Chapter Fifty-Nine Ashley
FIFTY-NINE ASHLEY
Pops had his rifle pointing at Malcolm, who held his hands up, blood from the gash on his hand trickling down his arm.
Josephine came up to the shrine, and made a disgusted sound when she saw the damage.
“And to think, I had such high hopes for you, Malcolm. You could have fulfilled your destiny. Just look at what you’ve done.
This holy place defiled!” She shot angry glares at Pops and Jack too.
Ash thought they looked sheepish, and wondered at the power Josephine wielded.
“Destiny?” Malcolm said.
“You felt it, didn’t you? When you first came? Knew you were tied to this place. That you had a special role here. The visions you had of your ancestral home, the ones you told me about, they led you here for a reason. You could have had everything.”
People were filtering into the church now, gathering around, taking seats in pews, answering the call of the bell. Some came in talking loudly with their neighbors about how he’d marked every house. Some came in with heads bowed low, whispering, frightened of what might happen next.
“But now look,” Josephine said to Malcolm, shaking her head in disgust. “How dare you? Destroying these sacred relics! And with his blood in your veins!” She gestured to the painting of the knackerman. Malcolm and Ashley turned to look at it. They locked eyes as the realization hit them both.
“It makes sense,” Ash said to him. “Right before Mom came here, she did a DNA test that showed Thomas Endicott wasn’t Gram’s father.”
“Your grandmother wanted no part of it,” Josephine said bitterly. “She found out her true heritage and ran away like a coward, cut off all her ties to Boone’s Ferry. Refused to take her rightful place as a leader here in town. Shameful.”
More people were trickling in, including a lanky man in a blaze-orange knit cap who rushed toward Josephine, shouting, “Miss Banks! You’ve gotta help us! What are we going to do? Half the town’s been marked!”
Pops lowered his gun, put a hand on the man’s back, and said, “Come on, Neil, let’s go sit down. We’ll get it sorted.”
“Why are the strangers here?” demanded a man from the front pew.
Josephine’s eyes darted from Ashley and Malcolm to the growing crowd of townspeople.
“These two belong to him!” she cried out. “They’ve been marked. We’ll give them to him.”
“Dozens have been marked,” called a woman from the middle of the church. “Why? What does it mean?”
“Is he coming for us? Is he here?” said someone else.
“Enough!” yelled Josephine. “Everyone needs to calm down!” But she sounded anything but calm.
Ashley twisted the cameo ring on her finger.
Josephine spun her head around, noticed the ring, and narrowed her eyes. “You ungrateful bitch! You’ve stolen an offering! I demand that you put it back. It belongs to him!”
“Like hell.” Ashley stepped toward Josephine, who fell back a bit. “It belonged to my mother and now it belongs to me.”
Ashley felt her then: her mother. Only she wasn’t a ghostly form at the edge of Ash’s vision. They were all there with her: Mom and Gram, even Gram’s mother, Margaret, and the nameless woman who was Margaret’s mother.
It was just like her mother had said: the past and the present are connected inside us all; we carry more than stories, we carry family traits, DNA, sometimes even secrets, deep in our cells. She touched the ring again, and it gave her strength.
A woman came tearing in the front doors of the church.
“He’s in the cemetery!” She was panting, out of breath. “He’s got Mini Fitzpatrick!”
There was a high-pitched scream from the graveyard.