Darkness Rising (The East Salem Trilogy) Page 7

  “I’m not baking a man a pie just to get him to ask me out.”

  “Then bake me one and I’ll see that he gets it,” Tommy said as Carl strode through the library’s automatic front doors. He took his helmet off and tucked it under his arm as he removed his gloves.

  “Carl,” Ruth said in a measured tone.

  “Ruth,” Carl said. “How are you?”

  She said, “Very well, thank you,” and returned to the reference desk.

  “Why does she hate me?” Carl said to Tommy.

  “She doesn’t hate you. That’s Scandinavian reserve. Saying, ‘Very well, thank you,’ is the Norwegian way of flirting. It’s actually almost lewd. Do you like strawberry-rhubarb pie?”

  “It’s my favorite. Why?”

  “Not important,” Tommy said, gesturing toward the media room. “We can talk in there.”

  When they got inside, Carl took off his leather jacket and the down vest he wore beneath it and set them both over the back of a chair, then placed his helmet carefully on the seat. Tommy closed the door, turned on one of the computers, plugged an SD card into it, then turned on the projector and used the Smart Board as a video screen. Ruth had used the room for everything from toddler Music Together classes to senior citizen Thin Man movie marathons, though for the senior citizens a marathon meant four p.m. to nine p.m. Tommy had decided that his next donation would be a grand piano for the music series.

  “You said this has to do with Abbie Gardener?” Carl said while Tommy fiddled with the computer. “Do they know more about how she died?”

  “Dani was going to fill me in, but she hasn’t called yet. Usually she’s good about checking in. I left her a message to meet us here.”

  “I’m sure she just got busy with something.”

  “Probably,” Tommy said, turning down the lights. “Remember when we interviewed Abbie at the nursing home?”

  “Who could forget?” Carl said. They’d found the old woman in the lounge watching Jeopardy. She’d been engrossed in the show, in which the moderator, Alex Trebek, gives contestants answers and they have to come up with the proper questions. Abbie had seemed confused, unable to tell where the TV show ended and real life began.

  “We thought she was ranting, right?” Tommy said.

  “As far as I could tell.”

  “Then she got really upset.”

  “I believe ‘disinhibited’ is the term.”

  “What if she wasn’t ranting? What if she was trying to tell us something?”

  “Why didn’t she just say it straight out?”

  “Maybe she couldn’t,” Tommy said. “Just hear me out. Assuming her brain was scrambled—”

  “Not sure ‘scrambled brain’ is the technical term, but go on.”

  “As I understand it, sometimes people with Alzheimer’s have trouble saying the right words. They want to say table, but what comes out of their mouth is watermelon. Right?”

  “Okay . . .”

  “So maybe she had to find a way around what she was actually trying to say. But she was trying to tell us something important. Something she’d tried to tell us before. I don’t think she just accidentally showed up at my house the night Julie Leonard was killed. I think she came to me on purpose.”

  “Because she needed to tell you something,” Carl said.

  “Yes. I don’t know why she needed to tell me, specifically, and not somebody else, but for right now let’s assume she came to my house for the same reason the angel did—to deliver a message.”

  “Can you assume that? You think God was speaking through her?”

  “Maybe not directly,” Tommy said. “I mean, she was the one talking, but the words weren’t coming out right. Maybe God spoke to her at some point in either the recent or distant past, and she wanted to tell me about it but her mouth just couldn’t produce the proper words.”

  “With you so far.”

  “So when we visited her in the nursing home, the same thing happened. Maybe she saw it as a second chance to tell us something important.”

  “Maybe,” Carl said.

  “I was up late editing the recording we made and transcribing what she said,” Tommy told his friend. “I think the first part is relatively easy to figure out, but the second part is harder. I’ll play it for you and you tell me what you think.”

  Tommy clicked on the Windows Media Player and opened the file on his SD card containing the interview with Abbie that Carl had recorded using Tommy’s phone. On the screen, they saw Abbie in her wheelchair with a housecoat over her nightgown.

  “I’ll skip the preliminary stuff,” Tommy said. “She started out reasonably lucid, if you’ll recall. She recognized us, I think. And she remembered her son, George. Then she started to overheat.”

  He advanced the video and turned up the volume.

  World Religions for six hundred . . . The Beast and the antichrist. The false prophet and the false teacher. You’d better be on your toes, Alex. They stand on their heads by the crossroads at the foot of Mt. Maggedo with the 999 and think they’re fooling us! They think we don’t know the war has already started! That the Tribulation is just the school of hard knocks! Ha!

  You’d think we would have done away with human sacrifice by now. After all, we’re not Aztecs. We don’t eat the hearts of those we capture—though we might poison them just a little bit.

  Tommy hit the pause button.

  “Now you know why we used to call her the Witch Lady when we were kids,” he said. “Nobody dared go to her place on Halloween.”

  “I’ll bet she had a big bowl of candy ready anyway.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “Well,” Carl said, “she’s warning us about Satan, clearly, and the end times. A lot of what she’s saying we could find references to in Revelation. Armageddon and the sign of the Beast, 666, which is 999 upside down if you stand on your head, in her words. Which is what she told you the night she came to your pond, right?”

  “Pretty much,” Tommy said. “The thing with the frogs and predicting the future by examining dead animal entrails. What else do you get from it?”

  “I’m not sure,” Carl said.

  “Well, humor me for a second,” Tommy said. “Suppose Abbie knew something about St. Adrian’s. She was the town historian. Suppose she was digging around and she found something. Revelation talks about the false teacher. St. Adrian’s is a school. It could be full of false teachers. She’s talking about human sacrifice—”

  “Which was how Julie Leonard was killed, apparently,” Carl said.

  “Yes. But then Abbie says, ‘We don’t eat their hearts, but we might poison them a little.’ I think she was trying to warn us about the school. She’s talking about ‘the hearts of those we capture.’ Students are captive, in a way.”

  “So when she says, ‘They think we don’t know the war has already started,’ she’s talking about Wharton and Ghieri?”

  “Maybe. So that’s number one.” Tommy wrote on the Smart Board with the tip of his finger: #1. Abbie knows about the school. “So how does she know about the school?”

  Carl shrugged. “Town histories? Archives? Old newspapers? All of the above?”

  Tommy wrote: Question #1: How does Abbie know about the school?

  “What’s next?” Carl asked.

  “Now it gets weird.”

  World Religions for a thousand, Alex! Anyone for a little game of dodge ball? Dodge one, Dajjal . . .

  “Dodge one, dodge all,” Tommy echoed.

  “Dodge what?”

  “A ball,” Tommy said. “Those soft red playground balls they gave you in gym class, with the pebbled surface, about the size of a basketball. That used to be my best sport.”

  “She wanted you to throw a ball at somebody?”

  “That makes no sense.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Carl agreed.

  Tommy wrote: Question #2: Dodge ball? What?

  “What else did she say?” Carl asked.

 
“Here’s the last bit, before the men in the white coats came to take her away. Literally.”

  World Religions for a thousand, Alex! It’s both the question and the answer, Alex. The beginning and the end—what more do you need to know?

  Potpourri for one hundred, Alex—this common element is something you pass, but that’s asking a lot . . . Make your way with all haste and look not behind you, ’cause you never know what’s sneaking up on you, Satchel Paige! Baseball for two hundred, Alex—this Sultan of Swat is the boy’s best chance! Native Americans for five hundred, Alex—this Native American sorcerer’s black magic killed the daughters of Hiawatha . . .

  Tommy paused the video on the image of Abbie being wheeled away, reaching up with one frail arm to grab the sleeve of one of the orderlies. He minimized the screen and opened a text document in which he’d transcribed what she’d said.

  “This one goes by pretty fast, so I typed it out. ‘The question and the answer . . .’ The beginning and the end is alpha and omega.”

  “Don’t forget the symbol Julie Leonard drew on her stomach,” Carl said. “The letter Z in the Cyrillic alphabet. Omega.”

  “The question and the answer are the same thing,” Tommy said, tapping the words with his finger. “The beginning is the question and the ending is the answer, and they’re the same thing. I’m getting a headache.”

  “A circle? A circle begins and ends at the same place.”

  “A circle doesn’t have a beginning or an end,” Tommy said. “That’s why they call it a circle.”

  “An orbit has a beginning and an end,” Carl said. “Maybe it means something that repeats, like a year on the calendar.”

  “We begin the way we end,” Tommy said. “With a party in Times Square with drunk people throwing up.”

  “We end the way we began?” Carl said. “Flip them around because it’s the same thing.”

  “Which is what?”

  “We’re born helpless infants who need to be taken care of by our parents, and we end as infirm old parents who have to be taken care of by our children. Like the old riddle—what has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening? A man who crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two as an adult, and ends up with a cane. The diaperer becomes the diapered.”

  “Not helping,” Tommy said. He wrote, Question #3: Beginning-end, question-answer, same thing?

  “You could have been a schoolteacher,” Carl said. “You have excellent handwriting.”

  Tommy ignored the joke.

  “What about ‘This common element is something you pass, but that’s asking a lot. Make your way with all haste and look not behind you, ’cause you never know what’s sneaking up on you, Satchel Paige.’ What do you make of that?”

  Carl thought a moment. “‘Common element we pass’ could be . . . water? But that’s not quite an element. What else do we pass?”

  “Gas,” Tommy said, and as Carl grimaced, he quickly added, “stations. We often pass gas stations.”

  “I doubt that’s what she meant.”

  “You can take the boy out of the locker room, but you can’t take the locker room out of the boy,” Tommy said. “Maybe pass means miss? Something we walk right by without noticing it. And element is like the weather. The elements. What weather don’t we notice? Or take for granted?”

  “We definitely notice the weather when it’s bad,” Carl said. “When it storms. So what’s the opposite? When it’s nice out? The absence of bad?”

  “Now I’m really getting a headache,” Tommy said.

  He wrote, Question #4: What common element do we pass?

  “Next one: ‘Don’t look back because something might be gaining on you’ is a quote from Satchel Paige,” he told Carl.

  “He said that in reference to what?”

  “I don’t know. Growing old, I think.”

  Carl stood suddenly and moved to the screen, where he used his finger to draw a circle around the last word of the previous sentence and the word lot.

  “Salt,” Carl said, tapping the screen. “The common element we pass is salt. It’s not a lot. It’s Lot, nephew of Abraham. Genesis 19, I believe it is. Lot fled from Sodom with the help of an angel when the city was destroyed by fire and brimstone. The angel told Lot his wife could escape too, on the condition that she not look back at the burning city. But she did and turned into a pillar of salt.”

  “Abbie was trying to warn us about too much salt in our diet?” Tommy said.

  “Or not enough. Though that seems pretty unlikely, given the American diet.”

  Tommy clicked the eraser icon and used the side of his hand to erase Question #4, then wrote: Question #4: What about salt?

  “Why ‘Don’t look back’?”

  “She wants us to flee the city?” Carl said. “Don’t look back or we’ll turn into pillars of salt? I’m not ruling it out, but there’s not a lot of that going around these days.”

  “Dani and I both had a dream about people fleeing the city. There was a flood.”

  “Flee East Salem?”

  Tommy wrote, Question #5: What does “Don’t look back” mean?

  “Next one is easier. ‘This Sultan of Swat is the boy’s best chance,’” Tommy said. “The Sultan of Swat was Babe Ruth.”

  “Who’s the boy?” Carl said. “The kid in the hospital who Babe Ruth promised he’d hit a home run for?”

  “Hang on,” Tommy said. He grabbed his phone and tapped his Google app. “Johnny Sylvester from Essex Falls, New Jersey. Died January 11, 1990, at the age of seventy-four. Oh wow. You’re not going to believe this.”

  “What?” Carl said.

  “It says here,” Tommy read from his phone, “that it happened in the seventh game of the World Series. The Yankees were trailing 3–2 in the ninth, but the game ended when Babe Ruth got thrown out stealing second.”

  “Maybe we should try to focus on the task at hand,” Carl suggested.

  “Oh, right,” Tommy said, putting his phone away. “Sorry. ‘This Sultan of Swat is the boy’s best chance.’ Probably not Johnny Sylvester.”

  “Amos Kasden?”

  “Maybe.”

  “But why would Babe Ruth be Amos Kasden’s best chance? Babe Ruth is dead, so he’s not going to help us,” Carl said. “We’re all out of Babe Ruths. Unless she meant the candy bar.”

  Tommy wrote, Question #6: Babe Ruth?

  There was a knock on the door and then Tommy’s aunt entered carrying a plate of brownies. “I had a few left over from story hour this morning— thought you boys might be hungry.”

  Tommy shot Carl a look as he said, “Speaking of babes named Ruth . . .”

  “Maybe she’s the one Abbie meant,” Carl said. Tommy shrugged to say, Anything’s possible.

  “She’s right here and she can hear you,” Ruth said. “May I ask what you’re doing?”

  “May I ask why you’re snooping?” Tommy said. “We’re trying to figure out what Abbie Gardener was saying when we talked to her at the nursing home.”

  “There isn’t anything . .. suspicious?”

  “No,” Tommy said. “I just wondered what Carl thought. What do you know about this, Aunt Ruth? ‘This Native American sorcerer’s black magic killed the daughters of Hiawatha’?”

  “I’m old enough to remember when we had to read The Song of Hiawatha by Longfellow,” she said. “People used to consider him America’s greatest poet. Today nobody’s heard of him.”

  “I’m old enough too,” Carl said. “I don’t recall any black sorcerers in the poem. I don’t think Longfellow was writing about vampires and zombies and the things kids are reading these days.”

  “Maybe he should have,” Aunt Ruth said. “Then people would remember him. Why don’t I look into it for you? That’s what a reference librarian does, you know. People ask me to help them with questions all the time. Just this morning, that English art historian was in here asking me about old maps.”

  “Old maps of what?” Tommy asked.<
br />
  “Of the town,” she said. “Who owned what, when.”

  “Did he say why?”

  “He’s a historian. That’s what historians do,” she said. “I’ll look into Hiawatha and tell you what I can find out. Actually, I came in to tell you Dani called. She said she sent you a text but she didn’t hear back. She’ll be here in—oh, there she is now.”

  Tommy saw Dani wave to him from the reference desk.

  He held the door for her and then opened his arms to hug her. She hugged him back, gave him a quick kiss, and then gave Carl a brief hug.

  “Sorry I’m late,” she said, smiling apologetically. “I had to meet with the medical examiner. I have a number of very strange things to tell you.”

  “We’ll match you strange for strange,” Tommy said, pulling out a chair for her. “Let’s get everything we know so far on the table.”

  She glanced at the words he’d written on the Smart Board and the six questions they’d come up with.

  “Good idea,” Dani said. “And if we’re talking about everything we don’t know, we’re going to need a bigger table.”

  Once Ruth was out of earshot, she turned to Carl. “I’m really glad to have you on the bus.”

  “Bound for glory.” Carl smiled. “One way or another.”

  9.

  After they’d debriefed each other for another hour, Tommy suggested they all get dinner somewhere. Carl begged off, his body language conveying a you-two-lovebirds-probably-want-to-be-alone message. He headed over to the nursing home, saying maybe there was something he could find out about the circumstances of Abbie’s death that Detective Casey had missed. “I feel like sushi,” Tommy told Dani. “There’s a new restaurant just across the state line in Ridgefield—want to try it?”

  “I feel like a wet noodle,” Dani said. “But if they don’t have that, sushi’s fine.”

  At the restaurant a waitress in a black kimono took their order quickly and left them with a pot of tea and two small cups. Dani wrapped both hands around her cup as she sipped.