Page 18 of The Gallagher Place
Marlowe kept walking to the edge of the field, following the path into the woods. She used to brag to visitors at this point on a tour, pointing out the moss-covered stone walls that cut straight lines through the trees. One of them stretched a few yards away from the path Marlowe trod, the rocks scattered in places, the top of the wall dipping in height, but the gray stone enduring.
“This is old land,” she would say. “Land with a history.”
Once upon a time, those stone walls had a purpose. They were built to separate properties or to keep the cows to certain tracts of land. There was something beautiful and ancient about them.
During her time studying abroad in college and while traveling the world, she had witnessed firsthand the age of many European structures; some were centuries older than anything in America. Yet when she stood before Stonehenge and, later, the terra-cotta soldiers of China, her thoughts had inevitably drifted back to the stone walls.
She enjoyed taking archeology in college. In one class, the professor showed a series of slides depicting little statues carved by people who had roamed the earth long before recorded history. He stopped on a stone effigy of a woman, bare-chested and with hands outstretched. There was a wolf beside her, snout tipped up, as if it was about to suckle on her breast. Her features had been worn away by time, until her face had become a smooth oval.
“Any guesses who this is?” The professor’s eyes twinkled in a way that signaled it might be a trick question.
Students raised their hands and chirped out their theories.Artemis, the goddess of the hunt.Maybe Hera.Perhaps a representation of the mother wolf that raised Romulus and Remus before they founded Rome.
The professor acknowledged that Artemis was a good guess, but then he revealed that the statue dated back a good three centuries before Greek mythology took root, when the oral stories were ever shifting, when people whispered tales that were lost or altered before they could be recorded. The little stone goddess—she was something else, something later goddesses were molded after.
“The Mother Goddess,” the professor said. “An ancient figure that appears across early civilizations in various forms.”
He took off his glasses as he continued. “Think of the Christian origin of man—where Adam was shaped in God’s image, and then Eve was made in man’s image, out of Adam’s rib. The people who carved this statue did not believe that. Women were not made in man’s image or God’s image. They were made inherimage. The Mother Goddess, the origin of all life.”
And in that classroom, so far away from the woods by the Gray House, Marlowe blinked up at the picture projected on the screen and wondered why it looked so familiar. Wondered why she felt she had unearthed something similar, running about as a child.
Marlowe stepped off the path and placed one boot atop a rock. Not a pagan carving, just a stone, moved into place by a humble farmer. It felt like more. As children, they had always searched for deeper meaning to add intrigue to their adventures. She shivered as she recalled the stories her brothers and Nora made up to scare each other, about a villainous stranger lurking in the woods.
The wall Marlowe stood by stretched westward as far as she could see. The barren branches seemed to point the way. Marlowe hadn’t followed their directions since she was a girl, but she knewif she kept walking, she would reach the old abandoned car. They had found it as teenagers. It had likely been left by a previous tenant, but charred logs nearby had been enough for them to conjure a character camping out in the woods.
They called him Mr. Babel. Nora had come up with the name, inspired by the biblical story of the Tower of Babel, which had stuck with her since Sunday school. She’d claimed Mr. Babel spoke to snakes and came out of the woods at night to peer into the windows of the Gray House.
Marlowe had added her own details: Mr. Babel had no fear of getting caught; he had lethal aim with his shotgun and knew the land, with all its hiding spots, like the back of his hand.
Even now, Nate and Henry told stories about him to their children, but their tales were tamer. Mr. Babel had transformed into a genial hermit hiding treasure in the woods. That wasn’t how he had started out, though. In fact, there was a time when Marlowe truly feared Mr. Babel. She’d even thought she had spotted him once or twice, weaving among the trees, a grizzled beard covering his face, dead squirrels tossed over his shoulder.
All at once, a smile tugged at the corners of Marlowe’s mouth, and tears threatened to well in her eyes. She wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry at the memory of Nora’s dramatics.
Marlowe moved back to the path. The abandoned car was still a long ways off, and she doubted there would still be any sign of a fire. Mr. Babel was a myth; by the time Nora disappeared, Marlowe was certain of that. The woods weren’t even that vast—a few miles in any direction and a walker could hit a road or someone’s backyard. It wasn’t a true wilderness, and there were no monsters hiding behind the thick tree trunks.
But there had been Gallaghers. Marlowe confronted that fact as she emerged into the field, the ground brown and dull. AnotherGallagher, camping out, just as Harmon had done mere nights ago.
Only this other Gallagher was far more secretive. He had picked a hidden spot up in the woods. He had not reached out to them. Had he been watching them? And, if so, for how long?
TEN
The laptop screen flickered before the search results populated one by one in rapid succession. Marlowe scanned each link and snippet before pushing the laptop toward her father, sitting next to her at the kitchen table. Marlowe was tired and peckish after her long walk and wanted to rest in her room until dinner was ready, but Frank had asked her to do an online search for background information on the detectives after they’d called to say they would be stopping by on Monday to discuss Harmon’s threats in more detail.
Ariel Mintz and Ben Vance had both attended the police academy and served in uniform. Judging from the dates she could find, they were promoted quickly. Other than their basic credentials as homicide detectives, that was all Marlowe could find. She recalled Ariel’s sharp gaze, her no-nonsense attitude. Marlowe wondered what it would be like to take in the world and make definitive judgments about it so easily. The harder Marlowe looked at people and places, the more confused she became.
“I wonder why Poughkeepsie,” Marlowe mused. “You would think if they were good enough to be promoted so young, they would perhaps go to a bigger city.”
“Never assume your own ambitions exist in others,” Frank said, folding his hands together and resting them on his stomach.
“You should call that judge upstate. You know, Lydia Freeman’s husband. Bill. See if he’s crossed paths with them before and has anything useful to share,” Glory said without looking up from the salad spinner.
“Good idea,” Frank said.
Frank and Glory believed in research. They never so much as attended a dinner without discovering the crucial details about the guests. Who had accomplished what. Who was useful or interesting or well connected. Marlowe wondered what kind of value they would assign her if she weren’t their daughter and they were to research her.
“Did you speak to the Hopewells or any of the other neighbors yet?” Marlowe asked. “I’m curious what the detectives have been asking.”
“Yes, Todd Hopewell and I spoke briefly. They asked him about the brothers, the land, dates of purchase,” Frank said. “As if that poor young man, Harmon, had anything to do with what was between me and Tom. Not that the Hopewells would know—they’re still new around here.”
