Fifth Son Page 9

  “They burned it down,” she said. “That shed was Lawrence’s special hideout. And after they shipped him off, they got rid of all his things. Clothes, books, belongings. Burned every last one of them, like they were contaminated by the devil.”

  There was a thumping on the stairs, and Sandy burst back into the room with a slim volume open in his hands. “I found her. Sophia Vincelli.” He handed Green the book and jabbed his finger at the photo of a beautiful, porcelain-fine girl with long black hair falling in a sheet below her shoulders. The same girl who had been clinging to Tom in the photo Robbie Pettigrew had shown them.

  “Tom’s girl,” Edna said without hesitation.

  “One of Tom’s girls,” Sandy amended. “Come on, Mom, they usually only lasted a week.”

  “Oh, but she was a beautiful girl. I remember her from that school play in your Grade Eleven year. She played Ophelia. I’m surprised you don’t remember her, dear. All you boys were cross-eyed over her.”

  Sandy rolled his eyes so quickly that Edna didn’t notice, but Green smiled to himself, suspecting Edna rarely missed the chance to remind her son of all the ones who got away. Sandy parried the thrust with practised ease. “For all the good it ever did any of us,” he replied. “If she was dating Tom Pettigrew, she was way out of our league. He’d already dropped out of school by then and was working. Tom always picked off the best ones, only to break their hearts and dump them when the next one came along.”

  His mother leaned over to peer at the yearbook. After a moment, she tapped the picture thoughtfully. “I know Tom was a ladies’ man, but I seem to remember this one was different. Katherine Pettigrew told me it ended badly for Tom. The girl simply vanished one day, probably ran off with someone else. Broke Tom’s heart. That’s why he left town. Of course, she was Italian.”

  She made the pronouncement as if it explained everything, but Green’s thoughts were already running ahead. To another person who had also inexplicably vanished, to the bloody note in the elegant hand “S. Bus 4:30, meet me 3:00 our place”. To a crucifix that had ended up in Lawrence’s hands twenty years later.

  He had an idea how they might all fit together, but only a vague, uneasy idea what they might mean. First, he had to see the crime scene for himself, to try to put himself in Lawrence’s mind. Then he needed a long talk with the most sensible, psychologically insightful person he’d ever known.

  * * *

  The sun had almost dipped to the horizon, casting a searing orange glare over the barren field. The autumn chill was already stealing in, and Isabelle’s breath formed frosty swirls as she bent over the ground. She swore at the gathering darkness, which would cut short her efforts long before she felt she’d done justice to the task. Rationally, she knew the pond could wait, but her frustration needed an outlet, and shovelling was as good as any.

  After Green had left that afternoon, she and Jacques had had a pitched battle over what to do with the tangled eyesore at the edge of the yard. He’d been spooked by the story of decapitated birds and bizarre blood rituals and had wanted to raze the site at once and pour a slab of concrete over the whole mess. She was not inclined to disagree, but in his vision of their future home, he saw a double car garage on that spot, whereas she did not want to look out the window at the backside of a garage and favoured instead a lush garden complete with pond, water lilies and exotic fish.

  But before she knew it, Jacques had Sandy Fitzpatrick’s buddy on the phone and was arranging for the foundation to be poured next week. “Fine,” he had snarled when she protested, “if you want your damn pond, you have one week to dig it yourself, but if that mess is still there next week, the garage goes up.” Isabelle had been so fired up with adrenaline and fury that she had snatched up the shovel and crowbar and marched straight out to the yard.

  By the time the sun finally slid out of sight, she had accumulated a vast pile of raspberry canes and charred timbers and was plunging her shovel deep into the sandy soil. Time and time again, her shovel thudded against rock or hit a wayward root from a distant tree, so she thought little of it when it struck something hard once more. She shifted her position a few inches and tried again. This time the shovel sank deep but became stuck underneath something. Swearing, panting and drenched in perspiration despite the cold, she wrenched the object free.

  It was a long shaft with bulbous ends, brown and pitted beneath the dirt. She turned it over, straining to see it in the failing light. A bone. She shivered a little as the sweat ran cold down her back. Probably a cow or moose long buried in the dirt, she told herself as she tossed it onto her pile and retrieved her shovel. She probed more carefully this time, almost reluctantly, and was rewarded with nothing but dirt and sand. She was just beginning to return to her former vigour when her shovel clanged against something hard again. She probed the length of it, dug and pried as she explored an unmoveable object only three inches wide but over three feet long. Far too long to be a bone. Cautiously, she knelt by the hole and explored by touch. Felt the cold, hard surface of metal. Relieved, she began to tug and twist. Finally, she had freed it enough to reach down and pull it out. The long shaft broke in her hands, rotten from years underground, but the end, heavy and covered with rust, had retained enough of its shape to be recognizable.

  It was a huge axe, pointed at one end and brutally blunt at the other. A peculiar fear crawled over her. Glancing up sharply, she saw how dark the night had become. How full of shadows. She swallowed and tossed the axe aside with disgust. Not one goddamn axe anywhere on the farm, not even a hatchet in the tool shed, and here’s this thing, cast aside and forgotten as if it were of no use whatsoever.

  What other buried treasure am I going to find in this dilapidated, mistreated heap of junk we bought?

  She told herself it was too dark to see any more, so she wiped off her tools, returned them to the shed and headed towards the house, steeling herself for Jacques’ mood. Instead, the scent of cinnamon and apples hung in the chilly air, and when she walked in, Jacques greeted her with a cup of hot cider, a strong, warm embrace, and a kiss that reminded her why she’d married him in the first place. And chased away the taste of fear from her throat.

  Eight

  The Mobile Command Post was gone, but a squad car was still parked on the square outside Ashford Methodist Church. The patrol officer guarding the scene was nowhere in sight, however, and the heavy oak door to the church was still padlocked shut. Carrying the evidence bags containing the contents of Lawrence’s tin can, Green ducked under the yellow police tape and mounted the stone steps to the door. Brown leaves had accumulated along the base of the door, and an intricate network of spider webs clung to the corners. No one had opened this door in a long time.

  As a precaution, he slipped on nitryl gloves before stooping to examine the lock with his magnifying glass. Rust had caked around the hole, suggesting no one had tried to insert a key in quite some months. But the size of the hole looked about right. He took the brass key from its evidence bag and inserted it into the keyhole. It was stiff and balky, but with some gentle coaxing, he was able to work it in all the way. He was about to turn it when he heard a shout.

  “Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?” He spun around and spotted a uniformed constable striding around the corner of the bell tower, bunching a stream of discarded yellow tape in his hands and scowling at Green from beneath thick black brows. A cop’s scowl, honed to intimidate and control. When Green identified himself with his badge, the scowl rapidly gave way to alarm.

  “Sorry, sir. I thought everyone was finished here.”

  “Where the hell were you?” Green countered. “This scene is supposed to be secure.”

  “Ident released it this afternoon, sir. I was just clearing things up.” The young man’s forehead puckered. “Is that a problem, sir?”

  Green shook his head. Cunningham was as obsessive and meticulous a forensics specialist as Green had ever encountered. He and his partner had had two days to process the scene
and if Cunningham said they were done, they were done. Besides, that meant Green could finally prowl around all he wanted.

  Green hastened to reassure the officer before dispatching him to continue his clean-up. Once the officer had disappeared back around the bell tower, Green returned his attention to the key in the padlock. The mechanism was badly rusted, and for a few moments the key wouldn’t budge, but finally, with one strong twist, the lock clicked open. As Green unhooked the padlock and slowly pulled open the door, a wave of cold, musty air rushed over him.

  He stepped through into the interior, rendered dank and gloomy by the boarded windows. Slivers of sunlight pierced through the cracks and cut shafts through the dusty air. There was a small ante-chamber with a table and a door off to the right, presumably to the bell tower. Beyond the ante-chamber, the church opened into a rectangular sanctuary with a vaulted ceiling crisscrossed by thick, black beams. Green’s footsteps echoed on the stone floor as he walked the length of the interior. It had been stripped bare of furnishings except for a black wood stove sitting in the corner with an empty wood box beside it and a rusty axe propped against the wall. Over the altar hung a plain wooden cross. Green stood a moment before the altar, trying to picture the room full of pews and people, with the mischievous Reverend Taylor ministering to his flock and the Pettigrew family swaying happily to the hymns.

  Green turned slowly in place. Lawrence had the key to this church in his treasure chest. Stolen, or freely lent? Reverend Taylor had a soft spot for society’s lost souls. Perhaps it was the key Lawrence was searching for in the Boisvert yard that morning. But since he’d been scared away before finding it, then how had he gained access to the church?

  The lure of the unanswered questions—the how and why— drew Green like a magnet. He walked back through the sanctuary towards the bell tower, trying to gather the few fragments he’d learned about Lawrence into some form of understanding. He needed to get inside the man’s head, to see those last few moments of his life as Lawrence had seen them. But as Green entered the tower, he sucked in his breath with dismay. Dim daylight slipped in through the arched openings where the cast-iron bell hung, but otherwise the tower was dark. Fastened to the interior stone wall was a metal ladder which reached up past the massive bell to a trap door above. The climb was probably thirty feet; to Green it looked like a hundred.

  Just contemplating it made him dizzy. He’d hated heights ever since his childhood, when his friends had made a game of chasing each other up the rickety fire escapes and over the tenement rooftops of Lowertown. He’d slipped, breaking his collarbone and subjecting himself to weeks of painful immobility. Now his palms turned slick and his legs jellied as he gripped the bars. The silence was broken only by the cooing of pigeons up above and the pulse of his own heartbeat in his ears. He was so alone. Surely, it was unwise to make the climb with no one there to get help should he fall, or should the ladder break away from its rusty anchors and crash to the ground.

  He shook the bars to test the ladder’s stability. Flakes of debris floated down, but the ladder was rock solid. “Coward,” he muttered aloud, and the curse echoed around him. If the Ident team could go up and down the ladder half a dozen times, then so could he.

  Gingerly, he planted his foot on the bottom rung and began his ascent. He kept his body pressed to the wall and his eyes fixed on the stones in front of him, forcing his feet to follow one step after another. Soon he was level with the old bell, which hung motionless in the fading light. Lawrence might have found this seclusion comforting, but when the bell rang it would have been deafening inside this small space.

  Green raised his eyes to the trap door and felt his stomach churn. He would have to hold on with one hand and pry open the door with the other. Fear hammered in his ears as he forced himself upwards. The platform above was wooden but supported on all sides by a small stone ledge. Glued to the wall, he groped overhead to feel the contours of the door, found the hinge, the opposite edge, the slight gap where the door abutted the floor. He pushed. Nothing. The goddamn door weighed a ton. He gritted his teeth, leaned into it and pushed again. It lifted six inches before slamming back down with such force it nearly knocked him off the ladder. He clutched the bars, gasping for breath. What the fuck am I doing, he thought. I’m not some muscle-bound farmer used to tossing bales of hay into the barn. I’m a pencil pusher, for God’s sake. Much as I hate it, much as I mock it, I spend most of my days on the phone or on my ass in a committee room chair. Even when I was a kid, my idea of serious exercise was jumping my bike over the potholes on Nelson Avenue.

  But I’m here. I’ve come this far and going down will be even worse than going up. If I go up one more step so I can get my shoulders and back behind the push, maybe I can work a miracle.

  He pushed, grunted, pried and slowly forced the door up far enough to wedge it open with the stick that had obviously been left inside for that purpose. Not daring to look down, he crawled through the opening and rolled over onto the roof.

  Late afternoon sun nearly blinded him. He lay on his back, blinking at the blue sky and thanking God for the feel of solid wood beneath him. On all sides, the stone parapet was covered with lichen and stained with a century of bird droppings. He stood up in disgust, wiping the stains off his jacket as he surveyed the scene.

  The stone wall rose to about hip level, affording a sense of both security and privacy. Down below him on one side lay the village square, the cars catching the sunlight as they cruised down the main road. On the other side stretched a view of golden trees and vast fields bisected by the river. In the distance, if he looked hard, he could just make out the reddish smudge of the Boisvert’s old farmhouse. A person could stand here virtually unseen, divorced from the world below and yet witness to it all. A spymaster’s dream.

  Here the teenage Lawrence could have sat in isolation, safety and peace. At the top of God’s house, in the palm of God’s hand. Here, sharing this private spot with his favourite feathered creatures, his angels of God, he could have spied on the world, seen who went where in the village, who came and went through the oak door below.

  He would have felt all-knowing, all-powerful. Perhaps even messianic.

  Was that what had lured him back all these years later? Not a girl but a yearning to reconnect with his spiritual past, to capture once more the power and inspiration that this special place had given him in his troubled youth? Perhaps when he first left Brockville six weeks ago, he had simply wanted to come home, but as his medication wore off and his delusions gained hold, had he remembered this sanctuary, where he communed with the angels and talked directly to his God? Perhaps he hadn’t been looking for the old love notes at all when Isabelle Boisvert spotted him, but for the antique key that would get him back in here.

  A century of ice and rain had gouged deep cracks in the wall. Green examined the spot where the top had crumbled. MacPhail was right; a mere few inches had broken away, hardly enough to cause an accidental fall. Furthermore, anyone trying to force a person over the wall would have a major task lifting them over the lip and preventing them from scratching and kicking everything within sight. Yet there were no signs of a struggle. The lichen was nearly undisturbed, and many loose pieces of stone were still in place.

  It looked as if Lawrence’s jump had been intentional, and Green felt a wave of sorrow for the man. What had happened? Had God failed to come to him? Had he suddenly realized the futility of it all? Twenty years later, looking not through the rosy lens of an impressionable, delusional teenager but through the dimmed lens of a burned out schizophrenic, had he realized he would never hear God, and that his angels were nothing more than pigeons pecking out a pointless existence on a smelly little roof?

  A pigeon swooped in, landed on the wall opposite him and fixed him with beady eyes. Green watched it a moment, wondering if Lawrence had seen it that afternoon, read meaning into its random pecking at the lichen and into its frankly hostile stare. Then the bird shook its wings, gave a soft coo and lifte
d off again, sailing high above the square.

  Green tracked it until it was nothing but a white speck over the distant trees. Such freedom. Had Lawrence watched it fly away, felt the tug of freedom as Green had. What was it the St. Lawrence supervisor had said? That after twenty years in hospital, several hundred electroshocks, and a ton of mind-numbing drugs, Lawrence had very few brain cells left? Had he thought, in his primitive, child-like way, that he could fly free like the birds? Spread his imaginary wings and fly straight up to heaven?

  The sun dipped below the horizon, sapping the warmth from the air and bringing Green back to reality with a jolt. He reached out his hand to steady himself. Shook his head incredulously at his own folly. What was it about this place that unleashed such spiritual ravings? He was an investigator, not a psychic trying to communicate with the dead. This was a crime scene, not a seance.

  Green leaned over the edge of the wall and peered cautiously down at the spot where Lawrence had fallen. The grass all around had been trampled, and blood still stained the stones. He remembered the photo of the body splayed in the grass, and now, looking down from above, he realized something was odd. Why would the head be facing the tower rather than out? If Lawrence had jumped of his own accord, he should have fallen feet first and pitched forward so that his head was facing out. To have landed face down with his head towards the tower, he would have had to twist in mid flight. Green had never known a jumper to do that.

  As he leaned over, the rough surface of the wall scraped his suit. He backed away, brushing mortar dust and lichen from the front of his jacket. At once, another inconsistency struck, him. The back of Lawrence’s jacket had snagged on the inner edge of the wall. But if Lawrence had been preparing to jump, he would probably have stood facing outward to clamber up onto the wall, in which case he’d be more likely to snag the front hem of his jacket rather than the back. If he’d then swung himself over the wall and sat on the edge, perhaps gathering the courage to jump, he’d be more likely to catch the back hem on the outer edge of the wall, not the inner.