Logan followed her back out to the living room with a mind deeply troubled.
28
When he left the Jessup residence, about half an hour later, the inner turmoil had not left him. Glancing at his image in the rearview mirror, he reflected that he was now finished — and yet, on the other hand, he was not finished. True, his monograph was complete. But Jessup, who had asked him in person to look into the peculiar circumstances regarding the recent murders, was still asking — only now the voice was quieter, and Logan could no longer see him. The request remained, however — and the ranger’s own death had given it a new urgency that Logan could no longer ignore.
And so he did not turn in at the entrance to Cloudwater, but instead drove past the artists’ colony and continued down State Highway 3, taking the turnoff to 3A and heading toward Pike Hollow. A few miles short of the hamlet, he pulled in at the rustic A-frame set back from the road, red pickup in the driveway.
Albright answered the door on the second rap. It was almost as if he’d been expecting someone. And there was no surprise in his clear blue eyes at seeing Logan, either. Wordlessly, he motioned for Logan to take a seat in one of the hand-carved chairs, then sat down himself. He’d been whittling something out of a piece of pine with his massive hunting knife; looking closely, Logan saw that it was a long-gowned woman, apparently holding a lyre.
“Euterpe?” he asked, hazarding a guess.
Albright nodded. “Muse of lyric poetry.” He shaved off a few more parings, then dropped the knife and the carving onto the floor beside his chair.
“Did you hear about Randall Jessup?” Logan asked.
Albright nodded. Despite the chill weather, he wore a chambray shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and as he scratched his thick white beard the muscles in his forearm knotted like whipcord. “I feel real bad about that.”
Logan didn’t know exactly how to begin. Albright, he was sure, was the connection he sought — but in what way exactly, or whether the tough, reserved mountain man would be forthcoming, he couldn’t begin to guess.
“He called me up, last night,” Logan said. “He’d been looking into the recent murders, of course — and, as I told you, he’d been asking me to do the same. After some investigation I’d told him that I couldn’t help. But he’d discovered something — that much was clear. He wanted to meet at the Hideaway, right away. He had something to tell me.”
Albright said nothing; he merely listened, still slowly scratching his beard.
“I stopped by his house this morning, to do what I could to comfort Suzanne. While I was there, I happened to find Randall’s journal — the one he jotted all his case notes in. The last entries were very curious. My name was mentioned. So was that of Chase Feverbridge. The final entry is why I’m here. It read: ‘Albright: F. & Blakeneys.’ ”
Albright stopped scratching and let his hand drop to his dungarees. “Randall was a good man. And a good ranger. That philosophical bent of his: it helped him see things in ways other rangers couldn’t — helped him ask the hard questions, the unusual questions.” He paused a moment, as if taking the measure of Logan with his eyes. “He stopped by to see me yesterday, too,” he said. “He did that now and then: if he had a problem he wanted to bounce off an objective listener — hard to find in these parts — or just talk about poetry or the lure of the deep woods. But he hadn’t come to chat this time. He came loaded with questions: about Laura Feverbridge. About you, too. And about the Blakeneys. And that’s when I told him.”
“Told him what?”
Albright picked up the knife again, began cleaning his fingernails with its edge. “Guess I’d better tell you, too — under the circumstances. Randall’s dead; he can’t tell you himself. See, I’ve been trying to stay out of this whole mess ever since the first body was found. It’s like I told you the first time we met: I’ve heard some pretty outlandish backwoods tales, both growing up and since moving back here, and these murders… well, they were no ‘tale.’ And they felt wrong to me. That’s the only word I can use for them. Not just cruel, vicious, bizarre — but wrong.”
Wrong. Jessup had used the same word, that first night he described the killings in Logan’s cabin. And it was the same word that had come to Logan’s mind, more than once.
“Murders like these stir people up. Get them thinking things, suspecting things. I didn’t want to add fuel to the fire. Besides, it wasn’t any of my business. And from what I heard, the poor man had been subject to enough criticism and second-guessing during his lifetime. Why trouble his rest?”
Logan thought back to Jessup’s final scrawled notes. “You’re talking about Dr. Feverbridge.”
“Did you know he wrote poetry, too? Not the kind I write — and not the kind I’d care to read, either. But you have to admire a scientist who does any versifying at all. Besides, I liked the way he fought against his critics, the way he raged against the world, even though the effort to do so broke his will.”
“How do you know this?” Logan asked.
“We met a couple, three times. Sort of hit it off. Don’t ask me why — two more different men were never born. He came to a reading I did in Lake Placid. Hung around afterward and we got to talking. Some time later, I stopped by the fire station where he had his lab. This was early in the spring, and I do a fair amount of hunting for wild hare around those parts after the first thaw. Must have been a month or so before his death. He talked about his work — can’t say I understood it. And that’s when I learned we had something in common.”
“What was that?”
“The Blakeneys.”
Logan sat forward in his chair. “What?”
“Oh, they’re not quite as ornery and standoffish as they put on. There’s one or two folks that they tolerate, more or less. It’s true they don’t like strangers, and there’s no love lost between them and the good citizens of Pike Hollow — the bad blood goes back too far for that to ever change. And they have a good reason to keep to themselves.”
“What’s that?” Logan asked.
But Albright didn’t answer directly. “Dr. Feverbridge told me he’d managed to make the acquaintance of the clan — exactly how, I don’t know. Maybe the same way I initially did: on the off chance you run into one, treat him respectable, don’t get all judgmental and curious. But if you want my real opinion, I think it had to do with money — that’s something the Blakeneys could always use a lot more of, no matter how self-sufficient they might seem. No doubt he’d heard the rumors about them and grown curious. Anyway, he’d been a visitor at their compound — once, maybe twice; Feverbridge grew vague with the details when I started asking questions.” He slipped the knife back into the scabbard. “And that’s what I told Jessup, when he stopped by here yesterday afternoon. And that’s when Jessup told me how curious he was about what Feverbridge had been working on: the lunar effect, I think they both called it.”
Logan was silent. He couldn’t tell Albright that Feverbridge was still alive; that would be breaking his promise to Laura and to the scientist himself. His mind worked fast, trying one theory after another but rejecting each in turn. That Feverbridge had visited the Blakeneys — that anyone had visited them — was a surprise: but why was it important? Then he recalled the articles he’d seen displayed on Jessup’s desk — and it was as if a key had just slid into a lock.
Albright said nothing, but his expression implied an understanding that some revelation, or partial revelation, had taken place. “You’ve been out to the Feverbridge lab,” he said.