Page 22 of The Executioners Three

Freddie dreamed of the Hangsman from the poem again, but this time, he was not alone. This time, he hunted with a companion. Through woods of darkness and starlight, the Hangsman held a rope of flames—and his partner held an axe gleaming with fire.

The Headsman was now hunting too.

Heat pulsed against Freddie. No matter how far ahead she seemed to run, she couldn’t escape it. Worse, she was also not alone. Mrs. Ferris stumbled alongside Freddie, and though Freddie tried to get the old woman to run, Mrs. Ferris would never move faster than a sluggish crawl.

“Please,” Freddie begged, over and over again, towing at the old woman’s bony elbow. “I didn’t mean to leave you behind, Mrs. Ferris. I didn’t know you would get hurt. Please, if you would just move faster, then we can get away.”

But Mrs. Ferris wouldn’t speed up.

Not that it mattered in the end. Neither the Hangsman nor the Headsman caught up until Freddie and Mrs. Ferris were at the old schoolhouse, and like the night before, when Freddie turned to face them, the shadows peeled away.

Then the two figures converged into one: Theo.

He held out his hand, upon which gleamed the heart. “On n’est jamais si bien servi que par soi-même,” he told Freddie. “This is for you, and only you can break it.”

“Break what?” Freddie glanced sideways. “Your grandmother told me…” Freddie’s voice died.

Mrs. Ferris was no longer there. The schoolhouse was empty. The night sky shone outside.

“You, Freddie,” Theo said. “Only you can break it.”

“Oh.” She angled back to him, frowning, and as she’d done the previous night, she cautiously accepted the heart of iron.

It beat against her fingertips.

This time, though, she realized she did know how to break it.

Still holding the heart, she stretched onto her toes and she kissed Theo.

Like she had at the old mill. So hard it left Freddie’s dream-heart hammering and her dream-lips raw.

And this time, when Freddie awoke drenched in sweat, it was for a completely different reason than the night before.

Her mouth tasted of honey.

It took Freddie twice as long to get ready that morning.

To shower. To pick out clothes (four trial outfits before she finally settled on jeans, a pistachio turtleneck to hide the hickey, and her winter coat because it was getting cold outside).

She needed three tries to get her left contact onto its respective eye, and she hadn’t even started to dry her hair when Divya showed up to walk to school together.

“Just go without me,” Freddie said wearily, and Divya—who had never been tardy in her entire life and was determined to graduate with an untarnished record—complied. There was still something Freddie needed to do before school, while the house was empty.

Because Freddie had finally remembered where she’d seen “The Executioners Three” before: in the darkest corner of the family basement, where a secret box of files hid.

A secret box that Freddie’s mom didn’t know Freddie knew about, and that Freddie had only ever looked at once, when she was nine years old.

She’d been pretending to be Nancy Drew—specifically Nancy Drew in The Secret in the Old Attic, except that her house didn’t have an attic, so to the basement she’d gone. There, she’d scoured and examined and searched for clues about deceased soldiers and missing musical scores.

What she’d found instead was a cardboard box labeled Frank Carter, Desk .

Freddie had of course recognized her dad’s name, and in an instant, all thoughts of Nancy Drew had fled.

Because right here were answers. Right here was her chance to maybe learn something without opening leaky tear ducts or clogging up throats.

With nine-year-old enthusiasm—and definitely a spike of guilt she had to punt aside—Freddie had torn back the box’s flaps, ignoring all the dust and swatting away the nest (or was it a swarm?) of tiny spiders that had taken up roost within.

She’d found legal pads, a set of keys, a Rolodex, a stack of newspaper articles and printouts, and a bunch of pens that didn’t write anymore.

She’d also found her dad’s badge, gleaming and cold.

She would have pocketed it right away if she hadn’t been afraid her mom might one day discover it missing.

Although, while Freddie had sat there exploring the box, she had fastened it to the pocket on her T-shirt.

She’d liked the weight of it, and she still remembered how it had felt hanging there.

At the bottom of the box, underneath all the files and pads, Freddie had found the biggest surprise of all: a faded photograph of Dad holding her on the day she’d been born. He’d had a beard then, and he’d been grinning like the happiest man who’d ever lived.

For the next twenty minutes, Freddie had simply stared at that picture, trying to conjure memories of his face. She’d had a handful of her own photos with Dad in them, but he was never smiling—at least not like he’d been here. In all of her photos, he’d looked vaguely haunted. Vaguely lost.

Which was the way he lived in Freddie’s memory too. She couldn’t summon him—not precisely—but she could summon the way it felt to be around him: like he was quiet, withdrawn, and with his mind focused anywhere but on the people right beside him.

Freddie hadn’t liked how the photo had made her feel. The cavernous shame. The hardening of her intestines like concrete had been poured in. Some heated anger too, because this guy in the photo wasn’t her dad. Her real dad in all the ways that mattered—that was Steve, and it felt…

Well, disloyal to even wonder about the guy who hadn’t stayed when she had two amazing parents who had.

And it felt even more disloyal to break the unspoken family rule regarding Frank Carter.

So Freddie had decided this was one area where she didn’t want to be the Answer Finder any longer. Where she didn’t want to open Pandora’s box. So she’d closed the literal box, and she’d never gone back into that corner of the basement again.

Tamp down thoughts. Tamp down feelings.

If not for Sheriff Bowman’s comment about her dad on Saturday, Freddie might never have come to this box again. But the comment plus the poem at the archives—they had finally collided in her brain in a great Aha! Eureka and gesundheit! moment.

Nine-year-old Freddie hadn’t cared about all the 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 be important to her.

So she focused on the task at hand.

She dumped the box’s contents onto the cold concrete floor. Newspaper clippings, Xeroxed articles, and dot-matrix printouts with the edges still on stared up at her.

And there it was: the poem from The Curse of Allard Fortin —exactly as it had looked in the book, because this was a Xeroxed copy. It was old, yellowed, and folded to the point of being crumpled, but it was definitely a copy of what Freddie currently had hidden in her bedroom.

Freddie’s hand started to shake—just a slight tremble—as she flipped the paper over. On the back of the sheet, her dad’s tiny, slanted handwriting stared up at her.

Dreams came again, it read. Always the same. The Village Historique. Ghosts hunting. Then below that: Edgar didn’t die?

Freddie sucked in sharply. She’d been having dreams too, which, in and of itself, didn’t mean much. After all, the poem had strong imagery, so it was totally natural for those images to crop up during a REM sleep cycle…

But the name Edgar? That was worth digging into, since it was the same name as the author of The Curse of Allard Fortin .

Freddie set aside the poem and turned to the next documents. They were newspapers, all dated October 1987, the year and month during which Frank Carter had died.

In fact, the anniversary of his death was only eight days from today. October 26. A day that always coincided with final preparations for the fête—meaning a day when Mom would always throw all her focus on the task at hand.

Like mother, like daughter.

Freddie stared at the headlines of Dad’s collected articles. They were all toe-curlingly familiar: “Wild Animals Abandoning Local Forests” read one. And another: “Thick Fog Leads to Three Car Accidents.”

One headline, though, was especially gruesome and familiar: “Suicide by Hanging in County Park.” It described an unidentified corpse discovered near the beach.

Other than reporting the victim’s sex (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.

The Xeroxed articles and printouts Freddie studied next had similar headlines—except that they weren’t from 1987. They were all dated October 1975. Freddie’s breaths shallowed out as she skimmed each one. At some point, her mouth went dry too. She kept swallowing.

First 1975, then 1987, and now in present day, there had been intense fog, lots of roadkill…

And hangings.

Body Found in County Park

Newly elected sheriff Frank Carter was called to his first crime scene this weekend after a jogger discovered a body. Carter has released no details except to say the deceased was not local and appears to have died by self-inflicted wounds. Foul play is not suspected.

An interview with the person who discovered the body (and who has asked to remain anonymous) indicates the victim hung themself.

Three people had died by hanging since 1975. That felt way too big to be coincidence.

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