by Stuart Jaffe
Stumbling toward their car, Max and Sandra moved like zombies as they tried to process what had happened. They settled in and drove off. Drummond must have seen it on their faces because he kept quiet for a full five minutes.
But eventually, he burst. “One of you tell me what the heck went on in there.”
Max pulled into the last gas station before hitting the highway. With only a few interruptions from Sandra, he detailed their visit with Madame Yan.
At the end, Drummond said, “Are you out of your mind? You gave her your lipstick?”
Sandra said, “Should I have hung PB out to dry? Would that have been better?”
“That’s not the point.”
“It absolutely is.”
“But you gave her something that belongs to you. Of all people, you should know what that means.”
Sandra whipped around. “Of course I know. But I am not going to let anything happen to that boy — even if it means taking a risk with a witch.”
Drummond’s face pleaded with Max. “You just got out of a witch’s curse. Are you really going to let her get caught up in a new one? You want her to go through that?”
Forcing his voice to remain calm, Max said, “This isn’t helping. The three of us fighting won’t solve anything. The lipstick has already been given away. It’s done. I’m fairly certain that Madame Yan won’t let us simply take it back. So, if you want to be helpful, let’s work the case in front of us. Let’s help out PB, so that Sandra’s sacrifice was worthwhile.”
“But —”
“We solve this case first. Then we can focus our energy on getting Sandra free from whatever Madame Yan might do.”
Tapping the headrest with her fingernail, Sandra said, “Don’t forget that just because Madame Yan has my lipstick doesn’t mean she’s going to use it. She had dozens of them in that box.”
Drummond shook his head, but he also pursed his lips — a sign of him working through a case. “You may never get that lipstick back. You understand that? If she doesn’t use it to cast a spell or a curse, she’ll hold it over you for the rest of your life.”
“It’s a risk I had to take,” Sandra said. “But Max is right — we need to focus on PB’s case right now. Then, I promise, we can do whatever needs to be done to protect me. If anything can be done.”
“Besides,” Max said, “of all the witches to give a personal item to, Madame Yan is probably the nicest. We may never have to worry about her actually doing anything with it.”
Nobody spoke a word, and the silence filtered out the lie Max wanted them all to believe. “Okay,” Drummond finally said. “We now know that Klein’s murder was all part of this tragedy group. We also have a name, Soro Brown, to look into.”
“That could be anybody,” Sandra said. “It’s not like Max can get anywhere researching Mr. Brown.”
“Then let’s go over Wilson Klein’s crime scene again.” Drummond walked them through each step of their approach to the car and the way it had looked. They all checked over the photos on Max’s phone and discussed the way Klein had appeared. Drummond suddenly clapped his hands together. “The finger.”
“What finger?” Sandra asked.
“He was pointing into the woods with his finger. Sort of. And Max went in and found a little stool. Right? With some candles. But then we got taken away by Cecily Hull’s rent-a-cop.”
Max’s head spun. How could have been so stupid? He grabbed his coat and rifled through the pockets. “The pictures. There were two photographs in those woods.” He pulled them out and held them up for the others to see.
Drummond only glanced at the photos before he drifted backwards. “Damn.”
Sandra grabbed the photographs. “A big funeral and an old shack of a house. You know what these are?”
With a bitter nod, Drummond said, “The Lawson farmhouse. And all those coffins are the Lawsons. What you’re looking at is one of the most famous, most brutal massacres in North Carolina history.”
Chapter 8
AS MAX PULLED ONTO 52 NORTH and headed toward the office, he listened closely to Drummond’s story. Sandra faced the back, and Max could tell she tried to console Drummond with her sympathetic expressions. Looking in the rearview mirror, he could see that Drummond’s attention had turned inward — into memories of long ago.
“It was 1929,” Drummond said. “Actually, it was Christmas — December 25th. Can you believe that? Fellow by the name of Charlie Lawson had bought a farm up in Germanton. It’s a town a bit north of Winston-Salem. From the stories I heard, he had a fetching wife and seven well-raised kids.”
“Seven?” Sandra said. “I mean I know that was pretty common back then, but still — seven.”
“Well, it wasn’t so strange to see a large family like that — especially a farmer’s family. But not everybody had them like that, either. And so close together. Their eldest was only seventeen, and the rest went down all the way to four months old. Just four months and that bastard killed them all.”
“So they caught who slaughtered the family?”
“That part was easy. Charlie Lawson did it. Killed his whole family.” Drummond shifted his hat and watched the scenery race by the window. “As I understand it, a little bit before Christmas Charlie took the whole family into town — Winston-Salem — had them buy new clothes and had a family portrait taken. That was pretty strange. Back then, that was an expensive trip. Today, you can drive to Germanton in about fifteen minutes or so, but in the 20s — getting the whole family loaded up, hitching a horse, since they couldn’t afford a car, going all the way to Winston-Salem, buying new clothes, having a portrait taken — that was an all-day affair. Lawson spent a lot of money on that.”
Max said, “You think he was planning on doing this then. This was premeditated.”
“I think so. But who knows. The whole thing is madness.”
As he described the events that followed, Max could see it unfold in his mind. It was the afternoon of Christmas. Lawson sent his eldest son, Arthur, into town on some silly errand. Having gotten rid of the only real threat, the man put together his arsenal and waited by the tobacco barn. When his daughters, Carrie and Maybell, came by, he pulled out his twelve-gauge and shot them both. He dragged the bodies into the barn and bludgeoned them to make sure they were dead.
Next he went straight up to his house and shot his wife on the porch. His eldest daughter, Marie, was inside baking a cake. She must have seen what happened — certainly heard it — and she screamed.
A blind rage then took over Lawson. He burst into the house, shot Marie, and then hunted down his two young boys. His raging steps clumping on the old wood floor would have terrified the children. After disposing of them, he murdered the four-month old baby. Bashed the poor thing to pieces.
With his whole family destroyed in a matter of minutes, Charlie Lawson walked out into the woods. As people discovered what had happened, they assumed Charlie to also be a victim. They started searching for his body.
“The story I heard is that when he shot himself, the sound echoed for miles. A little while later, folks finally found him, and there was a well-worn circle where he had been pacing for hours.”
“This picture,” Sandra said, “These are all their bodies.”
Drummond nodded. “I didn’t know the Lawsons. Never would’ve heard of them if not for this sensational story. Read about it in the papers. Everybody was talking about it.”
“But one of the children survived.”
“Arthur did because he wasn’t there. Really messed his head up worse than any shellshock or such could ever do. But other than him, none of them survived.”
“But there aren’t enough coffins in this photo.”
Drummond dropped his head and his voice. “The baby didn’t get a coffin. They put her in her mother’s arms and buried them together.”
A sharp sniffle and Sandra looked away.
Max said, “Did the police ever learn why he did it? It was 1929. The stock market
had just crashed. He lost everything maybe and decided to take out his family before they had to suffer? Something like that?”
“If anything, that farm had a lot going for it. As far as I know, nobody ever figured out why it happened. I think he wrote some letters before killing himself, but I don’t know what was in them. It was a big story and all, but it didn’t really change my life or anything. It was dark and horrible, yet our lives kept moving on.”
As Max pulled off the highway and headed toward Trade Street, he said, “Then why are you acting so sad?”
“Well, there’s one more piece to this that I can tell you. See, shortly after all that tragedy, one of Lawson’s brothers decided to open up the house for tours. Charged people twenty-five cents, if I remember.”
Sandra wrinkled her brow. “That’s sick.”
“The Lawson family wasn’t particularly wealthy. They had a lot of funerals to pay for. Plus who was going to buy that house? They had to pay their bills somehow. Probably still owed money on the farm itself. And frankly, I’m sure kids and curious folk were sneaking in to see it anyway. Might as well make a buck or two off it.”
Max found a parking space a few blocks up from the office. After he turned off the car, he faced Drummond. “I’m guessing that you paid your quarter and took a visit.”
“By that point in my life, I’d already had a few run-ins with the more bizarre things in the world. I don’t know if I wanted to see the ghosts of any of those kids, but it would’ve gnawed at me if I didn’t try to find out. I think I needed to see if it was real. None of it could be believed, so I had to check it out for myself.”
“Did you see anything?”
“No. I walked through that house, though. Strangest part of it was that being there made the place feel less real. It was like walking through a dollhouse. Marie, oldest daughter, she had been making this cake — raisin cake, I think — and they still had the cake. Put it under a fancy glass cover. Everything was still in the house. Everything seemed staged. Except the blood that stained the floor. Especially the ones next to the basinet. That was horrible. That knocked the reality of it into me like a prize fighter’s haymaker. And once that sunk into my head, I could feel the pain oozing off the walls.” Drummond removed his hat and ruffled his hair at an unreachable itch. “I should never have gone there. For months after, I felt like part of it had rubbed off on me. I couldn’t wash it away. It was a terrible experience.”
Max pocketed the photographs. “I’d say this place certainly fits the needs of this tragedy group. So, here’s what I’m thinking — I’ll go up to the office and do deeper research on Lawson. See what I can find about all of this, so we’re not walking into anything blind. Drummond, if you can handle it, you know what I’m going to ask you to do.”
“I’ll check the Other, but I don’t expect to find them. All those innocent kids and their darling mother — they had to have moved on. As for Charlie Lawson, if he acted out of witchcraft or some type of curse, then he might be stuck here or in the Other, but I never saw any evidence of magic in that farmhouse. No symbols, no casting circles, not even a mojo bag or an arcane book. Pain and madness — that’s what I saw. But not magic.”
Sandra said, “I’ll take a look into these tragedy groups. Even if their magic is not real, they certainly think it is. Now that I know what I’m looking for, I should be able to find some references, maybe even some spells. Then I’ll go pick up PB and J and bring them home.”
Max reddened. He hadn’t thought about them. “That’s good. I appreciate that.”
She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “Just be home for dinner tonight. I’m going to put something together so that the four of us can eat as a family. Don’t be late.”
As Max headed up to his office, he felt a warm flush at the thought of Sandra preparing a family meal. Then his thoughts drifted to Charlie Lawson. Max could not imagine entering his home later that evening and slaughtering Sandra and the boys. What could have driven Lawson to do such a thing? And not just one child but all of them.
As he opened the office door, the researcher in him looked forward to the hunt for information. But the rest of him loathed finding the answers.
Chapter 9
AS MAX SAT BEHIND HIS DESK to start his research, his head reeled. On one hand, the story of the Lawson family massacre tapped into everything exciting about his job. Researching old and unusual stories with the goal of helping people in the present day — his fingertips jittered as he typed in his initial search. But on the other hand, the person he sought to help was PB. What if Max couldn’t save him? What if all his research brought them no closer to stopping the people who sought to hurt him? Max’s jaw set as he narrowed his eyes onto the screen.
Unlike the other research that the Porter Agency cases brought his way, this one centered on a famous incident. Max would have no trouble getting information. If anything, the problem would be too much information.
As he brought up one browser tab after another, he quickly saw that he needed several approaches to organize the deluge of material. While he preferred to take handwritten notes — it helped him remember things better — he also brought up a blank document on his laptop that he could build a timeline in. He created a spreadsheet to categorize the different websites and color-coded them for easier access later.
“Look at me,” Max said to the laptop. “It’s almost like I’ve done this before.”
Once he had everything in place, he dug into the reading. There were firsthand accounts from interviews conducted over the last several decades with neighbors and family members still living until recently. There were news articles and photographs — including the infamous family portrait taken shortly before the tragedy. After a few hours, Max had a fairly clear picture of the way things had happened.
It all started back in 1918 when Charlie and his family moved to Germanton. Everything that followed convinced Max that a curse hounded them. Whether or not that curse was witch-borne remained to be seen.
But in the winter of 1919, Charlie suffered an odd form of arthritis that hindered his ability to fully work the farm. As a result, the income loss prevented them from paying their mortgage, and they lost ownership of the land back to the original owners.
One year later, Lawson’s son William died from pneumonia. He was only six. Two years after that Lawson’s sister suffered the loss of her baby girl in a fire. Autumn of that same year Lawson’s brother Marion, lost his ten-month old son, Chester, through a sudden and unnamed illness.
Despite this series of deaths, the families pushed on. The death of children was not uncommon, but Max wondered how normal it was to have so many deaths within the same family tree.
He pulled up the document screen and outlined all the deaths and their years. Then he picked up his pen and wrote in his notebook further details.
“What I really need,” Max told his computer screen, “is to understand why Charlie became a raging, homicidal maniac. What led him to destroy all that he loved?”
By all accounts, he did love his family. He took great pride in them, was a stern disciplinarian, and considered by all to be a fine father. Losing his own children and his nieces and nephews would have been a serious blow to him, no matter how common an occurrence child death had been, but that such things could have propelled Lawson to destroy his own family — Max found it hard to believe . After all, the string of child deaths and the slaughter of his own family happened nearly a decade apart. If he had been so distraught by the loss of the children, he would have acted much sooner.
In fact, the Lawsons didn’t even move to the murder site until 1927. Despite having little money and little support for the decision, Charlie bought a hundred and fourteen acre farm on Brook Cove Road in Germanton. Max was even able to locate a record of the purchase — $3200 financed by Wachovia Bank in Winston-Salem.
Charlie thought this would be a fresh start, and Max wondered if he knew he had been cursed. If he had attempted to run away from i
t through this move. But, Max had to remind himself, not every terrible event could be linked to witchcraft.
In fact, the next hour of research brought Max to a very non-supernatural conclusion. Two of them, actually. Which one would prove the truth, he did not know. And he could see an argument that both, when combined, might have led to the horrible events of Christmas 1929.
Back in ‘27, Charlie went about digging a basement to regulate temperatures in his tobacco pack house. This new farm was going to be the tobacco farm he had always wanted and a lucrative one at that. While digging that basement, Charlie had an accident.
One day, while working on the drainage of his pack house, he used his mattock — a pickax-type tool — to break up chunks of the ground. Unfortunately, the mattock caught on remnants of an old fence buried under the dirt and brambles. Charlie yanked at it hard and when it broke free, the sharp mattock slammed into his forehead. From that day onward, Charlie was never the same. Though nobody could prove that the head injury had changed him, looking at it now, nearly one hundred years later, Max thought there was a good argument to be made that Charlie had begun to suffer bleeding in his brain.
Pressure changes in the brain caused by bleeding or tumors could drastically alter an individual’s personality or behavior. Plenty of documented cases existed to support the idea. But back in the late-1920s — such things were still mysteries. With the benefit of a near-century between them, Max spotted numerous moments to back up a brain trauma argument.
In 1928, for example, Charlie took his haul of tobacco to Winston-Salem to sell. A man accidentally hit Charlie’s leg with a cart and injured it. Later, the same man did it again. Charlie burst into a rage. The altercation turned physical, and the man pulled out a switchblade. At that point, without a weapon, most people would have backed away. But Charlie pushed on. The man stabbed him, sending Charlie to the hospital for two weeks.
