Free Bloodstone by Nate Kenyon

apparent. He watched Angel’s face as Stowe spoke, and felt a slight twinge of something— jealousy? he wondered. He pushed it aside.
    “I’ve got about an hour before I should be back at the clinic,” Stowe was saying, looking at his watch. “Would you like to walk around the square? I can point out a few of the old houses. There are some good stories behind them.”
    They began to walk slowly together past the gazebo and under the line of trees toward the western end of the square and the hills, Stowe talking animatedly as they went. He pointed out the Thomas mansion and told them the story of the eccentric recluse who built it and kept building, walling himself in, year by year. “There were some pretty crazy stories about Frederick Thomas,” Stowe said. “I’ve read a little about him in the town records. The people didn’t like himmuch; they thought he was some kind of sorcerer. The way he lived probably didn’t help much. I think he fed off of their paranoia and became more paranoid himself, until he was just as crazy as a shi—well, just plain nuts. Frankly, I’m surprised he kept himself alive as long as he did. Back then people didn’t think twice about burning so-called witches at the stake. Or worse.”
    Smith studied the house and felt himself oddly drawn to the strange angles and walls that seemed to lead nowhere in particular, the brooding octagonal windows on the attic level, the right wing that hung out over the fence line on the third floor. The house seemed to watch over the square and the surrounding houses like a guard keeping an eye on a prisoner.
    Stowe turned them toward the north and showed them the McDonald house, a much more manageable, pleasant-looking colonial, and the Deane house, a square, two-story box set back a bit farther from the square and surrounded by a line of hedges at least six feet high. “McDonald and Deane were the first of the white settlers to set foot on this ground,” he said. “They came up from the south along the river and were attacked by some sort of Indian tribe and forced to turn back. But they remembered the place, and came back a year later with three others. Frederick Thomas was one of those later three, just a kid then, maybe eighteen or twenty. They managed to get along with the Indians, more or less, and after a while they had a neat little settlement going here. This was I guess about a hundred years before Maine became a state. By the 1800s, they were doing a pretty good trade with the other settlements downriver. They took ice from the river below the falls and sold it, and there was fishing, too. The river was well-known in those days, though I don’t know if there’s many fish in her now.”
    “Do people still live in these houses?” Angel asked.
    “There’s nobody in the Thomas place anymore. Henry Thomas was the last of the line, and he died about ten yearsago. The other two have people in them, though those aren’t the original houses. The original places burned down sometime in the 1800s, and were rebuilt on the same sites. The same families still own them, if you can believe that. Descendants, of course.” He chuckled. “People born around here don’t go very far, or if they do, they always seem to find their way back.”
    Stowe pointed a few other things out to them as they walked back down in an easterly direction. The storefronts across from them, including the Johnson Café, were built just after the turn of the century, and the gazebo went up about twenty years later. There were bands that played on the green occasionally, mostly local types, none very good. “The kids like them, though. It used to be a time for families to come out and sit down with a picnic supper, but now I’m afraid it’s mostly just kids getting drunk and causing trouble. There’s usually one or two fights by the end of the night, and once in a while somebody ends up in jail. Putting an end to these bands always comes up at town meetings, but they