Jessica took out a card, put it on the wooden table by the front window. She wasn’t even sure this woman had a phone. ‘If you can think of anything that might help us locate Ruby Longstreet, please give us a call.’
No response. Just the creak of the rocking chair.
As they reached the car, Jessica had the feeling they were being observed. After a few steps she turned.
The boy was sitting on the roof, watching them.
*
Jessica and Byrne headed south. They didn’t talk. The encounter with Ida-Rae Munson and the barking boy had pretty much taken the words right out of them. When they reached the five-mile mark, they came to the overgrown drive that led back toward what they assumed was the Longstreet property. Jessica stopped the car.
‘You sure you want to do this?’ she asked.
‘Well, we’re here, right?’ Byrne asked. ‘I mean, what would a trip to West Virginia be without a visit to the famous Longstreet Estate?’
Jessica wasn’t finding the humor.
‘It would be like visiting Asheville and not going to Biltmore,’ Byrne added.
Against her better judgment, Jessica turned into the drive. She said a silent prayer that they would not encounter any more barking boys.
They rode the overgrown lane back over the rise, more than a half-mile, and saw what was once a home. Two buildings, flattened by time and weather, sat next to a frozen pond. Behind it a dry gully ran down the hill.
In the pond were the remnants of an old pickup truck’s fender and wheel well. As Jessica and Byrne got out, and moved closer, Jessica saw that the buildings had been burned, but, apparently, when they had fallen into the pond, the fire halted. Half-walls and a charred ridge pole stuck out of the ice. Tar-paper spread across an overgrown field. Emerging from the ground behind the house were a half-dozen crosses, simple monuments of twined-together two by fours.
‘Well, our friend Ida-Rae was right,’ Jessica said, as brightly as possible. ‘Nothing to see here. Nope. Nary a thing. Let’s go.’
Instead of responding, Byrne walked toward the pile of charred rubble. Jessica recognized the set of her partner’s shoulders, his gait. She knew they were not going to leave any time soon.
Jessica followed, watching the ground for all manner of danger — snakes, rats, and especially old boards with big rusty nails sticking out of them. Once, when she was seven years old, she and her cousin Angela snuck onto a construction site in South Philly, and Jessica stepped on a board, putting a sixteen-penny nail through her right foot. Besides the excruciating pain, she’d had to get a tetanus shot, which was almost worse. Since then it had become a bona fide phobia. She could square off in the ring with big nineteen-year-old girls named Valentine, run after crazy men with butcher knives, but she was scared shitless of stepping on an old rusty nail sticking out of a board.
And snakes. She was not a snake person.
‘I can’t believe a whole family lived in a place this small,’ Jessica said. While the rowhouses in cities like Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia were notoriously small, at least they could grow vertically. This had been a three- or four-room shack, one-story tall. Jessica looked to her right and saw an old metal bed frame grown over by weeds. She wondered how many people had slept in it.
She was just about to ask Byrne what she could do to help move this investigation along, when she heard a noise to her right. An animal sound. She turned and saw, on a ridge about fifty feet away, two black dogs.
Big black dogs.
‘Kevin,’ Jessica whispered.
‘I see them.’
Both detectives slowly unsnapped their holsters, drew their weapons, held them at their sides. Jessica looked back at the car. It was at least thirty yards away. They would never make it, even at a dead run.
The dogs did not have their heads lowered, nor were they growling. But then again, neither Jessica nor Byrne had moved.
‘What you want to do?’ Jessica asked.
‘Just stay as still as possible. Don’t make eye contact.’
The dogs milled back and forth on the ridge, circling each other, nuzzling, sniffing the air. It looked as if they might be protecting something, but were unsure that Jessica and Byrne posed any threat. Jessica noticed they were well-fed, heavily muscled. After a few minutes they turned and loped down the other side of the hill.
Jessica and Byrne stood still for a full minute. Had the dogs left? There was no way of knowing, and Jessica would be damned if she was going to go to the top of the ridge and take a peek.
‘Partner?’ she said.
‘Yeah?’
‘I love the hell out of you, you know that, right?’
‘I do,’ Byrne said. ‘And it means the world to me.’
‘But if you don’t mind, could you do me a favor?’
‘I will surely entertain the notion.’
‘Could we maybe get the fuck out of here?’
‘I think we’re okay,’ Byrne said. ‘I think they left.’
Jessica wanted to believe he was right. She wasn’t so sure.
For the moment her thoughts returned to the case, and to Ida-Rae Munson’s words:
Word was she had a devil-child.
In the context of the horrors they had seen in the desecrated churches, the words certainly took on a new meaning. She just didn’t know what that meaning might be. Either way, it was time for some old school, shoe leather police work. She just didn’t want to do it here.
‘I think we should go back to the town,’ Jessica said. ‘Maybe there’s some forwarding address for this Ruby Longstreet, some attorney who handled the property. I want to see the records of this place.’
Byrne reached into his coat pocket, gave Jessica the deputy’s card. ‘Nice kid. Believe me, he’ll fall all over himself to help you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I’ll wait here.’
Jessica looked at her partner. ‘You’re going to stay here.’
‘Yeah.’
‘In the middle of nowhere.’
‘Yeah,’ Byrne said. ‘You might want to fix your hair.’
Jessica did a quick comb-through with her fingers. ‘Better?’
‘Better.’
‘You sure you want to do this?’
Byrne just nodded.
Jessica backed her way to the car, listening for the sound of eight heavy paws loping up the hill. She heard nothing. She opened the driver’s door.
‘Kevin?’
Byrne looked over.
‘The dogs?’
Byrne raised a hand, waved. He’d heard her.
THIRTY-THREE
Byrne walked to the top of the hill, weapon in hand. There was a tree line about a hundred yards away. There was no sign of the dogs.
He holstered, walked back down, stood at the base of the foundation where the old shack had stood, listened to the silence. He had grown up in the city, had spent most of his life in one. The mind-numbing quiet of a place like this was profound.
His mind was not quiet for long.
Who are you, Ruby Longstreet?
Byrne crouched down near the footer, an old track-style foundation made of packed earth and stones. He picked up one of the white stones and knew where he had seen one like it before. It was in the victim’s mouth at St Regina’s. He rolled the smooth rock in his hand, felt the malign presence of this place, a history that was fearsome and dark.
Who are you, Ruby Longstreet?
Byrne glanced skyward. The air was cold, but the sun warmed his face. He stood, walked around the frozen pond and saw, just at the bottom of the rise, the handful of homemade crosses, a half-dozen in all. This was the family plot. He wondered if Elijah Longstreet was buried beneath his feet.
Byrne looked at the edge of the overgrown area, saw an old realtor sign, rusted and battered by time and weather. He turned it over. There, painted on the back, was a telling legend.