Sleepy Hollow: Children of the Revolution by Keith R.A. DeCandido

Author:Keith R.A. DeCandido [DeCandido, Keith R.A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780553419092
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2014-09-30T05:00:00+00:00

ELEVEN

SLEEPY HOLLOW, NEW YORK

JANUARY 2014

ALBERT JOHN WHITCOMBE-SEARS had always considered himself a rationalist and a skeptic. He believed only in what he could see with the evidence of his own eyes, or that which could be proven by scientific theory.

In this he was following in a family tradition. Both the Whitcombe family and the Sears family traced their lineage back to the first European colonists to come to the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and they were products of the Enlightenment. Since then, the tradition of both families was to only believe in the tangible.

What Al did not realize was that it also meant he’d find himself believing some things that seemed on their face to be impossible, yet he saw them with his own two eyes.

It was his first encounter with Sheriff August Corbin that opened his eyes to what people referred to as the supernatural. Al never liked that term. If it occurred in the world, then it was natural. He found supernatural to be a contradiction in terms.

He still remembered the day when everything changed.

At the time, he’d been working as a reference librarian. He worked in the main reading room of what Al continued to insist was the New York Public Library’s Research Building. It was referred to by the maps and tourist websites as the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, thanks to Mr. Schwarzman’s admittedly very generous donation of a hundred million dollars.

Regardless, he had commuted to Manhattan from his apartment in Sleepy Hollow five days a week for that job, while his father and uncle ran the Whitcombe-Sears Library, which had been in the family ever since the Episcopal Church gave up on the structure.

Then one day a decade ago, before Schwarzman’s donation got the library named after him, Al got a call on his cell phone from a 914 number he didn’t recognize. He almost didn’t answer it. Most numbers he didn’t have in his phone’s directory turned out to be telemarketers, but it could’ve been one of the neighbors or some friend of the family whose number he hadn’t put in the phone.

A gruff voice on the other end had said, “Mr. Whitcombe-Sears, this is Sheriff August Corbin in Sleepy Hollow. I’m afraid I have some bad news. Your father and your uncle have been murdered.”

Al no longer remembered any of the rest of the conversation. In fact, he no longer recalled anything that happened between his standing in the library’s reading room with its high ceilings and susurrus of low-level noise made by people doing research and clacking on their laptops and hearing Corbin speaking the word murdered, and his standing outside the converted church next to Corbin in front of yellow crime-scene tape that blocked the entrance. Colored lights strobed in the air and he had asked Corbin, “What happened?”

“We’re still trying to figure that out.”

“Right.” Al knew that was cop-speak for we have no bloody clue what happened. “I want to see the bodies.”

“That’s—that’s not the best idea, Mr.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.