“You are kind to think of me, Miss Swanson. I’m almost finished here.”
“What are you doing?”
“Reading the genius loci.And preparing myself.”
“For what?”
“You shall see.”
Corrie sat on a rock and sipped her coffee. It was strong and cold and as sweet as ice cream: just the way she liked it. She watched as Pendergast walked about the area, stopping to stare for minutes at a time in seemingly random directions. Occasionally he would pull out his notebook and jot something down. At other times he would return to one of his maps—some of them looked old, at least nineteenth-century—and make a mark or draw a line. Once Corrie tried to ask a question, but he quietly raised his hand to silence her.
Forty-five minutes passed as the sun began to sink into a swirl of ugly clouds on the western horizon. She watched him, mystified as usual, but with a perverse kind of admiration she didn’t really understand. She was aware of feeling a desire to help him; to impress him with her abilities; to gain his respect and trust. In recent years no teacher, no friend, and certainly not her mother had ever made her feel useful, worthwhile, needed. She felt that way now, with him. She wondered what it was that motivated Pendergast to do this kind of job, to investigate horrible murders, to put himself in danger.
She wondered if perhaps she wasn’t just a little bit in love with him.
But no, that was impossible: not someone with those creepy long fingers and skin as pale as a corpse and strange blond-white hair and cold silver-blue eyes that always seemed to be looking a little too intently at everything, including her. And he was so old,at least forty. Ugh.
Finally Pendergast was finished. He came strolling over, slipping his notebook into his jacket pocket. “I believe I’m ready.”
“I would be, too, if I knew what was up.”
Pendergast knelt on the ground among his maps and documents, gathering them carefully together. “Have you ever heard of a memory palace?”
“No.”
“It is a mental exercise, a kind of memory training, that goes back at least as far as the ancient Greek poet Simonides. It was refined by Matteo Ricci in the late fifteenth century, when he taught the technique to Chinese scholars. I perform a similar form of mental concentration, one of my own devising, which combines the memory palace with elements of Chongg Ran, an ancient Bhutanese form of meditation. I call my technique a memory crossing.”
“You’ve totally lost me.”
“Here’s a simplified explanation: through intense research, followed by intense concentration, I attempt to re-create, in my mind, a particular place at a particular time in the past.”
“In the past? You mean, like time travel?”
“I do not actually travelin time, of course. Instead, I attempt to reconstruct a finite location in time and space within my mind;to place myself within that location; and to then proceed to make observations that could not otherwise be made. It gives me a perspective obtainable in no other way. It fills in gaps, missing bits of data, that otherwise would not even be perceivedas gaps. And it is frequently in these very gaps that the crucial information lies.” He began removing his suit coat. “It’s especially relevant in this particular case, where I have made absolutely no progress through the usual methods, the offices of the good Mrs. Tealander not excepting.”
Pendergast carefully folded his suit coat and laid it across the gathered maps, charts, and journal. Corrie was startled to see a large weapon strapped beneath one arm.
“Are you going to do it now?” Corrie said, feeling a mixture of curiosity and alarm.
Pendergast lay down on the ground, like a corpse, very still. “Yes.”
He folded his hands on his chest.
“But . . . but what am I supposed to do?”
“You are here to watch over me. If you hear or see anything unusual, wake me. A good hard shake should bring me back.”
“But—”
“Do you hear those birds? Those chirping grasshoppers? If you hear them stop,you must also awaken me.”
“Okay.”
“Finally, if I do not come back in one hour, you must wake me. Those are the three circumstances under which I am to be awakened. No others. Do you understand?”
“It’s simple enough.”
Pendergast crossed his arms over his chest. If Corrie had been lying there like that, there was no way she could have thought of anything but the hard ground and the stubble underneath her. And yet he seemed to be becoming so still.
“So what time are you going back to?”
“I am going back to the evening of August 14, 1865.”
“The Ghost Massacre?”
“Precisely.”
“But why? What does this have to do with the serial murders?”
“The two are connected, that much I know. Howthey are connected is what I hope to discover. If there is no key to these new killings in the present, then that key must lie in the past. And the past is where I intend to go.”
“But you’re not really going anywhere, are you?”
“I assure you, Miss Swanson, the journey I make is strictly withinmy own mind. But even so, it is a long and dangerous interior journey to terra incognita, perhaps even more dangerous than a physical journey would be.”
“I don’t . . .” Corrie let her voice trail off. Any more questions would be useless.
“Are we ready, Miss Swanson?”
“I guess so.”
“In that case, I shall now ask for your absolute silence.”
Corrie waited. Pendergast remained absolutely still. As the minutes went by, he seemed even to have stopped breathing. The afternoon light poured through the trees as usual, the birds and grasshoppers chirped, the thunderheads continued to rear above the trees. Everything was as before—and yet, somehow, she herself could almost hear a faint whisper of that same late afternoon 140 years before, when thirty Cheyenne had come galloping out of a swirl of dust, bent on a most terrible revenge.
Thirty-Seven
Sheriff Hazen pulled into the big parking lot at the Deeper Mall, sped across the nearly empty blacktop, and slid his cruiser into one of the “Law Enforcement Only” spaces outside the Deeper sheriff’s office. Hazen knew the Deeper sheriff, Hank Larssen, well. He was a regular guy, decent, if a little slow on the uptake. Hazen felt a twinge of envy as he walked through the hushed outer office with its humming computers and pretty secretaries. Christ, in Medicine Creek they couldn’t even afford to recharge the AC in the squad cars. Where did these guys get the money?
It was almost five, but everyone was still busy propping up the decrepit Lavender empire. Hazen was well known here, and nobody stopped him as he made his way through the building toward Larssen’s office. The door was shut. He knocked, and then, without waiting for a reply, opened.
Larssen was sitting in his wooden swivel chair, listening to two guys in suits who were both talking at once. They broke off when he entered.
“Perfect timing, Dent,” Larssen said with a quick smile. “This is Seymour Fisk, dean of faculty at KSU, and Chester Raskovich, head of campus security. This is Sheriff Dent Hazen, Medicine Creek.”
Hazen took a seat, giving the two KSU people the once-over. Fisk was a typical academic, bald, jowly, reading glasses dangling from his neck. Chester Raskovich was a type, also: brown suit, heavyset, sweating all over, with close-set eyes and a handshake even more crushing than Agent Paulson’s had been. A cop wannabe if he’d ever seen one.