Read Covenant for Free Online Page B

rewound the film and put on the roll for the fall of 2002. He advanced to November 1, and then 2. But there was no report of any Halloween deaths.
    There was a story about the town’s centennial that caught his eye.
    TERREL TURNS 100 ! boasted the front-page headline.
    He skimmed through the puff copy. God, there were times he detested backwoods journalism! It read as if it were written by old women who thought journalism was just a creative step sideways from putting down their thoughts late at night in their farm journals after cleaning the supper dishes.
    It was a century of change. The telephone, the radio, television, the motorcar. Through it all, the citizens and town of Terrel have remained nestled near the prominent outline of Terrel’s Peak.
    “The river of time has rushed through Terrel and left us changed, and yet, somehow, still the same,” said Mayor Pierce Harden during the centennial ceremonies held Saturday in Memorial Park.
    Founded by Broderick Terrel in 1893, the town grew from a lonely watchtower to a small, thriving community by the turn of the century and was granted township in 1902. Terrel’s lighthouse on the peak provided safety not only to ships navigating the dark and foggy coasts, but to the people who began to build a community at the peak’s base.
    While Terrel never became a haven for large shipping commerce due to the treacherous currents of its shallow, rocky bay, for a time it was a well-used port for small crafts stopping down from Port Haven, fifty miles north.
    After the sudden death of Broderick Terrel, however,the lighthouse fell into disrepair, and ships began to avoid chancy stops at the town’s tiny seaport. The lighthouse, both a landmark and memorial to the town’s found er, was destroyed in 1951 during a storm that also leveled several homes in town. It was never rebuilt.
    More than he needed to know, Joe thought, scrolling past the end of the story. Terrel was a backward little town near the sea that didn’t actually get anything out of the nearby ocean but the view. And apparently even the view wasn’t safe to enjoy.
    The obituary ran on November 4.
    The body hadn’t been found for a couple days and was badly mangled and snagged on some rocks when a couple kids on a boat ran across it at the base of the cliff. The coroner’s report indicated that the woman had apparently died sometime between October 31 and November 1. The cause of death was a broken neck, presumably from hitting the rocks on the beach below the promontory. The brief obituary said the woman had been traveling through Terrel on her way to visit a relative in Virginia.
    Go for three? Joe asked himself, and rewound the film. He didn’t really believe it could be that easy, that he could just scroll to the same week in year after year of the Times and find an obit for a suicide. But his heart started pounding faster as the 2001 microfilm spooled noisily through the machine. He wanted to find out that he wasn’t crazy. That something or someone was killing people every Halloween and every May 22 on the cliff, the shadow of which blanketed this town every morning and evening. And then again, he didn’t want to find that out. Because what was he going to do with the information? He couldn’t publish it. That had been made quite clear. And the police were apparently not interested in following up on it either.
    November 1, 2001 was clean. No death notices.
    November 2, 2001 was not.
    Richard Chambers, 45, of New York City, was found dead on the rocks below Terrel’s Peak yesterday morning. Mr. Chambers suffered massive head and back injuries due to a fall from the cliff. The coroner’s report said Mr. Chambers died twenty-four to twenty-eight hours prior to the discovery of his body. Mr. Chambers was a computer salesman for Elek-Tek, en route to a convention in Sara Clair. The police have located his next of kin, who will hold services for Mr. Chambers in his hometown of Queens.
    On October 31, 2000, it