Dead Man's Song (Pine Deep 2)

“Did you know those kids? I mean, did you go to school with them or anything?”

Crow looked at him, eyes steady and glittering. He said, “The little girl’s name was Amanda. The boy is Terrance. ”

Newton made a note in his notebook. “Last name. ”

“Wolfe,” Crow said simply.

Newton’s pen froze halfway through writing the W. He looked up. “Wolfe? Terrance…Terry Wolfe?”

“Yeah. ”

“Then the little girl was—”

“Amanda Wolfe,” Crow said. “Mandy, to us. ”

“Good God!” Newton chewed his lip for a long minute, then he gave a flustered series of blinks and looked at his notes. “Okay, now, from what I’ve read about the Massacre there were sixteen murders. Mandy Wolfe was number five. ”

“Right, but after that the killings stopped. Not completely, mind—just for a while. For twenty-eight days, actually. During that time whole town went absolutely crazy. There were carloads of guys with guns riding around, shooting at anything that moved. I think they managed to bag one mangy German shepherd that had escaped the original dog slaughter, three cows, and a guy getting a blow job from his neighbor’s wife in the hedges behind his house. ”

“They kill him?”

“No, but she got so scared she nearly bit his pecker off. ”

“Resulting in nineteen stitches,” Val said, “and two divorces. But they never bagged the killer, and by the end of those twenty-eight days, everyone had figured that the killer had skipped out and was terrorizing the citizenry of some other town. He’d had a couple of near misses that last night. Seems reasonable that he’d take off before his luck completely ran out, but on the twenty-eighth day the killings began again. Just like the first ones. People were attacked and savagely murdered. One of them was a cop. ”

Crow nodded. “The bastard hit him so fast that he never had the chance to draw his gun. Maybe he knew him, let him get close. Hard to say. Next victim was the cousin of a local farmer. His name was Roger Guthrie. ”

“Guthrie!” Newton looked sharply at Val, who nodded.

“He was my second cousin. Staying with us while on leave from the Air Force. Rog was strolling through the cornfields out behind the house, smoking a cig

ar and just relaxing. We all heard him scream and when Dad and his brother, Uncle George, came running up with rifles, Roger was dead. ”

“That’s incredible! Two murders in the same family, thirty years apart. ”

“In the same field, too,” observed Crow hoarsely, “almost the same spot where Henry was gunned down. ”

That fact seemed nailed to the air in front of Newton and he sat there, staring for a while. Then he shook his head and his eyes refocused, and he rifled through his notebook. “How many deaths is that?”

“Actually Rog was the sixteenth. I skipped some of the others. You can look up the names, but we didn’t know any of them. Just names and pictures in the newspapers. Roger, though, he was the last one killed during the massacre. ”

“But,” Val said significantly, “there were two more killings. ”

Crow nodded. “Oren Morse…and Ubel Griswold. And”—he held up a finger—“this is where I go into the area of conjecture. What I think happened was this—Oren Morse tracked Griswold down, chased him into the woods, and murdered him somewhere out beyond the Guthrie Farm, somewhere in or around Dark Hollow. ”

“So…what? He thought Griswold was the killer because he’d seen him when he attacked you in your yard?”

“Sure,” Crow said, setting his bottle down. “That has to be it. I mean, I saw Griswold’s face, too, but since I’d only seen him once before in town I didn’t recognize him at first. It wasn’t until things had settled down that night and I was about to go to bed that I realized that I had seen my attacker’s face before. Morse had worked for him, of course, and he knew him very well. ”

“Didn’t he make a police report?”

Val said, “My dad told me some years later that Morse had told him that he’d tried to make a police report and the officer at the desk had laughed him out of the office. Nobody believed him. ”

“Did your father?”

“I don’t know, but I think so. I asked him a few times, but he never really answered me. He’d just spread his hands and say something like ‘World’s a funny place, Val…who knows what people will do,’ which is no answer at all. ”

“Even after his nephew was killed?”