Ronan Lynch handed Adam Parrish an oversized, bulging manila envelope.
“Oh, I don’t think you do,” Adam replied.
Greenmantle disliked the fearlessness in his face. It was not even fearlessness: It was a lack of expression entirely. He wondered what was in the envelope. Confessions of a Teen Sociopath.
He said, “Do you know what keeps poor people down, Mr. Parrish? It’s not a lack of income. It’s a poverty of imagination. The trailer park dreams of the suburbs, and the suburbs dreams of the city, the city dreams of the stars, so on and so forth. The poor can imagine the throne, but not being kingly. Poverty of imagination. But you — you are a cuckoo who sneaks into this nest. You are Mr. Adam Parrish, of twenty-one Antietam Lane, Henrietta, Virginia, and you have a good imagination, but you are a pretender nonetheless.”
The kid was good. The skin around his eyes tightened only a tiny bit when Greenmantle read off the trailer park’s address.
“And it would be so easy to hurl you to the ground from this tree,” Greenmantle said, in case he wasn’t nervous yet. “You would long for those days in your trailer park.”
Adam Parrish looked at him. Greenmantle realized all at once that he was unsettling in the same way that Piper had been when he caught her looking in the mirror.
Adam turned the bulging envelope around so that Greenmantle could see that it was seeping something red-brown, which was never a good sign. He said, “If you’re not out of Henrietta by Friday, everything in that envelope comes true.”
Ronan Lynch smiled then, too, and it was a weapon.
They left the envelope there.
“Piper!” Greenmantle called after they had gone. But she didn’t answer. It was impossible to know if she was there, but in a trance, or if she was gone, hunting for the thing that she heard humming in mirrors.
This place. This damn place. They could have it.
He climbed down the stairs, finally, and managed to find a door that led outside. He opened the envelope. The seeping was from a rotting, severed hand. It was small. A child’s hand. Beneath it was a sealed plastic bag, smeared with gore, containing paperwork and photographs.
Individually, they were distasteful.
Collectively, they were damning.
The envelope contents told a story of Colin Greenmantle, intellectual mass murderer and habitual pervert. It provided evidence of where the bodies, and parts of bodies, could be found. There were screenshots of condemning texts and cell phone photos — and when Greenmantle swiped up his real phone, he discovered that, somehow, they actually were on his phone in all their gruesome glory. There were letters, homemade DVDs, photographs, a mountain of evidence.
None of it was true.
All of it had been dreamt up.
But it didn’t matter. It looked true. Truer than the truth.
The Greywaren was real, and those two boys had it, but it didn’t matter, because they were untouchable, and they knew it.
Damn youth.
On the very bottom of the stack of filth was a single piece of paper with handwriting so similar to Niall Lynch’s that it could only belong to his son.
It said, Qui facit per alium facit per se.
Greenmantle knew the proverb.
He who does a thing by the agency of another does it himself.
45
Okay, we’re going,” Greenmantle said. “Family emergency. Back to Boston. Pack your things. Call your friends. You’re off the hook for that book club book.”
Piper was getting her purse. “No, I’m going out with the men.”
“The men!”
“Yes,” Piper said. “Does that horrible Gray Man drive a white car? One of those boy racer cars. You know, with the big wing on the back. It’s supposed to demonstrate what a big member the driver has? Because I feel like one of those has been following me. I mean, ha, more than usual, because please.” She flipped her hair.
“I don’t want to talk about the Gray Man,” Greenmantle said. “I want to talk about your luggage.”
“I’m not packing. I think I’ve found something,” Piper said.
Greenmantle showed her the envelope.
She was not as impressed as he had been. She said, “Oh, please. If I find what I think I’m finding, making that go away will be children’s play. No pun intended. Oh, that was distasteful.” She laughed. “Okay, I’m out.”
With the men. Greenmantle got up. “I’ll come with you. I’ll convince you to come back with me along the way.”
There was no chance Piper was finding something to counteract that envelope. The only thing Piper could find was fad exercise classes and hairless dogs.
“Whatever. Put on some boots.”
Piper’s destination for that night involved meeting up with two thugs Greenmantle had hired. Actually, they were not as thuggish as Greenmantle would have expected. One of the men was named Morris, and a problem with alimony had driven him to a life of crime. The other seemed to be named Beast, and — well, actually, he was exactly as thuggish as Greenmantle had expected.
They both treated Piper as if she knew what she was talking about.
“Show me what you got,” Piper said to them.
Morris and Beast led them to a run-down farm just as the sun set. Even in the car lights, it was easy to tell that the farmhouse had seen better days. The porch sagged. Someone had tried to improve it by planting a cheery row of flowers in front.
Beast and Morris led them past the farmhouse and through a field. They had all kinds of equipment. Piper had all kinds of equipment. Greenmantle had boots. He felt like a fourth wheel on a vehicle that was not, in fact, meant to have four wheels.
He looked over his shoulder to make sure that the Gray Man, ever standing over his shoulder, was not, in fact, standing just over it.
“I’m not experienced with practical crime,” Greenmantle said as they walked across the field, “but shouldn’t we have parked the cars someplace more clandestine?” He added, “Sneakier?” for Beast.
“No one lives there,” grunted Beast. Greenmantle was both horrified and impressed by the subsonic nature of his voice.
Morris, considerably more cultured-sounding, added, “We were here earlier, checking it out.”
The two men — thugs — the thug and Morris — brought them to a stone building. Greenmantle thought it didn’t have a roof, but then after a second, his eyes adjusted and he saw that it was a stone tower extending up into the night. He wasn’t sure why he’d thought it was a ruin at first. He wasn’t sure why a tower like this would exist in the middle of redneck Virginia, either, but it was interesting at least, and he liked interesting.