Page 43 of The Executioners Three
“Stop!” she screeched, rounding first on Kyle and Luis. Then on Theo. “Just stop, all of you.” Lastly she turned to Freddie. Her cheeks were flushed with cold—and with emotion too. “Laina is missing, Fred. That’s why we’re here. I went down to my kitchen and when I came back up, she was gone.”
No. Freddie’s lungs inverted. Her gut swept down to her toes.
“I tried calling you,” Divya went on. She walked toward Freddie. Snow flickered across her black hair. “But your phone was off, and your mom didn’t know where you were. Since the library was closed, I figured you had to be here.”
Good detective work, Freddie thought, and if the moment had been anything but this one, she would’ve said so. Instead, she asked: “And you tried Laina’s house?”
“Of course, but her mom hasn’t seen her, and she’s not answering her phone. So I called them.” Divya waved to Cat, Luis, and Kyle. “I didn’t know who else could help me.”
“Right.” Shame spiderwebbed through Freddie’s belly. Her friend had needed her, and she hadn’t been there. “And… and did you explain to them what’s going on with Laina?”
“You mean that Laina sleepwalks?” Cat folded her arms over her chest. “She did.”
Okay. Okay. Freddie could figure this out. She had to figure this out. Although first she turned to Theo. He had been watching this whole exchange, locked up and closed off. Freddie approached him, and though she didn’t want to, she removed his blazer. Cold rushed in. “You should go, Theo.”
He wet his lips. “So you’re choosing them?”
“I’m not choosing anyone.” Freddie offered him the jacket. He didn’t take it. “But I have to deal with this, and you have to see your grandmother.”
He winced, a tiny movement around his eyes. As if, in all this madness, he had forgotten Mrs. Ferris and the beef jerky. Freddie almost had.
“Okay,” he said softly. Then before Freddie could stop him, he leaned in and kissed her on the forehead.
It was a curt movement, like he didn’t want to do it in front of everyone but rather had to. Like it was Very Important that Freddie see he wasn’t upset with her. “Keep the jacket,” he said, “and I’ll call you later.”
Theo stalked away.
“Piss off, Porter!” Kyle shouted at Theo’s back.
And Theo answered with an expertly flicked middle finger before slinging into his Civic. A heartbeat later, the car revved to life. Two heartbeats after that, and it was pulling away.
“Alright,” Freddie said, once Theo was out of the parking lot, “the first place we should look is at Fortin Prep.”
“Um.” Luis barked a laugh. “You’re not going anywhere with us.”
Freddie blinked. “What? Of course I am.”
“Definitely not,” Cat chimed. She planted her hands on her hips. “We don’t need your help, Freddie, and we don’t want it.”
“Are you serious right now? I sacrificed myself to the sheriff earlier so you and Kyle could get away, and this is how you treat me?”
Cat cringed, but before she could answer, Kyle declared, “That was before we caught you hooking up with the enemy.” His lips curled back and Freddie wondered how she had ever found him cute. “Now we’ve seen your true colors.”
“Fortin Prep colors,” Luis added.
To which Freddie could do nothing but gape—because how could this be happening right now? “Laina is missing,” she sputtered at them, “and you guys are worried about some stupid rivalry?”
“Stupid?” Cat repeated. “You’re part of it, remember? You were the Prank Wizard!”
“Of course I remember!” Freddie opened her arms. “But none of that matters right now. Divya, tell them that I can help you find Laina.” She whirled toward her best friend.
But as soon as she caught sight of Divya, she knew her best friend couldn’t help her. It was clear from the slant of Divya’s brow that she wanted to… but she was also thrust into a terrible choice. Freddie had the knowledge; Kyle had the transportation; and right now, speed mattered most.
Freddie understood this. “Fortin Prep,” she said softly. “Start there, Divya. At the crypt. It’s easier to search, and Laina said she’s gone there be fore. After that, check the gravestones from earlier. But be careful. I mean, really careful. Those woods are not safe.”
Divya gave her a sad smile. “Thanks.” She turned to go.
“Wait.”
Divya glanced back. “Yeah?”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know.” Divya shook her head. “And I’m sorry you were too afraid to tell me about Theo.”
“Call me if Laina’s not at Fortin Prep, okay?”
“Yeah.” Divya wet her lips. “I’ll call you when we find her.”
Freddie didn’t watch the Jeep leave. She didn’t watch her best friend walk away or her ex-squad vanish into the snow. For one, she was freezing and just wanted to get inside. Even slipping back into Theo’s blazer hadn’t been enough to fight the cold.
For two, there was just so much she had to do now. Film to be developed, theories to be spun, and evidence to be catalogued. Plus, if Laina wasn’t at the mausoleum or at the gravestones in the county park, then Freddie needed to figure out where else to send the Prank Squad.
She pushed into the Frame she was alone; she had work to do.
Because for all that she had briefly related to what Mulder had said about science providing no place to start, it was Scully’s response that Freddie always relied on: Nothing happens in contradiction to nature, only in contradiction to what we know of it. And that’s a place to start.
Nothing might make sense right now, but Freddie had heaps more information to work with than she’d had a few hours ago. And that was absolutely a place to start.
Freddie yanked a piece of paper from the laser printer in the corner. Then she plopped onto a stool beside the nearest stretch of counter and plucked up a pencil.
“You want people who keep journals,” Bowman had told Freddie the summer before.
“They’re always the best for accuracy because they’re used to writing down the memories of their day.
They’re used to taking notice and turning it into words.
So, if there’s ever something that you want to remember, Gellar, write it down. ”
Freddie did exactly that, starting as early in the day as she could.
With Sheriff Bowman showing up at the school.
Then the woods. Then Laina and the candle and the words she’d been saying (Freddie had no idea how to spell French, so she just wrote it down phonetically).
Juh sweez eessee. Next, she wrote down everything that Laina had said in Divya’s bedroom, about sleepwalking.
About seeing a counselor from out of town.
Then came Mrs. Ferris. Then came her attic and all the weird stuff in the secret room.
Everything Freddie could remember, she scrawled down.
Sometimes, she’d jump back up to an earlier moment and write in an extra detail—the direction of the wind, the depth of the gravestones in the earth.
Sometimes she’d shoot ahead, afraid to lose a memory if she didn’t scrawl it down right away.
Once all of today was recorded, she moved backward in time: every single moment from the past week she scribbled onto printer paper, from newspaper articles to The Curse of Allard Fortin to even that dead smell that had filled up the archives.
When she’d finished recording all her memories, she grabbed scissors and cut everything into individual sections.
Here was the information on the Executioners. Here was what had happened in the attic and what she’d found. Here was what she and Divya had seen on the tombstones. On and on, until she had several stacks and a lot of clues to work with.
Finally, Freddie grabbed tape and set to building herself a murder board on a stretch of blank wall.
She lost all track of time. She was in the zone.
She was doing the thing she’d been born to do—the thing that her dad had apparently been born to do too.
He might have been a bad father, a bad boss, and a bad husband, but he’d been a great detective.
And right now, what Berm needed was a detective.
Tamp down thoughts. Tamp down feelings. Focus on the task at hand.
When all the papers had been fastened to the wall, she stepped back and admired her handiwork. It was absolutely worthy of Fox Mulder’s messy office—and it was much easier to study and find connections this way.
And what a lot of connections.
But also, what a lot of holes.
Sometimes people died; sometimes a bell tolled from nowhere; and sometimes descendants like Laina and Bowman and Teddy went off sleepwalking when they heard the bell.
At that thought, a new idea sizzled into Freddie’s brain.
She snatched up a final sheet of paper, and in frantic, sloppy scrawl, she wrote down the entire Executioners poem.
She’d read it so many times in the last few days the whole thing was firmly planted in there.
Especially the last line of the last stanza:
The Oathmaster is waiting.
That was the person to tie all these parts together.
That was the serial killer behind all these deaths.
And all signs currently pointed to Edgar Fabre Jr.—assuming he really hadn’t died in 1975.
Sure, Teddy Porter had believed the body he’d found had been his friend’s, but there’d been no head attached to prove it…
“Aha,” Freddie sighed. “Eureka and gesundheit.” There had been a missing person in October of 1975 from Elmore. Freddie had seen that on the microfiche at the library, but she’d dismissed it at the time. Could that person have been the actual body that Teddy had found?
There was only one way to find out, and that was to track down Edgar Fabre Jr. His family had been run out of Berm, but the photo of Teddy and Edgar had shown the young men in front of Elmore High.
So maybe when Edgar Sr. had fled the area, he’d only actually moved twenty miles north of here?
Alright, Freddie knew who she had to track down, and she had a solid foundation for where to start. Now she just needed to develop all her photos from Xena and then maybe pass those images off to the two visiting federal agents. Because Freddie wouldn’t be foolish enough to go to Bowman again.
And honestly, props to Divya for actually being at least partially right back in the forest when she’d speculated Bowman might have been the one who’d moved the water bottle. She probably had been the one, but only because she’d been hypnotized by Edgar Jr.
God, Freddie hoped Edgar didn’t try to take control of anyone else. Bowman, Laina, Mrs. Ferris…
Would he go for Theo next?
At that thought, a new idea lightninged across Freddie’s brain. “Justin,” Freddie hissed to herself, gazing again at her murder board. “Justin, Justin, Justine… Justine .” She found the paper where she’d written Mrs. Ferris’s words: Teddy and Justine live in Chicago now.
She stared at them.
Teddy and Justine live in Chicago.
Freddie had already wondered if maybe Justine was a descendant from Justin Charretière. And she’d already wondered what it might mean if Theo was descended from not one Executioner, but two…
She hadn’t, however, thought what that might actually mean for Theo .
“Holy crap,” Freddie breathed. She gawped at the murder board for a full two seconds. One Lance Bass. Two Lance Bass. Then she burst into action, grabbing for paper and pencil. In a fraction of a second, she wrote down:
Two candles now lit on the graves. One for Bowman’s ancestor: Portier, aka Ropey, aka the Hangman. One for Laina’s ancestor: Steward, aka Hacky, aka the Headsman.
One candle was still missing, though. Presumably one that would also end up lit at Allard Fortin’s mausoleum.
One for Theo’s ancestor: Charretière, aka Stabby, aka the Disemboweler .
Freddie needed to get to Theo.