Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution

by Keith R. A. DeCandido

  Jessica got a dubious look on her face. “All the valuables up in here, and that’s what they’re after? What the hell for?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine,” Irving said, “but three others just like it have been stolen, with other merchandise left alone, and that’s a good enough reason for us to not let him have this one. We’re augmenting you two with three officers from the two-three, Ms. Nugent from IYS, myself, and Mr. Dezan.”

  “Great, a stakeout. Just like the good old days.” Jessica was grinning.

  Emmett wasn’t. “Y’know, Bedraj, I ain’t feelin’ so good. I only didn’t call in sick ’cause I didn’t wanna leave Jess alone, but looks like you’re covered, so if it’s all’a same to you …”

  Now Jessica was rolling her eyes. “For cryin’ out loud, Emmett, grow a pair, willya please?”

  Putting his hands on his large hips, Emmett said, “I got me a pair, Jess. And I wanna keep ’em. ’Sides, even Bedraj is stayin’.”

  “Gave up Milena’s lamb stew, too,” Beth said with a twinkle in her eye.

  That, in turn, made Emmett’s eyes go wide. “Oh, hell, no. If you’re that worried, I don’t want no part’a this. Overnight gig’s supposed to be cushy. I retired from the docks so I wouldn’t have to risk my life no more.”

  Jessica was about to object again, but Bedraj interrupted. “It’s fine, Emmett, go home. It’ll come out of your sick leave.”

  A look of relief washed over Emmett’s face, his shoulders slumping. “Thank you, Bedraj. I owe you one. Hell, I owe you six.” He turned and practically ran out the door.

  Beth chuckled. “And then there were seven.”

  “It’s fine,” Jessica said. “Only thing he was good for was being a second set of eyes when I take a piss. So what’s the plan?”

  Bedraj had actually been thinking about it all day, and the plan he came up with would work just fine—he just put himself where he’d originally put Emmett. “Captain, Beth, I think you two should stay on the third floor—that’s where the cross is, in the south gallery.”

  Irving nodded. “Makes sense.”

  “Sure, that’s perfect,” Beth added.

  “I’ll stay up on five and monitor everyone and keep an eye on the roof, since that’s an access point. Jessica, you and the three officers do roving patrols of the other floors.”

  “That’s four people for six floors,” Jessica said.

  “No,” Bedraj said slowly, “that’s four people for four floors. Captain Irving and Beth will be on three and I’ll be on five. The rest of you will cover the ground floor, the first floor, the second floor, and the fourth.”

  “Why bother with the ground floor?” Beth asked. “It’s just got the kids’ thing, right?”

  Bedraj nodded. Beth was referring to the Frederick A. O. Schwarz Children’s Center. “Yeah, c’mon, Beth, you know as well as I that thieves tend to come in from either above or below. I think the ground floor or the fifth is our most likely point of entry.”

  She shrugged. “Fair enough.”

  “Everyone stay in touch via radios.” He had gathered up spare radios for the cops and Beth. “I know you all have your own radios, but these are all on the right frequency. Just easier.”

  Irving nodded and took his. “Thank you, Mr. Dezan. Good work.”

  “Yeah, thank you, Captain. I’m glad you alerted us to this threat so we could be prepared. Let’s get to work.”

  The elevators were shut down for the night—another security measure—so Bedraj took the stairs up. The staircase was decorated with sayings about the city, good and bad, from a variety of sources. His favorite was always the one between the second and third floor from John Adams in 1774: “New Yorkers talk very loud, very fast, and all together. If they ask you a question, before you can utter three words of your answer, they will break out upon you again, and talk away.”

  For the first six hours after he settled down at the fifth-floor security station, all was quiet. Each of the seven of them got a dinner break—they got food from Chalsty’s Café on the second floor—with only one person eating at a time. Any time someone needed the bathroom, they did an entire run of their assigned area first before using the facilities.

  And then the clock on the monitor of his computer went to midnight and all the lights in the entire museum went out.

  Frowning, Bedraj reached for his cell phone, only to discover that he could still see by the light of his illuminated keyboard. The computer had been showing him the feeds from the security cameras when the screen went dark, but when he Alt-Tabbed over to Adobe Acrobat, it showed him the report he was reading earlier.

  But his desk lamp no longer was working. He tried flicking it on and off several times, but it was no longer emitting light.

  He grabbed his radio. “Everyone report in. Irving.”

  The Westchester cop said, “Whole room’s gone dark.”

  “Nugent.”

  “Same out here in the hallway,” the insurance investigator said. “Flashlight ain’t working, either.”

  Everyone else reported the same thing.

  Jessica added, “Just looked out a window. All the buildings to the north on Fifth are lit up, so it ain’t a power outage.”

  “What about to the south?” That was Beth.

  Bedraj shook his head, even though no one could see it. “To the south is Mount Sinai Hospital. They’ve got their own generator so their having lights doesn’t mean as much. All right, everyone stay where you are and move slowly toward—”

  “AAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  To Bedraj’s horror, he had no idea whose scream that was. He’d never heard anyone scream quite like that before.

  One of the cops cried out, “Xander! Xander, what happened? Wha—AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  The two cops in question were on the ground floor and the first floor. Jessica was on the second. “Jessica, keep an eye out, the—”

  He was interrupted by the sound of several shots being fired. Then: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

  Bedraj recognized the third scream instantly, even though he’d never actually heard Jessica scream.

  Alt-Tabbing over to the control center for the museum, he turned the elevators back on. No way was he going to try to take the stairs in the dark, and if the electricity was working, he’d be able to get down faster in the elevator, especially since one of them was already up on five with him.

  Getting up from his loud, squeaky chair, Bedraj ran toward the door and promptly slammed his knee into the side of his desk. “Sonofabitch!” He limped his way more slowly to the door, knives of pain slicing through his left knee as he hobbled forward.

  Feeling his way across the hallway wall until he reached the elevator, he pressed the down button and the door opened right away, even making the dinging sound. Using his phone screen as a flashlight—the actual flashlight app wouldn’t work, but the screen still lit up—he found the third-floor button and waited very not-patiently for it to ding down two flights.

  When the doors opened, he was surprised that he could see in the hallway. Irving and the third cop were standing with their weapons out, the former in front of one of the two sets of glass doors on the far end of the hallway, which led to the Society of the Cincinnati’s exhibit.

  Then he saw Beth Nugent lying on the floor. “What happened?”

  “I heard Beth cry out, and I found her like this,” Irving said. “But nobody has moved past me.”

  The cop said, “I heard the same thing.”

  Bedraj nodded. “Officer, check on her. Captain, you need to stay with the cross. I’ll go downstairs and”—he swallowed—“see what happened to the others.”

  He started to move toward the staircase, figuring that if the hallway was illuminated again, maybe the stairs would be as well.

  Then he heard a scream from the end of the hallway.

  No, not a scream, a curse.

  Turning, he saw Irving running out of the glass door. The security guard
in him wanted to berate Irving for using the near door, which was supposed to be the entrance—the far door was the exit. It was their way of dealing with crowd control, and he had no idea why his brain decided to go there now of all places.

  “The cross is gone!” The captain looked furious. “There’s no way anyone could’ve gotten past me.”

  Shaking his head, Bedraj muttered, “This is a damn nightmare.” He couldn’t do anything about the cross yet, as he had to find out what happened to Jessica and the other two cops.

  The staircase was still lit, and he ran down two flights to the first floor, running out into the hallway to see an arm on the floor.

  It wasn’t until he looked in the gift shop that he saw Jessica’s head, her dead eyes staring right at him, her mouth open with the scream he’d heard over the radio.

  Bedraj turned and ran toward the restrooms as the dinner he’d eaten at the café came welling up his throat. Bizarrely, his first thought was that he was glad he didn’t eat Milena’s lamb stew, as it would have been a shame to throw it up.

  He also wished he’d gone home. A nervous wreck he might have been, but if he’d been spared the sight of one of his employees looking like that, and then throwing up all over the marble floor of the museum …

  NINE

  TICONDEROGA, NEW YORK

  JANUARY 2014

  ABBIE SPENT MOST of the drive up Interstate 87 to Ticonderoga being simultaneously charmed by Crane and seriously wanting to strangle him.

  Thinking about it, that defined a lot of her relationship with him.

  While they drove through Albany, Crane was going on about his previous visit to Ticonderoga.

  “The Crown had actually renamed the fort after the region, but we had continued to refer to it by its French name of Fort Carillon, particularly once the fort was taken. There were only a few score men stationed there when Ethan Allen and Benedict Arnold stormed the place one early spring morning.”

  As much to reassure Crane that she was paying attention to his babbling as anything, Abbie said, “I’m assuming that’s before Arnold turned traitor?”

  Archly, Crane replied, “Strictly speaking, Lieutenant, I ‘turned traitor.’ Benedict had his reasons for what he did, just as I had mine.”

  “I’m sure he did. But most of the history that’s been written since your time portrays him as one of the big villains of the revolution.”

  “As you and I both know, the truly ‘big villains’ were not recorded in your history books at all. In any event, I was not present for that particular battle, though I reported there the following winter alongside Henry Knox. Our task was to remove several cannon from the fort to Boston. Caleb Whitcombe was with us as well, and he expressed grave concern over leaving Fort Carillon poorly defended. Knox did insist that the defense of Boston was of more import.” Crane smiled ruefully. “As it happens, both Whitcombe and Knox were correct. The fort was inadequately defended—it was taken without a shot by General Burgoyne—but the cannon were required at Boston.”

  “How many did you take with you?”

  “Approximately sixty tons of cannon, and other artillery.”

  Abbie turned her eyes briefly from the road to shoot Crane a surprised glance. “Seriously? Without railroads? Or, hell, roads?”

  Crane’s smile was proud now. “Mr. Knox was quite the logistical genius. It was an amazing operation, one that many assumed would fail horribly, but Knox prepared for every eventuality. Indeed, one of Whitcombe’s complaints was that we were trying to move the items in winter, when we’d be bogged down by snow. But we would have been far more greatly bogged by the rivers and swamps on the route that were conveniently frozen over.”

  This prompted a lengthy recitation of the pitfalls and problems they encountered over the three-month journey from Ticonderoga to Boston, which Abbie had to admit to only halfway paying attention to, as it was getting very late at night, she’d been driving for hours, and she needed all of her focus to stay awake and watch the road.

  Eventually they arrived at Ticonderoga, and checked into a cheap motel with two double beds. The carpet had worn down enough that she could see most of the underflooring, the place was last painted during the Reagan administration, the so-called art on the wall was hideous even by hotel room standards, and when she sat on one of the beds, she could feel the springs through the sheets and her jeans.

  But she could afford it, which was what mattered.

  “We shall get a good night’s rest, Lieutenant,” Crane said enthusiastically, “and then on the morrow we shall visit this re-creation of Fort Carillon that you and the captain spoke so highly of. I must confess to anticipation.”

  “Really? I hadn’t noticed.” Abbie smirked.

  “Your sarcasm is noted, and not appreciated,” Crane said tartly. “I have observed that, while lacking in several specific details, many of the re-creations in the Hudson Valley are more or less satisfactory, given the passage of time. I eagerly await observation of what the Pell family have accomplished.”

  Abbie frowned. “Who?”

  “According to what I was able to ascertain on the Internal Net—”

  “Internet,” Abbie corrected automatically.

  “—the land on which the fort had existed was sold to the Pell family after the war. They were responsible for the reconstruction of the fort and the conversion of it to an attraction for alien visitors.”

  “A tourist trap.” Abbie got up from the uncomfortable bed. “After that drive I need a shower. The fort isn’t actually open this time of year, but we’re meeting up with a local cop and one of the docents to take us around.”

  “Excellent.”

  Abbie tossed and turned the entire night. Crane, of course, slept quietly.

  “How do you do that?” a bleary-eyed Abbie asked as they went to the lobby so Abbie could obtain a desperately needed caffeine infusion.

  “Do what?”

  “Sleep on that collection of metal springs really badly disguised as a mattress.”

  “I slept on much less comfortable surfaces during my time at war, Lieutenant. By comparison, even that poorly disguised mattress is the lap of luxury.”

  “If you say so,” she muttered, and then ordered the largest coffee the place would give her.

  She checked in with Irving and Jenny while drinking her coffee and chowing down on a muffin. Her sister had nothing new beyond what Whitcombe-Sears had told her last night—including how George Washington used the six crosses for a spell that staved off death—but the captain did have news and it was all bad. The cross at MCNY had been stolen at midnight, with two NYPD cops and one MCNY security person killed in the same grisly manner as the three security guards in Tarrytown. Irving was fine, as was his ex-partner, MCNY’s security chief, and the third cop who’d been assigned, but Tench Tilghman’s medal was gone.

  In light of this, Irving also assigned two uniforms to the Whitcombe-Sears Library and had a patrol car drive by regularly.

  It was a short drive over to Fort Ticonderoga for Abbie and Crane. However, they’d barely started down Wicker when Crane, noticing something up ahead, asked, “May we pull to the side, please?”

  Following Crane’s glance, she saw a bronze statue in the midst of a traffic circle at the intersection of Wicker Street and Montcalm Street. “Hang on,” Abbie said, and turned right onto Montcalm, pulling into a diner’s driveway.

  They exited the car and then walked back to the traffic circle. Now that she wasn’t driving and searching for somewhere to park, Abbie took a more significant look at it. The statue itself was a woman with her left hand upraised. At the base of the statue were four figures.

  “I read of this,” Crane said as they approached it. “The figure atop is representative of liberty. The four figures at the base are a Scotsman, a Frenchman, an Iroquois, and a British colonist—or, rather, American, as you’d say now.”

  Abbie nodded. “Represents the region’s history nicely, doesn’t it?”

  “
Indeed.” He turned to Abbie and smiled. “Thank you for the indulgence, Lieutenant. Shall we proceed?”

  They got back into the car and continued down Montcalm. En route they passed a small star-shaped structure—the exact configuration of the fort, as it happened. Crane did a comical double take, but Abbie just smiled. “Irving told me about the sewage plant over there.”

  “Sewage plant?”

  “Yup. They built it scaled down from the same specs as the fort.”

  “How droll. Based on what I read of the Pell family, not to mention the statue we just saw, I thought the people of this village to be more respectful of their history.”

  “The fort’s not the only history,” Abbie said. “In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was a big paper mill here. I used to think they made pencils, too, since every standardized test I took was with a pencil that said TICONDEROGA on the side.” She shrugged. “Turns out those were made from a mine about twenty-five miles from here, and the wood came from somewhere else entirely.”

  When they arrived at the parking lot adjacent to the fort, Abbie pulled her car in next to the blue cruiser from the Ticonderoga Police Department and a battered, brown midsized SUV. Both had plenty of white residue on the underside from driving on roads that had been covered in salt to melt snow and ice.

  As they approached the star-shaped fort itself, Crane started getting what Abbie had started to think of as his disapproving face, last seen when he heard a tour guide misrepresenting Paul Revere’s midnight ride.

  But before he could complain about whatever new slight he’d found, they were greeted by a tall young man wearing a police uniform, and a stooped-over old man with much paler skin than the cop, who wore a black wool coat and carried a wooden cane. It didn’t take Abbie’s skills as a detective to work out who had the cop car and who had the beat-up SUV.

  Looking at the cop, Abbie said, “You must be Investigator Ruddle.”