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Fritz jolts, possibly from confusion, probably from surprise. “That’s a mighty big accusation, Ethan. Irresponsible, too.”
“But is it wrong?”
At first, Fritz says nothing, his sudden plunge into silence a stark contrast with the noise coming from the woods. The symphonic chirp of crickets and the droning chorus of cicadas. I wonder if Billy is with them there now. Blending in with the shadows. Quietly watching. Waiting for justice.
“What’s your goal here, son?” Fritz finally says.
“The truth.”
“In my experience, men who say they want the truth end up wishing they had settled for the lie.”
I’m not one of them. Thirty years of knowing nothing about what happened to Billy has me primed for the facts, no matter how brutal they may be.
“Let’s start with the Hawthorne Institute,” I say. “What went on there?”
Fritz straightens his spine and clears his throat. “The institute was devoted to the study of parapsychology. Are you familiar with the field?”
I am, slightly. A week ago, I would have dismissed what I’ve heard as pseudoscience. Now, having experienced some of it myself, I’m less doubtful.
“Give me your definition,” I say.
Fritz pulls a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of his windbreaker. After tapping one out and lighting up, he says, “Parapsychology is the belief that there are forces at work beyond the easily proven ones we encounter every day. Extrasensory perception, telepathy, clairvoyance. I’m sure you’ve occasionally been hit with a sudden sense of déjà vu. Have you ever wondered why?”
“Can’t say I have.”
“Well, Ezra Hawthorne did,” Fritz says, exhaling a stream of smoke that hovers in the still, humid air. “From a very young age, he wondered about many such things. He didn’t think the way most people do. He was more attuned to what’s beyond the things we see and know to be fact. He told me once it was because he emerged from the womb stillborn. For a full minute, there was no life in his infant body until, suddenly, there was. Because of that, he said, a piece of him always remained tethered to the afterlife.”
I give him a look. “That sounds like bullshit.”
“It might have been,” Fritz admits. “But he believed in things like that. Because he was blessed with both money and an estate with plenty of privacy, he created a place where people could study unexplained phenomena without mockery or skepticism. That was the purpose of the institute. To provide room, board, and research space for those trying to explain the unexplainable. Why can some people sense things more than others? How can someone seemingly read minds, predict futures, move things without laying a finger on them?”
My mind’s eye returns to the photograph of the men in robes and what my mother said she saw.
“And occult rituals? Where do those come in?”
“Occult.” Fritz makes a disapproving sound. “Mr. Hawthorne despised that word. He said it was simply a label people put on practices they either feared or failed to understand. After all, something called occult by one person could have deep, religious meaning to someone else. It’s all in how you perceive it.”
“What did my mother perceive the night you fired her?”
Fritz looks past me to the forest at the edge of the yard, almost as if he can see the two miles to the Hawthorne Institute, where Ezra Hawthorne and his robed cohorts continue to circle a fire.
“That was unfortunate,” he says. “Your mother was mistaken about what she saw. I suppose that was to be expected. It looked farmore sinister than it really was. The institute had a policy in place for such situations, which was instant termination and a nondisclosure agreement. It avoided a lot of explaining on our part and a lot of unwanted scrutiny from the outside world. As a result, your mother has held a grudge against me for the past thirty years.”
“I don’t think it’s a grudge,” I say. “I think she was scared of you—and that place.”
“She had no reason to be.”
“She witnessed a satanic ritual.”
“Satanic?” Fritz does an incredulous headshake, as if he can’t believe I’m so dumb. “That was a ritual practiced by a small sect of Druids in the fourth century BC. It was an offering to the earth, expressing gratitude for what it provides.”
“By ‘offering,’ you mean sacrifice.”
“No,” Fritz says, the tip of his cigarette flaring orange as he takes a drag. “I mean a pig’s heart I procured from a butcher right before the ceremony began. Ezra Hawthorne had many eccentricities, like requiring all men at the institute to wear a black suit like he did, but he abhorred violence. He never would have ordered me to harm a child, which is what you’ve been insinuating. Nor would I ever have resorted to such a thing.”
“So he was a pacifist.”
“Yes. Ezra was a jack-of-all-trades when it came to religion, master of none. If he had any deep-seated spiritual beliefs, he never shared them with me. But I do know he kept an open mind about all of them. He attended Catholic Mass, studied the Quran and the Torah, spent a month living with Buddhist monks in Tibet, and, yes, conducted ancient Druid rituals. All in an attempt to expand his understanding of the universe.”