Ghost Dance (23 page)

Founded in 1867 as the Catholic Home for Abandoned and Wayward Children, Hennessy House provided shelter to generations of Green Mountain orphans for the next one hundred and eight years, until the state of Vermont and the Archdiocese of Burlington decided that such institutions were not in the children’s best interests and closed the house in favor of a foster-home system.

Gallagher had stopped at the state social services office in Burlington to pick up some background literature on Hennessy House and casually asked how he might track down people who had worked there the last few years it was open. One of the older social workers had remembered the Stubbinses. Gallagher found them living in a forest-green ranch house on a bluff above Lake Champlain, just south of Ferrisburg.

Their family room had been set up like a hospital ward: a white adjustable bed, a wheelchair, an oxygen tank, an old metal television table stocked with medicines, folded sheets on the couch where Cornelia slept. Overpowering everything was the harsh scent of antiseptic cleanser.

‘Smartest fella I ever saw at the house,’ Stubbins said. ‘Read everything. But my sweetie’s right: Terrance was a spider.’

Cornelia slid the tip of her tongue around her right tusk and clucked her approval. ‘Just waiting for you to get snarled in his web, that one.’

‘Why did you think he was a spider?’

Stubbins glanced furtively at his wife. She got up out of her chair on two wooden canes. ‘Go on!’ she cried, shaking one cane at him. ‘You always said we should tell someone, make people know. Now you’re about done for. Here’s your chance.’

The dying man hesitated.

‘Go on!’ Cornelia cried again.

‘Give us a puff first,’ he croaked.

In hoarse starts, through puffs and choking fits over the course of an hour, the whole shameful story came out. Terrance Danby arrived at Hennessy House in late 1968. Ten years old, with the frozen look a deer gets in headlights and kids get when they’ve gone through a shocking loss. But behind the look lay a deep and abiding craftiness.

‘Spider eyes,’ Cornelia said.

‘That’s enough spider talk!’ Stubbins choked.

‘Just the same,’ she retorted smugly, ‘that’s what they were.’

Terrance found the library and started to read. Two, sometimes three books a day. Science, novels, biographies, newspapers, magazines. Anything that was printed. By the time he was twelve, he had read all of Shakespeare and the Bible, and was studying Latin and Greek. He had also developed a fearsome reputation in the house. One of the boys, a bully named Alan Haig, picked on Terrance because he was reading all the time. Terrance took it and took it—‘waiting in his web for the fly,’ as Cornelia put it.

Then one night as he was making his rounds, Stubbins found Haig strapped to a chair in an empty office. Haig was gagged with duct tape. The foreskin of the boy’s uncircumcised penis had been stapled to the chair seat. Haig refused to tell anyone what had happened.

‘But ya could see after that that he was terrified of Terrance, this kid half Haig’s size,’ Stubbins said. He stopped to consider his hands. There were dark blotches of purple on his skin.

‘You ain’t done by a long shot,’ Cornelia said. ‘Tell him.’

Stubbins took a deep, garbled breath. ‘We don’t know what happened for sure, sweetie. Maybe it’s best to let the story die.’

‘That ain’t right, Oscar, and you know it,’ his wife protested. ‘You don’t tell, it’s all a lie.’

‘What’s a lie?’ Gallagher asked, confused.

Stubbins waved one of his skeletal fingers at him and croaked, ‘We had nothing to do with it. We tried to tell people back then. … but no one would listen till it was too late.’

Stubbins said that the year Danby turned thirteen, the diocese appointed a young priest as headmaster in an effort to turn around an institution in chaos; six of the boys at Hennessy House had been expelled from school for one infraction or another in the prior semester. The priest was an authoritarian, bigger, stronger, faster and meaner than any boy in the orphanage.

‘If a kid got out of line, he’d haul the little shit off into his office,’ Stubbins said, men started coughing. He gestured wildly at his wife to continue.

‘He’d spank on ’em, even the biggest boys,’ Cornelia said. ‘Not that I’m against a good spanking when it’s done right, but—’ She paused and tongued her tusk again. ‘I don’t know how to say this, but after a while you got the feeling he liked it. Hitting ’em, I mean.’

‘And God only knows what else he liked,’ Stubbins gasped, then went on to say that the priest played favorites. And the biggest favorite was Terrance Danby. By the time Danby was fifteen, he was often overheard talking about books and languages with the priest, who was a Jesuit, a learned priest.

That same year, while Stubbins was making his nightly rounds, he found the beds of Danby and another boy empty. He rushed down to tell the priest, only to find Danby leading the crying boy back to the sleeping dormitory. Danby said the boy had been bad and the priest wanted to see him.

Over the course of the following two years, Stubbins had many nocturnal encounters with Danby and other boys who had been bad. While Hennessy House boys no longer got expelled from school, the orphanage became, in Cornelia Stubbins’ words, ‘dark and nasty. A loveless place.’

One day in the summer of 1975, Cornelia overheard Danby’s old nemesis, Alan Haig, telling another boy that he ‘was tired of it all. I’m going to the bishop or the police or something unless it stops.’

A week later Haig’s body was found in the woods north of Burlington. His throat had been slit. Danby was an immediate suspect, but the priest gave the teen an ironclad alibi. They had been hiking all day on the back side of Mount Mansfield.

During the course of the murder investigation, detectives got several of the boys to talk about life at Hennessy. Within months, the diocese decided to close the orphanage. Terrance Danby was seventeen and forced into the Army. The priest was quietly sent off to Central America to work as a missionary.

‘A missionary?’ Gallagher said, flashing on a memory of a photograph. ‘What was his name?’

‘McColl,’ Stubbins croaked. ‘Timothy McColl.’

‘L
AWTON’S BECOME THIS FESTERING
wound,’ Andie fretted. ‘I don’t know who to trust any more, Pat.’

It was nine o’clock on Wednesday night. She and Gallagher had lowered the blinds on all the kitchen windows. They sat at the kitchen table with her notes from the Lamont Powell file at the Waterbury hospital between them. She wore faded denim overalls, a white jersey embroidered with purple flowers, and makeup—the first he’d ever seen her use—to cover the bruising from the stitches.

‘You can trust me,’ Gallagher said.

‘Can I?’ she asked.

‘I’ve stuck by you, haven’t I?’

Andie nodded, reached over and squeezed his hand. ‘I’m sorry. I’m scared.’

Gallagher squeezed back ‘Apology accepted. What else happened to Powell?’

She turned the page in her notebook. ‘Listen to this: “Patient Powell was admitted after being found in his office tearing his upper canine teeth from his head with a pair of pliers.

‘ “Patient has spent the last three months alternately in a straitjacket and in a four-point restraint system in C Ward for the violently insane,” ’ she continued. ‘ “Patient Powell suffers prolonged periods of severe dementia where he claims to be visited by a Sioux squaw that he says haunts him because he helped murder her.

‘ “Powell claims the squaw hovers in front of him and tells him he is damned because”—and this is evidently a quote from Powell himself—“she was eaten not by fire, nor water nor earth, but by man.” ’

Gallagher spilled his coffee across the table. He stood up, stunned. ‘Say that last part again.’

‘ “She was eaten not by fire, nor water nor earth, but by man,” ’ she repeated.

Gallagher felt like he was going nuts and he had to tell someone. ‘I heard that in a dream the other night.’

Andie stared at him. ‘A dream?’

‘That’s right,’ Gallagher said, flushing at the idea. ‘I keep having these dreams of Many Horses and she talks to me.’

Andie allowed herself a smile. ‘Here I thought you were an atheist who didn’t believe in ghosts.’

‘I am an atheist who doesn’t believe in ghosts!’ he snapped. ‘And besides, it wasn’t like Casper came to call. It was just a dream, a coincidence, or maybe my mind’s trying to convince me that that’s what I heard in my dream.
Déjà vu.
I … I don’t know.’

Her amusement turned to concern. ‘I hate it when people ask me, but are you feeling all right?’

‘Yes,’ Gallagher insisted. ‘I’m … just keep reading.’

Andie watched him for several moments, then returned to her notes. ‘Here’s another quote: ‘Subsequent interviews with Patient Powell’s son, Lamont Jr. and two daughters—June of Glens Falls, New York, and Lenore of Poultney, Vermont—indicate he has been in a continually weakened mental condition since the passing of his wife, Katherine, in 1891. June and Lenore said Patient Powell dabbled in spiritualism and other tangents of the occult, as have many in recent years. But they assert that Patient Powell has never been west of Albany, much less to Indian territory.

‘ “Discussions with Lawton Police, while cursory, indicate no recent slayings of Indians. And indeed, no record of any Indian having lived in the town since the last Abenaki family left in 1874—” ’

‘We know that’s not true,’ Gallagher interrupted.

‘The police must have been lying,’ Andie agreed. ‘Do you think Powell helped kill Many Horses?’

‘If he did, he didn’t do it alone,’ he replied. ‘If he was a single loony, they would not have covered up the killing. So there had to be several people involved. And the killing had to have been brutal. I mean, the guy digs out his teeth, cuts off his tongue and then hangs himself because of it, right?’

Andie picked up her pistol off the table and checked the safety. ‘And because of it, someone tries to run us off the road. I think Kerris, the mayor, Bernie Chittenden and God only knows how many others know some of this. At least about the fact that Lamont Powell went insane claiming he’d helped kill an Indian woman.’

‘Fits the cover-up theory,’ Gallagher agreed. ‘But is it enough motivation to hunt down and kill three people? I mean, I wouldn’t want to be known as the descendant of a murderer, but would I care enough to kill people who might reveal that knowledge to the world?’

‘I don’t know,’ Andie said. ‘But I’ll tell you one thing: no one in Kerns’ family has a cabin on a lake down near Cartersburg. Remember? That’s what he told Lieutenant Bowman outside Nyren’s house—that he’d gotten to the scene because a relative had a camp nearby and he heard the dispatch calls.’

‘Yeah, so?’

‘So I ran into Gavrilis, Kerns’ deputy, this afternoon on the way back from Waterbury. Phil doesn’t know anything about a cabin down south. The story Kerris gave Gavrilis is that he went fishing. Gavrilis also let me know that the chief’s marriage is on the rocks. His wife’s got a restraining order on him and he’s been away fishing, out of radio contact, two or three times the past few weeks, including the morning Olga’s house burned.’

‘And Kerris has a history of sexual violence,’ Gallagher said softly.

Andie tightened, but nodded. ‘I don’t think we’re close to having the whole story on this.’

‘You got a good chunk of it today, but not all,’ he said, then pondered something bothering him. ‘The Waterbury records say Mayor Powell dabbled in spiritualism and the occult. The Danbys?’

‘In Lawton, who else?’ Andie replied. ‘So we still can’t rule out Terrance.’

‘Or Monsignor McColl,’ he said.

‘Monsignor McColl!’ Andie cried. ‘What are you talking about?’

Gallagher related the details of his conversation with the Stubbinses, including the fact that the priest had run the orphanage while Terrance Danby was a resident and had been suspected of brutality and possibly of accessory to homicide.

‘He’s been our parish priest for nearly ten years,’ Andie said, stunned. ‘He said my mother’s funeral mass. She thought he was some kind of saint.’

‘Some kind of saint,’ Gallagher repeated, thinking about Father D’Angelo for the first time in many days. There was something about his earlier meetings with the monsignor that was still nagging at him, but he couldn’t figure out what it was.

‘I’m going to have a talk with Monsignor McColl tomorrow morning,’ Andie promised.

‘I can’t tell you how much I’d love to be there for that little chat,’ Gallagher said. ‘But I think I’m better off going to Washington.’

The second Gallagher left the Stubbins house, he’d used his cellular phone to call Jerry Matthews, his partner. It had been nearly two weeks since they had talked, two weeks since he’d turned forty and Emily had remarried. The second Jerry answered, the image of Gallagher’s ex-wife lying on some beach with her new husband played in his head, but he forced himself not to ask about her or the wedding. Those kind of answers threatened almost as much as the killer stalking Vermont.

Instead, he gave Jerry a rough outline of what had happened since their last conversation, including the bodies, the journal, the drawings of Charun and the story of Danby. Jerry had covered the military for the old
Washington Star
before joining
Time
in a similar position. Like Gallagher, he had an undergraduate degree in anthropology and had tried to cover the arcane world of the Defense Department as a culture to be deciphered. That had led to the writing of books and, eventually, film scripts, which was how they had met.

Jerry was furious at first that Gallagher had done so little work on the D’Angelo story, but the more he heard about the Lawton killings, the more intrigued he became.

‘The hell with a documentary!’ he advised. ‘You write the story as a book, make a million, then sell the film rights.’

‘The American way,’ Gallagher cracked.

‘C’mon, be cynical,’ Jerry replied blithely. ‘But be rich cynical. If you let this one get away, you’re more far gone than I thought.’

‘I’m not letting it get away,’ Gallagher assured him. ‘Right now, I need everything you can find out about Terrance Danby’s military history.’