Page 39 of The Executioners Three

The next thing Freddie noticed was a letter affixed to the fridge. It had a bright sunburst magnet that stood out in the dark, and after locking the door behind her—then deadbolting it for good measure—Freddie crept over. Under the magnet was a letter with a pink Post-it stuck to the top.

I’ll see you soon, Grandma, the Post-it read in a sloping scrawl. Love, Theo.

Freddie couldn’t help but smile at that.

Then she peeled up the Post-it and scanned the paper below.

It was an acceptance letter from Allard Fortin Preparatory School, dated April of this year.

They were pleased to inform Mr. Theodore Porter that he had been accepted into their prestigious journalism program, and that his financial aid application had been accepted.

He would have full room, board, and tuition covered for the 1999–2000 school year.

As Freddie read this, as she ran her finger down the letter, sadness wefted through her muscles. I was in the journalism program, Theo had said that very morning, before quickly correcting to, I am in the journalism program.

Freddie had to wonder if he’d been kicked out.

Which must have been her fault.

She shook her head. She wasn’t here for Theo. She was here for answers in the attic.

Freddie traced her way out of the kitchen, giving it one more glance before she left.

But other than a yellow raincoat on a hook by the door, nothing caught her eye.

So into the living room she wandered. Here, every surface was crowded with knickknacks, framed family photos, and an uncomfortable number of Precious Moments figurines.

It was so stereotypically Old Lady it was almost painful.

A shadowy stairwell waited beyond, so Freddie made her way over.

The steps creaked beneath her duck boots, and halfway up, the furnace clicked on—loud enough to send Freddie jumping.

Loud enough that she had to stand there mid-step with her hand clutching the banister for a solid ten seconds before her heart finally slowed.

“Nerves of steel, Gellar,” she whispered as she resumed her ascent. “Nerves of steel.”

She reached the second floor, and there, at the end of the hall as promised, was a door.

As Freddie snuck toward it, she passed two open doors.

One revealed a tiny bathroom, the faded wallpaper as outdated as the fridge downstairs.

The second showed a bedroom with a bunk bed draped in Fraggle Rock sheets.

Freddie approved.

At last, she reached the attic door, and after a brief pause to listen very hard over the furnace’s blast (and after hearing nothing), she turned the knob and pressed inside. A narrow stairwell met her eyes, lit only by a dim light through a circular window.

At the top of the stairs, Freddie found more issues of National Geographic than she had ever known existed.

As she twisted around to cross the attic—dusty, spider-y, and with exposed nails in all the most dangerous places—she examined the magazines.

They went back decades, and the worn creasing in the spines suggested they’d all been read cover to cover. Several times.

Next came old toys. Heaps and heaps of them—and ahead in the weak light, Freddie could see the dollhouse Mrs. Ferris had told her about. It was as tall as Freddie’s waist, with as many steeples and gables and what-have-yous as Allard Fortin’s estate.

Freddie’s boots thumped over the attic. Floorboards groaned.

She reached the dollhouse and peeked behind.

Her lungs tightened. A small door waited.

The kind that led into crawl spaces and murder dungeons.

It wasn’t well hidden, though, and now that Freddie was looking, she realized no cobwebs clustered here.

Nor did dust. In fact, a streak of clean wood suggested the dollhouse had been moved.

Recently.

Freddie inhaled deeply, senses sharpening and logic waking up.

Mrs. Ferris had been in the hospital for two days.

This could feasibly have been her doing.

But cobwebs formed fast. Freddie knew that from her days of cleaning at City-on-the-Berme, yet there wasn’t a single web between here and the doorway.

Maybe Mrs. Ferris had told someone else about this secret area?

Ducking down, Freddie gently turned the knob. It squeaked. The door pulled wide, revealing a tiny room tucked beneath the roof’s support beams. A string dangled down, and when Freddie yanked it, a lone bulb flashed on.

She winced. So bright. So obvious. She hastily shut the door behind her.

Unlike the rest of the attic, everything here was meticulously organized in boxes. Tools, read the closest. Documents, read the next. And a third, unlabeled, sat in the farthest corner.

It was the massive corkboard leaning against the sloped beams that captured Freddie’s gaze.

She scooted in close. On one half was a topographical map of the county park.

Someone had drawn in all the trails with a red marker.

They’d marked the Village Historique too, and the parking lot and the archives, and…

The gravestones.

Or that was what Freddie assumed the three red Xs labeled burial site meant. She set down her flashlight and snapped a picture of the Xs. Then she moved to the second half of the corkboard.

Her eyes widened as she beamed her flashlight over it.

“Holy smokes.” This was even better than the map.

The page was shorter and the edges had been folded inward, but there was no mistaking what she was looking at: three family trees, tracing all the way back to 1679.

It began with a Portier, a Steward, and a Charretière—the same titles inscribed on the three gravestones.

And the same roles referenced in The Curse of Allard Fortin : a footman, a steward, and a carriage driver.

Freddie quickly snapped a photo, then kept on snapping all the way through to the present day, unfolding the enormous page as she went. Tens of names unfurled before her. Generation upon generation of descendants of the three men who must have worked for Allard Fortin.

Ropey, Hacky, and Stabby. A footman, a steward, and a carriage driver. They’d each had children here, and those children had continued to live here for generations.

It was when Freddie reached the 1950s, though, that the family tree changed. The names were still there, but now they’d been scratched out. And not just casual strikethroughs, but scrubbed away so hard that the black pen had torn the paper.

It was as if someone hadn’t simply tried to erase these people from the family trees but had tried to erase them from life entirely.

Freddie gulped and snapped one more picture before turning her attention to the boxes. With her flashlight back in hand, she opened the one labeled Tools— only to instantly rear back. She had no idea what she’d expected to find inside, but it definitely hadn’t been what glittered up at her.

Handcuffs. A rope. Duct tape. And zip ties.

Okay, sure. Those were tools, alright. For murder. And not supernatural murder either, but, like, legit murder by a very human hand.

Stomach roiling, Freddie took a picture of the contents. Then plunked the lid back on and shoved the box aside. Her skin crawled. She didn’t think Mrs. Ferris was a killer, so what were these things doing in her attic?

With shaky hands, she next opened the box labeled Documents .

It was almost entirely empty save for three handwritten copies of “The Executioners Three.” The topmost page was clean white printer paper with 1999 scribbled in the corner.

Beside the poem’s second and third refrains were the dates October 13 and October 15.

Freddie’s breath hissed out. Those were the dates of the hanging and the decapitation—and they matched up with the verses for the Hangsman and the Headsman. Meanwhile, next to the line The Oathmaster is waiting were the words He’s back .

Well, clearly the he in question was the serial killer, and presumably this meant Mrs. Ferris had been trying to track him. The question was why, and what did it have to do with her children and the bell?

The next copy of the poem, handwritten on faded notebook paper, was dated 1987. Another date had been scrawled beside the Hangsman’s verse: October 16. That, of course, matched with the newspaper articles Freddie had found in her dad’s box and at Fortin Prep.

On the back, there was another note: The fog and crows rise again, but no one is here . Rita is traveling, and Teddy and Justine live in Chicago now.

Then, added in thick red marker below that was: I am so sorry, Frank.

Freddie swallowed, her throat suddenly shut tight. She’d already known that her dad had gone looking for answers about this. She couldn’t let a fresh monsoon get the better of her simply because that was her dad’s name right there.

Tamp it down. Focus on the task at hand.

Freddie forced her gaze back up to the other notes. Rita was obviously Sheriff Bowman. And Teddy must be Theo’s dad, who’d moved to Chicago. Justine, therefore, must be Theo’s mom.

For some reason, Freddie’s gut gave a hard clench at that thought . As if to say: This name is important. Don’t forget Justine.

Hadn’t one of the Executioners been named Justin ? Could Theo’s mother be descended from the Charretière line? That would make him a double descendant…

Freddie turned to the final copy of the poem, on an even rattier piece of lined paper, dated 1975.

It was the same handwriting as before, but swoopier, as if Mrs. Ferris—assuming that was who had kept these notes—had been younger.

More dates filled the margin, and beside the Headsman’s stanza, it also read: Poor Edgar.

Teddy blames himself. He tells me he hears a bell and can’t resist it.

I have found him sleepwalking twice now in the forest with no memory of how he got there.

Freddie bit her lip. There was so much to take in right here.

Poor Edgar had to refer to Edgar Fabre—although why? What had happened to him in 1975 that Teddy would blame himself for? Edgar would have been pretty old by then, and hadn’t he been run out of town?

As for the bell that Teddy claimed he’d heard—which had to be the same bell that Freddie kept hearing—what did it mean that he couldn’t resist it? Mrs. Ferris had said Sheriff Bowman was the same. Plus, he’d been found sleepwalking just like Laina had.

So maybe someone was hypnotizing them all. Hypnosis had triggers, right? So the bell could be the mechanism that controlled them to… do what?

Freddie would have to research that hypnosis tomorrow at the library. And she could do a cursory search tonight with Ask Jeeves once she got home.

She rubbed at her eyes. This was a lot to take in. A lot of lines drawn on a murder board that currently existed only inside her brain. She needed to sit down and try to map it all out in an organized fashion.

After returning the three poems to their box, Freddie finally turned her attention to the last box. The one without a label, lurking in the shadows. While the others were all brown filing boxes, this one was white. Newer. Cleaner.

Later, Freddie would swear she’d known what she was going to find before she’d even pulled off the lid. She would swear her gut had already sensed the box’s contents, her mind had already decided.

She pulled off the top, and there it was: a red water bottle with Wed. run, lap 2 on the side.

Beside it was a roll of 35mm film.

And under it was a sheaf of stolen newspapers.

“Aha,” Freddie whispered shakily, “eureka, and gesundheit.” Here was all of her serial killer evidence.

Just staring up at her in a secret attic room that no one was supposed to know about except for Mrs. Ferris.

A woman who was supposedly attacked by a wild animal.

A woman who was afraid of her own daughter and could only turn to Freddie for help.

Heart thundering, Freddie wrapped her right hand in her sleeve and withdrew the topmost newspaper.

In huge letters, it declared, “Headless Body Found in City-on-the-Berme.” Below was a picture of two young men, arm in arm and grinning before Elmore High School.

Teddy Porter, the caption said, who found the body of his friend, Edgar Fabre Jr .

Freddie’s lungs deflated. Air whistled through her teeth. Because holy moly, this was a clue. It wasn’t Edgar Fabre Senior that her dad had believed was still alive—it was the son. Junior was the one who maybe hadn’t died.

Except, how could one even fake a decapitated body?

And for what purpose? Sure, Freddie could see why he might have had a motive to kill if he’d wanted to prove his dad’s book was real.

And if he’d wanted to show everyone in Berm that Original Fabre hadn’t just been a disgruntled blacksmith with outstanding money owed .

But the amount of work that would have to go into a scheme like this—from faking his own death to multiple killings over twenty-four years…

Freddie’s face folded into one of Divya’s something does not add up here expressions. And in a numb, hazy movement, she clicked Xena’s film advancer and pressed the viewfinder to her eye.

Snap! Light flared. The face of Teddy Porter was captured on film, the resemblance between Theo and his dad unmistakable.

Then, with her fingers again wrapped in her sleeve, Freddie withdrew more newspapers.

The stack included all the 1975 editions missing from the Fortin Prep collection, as well as envelopes of microfiche from the library.

There were also extra copies of the same newspapers, as if the killer— Edgar Junior —had gone to neighboring libraries and relieved them of their editions too.

Freddie cranked Xena again, ready to grab a picture of the whole article cache…

except Xena wouldn’t move. “Crap,” she snarled.

She had taken all the pictures she could.

Frantically, she patted her jeans pockets.

Front, back, front again. But there was no spare film.

What a rookie move, Gellar! Mulder and Scully would never .

But okay, okay. This would be fine. All Freddie had to do was come back later. She knew where the key was, and surely if she came during the middle of the night, there’d be no risk of getting caught by a murderer.

Freddie was just picking up the newspaper to return it to the box when the house shook. A sudden slam that rattled everything.

Freddie froze. The furnace, she thought. It’s probably just the furnace. It wasn’t the furnace, though. Someone was in the house, and now their stomping feet were coming this way.