The Devil Dances (23 page)

I spread my wings and jumped. They slowed my descent… a little. I landed in a crouch on the hard, gritty gravel and rolled with it, coming up on my knees. I didn’t waste any time after that. I threw on the coat, belted it, and headed for the little lean-to beside the barn, where the Knapps kept their gardening supplies. I’d spied a bicycle there a few days ago.

Five minutes later, I started riding down the road, wondering which farmhouse in the far distance was Abraham’s. Idly, I wondered if flying was like riding a bike. Once you learned how, could you always do it?

Nah. Didn’t think so.

One of the women I passed said that Isaac Schroder wasn’t working at Abraham’s place; he was helping with a barn raising about three miles down the road. I rode that way, and about a half hour later saw the big, skeletal outline of the barn, dark against the brightness of the early afternoon sun. The men were on break, gathered around a wagon where several women were serving lunch and drinks.

I skidded the bike to a stop where the road met the shoulder and jumped off, walking the bike into the tall, yellow, late-summer grass. Isaac was sitting on the flatbed of the wagon, drinking a glass of lemonade and nodding over something one of the other men was saying to him, but when he spotted me, he jumped off and started jogging my way through the weeds while the rest of the crew headed back to work on the barn.

“Are you all right?” he asked with genuine concern, looking at my arms—which, ironically enough, were the least of my worries at the moment.

“I’m fine, but can we take a walk?”

Isaac glanced over his shoulder uncertainly. I saw the worry in his eyes.

“It’s about Caleb.”

His head snapped back around and his eyes were dark and serious. “Yah, all right.”

We went down the road a ways and I said, “Do you know if Caleb was involved in any kind of Craft? Witchcraft, I mean.”

Isaac glared at his feet as we trudged along. I could see the insult in his face. “Caleb would not. He was a God-fearing Christian above all else. He would not have anything to do with the Craft.”

“Are you sure?”

“If Grandma Knapp was here, she would tell you. Caleb was a good man.”

“Grandma Knapp was pretty close to Caleb, right?”

“She looked after him, yah. Mrs. Knapp saw to it that Caleb went to an English school for his condition. She was good that way.”

I stopped so we were standing in the weeds on the shoulder of the road. My wings were straining against the back of my coat, so it took some concentration to get myself back under control. “What condition?”

Isaac looked surprised. “Caleb was deaf. I thought you knew that.”

“No,” I said, getting angry now. “No one ever said anything about that.”

“They wouldn’t, seeing how he was shunned. It’s almost like he never was, you know?”

We started walking again. Isaac stuck a long blade of grass between his teeth.

“Tell me about Caleb,” I said. “So he went to school among the English?”

“Yah, to learn. There were no teachers here who knew Sign.”

“So Caleb had exposure to English ways.”

“He knew more about them, but he was not corrupted, if that’s what you mean.” Isaac kicked angrily at some pebbles. “He was a very good man. Before he left the colony, we were together one last time. He told me that bad things were coming, very bad things.”

“He didn’t have the Sight…?”

“Not like that. Caleb learned to read lips. He knew all the secrets in the colony. Some of us believe that was the real reason for his shunning… not what he and I did.” He squinted through his glasses. “There are many like us in the colony. More than you know. And there are others who’re perverse. Boys who sleep with the goats. Boys who like to hit their girls. But only Caleb was shunned. Isn’t that funny?”

“Yes,” I agreed. “That is funny, indeed.” I stuck my hands in my coat pockets and looked away, toward the skeleton of the building going up. From here, I could hear the knock of hammers, men calling to each other, working hard like some giant colony of ants all of one mind. I thought about what Isaac had said about the colony importing new blood, and the rather liberal Rumspringa being encouraged by the Church Elders. I suppose if your genetic pool is shrinking down to a wading pond, the last thing you want to do is throw good, strong, healthy adults out of it… unless you have no choice.

“I must return,” Isaac told me, sliding off his hat and swiping at his sweaty hair, then setting the hat back on his head. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you, Nicholas.”

“Actually, Isaac, you were a very good help to me. More than you know.”

He nodded.

I watched him amble back up the road, his shoulders slumped. “Very good, indeed.”

When I got back to the Knapp farm, Vivian was waiting for me at the back of the house. Her eyes blazed with anger. “Nick, where were you?” she said as she grabbed my arm as if afraid I might fly away or something. “I checked our room and you left me a goddam note? Do you realize what would have happened if someone discovered you?”

“I went to talk to Isaac. And I wore the coat, so don’t worry. He didn’t notice anything. No one did.”

“Why were you talking to Isaac?”

“I thought he might know something about Caleb.”

She shook her head. “Christ, you’re like a bloodhound. You just can’t leave anything alone, Nick, can you?” She pulled me away from the rear entrance of the house like she was afraid someone might notice us. Still exasperated, she went on without listening to me defending myself. “I checked all over the house—basically, I helped Mary tidy things up—but I was really looking for any kind of witches’ paraphernalia.”

“And…?”

“Nothing in the house.” We stopped by a pair of wooden basement doors set at a forty-five degree angle in the ground. Vivian looked around to make certain no one was spying. “But…” she held up a finger, “when I asked Mary about what else I could tidy up for her, she suggested the root cellar.” She turned toward the doors and opened them into a yawning darkness. “Follow me.”

We went down a long flight of concrete stairs. The basement was neat and orderly, lit by lanterns and full of crates, boxes, and various bric-a-brac from the house, stables, and barn. The floor was dirt, not concrete as in modern houses, but neatly swept, the walls full of shelves that sagged under countless jars and bottles of preserved produce that probably represented a winter’s worth of food for the Knapp household. She led me down a long aisle of jarred goods to the back, where several crates were stacked. Among them were some old trunks.

“Mary was talking so much, I had no problem getting information out of her. She let it slip that Grandma Knapp stored Caleb’s things down here. He didn’t have a wife or anything, so she just moved it down here. Come take a look.”

She unlatched a large, heavy chest that looked like something that belonged on a pirate galleon and flipped the lid back. She had taken one of the lanterns off a hook, and now she drew it close so I could see some of dead Caleb’s things in storage. There were old clothes, old toys, some trinkets, and a number of stacked books that I assumed were from Caleb’s personal library.

Vivian picked up an old, handmade toy horse and said, “I don’t know if it’s much help, but I thought if maybe we can figure out why Caleb died, maybe it’ll lead to whoever’s doing this to the colony. I mean, the two things have to be linked somehow, right?”

“You did really well, Viv.”

She beamed as she started taking things out of the trunk. I started paging through the books. Most were old novels—Dickens, Hawthorne, Austen, Homer—pretty innocent stuff. No conjuring books of any kind. I couldn’t see a reason the colony would shun the same books I saw on their shelves upstairs. When I mentioned that to Vivian, she looked up from the copy of
The Pilgrim’s Progress
in her hands and said, “Mary says no one goes through the things of a shunned member of the colony. That whole
they don’t exist anymore
. Even their stuff doesn’t exist.”

“Huh.” I sat back on my heels. “Now isn’t that convenient.”

While I was growing up in New York, I’d spent time in this one Roman Catholic juvie hall down in the Bronx for more problematic kids like myself. The priest who ran the place had been into tough love—he was a tough guy himself, a former heavyweight boxer before he became a priest—and he was one of the few adults I had actually trusted. He used to let me go through his library anytime I wanted. Back then—in the years before I discovered girls—reading had been one of my few joys in life. Besides the usual religious material, he kept hundreds of mystery and pulp novels—Sherlock Holmes, Mike Hammer, The Shadow, The Phantom Detective, you name it. I never realized how much those old novels with their clever, hardnosed detectives and larger-than-life villains had influenced my deductive process until now.

I liberated the athame from my boot and used the blade to cut back the glued paper on the inside of the cover of the book in my hand. I immediately spotted several handwritten letters poking out. I asked Vivian to gather up the rest of Caleb’s books and together we went back upstairs with them.

We found a series of letters from Caleb to Elsie Knapp, written in Pennsylvania Dutch. Vivian was confused as to why Elsie would hide them until I mentioned Caleb’s deafness, how he’d had his finger on the pulse of the colony up until his shunning. Generally speaking, people hated having their dirty laundry aired; it had probably been the main reason our witch had murdered him.

We spread the letters out on the bed and started looking over them. “What now?” Vivian asked. “We could probably use the Internet to translate some of these, but that’ll take forever.”

I thought about asking Mary to look them over, but I wasn’t sure just yet if I could trust her completely. “Do you have a notebook and a pen?”

She dug through her knapsack until she found the big, fat notebook she used for her college notes.

I ripped out a piece of paper, knelt down on the floor, and went line-by-line over each letter, scanning the unfamiliar words but writing down the frequency of the names in the letters.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s an old trick I learned from this FBI agent who was working with the NYPD back when 9/11 was still going on. He didn’t want to wait for the translator to finish translating some Al-Qaeda emails, so he started picking over them himself, looking for frequent names or repeated words.”

Ten minutes later, I said, “Caleb mostly talked about Isaac, a little about John and Mary, and a little about Abraham.”

“Our suspects,” she mused. “Which one do you think killed him?”

It bothered me that Isaac had been mentioned so many times. “Not sure. But I’m pretty certain it’s the same person who killed Elsie.”

Vivian narrowed her eyes when she saw my expression. “Elsie didn’t kill herself?”

That thing that had been bothering me so much about Elsie’s suicide suddenly jumped out at me in bright Technicolor, like something that had been there at the back of my mind all along. It hadn’t clicked until I looked down at my left hand, where I was taking notes. “Elsie was left-handed,” I said, remembering the way she would nervously play with the loose ties of her cap. “But the cut on her left arm was deeper than her right.” I stood up and demonstrated for Vivian with my pen substituting as a knife. “A left-handed person doesn’t cut their wrist with their right hand.”

She nodded. “So whoever killed Caleb also killed Elsie for similar reasons and made it look like suicide. Something to do with these letters?” She held up the stack. “You don’t think it was Isaac, do you?”

I grabbed my coat and slipped it on around my winged shoulders. “I don’t know, Viv, but I mean to find out.”