Hometown Heroes — Susanna Hofmann McShea

NEW BLOOD FROM OLD WOUNDS

For thirty years police chief Forrest Haggarty insisted that a serial killer was loose in Raven's Wing--but no one believed him. Now elderly and retired, his suspicions are disregarded as the paranoid ravings of a senile old man--despite the recent unsolved murder of lonely widow Agnes Peabody.

But Mildred Bennett believes. Returning to her sleepy New England hometown after being dumped by her philandering husband, she joins forces with the irascible ex-lawman and two other longtime residents to track down an elusive evildoer. But their investigation could prove fatal when it points them toward the town's five most prominent civic leaders--each of whom guards a secret worth killing to protect.

"She never felt him pull her from the car, and she never felt him kill her, either. Betty Murphy, who wore the imitation cashmere sweater and the frilly skirt and the silk stockings saved for special occasions. Betty Murphy, who on an evening in June 1944 never went back through the open window into the safety of her own bedroom. Betty Murphy--no, she never went home at all."

But Betty Murphy, who disappeared on the night of her high school prom, is only the first of several women to vanish from the small Connecticut town of Raven's Wing without a trace. So Mildred Bennett learns when she returns to her hometown after spending several years in New York City. Mildred's husband has just left her and--at the age of sixty--she welcomes a chance for a little breathing space.

Raven's Wing is anything but calm, however, although most of its tensions seethe quietly, beneath the surface. Mildred encounters Forrest T. Haggarty, the town's irascible retired police chief, who, after a recent murder, is convinced that the scattered disappearances of Raven's Wing women over the years are the work of a lone serial killer. And so Mildred finds herself part of an unlikely quartet of senior citizens embarked on a two-edged mission: to prove that Haggarty's suspicions are correct and to bring the killer to heel.

"The voice was filled with a razor-blade kind of pain. Clement felt slightly dizzy. He was conscious all at once of the stale air within the confessional, the perspiration that trickled under his cassock, the dryness of his chapped lips.
"Is there," Clement repeated, "Something you wish to confess?" He tried not to sound harsh.
"Yes. But it wasn't my fault, you understand. I merely do that which must be done..."
Clement rode along on a torrent of words as though on a roller coaster... When he was a seminarian, there was so little emphasis on such things.
"...Usually I'm fine. I mean, for years I might be fine. No one would ever know, ever suspect. And they mustn't, you understand? You must never tell...I only kill the bad ne."