“Father? Father, it’s Sylvie.”
At the mention of her name, the priest looked up, sniffed, and then wiped the snot from his nose with the back of his hand.
“Sylvie… she took my daughter. They took Patty from us.”
Instead of asking for clarification—which is exactly what Liam wanted to do, ask who took his daughter, where they took his daughter, what they wanted with his daughter—Sylvie reached out and wiped the tears from beneath father Smith’s eyes.
The man shuddered at her touch, and then he took a deep, hitching breath. And then the question that Liam wanted to ask but didn’t was answered without prompting. Only instead of clarifying things, it only confused him further.
Confused and scared him.
“The witch’s children… the witch’s children took my daughter. They took her into the swamp and murdered her.”
Chapter 6
The old woman pressed her cane into the boggy marsh, watching as water built up from below and soaked the tip, before lifting it again. A series of small bubbles followed where her cane had left an indentation in the bog, and she watched these with keen interest. If anybody had been staring at the woman, they would’ve thought it impossible for her to see: her eyes were white, the consequence of long hardening cataracts that had never been dealt with.
But that didn’t matter.
Because the old woman didn’t need her eyes to see. In fact, she hadn’t needed her eyes for as long as the swamp had been here.
For as long as Stumphole had existed.
The woman had been moving through the trees even before Anne LaForet had been burned at the stake—she had even warned the woman about the dangers of what she was doing.
The croon had been here when the man had first come; the man with the black hat and faded Jean jacket vest, both of which seemed out of place and time. Back then, horses were used to plow fields, and trade routes were only as far as you could travel in a few days.
Things had changed over the years, and that was of no surprise to the woman who had seen many come and go and return to dirt.
Everything turned to dirt, in the end.
Except for her. Her and the man in the hat.
She used her cane to scratch a sigil into the mud in front of an old oak tree. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the trunk groaned and seemed to stretch before her blind eyes.
Chapter 7
“Dwight?” Sheriff Lancaster barked into the radio on his shoulder. “Dwight, where the hell are you? I need you in here, STAT.”
Liam glanced furtively over his shoulder at the slumped priest who was still being consoled by both Stevie and Sylvan Sinclair.
What the hell is going on? What in God’s name is happening here? First, the missing girls… and now this? His daughter… dead?
Liam looked down at his coffee cup and was surprised to see that his hand was trembling, causing the dark liquid inside to quiver as if struck by a miniature earthquake.
Calm down, Liam. Call down and think this through. You’re the Sheriff here, the Captain, you’re the one in charge. If they see you nervous like this, it’ll only make them nervous, a voice in his head reminded him.
Liam strode over to Stevie, Sylvie, and Father Smith, and bent on his haunches. He gently tapped Stevie on the left shoulder indicating for the man to rise. Although the deputy made a strange face, which wasn’t uncommon given that this was the most natural expression that he could make with his lopsided features, he eventually got Liam’s intention and stood.
Liam resisted the urge to touch Sylvie on the shoulder next for even in this high-strung environment he was worried about sexual harassment and #metoo.
“Sylvie, can I have a moment here with Father Smith?”
Sylvie turned to him then and pushed her lips together tightly, but she did as she was asked and retreated to her desk without complaint.
Liam took a moment to study the priest’s sullen features, the raw skin on his cheeks from all the crying he had been doing.
“Father Smith? Larry? I need you to tell me everything that happened. Can you do that? It’s important that you tell me while it’s still fresh in your mind.”
Something in Father Smith’s face seemed to break and collapse inward. For a second, Liam thought that he had taken the wrong approach, that he was going to get nowhere with this. But then Father Smith raised his dark eyes and stared at him.
“I can do that… but you’re not gonna believe it.”
***
Father Smith was right; Liam didn’t believe the man’s story. A story about slashes on Patty Smith’s hip moving, rearranging themselves to form two letters: BH. Of weird Latin phrases and a near levitation experience.
Liam chalked the fantastical story up to shock, which would make sense given the fact that Larry Smith had just offered his daughter final rights while she lay nude in his backyard.
Liam glanced over at Stevie several times as Father Smith told his tale, but Stevie didn’t look back; the deputy’s eyes were trained on the priest as he spoke, all the while maintaining a dumbfounded expression on his own face. This wasn’t his usual, goofy expression, however; it was an expression of…
What? What is that expression? Liam wondered. It almost looked like… recognition?
When the priest was done, when he breathed a sigh of anguish and terror as the last words left his mouth, Liam reached over and laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.
“Thank you, Father Smith, and I’m very sorry for your loss.”
The words seemed hollow to Liam, hollow and trite, but he didn’t know what else to say. If this had been a regular crime, if… if Father Smith’s daughter hadn’t walked into their backyard with nothing on but her birthday suit, covered in slashes, Liam would know exactly what to do.
And maybe if this tale hadn’t come from a man of the cloth, if it hadn’t come from his priest, from Father Larry Smith, then he would have behaved differently. Liam might have even put the man in the cell, the only jail cell in all of Elloree, just to keep them all safe. He might have gone as far as to take the man’s shoelaces away to make sure he didn’t do something that he couldn’t undo later.
But this wasn’t a normal man; this was Father Larry Smith. A pillar of the community, a pillar that had been standing since the church itself was raised. Maybe not Larry personally, but his Father before him, and all the Fathers that came before them.
But you need to do something, Liam thought. You have to do something, and you have to do it now.
Liam squeezed the man’s shoulder gently and rose to his feet. Then he turned to Sylvie and gave her a curt nod.
“Sylvie, do you think you can stay here with Father for a little while? I need to visit the hospital.”
Sylvie nodded and as Liam stepped away from the priest, she moved forward to console him again.
“What about me, boss? What you want me to do?” Stevie asked. His voice was excited, or frightened, or maybe both.
Liam contemplated this for a moment. It made sense to keep Stevie here with Sylvie, given the fact that Sylvie wasn’t an actual police officer, but there was something about that expression…
“I have to tell you something,” Stevie said suddenly.
And there it is, Liam thought; it looked like he needed to tell me something, and evidently, he does.
Liam opened his mouth to answer when the walkie on his shoulder suddenly squawked.
He turned respectfully away from the three of them and then clicked the button on the mouthpiece.
“Yeah? Sheriff Lancaster here.”
There was a moment of silence punctuated only by a crackle of static before Dwight Porter’s familiar voice filled the room. And when it did, Liam Lancaster immediately cringed and wished that he hadn’t taken just one step away from Father Smith, but a couple dozen.
“Sheriff? Sheriff? It’s Dwight… Dwight Porter. I’m here at the… uh… uh…”
“Spit it out, Dwight, and keep your damn voice dow
n.”
There was another pause, but when Dwight spoke again, he had thankfully lowered his voice an octave.
“Sheriff, I’m here at the hospital. And I think you should get down here—there’s something you’re gonna want to see.”
Chapter 8
Liam kept the siren off, but had the lights flashing as he sped towards the hospital. If he had been frantic and confused inside the station in the presence of Father Smith, he was bordering on hysterical now.
Apparently, one of Dwight’s buddies was a paramedic and had been the first on the scene when Ginger Smith had called about their daughter Patty. Liam was still holding onto the idea that Father Smith had had a stroke of some sort, and that he had just imagined the scene in his backyard; after all, it had sounded made up. But Dwight quashed this idea.
Patty Smith was dead; Dwight’s friend had confirmed that she had arrived to see Patty lying on the glass covered in only a thin sheet that Ginger had retrieved from her bedroom. Both parents were sobbing, intractable in their grief and confusion. The paramedic had convinced Father Smith to go to the police station, to seek out Sheriff Lancaster.
And then the paramedic had called Dwight, who had met her at the hospital.
It was only a short, five-minute drive from the police station to the hospital, but there had been a small fender bender on what residents called Main Street, even though its name was technically Doherty Street. Mrs. Pincourt tried to flag down Sheriff Lancaster as he passed, thinking that he was there to help assess the damage to her 2007 Honda Civic, but frowned and shook her fist when Liam had simply sped by.
Heart racing, mind racing even more than his heart, Liam continued towards the hospital.
Calling it a hospital was perhaps a bit of an overstatement; it was more of a glorified warehouse with one operating room, one secretary, two doctors, one of which was on call, and a total staff of six people. As a result, it could only accommodate two or three patients at a time, which generally suited the thousand or so Elloree residents just fine. For any major surgery or a major problem such as the heart attack that Mr. Danby had had a few weeks ago, they simply shipped the patient off to Batesburg or one of the larger surrounding areas to get treated.
Liam pulled up right outside the large swinging doors, now equipped with a wheelchair access ramp off to one side— Sylvie Sinclair’s doing of course, even though Elloree did not presently, and for as long as Liam could remember, have a resident who actually used a wheelchair—and then shut off the car. He sat in the vehicle for just a moment longer, trying to calm himself, his eyes focusing on his fingers which hadn’t stopped shaking since Father Smith had first burst through the police station doors.
Calm down, Liam, calm down. People are counting on you now. It’s just like when you’re—
Liam opened the door to distract himself from his thoughts, then he stepped out into the hot sun.
Walking with purpose, he strode towards the doors, which opened automatically, and then into the sterile building.
The waiting room, which had been filled with plastic chairs leftover from when they had renovated the high school, was empty. As was, to Liam’s dismay, the receptionist desk.
It didn’t really matter, however; Liam made his way down the narrow hallway flanked by triage rooms on either side. He knew where Patty Smith would be—he knew where she would be even before he heard Dwight Porter’s loud voice coming toward him.
There was no morgue in Elloree hospital. When a resident passed away, they simply re-purposed one of the two surgical rooms into a makeshift viewing area so that the body could be identified before Dr. Larringer signed the death certificate, and then started the funeral arrangements.
And this is where Liam Lancaster went first; surgical room one. Dwight’s loud voice could be heard through the frosted glass door, and Liam could make out three shadows in the room. There was movement, and then a fourth became apparent.
Liam rested a palm against the outside of the door, took a deep breath, and then pushed it wide. He raised his head as he entered the room, doing his best to put on at least an air of authority.
Inside, however, Liam quickly became as confused as Father Smith had been.
There were indeed four people in the room: Ginger Smith, her eyes red and her cheeks raw, Deputy Dwight Porter, a burly bear of a man with a rust-colored mustache, thinning hair, and eyes that were big as pieces of coal, Dr. Larringer, rail-thin and white as a sheet of paper, and a woman who although Liam didn’t know her by name, he judged by her outfit to be Deputy Porter’s paramedic friend.
There’s a fifth person in the room, Liam thought. But then he tried to take this back, unsure of whether or not a dead person still counted as a person. Four living—five including me—one dead.
Before his thoughts could get off track by this nonsense, Dwight Porter stepped forward and directed his loud, booming voice at the Sheriff.
“Patty Smith is dead,” he said simply.
Liam frowned at his subordinate’s bluntness, his candor, and most of all his redundancy. After all, Liam knew that Patty was dead, Father Smith had told him so and this had been reiterated by Deputy Porter himself; there was no need to continue to announce this fact in front of Ginger.
Liam decided not to respond to Dwight’s observation and instead directed his gaze at Dr. Larringer.
“Doctor,” he said with a nod. The man nodded back, but instead of saying anything, he flicked his eyes over to Ginger Smith.
Liam immediately walked over to the woman and, realizing that Sylvie wasn’t present, he embraced her tightly. Holding her against his chest, she began to sob again, and her thin back quivered in his arms.
“I’m so sorry,” he whispered in her ear. “I’m so, so sorry for your loss.”
He wondered if this was the exact same thing he had said to Father Smith, and if it was, if he and his wife would talk about him later and consider him an idiot.
It was Ginger Smith who eventually pulled away from the embrace, turning her eyes upwards to look at him.
“I don’t… I—I don’t know what happened,” she said between hitched breaths. “She just… She just—”
Ginger Smith couldn’t get any more words out; she simply collapsed again and this time Sheriff Lancaster’s embrace wasn’t so much to comfort her, but to prevent the woman from falling flat on her face. This hug went on for so long that Liam began to feel uncomfortable, irrespective of whether Sylvie Sinclair was in the room. He looked around at the others, but they seemed as bewildered as he felt. Eventually, the paramedic saved him.
Still sobbing, Ginger Smith was guided away from Liam and into the paramedic’s arms.
“Why don’t you take her into the waiting room,” Liam whispered softly.
The paramedic nodded and a few seconds later she managed to shuffle, bearing most of Ginger Smith’s modest weight, from the room.
Sheriff Liam Lancaster then took a deep breath himself and raised his eyes to Dr. Larringer.
“Show me what we’ve got,” he said. “Show me her body.”
Chapter 9
“Cause of death was not blood loss, as you might expect given the condition of the body,” Dr. Larringer said in a matter of fact voice.
Liam heard the doctor’s words, but most of his attention was focused on Patty Smith’s body. She was splayed out on the metal operating table like some sort of piece of meat, a slab of pork bled before the butcher chops it into bite-size portions.
She was pale, her skin a color only acquired in death. Her eyes were closed, her mouth twisted into a grimace. Everything from the neck to the top of her thighs had been slashed. The wounds themselves didn’t appear terribly deep, aside from one near her left nipple, but there were just so many of them… so damn many of them, that Liam was surprised by the doctor’s claim.
“How’d she die then, doc?”
Dr. Larringer cleared his throat.
“Patty Smith appears to have died from a myocardial infarction.”
Liam’s eyes shot up.
“Myocardial infarction?”
“The technical term for a heart attack,” Dr. Larringer clarified.
Liam shook his head.
“Oh, I know what it means doc, but how? How is that possible? Did she have some sort of genetic condition?”
Dr. Larringer shook his head tentatively.
“Not sure; there’s no history of it in her family—Ginger told me that her grandfather and grandmother were still alive and pushing eighty-five, and I think I remember at his sermon a couple weeks back that Larry Smith mentioned that his parents were still amongst the living as well. So, it’s not impossible, but it’s unlikely at this point.”
Daughter Page 3
