Death Falls (12 page)

“I think it’s a serial,” he said. “These incidents are too similar to be coincidence. Then there’s the fact that they coincide with lunar landings.”

“Who knows about this?”

“Just Chief Campbell, Eric Olmstead, and myself.”

One of the names took Gloria off guard. “Eric Olmstead, the writer?”

“Yes. He’s my client.”

“I’m impressed.” Nick wasn’t sure, but he thought she might have been telling the truth. Her voice was pitched slightly higher than usual and tinged with what could only be described as respect. But that quality vanished just as suddenly as it had appeared, replaced by Gloria’s usual brusque tones.

“Thank you for bringing this to my attention. It was good of you to do so.”

“Are you going to look into it?”

Nick knew he shouldn’t have asked, but old habits die hard. It was none of his business now, which Gloria wasted no time in pointing out.

“I’m not at liberty to say. Are we finished?”

Nick wanted to tell her that he wasn’t finished by a long shot. He wanted to tell her that his foundation was going to solve all the crimes they had given up on long ago. And he wanted to call Gloria all the horrible names he had devised for her in the eleven months since being ass-kicked from the state police. But his dignity—what little was left of it—won out.

“I guess we are.”

“Then good-bye, Nick. Do take care.”

And that was that. He had called Gloria Ambrose with a minimum amount of fuss and external stress. Kat would be proud. He assumed both women would take his actions to mean he was now done with the case.

He wasn’t.

Eric Olmstead had hired him to find out what happened to his brother. First Kat and now Gloria had gotten involved only because he had told them about it. As far as Nick was concerned, this was still his case and he planned to investigate it as such.

Picking up the phone again, he dialed another number he knew from memory. It belonged to a man named Vincent Russo, a cop who worked Philly’s South Side. Vinnie’s wife had been killed by a hit-and-run driver fifteen years earlier. The man behind the wheel was never caught. Because of their shared pain—and because he liked what Nick was trying to do with the foundation—Vinnie was always willing to do him a favor. That night, Nick needed a big one.

“Nick Donnelly,” Vinnie said when he answered his phone. “How the hell are ya?”

“How’d you know it was me?”

“The caller ID never lies,” Vinnie replied. “I think I know why you’re calling, too.”

“Yeah,” Nick said. “I need some information.”

“Of course you do. Names? Addresses? What?”

“A little of both. You got a pen and paper? There are five of them.”

Vinnie let out a low whistle. “I guess you’ve got a real whopper on the line.”

“You have no idea.”

“Okay,” Vinnie said. “Hit me with them.”

Nick took a deep breath. “The first one is in Fairmount,” he said. “Last name is Kepner.”

Kat waited until James went to bed before smuggling Maggie Olmstead’s map and newspaper clippings into the house. There was no need for him to read the sad headlines that filled the board or see the faces of boys his own age who had gone missing long ago. Dragging it into the basement, the plywood bumping against her knees, she felt a bit like Maggie herself. Their goals were the same: hide the truth from their children for as long as possible.

Once she had the board leaning against the cement block wall, Kat went back upstairs to retrieve her laptop and a glass of wine. She had a feeling she was going to need it. Sitting cross-legged on the chilly floor, she fired up the computer and dove into that swirling vortex known as the Internet.

Her first order of business was to check databases of missing children to see if any of the boys Maggie had singled out were eventually found. None were. Kat then tried to find out if there were any additional abductions Maggie had missed. Just because six boys were taken during moon landings didn’t mean the culprit hadn’t abducted more over the years. That led to an hour scrolling through gut-wrenching lists of missing kids. Many had been found within hours in the company of estranged family members. Some were never found again. None of them, however, seemed to be related to the six boys tacked onto Maggie Olmstead’s board. Different ages, different areas, none of them looking like accidents and none of them taking place around any lunar activity.

Taking a deep breath, Kat next accessed the listing of known pedophiles in Pennsylvania. She narrowed her search, winnowing the list down to those found guilty of sex crimes against young boys between 1969 and 1972. There were a lot of them—too many, in fact—but none of them were murderers.

Her next goal was to look into potential reasons why the boys had been taken. No one decided to abduct boys during lunar landings just for the hell of it. There was something about those momentous NASA missions that compelled the culprit to seek out those kids.

Early in her search, she realized that the abductions could simply have been a by-product of a crazy time in American history. The late sixties and early seventies saw astonishing upheaval. Weeks after Charlie Olmstead vanished, members of the Manson family went on a killing spree in California. A few days after that, Woodstock took place, its message of peace, love, and experimental drugs reverberating around the world.

The sixties came to an end with a concert at Altamont, in which the dark side of the flower power generation was revealed during a set by the Rolling Stones. The shootings at Kent State happened the following May, and by the time Bucky Mason vanished in 1972, the Watergate break-in had occurred, setting Richard Nixon on the road to resignation. Through it all, humming loud in the background like static from a TV set, was the Vietnam war—a seemingly endless parade of bad news and dead soldiers being carried from the steaming jungles of a faraway land.

Kat took a break to refill her wineglass before sinking deeper into the search. Sipping steadily, she read about the effect the moon landings had on the world. Americans cheered when
Apollo 11
landed in the Sea of Tranquility. Enthusiasm was still strong, although slightly more quiet, when
Apollo 12
landed that November. When 1972 rolled around, the nation—having witnessed four more landings in less than two years—had become jaded. When the lunar missions came to an end with
Apollo 17,
no one seemed to care.

Except, Kat suspected, the person who had been snatching boys all across Pennsylvania. To him, the ending of the missions meant no more crimes. Why that happened is what she wanted to find out.

The Internet offered plenty of suggestions. She learned that a startlingly wide swath of the population believed the NASA moon landings were just an elaborate hoax. On the flip side were those who thought that astronauts did walk on the moon but brought something extraterrestrial back with them. Kat assumed both groups were insane, and she wondered if that craziness extended to one of their members targeting little boys.

Then there were the doomsday cultists, who had worried that venturing into space would bring about the end of life on Earth. During her search, Kat stumbled upon an article about a group of religious fanatics in Texas who prepared for the first moon landing by building an underground bunker on their property. When Neil Armstrong took those historic first steps, the men stayed outside, armed with rifles, while the women and children huddled together in the bunker. Some of the children, it turned out, didn’t even belong to members of the group. They had been taken from nearby homes. “For their own safety,” one of the cult members told police. But those children were returned to their families unharmed within a few hours. The ones unfortunate enough to be a part of Maggie Olmstead’s collage were never seen again.

Kat suspected there were hundreds of similar stories and scenarios. She knew from experience that there were horrible people out there doing horrible things. Sometimes, the reason was known only to them, and Kat realized that searching for one was probably fruitless until she got a better idea of what happened to those boys and who could have done it.

She shut off the computer, downed the last drops of wine, and turned the board of victims to face the wall. Upstairs, she made sure all the doors and windows were locked. Then it was on to the second floor, where she would check to see if James was asleep before landing into bed herself.

On the way there, she paused at a framed photograph of her parents, which was hanging in the stairwell. It showed her mother standing in front of a tidy two-story house with an apron around her waist. Kat’s father was next to her, wearing his uniform. The house in the picture was the same one Kat lived in now. She had inherited it from her parents.

Staring at the picture, Kat realized she had also inherited something else from her father—the Charlie Olmstead case and all the other missing kids that came with it.

“Thanks a lot, Dad,” she muttered. “I would have preferred cash.”

Eric spent the rest of the day in a silent daze. After Kat and Nick left, taking that morbid board of pictures and clippings with them, he had wanted to go about his normal business. He tried to write. He made dinner. He called his father again. But everything was filtered through a numbing haze of shock and helplessness. The end result was that his laptop monitor remained a blank slate, his dinner was as flavorless as it was unappetizing, and he decided not to leave another message when his father didn’t answer.

Adding to his stupor was the rain that had started soon after he was alone. With it had come an unrelenting grayness that seemed to settle over the town like a damp blanket. The sky was so dark and dreary that Eric never noticed the transition between day and night. Meanwhile, the rain kept coming, steadily pummeling the roof.

Now it was nearing midnight, and Eric decided it was time for him to try to get some sleep. He didn’t think it would come. The day had been too surreal for him to fall easily into sleep. Even if he did, he wasn’t looking forward to the faces of missing children that were bound to haunt his dreams.

Trudging up the stairs to his old bedroom, he marveled at how his mother had lived for so long with her suspicions, theories, and crazy string-crossed map. He wondered how much time she had spent on her amateur sleuthing and where she got some of those newspaper clippings in the first place. Crawling into bed and closing his eyes, he pictured her slipping into libraries in distant towns while he was at school. He imagined her looking over her shoulder like an unfaithful wife before she stepped into reading rooms or sat before microfilm machines. He wondered how she reacted each time she discovered a new victim to add to her collage and if she ever told anyone about her search.

Hovering in that zone between sleep and wakefulness, he silently apologized to Maggie for not being the son she wanted or needed. For not being good enough to be trusted with her suspicions. For leaving in the dead of night when he was eighteen, leaving only a note on the kitchen counter and two broken hearts in his wake.

I’m sorry, Mommy,
he thought.
I didn’t know. I’m so sorry.

A strange noise silenced his thoughts. It was a muted thud, followed by what seemed to be a watery scratch. At first Eric thought he had imagined it. Then he heard it a second time. A third time. A fourth.

He opened his eyes. When the sound occurred a fifth time, Eric realized it was coming from outside, and he padded to the window. The rain, still falling heavily, had dappled the glass until it resembled a mirror that had been shattered to smithereens. But by adjusting his eyes and peering past the drops, he was able to make out Glenn Stewart’s house next door and a portion of his backyard.

There were no lights on at Mr. Stewart’s house, but Eric knew he wasn’t asleep. Instead, he was outside. Eric spotted him through the inky darkness, standing by the line of trees that bordered his yard. At his feet was a small cardboard box. In his hand was a shovel. When he lifted the shovel and sunk it into the ground, it made the exact noise Eric had heard when his eyes were closed.

The shovel continued to rise and fall, going deeper each time. After a few more minutes, Glenn dropped the shovel, picked up the box, and placed it in the hole he had just created. He bowed his head a moment, as if in prayer. Eric counted as he watched, noting the stillness lasted about fifteen seconds. Twenty, tops.

Then, without further hesitation, Glenn Stewart grabbed the shovel and began to bury whatever was in the box.

Although the bulk of the rain had stopped during the night, there was enough of a drizzle in the morning to require an umbrella. Kat struggled with hers as she got out of the Crown Vic. An old golf umbrella that had once belonged to her mother, it didn’t want to open. When she finally did force it into full bloom, Kat discovered one of the ribs was broken, causing a third of the umbrella to flop down like one of Scooby’s ears when he was tired. She decided that, flop or no flop, it would do in a pinch. She didn’t expect to be in the cemetery for very long.

Edging around the massive puddles that dotted the gravel parking lot, Kat headed for the wrought-iron arch that was the only way in and out of the cemetery. Passing beneath it, she looked up at the words welded into place more than a century earlier—
Oak Knoll Cemetery
.

The cemetery was the only game in town as far as graveyards went. Most of Perry Hollow’s past residents lay within its gates, which had enough room to accommodate most of its present citizens whenever their ends arrived. Kat visited twice a year, once on Mother’s Day and once on Father’s Day. That morning, three days after Labor Day, was an anomaly. She didn’t want to be there, but she had to go. There was something she needed to get off her chest.

Carrying two bouquets of flowers under her arm, she walked to a secluded corner of the cemetery that was studded with ancient maple trees. There were six of them total, their heavy branches grazing each other and creating a leafy canopy. Once under it, Kat discovered that the leaves created enough cover to allow her to lower the umbrella and go about her business.