“When was the last time you spoke to Isaac, Mrs. Cranley?”
“You can call me Georgette. And, eh . . . maybe twelve years ago at our daddy’s funeral. Me and Isaac didn’t get on real well. Guess that doesn’t matter now. He was a creep, truth be told.”
Mark cleared his throat. Apparently, this woman had no problem speaking ill of the dead. Made his job easier anyway. “How do you mean, ma’am? Georgette?”
Mark heard a deep inhale as if the woman had just lit a cigarette. “He just was. He was always watching everyone with this weird look on his face. Gave me the chills, and he was my own brother. It got worse as he got older. I was happy when me and Lester moved to Portland, and I had no reason to see him anymore.”
“I see.”
“’Course I figured it out when I went over to his place in Missoula, oh . . . I guess it’d have been going on eighteen or nineteen years now and there was an old lady neighbor at his place with her grandson I guess. Kid was just a toddler, so it’d have to be. Isaac kept staring at him with this look on his face.” She made a sound that gave Mark the idea she’d just done an exaggerated shiver. “Well, that’s when I said, ah, bingo. Isaac’s a pervert. It all made sense.”
Mark felt suddenly sick. He cleared his throat. “But you never saw any evidence of him abusing children?”
“Nah. Just that look. But women know things, ya know? Intuition.” He heard her suck in another inhale of her cigarette.
“And this was in Missoula, you said?” Mark pulled Isaac Driscoll’s file closer and noted that his last known address had been in Missoula—probably an apartment building. He’d been in unit A.
“Yup. I don’t have the address anymore, but that’s the last place I seen him.”
“From what I understand, your brother did volunteer work for several social services agencies in the area.”
“Well, there ya go. Gave him access.”
Mark cleared his throat again. He’d spoken to several people at the volunteer agencies Driscoll had done work for, but no one had said anything disparaging about him. He made a note to widen the net of people to interview who might have known Driscoll in a volunteer capacity.
“This woman at your brother’s house all those years ago, can you tell me anything about her?”
“Yeah, she was real hard to understand. Had a thick accent. She left pretty quick with the kid but not soon enough for me to see how Isaac looked at him. I thought about going over to her apartment and warning her away from Isaac, but I figured people gotta learn their own lessons, ya know?”
Again, Mark was taken off guard. Maybe the whole Driscoll family was just off. ?
?Um, right. Well, I’m calling for another reason. Your brother owned quite an extensive acreage of land outside of Helena Springs. As his next of kin, the acreage will go to you, but Isaac was allowing a young man to stay in a cabin on the property.”
She made a small huffing sound. “Yeah, I bet he was.”
“There is no evidence of any sort of abuse. The man is in his early twenties. It appears Isaac let him stay there after his parents abandoned him, and the man grew up without any exposure to society.”
Georgette laughed, a low sound filled with phlegm. “So Isaac was raising himself a mountain man? Weird.”
“I can’t say Isaac did much of his raising. But like I said, he let him stay on the property. When the estate is released to you, would you allow him to remain in his cabin until he figures out what to do? His options are very limited.”
Georgette sucked in another loud inhale and Mark grimaced on behalf of her lungs. “Nope, nope. I don’t want a thing to do with Isaac’s weirdness, not when he was living and especially now he’s dead. Nope, that mountain man’s gotta go. The sooner the better.”
Mark sighed. “If you reconsider, ma’am—”
“I won’t. He’ll need to vacate immediately. As far as I’m concerned, he’s poaching on my land.”
**********
The Internet was filled with information about the Spartans and for fifteen minutes or so, Mark got caught up in the research. He’d needed a palate cleanse after talking to Isaac Driscoll’s sister and her blackened lungs, and sad to say, stories of war and carnage were more appealing at the moment.
Sparta, Greece, was a warrior society centered around military service. Apparently, it began in infancy when children were inspected for strength, and then, at age seven, soldiers came and took the child from the caretaker, whose gentle and affectionate influence was considered a negative, and housed them in a dormitory with other boy soldiers. The Spartan child then endured harsh physical discipline and deprivation to learn how to be strong, and rely on his wits. In his early twenties, he had to pass a rigorous test and only then, became a Spartan soldier.
Sounds brutal. Mark could be grateful for one thing—he hadn’t grown up in ancient Greece.
He looked up the Battle of Thermopylae, a military encounter with the Persians, who greatly outnumbered the Spartans. He studied the picture online, and just as it had the first time, it sent a strange shudder down his spine. It was definitely the presence of bows and arrows in the warriors’ hands—that obviously could not be ignored based on the weapon used in the two murders—but it was something else too. Something that skated just out of reach. Maybe not something in the painting so much as a puzzle piece that would link all of this together. Make sense of it.
A mystery woman, murders, bows and arrows, an abandoned boy, a sister who thought her brother was a “pervert,” government-run social studies . . . Had Driscoll been attempting to raise . . . a modern-day Spartan? But why? Had he been plain batshit crazy? Or did he really believe he was helping Lucas?