Sacrifice Page 13

  He checked off some familiar names on the list: Chip Fletcher, Don Van Buskirk, Veronica Parker. Veronica was in the woodwinds section of the school band. Flute if he remembered correctly. He added two more that he didn’t know. That made five descendants of the founders. Well, six including himself. A bumper crop based on the birth year distribution on the family tree. Of them all, only he didn’t have a star by his name.

  The other five didn’t share anything in common. Three boys, two girls. Two jocks, one geek, one drama club member destined for a life in Greenwich Village, and one with no affiliations, part of the overlooked high school middle class. Since they’d attended different junior highs, they did not even live in the same area.

  Whatever club they had joined, Marc hadn’t been invited. From her lack of a star, he guessed Josie Mulfetta hadn’t been invited either. She was dead and Marc had a close call on the dock at age three. The other five were all alive and kicking.

  He paged back through the family tree sheets. Almost everyone with a star had lived to a ripe old age. Many without did not.

  He flipped past the last page of the senior pictures to a section titled “The Way We Were.” There were rows of baby pictures. Katy had talked Jeff into submitting one of his. In it he wore a red cowboy hat and a pair of plastic six-shooters. He looked like an idiot. There were times when it paid to not have a steady girlfriend.

  Chip Fletcher had a picture there. The lacrosse team captain didn’t look much different at age three. Same blond crew cut, same head like a block of ice. He was at the beach in a Hawaiian print swimsuit leaning on a kid-sized surfboard. A small silver charm hung from his neck. Even in preschool the kid oozed cool.

  He looked over to Veronica. Her picture looked like it was taken at her baptism. She wore a white lace smock and she couldn’t have been more than a month old, with peach fuzz hair and huge, inquisitive eyes. Marc had to check twice when he saw her wrist. She wore a silver charm, a dead ringer for the one around Chip’s neck, a simple, half-inch oval with a blurry inscription.

  Marc searched for the next two founders’ kids. One was blowing out candles at his seventh birthday party. No chain evident, but if it was under his clothes, no one would know. The next kid had a shot from summer day camp, circa 1969. She wore a halter top and shorts. Nowhere to hide a chain there.

  Don Van Buskirk’s shot was on the last page. He sat in a metal pedal car, one of the fire truck versions. He had on a red plastic fireman’s hat. He wore an open-necked shirt and while a charm wasn’t visible, there was a single-strand chain around the back of his neck that disappeared beneath his shirt.

  Since small boys and jewelry weren’t a common mix, Marc assumed Don was wearing a charm. That was three out of five and no coincidence. Maybe the others had aged out of the Woodsman’s range by the time those pictures were taken.

  The jewelry had to do something special for parents to make little boys wear them and wrap them around the wrists of newborns. Was this some sort of protection? The equivalent of lamb’s blood on Jewish lintels Passover night?

  If his theory was correct, it explained a hell of a lot. He’d have to confirm it though. Dropping by to ask Ms. Childress wouldn’t be much help, though he was sure she knew the answer. He thought of another way.

  He closed the yearbook and put it on his stack of school books. It would actually come in handy after all.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  On the other side of town, Ken delved into A Century of Sagebrook History. The dry and archaic prose made the process a chore. He remembered complaining about reading Dickens in English class and felt remorse. He skimmed whole sections on agricultural minutiae and the details of who built the first dock in the harbor.

  The author was local and assumed his audience was as well. Items and locations long gone were alluded to as if they were common knowledge. Community members were invariably heroes, hinting that the work had been a Sagebrook commission.

  Some chapters had woodcut illustrations, like the ones that peppered Harper’s Weekly during its Civil War heyday. They were quite a bit less detailed than the ones in Harper’s, and the perspectives were regularly a bit skewed. The local author had enlisted a local artist who apparently matched his caliber.

  Whatever indigenous population the first settlers displaced didn’t warrant mention. Perhaps imported disease had done them in before the first families arrived. By 1730 the town had coalesced into the form still frozen in time around the village green, including St. Andrew’s Episcopal, the mill for crushing grains into something edible, an early version of the Village Green Inn and commercial shops around the harbor. The town council ran the show and the founder’s last names populated the list: Reed, Wollam, Fletcher, Parker. These same names still graced a variety of local businesses, and a Parker descendent was still Head Selectman.

  All this stirred vague memories from history classes and local lore. But whatever important event had occurred was no longer common knowledge. It was something shoved under the carpet by the founding families. There had to be something in this little book that got it pulled off the shelf and stuck in a display case.

  Ken found it in 1740. A chapter about that year carried the headline “The Great Trial.” For something the author treated as such a monumental event, Ken was certain he had never heard a word about it.

  The author broke style in this chapter as if he personally relished the details, and the story came alive as Ken read it.

  That summer, one of the children in town went missing. Charles Reed, age six, went into the village for a few measures of salt. When he did not return, his father Hiram saddled his horse and rode in to find him. It wouldn’t be the first time Charles had lost himself to daydreams and diversions.

  But Charles never made it to the dry goods store. The shopkeeper hadn’t had a customer all afternoon. Hiram scoured the harbor, the pond and any other place that might spur the interest of a curious boy, but to no avail.

  Hiram returned home and convinced his distraught wife Elizabeth to give the boy a few hours to make his way home, but as dusk fell, neither of them could be consoled. Long Island wasn’t the Alleghenies. There were no large predators, no hostile Indians. The boy had to be nearby. They guessed he might have stumbled and hit his head on the way to the store. He’d have to be somewhere along the route. Hiram contacted the Town Council. As the moon rose, they began a torchlight hunt of the route from their home to the village.

  At midnight they suspended the search and closed with prayers that daylight would make a difference and that the boy would be found alive.

  But the next day’s results were no better. All the men who could be spared searched the route and the forest around. There wasn’t a trace.

  For days Hiram and Elizabeth held out hope that their only son would return, alive and well. The rest of the village thought their optimism foolish. The two rebuffed Pastor Jenkins’ offer of a memorial service. By the weekend, the villagers had settled on a theory of accidental drowning for poor Charles. But a new development shot that theory down. That Monday, Dolly Jamison disappeared.

  Eight years old with bright red tresses, the precocious girl had been out gathering blackberries for preserves. Her mother went to the patch when Polly was late to midday dinner. A half-filled inverted bucket lay at the edge of the thicket. Berries were strewn everywhere like the field had exploded. Whatever had taken her, Dolly had put up a fight.

  The town repeated the search process. This time all other activity ground to a halt. Again the search was fruitless.

  A few of the more creative townsfolk offered up witchcraft-oriented explanations, as the stories from Salem had a stubborn hold on the New England psyche. But the more level headed knew there was a predator among them. The question was who.

  The village selectmen were in an anguished meeting when Nell Parker broke in breathless with news. The body of little Charles Reed had been found, partly submerged in the millpond. Men were pulling it out.

  The selec
tmen rushed to the pond. Elizabeth Reed was in hysterics, held back by some men to keep from cradling her son’s bloated, fish-eaten corpse in her arms. Ropes still bound the boy’s waist and arms. His head was crushed like a ripe melon. The boy hadn’t drowned. He’d been dumped, weighted to hold his body under.

  It was Ezra Fletcher, searching in the deep muck at the pond’s center, who found the damning evidence. He waded ashore with a chunk of stone in his hand, rope still tied around its center. The frayed end matched the ropes that bound the late Charles. The gray granite was a broken millstone.

  Tom Silas had been the miller for just over a year, buying the mill when the previous owner fell ill. Single and solitary, Silas seemed happy with a routine with limited human contact. It was only in the last month he’d even hired help, a Dutchman from New York City. Silas’s lack of church attendance had raised some eyebrows, but it was not enough to raise suspicions that he could be evil. Until now.

  No further evidence was necessary. The assembled crowd, which now numbered in the dozens, surged from the pond’s perimeter. Selectman Jonas Parker led his townsmen across the street to smash the mill’s locked door. The crowd surged inside to find the mill empty.

  But Jonas remembered working once in the narrow crawlspace under the main floor, where the great spindle of the mill’s drive cog was anchored. He led the crowd to the half door at the base of the mill’s north wall. He yanked it open to a horrible scene.

  The crawlspace had been excavated to standing height, no easy task in the rocky soil. Candles lit the space in an eerie flickering light. Tom Silas stood over the limp body of Dolly Jamison, her copper hair streaked with the richer red of fresh blood. Silas held a heavy brass seal in one hand, one of the ones he used to certify wax-sealed documents. Blood dripped from the base.

  The crowd dragged Silas out from under the mill. He professed his innocence and said he had just found Dolly’s body. While several of the women tended to the cooling body of Dolly Jamison, Silas was roundly beaten by the mob. Someone brought out a length of rope to better have justice served.

  Jonas Parker took charge of the throng. He stood atop the mill wheel sluice and shouted for order. He called forward the other council members to create the façade of civilization. He appointed them jury and asked, given the evidence presented, what verdict they had on two charges of murder. The members declared Silas guilty in unison.

  Silas lay on the ground, his now toothless face looking a lot like ground meat. His leg had suffered a compound fracture. Parker ordered two men to stand him up for sentencing. They grabbed Silas under the shoulders and lifted him waist high. Silas cocked his head and stared up at Parker with his one eye that still worked. He mouthed the words “I am innocent.”

  Parker pronounced a sentence of death. But hanging would be too good. He ordered Silas bound to the mill’s paddle wheel, head down across the buckets that ran around the rim. When the brake was released, Silas would be killed by his own machinery, submerged and suffocated as he finally drowned.

  A cheer arose at this just verdict. Silas was in no shape to offer resistance. Men tied his limp body to the mill’s paddlewheel. A few villagers speculated he was already dead. But his first turn around the wheel proved his heart was still beating. He rose from the water spitting and sputtering, cursing those who surrounded him.

  The mob responded in kind and shouted that he deserved worse. By now Dolly Jamison’s parents were there. They hurled rocks at Silas as he passed for a second partial drowning. When he rose from the water the second time, he shouted the names of the council members and told them they were damned to hell. He swore revenge, revenge on all of them. Jonas Parker laughed.

  It would take Tom Silas five trips around the wheel to die. To prevent soiling the gravesites of the God-fearing townsfolk of Sagebrook, they did not bury Silas in the church graveyard, though where they did lay his bones was not mentioned.

  “Let him rest eternal with the blood of his victims around him,” Jonas Parker said.

  The Dutch assistant was never seen again. The author guessed that the man could not work in a house where children had been murdered.

  Ken snapped back to 1980 at the end of the chapter. Goosebumps prickled the flesh on his arms. The author had penned that section with pride, even described it as a strengthening event for the growing town. The town leaders were all heroic, Jonas’s exhortation to the crowd a polished speech. The miller was an evil villain, his protestations of innocence all lies. The mysterious Dutchman was a lead never followed.

  But Ken knew time had passed a different verdict on their actions. A descent into mob rule and the summary execution of a possibly innocent man? These were not events to be proud of. There was a good chance the people even knew it then. Why else would they bury a body right away, location unmarked, except to, perhaps subconsciously, hide the evidence of their actions? No wonder the current sanitized versions of the town history made no mention of the Trial at the Mill. Salem, Massachusetts would probably erase a few years of its history if it could.

  But his unease around the event wasn’t what told Ken the trial was the antecedent of the Woodsman incidents. The clincher was the chapter’s sole woodcut illustration. It was a picture of the crowd outside the mill, along the north side, the great, soon-to-be-murderous paddlewheel in the background. The town council stood at the base of the wheel. Jonas Parker was solemn and center stage, hand upraised like prophets of old. Two burly men held Tom Silas at the shoulders, unbeaten in this G-rated version. It was Tom’s picture that made the hairs on Ken’s arm stand on end. His nose was elongated and pointed. He wore a hat, a kind of tri-corner design with narrow sides swept back like a delta-winged jet. A unique hat that the Half Dozen found all too familiar.

  Silas was the Woodsman.

  The pieces fit. The spirit returned to target the families of the council members, or their descendants. That’s why the family trees were so important to track, to know who was at risk, at least until whatever age the Woodsman (or should he be the Miller?) could no longer work his black magic. At some age enough cognitive reasoning had to be available to reject the illusions; otherwise the Woodsman would have returned to finish off the council members themselves. Of course, you could always get your ass struck by lightning if you wanted to see Silas’s spirit in action.

  Now all the Half Dozen had to do was figure out how to kill a ghost.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  It was ten p.m. when Marc snuck off to the upstairs phone extension. His mother was loading the dishwasher, her last ritual before bed each night. His brothers had been asleep for hours and Dad was glued to the “if it bleeds it leads” stories on the Channel Eleven News. Now would be Marc’s best window to get some answers.

  The family tree needed some explanation, but he couldn’t imagine getting it from his mother. Most conversations with her came across as thinly veiled arguments, and those were about crap like why she had to use wheat bread for his lunch. Asking about why she never mentioned a family history so firmly rooted in Sagebrook would get a stone wall if she didn’t want to talk about it. Since she hadn’t mentioned it to him in seventeen years, he bet she didn’t want to talk about it.

  Marc pulled the phone into the upstairs bathroom and tucked the cord through the gap at the bottom of the door. He left the light in the room off, as if that would somehow muffle the conversation. He dialed his grandmother’s number from memory. Since he was five, his parents had awarded him that honor when they called on alternating Sunday evenings.

  “Grandma, it’s Marc.”

  “Oh my,” she said, confused. “Is it Sunday?”

  “No, Grandma. I just wanted to talk to you. Catch up on some family history.”

  “That’s so nice,” she said. Her genuine gratitude made Marc feel guilty for not speaking to her more often.

  “You were born on Long Island, right? More specifically, right here in Sagebrook.”

  Pause. “Now how would you know that? I never even told y
our mother that.”

  “I just found out that your family had been here for generations.”

  “Yes, my father’s side of the family went back to the 1700s. We moved upstate right after I was born. My father got a job in Owego.”

  Grandma recited the line as it had been recited to her and as she had recited it to others. But the statement rang hollow. She was born during the Great Depression. The odds of there being a greater job opportunity in boondocks Owego than outside New York City were slim. And who moves with a newborn anyway?

  The founders kept track of the family tree either in the hope that the kids were destined for greatness or fear that they were shadowed by doom. Marc guessed it was the latter. He fished with his next question.

  “They really moved to protect you, didn’t they, Grandma?”

  No pause before an answer this time. “How do you know all these things?”

  “I researched the town history,” Marc said. “After I found out I was on a list of the founder’s descendants.”

  “I promise that your mother didn’t know,” Grandma apologized. “She couldn’t. I never told her.”

  Marc didn’t answer. The weight of the silence would make her continue.

  “She and your father moved there before you were born. It was a coincidence that I’d been born there. When they first moved, they rented in Smithtown where it was safe.”

  Marc didn’t like the use of the word “safe.”

  “I had no idea they were in Sagebrook until after they bought the house,” Grandma continued. “But they didn’t have kids, and your mother had such trouble conceiving…”

  Marc winced at being reminded his parents had sex.

  “…so it would still be safe.”

  That was twice she’d used “safe” in the past tense. That meant now it wasn’t.

  “Once she told me she was expecting,” Grandma said, “I asked her to move. I begged her to move at least twenty miles from town. But she wouldn’t do it.”