In 1974, the Portland police had moved out of the old headquarters on Federal Street so that the place could be levelled to the ground.
Where the building once stood, there was now a parking lot that served the Cumberland County courthouse. Since then the police had operated from an angular, modern building of brick and glass that stood on the corner of Middle and Franklin Streets.
In the Bureau of Investigations office on the fourth floor a tousled man in a v-neck sweater that was a little tight over his gut sat alone at a window, watching the day begin and his night shift finish.
The waters of Casco Bay looked like steel. It was six twenty a.m. and orange-pink streaks were beginning to grow stronger in the sky. The colours made the dawn look warm but he knew that was a lie. The temperature would not rise above freezing today and tonight, once more, it would drop way, way down.
And there was the rain.
It was his last night duty for a couple of weeks and in a few minutes he would be out of here, heading away from the city towards the dormitory community of Gorham.
There had been more rain in the night, freezing as it fell, coating power lines and the branches of trees with layers of ice that made them too heavy to hold themselves up. He wondered if there was any power at home but there was no one who could tell him.
He had lived in the house alone since his wife left. It was a year now but the hurt was deep.
The weather was keeping everyone indoors, even those who might have had mischief in mind. There had not been much of that for him to deal with during the night and certainly nothing that the uniforms had not been able to handle. Thank God he hadn‘t had to go out.
But he was wondering about the phone call he had taken a few minutes ago.
He had just finished putting it into the computer log. A strange one.
He swivelled round towards his desk. There were little plastic name plates on each of them. His said, ‘Detective Roy Flynn’.
As he looked at the notes he had scribbled down when the call came in, the door at the end of the room opened.
‘Jeez, it’s a cold one out there.’
Bob Reglinski’s fleshy face with its bushy moustache peered out from under layers of wool. In his gloved hands he carried two containers of Java from On The Go, the coffee shop next door.
He handed one to Flynn who inhaled the aroma deeply. ‘Ah, great. Thanks, Bob.’
‘Anything?’ Reglinski said, squeezing his bulky backside into his own chair and putting his feet on the desk. His heavy boots were wet. They smeared some of the paperwork lying there but he did not seem to notice or, if he did, he did not care.
Flynn made a face. ‘Nah,’ he said and stood up. He tore the page of notes from the pad and stuck it in his pocket, then went to the rack in the alcove for his coat. ‘I got a call a little while ago. Kinda weird. I might do a quick check on something on my way home.’
Reglinski wasn’t that interested. ‘You back on tonight?’
‘Nope. I got a couple of rest days and then I’m on earlies. Catch you later.’
The police parking lot was a skating rink that he crossed with tiny, careful steps. The rain that had fallen on his car during the night had become a shell and stilettoes hung from the wing mirrors. He chipped at the ice with a plastic scraper, watching it crack and slide away and fall to the ground like sheets of thin, pebbled glass. It took him ten minutes to clear it all, stopping every now and then to drink some of his coffee.
The big gritting trucks had been spraying all night to give the surface of the streets some grip. But as he drove, he bounced his way over lumps of ice which had been welded to the ground by the pounding of the traffic and were now as hard and immovable as stone.
In a few minutes he was pulling up outside a big hotel. He got out and the glass doors parted to let him into the building. He wiped his feet on a thick mat that had been put down on the edge of the lobby carpet in an attempt to keep it clean, then he walked towards the reception desk, glancing at a sign on an easel. It said: ‘The Holiday Inn By The Bay Welcomes The Roundtable Center Conference’.
Behind the desk, a pale young woman with sleep on her mind watched him coming. The tag clipped to her jacket told him her name was Naomi Waitt and that she was an assistant manager.
‘Just finishing?’ he said as he reached her.
‘Just starting.’
He winced and let her have a sympathetic smile, then he took his police shield from his inside pocket. She looked at it and gave him a nod that said she already knew, the way people always did.
‘Yes, Detective,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘Not entirely sure. Just something I’m checking. Can you tell me if you have anyone called Meg Winter registered with you?’
She turned to her computer. ‘Winter,’ she muttered, flicking through the details. ‘Winter, Winter. Yes, here we are – oh, no, we don’t. At least not yet.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean we don’t have her yet. She’s due to book in some time later today.’ She frowned. ‘Is there a problem?’
He made a face. ‘No, no, I don’t think so. It was just in relation to something – a call I got. Look, it’s probably nothing. Don’t mention anything to her, if you don’t mind.’
‘That’s OK – as long as you’re sure there’s nothing wrong?’
‘No, no. Thanks for your help.’ He backed away, holding his palms up in surrender. ‘It was just a routine check, that’s all.’
As he reached the main door, two young men in bellhop uniforms were carrying the easel and the sign away. They read the question on his face.
‘Cancelled,’ one of them said. ‘The ice storms strike again.’
At Shannon, there was a short stop.
The plane from Belfast was actually going on to New York which meant Meg had to change for her flight to Boston. Everyone got off. They had to anyway. Shannon was also an outpost of US Immigration and when she reached Boston she would be glad of the time that saved her.
With each minute, her anticipation grew. But Dan was on her mind now, too. His had been a peculiar phone call. It would be hours before she could ring him. She thought of trying him from Shannon but she was worried that there wasn’t enough time so she didn’t risk it.
The long journey made her impatient.
Over the Atlantic she ate the flight meal, watched a movie and failed to get any sleep. They made landfall over Canada, turning south, and she looked out of the window at a view which gave her a taste of what was to come. As far as her eye could see, there was whiteness, broken only by dark patches of forest and grey veins that were roads and rivers. She saw vast frozen lakes with snow thick on the ice, enormous ploughed fields that had been transformed into patterns like fingerprint negatives.
And then they were coming in over Cape Cod and Martha’s Vineyard and suddenly Boston’s tall buildings were shining in the sun and they were landing on a runway at the edge of the water.
The plane took an eternity to come to a halt. When the doors opened, only the first class passengers were off before she was.
She strode down the ramp into the terminal building, following the car rental signs, seeking out the Dollar desk, where an attendant checked her voucher and then directed her to a coach waiting in a parking bay outside.
She put her coat on before walking out of the terminal and into fresh air.
The incredible cold took her breath away.
It gripped her nose and seized her ears and made her eyes water. She was wearing jeans but it ignored the thick denim and it clasped icily at her knees. She put her bag down, fumbling in it hurriedly for her gloves, then put them on and pulled the zipper of her coat up as far as it would go.
The door of the coach swung open with a hiss and the driver reached out and took her bag for her. He was wearing a coat with quilted panels and a leather cap with furry flaps down over his ears. He saw her shocked, frozen expression, her red, pinched cheeks, and laughed.
‘Heh, heh. Cold enough for you, Miss?’
‘Unbelievable,’ she said, taking a seat near the heating vents. They were blasting like a furnace.
‘Where you from?’
‘I just got off a plane from Ireland.’
‘Ireland, huh. Does it get cold over there?’
‘Not like this.’
Still chuckling, he looked out the window, scanning the terminal exits. ‘OK,’ he said, ‘guess you must be the only one. You getting the VIP treatment today.’
He swung away from the kerb and into the airport traffic, following a baffling array of signs and slip roads. In a couple of minutes, she saw Hertz, Avis and Budget. Then Dollar. The driver stopped, got off first and took her bag down for her.
‘There you go, Miss. You have a nice day.’
‘Eh – you, too,’ she said awkwardly.
She queued at the desk, then handed in the voucher and signed something. The woman who dealt with her was called Dolores. She handed her a set of keys with the car number on a tag. ‘Your car’s in bay number nineteen. It’s a dark blue Plymouth.’
‘I’m driving to Portland,’ Meg said. ‘I haven’t a clue how to get there. Somebody told me I needed the I-95.’
Dolores nodded and took a leaflet and a street map from her desk. ‘The I-95 north. Don’t go south or you’ll end up in Florida. This will tell you everything you want to know. How to get out of this terminal for a start. You don’t want to find yourself driving in circles around here for the next couple of days.’
Meg looked at the leaflet and then she looked at the map. It was a street map of Portland. ‘This is terrific. How much do I owe you for this?’
‘On the house,’ Dolores said. ‘All part of the service.’
The car was an automatic, which she was not used to, and after five minutes she had not gone anywhere. An attendant, menacing in a hooded parka, watched for a while then he walked over and yanked the door open, startling her.
‘It’s OK, miss,’ he said. ‘Just use your right foot. That’s all you need.’
He closed the door and she reversed out of the space successfully.
‘There you go. You got it,’ he called after her, waving. She waved back briefly, then concentrated on trying to get into the traffic.
Once she was away from the airport and heading in the right direction, she began to relax, adjusting her seat so that she was more comfortable. She gave a sigh of relief and then smiled excitedly to herself.
Made it.
She was in America, snow all around her, driving a strange car on a strange highway to a strange town to meet two people she did not know and she felt good about it. No, she felt terrific. She had been in the country for only about an hour and she felt more at home than she had for a long time.
In a land of strangers she did not feel like one.
It was mid-afternoon. She turned on the radio and found a talk station where they were interviewing people in the street about some scandal or other involving the President. There was always one of those.
‘They’re hounding people,’ a man protested. ‘It’s never been the same since Watergate. And that was another thing that was blown out of all proportion.’
She found a country station instead and listened to it for a while. The roadside advertising signs fascinated her. They were for pizza, beer, cars, furniture stores. She passed a thirty foot-high fake cactus with the name of a steak and rib restaurant emblazoned on it.
Flashing dot matrix signs thanked emergency crews for helping out during the ice storms. On the radio, a weather forecaster warned that more was on the way.
Behind her, the sun was beginning its descent. As she looked in her rear-view mirror along the miles she had driven, she could see its dazzling brightness turn gradually to pink and mauve smears. She turned her sidelights on.
The road took her out of Massachusets and into New Hampshire. She searched for change at a toll plaza while the attendant waited, but she had the money ready the next time, when she crossed into Maine.
It was dark and starting to snow when she reached Portland.
It was like no snow she had ever seen: dry, fine powder, deceptively gentle in its fall. She tried to follow the street map but it was difficult to do while driving. She pulled into a petrol station on Congress Street. A woman in a coat and gloves stood behind the counter, watching an ice hockey game on TV.
Meg explained where she was trying to get to. The woman took off a glove and drew a wavy line on the street map with a pencil. ‘It’s a one-way system. Just follow this and you can’t go wrong.’
The directions were simple but nevertheless she managed to make a couple of wrong turns before she found what she wanted: Spring Street.
The Holiday Inn sign that lit up the building ahead of her was like a warm embrace.
She checked her watch. Nine p.m. Two a.m. at home. Sixteen hours since she had left Truesdale Street. She felt tired and hungry and in need of a hot bath and she decided to call Dan tomorrow.