Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) (42 page)

The twenty-one boys who’d assembled wore winter clothing, coats and hats and gloves, and each boy had a suitcase. Each suitcase contained a small wooden box holding the cremated remains of a small animal. Mixed in with the ashes, something else.

The boys spoke quietly to each other, waiting. At the appointed time they were told by the porter that the vans to take them to the Westchester County Airport in White Plains had arrived. Dr. John Adams Wharton and Dr. Adolf Ghieri stood at the door as the boys filed out, each boy shaking the hand of the headmaster and the school psychologist. No words were spoken, no wishes for happy holidays or merry Christmases. The semester
was over. The other boys on campus had already departed for home and the six-week-long winter break between semesters.

In the distance, work had begun on the new science center, bulldozers and caterpillars moving earth and digging holes.

Dr. Ghieri smiled. At the very same time, a motorcycle chase and a battle between good and evil were taking place. He’d sent the demon to the house where the athlete and the girl and the others had taken refuge to inflict as much damage as possible, but mainly to create a diversion. The ploy had worked. The boys were safely on their way.

Shortly after the scene in Tommy Gunderson’s courtyard ended, a lone unmarked police car pulled up to the gates and Detective Phillip Casey asked over the intercom if Tommy was home. Tommy recognized Casey’s voice and told the detective to drive on through, then pressed the button to open the gates.

The detective parked on the cobblestones and got out of the car, walking with a stiffness that made him seem older than he was. Tommy and Dani greeted him on the back steps.

“Are you all right?” Tommy said.

“My knees don’t like the cold,” Casey said. “My nephew ain’t crazy about it either.”

“Hello, Detective,” Dani said.

“Dr. Harris. They told me I might find you here.”

Dani and Tommy looked at each other.

“I didn’t mean that to come out the way it sounded.”

“My house is being fumigated, so Tommy told me I could stay in his guestroom for a few days,” Dani explained. She hated lying, but at the moment she couldn’t think of any way to explain to Casey what was really going on.

She glanced over her shoulder to where Quinn, Cassandra, and Ruth were clearly visible through the kitchen windows. Villanegre had recovered enough to walk under his own power to a bed in a downstairs guestroom. Dani hadn’t had a chance to call an ambulance, but he seemed to be stable and not as seriously injured as they’d first thought.

“Their houses being fumigated too?” Casey asked. “Look, this is none of my business. All I ask is that if you have a Super Bowl party, you invite me, because my wife says we can’t get a flat-screen TV until the old TV breaks.”

“Would you like to come in for coffee?” Tommy said. He saw Casey eyeing the barbecue pit where the propane explosion had singed the grape arbor. The expression on Casey’s face grew even more puzzled.

“I think I’ve had enough caffeine for the day,” Casey said. “Looks like maybe you have too. Is there someplace we can talk? The three of us?”

Tommy led him to the greenhouse. The air outside was cold and dry, but the temperature inside the greenhouse was over eighty, the air humid and fragrant with the aromas of hothouse tomatoes and marigolds. There were benches in the center of the greenhouse, but when Tommy suggested they sit, Casey declined.

“I’ve just got a minute,” he said. “Dani, I looked into Jerome Leonard, last seen in Portland, Maine, like you asked. I’m afraid it’s not good.”

“What happened?” she asked.

“That’s why I wanted to talk to you in private,” Casey said. “You remember the condition of the body when they found Abbie Gardener? How she seemed to have been crushed, like those submarines that dive too deep and implode? That was how they found Jerry Leonard. Same COD: not yet determined. Same sort of crime scene, except this time, the guy was inside a locked room.”

“When was this?” Dani asked.

“About six months ago,” Casey said. “Jerry Leonard was Julie’s father. That makes the whole family either killed or dead under suspicious circumstances. Any thoughts?”

The way Casey eyed her, Dani understood that he suspected she knew more than she was saying.

“What do the Portland police say?”

“They don’t say much,” Casey said. “He was living alone in a crummy apartment by the waterfront. Using a fake name. They just called it cause of death unknown and closed the case.”

“Huh,” Dani said.

“Huh?”

“You’re thinking someone might be going after the whole family?” Tommy asked.

“It certainly looks that way,” Casey said. He looked at each of them again before realizing they weren’t going to tell him anything.

“Okay, look,” Casey said. “I like you both. I don’t know what’s going on here, but right now, since there apparently aren’t any other members of the Leonard family we need to worry about, I’m going to put this aside and move on. I don’t know you very well, Tommy, but you seem like a straightup guy, so if you have your reasons not to talk to me right now, I’m going to respect that. But I want you to know I’m on your side and I can work with you on this if you want my help. Meanwhile, I got your backs. Okay?”

“Okay,” Dani said.

“And I meant what I said about the Super Bowl party,” he told Tommy, opening the door to his car. “My brother-in-law Vinnie runs a pasta tailgate at Foxborough where guys pay $20 a head for all they can eat, and I know all his recipes.”

“We’ll definitely invite you if we have a Super Bowl party,” Tommy said.

After he left, Tommy turned to Dani. “How much do you think he really knows?”

“He’s like an iceberg,” Dani said. “What he lets you know he knows is just the tip. He’s really smart.”

“He’d be good to have on the team,” Tommy said.

“We might need to include him, eventually,” Dani said. “You realize
that the more people we bring on board, the more we’re going to look like a bunch of kooks. Radical religious extremists, predicting the end times.” “It crossed my mind,” Tommy said. “We should be careful.”

“You can say that again.”

“We should be careful.”

39.

The next two days were quiet. They regrouped and discussed how to proceed. The immediate danger had passed, but the greater danger had not. Villanegre was taken to North Westchester Hospital, where he was treated for a punctured lung, broken ribs, and a bruised kidney. He smiled through the pain and tried to dismiss his condition, adding that his belief in the eternal life palliated any concerns as to his immediate future. “I’ll be all right,” he told Dani. “But I won’t mind a few days in a hospital. Stay calm and carry on, as they say.”

Ruth went back to her house to collect the small arsenal she’d inherited from the policeman. Cassandra called her agent and told him she was entering rehab, and that she couldn’t tell him where she was because she didn’t want the paparazzi to find her, hanging up before he could protest. Quinn spent the time developing a pair of simple colorimetric protein assays using dyes that would bind with the compounds they’d found in the pill Dani had taken from Starbucks and with the Provivilan sample. The first dye test would turn a glass of water blue if it contained Provivilan. The second dye test would turn a sample red if it contained the Doomsday Molecule. Quinn’s work gave them the ability to detect the presence of a threat. It was a good start.

Knowing Carl had betrayed them (“death by drowning” was the
official version of events), they looked back and wondered why they’d failed to notice something that should have been obvious. The way he’d failed to translate simple Latin words or make jokes from obvious setup lines, or turned down Ruth’s strawberry-rhubarb pie after saying it was his favorite—they’d known he’d been acting odd, but they hadn’t put it together, even when they’d been explicitly warned. The message was clear: think the unthinkable. They were fighting an enemy that would stop at nothing to defeat them. It was agreed that they would monitor each other and speak freely if they noticed any aberrations.

“They’re evil and we’re not,” Tommy said. “We need to try to understand how they think. ‘Be wise as serpents but harmless as doves.’ So says Scripture.”

“Good advice,” Dani agreed.

Detective Casey told Dani that the case on Abbie Gardener was closed. As far as Irene Scotto was concerned, a 102-year-old woman had died alone in her room of unknown causes. The papers said only that Abbie had died of “old age.” Casey told her the report on the reptile scale Banerjee had sent to the FBI came back marked
Cannot identify
.

“I think I’m going to have trouble sleeping over this one,” Casey said. “I might call you for a prescription. I’m going to call my guy in Portland and see if they found any reptile scales near Jerome Leonard. You never know.”

“Try warm milk,” Dani told him. “It really does work.”

George Gardener came down from the bedroom after sleeping for nearly forty-eight straight hours and asked what he’d slept through.

Tommy laughed. “Not much.”

George ate three cheeseburgers, a large bag of chips, and half a pie, and drank four cups of coffee before Dani and Tommy questioned him.

He said he hadn’t known his mother was some kind of warrior for Christ until a year ago. Before that he merely thought her to be a somewhat distracted and distant woman who was always busy with what she told him were “her books.” He’d been resentful of the neglect he’d
endured, but stayed on the farm because she told him she needed him to run things. She had written him a letter, he said, once she’d realized her mind was slipping, but she’d asked him not to open it until after she’d passed. He didn’t wait—he opened it the day he came home from putting her in the nursing home, which he said was the worst day of his life. The letter explained her mission in life, that she’d been chosen by her predecessor, a banker named Leominster, George recalled, and told to carry forward a sacred duty.

“At first I thought she was crazy,” he said. “All that nonsense about witches in East Salem. But then I realized the people she’d named as witches had all been affiliated with the school. They really were evil. She wasn’t crazy after all. She was watching the school. Getting names. Finding out where people went.”

Tommy put his hand on George’s shoulder. “When we found you, you said that you’d killed Julie Leonard.”

“She came to the house,” George said. “She wanted to talk to my mother, but she wouldn’t tell me what it was about. I should have scared her off. They were watching me. They wouldn’t have known about her if they hadn’t been following me. I’m not smart enough. I got her killed.”

“You didn’t know,” Tommy said. “They already knew about her, George. They killed her father six months ago. He was the one your mother chose, but he didn’t want the job. He was too afraid.”

“It’s up to you now,” George said. “You and Dr. Harris.”

“We’re going to carry on your mother’s work,” Dani said. “We promise.”

“I’m sorry,” George said. “I let her down. I can’t go home. They’re going to kill me. I figured if everybody thought I was dead already, they’d leave me alone.”

“You can stay here,” Tommy said.

“Thank you,” George said. “My mother’s letter said they’re getting bolder. They think . . .” He was unable to finish the thought.

“It doesn’t matter what they think,” Tommy told him. “They’re wrong.”