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“What’s all this?” I asked, sliding a couple of the letters forward. These were among the typed ones as opposed to written long-hand. We theorized that many of them may have been sent by a single person. But Dad had separated out far more than I had last night.

“Gibberish,” Dad said, handing me one of the letters. “That’s what we thought. There’s five in particular. It’s just nonsense phrases and sentences that seem like a stream of consciousness.”

The Raven understands. The crow merely suspects. The void is the only truth that does not require belief.”

“Time is of no consequence. We have all the time in the world. We have none at all. It’s time to go.

“But they’re not nonsense,” Pollack said. “These are direct passages from Sherman’s book.”

He flipped to one dog-eared page and handed the book back to me. I skimmed it. It seemed to be a long passage comparing the anatomical differences between crows and ravens. But toward the bottom of page 342, Pollack had highlighted two lines.

The Raven understands. The crow merely suspects.

“You’re right,” I said, my heart skipping. The odd capitalization of Raven but not crow was also the same.

“I counted at least a dozen other direct passages lifted from the book in these letters. I think you’ve got one writer here.”

“Then this one,” Dad said, handing me a letter. “Look closely.”

I skimmed the contents. It was more nonsensical musings. The writer even listed a recipe for corn chowder. As I’d noticed before, many of the most confusing sentences had strange numbered superscripts above many of the words. Then I saw the passage I knew my father had hit on.

I understand what you told me. This can’t last long. You’re right.

Dad handed me another letter and pointed to a line near the bottom.

“Thank you for setting me straight. I misunderstood your meaning before.”

“He’s writing back,” I said. “Sidney’s engaging with the writer.”

“I think so too,” Pollack said. “And whoever it is has read The Traveler’s Guide enough to become familiar with some of the more obscure references in it.”

“You were right, Mercy,” Dad said. “This guy, if it’s a guy, was communicating with Sidney for up to a year before Deadwater Lake. He’s sending these letters from different locations. Different postmarks. But they’re frequent and similar enough I think we can assume it’s the same person or connected people. And that Derrek Sidney was writing back. They had an ongoing relationship. This could be our bad guy. His accomplice. Or multiple accomplices.”

“But their communications are barely more than gibberish. At least this guy’s,” I said. “What does it mean?

“We need to make duplicate copies of everything. I promised Boone Sidney I’d bring the originals back to him. He’s expecting them back in a few days.”

“Do you think Sidney’s son would know anything about who these letter writers were?” Pollack asked.

“He’s never even read these letters,” I said. “He gave them to me in a sealed envelope from the prison.”

“How could anyone have that much willpower?” Pollack said. “Didn’t he want to know about his dad? Even a little?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But it’s worth asking him about some of these. Maybe if Boone knows the content of the conversation, he might remember something useful. I’ll run back down to Chelsea tomorrow. But this is good work. Both of you. Dr. Pollack, if I give you copies of the letters with the quotes from The Traveler’s Guide, do you think you could spend more time with them? If you could think of anything else about them, that might be useful. Why did the writer choose these specific phrases?”

“I’m happy to try. I also have a better suggestion. I took the liberty of sniffing around for you. The academic community can sometimes be smaller than you might think. I’ve communicated with Dr. Andrea Glassman. She’s a psychologist who wrote a book on Derrek Sidney. Turns out she’s a friend of a friend. I hope you don’t mind. If you’d like, I could reach out to her again and see if she’ll meet with you. With your permission, I’d love to send her a couple of these letters. See if she can shed any light on them.”

“Please do,” I said. “If you can trust her to be discreet.”

“Absolutely.” Henry Pollack beamed. I had the feeling that today was one of the highlights of his life. Working on a case with the legendary E. Thomas Gale involving his favorite obscure novel.

I wanted to be excited too. But I couldn’t shake the image of those four women, slaughtered in their beds. This wasn’t a game. This was a tragedy. A nightmare. And I had the strongest sense that it wasn’t over.

Chapter

Twenty-Four

My father was a different person by eight o’clock the next morning. Always an early riser, he liked to fish right off the dock in a protected cove on the west side of the property. I could usually see him from my bedroom window. Some mornings he was up and out there before the sun came up.