December 14, 2015, is still two months and twenty-seven days in Walter Eckert’s future when his mother calls from her nursing home to tell him the pieces of evidence, the film and the photograph, are connected. There are two things Walter never discusses with his mother — his work and his dreams, which are usually about Twin Peaks and who really killed Laura Palmer.
Walter has never entirely believed in his mother’s psychic powers, but when she calls him as he’s staring at the photograph of Charlie Miller paper clipped to the cold case file, a shiver traces his spine.
He hasn’t told her anything about the Miller family or the cold case file currently sitting open on his desk. He hasn’t said one word about the two pieces of evidence, not even that they exist, but she knows and she tells him they are connected anyway.
Just before he hangs up, she says, “There’s more. Lemuel Mason. The name came to me in a dream. Find him.”
After he hangs up, Walter slips the Miller file into his briefcase. He puts the picture of the clown, pasted to the section of plywood, and the reel of film into his briefcase, as well. Following what he would call a hunch and his mother would call a prediction, Walter ventures out into the blustery September weather and goes to the local library to do some serious and irrational searching.
Virginia Mason, a resident of Pottstown, Pennsylvania, from 1863 to 1887, wife of the Reverend Lemuel Mason, was generally known to be a pious woman. She aided her husband in his ministerial duties, and was much loved in their town, known for organizing women’s charity drives and bake sales with all the proceeds going to support Mr. Clement and his one-room schoolhouse. The great tragedy of her life, as far as the town was concerned, is that she never bore the reverend a child.
So the stories say.
So some stories say.
But there are other stories, too.
There are stories of a certain tree where the devil was said to appear, and of Virginia, walking at night, restless and unable to sleep. Stories of Virginia growing large although her husband was away, conducting missionary work in Peru. Stories, contrary to the tutting of the townsfolk over the Masons’ childless life, that Virginia was indeed delivered of a babe. But what babe? Was it born sad, mad, twisted, and deformed, as rumors claimed? And who was its sire?
Other tales say Reverend Lemuel Mason was never a missionary and, devoted husband that he was, he rarely left his wife’s side.
What can be confirmed by public records is Virginia Mason died at a young age. Or, at least, that a stone sits on the outmost edge of the churchyard, indicating she was given a Christian burial. Her cause of death is unknown. Some terrible, wasting illness is suspected, as Virginia was little seen by anyone but her husband in her final days.
Lemuel Mason mourned deeply. Some good folk of his town, when they came upon him unexpected, heard him talking to Virginia, even after she died. On occasion, he was also heard talking to a child, rocking it in his empty arms and singing lullabies.
Some rumors suggest the desecration of Virginia Mason’s grave. But they are only rumors.
There are wilder stories still, of Virginia Mason’s body found in a tree, with only scraps of cloth clinging to its bones, and wisps of hair adhering to its skull. The body was found wedged in a crook of the tree, arms and knees raised to wrap around a conspicuous absence, just the size of a child. The remains were discovered three days after Virginia Mason was supposedly buried — not long enough for her to decompose to such a state, if those were indeed her bones.
Two months after the stone was raised in the churchyard bearing Virginia Mason’s name, words in white chalk appeared upon the tree where the bones were found: Who put Ginnie in the tree?
Whatever the truth, this is a publicly recorded matter as well, appearing in the local Pottstown newspaper: three months after Virginia Mason died, Lemuel Mason vanished.
No trace of his fate was ever discovered. He was never seen again.
A day before he vanished, the carnival entered town. The day after his absence was noticed, the carnival left town again.
It’s impossible to tell whether the grainy, black and white image of Lemuel Mason accompanying the news story of his disappearance shows the same man depicted in the black-and-white image of the clown cradling a child’s deformed bones. The greasepaint is too thick. It could be anyone lost in all that whiteness, with black crosses over their eyes.
Who would even think to compare the pictures? Walter would not, unless his mother had called him to say the name Lemuel Mason, which came to her in a dream. He would not, if the paper reporting Lemuel Mason’s disappearance had not also contained a note regarding the “funfair” leaving town.
The pieces of evidence are connected, Walter thinks. It is not an advertisement; it’s an invitation.
“It’s coming back,” a voice just behind Walter says.
He twists around in his chair to hide his startled jump. “What is?”
The librarian is slender, nervous, like a young colt. Her hands flutter in the direction of the newspapers spread in front of him — stories of carnivals, the carnival, as Walter has come to think of it, coming to town and leaving town. The librarian’s hands settle, falling to clasp and twist in front of her.
“The carnival,” she says. “I’m sure I saw it somewhere.”
She lifts the top paper from Walter’s pile, the local paper from today, and scans it briefly, frowning, before replacing it.
“Maybe I imagined it.” The librarian shrugs, but her frown lingers. Her expression is one of someone who has misplaced an object they were holding just a moment ago, an object they could swear they never set down.
The same finger of dread that touched Walter when his mother called touches him again. He resists the urge to grab the librarian by the shoulders, shake her, and demand she tell him everything she knows about the carnival.
As evenly as he can, trying on his most disarming smile, Walter Eckert meets the librarian’s eyes and asks, “Would you like to have dinner with me?”
The third piece of evidence is the oldest thus far. It is not a piece of evidence yet, but as he digs deeper, following tenuous connections and unexplained coincidences, Walter will encounter a glossy, full-color reproduction in a museum catalog, and file it as such.
The original is under glass at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. It is a shirt found among the grave goods of a nomadic steppe warrior, believed to have lived in the early 1200s, during the time of Ogedei Khan. It is remarkably well preserved. There are words stitched into the fabric, in a jumble of languages, as though each part was stitched by a different hand.
The words tell a fairy tale about a tame flock of crows and a girl who trained them to do tricks and follow simple commands. Like all good fairy tales, it is laced with darkness of the most brutal kind. The girl, who is only known as the daughter and never given a name, asks the birds to do something for her after she has taught them all the tricks she knows. She asks them to pick the flesh from her mother and stepfather’s living bones.
The crows obey.
And, hungry, wicked birds that crows are, once they are done, they devour the nameless girl’s eyes, too. It is not clear whether they do this as punishment, or as an act of mercy. After all, who would want to walk around with the image of their parents’ flesh-stripped bones fixed in their skull until the end of days? None but the most heartless of creatures, carrying feathers where their heart should be.