The Isle of Blood

A few e-mails and a phone call later, I was on a flight to New York to meet Elizabeth in her hometown of Auburn. After some pleasant conversation and several cups of coffee at a local diner, she took me to Fort Hill Cemetery. My guide was a vivacious, outgoing middle-aged woman who had come to share my fascination with the mystery of Will Henry. She agreed with me—as would any reasonable person—that his story had to be more fiction than fact, but her very real family connection to a man by that name was no fabrication. It was that connection that brought me to New York and to that cemetery. She had e-mailed me a picture of the tombstone, but I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

It was a beautiful afternoon, the trees decked out in all their autumnal glory, the sky a cloudless, brilliant blue. And, three years and three months after first reading those haunting opening lines (These are the secrets I have kept. This is the trust I never betrayed…), I was standing at the foot of a grave, before a granite marker that read:

LILLIAN BATES HENRY

1874–1950

Beloved Wife

Parting is all we know of heaven,

And all we need of hell.

“I never knew her,” Elizabeth said. “But my father said she was quite a character.”

I could not take my eyes off the name. Until that moment I had had nothing tangible except the diaries and a few old newspaper clippings and other questionable artifacts tucked within the yellowing pages. But here was a name etched in stone. No. More than that. Here was a person, literally right at my feet, whom Will had written about.

“Did you know him?” I asked hoarsely. “Will Henry?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t know either of them. He disappeared a couple years after her death, before I was born. There was a fire.…”

“A fire?”

“Their house. Will and Lilly’s. A total loss. The police suspected arson, and so did the family.”

“They thought Will Henry set it, didn’t they?”

“My family didn’t like him very much.”

“Why?”

She shrugged. “Dad said he was… kind of odd. But that isn’t the main reason.”

She dug into her purse. “I brought a picture of her.”

My heart quickened. “Is Will in it?”

She pulled out a faded Polaroid photograph and tipped it slightly to reduce the glare from the bright sun overhead.

“It’s the only one I could find in Dad’s things. I’m still looking, though; maybe I’ll find some more. It’s from her seventy-fifth birthday.”

I did the math quickly. “That would be in ’49—her next to last.”

“No, it was her last. She died before her next birthday.”

“Is that Will sitting on her left?” He looked to be about the right age.

“Oh, no. That’s her brother, Reggie, my great-grandfather. Will is sitting on her other side.”

The photograph was more than sixty years old and was slightly out of focus, but the man on Lilly’s right struck me as being at least twenty years younger than her. Elizabeth agreed.

“That’s the main reason the family didn’t like him, according to Dad. Lilly told everyone he was ten years younger, but he looks twice that in this picture. Everyone thought he married Aunt Lilly for her money.”

I could not tear my eyes away from the blurry image. A lean face, dark deep-set eyes, and a stiff, somewhat enigmatic smile. These are the secrets I have kept.

“Children?” I asked.

She shook her head. “They never had any. And Dad said they never met any of Will’s relatives. He was a total mystery-man. No one was even sure what he did for a living.”

“I guess you know what I’m going to ask next.”

She laughed brightly. It sounded oddly tinny in the setting.

“Did he ever talk about working for a monster hunter when he was younger? He didn’t—at least in none of the stories I’ve heard. The problem is, anyone who might have heard a story like that is dead now.”

We were silent for a moment. I had a thousand questions and couldn’t get a grip on a single one of them.

“So their house burns down and Will disappears, never to be heard from again,” I finally said. “That would be—when? Two years after she died, so 1952?”

She was nodding. “Around that time, yes.”

“And fifty-five years later he turns up again in a drainage ditch a thousand miles away.”

“Well,” she said with a smile. “I never said I had all the answers.”

I looked at the gravestone. “She was all he had,” I said. “And maybe when she died he went a little crazy and burned down the house and lived on the streets for the next five decades?”

I laughed ruefully and shook my head. “It’s weird. I’m closer to the truth now than I’ve ever been, and it feels like I’m farther away.”

“At least you know was telling the truth about her,” she tried to comfort me. “There really was a Lilly Bates who was around thirteen years old in 1888. And there really was a man named William James Henry.”

“Right. And everything else he writes about could still be a product of his imagination.”

“You sound disappointed. Do you want monsters to be real?”