Dead Man's Song

Chapter 18

(1)

When Newton parked in the turnaround, Crow was standing on the top step of the porch, a bottle of Yoo-Hoo in one hand, a Phillies ball cap pushed back on his head and a smile on his face. As Newton got out and approached, he saw that Val Guthrie was seated on a porch swing. He recognized her from the stock photos his paper had run after the shooting. Unlike Crow, she was not smiling, and her eyes were even colder and less welcoming than the cop’s had been.

“Welcome aboard,” Crow said and took one step down as he extended his hand. “This is my fiancée, Val Guthrie.”

He nodded to Val. “Good afternoon, Ms. Guthrie. Please accept my condolences. And…thanks for taking some time out to chat with me. I can’t even imagine how tough things must be for you both right now.” He offered his hand to her and her grip was stronger than his by a long way.

“Glad to have you, Mr. Newton,” Val said. “I read your articles. I appreciate the things you said about my father.” Her eyes were a hard, dark blue and though there was obvious sadness in them, they were not weak eyes in any way. Her gaze was level, direct, and unwavering. “I’ve read other pieces about what happened, and some writers have used some pretty unfair descriptions, calling Dad ‘an old man’ and insinuating that he was too old to outrun the bullet that killed him. What do you think about that?”

Newton felt his neck get hot. He was never good around women at the best of times, and Val Guthrie made him immeasurably uncomfortable. A dozen different replies flitted through his head, but he liked the strength he saw in her eyes, and all thoughts of dissembling—or of defending his fellow journalists—melted away. “Quite frankly, Ms. Guthrie, even if your father had been a twenty-year-old Olympic track star he couldn’t have outrun a bullet. No one can. That’s why cowards like Karl Ruger use guns.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw Crow give him a tiny nod of approval. Newton plowed on. “Since the other day I’ve been asking around about your father and the picture I got was that, despite his age, he was one tough son of a bitch, if you don’t mind me being frank. So, if I interpret the facts right, I believe he died to save your life, which qualifies him in my book as a hero. I wish I’d had the chance to know him.”

Val looked up at him for a moment. Her eyes didn’t soften, but she did give him a small smile. “Thank you, Mr. Newton.”

“Please, just call me Newton…or Newt. Everyone does.”

“Val,” she said, nodding. She was a very pretty woman, a few years older than Newton, and with the kind of intensity that had always frightened him. She wore a thin silver chain around her neck on which was a cross—surprisingly delicate for so strong a woman—that hung just above the vee of her blouse. He noticed that her only concession to apparent vulnerability was that she absently touched the cross from time to time, as if drawing comfort from it.

To Crow, she said, “I like this one. He can stay.”

“You want something to drink, Newt?” Crow asked. “Ice tea? Something?”

“If you have another one of those,” he said gesturing with his chin toward Crow’s Yoo-Hoo, “then I’ll have one.”

“Good man.” Crow went into the house and came back out with two cold bottles for them, and a cup of coffee for Val. To Newton he said, “Pull up a pew.” They sat down, shook their bottles, opened them, and exchanged a nod as they took their first sips. “Where do we start?” Crow asked, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Well,” Newton said, removing a small tape recorder from his briefcase, “first I want to know if it’s okay if I tape this.”

Crow nodded. “Sure, but I do have a couple of conditions before we start. I’m willing to tell you the whole story of the Pine Deep Massacre, and everything I know about the Bone Man, but only on two conditions.”

Newton hedged. “What conditions?”

“First,” said Crow, “you don’t print any part of it I tell you not to print.”

“I don’t know if I can agree to that.”

Crow spread his hands. “Have a nice trip back. Watch out for potholes.”

“No! No, I mean, how can I—”

“Newt, listen to me, I’m going to give you a hell of a story. I’m not joking here, and it’s as intense a story as you’re ever likely to write. If I want something kept out of it, then you have to trust that I have a good reason, but you also have to trust that what I will let you write about will be well worth any small concessions. So…?”

The reporter gave it some thought, but in the end his curiosity won out over any objections he might have otherwise raised. “Okay. I agree. What’s the second condition?”

Crow smiled faintly. “That if you don’t believe me, at least do me the courtesy of not laughing in my face.”

“Of course not—”

“Good, ’cause some of what I have to tell you is going to be pretty hard to swallow. I haven’t told this story to too many people—actually I’ve only told it to Val, and she was there for most of it—and I don’t feel like being ridiculed for it.”

From that Newton supposed that Crow had been too drunk to remember telling the story to Toby, but he decided not to mention it. “I can promise you that I won’t laugh or mock or anything. Just tell me, and I’ll listen.”

“Okay,” Crow said, nodding. “I’m taking you on faith, Newt. Don’t make me sorry about that. You can turn your recorder on.” He paused and closed his eyes, collecting scraps of old memories from a closet deep within his mind. He began speaking before he opened his eyes. “If you can believe it, except for Val’s dad being killed, the stuff that happened here these last few days were nothing compared to what happened thirty years ago. I mean, Karl Ruger and his cronies were bad enough, but back then we had someone as close to the devil as anyone I ever hope to meet. And like I told you yesterday it wasn’t the Bone Man…he wasn’t the one the papers nicknamed ‘the Reaper.’ I’d bet my life on that right now, and I can say that because I did stake my life on it back then.”

“Then, who…?”

Crow glanced left and right as if looking to see who was listening and then leaned close and in a hushed voice said, “Ubel Griswold.”

“I know that name…” Newton flipped through the pages of his notebook. “Griswold—yeah, he was the last of the victims, right? A local farmer?”

Crow shook his head. “I figured you’d have that wrong. I mean, yeah, Griswold was a farmer, but he wasn’t one of the victims.” He glanced at Val. “You know, baby, I don’t think I’ve even said that name out loud in…what? Twenty years? Whew!” He turned back to Newton. “It’s not a name one says lightly, no sirree. At least not me. Folks around here openly blame the Bone Man for what happened, but it was Ubel Griswold. He was an evil, evil man.”

“You’re confusing me here, Crow. Who was he?”

“What was he is a better way to put it.” Crow considered. “First let me put things into perspective for you, so let’s jump back thirty-six years ago to when Griswold first moved to Pine Deep, supposedly from Germany, and bought an old stone farmhouse in one of the more remote sections of town, way off of A-32 and nearly impossible to reach except by some obscure back road that’s no longer even there. This was before A-32 was expanded and paved, you understand. Back then it was called the Pinelands Highway, which was a joke because it was just dirt and gravel. When they built A-32 twenty-six years ago, a lot of the smaller roads became officially abandoned since many of them were cut into the state forest. That’s why they built the road in the first place, to keep traffic out of the forest. Anyway, Griswold settled himself down to raise cattle and generally kept to himself. His farm was small but he had a fair-sized herd for the available room. There are, however, no records of him ever selling a single one. Odd, don’t you think?”

Newton shrugged. Even after eight years in Black Marsh, what he knew about cattle farming would barely fill the back of an index card. Other than the fact that they were big, smelly, and went “Moo!” he didn’t know from cattle beyond medium rare at Outback Steakhouse. “Private sales?”

Crow shook his head and continued, “Griswold ran his farm more or less by himself. Sometimes he’d turn a couple of acres over to crops like pumpkins and corn and gourds, and then he’d hire day labor, always hiring drifters as his day labor. Not regular migrant workers, mind you, but hoboes, bums, guys like that. Never any local people.”

“So what? Cheap labor is cheap labor, and, who knows, maybe he felt sorry for them.”

Val said dryly, “I don’t think that was it.”

“No,” Crow agreed, “I think he just liked the fact that these were people no one would ever care about.”

“How do you mean?”

“If they went missing, I mean. No one would ever know if they went missing—no one would care.”

Newton laughed. “What are you saying? That he was doing…what? Feeding them to his cows?”

“I think he was killing them, is what I’m saying.”

“Killing them?” That knocked the smile from Newton’s face.

“It lays out like this. For four years Griswold ran his farm with the drifters acting as day labor, and no one ever noticed a damn thing. Then the fifth year was the Golden Harvest.”

“What’s that?”

“Local farmer’s legend,” Val said. “The Golden Harvest was the year we had the best crop that was ever reaped in these parts. Who knows why, but the crops went absolutely wild. Understand—when you plant, the birds get about half the seed and of the rest only a fraction actually produces a harvestable crop. That’s why farmers sow so many seeds, far in excess of expectations, so that the resulting crop will be enough. Well, that year it seemed like every seed that was sown took root and bore fruit.”

Crow nodded. “And what a crop! Jesus God! Ears of corn so big that they actually made it into textbooks as agricultural oddities. Tomatoes bigger than softballs and sweet as sugar, and apples that would make any teacher cry. Newt, this was like farmer’s heaven.”

“What does it have to do with Griswold?”

“Don’t rush me, son,” Crow said with a crooked grin. “It actually has more to do with the drifters than with Griswold per se. The crop yield was so big that farmers just couldn’t keep up, so they had to fish around for extra hands. A lot of them took on busloads of migrants from the ghettos in Philly and Trenton, and some of the others snagged up anybody who had two hands and needed a buck. A few farmers took on the drifters who usually worked for Griswold. As it chanced, that was one of the years that Griswold was not growing crops in his fields, he was just raising cattle.”

“The cattle he never sold,” said Newton.

Crow nodded. “The cattle he never sold, right. Henry Guthrie took on four or five of the drifters who had done field work before for Griswold and who were scouting around town for some shifts. Oren Morse was one of them. Now Morse—the Bone Man, as I prefer to call him—was a genuine cultural dropout. Young black guy, about twenty-five or-six. A blues-playing ex-hippie who quoted Santayana and Charles Bukowski and John Lennon. My brother Billy and I thought he was coolest thing going. We used to work side by side with him. We had lunch with him, listened to his stories about being on the dharma road like Kerouac. Even at eight I knew he was a good guy. Maybe not a pillar of any community, but he was a decent person—just a dropout from a world that he wasn’t suited for. He’d dodged the draft in 1969 and then just kept on running. This was long before the amnesty thing. He wasn’t running ’cause he was scared but because he actually thought the peace movement meant something and he didn’t want anyone to put a gun in his hand. Does that sound like a killer to you? Anyway, all through that season, through the Golden Harvest, we worked and talked and we learned a lot about dreaming and thinking from him. We all wanted to be just like him, to be that free. Then the year of the Golden Harvest came to an end and the year that followed changed everything.”

“Why? What happened?”

“Well, I suppose when you get a year like the Golden Harvest you can become soft really quickly. Everyone came out on top that year, from the farmers to the merchants to the everyday folk; that year was incredible. We all made money, we all had more than enough to eat, and I guess in some ways we all got complacent. Then the following year we had a different kind of harvest.”

“Nothing like the Golden Harvest?” asked Newton.

Crow snorted. “No sir. What came that next year was a Black Harvest.”

“A…Black Harvest? That sounds ominous. What was it?”

“Figure it out,” Crow said. “We went from one extreme to the other. Where the year before every damn seed was taking root and producing stalks and vines heavy with succulent fruit, the year of the Black Harvest was a year of blight and sickness. It started at the end of June, which is when the first wave of crops are generally harvested, and the crops that grew were thin and sparse, or swollen with disease. You’d break open a big juicy watermelon and the meat inside would be spoiled and black and crawling with maggots. The corn was so harsh and foul that even pigs wouldn’t eat it. Any person dumb enough or unlucky enough to eat the vegetables and fruits harvested that year fell sick, and soon we found that the diseases and decaying vegetation had bred some kind of virus or bacteria, or something like that—I don’t know the biology of it, all I know is that a lot of people died that year. Highest mortality rate in the history of Pine Deep, highest per capita in the state for any one town, at least in this century. It was like a plague, and it swept right through the town, from mid-July until the middle of September, and it chopped down old folks and kids, and left a lot of the adults weak and broken. Forget the farm animals—those that didn’t just drop dead in their tracks had to be slaughtered to try and keep the infection from spreading to Crestville and Black Marsh.”

Newton held up his palm. “Wait a minute…you’re describing what’s happening this year.”

Crow nodded, eyebrows arched significantly. “You should get out and meet the people, Newton. Everyone over thirty-five is talking about this being another Black Harvest year.”

“It can’t be that bad. There hasn’t been a significant increase in deaths.”

“No, not like before, and that’s a plus,” Val said. “Maybe it’s because we have a hospital here now, or maybe the antibiotics and drugs are better now. Who knows? Some older folks and some kids have gotten sick, but we haven’t had a real killer plague this year, thank God.” Crow reached out and gave her thigh a small squeeze.

Newton said, “Did the blight spread to other towns?”

Crow shook his head. “No, and that’s pretty weird, don’t you think? Some folks said that it was because Pine Deep is surrounded by water on all sides, it’s kind of like a little island. They said that the water boundary stopped whatever infection was in the actual soil. Of course that wouldn’t stop an airborne virus, nor would it stop much of anything else with all the traffic that goes back and forth between Pine Deep, Crestville, and Black Marsh, but none of the surrounding towns experienced any increase in sickness or mortality and none of the crops of the other towns was in any way affected.”

“Jeez, that is weird.”

“On the other hand,” Val said, “it’s different from the current blight. This time there are cases of crop disease as far away as Lambertville, Stockton, and Frenchtown in New Jersey, and all through this part of Bucks County. New Hope, Upper Black Eddy, Doylestown, New Britain. Understand, it’s not as bad anywhere else as it is here in Pine Deep…but it’s spreading this time. No doubt about it.”

Newton looked at her, then at Crow. “I have to say, folks, that this is making me feel a little sick myself.”

“Buckle up, Newt, ’cause it gets worse,” Crow said drily. “Folks who got sick back then, but who went to hospitals outside of town, or who went to stay with relatives in other towns, got better quickly and never had any lingering symptoms. Not one sick person who left town to recuperate died as a result of the disease.”

“Oh, come on—”

“It’s a matter of public record,” Val said quietly. “Look it up.”

“Yeah,” Crow agreed. “That was a terrible year. I got sick, too, but not bad. My brother Billy never got sick, so he was okay. A couple of my friends from school died, though.”

Val said, “Eventually the blight and the epidemic ended. Slowly, but it ground to a halt. There were fewer new cases of the sickness, and fewer deaths as the weeks passed and it got closer to October. Of course by then most of the crops had been chopped down and burned, so perhaps that halted the spread of the infection.”

“I know you’re going to think that this is romantic or morbid or something,” Crow said, “but it was as if the souls of the people of Pine Deep were being harvested that year, instead of the crops.” The reporter said nothing to that, nor did Val add anything to it. After a moment, Crow said, “Okay, so that sounded stupid.”

“‘Sounded’?” Val said with a wicked little smile pulling at one corner of her mouth.

Crow motored on. “Obviously I didn’t work at the farm that year, but the bunch of us hung out there all the time. Morse was there sometimes, too, but not to work. My brother Billy said that Morse was working out at Griswold’s farm that season.”

“Griswold’s farm wasn’t hit?”

“Oh, his farm was all but smashed flat. Nearly all of his cattle died in the first few weeks, and the meat must have been spoiled because Morse worked his ass off hauling off dead cattle and trying to keep alive all the new ones Griswold would import, but they all died, too. It must have been some nasty, disgusting work—but it was work. Drifters can’t be all that picky, you know. So the weeks passed and Morse kept at it, and at the same time the town kept going to shit. Finally, by the middle of September the plague and the blight were over, probably because every harvestable crop was already dead. The crop that year was a complete and total loss. Just a year after the Golden Harvest, that year turned out to be a financial disaster. Whole families went down the drain, people lost their homes, their farms, and, as you can imagine when things go really bad really fast, there was a lot of anger and frustration. Even some violence. Fights broke out, people started getting hurt.” He paused and looked up at the ceiling. “My dad was one of the ones who took his frustrations out with his fists.” That statement hung there, and Newton was sharp enough to read into it what was meant.

Into the silence, Val said, “For some reason my family’s farm wasn’t hit by the blight…just like it hasn’t been hit by this current blight. We were actually having a pretty good year, good crops. My dad took on more help than he really needed, hiring as many of the locals as wanted to work here, adults and kids. He hired Billy and Crow to be gofers on the farm, and, I think, to keep me company. Crow and Billy became friends with me and Terry Wolfe, who was my best friend at the time. That whole season we were always together.” She paused. “Terry’s little sister used to tag along with us. Terry and I were ten, Crow was nine, and Billy was twelve. It was fun having my own little ‘gang.’”

“Her dad also hired Oren Morse when there was no more work at Griswold’s.”

Val nodded and sipped her coffee. “Dad had heard him play his guitar a bunch of times the year before, and the two of them had talked quite a bit. Politics mostly, and books. Dad liked him, and maybe felt sorry for him, thought that Morse could have been someone. So, when Griswold cut him loose from the cattle job, Dad hired him. Dad was like that.”

“No one better,” Crow said, almost to himself and he toasted himself on the sentiment and sipped his drink. “As for Morse, we were the ones who gave him his nickname. The Bone Man.”

“You never met him,” she said, leaning forward to make better eye contact, “and probably the only things you’ve heard about him are the rumors and local legends, making him out to be something between Jack the Ripper and the Boogeyman, but that wasn’t who he was. He really was a good man. My dad was almost never wrong about people. He was a very good judge of character, which is one of the reasons he was so good in business.”

“She’s right,” Crow said. “Henry’d look you right in the eye and he’d know right away if you were going to deal straight or if you were a shifty bastard. As I recall,” he added with a smile, “he didn’t much care for me when he met me.”

“He liked you when you were a kid, honey,” Val said. “He just had some issues with you when you were…” She trailed off, realizing that she was talking in front of a reporter.

“It’s okay, baby, you can say it,” Crow said, then he looked at Newton. “I used to be a drunk. Or…I am a drunk, though I haven’t had a drink in years. What they call a sober drunk. I go to meetings. Val and I had kind of drifted apart as friends for a while there and when we met up again I was hitting the sauce pretty hard. That didn’t wash too well with Henry and he told me in no uncertain terms to dry out or buzz off.”

“He didn’t phrase it that way,” Val said.

“The hell he didn’t. You weren’t there, sweetie. Your dad looked me right in the eye and he was about fifteen feet tall and he told me to stay the hell away from his daughter until I had some self-respect.”

“Jeez,” Newton said, grinning.

“I tell you this, Newt,” Crow said, “because I want you to understand Henry Guthrie. If he thought Oren Morse was a bad man he’d have never let him near his farm, let alone near his daughter, and yet we worked side by side with the man, and almost every night Henry’d have us all on the porch—us kids, a few of the regular farm staff, and the Bone Man—and we’d hang out and drink ice tea Val’s mom made, with mint and lemon slices, and we’d listen to the Bone Man tell stories and sing the blues. We knew that man.”

Newton considered this for a moment, and then nodded. “Okay, you sold me. If Henry Guthrie gave him the seal of approval then he’s okay with me.”

Val chuckled. “You kiss up very well.”

“Part of the job,” he said, and they all laughed.

Crow nodded to Newton. “You can leave all that shit about me being a drunk out of the article, okay?”

“Sure,” Newton said a little too quickly, but then he caught the look in Val’s eyes, which were as uncompromising as a fist. Yeah, he thought, Henry Guthrie’s daughter right enough. Screw with her, Newt ol’boy and she’ll rip you a new one. “Sure,” he repeated with emphasis, giving Val a brief nod. She returned the nod and sat back in her chair.

“Okay, so where were we? Oh yeah,” said Crow, “the summer was coming to an end and fall was coming on.”

“And that,” Val said, “was when people started getting killed.”

“The Massacre?”

“Right,” Crow said. “That’s when it started. The first to die was one of the drifters. An old wino who’d been doing day labor with Morse, but who doesn’t show up for work one day near the end of September. The Bone Man and another guy go looking for him after work, thinking maybe he’s sick or something. The guy usually slept in a ragged bedroll under that old covered bridge near the reservoir and, he was there all right, but…well, I never saw it firsthand, but years later, when I worked as a town cop I looked at the case file, read the description, and saw the crime scene photos. The poor old bastard had literally been torn to pieces. Pieces, mind you—his throat was ripped out and his head was found thirty feet from his body, and the body had been partially devoured. No one knew what to make of it. Naturally, starving dogs were blamed. Seemed like a logical choice.”

“Sure.”

“Then it happens again. Same thing—another drifter. Guy never shows up for work, and when they find him he’s in his bedroll, torn to pieces and partly eaten. Two kills on two consecutive nights just rocks the whole town. They formed groups, loaded their guns, and killed damn near every dog in and around Pine Deep.”

“The killings didn’t stop?” Newton prodded.

“Of course not. Wasn’t any damn dog doing it, and the killings kept up, nearly every night. Third vic was another drifter, but the fourth wasn’t any drifter.”

“Who was it?”

Crow’s eyes were as dark and intense as those of a real crow. “The fourth body they found that year, the body they found without its head and with its heart torn out of its chest was…my brother Billy.”

Newton felt as if someone had just punched him in the stomach. “Oh…my God…”

Crow eyes glistened with unshed tears. “I thank God I never saw the body, and I never had the nerve to look at those photos in the file. They had a closed coffin, of course. Cremated him and spread his ashes over the baseball diamond. He had always wanted to play pro ball when he grew up.” Crow wiped at a tear and gave a small laugh. “Man did he love baseball. Bone Man called him Boppin’ Billy.”

“Damn, Crow,” said Newton, “I’m really sorry. I should never have—”

Crow waved it away. “No, it’s okay. I’d actually want the story to be told.”

“Yeah…I can see that. But why? I mean…why now?”

Crow looked at him over the mouth of the bottle, but Val answered the question, her fingers lightly touching her silver cross. “Because he doesn’t think it’s over yet.”

(2)

“You’ll have to sign for these, doctor.”

Weinstock nodded, took the pen from the assistant security supervisor and signed his name on the clipboard.

“Doctor…you do know these are tapes from the interior cameras, not the ones in the hall? When the night guard told me that you wanted the interior cameras left on all night, I thought he was mistaken.”

Weinstock’s face showed no emotion, but in a cool authoritarian voice he said, “Is there a problem, Gary?”

“Uh, no, sir. It’s just a little strange.”

“Is it?” Weinstock said in a way that did not invite any further comment. “Can we assume that as the hospital administrator I have the authority to have a camera running when and where I please?”

The assistant supervisor stiffened. “Sir, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t…”

“Then what were you going to say?”

“Well, it’s just that the security assistant hasn’t had a chance to review those tapes. We don’t know what’s on them, yet.”

“Gary, if there is anything of note on these tapes, I’ll bring it to the attention of your supervisor. Now, any further questions?”

Gary, seated behind his desk, had stiffened so much as to give the appearance of having snapped to attention. Weinstock took the tapes, turned without a further word, and walked away.

Back in his office he locked his door and popped the tape into the deck, sat down in his swivel chair and hit PLAY. For a long while he saw the morgue room, empty and badly lit. He hit FAST-FORWARD and the time code in the lower left speeded up. There was a blur of movement and he stopped, rewound the tape, and played it forward at normal speed. It took him nearly ten seconds to understand what he was seeing. It would take him the rest of his life to fully accept that what he was seeing was real. Numb, staring, immovable except for his thumb on the remote he sat there for over an hour, pressing STOP, REWIND, PLAY. Over and over again as icy tears streamed down his cheeks.

(3)

Newton looked at Val and then swiveled his head toward Crow. “What do you mean about it not being over?”

“I’ll get to that in a sec.” Crow said. “So, with Billy dead, the people in town started to really get up in arms. Drifters getting hacked up they could more or less accept—you’re a drifter, shit happens—but a popular town kid like Billy getting killed, well that was something different. Cops and men from town started scouring the brush, checking the forest, poking in every swamp and hollow around town. I don’t think they had any kind of a clear idea what they were looking for—they were just looking. They needed to find something, and in a way it brought the town together. Instead of fighting each other, they were unified in searching out what had done this thing to Billy.

“Two days later I was in my backyard, just sitting on a swing and thinking about Billy. It was just around sundown, and I wasn’t allowed to go anywhere out of sight of the house, of course, but I couldn’t stand to be inside. I guess if my dad had actually cared about me he’d have had me inside with every door and window locked shut, but he was too busy drinking and he figured if I was in the yard what could happen? Ah well. Anyway, I was sitting there and trying to wrap my head around the idea that Boppin’ Billy was dead. I was still all screwed up by the deaths of my friends, but that was from sickness, and I could half-assed understand sickness leading to death, but to die by violence, that was something totally outside of my experience, and it was hurting me. I felt lost and stupid, and somehow I even felt as if I was to blame. No, don’t ask me how, it was just the sort of stupid thing a confused kid feels. Something about feeling like I was being punished for being a brat by having Billy taken away. Stupid shit.

“So, I just sat there and watched the sun go down, trying to understand the enormity of the fact that Billy was dead and was going to be dead forever, and that I would never, ever see him again. I kept wanting to, you understand. I think I even wished on the first star that came out just to be able to see him one more time. Maybe I was half asleep, or maybe I was so wrapped up in thinking about it that I had sort of hypnotized myself. Either way, just as the sun was dipping down over the treeline I heard something crunch down on a branch behind me. I actually believed it was Billy. Boppin’ Billy come back to be with me, smiling that cocky smile of his. I remember that I was actually smiling when I turned my swing around to face him, grinning the way I always did when Billy came home from school. I swung myself around and I think I even said his name.

“But…it wasn’t Billy, of course. That was stupid. It was—someone else. He grabs me by the front of my shirt and throws me—actually throws me—across the yard. I go flying, screaming, terrified, and crash right into a big azalea bush, land upside down, still screaming, hurt, confused…nothing making sense. I can hear whomever it is running at me, grunting and wheezing with effort. Sounds like a bear with all the noise he’s making. I get only one brief glance at the man’s face, and even then it isn’t a good clear look. I have leaves and stuff in my face and fireworks going off in my head. When he grabs me again I try to hold onto the branches, try to keep from being picked up again. I never made the connection that this might be the same guy who killed Billy, dumb as that sounds. For a minute there I actually thought it was…my father.”

“Your father?”

“Sure. He was always kicking the shit out of me. Sometimes it was as bad as what was happening that night in the yard. Sometimes he’d beat me so bad I’d be out of school for a week, two weeks.”

“Jesus…”

“And you can leave that part out of the article, too.”

“Uh, sure, man. Don’t worry. “

“Good,” Crow said firmly. “Anyway…the guy starts grabbing at me and I’m thrashing around, trying to hold onto the bush, trying to kick him, and this time I get a real good look at his face, which is when I really start screaming my head off. He suddenly lets go, and I fall and whack my head against the trunk of a pine tree. I’m lying there, stars in my eyes, and I hear the sounds of a scuffle and some screams and even something that sounds like a roar. The next thing I know, someone is grabbing at me again, but this time it’s different, gentler. I stop fighting back and let myself be picked up. Once the fireworks in my head settle down I can see that the man holding me is Oren Morse, and the other guy—the real attacker—is running away down the alley.”

“Damn,” Newton said, scribbling furiously in his notebook.

“Then there were lights on in all the houses around, people are coming from everywhere. My father comes hustling out of the house carrying a big son of a bitch of a shotgun. Everyone swarms around me and Morse, and my father literally tears me out of the Bone Man’s hands.”

“Is that when they got the idea he did it?”

“No, not then. Too many people had looked out of their windows and backdoors and saw him fighting with some other guy—something they all conveniently forgot later when the Bone Man got blamed for everything. Right then they saw some other guy hotfoot it out of there and Morse helping me up.”

“Morse chased him off, then?”

“Well, if no one else had showed up, I think both Morse and I would have been killed, but the Bone Man slowed the killer down long enough for the commotion to get the neighborhood up in arms. With all that had been going on in town, everyone was trigger-happy and came running with plenty of artillery. Typical of these things, nobody got a good look at the attacker. At least none of the neighbors, but Morse must have, though, ’cause later he knew where to go looking for the guy. But, I’m getting ahead of the story. I don’t want to tell it out of sequence. Morse was kind of out of it right then. The other guy had smacked him around pretty badly, his nose was bleeding and all.”

“The attacker got away clean?”

With a sigh, Crow sipped his Yoo-Hoo and then said, “The guy ran, all right, but he didn’t give up. He went all the way over to the far side of town, the upscale part of Pine Deep. Mind you, at the time, the town was not as rich as it is now. Back then only Corn Hill was ritzy. Well, this sonovabitch went over to Corn Hill and found another yard with another kid. Actually, two kids. He scaled this big wooden security fence and there was a little girl playing in the yard, right in sight of the kitchen window, and her older brother in his tree house reading Fantastic Four comics by the light of a Coleman lantern. He didn’t waste any time throwing her around—he just pounced on her, tore her throat out, and hacked her body up pretty bad. They said it looked like a bear had mauled her.”

“Good God. What happened to the boy?”

“No one has ever been able to put that together clearly. The popular version of the story has it that the boy jumped out of the tree to try and save his sister, and the killer gave him a couple of pretty bad slashes across the chest and left him dazed and bleeding. By that time their mother was running out of the house with a .22 caliber rifle. She found the boy sitting on the ground holding his sister’s body. He was in a kind of coma, but he was alive. The little girl, of course, was dead.”

“Jesus…that’s horrible. It’s so…sad!”

“Yeah.” Crow wiped his mouth. “The boy was in the hospital for over a month, and when he snapped out of the coma, he couldn’t remember a single thing.”

“Maybe it’s better for him that way,” suggested Newton.

“Maybe. Who’s to say?”

“Did you know those kids? I mean, did you go to school with them or anything?”

Crow looked at him, eyes steady and glittering. He said, “The little girl’s name was Amanda. The boy is Terrance.”

Newton made a note in his notebook. “Last name.”

“Wolfe,” Crow said simply.

Newton’s pen froze halfway through writing the W. He looked up. “Wolfe? Terrance…Terry Wolfe?”

“Yeah.”

“Then the little girl was—”

“Amanda Wolfe,” Crow said. “Mandy, to us.”

“Good God!” Newton chewed his lip for a long minute, then he gave a flustered series of blinks and looked at his notes. “Okay, now, from what I’ve read about the Massacre there were sixteen murders. Mandy Wolfe was number five.”

“Right, but after that the killings stopped. Not completely, mind—just for a while. For twenty-eight days, actually. During that time whole town went absolutely crazy. There were carloads of guys with guns riding around, shooting at anything that moved. I think they managed to bag one mangy German shepherd that had escaped the original dog slaughter, three cows, and a guy getting a blow job from his neighbor’s wife in the hedges behind his house.”

“They kill him?”

“No, but she got so scared she nearly bit his pecker off.”

“Resulting in nineteen stitches,” Val said, “and two divorces. But they never bagged the killer, and by the end of those twenty-eight days, everyone had figured that the killer had skipped out and was terrorizing the citizenry of some other town. He’d had a couple of near misses that last night. Seems reasonable that he’d take off before his luck completely ran out, but on the twenty-eighth day the killings began again. Just like the first ones. People were attacked and savagely murdered. One of them was a cop.”

Crow nodded. “The bastard hit him so fast that he never had the chance to draw his gun. Maybe he knew him, let him get close. Hard to say. Next victim was the cousin of a local farmer. His name was Roger Guthrie.”

“Guthrie!” Newton looked sharply at Val, who nodded.

“He was my second cousin. Staying with us while on leave from the Air Force. Rog was strolling through the cornfields out behind the house, smoking a cigar and just relaxing. We all heard him scream and when Dad and his brother, Uncle George, came running up with rifles, Roger was dead.”

“That’s incredible! Two murders in the same family, thirty years apart.”

“In the same field, too,” observed Crow hoarsely, “almost the same spot where Henry was gunned down.”

That fact seemed nailed to the air in front of Newton and he sat there, staring for a while. Then he shook his head and his eyes refocused, and he rifled through his notebook. “How many deaths is that?”

“Actually Rog was the sixteenth. I skipped some of the others. You can look up the names, but we didn’t know any of them. Just names and pictures in the newspapers. Roger, though, he was the last one killed during the massacre.”

“But,” Val said significantly, “there were two more killings.”

Crow nodded. “Oren Morse…and Ubel Griswold. And”—he held up a finger—“this is where I go into the area of conjecture. What I think happened was this—Oren Morse tracked Griswold down, chased him into the woods, and murdered him somewhere out beyond the Guthrie Farm, somewhere in or around Dark Hollow.”

“So…what? He thought Griswold was the killer because he’d seen him when he attacked you in your yard?”

“Sure,” Crow said, setting his bottle down. “That has to be it. I mean, I saw Griswold’s face, too, but since I’d only seen him once before in town I didn’t recognize him at first. It wasn’t until things had settled down that night and I was about to go to bed that I realized that I had seen my attacker’s face before. Morse had worked for him, of course, and he knew him very well.”

“Didn’t he make a police report?”

Val said, “My dad told me some years later that Morse had told him that he’d tried to make a police report and the officer at the desk had laughed him out of the office. Nobody believed him.”

“Did your father?”

“I don’t know, but I think so. I asked him a few times, but he never really answered me. He’d just spread his hands and say something like ‘World’s a funny place, Val…who knows what people will do,’ which is no answer at all.”

“Even after his nephew was killed?”

“I think Val’s dad was planning to go after Griswold himself,” Crow said. “He never said as much, and I don’t have anything but a gut feeling about it, but that’s what I believe.”

Val sipped her coffee, said nothing.

“So,” Newton said in a summing-up tone of voice, “the Bone Man sees and recognizes the killer as the guy he used to work for, is rebuffed by the local cops when he tried to make a police report, and probably got a noncommittal answer from your dad, Val, when he shared his suspicions with him. Okay, so then what? He goes out as some kind of vigilante? I’m not feeling it. A guy who ran from the draft because he didn’t want to carry a gun? That’s a bit of a stretch, don’t you think? I mean, do people change their character just like that?”

“Some people do. Sometimes an event can change a person’s entire nature and personality,” Val said, sharing a significant look with Crow. Newton had the impression, though, that she was referring to something else as well, but he let it go.

He said, “Crow, didn’t you tell your father that you’d seen Griswold’s face, and that you could identify him?”

Crow’s face darkened a little. “Sure, I told my father. I told him everything I saw, and once I remembered whose face it was I’d seen I told him that, too. He beat the shit out of me for lying. Laid into me so hard I was sick for three days. People just assumed I was shaken up by the attack, but it was because of my father, and he told me to keep my mouth shut, to never say anything about it to anyone. Ever.”

“Why? I would have thought he’d have wanted some kind of payback for what happened to his sons.”

“The matter is a little more complex than that. You see, if I’d named just about anyone else in town as the guy who’d attacked me, then my dad would have rounded up some of his redneck cronies and gone out and killed the guy. No question. But when it came to Griswold all bets were off because dear old dad all but worshipped Griswold. There were a handful of guys who used to hang out at Griswold’s place. Young turks, mostly—high school age all the way to early thirties. My dad would have been the oldest, probably, at thirty-two. Youngest would have been Vic Wingate who works at Shanahan’s. Also around the same age you have Stosh Pulaski, Phil Teague, and then a little bit older was Jim Polk, who’s a local cop now, and our esteemed chief of police, Gus Bernhardt,” Crow said, “who was ten years younger than my dad but already a cop, and maybe one or two others that I didn’t know at the time. All of them were either closet-Klansmen or something like it. Don’t forget, Newt, that we have more KKK members here in Pennsylvania than in any other state.”

“I’d heard. Something to be proud of.”

“You Jewish, by the way?” Crow asked.

“Only my mother’s side, which I guess makes it official.”

“So you probably have the same opinion of these boneheads as I do. So, then we have Griswold who was very probably of age to have been a soldier in World War Two—and who is German—and you have an interesting little clubhouse out in the woods where these redneck mouth-breathers can drink and raise whatever brand of hell they thought was fun. No way any of them would turn on Griswold, even if they believe he was guilty, which most of them probably did not.”

Newton was shaking his head. “This must have traumatized you.”

Val nodded and reached out to touch Crow’s shoulder. “It did.”

“More than I can express,” Crow agreed. “Every part of that autumn traumatized me, and it took me a long time to get over it. It’s one of several reasons why I had such a long love affair with the bottle. When you drink, you always have something to blame for your nightmares. And the booze hides them.”

“But you don’t drink anymore,” Newton said, “so what about the nightmares?”

Crow glanced at Val again, and then shrugged. “They’re back, and I have to face them without the support of my old friends Jim Beam and Jack Daniels. That’s one of the reasons I’m being so candid with you, Newt. I guess it’s a kind of therapy for me. What’s the word? Cathartic?” He shrugged again. “I’m doing it to myself, and, I guess, for myself, I want to get it all out. Now, where were we? Oh, yeah. I had come out to the farm here for the memorial service for Roger Guthrie. Afterward I talked to Morse for a bit, and I told him that I thought the man who had attacked me was my dad’s friend, Mr. Griswold, but the Bone Man told me to just forget I saw anything. He told me to make sure I stayed indoors at night, and made me promise to tell Val the same. Then he smiled, gave me a kind of pat on the head, and took off.” Crow paused. “I never saw him again. Well…not alive anyway.”

“What happened?”

“I don’t know the details, you understand, because I wasn’t there, but from what I’ve been able to figure out is that the Bone Man must have gone and confronted Griswold. They must have fought, and I think the Bone Man killed him. How he managed it, I don’t know. Morse really was just a skinny bag of bones, and Griswold was this big tough son of a bitch, but Morse must have done it. Killed him and buried him God only knows where. No trace was ever found of Griswold’s body. Not a single trace.”

“What about the Bone Man? What happened to him?”

“They killed him,” Val said simply, and when Newton looked at her she spread her hands in a gesture of disgust. “Beat him to death and then tied him to the scarecrow post that marks the boundary line between my property and the section of state forest over by Dark Hollow Road. Which is another tie-in to the present…events. That was the same spot where those two poor officers were killed.”

Newton licked his lips. “I’m glad you’re telling me this while it’s bright daylight.”

Val grunted, then picked up the thread of the story. “Crow and I were the ones who found him next morning. I screamed so loud my dad heard me all the way from the barn and he came pelting out with a pitchfork in his hands and ten of the field hands at his heels. I’ve never seen anyone look so scared and so furious!”

“He thought someone was attacking you,” Newton said, and she nodded. “So…if the Bone Man really did kill Griswold, then who killed him? You think it was the crowd that hung out on Griswold’s property?”

“Who else could it have been? I mean, what else would make sense?”

“Maybe Griswold killed him. Killed him, strung him up, and then took off for parts unknown.”

“That’s one of the popular theories,” Crow said. “Though I’ve heard some talk that the town fathers did him in as a way of protecting the community, which paints them as heroes and the Bone Man as the villain.”

“Which you think is horseshit?” Newton asked.

“Yep. I think that bunch of redneck assholes lynched him, either on Griswold’s orders or as a revenge killing after their friend Griswold had been killed.”

Newton sipped his Yoo-Hoo; Val sipped the last of her coffee. Crow blew across the neck of his bottle, making a mournful wail.

“Would you…um…know the names of any of these guys? Not just the ones who hung around Griswold’s but the ones who may actually have had a hand in murdering Morse?”

Crow reached over and punched the OFF button on the tape recorder. “You didn’t hear me say this, and if you print it I’ll call you a liar. Are we clear?”

“We’re clear.”

“Okay. Gus Bernhardt let something spill once, years ago, back during that short—and I mean very short—period where he and I were kind of chummy. My first days on the job as a cop. We were both off duty and had been drinking and he let it slip that he was there when the Bone Man was killed, and then he clammed right up. Never said another word again but it was enough. No way on earth are you going to get that into print without poking a stick in the beehive.”

“I guess not. Well, can you tell me—off the record—who else was there?”

“I never did put names to all of them, but from what I’ve been able to pick up here and there over the years, I can say for sure that Jim Polk was one of them. He and Gus were always thick as thieves. Maybe my dad, too. And Vic Wingate, and he is one mean bastard. If I had to pick someone as the ringleader at that lynching, it’d be Vic.”

“He was just a teenager, Crow,” Val said. “Just a kid.”

“That bastard was never a kid,” Crow snapped, his voice suddenly bitter and harsh. “He was born old, mean, and twisted. He was over my house enough when my dad was still alive, and from my earliest memory Vic was always very controlled, very focused, and as evil as the day is long.”

“Evil is a pretty strong word, Crow,” Newton said, but Crow only shrugged. “Okay, I won’t print the names of the men you suspect. Can I turn my recorder back on?” Crow nodded and Newton hit the button. “So, what happened to Morse’s body? Where is he buried?”

“In your hometown actually, Newt—Black Marsh. The people in Pine Deep nearly threw a fit when they learned that Morse’s body was going to be buried in our local cemetery. There were threats and some of them were nasty, so Henry somehow managed to have the body shipped to Black Marsh and had it buried there. He put up a stone and even bought a suit for Morse to be buried in.”

“So it was all swept under the carpet?”

“Sure. It wasn’t long after that that the town started building up, going upscale. The Massacre was pushed back out of sight and no one really ever talks about it. We have too many fun ghost stories to keep us in business, no real-life tragedies need apply.” He gave an ironic laugh. “In all the official reports Griswold was counted as murder victim number seventeen. Problem was that Griswold was local money who left no heirs, no will, no papers of any kind, so it was a bitch of a legal tangle to decide what to do with his property. It’s still there. Fields and gardens all gone back to forestland now, I expect, but the big old stone farmhouse would still there, back past Dark Hollow. I think the property reverted back to the state, or something like that. I don’t know how the law works on something like that. I would imagine the place is overgrown, and the local folklore insists the place is haunted.”

“Sounds appropriately spooky. Ever go there?”

“No!” Crow said abruptly, startling Newton, but the look of alarm that had appeared on Crow’s face passed quickly. He tried a dismissive laugh, but it sounded flat. “Uh…no, man, I don’t think I would ever go there.”

“Why not? Surely you aren’t scared of ghosts! Not you, of all people.”

“Ghosts? No…no, I don’t think I’m afraid of any ghosts.”

“Then what?”

“It’s just…ah, man, it’s really hard to say without sounding like I’m off my nut.”

“Too late for that, sweetie,” Val said softly. Crow gave her leg a little pinch and she slapped his hand.

“Why…what is it you’re afraid of?”

Crow looked at him strangely. “Why, him, of course.”

“Who?”

“Griswold.”

“I thought you said the man was dead.”

Crow shook his head vigorously. “You see, that’s just it. He wasn’t.”

“Wasn’t—what? Wasn’t killed.”

“No, wasn’t a man,” Crow said. “I don’t think Ubel Griswold was a man.” Before Newton could reply, Crow explained. “You see, when I looked into his face back then, even though it was just a brief look, and even though I could still recognize him somehow as Griswold, the face I saw wasn’t a human face. So, I don’t think he was a man.” His eyes were intense, haunted. “I think Ubel Griswold was a monster.”

(4)

In the silent wormy darkness, he waits; beneath tons of muddy dirt, he waits. He is not lost in the utter blackness of his forgotten grave in Dark Hollow; he is not dwarfed by the immensity of it, but the lightless vastness of it. When he trembles and the ripples of each shudder rolls out through the roots of the mountain, he is not trembling with fear, or loneliness, or despair. He is shuddering with a darkly sensual delight that undulates outward and upward toward the town, throughout the farms, into wells and beneath cultivated fields until it laps against the rushing waters of the canals and rivers that ring all of Pine Deep. Beneath those millions of pounds of bubbling muck he is the poison in the earth, the author of blight and sickness, the soulless heart of corruption. As each new tourist car rumbles over the bridges and rolls along the black arm of A-32, as hotels fill and fill, as everyone in town turns blindly away from manhunt toward holiday, as hearts quicken with excitement at the coming of Halloween, he—down deep in his grave—laughs with a ravenous and expectant delight.