Paskagankee (35 page)

Mike drew a glass of water and sat down at the small kitchen table where he noticed a plain white sealed envelope placed squarely in the middle of the surface. On the front was his name, CHIEF MIKE MCMAHON, spelled out in the professor's almost compulsively neat block letters. Mike picked it up and turned it over curiously. Nothing else was written on either the front or the back.

He stared at the envelope for several long moments as if trying to absorb its contents through osmosis and was sorely tempted to open it right there at the table, but decided to wait and examine it at Mercy Hospital with Sharon. She had nearly given her life for the investigation, and he felt it was only fitting that they discover its contents together.

Mike slid the envelope securely into his jacket's interior breast pocket. He sat quietly in the cool stillness of Ken Dye's kitchen and thought about Sharon's reaction to the discovery that her head had been shaved. He was surprised at how much it bothered her; after all, her hair would grow back quickly, and he didn't picture Sharon Dupont in any way, shape or form as a vain person. He supposed she viewed her hair as one of the few ways she could maintain her femininity in the largely macho world of law enforcement.

Mike took a final look around the kitchen and decided he had nothing to gain by sitting here any longer. Ken Dye hadn't had any close relatives, he knew that much, and he wondered what would become of the professor's large collection of scholarly books and teaching materials now that he was gone.

He drained the last of his water, placed the glass in the sink—feeling slightly guilty as he did since the man had left his home in such tip-top shape—and limped on his crutches to the front door, turning to lock it behind him as he exited. The driving rain was beginning to freeze on the roads again, and Mike faced a slow, hazardous trip back to Paskagankee. He still had a couple of errands to run and wanted to get back to Mercy Hospital and Sharon's bedside as soon as possible.

58

THE HOSPITAL BED FELT lumpy and uncomfortable, and on top of that, Sharon had to deal with a maddening itch attacking her left arm, under the cast and about two-thirds of the way between her wrist and elbow. If she could just escape her bed for a moment, she could grab a wire coat hanger from the little closet in the corner of the room, straighten it, and slide it under the cast; but of course she was hooked up to so many machines and tubes in this damned hospital that going anywhere at all represented nothing more than a pleasant daydream. Plus, there was the small matter of the broken ribs, which made just breathing a painful exercise. Sharon reluctantly decided getting up might be more than she could handle right now.

Buzzing a nurse seemed the most obvious solution, but Sharon Dupont wasn't one to ask for help lightly—she had grown up pretty much on her own and knew nothing other than self-reliance. The itch was wearing her down, however, and she was rapidly reaching the point where calling for assistance was beginning to look like a reasonable option, even to her.

As her internal battle raged, one side demanding relief from the itching and the other insisting she figure out a way to do it for herself, the door opened and in stumbled Mike McMahon, limping with both crutches trapped under his right arm and his left hand clutching a huge bouquet of flowers adorned with a colorful balloon that demanded Sharon GET WELL SOON! He held two large cups of coffee precariously between his elbow and his chest. He was swearing impressively and fighting a losing battle with the paper cups, which threatened at any moment to drop to the floor, splashing hot coffee everywhere.

Sharon giggled in spite of herself, and Mike mock-scowled at her, somehow managing to set the flowers down on a small table and work both coffee cups into his hands without spilling a drop. “You're supposed to be recovering. Shouldn't you be sleeping or something?” he asked gruffly.

The itch under her cast was forgotten as she admired the flowers, a dozen roses surrounded by yellow daisies with a spray of baby's breath. “For your information, I've been trying to sleep,” she said. “But I've just about had it with lying around doing nothing. It's boring. What does a girl have to do to get a little excitement around here?”

Mike laughed and handed her the bouquet. “Please accept these as a small token of my appreciation to you for not croaking.”

“You're such a romantic. They're for
me?
”

“Well, of course. Who else would they be for?”

“I don't know, I just assumed they were given to you by one of your many female admirers.”

“Very funny,” Mike said as he took off his blue Paskagankee Police baseball cap to reveal a freshly shaved head. The whiteness of the skin that had been covered by his thick thatch of brown hair contrasted sharply with the wind-chapped texture of his neck and face. Mike's tan was beginning to fade as winter approached, but it was still strong and noticeable. Sharon stared, her eyes filling with tears.

“What's the matter?” he asked, casting his eyes upward as if he could see the top of his head. “Not a good look for me?”

A crooked smile lit up Sharon's face. “Why did you shave your head?”

Mike grinned. “Moral support. When I saw how much it bothered you that the doctors had to shave your head I decided to join you in the Chris Daughtry lookalike club. Plus, I figured this way we could have a little contest. We both start out with no hair and see whose grows back the fastest. I'm betting on me, but I have to tell you, this feels pretty liberating. I might never go back. It makes me look even sexier than usual, don't you agree?”

The tears ran down her cheeks. “That was so sweet,” she whispered. “Come here.” Mike approached the bed and she told him, “Bend down to me, I have something to tell you.”

He leaned down and she lifted her head off the pillow to meet him, kissing him fiercely, their tongues dancing. Finally she dropped her head back on to her pillow and said, “It's lucky for you I have all these tubes and wires holding me down, otherwise you might not make it out of this room alive.”

“Threatening a law enforcement officer, huh? You had better be careful, missy, we take that sort of thing pretty seriously around here; you could face severe punishment if you keep it up.”

“Promises, promises,” she said, looking up at Mike, her face still damp from her tears. “Thank you so much.”

“Jeez, it's just a few flowers. If I had known you were going to be this excited, I would have pulled some out of old Annie Kramer's rose garden a long time ago.”

“Those didn't come from Annie Kramer's garden. You wouldn't stand a chance against that old bird. Besides, I'm not talking about the flowers and you know it.”

“Okay, I admit it, I bought them. Are you saying I could have saved all that money?”

Sharon laughed. “You're lucky I don't have my gun.”

“Again with the threats,” he said. “We're going to have to work on controlling that temper of yours.”

Mike dragged his plastic chair next to the bed and reached into his jacket pocket. He fished out an envelope. “I've been doing more than just figuring out how to sweep you off your feet,” he told her. “I drove to Orono this morning to walk through Professor Dye's house. I'm not sure why; I just felt like I needed to go there one last time, like we had unfinished business or something.” He took a deep breath. “Look what I found.”

She looked curiously from the envelope to Mike. “Is it from him?”

“Presumably,” he answered. “I haven't actually opened it yet. I thought you might like to be here when I did.”

“Absolutely!” she said enthusiastically. “That sounds way better than lying here trying to figure out how to aim a television remote when I can't bend my arms. Climb on up here with me so I can read it, too.”

Mike stood and looked dubiously at the frail-looking young woman surrounded by so much medical equipment and with tubes and wires and casts taking up so much space on the bed. “I'm not sure I can manage that,” he said doubtfully, not wanting to take the chance of hurting her.

“Don't be such a wimp. Clear off some space and take a seat,” Sharon demanded.

When he had carefully rearranged things as much as possible, he sat, his right leg resting on the small bedside table. Mike sliced open the envelope and pulled out several sheets of paper. “I'm surprised he didn't type it,” Sharon said, looking at the pages filled with the man's carefully handwritten words.

“I think he wanted it to be a little more personal than a typed message,” Mike answered. “That would be my guess, anyway.” Together they started reading:

Dear Chief McMahon,

I'm not sure exactly how to begin,
the letter read,
so I'll start with a cliché. If you're reading this, I must be dead. That, of course, would be the bad news, especially for me. On the other hand, the good news would be that my hypothesis about what's happening in Paskagankee was correct, meaning I didn't waste most of my adult life and my entire professional career on a ridiculous fairy tale, as most of my colleagues have suspected (and some have come right out and informed me).

Small consolation, I suppose, now that I'm gone, but still you should be aware that the knowledge that I was correct fortified me tremendously at the end. Anyway, please allow me to explain some things you must be wondering about and some you may have begun to suspect.

I believe you are aware that I was born in Great Britain and moved to the United States as a young man in order to study Native American folklore and customs. As a child in England I was able to trace my lineage back several hundred years, discovering in the process that one of my ancestors had been a missionary working in the late-1600's with natives for several years in the wilderness that would later become the United States.

Further research revealed that my long-dead ancestor had participated in a tragic confrontation between the band of missionaries and a local Abenaqui tribe; a confrontation resulting in the slaughter of virtually every member of both sides. The lone exception on the missionaries' side—the only European to survive—was my forebear, who suffered grave injuries but somehow managed to escape the carnage with his life. Eventually he recovered sufficiently to return to England but did so having to live with the awful knowledge that he was responsible for the death of a young baby and her mother during the battle.

This long-forgotten family history formed the basis for my desire to learn all I could about Native Americans in general and the Abenaqui in particular. During the course of my research, I learned of a disturbing Abenaqui legend: that of a young mother slaughtered along with her infant child by a traveling missionary in such brutal fashion—the baby was decapitated by a musket ball—that the distraught woman's spirit remained earthbound, unable to move beyond this world even in death while she awaited an opportunity to avenge her baby's horrible death.

For years I refused to acknowledge my family's connection to this legend, but eventually I could no longer ignore the growing suspicion, the dread, really, that my long-dead ancestor had committed the horrible act upon which this Native American legend was based.

But that is not the worst of it. The worst part involves the specifics of the Abenaqui curse. The legends states the spirit of the young mother must remain in the area immediately surrounding the location of her child's death. Lacking a human host, she would remain powerless, but should a person take up residence in that location, she would eventually manage to enter and gain control of that host's body. Once doing so, she would begin to generate tremendous physical strength, which she would then use to terrorize the population, wreaking havoc as vengeance for her child's death.

I believe this to be the reason for the sudden relocation of the village of Paskagankee three hundred years ago. The buildings of the original town were constructed directly upon the site of the 1691 massacre, and I am convinced the spirit of that poor young woman was able to locate and inhabit a human host. Circumstances in the village eventually deteriorated to the point that the residents abandoned the entire town virtually overnight and reconstructed it several miles away in its current location.

I feel certain this tragic spirit has somehow found a new human host and is again wreaking havoc upon the surrounding population for the gruesome decapitation and loss of her baby so many centuries ago—all signs point to this being the case.

According to the Abenaqui legend, there is but one way to bring the killing to an end and allow the three-hundred-twenty-one-year-old spirit to rest forever: She must avenge her baby's death against a direct blood relative of the man who murdered her child so long ago.

Undoubtedly you have by now deduced where I am going with all of this. My bloodline descends directly from the misguided individual who—intentionally or not; I choose to believe it was unintentional but have no evidence upon which to base my opinion—so brutally murdered the young Native American woman and her infant child. I am that descendant the legend dictates must be held accountable; therefore, it is incumbent upon me to put an end to the bloodshed. It
must
be me and
can only
be me. No one else is capable of putting an end to this horror.