Harmony Black (12 page)

“He goes to jail anyway,” I said. “It doesn’t matter whether he accepts it or not.”

Fontaine leaned back and smiled. “Now you two know what
you
look like, from
my
perspective.”

“Earl Gresham told us you’re a . . . Chainman,” I said to Fontaine. “A bounty hunter.”

“Speaking of, where are those boys? They’re apparently late
and
loose lipped, neither of which I’m inclined to stand for.”

“Two are dead and one’s behind bars,” Jessie said. “And you aren’t laying a hand on him.”

Fontaine’s borrowed corpse arched a waxy eyebrow. “What, you think I’d
hurt
them? Now why would I do that? I was just gonna give ’em a good talking-to and cancel their bonus pay. Why would you think so poorly of me?”

“Because you’re a demon?” I said.

“I’m a professional. The Chainmen’s Guild holds itself to the strictest standards of conduct. We are the upholders of order. It’s expected.”

“Order,” Jessie said, “in hell.”

“You ladies are just adorable, with your little guns, and your little spells, and your entirely unearned sense of authority. Allow Fontaine to convey a bit of education. I’m just gonna need you to do one thing for me first.”

“Oh?” I asked. “What’s that?”

“Order breakfast.” He wore a lazy, reptilian smile as he leaned closer. “I want to watch you eat.”

NINETEEN

T
he pancakes, topped with a melting dollop of sweet butter and drizzled with maple syrup, melted in my mouth. The hash browns were lightly salted, crunchy, cooked just right.

I could have done without the staring, though.

“Swear to God,” Jessie said, cutting into a sausage link and scooping up a forkful. “If your hands go anywhere near your pants, this discussion is over.”

Fontaine cast a rueful glance downward. “Alas, that’s another part that doesn’t work on a corpse. My sensual pleasures, for the moment, are entirely cerebral.”

“You were talking about order,” I said.

“Right, right.” He picked up his fork. “We are a rather . . . rambunctious people, my kind, prone to
excess
. When Big Daddy went on his permanent vacation, we all went a little crazy down there. Those were the Years of Iron and Fire, and they were a bad time. A bad time, indeed. What came out of that, though, was order. The courts of hell. Divisions of power.”

He held the fork straight, rested it on its tines, and slowly pulled his hand away. It stood there, perfectly and impossibly balanced.

“But the courts feud,” he said, “and the schemers scheme, and everybody’s hungry. Everybody’s hungry, but there’s only one fork.”

He inhaled and gave a little puff of air. The fork toppled over, rattling on the table.

“It’d be just that easy for everything to fall apart all over again. So we have laws. Laws with punishments, terrible and cruel. They have to be, to keep everyone in line. To keep the fork standing on its tines.”

“And you . . . pursue other demons, who have broken these laws,” I said.

“It’s a living. Sometimes I hunt my own kind, and sometimes yours, if you cross certain lines. Word of general advice: if you make a deal with hell, you’d best keep your word, lest dire consequences ensue.”

“A deal,” I said. “Like the power to summon the Bogeyman.”

“Ah, now that’s a morbid tale indeed. But thank you for revealing why you’re poking around this humble little town. Tell you what, ladies: Go home. Go home and forget all about the Bogeyman. That’s one problem that’ll take care of itself, once my work is done.”

“Not happening.” Jessie waved a forkful of pancake at him. “You think we’re going to trust one demon to get rid of another one?”

Fontaine arched one thin eyebrow. “Is
that
what you think it is? Blessed innocents. I’m almost glad we crossed paths. You would’ve gotten yourselves ripped limb from limb, trying your little chants and exorcisms on
that
monster. That, ladies, is no demon. No . . . Bogeymen aren’t born. They’re
made
.”

I was about to take another bite, fork halfway to my mouth. I set it down on the plate instead.

“Made, how?”

He shook his head. “Same way they always have been, miss. Same way as ever. But that’s not a tale I feel like telling today. Again, I must request that you vacate this fine municipality, for your own personal safety.”

“You threatening us?” Jessie said.

“Me? Oh, not in the slightest. Long as you don’t block my road, I’ve got no reason to run you down. But a little crow tells me my competition just arrived last night.”

“Earl mentioned him,” I said. “Another Chainman, named Nyx?”

“
Her.
And she is not as cultured as I am, or as patient. Nyx is a daughter of the choir of wrath. She was personally trained by the matriarch of the House of Dead Roses. Believe you me, that’s one bed you never want to find yourself sharing, not unless your sexual proclivities extend to barbed wire and rusty razors. If she learns that there are humans on her trail, aware of hell’s influence and interfering with the hunt, she won’t sit down to pancakes and pleasant conversation. She’ll skin you alive just for kicks and giggles.”

“We can handle ourselves,” I said.

“Really?” He chuckled and folded his hands. “Have you ever faced the wrath of an incarnate demon, darlin’? Stared down a predator with eight hundred years of experience hunting and killing and lovin’ every second of it?”

I thought back to Las Vegas.

“Once,” I said.

“Oh?” His eyebrows went up in surprise. “Did you win?”

I shrugged. “I broke even.”

“This time, sad to say? You won’t.”

“I don’t see why you won’t share what you know,” I told him. “We’re after the same thing.”

“You don’t even know
what
you’re after. You’re not ready for what’s waiting at the end of this road, ladies. I’m trying to be kind. But I’m not dissuading you at all, am I?”

“Nope,” Jessie said.

“Let me ask you something,” I told him. “Is this just a job to you, or do you actually care?”

“That is,” he said, “quite possibly the rudest thing you could say to a Chainman. If you were one of my breed, it’d be grounds for claws and teeth. But seeing as you’re human and, well, ignorant, I’ll let it slide. Yes. I care very deeply about my people.”

I rapped my fork against my plate. “So do we. You’re basically a cop. So are we. And that’s why you should know we aren’t leaving. We’ve got a job to do, and people to protect. We
don’t
quit.”

“All right,” Fontaine murmured to himself, nodding slowly. “All right, all right. You’ll do.”

“Do what?”

He spread his hands and grinned. “What you will! You’ll do what you will. I’m going to extend you ladies my professional courtesy. Go ahead. Stay. Hunt. I won’t help and I won’t hinder. Let’s see how far you get on your own.”

I didn’t like it. I’d seen
human
bounty hunters less friendly than Fontaine claimed to be, and never one that was happy about people getting in the way of their claim. Did he think we were that insignificant, that we
couldn’t
get in his way? Or did he stand to gain something by sharing the field with us? He didn’t have any kind words to say about his rival Nyx, and they were obviously racing each other for—

I sipped my ice water, the answer suddenly obvious.

“And while we’re doing that,” I said, setting down my glass, “you’re hoping we draw Nyx’s attention and slow her down, so you can catch this guy first.”

“Why, heavens, the thought hadn’t even occurred to me. Though she is unlikely to be as considerate as I am. But as you said, you can take care of yourselves, isn’t that right?”

“Watch and see,” Jessie told him.

“Out of curiosity,” I said, “who pays you?”

His gaze flicked toward me. “Hmm?”

“This is a job, right? So who pays you?”

“Oh,” he said, “whoever hires me for the hunt. Usually the prince of a court, or some aggrieved noble. And they are
always
aggrieved.”

“The guy you’re after now, the one summoning the Bogeyman and sending it after people. He busted a deal with a demon, didn’t he? And that’s who hired you to hunt him down.”

Fontaine shook his head. “Now, I didn’t say that. I said words that could be construed in that particular pattern, but I did not
say
that.”

“You didn’t have to. So your client, he hired you and he hired Nyx. Who else? How many demons will converge on Talbot Cove before this is all over?”

He smiled. “You’re asking the wrong question.”

“What’s the right one?”

“My client . . . did
not
hire Nyx.”

“Who did?” I asked.

“That,” he said, “is the right question.”

“What’s the answer?”

Fontaine took the unused paper napkin from his lap and daintily pressed it to his lips. Then he folded it, set it next to his untouched plate, and slid out of the booth.

“Worth pursuing,” he said. “The answer is worth pursuing. Happy hunting, ladies.”

F
ontaine drifted through the restaurant, strolling away.

“We really gonna let him go?” Jessie said.

I sighed. “I don’t see any other option. If we corner him, he’ll just jump into another body. You’ve got to have a plan to take down a hijacker. A snare, binding wards, something to pin him down while I do a full exorcism. It’s not improv work.”

I tried another bite of my pancake. Suddenly, I wasn’t hungry anymore. I set my fork down and shoved the plate back.

“So what do we know,” Jessie asked, “and what do we think we know?”

I ran down the points on my fingertips. “We know that the Bogeyman has to be deliberately summoned and sicced on your enemies. You enchant the token, set it on the target’s lawn, and the Bogeyman hits that house. It’s a weapon. It’s also—if we can believe Fontaine, and for the sake of discussion, let’s say we do—not a demon.”

“He used the plural, too,” Jessie said. “Made it sound like people have been creating these things for a long time. Not only might this not be the same summoner from thirty years ago, it might not even be the same Bogeyman.”

I thought about my baby sister, clutched in that monster’s arms. Then I pushed the image away. It didn’t help me work any harder.

“Either way, they’re both going down,” I said. “Doesn’t matter. Okay. We know Fontaine was hired by another demon. We
think
we know he’s here to hunt the Bogeyman’s summoner. He pulled a double cross, and now Fontaine’s here to bring down hell’s hammer on him.”

“I don’t know.” Jessie tapped her fingertip against her chin, thinking. “Isn’t that . . . weirdly reckless? I mean, okay, you screwed over a demon. You’ve got two bounty hunters from hell, literally, tracking you down. Is that a good time to hang out in a small town, sending your pet monster to screw with people you don’t like? If I was this guy, I’d go so far underground I’d burrow a hole straight to China.”

“If he feels that injured by these people, if he’s that obsessed, maybe not.” I shook my head. “But neither Helen Gunderson nor Bill and Shelly Morris have any obvious skeletons in their closet. And then there’s the place. If there’s no connection to the last two times the Bogeyman showed up, why
this town
? What’s so special about Talbot Cove? That’s why I don’t buy it. There’s no way the Bogeyman was summoned here in the ’40s, the ’80s,
and
now, all by random chance.”

“Or even farther back,” Jessie said. “Remember, Kevin just couldn’t find
proof
of any abductions before the ’40s. He sure as hell found hints and rumors. Considering there’s a human hand behind the monster, it can’t be the same person calling it. They’d be ancient now.”

“So. More than one perp. The current one may or may not be the same person behind the ’80s abductions. Probably not the one who did the summonings in the ’40s, and definitely not any earlier than that. And this all has to be tied to Talbot Cove itself, somehow.”

“The Nyx thing,” Jessie said. “That was weird. Fontaine really wants us to know who hired her.”

“Yeah, but not enough to just make it easy and
tell
us. He wants us to blunder into her path. If she kills us, one less thing for him to deal with. If we slow her down, same outcome. Letting us stumble around blind is a win-win situation for him. Me, I’m thinking about what Tucker said.”

“The newspaper article?”

I sipped my water. The ice had melted down to little slivers, bobbing at the top of the glass.

“The Bogeyman’s victims are never found. No bodies, no trail, not even a trace. They just vanish off the face of the earth. If Tucker is telling the truth, and if the article wasn’t a mistake, then one time—just
one time
—the Bogeyman returned one of its victims. We need to know why.”

“You thinking what I’m thinking?” Jessie asked.

“Yep. Let’s go do a little light reading.”

TWENTY

W
e asked for the check at the front counter, but the cashier just shook her head and smiled.

“That gentleman you were with? He already paid the bill and covered the tip. He asked me to give you this.”

She handed me a slip of cream-colored cardboard. A business card with no phone number, no e-mail address, just a name—
F
ONTAINE
—in crisp black type. Written on the back, a line of neat cursive read, “Next time’s on you. —F.”

I kept the card.

Talbot Cove’s town hall wouldn’t have looked out of place in a movie about colonial times, with its redbrick facade and whitewashed window slats. A great brass bell hung inside the open arch of the hall’s clock tower, and the clock above was set to run exactly five minutes slow.

The police station sat on the far side of the parking lot. I didn’t feel like stopping in to pay Barry a visit. Not until we knew how clean his hands were. I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I wanted a lot of things I didn’t have.

The Talbot Cove town seal, a vinyl decal faded and scuffed by time and shoe leather, was laid into the lobby floor. It depicted a giant eagle in flight, one talon clutching a fresh-cut log of pine, the other a sheaf of papers. I knew enough Latin to understand the motto that encircled the picture:
Through the grace of the land, we prevail.

One wall bore photographs of the town’s mayors, going back to the early 1920s. The current one, Mitchum Kite, was a plump and apple-cheeked man with a big, gregarious smile and a checkered sport coat. I was more interested in the directory on the opposite wall, where there was a corrugated metal board with big, white magnetic letters.

“Archives and public records,” I said. “Sounds about right.”

On the other side of a frosted glass door, the smell of mothballs and brittle paper clung to the humid air. A slip of a man in a tweed vest, who was peering at a ledger through his bifocals, sat on the opposite side of a long wooden counter. Jazz music crackled on an old portable radio, its antenna jutting out like a fencing foil.

The old man looked up and smiled. “Help you, ladies?”

“Special Agents Temple and Black,” I said. We flashed our identification. “We understand that you store the old town newspaper archives here?”

Something flashed in his eyes, just for a heartbeat. Fear. He tried to put his smile back on, but it didn’t fit his face anymore.

“Er, well, more or less. I mean, we did take in the old archival copies once the
Eagle
went out of circulation, just for historical sake, but only the first decade was ever properly placed on microfiche. Is . . . is there a reason why you ask?”

I took out the slip of paper Tucker Pearlman gave me and rested it on the counter. “We need two issues. This one, and the one from the next day.”

He leaned in to read it, then sagged back in his wooden swivel chair. His hands gripped the chair’s arms, like it might launch into the air at any moment.

“I’m . . . I’m sure we don’t have that one anymore,” he said. “The archives aren’t perfect—I mean, there are gaps, years of gaps, even. Sorry I can’t help.”

Jessie shot me a look. I nodded. She rested her palms against the counter and leaned in.

“We’d like to look for ourselves. Just to be thorough. You understand.”

“D-do you have a warrant?” he stammered. “I mean, I just don’t want to get in trouble for not following protocol—”

“These are the public town archives, yes?” she asked.

“Well, yes—”

“Then do two things for us. First, walk us back there and show us where to find the
Talbot Eagle
archive. Second, get a dictionary and look up the word
public
.”

He led us back into the stacks—tight aisles overflowing with cardboard boxes and bundled-up folders, piles of loose paper and rows of magazine binders.

“How do you find anything back here?” Jessie asked.

He looked back over his shoulder and smiled nervously. “Oh, there’s—there’s a system, ma’am. A place for everything, and everything in its place. Ah, here we are.”

The
Talbot Eagle
archive consisted of twelve tub-size boxes of folded newspapers, with nearly illegible dates scrawled on each box in thick black Sharpie.

“As I said, it’s . . . not very organized, or complete. Still, you’re welcome to take a look for yourselves.”

“Thank you,” I said.

He didn’t move. He just stood there at the end of the aisle, watching us and wringing his hands.

“
Thank
you,” I repeated. This time he got the hint and doddered back to the front desk.

“That wasn’t suspicious or anything,” Jessie murmured.

“Agreed, but remember, last person through here was Tucker. Jerk probably bragged about how he was uncovering some big local scandal. That, followed by a visit from the FBI? Can’t be good for the nerves.”

“I still don’t like it,” Jessie said. She put her hands on her hips and stared down the wall of boxes. “So. You take one, I take one?”

We each pulled down a box, set it on the hardwood floor, crouched down and started hunting. The filing system was even worse than I’d feared. The dates on the boxes, at least the ones we could read, were more vague suggestions than firm commandments. The folded, faded papers mixed together with no rhyme or reason, stacked this way and that. The ink on the oldest papers had already faded to faint hints of words on yellowed, brittle pages—years of history abandoned to careless neglect.

“Kinda sad,” Jessie said. “You’d think they’d want to preserve this stuff. Small-town pride and all that.”

I lingered over a headline.

Kite Paper Mill Closes Its Doors

Below, a smudged black-and-white image of the factory on the waterfront, skeletal and lonely.

“Not always. Places like this . . . sometimes there’s a lot of pain buried just under the surface. Some people think it’s better to cover it up than to talk about it.”

“What do you think?”

I glanced up at her. She watched me from the other side of the aisle, her turquoise eyes bright and curious.

I shrugged. “Doesn’t matter what I think. People hide the truth. We dig it up. That’s our job.”

Something annoyed me, like a fly buzzing near my ear. Not her question, and not the tedium of searching through faded byline after byline, something I just couldn’t put my finger on. I was halfway through the second box before I figured it out.

“Somebody’s messing with us,” I said.

“What, is it a day ending in the letter
Y
?”

“I’m serious.” I gestured toward her box. “Let me guess. The papers on top are all out of order and jumbled around, right?”

“So far, yeah.”

“Dig deeper. Go about halfway down.”

Jessie lifted out an armful of papers, stacking them on the floor, then resumed her search. She looked up a moment later, frowning.

“They’re in perfect order.”

I swept my arm out, gesturing to the stacked boxes.

“So have the last two I searched. I bet they
all
are,” I said. “This isn’t carelessness. Somebody pulled the boxes out and scrambled them on purpose, mixing fistfuls of back issues at random. It was a rush job, though. They mixed up only the top layers to make it look like they were hopelessly out of order.”

“Since most people would get just about that far before giving up,” Jessie said. “And since Tucker Pearlman didn’t have any trouble at all finding what
he
needed . . . ”

“It happened after his visit. Somebody found out what he’d dug up and went back to make it harder for anyone else to do the same.”

Jessie’s gaze turned slowly toward the front desk.

“Let’s go have a word,” she said, and cracked her knuckles.

The archivist swiveled in his chair as we walked up the stacks, forcing a big smile.

“So, uh, Agents, did you find what you were looking for?”

“No,” Jessie said, looming over him. “We didn’t, because some asshole went and sabotaged the filing system. Know anything about that?”

He held up his open hands, eyes going wide.

“Now, now, ladies, I told you the newspaper archives are very poorly maintained. I
did
warn you.”

I flanked his chair and slapped Tucker’s paper down on the desk under the palm of my hand, loud enough to make him jump.

“Do you remember yesterday?” I asked him.

“W-well, sure, of course, but what does—”

“So do we. Because we weren’t
born
yesterday. A reporter for the
New Perspective
came in here. He asked to see the stacks. Probably said some things you didn’t like. Such as, for example, bragging about a news piece he’s doing: Talbot Cove’s history and the Bogeyman abductions from the ’80s. Tell me if I’m warm.”

“He . . . he did, yes, that . . . that happened.”

“Spooked you, huh? And maybe you got to thinking, he might not be the
only
big-city reporter who’ll come breezing through town, looking for some dirt to toss on the Cove’s good name.”

“Reasonable,” Jessie said. “Nobody could blame you for that. You were trying to do the right thing.”

His head jerked between the two of us, neck swiveling, as if his attention was a ping-pong ball.

“Sure, sure,” I said, “nobody likes those guys. Muckrakers. They don’t understand small-town life. Me, I was
born
here. And I’m not writing any articles.”

“You don’t understand,” he said, his voice cracking. “I had to protect myself. It would have been too obvious . . . ”

He bit his cheek and clammed up. I sighed and looked over at Jessie.

“What do you think he’ll get? Twenty years?”

“Oh,” Jessie said, catching my angle, “at least. He’s lucky Michigan abolished the death penalty.”

The archivist’s eyes bulged. “
W-what?
What are you
talking
about?”

“Obstruction of justice,” I said, “carries a maximum penalty equal to the actual crime itself. The obstruction, in this case, is that you’re willfully withholding critical evidence. The crime, in this case, is at least six counts of kidnapping. Six. Counts. Maybe more. You can go behind bars with a life sentence for just
one
count.”

“I say we run him in,” Jessie said. “We don’t need this guy. There’s nothing useful he can tell us.”

He grabbed the lifeline, just like we knew he would.

“Hold on, hold on! I can! I can tell you where to find them. They’re not here—the articles, I mean.”

“We’re listening,” I told him.

He slumped back in his chair. Beads of sweat glistened on his wrinkled brow.

“When that . . . reporter left, I called the mayor immediately. He stormed in, frantic. I guess he didn’t realize we
had
that year in our archive. He demanded to see those two issues. And he left with them. He told me . . . he told me that if I said a word about it to anyone, I’d be fired or worse.”

“Or worse?” Jessie said.

He shrugged, helpless. “I don’t know what he meant, but he . . . I’ve never seen him that frightened.”

“And the scrambled papers?” I asked.

“That was me. The mayor made it sound like other people would be coming to look for the papers. I just thought, if I made it look like a hopeless search, they’d just give up and I wouldn’t have to lie when they found the gap in the records. I didn’t know it was
evidence
! Please, believe me, I was just trying to protect my job.”

Jessie and I locked eyes. We nodded simultaneously. I put my hand on the archivist’s shoulder.

“We believe you,” I said. “Now tell me just one more thing: Which way to the mayor’s office?”