“I think that’s why John Rookwood decided to kill my father. Why he stalked him in the woods and crushed his head in. My father found out the Fireman was making a whore of a sixteen-year-old girl and meant to expose him. To drive him from this camp. But the Fireman moved first and struck him down with that weapon of his. You have all seen him with it. The halligan. He never even cleaned it off. You can still see my father’s blood and hair on it. Michael, show them.”
Michael stepped around the convicts, carrying the long rusted bar of black iron. He carried it past Harper toward the crowd and for a moment Harper had a good look at it. It was slightly dented where, months before, she had struck the Gasmask Man in the smoke. Now, though, there was what looked like old gummy blood smeared across the bar, and strands of hair that glinted gold and silver in the torchlight.
Michael held the bar up, showing it to the onlookers. Norma Heald reached out with a fat, white, shaking hand and touched it, almost reverently, then looked at her fingertips.
“Blood!” she screamed. “Father Storey’s blood is still on it!”
Harper looked away in disgust. She wondered when Michael had crept to the boathouse to get the halligan out of the fire truck and prepare it. She hoped Father Storey had already been dead before he smeared the old man’s blood on the rusting iron, pulled the old man’s hair from his battered head.
When she turned her gaze from Michael, though, she saw a thing that made her breath catch for a moment. The Fireman’s foot flopped to the left, then back to the right. Whether anyone else noticed, she couldn’t say. The burlap sack fluttered before his mouth, as if he had sighed.
“You all know how strong my father is. How he fought to come back to us, to recover his poor—his poor—” For a mo ment Carol was so overwrought with emotion she could not speak.
“He never left us!” a man yelled. “He was always with us in the Bright!”
Carol stiffened, as if stabilized by an invisible hand. “Yes. That’s right. He was always with us there and he always will be. I take comfort in that. We can all take comfort in that. We live forever in the Bright. Our voices are never stilled there.” She wiped the knuckle of her thumb under one eye. “I know, too, that Nurse Willowes was sure she had destroyed his brain in the course of performing surgery on his broken skull, and that he would never recover, and so there was no reason to see to his death. Keeping him alive was in fact the best way to hide her true intentions toward myself and Ben and the rest of us. Her arrogance was her downfall, though! Soon he began to show signs of recovering anyway, drawing strength from our song, from the Bright. Then she tried to induce seizures by injecting him with insulin. But she only dared try it once or twice. My nephew was there, and I know she felt little Nick had come to spy on her and watch over my father.”
She paused again, collecting herself. Her voice was low when she spoke once more, and many in the crowd leaned forward to hear her. “My dad. My dad was so strong. He fought his way back again and again. He began to wake. I think he willed himself to wake, against all odds. He knew the danger he was in. He found pen and paper and wrote a message.” She flapped one hand up in the air, holding a folded sheet of white paper. Her shoulders shuddered. “It’s his handwriting. I’ve known it since I was old enough to read my letters. It’s shaky, but it’s his. It says—” She looked upon it, blinking at tears. “It says, ‘Dear Carol, I will be dead soon. I hope you find this and not the nurse. Protect yourself. Protect the children. Protect the camp. Protect them all from the Fireman. Remember that Jesus came not to bring peace but the sword. I love you.’”
She lowered the note, shut her eyes, swayed. When she opened them and looked up, Michael was waiting. She handed him the sheet of paper and once more he carried the evidence to the crowd, so they could pass it around, see for themselves.
“None of this proves anything,” Renée shouted from where she sprawled in the mud. “There is no court anywhere in America that would accept any of this as evidence. Not your father’s note, which could’ve been written under duress, not that halligan bar, which could’ve been tampered with.” She turned her head, staring around at the crowd gathered at the edge of the stone ring. “There was no one planning to kill anyone. We talked about leaving! Not about murder. All Harper and John wanted to do was get a small group of us out of here and off to Martha Quinn’s island . . . which is a real place. With a charged cell phone we could prove it to you. Their signal broadcasts on the Internet. No one here—not Carol, not anyone—can offer any firsthand evidence of any criminal intention that would stand up in a true court of law.”
“I beg to differ,” said the Mazz, from the edge of the circle.
When Renée spoke of Martha Quinn’s island, there had been an almost immediate murmur of nervous surprise, a low thrum like an amplifier buzzing with feedback. But at this the many went silent again.
“Just a couple nights ago, we all met in a secret conference on the Fireman’s island: myself, Gil here, Renée, Don Lewiston, Allie there, the Fireman, and the nurse,” the Mazz called out. “Renée asked me if I’d be head of security around camp after the Fireman got rid of Ben Patchett and Carol. And the nurse, she promised me I could have my pick of the girls, anyone over the age of fourteen. All I had to do was keep people in line. What they didn’t know was I had already tipped off Mr. Patchett something was up, and promised to work for the camp as a double agent, like. Renée and Allie thought they were so smart, sneaking us out of the meat locker for the meeting. They didn’t know Mr. Patchett let them break us out. Ben Patchett, Chuck Cargill, and Michael Lindqvist set the whole thing up so I could collect intel.”
“And Cline will confirm all that,” Ben Patchett said, and thumped Cline in the back. “Won’t you, Cline?”
Gilbert Cline turned his gray, calm eyes on Renée. Renée looked as if she had just caught a rifle butt to the stomach. She looked like she wanted to be sick.
“I can confirm one thing,” Gil said. “I can confirm the Mazz is a lying sack of shit who will tell Patchett anything to get out of that meat locker. The rest of it is a crap sandwich and I can’t believe any of you are going to eat it.”
Ben struck Gil in the back with the butt of his pistol. It made a low knocking sound, like knuckles on wood. Gil dropped to one knee.
“No!” Renée said. “No, don’t you hurt him!” Harper doubted if many heard her over the sound of the crowd, which was now making a muted roar of surprise and rage.
Ben stood behind Gil Cline, shaking his head and staring at Carol with a look of outrage.
“He was telling a different story in the basement,” Ben said. “He was! He told me he’d back the Mazz up to the hilt, as long as we’d give him the same deal we gave Mazzucchelli. He said—”
“I told you to leave him out of it,” the Mazz said. “Why do you think I didn’t bring him in from the start? I told you he wouldn’t—”
“Enough!” Carol cried, and most of the chatter fell away. Most. Not all. The people of the congregation were restless now, shifting from foot to foot, whispering. “Anyone can see Cline is in love with Gilmonton and will tell any lie to protect her.”
“Oh, no doubt!” shouted the Mazz. “They’ve been screwing for weeks! Her phony little book club was always just a cover story. Reading Watership Down, my ass. That was their code word for what they were really up to, which was fuckin’ like rabbits, every chance they—”
“Once a perjurer, always a perjurer,” Gil said.