offices are?”
“Not really.”
“You’re not missing much. Anyway, they’re kind of black sheep in our business, but I like underdogs and they needed some advice.” “Hide the outcasts,” she murmured.
Anselm laughed again. “That’s a pull.”
So Anselm knew the Isaiah quote. But if he was somehow involved in the murders, he probably wouldn’t have volunteered that knowledge. “You don’t strike me as the religious type.”
“Not at all, but that’s an essential bit of New Haven lore. God,” he said, shaking his head. Not a single carefully styled hair moved. “I’m even boring myself.”
“Go on,” she said. “I like this kind of stuff.” Especially if it could help her catch a murderer and put her in Turner’s good graces.
Anselm looked skeptical, but said, “It’s from the sermon John Davenport gave in support of the three judges.”
Judges. Interesting. “That clears up everything.”
Again his brows rose, and Alex realized why she liked this version of Anselm. He reminded her just a little of Darlington. Not the Darlington she’d known but who he might have been if he hadn’t grown up in Black Elm and fallen in love with Lethe, a slicker, less hungry Darlington. A Darlington less like her.
“You’ve never been to Judges Cave?” Anselm asked. “Okay, so the year is 1649, and Cromwell orders the execution of Charles I. Fifty-nine judges sign the death warrant. All well and good. Off with his head. But just a decade later, the monarchy is restored, and his son Charles II—”
“Junior.”
“Exactly. Junior isn’t pleased with what happened to his father or the precedent of killing off kings. So, ruthless he must be. He sentences all of the judges to death.”
“That’s a lot of dead judges.” And it lined up with Turner’s initial theory of the crime, that the disgraced Professor Lambton had gone after the people who had sat in judgment on him.
“Some of them were executed, others fled to the colonies. But there are British soldiers everywhere and no one is particularly excited about harboring
fugitives and bringing down Junior’s wrath. Except for the good citizens of New Haven.”
“Why?”
Anselm gestured to the boats in the harbor as if they might have an answer. “It’s always been a contrary town. The good Reverend John Davenport steps up to the pulpit and preaches, ‘ Hide the outcasts. Bewray not him that wandereth. ’ And hide the outcasts they do. When the British come snooping around, the townspeople keep their secrets and the judges hide out near West Rock.”
“At Judges Cave?”
“It’s technically just a cluster of big rocks, but yes. Their names were Whalley, Goffe, and Dixwell.”
Alex hadn’t lived in New Haven long, but she knew those names. They were streets that branched off of Broadway. Follow Whalley long enough and you’d end up in West Rock. Three streets. Three judges. Three murders.
There will be a third. That was what Darlington had meant. He’d been trying to make the connection for them even as his demon half had been toying with them, enjoying the riddle the killer had set.
“What happened to the judges?” Alex asked. “Did they get caught?”
“Lived to a ripe old age. Two of them ended up somewhere in Massachusetts, but Dixwell changed his name and lived out his days in New Haven. His ashes are interred beneath the New Haven Green. British troops used to travel here just to piss on his gravestone, one hundred years after he died. That’s how big a deal these guys were. Martyrs to liberty and all that.
And now they’re a footnote, a bit of trivia for me to try to impress you with over lunch.”
Alex wasn’t sure whether to be uncomfortable or flattered at the idea of Anselm trying to impress her.
“Have you ever wondered why the death words work?” He leaned forward. “Because we all amount to nothing in the end and there is nothing more terrifying than nothing.”
Alex hadn’t really cared why they worked so long as they did. “You know a lot about this place.”
“I like history. But there isn’t any money in it.”
“Not like the law?”
Anselm lifted a shoulder. “Lethe makes a lot of promises, so does Yale, but none of them come true in New Haven. This is a place that will never repay your loyalty.”
Maybe not much like Darlington after all. “And Lethe?”
“Lethe was an extracurricular. It’s silly to think of it as anything else.
Dangerous even.”
“You’re warning me.” Just as Michelle Alameddine had.
“I’m just talking. But I don’t think you came here to listen to me pontificate about Cromwell and the perils of growing old in Connecticut.”
So this was it. “You said you read my file. My mom … my mom isn’t doing great.”
“She’s ill?”
Was chasing after any whiff of a miracle diagnosable? Was there a name for someone doomed to seek invisible patterns in gemstones and horoscopes?
Who thought life’s mysteries might be revealed by eliminating dairy from your diet? Or gluten or trans fats? Could Los Angeles be called an illness?
