I slept badly that night, my dreams punctuated by recurrent images of eyeless men who yet could somehow see, and a faceless child curled up in a ball in a darkened attic, whispering only the single word “afraid” to herself, over and over again. I checked in with Jackie Garner first thing. It had been a quiet night in Willard, and for that much I was grateful. Jenna had departed for D.C. with her grandparents shortly after seven, and Jackie had stayed with their car as far as Portsmouth while the Fulcis remained with Rebecca. There was no sign of Merrick, or of anyone else showing an unhealthy interest in the Clay family.
I went for a run to Prouts Neck, Walter racing ahead of me in the still morning air. This part of Scarborough was still relatively rural, the presence of the yacht club and the country club ensuring that the area retained a certain exclusivity, but elsewhere the town was changing rapidly. It had begun as far back as 1992, when Wal-Mart arrived near the Maine Mall, bringing with it minor irritations like the RV owners who were allowed to park overnight on the store’s lot. Soon, other big-box retailers followed Wal-Mart’s lead, and Scarborough started to become like many other satellite towns on the edge of larger cities. Now residents at Eight Corners were selling out to allow Wal-Mart to expand further, and, despite a cap on residential building permits, more and more families were moving into the area to take advantage of its schools and the town’s recreational pursuits, pushing property prices up and causing increases in taxes to pay for the infrastructure needed to support the new arrivals, who were taking root at four times the county average. In my darker moments, I sometimes saw what was once a fifty-four-square-mile town encompassing six distinct villages, each with its own distinct local identity, and the largest salt marsh in the state, becoming a single homogenous sprawl populated almost entirely by those with no concept of its history and no respect for its past.
There were two messages on my answering machine when I returned. One was from a guy in the DMV who charged me $50 for every search he ran on vehicle plates. According to him, Merrick’s car was a company vehicle recently registered to a law office down in Lynn, Massachusetts. I didn’t recognize the name of the firm, Eldritch and Associates. I scribbled the details on a notepad. Merrick could have stolen a lawyer’s car—and a call to the firm would quickly confirm whether or not a theft had occurred—or he might have been employed by the attorney or attorneys, which didn’t seem very likely. There was a third option: that the firm had provided Merrick with a car, either out of choice or at the instigation of a client, thereby offering at least some degree of protection if someone came around asking questions about what Merrick was doing, as the firm could offer client confidentiality as a defense. Unfortunately, if that was the case, the individual involved had underestimated Merrick’s capacity for causing trouble, or just didn’t care.
I thought again about Merrick’s sudden appearance so many years after Daniel Clay had vanished. Either some evidence had emerged recently to convince Merrick that Clay was still alive, or Merrick had been out of the loop for a long time and had just emerged to rattle a few cages. Increasingly, I was drawn to the view that Merrick might have been in jail, but I didn’t have his first name, assuming Merrick even was his real name. If I had it, I could run searches in corrections.com and bop.gov in the hope of turning up a release date. Still, I could make some calls and see if the name rang any bells, and there was always Eldritch and Associates although, in my experience, lawyers tended to be unhelpful at best in these situations. I wasn’t even sure that Merrick’s pursuit of Rebecca Clay and the broken pane of glass would be enough to force some information out of them.
The second message was from June Fitzpatrick, confirming our dinner at Joel Harmon’s house the following night. I had almost forgotten about Harmon. It might be a wasted evening. Then again, I still knew next to nothing about Daniel Clay, apart from what his daughter had told me, and the little extra that I had found out from June. I would drive down to the Commonwealth early the next morning, see what I could wring out of Eldritch and Associates, and try to fit in a conversation with Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband before Harmon’s dinner. I remained aware that a clock was ticking, slowly counting down the minutes to Merrick’s promised return and what was certain to be an escalation of his campaign of intimidation against Daniel Clay’s daughter.
• • •
Rebecca Clay sat in her employer’s washroom and wiped away her tears. She had just spoken to her daughter on the phone. Jenna had told her that she missed her already. Rebecca had told her that she missed her, too, but she knew that sending her away was the right thing to do.
The night before, she had walked into Jenna’s bedroom to make sure that she had packed everything that she needed for her trip. Jenna was downstairs reading. From her daughter’s bedroom window, Rebecca could see the man named Jackie sitting in his car, probably listening to the radio judging by the slight glow that came from the dashboard, illuminating his features. His presence made her feel a little better. She had also briefly met the other two men, the massive brothers who gazed adoringly at Jackie, hanging on his every word. Although big, they did not fill her with the same sense of assurance as Jackie did. They were intimidating, though, she had to give them that. One of her neighbors had been so disturbed by their presence that she had called the police. The cop who drove by in response had taken one look at the pair, recognized them for who they were, and immediately driven away without exchanging a single word with either of them. Nobody had seen a cop in the vicinity since.
All in Jenna’s room was neat and in its place, because that was the kind of girl her daughter was. Rebecca looked down at the little desk that Jenna used for homework, and for her painting and drawing. She had clearly been working on something quite recently, a sketch of some kind, for a pack of colored pencils lay open beside a couple of sheets of paper. Rebecca picked up one of the sheets. It was a drawing of their house, and two figures stood beside it. They were dressed in long tan coats, and their faces were pale, so pale that her daughter had used a white wax crayon to accentuate it, as though the paper itself was not sufficient to convey the depth of their pallor. Their eyes and mouths were black circles, draining light and air from the world. The same figures appeared in each of the drawings. They looked like shadows given form, and the fact that her daughter was imagining such beings had made Rebecca shudder. Perhaps Jenna had been more disturbed by the actions of the man named Merrick than she had pretended to be, and this was some manifestation of that fear.
Rebecca had gone downstairs to Jenna and shown her the drawings.
“Who are they supposed to be, honey?” she said, but Jenna had merely shrugged.
“I dunno.”
“I mean, are they supposed to be ghosts? They look like ghosts.”
Jenna had shaken her head. “No, I saw them.”
“You saw them? How? How could you have seen something like this?”
She had knelt beside her daughter, genuinely troubled by what she was hearing.
“Because they’re real,” Jenna had replied. She had looked puzzled for a moment, then had corrected herself. “No, I think they’re real. It’s hard to explain. You know, it’s like when there’s a little fog, and it makes everything fuzzy, but you can’t see what’s making it fuzzy. Then I took a nap this evening after packing, and it was almost like I dreamed them, but I was awake because I was drawing them at the same time that I saw them. It was like I woke up with them still in my mind, and I had to put their images down on paper, and when I looked out of the window they were there, except—” She had paused.
“Except what? Tell me, Jenna.”
The girl had looked uncomfortable. “Except I could only see them if I didn’t look directly at them. I know it makes no sense, Mom, but they were both there and not there.” She took the drawing from her mother. “I think they’re kind of cool.”
“They were here, Jenna?”
Jenna had nodded. “They were outside. What did you think I meant?”
Rebecca’s hand went to her mouth. She felt ill. Jenna rose and hugged her and kissed her on the cheek.
“Don’t worry, Mom. It was probably just some weird mind thing. If it helps, I didn’t feel scared or anything. They don’t mean us any harm.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. I kind of heard them, in my head, while I was sleeping or waking or whatever it was I was doing. They weren’t interested in us.”
Then, for the first time, Jenna had looked thoughtful, as though she had only just begun to understand how truly odd her words sounded.
Rebecca tried to stop her voice from trembling when she spoke. “Honey, who are they?”
The question distracted Jenna. She giggled. “That’s the weirdest part of all. I woke knowing who they were, like sometimes I’ll have a painting and a title in my head, both at the same time, and I won’t know where they came from. I made this first drawing, and I knew who those figures were almost before the pencil touched the paper.”
She held the drawing up before her, both admiring it and yet slightly concerned at what she had created.
“They’re the Hollow Men.”