“I met Rowenna in New Orleans, and I happened to be coming up here right when she was coming home,” Jeremy said.
Rolfe studied Jeremy. “Well, it’s good to see her with someone, and from what I’ve been hearing, you’re a stand-up kind of guy. Half the guys in high school had a thing for her, but she was in love with Jon Brentwood from the get-go. It was hard to hate him for it, though a lot of us tried. Strange thing, him becoming a soldier. He was always the kid who broke up everyone else’s fights. The kind who never felt he had to prove anything to anyone. He got teased to death in school, his dad being a cop and all. When we were smoking in the boys’ room, or sneaking off to try pot, we’d all rag him, saying he was likely to turn us in to his dad.” He took a long swig of beer and shook his head. “He never ratted on anyone, though. Of all the guys who shouldn’t have left this world too soon, Jon Brentwood was at the top of the list.”
“His father must have taken it hard,” Jeremy said. “And Rowenna.”
“Yeah. Yeah. I wasn’t here—didn’t make it back for the funeral. But it must have been tough. Joe kind of adopted Rowenna after Jon’s death. Her folks were gone, his only child was gone, she would have been his daughter-in-law anyway. I guess it was natural.” He made no effort to hide the fact that he was staring at Jeremy, studying him. “So what does Joe think of you?”
“We seem to be getting along.”
“Good. I’m glad to hear Ro’s moving on finally. You can’t dig up the dead, and that’s a fact. Strange, though, coming back here. This place is still the same in so many ways. Pretty different from…”
“From…?”
Eric Rolfe laughed. “Hollywood. Coming home to Salem…it’s like taking a giant step back into the past. You just get swept right up into all the old stuff, the same routine, the same ‘witches are silly’ or ‘don’t show witches on broomsticks, it’s such a stereotype.’ Personally, I’ll take the witches, past or present, over those Puritan Fathers any day. Man, those guys were messed up.” He shrugged and gave a dry grin. “But they left some great stuff for an artist to work from.”
“Like your masks? Where did you get the pictures you modeled them on?” Jeremy asked.
“The Internet. I’ve got a bunch of them printed off, if you’d like to have them, if you think it will help you in any way.”
“Sure. Thanks.” Jeremy wondered if the guy really was innocent or just ingenuously pretending he had nothing to hide.
Rolfe went to the bookcase in the living room, behind the leather recliner that faced the state-of-the-art television. He dug around in a folder, then handed the whole thing to Jeremy. “Take it. I’m done with the masks. I’m working on a Christmas monster for a film that’s supposed to start shooting in Vancouver in January.”
“So you’re not staying in town?”
“It’s home. I guess I’ll always come back. Strange thing about New Englanders—we leave, we come back. I think it’s the draw of the autumn colors,” he said.
“When did you get back to town?” Jeremy asked him.
Eric Rolfe thought about that a moment. “I drove cross-country. All by my lonesome, with my audiobooks and CDs. Stopped here and there…I think I got in on the seventeenth.” He smiled slowly. “Just in time to commit murder, right?”
“The timing fits,” Jeremy agreed equably.
Eric shook his head. “I’m clearly your man, then. I must’ve done it.”
“Did you spend Halloween in town?”
“Yes, I did. And please, for the love of God, don’t ask me if I saw anything strange,” Rolfe said, rolling his eyes. “It was Halloween in Salem. It would have been a miracle if I didn’t see something strange.”
“I was about to ask you if you happened to meet a fortune-teller called Damien.”
He had.
Jeremy was sure of it.
Something had briefly flickered in the other man’s eyes.
Eric Rolfe hadn’t just seen the man. Jeremy had somehow hit a nerve.
“Yeah, I saw him.”
“Had you seen him before?”
“No….” Rolfe answered slowly. “No…I don’t think so.”
“Okay, that’s a leading answer,” Jeremy told him.
“Well, the guy was out shilling for customers when I walked by. I was on my way to see Eve and Adam, and I was just kind of looking around, watching the kids in their costumes, catching the displays—looking down my nose, if you must know, at some of the cheesy effects some of those people use—when I almost bumped into the guy.”
“And then?”
“Then I backed up and said excuse me or something like that. But the guy was staring at me as if…”
Rolfe stopped talking. He appeared to be deep in thought, as if he were trying to remember exactly what had happened. He stared at Jeremy suddenly. “He looked at me as if he knew me. For just a split second it was as if he thought I might know him. You know, I wouldn’t even have remembered that—except that you just asked me. He laughed and said he could tell me the future. He said—”
Rolfe broke off abruptly.