“Yes,” she murmured. “A yard of heart. Maybe more.”

She dragged at her cigarette, then snuffed it out half-smoked. She riffled through the clippings a final time and looked out the window at the slope of Eastern Prom. The snow had long since stopped and the sun was shining brightly, although it wouldn’t be for much longer; February days in Maine are thankless, miserly things.

“What do you say, Punkin?” Jessie asked the empty room. She spoke in the haughty Elizabeth Taylor voice she had favored as a child, the one that had driven her mother completely bonkers. “Shall we carry on, my deah?”

There was no answer, but Jessie didn’t need one. She leaned forward in her chair and set the cursor in motion once more. She didn’t stop again for a long time, not even to light a cigarette.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

This is the time to talk about Raymond Andrew Joubert. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to do my best. So pour yourself another cup of coffee, dear, and if you’ve got a bottle of brandy handy, you may want to doctor it up a bit. Here comes Part Three.

I have all the newspaper clippings beside me on the desk, but the articles and news items don’t tell all I know, let alone all there is to know-I doubt if anyone has the slightest idea of all the things Joubert did (including Joubert himself, I imagine), and that’s probably a blessing. The stuff the papers could only hint at and the stuff that didn’t make them at all is real nightmare-fodder, and I wouldn’t want to know all of it. Most of the stuff that isn’t in the papers came to me during the last week courtesy of a strangely quiet, strangely chastened Brandon Milheron. I’d asked him to come over as soon as the connections between Joubert’s story and my own had become too obvious to ignore.

“You think this was the guy, don’t you?” he asked. “The one who was in the house with you?”

“Brandon,” I said, “I know it’s the guy.”

He sighed, looked down at his hands for a minute, then looked up at me again-we were in this very room, it was nine o'clock in the morning, and there were no shadows to hide his face that time. “I owe you an apology,” he said. “I didn’t believe you then-”

“I know,” I said, as kindly as I could.

“-but I do now. Dear God. How much do you want to know, Jess?”

I took a deep breath and said, “Everything you can find out.”

He wanted to know why. “I mean, if you say it’s your business and I should butt out, I guess I’ll have to accept that, but you’re asking me to re-open a matter the firm considers closed. If someone who knows I was watching out for you last fall notices me sniffing around Joubert this winter, it’s not impossible that-”

“That you could get in trouble,” I said. It was something I hadn’t considered.

“Yes,” he said, “but I’m not terribly concerned about that-I’m a big boy, and I can take care of myself… at least I think I can. I’m a lot more concerned about you, Jess. You could wind up on the front page again, after all our work to get you off it as quickly and as painlessly as possible. Even that’s not the major thing-it’s miles from the major thing. This is the nastiest criminal case to break in northern New England since World War II. I mean some o this stuff is so gruesome it’s radioactive, and you shouldn’t plink yourself down in the fallout zone without a damned good reason.” He laughed, a little nervously. “Hell, shouldn’t plink myself down there without a damned good reason.”

I got up, walked across to him, and took one of his hands with my left hand. “I couldn’t explain in a million years why,” I said, “but I think I can tell you what-will that do, at least for a start?”

He folded his hand gently over mine and nodded his head.

“There are three things,” I said. “First, I need to know he’s real. Second, I need to know the things he did are real. Third, I need to know I’ll never wake up again with him standing in my bedroom.”

That brought it all back, Ruth, and I began to cry. There was nothing tricky or calculating about those tears; they just came. Nothing I could have done would have stopped them.

“Please help me, Brandon,” I said, “Every time I turn off the light, he’s standing across the room from me in the dark, and I’m afraid that unless I can turn a spotlight on him, that’s going to go on forever. There isn’t anybody else I can ask, and I have to know. Please help me.”

He let go of my hand, produced a handkerchief from somewhere inside that day’s screamingly neat lawyer’s suit, and wiped my face with it. He did it as gently as my Mom used to when I came into the kitchen bawling my head off because I’d skinned my knee-that was back in the early years, before I turned into the family’s squeaky wheel, you understand.

“All right,” he said at last. “I’ll find out everything I can, and I’ll pass it all on to you… unless and until you tell me to stop, that is. But I have a feeling you better fasten your seatbelt.”

He found out quite a lot, and now I’m going to pass it on to you, Ruth, but fair warning: he was right about the seatbelt. If you decide to skip some of the next few pages, I’ll understand. I wish I could skip writing them, but I have an idea that’s also part of the therapy. The final part, I hope.

This section of the story-what I suppose I could call Brandon’s Tale-starts back in 1984 or 1985. That was when cases of graveyard vandalism started popping up in the Lakes District of western Maine. There were similar cases reported in half a dozen small towns across the state line and into New Hampshire. Stuff like tombstone-tipping, spray-paint graffiti, and stealing commemorative flags is pretty common stuff out in the willywags, and of course there’s always a bunch of smashed pumpkins to swamp out of the local boneyard on November lst, but these crimes went a lot further than pranks or petty theft. Desecration was the word Brandon used when he brought me his first report late last week, and that word had started showing up on most of the police crime-report forms by 1988.

The crimes themselves seemed abnormal to the people who discovered them, and to those who investigated them, but the modus operandi was sane enough; carefully organized and focused. Someone-possibly two or three someones, but more likely a single person-was breaking into the crypts and mausoleums of small-town cemeteries with the efficiency of a good burglar breaking into a house or store. He was apparently arriving at these jobs equipped with drills, a bolt-cutter, heavy-duty hacksaws, and probably a winch-Brandon says a lot of four-wheel-drive vehicles come equipped with them these days.

The breaks were always aimed at the crypts and mausoleums, never at individual graves, and almost all of them came in winter, when the ground is too hard to dig in and the bodies have to be stored until the deep frosts let go. Once the perpetrator gained entry, he used the bolt-cutter and power drill to open the coffins. He systematically stripped the corpses of any jewelry they might have been wearing when they were interred; he used pliers to pull gold teeth and teeth with gold fillings.

Those acts are despicable, but at least they’re understandable. Robbery was only where this guy got started, though. He gouged out eyes, tore off ears, cut dead throats. In February of 1989, two corpses in the Chilton Remembrance Cemetery were found without noses-he apparently knocked them off with a hammer and a chisel. The officer who caught that one told Brandon, “it would have been easy-it was like a deep-freeze in there, and they probably broke off like Popsicles. The real question is what does a guy do with two frozen noses once he has them? Does he put “em on his keychain? Maybe sprinkle “em with nacho cheese and then zap “em in the microwave? What?”