13

Serenity, Michigan

December 1879


Hampton had been in Serenity for nearly three weeks. On the day he’d first heard the name of Dr. Michael Parré, he had taken a brisk and thorough walk around the burgeoning town.

This was not the first community which had grown around a single tent, pitched by a timber cruiser—a man sent in by a speculating lumberman to claim prize stretches of virgin forest for his employer. Most were complete cesspits. Oddly, this town was much less so than many. The last place he had gone had been the base of the hill on which the Parré mansion sat. It was very late by then, but almost every window in the house had light issuing from its panes.

It had been a strange experience. Not the least unsettling thing was that the street out of the town simply ended at the gate of the Parré’s property. He wasn’t sure if it left him with the feeling that the entire town of Serenity had issued forth, running down the incline and out of the gates, like a flood, to congeal in the lower lying plain, or if the entire village was poised to storm the gates and charge up the hill.

Over the next days as he spoke to more and more of the town’s permanent residents, the more he realized that they were content to stay on their side of the gates.

As had been the case with the bartender who had first told him the story of the family, aside from the sudden deaths of the current resident’s parents, much of what they carried about as assumed fact was in truth nothing better than that—assumptions and speculation. It was not lost upon Hampton that speculation is what had brought all of these people together in this place.

In the end, he was always left with the same advice. Give a wide berth to Michael Parré.

Ultimately Hampton had secured a room not far from the train depot. Its very proximity to the tracks meant the price was considerably less than in many of the houses that let rooms, though it was still more than the closet-sized space was worth. Generally, only the drunkest could sleep this close to the train’s comings and goings.

For Hampton, the sleep robbed by the arrivals and departures was the cost of doing business.

After his chance and peripheral encounter with Parré, Hampton had watched him convince another man to follow him. It had been a poor man who’d arrived on the same train as Hampton, although in a far meaner car.

It had struck Hampton as odd before he’d begun hearing the whisperings about the orphaned lumber baron.

And so Charles Hampton’s room not only served as its own alarm clock, but it allowed him an unobstructed view of the busy area near the train stop. Depending upon the time of day there were a good many people preying upon the newly arrived, but most were vendors, camp recruiters and other marginal ne’er-do-wells.

It was never difficult to pick out when Michael Parré visited the square, however. The spotless double-breasted frock, the top hat which made him stand six inches above the rest of the rabble, the walking stick, the cocksure stride. And the swath he cut through the crowd as the locals rushed to give him the recommended wide berth.

It had not taken Hampton long to form a theory. Michael Parré would not have been the first heir to squander a fortune. Hampton thought that perhaps, at least in terms of liquid assets, Parré may have been in a dire strait. Whatever else the hulking house had going for it there were plenty of rooms no doubt laying empty.

And so on many occasions when a new train brought new people looking to find a way to profit from the lumber trade’s lowest rung, Parré would arrive on the scene, survey the late arrivals, and would generally select the fellow with the roughest, most hardscrabble appearance, and always those, Hampton could tell even from his second floor perch across the way, who were most obviously timid, disoriented, out of their element and, importantly, out of luck.

“Fish in a barrel,” Hampton had said to himself on his third day of observing.

But now it had been three weeks, and Hampton’s theory was leaking water.

If Parré’s interest in the men had been purely financial, why gravitate to the poorest looking, for one thing? He’d wrestled with himself about this for several days, some days believing he could explain it away, others spent internally screaming that it made no sense.

But what had really caused the hypothesis to show cracks was the ever-accelerating volume of encounters. The day he’d arrived he’d seen a man led off, but it had been late, and he had immediately wondered if Parré had visited the depot earlier in the day. For the first few days he’d come only once, for that same, last train of the night.

But then he’d met two trains.

A few days later, it had been four.

Charles Hampton had quickly determined that on any given day, including Saturday and Sunday, as many as six regularly scheduled trains rolled into Serenity. Occasionally special locomotives rolled in, as companies occasionally brought in entire crews, pre-selected from other operations. “Hijacked” was the term many would use.

It didn’t take Hampton long to realize that Parré had long ago led more men away than the house could possibly have accommodations, even packing them uncomfortably into the mansion’s many spaces.

So what was happening to them? Where were they going when they left the mansion? There were far too many lumber camps and too many men to effectively keep even a cursory view of the work-rolls of one, let alone all of them. Conceivably, many could have spent a night or two in the house then moved into a lumber camp, to stretch their wages as far as possible with their housing now provided by the company.

But the final hole in this original theory was something that probably only he could have determined with any certainty. Because among the many benefits of his magnificent mind, (although to Hampton they sometimes felt like curses), was that he did not, could not forget a face.

And after seeing the faces that stepped off of the train, hour by hour, day after day for over twenty days now, and after walking around the streets, visiting the nighttime establishments favored by the lumberjacks and other camp scum when the time came to fritter away their earnings, he was certain of one thing.

At some point, every man who came to work in the forests of Serenity eventually came back into town to drink from the taps and bottles of Serenity, to listen to the off-key music from what passed as dancehalls in Serenity and to fornicate with the loosest women.

But the men who left the train and went with Michael Parré were never seen again.