Alice had wanted to come clean, tell her everything that had really happened in the attic, but she couldn’t bring herself to talk about coming face to face with the Quinkan again, after all this time. In truth, she had been afraid that the mere mention of it might cause the thing to materialize again. But that, too, was changing.
She closed her eyes and pushed the swing, slowing her breathing. Finally, Alice allowed herself to think about Gull Harbor, to see the house in smoking ruins, to see Carlisle cradled in her arms, to see Hal’s body stretched out on his deck chair. She tried regarding all these images dispassionately, as from a distance, seeing each one as a past event from which she was moving away, although a piece of her continued to mourn those two souls, man and dog, in their shared violent death. The greatest milestone in her recovery, the one thing not shared with her therapist, was her willingness to accept the Quinkan for what it was, to analyze it and know that she would survive, not on its terms, but on her own. If anything, she was more determined than ever.
“Hey, fella,” she said, rubbing Dawg’s belly with her foot. He lay sprawled underneath the swing, panting. He licked her toes and pounded the weathered boards of the deck with his tail. A few days ago that simple doggy response would have brought on the tears, but not today. Her mind was focused.
She got up and limped inside, heading with resolve to the small bedroom study. These days most of the available space was covered in books, trays of slides, and research materials related to Nik’s dissertation-in-process. Alice moved around the piles of books and bent down to retrieve Milton Crouch’s folder from the bookcase where she’d shelved it, unable to deal with its contents since the events in Gull Harbor.
Carrying the folder back to the living room, she flopped down on the couch and propped her injured ankle up on a pillow. Then she reread all the documents and made some notes. According to Milton, Patterson Undertakers, who’d handled the charred remains of the late Rev. Harrow, had gone out of business nearly fifty years ago. But now, thanks to Milton’s bloodhound inquisitiveness, she had a lead on the Tanners, who’d made the funeral arrangements. Milton had discovered a Brumlie Tanner listed among the county’s turn-of-the-century property tax rolls, and as this was the only appearance of that last name within the time frame, he’d felt sure it was the family in question.
The original location of the Tanner property, a twelve-acre farmstead, Milton further told her, was described as being about six miles southwest of Magnolia. He’d taken the liberty of trying to find it and had driven down the dusty dirt road shown on the county surveyor’s map for that particular plat. But to his extreme disappointment, the stretch along the road where he expected to see fence posts and farmhouse foundations was instead a fairly new housing development carved out of open pastureland with a few surviving patriarch oaks dotted among the winding paved roads and cul-de-sacs.
But there was one other tantalizing piece of information. In 1915, the property had been sold for nonpayment of taxes, and the buyer had been forced to file for a quitclaim deed since the land was considered abandoned and no relatives of the missing Tanner family could be found. It had changed owners several times since then. Alice sighed. That pretty much ended her chances of finding a remnant of the Tanners, but it still made her wonder who these people could have been who’d taken it on themselves to bury the fiend. She could think of him in no other terms.
Alice tried to imagine the scenario. As far as she knew, no relatives were ever mentioned in connection with Harrow, who seemed to have descended on Magnolia out of nowhere—a loner with gold in his pocket and a burning mission in his soul. There was no indication, either from the article describing his demise or from his later obituary, that he had been survived by any wife or next of kin. It was likely, then, that the Tanners were members of the congregation wealthy enough to pay for the funeral expenses. If they were church members, Alice supposed there was some record of them, especially as donors or financial supporters. There was only one person she knew who might have that information.
She found the number in the phone book and dialed.
“Could I please speak to the Reverend Cecil Rider?”
The church receptionist sounded surprised. “I’m sorry, he’s retired now. But I’m sure the new pastor would be glad to take your call.”
“Oh. No, my business is personal. Could you tell me how to contact Reverend Rider?”
Alice frowned as the receptionist explained that he was not in good health due to his advanced age and that he now lived with his married daughter. Grabbing a pen, Alice scribbled the daughter’s phone number and address.
“Thanks very much, and have a great day,” she said, her heart thudding. She was going to have to go search out Cecil and his dark secrets. If his heart was bad, the last thing she wanted to do was spring surprises on him, but he was her last viable source. She picked up the phone again and dialed his daughter’s number.
Chapter 31
September 8, Thursday—Present Day
Ironwood Drive, where Pearl Rider-Vincent lived, was in an older subdivision just off the main road past the Massalina County high school. It was fairly easy to find, and Alice pulled into the narrow concrete driveway of the modest brick house just after two o’clock. A boy’s bicycle leaned against one of the tall pines that fronted the house, and a herd of half-grown cats scuttled for cover under a boxwood hedge as she got out of the car. She limped across the neatly mowed lawn to the front steps and pushed the doorbell.
A slender black woman in her late forties opened the door and considered Alice with a curious expression in her dark eyes. She wore faded jeans and a man’s work shirt with the sleeves rolled up. “Are you the Miz Waterston that called?”
“Yes, thanks. I really hate to impose on you like this, but it’s rather important. I promise I won’t take much of your father’s time,” she lied, knowing that she intended to stay as long as it took. “I know he’s not well.”
“I guess it’s all right, then,” said Pearl, stepping away from the door and motioning Alice inside. “Daddy’s in the TV room watching his soaps.”
Alice followed her through the tiny living room to a den where Cecil Rider sat in an upholstered rocker in front of a large wood-encased television set. Although the room’s concrete block walls were painted a cheerful daisy yellow and its floor wore a thick carpet of tan wool, there was no mistaking it as an enclosed carport.
“Daddy, that lady who called is here to see you.” Pearl motioned for Alice to go in. “I’ll be in the kitchen if you need anything,” she said, glancing at Alice over her shoulder.
Cecil Rider looked away from the TV and up at Alice.
“We meet again,” he said softly.
Alice sat down beside him in a wooden rocker, and laid Milton’s folder across her knees.
“I’m really sorry to—”
“Stop, please. You didn’t come here to apologize, you came looking for answers. It remains to be seen whether I can give you what you want.” He muted the television program and turned his full attention toward Alice.
Cecil Rider seemed shrunken, smaller than she remembered from that freezing January afternoon when she’d shown him Harrow’s notebook. Today, his slender, veined hands lay clasped in his lap, his boney knees visible through his thin trousers and his feet hidden in a pair of slippers. His hair had been grizzled when they’d first met, but now it was mostly white. Only his eyes were as bright and aware as Alice remembered.
“Well, then. I won’t waste any more of your time than I have to,” she said. Opening the folder, she pulled out the article from 1900 and read him the sentence that mentioned the Tanner family. “Do you know who they were?”
Cecil shook his head. “No, I truly have no idea. Some members of his congregation, I would assume.”
“Wouldn’t there be a roster from the early days listing the members of his church?”
“If there was, I’ve never seen it. My father Antoine may have known, or maybe there neve
r were any such records. Why do you care who these people were?”
“I thought their descendants might still be living in the area, and I had hoped they might tell me something about … him.” Alice couldn’t bring herself to say the human name of the creature who’d masqueraded in the clothes of a minister of God.
“What could you possibly want to know that I haven’t already told you? The most important thing is that a great evil was removed from this world by the power of our Lord.”
Alice studied her shoes. She was not going to give up this time; she was certain Cecil Rider must know more than he was willing to say about the history of the church he’d led for nearly sixty years. She wondered how old he’d been when he’d taken over from his father. If in his thirties, which seemed reasonable, he must now be over ninety. A sense of desperation set in.
“I want to know where he came from,” she said. She paused and took a deep breath. “I want to know what kind of curse he may have brought with him. I especially want to know about the thing that followed him around in the shape of a dog. Most of all, I want to know how it can be banished. Have you ever performed an exorcism, Reverend Rider?”
Cecil raised a thin brown hand and touched the corner of his eye. “Yes.”
Alice sucked in her breath. “When? Where?”
“Do you have any idea how we, the good people of St. Christopher’s United, were able to build such a fine brick church to replace the old wooden one?”
Alice shook her head.
“With stolen money,” he said, and here his eyes shone liquid. “It was my father Antoine, a mere boy at the time, who found the remains of Pastor Harrow in the bell tower. My father took something from that room he should not have, a strongbox that contained a lot of money. He kept it for years, and finally, as pastor of the reunited flock, decided to use the money for a holy purpose, to build a new church as a gift to God and to the congregation. They were scattered, you know, after our Lord struck Harrow dead, and only after some years did they try to regroup and rebuild the church they’d lost.”
“That’s admirable,” said Alice.
“It seemed so,” Cecil murmured more to himself than his unwelcome guest. “But after work on the new church began, he started to think he was being haunted by Harrow’s ghost for taking the strongbox. At that time, I was living in Birmingham, preaching and newly married. I had just convinced Estell, my wife, that we needed to move back here to look after my father, but he died suddenly before I returned.”
Alice flinched. She knew, from Milton’s photocopied article, how Antoine had died. She thought of Hal, frightened to death in his own home.
“After my father’s death,” said Cecil, “the congregation invited me to take up the pastorship in his place. It was then I decided to exorcise the old church of its evil past and bless the new one to our Lord’s use, and I also saw to putting up a godly marker stone over the grave of Pastor Harrow, so the Holy Spirit would keep an eye on him. I loved my father deeply, and his loss was a great blow to me. Do you know how it feels, to suddenly lose the father you cherished, Miss Waterston?” Cecil Rider sat with bowed head, lost in his memories.
Alice shifted in her chair, embarrassed and guilty. “I can relate,” she said. “I never knew my father. He died before I was born, but I’ve been able to learn a little bit about him recently.” Opening her purse, she pulled out the passport and handed it to Cecil. “This is his photo.”
Cecil took the open passport and felt around on the table beside his chair for his wire-rimmed glasses. Putting them on, he looked at the photo for several minutes without speaking, his hands trembling. Then he looked at Alice, leaning forward in his rocker. He continued to stare silently, the passport gripped in his hands.
“Is something wrong?” Alice squirmed uncomfortably.
Cecil looked back to the image of Ned and Suzanne. “I know this person,” he said finally.
Now it was Alice’s turn to stare open-mouthed. “But how? I mean, that’s not possible.”
“I always felt, you know, when you first came to the church to see me, doing your so-called research, that there was something secret about you, and something oddly familiar. I guess I saw Ned in you without knowing it. He came to me as a charity case, an orphaned white boy recovering from a near-fatal rattler bite. He ran away while we were tending him, and I didn’t see him again for nearly twelve years. When he reappeared on my doorstep, he was a grown man who looked like this.” Cecil looked at the passport photo once more and handed it back to Alice.
Alice’s mind was reeling. “You’re telling me he was from around here?”
“Yes. When he returned, as I said, he told me he’d come in search of his father. He’d recognized the man in a family photograph he’d seen in my house twelve years earlier, you see? I drove him back to his childhood home on the edge of the National Forest myself, except that it had burned down; he told me it was just a ruin, but he wanted to go there anyway.”
“Where was this place? Could you find it again?”
“I doubt it. That was forty years ago, and obviously I don’t travel these days.”
Alice was thinking it wouldn’t take much for her head to explode. “Why would Ned’s father be in a photo of your family?”
“Because my grandmother raised him—Ned’s father, that is—alongside Antoine as one of her own. I lived in the same house with him until he ran off and got married. I can show him to you.” He turned slightly in his chair and called. “Pearl? Can you come here for a minute?”
Pearl came from the kitchen immediately. “What is it?”
“Don’t look so worried,” he smiled up at her, “I just need you to fetch me something. Would you bring me that photo of your great-grandmother that’s on my dresser?”
Alice caught the look of confusion on Pearl’s face as she disappeared into the back of the house. Alice rubbed her forehead, feeling headachy and drained.
“Let me get this straight. If I understand what you just said, that means my own grandfather was adopted by your grandmother. In some weird way that I can’t work out, does that mean you and I are related?”
For the first time in the entire course of their conversation, Cecil smiled at her with the warmth she remembered from their very first meeting. “Yes, Miss Waterston, I believe it does.”
Pearl returned at that moment with a framed photograph. Cecil took it from her and regarded the image with a wistful smile.
“That was a happy moment,” he said. “Here, this is Ned’s father, your grandfather. His name was Lazarus, but we called him Lacy.” He pointed to a young man with liquid dark eyes and a bow-shaped mouth, seated on the front steps of a house beside a family who was clearly not of his same coloring.
“My father told me, when I was older,” Cecil continued, “that Lacy’s relatives had lived on a small farm or acreage of some kind near Magnolia. That was the most frustrating thing of all for Ned when he came back: knowing the place was somewhere in the county, but having no way to locate it or find out who had owned it. As far as I know, my grandmother went to her grave without telling a soul who Lacy’s parents had been, if she even knew.”
“A small farm?” Alice repeated. Something was pinging in her brain that threatened to undermine her reason.
“W-when was this taken?” Alice asked, barely able to think.
“I’m afraid I don’t remember.”
“The date’s on the back, Daddy,” Pearl said, looking at Alice with an expression that she probably reserved for homeless people and aliens.
Alice turned the photo over. “Yula and her boys,” she read. It was dated 1934. Looking at the picture again, Alice touched the young man’s face with her fingertips and shook her head. “This is my grandfather?” It seemed impossible.
“Pearl, would you mind giving us a private minute or two?” Cecil asked.
His daughter nodded, and headed toward the kitchen. “Call if you need me,” she said, looking back.
“If Ned is
indeed your father,” said Cecil quickly, after Pearl had gone. “there’s something I need to tell you. Money wasn’t the only thing my father acquired when he stole the strongbox. That hellish book you once brought to me was in the bottom of the box, under all the money.”
“So that’s how you got it. I wondered,” Alice said.
“While your father was with us that second time, he found the book and claimed the heathen scrawls in it moved when he touched them … he said they took him away to some alien world. He was beside himself with me for keeping the book after Antoine’s death. He said I should have destroyed it. I know now that he was right. Please tell me it’s gone, that you burned it as I once begged you to do.”
Alice stood up. She’d reached a decision that had been taking shape in the back of her mind, and now it was time to get out of there. “Reverend Rider, I have to go, but I can’t thank you enough for being so candid with me.”
She started to leave, but Cecil reached out and caught her by the hand. He held it for a moment, looking up at her. “Ned’s daughter,” he mused. “And that beautiful lady in the passport picture was his wife?”
“Suzanne,” said Alice.
“Take care of yourself,” he said, and let go of her hand. He touched the photograph of Yula Rider and her boys lying in his lap.
“Thank you,” she said, her thoughts in freefall. “I won’t bother you again.”
Chapter 32
September 8, Thursday—Present Day
Pulling into her parking bay under the house, Alice was relieved to see Nik’s slot empty. The interview with Cecil had taken less than an hour, but she’d been afraid Nik and Margaret would beat her home, which would prevent her from carrying out her plan. She climbed the stairs, her swollen ankle complaining at every step, and went into the house. In her bedroom, she dug Harrow’s notebook out of its hiding place. All these months she’d kept it hidden in a shoebox in the top of her closet under blankets and old pillows. She wondered now if having it in her bedroom, so close to her all this time, accounted for her insomnia and disturbing dreams.
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