Free Covenant by John Everson Page B

week afterward.
    Maybe longer, if he didn’t find the source of the Halloween murders. They’d have to start searching for that mystery’s solution if he handed them this one. Maybe they were connected. But he doubted it, for some reason. The May 22 Murders, as he’d begun to headline them, smelled like copycat killing to him.
    One thing was certain: he didn’t believe that there had been a bogeyman hiding out in the mountain pushing people off one day a year for the past century. But there was also no way all these deaths were the off spring of a single psycho serial killer. This kind of regularity took organization.
    As for the recent May 22 murders, well, it really all pointed back to five women, didn’t it? Or at least four. Rhonda Canady, Karen Sander, Melody O’Grady and Monica Kelly were all present over two decades ago when Bernadette O’Brien mysteriously drowned. And then twenty years later their own kids, one by one, were suddenly disappearing just as each of them turned eighteen. Was it some kind of sacrificial rite they’d sworn to as girls?
    It was wicked. Twisted.
    Unfathomable.
    But it didn’t make any sense that the killer was outside the circle. Why the hell would a murderer wait twenty years to strike back at the girls who escaped death the first time?
    And then strike back only indirectly, through their kids?
    No, Joe felt that at least one of the five had played a part in the kids’ murders. They sure hadn’t been suicides. That was the one point he was completely sure of now.
    The easiest person to point a finger at, of course, would be Angelica. She had no kids, and so was the only one who had not yet been hurt by the deaths.
    Could she have drowned Bernadette when they were kids, and now, for some reason, was getting back at her friends for something?
    Or, perhaps more likely, what if the other four girls had been responsible for Bernadette’s death? Maybe Angelica had been Bernadette’s best friend, and had been plotting revenge on the other four ever since. They would be blackmailed into not turning Angelica in as she played angel of death to their kids, because she could bring them down for their own ancient crime.
    Could it be her? He tried to picture Angelica smuggling her friends’ kids off to the cliff on May 22, the year they each turned eighteen. Could she really be the one who took their lives at the same spot where their mothers had killed so long ago?
    No. He couldn’t believe it. There were few mothers who wouldn’t give their own lives to protect their children. It was unlikely that all four of them were so cowardly as to allow Angelica to snuff out their babies, just to protect themselves. This had to be something that they couldn’t stop.
    And as twisted as Angelica’s little magic act was, he couldn’t see those hands pushing kids off cliffs every spring. He was prejudiced in her favor, sure. A fiery night of sex after months of nobody but Lefty could sway anybody’s thinking.
    But then again, were the other options any better?
    Four mothers who each had killed their children as part of some weird pact from their pasts…
    A killer who had waited for two decades for a group of women to birth and raise kids that could then—and only on a certain day—be shoved off a cliff…
    Or how about the apparent town favorite: a devil who lured people to walk his plank and fall to their deaths on the blackened rocks and powerful surf hundreds of feet below?
    They were all pretty unpalatable. But whatever the answer was, he had an idea it lay hidden in the hearts of one or more of the five. He had some more visits to make.
    But first he would take a ride out to the instrument of this little Kevorkian festival. He could still hear the vinegar in Karen Sander’s voice.
    If you want to understand, go up there after sundown tonight and listen to the wind .
    Okay, he thought to himself. I can do that . It wouldn’t hurt to have a look around the diving board before jumping into