Paskagankee (36 page)

Therefore, my plan, which I must assume was successful if you are now reading this letter, is to locate the spirit in whatever body she now inhabits and offer myself up as long-overdue retribution for her terrible loss.

I am truly sorry for the pain and suffering my bloodline has caused but am also truly thankful for the opportunity to bring this tragic chapter of Abenaqui history to a close. Good luck to you in the future, Chief McMahon.

May God have mercy on me.

Sincerely,

Professor Ken Dye

Sharon and Mike remained silent for a long time after reading the letter. “Now I get it,” Mike muttered.

“He did exactly what he said he was going to do, didn't he?” asked Sharon.

Mike nodded. “I didn't understand why the spirit suddenly dropped me just as it was about to tear me to shreds, only to go after the professor when he revealed himself. Now it makes sense. Somehow the spirit knew Ken Dye was the one that would satisfy its centuries-old need for retribution. After it killed the professor, I assumed it was going to come back and finish me off; I was expecting it to do exactly that. Instead, I watched as it disappeared out of poor Chief Court's broken body. The chief's body just fell to the ground and was still. Now I understand why—the spirit's long quest was finally over.”

“No one is going to believe this, you know,” Sharon said, staring at the paper. She noticed Mike's hands were shaking. “You're going to end up as much of an outcast as the professor was.”

“I'm not the one conducting the investigation, remember? With the murders of O'Bannon and Shaw, the state isn't going to allow a hick-town police chief to investigate, especially since I was directly involved in everything. So, really, I don't have any say in how this thing ends up being presented to the outside world. All I can do is tell my story to the next set of investigators and wait to see how it all gets whitewashed.”

Sharon shook her head, slowly and painfully. It was obvious to Mike she was tiring and needed rest, but she clearly wanted to talk this out. “You really think they're going to gloss over everything that happened?”

“Maybe not intentionally,” Mike answered, “but think about it—you were there, you saw things with your own eyes that defied conventional explanation. So did I. These incoming investigators, whoever they are, did not. There is absolutely no way they will accept that the spirit of a young woman killed in 1691 was dismembering people as retribution for the death of her baby, and that this aging professor, who most people viewed as a joke, brought it all to a close by sacrificing himself to that spirit. It's just not going to happen. I've spent my entire adult life as a member of the law enforcement community, and I can tell you that much conclusively.”

“It just seems so unfair,” she said. “He suffered for decades because of his research and now it turns out that he was right on target, and nobody is going to know?”

“That's not the worst part,” Mike answered.

“What could be worse than that?”

“Your friend, Chief Court, a man you described to me as the biggest positive influence in your life, is going to go down in history as a brutal serial killer when all he did was build a house out in the middle of nowhere. He was a victim in this as well, literally a man caught in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Sharon fell silent and Mike began to wonder if she might be drifting off to sleep. Suddenly she trained her piercing blue eyes on his and asked, “Why the dog?”

Now it was Mike's turn to hesitate. “Dog? What dog?”

“You know, the dog,” she insisted. “The call we investigated that got this whole ball of shit rolling. The dog that got torn apart up on Route 14. Why in the world would this wayward Native American spirit have done that? It's obvious the dog was killed by the same entity that killed all those people. My question is, why?”

Mike looked at her with admiration. “And the doctors told me you wouldn't remember anything,” he said. “I knew they were wrong.”

“Thanks,” she said with a smile. “But do you have any theories?”

“Well, I've been wondering about that, too. It doesn't fit with what we've learned from Professor Dye. Unfortunately we can't ask him about it, but my guess is this: Wally Court was a strong man with a strong code of moral conduct, would you say that's an accurate assessment of the man?”

Sharon nodded her head enthusiastically and then grimaced from the accompanying pain. “Absolutely,” she said quietly when the discomfort had subsided.

“That's what I figured. My theory, then, is this: He must have known something was happening to him, although he couldn't begin to imagine what it was. He probably thought he was losing his mind, that he was literally going insane. I think he probably fought the possession as long as he could, but he couldn't hold out forever. When the apparition became too strong for Court to control, he went after the dog in one final, desperate attempt to avoid killing another human being. After that, I'm afraid the spirit became so powerful he couldn't fight it. Before long, I'm sure the stress on Chief Court's body was so great it killed him. Toward the end he undoubtedly had no control at all over what the entity was forcing him to do.”

Mike looked at Sharon and saw tears running silently down her face. She looked exhausted, and he knew it was time to leave her so she could get some much-needed rest. He walked from the window, where he had been looking out at the Orono skyline and the University of Maine off in the distance, to the hospital bed holding the petite young officer.

Taking her hand gently, he leaned over and kissed her forehead. “None of that,” she whispered through her tears. “I want a real kiss.”

Mike smiled and shook his head. “I'd never have the willpower to leave if I kissed you the way I want to.”

“You say that like it's a bad thing.”

He laughed. “It is when you've got serious recovering to do. You lie back and get some sleep, and I'll see you tomorrow morning, bright and early.” Mike lowered Sharon's hand to the bed, drained his coffee, and prepared to do battle with the crutches he had already come to hate. Pausing at the door, he turned awkwardly to wish Sharon goodnight and saw she had already fallen asleep. The lines that seemed to have sprung up in her beautiful face over the last few days were gone, and she breathed slowly and easily, the light cotton blanket covering her broken body rising and falling with the rhythm of her respiration.

He eased the door shut and struggled down the hall, dodging visitors, nurses and other patients as they hurried past. It was time to pay a visit to Melissa Manheim.

59

“HOW THE HELL DID you wind up in that log cabin?” Mike asked the Portland Journal reporter. Incredibly, Melissa “the Maneater” Manheim had suffered nothing more than a concussion and some bumps and bruises from her run-in with the homicidal spirit. Mike knew she would be the prime source of information for the State Police investigators—along with him, of course—and he was curious as to what, exactly, she may have seen and how much of it she would be willing to admit to.

She looked up at him from her hospital bed, where she was propped up on three plump pillows, surrounded by laptops, telephones, and what looked like some sort of portable fax machine that was busy beeping and spitting out a more or less steady stream of documentation. Mike pictured Sharon lying in her own bed a few rooms down the hall, nearly immobile after her brush with death, and marveled at the unfairness of life.

“Well,” she sniffed, “
you
weren't giving me anything I could print, so after you threw me aside at the Sprague bonfire, I marched right off toward the forest. I knew you had assigned your little girlfriend to patrol the bonfire, too, so I figured I would eventually run across her. When I did, I intended to find out if she felt differently than you obviously do regarding the freedom of the press.”

“You mean you intended to threaten her with public exposure for sleeping with me. You figured by blackmailing her, you would be able to get the information I wouldn't give you.”

“I can't stop you if you choose to look at it that way.”

“It's not a matter of me looking at it that way, that's how it
is.
But in any event, it's obvious you never found her.”

“Why do you say that?”

“You're still more or less in one piece. If you had tried to threaten Sharon Dupont, she would have kicked your ass. You'd have been begging for a serial killer to show up by the time she was done with you. She may look small, but let me tell you, she packs a punch.”

“I know why you're here,” she told him, interrupting as was her custom and apparently choosing to ignore Mike's comment. “You want to know if I'm going to tell the investigators about the broken-down body of that poor man floating rather than walking and about him doing things that no human being could possibly do, especially an old man—”

“So you saw quite a bit,” Mike interrupted. He wondered how she liked it.

“I was knocked silly when that thing flung me into a tree and remained woozy until after you rescued me, which, by the way, seemed to take a lot longer than it should have. Anyway,” she continued after a short pause when Mike refused to take her bait, “of course I saw quite a bit. I really wasn't injured that badly.”

“I hope you're prepared for the investigators to label you a nutcase,” he said.

“I've dealt with much tougher than the Maine State Police, believe me,” she said dismissively, waving her hand like a petulant princess. “But in any event, no one will be labeling me anything,” she continued. Her face was a mask of innocence. “As far as they're going to know, I was unconscious the entire time. I didn't see a thing.”

“Are you telling me you're going to withhold evidence from the police in a murder investigation?”

Melissa Manheim snickered. “Come now, Chief,” she said. “This isn't your first time around the block, is it? You know as well as I do that if the evidence points toward a supernatural element or any sort of connection to Native American mysticism, it will all be whitewashed away like Tom Sawyer painting the fence. I'm sorry, but poor old Chief Wally Court is going to be the fall guy here, there's simply no way to avoid that.”

“And you're comfortable with an innocent man being railroaded, even though he's dead? You don't want the truth to come out?”

“I didn't say that,” she answered coyly. “There is definitely a bestseller in this, a book waiting to be written, and I hope you don't think I'm bragging when I say that I feel pretty confident I'm the one to write it.”

Great,
Mike thought.
I wonder what Ken Dye would have to say about this?
Then he decided the professor would probably applaud the idea, in spite of all that had happened to him and the beating his reputation had taken.

Mike shook his head at Melissa Manheim's obstinacy. “Well, I'm glad you're going to be all right,” he said, leaning on his crutches and turning toward the door. “Good luck to you—“

“Wait,” she said quietly. “Please.”

“What is it?”

“I know what that college professor—“

“His name was Ken Dye,” Mike interrupted.

“Yes, Ken Dye. I know what Professor Ken Dye did; how he was directly responsible for saving Officer Dupont and me, and I'll never forget it.” Mike listened in amazement and wondered, not for the first time, where she got her information.

“He was quite a guy,” Mike agreed, not sure where she was going with this.

“Anyway, effective immediately, I am establishing a scholarship fund in Professor Dye's name, to support research into the field of Native American folklore that was so close to his heart. My newspaper will be contributing big bucks too; you can mark my words on that one.”

“I sort of think the University would just as soon Ken Dye fade off into the sunset with as little fanfare as possible,” Mike answered.

At that, Melissa Manheim laughed, the sound echoing off the walls and out into the hospital hallway. “Really, Chief McMahon, I'm starting to believe you actually
did
just fall off the turnip truck.” Mike could feel his ears start to burn as his face turned red. “Once the money starts coming in, and I will personally ensure it flows in by the boatload, the school will do an about-face on the subject of Professor Ken Dye and his research quicker than you can say ‘ghosties and apparitions.'”

Mike stared at her in slack-jawed amazement. “
You're
going to help rehabilitate the man's legacy?”

“Don't sound so surprised,” she answered with a smile. “Like I said, I'm well aware that I am alive right now solely because of his sacrifice. I consider it the least I can do, especially considering how much money I expect to make off the book I have already begun writing. It won't hurt me to throw some of that cash the school's way.”

“Wow,” Mike muttered as he turned back toward the door. “Strange bedfellows.”