Sister Walker had been driving for twelve hours straight, so while she napped in her room back at the motel, Will kept a grip on his coffee cup and stared out the window of the Hopeful Harbor diner. Crepuscular light veiled the tops of the snow-dusted hills. The sky was a distant bruise. A bronze plaque in front of the courthouse across the street commemorated a spot where George Washington had once tasted victory. Quite a few Revolutionary War battles had been fought in this part of the country, Will knew, battles that turned the tide of the war and helped decide the fate of a new country, taking it from an exciting idea of self-governance to possibility and then reality. A government by the people, for the people.
America had invented itself. It continued to invent itself as it went along. Sometimes its virtues made it the envy of the world. Sometimes it betrayed the very heart of its ideals. Sometimes the people dispensed with what was difficult or inconvenient to acknowledge. So the good people maintained the illusion of democracy and wrote another hymn to America. They sang loud enough to drown out dissent. They sang loud enough to overpower their own doubts. There were no plaques to commemorate mistakes. But the past didn’t forget. History was haunted by the ghosts of buried crimes, which required periodic exorcisms of truth. Actions had consequences.
Will knew this, too.
“More coffee?” the waitress asked Will and poured him a fresh cup anyway. “Shame you’re here at such a miserable time of year. The road up into the mountains is awful treacherous just now.”
“Yes,” Will said. “I remember.”
“Oh, so you’ve been here before?”
“Once. It was a long time ago.”
“Gee, what you ought to do is come back in the spring, drive on up there to the old Marlowe estate. Beautiful grounds. It’s closed now, but they open it up in the spring.”
Will fished out a quarter and left it on the table beside the full, untouched cup of coffee.
“Thank you. I’ll do that,” he said.
Back in the motel, by the weak light of a bedside lamp, Will read through his stack of clippings gathered from newspapers around the country:
THE BOSTON GLOBE
“… I was walking in old Salem, up near the hill where they used to hang the witches, you see, when Buster, my dog, barked up a storm, and a terrible feeling come over me. I saw them silhouetted by the mist in their black dresses, some with heads wobbling on broken necks and eyes dark with hate.…”
THE CEDAR RAPIDS EVENING GAZETTE
Mr. and Mrs. Samuel Stuart of Altoona have asked for any assistance in locating their daughter, Alice Kathleen, who disappeared on her way home from a territory band dance. The orchestra in question, the Travelers, has also disappeared, and curiously, no other territory bands can remember much about them at all, though there are many accounts of people who’ve gone missing once the band has come through town.…
THE NEWPORT MERCURY
… Passing by the site of a former slave auction block, the ship’s captain, John Thatcher, claimed to hear terrible cries and swore that he saw, for a moment, stretched out along the port, the ghosts of whole families in chains, their eyes on him in accusation, inciting in him a feeling “as if a day of reckoning were at hand…”
THE DOYLESTOWN DAILY INTELLIGENCER
… Mrs. Coelina Booth will not enter the woods beyond her home anymore, for she believes they are haunted by malevolent spirits. “I noticed the birds had stopped singing in our trees. Then I got a chill for no good reason, and I heard giggling. That’s when I saw them—two phantom girls in pinafores with teeth sharp as razors and all around them the bones of the birds.…”
… The longtime groundskeeper reported graves desecrated and one tomb left open.…
… Graves disturbed… cattle mutilated…