I stayed behind the crime scene line and called his name. He waved a hand in acknowledgment and climbed from the hole, unfolding a frame that was at least six-six or six-seven in height. He towered over me, his head blocking out the sun. His nails were black with mud and beneath his overalls his shirt was drenched in sweat. Damp earth clung to his work boots, and dirt streaked his forehead and cheeks.
“Ellis Howard tells me you're assisting them in an investigation,” he said, after we had shaken hands. “You want to tell me why you're up here if your investigation is centered on Portland?”
“You ask Ellis that?”
“He told me to ask you. He said you had all the answers.”
“He's being optimistic. Curtis Peltier, the man who was murdered in Portland over the weekend, was related to Elizabeth Jessop. I think her remains were among those found here. Curtis's daughter was Grace Peltier. CID III is looking into the circumstances of her death. She was doing graduate work on the people buried in that hole.”
Brouchard eyeballed me for a good ten seconds, then led me to the mobile crime scene unit, where I was allowed to view the video tour of the crime scene on a portable TV borrowed for the duration of the field recovery. He seemed grateful for the excuse to rest, and poured us both coffee while I sat and watched the tape: mud, bones, and trees; glimpses of damaged skulls and scattered fingers; dark water; a rib cage shattered and splintered by the impact of a shotgun blast; a child's skeleton, curled in fetuslike upon itself.
When the tape had concluded I followed him across the road to the edge of the grave.
“Can't let you go beyond here,” he said apologetically. “Some of the victims are still down there, and we're searching for other artifacts.”
I nodded. I didn't need to go inside. I could see all that I needed to see from where I stood. The scene had already been photographed and measured. Above holes in the mud, pieces of card had been attached to wooden spikes, detailing the nature of the remains discovered. In some cases the holes were empty, but in one corner I saw two men in white overalls work carefully around a piece of exposed bone. When one of them moved away, I saw the curved reach of a rib cage, like dark fingers about to clasp in prayer.
“Did they all have their names around their necks?”
The details of the names written on the wooden boards had appeared in a report in the Maine Sunday Telegram. Given the nature of the discovery, it was a wonder that the investigators had managed to keep anything at all under wraps.
“Most of them. Some of the wood was rotted pretty bad, though.” Brouchard reached into his shirt pocket and produced a piece of folded paper, which he handed to me. Typed on the page were seventeen names, presumably obtained by checking the original identities of the Baptists against the names discovered on the bodies. DNA samples were to be taken from surviving relatives, where dental records were not available. Stars beside some names indicated those for whom no positive identification had yet been made. James Jessop's name was the next to last on the list.
“Is the Jessop boy's body still down there?”
Brouchard looked at the list in my hand. “They're taking him away today, him and his sister. He mean anything to you?”
I didn't reply. Another name on the page had caught my eye: Louise Faulkner, the Reverend Faulkner's wife. Faulkner's name, I noticed, was not on the list. Neither were those of his children.
“Any idea yet how they died?”
“Won't know for certain until the autopsies are done, but all of the men and two of the women had gunshot wounds to the head or body. The others seem to have been clubbed. The Faulkner woman was probably strangled; we found fragments of cord around her neck. Some of the children have shattered skulls, like they were hit with a rock, or maybe a hammer. A couple have what look like gunshot wounds.” He stopped talking and looked away toward the lake. “I guess you know something about these people.”
“A little,” I admitted. “Judging by the names on this list, you have at least one suspect.”
Brouchard nodded. “The preacher, Faulkner, unless somebody planted those boards to throw us off the trail and Faulkner is lying there dead with the rest of them.”
It was a possibility, although I knew that the existence of the Apocalypse bought by Jack Mercier made it unlikely.
“He killed his own wife,” I said, more to myself than to Brouchard.
“You got any idea why?”
“Maybe because she objected to what he was going to do.” The article Grace Peltier had written for Down East magazine had mentioned that Faulkner was a fundamentalist. Under fundamentalist doctrine, a wife has to submit to the authority of her husband. Argument or defiance was not permitted. I guessed also that Faulkner probably needed her admiration and her validation for all that he did. When that was withdrawn, she ceased to have any value for him.
Brouchard was looking at me with interest now. “You think you know why he killed them all?”
I thought of what Amy had told me of the Fellowship, its hatred for what it perceived as human weakness and fallibility; of Faulkner's ornate Apocalypses, visions of the final judgment; and of the word hacked beneath James Jessop's name on a length of dirt-encrusted wood. Sinner.
“It's just a guess, but I think they disappointed him in some way, or turned on him, so he punished them for their failings. As soon as they stood up to him they were finished, cursed for rebelling against God's anointed one.”
“That's a pretty harsh punishment.”
“I figure he was a pretty harsh kind of guy.”
I also wondered if, in some dark place inside him, Faulkner had always known that they would fail him. That was what human beings did: they tried and failed and failed again, and they kept failing until either they got it right at last or time ran out and they had to settle for what they had. But for Faulkner, there was only one chance: when they failed it proved their worthlessness, the impossibility of their salvation. They were damned. They had always been damned, and what happened to them was of no consequence in this world or the next.
These people had followed Faulkner to their deaths, blinded by their hopes for a new golden age, a desire for conviction, for something to believe in. Nobody had intervened. After all, this was 1963; communists were the threat, not God-fearing people who wanted to create a simpler life for themselves. Fifteen years would pass before Jim Jones and his disciples blew Congressman Leo Ryan's face off as a prelude to the mass suicide of 900 followers, after which people would begin to take a different view.
But even after Jonestown, false messiahs continued to draw adherents to them. Rock Theriault systematically tortured his followers in Ontario before tearing apart a woman named Solange Boilard with his bare hands in 1988. Jeffrey Lundgren, the leader of a breakaway Mormon sect, killed five members of the Avery family-Dennis and Cheryl Avery and their young daughters Trina, Rebecca, and Karen-in a barn in Kirtland, Ohio, in April 1989 and buried their remains under earth, rocks, and garbage. Nobody came looking for them until almost one year later, following a tip-off to police from a disgruntled cult member. The LeBaron family and their disciples in the breakaway Mormon Church of the Firstborn murdered almost thirty people, including an eighteen-month-old girl, in a cycle of violence that lasted from the early seventies until 1991.