Dark Rites

  “You don’t think the whole thing is crazy?” Devin asked her.

  “Okay, yes.”

  “Well, I’ve mailed in these pics. Angela will do an overlay. She’ll get us what we need. But...even if we find it, we’re going to have to be really careful. We need to find Jehovah—without anyone knowing that we’ve found Jehovah.”

  “Because...that will ruin it for this guy? Wouldn’t that be good?” Vickie asked.

  “Not if we don’t want a slew of corpses,” Devin said. She hesitated. “I’m afraid that this guy will kill everyone with him—if he thinks we’ve really got him, or whatever it is that he really wants.”

  “Good point,” Vickie murmured. “Let’s get to bed.”

  “Rocky made sure that the front door is locked,” Devin said. “But of course, make sure you lock your room door. Well, never mind. I know Griffin. He’ll check it a few times over.”

  “Yes, he checks every door and window—all of the time.”

  “Habit of the trade!” Devin said. “Well, good night!”

  They’d come up the stairs together and stood on the second-floor landing. Vickie smiled as she watched Devin go into her room.

  She turned to her own.

  “Vickie!”

  She spun around, her heart nearly in her throat, as she heard her name whispered.

  It was Dylan. Darlene was at his side, her hand in his, hanging just a bit behind him.

  “Dylan! You nearly scared me to death. Why are you whispering to me on the landing?”

  “Well, we’re not walking into the bedroom!” Dylan said.

  “That would be creepy—and very rude!” Darlene assured her.

  “Well, Griffin is in there,” Vickie said.

  “Kind of the point,” Dylan said.

  She sighed. “Okay, so...what’s up?”

  “Not that much,” Dylan said. “I mean, if it were long or complicated, I’d have you go in and make sure that he was dressed, so we could talk to him, too.”

  “But it’s not that much,” Darlene said.

  “What do you have to tell me?”

  “We’ve been following them around all day,” Dylan said.

  “Who?” Vickie asked.

  “Isaac Sherman and Charlie Oakley, of course,” Dylan told her, shaking his head as if his words had been so obvious he was at a loss as to her failure to understand. “Charlie Oakley first.”

  “And then Isaac Sherman,” Darlene added.

  “And?” Vickie asked.

  “Well, first, they were being watched from the woods!” Dylan said.

  “By who?” Vickie asked.

  “We don’t really know. We saw the movement in the trees and naturally ran up—they were walking along a trail between a couple of hills,” Dylan explained. “We didn’t catch anyone, but, Vickie, I swear—they were being watched.”

  “Okay, thank you!” Vickie said. “Keep following them—that’s great.”

  “Oh, we did keep following them,” Dylan assured her.

  “I followed Isaac,” Darlene said. “And...nothing.”

  “I followed Charlie Oakley,” Dylan said. “And guess what? He was on the phone with the dude who is his friend—and still a cop,” Dylan said. “The old dude, not the young one.”

  Vickie shook her head slightly. “You mean Robert Merton? The detective from Rhode Island?”

  “Exactly!” Dylan said.

  “That’s not really shocking—they’ve known each other for years.”

  “Aha! But here’s the thing,” Dylan told her proudly. “He’s coming here. Well, he’s coming to where Charlie Oakley is staying. Which is Ware. I mean W-a-r-e, not w-h-e-r-e. Well, Ware is where, if that makes sense. I mean, it does, but—”

  “He is coming here?” Vickie asked. “On business? But he’s not state police. He’s a detective. Hmm. That is interesting.”

  “See!”

  “If you want to just come in, you can...”

  “Oh, no. We’re going back to the sofa in the parlor!” Darlene said.

  “Long day,” Dylan said. “But there’s more.”

  “Okay?”

  “I think we saw...someone you’re seeing.”

  “The blonde woman? A...dead woman?” Vickie asked. She looked at Dylan, not Darlene.

  Vickie had seen Darlene’s dead body, had found her, during the Undertaker case.

  “She’s shy,” Darlene said.

  “Very. She disappeared, as if she was afraid, really,” Dylan said.

  “We saw her up on the hill—when we were trying to figure out who was stalking Isaac Sherman and Charlie Oakley.”

  “I think she’s been dead a very long time—with no one!” Dylan told Vickie.

  “Thank you. I’ll keep watching for her. You two...maybe you can help her.”

  “We’ll certainly try,” Darlene said.

  “But I think she’s trying to reach you. I think she’s been trying to reach you,” Dylan said.

  “Thank you. Well, good night, then.” She turned to open her own door.

  “Vickie?” Dylan said.

  “Yes?” she asked him, pausing.

  “I don’t know about all this. I mean, where you’re concerned. You’re not carrying a gun, are you?”

  “No. I’ve only been to the range about five times. I don’t have a license. But I do know how to use Griffin’s Glock, and the agents are all armed,” Vickie said.

  Darlene and Dylan looked at one another worriedly.

  “Can’t help but think that they want you, too,” Dylan said.

  “They have Alex. He truly is brilliant,” Vickie said. “I think he’d made some kind of a super research find the night...the night he disappeared, when he didn’t meet with me and Roxanne.”

  “But maybe having Alex wasn’t enough,” Dylan said.

  They looked at each other again. “We were, uh, kind of hanging around eavesdropping,” Dylan said to her.

  “We heard Griffin say that you needed to...well, to get away from all this,” Darlene said.

  “Just saying!” Dylan put in quickly, apparently seeing the set in her expression. “Yup, heading down to the sofa now,” Dylan said.

  “Yes, sadly, no television there, but...” Darlene said.

  “We do have each other!” Dylan said.

  “I really do wish I could just get the two of you a room!” Vickie said. “Good night, then. I’ll tell Griffin what you’ve told me.”

  She waved to the two of them as they made their ghostly way—disappearing as they raced down the stairs, hand in hand.

  She walked into her room.

  Griffin wasn’t exactly dressed, but he was down to boxers. The minute she came in, he walked over to the door, closed it, locked it and even slid a chair before it.

  “You can never be too safe,” he told her. Then he smiled. “I heard you with Dylan and Darlene. What’s going on? Oh, by the way, Robert Merton is coming out here tomorrow. He called Barnes and told him that he actually took some personal time. He wanted to help Charlie Oakley. Barnes doesn’t know Oakley, but Merton thought that it was important that we all know what’s going on and who is where.”

  “Well. That’s the big news I was just about to tell you. Dylan and Darlene have been following Charlie and Isaac Sherman around all day.”

  “And they knew about Merton coming?”

  “Dylan followed Charlie Oakley. Oakley had a conversation with Merton on the phone,” Vickie said.

  “So that’s why he’s coming out here,” Griffin said. He hesitated. “This has to be... Whatever the plan between them, I imagine, it has to be really careful. They have to have their actions synced and coordinated. Whoever is involved in all this.”

 
“So you do believe that Hanson might have something to do with it?” Vickie asked him.

  “I’m not saying that he didn’t. Vickie, we don’t know.”

  She hesitated and then told him, “They saw the blonde woman—a dead one.”

  “And who was she?”

  “They don’t know. Griffin, she’s the woman I see in my dreams. I’m certain.”

  He took her into his arms. “Tomorrow,” he said softly. “It’s late. Let’s take tonight.”

  He pulled her close. She quickly smiled, feeling his arousal grow as he helped strip her of her clothing.

  “The walls are paper-thin,” she murmured.

  “Nah, not that thin.”

  “Pretty thin.”

  “So we’ll be kind of quiet!” he said.

  And of course they were. Quiet.

  Kind of...

  But with or without sound, it was certainly a wonderful night.

  * * *

  “I had to come,” Robert Merton said, standing by Griffin as the machinery worked to extract Brenda Noonan’s coffin from the ground. His voice was quiet and his gaze was sad as he focused on the work being done.

  Griffin looked around the cemetery. It appeared as any other; the situation of graves might have been a natural one. But graves had been moved here from eight cemeteries affected by the flooding. There was really nothing at all haphazard about the place.

  Or the group of people milling about as the morning faded to noon, and the machinations of getting the buried out of the ground went on.

  Griffin couldn’t help but wonder how many stones were actually over the remains of those they commemorated. They ranged from slate to marble; cherubs, angels and other funerary art manifested here and there. The cemetery was an homage to lives that had been led in places that had become nonexistent.

  Brenda Noonan was in a section where a number of graves—dated from the early 1800s into the early 1900s—bore her family name.

  The coffin was out of the ground; there was shouting among the workers as it was first set down and then hiked onto the vehicle that would carry it back to the morgue. Comparisons would be made to the wounds on the bodies that had been found in the Quabbin.

  Griffin looked across the cemetery. Vickie and Devin had wandered off; they were reading old stones and pointing at epitaphs here and there.

  Isaac Sherman was standing a few feet away, his arms crossed over his chest as he watched the action. Charlie Oakley was just a few feet away from him, watching alongside Rocky.

  And now, Robert Merton. Here. Along with Charlie Oakley.

  Why?

  “I had to be here,” Merton repeated, and Griffin wasn’t sure if he was speaking to him—or to himself. But Merton looked over at him then. “I remember her, too, you know. I remember Sheena Petrie. I remember what the case did to Charlie. And now...now Helena,” he said.

  “They’re doing DNA testing, but they’ve made comparisons,” Griffin said. “Neither of the bodies found in the Quabbin has been identified as Helena. There is still the remote possibility that she’s alive.”

  Dr. Evan Graves, who had stood like the grand conductor of the action, came over to Griffin. “We’re heading to the morgue now, if you want to make your way there.”

  Griffin found himself looking around the Quabbin cemetery again.

  There seemed to be something infinitely sad about it. All these graves brought here...and yet, so many lost, so many stones and monuments moved...

  Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Nothing of the mortal coil lasted forever.

  And looking across the slopes of the landscape, Griffin wondered if he wouldn’t see something, someone, a whisper of the past, of those who had come before. But there was nothing—no one.

  Vickie and Devin were walking back toward them.

  The empty hole of Brenda Noonan’s grave seemed to gape like a mouth that screamed a silent protest.

  “You’re going into the morgue?” Vickie asked him.

  It was as if they were all trying not to look at the gaping hole.

  He nodded to her. “I know what they’re going to find. That’s part of the process, though. It will only take a few hours.”

  “Devin and I are going to drive around the Quabbin, heading out on Route 9. Angela got my map from the book and a more current map superimposed,” Vickie told him. She paused, looking around the cemetery, as well, speaking softly as she added, “We’re not getting anywhere here.”

  Charlie Oakley, Robert Merton and Isaac Sherman were now standing together, watching as the ambulance drivers closed up the doors on the vehicle that would bear Brenda’s remains to the morgue, second time around.

  “I know that Devin will be with you, but stay in the car, please? If you find the landmark that you’re looking for, call me. Rocky and I will run out of the autopsy—out of anything—to be with you, okay?” he asked her.

  She smiled and nodded.

  “Don’t get out of the car, even if you see your blonde woman,” he said. “Promise me. I still think that you should be heading out of town today, going as far as you can go.”

  “I will not get out of the car. I promise—pinkie promise, promise on the lives of all I love and so on. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Griffin agreed.

  Merton came striding over to them. “We’ll be out here. Call us if...anything,” he said. He lowered his voice, looking at Griffin, and then Rocky, who was moving their way, as well. “Isaac Sherman, Charlie and me. We’ll be searching the Quabbin. I hear that Wendell Harper has his boys—whoops, sorry, Miss Preston—his men and women out searching for whatever can be found also.”

  Griffin looked at him unhappily. “Be careful,” he said.

  “I’m an old warhorse, Special Agent Pryce. I’ll be fine,” Merton told him. “I’m out of my district, but I am a cop.”

  “With Charlie and Isaac,” Vickie said.

  “Charlie is solid—and Isaac seems to be steady enough,” Merton said.

  “It’s not just you all. We do have a noose here, and we are pulling it in. On a fellow who likes handing out cyanide pills,” Griffin reminded him.

  “We’re just two old geezers and a young’un, walking around the Quabbin. Hey, the bike tours are still out in full bloom and it remains one of the greatest tourist attraction areas here. We blend in. Honest. Not so sure the rest of you law-keeper types do, though!”

  He grinned over at them, turned and headed toward the others.

  Charlie and Isaac waved at them. They spoke among themselves for a minute, and then all of them got into a large blue sedan.

  “And they’re off,” Rocky murmured, joining them.

  “Two of them in the state and involved with or aware of what had happened from the time Sheena Petrie was killed,” Devin noted.

  “But they didn’t find her.”

  “No, Syd Smith found her. But Syd isn’t here,” Vickie pointed out.

  “He isn’t,” Griffin agreed. He shrugged. “Syd was her friend. He watched out for her when she was alive. If he’s not at peace with what happened to her, he is, at least, at peace with the fact that he was there for her in life. Maybe these guys don’t feel that they did the right thing back then.”

  “Or maybe they were involved,” Vickie said. “What about Milton Hanson?” she asked. “Has there been any word of him at all? Have they found anything on him?”

  “No, not yet,” Griffin said.

  “Suspicious,” Vickie said.

  “Yes, suspicious,” Griffin agreed.

  “All right,” Griffin said. He hesitated, looking at Devin and Vickie. “I talked to Barnes this morning. He found reports on fifteen robberies of pharmacies around the state. Three of those were armed and, thank God, two out of three the alarms went off, but the
perps were gone when cops got there. The others were all robberies in which the stores were really burglarized—cameras knocked out, supplies stolen—but no one threatened, hurt or killed. This is a really organized group. Vickie, you stay out of harm’s way.”

  “We’ve got it, promise,” Vickie said. “We’re just going to find the landmarks using the overlay, and by evening we’ll be back with you.”

  “Promise,” Devin agreed.

  “Okay,” Griffin agreed. He wasn’t happy.

  Vickie spoke softly to him. “Griffin. I’ve had the dreams. I have the Nathaniel Alden book. I have the information that Gloria Martin gave to us. And, before Alex disappeared, there was something that he wanted to tell me. There are two situations that combine as one, and there is a lot we have to be afraid of happening very, very soon. One, Alex is being held somewhere, along with a blonde woman—whether she’s Helena Matthews or not. They could both die by tomorrow night. We have to find the truth quickly. Because, if I’m right, a killer is using the past. He wants everyone to think that there is a crazy suicide cult out here, ready to bring back Satan. But he’s holding Alex to find Jehovah, because, somehow, the Martin treasure that the Puritans denied him is buried in Jehovah.”

  “Maybe,” he told her.

  “Maybe!”

  “And maybe there’s a crazy-ass suicide Satan cult out there. But you’re right about one thing—time matters. So, go be brilliant. But don’t get out of the car. Wait for us, please.”

  “Until the ends of the earth!” she promised him, smiling.

  “I don’t intend to be nearly that long,” he assured her.

  “Come on,” Rocky said to him. “The sooner we get in on this, the sooner we’ll be meeting up with these two!” He smiled at Devin, paused, kissed her quickly and headed for Griffin’s rental.

  Devin was already heading toward the car they had taken, a Jeep. Vickie grinned and waved at Griffin, hurrying to run after Devin.

  15

  “Did you notice which way our friends went?” Devin asked Vickie.

  She was doing the driving; that allowed Vickie to hold the map.