by Lis Wiehl
“He didn’t study pharmacology?”
“Oh no—why would he? Business administration. Biology too. Had the most extraordinary collection of poisonous tree frogs. How is it that God gave the most beautiful colors and patterns to his deadliest creations?”
Dani gave Tommy a quick look. Abbie Gardener had handed him a dead frog that night in his yard, and the frog had dissolved when he threw it back into the pond. “These are the first, you’ll be the last,” Abbie had said. He’d later found a frog in a pond on the St. Adrian’s campus that didn’t try to jump away when he reached for it; it just sat calmly in his hand.
“One of Udo’s associates told me studying frog toxins has been leading into some very promising medical applications,” Villanegre said. “Dr. Guryakin. Did you meet him?”
“Briefly. What does Dr. Guryakin do for Mr. Bauer?”
“He’s the head of research at Linz, I believe. Intelligent enough chap, but I don’t know what he was doing at the exhibition. No particular grasp of the subject as far as I could tell.”
“Perhaps he was there to learn.”
“Perhaps,” Villanegre said. “We were all there to learn something. If I may ask—are you married, Dr. Harris?”
“I am not, Dr. Villanegre.”
“Julian,” he said. “Please call me Julian.”
“Only if you call me Dani.”
“Agreed, Dani. So is there someone special in your life?”
“There is,” Dani said. “Quite special.”
“Then I suggest,” Villanegre said, rising to his feet, “you avoid the young gentleman by the door who has been staring at you this entire time. Unless, of course, he’s the special one. Good night, Dani. Very nice chatting with you.”
Once the art historian was out of sight, Tommy joined Dani. “What?” he said as he sat down. “I was being inconspicuous.”
“Obviously not inconspicuous enough.”
“Next time I’ll cut a pair of eyeholes in a newspaper, like in The Three Stooges. So what do you think?”
“About Villanegre?”
“Please, call him Julian.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m not sure,” Tommy said. “At first I thought he was one of them, but now . . .”
“I agree,” Dani said. “In all my years—well, okay, it hasn’t been that many years—during the time I’ve worked with the criminal element, I’ve had one criterion that has yet to steer me wrong.”
“Which is?”
“I like him. I’ve never liked someone who was guilty. Though I’ve disliked plenty who were innocent.”
She was about to say something more when her phone chirped. She opened her message screen. LOOK BEHIND THE SWT’N LOW.
She quickly scanned the room as she showed Tommy the message. She saw nothing unusual. No one was looking at her.
Tommy jumped up and walked to the coffee station, where he reached behind the small pink packages of artificial sweeteners. He probed until he felt a small capsule. It was pale blue and about a half-inch long with no markings. He pocketed the capsule and rushed through the front door, looking both ways in the parking lot, hoping to see if someone was fleeing, but the lot was empty.
He returned to the table and set the capsule in front of Dani. She picked it up and examined it.
“Can you tell what it is?” he asked.
“Not by looking at it. But I know someone who can figure out what’s inside it.”
“Quinn?”
“Uh-huh.”
“When are you going to see him?”
“Tomorrow. Would you like to come?”
“I would, but I asked Carl if he wanted to run over to the Gardener farm tomorrow to talk to George. Do you mind going alone?”
“I don’t mind.”
In fact, she was relieved. Seeing Quinn with Tommy present would have been awkward. She couldn’t help but wonder if she was making the same mistake she made with Quinn . . . letting too many things go unsaid.
11.
“My name is Ben Whitehorse, and I saw you in a sacred vision. I’d like to talk to you.”
The voice on the intercom was strong but calm. It was seven in the morning, and Tommy was just finishing up his morning workout when his security system alerted him to a visitor at the gates.
Tommy had found the system useful over the years. Occasionally autograph-seeking football fans appeared on his video monitor standing at the end of his driveway with Sharpie in hand, but it was rare for someone to press the call button. Even rarer that someone said they had seen him in a sacred vision. He considered his options. Would pure evil just ring your doorbell at seven a.m. and ask to come in? Probably not.
Tommy pushed the intercom button. “How can I help you?”
“I just need a few minutes. I don’t want to intrude, if you’d rather meet me out here.”
Tommy studied the image on the monitor. The man was dressed in blue jeans, suede cowboy boots, and a khaki-colored barn coat over a plaid shirt. He wore tan buckskin work gloves and a black cowboy hat, and his gray hair fell in a braided ponytail halfway down his back. He appeared to be in his late sixties or early seventies, a Native American who gave no evidence that he was uncomfortable even though the thermometer said the temperature was only forty degrees. The man’s breath made clouds of steam that rolled out from beneath the brim of his black hat.
“I’ll buzz you in,” Tommy said. “You must be freezing.”
“Thank you. I’m not cold, but I appreciate your concern.”
Tommy’s morning workout, on easy days, consisted of a five-mile run, a hundred push-ups, and a hundred sit-ups. He’d just finished and needed a shower. He looked out the window where the old man was walking slowly up the driveway, still a quarter mile away, then went upstairs to his dresser, opened the top drawer, grabbed his .45 Taurus 1911SS automatic, and stuffed it into the pouch of his sweatshirt. The sweatshirt was the same lucky one he’d worn in high school. Dani had teased him about being superstitious, even though he’d explained to her that professional athletes considered it bad luck to be superstitious.
The man in the black cowboy hat was wiping his feet on the bristle mat on the back porch when Tommy opened the door.
“Ben Whitehorse,” the man said, extending his gloved hand. Tommy shook it. The man’s grip was firm despite his advanced years.
“Come on in and have a seat,” Tommy said, closing the door behind him. The older man was several inches shorter than Tommy but firmly built, with a barrel torso, as if he were wearing a baseball umpire’s chest protector beneath his coat. He took his gloves off but kept his coat and hat on as he sat down at Tommy’s kitchen table.
“Can I get you anything to warm you up?” Tommy said. “Coffee or tea or cocoa or something?”
“I would love a cup of cocoa.”
“Do you take marshmallows with that?” Tommy said, putting a kettle of water on one of the front burners of his six-burner Viking gas stove.
“Is that good? I’ve never tried it that way.”
“It’s very good,” Tommy said, emptying two packs of Swiss Miss cocoa mix into a mug and then fishing in the back of one of his cupboards for the bag of marshmallows. He added hot water, gave the cup a quick stir, and handed it to his visitor.
“You have a very nice house,” Whitehorse said, sipping the cocoa. “Do you live here alone?”
“I live with my dad. I moved him in after he started failing. His caretaker stays with us sometimes, but they’re both down in Texas right now visiting my uncle.”
“Old people can have a lot of trouble with cold weather,” Whitehorse said, still looking around the kitchen.
“Where’d you come from?” Tommy said.
“You used to play professional football,” Whitehorse said. He seemed not to have heard Tommy’s question.
“I did.”
“Why did you quit?”
“The joy came at too high a cost.”
The old man slurped up
the last of his marshmallows.
“Would you like more?” Tommy said. The old man nodded and handed Tommy his mug. “So you had a vision about me?”
“I will tell you about that,” Ben Whitehorse said. “But before I do, tell me why you have a gun in the pouch of your sweatshirt. Are you going to shoot me?”
“No,” Tommy said. “I just thought I’d be careful.” With an apologetic shrug he laid the gun on the counter.
“You have no reason to be afraid of me,” Ben Whitehorse said.
“I can see that now,” Tommy said, refilling the old man’s mug and adding an extra marshmallow. “There’ve been a lot of strange things happening around here lately.”
“I think I know why that might be,” Whitehorse said. “Do you know what the Europeans said to the Native Americans when they landed in North America?”
“‘Stick ’em up’?” Tommy said, handing the man his cocoa.
Whitehorse smiled. “No, they wanted to buy the land. But the people who already lived here couldn’t imagine buying or selling the land any more than they could imagine buying the ocean or selling the clouds in the sky. If somebody offered you $28 for a cloud, you’d take it, right?”
“Probably.”
Tommy sat down at the table.
“The Europeans said to the people who already lived here, 舖Who is your leader?’ It was a difficult question to answer because in many tribes, the people who already lived here didn’t have any one single leader. So the Europeans tried again; they said, 舖Take me to the person who speaks for you.’ And when the people who already lived here translated that request, they brought out their storyteller, and then the Europeans asked the storyteller to sign some papers, and he thought, Well, why not? You can’t buy a cloud anyway. And then the Europeans took the land because the storyteller signed the papers.”
“My ancestors just stopped in for a visit,” Tommy said with an apologetic shrug.
“The Vikings? Yes, that’s true.” The old man swirled the cocoa in his mug. “Do you know the biggest advantage the Europeans had over the people who already lived here?”
“Guns?” Tommy said, nodding at the Taurus automatic on the counter.
“No. Paper. They could write their stories down and make copies so that everybody could have their own collection of the important stories. The Native Americans didn’t have paper, so they depended on the storytellers to keep their history and their wisdom alive, and they could only do that by speaking to a group that had gathered to listen. I’m telling you this because I want you to know who I am. I am a follower of Jesus Christ, but I’m also one of those storytellers . . . one of those story-keepers.”
“Okay,” Tommy said, more than a little intrigued. He thought about Abbie Gardener’s reference to Hiawatha. It had seemed random at the time. He wondered if his aunt had learned anything. “And you saw me in a dream?”
“It wasn’t a dream. I wasn’t asleep. It was a picture that I received in my mind. You probably think I saw your picture in the newspaper sports section, but that isn’t true. But I knew who you were and I knew where you lived and I knew that I had to come see you.”
“Why?”
“I need to warn you. Do you know anything about demons?”
Tommy sat up.
“A little.”
“Well, I know a lot,” Whitehorse said. “This is what I came to tell you. The people who already lived here before the Europeans arrived formed many tribes, Mohegans and Pequots and Ojibwa and Cree. About a thousand years ago, they started to tell a new story about a demon called the Wendigo.” Whitehorse paused to sip his cocoa.
The kitchen was unusually quiet, Tommy thought. He could hear the hands of the clock on the wall turning, and the sound of the far-off furnace pushing heat through the pipes.
“The Wendigo was a terrible demon,” Whitehorse said in almost a whisper. “The people who already lived here didn’t know the power of Jesus, so they had no defenses against it. The Wendigo changed the people who came into contact with it. They began to eat the flesh of other human beings, and they were always hungry and needed more and more. They knew things they’d never known before, like greed and gluttony and wastefulness. Before the Wendigo came, they never killed more than they could eat, but after the Wendigo, they killed just because they could. It gave them pleasure to destroy things. And they became murderous toward each other, even toward members of their own families. The Wendigo took many shapes and had many different names—”
“Paykak?” Tommy interrupted.
“That’s one,” Whitehorse said, nodding. “How did you know that?”
“My scoutmaster used to tell us stories to scare us. Campfire stuff.”
“The stories have stayed alive that way,” Whitehorse said. “The problem is that children can’t tell the difference anymore between what’s entertainment and what’s true. They think they’re just stories. The demon has had many names. Paykak. Da’anabe. Ashnabeg. The Wendigo can move through the air without being seen, faster than a bird can fly, or it can take on a physical form. But when it does, it smells like death. Like things that are unclean and rotting and decaying. It can come inside a person or it can stay outside of them. But either way your scoutmaster was right. You should be afraid of it. You won’t see it until it’s on top of you. It’s a terrible demon.”
“Where does it come from?”
“It comes from the devil himself,” Whitehorse said. “Satan sends it out to do his work. You can’t defeat it. Only an angel of the Lord can do that.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because it’s here,” Whitehorse said. “The Wendigo is in East Salem.”
“Here? Why?”
“That, I don’t know. I just know that I needed to tell you,” Whitehorse said. “Sacred visions come from God. He wanted me to tell you. This thing is bad. It shouldn’t be here. It’s stronger than it’s ever been. You need to do something.”
“Me? Do what?”
“I don’t know, but you can start by giving me a ride to the Peter Keeler Inn. I left my bag on their porch because they weren’t awake when I got there this morning. I need to check in.”
“You’re staying in town?”
The old man nodded.
“How long?”
“As long as you need me.”
12.
VERY INTERESTING DEVELOPMENT. CALL ME.
Dani looked at her watch, then her phone.
OKAY. NOT SURE WHEN. ASAP
Quinn McKellen was late. He was always late and he always had a good excuse. She was waiting in a restaurant called Andante on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, a place Quinn had picked because it was close to his hotel. Finally, just as she was about to call his cell, he plopped down across from her, blustering in the way a newspaper blows down an alley and comes to rest pressed against a fence.
“Hello, Harris,” he said. “I know you’re asking yourself why I’m always late, but I met the most interesting man on my way here who invited me to join him on a fascinating project. I don’t think I will, but he’s been running EEGs on epileptics to see what lights up during seizures and collaterally located a part of the amygdule that activates in the presence of another animal—spiders, snakes, whatever—you know how we jump away from a snake long before we consciously process the threat? Snake-venom-danger-flee, but the precognitive response is more like fleedanger-venom-snake. He’s found specific neurons triggered by biological stimuli that cue an instantaneous affective response. You work with deviants who like to torture animals, don’t you? Could be why. Digging deep to see if they can kick-start the emotional engine. To no avail, I’m sure. How are you, by the way?”
Dani felt like she needed to take a deep breath just to keep listening. Quinn had always talked fast, his mind jumping from one idea to another and making connections that seemed obvious to him but weren’t readily apparent to anyone else. He took medication for attention-deficit disorder, a condition he was diagnosed with when he
was twenty-five. The medication made him less forgetful and slowed him down a bit but not enough.
“I’m good,” Dani said. “You’re not going to work on the project?”
“Nah,” Quinn said, picking up a menu. “I have way too much on my plate as it is. Speaking of plates, what’s good here? Oh, right—I picked the restaurant. Do you remember what I like to eat? I don’t.”
He’d always been thin, but he seemed even thinner than she remembered. He was six foot four with black hair always in need of combing. He shaved once a week because he couldn’t bear to waste the time it took to shave every day. His auto-tinting wire-rimmed glasses never cleared all the way, even at night, which made him look a bit like a rock star. He was wearing black corduroy pants, a white shirt, a narrow black tie, and a black blazer that made him seem more like an English schoolboy.
“What I remember is that you don’t like to eat,” Dani said. “You never had time.”
“At these prices, I’m still having a few misgivings,” he said.
When the waiter came, Dani ordered a salad and he ordered coffee and a side order of garlic bread.
“Do you come into the city much?” Quinn asked. “You’re up in Westchester, aren’t you?”
“Just when I teach,” Dani said. “John Jay College of Criminal Justice.”
“What are you teaching? It’s really good to see you, Dani.”
“It’s good to see you too.”
“Listen, before we go any further, let’s just say that whatever was going on between us in Africa, we blew it, or I blew it, if you need me to take 100 percent of the blame, because that’s fine with me. And probably accurate. I blew it, it’s over, no regrets, moving on, all’s forgiven, still friends—okay? I wanted to get that out, straight off.”
“Okay,” Dani said, both startled and comforted by his directness.
“I trust you’ve moved on and are seeing somebody?”
“I am,” Dani said.
“I’d say tell me about him, but it’s none of my business. I’ve been too busy to date. But that’s not what I should be telling you—your e-mail asked if I could help you with something, and I’m making it sound like I couldn’t possibly find the time. Which I can’t, but for you, I will tell somebody else to go—I will tell them my dog deleted my homework. I got a dog—did I tell you I got a dog? A bloodhound. I call him Otto. I’m trying to train him to sniff out depression.”
