It was a long ride to the property Rachel and Sam now shared with Rachel’s parents in Vermont, and I spent most of it driving in silence, going over all that I had learned about Daniel Clay and Frank Merrick, and trying to figure out where Eldritch’s client fitted into the whole affair. Eldritch had told me that his client had no interest in Daniel Clay, yet they were both facilitating Merrick, who was obsessed with Clay. And then there were the Hollow Men, whatever they were. I had seen them, or perhaps it would be more true to say that they had entered my zone of perception. The maid at Joel Harmon’s house had seen them too and, as I had learned from the brief conversation with Rebecca Clay the night before, her daughter, Jenna, had drawn pictures of them before she left the city. The connection appeared to be Merrick, but when he was asked during his interrogation if he was working alone, or if he had brought others with him, he had seemed genuinely surprised and had responded in the negative. The questions remained: who were they, and what was their purpose?
• • •
Rachel’s parents had gone away for the weekend and weren’t due back until Monday, so Rachel’s sister had come to stay in order to help with Sam. Sam had grown so much, even in the few weeks since I had last seen her, or perhaps that was just the view of a father conscious of the fact that he was separated from his daughter, and that the stages of her development would from now on be revealed to him in leaps rather than steps.
Was I simply being pessimistic? I didn’t know. Rachel and I still spoke regularly on the phone. I missed her, and I thought that she missed me, but on the recent occasions when we had met, her parents were present, or Sam was acting up, or there was something else that seemed to get in the way of talking about ourselves and how things had become so bad between us. I couldn’t figure out if we were allowing these intrusions to become obstacles in order to avoid some kind of final confrontation, or if they truly were what they seemed to be. A period apart to allow us both to figure out how we wanted to live this life had become something longer and more complicated and, it appeared, more final. Rachel and Sam had moved back to Scarborough for a time in May, but Rachel and I had fought, and there was a distance between us that had not existed before. She had been uncomfortable in the house that we had once shared more easily, and Sam had trouble sleeping in her room. Had we simply grown used to being without each other, even though I knew that I still craved her, and she me? We existed in a kind of strained limbo, where things were left unsaid for fear that to speak them aloud would cause the whole fragile edifice to collapse around us.
Rachel’s parents had converted some old stables on their property into a large guesthouse, and that was where Rachel lived with Sam. She was working again, employed on a contract basis with the Psychology Department of the University of Vermont in Burlington, taking tutorials and lecturing on criminal psychology. She told me a little about it as I sat at her kitchen table, but in the casual, passing way that one might describe one’s pursuits to a stranger at dinner. In the past, I would have been privy to every little detail, but not anymore.
Sam was squatting on the floor between us, playing with big plastic farm animals. She gripped two sheep in her chubby hands and pounded their heads together, then looked up and offered one to each of us. They were slick with baby drool.
“You think it’s a metaphor for us?” I asked Rachel. She looked tired, but still beautiful. She caught me staring and brushed a strand of hair back over her ear, blushing slightly.
“I’m not sure that knocking our heads together would solve anything,” she said. “Although admittedly I’d get a sense of satisfaction from knocking your head against something.”
“Nice.”
She reached out and touched the back of my hand with her finger.
“I didn’t mean it to sound quite as harsh as it did.”
“It’s okay. If it’s any consolation, I often feel like beating my head against a wall too.”
“What about beating mine?”
“You’re too good-looking. And I’d be afraid of ruining your hair.”
I turned my hand palm up and held her finger.
“Let’s go for a walk,” she said. “My sister will look after Sam.”
We rose, and she called her sister’s name. Pam entered the kitchen before I had a chance to release Rachel’s finger, and she gave us both a knowing look. It wasn’t disapproving, though, which was something. Had Rachel’s father seen us like this, he might well have reached for his rifle. I didn’t get on with him, and I knew that he hoped the relationship between his daughter and me was over for good.
“Why don’t I take Sam for a ride?” said Pam. “I have to go to the store anyway, and you know how she likes people-watching.” She knelt in front of Sam. “You wanna go for a ride with Aunt Pammie, huh? I’ll take you to the health section and show you all the stuff you’re gonna need when you’re a teenager and boys come calling. Maybe we can go look at guns too, huh?”
Sam let her aunt pick her up without complaint. Rachel followed them and helped her sister to get Sam ready, and to fit her into the child seat. Sam cried a little when the door closed and she realized that her mom wasn’t joining them, but we knew that it wouldn’t last long. She was fascinated by the car, and seemed to spend most of her time in it either watching the sky go by or just sleeping, lulled by the movement of the vehicle. We watched them drive off, then I followed Rachel across the garden and into the fields that bordered her parents’ house. She kept her arms folded across her chest, as though uneasy about the fact that she had held my hand earlier.
“How have you been?” she asked.
“Busy.”
“Anything interesting?”
I told her about Rebecca Clay and her father, and the arrival of Frank Merrick.
“What kind of man is he?” asked Rachel.
It was a strange question. “A dangerous one, and hard to read,” I replied. “He thinks Clay is still alive, and that he knows what happened to his daughter. Nobody else seems to be able to say different, but the general wisdom is that Clay is dead; that, or his daughter is the best actress I’ve ever met. Merrick tends toward the latter view. He used to be a freelance button man, a hired killer. He’s been in jail for a long time, but he doesn’t strike me as being rehabilitated. There’s more to him than that, though. He looked out for one of Clay’s patients while he was in the can, even getting himself sent to the Max so he could be close to him. I thought at first that it might be a jail thing—older guy–younger guy—but it doesn’t look like it was that way. Merrick’s own daughter was one of Clay’s patients at the time that she disappeared. That may be why there was a bond between him and this kid, Kellog.”
“Maybe Merrick also hoped to learn something from Kellog that might lead him to his daughter,” said Rachel.
“Probably, but he shadowed this kid for years, and he protected him. It wouldn’t have taken him long to find out what Kellog knew, but he didn’t cut him loose. He stood by him. He took care of him, as best he could.”
“He couldn’t protect his own daughter, so he protected Kellog instead?”
“He’s a complex man.”
“You sound almost as though you respect him.”
I shook my head. “I pity him. I think I even understand him some. But I don’t respect him, not in the way that you mean.”
“There’s another way?”
I didn’t want to utter it. After all, it would lead us back to one of the reasons why Rachel and I had parted.
“Well?” she pressed, and I knew that she had already guessed what I was going to say. She wanted to hear it spoken, as though to confirm something sad but necessary.
“He has a lot of blood on his hands,” I said. “He doesn’t forgive.”
I could have been talking about myself, and once again I was aware of how much like Merrick I once was, and might still be. It was as though I had been given an opportunity to witness a version of myself decades down the line, older and more solitary, trying to right a wrong through force and the infliction of harm upon others.
“And now you’ve crossed him. You brought in the police. You got in the way of his efforts to find out the truth about his daughter’s disappearance. You respect him the way you’d respect an animal, because to do otherwise would be to underestimate him. You think you’re going to have to face him again, don’t you?”
“Yes.”
Her brow wrinkled, and there was pain in her eyes. “It never changes, does it?”
I didn’t reply. What could I say?
Rachel didn’t pursue an answer. Instead, she said: “Is Kellog still in jail?”
“Yes.”
“Are you going to talk to him?”
“I’m going to try. I’ve spoken to his lawyer. From what I hear, he’s not doing so good. Then again, he was never doing good, but if he stays in the Supermax for much longer, he’s going to be beyond rescuing. He was troubled before he got there. It sounds like he’s bordering on insane now.”
“Is it true what they say about that place?”
“Yes, it’s true.”
She didn’t speak again for a time. We walked through dead leaves. Sometimes, they made a sound like a parent hushing a child, soothing it, consoling it. At other times, the noise was empty and dry, crackling with the promise of the passing of all things.
“What about the psychiatrist, Clay? You say there were suspicions that he might have been providing information on the children to the abusers. Was there anything to implicate him directly in the abuse itself?”
“Nothing, or nothing that I’ve been able to find. His daughter’s view is that he couldn’t live with the guilt of failing to prevent it. He believed that he should have spotted what was happening. The kids were damaged before he even began treating them, just like Kellog. He was having trouble getting through to them, but his daughter remembers that he was making progress, or thought he was. Kellog’s lawyer confirmed as much about him. Whatever Clay did, it was working. I spoke to one of his peers, too, a doctor named Christian who runs a clinic for abused children. His main criticism of Clay seems to have been that he was too anxious to spot abuse. He had an agenda, and he got into some trouble over it that prevented him from making any further evaluations on cases for the state.”
Rachel stopped and knelt down. She picked a piece of rabbit-foot clover, still with one of its fuzzy, grayish pink flowers in place.
“This is supposed to stop blooming in September or October,” she said. “Yet here it is, still in flower. The world is changing.” She handed it to me. “For luck,” she said.
I held it in my palm, then carefully slipped it into the plastic pocket of my wallet.
“The question still remains: if the same people were involved in the abuse of different children, then how did they target them?” she asked. “From what you’ve told me, they picked the most vulnerable. How did they know?”
“Somebody told them,” I said. “Somebody fed children to them.”
“If not Clay, then who was it?”
“There was a committee formed to select the children who would be sent to Clay. It had mental health workers on it, and social workers. If I had to pick, I’d say it was one of them. But I’m sure the cops looked at that angle. They must have. Christian’s people did too. They came up with nothing.”
“But Clay disappeared. Why? Because of what happened to the children, or because he was involved? Because he felt responsible, or because he was responsible?”
“That’s a big leap.”
“It just feels wrong, Clay disappearing like that. There are always exceptions, but I can’t think of a doctor in that situation who would respond in a similar way. He’s a psychiatrist, a specialist, not some ordinary joe. He’s not going to buckle, not in the space of a few days.”
“So either he ran away to avoid being implicated—”
“Which doesn’t sound right either. If he was involved, he would have been smart enough to cover his tracks.”
“—or someone ‘disappeared’ him, maybe one or more of those involved in the abuse.”
“Covering their tracks.”
“But why would he do it?”
“Blackmail. Or he may have had those tendencies himself.”
“You still think he might have been a participant in the abuse? It would be risky.”
“Too risky,” she agreed. “It doesn’t rule him out as a pedophile, though. Neither does it rule out blackmail.”
“We’re still assuming he’s guilty.”
“We’re speculating, that’s all.”
It was interesting, but it still didn’t fit right. I just couldn’t figure out what was wrong with the picture. We headed back toward the house, the moon already rising above us in the late-afternoon sky. I was facing the long ride home, and suddenly I felt unbearably lonely. I didn’t want to drive away from this woman and the child we had made together. I didn’t want to leave things this way. I couldn’t.
“Rach,” I said. I stopped walking.
She paused and looked back to where I stood.
“What happened to us?”
“We’ve talked about this before.”
“Have we?”
“You know we have,” she said. “I thought I could handle you, and what you did, but perhaps I was wrong. Something in me responded to it, the part of me that was angry and hurt, but in you it’s so great that it frightens me. And—”
I waited.
“When I returned to the house, that time in May when we—I don’t want to say ‘when we got back together,’ because it didn’t last long enough for that—lived together again, I realized how much I hated being there. I didn’t notice it until I went away and came back, but there’s something wrong with that place. I find it hard to explain. I don’t think I’ve ever tried, not aloud, but I know there are things that you haven’t told me. I’ve heard you sometimes, crying out names in your dreams. I’ve seen you walking through the house half-asleep, carrying on conversations with people that I can’t see, but I know who they are. I’ve watched you, when you think you’re alone, responding to something in the shadows.” She laughed mirthlessly. “Hell, I even saw the dog do it. You have him freaked out too. I don’t believe in ghosts. Maybe that’s why I don’t see them. I think they come from within, not beyond. People create them. All that stuff about spirits with unfinished business, individuals taken before their time haunting places, I don’t believe any of it. It’s the living who have unfinished business, who can’t let the past go. Your house—and it is your house—is haunted. Its ghosts are your ghosts. You brought them into being, and you can get rid of them too. Until you do, nobody else can be part of your life, because the demons in your head and the spirits in your heart will force them away. Do you understand? I know what you’ve been going through all of these years. I waited for you to tell me, but you couldn’t. Sometimes, I think it’s because you were afraid that by telling me you’d have to let them go, and you don’t want to let them go. They fuel that rage within you. That’s why you look at this man Merrick and feel pity for him, and more than that: you feel empathy.”
Her face changed, the tone of her voice transforming with it, and her cheeks flushed red with anger.
“Well, be sure that you look closely at him, because that’s what you’ll become if all of this doesn’t stop: an empty vessel motivated by hatred and revenge and frustrated love. In the end, we’re not apart just because I’m afraid for Sam and myself, or scared for you and for what might happen to all of us as a consequence of your work. I’m frightened of you, of the fact that part of you is drawn to evil and pain and wretchedness, that the anger and hurt that you feel will always need to be fed. It will never end. You talk of Merrick as a man unable to forgive. Well, you can’t forgive either. You can’t forgive yourself for not being there to protect your wife and child, and you can’t forgive them for dying on you. And maybe I thought that that might change, that having us in your life would enable you to heal a little, to find some peace with us, but there will be no peace. You want it, but you can’t bring yourself to embrace it. You just—”
She was starting to cry now. I moved to her, but she stepped away.
“No,” she said softly. “Please don’t.”
She walked away, and I let her go.