Black Creek Crossing

Chapter 47

ATHER MIKE MULRONEY HAD A SENSE THAT SOMEthing was wrong from the moment he awoke the next morning. At first he thought he’d slept late, but both the faintly glowing hands of the clock on his bedstand and the darkness of the room told him that was not so.

It was five o’clock, the time at which he always awoke.

Nor did he feel in any way ill.

Then what was it? Rising from his narrow cot and following the routine of years, he used the small prie-dieu in his bedroom to offer his first prayers of the day. Then, still before the sun had risen, he showered, dressed, and prepared his breakfast of orange juice, two fried eggs, a single slice of wheat toast, and a demitasse of the kind of rich bitter coffee he’d fallen in love with the year he’d spent in Rome, before being ordained into the priesthood by His Holiness himself.

And the feeling that something was wrong stayed with him.

After cleaning up what little mess his breakfast had caused in the kitchen, he moved through the rectory, seeing nothing amiss, but with his feeling of unease growing stronger. Finally, as the blackness outside began to give way to the first faint gray of the coming sunrise, he went to his desk to begin organizing the day. Not that there was much to organize: Tuesday was the closest thing to a day off Father Mulroney had, and this Tuesday nothing at all was on his schedule.

So why was he certain that something was amiss?

His eyes fell on the old book recounting the legends of Roundtree’s past — if they were legends at all — and he remembered the storm that had struck yesterday, exploding out of nowhere to batter the town for nearly three hours, and vanishing as quickly as it had come.

Three hours during which Angel Sullivan had not been in either of the places people had expected her to be.

Her mother had expected to find her at school, where she should have been all day.

Father Mulroney, though, had not expected her to be in school — indeed, he would have been very surprised to find her there. However, he’d been very surprised when she hadn’t been at home either. In fact, one of the reasons he’d insisted on accompanying Myra Sullivan back to her house in the afternoon was his certainty that Angel was there, and he was curious to see what she might be doing. Yet the house had been empty, and finally he brought Myra back to the rectory with him, where she’d worked until after sunset, and refused his offer to take her home.

He let her go — after all, the storm had passed.

Now, picking up the book, he locked it back into its usual desk drawer and returned the key to its place in a small box on the mantel. As he turned away from the mantel he glanced out the window behind his desk. The sun had finally risen above the horizon, and across the street, silhouetted against the morning sun, stood the ancient oak tree.

It was a sight Father Mulroney had witnessed thousands of times before, but one he never tired of. And this morning it was almost perfect. The sun was directly behind the tree, which stood in stark contrast to the pale blue of the cloudless sky, its limbs casting black fingers across the brilliance of the morning, which reached all the way to the rectory.

But this morning it wasn’t only the tree that caught the priest’s attention, for there were two other shapes etched starkly against the pale canvas of the morning sky.

Two shapes that Father Mulroney recognized immediately.

Two shapes that told him exactly what had felt so wrong this morning.

Picking up the telephone, he dialed a number, spoke rapidly for a few seconds, and then left the rectory, hurrying across the street to the cemetery.

The sound of sirens was already wailing through the town by the time Father Mulroney was close enough to the ancient oak to see the faces of Angel Sullivan and Seth Baker.

Their jaws had gone slack and their eyes were open.

Father Mulroney crossed himself and began to pray, but even as he prayed, he couldn’t take his eyes from the terrible visages of the two children who had hanged themselves from the tree in the darkness of the night…