On Harrow Hill

The rising sun was visible above the eastern ridge. The earlier thunderstorm was long gone, the sky was clear, the air was pleasantly cool, the water droplets on the grass were glimmering points of light. Swirls of tiny insects were rising and falling over the surface of the pond. Redwing blackbirds were building nests in the reeds. The night’s rain seemed to have intensified the blue of the wild irises by the road.

He reached out and held her hand.

“I was thinking,” she said, “that maybe we should go ahead and get a pair of alpacas.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I mean, I feel like we’ve been given a sign. Sort of, anyway.”

“How’s that?”

“If we hadn’t been talking about alpacas, we probably wouldn’t have thought of building the shed extension on the henhouse. And if we hadn’t built the shed, the saw wouldn’t have been out there, and I wouldn’t have known how to use it. So, in a way, talking about alpacas ended up saving your life.”

“Hmm.”

“So, what do you think?”

EPILOGUE

Martin Carmody’s best PR efforts were no match for the sheer number of homicides now associated with Larchfield. The media continued to befoul the reputation of the place in a way that seemed irreversible. The nadir was a RAM-TV special, Village of the Dead.

From legal and tax points of view, Silas Gant’s Church of the Patriarchs turned out to be unusually complex. From a practical point of view, it simply fell apart. In the absence of their well-connected leader and protector, the remaining Patriarchs faded back into the motorcycle-gang netherworld from which they had come. The frightened, emotionally damaged young women who had been kept at Gant’s fortified compound were taken under the wing of a state social service agency, where they were offered all the forms of transitional help and direction that the “caring professions” are empowered to provide.

Discovered among Danforth Peale’s assets were three upstate New York cemeteries. In one mausoleum several unidentified bodies were discovered in advanced stages of decomposition, along with a new one, easily recognizable as Randall Fleck.

Selena Cursen and Raven (née Lulu Rubin) were released from the hospital, put the property with the burned and bullet-ridden house up for sale, and moved into a holistic community for trauma victims in California.

Mary Kane’s body remained for six weeks at the morgue. No relatives could be located. The Nocturnal Bird Club, to which she’d left her meager estate, finally assumed responsibility for her burial.

Angus and Lorinda Russell were both cremated with no one in attendance. Hilda Russell directed that their ashes be disposed of as medical waste.

Silas Gant was given a high-profile funeral by the Armed Ministers Movement. He was eulogized as a true Crusader, ready to stand his ground for God against the rising tide of atheists, socialists, and queers. His killing was condemned as a terrorist attack on Christianity.

Linda Mason’s sister had her body transported to the tiny upstate town of Vorlandville, where she was born. She was buried in the Gate of Angels cemetery next to the graves of her parents.

Billy Tate’s body parts—which had been removed from the places where Peale had buried them near Chandler Aspern’s house and sent to the ME’s office for forensic identification—were unclaimed. Despite Darlene Tate’s request that they be fed to sewer rats, they were disposed of in the manner prescribed by New York State Department of Health regulations.

Minute flecks of Chandler Aspern’s blood were found on the ropes of the conservatory plant hoist, confirming Gurney’s suspicion that the device had been used to facilitate shooting him in an upright position.

William Danforth Peale III was interred, according to the instructions in his will, in the Peale family’s mausoleum in the most exclusive of the three Peale cemeteries. There was a minimal media presence at the event. No family members or friends could be located.

Aided by Madeleine’s dependable instinct for the truth, Gurney made an assessment of the mistakes he’d made in the course of the investigation: the faith he’d originally placed in the integrity of the mortuary video, the excessive fondness for a coherent narrative that led to his unquestioning acceptance of Barstow’s and Vickerz’s description of Tate’s putative “escape” from the casket, the credulity with which he’d swallowed Peale’s pretense of rage against Fallow. That particular failure of judgment revealed something in himself he hadn’t previously been aware of—his tendency to ascribe greater authenticity to expressions of hatred than expressions of love. Rage seemed real, affection questionable. Perhaps someday he’d get to the root of that. In the meantime, he decided to incorporate an unsparing description of his errors into his next academy lecture. He knew that nothing captured a student’s attention more effectively than a teacher’s admitted screwups.