Richard Bowes by From the Files of the Time Rangers

Author:From the Files of the Time Rangers
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2012-02-18T21:24:04+00:00

You told me to sit down and I did. You explained a few things and told me what I was going to do. I followed your instructions, including making every effort to forget what had happened when it was over.

Recent events with Olney and Gonzalez have made that impossible. Yesterday, I spoke to our old friend Angie. She says Gonzalez knew you. I’d like to ask you about that. I need your help.

3.

It’s dusk outside. Robert and Sandra’s cups have been refilled for what will be the last time. A dinner crowd drifts in.

“Mortal man, mortal man,” she shakes her head, refuses the brandy and almost smiles. “This is the third time you have crossed my path. For many of your sex, one encounter is more than is allowed.

“With Maria Czerny, you even surprised us. And lived. You appeared on TV claiming to have found a decades-old missing-child pattern in an immigrant Czech community outside Cleveland. A series of little girls had all disappeared without a trace. At midday.

You identified a certain Maria Czerny as the murderess, described how years before she had kidnapped children in broad daylight and eaten their hearts.

“Old Bohemians believed in a witch that stole children at noon. Their fears had made them reluctant to cooperate too closely with the authorities. You called Czerny ‘The Noonday Witch.’ Quite catchy.

“For the Sisterhood, witch hunts are a nightmare comparable to the Holocaust for Jews, lynchings for African-Americans. We were confronted by two facts. Maria Czerny was still alive, though senile and in a mental hospital. And in Europe, before the Great War, she had been one of us. We had severed our ties, then lost track of her.

“Of course, I recognized you and knew how you had actually sniffed out the crimes. Twenty years before, I’d passed up the chance to dispose of you. In a sense, you were my responsibility.

“So I visited Cleveland and used my powers of persuasion. It was too late to do anything about the name you had given the case. But I convinced you to make every effort to show that, in fact, so-called witches were harmless. Benevolent even. And that, in any case, no proof existed that Maria Czerny ever was one.”

“And when you were finished with the evidence, that was true,” Robert says. “Powers of persuasion? Try terror. You snapped your fingers and fifty miles away, Ms. Czerny died in her bed. Stacks of letters turned to ash inside locked safes. Then there was the way you reminded me of our prior meeting.”

“I wanted you to see both my manifestations. Even when I was Alan, you aroused my sentimental side, Robert. And I find it amusing when you are afraid.

Like now.”

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