Chapter 19
September
Charles Forrester sat at his desk and looked at the letter placed on top of the rest of his mail. Looked at Beth Fahey’s name on the return address. Looked at his two detectives, who seemed overly interested in this piece of mail.
“Don’t the Arcana usually call if it’s something official?” Tom Castelletti asked.
“They do,” Charles replied. “This is personal.” He considered how much to explain, then decided he needed to tell his men as much as he could. “This isn’t actually a letter to me. It’s for Colin. And it’s not from Beth. She’s the go-between.
“Colin befriended someone while he was staying in Wyrd, and he’s been reluctant to say anything about the person or why he communicates by writing letters.
He finally told me to talk to Beth.” Charles hesitated, weighing his words.
“Imagine you made a friend, then discovered that person had needed to disappear in order to stay alive.”
“Like witness protection?” Kuhn asked.
“Similar to that,” Charles agreed. “You decide not to abandon the friend, but you don’t talk about that person to anyone except on a need-to-know basis. This”—Charles held up the letter—“is the only way to keep in touch, and both parties are careful about what is said. But…”
“But a slipped detail might be enough if someone was still looking for that person,” Castelletti said.
Charles nodded. “Jazz has been inquisitive about Colin’s time on the island to the point of being a brat.
We’re all curious about it, but Aisha and I respect that there are things he can’t talk about.
Jazz kept badgering him for details, promising she wouldn’t tell anyone.
So he told her that someone had said there was a herd of purple cows on the island, but she really couldn’t tell anyone else.
She promised she wouldn’t tell, and then she told her best friend, who also promised not to tell anyone, and within a couple of days the whole school had heard that there were purple cows on the island.
“Colin went ballistic, and Jazz was crying and yelling that it wasn’t a big deal because it was just some stupid cows. Then Colin said, ‘You made a bargain with me, and you broke it.’ ”
“Shit,” Kuhn said. “That’s Arcana talk.”
“Yes, it is. Anyway, it escalated to a letter coming for Colin and Jazz getting to the mail first and teasing him by holding up the letter and dancing out of reach until he grabbed her and yanked the letter out of her hand. The next letter that arrived, Jazz took it and not only opened it, she was calling her friend Davie to read him the letter when Aisha walked in with some clean laundry. Realizing what was happening, Aisha confiscated the phone and the letter. The next afternoon, Colin put a dead bolt on his bedroom door. He gave Aisha the second key, but his sister is no longer welcome in his room—and he’s already talking about going back to Wyrd to work in the park next summer. ”
“It’s just kids spatting,” Castelletti said.
“That’s part of it. Another part is she’s developed a reckless attitude and thinks she can go to Wyrd and have a bigger adventure and then won’t share anything with Colin—and he’s scared she’ll try it and die because he knows more about Wyrd now than I do despite all the years I’ve interacted with Lucas Frost.”
“So the letters come here, and you hand them over to Colin?”
“Yes.”
“Carrying secrets can be a heavy weight if there’s no one to talk to,” Kuhn said.
Charles sighed. “He can talk to Beth. She’s carrying the weight of those secrets too.”
2
Beth hung the last framed piece of fantasy art, then stepped back to make sure it was level.
Lucas had been right about her waiting until after the summer rush before she moved to her new home.
For one thing, Colin had gone with her to see the two available cottages and had strongly lobbied for the one that was more rustic while she considered the one with the remodeled bathroom and kitchen as a better choice.
Since there was a “no guests” rule for the cottages in this part of the park—unless your guest lived in another part of Wyrd—Colin’s vote didn’t matter, but having “the boss” delay her official decision had avoided her butting heads with Colin over something that really wasn’t his concern.
Besides, this cottage had newer furniture as well as windows with screens and storms and a screened-in porch where she could sit out at night and not be devoured by insects.
When someone knocked on her front door, she called out, “Come in!” and continued to study the artwork. Then she shrugged. She could rearrange it later if the groupings didn’t quite work.
Lucas walked in and looked around. “Are you settling in? Have everything you need?”
Beth nodded. “I still have to go to the Teeth and pick up some groceries so that I have some food on hand.” And she needed to bring her list of preferred brands of “female and personal products” to the store there so those items would be stocked from now on.
“Catch the shuttle in the morning and run your errands,” Lucas said.
“Okay.” She noticed him eyeing the fantasy art. “Do you recognize any relatives?” Lucas was still her boss, and Jack was still her trainer, but she’d discovered over the summer that they would tolerate being teased a little.
“Not any of my relatives.” Lucas studied the artwork and smiled. “But you might find one or two of your ancestors included in those pictures.”
When he said things like that, she was never sure if he was teasing or serious. She suspected it was a little of both.
“I’ll be heading up to the pavilion around lunchtime,” Beth said. “I’m helping Rahele write a note to her friend, a few words at a time.”
Nothing was said about why or how a lark could arrange letters into words and make those words into complete sentences.
Beth had come to understand how the Arcana balanced those who came to Wyrd and needed to disappear.
So she dug through her personal hoard of stationery and note cards and transcribed the words made with letters on wooden blocks, then gave the finished note and a blank envelope to Lucas to address.
She didn’t know where Rahele’s friend lived, but she knew where a certain black-haired boy could be found since she had arranged a couple of meetings between the boy and Colin over the summer.
People disappeared—and not everyone wanted to be found.
“Make sure you’re somewhere conspicuous when you eat lunch,” Lucas said as he opened the door to leave. “Jack worries.”
Food wasn’t the worry; it was an excuse to keep track of her while she learned her job as park security—and learned which statues in the park weren’t really statues. And learned about the place and the people who lived there. Still…
Beth waited until she could see Lucas walking down the path back to the pavilion before she grinned and said, “Cluck cluck.”
3
Acid walked through another graveyard. He had learned how to feel the boundary that separated one graveyard from the next, but he had no way of telling where he would end up. Blazing sun or frigid cold? Lush jungle or rocky soil that wasn’t good for anything except burying the dead?
And what was he? Not alive enough to be living but not truly dead. He occasionally craved food, but he couldn’t taste it anymore.
How long had he been walking near railroad tracks that seemed to run through graveyards?
A week? A month? A year? Sometimes he found a piece of a newspaper and looked for a date, but that didn’t help either because the date could be from a hundred years ago—or it could be in a language that told him he wasn’t even close to home.
He wanted to go home.
It wasn’t going to happen.
Acid heard the train whistle and looked around. There was a single mausoleum close to the tracks. The rest of the graveyard was almost out of sight. The town must be anticipating the need for more acres filling up with the dead. Which made the mausoleum a distinct landmark.
He removed his wallet and made sure it still held his ID and the slip of newspaper he’d used to write two words. He placed his wallet between the railroad ties and waited. Waited. He couldn’t change what was happening to him, this transition from living to dead, but he could decide his fate.
When the train was in sight, when it was too late for the engineer to do anything to change the outcome, Acid stepped onto the tracks.
4
Charles Forrester stepped out of his office and joined his men to hear what Officer Leanne Curran had come to report.
“Everything all right in Lovecraft?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. More or less,” Curran replied. “Captain Wozniak sends his regards.” She fiddled with the strap of her messenger bag. “I have a cousin who investigates railway accidents. He called me last night because he wasn’t sure who to contact in Penwych and thought I might know.”
“So you came to us?”
Curran withdrew a piece of paper from the messenger bag and laid it on the evidence table.
“An incident two days ago. A person stepped onto the tracks in front of a train. No time for the engineer to stop. Since the person stepped onto the tracks and faced the oncoming train, the consensus is it was intentional, and it was suicide.”
“But…?”
“The investigators couldn’t find a body.
There was some evidence on the engine that the train had struck a person—some fragments of flesh and cloth—but there should have been more.
When the investigators went back to the spot where the engineer said he saw the person, they found a wallet with ID and a note.
That’s a printout. They’ll send the wallet when they know who to send it to. ”
Charles looked at the student ID and the two words—“I’m sorry”—that had been printed on a scrap of newspaper from 1953. “This boy has been missing since the spring. It’s anyone’s guess what he was doing so far from home.”