Jeremy, I don’t know how to tell you this—how to ask you this. I think we should talk now.
Jessup had discovered something. That was why he did not bring his notebook with him the night before. He wasn’t planning to meet in order to interrogate Logan further, but to tell him something.
He let his eyes continue roaming over the desk as he tried to parse this sudden and surprising development. Now his eyes stopped on the screen of the computer. It showed two browser windows, each containing what appeared to be a scholarly paper. To his astonishment, Logan saw that the papers were written by Chase Feverbridge.
Eyes not moving from the screen, he sat down at the desk and began to read. Both articles, it seemed, had appeared in less-than-reputable publications: perhaps the best, or only, scientific organs in which Feverbridge could lately get his work disseminated.
He read through both from beginning to end. The first article, actually more of an extract than a full-blown paper, had been published late the previous year and discussed how Feverbridge planned to demonstrate, through conclusive proof, that elements in the moon’s atmosphere were the direct cause of the “lunar effect.” The second—and last, having been published this last February—dealt with transformational biology and regrowth: the macrophages that permitted a salamander to regrow a lost limb; the “imaginal discs” that allowed a caterpillar to transform into a butterfly, even once enzymes had dissolved many of its tissues. The article concluded with speculation about potential ways in which animal DNA could be used to influence, if not directly modify, human DNA and its genetic code—and how such changes could perhaps be precipitated in the laboratory.
Logan sat back in the chair. No wonder Laura Feverbridge had spoken of her father being the object of withering scorn. The first article reflected in vague terms Feverbridge’s recent experiments with the quality and duplication of moonlight and its influence on behavior, which he’d seen firsthand, but the second—with its talk of bizarre transformational effects—was no doubt what had really made him an object of ridicule. Perhaps coming under severe academic fire had forced him to reconsider such radical speculation and—in the wake of his aborted suicide and apparent death, which in a sense gave him a new lease on life—Feverbridge had scaled back the nature of his experiments and concentrated on proving the argument made in his first paper.
One thing was clear: Jessup had been on a journey of discovery that Logan himself should, if he was honest with himself, already have made. With his eidetic memory, he recalled Laura Feverbridge’s words: And then, he published those last two articles…but he did it prematurely, submitted without my knowledge, promising much in the text but without the necessary scientific underpinnings and relevant data. I guess he was lashing out at his detractors, trying to prove his point. The result was precisely the opposite he’d hoped for—he was subjected to academic ridicule even more severe. It was then that he…tried to kill himself.
The first thing he should have done, he now realized, was consult those articles she’d mentioned—if only for the sake of comprehensiveness. But then, at the time he’d been too shocked by the discovery that Dr. Feverbridge was still alive, and too impressed by the laboratory results he’d been shown, for her passing reference to her father’s last articles to truly register.
He wondered just what Randall had discovered, and what he’d planned to tell him at the Hideaway. Was he planning to confront Logan about the Feverbridges? Was it possible he’d learned the father was still alive? No—that didn’t seem likely. What could he have wanted to tell Logan so badly it could not wait for the following day? He sighed: now it did not seem like he would ever know.
But wait: there had been another fragmentary entry in the last page of Jessup’s notebook—one that Logan understood even less. Albright: F. & Blakeneys…
The voices from the living room increased in volume; there was the sound of an opening door. Quickly, Logan rose from the chair, pushed it back up to the desk. He considered closing the browser windows, but left them untouched out of respect for his dead friend. A moment later, Suzanne appeared in the doorway to the office. Her eyes were even redder now, but a small, sad smile was on her face.
Logan followed her back out to the living room with a mind deeply troubled.
28
When he left the Jessup residence, about half an hour later, the inner turmoil had not left him. Glancing at his image in the rearview mirror, he reflected that he was now finished—and yet, on the other hand, he was not finished. True, his monograph was complete. But Jessup, who had asked him in person to look into the peculiar circumstances regarding the recent murders, was still asking—only now the voice was quieter, and Logan could no longer see him. The request remained, however—and the ranger’s own death had given it a new urgency that Logan could no longer ignore.
And so he did not turn in at the entrance to Cloudwater, but instead drove past the artists’ colony and continued down State Highway 3, taking the turnoff to 3A and heading toward Pike Hollow. A few miles short of the hamlet, he pulled in at the rustic A-frame set back from the road, red pickup in the driveway.
Albright answered the door on the second rap. It was almost as if he’d been expecting someone. And there was no surprise in his clear blue eyes at seeing Logan, either. Wordlessly, he motioned for Logan to take a seat in one of the hand-carved chairs, then sat down himself. He’d been whittling something out of a piece of pine with his massive hunting knife; looking closely, Logan saw that it was a long-gowned woman, apparently holding a lyre.
“Euterpe?” he asked, hazarding a guess.
Albright nodded. “Muse of lyric poetry.” He shaved off a few more parings, then dropped the knife and the carving onto the floor beside his chair.
“Did you hear about Randall Jessup?” Logan asked.
Albright nodded. Despite the chill weather, he wore a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and as he scratched his thick white beard the muscles in his forearm knotted like whipcord. “I feel real bad about that.”
Logan didn’t know exactly how to begin. Albright, he was sure, was the connection he sought—but in what way exactly, or whether the tough, reserved mountain man would be forthcoming, he couldn’t begin to guess.
“He called me up, last night,” Logan said. “He’d been looking into the recent murders, of course—and, as I told you, he’d been asking me to do the same. After some investigation I’d told him that I couldn’t help. But he’d discovered something—that much was clear. He wanted to meet at the Hideaway, right away. He had something to tell me.”
Albright said nothing; he merely listened, still slowly scratching his beard.
“I stopped by his house this morning, to do what I could to comfort Suzanne. While I was there, I happened to find Randall’s journal—the one he jotted all his case notes in. The last entries were very curious. My name was mentioned. So was that of Chase Feverbridge. The final entry is why I’m here. It read: ‘Albright: F. & Blakeneys.’ ”
Albright stopped scratching and let his hand drop to his dungarees. “Randall was a good man. And a good ranger. That philosophical bent of his: it helped him see things in ways other rangers couldn’t—helped him ask the hard questions, the unusual questions.” He paused a moment, as if taking the measure of Logan with his eyes. “He stopped by to see me yesterday, too,” he said. “He did that now and then: if he had a problem he wanted to bounce off an objective listener—hard to find in these parts—or just talk about poetry or the lure of the deep woods. But he hadn’t come to chat this time. He came loaded with questions: about Laura Feverbridge. About you, too. And about the Blakeneys. And that’s when I told him.”
“Told him what?”
Albright picked up the knife again, began cleaning his fingernails with its edge. “Guess I’d better tell you, too—under the circumstances. Randall’s dead; he can’t tell you himself. See, I’ve been trying to stay out of this whole mess ever since the first body was found. It’s like I told you
the first time we met: I’ve heard some pretty outlandish backwoods tales, both growing up and since moving back here, and these murders…well, they were no ‘tale.’ And they felt wrong to me. That’s the only word I can use for them. Not just cruel, vicious, bizarre—but wrong.”
Wrong. Jessup had used the same word, that first night he described the killings in Logan’s cabin. And it was the same word that had come to Logan’s mind, more than once.
“Murders like these stir people up. Get them thinking things, suspecting things. I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire. Besides, it wasn’t any of my business. And from what I heard, the poor man had been subject to enough criticism and second-guessing during his lifetime. Why trouble his rest?”
Logan thought back to Jessup’s final scrawled notes. “You’re talking about Dr. Feverbridge.”
“Did you know he wrote poetry, too? Not the kind I write—and not the kind I’d care to read, either. But you have to admire a scientist who does any versifying at all. Besides, I liked the way he fought against his critics, the way he raged against the world, even though the effort to do so broke his will.”
“How do you know this?” Logan asked.
“We met a couple, three times. Sort of hit it off. Don’t ask me why—two more different men were never born. He came to a reading I did in Lake Placid. Hung around afterward and we got to talking. Some time later, I stopped by the fire station where he had his lab. This was early in the spring, and I do a fair amount of hunting for wild hare around those parts after the first thaw. Must have been a month or so before his death. He talked about his work—can’t say I understood it. And that’s when I learned we had something in common.”
“What was that?”
“The Blakeneys.”
Logan sat forward in his chair. “What?”
“Oh, they’re not quite as ornery and standoffish as they put on. There’s one or two folks that they tolerate, more or less. It’s true they don’t like strangers, and there’s no love lost between them and the good citizens of Pike Hollow—the bad blood goes back too far for that to ever change. And they have a good reason to keep to themselves.”
“What’s that?” Logan asked.
But Albright didn’t answer directly. “Dr. Feverbridge told me he’d managed to make the acquaintance of the clan—exactly how, I don’t know. Maybe the same way I initially did: on the off chance you run into one, treat him respectable, don’t get all judgmental and curious. But if you want my real opinion, I think it had to do with money—that’s something the Blakeneys could always use a lot more of, no matter how self-sufficient they might seem. No doubt he’d heard the rumors about them and grown curious. Anyway, he’d been a visitor at their compound—once, maybe twice; Feverbridge grew vague with the details when I started asking questions.” He slipped the knife back into the scabbard. “And that’s what I told Jessup, when he stopped by here yesterday afternoon. And that’s when Jessup told me how curious he was about what Feverbridge had been working on: the lunar effect, I think they both called it.”
Logan was silent. He couldn’t tell Albright that Feverbridge was still alive; that would be breaking his promise to Laura and to the scientist himself. His mind worked fast, trying one theory after another but rejecting each in turn. That Feverbridge had visited the Blakeneys—that anyone had visited them—was a surprise: but why was it important? Then he recalled the articles he’d seen displayed on Jessup’s desk—and it was as if a key had just slid into a lock.
Albright said nothing, but his expression implied an understanding that some revelation, or partial revelation, had taken place. “You’ve been out to the Feverbridge lab,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Seen those dogs of his?”
“The Weimaraners? Yes.”
“Awful big, aren’t they?”
Logan didn’t reply, and after a moment Albright spoke again. “Anyways, now you know why I feel bad about Jessup’s death.”
“Why? You don’t think your telling him that fact could possibly have anything to do with his death?”
Albright shrugged.
“His death has had one result, though. The leader of the task force, a trooper named Krenshaw, is planning to raid the Blakeney compound.”
At this, Albright’s bushy eyebrows shot up. “When?”
“Soon. Perhaps the day after tomorrow.”
Albright stood up, dusted the wood curlings from his lap. “Then I guess we’d better go pay a call.”
Logan glanced up at him. “Where?”
“The Blakeneys. Who else?” And as he spoke, the man shrugged into a faded hunting jacket.
29
Logan rose slowly to his feet. Albright glanced over at him, chuckling at his obvious discomfiture.
“We’re going to pay a social visit on the people who stuck a shotgun in my face the last time I went calling,” Logan said.
“Not a social visit, exactly,” Albright replied. “But I think it’s time you found out just what kind of people they really are. They need to know about this raid the troopers are planning—I owe them that much. Besides, isn’t there something you want to ask them?”
“What’s that?” Logan asked.
“Why Dr. Feverbridge visited their compound.”
Logan glanced at him for a minute. Over the past twenty-four hours, the shocks and the tragic events had followed so closely, one upon the other, that he now felt tired and almost stupefied. But immediately, he realized the man was right. He’d come to see Albright because he’d believed, at some instinctual level, that the man was the connection he sought to what Jessup had uncovered: and he’d been right. That connection was Dr. Feverbridge, and why he had struck up an acquaintance with the Blakeney clan, of all people—the very group that all the locals hated, mistrusted, and suspected of murder.
“Of course,” he said. “But will they talk to me?”
“Maybe. If I’m with you.”
“Very well. But aren’t you going to take that?” And Logan nodded toward a .20-06 rifle that hung over the rough stone fireplace.
“No, sir. That would just agitate them.” And he led the way out the front door.
The passenger seat of Albright’s pickup was loaded with an assortment of junk—waders, a few knives of various sizes, a crossbow and assorted quarrels, a torn and faded army jacket with a sergeant’s patch on one shoulder, a box of fishing tackle. Albright threw it all into the backseat and Logan climbed in. Firing up the engine, Albright backed out of the driveway, then started west down 3A. Logan glanced at his watch: it was quarter past two.
They passed the turnoff for Pike Hollow and, after another bend in the road, the overgrown entrance to the Blakeney compound. Three state trooper vehicles were now blocking it.
“How are we going to get past that welcoming committee?” Logan asked.
“We’re not going in the front door,” Albright explained.
A few more bends in the road brought them to the site where Jessup had met his death. Crime scene tape was still strung around a large area of the shoulder. Logan stared at it as they passed by, horror and sorrow mingling within him.
Albright drove the truck around one more bend, and then—veering across the center stripe—pulled onto the oncoming shoulder and then into what to Logan appeared an impenetrable wall of brush. It was, however, only a foot or two deep—the truck pushed its way through and into a small clearing, barely large enough for the vehicle, surrounded on all sides by thick forest. The shrubbery sprang back into position behind them, effectively hiding the truck from the road. Albright shut off the engine, then jumped out, and Logan followed his example.
“Ready?” Albright said.
Logan nodded. Albright walked around the front of the truck and stepped into what was seemingly an unbroken line of trees and heavy vegetal undergrowth. As they began penetrating deeper, however, Logan realized they were following a path of sorts—unmarked, barely visible, but nevertheless of human construction. It was so
faint and narrow that he could never have followed it himself. Branches of pine needles brushed across his face as he stayed close behind Albright.
“How can you navigate this without a compass?” he asked. Albright’s only answer was a scoff.
The path twisted and turned with the varying topography of the forest floor, now rising to a height of land, now descending into a valley. Sunlight barely filtered through the heavy canopy overhead. Albright never stopped to check his position, but kept up a steady pace.
“I first met Nahum Blakeney in these woods,” he said over his shoulder. “I couldn’t have been more than ten, and I was practicing my bow-hunting skills on coons. He was maybe a year older than me. He’d never been to school a day in his life. First time I saw him, he just ran off. Melted into the woods. But then I saw him again, a few weeks later. I let him try my bow. Over time, we became…well, not friends—I don’t think the Blakeneys have any friends—but acquaintances. I taught him a few things, brought him some books—he was a poor reader, but he had an eager mind—and he taught me more woodcraft than even my daddy knew.” He shook his head. “One day, he brought me into the compound, introduced me to his people.”
“What were they like?” Logan asked.
“I think it would be better if I let you make that judgment on your own. I’ll wager you’ll discover soon enough which of the legends are true—and which aren’t.”
“Are you saying there’s some truth to the stories I heard in Pike Hollow?”
“Oh, there’s some truth, all right—if we can convince the Blakeneys to reveal it.”
The path was now hugging a steep rock face on one side and a narrow valley on the other. As best he could tell, Logan estimated they had walked about a mile, and the path was gradually trending eastward. Albright followed the invisible trail around a sharp bend in the cliff face, and suddenly Logan found himself confronted with another wall of endless twigs, lashed together with baling wire in vertical rows, seemingly as impenetrable as brick or concrete. This wall was shorter than the first he had encountered, however, and apparently less thick, and it disappeared into the surrounding forest on both sides almost immediately. There was no clearing before it, and the trees crowded in overhead; he could see nothing beyond the serried ranks of twigs, arranged so obsessively in their tightly fitted rows.