THERE WERE TWELVE snakes in all, common garters. They had taken up residence in an abandoned shack at the edge of my property, secure among the fallen boards and rotting timbers. I spotted one of them slipping through a hole beneath the ruined porch steps, probably on its way home from a morning spent hunting for prey. When I ripped away the floorboards with a crowbar I found the rest. The smallest looked to be about a foot long, the largest closer to three. They coiled over one another as the sunlight shone upon them, the yellowish stripes on their dorsa glowing like strips of neon in the semidarkness. Some had already begun to flatten their bodies, the better to display their colors as a warning. I poked at the nearest with the end of the crowbar and heard it hiss. A sweetish, unpleasant odor began to rise from the hole as the snakes released their musk from the glands at the base of their tails. Beside me Walter, my eight-month-old golden Labrador retriever, drew back, his nose quivering. He barked in confusion. I patted him behind the ear and he looked at me for reassurance; this was his first encounter with snakes and he didn’t seem too sure about what was expected of him.
“Best to keep your nose out of there, Walt,” I told him, “or else you’ll be wearing one of them on the end of it.”
We get a lot of garters in Maine. They’re tough reptiles, capable of surviving subzero temperatures for up to one month, or of submerging themselves in water during the winter, aided by stable thermals. Then, usually in mid-March when the sun begins to warm the rocks, they emerge from their hibernation and start searching for mates. By June or July they’re breeding. Mostly, you get ten or twelve young in a nest. Sometimes there are as few as three. The record is eighty-five, which is a lot of garter snakes no matter what way you look at it. These snakes had probably chosen to make their home in the shack because of the comparative sparsity of conifers on this part of my land. Conifers make the soil acidic, which is bad for night crawlers, and night crawlers are a garter’s favorite snack.
I replaced the boards and stepped back out into the sunlight, Walter at my heels. Garters are unpredictable creatures. Some of them will take food from your hand while others will bite and keep biting until they get tired or bored or killed. Here, in this old shack, they were unlikely to harm anyone, and the local population of skunks, raccoons, foxes, and cats would sniff them out soon enough. I decided to let them be unless circumstances forced me to do otherwise. As for Walter, well, he’d just have to learn to mind his own business.
Below me and through the trees, the salt marsh gleamed in the morning sun and birds moved on the waters, their shapes visible through the swaying grasses and rushes. The Native Americans had named this place Owascoag, the Land of Many Grasses, but they were long gone, and to the people who lived here now it was simply “the marsh,” the place where the Dunstan and Nonesuch Rivers came together as they approached the sea. The mallards, year-round residents, had been joined for the summer by wood ducks, pintails, black ducks, and teal, but the visitors would soon be leaving to escape the harsh Maine winter. Their whistles and cries carried on the breeze, joining with the buzz of the insects in a gentle clamor of feeding and mating, hunting and fleeing. I watched a swallow make an arcing dive toward the mud and alight upon a rotting log. It had been a dry season and the swallows in particular had enjoyed good eating. Those that lived close to the marsh were grateful to them, for they kept down not only the mosquitoes but also the far nastier green-heads, with their strong-toothed jaws that tore through the skin with the force of a razor cut.
Scarborough is an old community, one of the first colonies established on the northern New England coast that was not simply a transient fishing station but a settlement which would become a permanent home for the families that lived within its boundaries. Many were English settlers, my mother’s ancestors among them; others came from Massachusetts and New Hampshire, attracted by the promise of good farmland. The first governor of Maine, William King, was born in Scarborough, although he left there at the age of nineteen when it became clear that it didn’t have too much to offer in the way of wealth and opportunity. Battles have been fought here—like most of the towns on the coastline, Scarborough has been dipped in blood—and the community has been blighted by the ugliness of Route 1, but through it all the Scarborough salt marsh has survived, and its waters glow like molten lava in the setting sun. The marsh was protected, although the continuing development of Scarborough meant that new housing—not all of it pretty, and some of it unquestionably ugly—had grown up close to the marsh’s high-water mark, attracted both by its beauty and by the presence of older, preexisting populations. The big, black-gabled house in which I now lived dated from the early nineteen thirties, and was mostly sheltered from the road and the marsh by a stand of trees. From my porch, I could look out upon the water and sometimes find a kind of peace that I hadn’t felt in a long, long time.
But that kind of peace is fleeting, an escape from reality that ends as soon as you tear your eyes away and your attention returns to the matters in hand: to those whom you love and who depend upon you to be there for them; to those who want something from you but for whom you feel little or nothing in return; and to those who would hurt you and the ones close to you, if given the opportunity. Right now, I had enough to be getting along with in all three categories.
Rachel and I had moved to this house only four weeks previously, after I had sold my grandfather’s old home and adjoining land on Mussey Road, about three miles away, to the U.S. Postal Service. A huge new mail depot was being built in the area and I had been offered a considerable amount of money to vacate my land so that it could be used as a maintenance area for the mail fleet.
I had felt a twinge of sorrow when the sale was finally made. After all, this was the house to which my mother and I had come from New York after my father’s death, the house in which I had spent my teenage years, and the house to which I, in turn, had returned after the death of my own wife and child. Now, two and a half years later, I was starting again. Rachel had only just begun to show, and it seemed somehow apt that we would begin our life as a couple in earnest in a new home, one that we had chosen together, furnished and decorated together, and in which, I hoped, we would live and grow old together. In addition, as my ex-neighbor Sam Evans had pointed out to me as the sale was nearing completion and as he himself was about to depart for his new place in the South, only a crazy person would want to live in close proximity to thousands of postal workers, all of them little ticking time bombs of frustration waiting to explode in an orgy of gun-related violence.
“I’m not sure that they’re really that dangerous,” I suggested to him.
He looked skeptical. Sam had been the first to sell when the offers were made, and the last of his possessions were now in a U-Haul truck ready to head for Virginia. My hands were dusty from helping him carry the boxes from the house.
“You ever see that film The Postman?” he asked.
“No. I heard it kind of sucked.”
“It sucked sperm whales. Kevin Costner should have been stripped naked, soaked in honey, and staked out over an anthill for it, but that’s not the point. What’s The Postman about?”
“A postman?”
“An armed postman,” he corrected. “In fact, lots of armed postmen. Now, I bet you fifty bucks that if you accessed the records of shitty video stores in any city in America, you know what you’d find?”
“Porn?”
“I wouldn’t know about that,” he lied. “You’d find that the only people who rented The Postman more than once were other postmen. I swear it. Check the records. The Postman is like a call to arms for these guys. I mean, it’s a vision of an America in which postal workers are heroes and still get to blow away anyone who pisses them off. It’s like porno for postals. They probably sit around in circles jerking off at their favorite parts.”
I discreetly took a step away from him. He wagged a finger at me.
“You mark my words. What Marilyn Manson is to crazy high schoolers, The Postman is to postal workers. You just wait until the killings start, then you’ll say to yourself that old Sam was right all along.”
That, or old Sam was crazy all along. I still wasn’t sure how serious he was. I had visions of him holed up in a farmhouse in Virginia, waiting for the postal apocalypse to come. He shook my hand and walked to the truck. His wife and children had already gone on ahead of him, and he was looking forward to the peace of the road. He paused at the door of the truck and winked.
“Don’t let the crazy bastards get you, Parker.”
“They haven’t succeeded yet,” I replied.
For a moment, the smile departed from his face, and the undercurrent to his comments rippled his surface good humor.
“That don’t mean they’ll stop trying.”
“I know.”
He nodded.
“If you’re ever in Virginia…”
“I’ll keep driving.”
He gave me a final wave and then he was gone, his middle finger raised in a last farewell to the future home of the U.S. Mail.
From the porch of the house, Rachel called my name and waved the cordless phone at me. I raised a hand in acknowledgment and watched Walt tear away from me at full speed to join her. Rachel’s red hair burned in the sunlight, and once again I felt a tightening in my belly at the sight of her. My feelings for her coiled and twisted inside me, so that for a moment I found it hard to isolate any single emotion. There was love—that much I knew for certain—but there was also gratitude, and longing, and fear: fear for us, a fear that I would somehow let her down and force her away from me; fear for our unborn child, for I had lost a child before, had watched again and again in my uneasy sleep as she slipped away from me and disappeared into the darkness, her mother by her side, their passing wreathed in rage and pain; and fear for Rachel, a terror that I might somehow fail to protect her, that some harm might befall her when my back was turned, my attention distracted, and she too would be torn away from me.
And then I would die, for I would not be able to take such pain again.
“It’s Elliot Norton,” she said as I reached her, her hand over the mouthpiece. “He says he’s an old friend.”
I nodded, then patted Rachel’s butt as I took the phone. She swatted me playfully on the ear in response. At least, I think it was meant to be playful. I watched her head back into the house to continue her work. She was still traveling down to Boston twice weekly to hold her psychology tutorials, but she now did most of her research work in the small office we had set up for her in one of the spare bedrooms, her left hand resting gently on her belly while she wrote. She looked over her shoulder at me as she headed into the kitchen and wiggled her rump provocatively.
“Hussy,” I muttered at her. She stuck her tongue out and disappeared.
“Excuse me?” said Elliot’s voice from the phone. His southern accent was stronger than I remembered.
“I said ‘hussy.’ It’s not how I usually greet lawyers. For them I use ‘whore,’ or ‘leech’ if I want to get away from the whole sexual arena.”
“Uh-huh. You don’t make any exceptions?”
“Not usually. By the way, I found a nest of your peers at the bottom of my garden this morning.”
“I won’t even ask. How you doing, Charlie?”
“I’m good. It’s been a while, Elliot.”
Elliot Norton had been an assistant attorney in the homicide bureau of the Brooklyn D.A.’s office when I was a detective. We had managed to get on pretty well together both professionally and personally on those occasions when our paths crossed, until he got married and moved back home to South Carolina, where he was now practicing law in Charleston. I still received a Christmas card from him each year. I’d met him the previous September for dinner in Boston when he was dealing with the sale of some property in the White Mountains, and had stayed in his house some years before when Susan, my late wife, and I were passing through South Carolina during the early months of our marriage. He was in his late thirties now, prematurely gray and divorced from his wife, a woman named Alicia who was pretty enough to stop traffic on rainy days. I didn’t know anything about the circumstances of the breakup, although I figured Elliot for the kind of guy who might have strayed from the marital fold on occasion. When we’d had dinner, at Sonsi on Newbury, the girls in their summer dresses passing by the open doors, his eyes had practically been out on stalks, like those of a character in a Tex Avery cartoon.
“Well, we Southern folks tend to keep pretty much to ourselves,” he drawled. “Plus we’re kinda busy, what with keeping the coloreds in check and all.”
“It’s good to have a hobby.”
“That it is. You still private detecting?”
The small talk had come to a pretty sudden end, I thought.
“Some,” I confirmed.
“You in the market for work?”
“Depends upon the kind.”
“I have a client due for trial. I could do with some help.”
“Maine is a long way from South Carolina, Elliot.”
“That’s why I’m calling you. This isn’t something that the local snoops are too interested in.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s bad.”
“How bad?”
“Nineteen-year-old male accused of raping his girlfriend, then beating her to death. His name is Atys Jones. He’s black. His girlfriend was white, and wealthy.”
“That’s pretty bad.”
“He says he didn’t do it.”
“And you believe him?”
“And I believe him.”
“With respect, Elliot, the jails are full of guys who say they didn’t do it.”
“I know. I helped to put some of them away, and I know they did it. But this one’s different. He’s innocent. I’ve bet the homestead on it. Literally: my house is security on his bail.”
“What do you want from me?”
“I need somebody to help me move him to a safe house then look around, check witness statements; someone who isn’t from around here and isn’t likely to be scared off too easy. It’s a week’s work, maybe a day or two more. Look, Charlie, this kid had a death sentence passed on him before he even set foot in a courtroom. As things stand, he may not live to see his trial.”
“Where is he now?”
“Richland County lockup, but I can’t leave him in there for too much longer. I took over the case from the public defender and now rumor is that some lowlifes from the Skinhead Riviera may try to make a name for themselves by shanking the kid in case I get him off. That’s why the state agreed bail on a potential capital case. He’s is a sitting duck in Richland.”
I leaned back against the rail of my porch. Walter came out with a rubber bone in his mouth and pressed it into my hand. He wanted to play. I knew how he felt. It was a bright autumn day, my girlfriend was radiant with the knowledge that our first child was slowly growing inside her, and we were pretty comfortable financially. That kind of situation encourages you to kick back for a time and enjoy it while it lasts. I needed Elliot Norton’s client like I needed scorpions in my shoes.
“I don’t know, Elliot. Every time you open your mouth, you give me another good reason to close my ears.”
“Well, while I have your attention you may as well hear the worst of it. The girl’s name was Marianne Larousse. She was Earl Larousse’s daughter.”
With the mention of his name, I recalled some details of the case. Earl Larousse was just about the biggest industrialist from the Carolinas to the Mississippi; he owned tobacco plantations, oil wells, mining operations, factories. He even owned most of Grace Falls, the town in which Elliot had grown up, except you didn’t read about Earl Larousse in the society pages or the business sections, or see him standing beside presidential candidates or dullard congressmen. He employed PR companies to keep his name out of the public domain and to stonewall journalists and anybody else who tried to poke around in his affairs. Earl Larousse liked his privacy, and he was prepared to pay a lot of money to protect it, but the death of his daughter had thrust his family unwillingly into the limelight. His wife had died a few years back, and he had a son, Earl Jr., older than Marianne by a couple of years, but none of the surviving members of the Larousse clan had made any public comment on the death of Marianne or the impending trial of her killer.
Now Elliot Norton was defending the man accused of raping and murdering Earl Larousse’s daughter, and that was a course of action likely to make him the second most unpopular person in the state of South Carolina, after his client. Anybody drawn into the maelstrom surrounding the case was going to suffer; there was no question about it. Even if Earl himself didn’t decide to take the law into his own hands there were plenty of other people who would because Earl was one of their own, because he paid their wages, and because maybe Earl would smile upon whoever did him the favor of punishing the man he believed had killed his little girl.
“I’m sorry, Elliot,” I said. “This isn’t something I want to get involved with right now.”
There was silence at the other end of the line.
“I’m desperate, Charlie,” he said at last, and I could hear it in his voice: the tiredness, the fear, the frustration. “My secretary is quitting at the end of the week because she doesn’t approve of my client list and pretty soon I’ll have to drive to Georgia to buy food because nobody around here will sell me jackshit.” His voice rose. “So don’t fucking tell me that this is something you don’t want to get involved with like you’re running for fucking Congress or something, because my house and maybe my life are on the line and…”
He didn’t finish the sentence. After all, what more was there to say?
I heard him exhale a deep breath.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“It’s okay,” I replied, but it wasn’t, not for him and not for me.
“I hear you’re about to become a father,” he said. “That’s good, after all that’s happened. I was you, maybe I’d stay up there in Maine too and forget that some asshole called you up out of the blue to join in his crusade. Yeah, I think that would be what I’d do, if I was you. You take care now, Charlie Parker. Look after that little lady.”
“I will.”
“Yeah.”
Then he hung up. I tossed the phone on one of the chairs and dragged my hands over my face. The dog now lay curled at my feet, his bone clasped between his front paws as he tugged at it with his sharp teeth. The sun still shone on the marsh and birds still moved slowly on the waters, calling to one another as they glided between the cattails, but now the transient, fragile nature of what I was witnessing seemed to weigh heavily upon me. I found myself looking toward the ruined shack where the garter snakes lay, waiting for rodents and small birds to stumble into their path. You could walk away from them, pretend to yourself that they weren’t doing you any harm and that you had no cause to go interfering with them. If you were right, then you might never have to face them again, or maybe creatures bigger and stronger than they would do you a favor and deal with them for you.
But, someday, you might go back to that cabin and lift up those same floorboards, and where once there were a dozen snakes there would now be hundreds and no collection of old boards and decaying timbers would be enough to contain them. Because ignoring them or forgetting them doesn’t make them go away.
It just makes it easier for them to breed.
That afternoon, I left Rachel working in her office and headed into Portland. My trainers and sweats were in the trunk of the car, and I had intended to go into One City Center and do a couple of circuits, but instead I ended up walking the streets, browsing in Carlson & Turner’s antiquarian bookstore up on Congress Street and Bullmoose Music down in the Old Port. I picked up the new Pinetop Seven album, Bringing Home the Last Great Strike, a copy of Ryan Adams’s Heartbreaker, and Leisure and Other Songs by a group called Spokane, because they were led by Rick Alverson, who used to head up Drunk and who made the kind of music you wanted to listen to when old friends let you down or you caught a glimpse of a former lover on a city street, her fingers entwined with those of another, looking at him in a way that reminded you of how she had once looked at you. There were still crowds of tourists around, the last of the summer wave. Soon the leaves would start to turn in earnest and then the next wave would arrive to watch the trees burn like fire as far north as the Canadian border.
I was angry with Elliot and more angry with myself. It sounded like a difficult case but difficult cases were part of the job. If I sat around waiting for easy ones, then I’d starve or go crazy. Two years ago, I’d have headed down to South Carolina to help him out without a second thought, but now I had Rachel and I was about to become a father again. I had been given a second chance, and I didn’t want to endanger it in any way.
I found myself back at my car. This time, I took my kit from the trunk and spent an hour pushing myself as hard as I had ever pushed myself in the gym, working until my muscles burned and I had to sit on a bench with my head down before the worst of the nausea had passed. But I still felt ill as I drove back to Scarborough, and the sweat that dripped from my face was the sweat of the sickbed.
• • •
Rachel and I didn’t talk properly about the call until dinner that evening. We had been together as a couple for about nineteen months, although we had only been living under the same roof for less than two. There were those who looked at me differently now, as if wondering how a man who had lost his wife and daughter under such terrible circumstances less than three years before could bring himself to begin again, could create another child and attempt to find a place for it in a world that had spawned a killer capable of tearing a daughter and her mother apart.
But if I had not tried, if I had not reached out to another person and made some small, halting connection to her in the hope that it might one day bring us closer together, then the Traveling Man, the creature that had taken them away from me, would have won. I could not change the fact that we had all suffered at his hands, but I refused to be his victim for the rest of my life.
And this woman was, in her quiet way, extraordinary. She had seen in me something worthy of love, of salvation, and had set about recovering that thing from the deep place to which it had retreated in order to protect itself from further harm. She was not so naive as to believe that she could save me: rather, she made me want to save myself.
Rachel had been shocked when she discovered that she was pregnant. We both were, a little, in the beginning, but it seemed even then that there was a rightness to it, an appropriateness, that allowed us to face our new future with a kind of quiet confidence. It sometimes felt like the decision to have a child had been made for us by some higher power, and all we could do now was hang on and enjoy the ride. Well, maybe Rachel wouldn’t have used the word “enjoy”: after all, it was she who had felt a strange heaviness to all her actions from the moment the test had proved positive; she who stared at her figure in alarm as she began to put on weight in strange places; she whom I found crying at the kitchen table in the dead of one August night, overcome by feelings of dread and sadness and exhaustion; she who threw up every morning with all the certainty of sunrise; and she who would sit, her hand upon her belly, listening to the spaces between her heartbeats with both fear and wonder, as if she could hear the little bundle of cells slowly growing within her. The first trimester had been especially difficult for her. Now, in her second, she had found new reserves of energy initiated for her by the child’s first kicks, by the confirmation that what lay inside her was no longer potential but had become actual.
While I watched her quietly, Rachel tore into a piece of beef so rare she had to hold it down with her fork to keep it from making a break for the door. Beside it, potatoes and carrots and zucchini lay heaped in little mountains.
“Why aren’t you eating?” she asked, when she came up briefly for air.
I curled my arm protectively around my plate. “Back,” I said. “Bad dog.”
To my left, Walt’s head spun toward me, a brief flash of confusion visible in his eyes. “Not you,” I reassured him, and his tail wagged.
Rachel finished chewing, then jabbed her momentarily empty fork at me. “It was that call today. Am I right?”
I nodded and toyed with my food, then told her Elliot’s story. “He’s in trouble,” I concluded. “And anyone who sides with him against Earl Larousse is going to be in trouble too.”
“Have you ever met Larousse?”
“No. The only reason I know about him is because Elliot has told me things in the past.”
“Bad things?”
“Nothing worse than you’d expect from a man with more money than ninety-nine-point-nine percent of the people in the state: intimidation, bribery, crooked land deals, brushes with the EPA over polluted rivers and poisoned fields, the usual stuff. Throw a stone in Washington when Congress is in session and you’ll hit apologists for any one of a hundred people like him. But that doesn’t make the loss of his daughter any less painful for him.”
An image of Irv Blythe flashed briefly in my mind. I swatted the thought away like a fly.
“And Norton is certain that his client didn’t kill her?”
“Seems that way. After all, he took over the case from the original lawyer and then stood bail for the guy, and Elliot isn’t the kind of man who risks his money or his reputation on a losing prospect. Then again, a black man accused of the murder of a rich white girl could be at risk among the general population, assuming somebody got it into his head to make a name for himself with the grieving family. According to Elliot, he either bailed his client or he buried him. Those were the options.”
“When is the trial?”
“Soon.” I had gone through the newspaper reports of the murder on the Internet, and it was clear that the case had been fast-tracked from the beginning. Marianne Larousse had been dead for only a few months, but the case would be tried early in the new year. The law didn’t like to keep people like Earl Larousse waiting.
We stared at each other across the table.
“We don’t need the money,” said Rachel. “Not that badly.”
“I know.”
“And you don’t want to go down there.”
“No, I sure don’t.”
“Well, then.”
“Well, then.”
“Eat your dinner, before I do.”
I did as I was told. I even tasted some of it.
It tasted like ash.
After dinner, we drove out to Len Libby’s on Route 1 and sat on a bench outside to eat our ice cream. Len Libby’s used to be on Spurwink Road, on the way to Higgins Beach, with tables inside where people sat and shot the breeze. It had moved out to its new location, on the highway, a few years back, and while the ice cream was still good, eating it while looking out at four lanes of traffic wasn’t quite the same. Instead, there was now a life-size chocolate moose beside the ice cream counter, which probably counted as some form of progress.
Rachel and I didn’t speak. The sun set behind us, our shadows growing longer before us, stretching away ahead of us like our hopes and fears for the future.
“You see the paper today?” she asked.
“No, I didn’t get a chance.”
She picked up her bag and rummaged through it until she found the piece she had kept from the Press Herald, then handed it to me. “I don’t know why I tore it out,” she said. “I knew you’d have to see it sometime, but part of me didn’t want you to have to read about him again. I’m tired of seeing his name.”
I unfolded the paper.
Thomaston—The Rev. Aaron Faulkner will remain at Thomaston State Prison until his trial, a Department of Corrections spokesman said yesterday. Faulkner, indicted earlier this year on charges of conspiracy and murder, was transferred to Thomaston from the state Supermax facility a month ago, following what appeared to be a failed suicide attempt.
Faulkner was arrested in Lubec in May of this year following a confrontation with Scarborough-based private detective Charlie Parker, during which two people, a male calling himself Elias Pudd and an unnamed female, were killed. DNA tests revealed that the dead man was in fact Faulkner’s son, Leonard. The woman was identified as Muriel Faulkner, the preacher’s daughter.
Faulkner was formally indicted in May for the murders of the Aroostook Baptists, the religious group headed by the preacher that disappeared from its settlement at Eagle Lake in January 1964, and conspiracy to murder at least four other named individuals, among them industrialist Jack Mercier.
The remains of the Aroostook Baptists were uncovered close by Eagle Lake April last. Officials in Minnesota, New York and Massachusetts may also be examining unsolved cases in which Faulkner and his family were allegedly involved, although no attempt has yet been made to charge Faulkner outside Maine.
According to sources within the Maine attorney general’s office, both the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI are also examining Faulkner’s case, with a view of trying him on federal charges.
Faulkner’s attorney, James Grimes, told reporters yesterday he remained concerned for the health and well-being of his client and he was considering appealing to the State Supreme Court following the decision of a Washington County Superior Court to refuse bail. Faulkner has said he is innocent of all charges and was kept a virtual prisoner by his family for almost forty years.
Meanwhile, the consultant entomologist employed by investigators to catalogue the collection of insects and spiders found at the Lubec compound occupied by Faulkner and his two children told the Press Herald yesterday that he had almost completed his work. According to a state police spokesman, the collection is believed to have been assembled by Leonard Faulkner, alias “Elias Pudd,” over many years.
“So far, we’ve identified about two hundred different species of spider, as well as about fifty other species of insect,” Dr. Martin Lee Howard said. He said the collection contained some very rare species, including a number that his team had so far failed to identify.
“One of them seems to be some form of extremely nasty cave spider,” said Dr. Howard. “It’s certainly not a native of the United States.” Asked if there were any patterns emerging from his research, Dr. Howard said that the only common factor uniting the various species at this point was their “general unpleasantness. I mean, insects and spiders are my life’s work and even I have to admit that there are a lot of these guys and gals I wouldn’t like to find in my bed at night.”
Dr. Howard added: “But we did discover a lot of recluse spiders, and when I say a lot, I mean a lot. Whoever assembled this collection had a real affection for recluses, and that’s not something you’re going to find too often. Affection is pretty much the last thing the average person is going to feel for a recluse.”
I refolded the paper, then threw it in the trash can. The possibility of a bail appeal was troubling. The attorney general’s office had gone straight to a grand jury after Faulkner’s apprehension, common practice in a case which looked set to deal with matters that had gone unsolved for a long time. A twenty-three-member grand jury had been specially convened at Calais, in Washington County, twenty-four hours after Faulkner was found, and an arrest warrant had been issued upon his indictment on charges of murder, conspiracy to murder, and accomplice liability in the murder of others. The state had then asked for a “Harnish hearing” to decide upon the issue of bail. In the past, when the death penalty had still existed in the state of Maine, those accused of capital offenses were not entitled to bail. After the abolition of the death penalty, the constitution was amended to deny bail for formerly capital offenses as long as there was “proof evident and presumption great” in the alleged guilt of the accused. In order for that proof and presumption to be established, the state could request a Harnish hearing, conducted before a judge with both sides entitled to present arguments.
Both Rachel and I had given evidence before the hearing, as had the primary detective from the state police responsible for the investigation into the deaths of Faulkner’s flock and the murder of four people in Scarborough, allegedly on Faulkner’s orders. The deputy AG, Bobby Andrus, had argued that Faulkner was both a flight risk and a potential threat to the state’s witnesses. Jim Grimes did his best to pick holes in the prosecutor’s arguments but barely six days had elapsed since Faulkner’s apprehension and Grimes was still playing catch-up. Altogether it was enough for the judge to deny bail, but only just. There was, as yet, little hard evidence to link Faulkner to the crimes of which he was accused, and the Harnish hearing had forced the state to demonstrate the comparative paucity of its case. That Jim Grimes was now talking publicly about an appeal indicated that he believed a judge in the state’s highest court might reach a different conclusion on the bail issue. I didn’t want to think about what might happen if Faulkner was released.
“We could take the long view and look at it as free publicity,” I said, but the joke sounded hollow. “There’s no getting away from it, not until they put him away permanently, and maybe not even then.”
“I guess it’s your defining moment.” She sighed.
I put on my best earnest romantic look and clasped her hand. “No,” I told her, as dramatically as I could. “You define me.”
She mimed sticking her finger down her throat, but she smiled and the shadow of Faulkner passed from us for a time. I reached out and held her hand, and she raised my fingers to her mouth and licked the last of the ice cream from the tips.
“Come on,” she said, and her eyes shone with a new hunger. “Let’s go home.”
But there was a car standing in the driveway of the house when we arrived. I recognized it as soon as I glimpsed it through the trees: Irving Blythe’s Lincoln. When we pulled up he opened his door and stepped out, the sound of classical music from NPR flowing like honey into the still evening air. Rachel said hi and headed into the house. I watched as the lights went on in our bedroom and the shades came down. Irv Blythe had picked his moment perfectly if he was trying to come between me and an active love life.
“How can I help you, Mr. Blythe?” I asked, my tone betraying the fact that right now helping him was pretty low down on my list of priorities.
His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his short-sleeved shirt tucked tightly into the elastic waistband. His pants were shucked up high over what remained of his paunch, making his legs look too long for his body. We had spoken little since I had agreed to look into the circumstances of his daughter’s disappearance. Instead, I dealt mostly with his wife. I had gone back over the police reports, begun to speak again to those who had seen Cassie in the days before she disappeared, and retraced her movements in those final days; but too much time had elapsed for those who recalled her to remember anything new. In some cases, they had trouble remembering anything at all. I had come up with nothing remarkable so far, but I had declined the offer of a retainer similar to that enjoyed for so long by Sundquist. I told the Blythes that I would bill them for my time, nothing more. Yet if Irv Blythe wasn’t openly hostile toward me, he still left me with the sense that he would have preferred it if I had not become involved in the investigation. I was not sure how the events of the previous day would affect our relationship. As it turned out, it was Blythe who brought them up.
“Yesterday, at the house…” he began, then stopped.
I waited.
“My wife thinks I owe you an apology.” His face was very red.
“What do you think?”
“I think I wanted to believe Sundquist and that man he brought with him. I resented you for taking away the hope they brought with them.”
“It was false hope, Mr. Blythe.”
“Mr. Parker, until now we’ve had no hope at all.”
He removed his hands from his pockets and started to dig at the skin in the center of his palms, hoping to locate the source of his pain there and remove it like a splinter. I noticed half-healed sores on the back of his hands and the exposed patches of his scalp, where he had torn at himself in his hurt and frustration.
It was time to clear the air between us.
“I get the sense that you don’t like me very much,” I said.
His right hand stopped digging and flailed loosely at the air, as if he were trying to grasp his feelings toward me, to snatch them from the air so he could display them on his wrinkled, gouged palm instead of being forced to put them into words.
“It’s not that,” he began. “I’m sure that you’re very good at what you do. It’s just that I know about you. I’ve read the newspaper reports. I know that you solve difficult cases, that you’ve found out the truth about people who’ve been missing for years, longer even than Cassie. The trouble is, Mr. Parker, that those people are usually dead when you find them.” The final words came out in a rush, and left him with a tremble in his voice. “I want my daughter back alive.”
“And you think that hiring me is like an admission that she’s gone forever?”
Irv Blythe’s words seemed to open wounds inside me that, like his own exposed sores, were only half healed. There were those whom I had failed to save, that was true, and there were others who were long gone before I had even begun to understand the nature of what had been visited upon them. But I had made an accommodation with my past, a recognition that although I had failed to protect individuals, had even failed to protect my own wife and child, I was not entirely responsible for what had happened to them. Susan and Jennifer had been taken by another, and even had I sat with them twenty-four hours a day for ninety-nine days, he would have waited until the hundredth day for me to turn my back briefly before he came for them at last. Now I spanned two worlds, the worlds of the living and the dead, and to both I tried to bring some measure of peace. It was all that I could do in reparation. But I would not have my failings judged by Irving Blythe, not now.
I opened his car door for him. “It’s getting late, Mr. Blythe. I’m sorry that I can’t offer you the reassurance that you want. All I can say is that I’ll keep asking questions. I’ll keep trying.”
He nodded and looked out over the marsh, but made no move to get into his car. The moonlight shone on the waters, and the sight of the gleaming channels seemed to jolt him into some final form of self-examination.
“I know she’s dead, Mr. Parker,” he said softly. “I know that she’s not coming home to us alive. All I want is to put her to rest somewhere pretty and quiet where she can be at peace. I don’t believe in closure. I don’t believe that this thing will ever be closed to us. I just want to lay her down, and to be able to go to her with my wife and place flowers at her feet. You understand?”
I almost reached out and touched him, but Irving Blythe was not a man for such gestures between men. Instead, I spoke to him as gently as I could.
“I understand, Mr. Blythe. Drive carefully. I’ll be in touch.”
He climbed into his car and didn’t look at me until he had turned toward the road. Then I saw his eyes in the rearview, and caught the hatred in them for the words that I had somehow forced him to speak, the admission that I had drawn from deep inside him.
I didn’t join Rachel, not for some time. I sat on my porch and watched the passing lights of solitary cars until the biting of the insects forced me inside. By then, Rachel was asleep, and yet she smiled as she felt me close beside her.
Beside both of them.
• • •
That night a car drew up outside Elliot Norton’s house on the outskirts of Grace Falls. Elliot heard the car door opening, then footsteps running across the grass of his yard. He was already reaching for the gun on his nightstand when the window of his bedroom exploded inward and the room erupted into flame. The burning gasoline splashed his arms and chest and set fire to his hair. He was still burning when he staggered down the stairs, through his front door, and onto his lawn, where he rolled in the damp grass to quench the fire.
He lay on his back in the moonlight and watched his house burn.
And as Elliot Norton’s house flamed far to the south, I awoke to the sound of a car idling on Old County Road. Rachel was asleep beside me, something clicking inside her air passages as she breathed, a soft noise as regular as the ticking of a metronome. Gently, I slipped from beneath the covers and walked to the window.
In the moonlight, an old black Cadillac Coupe de Ville stood on the bridge that crossed the marshes. Even from a distance, I could see the dents and scratches on the paintwork, the broken-limb curve of the damaged front bumper, and the spiderweb tracery of cracked glass in the corner of the windshield. I could hear its engine rumbling but no smoke came from the exhaust; and though the moon was bright that night I could not glimpse the interior of the car through the dark glass of the windows.
I had seen such a car before. It had been driven by a being named Stritch, a foul creature, pale and deformed. But Stritch was dead, a hole torn in his chest, and the car had been destroyed.
Then the rear door of the Cadillac opened. I waited for someone to emerge, but no one did. Instead the car just stood, its door wide open, for a minute or two until an unseen hand pulled the door closed, the coffin-lid thud coming to me across water and grass, and the car moved away, executing a U-turn to head northwest toward Oak Hill and Route 1.
I heard movement from the bed.
“What is it?” asked Rachel.
I turned to her and saw the shadows drifting across the room, clouds chased by moonlight, until they reached her and, slowly, began to devour her paleness.
• • •
“What is it?” asked Rachel.
I was back in bed, except now I was sitting bolt upright and I had pushed the sheets away from me with my feet. Her hand was warm upon me, flat against my chest.
“There was a car,” I said.
“Where?”
“Outside. There was a car.”
I stepped naked from the bed and walked to the window. I pulled back the curtain, but there was nothing there, only the road, quiet, and the silver threads of the water on the marsh.
“There was a car,” I said, for the last time.
And I saw the marks of my fingertips against the window, left there as I reached out the car, just as they, reflected in the glass, now reached out for me.
“Come back to bed,” she said.
I went to her and I held her, spoonlike, as she slipped softly into sleep.
And I watched over her until morning came.