The Jefferson Key

Many accepted the invitation, and it was their treason that eventually cost the Boers the war. Our host had a name for those men. Hensoppers.

Here was this woman, seventy years after the fact, worshiping a maniac.

He stepped inside and saw, to his right, Isabel’s wizened body slouched in a rocker beside the hearth, a bullet hole in the head.

There’s not a day that goes by I don’t think of her. I wake up at night and hear her calling for me through that fire. It’s haunted me in ways I never understood.” He paused. “Until today.”

He shrugged. “Those chutes weren’t like when you and I went through them. She’d better have good lungs.”
“As I recall, she did.”

“No sign of the she-devil.”

“Still defiant to authority?”

The House adjourned.

Halfway, he encountered the first bloated corpse.

“Shackle both prisoners,” he ordered. “And gag them.”