Seated in the comfortable armchair in his wood-paneled room at the Red Door Inn in Woonsocket, Reaper nodded, satisfied.
This place was a gift to himself. A night or two of real comfort while preparations continued. There’d been too many nights of discomfort and ugliness, years of endurance, then of making ends meet while he worked things out. Life in a trailer, for a time, though that had made his chest worse, and he’d known he had to survive a while longer.
The Ford rental had been exchanged for a Volvo XC70. The right car for the job, whatever the weather, he’d been assured.
His short home movie already prerecorded, only his voiceover to add.
No script needed. Just a tumbler of malt whisky – strictly proscribed by the last doctor he’d seen before the man on Shiloh Road a week ago.
No more doctors for him now, ever, if he had his way.
The movie was on his screen, ready to run, first clip selected, voiceover primed.
Shiloh Village in the fall. Nature rendering it pretty as a picture.
As deceptive as some of its inhabitants.
He began to speak into the built-in microphone.
‘I present you with some of the citizens of Shiloh. All of them witnesses for the prosecution against the then town council president, Donald T. Cromwell.’
Second clip of a white-haired elderly man emerging from a clapboard house.
‘Seth Glover. Owner of the local food market at the time, and the only eye witness to the abduction, who testified to having seen Alice Millicent climbing into Cromwell’s Cadillac Seville. Glover’s retired now, but his son Adam has expanded the old business …’
A shot of a store on a busy main street: Glover’s of Greenville.
‘… into one of the finest markets in Providence County.’
Cut back to Seth Glover, walking down his pathway.
‘Seth’s a grandfather, but he still lives in his old Shiloh house, in an add-on built by Adam and Claire, his daughter-in-law.’
The next clip was of another man of similar years, well-dressed, gray-haired and paunchy, walking into the Shiloh Inn, once the school.
‘John Tilden, formerly of Tilden’s restaurant, now the proprietor of the village inn, who made remarks during the trial about the councilor’s womanizing habits. The defense objected and the judge sustained. Tilden’s eighty now, but doesn’t he look fit and prosperous? He lost his first two wives, but then he married Eleanor.’
The movie cut to the bar at the Shiloh Inn, to a strong, vigorous-looking blonde woman in her mid-sixties, pouring drinks for customers.
‘Ellie used to run her own café, but now she pretty much rules the inn and their marriage, and I’ve heard it said that she’s cut her husband’s drink tab in half.’
Reaper froze the frame and reached for his own glass. The whisky burned as it went down, but he relished it anyway, wanted it – and other motivations aside, wasn’t all this ultimately about what he wanted?
He replaced the glass, began to cough, and opened the small bottle of water standing beside the whisky, drank a little, fought to try to prevent the cough from having its way, felt it settle, then threaten again.
‘No,’ he told it, and it subsided.
He restarted the movie.
Another clip: a third elderly, tall man climbing slowly out of the passenger seat of a Chevy.
‘Dr Stephen Plain. Answers given by the now-retired doctor to the prosecution’s loaded questions concerning Cromwell’s “inappropriate closeness” to Emily, his own daughter, raised furious objections by the defense. They were the last pieces of testimony heard by the accused before he took his own life.’
Reaper paused to cough again, took another sip of water, then forged on.
Two women in their sixties now on the screen, sweeping leaves off a driveway, both energetic, laughing.
‘The redhead is Gwen Turner.’ Reaper’s voice was a little huskier. ‘The teacher on duty in the playground at the time of Alice Millicent’s disappearance. She wept on the stand because of her sense of guilt, but admitted, under duress, that she had once told a colleague that during an official school visit by Cromwell he’d seemed to pay more attention to the girls than the boys.’ Reaper paused. ‘Turner left Shiloh soon after, but returned to her parents’ house after their deaths ten years later. She lives there still, with her partner, Jill Barrow.’
Next, a signpost reading Jackson Farm, and another old couple, sitting on a porch drinking out of mugs.
‘That’s Mark Jackson with his wife, Ann. Jackson told the court that they’d once seen the councilor in a Providence department store buying women’s underwear and joking about it. The prosecutor was chastised, Jackson’s remarks stricken from the record, and in any event, though Alice’s underpants had been removed, there was never any allegation of sexual molestation, but the jury had heard the remarks. Damage done.’
Two clips followed in swift succession, the first a shot of the Shiloh Weekly building on Shiloh Road, cutting away to film of another elderly man, portly and balding, with a silver-haired woman, the couple wearing matching green Barbour jackets – the film taken through trees as they walked two black Labrador retrievers in a sprawling landscaped backyard, the woman throwing sticks for the dogs.
‘William Osborn, proprietor and editor of the local paper at the time, who went on vilifying Cromwell after his death. Shiloh’s richest, fattest cat, rumored to have stashed away a fortune made from loan sharking, though nothing ever stuck, and so William and his wife, Freya, ten years his junior, seem likely to live out their days in Shiloh Oaks, the home they took over when all the Cromwells were gone.’
Reaper reached for the whisky glass, watched as the screen cut to that house, after which the shot pulled back on to Main Street, finally encompassing the whole village once again.
He went on, still holding the glass, not drinking.
‘Shiloh Oaks. St Matthew’s Church. The Shiloh Inn. The inhabitants, most of them respectable, some veritable pillars of their community, as Donald Cromwell once was.’ A pause. ‘Shiloh Village. A New England postcard. Not quite Norman Rockwell material, but almost grand by Little Rhodie standards.’ Another brief pause. ‘But, oh, the deceit, the hypocrisy, the lies.’
His voice had weakened a little.
‘Not long now,’ he said, ‘till they rise to the surface at last.’
Another pause.
‘Not long.’
He stopped speaking. Stared at the screen, not really looking now, gazing at nothing at all.
Not wholly aware of the frozen shot.
Or of the glass falling from his hand.
Which was trembling.
He was aware, though, of the tremor, knew in the cognizant part of his brain what it might be heralding.
It came, sometimes, at moments of great fatigue, but it also came, paradoxically, at times of intense psychological stimulus.
He regarded the hand.
Waited for what he knew would come.
It had been a long time since he had heard it, and he welcomed it now.
He nodded.
Closed his eyes.
And listened.