I rang the doorbell of Rebecca Clay’s house. I could hear the waves breaking in the darkness. Jackie Garner and the Fulcis were long gone, now that Merrick was dead. I had called ahead and filled her in on what had happened. She told me that the police had called her after I admitted that I had lied about Jerry Legere, and she had made a formal identification of his body earlier that day. They had interviewed her about her ex-husband’s death, but there was little that she could add to what they already knew. She and Legere had been completely estranged, and she had neither seen nor heard from him in a long time until I had begun asking questions, and he had called her a couple of nights before his death, drunk, and demanding to know what she thought she was doing by setting a private eye on him. She had hung up, and he had not called back.
She answered the door wearing an old sweater and a pair of loose-fitting jeans. Her feet were bare. I could hear the TV in the living room, and through the open door I saw Jenna seated on the floor, watching an animated movie. She looked up to see who had entered, decided that I wasn’t anyone for whom it was worth missing anything, and returned to her viewing.
I followed Rebecca into the kitchen. She offered me coffee or a drink, but I declined both. Legere, she said, would be released for burial the following day. Apparently, he had a half brother down in North Carolina who was flying up to take care of the arrangements. She told me that she would be attending the funeral for the half brother’s sake, but that she wouldn’t be taking her daughter along. “It’s not something that she needs to see,” she said. She sat at the kitchen table and fiddled with an empty cup. “So it’s all over,” she said.
“In a way. Frank Merrick is dead. Your ex-husband is dead. Ricky Demarcian and Raymon Lang are dead. Otis Caswell is dead. Mason Dubus is dead. The Somerset County Sheriff’s Department and the ME’s office are digging for the remains of Lucy Merrick and Jim Poole up at Gilead. That’s a lot of dead people, but I suppose you’re right: it’s over for all of them.”
“You sound sick of it.”
I was. I had wanted answers, and the truth about what had happened to Lucy Merrick and Andy Kellog and the other children who had been abused by men masked as birds. Instead, I was left with the sense that, the girl named Anya apart, and the removal of a little evil from the world, it had all been for nothing. I had few answers, and at least one of the abusers remained at large: the man with the eagle tattoo. I also knew that I had been lied to all along, lied to in particular by the woman who now sat before me, and yet I could not find it in my heart to blame her.
I reached into my pocket and removed the photograph that I had taken from Raymon Lang’s album. The little girl’s face was almost hidden by the body of the man who knelt above her on the bed, and he himself was visible only from the neck down. His body was almost absurdly thin, the bones visible through the skin of his arms and legs, every muscle and sinew standing out upon his frame. The photo had been taken more than a quarter of a century before, judging by the age of the girl. She couldn’t have been more than six or seven. Beside her, jammed between two pillows, was a doll with long red hair and dressed in a blue pinafore. It was the same doll that Rebecca Clay’s daughter now carried around with her, a doll passed on to her by her mother, a doll that had given Rebecca comfort during the years of her abuse.
Rebecca looked at the photograph, but she did not touch it. Her eyes grew glassy, then damp with tears, as she stared at the little girl that she once was.
“Where did you find it?” she asked.
“In Raymon Lang’s trailer.”
“Were there others?”
“Yes, but none like this one. This was the only one in which the doll was visible.”
She pressed her hand against the picture, blotting out the form of the man who towered above her younger self, covering the naked body of Daniel Clay.
“Rebecca,” I asked, “where is your father?”
She stood and walked to a door behind the kitchen table. She opened it and flicked a switch. Light shone on a set of wooden steps that led down to the basement. Without looking back at me, she began to descend, and I followed.
The basement was used for storage. There was a bicycle, now too small for her daughter, and assorted boxes and cartons, but there was nothing that looked as if it had been moved or used in a long time. It smelled of dust, and the concrete floor had begun to crack in places, long dark lines extending like veins from a spot in the center. Rebecca Clay extended a bare foot and pointed its painted toes at the floor.
“He’s down there,” she said. “That’s where I put him.”
• • •
She had been working down in Saco that Friday, and there had been a message on her answering machine when she got back to her apartment. Her babysitter, Ellen, who looked after three or four kids each day, had been taken to the hospital following a heart scare, and Ellen’s husband had called to say that, obviously, she would be unable to pick up any of her charges from the school. Rebecca checked her cell and found that the battery had run down while she was in Saco. She had been so busy that she had failed to notice. For a moment, she felt utter panic. Where was Jenna? She called the school, but everyone had gone home. She then called Ellen’s husband, but he didn’t know who had taken Jenna after school. He suggested that she call the principal, or the school secretary, for both had been informed that Jenna would not be picked up that day. Instead, Rebecca called her best friend, April, whose daughter, Carole, was in Jenna’s class at school. Jenna wasn’t with her either, but April knew where she was.
“Your father collected her,” she said. “Seems the school found his number in the book and called him when they heard about Ellen and couldn’t get in touch with you. He came by and took her back to his house. I saw him at the school when he came to collect her. She’s fine, Rebecca.”
But Rebecca thought that nothing would ever be fine again. She was so scared that she threw up on her way to the car, and threw up again as she drove to her father’s house, coughing up bread and bile into an empty convenience store bag as she waited at the lights. When she got to the house, her father was out in the garden, raking dead leaves, and the front door was open. She rushed past him without speaking and found her daughter in the living room, doing just what she was doing now: watching TV from the floor, and eating ice cream. She couldn’t understand why her mommy was so upset, why she was hugging her and crying and scolding her for being with Grandpa. She had been with Grandpa before, after all, although never alone and always with her mommy. It was Grandpa. He had bought her fries and a hot dog and a soda. He had taken her to the beach, and they had collected seashells. Then he had given her a big bowl of chocolate ice cream and left her to watch TV. She’d had a nice day, she told her mommy, although it would have been even better if her mommy had been there with her.
And then Daniel Clay was at the living room door, asking her what was wrong, as though he was just a regular grandfather and a regular father and not the man who had taken his daughter to his bed from the age of six until fifteen, always being gentle and kind, trying not to hurt her, and, sometimes, when he was sad or when he had been drinking, apologizing for the night that he had let another man touch her. Because he loved her, you see. That was what he always told her: “I’m your father, and I love you, and I’ll never let that happen to you again.”
• • •
I could hear the bass notes of the television vibrating above our heads. Then it went silent, and there were footsteps as Jenna headed upstairs.
“It’s her bedtime,” said Rebecca. “I never have to tell her when to go. She just heads up to bed all by herself. She likes her sleep. I’ll leave her to clean her teeth and read, then I’ll kiss her good night. I always try to kiss her good night, because then I know that she’s safe.”
She leaned back against the brick wall of the basement and ran the fingers of her hand through her hair, pushing it back from her forehead and exposing her face.
“He hadn’t touched her,” she said. “He’d done just what she said he’d done, but I understood what was happening. There was a moment, just before I brushed past him and took Jenna home, when I could see it in his eyes, and he knew that I saw it. He was tempted by her. It was starting again. It wasn’t his fault. It was an illness. He was sick. It was like a disease that had been in remission, and now it was returning.”
“Why didn’t you tell someone?” I asked.
“Because he was my father, and I loved him,” she replied. She didn’t look at me as she spoke. “I suppose that sounds ridiculous to you, after what he did to me.”
“No,” I said. “Nothing sounds ridiculous to me anymore.”
She worried at the floor with her foot. “Well, it’s the truth, for what it’s worth. I loved him. I loved him so much that I went back to the house that night. I left Jenna with April. I told her that I had some work to do at home, and asked if she’d mind letting Jenna sleep over with Carole. They often did that, so it was no big deal. Then I came here. My father answered the door, and I told him that we needed to talk about what had happened that day. He tried to laugh it off. He was doing some work in the basement and I followed him down here. He was going to lay a new floor, and he had already started breaking up the old concrete. The rumors had started, by that point, and he’d virtually been forced to cancel all of his appointments. He was already becoming a pariah, and he knew it. He tried to hide his unhappiness about it. He said it would give him the time to do all kinds of jobs around the house that he’d been threatening to do for so long.
“So he just kept breaking the floor while I screamed at him. He wouldn’t listen. It was as though I was making it all up, all the things that had happened to me, all the things that he’d done and that I believed he wanted to do again, but this time with Jenna. He would only say that whatever he had done, he’d done out of love. ‘You’re my daughter,’ he said. ‘I love you. I’ve always loved you. And I love Jenna too.’
“And when he said that, something fell apart inside of me. He had a pickax in his hands, and he was trying to lever up a slab of concrete. There was a hammer on the shelf beside me. He had his back to me, and I hit him on the crown of the head. He didn’t fall down, not at first. He just bent over and put his hand to his scalp, like he’d smacked it against a beam. I hit him again, and he fell down. I think I hit him twice more. He started to bleed into the dirt, and I left him there. I went upstairs to the kitchen. Blood had splashed on my face and hands, and I washed it off. I cleaned the hammer too. There was hair caught in it, I remember, and I had to pick at it with my fingers. I heard him moving down in the basement, and I thought he tried to say something. I couldn’t go back down, though. I just couldn’t. Instead, I locked the door and sat in the kitchen until it got dark, and I couldn’t hear him moving around any longer. When I unlocked the door, he had crawled to the bottom of the stairs, but he hadn’t been able to climb up. I went down to him then, and he was dead.
“I found some plastic sheeting in the garage and I wrapped him in it. There used to be a greenhouse in the back garden. It had a dirt floor. It was dark by then, and I dragged him out there. That was the hardest part: getting him up from the basement. He didn’t look like he weighed a lot, but it was all muscle and bone. I dug a hole and put him in, then covered him up again. I suppose I was already planning, already thinking ahead. It never crossed my mind to call the police or to confess to what I’d done. I just knew that I didn’t want to be separated from Jenna. She was everything to me.
“When it was all done, I went home. The next night, I waited until dark then drove my father’s car up to Jackman and left it there. I reported him missing once the car was taken care of. The police came. Some detectives looked at the basement floor, like I knew they would, but my father had only just started tearing it up, and it was clear that there was nothing underneath it. They knew all about my father, and when they found the car up in Jackman, they figured he’d fled.
“After a couple of days, I came back and moved the body. I’d been lucky. It had been wicked cold that month. I guess it kept him, well, you know, from rotting too much, so there wasn’t a smell, not really. I started to dig in the basement. It took me most of the night, but he had taught me what to do. He always said that a girl should know how to take care of a house, how to fix things and keep them in order. I cleared a space of rubble and dug down until there was a hole big enough to take him. I covered him up, then I went upstairs and fell asleep in my old room. You wouldn’t think that someone could just fall asleep after doing something like that, but I slept straight through until midday. I slept so peacefully, better than I could ever remember doing before. Then I went back down and kept working. Everything that I needed was down there, even a little mixer for the cement. Getting the rubble up took some time, and my back ached for weeks after, but once that was done, it was all pretty easy. It took me a day or two over the weekend, all told. Jenna stayed with April. Everything just worked out.”
“And then you moved into this house.”
“I couldn’t sell it because it wasn’t mine to sell, and anyway I would have been afraid to do that even if it had been, just in case someone decided to renovate the basement and found what was there. It seemed better to move in. Then we just stayed here. You know what the strange thing is, though? You see those cracks in the floor? They’re new. They only started appearing in the last couple of weeks, ever since Frank Merrick came around causing trouble. It’s like he awakened something down there, as if my father heard him asking questions and tried to find a way back into the world. I’ve started to have nightmares. I dream that I hear noises from the basement, and when I open the door, my father is climbing the steps, hauling himself up from the dirt to make me pay for what I’ve done, because he loved me, and I’d hurt him. In my dream, he ignores me and starts crawling toward Jenna’s room, and I keep hitting him, over and over, but he won’t stop. He just keeps crawling, like a bug that won’t die.”
Her toe had begun to explore one of the cracks in the floor. She withdrew it quickly when she became aware of what she was doing, the description of her nightmares reminding her of what lay below.
“Who helped you with all of this?” I asked.
“Nobody,” she said. “I did it alone.”
“You drove your father’s car up to Jackman. How did you get back down after you’d abandoned it?”
“I hitched a ride.”
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
But I knew that she was lying. After all that she had done, she wouldn’t have taken a chance like that. Someone followed her up to Jackman, then drove her back east again. I thought it might have been the woman, April. I remembered the way they had looked at each other that night after Merrick had broken the window. Something had passed between them, a gesture of complicity, an acknowledgment of a shared understanding. It didn’t matter. None of it really mattered.
“Who was the other man, Rebecca, the one who took the photograph?”
“I don’t know. It was late. I heard someone drinking with my father, then they came to my room. They both smelled pretty bad. I can still recall it. It’s why I’ve never been able to drink whiskey. They turned on the bedside light. The man had a mask on, an old Halloween mask of a ghost that my father used to wear to frighten the trick-or-treaters. My father told me that the man was a friend of his, and that I should do the same things that I did for him. I didn’t want to, but . . .” She stopped for a moment. “I was seven years old,” she whispered. “That’s all. I was seven. They took pictures. It was like it was a game, a big joke. It was the only time it ever happened. The next day, my father cried and told me he was sorry. He told me again that he loved me, and that he never wanted to share me with anyone else. And he never did.”
“And you’ve no idea who it might have been?”
She shook her head, but she would not look at me.
“There were more pictures of that night in Raymon Lang’s trailer. Your father’s drinking buddy was in them, but his head wasn’t visible. He had a tattoo of an eagle on his arm. Do you remember it?”
“No. It was dark. If I did see it, I’ve forgotten it over the years.”
“One of the other children who was abused mentioned the same tattoo. Someone suggested to me that it might be a military tattoo. Do you know if any of your father’s friends served in the army?”
“Elwin Stark, he did,” she said. “I think Eddie Haver might have been in the army too. They’re the only ones, but I don’t think either of them had a tattoo like that on his arm. They came on vacation with us sometimes. I saw them on the beach. I would have noticed.”
I let it go. I didn’t see what else I could do.
“Your father betrayed those children, didn’t he?” I asked.
She nodded. “I think so. They had those pictures of him with me. I guess that’s how they made him do what he did.”
“How did they get them?”
“I suppose the other man from that night passed them on to them. But, you know, my father really did care about the kids he treated. He tried to look out for them. Those men made him choose the ones that he gave to them, made him pick children to be abused, but he seemed to work twice as hard for the rest because of it. I know it makes no sense at all, but it was almost like there were two Daniel Clays, the bad one and the good one. There was the one who abused his daughter and betrayed children to save his reputation, and the one who fought tooth and nail to save other kids from abuse. Maybe that was the only way he could survive without going insane: by separating the two parts, and by taking all of the bad stuff and calling it ‘love.’”
“And Jerry Legere? You suspected him after you found him with Jenna, didn’t you?”
“I saw something of what I had seen in my father in him,” she said, “but I didn’t know he was involved, not until the police came and told me how he had died. I think I hate him more than anyone. I mean, he must have known about me. He knew what my father had done and, somehow, it made me more attractive to him.” She shuddered. “It was like, when he was fucking me, he was fucking the child I was as well.”
She sank down on the floor and laid her forehead on her arms. I could barely hear her when she spoke again.
“What happens now?” she asked. “Will they take Jenna away from me? Will I go to jail?”
“Nothing,” I said. “Nothing happens.”
She lifted her head. “You’re not going to tell the police?”
There was no more to say. I left her in the basement, sitting at the foot of the grave she had dug for her father. I got in my car and I drove away to the susurration of the sea, like an infinite number of voices offering quiet consolation. It was the last time I would ever hear the sea in that place, for I never returned there again.