Authors: Nicholas Wolff
Back before the wall, Irish immigrants had flocked to Northam to work its mills and its factories, crowding into old mansions in the Shan that had been divided up into tiny apartments. Wartham College had reacted with horror to the dumb unwashed micks who had propositioned its upper-class girls as they walked to town on a Saturday for an ice cream or sarsaparilla or whatever the hell you went into town for back then. But you couldn’t arrest the micks for talking to a girl. They just didn’t understand the social code; they thought they’d left all that behind in County Clare. Unbeknownst to them, in Northam, the rules were a little more mysterious but just as hard.
So the college trustees decided to build a fence. Not an iron barrier like they had at Mills College, another all-girls university twenty miles away. That wasn’t good enough for the caretakers of Wartham because the Irish could see through it and leer at the bodies of the girls, put their dirty-ape mick faces between the bars and have themselves a good look. The men’s gazes polluted the atmosphere at Wartham. So the trustees had built a high brick wall.
Maybe that was the start of the Mills girls’ rep for being wild.
Mills to bed, Wartham to wed
was the saying around town. Wartham girls were the ones you took home to California or New Jersey to meet your family at Thanksgiving, while you went to Mills to do drugs and have threesomes with budding lesbians. Who knew if that was true anymore, or if it had ever been true to begin with? It was something John had overheard in bars from loud frat boys visiting from colleges across the state.
The saying about Mills and Wartham girls only applied if you were some rich kid down from Amherst or Williams for homecoming weekend. They were the ones who swarmed into the little red beehive of Wartham, plundered the freshmen, then wandered out drunk as dogs, engaged to some dentist’s daughter. If you’d grown up in Northam, like John Bailey had, you were local scen
ery, like the trees and the bell tower. A Wartham woman would rather marry a retarded midget than a local.
All John knew for sure was that Mills College had built an iron fence around its campus, allowing for the girls to be seen, and Wartham had gone with brick twelve feet high.
Little good it had done Margaret Post. John got the sense she wasn’t the kind of girl who showed herself much—a loner, wearing a long coat the night she was killed. No flesh visible. But something had attracted a vicious killer.
John pulled up to the tree where he’d found Margaret Post hanging two nights earlier. He parked the car and looked at the tall spindly ash. The police tape was gone; the ground had been left as it was, muddy under where her feet had been dangling.
He’d been the third man on the crime scene. Those moments, beginning at 1:14 a.m. Tuesday night when he got the call, seemed to have been traced in his memory with acid. Wartham College was the biggest taxpayer and second biggest employer in Northam, so when you got a call about one of its students, you blew red lights all the way to get there. That was understood. He’d arrived on scene at 1:22 a.m. and found Dunlop, a patrolman, standing by the tree, along with the college security guard, an old guy wearing a pea green cardigan and orthopedic shoes.
“You call it in?” John said as he got out.
“Yeah,” Dunlop had said. John was pulling on a pair of latex gloves. He could hear a branch creaking, as if it was under stress. There was a light crust of snow on the ground, but no ice on the branches. He reached back into the car and got his flashlight, clicked it on.
“Anyone see anything on the street?”
Dunlop seemed frozen.
“Dunlop?”
“Yeah?” the patrolman said faintly.
The wind stirred the tree branches, and there was the creaking sound again.
“Did anyone see anything?”
Another headshake.
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m sure.” Dunlop’s voice had been so low John had to strain to hear it.
Margaret Post had been hanging on the bottom branches of one of the ash trees that lined the border of the brick wall, her feet six inches from the ground. The college had planted the trees years ago to make the wall seem less forbidding, to make the fact that they’d built a barricade between themselves and the town seem less harsh. And Margaret was hung on one of the original ashes, her limp hands making a V above the branch.
John had walked up, still rubbing the sleep out of his eyes, not knowing what the security guard was pointing to so dully. He shone his flashlight up into the branches. And he’d seen the two hands above the tree limb, tied at the wrists with rough rope, the body hanging straight down, the head perched between the upraised shoulders. It didn’t look right. The head was too low. It made it look like the thing had been severed and then hurriedly stuck back on between the shoulders, as if it corrected things. Margaret’s mouth was open, her tongue black and sticking out of her mouth, and in the light of John’s flashlight her skin was one shade paler than the snow on the ground.
John stopped, then moved toward her. Margaret, her name was Margaret Post. School ID in her pocket, the dispatcher had said. Clearly, the security guard had reached into her pocket and fished around for it. John hated when people messed up his crime scenes.
He’d touched her face, and suddenly an electric shock had gone through him. Like you get when you walk across a carpet
and touch something metal. He dropped his hand immediately, and the old duffer of a security guard looked at him strangely.
“Something stick you?” he said.
No. It was as if a sliver of Margaret’s fear had shot into his body. As if there were something still alive in her. Electrical charge. Leftover terror that hadn’t been fully spent when she died.
But bodies don’t have leftover electricity, John knew. No way, no how. No training in such things. No entry in the detective’s manual,
Beware of stray shocks from corpses.
He’d given the latex gloves another tug and lifted up her chin. When he did, the neck wound opened and the two flaps let out a wet sound. Her eyes goggled at him and her mouth hung open.
“Did you hear that?” he said to Dunlop.
“Hear what?”
John lowered his voice. “Did you check her pulse?”
Dunlop gave him a look. “Check the pulse?”
He was right to say it, John thought. Check the pulse when the woman’s head was cut half off? What goddamn sense would that make?
Little bulbs of pink flesh were visible where the knife had gone through, washed in dark blood. And blood had fallen from the neck wound and soaked her kelly green blouse with the small white flowers, all the way down to the waist of her jeans. The smell of blood was in the air, like an aerosol that had been sprayed only minutes before.
The face was so chalky white it looked like she’d applied talcum powder for a Halloween party.
John sat in the car now, remembering that night. Trying not to look at the tree. Or think about what he’d seen on the tape from the Wartham security camera.
CHAPTER FIVE
A
fter a late breakfast, Chuck Godwin walked out his back door, across his snow-covered yard, out the screechy gate in the fence, and into the Raitliff Woods. He liked to get out in the morning before heading in to work at his office on State Street. Divorce law wasn’t the kind of thing that got you out of bed, charged up with purpose and inner fire. He needed to hear the forest streams and the crunch of moldering oak branches beneath his feet before he plunged into the raw human misery of his work.
The morning mist hadn’t yet been completely burned away by the pale sun. He was glad he’d stayed in the Shan, in his part of it, at least—“his” because Chuck’s family had been walking these trails since 1789, back when the Wampanoag tribes still came to the door asking for bread for their tawny little babies. It was wild, undeveloped land. Usually he loved wandering through the old paths that he imagined the Wampanoag had walked down two or three centuries ago. Sometimes in summer, he even took off his shoes and let his big pale feet toughen up on the trails. It connected him with the old place. He cherished that.
But Chuck’s mind wasn’t on Indians today; he walked purposefully, slightly out of breath, rarely looking up at the jaybirds swooping through the old-growth trees. He was taking a secret back trail that would lead him on to the back of Mary Reddington’s house. The girl he should have married forty years ago instead of Stephanie. The girl he would have married, except he hadn’t expected to live so long.
The land slanted away from him. Up ahead, Chuck saw a stand of birch trees—rare in this area—through the parting mist. Their thin white trunks caught in the mesh of fog always seemed to him like the bones of the Wampanoag dead, having been sucked from their burial grounds by the mist and now hanging in midair like an accusation. Haunts. Spectral, whiter than the gray gauze of the dew. They sent a chill up his spine, but he made as much noise as he could to dispel the spirits, snapping branches with his Timberland chukka boots, the branches’ severed spines sending shots crackling through the woods. Only when he approached the Reddington house would he grow quiet. Mary couldn’t know he was there. It would ruin things.
Chuck Godwin had never crossed the lawn that separated the tree line from Mary’s house. He’d only stood at the forest’s edge and caught glimpses of Mary as she got ready for her day. She was a widow now, all alone in the big house, her shadow visible on the pale upstairs curtains, then her face in the downstairs ones as she made breakfast for herself. But he felt the need growing in him to stride across the lawn. He’d once even emerged, drawn to Mary’s profile in one of the upstairs windows covered with a strawberry-dotted curtain. It wasn’t fear that made him turn and disappear back into the forest; it was that the thought of what he was about to do had been so exquisite that he’d grown weak with anticipation. Next time, he would be bolder. He’d march on over and tell Mary how he felt, that they had to be together again.
Chuck could hear the sound of running water, the stream at the bottom of the hill. His boot steps echoed like muffled gunshots as he clumped down the path. The burbling sound of water fast with runoff from melting snow grew louder. He turned right at an enormous oak, and the stream was in front of him with a small homemade bridge that had been here for generations, set deep in the banks.
Chuck was walking across the bridge, his bird-watching bin
oculars smacking firmly against his sternum, when something caused him to turn and look upstream. Suddenly he felt someone was out there, on the bank, watching.
The sun was hidden behind a thick stand of trees, and the riverbank was covered in a gray gloom. The pale trunks were encased in darkness. He could see nothing out of the ordinary in the feeble light of early morning.
Someone is following me
, he thought. A tremor seized Chuck’s heart, and in that moment, he wanted to run away.
Buck up, Chuck
, he told himself. It was something his father used to say, not unkindly.
Buck up, son, buck up, Chuck, buck up.
He remembered it so vividly because when his father had gone off and hanged himself, Chuck had wondered to himself why the old man couldn’t take his own counsel. But he knew the answer: it was because his father hadn’t believed it himself. His dad’s watery blue eyes looked like they wanted to cry even as he gave Chuck that ridiculous advice. He thought his father was laughing at him, toward the end of his life, with those stupid words.
Buck up.
As if there were any such thing.
Chuck stepped quickly across the bridge, and his boot sank to the leather in the soft loam of the bank, and the soil gave a tiny moan and then sucked at the rubber sole as he pulled it out. He would stay away from the deep woods and follow the path of the stream all the way to Mary’s house, keeping out in the open.
He began to walk along the bank. The mud slurped. The water rippled. And as Chuck bent forward and tried to increase his speed, he thought he heard a third sound disguised in the noises around him.
Whispering. He was certain of it, as if there were lips a few inches from his ear.
He caught his breath and stood panting on the waterline. Nothing but stillness and bird cries.
“Who’s out there?” he shouted. These were
his
family’s woods. A trespasser was an unwelcome thing.
He scanned the tree line, the birch trunks and the heavy pine branches. Suddenly, the top of the pines to his right began to move, shivering as if someone were gently shaking the tree limbs. Chuck watched, his heart skipping beats, as the green branches jerked and bucked. There was no wind blowing across his face.
Run
, he said to himself.
Quickly.
He took his foot out of the hole it had just made in the mud and took a step backward. The tree shivered, and Chuck’s mouth fell open in an O of horror.
An enormous bird came bolting out of the tree and flapped its wings. A sleek night-black crow. It gave Chuck a piercing look and headed upstream.
Chuck was shaking. He realized he’d been holding his breath.
He began to walk again.
Buck up, goddamn it. Just an old bird, for Christ’s sake.
He spotted the open space to the right that meant he was near the backyard of Mary’s house, which itself was set back a hundred yards from the road. He crossed the stream, the water rippling over his boots and reaching almost to the top of the leather. The flat rocks underneath his feet were slippery—he felt as if they were covered with some gooey substance, as if he were walking on jellyfish—but when he looked down, the stones seemed clean. He made it safely to the other side, but a sudden repulsion puckered his skin.
Between him and the house was a thick patch of young birches, surrounded by a line of dry scrub. The path that he usually took was visible even in the bad light, but Chuck headed to the left of the trail, stepping onto fresh snow that crunched loudly in the still air. For some reason, he had the uncanny sense that, if
he took the usual way, he would meet someone on the path. Someone that he didn’t want to bump into.