The first voice mail message was from Larry Everett.
‘Hi Meg,’ he said. ‘I’m really sorry. Seems I’m never around when you call. How do I manage to do that? It’s just that Marcie had a medical appointment and wanted me to go with her. But we’re back now and all’s well. Listen, I’m so glad you’ve got here. We can’t wait to see you. But I’ve got to tell you what I’ve arranged. Now, I don’t do much driving these days, not in the winter anyhow, on account of this arthritis of mine, but my brother Tom lives nearby. If you don’t mind, he’ll swing by the hotel at about three-thirty and bring you to see us. I could give you directions but this place is kind of tricky to find so I thought it would be a better plan if Tom just picked you up. Give me a call if that doesn’t suit you. Talk to you later.’
She frowned. She was quite prepared to try to find their home by herself. She had a car. But if he had worked all this out, taken a bit of trouble to organise it, then maybe she would just go along with what he suggested.
The voice mail light was still flashing, reminding her that she had not picked up the second message. She accessed it and was taken aback to hear the voice of her father.
‘Meg,’ he said, ‘call me as soon as you get this. It’s urgent. Please – as soon as you get this. I’m at the Malone Group office in Belfast.’ He gave her a direct line number.
Something had happened. That was the only reason he would make a call like that. She always worried about him but what if it was her mother? Her fingers trembled as she dialled.
A woman answered. ‘Brenda Brennan.’
‘This is Meg Winter,’ Meg said. ‘I’m looking for my father. He told me to ring here.’
‘Oh, Meg, at last.’ BB put the receiver down and called out. ‘Sam! It’s your daughter!’
He sounded breathless when he picked up the phone. ‘Meg?’
‘Yes, Dad. What is it? What’s happened? Is Mum all right?’
‘Your mother? Of course, she is. Look, where are you? Are you all right?’
‘Well, yes. Why shouldn’t I be? And what are you talking about – where am I? I’m in my hotel room in Portland. I just got your message.’
‘I want you to get out of there straight away.’
‘You want me to do what?’ She gave a nervous laugh. ‘What is all this? Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not going—’
‘Just listen to me,’ he said with a firmness that silenced her and then he told her everything that had happened.
As she listened, the phone seemed to burn into her ear, his voice and the unbelievable things he was saying lighting fires of pain and confusion somewhere behind her eyes where Dan Cochrane’s face kept coming into view.
She felt weak. Her father was asking her something but she had not heard him.
‘Meg, are you there?’
‘I just can’t believe it,’ she said, almost whispering it to herself. There was a numbness now and she found it hard to concentrate. ‘I thought I knew him.’
‘What? What are you talking about – you thought you knew him? Who do you know?’
‘Dan,’ she said. ‘Dan Cochrane. You remember I was seeing someone? Well, that’s who it was. I’ve been seeing Dan Cochrane.’
Sam whispered, ‘Wait – say that again.’
Then she explained.
As she did, telling him how they had met and got to know each other, although she decided to avoid any reference to Noel Kennedy, she found that odd things which she had chosen to ignore were starting to make sense.
‘God, tell me this isn’t happening,’ her father groaned. ‘Look, does he know where you are? Did you tell him where you’re staying?’
‘No . . . no, I didn’t. He called me at home just as I was about to leave for the airport and I told him I was flying to Boston. I hadn’t time to talk. I tried to call him from here but I wasn’t able to reach him.’
‘No, you wouldn’t have. At least that’s something. But Meg, you’ve got to get out of that hotel, no matter what. Did you tell anyone else you would be staying there?’
‘Elizabeth. I told her. I gave her the address and phone number. The same as I gave you.’
‘Does Cochrane know Elizabeth?’
‘Not really. He knows who she is, though. I was with her the day I met him.’
‘What’s her number?’
‘It’s – ah – it’s . . .’ It had gone from her memory. She felt a sudden ripple of fright. God, what was happening to her? ‘Wait. I’ll get my diary.’
She read him the number, then he said, ‘I’m going to call and see if he’s tried to contact her. And the police will need to hear all this too. In the meantime get your things packed. I’ll call you back in a couple of minutes. Now hurry.’
But when he had gone, she did not feel able to do anything. Instead, she sat on the edge of the bed, piecing her thoughts together and finding how easily everything managed to fit.
There was the business of the credit card which she had apparently dropped that first day she had been in the pottery. Thinking about it now, she was certain she had put it back in her bag. But there had been all the excitement with Catriona and the broomstick. That would have created a very handy diversion for him so that he could have taken the card without being noticed. By that stage she had signed the slip for the goods and – Christ, even more helpful – she had given him her name and address and telephone number.
The card had provided the excuse to call on her, to see where she lived, to begin the process of getting to know her better. But why? What was his plan?
She thought of Noel Kennedy. He had admitted making the anonymous phone calls but he had denied hanging around in her back garden and had seemed totally surprised when she threw that at him. She had told herself that she had imagined that one. But what if she hadn’t? What if she had really seen someone?
Dan.
Photographs had been found in the pottery. On the phone her father had tried to describe them to her. But without even seeing them she thought she understood.
Like that day when she had gone back to the woods. She had thought there was someone else there, someone behind her, and she had fled in panic. She had told herself she had imagined seeing a figure hiding amidst the trees but she had, damn it, she had. Dan had been there, taking pictures of her.
He had been everywhere, following, watching.
The night of the confrontation with Kennedy . . .
She shook her head at her stupidity. Well now, that had been a happy coincidence, hadn’t it – how he had managed to be in the right place at the right time, with the handy excuse that he had just been dropping by with the present for her mother. She thought she had seen through him – that his real reason for being there was his interest in her.
How true that was. But not the way she had imagined it.
Once more she thought of how hard he had hit Kennedy and again she wondered what he would have done if she had not stopped it. There was a violent streak in him and she had seen it.
She shivered suddenly even though the room was warm now. God, she had confided in this man, trusted him, slept with him.
And yet it didn’t altogether make sense. She had felt secure when they were together. She had felt watched over, and not in any sinister way. She wasn’t that easily taken in, was she?
But the evidence was there now. Those photographs. She imagined how he must have stalked her and the thought of it made her feel violated.
After all was said and done, what did she know about him? He had revealed little about himself and she had no way of knowing whether anything he had ever told her was really true. And in the telling, he had left out one important part of his story: the fact that he was the man who had tried to burn her father’s hotel down and had gone to jail for it.
Why had he phoned her yesterday? What had he wanted to say that was so important? He had sounded concerned. Or was this just another act, another stunt designed to unhinge her. Well, he was making a damned good job of that.
The phone rang.
She leaped up from the bed and stepped back, staring at it, not wanting to answer in case he was the caller. But she had to pick it up.
‘Meg?’ It was a woman’s voice. ‘It’s Florence Gilmour. Do you remember me?’
‘Yes,’ Meg said, dazed.
‘Meg? Are you all right?’ Gilmour spoke up, as if she were trying to make herself heard. ‘Yes, I think so.’
‘There’s no one there with you?’
‘No.’
‘OK, that’s good. Now, there’s a couple of things I have to tell you. Are you listening?’
‘Yes.’
‘All right. First, we spoke to your friend Elizabeth and she tells us that Dan Cochrane phoned her yesterday, sometime after eleven a.m. She says he was very anxious to get hold of you, said it was very important, but he didn’t know where you were staying. So she told him.’
Meg swallowed hard but said nothing.
‘Still there?’ Gilmour asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Now, we’ve also discovered that he took a flight from Belfast to Heathrow yesterday and then he bought a British Airways ticket from London to Boston. The thing is, he could be in Portland at any time now. So we want you to get out of that hotel immediately, like your father said, but listen – don’t check out. Do you hear me? Don’t check out. We want Cochrane to think you’re still there. We’ve been in touch with the police in Portland and we hope they’ll take it from here. Now you need to get a move on. Find somewhere cheap and cheerful and call your father at his number when you get there. And Meg . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘When you do – stay inside. Don’t go out of doors. We’ll keep in touch. Have you got all that?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK,’ Gilmour said. ‘So good luck.’
When they had ended the conversation, Meg thought for a moment. How was she going to find somewhere else to stay? She didn’t know any other hotels, cheap and cheerful or otherwise, and she couldn’t very well ask the staff in the lobby or they would wonder what was going on.
And what about the Everetts? Someone was supposed to pick her up here at three thirty. That was only half an hour away.
She lifted the phone and dialled their number, frowning when she found she had got the answering machine again. Damn.
She left a message. ‘Hi, it’s Meg calling. Listen, there’s a problem. I’m not going to be at the hotel when – what’s-his-name – Tom – comes by for me. I can’t explain right now. I’m just going to make my own way to you. Don’t worry. I’ll find you OK.’
She hung up, grabbed some things from the drawer and her washbag from the bathroom and threw them into her bag. The rest could stay until this was over.
A dark Dodge sedan sitting across from the hotel started its engine as she pulled out into Spring Street, her map folded on her lap, feeling decidedly less confident about finding the Everetts than she had indicated on the phone.
Twenty-three Elmwood. That was the address she was looking for.
She had worked out that if she took a left just along here, it would take her onto Congress Street and eventually out of town. She could see Stevens Avenue on the map. Like Congress, it was a long artery that seemed to go on forever, eventually disappearing off the page.
She reached a complex intersection where the lights did not allow her to go straight on so she did what most of the traffic in front did, turning left, which, she realised when she found herself in South Portland, was a mistake. But in a few minutes she managed to find a way of doubling back to the intersection again. This time she took a right and after a couple of mistakes and another quick circuit to correct them she realised with satisfaction that the road she was on was called Stevens Avenue.
‘So far so good,’ she muttered to herself.
She drove for a couple of miles, peering right and left, but she did not see anything called ‘Elmwood’. She passed the imposing grey stone building that was Deering High School and then she saw a huge sign that told her she was passing Evergreen Cemetery.
She turned right into a residential avenue, just in case this Elmwood place might be somewhere along it. She passed gardens that were buried under snow. Green winter wreaths with red ribbons were vivid on the front doors of tall white houses.
It was all very nice but there was no Elmwood.
She looked at her watch and wondered if the Everetts had picked up their messages. It would be too bad if Tom, the brother, was at the hotel, not knowing why she wasn’t there.
She picked up speed but she drove aimlessly, turning corners at random, and eventually she saw signs directing her to the Portland International Jetport where, she could see from the map, she did not want to be.
She found signs pointing back towards the city so she followed them and twenty minutes later she was approaching the cemetery again, this time from the other direction. It had a big, open gateway. She pulled in through it. She would park for a moment, examine the map properly and try to get her bearings.
She got out and looked around her. A notice told her that entry to the site after sunset constituted a criminal offence. Not all of the trees were evergreen, she observed. Some were bare and bleak with branches spread like bony fingers. The cemetery stretched as far as she could see and the tops of some of the gravestones were barely visible above the surface of the perfect, crystal snow. But many others stood tall, in sombre dignity. There were huge carved crosses and granite obelisks, Christ figures with outstretched arms and, in places set apart, separated from the common herd in death as they had been in life, the bones of the rich rested in pillared family tombs surrounded by manicured fir trees.
She saw that the route to all of the graves was via a network of narrow roads with little green signs on thin poles telling you where you were. She looked at the sign beside her. She was standing at the edge of somewhere called Eastern Avenue.
The cemetery office appeared to be open. Lights were on inside. Someone in there might know where this Elmwood was.
She pushed open the door and walked into heat that was almost suffocating. There was a big counter with neat piles of leaflets about funerals and the facilities the cemetery had to offer. A chart of the place, like a street map, took up a large portion of one wall.
A small man with heavy glasses sat at a desk behind a computer terminal. He got up with a smile when he saw her.
‘Can I help you?’
‘I hope so.’ She put her folded map down on the counter. ‘I’m trying to locate people who live in a place called Elmwood. I’m told it’s off Stevens Avenue but I can’t find it. You don’t happen to know where it is?’
He scratched his head. ‘Well now, Stevens Av. is pretty big, a lot of residential property around here, new houses all the time, but I’ve been working here for twenty years and I’ve never heard of any Elmwood. You sure you’ve got the right name?’
‘I’m certain. Is it possible that it is a new development of some kind? The people I’m looking for have moved there recently. To an apartment.’
He made a face. ‘An apartment building – could be, but it’s a new one on me. The only Elmwood I’ve ever heard of is the one we have here.’ He gave a little laugh.
Her heart stumbled. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘What did you say?’
‘Well, there’s an Elmwood here, in the cemetery’ He leaned over the counter towards the wallchart. ‘There you go.’ He tapped the spot with his finger. ‘But I don’t suppose that’s the one you want, is it?’ He laughed again. ‘Nobody lives there.’
She took her glasses off and looked to where he was pointing. Along each line that was a cemetery road, a name had been printed. There was Redwood Avenue, Maple, Sunset, Hickory, Fuchsia, most of them, she guessed, named after the trees and the shrubs which adorned these resting places.
She saw Woodlawn Avenue, Highfield.
Elmwood.
She stared at the word. Then she asked, ‘Are the graves numbered? Do you have a record of who’s buried where?’
‘Well, naturally we do,’ he said, as if she had a cheek to question his efficiency. ‘We’ve got a two hundred and thirty-nine acre site here. It would be kind of stupid not to.’
She turned and gave him the best smile she could manage. ‘Of course. I wasn’t thinking. But would it be possible to check something?’
He was wondering what she was up to. It was on his face. But he said, ‘If I can.’
‘Elmwood. Could you find out who owns plot number twenty-three?’
‘That’s easy,’ he said, walking back over to his computer and sitting down. ‘Have that one for you in a second.’ He tapped and clicked a couple of times. ‘Here we go. Number twenty-three. That plot’s owned by a family by the name of Everett.’
Meg had been leaning on the counter but now she gripped the edge of it, afraid that she would fall. There was no strength in her legs.
He walked back to her. ‘Miss, are you all right?’
Her mouth was dry and she did not feel that she could open it to answer him. He was staring. She forced herself to speak. ‘May . . . may I take one of these?’ Photocopies of the cemetery layout sat on the counter.
‘Sure. That’s what they’re for. But are you sure you’re OK? You look a little pale.’
‘The heat. It’s just the heat in here, that’s all.’
‘Yeah, well, believe me, when you’re in and out of here all day like I am, you sure need it.’
She grabbed a leaflet and muttered her thanks, then went back outside where icy winter was waiting. She walked towards her car, her feet slipping a little.
‘You want to be careful on that ice,’ he called. He had come out of the building after her and was watching. ‘And if you’re going to drive round the cemetery, stick to the avenues that have been treated. Some of the others are very dangerous.’
She gave him a little wave, then started the car and drove forward at a slow, cautious pace, holding the cemetery map against the steering wheel. In her mirror, she saw that he was still there and she knew that he would be curious about the behaviour of this strange woman.
But that was not important. What was important was that she had to see. She had to see for herself what was there.
Her wheels slid a couple of times and she slowed to let the car regain its grip. Across the frozen grave-fields a funeral was taking place, a silent, distant scene, hearse and mourners stark and black against the unblemished whiteness. She drove along Eastern Avenue, then on to Sunset, left into Mulberry and in a few minutes she saw it.
Elmwood was a far corner of the cemetery, lonely and dead. Almost engulfed by the snow, headstones were simple slabs in sober shades. Like a windbreak behind them, rows of tall larch and beech trees stood naked in the cold, stripped of the leaves that would one day provide shade from the summer sun.
She stopped the car and got out. She stood for a few moments and then began to walk along, trying to read the names from the roadside, finding that some were obscured completely. She stepped forward on to the snow, her feet sinking into its deep softness, but she was nearer now and she could see better.
Twomey. Croce. Croy. Thibodeau. Hinckley. Sabatino.
Everett.
The name was etched into a mottled green marble that was the colour of seaweed. It was all she could see, just that one word. She crouched in front of the headstone and she scraped the snow away with her gloved hand to reveal what was underneath.
There were two names.
Paul Everett’s was the first.
She stood up and stepped back. He was in there, buried in the hard ground. She was near him again, near this man she did not remember.
She read the date of his birth, she read the date of his death. And then she read the second name.
Marcia Everett.
She wondered if the pounding of her heart would cause it to burst.
There were dates below. Marcia Everett had been born twenty eight years before her son. And she had died a year after him.
Marcie Everett – whom she was expecting to see this afternoon. In her home at a place called Elmwood.
There was a stillness in the cemetery that she could feel on her skin. Not a bird sang. Traffic was a distant whisper. Somewhere far away there was the long wail of a train and the faint clink of the rolling stock along the rails.
She stood motionless, her brain reverberating with questions that had no answers. She thought of her father’s warnings about coming here, warnings that she had dismissed. What was going on in Larry Everett’s mind? And Dan – surely it wasn’t possible that he was somehow part of this too?
The afternoon light was dimming, a faint hint of pink beginning to bleed into the sky. She felt alone. But when she looked around she saw that she was not.
A dark Dodge had parked some distance behind her car and she realised that she had not heard it drive up. A few yards along a man in a brown wool coat and a muffler over his mouth was arranging flowers on a grave.
She gave a sigh of relief. The presence of this stranger ensured her safety. No one would be mad enough to try to harm her in front of him.
Harm her? Was that really what was happening here? She took her glasses off and tried to rub away the pain that was looming in her head.
Yet no one knew she was here in the cemetery. No one knew she had discovered the grave. Whatever Larry Everett had dreamed up, this would not have been part of it.
She had to tell someone but who? She could call her father or Florence Gilmour although they seemed very far away, too far away to be of help. But there was the Portland police. Hadn’t Gilmour said she had contacted them?
That was the answer. She turned and began plodding back through the snow towards her car.
The man in the dark coat had finished tending the grave and was walking in the same direction. She looked at him and their eyes met and it occurred to her that she did not know what Larry Everett looked like. God, she did not know if he even existed.
The muffler slipped from the man’s face. There was something about him. She tried to shake her memory awake.
She was a fool. She was alone in a secluded part of the cemetery with this stranger coming towards her. She stepped back, away from him.
He spoke. ‘Miss, is anything the matter?’
He had stopped and she saw that he was between her and her car. She did not answer him but as she looked at his face something flashed in her mind.
There was a fire blazing in a hearth. Music. People laughing.
She had seen him before.
How or when or where she did not know but the certain knowledge of it stabbed at her and with the knowledge came the sickening presence of danger.
She turned away from him and tried to run but the pathway was like polished glass and her feet almost went from under her. Somehow she kept her balance and managed to get on to the snow again but it was deep and heavy and it held on to her, clinging to her legs and weighing her down.
He was behind her.
It was hopeless. It was like trying to run through deep water. She stepped on something uneven and lost her balance. A pain shot through her ankle and she cried out as she fell. Bright lights sparked behind her eyes and then he had thrown himself on top of her heavily, straddling her, pushing her down.
She wriggled under his weight and his bulk and tried to burrow herself forward. The snow was wet in her eyes and it was cold in her mouth.
He began wrapping the muffler round her throat.
‘No!’ she managed to cry, hearing her voice coming back to her in an echo from the trees. She twisted to escape his grip but he was heavy and she was losing strength.
She called out again. ‘Help! Somebod—’ Then he forced her face into the snow and she felt her glasses snap at the bridge.
‘Hey! What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
The shout startled the man and as he turned his head towards the voice, his grip eased a fraction, just long enough for her to take advantage. She raised herself on one knee and launched herself forward like a sprinter. His fingers grasped at her foot but she was free.
‘You there! Stay away from that woman! I’m calling the cops!’
She was on her feet, but barely, staggering on towards her car, every stumbling step a torture because of the pain in her ankle. She could not see clearly – her glasses were in pieces in the snow somewhere – but she saw a man get out of a pick-up truck and she knew it was the caretaker.
He moved towards her attacker. ‘Now listen here, mister—’
The man tried to push him out of the way but the caretaker wasn’t going to make this easy. He was stocky and strong and he struggled. He grabbed the bigger man’s coat and held on to it, pulling him off balance so that he lost his footing and fell sideways. The man threw out his right arm to stop himself hitting the ground hard and did not feel something fall from his pocket into the snow.
He pushed himself to his feet, then swung towards the caretaker and hit him hard in the side of the face with a gloved fist, knocking him backwards.
Their confrontation took just a few seconds but it gave her time to get into her car and she rejoiced that she had left the keys in it. She started the ignition and gunned the accelerator, the engine whining as the wheels spun on the ice.
His hand was on the door handle, pulling at it, but then the car shot forward in a violent thrust of speed.
She had no idea where she was or where she was going. All she knew was that she had to get out of there and find a way to the exit somehow but she had to do it without her glasses and with the light of day fading.
Her face and hair were soaked from the snow and she was trembling. But that was fear and shock, not the cold. She drove madly, skidding from side to side on the winding, frozen avenues. Huge statues and memorial monuments loomed into her blurred vision like figures on a ghost train, and she spun the wheel to try to escape them. She took one turn, then another, sliding and screeching as she jammed her foot to the floor to power the engine.
The place was a maze and she had no idea how to get out of it. She glanced in her mirror. His car was right behind.
And then something started happening to her.
As if a circuit had tripped in her brain, images began to pass across the eye of her memory. They were like slides in a viewfinder, focussed and vivid, staying for a split second then moving on.
First she saw a road. Then blinding headlights in the darkness. She saw herself in the passenger seat of a car being driven much too fast. She heard her own voice crying out, wordless sounds of anguish. She felt a shudder that jarred every bone in her body and then she heard an engine roaring as if in pain. She felt herself being plunged down, down into emptiness.
The vision vanished and she gasped.
There was something ahead. She was almost on top of it. It seemed to be standing in the road in front of her. A huge figure with its arms open wide. There were bright colours. She turned hard but the wheels locked and the car spun sideways.
It slammed violently into the stone embrace of the Virgin Mary.
Her robes were coloured sky blue and she had a cloak that was a terracotta red. She stood on top of a narrow pedestal in the centre of a small raised roundabout, gazing benignly on all who passed her by.
Meg’s head hit the steering wheel.
The force of the crash rocked the figure but she stayed on her feet, seeming to stare down on to the car crushed into her base and the woman now bleeding and unconscious in the driving seat.
The Dodge skidded to a halt and the man leaped out. He wrenched open the passenger door and stared at Meg for a second. Then he reached in and tried to grab her bag. But it was wrapped around her and he could not free it. He ripped the catch open and began searching for something.
The little truck roared up. The caretaker called to him. ‘The police are on their way. I called them on my cell phone. You won’t get far, buddy!’
A hundred yards away, along another avenue, a hearse and a procession of shiny black cars had slowed to see what was happening. Some people were starting to walk forward.
The man jumped back into his car and with the caretaker still shouting after him he raced in the direction of the exit.
It was only two hundred yards away. She had almost made it.