The Executioners Three

Chapter Eight: Memories and Bribes

But the comment and the water bottle and the poem—it had all collided in her brain in a great Aha! Eureka and Gesundheit! Because she'd suddenly remembered what contents were tucked away within one of the manila envelopes.

Eight-year-old Freddie hadn't cared about those weird documents; only the picture of Dad and his badge had held her attention.

But seventeen-year-old Freddie knew it was the other stuff that might actually end up being important. So after digging out the correct envelope, she dumped the contents onto the cold, cement floor.

Newspaper clippings, xeroxed articles, and dot-matrix printouts with the edges still on stared up at her. Freddie examined the newspapers first. They were all dated October 1987, the year and month during which Frank Carter had died.

And they all had eerily, toe-curling-ly familiar headlines. Wild Animals Abandoning Local Forests, read one. And another: Suicide by Hanging In City-on-the-Berm. And the three other articles described unseasonable weather, ranging from icebergs on the shore to hot spells a week later.

One headline was especially gruesome: Headless Body Found in County Park. It described an unidentified corpse, decapitated, discovered near the beach by a jogger. No head had been located, and other than reporting the victim's gender (female) and approximating her age (thirty-four), there were no leads as to who the person might have been. Police were, on that day in 1987, asking for people to report any missing persons.

Please call Sheriff Frank Carter, it said at the bottom, with any leads. Anonymous tips accepted.

Meanwhile, the xeroxed articles and printouts had almost the exact same headlines—except that they weren't from 1987. They were all dated October 1978.

Freddie's hands shook as she skimmed each one. At some point, her mouth went dry too. She kept swallowing. Kept wetting her lips. Because this was evidence she simply couldn't ignore.

Maybe, if she and Divya hadn't just found those old ledgers in the Archives, Freddie could have chalked it up to coincidence. Sure, it was a reach to say that three times over thirty years, there had been similar hangings, similar weather, and similar animals on the prowl, but the mind could be convinced of anything.

However, Freddie couldn't convince her mind, skeptical as it was, that it was all mere coincidence. Not when it had also happened in 1788. No way in hell.

Of course, that left one big question: how could she possibly explain it all? She really, really, really didn't believe in ghosts or the supernatural. Buffy and X-Files were fun, but nothing more.

What Freddie did in believe were in her instincts—instincts that she'd inherited from Frank Carter, who had also noticed a pattern twelve years before.

The house trembled. A squeal split the basement, and Freddie's heart lurched. The garage door was opening, which meant Mom and Steve were home. She could not be caught down here.

With frantic speed, she shoved the papers back into the envelope, shoved the envelope back into the box, and shoved the box back into its shadowy corner.

She reached the living room and snapped on the TV right as Mom pushed into the kitchen and called, "I hope you didn't eat yet! Because we got pizza! And I even ordered pineapples on it, just for you."

"Great," Freddie called back, her pulse thudding against her ribs. Don't breathe hard. Don't breathe hard. "You guys made it home just in time for Nick at Nite!"

#

Freddie stayed up too late watching I Love Lucy and The Munsters with Mom and Steve. She had felt so guilty about snooping in the basement and stealing from the Archives that she'd been too ashamed to skulk off to her room early—even though she had a perfectly good excuse of polishing her RPG dice, since the purple sparkly plastic had gotten a bit fingerprint-y as of late.