The Last Child

EPILOGUE

Summer heat was a fading memory when Johnny and his mother drove to Hush Arbor. It was Saturday, late afternoon. The trees towered over the car as she drove. Ahead, sunlight pushed through, and they could see granite posts and blackberry brambles. “I can’t believe you came out here like you did.”

“Chill, Mom.”

“Anything could happen way out here.”

Johnny pointed. “The cemetery is that way.” She drove as far as she could, then they got out. Johnny led her through the cut in the trees. “Detective Hunt says he was buried here last week. Some friend of his mother paid for it.” They walked farther. The paint on the fence was still white. The grass was long and gone to seed. “I should come out and mow sometime.”

“Please, don’t,” she said, but Johnny was already thinking about it.

They walked to where Levi Freemantle was buried. The earth was freshly turned. His daughter was beside him, and she, too, had a new stone. “ Sofia,” Johnny said. “That was her name.” They looked at Freemantle’s headstone. It gave the dates of his birth and death. The inscription was simple.

Levi Freemantle

Last Child of Isaac

“I counted headstones,” Johnny said. “The night I spent out here. There are three for those who were hanged.” Johnny pointed to the small, rough stones at the base of the giant oak. “And forty-three descendants of Isaac Freemantle. Forty-five, now.” They looked across the rows of weathered stone. “If Isaac had been killed, hung like the others, then none of them would have lived or died.”

“Your great-great-grandfather was an exceptional man.” A pause. “So was your dad.” Johnny nodded, unable to speak. She went on, “Ken Holloway was as bad, that day, as I’d ever seen him.” She rubbed at her wrists, where scars still showed the deep bite of piano wire. “We might have died without Levi Freemantle.”

Silence. Sunlight on new-cut marble.

“He told me life is a circle.”

His mother looked at the trees, the rows of stone. She put an arm around Johnny’s shoulders.

“Maybe it is.”

That night, Johnny wrote to Jack. He told him everything that had happened in the months that he’d been gone. It took ten pages to do it. He addressed it to Jack Cross, My Friend.