CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
Laura was still wrestling with the concept of how to cover up the fact she’d had a vision as they approached the dilapidated office building again. She couldn’t exactly walk in there and say that she’d had a vision of the past which connected an identical historic crime with what was happening here. She needed an excuse—a way to explain how the idea had come to her.
She couldn’t just say that she’d driven there on a whim. Could she?
It was a long way to come just for that. Surely if it was only a whim, she would have done some research first. Looked it up herself or at least called ahead before visiting in person. It had to be more than just a whim.
Unless, of course, she just pretended that she had done some research.
“Why are we here again?” Agent Moore asked, puzzled, as she came up behind Laura. She was delayed, having still been on the phone to one of the reunion attendees when they pulled up. Apparently, she was now done with that particular conversation.
“To chase down another lead,” Laura said. “Who better to tell us about something connected to the family bloodline than someone who has already researched it extensively? Anyway, I take it you don’t have any new leads.”
“Nope,” Agent Moore said cheerfully. “I’ve managed to get through nearly a hundred people, though!”
For a moment, Laura actually felt impressed. Then she remembered that there were almost two thousand people to get through, and the feeling faded.
Maybe she should have instructed that old deputy to start calling people—but it looked as though the Sheriff only trusted him to sit at his desk and take on any calls that came through in an absolute emergency when everyone else was busy, rather than deploying him as a go-to. He probably wasn’t very reliable. Laura wasn’t sure exactly what kind of work he was even doing at that desk.
“Let’s head up,” Laura said, gesturing toward the building in front of them. She tried the door, having developed a suspicion last time they were here; it opened. In spite of the buzzer system, it seemed that there was no need to call ahead, since the door lock didn’t work properly in the first place.
She walked up the now-familiar route to the genealogist’s office, stopping and knocking on it rather than just bursting in. She could hear the low murmur of a voice coming from inside. It stopped abruptly when she knocked; then she heard a few more quick words before the sound of someone’s rapid steps across the floor.
“Hello? Oh,” Alice Papadopoli said, looking up and recognizing both Laura and Agent Moore. “Well, you’d better come in.”
“Thank you,” Laura said, stepping into the office after her. The small space felt cozier today. Maybe it was because she was no longer shocked by the state of the building itself and how it seemed to foreshadow a much less professional business. Perhaps it was that the weather had dropped colder out there, leaving the small heated office to feel like an island of warmth. Whatever it was, she almost welcomed stepping inside today.
“I take it this is in regards to the murders again?” Alice said, giving a little shudder as she sat back down behind her desk. She had a thin shawl-like garment over her shoulders today—Laura recognized that it was probably some kind of fashionable scarf that she had picked up in the eighties, but she couldn’t help associating it with the old-fashioned farmers she had seen in her vision.
“It is,” Laura confirmed, taking one of the chairs in front of the desk. “I had a bit of a thought, and I did a little research to follow up on it. I think you’ll probably be best placed to tell us more about what I found.”
“Go on,” Alice said, sounding very intrigued. She even leaned forward a little in her chair.
Laura didn’t look at Agent Moore as she explained; she didn’t want to give herself away. She just hoped the younger rookie didn’t figure out that Laura hadn’t had enough time to do this kind of research—or that if she had done it much earlier, she hadn’t mentioned it to her partner at all. “I found there was a vicious attack back in the earlier days of the farming community here,” she said, picking her phrasing carefully to sound specific while actually being as vague as possible. She didn’t really have the details, but she needed Alice to hear what she said and know what she was talking about. “A scythe was used as the weapon. Did you come across that while looking into your ancestry?”
“Ah.” Alice nodded, drawing the shawl tighter about her as if she felt a sudden chill. “Yes, the massacre of 1825. Of course, it was a huge event in our state’s history. Although I’m not sure what that can possibly have to do with your case today.”
“You’ve heard of copycat killers, yes?” Laura said. She hadn’t quite figured out the connection herself, yet, but this was the obvious explanation. It might even be the right one. She needed more information to know whether that really was the case or not.
“I see.” Alice nodded. “Then I suppose you want to know everything you can about it.” She stood up, moving just a couple of steps to the back of the room where a large, dark wood bookcase stood filled with leather-bound books. Some of them looked historical, with faded and cracked spines, while others were more modern imitations. The one that Alice took down was a curiously new-looking volume, though the paper was heavy and yellow as if it had been printed in a bygone time.
“What’s that?” Agent Moore gaped. “It’s huge! I’m surprised you can lift it.”
Alice chuckled, smoothing down the first page as she laid it open. “It is indeed very heavy,” she said. “But that’s because it is very important. For me, anyway. This is the results of my work on investigating my own family tree. I had it printed up professionally, so this is the only copy. I’ll ask you to be careful with it, though I already know you will be.”
Laura cast a warning look at Agent Moore to not even touch the thing. If she did, they would probably end up in some terrible romantic comedy movie sequence of spilled coffees, stumbles that resulted in torn pages, and something involving the very small window on one side of the room.
“You traced back your family tree through all the branches you could find? How far back?” Laura asked, seeing the neat diagrams printed on each page. The first page had just held a single family unit: Alice and, obviously from the line that connected them, her parents. From then, each page held a new branch spiking off into the past.
“As far as I could,” Alice explained. “Some of the branches go back into the 1700s and I even managed to find one Dutch relative from the 1600s, although the records are so patchy that I couldn’t identify who their wife was or anything about their parentage. That’s where it all ends. Still, I’m pretty pleased with how far back I managed to go. Every time I found a new branch, I spent time tracing that down to present day as well, so I had as much complete information as possible. You’ll find most of the attendees from the reunion here, too.”
“The deceased?” Laura asked.
Alice flipped back through a few pages; she obviously knew the spiderweb-like trees well enough to be able to estimate whereabouts each one could be found in the book. “Here,” she said, tapping one branch. Janae Michaels was right at the end, underneath her parents’ names, with no siblings. Another page showed the same story for James Bluton, with a line for marriage connecting him to Maria. The line of parentage extended from her to her two children, but not from James, who of course was not their biological father. The third page, belonging to Hank Gregory, bore the names of both his wife and his son, both of them marked with a (d.) for deceased.
“You’ll need to update this,” Laura noted. She felt a tinge of sadness at it. It was always tragic to see loss of life, of course, but she was also used to it. Something like this, this official document which recorded the victims as being alive, seemed to drive it home in a totally different way. There was also the fact that this book had clearly been a labor of love on Herculean proportions, and to see it reduced to being inaccurate so quickly was a real shame.
“It’s an historical document now,” Alice noted, with a certain amount of philosophy. “A record of what the family tree looked like at that point in time. Anyway, this is what I wanted to show you.” She flipped back many more pages to a place near the end of the records, to a branch of a tree that appeared to begin with relatives born in 1770 and later. There were a large number of entries spreading across the page, but each of them seemed to be the end of the line: even where the last member of the branch was married, there was nothing after them. No children. A whole branch of the tree that had simply ended with no progeny.
“What happened here?” Laura asked, even though she was starting to put the pieces together herself. A whole branch with no more leaves. Everyone dead. The death dates—she could see they were all the same.
A massacre.
Everyone killed at once.
“It was a shocking time,” Alice said, shaking her head. “There was a terrible year. First, the crops were going black in some parts of the county, but not others. Of course, back at that time, this was just a small collection of farms loosely grouped around a few general stores, built in timber with names like ‘bank’ and ‘dry goods’ painted above the doors. But there was a rash of ergot. It spread across all of the fields but one. There, the corn stayed healthy. Of course, they didn’t know about ergot back then—they just knew there wasn’t much they could salvage, so what they could salvage, they ate. They didn’t have anything else.”
Laura frowned. “Why was one field unaffected?”
Alice reached behind herself and pulled a large sheet of paper from a nearby shelf—as she placed it on the desk, it turned out to be a map of the surrounding area. “This is the location of the field,” she said, tapping it with one finger. “See how the land lies? It’s in a natural valley, and it also has the river right beside it. It’s almost a closed ecosystem because of the shape of the land. Now, ergot is spread by wind, by physical contact, by insects, and by rainwater. The wind for the most part blows above the valley, leaving the ground underneath protected. The insects stuck to the banks of the river rather than going out of the valley, for the most part. Rainwater follows the path of least resistance and the shape of the valley encourages it to fall to either side—it would be dry down here if it wasn’t for the river flowing across. And as for physical contact, people kept to themselves. They wouldn’t be wandering across one another’s land. That would lead to conflict—you might get shot at if people assumed you were a native raider or a stranger come from out of town.”
“But they didn’t know that at the time.”