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