“Just about.” He smiled thinly. “You should’ve seen me. I had to show my badge and bluster a lot to get so many out. Also, I think I’m involved with the librarian.”
Doris laughed too loudly. Shaking her head, she watched him spread the books out in front of him, and suddenly she wanted desperately to avoid dealing with this.
“Well, you’re here again, I see.” Pam flitted in and made straight for Steve. “It’s nice to have a cop around. That Barry always made us feel nice and safe, didn’t he, ’Thena?” She played with the ribbons on her dress. “Don’t the place look nice? Oh, ’Thena really cleaned in here today. All day long. I’m so glad her friends is here. I just come down to get a doughnut. For Matty.” She broke a jelly doughnut in half and put one piece on a plate and the other in her mouth. She turned to leave, smiling at him with her cheeks bulging, then just stood, chewing. “I wanted to ask you something, ’Thena,” she began, clearly wracking her brain. “I wanted to ask you…Matty’s almost asleep. Do you want me to do the sheets tomorrow?”
“Where is your son?” Steve asked. “I never did get to see him.”
“Pamela, could you and I talk about this later? We’re rather busy just now.”
“I didn’t think you was busy.” Looking skeptical and hurt, she shuffled out of the room. “I thought you was just having coffee.”
They stared at the volumes on the table. “Well.” Doris exhaled smoke and paged through the first book that came to hand. “Let’s see what we’ve got here. The Encyclopedia of American Folklore. Say anything about the barrens? Barrens…barrens…nope. Wait. ‘Barren ground—traditional—ground reserved for Satan’s use.’”
Athena spoke. “Look up Jersey Devil.”
Steve and Doris exchanged glances.
“Jersey Devil. Let’s see now.” Doris dragged deeply on her cigarette. “Nope. There’s a Devil’s River, Texas. Listen to this: ‘Lobo, the Wolf Girl.’” She scanned it. “All about this naked chick who used to be seen doing things like devouring freshly killed goats in the company of two large wolves.” She let the book fall closed. “Sounds yummy,” she added, the facetious tone of her voice not matching the vaguely accusatory look she gave Steve.
“Do you suppose that’s what we’re dealing with?” asked Athena, her voice clear and fragile. “Someone…feral?”
“What?” Doris studied her face. “You mean like the—what do they call them?—the wolf children in India? I saw something about that in the paper once.” Suddenly, she smiled. “So that’s why we’re here. We’re monster hunting.” Picking up another book, she examined the binding, but the title had worn away. She opened to the title page: A History of the New Jersey Pine Barrens, compiled by the Federal Writers Commission, copyright 1933. “This is a real gem.” She paged through it. “There’s a whole chapter on the barrens in New York and Pennsylvania. What’s the matter, honey?”
“I only just remembered something. My grandmother used to talk about the Georgia pine barrens.”
“So long as we’re talking about the so-called Jersey Devil…” Steve cleared his throat, and the women turned to him. “I’ve got some notes here. I checked out all the different versions of the story. The mother is variously recorded as Jane Leeds Johnson in 1735, and as a Mrs. Shrouds in 1855. I looked for anything that made sense, anything that might give us a lead.” He squinted at the notebook and shrugged. “A lot of it’s pretty crazy, and certain things vary with the telling, like about its being born with teeth, drawing blood with milk. I think we can discard that sort of thing as pure folklore. Still, the basics stay pretty much the same.”
Doris stared at him. “Before we get too far into this, I’d just like to know why. I mean, you know that feeling you get when you’re the only person on the bus who isn’t communicating with a UFO? You start to wonder if you’re the crazy one. I mean, are we really assuming the actual Jersey Devil is involved here?”
He told them about the starving woman who’d been picked up in the woods, and about the dead body found staked in the sand that morning. “I found myself recalling things Athena said.” He kept his eyes on the table. “About there being a history of unsolved murders out here. Seems to me if we’re going to find out what happened to—”
“Barry.”
“What?”
“It was Barry,” Athena told him. “He said that. Not me.”
“So?” Doris set down the book she’d been holding. “What’s the story? Exactly?”
“You’ve never heard it?” he asked.
“Let’s hear your version.”
“Well, let’s see, near as I can figure, a deformed child was born to a woman in the pines. She apparently kept it hidden for years, locked up in a shuttered room. After her death, the child went berserk with hunger and took to making raids on the local farms.”
“A star is born,” muttered Doris.
“That’s all really. The stories say he always escaped to the swamps. In time, mysterious raids on livestock, even the deaths of small children, always got attributed to him. Anyway, there’s a lot of that sort of thing, stories about the Devil. The creature was even said to mutilate strong men.” His face drained white as Doris sucked in her breath. He shuffled through papers.
“Go on,” insisted Athena.
He didn’t look up from the notes. “Eventually, any freakish child could be labeled another Jersey Devil. And in time, whenever campers disappeared, due to say a boating accident or something, it got blamed on the creature.”
“Or the other way around.”
“How do you mean?”
Athena’s voice seemed to come from a long way off. “Whenever the creature took someone, they blamed it on a boating accident.”
“What about Barry?” Doris asked.
“What…?”
“Officially.”
“Oh. They’re saying it was dogs.”
Doris choked out a laugh. “Climbing ladders?”
“This doesn’t help. This is crazy.” Athena sounded defeated. “Some poor starving goon running around the woods. What’s that got to do with…with the horrible things that…? First Lonny. Now Barry. It’s getting closer. I can feel it. I’ve always felt it.”
“I looked for details common to the different versions.” Steve clutched the wad of notes. “You never know what’s going to be important.” And he stared at the papers with hard-eyed pain. “Most of the variations involve some sort of transformation as a major feature. Depending on who you listen to, Mrs. Leeds’s little boy is reported to have grown a long tail, bat wings, hooves, antlers, or—”
“That’s a dead end. Athena’s right. It doesn’t help. Malformed animals—we’ve all seen things out there, things that shouldn’t be.”
Athena tried to talk over her. “There’s an image I can’t get out of my mind. Something on top of Pamela’s trailer, dogs all around it in the storm.”
He shuffled papers, afraid of the look on Athena’s face. “I found something that ties in with what you just said, Doris. Where…? Here it is. A British soldier during the Revolutionary War—the researcher gives him the name of Kallikak—fathered eight mentally defective children by various women in the barrens, then returned to England and sired three normal children.” Putting down the notes, he wondered why Doris kept shaking her head at him.
“Maybe it’s the vegetation.” Doris stirred her coffee, then stubbed her cigarette out in a saucer. “What are those things?” She pointed to a pile of slick-looking papers.
“Newspaper and magazine articles mostly,” he said, “some stuff from books. I must’ve gone through a hundred of them.”
“Looks like you spent a fortune copying this.” Doris flicked dismally through the pile. “Do we need to read it all?”