“Summon the police,” urged Justice Holmes, who’d grasped Mrs. Holden’s shoulders in an effort to calm the shocked woman.
Grey sprinted ahead and leaped onto the bench. Pausing only long enough to ensure that his feet were under him, he launched himself again, trying to capitalize on his momentum. He clutched the rope as it wavered in the air. Seeing a series of knots tied every two feet, Grey wrapped his feet around the cord and pressed down onto the closest knot for support.
One hand shot out for the next knot, and he hauled himself upward, pushing with his legs as the other hand reached past the first. His eyes were locked onto the thief, who was scurrying up the rope with what seemed like inhuman speed. The man was already approaching the skylight.
“This is madness! Come down!” Justice Holmes called out below, but Grey focused solely on climbing faster.
Above him Grey saw the man pause briefly to grab hold of one of the skylight’s edges. A wide, slanted pane had been removed, and the thief twisted his thin body and pulled himself through the narrow opening. Grey’s left hand slipped several inches, and he felt the rope burn in his palm. Ignoring it, he forced himself farther up the rope, hand over hand. His feet twisted and locked together around the rope, coiling against the next knot in the line, then springing, pushing him along.
The thief’s face appeared in the frame of the skylight looking down at Grey, who was still one body length shy of the goal. Grey pulled even more desperately, spurred on by the thought that the man might cut the cord. Instead the thief vanished from view. A few seconds more and Grey reached out for the ledge of the skylight. With his other hand braced against the wooden frame of the missing pane, he hauled up and got his torso through the gap. He spun his head around, making sure the thief wasn’t close by, ready to ambush him. The man was fleeing along with one foot just to each side of the peak of the building’s pitched roof. Grey stood up near the middle of the Athenaeum’s 114-foot length, by the third of four raised skylights. Ahead of him the thief reached the last skylight and began inching his way around it.
Grey steadied himself before continuing the pursuit. To his left the roof sloped away toward Beacon Street and the building’s front entrance, sixty feet below him now. On his right the roof sloped down toward a lower addition, then the wide, dark expanse of the Granary Burying Ground. He followed the thief’s example: one foot on either side of the peak, sliding each forward more than actually lifting his feet to take steps. By the time Grey reached the next skylight, his quarry had disappeared from view. Grey turned sideways with his weight leaning in above the slanted glass panes for balance as he shimmied along the edge of the raised skylight.
The thief had shimmied down a short slope at the end of the Athenaeum. He’d made the descent and was now inching along a stone ledge that jutted out just below the edge of the roof. Grey could see only his head and shoulders.
“Chester Sears! Stop!”
Grey saw the man’s silhouette stop and wobble in surprise at the sound of his name. The pause in the thief’s flight was only momentary. Sears moved on, reaching the end of the ledge, where he was able to drop a few feet to a flatter section of roof. Grey recalled seeing a narrow alleyway on that side of the building, separating the library from its neighbor. The thief now stood on an addendum to the Athenaeum where a circular bulge jutted into the alleyway. It would allow Sears to get close enough for a leap to the neighboring rooftop, one story lower.
Seeing that he was in danger of losing the man, Grey sat down on the side of the roof that faced the rear and the burying ground. Although steeper, it offered a direct route to the lower, flat section where Sears now stood. Grey quit bracing himself with his hands and slid on his backside down the pitched roof. He tried, with little success, to slow himself as he approached the rim, but he wound up falling onto the flat section of roof at full speed and tumbled roughly several times before coming to a stop.
Grey looked up and saw Sears fifteen feet away, standing at the edge of the roof. The thief glanced back at Grey. There was moonlight enough for Grey to see the last ripped page from the book still jutting out of Sears’s breast pocket like some ridiculously oversize kerchief. There was also a look of panic on the man’s face.
“You’ve reached the end, Sears. Don’t try it. You’ll end up like your friend Cosgrove.”
“No. You won’t do me like you done him. You won’t get my soul!”
Sears turned to face the alley again and backed up two steps.
“Don’t jump!” Grey cried as he bolted to his feet and rushed toward the man.
Sears took two quick steps, launched himself off the roof, and dropped out of sight. Grey skidded to a stop a foot short of the edge. Sears cleared the alleyway to reach the neighboring rooftop, which was steeply pitched with its peak running away from him. He landed awkwardly, his momentum carrying him forward, out of control. He tumbled head over feet and made one flailing grab for the peak of the roof. He missed—and continued to topple down the roof slope, picking up speed as he went. The thief let out a scream as he careened off the roof and fell thirty-odd feet toward the Granary Burying Ground.
Grey watched in horror as the man dropped toward the old black wrought-iron fence that bound in the city’s ancient cemetery. Sears missed the fence’s spikes but landed inside the burying ground with a sickening crack, as if he’d hit a stone rather than just the grassy earth. Grey stared down but couldn’t make out any movement there in the dark. Even the moonlight was cut off by the shadows of nearby buildings and the cemetery’s scattered trees. What he could see was the solitary white page that Sears had stuffed into his breast pocket. The paper floated down, carried by gentle evening breezes, to land fifty yards off amid the headstones.
[ Chapter 16 ]
AFTER A MOMENT LEAN RECOGNIZED THE VOICE CALLING out for Chester Sears to stop. He saw the second figure, Grey, on the rooftop. Lean’s legs moved faster, though he dared not run. He had to heed the stones, some of which were short and darkened with age. In the gloomy space of the burying ground, these lurked like treacherous reefs ready to doom a passing ship. During one of his glances down to the ground and back up again, both the shadowy figures above slipped from view. He paused at a small raised square of earth surrounding a tall obelisk and caught sight of a man close to the edge of the roof.
“Don’t jump!” Grey shouted.
Sears flew through the air, briefly visible in the sky between the Athenaeum and the neighboring building. Lean watched the man crash down and tumble along the slanting roof. Quick scratching, scrambling sounds were followed close behind by a shriek. The figure plummeted off the side of the building and landed with a crack on the dark ground below.
Lean raced forward to the site of the horrible landing and stopped several feet shy of the crumpled body. Chester Sears was alive; Lean heard ragged, desperate breaths. The man lay on his side, and Lean guessed that some part of him had struck a headstone standing just feet away. Lean knelt and eased Sears onto his back.
“Is anything broken? Where does it hurt?” Lean asked.
In the faint moonlight, Sears’s dazed, stunned eyes met Lean’s. A look of confusion rose up through Sears’s pain as he regarded the deputy’s face staring down at his own.
“Father Leadbetter,” the injured man muttered.
“No—you’re going to live, just hang in there, man. We’ll get you a doctor.”
“No,” Sears said.
What at first appeared to be a wild grin Lean now understood to be a grimace of pain mixed with a sliver of relief.
“You’ve failed.” Sears’s breath was fading. He glanced sideways at the grave marker and then said in a gurgling whisper, “Hallowed ground.”
“What?” Lean bent in closer, not sure he was hearing the man correctly.
“My soul’s safe now.”
Lean stood as he heard the sound of feet on pavement nearby. Help would be there any moment now, but he glanced down again at the limp body of Chester Sears and knew
it was too late.
“AND THAT’S IT, then, Your Honor?” Inspector Greeley asked.
“In sum and total, Inspector,” Justice Holmes said to the investigator from the Boston police.
They’d returned to the scene of the attempted theft, the top-floor painting gallery, and had been going over the details for the past hour. Lean, Grey, Mrs. Holden, and Justice Holmes had each recounted events as they knew them, minus the more gruesome and confusing details of the digging up and burning of Frank Cosgrove in Portland. Inspector Greeley, a stout bulldog of a man, had enough time on the job to be very concerned about the details of Lean and Grey’s interest in the recently deceased Chester Sears. Fortunately for the Portland detectives, the inspector was also wise enough not to spend too much energy questioning the straightforward account given by Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., a justice on the state supreme court.
“It all seems to fit. Mr. Grey came back down this rope.” He glanced at the assistant librarian, Mrs. Holden, who nodded, confirming that she’d returned to the third floor in time to witness that. “So he never left this roof. And from where this fellow Sears landed, he clearly fell from the roof next door. Too far to possibly have been pushed. He must have jumped to his own death.” The stocky, round-faced inspector scratched his head, where the thinning strands of hair offered little resistance.
“Certainly queer, though, isn’t it?” Greeley said.
“Yes, that he would risk death to avoid capture after such an elaborate break-in and all for a dozen pages from some obscure book on Viking settlements,” Grey answered.
“It’s madness. And I daresay it might be catching, Mr. Grey. Climbing that rope and chasing him across a slanted roof—must be fifty feet up, in the dark. You’re lucky the meat wagon collected only one set of shattered bones tonight.”
“Exactly,” Justice Holmes agreed. “I called out the same when he started after the man.”
“Caught up in the moment, I suppose,” Grey said, and held up his hand. A handkerchief was bound about the rope burn on his palm. “I suppose I’ll have a little souvenir to remind me to think twice in the future.”
Lean fought back a smile, knowing full well that Grey would commit the same reckless pursuit a hundred times over and was now trying to play the part of naïve bystander to assuage the inspector’s doubts about the whole situation.
Justice Holmes might have been sharing Lean’s thoughts, since he immediately returned the focus to the burglar. “Though as Deputy Lean said, that Sears chap may recently have murdered an old accomplice in Portland. May well be that the man was some sort of lunatic. Who’s to say?”
“Not me,” Greeley said with a shrug. “I’ve got work enough for me in writing up this mess as it is. I think I’ll do well if I can get it all down just with the facts as they stand. Gentlemen, Your Honor.” The inspector set his bowler atop his head and touched his fingers to the brim in Justice Holmes’s direction. “I should make sure that all’s been set to rights out back in the burying ground. Good evening to you.”
He picked up the torn-out pages, which he tapped into line before handing them over to a uniformed officer. He looked about on the table for Professor Horsford’s book. His frown deepened as the sound of a turning page led to the sight of Grey skimming through the damaged book. Inspector Greeley held his hand out for the book and cleared his throat like a broadside from a man-of-war.
“Says here that these symbols were originally found etched into a rock ledge just north of Portland in the early 1830s,” Grey declared.
“Inspector, will it be necessary for you to remove the book and pages from the Athenaeum?” Lean asked. “I am a bit curious to get a closer look at them. See if there’s any possible connection between them and the murder back home.”
“Sorry, Deputy. As these pages amount to the property being stolen at the time of the death, I’ll need to withhold them until the coroner’s inquest is completed. Send them back here as soon as that’s done with, however. Best I can do. You understand.”
“Of course. I appreciate your help,” Lean said.
“What I’d appreciate is if next time you’re snooping around Boston for a possible murder arrest, you maybe give us local boys a tip of the hat first. Maybe we avoid another situation like this.” Greeley shot him a sharp look.
“Agreed,” Lean said. “Just meant to ask the man a few questions. Certainly wasn’t expecting all this.”
“I reckon I could come here every night until I die at a ripe old age and I’d never expect to see what I’ve seen here tonight,” the inspector said.
“True enough. Remarkable turn of events, to say the least. All the more reason perhaps to at least let Deputy Lean have a quick look at the pages,” Justice Holmes suggested. “A bit of that professional courtesy you referenced earlier.”
The inspector’s frown lasted only an instant; he could hardly deny a direct request from Justice Holmes about sharing knowledge of a crime with another police inspector, even if the man in question was from Maine.
“Fair enough.” Greeley motioned to the patrolman, who placed the book and ripped pages back on one of the benches.
Lean spread out the dozen separate, double-sided pages, which held reproductions of sketches of various strange symbols. Justice Holmes leaned in for a better look, while Grey opened the book and flipped back through the pages of the manuscript. Upon finding what he was looking for, he jotted a few details in his notebook.
“What have you found?” Inspector Greeley asked him.
“Dastine LaVallee. The name of the woman reported as originally finding these carved markings.”
“When was that?”
“In 1834.”
“Damn near sixty years ago,” Greeley scoffed, then turned away as if he wanted to physically distance himself from such an obviously futile line of pursuit.
Grey finished his notes and turned his attention to Lean’s perusal of the symbols.
“I have to give it to old Horsford,” Justice Holmes said. “Wherever he supposedly found these images, some of them do certainly have the flavor of Viking runes.”
“But then some look familiar, don’t they?” Lean asked. “Greek?”
“There are limited similarities, but I might actually classify some of these as older than Greek. Phoenician, perhaps” Grey said.
“Ah, yes,” Lean muttered with a roll of his eyes, “how foolish of me. Definitely Phoenician.”
“Others I don’t recognize at all,” Grey continued, ignoring Lean’s last comment.
“One thing’s for sure,” Inspector Greeley said. “Whatever they look like to you, in the end they’re just drawings on paper. And to me they don’t look anything like the real reason a man goes jumping to his death.”
AFTER SAYING THEIR farewells to Justice Holmes, Grey and Lean walked along the sidewalk away from the Athenaeum.
“That bit you mentioned inside about the woman who found those symbols,” Lean said.
“Dastine LaVallee.”
“In 1834, though? She must be dead by now.”
“The newspaper article cited by Horsford referred to her as a young woman out for an afternoon stroll with her beau. So she may still be in her late seventies,” Grey said.
“Even if she is still alive, she likely goes by her married name. And no sure thing that she’s even lived in Portland for the past fifty or sixty years.”
“Granted, it’s not the most promising lead, but the best link we had to Cosgrove’s murder was Sears, and the best link we have to him is these curious symbols. We must learn whatever we can about them.”
“That’ll need to wait until Greeley decides he’s done with the book,” Lean said.
“I’ll ask Justice Holmes to check in with the librarian and monitor the book’s return. I’d also like to find the original newspaper story and learn the location of the ledge where the symbols appear. But in the meantime we can start with this.”
The two men paused by themselves beneath a streetli
ght as Grey drew a folded piece of paper from his pocket and handed it over. Several paragraphs of close-set type covered the outer side of the paper. Lean unfolded the page to reveal a large diagram on the other side. It was a rough circle resting upon a cross. A short arc, almost like a pair of horns or a thin crescent-moon shape, sat atop the circle.
“An extra page from Horsford’s book. Did you tear it out?”
Grey shook his head. “This was the last page Sears ripped from the book and shoved into his pocket. It drifted out during his fall. I managed to slip aside and retrieve it.”
“Well done, though I’m not sure it provides much in the way of assistance at this point.”
“Perhaps not,” Grey said as he accepted the paper again. “According to the limited text here, Professor Horsford attached particular import to this page. He viewed the image as a Viking head. The arc here represents his horned helmet. Horsford took it as definitive proof that the entire set of symbols was produced by the Norsemen.”
Lean shrugged and began walking again. “Maybe. If it’s not a Viking rune, what is it?”
“I can’t say. Though it does strike me as vaguely familiar.”
“Well and good, Grey, but I fear it will take a sight more than vague familiarity to breathe any life back into this case.”
The pair had only just rounded the corner from the Athenaeum, passing along the final bend in Beacon Street, when Walt McCutcheon came striding up behind them.
“Evening, gents. Was that the sound of defeat I heard in your voice, Lean?”
“There you are, McCutcheon,” Grey said, without breaking stride. “So I take it you didn’t have any luck tracking down Chester Sears?”
“Not while he was alive, no.” McCutcheon chuckled as he paused to light his cigar, then hurried to catch up. “Saw him lying dead in the old boneyard. Heard the commotion earlier around the back, but Inspector Greeley was already arriving so I steered clear.”
“Had some trouble with the man, have you?” Lean asked.
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