Not all of Jacobs’s cures killed themselves, but over the next two years, a great many did. Not all of them took loved ones with them, but over fifty did; this I know from my research, which I shared with Ed Braithwaite. He would like to write it off as coincidence. He can’t quite do it, although he is happy to dispute my own conclusion from this parade of madness, suicide, and murder: Mother demands sacrifices.
Patricia Farmingdale, the lady who poured salt in her eyes, recovered enough of her vision to smother her elderly father in his bed before blowing her brains out with her husband’s Ruger. Emil Klein, the dirt-eater, shot his wife and son, then went out to his garage, poured lawnmower gas over himself, and struck a match. Alice Adams—cured of cancer at a Cleveland revival—went into a convenience store with her boyfriend’s AR-15 and unloaded, killing three random people. When the clip was empty, she pulled a snub-nose .38 from her pocket and fired it into the roof of her mouth. Margaret Tremayne, one of Pastor Danny’s San Diego cures (Crohn’s disease), threw her infant son from the balcony of her ninth-story apartment, then followed him down. Witnesses said she uttered not a sound as she fell.
Then there was Al Stamper. You probably know about him; how could you have missed the screaming headlines on the supermarket tabloids? He invited both of his ex-wives to dinner, but one of them—the second, I believe—got caught in traffic and showed up late, which was lucky for her. When she walked in the open door of Stamper’s Westchester home, she discovered Wife Number One roped to a chair at the dining room table with the top of her head caved in. The ex–lead singer of the Vo-Lites emerged from the kitchen, brandishing a baseball bat slimed with blood and hair. Wife Number Two fled the house, screaming, with Stamper chasing after her. Halfway down the residential street, he fell to the pavement, dead of a heart attack. No surprise there; he was a heavyweight.
I’m sure I didn’t find all the cases, scattered across the country as they were, and buried in the outbreaks of senseless violence that seem more and more to be a part of daily life in America. Bree could have found others, but she wouldn’t have helped me even if she had still been single and living in Colorado. Bree Donlin-Hughes wants nothing to do with me these days, and I totally get that.
Shortly before Christmas last year, Hugh phoned Bree’s mother and asked her to come up to his office at the big house. He said he had a surprise for her, and he certainly did. He strangled his old lover with a lamp cord, carried her body into the garage, and slipped her into the passenger seat of his vintage Lincoln Continental. Then he got behind the wheel, started the engine, got some rock on the radio, and sucked exhaust.
Bree knows I promised to steer clear of Jacobs… and Bree knows I lied.
“Let us suppose it’s all true,” Ed Braithwaite said during one of our recent sessions.
“How daring of you,” I said.
He smiled, but stayed on point. “It still wouldn’t follow that the vision you saw of that hellish afterlife was a true vision. I know it still haunts you, Jamie, but consider all the people—not excluding John of Patmos, author of the Book of Revelation—who’ve had visions of heaven and hell. Old men… old women… even children claim to have peeked beyond the veil. Heaven Is for Real is basically the afterlife vision of a kid who almost died when he was four—”
“Colton Burpo,” I said. “I read it. He talks about a horsie only Jesus can ride.”
“Make fun all you want,” Braithwaite said, shrugging. “Lord knows it’s an easy account to make fun of… but Burpo also met a miscarried sister whom he knew nothing about. That’s verifiable information. Like all those murder-suicides.”
“Many murder-suicides, but Colton only met one sister,” I said. “The difference is one of quantity. I never took a course in statistics, but I know that.”
“I’m happy to assume the kid’s vision of the afterlife was false, because it supports my thesis that your vision of it—the sterile city, the ant-things, the black-paper sky—was equally false. You see what I’m driving at, don’t you?”
“Yes. And I’d love to buy into it.”
Of course I would. Anyone would. Because every man and woman owes a death, and the thought of going to the place I saw has done more than cast a shadow over my life; it has made that life seem thin and unimportant. No—not just my life, every life. So I hang on to one thought. It’s my mantra, the first thing I tell myself in the morning and the last thing I tell myself at night.
Mother lied.
Mother lied.
Mother lied.
Sometimes I almost believe it… but there are reasons I can’t quite manage to do so.
There are signs.
Before going back to Nederland—where I would discover that Hugh had killed himself after murdering Bree’s mother—I drove to the home place in Harlow. There were two reasons for this. After Jacobs’s body was discovered, the police might get in touch with me and ask for an accounting of my time in Maine. That seemed important (although in the end, they never did), but something else was more important: I needed the comfort of a familiar place, and people who loved me.
I didn’t get it.
You remember Cara Lynne, don’t you? My great-niece? The one I carried around at the Labor Day party in 2013 until she fell asleep on my shoulder? The one who held out her arms to me every time I came near? When I walked into the house where I’d grown up, Cara Lynne was between her mother and dad, sitting in an old-fashioned high chair that I might have sat in once myself. When the little girl saw me, she began to scream and throw herself from side to side so violently that she would have tumbled to the floor if her dad hadn’t caught her. She buried her face against his chest, still screeching at the top of her lungs. She only stopped when her grandfather Terry led me out onto the porch.
“What the hell’s that about?” he asked, half-humorously. “Last time you were here, she couldn’t get enough of you.”
“Don’t know,” I said, but of course I did. I had hoped to stay a night, perhaps two, sucking up normality the way a vampire sucks blood, but that wasn’t going to work. I didn’t know exactly what Cara Lynne sensed in me, but I never wanted to see her small, terrified face again.
I told Terry I’d just stopped by to say hello, couldn’t even stay for supper, had a plane to catch in Portland. I’d been in Lewiston, I said, slop-recording a band Norm Irving had told me about. He said he thought they had national potential.
“And do they?” he asked.
“Nah. Strictly lo-fi.” I made a business of looking at my watch.
“Never mind the plane,” Terry said. “You can catch another one. Come on in and have dinner with the family, little brother. Cara will settle down.”
I didn’t think so.
I told Terry I had recording gigs at Wolfjaw that I absolutely could not miss. I told him another time. And when he held out his arms to me, I hugged him hard, knowing chances were good I’d never see him again. I didn’t know about the murders and suicides then, but I knew I was carrying something poisonous, and would probably carry it for the rest of my life. The last thing I wanted was to infect the people I loved.