Deadly Harvest

by Heather Graham

  “Ro, what did you see? It was like you were somewhere else,” Eve told her.

  “I just imagined it, imagined the way it must have been,” Rowenna said. She looked at Brad. “I’m sure you’re right. That fortune-teller, Damien, is the one who took her.” She kept her eyes on Brad. She didn’t want to add, And he’s one of us, someone who knows how everything here works, people’s habits and schedules, and how to slip through a crowd in costume, dragging a drugged woman, and make it all look like some sort of macabre show, so no one would even notice with everything else that was going on.

  Brad stared at her, nodding. They all jumped when his cell phone went off. “Jeremy,” he said apologetically when he looked at the number.

  A tour guide, dressed as a Pilgrim, was leading a group through the cemetery. Suddenly it was a normal place again, sad, but not evil.

  “Let’s get out of here, huh?” Eve suggested.

  “Absolutely,” Rowenna agreed. “Don’t tell Jeremy where we are,” she whispered to Brad.

  He glanced at her curiously, but he nodded. “Yeah, she’s right here. We’re having coffee. We’ll see you in a bit…. No? Okay, well…Sure. Where do you want to meet?”

  Eve caught Rowenna’s arm, dragging her toward the gate. Brad followed.

  Rowenna wanted to tell Eve that after what she’d just experienced, she had to say something to Jeremy about Eve’s suspicions of Adam, so Jeremy could get to the bottom of things, one way or another, but she didn’t want to say anything in front of Brad, just in case he took the information and went off half-cocked. Anyway, she still couldn’t believe Adam was guilty. But if there was even the slightest chance…

  Then Eve wasn’t safe with her husband.

  She was going to have to find a way to say something soon, but her thoughts as to how and when were interrupted when Brad closed his phone and turned to face her curiously.

  “Where are we supposed to meet him?” she asked quickly, to stop him from asking why she hadn’t wanted Jeremy to know where they were.

  “Down by the water in half an hour,” Brad said. And then, clearly not willing to be deterred, he asked, “Why can’t we tell him we were in the cemetery?”

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Rowenna said, then hesitated. “You know Jeremy. He was your partner. He wouldn’t think much of me trying to…relive Mary’s experience.”

  Brad nodded, and she knew he wouldn’t tell Jeremy, even if he was his close friend. He wasn’t willing to put a damper on any efforts to locate Mary, no matter how crazy they might look to other people. No matter how crazy they might look to her, Rowenna forced herself to admit.

  “Good—there’s a café right there, across the street. We can make sure that we’re not complete liars and get some coffee,” Eve said.

  “Don’t forget to bring some back to Adam,” Rowenna reminded her.

  “We’ll walk you back on our way to meet Jeremy.”

  Eve nodded, tight-lipped, and looked imploringly at Rowenna.

  Don’t say anything to Jeremy, she pleaded silently.

  Rowenna tried to convey her own answer silently, too. I have to. But she promised herself that she would make him be subtle when he went to talk to Adam.

  They strode to the café, ordered their drinks, sat for a few minutes, then walked Eve back to the shop. “She’s nice,” Brad said, after Eve had hugged Rowenna goodbye and gone inside.

  “Yes, she is.”

  “For a demon worshipper.”

  “She’s not a demon worshipper,” Rowenna said impatiently. “Anything but. She’s a wiccan.”

  But her husband might be a Satanist.

  “Let’s get down to the waterfront,” she suggested, hugging herself to keep from shivering.

  The restaurant Jeremy had chosen was busy, and lots of the diners were clearly tourists. Apparently a body in a cornfield couldn’t stop people from enjoying the fall colors. Most of the tourists appeared to be either young and childless, or retired and enjoying their golden years, which made sense, Rowenna thought, since schools were in session.

  She and Brad were shown to a table and ordered more coffee while they waited for Jeremy and Joe. Brad suggested an appetizer, too, and they decided on an order of calamari.

  “You really do have a unique talent,” Brad told her as soon as the waiter had gone.

  “No, I don’t. Not really,” Rowenna said, pretending to study the menu.

  “You can find her for me. You can see things.”

  “Brad, I’m not—” She broke off. There was too much hope in his eyes. “Brad, I would do anything in my power to help you, but I don’t have any magical power.” I don’t, she insisted to herself. “I just think and feel things out. That’s all I do. All I can do.”

  “But you should have seen yourself in the cemetery. For a minute…you looked like Mary.”

  “I’ve seen her picture, I’ve heard you all talk about her. I can envision her. You can envision her, too. That’s why I looked like her.”

  He wasn’t convinced. “I think there’s more we can do. Like get a hypnotist or a medium, someone who could really guide you through…whatever it is you do.”

  Rowenna looked up. Jeremy and Joe were threading their way through tables toward them.

  “Brad,” she said. “Please don’t—”

  He shushed her with a wave. “Not a word,” he promised.

  Jeremy paused by her chair, and for a split second, he seemed awkward. Then he brushed a kiss on the top of her head and took the seat next to her. Joe slid into the chair opposite him.

  Jeremy had a folder, and he set it on the table, his fingers drumming. He was obviously anxious to get to it.

  “Have you two ordered yet?” Joe asked.

  “Just some calamari,” she said. “We were waiting for you.”

  “Thanks,” Joe said, and picked up the menu, then looked at Rowenna over the top of it. “Have you taken care of your costume yet?” he asked her.

  She stared at him and blinked. Admittedly, life did go on. But he and Jeremy had just been talking to a murder suspect, and even though he didn’t know it, she was still feeling the effects of the experience at the cemetery and worrying that one of her friends was married to a murderer. “Costume?”

  “Yes, costume. The thing you’re supposed to wear when they drive you through town on a horse-drawn float,” Joe said.

  “Oh, right. Ginny’s making it for me,” Rowenna told him.

  “What happened in Boston?” Brad asked tensely, his impatience with the current conversation obvious.

  “He isn’t our man,” Jeremy said.

  “The guy wasn’t the sharpest tool in the shed,” Joe said wearily. “Quite frankly, he wouldn’t have been capable of pulling off anything as complex as Mary’s abduction, and I doubt he had anything to do with Dinah Green’s death, either.”

  Brad looked at the other two men. “I know I’m playing devil’s advocate here—” He stopped and flushed at his own choice of words. “Look, you know I think it was that Damien guy, but even so…sometimes perps act dumb on purpose.”

  “Not this guy,” Joe said confidently. “Trust me, he’s a fair amount of brawn and not a hell of a lot of brain.”

  “And he had an alibi for Halloween,” Jeremy added.

  “Airtight?” Brad asked.

  “Sugar-Plum tight,” Joe muttered.

  Rowenna looked at Jeremy, who explained, “He used a credit card to buy liquor for a hooker named Sugar Plum, and the timing clears him in Mary’s disappearance. The Boston cops checked it all out.”

  “So it was a waste of time,” Brad said. “And Mary is still out there somewhere.”

  “It’s never a waste of time to eliminate a suspect,” Joe said.

  Rowenna was eager to finish the meal and get a chance to talk to Jeremy alone, so she could tell him about Adam. “Let’s order, shall we?”

  The calamari arrived, and they put in their entrée orders.

  When the waiter h
ad gone, Jeremy leaned toward Brad and said, “Richardson was with Dinah Green at the bar, and then he says he left. He claims he offered to walk her to her car—which was parked by the cemetery—but she said she wanted to stay and talk to someone she had met earlier in the day.”

  Brad shook his head. “So…?”

  “So Hugh went into the computer and pulled up all his receipts for that night so we can get at least a partial idea of who was there,” Jeremy went on.

  “It was Damien,” Brad said stubbornly.

  “Could be,” Joe agreed. “But whoever the hell he really is—because I can pretty much guarantee you his real name isn’t Damien—he disappeared into thin air…or back into his own skin, his own life. We have to track him down.”

  Brad looked glum. “He might not even have been the one who paid the bill. Or maybe he paid cash. If Dinah Green and Mary were even abducted by the same man.”

  “It’s something to start with, at least,” Jeremy said. “Brad, one way or another, we’ll track down everyone in the bar that night, I promise you. And Zach is coming up to help.”

  “Great. He can look for a needle in a haystack, too,” Brad said.

  Joe cleared his throat. “Quit bitching and be glad you have friends with resources the cops can’t afford—like extra manpower. Every qualified person working this case is something you should be grateful for.”

  Rowenna quickly lowered her head, hiding a smile, surprised that Joe had so quickly leaped to Jeremy’s defense.

  When she looked up again, Brad’s face was flushed.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like to love someone and be desperately afraid that they’re going to turn up dead.”

  “Yes, I do,” Joe said harshly, staring at Brad, who had the grace to look abashed.

  Rowenna wondered if he knew that Jonathan Brentwood had been killed in the service or if he had just gathered from Joe’s speech that there was a story to be told.

  “What time is Zach coming?” she asked Jeremy, trying to move past the awkward moment.

  “Not till late this afternoon. It was the earliest flight he could get.”

  “So what’s your plan now?” she asked him.

  “Are you thinking of doing some more research this afternoon?” he asked her.

  “Yes,” she said slowly. An idea had occurred to her; it had been forming since she had been at Eve’s shop, looking at Adam’s book, and she was interested in following up her theory. But she still needed to talk to Jeremy—alone—before dusk came and Adam and Eve closed up for the night.

  “I’m assigning two officers to follow up on the list Jeremy got from Hugh. They’ll find out exactly who was in the bar that night, and who talked to Dinah before she left,” Joe said.

  “I’m going to take a drive,” Jeremy said.

  “A drive?” she asked, surprised.

  He shrugged. “I want to go see if there’s anything out where Ginny saw those lights,” he explained.

  “She’s…getting old. Slipping a bit,” Joe warned Jeremy.

  “I know. Rowenna told me. But I still want to see what’s out there.” He turned to Rowenna. “I’ll come get you at the museum before dusk. I promise.”

  “I want to go out there with you,” Brad said.

  “Sure,” Jeremy said. “Two sets of eyes, you know how that goes.” He frowned. “But, Rowenna, wait for me there this time, all right?”

  “I will,” she promised.

  When they were leaving, she slipped an arm through his. “I need to talk to you,” she whispered.

  “What’s up?” he asked. She hesitated. Brad was hovering just a few feet away.

  “Can it wait till tonight?” he asked.

  “Can you come get me by four-thirty?”

  “All right.”

  She nodded.

  Joe bade them goodbye and headed for his office, and Brad and Jeremy walked Rowenna to the museum. June wasn’t at the desk this time, but Rowenna knew the coed who was—Lily Valentine—and Lily handed her the key and sent her back to the reading room, explaining that Daniel had popped out for lunch but would no doubt come join her when he got back.

  Rowenna was actually glad to be alone. She started reading about the four killers who all seemed to have followed the pattern set by the Harvest Man, jotting down notes as she went, paying special attention to the number of victims each killer had claimed. Three in one case, four in another, then three again.

  Hank Brisbin, the most recent link in the murderous chain, had also been the most prolific. Five corpses had been laid at his door, all of them found in the cornfields, one down to nothing but bones strewn by a bare stake. He’d given a newspaper interview shortly before his execution, and he’d told the reporter, “Seven must come and seven must go, and thus wilt thou Satan forever know.”

  Seven.

  Was it possible, she wondered, that in each case the killer, the incarnation of the Harvest Man, had been trying to make seven sacrifices but had been stopped before he succeeded?

  She leaped up, hurrying toward another bookshelf. She glanced past the volumes on paganism and wicca until her eyes lit on a book with the ridiculously long title of When Worlds Collide: Satanism and the Practice of the Ancients, Runes, Gods, Goddesses, Devils and Demons.

  She took it back to the table with her and started reading.

  The number seven was often associated with magic, the book said. It was considered a lucky number by some, but according to some of the primitive peoples who had inhabited Europe before the advent of Christianity, it was also the number of sacrifices that needed to be made in order to gain the approval of the harvest gods. Seven goats were still slaughtered at each fall’s harvest festival in certain remote villages on the continent. The seventh son of a seventh son was still widely supposed by many to be a magician, a god or a man possessed of godlike powers.

  She turned the page to see a sketch, rude, poorly crafted, hundreds of years old, of a red devil seated upon a high throne, horned and stroking his goatlike beard. His feet were cloven hooves, and his tail—with an arrow-shaped spike at the end—protruded from beneath him.

  His other arm was stretched out, his fingers sporting ridiculously long talons and curling around the throat of a woman wearing a crown of leaves and a golden cloak with vines growing from it. The devil’s head was cast back; he was strangling her with one hand alone.

  In front of him, upon a black altar, in sheer white gowns, their eyes and mouths opened in their final terror, six young women lay slaughtered, blood pooling around them. The caption beneath the picture read, He must come to know them, and to love them. And so shall he be fed to new life by the blood of the seven he has cherished and taken. Seven, and he will reign over all, for all time, the God of Fornication.

  She pushed the book away, feeling ill. This was the New World. This was the here and now. But it didn’t matter.

  They might not have found them yet, but there were more bodies out there.

  And more to come.

  The Harvest Man believed that he had to sacrifice seven women to the earth, to nature, to ensure the harvest and his own eternal power.

  And he needed to complete his bloody work before Thanksgiving Day.

  17

  The road that led northwest of the MacElroy house was in bad shape, forcing Jeremy to drive slowly. Not that he had planned to speed, since he and Brad needed to look carefully at everything they passed, looking for anything suspicious.

  All he knew for sure was that if the killer was seizing women and keeping them somewhere, it had to be a quiet somewhere. And if Ginny MacElroy was seeing lights where there shouldn’t be lights…

  They had passed miles of cornfields before finally reaching the empty scrubland where the ground was too thin and rocky to support corn or any other crop. He had noted that the barren lands began when they made a turn less than half a mile past Eric Rolfe’s house, which indeed seemed like the beginning of the end of the world. There
was one small cornfield, and then, for miles and miles, nothing but bracken-filled land, with occasional outcroppings of granite.

  He stopped the car when the road ahead narrowed and turned to rutted dirt, and sat for a long minute staring out at the desolation surrounding them.

  “What are you doing?” Brad asked.

  Jeremy left the car, walking to the edge of the broken pavement, where the high grass, thorns and brush began. He shaded his eyes with his hand and stared toward the fields and the houses to the southeast. The dirt road meandered on, disappearing in the distance. He started walking, his eyes scanning from side to side.

  “I’ll walk back the way we came and see if I can find anything we missed,” Brad said.

  Jeremy nodded and kept going.

  A needle in a haystack, Jeremy thought. Hell, that sounded easy, compared to what he was trying to find.

  It was so overgrown and wild here that any sign of a body, a shack, an old cellar, would be almost impossible to find. But he moved doggedly forward anyway, searching the brush nearest the road for any sign that it had been trampled or otherwise disturbed. At first he couldn’t find so much as a bent leaf or a cracked twig. He felt the hard-packed dirt of the road beneath his feet, and despite the coming winter, the sun beating down on him was hot, burning. It was already beginning its descent, but here, away from tall trees and taller buildings, its rays were still strong.

  “Hey!” Brad called out to him excitedly, his voice barely carrying from the distance.

  “What?” he shouted back.

  “Come here!”

  He turned and ran back to Brad, who didn’t say a word, only pointed.

  Brad had found a place along the road where a wild cherry bush had been all but flattened, though clearly the damage had happened some time ago. The bush was struggling to straighten itself, but it still grew at a slant—like a palm caught in a hurricane and bending to its will.

  Any footprints in the area were long gone, erased by rain and wind, so Jeremy didn’t worry about obliterating evidence as he followed the trail marked by damaged brush, as if someone had dragged a wagon or a wheelbarrow through at some point.