Bad Men

Chapter Six

It was close to dawn when they neared their destination. Already there was a faint glow visible in the east, as of a fire distantly glimpsed. They had agreed on a rotation for sleeping and driving, as Moloch was reluctant to pause for any reason. He had the scent of her now, of that he was certain. It had proved easier than expected, for elements outside his control had fallen into place for him: foolish Verso, who had hoped to trade Moloch’s life for his own; his idiot brother-in-law, risking his anonymity in order to gamble on meaningless outcomes; and Dexter’s casual remark that his wife would not be using her own name, causing tumblers to fall in Moloch’s mind.

For most of the journey, he remained silent and awake, watching the red lights of the cars on the road streaming toward the void, fading into the distance until they were swallowed up by the blackness. Moloch had been incarcerated for so long that he found himself fascinated by the small details of the lives being lived around him, although there was a remoteness, perhaps even a coldness, to his interest: it was the curiosity of a small boy marveling at the industry of termites or ants in the moment before he annihilates their mound or torches their nest. He watched the cars go by, their occupants only occasionally visible in the brief flare of a match or the comforting illumination of the dashboard lights, and wondered how so many could be on the roads and highways at this time, for what mission could be so urgent, what destination so compelling, that it caused them to give themselves up to a journey through the night, forsaking sleep? Moloch suspected that, for some, there was no destination. There was no home waiting, no husband drowsing, no wife sleeping or children dreaming. There was only the illusion of progress and momentum offered by the cocoon of the automobile in the surrounding night. These people were not traveling; they were fleeing, taunted by a false belief that if they ran fast and hard enough they might somehow escape their past or their present, that they might even somehow escape themselves. Moloch recalled those who had crossed his path and faded from the view of the world as a consequence. For some, he thought, it might almost have been a relief. He closed his eyes and waited for the coming of the dream.

Braun, weary now of Willard’s unsmiling company, had joined Dexter and Moloch in the lead van, while Leonie had taken the wheel of the second. Farther back along the road, Tell and Powell were engaged in a lengthy discussion of their various sexual conquests, both real and imagined, while Shepherd sat in silent judgment upon them. As the trip had worn on, Shepherd had begun to draw away a little not only from the younger men in the car but from the group as a whole. There had been no opportunity for him to talk with Dexter and Braun since Moloch’s escape, and the need to do so was now pressing. They knew one another well, these three men, for they had worked together before under Moloch’s aegis. Leonie too shared a history with Dexter, although she largely kept her own counsel, choosing to reveal her thoughts only with Dexter and trusting him to relay them, if necessary, to the rest of the group.

Shepherd was concerned about recent developments, including the killing of the investigator down at Dismal Creek and the mutilation of his companion, and the deaths of Moloch’s sister-in-law and her husband. He also had real worries about the sanity of at least one of their group.

Of Powell he knew little and, in truth, cared to know even less. He had come highly recommended, and had state time behind him in Maryland and Tennessee. Shepherd found him boorish and ignorant, and the snatches of conversation that were coming from Shepherd’s right did nothing to alter that perception. Tell, he liked, but while he understood the possible justification for taking the life of the young pizza-delivery man (he was smart, argued Tell after the fact, and might have noticed more than he pretended), he was not convinced that it was necessary, and Tell’s inability to make that distinction troubled him. The incident with the cell phone also indicated that Tell’s temper was somewhere between short and nonexistent. Shepherd, as previously noted, wasn’t a big fan of cell phones. He believed they were contributing to the creation of a ruder, less caring society. There was a time, and it wasn’t so very long ago, when people kept their voices down in public, not only because they wished to enjoy a little privacy in their conversations but also because talking too loudly disturbed the people around them. Now, all that was going out the window, along with leaving your car unlocked or your front door open. The fact that people now locked their doors and secured their houses to protect them from criminals like Shepherd was beside the point. Still, Shepherd had never really considered solving the cell phone problem by killing anyone who used one in a discourteous manner. It was a pity that nobody would ever know that excessive conversational volume was the reason behind the Arab’s murder. Otherwise, he might have made a nice example to others, convincing them to change their ways. Shepherd figured that Tell would be okay if he could just calm down some, maybe take a deep breath once in a while instead of pulling a trigger. Shepherd would work on him.

But the principal source of Shepherd’s unease was Willard, and he knew that Dexter shared that disquiet. Shepherd was a man who believed himself to be in control of his own appetites. He also knew, from past experience, that discipline and restraint in any operation increased the odds of its success, and that once those qualities began to dissipate, a breakdown of some kind inevitably followed. Willard, quite clearly, was incapable of exercising self-control, making Tell look like a Buddhist by comparison. He was an immature man defined by his appetites. Shepherd did not know what ties bound Willard to Moloch, or what made the older man show such indulgence toward the younger. Sometimes, Moloch seemed to demonstrate toward Willard the tenderness of a lover. At other times, he appeared almost paternal, protecting the younger man while reluctantly disciplining him. Whatever Moloch’s feelings about him, Willard was becoming more and more unpredictable. As a consequence, they were leaving a trail for others to follow, and there would be a reckoning because of it. Shepherd had no intention of sitting on death row, waiting to see if the chair or natural causes would take him first. His share of the money would buy him a comfortable life, if he was careful, and he had every intention of living long enough to spend it. He needed to talk with Dexter and Braun, for something had to be done about Willard.

If Leonie felt unease at the prospect of spending time in Willard’s company, she did not show it when Braun asked her to switch vehicles. Braun, for one, suspected that Leonie felt little of anything at all, and that under the skin she and Willard might well be blood relatives. Dexter had used her for jobs a couple of times, with Moloch’s agreement, but Braun still knew nothing about her other than a story Dexter had once told him. Leonie was heading out of some dyke bar in South Carolina-Braun was less surprised to hear that Leonie ate at home than that she’d managed to find a pickup joint in South Carolina-when a pair of guys jumped her in the parking lot. Braun knew their kind, had grown up alongside them: they hated women, particularly independent women, and there was nothing more independent than a woman who didn’t need a man for sex. They bundled her into the trunk of their car and drove her to a shack out in the woods. Braun didn’t need to know anything more about what had happened to Leonie after that, and Dexter didn’t tell him much anyway, but he could guess. Afterward, when they saw that she hadn’t buckled, they beat on her some, then dumped her out in back of the dyke bar, her clothes torn and bloody. She didn’t go back inside, though. Instead, she walked to her car, where her gun lay taped beneath the dashboard-she hadn’t bothered to carry it into the bar, a mistake that she would never again repeat-and returned to her apartment, where she washed and douched and treated her cuts, then took a couple of sleeping pills and went to bed.

The next morning, she called Dexter. She told him all that had occurred, and he drove down to be with her. It was Dexter who pulled the two guys from the street and brought them back to the shack, where Leonie was waiting. Then he sat outside in his truck, smoking and listening to R. L. Burnside while he watched the road. He heard that hunters found the two men a couple of days later. One of them was still alive, although he died as soon as the medics tried to move him. Dexter figured that Leonie would be kind of unhappy to hear that only one of them had survived for so long. Usually, she was precise about these things, but then she’d been pretty upset by what had been done to her, so it might have clouded her judgment some.

It wasn’t that part of the story that had stuck with Braun, though. The guys had gotten what they deserved, make no mistake about that, and Braun wasn’t about to shed any tears for them. No, what gave Braun an insight into Leonie was what those guys saw before they died. One had been married, while the other was dating a woman who worked nights providing technical support for her local ISP. Leonie had visited them both while she was waiting for Dexter to pick up the two men, and just as they’d had fun with her, well, she’d had fun with their women. She’d even taken some pictures before she left.

Dexter said they’d come out pretty good, considering the amount of red in them.

No, Willard wouldn’t be screwing with Leonie, not if he had any sense in that pretty-boy head of his.

Tell and Shepherd, meanwhile, appeared to have bonded. Shepherd had told Braun that he was reasonably impressed with how Tell had handled the Verso thing. Like Shepherd, Braun wasn’t so sure that Tell had really needed to kill the pizza guy, but there was no way of knowing how much he had taken in, so Tell had probably erred on the side of caution.

Whatever occurred, at least there was Dexter. Braun had known Dexter longer than almost any other human being. They were like brothers bound by blood. They shared cars, rooms, even women, although if Braun ever met a woman that he liked as much as Dexter, then he planned to marry her and not share her with anyone, not even Dexter.

This did not strike Braun as at all odd.

“You ever wonder about names?” asked Dexter, from out of nowhere.

“Wonder how?” said Braun.

“About how only some colors become names, and not others.”

“Like?”

“Like black. You know, Mr. Black. Or Mr. White. You got Mr. Green too, and your Mr. Brown, but that’s about it. You ever meet anybody called Blue, or Yellow, or Red? Doesn’t happen, except in movies. You think that’s strange?”

“You know, it never struck me before.”

“You think it’s interesting?”

“No. You got too much time on your hands, is what I think. You need to be doing something useful to keep your mind off shit like that. Just drive.”

“There was a time,” said Dexter, “when you thought I had a lot of interesting shit to say.”

“I thought you were deep. Then I got to know you.”

“You saying I’m not deep?”

“If you were a pool, little kids could paddle in you.”

“If you were a pool, little kids would piss in you.”

“Just drive, will you? The sooner we get to where we’re going, the sooner I can get away from your shallow black ass.”

But both men were smiling as Dexter tapped the gas, Moloch momentarily forgotten in the darkness behind them.

Shoot the women first: it was an axiom of antiterrorist units, quite literally a maxim to live by. The women were more fanatical. They had more to prove, and when they made a decision, they were less likely than their male peers to experience doubts or second thoughts about it. Women attempted suicide less frequently than men, but they were far more likely to follow the attempt through to its fatal conclusion. Similarly, when a woman picked up a gun and put her finger on the trigger, there was a good chance that someone’s body was about to be endowed with an extra hole.

If Willard was the most unpredictable of the little band of killers slowly making its way north, and Tell the most volatile, then Leonie was the most lethal. Braun was right to suspect as much, and Moloch, had he been asked, would have confirmed that his faith in her resolve was based entirely on the evidence of his own eyes. Leonie enjoyed power. Specifically, she enjoyed wielding the power of life and death, and had always done so. As a child, spiders and insects had briefly provoked her interest. They were simple to catch, and had enough easily detachable limbs to keep her amused in the clean little bedroom of the clean little unit that she shared with her mother in one of Philadelphia’s more desirable low-income housing projects. The young Leonie quickly tired of bugs, though, for there was no challenge to them. Similarly, unlike some of the boys who shared her environment, she did not enjoy tormenting cats and dogs. Instead, Leonie retreated into her own world, growing slowly quieter, a stillness creeping over her as she sat at her window and waited for the time when fantasy and reality might coalesce.

It was from that window that she watched as the slim black boy walked across the basketball court toward the one who called himself Ex. Ex had touched her once, while she was coming back from the store with an armful of groceries. She had been unable to move, fearful that she might drop the bag in her arms. It was the middle of the month, when money was always short for her momma, and so she had endured Ex’s touch, and the sour taste of his breath when he placed his mouth upon her own. Ex had grown bored when she did not respond, and called her some names that she did not understand. Secretly, her stillness had disturbed the young dealer, who found it unnerving the way her eyes had never left his, not even blinking while he fondled her. Since then, he had not approached her again, even as she matured into the fine-looking woman she would eventually become.

Now the boy was facing Ex, and Ex was saying something to him. Leonie felt her mouth grow dry. She pressed her fingers and face against the glass, a smear of breath pulsing, then fading, upon it.

She knew what the boy was about to do. She felt it from him, could see it in his stance.

Kill him, she thought. Kill him now.

And he did.

By the time Ex’s body hit the ground, the girl was running to the door of her apartment. She intercepted the boy on a patch of waste ground that led to the river. Already, she could hear sirens. The boy could hear them too. He looked scared.

“Give me the gun,” said Leonie.

The boy didn’t move. Instead, he just stared at the pretty girl with the thick black hair who stood before him. She was a year or two younger than he was, he guessed, but everything about her spoke of a maturity beyond his own.

“Give it to me,” she repeated. “They won’t search me.”

To their right, a patrol car made an arc into the project, spraying dirt and water from the rutted concrete. A second car came in from the left, effectively cutting off his exit. He couldn’t understand how they’d gotten there so fast.

Suddenly, the girl moved toward him, her hands slipping beneath his jacket as she hugged herself to him. She buried her face in his chest, then pulled back and kissed him on the cheek.

“Gotta run,” she said. “I’ll see you later, baby.”

And as the cops approached she skipped away across the dirt, the gun tucked into the waistband of her skirt, her shirt hiding the butt. He watched one of the cops glance at her, and saw her reward him with a little smile.

Then she was gone, and Dexter never saw the gun again.

But he saw the girl, and although that kiss was the only one she would ever give him, Dexter loved her, and he knew that she loved him too, in her way.

Still, he had never crossed her, and he never would. If it came down to it, he believed that she would kill him. She loved him more than she loved anyone else in the world, yet she would take his life if he failed her.

Dexter figured that, where Leonie was concerned, the rest of humanity didn’t stand a chance.

It was the absence of lights that alerted Karen Meyer. She heard the van pulling up outside her house, but no headlights matched its progress. Her first thought was that it was the cops coming, and she ran through a mental checklist as she climbed out of bed and pulled on a pair of jeans over her panties. The dummy passports and driving licenses were hidden in a panel behind her gas stove, accessible only by taking apart the oven from the inside, and she deliberately kept it thick with grease and food waste to discourage any possible search, even if it meant that the oven was rendered practically unusable as a result. Her inks, pens, and dyes were all in her studio, and were indistinguishable from the materials she used in her regular design work. Her cameras were an expensive Nikon, a cheaper Minolta, and a Canon digital. Again, she could argue that these were an essential part of her job, since she often had to take photos as part of her initial preparations. The last batch of material had gone out a few days before, and there was nothing on the slate. She figured that she was clean.

She had moved up to Norwich, Connecticut, to be close to her mother. Her mother had suffered a bad stroke that left her with impaired mobility, and Karen, as the only daughter in the family, had felt responsible for her. Karen’s brothers lived over on the West Coast, one in San Diego, the other in Tacoma, but they each sent money to boost the coverage offered by their mom’s insurance and to help Karen out, although, unofficially, Karen didn’t need their help because her sidelines were quite lucrative. Still, she wasn’t one to turn down free money, and the cash had helped her to rent the pretty house on Perry Avenue in which she now lived. Much as she loved her mom, she couldn’t live with the old woman, and her mom wanted to retain some degree of independence anyway. She had a panic button and a day nurse, and Karen was three minutes away from her. It was the perfect arrangement for all of them.

She looked out of the window and saw the van. It was black and comparatively clean-not so beat up that it might attract attention, and not so clean as to stand out.

There was no other vehicle in sight.

Not cops, she thought.

Her doorbell rang.

Not cops.

She went to her dresser and removed the gun from the drawer. It was a Smith & Wesson LadySmith auto, its grip designed for a smaller, woman’s hand. She had never fired it anywhere except on the range, but its presence in the house reassured her. Although Meyer made a point of no longer dealing with violent criminals, there was no telling what some people might do if they were desperate enough.

Barefoot, she padded down the stairs, the gun held close to her thigh. She did not turn on any of the house lights. The street lamps cast the shadow of a woman against her door.

“Who is it?” she said.

She glanced to her right, where the display panel for the alarm system was mounted, and began checking the sensors in each zone. Front door: OK.

“Karen?” said a woman’s voice. “Karen Meyer?”

“I said, ‘Who is it?’ ”

Living room: OK.

“My name is Leonie. I’m in trouble. I was told you could help me.”

“Who told you?”

Dining room: OK.

“His name is Edward.”

Garage: OK.

“Edward what?”

Kitchen: DISARMED.

Her stomach lurched. She felt metal at the nape of her neck. A hand closed over her gun.

“You should know my name,” said a voice. “After all, it’s the only one that you didn’t give me.”

Dupree awoke to pain.

His joints and muscles, even his gums, still ached, although he’d taken some painkillers the night before. He felt too weak to lift his own weight from his bed, so he lay still, watching shadows on the ceiling rise and fade like smoke. He wondered sometimes if the symptoms he felt were phantoms too, shadows cast by the knowledge of his impending mortality. The pain had been coming more frequently in recent months. He had been warned by old Doc Bruder that his size and build left him open to a variety of ailments, and the pain he was experiencing could be the onset of any one of those.

“You’re not frail by any means,” the retired physician had said while Joe sat on a couch in the old man’s den, Gary Cooper striding down a dusty street on the TV screen, forsaken by his darling, “but you’re not as strong as you look, or as people seem to think you are. Your job puts stresses on you. You’re complaining to me of pains in your chest, aches in your joints. I’m telling you that you need to get yourself checked out.”

But Dupree had not taken Bruder’s advice, just as Bruder had known that he would not. Dupree was afraid. If he was told that he could no longer do his job, then that job would be taken away from him. His work on the island was more important to him than anything else. Without it, he would be lost. He would die.

Dupree was thirty-eight now, and would be thirty-nine in May. He recalled a picture he had once seen of Robert Pershing Wadlow, the so-called Alton Giant, the largest man on record, Wadlow towering over the two men at either side of him, their heads barely reaching his elbows. At eight feet, eleven inches tall, he was taller than the enormous bookcase behind him. His hands were buried in the pockets of his dark suit, and he appeared to be teetering to his left, as if on the verge of toppling over, his thin frame buffeted by an unseen wind. Dupree guessed that Wadlow was twenty when the photograph was taken. Two years later he was dead, felled by the great curse that was his condition.

Lying on his bed in the house in which he had grown up, Dupree remembered his father’s stories, his tales of old giants, told to reassure a boy who felt himself alienated from his peers by his size. His father had lied to him. They were lies of omission, but lies nonetheless, for his father had tailored his stories to the boy’s problems, cutting, distorting, softening.

For his stories were not truly about giants.

They were about the death of giants.

Outside it was still dark. Ordinarily he would have been on his way to the station house by now, but he had juggled the rotation so that he could spend the evening with Marianne. He lay back on his bed and tried to rest.

Sharon Macy sat in the tiny kitchen of her apartment, sipping a mug of hot milk. She had a lot on her mind. Her father was due to enter the hospital the following week for a series of tests after he had complained of pains in his back and chest. He was laughing off the concerns of his wife and daughter, but there was a history of cancer in the family and Macy knew that the fear of it was with each of them. Under other circumstances she might have returned home immediately, but the department was already buckling under the combined weight of illness and leave-which was why Macy, although still on probation, had found herself on the island rotation-and she suspected that only a real emergency would enable her to absent herself from duty. Anyway, her father had told her in no uncertain terms that he did not want her hanging around the house fussing over him. Her tour on Sanctuary would leave her with five days off at the end of it. She would drive down to Providence as soon as she was back on the mainland, and would examine her options in the light of what, if anything, her father’s tests revealed.

Macy thought too of Barron and the drugs that she had seen him take from Terry Scarfe. Maybe she was mistaken in what she believed had occurred, but she didn’t think so. She wished that she had someone with whom she could talk about these things, and for the first time since the break up of their relationship, she felt herself missing Max, or at least missing what he had once represented for her.

To hell with him, she thought. To hell with all of them.

She placed the empty mug in the sink, returned to bed, and at last fell asleep to the sound of a ship in the bay, its horn rising like the cry of a sea creature lost in the darkness, seeking only to return to the safety of its kind.

The call woke Terry Scarfe from a deep, alcohol-induced sleep, and so it took him a couple of seconds to recognize the voice and the distinctive Eastern European accent.

“We have a job for you. Someone has purchased your expertise.”

Even in his dazed state, Terry knew that whatever expertise he might have was worth next to nothing, unless you were dealing in pesetas and were happy just to count the zeros.

“Sure,” he said. Terry wasn’t going to argue. He needed some cash. Even if he hadn’t needed it, these people weren’t the kind you refused. They owned Terry Scarfe, and he knew it.

“You’ll get a call, usual place, fifteen minutes,” the man said, then hung up.

Terry rose, swayed a little, and pulled a pair of sweatpants and an old T-shirt over his scrawny body. He found his heaviest overcoat, then walked two blocks to the pay phone, along the way picking up a coffee at the Dunkin’ Donuts to warm his body and his hands.

Life had not been particularly kind to Terry Scarfe. Most of the time it seemed to treat him like he had screwed its sister. Other times, it went after him like he had screwed its mother as well. He had one failed marriage behind him, a failure that was due, Terry felt, to a combination of factors, including excessive alcohol intake on the night that he had proposed, his arrest and incarceration shortly after the wedding itself, and the unforgiving (and, in fact, downright unpleasant) nature of the woman to whom he had attached himself. His wife had divorced him while he was in jail on burglary charges, then married someone else while Terry was locked up for possession of a controlled substance. Her significant life events, Terry concluded, seemed to coincide with his government vacations. Maybe if he stayed out of jail for a while, her life wouldn’t be quite so good, while the quality of his own existence would improve considerably.

A smarter man than Terry might have concluded that his criminal ambitions for himself far exceeded the talents available to him to achieve them, but like most criminals, Terry wasn’t particularly smart. Unfortunately, his career options were now even more limited than they had been to begin with, and few of them were likely to meet with the approval of the forces of law and order, which was why he was standing beside a telephone in the darkness waiting to talk to someone he had never met and who was unlikely to offer Terry a job tasting beer or testing feather beds for softness. Just as Terry was starting to notice that he could no longer feel his feet, the call came through.

“Terry Scarfe? My name is Dexter.”

Terry thought the guy sounded black. It didn’t bother him, except that black people tended to stand out some in Portland, and if the guy was planning on coming up, it could present problems.

“What can I do for you?”

“There’s an island, somewhere off the coast there. It’s called Dutch Island.”

“Yeah, Dutch. Sanctuary.”

“What?”

“Some folks still call it Sanctuary, that’s all, but Dutch, yeah, Dutch is good.”

He heard the black guy sigh.

“You done?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“We need you to find out as much as you can about it.”

“Like?”

“Cop stuff. Ferries. Points of access.”

“I’ll need to bring in someone else. I know a guy lives out there. He’s got no love for the big cop on the island.”

“Big cop?”

“Yeah, fuckin’ giant.”

“You’re shitting me.”

“Nope, for real.”

“Well, find out all you can. And get your friend to track down a woman. She’s using the name Marianne Elliot. She’ll have a little boy with her, about six years old. I want to know where she lives, who she’s friendly with, boyfriends, shit like that.”

“When do you need this by?”

“Tonight.”

“I’ll do my best.”

Terry thought that he heard, in the background, a soft pop. Terry knew that sound. Somebody had just taken a bullet.

“No,” said Dexter, “you’ll do better than that.”

Dexter stared down at the body of Karen Meyer. She had never been a pretty woman, but Leonie and Willard had removed what little superficial attractiveness she might have had. They worked well together. It was kind of worrying. Dexter would have to talk to her. He didn’t want her getting too close to Willard. He and Shepherd had talked, and the way things were going, Willard wasn’t going to be around much longer.

Meyer had been easy to find. She’d transferred her business north, but had left word with the kind of people who might need her services in the future. It had taken Dexter just one phone call to find out where she was.

He’d always thought Meyer was smart, and relatively unsentimental. It was all money with her, and he guessed that the woman had given her a big share of Moloch’s stash in return for her help. It must have been a lot to make her risk crossing Moloch. He hoped that she’d had a good time with it because, in those final minutes in her basement, she had paid in spades for what she’d done.

“Did you find someone?” asked Moloch.

“Yeah. He’ll cost us five Gs to our friends Boston, plus a straight ten percent of whatever is on the island and some favors in the future.”

“He’d better be worth it.”

“They threw in a bonus, as a sign of goodwill.”

Moloch waited, and Dexter smiled.

“They gave us a cop.”

The changeover went smoothly. Lockwood and Barker came out on the first ferry and started the weekly test of the medical and fire equipment at the station house. At eleven A.M., Dupree checked in with them, then drove down Main Street to the post office, parking the Explorer in the lot on the right-hand side of the white clapboard building. He had called Larry Amerling that morning to tell him that there was something he wanted to talk to him about. It struck him that Amerling might have been expecting the call.

Amerling knew more about the island than anyone else, maybe even more than Dupree himself. His home was filled with books and papers on the history of Casco Bay, including copies of his own pamphlet, printed privately and sold at the market and at the bookstores over in Portland. Amerling was a widower, and had been for ten years. His children lived on the mainland, but they visited regularly, little trains of grandchildren in tow. Dupree usually spent Thanksgiving with Amerling, as it was his family’s tradition to return to the island and celebrate the feast together. They were good people, even if it was Larry Amerling who had first christened the policeman Melancholy Joe. Only a handful of people used that name, and few of them used it to his face, although among the cops assigned to the island the name had stuck.

Dupree thought that Amerling would be alone when he called, as the old man usually took a half-hour’s time-out at eleven A.M. to get some paperwork done and drink his green tea, but the postmaster had company that morning. The painter, Giacomelli, was standing against the wall, drinking take-out coffee from the market. He looked troubled. So did Amerling. Dupree nodded a greeting to them both.

“I interrupt something?” he asked.

“No,” said Amerling. “We’ve been waiting for you. You want some tea?”

Dupree poured some of the green tea into one of Amerling’s delicate little Chinese cups. He held the cup gently in the palm of his hand. The three men exchanged pleasantries and island gossip for a time before lapsing into an uneasy silence. Dupree had spent the morning trying to put his concerns into words, to explain them in a way that did not make him sound like a superstitious fool. In the end, Amerling saved his blushes.

“Jack’s here for the same reason you’re here, I think,” Amerling began.

“Which would be?”

“There’s something wrong on the island.”

Dupree didn’t respond. It was Jack who spoke next.

“I thought it was just me, but it isn’t. The woods feel different, and…”

“Go on,” said Amerling.

Jack looked at the policeman.

“I haven’t been drinking, if that’s what you’re thinking, least of all not enough for this.”

“I didn’t think that at all,” said Dupree. There was no way to tell if he was lying or not.

“Well, you may reconsider when you hear this. My paintings are changing.”

Dupree waited a heartbeat.

“You mean they’re getting better?”

There was a burst of laughter that eased the tension a little and seemed to relax the painter slightly.

“No, smart-ass. They’re as good as they’re gonna get. There are marks appearing on the canvases. They look like men, but I didn’t put them there. They’re in the sea paintings and now they’re in some of the landscapes as well.”

“You think someone is sneaking into your house and painting in figures on your work?”

He tried to keep the disbelief from his voice. He almost succeeded, but Jack spotted it.

“I know it sounds weird. The thing of it is, these figures aren’t painted on.”

He reached down to the floor and lifted up a board wrapped in an old cloth. He removed the cloth, revealing one of his seascapes. Dupree stepped closer and saw what looked like two men in the shallows. They were little more than stick figures, but they were there. He reached out a finger.

“Can I touch it?”

“Sure.”

Dupree ran his finger over the board, feeling the traces of the brush strokes against his skin. When he came to the figures, he paused, then raised the tips of his fingers to his nose and sniffed.

“That’s right,” said Jack. “They’ve been burned into the board.”

He picked up a second painting and handed it to Dupree.

“You know what this is?”

Dupree felt uncomfortable even looking at the painting. It was certainly one of Jack’s better efforts. He sucked at sea and hills, but he did good trees. They were mostly bare and in the background of the picture, almost hidden by mist, Dupree could make out a stone cross. It was definitely a departure for the painter.

“It’s the approach to the Site,” he said. “I have to tell you, Jack, you’re never going to sell this painting. Just looking at it gives me the creeps.”

“It’s not for sale. I do some of these for, well, I guess out of my own curiosity. Tell me what you see.”

Dupree held the painting at arm’s length and tried to concentrate on it.

“I see trees, grass, marsh. I see the cross. I see-”

He stopped and peered more closely at the detail on the canvas.

“What is that?”

Something gray hung in the dark place between two trees, close by the cross. He almost touched it with his finger, then thought better of it.

“I don’t know,” said Jack. “I didn’t paint it. There are others, if you look hard enough.”

And there were. The closer he looked, the more apparent they became. Some were barely blurs, the kind of smears that appeared on photographs when someone moved and the shutter speed was kind of slow. Others were clearer. Dupree thought he could distinguish faces among them: dark sockets, black mouths.

“Are these painted on?”

Jack shrugged his shoulders. “They look painted to you?”

“No, they look like photographs.”

“You still afraid I might be drinking too much?”

Dupree shook his head. “I’d say you’re not drinking enough.”

Amerling spoke.

“You going to tell me you came here because you’re worried about raccoons, or have you felt something too?”

Dupree sighed. “Nothing specific, just an unease. I can’t describe it, except to say that it’s a sensation in the air, like the prelude to an electrical storm.”

“That’s about as good a description as I’ve heard. Other people have felt it too, the older folk, mostly. This isn’t the first time something like this has occurred. It happened before, in your daddy’s time.”

“When?”

“Just before George Sherrin disappeared, but it wasn’t quite like this. That buildup came quickly, maybe over a day or two, then was gone again just as quickly. This one is different. It’s been going on for longer.”

“How long?”

“Months, I’d say, but it’s been so gradual most people haven’t even noticed it until now, if they’ve noticed it at all.”

“But you did?”

“I’ve been feeling it for a while. It was the accident that confirmed it; the accident, and what the Lauter girl said before she died.”

“She was in pain. She didn’t know what she was saying.”

“I don’t believe that. I don’t think you do either.”

“She was talking about the dead.”

“I know.”

Dupree walked to the window of the little office and looked out on Island Avenue. It was quiet, but it wasn’t peaceful. Instead, it was like a community awaiting the outbreak of some long-anticipated conflict, or perhaps that was just a tormented policeman, a drunk, and an old romantic trying to impose their own interpretation on an innocent world.

“People have died on the island before now, some of them pretty violently,” Dupree said. “We’ve had car crashes, fires, even a homicide or two. You think they all saw ghosts before they died?”

“Maybe.”

Amerling paused.

“But I’d guess not.”

“So why the Lauter girl, and why now?”

“Your father, he told you about the island?”

Once again, Dupree glanced at Jack. He remembered taking the old man out on his porch, after Danny Elliot had found him with blood pumping from a deep scalp wound. He had been furious with the painter, maybe because he saw in him some of his own flaws, but mostly because he had scared the boy. Now he was about to reveal a part of himself that he had kept hidden from everyone. Jack, however long he might have been on the island, was still an outsider.

Amerling guessed his thoughts.

“If you’re worried about Jack, then I’d lay those worries to rest. He’s more sensitive to this place than some who have grandparents buried in the cemetery. I think you can speak safely in front of him.”

Dupree raised his hands helplessly before the painter.

“I understand,” said Jack. “No hard feelings.”

“He told me,” began Dupree. “He went through the histories of the families, right from day one. He made me memorize them all. He told me about the slaughter and the new settlement that followed later. He told me about George Sherrin and why he thought Sherrin had been taken. He told me all of it. I never fully understood. I don’t think I even believed some of it.”

“But he tried to explain it to you?”

“Yes. He told me what he himself believed. He believed that this place was always different. The natives didn’t come out here, and they used most of these islands before the whites arrived, but for some reason they wouldn’t come out to this one.”

Amerling interrupted. “They had pretty good reasons for not coming here. This island is kind of an anomaly. It’s big, but it’s way out on the outer ring. They only had bark canoes to get them out here. I think it was just too far away for them to worry about it.”

“Well, anyhow, then the settlers came,” continued Dupree, “and they were killed. My father thought like his father: what happened to them tainted the island, and some remnant, some memory of those events, clung to this place. The violence of the past never went away. Something of it stayed here, like a mark in stone. Now there’s a balance on the island, and anything that endangers that balance has to be dealt with. If it isn’t…”

He swallowed the last of the tea.

“If it isn’t dealt with, then something else on the island will deal with it in its own way. My father thought that it had found a way to purge itself of anything that might threaten it, the way a person’s system will flush out toxins. That’s what happened to Sherrin. He was toxic, and the island dealt with him. That’s what my father believed.”

He finished and stared at the leaves in the bottom of his cup. It sounded absurd, but he remembered the look on his father’s face as he told him the history of the island. His father was not a superstitious man. In fact, he was the most realistic, no-bullshit man that Dupree had ever met. Frank Dupree was the kind of man who would carry his own ladder around with him just so he could walk under it to show up more credulous folks.

Amerling poured himself some more tea, then offered the pot to Dupree. The policeman declined.

“Why do you drink this stuff, anyway?”

“It keeps me calm,” said Amerling.

After a pause, Dupree reconsidered and extended his cup. “Any port in a storm,” he said.

“Your father knew that this place was different,” said Amerling. “We talked about it some, and we both came to more or less the same conclusion. Sometimes, bad things happen in a place and it never truly recovers. The memory of it lingers. Some people are sensitive to it, some aren’t. I read once that Tommy Lee Jones, you know, that actor fella, he lived in the cottage where Marilyn Monroe committed suicide, or was murdered, or whatever you believe took her from this earth. Didn’t bother Tommy Lee Jones none. He’s not that kind of fella, from what I’ve read. But me, I don’t think I could have lived in a place like that, knowing what happened there. I believe, and I may be a fool, that something of its past must remain there, like damp trapped in its walls.

“What happened on Sanctuary was so much worse than a single murder. Like you say, it tainted this island, marked it forever. Then a bunch of rapists took a woman here a long time after, and they disappeared. Flash forward to George Sherrin, and he winds up under the roots of a tree. I was there when they dug him up, and I saw what the roots had done to him.”

Amerling leaned forward, grasping the teacup in both hands.

“He was an evil son of a bitch. There were stories about him, after he died. He tormented and abused his own children and they say he might have hurt children on the mainland.”

“I heard that too,” said Dupree. “My father believed it was so.”

“Well, if your daddy believed it, then it was true. I got no doubt in my mind now. The island, or whatever dwells here, wouldn’t tolerate him, and it got rid of him. There’s no better way of putting it than that.”

“But where does that leave the Lauter girl, and Wayne Cady? You’re saying they deserved what happened to them?”

“No, I don’t think the island played any part in that. They died because they’d been drinking and decided to boost a car. But I think something was drawn to that place as they died, because there’s an awareness now. This tension that we’ve all felt, it’s there for a purpose. I think when the crash happened, the nature of the tragedy-sudden, frightening-drew something. It came to see what was happening.”

“Something? Something like what?”

“I don’t know. Have you been out to the Site lately?”

“Not for a while.”

“It’s almost impossible to get to. The path’s become overgrown. There are fallen trees, briers. Even the marshes seem to be getting bigger.”

“You said ‘almost impossible.’ Does that mean you’ve been out there?”

Amerling paused. “Yesterday. Jack went with me. We didn’t stay too long.”

“Why?”

“It’s stronger out there. It’s like getting too close to the bars of the lion’s cage. You can feel the threat.”

“And there are no birds,” said Jack.

“Not out there, not anywhere,” said Amerling. “Haven’t you noticed?”

To tell the truth, Dupree hadn’t, but now that he thought about it, there was a silence to the island that he had never experienced before. The only bird that he had seen was the dying gull on Marianne’s lawn.

“That’s where your daddy and I differed about the island. He believed it was something unconscious, like a force of nature. A tree doesn’t think about repairing breaches in its bark, it just does it. He thought the island operated on that level.”

“But you don’t?”

“No, and the Lauter girl’s last words just confirm what I believe. Whatever is out there is conscious. It thinks, and reasons. It’s curious. And it’s getting stronger.”

Jesus, thought Dupree, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation. If anyone from the department heard me, they’d have me jacketed and locked up in a padded room. But the brass don’t come out here, so they don’t know what it’s like. They don’t understand it. Most of them don’t understand much about any of the islands, but this one in particular is beyond them. All I can do is hope that nothing happens that would force me to try to explain it to them.

Well, Chief, I guess you could say that the island is haunted, and I think some dead people came to take a look at Sylvie Lauter. Oh, they had lights, did I mention that? They must go through a hell of a lot of batteries, so that’s our main lead. We’re scouring the island for batteries…

“So, why now? Why should it be so strong now?”

“A convergence of circumstances, maybe. A new factor on the island that we don’t recognize, or haven’t noticed.”

“You’re thinking it’s dangerous?”

“Maybe.”

“Do you think it’s-” Dupree paused, uncertain that he wanted to use the word that came to mind, then relented.

“Do you think it’s evil?”

“Evil, that’s a moral concept, a human concept,” said Amerling. “It could be that whatever is on this island has got no concept of morality and no need for it. It just wants what it wants.”

“Which is?”

“I don’t know that. If I knew it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

“I’m not sure I even want to be having this conversation as it is.”

The postmaster grinned.

“Anyone else apart from us three was here, they’d say we were two foolish old men and a giant driven simple by what was ailing him.” Larry Amerling was never one to sugarcoat his words, but Dupree felt as if the older man had been reading his thoughts.

Jack interrupted.

“I heard from her father that there was some question about the Lauter girl’s death,” he said.

“Yeah, I heard that too,” said Amerling, “although I heard it from you.” He cocked an eyebrow at the painter.

“I just thought you might like to know,” said Jack. “Hell, you know just about everything else. I figure a gap in your knowledge would bug you more than most folks.”

Dupree didn’t answer immediately. He wasn’t sure that he should, but then both men already seemed to know as much as he did, or more.

“They found insect matter in her mouth, and beneath her fingernails,” he said. “It came from a moth, a tomato hornworm. They’re big and ugly and they’re all dead by September, and I’m not sure that I’ve ever even seen one on this island until recently.”

“I saw one on a tree in the cemetery, when they were laying Sylvie Lauter down,” said Jack. “I took it home, looked it up in a book, then pinned it to a board. Thought I might paint it sometime.”

“Paint it badly,” said Amerling. “You’d have to stick a note on it so folks would know what it was.”

“I’m not that bad,” said Jack.

“Yes, you are.”

“You came to my exhibition at the Lions Club.”

“There was free food.”

“I hope it poisoned you.”

“Nope, it was pretty good, unlike what was on the walls.”

Dupree interrupted them.

“Gentlemen! You’re like two old dogs fighting. It’s embarrassing.”

He picked up his cap and flicked at some dust.

“I was out at Doug Newton’s place. There was a moth there too, same type. I saw it on the curtains in his mother’s bedroom.”

But he wasn’t talking to the two older men as much as to himself. He ran his hands through his hair, then placed his cap carefully on his head. Moths. Why moths? Moths were attracted to flames, to light. Was that what it was, some form of attraction toward Sylvie Lauter and the old Newton woman? What did they have in common?

The answer came to him immediately.

Dying, that was what they had in common.

“How long have we got?” asked Dupree.

“Not long,” said Amerling. “I go outside, it’s like I can hear the island humming. The birds were the last sign. It’s bad news when even the birds fear to fly.”

“So what do we do?” asked Dupree.

“We wait, I guess. We lock our doors. We don’t go wandering near the Site at night. It’s coming soon, whatever it is. Then we’ll know. For good or bad, then we’ll know for sure.”

Chapter Seven

Moloch allowed them to rest for the remainder of the day, choosing to travel north under cover of darkness. Later that morning, Powell and Shepherd headed down to Marie’s Home Cooking and bought enough takeout for the day. On the way back to Perry Avenue, they stopped off at Big Gary’s Liquor Store and picked up two bottles of Wild Turkey to keep out the cold. Dexter and Braun took an opportunity to rest, once they had finished conversing softly with Shepherd in Karen Meyer’s kitchen.

Moloch had learned enough about Meyer from their past dealings to know that she was the kind of woman who would have few visitors. Her house was the last on the street, sheltered by trees and not overlooked by any of her neighbors. He didn’t know if she had a lover, but there were no photographs on the refrigerator, no little tokens of love on the shelf by the cookbooks. He went through her studio, heedless of the fingerprints that he left behind. If they found him, they already had more than enough evidence to justify the taking of his life. It mattered little to him if they added Karen Meyer’s name to the final tally.

The studio was neat and her computer was password protected. Moloch guessed that anyone trying to gain access to it without the password would probably have just two or three chances before the computer automatically commenced erasing its memory. He searched her bedroom and found a shoe box on the top shelf of her closet. It contained a collection of letters from a woman named Jessica, most of them expressions of love except for the most recent, dated October 1997, which detailed her reasons for ending the relationship. Jessica had met someone else, apparently. Moloch found it curious that Karen Meyer had retained the breakup letter. It seemed to suggest to him an element of emotional masochism in the forger’s personality. Perhaps some part of her might even have enjoyed what Willard and Leonie had done to her in the basement, although he somehow doubted it.

Her body still lay on the basement floor. She had resisted for longer than he expected, which surprised him. He had always thought of Meyer as a pragmatist. She must have known that she would have to tell him what she knew eventually, but something had made her hold out for so long that he feared she would die before she revealed the location of his wife and son. She had feelings for them. Moloch wondered if Meyer and his wife had been lovers. The possibility angered, and aroused, him.

Marianne Elliot. She had kept her first name almost intact, simply expanding it from the original Marian. It was a smart move, typical of Meyer. Moloch knew that those who assumed new identities sometimes gave themselves away in the first few months by failing to hear their new name when they were addressed by it, or by signing checks, rental agreements, or bank documents with their old name. The easiest way to avoid it was to give them a new name that began with the same letter, preferably even the same two letters, as their old name. So James became Jason, Linda became Lindsay.

Marian became Marianne.

His son was now named Danny, not Edward as they had agreed. Well, perhaps “agreed” wasn’t the right word. His wife had wanted something simple and boyish, but Moloch liked formal names. Trust the bitch to give his son a name like Danny as soon as she was out of his sight.

Moloch didn’t much care what happened to the boy. He might take him with him when he left the island, or he might leave him. He might kill him, or he might corrupt him. He hadn’t decided yet. All he knew was that he felt no paternal instincts whatsoever toward him, but his wife would understand before she died that it was within his power to do whatever he chose with his son.

He overturned the shoe box and watched as a jumble of photographs fell on Karen Meyer’s unmade bed. He went through them with his fingertips, turning over those that had landed facedown, until he found the one that he had suspected-even hoped-might be among them. She was a little different now: her hair was darker and she seemed to be downplaying her natural good looks. When he had met her first in Biloxi, she had used makeup with a delicacy that had impressed him, his experience of casino waitresses having led him to expect all of them to resemble the brides of Mary Kay. Now her face was completely unadorned, her hair lank. Her face was very pale and the photograph, taken in a photo booth, suggested that she had not slept well in a very long time. A perceptive man might look twice at her and begin to see something of the beauty that she was trying to disguise, and a very unusual man might suspect something of the history of pain and abuse that had led her to take such steps. The boy was on her lap, his finger raised to the camera, a birthday crown upon his head.

He had underestimated her, and that was what troubled him more than anything else, even more than the betrayal itself. He had thought that he knew her, knew her as intimately as only one who had explored both pleasure and pain through her could know her. He believed that he had broken her, for what was she but a thing to be used, part of a front to fool those who might come after him, the loving family man with the neat house, the pretty wife, the little boy who must surely have represented the first step on the road to a home filled with children and grandchildren?

Moloch’s was not the routine abuse of drunks and petty sadists, the kind that might at last force the object of their hatred to turn on them with a gun or a knife out of an instinctive desire for survival. No, Moloch’s capacity to hurt-emotionally, physically, psychologically-was more refined than that. The pain, the stress could never be allowed to become unbearable, and needed to be interspersed at times with moments of kindness, even tenderness; reminders of love, need, dependence. Yet somehow, despite it all, she had managed to keep something hidden from him, some vital part of herself that he was unable to touch, and it was that which had enabled her to escape him. He was impressed by what she had achieved. Perhaps they were closer in spirit than he had ever imagined.

He placed the photograph in his jacket pocket, then went back downstairs and turned on the television. Already, the TV news bulletins were describing how the search for the escaped man was expanding, extending the net to take in not only those states along the border but also the southern states as far north as Maryland. Worse, they had trawled for possible accomplices and now, in addition to Willard, he had to worry about Dexter and Shepherd. Their pictures had appeared on every news show, along with all known aliases. Their continued involvement was a risk, but a calculated one. Once they got to Maine, they could complete their work in a matter of hours, then head for Canada. Most of the routes across the border were unpatrolled, and those who chose to make the journey could easily slip across. Dexter would make sure of it.

Dexter was clever. That was why he had been entrusted with so much of the organization once it became apparent that Moloch would be forced to face the grand jury. Where Dexter went, Braun and Leonie would follow. As for Shepherd, he was a curious beast. He seemed to drift through his existence, never allowing himself to experience the extremes of pleasure or hatred. He appeared to take little from life, apart, occasionally, from the lives of others. There was no sentimentality to him, and while he was loyal, it was the loyalty of one who has signed a contract and proposes to remain strictly within its bounds. Any breach of its clauses by another would render the contract null and void and Shepherd would do whatever was necessary to extricate himself from its requirements.

As for the redneck, Powell, and the belligerent Tell, with his cornrows knitted tightly against his skull, tight as his pent-up rage at the world, Moloch knew little of them, except that Dexter vouched for them. They were men who would work for the promise of money, and that was enough. Moloch was not sure how much of his cash the bitch had spent, but there would be enough, he felt certain, to divide the best part of $500,000 between them, maybe even $600,000. The hardest parts-the escape, the associated killings, and the pinpointing of her location-were already behind them. With luck, their work would be done quickly and they would be scattered within two days. If there was less money than they had expected, then Powell and Tell were expendable. The others could take whatever was left. Moloch needed only enough to get him out of the country. After that, he would find ways to make some more. Perhaps he would ask Dexter to join him, once the time was right.

Except there was now a fatalism to Dexter that Moloch had not noticed before, although Moloch had often seen it develop in men like him. After years of violence, the odds in favor of meeting a violent end increased with every passing week. They had stayed too long in the life to imagine that they could enjoy an easy escape at this late stage. Dexter had not become reckless, as some of his kind did, and neither did he appear to have become overly cautious. Instead, that fatalism, that resignation, was written across his face. He looked like a man who wanted to sleep, to sleep and forget.

Moloch had seen him talking with Braun and Shepherd. He had not intervened. He knew the subject of their conversation: Willard, who now lay sleeping in the room across the hall. Moloch loved Willard, and knew that the love was reciprocated. There was a purity to Willard that was almost as beautiful as the boy himself, and unlike Shepherd, he would be loyal unto death. Moloch could only guess at what went on inside Willard’s head, and sometimes wondered what it would be like to probe the younger man’s mind. He feared that it would be similar to briefly inhabiting the consciousness of a vaguely self-aware spider: there would be blackness, patience, and a ceaseless, driving appetite that could never be sated, but there would also be inquisitiveness and rage and sensuality. Moloch had no idea where Willard had come from. He had not sought Willard out; rather, Willard had found him, and attached himself to him. He had approached Moloch for the first time in a bar on the outskirts of Saranac Lake, but the older man had been aware of him for some time, for Willard had been hovering at the periphery of his vision for a number of days. Moloch had made no move against him, although he took to sleeping with his gun close at hand and the locks in his hotel rooms carefully secured. The boy interested him, without Moloch really knowing why.

Then, exactly three days after Moloch had first sighted him, the boy had entered the bar and taken a seat in the booth across from him. Moloch had seen him coming, and in the time it had taken the boy to walk from the door to the booth, Moloch had unholstered his pistol, secured it with a silencer beneath the table, and wrapped the gun in a pair of napkins. It now lay between his legs, Moloch’s right index finger resting lightly upon the trigger.

The boy sat down carefully and placed his hands flat upon the table.

“My name is Willard,” he said.

“Hello, Willard.”

“I’ve been watching you.”

“I know. I was beginning to wonder why that might be.”

“I have something for you.”

“I’m straight,” said Moloch. “I don’t want what you have to sell.”

The boy showed no offense at the deliberate insult. Instead, his brow simply furrowed slightly, as though he didn’t fully understand the import of Moloch’s remark.

“I think you’ll like it,” he continued. “It’s not far from here.”

“I’m eating.”

“I’ll wait until you’re done.”

“You want something?”

“I’ve eaten.”

Moloch finished his plate of chicken and rice, eating with his left hand, his right remaining beneath the table. When he was finished, he laid down a ten and two ones to cover the food and his beer, then told Willard to lead the way. He picked up his coat, wrapped it around the gun, then stayed behind the boy until they left the bar and found themselves in the parking lot. It was a midweek night and only a handful of cars remained. Willard began walking toward a black Pontiac, but Moloch called him back.

“We’ll take mine,” he said.

He tossed Willard the keys.

“And you can drive.”

As the boy caught the keys, Moloch struck him hard with the butt of his gun and forced him against the Pontiac. He pushed the gun into the boy’s head, then frisked him. He found nothing, not even coins. When he stepped back, there was blood on Willard’s face from the wound in his scalp. His face was completely calm.

“You can trust me,” said Willard.

“We get to where we’re going, I’ll help you clean up that cut.”

“I been cut before,” said Willard. “It heals.”

They got in the car and Willard drove, unspeaking, for about ten miles, until they were close to High Falls Gorge. He turned left off 86, up a secluded driveway, then pulled up outside a two-story summer house.

“It’s in here,” he said.

He opened the door and moved toward the front of the house. Moloch stayed about five feet back from him.

“Anything happens, anything at all, and I’ll kill you,” said Moloch.

“I told you, you can trust me.”

Willard knelt down and took a key from the flowerpot by the door, then entered the house. He hit the hall lights so Moloch could see that they were alone. Despite his assurances, Moloch searched the house, using the boy as a shield as they entered each room. The house was empty.

“Who owns this place?”

Willard shrugged. “I don’t know their names.”

“Where are they?”

“They left on Sunday. They come up here for weekends, sometimes. You want to see what I have for you? It’s in the basement.”

They reached the basement door. Willard opened it and turned on the light. There was a flight of stairs leading down. Willard led, Moloch following.

Near the back wall was a chair, and in the chair was a girl. She was seventeen or eighteen. Her mouth was gagged and her arms and legs had been secured. Her hair was very dark and her face was very pale. She wore a black T-shirt and a short black skirt. Her fishnet stockings were torn. Even in the poor basement light, Moloch could see track marks on her arms.

“No one will miss her,” said Willard. “No one.”

The girl began to cry. Willard looked at her one last time, then said: “I’ll leave you two alone. I’ll be upstairs if you need anything.”

And seconds later, Moloch heard the basement door close.

Now, years later, Moloch thought back to that first night, and to the bound girl. Willard knew him, understood his appetites, his desires, for they existed in a similar, though deeper, form within himself. The girl was a courtship gift to him and he had accepted it gladly.

Moloch loved Willard, but Willard was no longer in control of his hunger, if he had ever truly been able to rein it in. The death of the woman Jenna and the damage inflicted on the bait for the escape indicated that Willard was spiraling down into some dark place from which he would not be able to return. Moloch loved Willard, and Willard loved Moloch, and love brought with it its own duties.

But then, as Moloch knew only too well, and as his wife was about to find out, each man kills the thing he loves.

Danny was kicking up a fuss, as he always did when his mother tried to leave him for an evening. It came from not having a father around, she believed. It had made him dependent, maybe even a little soft, and that worried her. She wanted him to be strong, because at some point he was going to have to learn about the world they had left behind, and the man who had contributed to his creation. But she also wanted him to be strong for her own selfish reasons. She was tired; tired of the constant fear, tired of looking over her shoulder, tired of having nobody on whom she could depend. She wanted Danny to grow up to be big and tough, to protect her as she had protected him. But that day, it seemed, was a long way off.

“Where are you going?” he asked again, in that whining voice he adopted when he felt that the world was being unfair to him.

“I told you already. I’m going out to dinner.”

“With Joe?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t like Joe.”

“Don’t say that, Danny. You know it’s not true.”

“It is true. I hate him. He killed a bird.”

“We went through this before, Danny. He had to kill it. It was hurt. It was in so much pain that the kindest thing Joe could have done was to put it out of that pain.”

She had given him the gull carved for him by Dupree. He had looked at it for a moment, then had cast it aside. Later, when she went to retrieve it from the floor, it was gone, but she had glimpsed it on the shelf in Danny’s room before they left the house. Her son was a complex little boy.

The car jogged as it hit a dip in the road, the headlights skewing crazily across the trees for a moment. She wondered if she should bring up what had been troubling her since earlier in the evening, or if she should just let it rest until the morning.

She had gone outside to put some water in the car and her attention had been drawn to the little grave that Joe had created for the dead gull. The stone that marked the spot had been moved aside, and the earth was scattered around what was now a shallow hole. The bird was gone, but she had found blood and some feathers nearby. It could have been an animal that had dug up the bird, she supposed, except that Danny had dirt beneath his nails when he’d eaten earlier that evening, and when she’d questioned him about it, he’d simply clammed up. It was only later, when she examined the grave, that she had begun to suspect what had happened.

She decided to leave matters as they were. She hoped to enjoy the night and didn’t want to leave her son after an argument.

“Will Richie be at Bonnie’s?”

“I’m sure he will,” said Marianne. Richie’s mental age wasn’t much more than Danny’s, but he seemed to care a lot about Danny, and Danny liked the fact that Richie deferred to him. That didn’t happen a lot for Danny, who had found it hard to make friends and to settle on the island.

She hung a left into Bonnie’s driveway and killed the engine.

Danny undid his seat belt and waited for her to come around and open the door. Light shone upon them as Bonnie appeared on the steps, her hair loose around her shoulders, a cigarette dangling from the fingers that cupped her elbow. Bonnie Claeson had endured a hard life: a husband who beat her, then ran off with a line-dance teacher; a son who would always be dependent on her; and a succession of men who were at best unsuitable and at worst unstable. Sometimes, Marianne thought, Bonnie Claeson appeared to live her life as if she were being paid by the tear. Then there was the accident, the one in which her nephew Wayne Cady had been killed. Marianne had attended the funeral, along with much of the island’s population, watching as the coffin was lowered into the ground at the small cemetery beside the island’s Baptist church, Bonnie’s sister so distraught with grief that when the time came to drop dirt on the coffin, she had fallen to her knees and buried her face in the damp earth, as if by doing so she might somehow burrow beneath the ground and join the dead boy.

Bonnie had been strong for her sister that day, but then she was strong in so many ways. It wasn’t easy for her raising a disabled son alone, and the state’s overburdened mental health system had been of little help to her during her son’s life. Much of the funding had traditionally gone to placing mentally ill children in psychiatric hospitals or residential programs, but Bonnie had resisted that from the start. For a time the state had provided at-home help to her after her husband left, but cuts in funding and the prohibitive cost of sending someone out to the island on a regular basis meant that the service was withdrawn after less than a year. Marianne was suddenly terribly grateful that Danny would never be so reliant on her, and that at some time in the future she might be able to lean on him for support.

Bonnie had been good to her from the beginning and she had returned that goodwill as much as she could, taking Richie for a night to give Bonnie a break, or bringing him on movie trips with Danny on weekends. She had never discussed her past with Bonnie, but Marianne knew that the older woman suspected more than she ever said. Bonnie had been a victim of enough bad men to recognize a fellow sufferer when she met her.

“Thanks for doing this,” Marianne said as she approached the step, her hand on Danny’s shoulder.

“It’s no problem, hon. How you doing, Danny?”

“Okay,” mumbled Danny.

“Just okay? Well, we’ll see if we can change that. There’s popcorn and soda inside, and Richie has got some new computer game that I’m sure he’s just dying to show you. How does that sound?”

“Okay,” repeated Danny in that same monotone.

Marianne raised her eyes to heaven, and Bonnie gave her an “I know” shrug in return. “If I’m not late, I’ll drop by to pick him up. Otherwise, I’ll be by first thing in the morning.”

“Don’t sweat it, hon. You just have a good time.”

Marianne kissed Danny on the cheek, hugged him, and told him to be good, then went back to her car. She waved good-bye as she drove, but Danny was already heading inside and his thoughts of her, and his anger with her, would soon be forgotten with the promise of new games to play. She picked up speed once she was back on the main road, which became Island Avenue. She parked across the street from Good Eats, the sound of bluegrass music coming to her from inside, and checked her makeup in the mirror. She touched up her lipstick, tugged at her hair, then sighed.

She was thirty-two years old and she was going on her first date in years.

With a giant.

Joe Dupree was waiting for her, a beer in front of him. He was seated at a table in the back of the restaurant, turned slightly sideways so that his legs didn’t hit the underside. Once again, she was struck by how out of place he must often feel.

Nothing ever sits right for him. Things are always too small, too tight, too narrow. He lives his life in a constant state of displacement. Even the island itself doesn’t seem big enough to hold him. He should be out in open spaces, somewhere like Montana, where he would be dwarfed by the scale of the natural world.

He rose as he saw her approach, and the table shuddered as he struck it with his thigh. He reached down to save a water glass from falling, liquid splashing the table and the single red rose in the vase at its center shedding a leaf as his hand made the clumsy catch. The restaurant was half full, mainly with local people, although she saw a young couple stealing curious glances at the big man. Visitors. Funny how, even after only a year here, she resented the presence of outsiders.

“Hi,” he said. “I was starting to worry.”

“Danny was kicking up some. He still doesn’t like it when I head out without him. If he had his way, he’d be sitting here now demanding french fries and soda.”

“Nothing wrong with that.”

She raised a quizzical eyebrow. “You want me to go back and get him?”

He lifted his hands in surrender. “No, you’re just fine.”

He reddened, thought briefly about trying to explain what he meant, then decided that it would only get him into further trouble.

In truth, it had been a long time since Joe Dupree had found himself in a social situation with a woman, and he figured that his skills in that area, limited as they were to begin with, were probably pretty rusty by now. Women occasionally came on to him, or they used to when Joe Dupree would take time out from the island to frequent the bars of the Old Port, the island’s little diesel ferry taking him over on its last scheduled run. He would drink in the city’s bars until one or two in the morning, then call Thorson and have him come pick him up. The old ferry captain didn’t usually mind. He didn’t sleep much anyway. On those rare occasions when Thorson couldn’t make it, Dupree would either hire a water taxi or take a small single room at a cheap hotel, where he would remove the mattress from the bed and place it on the floor, using cushions to support his legs where they overhung the end.

And in those bars, particularly the ones off the tourist trail, he would sometimes attract the attentions of women. He would hear them, two or three of them, laughing in that way that women with alcohol on their breath and sex on their minds will sometimes laugh, a hoarse, unlovely thing from deep inside them, their eyelids heavy, their eyes narrowing, their lips slightly pursed. Their comments would crawl across the dusty floor

I wonder if he’s big all over.

The hands and the feet. You always look at the hands and the feet.

or seep like smoke between the tables

I could make room for him.

Hon, they’d have to take something out of you to make room for what he’s got.

until at last they reached him and he would acknowledge them with a thin smile, and they would giggle some more and look away, or perhaps hold his gaze for a time with a look that spoke of tainted promises.

Sometimes he had taken them up on the offer made, and had usually regretted it. The last time it happened, he had accompanied the woman back to her little house in Saco, so neat and feminine that he instantly felt even more out of place than usual, afraid to move for fear that he might dislodge a china doll from the congregation of pale faces that seemed to gaze at him from every shelf, every ledge. She undressed in her bathroom and entered the bedroom wearing only a too-tight bra and black panties, a little fat spilling out over the straps at her back and the elastic at her waist. She was holding a cigarette, and she placed it in her mouth as she pulled back the sheets on the bed, undid the clasp of the bra, and slid it down her arms before hooking her thumbs into the waistband of her underwear and stepping out of them without once glancing at him. She climbed into the bed, drew the sheets up to her waist, then smoked her cigarette as he removed his own clothing, his face burning with shame and self-loathing.

He saw in her eyes not lust or need, not even curiosity, but merely the prospect of the temporary alleviation of her boredom with herself and her own desires. She took a last drag on the cigarette before she stubbed it out in the ashtray on the nightstand and pulled back the sheet, inviting him to join her. As he climbed into bed beside her, he heard the springs creaking beneath his weight, smelled the stale odor of smoke upon the pillows, felt her nails already raking five white trails along his thigh as her hand moved toward his sex.

He left her snoring, the china dolls watching him impassively as he slipped through the house, his shoes in his hands. He tugged them on as he sat on her porch steps, then called a cab from a pay phone and returned to the Old Port. On a bench by the Casco Bay Ferry Terminal he waited until light dawned, then walked down to Becky’s diner on Commercial and ate breakfast with the fishermen, working his way methodically through a plate of eggs and bacon, keeping his head down so that he would not catch the eye of any other diner. And when Thorson’s ferry drew toward the dock, carrying those who had jobs in the city, Joe Dupree was waiting for it, barely nodding at those who disembarked, until at last the boat was empty. He took a seat at the back of the ferry and when no further passengers appeared, Thorson started the engine and carried Joe Dupree away from Portland, the wind wiping the smell of perfume and booze and cigarettes from his clothes and hair, cleansing him of the proof of his sins.

Since then, he had not returned to the bars of the Old Port, and now drank little. He could see the surprise in the faces of the wait staff and in the smile of Dale Zimmer when he rose to greet the woman who now sat across from him. He didn’t care. It had taken him the best part of a year to work up the courage to ask her out. He liked her son. He liked her. Now she was saying something, but he was so lost in himself that he had to ask her to repeat it.

“I said, it’s hard to do anything in secret here. Seems like everyone knows your business before you do.”

He smiled. “I remember Dave Mahoney-he was heading on for seventy years of age, the old goat-got himself all worked up over a widow woman named Annie Jabar, who lived about half a mile down the road from him. Nothing had happened between them, nothing more than glances over the bingo table at the American Legion, I guess, or hands almost touching across the shelves at the market, but she was coming on to him, without a doubt. So one day Dave takes it into his head to do something about it. He puts on his best jacket and pants under his slicker, and heads out in the rain to walk down to Annie Jabar’s house. When he got there, she was waiting for him.”

He shook his head in amusement.

“Who?” asked Marianne. “The widow woman?”

“Nope. Dave’s wife. Don’t know how she did it, but she got there before he did. I figure she must have sprinted through the woods so that she’d be waiting for him, and she wasn’t much younger than Dave. She had a gun too, Dave’s varmint rifle. Dave took one look at her, turned around on his heel, and headed straight back home. Never again looked at the widow woman, or any other woman except his wife. She died a couple of years ago, and I heard tell that Annie Jabar might have hoped that she and Dave could get together now that his wife was gone, but far as I know he’s never gone next to near her since that day his wife confronted him and made him look down the barrel of his own rifle.”

“He loved her, then.”

“Loved her and was scared half to death of her. Maybe he figures she might still find a way to get back at him from the next world if he steps out of line, or maybe he just misses her more than he ever thought he would. I talk to him sometimes and I think he’s just waiting to join her. I think he realized how much she loved him when he saw that she was prepared to shoot him rather than let another woman take him, even at seventy years of age. Sometimes maybe you have to love someone an awful lot to be prepared to kill them.”

His attention was distracted momentarily by movement close to the door, so Dupree did not see the look that passed across Marianne’s face. Had he done so, their evening together might have come to an abrupt end, for he would have felt compelled to question her about it. Instead, he was watching a bulky man in a red-checked shirt, accompanied by his equally bulky wife, approaching the exit. As they left, the man gave Dupree a nod that was part acknowledgment, part dismissal. Marianne glanced over her shoulder, grateful for the distraction, and the man smiled at her before his wife gave him a sharp nudge in the ribs with her elbow that nearly propelled him through the door.

“Tom Jaffe,” said Dupree.

“His father runs the construction business, right?”

“That’s right. He’s near sixty-five himself now, but still won’t hand over the running of the business to Tom. Doesn’t trust him. Tom still believes he’s the Great White Hope. He was valedictorian the year I graduated from high school. Liked to think of himself as an orator.”

“How was his speech?”

“Terrible. It was basically an extended ‘Screw you’ to everybody he’d ever known. Somebody tried to run him over in the parking lot afterward.”

“Maybe it was just a misunderstanding.”

“Nope. I went around for a second try after I missed him. He could run, I’ll give him that.”

She laughed then, and for the first time, Dupree began to relax. The little restaurant filled up as the evening progressed, but there was never anybody left standing, waiting for a table. They talked about music and movies, and each spoke a little of the past, but not too much. In Joe’s case, his reticence was a result of embarrassment, shyness, and a feeling that his life on the island would seem somehow parochial and isolated to this woman with a soft southern accent, a young son, and a firsthand knowledge of places far from this one.

But the woman? Well, her reason for silence was different.

She spoke little of her past, because all that she could give him in return was lies.

They were on dessert when the restaurant door opened and Sally Owen entered. She was one of the bartenders at the Rudder, and had been for as long as Dupree could remember. Rumor was that, when she was younger, she once dragged a guy across the bar for not saying “please” after he’d ordered his drink. She was older now, and a little calmer, and contented herself with shooting dark looks at the ruder customers. Now she walked quickly up to their table and spoke to Joe.

“Joe, I’m real sorry to be disturbing you, but Lockwood is dealing with a possible burglary over on Kemps Road, and Barker is out with one of the fire trucks tending to a car fire.”

Dupree couldn’t hide his displeasure. He’d asked the cops on duty to try to give him a little space tonight, even if they were snowed under, which seemed unlikely at the start of the day. Still, it wasn’t their fault that cars were burning and houses were being burgled, although if they found the people responsible for either event, Joe Dupree was going to have some harsh words to say to the culprits.

“What is it, Sally?”

“Terry Scarfe is in the Rudder, and he’s not alone. He’s got Carl Lubey in there with him and they’re thick as thieves. Just thought you should know.”

Marianne watched Dupree’s expression darken. There was sorrow there too, she thought, a reminder of events that he had tried to forget. She knew the story of Carl Lubey’s brother. Everybody on the island knew it.

Ronnie Lubey had been a minor-league criminal, with convictions for possession with intent and aggravated burglary. On the night that he’d died, he had a cocktail of uppers and alcohol in his belly and was spoiling for a fight. He’d started shooting out the windows of his neighbor’s house, yelling about tree trunks and boundaries, and by the time Joe and Daniel Snowman, who had since retired, arrived out at the house, Ronnie was slumped against a tree trunk, mumbling to himself, puke on his shirt and pants and shoes.

When the two policemen pulled up, Ronnie looked at them, raised the shotgun, and shot wildly from the hip. Snowman went down, his left leg peppered with shot, and after an unheeded warning, Dupree opened fire. He aimed low, hitting Ronnie in the thigh, but the shot busted Ronnie’s femoral artery. Dupree had done his best for him, but his priority had been his partner. Snowman survived, Ronnie Lubey died, and his little brother, Carl, who also lived on the island, had never forgiven the big policeman.

Marianne didn’t know who Terry Scarfe was, but if he was keeping company with Carl Lubey, then he wasn’t anyone she wanted to know. During her first month on the island, Carl had tried to come on to her as she sat with Bonnie at the bar of the Rudder. When she’d turned down his offer of a drink, Carl called her every name he could think of, then tried to reach for her breast in the hope of copping a consolatory feel. She had pushed him away, and then Jeb Burris had climbed over the bar and hauled Carl outside. The young policeman Berman had been on duty that night. Marianne remembered that he had been kind to her and had warned Carl to stay away from her. Since then, she had endured only occasional contact with him when he came into the market. When she passed him on the street or saw him on the ferry, he contented himself with looking at her, his eyes fixed on her breasts or her crotch.

“I’d better go take a look,” Dupree said as Sally nodded a good-bye and returned to the bar. “You excuse me for a couple of minutes? I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He rose and laid his hand gently on her shoulder as he passed by her. She brushed his fingers with her hand, and felt his grip linger for a moment before he left her.

Dupree walked down Island Avenue and made a right. Straight downhill on the left was the island’s ferry terminal and across from it was the Rudder Bar. It had an open deck at its rear, which filled up with tourists during the summer but was empty now that winter had come. Inside, he could see lights and a half dozen people drinking and playing pool.

He entered the bar and saw Scarfe and Lubey immediately. They were sitting at the bar, leaning into each other. Lubey raised his glass as Sally came out from the small kitchen behind the bar.

“Hey, Sal, you got any shots that taste like pussy?”

“I wouldn’t know what pussy tastes like,” said Sally, glancing at Dupree as he drew closer.

Lubey lifted a finger and extended it to her.

“Then lick here,” he said, and the two men collapsed into laughter.

“How you doing, boys?” said Dupree.

The two men turned in unison to look at him.

“We’re not your boys,” said Lubey. His eyes were dull. He swayed slightly as he tried to keep Dupree in focus.

“It’s the Jolly Green Giant,” said Scarfe. “What’s wrong, Mr. Giant? You don’t look so jolly no more.”

“We don’t usually see you over here, Terry. Last I heard, you were doing three to five.”

“I got paroled. Good behavior.”

“I don’t think your behavior is so good tonight.”

“What’s your problem, Off-fis-sur?” said Lubey. “I’m having a drink with my buddy. We ain’t bothering nobody.”

“I think you’ve had enough.”

“What are you going to do?” asked Lubey. “Shoot me?”

Dupree looked at him. Lubey held the gaze for as long as he could, then glanced away, a dumb smile playing on his lips. Dupree returned his attention to Scarfe.

“I want you off the island, Terry. Thorson has a crossing in ten minutes. You be on that ferry.”

Scarfe looked at Lubey, shrugged, then slid from his stool and picked up his jacket.

“The Green Giant wants me off the island, Carl, so I got to go. I’ll be seeing you.”

“Yeah, be seeing you, Terry. Fight the power.”

Dupree stepped back and watched as Scarfe headed unsteadily for the door, then turned back to Lubey.

“You drive here?” he asked.

Lubey didn’t reply.

“I asked you a question, Carl.”

“Yeah, I drove,” said Lubey at last.

“Give me your keys.”

The other man dug into his pockets and found his car keys. As Dupree reached out for them, Lubey dropped them to the floor.

“Whoops,” he said.

“Pick them up.”

He climbed from the stool, bent down gingerly, then toppled over. Dupree helped him to his feet, picking up the keys as he did so. Once he was upright again, Lubey shrugged off the policeman’s hand.

“Get your hands off me.”

“You want me to put you in cuffs, I will. We can get a boat over here and you can spend the night in a cell.”

Lubey reached for his coat.

“I’m going,” he said.

“You can pick up your keys from the station house in the morning.”

Lubey waved a hand in dismissal and headed for the door. Behind the bar, Jeb Burris took off his apron and said: “I’ll give him a ride back.”

Dupree nodded and gave him Lubey’s car keys.

“Yeah, do that.”

Back outside, he watched as Terry Scarfe and two other people, tourists who’d been eating at the restaurant, climbed onboard Thorson’s ferry and headed back to Portland.

Scarfe kept looking back at the island, and Dupree, until the ferry faded from view.

Marianne had enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine at dinner, Dupree a single beer. He offered to drive her back to her house and said he would arrange to have her car dropped at her door before eight the next morning. She sat in the passenger seat of Dupree’s own Jeep and stared in silence through the side window. Dupree wanted to believe that it was a comfortable silence, but he sensed her sadness as he drove.

“You okay?”

She nodded, but her mouth wrinkled and he could see that she was near tears.

“It’s been a long time, you know?”

He didn’t, and he felt foolish for not knowing.

“Since what?”

“Since I had a nice evening with a man. I’d kind of forgotten what it was like.”

He coughed to hide his embarrassment and his secret pleasure.

“You always cry at the end of a nice evening?”

She smiled and wiped at the tears with the tips of her fingers.

“Hell, I must have snail trails running down my face.”

“No, you look good.”

“Liar.”

He hung a right into the driveway of her small house and pulled up outside her door. She looked at him.

“Would you like to come in? I can make you coffee.”

“Sure. Coffee would be good.”

He followed her inside, and sat on the edge of the living-room couch as she went to the bathroom to fix her makeup. When she came out, she went straight to the kitchen and put the kettle on the stove, then swore.

“I’m sorry,” she called out. “I’ve only got instant.”

“It’ll be just like home.”

She peered around the corner of the doorway, unsure if he was being sarcastic.

He caught the look.

“No, honest, it will be just like home. All I ever make is instant.”

“Well, if you say so. Put on some music, if you like.”

He rose and walked to the pile of CDs that lay stacked against the wall. A JVC system stood on the third shelf of the Home Depot bookcase. He tried squatting and looking sideways at the CDs, then kneeling. Finally, he lay flat on the floor and ran his finger down the spines.

“I don’t recognize any of this stuff,” he said as she came into the room carrying two mugs of coffee on a tray.

“You’re out of touch,” she said.

“Radio reception sucks this far out, and I don’t go over to the mainland as much as I used to. Hey, are the Doobie Brothers still together?”

“I hear Michael McDonald left,” she said. “Things aren’t looking so good for Simon and Garfunkel either.”

He smelled her perfume as she knelt down beside him, and her arm brushed his hair gently as she reached across and carefully removed a disc from the pile. He placed his hand against the discs beneath, steadying them so that they would not fall. She put a bright blue CD into the player, then skipped through the tracks until she got to number six. Slow funk emerged from the speakers.

“Sounds like Prince,” he said.

She cocked an eyebrow at him. “Maybe you’re not so out of touch after all. You’re close. It’s Maxwell. This track’s called ‘Til the Cops Come Knockin’. I thought you might appreciate the humor.”

“It’s good,” he said. “The song, I mean. The humor I’m not so sure about.”

She swiped at him playfully, then rose and sipped her coffee, her body swaying slightly to the music. Dupree watched her from the floor, then turned awkwardly and stood from the knees up. He lifted his coffee mug, instinctively grasping it in his hand instead of trying unsuccessfully to fit his finger through the handle. Little things, he thought. It’s the little things you have to remember.

Marianne walked to the window and looked out on the dark woods beyond. Her body grew still. He waited for her to speak.

“The bird-” she began, and he felt his back stiffen in response. Had she also noticed their absence? Instantly, his conversation with Amerling and Jack returned to him, and the pleasure of the evening began to dissipate like smoke.

“The gull that you put out of its misery?”

He felt relieved for a moment, until he thought about Danny and the look on his face after he had killed the bird.

“Like I said, I’m sorry about that,” he interrupted. “I should have made him walk away.”

“No, it’s not that. I think Danny dug it up, after you’d left. I think he dug it up and…did something to it.”

“Like what?”

“I found blood and feathers.” She left her fear unspoken, hoping the policeman would pick up on it.

Dupree put his cup down and stood beside her.

“He’s a boy. They can be curious about things like that. If you want, I can talk to him.”

“I guess I’m just worried.”

“Has he ever hurt any living animals?”

“I’ve told him off for throwing stones at cats, and he’s mischievous about bugs and stuff, but I don’t think he’s ever really hurt anything.”

“Well, then. I’d maybe leave him be this time.”

She nodded, but he sensed once again that she was far away from him, walking in the country of her past. He finished his coffee and placed the mug carefully on the tray.

“I’d better be going,” he said.

She didn’t reply, but as he moved to get his coat, her hand reached for him and laid itself softly upon his arm. He could feel the heat of her through the fabric of his shirt. She looked up at him, and the expression on her face was unreadable.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “Like I said, it’s been a long time. I’ve forgotten how this should go.”

Then he inclined his head and body toward her, bending almost double to reach her. He kissed her, and her mouth opened beneath his, and her body moved against him. Later, she led him into her bedroom and they undressed in darkness, and he found her by the light of her eyes and the paleness of her skin and the fading scent of her perfume. For a time, all of their pain was forgotten, and the night gathered them to itself and wrapped them, briefly, in peace.

And while they made love, the painter Giacomelli sat in his studio, the lamp on the table casting its harsh light across brushes and paints and leaning canvases. Jack wanted a drink. He wanted a drink very badly, but he was too afraid to drink. He wanted to be alert and ready. After his conversation with Dupree and Larry Amerling, he had gone for a late-afternoon walk along the wooded trails that crisscrossed the center of the island, but he had not gone as far as the Site. Instead, he had stood at a forest of dead trees, the roots drowned by bog, and looked toward the dark interior in which the ruins lay. There was a stillness there, it seemed, the kind of quiescence that comes on late-summer days when the sky is overcast, the heat oppressive and unyielding, and the world waits for the weather to break and the skies to explode violently into rain. He stood on the trail, looking out over the patch of dead beech trees, their trunks gray and skewed as their decaying root structures failed to hold them upright. A mist seemed to hang about them-no, not a mist, exactly, but rather it appeared as if their slow decay had now become visible, the tiny fragments combining to cast a veil over the trees and the ground. He dragged his fingers across the front of his coat and raised his hand before him, expecting to see them coated in gray, but they were clean.

He walked no farther that day.

Now he sat and stared at one of the flawed paintings, which were, in their way, better than anything that he had ever done before, for the waves seemed to move over the bodies, causing them to bob slightly in the tide, and there was a silver light over the waters and the rocks that he had never previously managed to capture, for it had never been apparent to him until now. In fact, he admitted, he couldn’t recall adding the sheen of light to the picture either, and no moon hung in the dusk sky of his work.

Or what used to be his work.

Moloch woke.

For a moment, he felt himself in the semidarkness of the prison, for in the cell block a dull light hung over all things, even at night. He could hear men snoring, and footsteps. He raised himself from the sweat of his pillow and ran his hands through his hair, then saw Willard, now also awake, watching him from his post beneath the window, the curtains drawn to discourage snoopers.

He had been dreaming again, but this time there was no girl and no killing. Instead, he was alone among the trees, walking through wooded trails, dead leaves crunching beneath his feet, moonlight gilding the branches. Yet when he looked up there was no moon visible, and the skies were black with clouds. Ahead of him lay a darkness, marked only by the thin shapes of dead beech trees, impaled upon the earth like the spears of giants.

Something waited for him in the shadows.

I could map this place, he thought, this landscape of my dreams. I know it well, for I have seen it every night for the last year, and each time it becomes more familiar to me. I know its paths, its rocks, the landings along its coastline. Only that darkness, and what lies within it, is hidden from me.

But in time, I will know that too.

He got to his feet. Willard remained seated, his eyes fixed on him.

“You okay?” asked Moloch.

“Dexter doesn’t like me,” said Willard. “Shepherd neither.”

“They don’t have to like you.”

“I think they want to hurt me.”

Moloch was grateful for the cover of darkness.

“They won’t do that. They’ll do what I say.”

“What you say,” echoed Willard. He spoke in a monotone.

“That’s right. Now let’s go downstairs, get something to eat.”

He waited until Willard rose. For a moment, they stood together at the doorway, each seemingly unwilling to turn his back on the other. At last, Willard stepped through, and Moloch followed him, just as Moloch had followed him from the bar years before.

I trust you.

Followed him to a house.

They’ll do what I say.

Followed him to a woman.

What you say.

And bound himself to Willard in damnation.