time, Grant found himself momentarily flustered, but his unease was immediately dispelled by the priest’s booming artificial laugh. There was definitely something wrong here. “If you can’t make fun of a disability, why have it?” Coughlin said. His continued handshake drew Grant into a short hallway past a
set of stairs and into a room. “I have some excellent scotch waiting to be done away with,” he said.

“How did you know—”

The priest stopped, turned with a cocked eyebrow. “Hmm? Oh, I didn’t know you like scotch. But
I
do.” He turned and continued to shuffle. “If you like it, too, so much the less for me.”

The room was tidy and small, and still managed to make Grant’s hotel room look like a closet. And a dirty one, at that. It was well furnished and cozy, warm and inviting. Too warm, in fact. Grant took off his coat.

“Make yourself comfortable, Detective,” the priest said. He was easing himself into one of two very comfortable-looking side chairs angled half toward one another and half toward an old nineteen-inch black-and-white television.

“You’re staring at the television, no doubt,” Coughlin said, reading the silence. “There’s no remote, and only those huge dials to change channels, so I’m afraid you’ll have to get up to turn down the sound when we get well into it. No color televison for this blind priest, not from this diocese. Not from
any
diocese, these days, I’m afraid. No cable, either, so we’ll have to put up with the Patriots and the Jets. You’re a Jets fan, I suppose, being from New York?”

Before Grant could speak the priest cut in: “But of course, you said yesterday that you’re a baseball fan. Mets?”

“Yankees.”

“Would you pour, Detective? I certainly know how, but things will go more quickly this way.”

Grant turned his attention to the tray set on an ottoman between them, laid out with a bottle of Johnnie
Walker red and two glasses. He made a slight sour face at seeing the Johnnie red.

“Since you are a scotch man, are you a Johnnie Walker man?” the priest asked brightly.

“Absolutely,” Grant fibbed.

“No, Dewar’s, I’d say. I could smell it about you when you came in.”

Grant laughed shortly. “Got me there, Father.”

“It’s an old trick from the confession box. Lean in close and smell the breath.”

Though everything the priest said was homey and warm, there was still something wrong in the air. Grant’s weird-shit detector was firing on all cylinders. It was like the priest was in some sort of trance.

Something’s wrong here,
he thought.

He poured, handed one glass over to the priest and drank off a bit of his own.

It was warm in his throat, in the warm room, and down into his belly.

“First drink of the day, if you don’t mind my asking?” Coughlin asked, chuckling to himself.

“You watch a lot of detective shows on television, Father?”

“Another pun? Watch?”

Grant was getting a little tired of the routine. What seemed just jocularity was instead a man talking a mile a minute so he didn’t have to get where he had to. It usually happened with a man who wasn’t intrinsically criminal but somehow found himself mixed up, after perhaps a lifetime of straight arrow law abiding, in something nasty and illegal.

No, it wasn’t that: it was like looking at a man who was waking up from a nightmare.

The priest was sipping his scotch, his hand shaking ever so slightly.

“What I was telling my housekeeper just the other day—”

Grant reached out and flicked off the television set.

“And it sounded like the Pats were about to score a field goal—” the priest started, almost sadly.

“Time to talk, Father Coughlin. And no bullshit. I came over here because you wanted to talk face-to-face. I take it there was a reason you didn’t want to talk on the phone. Correct?”

The priest nodded, and put down his glass. Grant noted that it was empty. He emptied his own and poured more scotch into each.

“Very sad. It was Mrs. Finch, the housekeeper. When she’s here she listens in on the extension, nothing I can do about it. That’s why I was so coy with you on the phone yesterday. I’m afraid even that was too much, as you will see.”

“What does that mean?” Grant asked.

“Please let me tell my story in my own way. I know this is about the girl, Anna.”

Grant’s pulse quickened. He watched as the priest brought his glass up, hand shaking more noticeably, and drained it in a single swallow. As he lowered it Grant moved to fill it again but the priest shook his head. “No more now. It would cloud my thoughts. Later, perhaps. Oh, yes, much more of it later.”

“As you like.” Grant topped his own drink and put the bottle aside.

Father Couglin stared hard at something only he could see. His brow furrowed. “This all seems so much clearer to me now that it’s over, in a sense. It all happened in a rush, and of course there’s Christian charity to account for. I’m
sure now that I was chosen because I was blind. She must be truly hideous to behold.” The blind eyes turned toward Grant. “Did you know that the blind can often
feel
the way something looks? It’s like heat from the sun, or call it intuition.

“She was brought to the rectory five years ago by someone who gave off the opposite of heat, Detective. I don’t know how quite to explain this to you, but it was as if winter had stepped into the hallway, and it was the middle of Indian summer. Early November. A beautiful day, too, but even the smell of late blooming flowers, the smell of the warmth itself—all of it went away in an instant, snuffed out and replaced by . . .” he waved an arm “. . . blank, odorless
cold.
”

“I know what you mean, Father.”

“Do you?” The priest’s face showed surprise.

Grant was silent.

The priest fumbled for his glass. “I believe I will have a little more of that scotch, Detective. This is all so strange. Like I’m slowly waking from a dream.”

Grant dutifully filled the glass and watched the priest drink.

“Please continue,” Grant said.

The priest stared into space again, concentrating. “He didn’t stay long, this . . . cold thing. He said his name was Samhain. But he put the child into our care, and extracted a vow that nothing would be said for five years. No one was to know. This puzzled me then, and it puzzles me now, except for the fact that when Mrs. Finch saw the child later she nearly fainted. I still remember her saying, ‘Saints in heaven!’ and I know she crossed herself because she told me of it later. But she also said that a child is a child and that we would do as I had vowed. I know now that the cold fellow came to the rectory when she
was out doing errands because she never would have stood the sight of him, and his plan would have gone awry. He was very clever.”

Grant waited while the priest drank again.

“I still don’t know how he extracted a vow from me. This is not something a priest would normally do. Paperwork, and the diocese, and so on. Not to mention the state. But once I had made that vow . . .” He shrugged.

“This . . . Samhain was very persuasive.”

The priest nodded, then leaned back and shrugged. “More than that. Like I said, it’s like the last five years were a sort of fugue. And that’s much of my story. Mrs. Finch and her husband raised the child, good people that they are—or were, I should say. For they changed as the baby grew. At first Mrs. Finch would mutter and pray and talk about the child’s ugliness and unnaturalness, but then, over time these complaints lessened, until they became endearments. And this puzzled me greatly, because I felt nothing from the child. As I told you, the blind can sometimes see with their other senses—but from this child I got nothing. No cold, or warmth, nothing at all. Like a blank slate. I ran my fingers lightly over her face once, when I thought she was asleep, and I had the oddest feeling that I was touching just that—a blank slate.

“They named her Anna, though I thought the name was not right. I could think of none that would be right. Does that make sense? And they kept her in the back bedroom and let her play—though I don’t know if I would call it that—in the attic room and the hedged backyard. And no one outside of this little house ever knew she existed. Samhain was often about, though he never spoke to me again.”

“Where is she now, Father?” Grant said quietly. The blood was pounding through his veins.

The priest looked distracted, then reached for his scotch. When he had finished with it he said, shaking his head, “This is all so strange. Like waking from a dream. All of it, from beginning to end, from the day that cold fellow arrived until now, this exact moment. As it was happening I knew it was unnatural, and perhaps even wrong, but I told myself that a vow was a vow. But of course it isn’t, not if it’s wrong. Even putting that television on before you came here was part of my dream, Detective. Do you understand?”