The Seven Whistlers (11 page)

The sound of the knife slicing through the heavy packing
tape was very satisfying. Rose slipped the blade under the side flap of the
box, and eased it through the rest of the tape, letting the box open of its own
accord.

She took out the contents, carefully arranging them on her
kitchen table. When she was done, she let her knife dance across the second
box. She repeated the process, until her tabletop was covered with the meager
remains of her grandfather’s life.

Not nearly enough to show for a man’s life.

Rose went through his clothes first. There was really only
some underwear, a few t-shirts, pajamas, and two pair of faded khakis. She
folded the clothes and put them back in the box. The whole thing was so
depressing she wanted to cry.

She picked up his watch and wallet next. The wallet was
empty, except for a picture of her grandmother. It was an old picture — her
grandmother was probably only in her early twenties — but it could be no
one else. The young woman in the picture had the same sharp, beautiful features
and hard-set mouth. Rose touched her own mouth, feeling smooth softness, where
her Grandmother’s young face was tense and drawn.

Rose put the wallet and watch back into the box, her hands
drawn instinctively to the small cache of papers she’d set aside earlier. There
was a small moleskin notebook mixed in with the hospital records, and other
paper detritus. She picked up the notebook, and flipped it open. Her
grandfather’s spidery handwriting covered the yellowed pages.

The date on the top of the first page was January 20th 1943.
Rose bit her nail, somehow certain that this was what she had been looking for.

She began to read.

January 20th 1943

I’ve been shipboard for less than two weeks, but I can
already feel my body beginning to settle into the rhythm of the sea. It’s
infernally hot below deck. Some of the guys on laundry detail sweat so much
they work in their underwear. I’m just glad Momma’s not here to see this, she’d
whoop them all for being disrespectful.

The ship’s so big, and gets dirty so fast, that it takes
all two thousand of us working non-stop to keep it clean. Scrubbing isn’t
woman’s work here, nor is cooking, nor doing wash.

Davey has the bunk below mine. It’s nice to have a friend
from home on board with me. We’ve made a few other friends, but Davey and I
stick together anyway. One of the other guys asked if we were brothers. Davey
just laughed, but here in the middle of nowhere I feel like we’re almost that
close.

Got a letter from Doris. The kid thinks she’s in love
with me. I told her before I shipped out that we were just friends, but at
least she writes. That’s nice. Davey got two letters from Isobel. I could smell
her perfume when he opened them.

Wish she was writing to me.

Rose made herself a cup of tea, sipping it as she made her
way through the journal entries, utterly enthralled by even the most mundane
details about her grandfather’s experience during World War II on the
battleship
North Carolina
. He’d spent his days working and training, his
nights on duty, watching for enemy aircraft as the ship trolled the waters of
the South Pacific.

Her heart had skipped when she’d first encountered her
grandmother Isobel’s name scratched into the little moleskin journal. She’d had
no idea her grandfather had married his best friend’s girl. She wondered how
that had come to pass.

March 25th 1945

We started shelling Okinawa yesterday. I keep thinking
about all the civilians there, wondering if they’re going to be alright. Davey
says they deserve what’s coming to ’em, but I don’t know. The Japs are the bad
guys, that’s for certain, but I just don’t know.

My mind keeps going back to better times, when we weren’t
preparing for this battle. When you could just sit out on your watch looking at
the stars in the sky. What you see out on the water is like nothing you could
ever see on land.

Makes you almost believe in magic when you’re alone out
here on the sea.

April 6th 1945

Dear God, what have I done? Davey is dead and it’s my
fault.

April 6th 1945 — Later

We were firing at a bunch of crazy Jap pilots. Kamikazes,
they call ‘em. The bastards crash into you, dying as they take you down with
’em. It was near the craziest thing I ever heard about until I saw it for the
first time. Chilled my heart.

The air was full of the stink of battle, guns going off
all around us, on our ship, and the carriers near us in the water. I just
remember hearing a loud crack in the air, and then there was smoke everywhere.

We were hit by friendly fire I heard later, but at first,
I thought one of them kamikaze planes had hit us. There was blood all over everywhere,
on the deck, just everywhere.

I didn’t see the guy until he was almost on top of me. One
of my shipmates, covered in blood. He threw himself at me, his eyes bugging out
of his head. He’d been hit by shrapnel or something, so that his face was ruined
and I couldn’t even have said if I recognized him or not. Maybe it was the pain
or the blood or the smoke, or maybe his fear just snapped something in his
head, but he’d lost it.

The sailor attacked me, drove me down on the deck. He hit
me a few times, then grabbed my head in his hands and started slamming me
against the deck. His blood was everywhere. I didn’t know what to do. I started
screaming for help, but none came. I found my hands around the man’s throat,
and then I was choking him, trying to force him off me. He thrashed in my
hands, and then suddenly, he was still.

I pushed him off me, and rolled him over, checking for a
pulse. There was nothing. I didn’t know what to do. The first thing that came
into my head was to just roll him off the side. The ocean would take him, I
thought. Just one more sailor, lost in the war . . . not killed by my own
hands.

I got the man to the side, but as I started to push him
over, I heard Davey’s voice through the smoke, shouting my name. He’d come
looking to make sure I was okay. I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t let him
find me kneeling over the corpse of one of our shipmates. Self-defense or not
— and it was, sweet Jesus, it was — I’d taken a life.

I backed off quickly, slipping away in the smoke, hiding
behind one of the big guns. Davey was just a figure in the smoke. He nearly
tripped over the dead sailor. But then, as he knelt beside the still form,
laying in that bloody mess on the deck, the smoke cleared.

A pair of sailors came up just behind him, and then one
of the deck officers. I heard a voice ask Davey what had happened, and moments
later, another voice saying the sailor had marks on his throat, that it looked
like he’d been strangled.

God, help me, but they thought Davey had killed him.

I knew I had to step forward right then and set them
straight, explain how it had all happened. But it would mean a court martial,
and if they didn’t believe it had been unavoidable, that it had been self-defense
— if they found that I’d committed murder — the penalty in court
martial would be death.

I wanted to speak up, to tell the truth. I just couldn’t
get my voice to work.

This was the last entry. Rose reread it twice before she had
to put it down. Her hand hands were shaking that much.

Arlene’s studio was a mess. She’d spent the whole of the
morning working on the book cover, the one with the warrior monk. Only now, the
monk had four Hell Hounds surrounding him, waiting to go do his bidding.

She had no idea why she’d added them to the painting. There
were no Hell Hounds in the book she was creating the painting for. She’d have
to do a lot of fast-talking with the publisher to get them to okay it. Or not. At
the moment, she found that she didn’t really care
what
the publisher
said. She liked the painting as it was, felt the energy the subject matter
invoked as she ran her brush across the canvas.

A chill went through her, even though the heat was going
full blast. She was getting antsy. Too much time with the paintings, and she
always went a little stir crazy. Still, this painting unsettled her, made her
feel strange whenever she looked at it. Only a fool would have failed to see
why she had included the hounds. Their presence lingered in her mind, both the
memory of having seen them at the lake, and the knowledge that others had seen
them as well.

Her stomach rumbled, angry that she’d only fed it egg whites
and a bagel this morning instead of her usual corned beef hash and scrambled
eggs. The culinary arts ran strong in her family. Arlene had been thrilled when
her niece, Jenny, had gotten the job as chef over at the Red Oak Inn. Some of
her friends had told her that the inn had been upgraded in most travel guides
from three to four stars, just based on Jenny’s cooking and the influence she’d
had on the menu and the kitchen.

After putting a few more strokes of paint onto the canvas,
Arlene decided to let the painting to dry a bit, and go over to the Thistle
Café for an early lunch. She cleaned her brushes — the one thing in her
life she was meticulous with was her brushes. She loved to see them all lined
up in a row waiting for her in the morning.

Her boots were waiting for her under the coffee table. There
was a dab of bright blue on the toe of one of the little Ugg slip-ons. She
liked it that way, she decided, not bothering to clean the leather. Arlene
flipped the switch on the overhead track lighting before she slipped out,
locking the door behind her.

The painting seemed to shimmer in the semi-darkness.

The Thistle Café had very few customers at eleven thirty. Arlene
went over to one of the corner booths, and slid onto one of the Naugahyde
seats, liking the smoothness of the material. Naugahyde had so much of
leather’s character, but was somehow glossier. As old-fashioned faux as it was
— lending the café an inescapable old diner ambiance — Arlene had
always loved it. Heck, she liked bad faux-wooden paneling, too. Nostalgia, she
supposed.

She went through the menu, her eyes alighting on the Cobb
salad immediately. When the girl came to take her order, she got the salad and
an herbal tea, then leaned back in the booth, and waited. Her mind instantly
dredged up an image of Rose Kerrigan’s face. A flicker of guilt went through
her as she thought about how dismissive she’d been toward Rose yesterday.

Guilt had been haunting her ever since. Arlene knew she
ought to have told Rose the truth, not only what she had seen, but what she
believed. Not just to appease her guilt, but because she had an idea that Rose
might actually have the courage to try to do something about it.

Someone had to, or the town of Kingsbury was in deep shit. And
that would only be the beginning. If all seven came together . . .

The waitress brought her tea, and Arlene felt absurdly
grateful. It was too hot, but she sipped it anyway and wrapped her hands around
the cup, borrowing its warmth. The cold she felt came both from the season and
from within her. She could wrap herself in thick sweaters and jackets to combat
the autumn chill, but the coldness inside her could not be escaped.

Arlene had spent her life delving into the supernatural. Not
because she wanted power, or wealth and fame, but because she was just plain
old curious about the subject. Magic and myth and legend. It filled her with
such hope, such pleasure. She remembered being a little girl, tucked away in a
lonely corner of the library, reading about dragons and ogres, trolls and
werewolves, vampires and ghosts. She’d been enthralled by the tales — the
myths and legends that were strangely synchronistic all over the world. It made
her think that there had to be some validity to them if the same creatures that
haunted Romania, also terrified the inhabitants of Peru.

Until now, she’d always
wanted
there to be truth in
those legends.

Lost in thought, she sipped her tea again.

A wailing cry filled the café, the hysterical cry of a young
child, and she spilled hot tea on her fingers. Arlene hissed as she put the cup
down, quickly grabbing up her napkin to wipe off her hands, which throbbed with
the scalding they’d received.

She looked over and saw a young tourist couple and their two
small children standing in the doorway of the café. The young mother held a
screaming, red-faced toddler in her arms, trying to quiet the child with
shushes and kisses. The man had the hand of the other child, a little boy no
older than five or six. The kid’s face was pale, and shed tears were slowly
drying on his cheeks and chin.

The waitress carried Arlene’s Cobb salad toward the table,
but was flagged by the woman with the now sobbing, snuffling toddler in her
arms.

“We’d like a table, please?” the woman said, and Arlene
realized she was almost as upset as the children. The husband remained calm,
but his expression was grim.

“Sit wherever you’d like, m’am,” the waitress replied. “I’ll
be with you quick as I can.”

The couple walked to the nearest table, and the woman sat
down, the child still in her lap. Arlene watched them, curious as to what had
upset them so much.

“Here you are,” the waitress said, setting the salad on the
table in front of her.

“Thanks,” Arlene said, distracted by her curiosity.

She waited as the waitress took the family’s drink order and
disappeared back into the kitchen. Arlene watched them. The husband glanced up
from his menu and caught her eyes. She offered a sympathetic smile and he
nodded his thanks.