“I don’t know…I just forgot. I guess I just didn’t pay much attention to it at the time. I’m sorry, okay? But at least let me tell you what I read. ”
“Yeah, useful information might be—oh, I don’t know—useful?”
“Stop shouting. It was just a quick reference, and I guess it didn’t really register at the time because it referred to something that happened in the late fifteen hundreds, maybe early sixteen hundreds. Something about a guy put on trial for being a werewolf. Peter something or other. Can’t remember his last name. Point is, he was point on trial for being a werewolf and later executed. ”
“You lost me. Guy named Peter gets killed four hundred years ago, what’s that got to do with—”
“They gave a bunch of aliases for him. One of them was Ubel Griswold. ”
Crow stood there and stared at him for quite a while after that. “Oh, that’s just swell,” he said.
“Maybe it’s an ancestor of his,” Newton offered. “If Griswold was descended from someone who was accused of being a werewolf—and a pretty famous one if the transcripts of his trial are on the Internet four hundred some years later—then maybe he played on that. ”
“What do you mean?”
“Figure it out. He took the werewolf thing from his ancestor as a gimmick to disguise the fact that it was just an ordinary man—albeit a serial killer—behind the Reaper murders. Or, maybe he was really nuts and thought he was channeling his ancestor. Didn’t Son of Sam get messages from a dog or something?”
“I think that was something he made up to try and prove to the cops that he was insane. ”
“Well, he was a mass murderer…how sane could he have been?” Newton said. “But the point is that if you’re a homicidal maniac and you discover that your ancestor was tried and convicted of being a werewolf, wouldn’t you play on that? Use it to increase the terror and thereby increase whatever psychosexual pleasure these guys get from killing? Isn’t that like a given here?”
“It would be,” agreed Crow, “except for one thing. ”
“What’s that?”
“During the Pine Deep Massacre no one even floated the word ‘werewolf. ’ Not even me. I don’t think I’ve even said that word aloud in conjunction with Griswold until today. I didn’t even tell Val that’s what I thought Griswold was. ”
“Balls. ”
“Yeah, so any connection Griswold had with the four-hundred-year-old werewolf trial was kept pretty well hidden until you found it on the Net. I never even made that connection, and believe me I have looked. ”
“Well, regardless of that…the original Peter what’s-his-name is dead, and the Griswold of the 1970s is dead, so as spooky as this is it’s all kind of academic. ”
Crow turned away and looked down the tangled path. “Maybe,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Crow turned back. “What if they’re the same werewolf?”
“Oh, come on now, that’s going too far. First you want me to believe you met a werewolf, now it’s an immortal werewolf? Next thing you’ll tell me that his real name is Dracula. ”
“Dracula was a vampire. ”
“Well, Crow, you want me to believe in ghosts and werewolves. Why not vampires, too?” Crow walked away from him and started down the path. Newton called, “Hey, while we’re at it we can see if we can find a crop circle and maybe a leprechaun. ”
Crow held up one hand, forefinger raised.
(2)
Mark stood on the porch, leaning his shoulder against the pillar, the neck of a Sam Adams hooked between his index and forefingers. The sun was up but storm clouds were rising in a solid ring from every point on the horizon; they were closing like a camera aperture, shutting out the blue of the sky. In another half an hour it would be black as night. Weird weather patterns lately, he thought. When he heard the screen door open and then bang shut he knew it would be Val and not Connie following him out of the living room battleground.
He didn’t turn to look, just said, “Don’t start. ”
“I’m not going to say a damn thing. ” Val’s voice was ice cold. Mark had heard his mother sound like that on those rare times when she and Dad were fighting.
“It’s
not your business anyway,” he said.