A Quiet Belief in Angels (11 page)

“We make an oath,” I said “We make an oath to protect the little girls—”

“Elena,” Hans Kruger said.

Michael Duggan looked up. “And Sheralyn Williams . . . and Mary.”

“And my sister,” Ronald Duggan added.

“Your sister?” Daniel said. “Your sister’s nineteen. She rooms in a three-decker and works in the post office in Race Pond.”

“We watch over all of them,” I said. “We the Guardians hereby promise to watch over all of them, and we promise to keep our eyes and ears open at all times, and we promise to stay up late and watch the roads and fields and—”

“And meet every night right here,” Hans said. “And then we go out and patrol the town and make sure that nothing happens—”

“What are you talking about?” I said. “What the hell’s gotten into you? These girls weren’t taken from their beds. They were taken in broad daylight, taken from right under our noses and killed where anybody could have seen them.”

“Which means that it must have been someone they knew, right?” Ronald said. “Otherwise they would have run away. They all know well enough to stay away from strangers.”

There was a cool silence. Everyone looked at everyone else in turn. I felt like a ghost had walked right through me.

“No one’s going anywhere alone,” I said. “And we’re making a promise to keep our eyes and ears open, and if we see anything suspicious we tell Sheriff Dearing, okay?”

“That’s what we’re going to do,” Maurice said.

“I agree,” Daniel said.

“We’re done then. The Guardians have been founded. No one speaks of this,” I said. “If this is someone we know then we don’t want everyone blabbing about it. We don’t want to give this . . . this boogeyman any chance to find out we’re watching for him.”

Minutes later I walked away, the newspaper clippings folded and stuffed into my pants pocket. My hand was sore, and before I went into the house I washed it in the rain barrel at the end of the yard.

I felt like a child. Perhaps for the first time I really felt like we were up against something that we could never hope to understand. I was frightened. We all were. Whatever was out there was an awful lot more terrifying than some war in a different country. But there was something else, something small but nevertheless significant. Took a while to get my finger on it, but when I did I looked underneath and found it.

It was the first time I’d ever felt part of something. That was all it was, but it seemed important and special. The first time I’d ever really belonged.

Three days later we met after school and agreed on the location of our first meeting.

“End of Gunther Kruger’s field,” I said. “The furthest one from the road toward the bend in the river.”

“I don’t know where that is,” Daniel McRae said, and for a moment I wondered whether it was simply fear that prompted such a statement. I got the impression he didn’t want to come, that he’d made an oath to do everything he could and now felt afraid.

“You know where the road from your house meets the road to school?” Hans Kruger said.

Daniel nodded; there was no way he could deny where that was.

“I’ll meet you there,” Hans said. “Meet you there and I’ll show you the way.”

Daniel’s eyes flashed nervously. He glanced at me. I smiled reassuringly. He did not smile back.

After school we went our separate ways, each of us to our own homes for dinner. My mother had plans to be away most of the evening. She asked what I would be doing.

“Reading some,” I said. “I have some work to do as well.”

“You get hungry there’s milk and corned beef in the cold box.”

She left a little after seven. I waited until eight, nervous in the base of my gut, and then I put on a dark jacket, took a box of matches from the stove, and from beneath my bed I retrieved a four-inch knife with a leather sheath that my father had given to me a year or so before he died.

“You can’t be giving him that,” my mother had said.

“Lord’s sake, Mary, he’s a grown boy. Anyway, the thing’s as sharp as a lettuce leaf. Maybe if he’s lucky he could crease someone to death with it.”

They shared words for a minute more. I had to give the knife back. Later my father took me aside, said he’d hidden it beneath my bed, that I shouldn’t say a word. Our secret.

I tucked the sheath into the waistband of my pants, tugged my shirt down over it. I looked once more at the kitchen, and then I left by the back door and crossed the yard toward the fields.

By the time I reached the end of the road I was joined by Hans and Daniel. They had walked the long way round. We said nothing, took forthright and confident steps as if we were trying to convince ourselves that we knew what we were doing.

By the time we reached the end of the Krugers’ field everyone was there save Michael Wiltsey. No one said a word. We merely nodded at one another, tried to smile, each of us waiting for someone else to say something of meaning. Ten minutes went by. Maurice Fricker suggested we go look for Michael, but I told them to stay put, that he’d be along soon enough.

By the time he arrived it was gone nine. Ronnie Duggan had brought his father’s pocket watch and a lantern. He suggested we light it. I said that lighting a lantern would be nothing better than an advertisement of who we were and what we were doing. Regardless, he insisted on carrying it with him.

“So where are we going then?” he asked.

“We walk around the edge of this field and start down toward the church,” I said. “Back of the church we turn toward the school, but before we reach the road we cut across behind my house and head toward the Sheriff’s Office—”

“The Sheriff’s Office?” Michael Wiltsey asked.

“We’re not going
to
the Sheriff’s Office,” I said, “just toward it, just as far as the bend in the road, and then we’re heading back this way.”

“Hell, Joseph, that’s gotta be the better part of two or three miles,” Daniel protested. “That’s most of the way round Augusta Falls . . .”

“Isn’t that the point?” Hans asked. “Isn’t that the point . . . to try and search as much of the town as we can?”

No one said a word, not until Maurice Fricker stepped forward, eyes wide, skin dead-white, and said, “We made an oath. We made a promise we were gonna do this. So let’s do it, huh? Or is any of you chickenin’ out?”

No one chickened out. I started walking. Hans right beside me and the others following in silence.

Less than an hour. The air was chill, the sky a deep midnight blue that made our faces and hands glow almost white. I could see how frightened Daniel McRae was, starting at every sound—the slightest rustle from the hedgerow at the side of the road, the wings of some bird launching itself from a tree. At one point I sensed his fear, and I wondered whether he believed that the killer would find him by his smell, would recognize him as a McRae. Would come to finish the work he’d started with his sister. Wanted to tell him not to worry, that the killer was only after little girls, but I was insufficiently convinced of this to make it sound genuine. I practised the words in my head but they did not work. I said nothing. I watched Daniel, and when we reached the turn in the road and started back the way we’d come I held his gaze for a moment. I knew he wanted to leave. I knew he wanted to run like the Devil all the way home, to bolt the door, to hide in his room, to bury himself beneath the bedcovers and make believe that none of this had ever happened. But he could not ask. He could not break his oath, so I made it easy for him.

“Daniel,” I said.

Daniel seemed to jump inside his skin.

“I need you to go back to your house.”

His eyes widened.

“What’s going on?” Hans Kruger asked.

The others gathered around us. We’d been stumbling about in the dark for more than an hour. We had seen nothing, believed now that there was nothing to see, and perhaps all of them were hoping that some sort of reprieve had been granted, that they were going to be sent home.

“I need Daniel to go back to his house,” I said.

“Why?” Maurice Fricker asked. “Why should he be allowed to go home?”

I looked at Maurice, and then each of them in turn. “Daniel’s the only one who’s lost a sister,” I said. “I’m concerned that the man who murdered his sister might be watching the rest of the family. I need Daniel to go and make sure they’re okay.”

It was a foolish and shallow reason. All of them knew that, but no one dared challenge Daniel McRae, because he
had
lost his sister, he had been the only one to lose a family member, and I knew they would give him some sort of leeway because of that.

Daniel’s eyes were wider than ever. He looked as if he was holding his breath.

“Yes,” Hans Kruger said. “He should go.”

I looked at Hans. I could tell from the way he returned my gaze that he understood what I was doing.

“Go,” Hans said. “Run quickly, and on the way you can look around my house and make sure there is no one after my sister.”

Daniel moved—suddenly, unexpectedly. He tried to smile at me, tried to say something, but it seemed that every muscle in his body was geared for running and nothing besides. He took off—Red Grange on a broken-field—and we stood there watching as he vanished toward the end of the road and finally disappeared.

A handful of minutes later we heard it.

The sound came from out amongst the trees to my right. Hans heard it too, Maurice Fricker, Michael Wiltsey also. We stood breathless and silent, and then—almost like an afterthought—I caught a flicker of something within the trees.

My heart stopped dead. My whole body stopped a second later.

I wondered if I’d imagined something, if the strength of my fear had projected something into the darkness, something that existed solely in my imagination.

“You see that?” someone hissed, their voice a rush of desperate sound.

I wondered how many frightened children it took to create a ghost.

The light again, this time for sure. I took a deep breath. I felt my eyes widen. A feeling of abject terror worked its way out from the base of my gut and trembled through my entire body.

I heard Ronnie Duggan’s voice then, nothing more than a petrified whisper.

“Jesus Christ almighty . . . it’s him . . .”

I backed up. Hans was beside me. I turned and started toward the low wall that bordered the edge of the field. I felt for the handle of the knife in my waistband, gripped it firmly, wondered whether I would have any chance at all to inflict damage on this thing if it came for us.

Ronnie dropped the lantern. I heard the glass break. It sounded extraordinarily loud. “Oh shit,” I heard him say, and I knew it was not because he’d broken his father’s lamp, but because now we had made it undeniably obvious where we were.

“Behind the wall,” Hans whispered, his voice like a hiss of steam escaping from a tightly lidded pan.

Five of us, falling over our own feet, each of us trying desperately to reach the wall.

I looked back, and where we had heard something—out amongst the trees—I saw a sudden flicker of light. My heart thumped violently in my chest, and even as we reached the rough stone wall I had wrenched the blunt knife from its sheath. I crouched there with my thudding heart, a film of sweat varnishing my entire body. All I could hear was the sound of five children trying their damnedest not to breathe.

I tried to pretend the killer had not seen us, that he would pause for a moment, glance along the road, see nothing, turn and walk back the way he’d come.

In less than a minute I knew this was not the case. I saw the beam of light bounce along the trees and come to rest on the road no more than fifty feet from where we hunkered down against the wall.

I began to pray, and then I knew there was no point. All of them had prayed. Every single one of them had prayed, if not for themselves then for one another. Miss Webber had had us pray for Alice Ruth Van Horne, for Laverna Stowell. She had us pray to God that He would see fit to prevent this killer from taking any more children. And what good had it done? It had accomplished nothing. Instead I gripped the knife. I turned and looked at Hans, and I could see in his wide, white-staring eyes, that he was as scared as me.

Heard the sound of footfalls. The glow of the torch illuminated the road no more than thirty feet from where we hid. Down behind the wall, five kids, frightened as hell, and a killer on the road, torch in hand and eyes waiting to catch sight of any one of us . . . perhaps could smell us, perhaps was fast enough to outrun us, strong enough to hold all of us, both arms stretched wide, and crush us wholesale.

Ronnie Duggan let out a cry. A tiny, whimpering, terrified cry, but it was enough.

The torchlight was still. The footfalls stopped.

Could hear his breathing, more like rasping, like something huge with blood bubbling in his chest . . .

Could smell the rank and poisoned haunt of his breath, the smell of leather, of a rusted metal cleaver . . . could hear his thoughts, sense what he wanted, see myself strung upside down from a tree and flayed alive, stripped of every inch of my skin . . . I would take hours to die, and every second would be a living Hell . . .

When he spoke . . . when those first words were uttered by the killer on the road, Michael Wiltsey screamed loud enough to be heard in Camden County.

Remember the Guardians.

A welcome memory, like a cool silence after endless noise.

Remember their faces. Ronnie Duggan with bangs that his ma never saw fit to trim. Michael Wiltsey, the King of Fidget. Maurice Fricker, spit of his dad, and how he could cross his eyes and then send them sideways like he was looking left and right both at the same time. Scared kids we were, each and every one of us. And then there was Hans. Remember Hans for the first time in as long as remembering can get. Seems like I pushed him out of my mind, because thinking of the Krugers was altogether too painful. Too painful by half. The night we were caught by Sheriff Dearing, the way we believed we’d been cornered by the killer. The trace of his torch as it bounced along the edge of the wall where we’d crouched, each of us white with terror, dry-sweating, teeth chattering. Skin raised like chicken flesh, and nerves tighter than tourniquets for bleeding wounds. Me holding onto my blunt knife as if it would have served some purpose.