by Mike Heppner
“You sound like you’re proud of yourself.”
“No, I’m not. It’s true, though. ‘Who was the third president of the United States?’ I don’t know. Some asshole with a wig. See what I mean? I must be dyslexic or something—the thing where everything looks backward.”
“Does everything look backward?”
“No.”
“Then I guess you’re not dyslexic.”
He snapped his fingers. “Autistic, then, or ADD. There’s gotta be something wrong with me.”
“Why? You’re just a little eccentric, that’s all.”
“Yeah, me and John Wayne Gacy, right?” He sighed. Lately, he’d resolved not to spend so much time talking about himself, particularly when he was around Sarah. “I wish you’d move back to Rhode Island,” he said.
“Why? I’m happy here.”
“Why can’t you be happy in Rhode Island?”
“I probably could be happy in Rhode Island, Nate, but I’m here, and I’m happy staying here.”
“I’ll buy you a house.”
“You will not. You don’t need to take care of me all the time, you know. We’re friends. If I really needed your help, I’d ask.”
“You make it hard for a guy to do something nice for you.”
She kissed his forehead. “I just don’t like to see you throwing your money away.”
“That’s what it’s there for. Besides, it all goes back into my pocket. I’m like a money magnet, Sarah. I can’t get rid of it. When I was a kid, hookers used to blow me for free. True story.” She was smiling at him, so he went on. “I’m the luckiest man in the universe. Why me? Of all the kind, deserving souls.”
“You’re a kind, deserving soul.”
“No, I’m not. I’m a prick, a scumbag . . . Hey, don’t rush to contradict me or anything.”
She laughed. “Well, you’re no Gregg Reese, that’s for sure.”
“No, and thank God for that. The poor guy. Always butting into other people’s business. I keep telling Allison, that’s no way to live.”
“Well . . .”
“Am I wrong? You know better than I do. What do you think old Keeny Reese would’ve done if she’d had her way with you back in Little Compton? I’ll tell you. Your folks’ house would be in the National Register by now, and you know what that means. Instant crucifixion in the Providence Journal.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.”
“It happens. Look at what happened to me. I made one stupid crack to the ProJo and went from saint to sinner in twenty-four hours. There are still folks who ask, Aren’t you the guy who said, ‘Those people are no more Native American than I am?’ Yeah, I am—and so what?” He stopped and realized that he was yelling. In a softer voice, he said, “I just didn’t want you to go through the same thing. People are strange in New England. Everybody’s out to get everybody else. I’m the only person in the entire state of Rhode Island who’s moving forward instead of backward.”
“I know you are, chief. You don’t have to prove anything to me.” After a long, moody silence, she said, “You just don’t think these things through. My mother had a hard enough time selling that house to a couple of total strangers. We certainly didn’t expect you to buy it from them. And then to tear it down, Nate. Think of the waste.”
“It’s like I told you, money means nothing to me.”
“Maybe it should. What would your daughter say if she—” Sarah knew that this was forbidden territory, so she backed off. “You just should’ve left it alone.”
“I did leave it alone eventually, once I saw how upset you were. It took a lot of hard work to put that house back together.”
“All of which could’ve been avoided if you’d just consulted me. Even now. Think about all the time and money you’ve wasted up here.”
“Time well spent, I might add.” With his nose in the air, he looked like an obstinate little boy.
“You should’ve asked me first,” she insisted. “I’m quite happy managing my little ski lodge. I don’t need to own a mountain, too.”
He roared back. “I thought you’d like it. You’ve always talked about putting up another ski lift.”
“You can’t ski down that mountain, Nate. You can barely walk down it.”
He blushed. “Well, I didn’t know that.”
“And now you’re stuck with seven and a half acres of junk property that no one wants—not even you.”
He forced himself to laugh. “No, now, Sarah . . . not quite. I’ve been planning on building that parking lot for a long time. At least three years. The reason I offered it to you was because . . . I figured I’d give you first crack at it. You know, as a friend.”
“As a friend, you could’ve just bought me dinner,” she said. Rather than argue with him, she sipped her coffee and reclined against him on the sofa.
Pike’s combative instincts had always prompted him to keep talking until his opponent, whether due to sheer fatigue or the strength of his persuasion, had to admit he was right; but this time, he accepted her gift of silence and said nothing.
Minutes later, an animal’s paws scratched against the screen door. “What the hell’s that?” he asked.
“Oh, we’ve got coyotes this year. They keep trying to get into the house.”
“What do you do with ’em?”
With a heavy sigh, she got up from the couch and hobbled toward the door. “Shoot ’em, if I can,” she said, then snarled at the coyote, “Get the hell away from there!”
Pike jumped, nearly dropping his coffee. “Holy Christ, Sarah. My nerves are shot as it is.”
She laughed and pushed open the door. The coyote was long gone; only a cluster of fireflies was left swirling under the lights above the porch. “Come on, chief. It’s nice out,” she said.
He joined her on the porch, where the air had turned chilly since nightfall. Sarah felt warm in his arms, and he liked the fruity, girlish smell of her hair. Walking his fingers down her stomach, he gently held her around the waist. “There’s a nice, meaty woman,” he said.
She smiled and settled deeper into his arms. “Why me, chief? Why do you keep pestering me?”
Instead of offering a clever one-liner, he just let the question stand. She knew the answer as well as he did. She was the only normal person who’d ever cared for him. Placing his lips to her ear, he whispered, “What do you want to do next?”
Eyes closed, she began to move against his body. “Next year?” she asked.
“No,” he said. “Right now.”
Meanwhile, in Providence, Gregg Reese was a nervous wreck. Reaching out to Siemens and McMasters had increased voter interest in the Allison Fund, although broad-based approval remained a longshot. Reese’s own people no longer supported him. Celia Shriver had even criticized him in public for spending too much time with Nathaniel Pike. Without Celia, the Reese Foundation would lose most of its grassroots appeal, and without the Reese Foundation, the Reese family itself wouldn’t survive. He couldn’t allow that to happen—not on his watch, not while his mother was still alive. Oh, to unburden himself of this millstone, this terrible “Reese”! No hope for it. Once again, he’d proven himself unworthy of his own last name.
7
Maggie Reese’s eldest son, Joseph, assumed control of the family in 1686, six years after his grandfather’s death. Joseph bucked convention by taking his mother’s maiden name. The word “Reese” didn’t merely denote a family; it was a product, an industry. It was status itself. One of the most prolific Reeses ever, Joseph was known to have fathered more than a dozen children, all born to his own slaves. The males he named Joseph II, III, IV; the girls were all named Josephine. Accounts written by Joseph Reese III, the only one of the sons to learn to read and write, described his father as “crazed with liquor, spells, and whores.”
By the early eighteenth century, prevailing attitudes toward slavery had not changed significantly. The number of slaves belonging to the Reeses was thirty-six in 1692, twenty-nine
in 1698, thirty-five in 1701. Of those slaves, more than half were young girls, few of them older than fourteen. Despite the bitter South County winters, the girls were given only rags to wear and forced to sleep on the bare earth inside the Reeses’ pen made of stone. When not working in the fields, they were little more than playthings for the Reese men. As violence periodically broke out in the region, hundreds of soldiers visited the estate, eating and drinking and enjoying their fill of women, whom they raped, sodomized and even tortured for amusement.
An Anglican church was built in 1707 in nearby Wickford, but no attempt was made by parishioners to intervene on the slaves’ behalf. Even the very devout owned slaves in Rhode Island, particularly in the southwestern corner of the state, home to several dairy plantations. The Reeses were hardly the largest slaveholders in South County. Some kept as many as fifty slaves, but those were typically black, not Indian. By mid-century, the number of slaves in South County was 17 percent of the total population. The only thing unusual about the Reeses was that so many of their slaves were girls, and so many were Native Americans.
Change came gradually as the century wore on, and various efforts on the part of reformers to limit the slave trade met with some success. Also, churches began opening their doors to blacks and Native Americans. Though Rhode Island was still a long way from emancipating its slaves, these were steps in the right direction. They had little impact on the Reeses, however, except to make their practices more covert. With so much religious Zeal in the air, the Reeses were careful to keep a low profile so as not to arouse the suspicions of their neighbors. Aside from those in the know— chiefly young soldiers whose grandfathers had been guests of Hugh Reese—the entertainments on tap at the Reese estate remained New England’s most carefully guarded secret.
IV
The Evil Source
1
“How’s it going down there?” Henry asked a man in an orange jumpsuit, who said, “We’ve moved about three feet of dirt. Nothing so far.”
Both men were standing in the fields behind the Parker house in Little Compton, where a hastily organized investigation was still in its early stages. Most of the activity was centered on the remains of the stone storage pen, which had monopolized Henry’s attention.
“Keep digging,” Henry said. “Tell the others to start near the perimeter, then work back. I’ll be right there.”
The man left just as the owner of the house, Barbara Parker, came up. “Thanks again for letting us do this,” Henry told her. “We’ll restore everything as soon as we’re finished.”
She laughed. “What would you have done if I’d said no?”
“I guess I would’ve been stuck.”
“No, I’m sure you would have figured something out. You don’t strike me as the kind of guy who takes no for an answer.” She yelled at her husband: “Parker! Stop gettin’ in the way!”
The old man came over from the excavation site. “I’m just making sure they don’t puncture the septic tank,” he explained.
“We’re not going anywhere near it, Mr. Parker,” Henry assured him. “What we’re looking for isn’t going to be that close to the house.”
“What are we looking for, anyway?” he asked.
Barbara sighed. “Parker, we’ve been over this.”
“I want to know what’s under that rubble,” Henry said. “I think it’s a marker of some kind.”
Three days had passed since Henry’s first visit with the Parkers, and in that time he’d developed two theories. First, the reason that Nathaniel Pike had torn down the original house in Little Compton was to keep Keeny Reese, as the head of the State Historic Preservation Society, from nominating it to the National Register of Historic Places. It wasn’t the nomination itself that troubled Pike so much as the scrutiny that went along with it. If he had something to hide, the last thing he wanted was a bunch of local historians and insurance appraisers snooping around the property.
The question remained, however, as to why he was so concerned about the house in the first place. The most likely explanation was that he was protecting someone else, a friend. Sarah Cranberry. This brought Henry to his second theory, which was that Pike wasn’t nearly as eccentric as his reputation suggested. In fact, he was quite sane, and his extravagances had a reasonable and coherent design—a pattern, if you like. Building a new storage pen would’ve involved digging several feet into the earth to set a new foundation. Whatever Pike was afraid of, Henry believed that it lay underground.
A voice called out from the woods, “Mr. Savage, take a look at this.”
Henry walked back to the excavation site, where an investigator handed him a round object still partially encrusted in dirt. As the Parkers looked on, Henry realized he was holding a skull. “Jesus,” he said, quickly returning it. “How old is it?”
The investigator studied the damaged cranium. “I don’t know yet. All of the cartilage is gone, so we’re not talking recent.”
“Ten years?”
“Easy. The teeth are still intact, which is strange. Judging from the shape and size, I’d say this was an adolescent girl, maybe thirteen years old.”
Henry glanced over the mountain of rubble at their feet. “Where’s the rest of her?”
“Gone, but we’re still looking. Our tools aren’t worth shit in this hard earth. Whoever left her here must’ve had some help.”
“Good, good.” Hastily, he added, “I mean, not good, but let’s keep at it.”
As the digging continued, Barbara demanded, “You’re not going to tear apart our whole yard, are you?”
“It’s a skull, ma’am,” Henry said. “That could mean any number of things. For all we know, it could be three hundred years old.”
“Let’s just stop this right now,” Parker said. “I don’t want anyone getting in trouble.”
“I’m afraid we can’t do that, Mr. Parker,” Henry said.
“I thought you told us—”
“That was then. I’ve got to treat this as a potential crime scene. We’ve discovered human remains on the property.”
A commotion under the rubble caught their attention, and Henry called down to the workers, “Kenny, what’d you find?”
The man held up a chunk of debris. “Here’s another one!”
Henry and the Parkers moved closer for a better look. The investigator got there first and gently handled the second skull. “It’s similar to the other,” he said. “Same bone structure. This one’s got an impact crater, I’d say from a rifle butt or a shovel.”
Deeper into the unearthed ruins, another worker exclaimed, “Holy shit!”
“What is it?” Henry shouted.
A second man said, “You’d better come here, sir.”
“Let me check that out,” Henry told an assistant. “You take care of the Parkers.”
“We’re not going anywhere,” Barbara insisted. She headed after Henry, but a man blocked her way.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “this area is off-limits.”
At the base of the ruins, Henry pushed past the workers who’d gathered around what they could now see was a mass grave, filled with skeletons that looked like they’d been trapped in a mudslide. “Good God,” one of them said, “there’s dozens of ’em.”
2
Gregg Reese woke up one morning in late May to discover he wasn’t alone in bed. A shape stirred next to him, but he couldn’t determine who or what it was. The light coming through his bedroom window stung his eyes, making it hard for him to see. He must’ve slept late, something he never did. He was always the first person up in the morning and usually beat Allison downstairs by a good three hours. But Allison wasn’t here. She was in New Hampshire. Who was this person?
“Good morning, sleepyhead,” said the stirring shape, who sat up to block the window light. Gregg blinked madly until his eyes focused on the figure of a young boy, maybe nineteen, lying naked above the satin covers. Feeling under the sheets, Gregg realized that he was naked, too. His gentle he
adache told him he’d had too much to drink the night before.
“Oh, hi.” Gregg’s voice sounded husky, and he cleared his throat. “I thought I’d set the alarm.”
The boy smiled and kissed his cheek. “It’s okay, I understand. Let me introduce myself. My name is Ferdinand. I’m an exchange student from Ecuador. We met at Viva last night, you bought me drinks, you took me home, I sucked your gorgeous penis, and we both fell asleep.” He laughed. “I think you are a very nice man.”
Gregg wasn’t sure whether to kiss him or run screaming out of the room. Instead, he scratched his thinning gray hair and mumbled, “Oh . . . Ferdinand, is it? I’m sorry, I must’ve dozed off. Did we . . . ?”
“Not yet. But there’s still time.” Gregg must’ve looked petrified, because the boy let him off the hook. “Seriously, though, I understand if you’re busy. Just the cab fare home would be nice.”
Giving the boy a second look, Gregg admired his firm chest and stomach, his slender waist and the tangled patch of hair above his genitals, which Gregg felt compelled to touch. “You’re lovely,” he said, then caught sight of the alarm clock on Ferdinand’s side of the bed. “Oh, shit, is that the time? I’ve got a meeting with my mother in forty-five minutes. Do you mind? I need to take a shower.”
Taking some of the covers with him, he wrapped them around his waist, trotted off to the bathroom and took a ninety-second shower. He was afraid that if he left the boy unattended for too long, he might start snooping around the house. When he finished toweling off, he called through the wall, “I’ll be right there! You’re welcome to use the shower downstairs.”
Emerging from the bathroom, he found the boy naked in the hallway and looking at framed photographs on the wall.
Pointing at one of them, Ferdinand asked, “Is that your daughter?”
Gregg stood behind him. “Yes, that’s Allison. And that’s Allison’s mother.”
“You were married, then?” Ferdinand asked.
Gregg nodded. “Twenty-three years.”
