Bad Men

Chapter Eight

The giant was gone. He left her before the clock read five, for he would soon have to relieve the patrolmen on duty and allow them to catch the ferry back to the mainland. A new cop was coming over on the return leg; a rookie, he said, one who had never been given island duty before. He stroked her hair as he spoke, his arm holding her to him as they lay close together in the false intimacy resulting from their lovemaking.

For it was false. Dupree wanted to be close to her, but how could he draw near when she would tell him so little and when he suspected the veracity of even those small details that she chose to reveal? In the restaurant, he had been startled by how beautiful she looked. During her time on the island, it had seemed to him that she did all that she could not to attract attention, to downplay and even to camouflage her looks. But when she’d entered Good Eats that night, heads had turned, and Dupree had tried hard not to look smug as she walked to his table. It made him determined that the night should be special for her, for them both. Without being asked, Dale Zimmer had taken personal responsibility for their meal, moving between the kitchen and the dining room, solicitous without being overbearing. From their window table overlooking the water they could see the lights of the neighboring islands shining brightly, like small night suns hoping to dazzle the stars. In the candlelight, he had found himself occasionally overawed by her and had concentrated so hard on trying not to break or spill anything that his head hurt by the end of the meal. The only taints upon the evening were the encounter with Lubey and Scarfe at the Rudder, and Dupree’s niggling concern at the fact that his companion was still keeping things from him.

Marianne was aware of his unease. Her years spent moving and hiding had heightened her perceptions, making her acutely sensitive to how others were regarding her. Now, alone, she replayed the events of the previous night in her mind, recalling his reactions, his hesitations, the fleeting changes in expression as he listened to her speak. She had not intended the night to end as it had, or if she had, then she had not admitted it to herself. But as the evening went on, and the wine began to have its effect, she wondered what it would be like to make love to him, to take him inside her. She had been a little afraid; afraid of the weight of him, his bulk, and the awkwardness that came with it, for there was little that was graceful about him. He was a man constantly waiting for the sound of falling objects, a man always out of step with the world. But then he came to her bed, and he was gentle, and his touch was surprisingly tender.

She felt guilty for lying to him about her past, but she had no choice in the matter. To tell him the truth could lead to her losing Danny. Worse, it would expose her, and then he would find out.

And his people would come.

Lost amid birdsong, the warmth of him still upon the pillow, Marianne began to cry.

Dupree drove first to his own house, where he showered and changed into his uniform. In his bathroom, as he listened to the water running in the shower, he smelled Marianne upon him and felt a twinge of regret that her scent would soon be washed from his body. Later, after he had changed, he picked up his shirt from the night before and brought it to his face. There was a small stain on the material where her face had pressed against him and he touched the traces of makeup with his fingertip. Then he carefully placed the shirt in the bathroom closet, above the laundry basket.

Barker was sitting in the office reading a novel when Dupree arrived. The sound of running water came from the open bathroom door, where Lockwood was brushing his teeth.

“Sleep well?” asked Barker. He was grinning.

“Pretty good,” said Dupree, maintaining a poker face.

“Dinner good?”

“That was pretty good too.”

“Breakfast?”

“I haven’t eaten breakfast yet.”

“You should eat breakfast. You need to keep up your strength. I like a woman to make me breakfast the morning after.”

Dupree scowled at him. “Is this in the real world, or the fantasy one?”

Now it was Barker’s turn to frown. “Hey, my wife makes breakfast every morning, now that I come to think of it. Sometimes we even have sex the night before. Not often, but sometimes.”

“More than I need to know,” said Dupree. “So much more than I need to know.”

Lockwood came out of the bathroom. He walked like a dancer on the balls of his feet. He and the overweight Barker were an unlikely pairing, but Dupree liked them both in their own way.

“I borrow you for a few minutes?” Dupree said to Lockwood. He wanted someone to help him take Marianne’s car back to her house, but he wasn’t about to ask Barker to do it. Lockwood was less likely to use his suspicions about Dupree’s nocturnal activities as a source of humor.

“Sure.”

Lockwood grabbed his jacket and followed Dupree outside.

“I have to take a car back to its owner. I’d like you to follow me in the Explorer, you got nothing else to do, and give me a ride back here afterward.”

“No problem.”

“I appreciate it.”

They drove out to Marianne Elliot’s house. Dupree parked outside her front door, leaving the keys in the ignition. He looked up at the window of her bedroom, but the drapes were closed. He wondered what she was doing, until he saw the drapes move slightly and then Marianne was standing at the window, looking down on him. She smiled nervously and gave him a little wave. He waved back, then walked over and got into the Explorer next to Lockwood.

Lockwood looked at him.

“So, did she make you breakfast?”

Dupree reddened.

“I asked you to come along because I didn’t think you were as big a horse’s ass as Barker.”

Lockwood shrugged.

“Not smaller, just quieter.”

They drove along in silence for a time, until Lockwood asked Dupree if Sally Owen had found him last night.

“Yeah, I took care of it.”

“Lubey give you any trouble?”

“Nope, just shot his mouth off some.”

“You think he and Terry Scarfe were just catching up?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they’re thinking of forming a book club.”

“A picture-book club. Those guys are dumb.”

“Lubey is, but Scarfe is a little smarter. He’s like a rat. He’d sell his mother’s corpse for cash, if he could bother to dig her up.”

“You think he was dealing on the island?”

Dupree winced. He’d been so distracted by Marianne that he hadn’t bothered to search either Scarfe or Lubey, yet he didn’t believe Scarfe would be stupid enough to bring drugs over with him. But he hadn’t known that Scarfe and Lubey were friendly, and even though they were laughing together the night before, he still got the feeling that they weren’t particularly close. Scarfe wanted something from Carl Lubey and that couldn’t be good because Carl Lubey had nothing positive to offer anyone.

“I’ll keep an eye on Lubey,” he said at last. “You hear anything about Scarfe over in Portland, maybe you’d give me a call.”

“Will do,” said Lockwood. They turned onto Island Avenue. It was still dark, but the sky was brightening slightly.

“Anything else I should know?” asked Dupree.

“Well, we’re still having trouble with the radios. Phones too.”

The problems with the radios were a recent development. The radio system in the Explorer was a dual arrangement. When the Portland PD had updated the island’s equipment, the old radio had been left in the Explorer and a second, portable system had been plugged into it. The new radio allowed the patrol cop to stay in touch with both the island base and dispatch over in Portland. The old system, meanwhile, enabled the island police to contact outside agencies such as the state police or the fire department. Over the last week, there had been gaps in transmission. Each of the island cops, Dupree included, had experienced some difficulty in raising either Portland or the station house, while on other occasions there had been the equivalent of a crossed line, faint voices audible in the background of regular transmissions. The radios had been checked and judged to be in perfect working order. “Ghosts in the machine,” as Lockwood had put it. Now the problem seemed to have spread to the phone lines.

“What about the phones?” asked Dupree.

“Same as the radio. Line was dead at least four times last night, just for a couple of seconds. You know, I picked up, there was nothing, then the dial tone kicked in. Other times there was light static. Could be the storm. Weathermen are saying that it’s going to hit the coast sometime tonight, although I’ve never heard of an approaching snowstorm affecting communications in that way before.”

Dupree didn’t reply. He was reminded of the previous day’s conversation with Amerling and Jack-It’s like the build up before an electrical storm-and the task that he had been putting off until after his dinner with Marianne: the visit to the Site.

“You know anything about this rookie cop Macy?” asked Dupree.

“I know she’s cute.”

“That’ll be a big help.”

“With respect, Joe, it’s not as if she’s entering a war zone.”

“No,” said Dupree. “I guess not.”

While the two men drove together, Sharon Macy stood in line for the small ferry. She’d heard tales about Thorson and his ferry, most of them, she hoped, gross exaggerations. One of the other field training officers, Christine McCalmon, had jokingly offered her the use of a life jacket for the trip. Macy had gone down to the dock the day before to take a look at the ferry as it left for its early-evening sailing. It looked a little rickety, but Macy figured it was better than rowing across Casco Bay in a teapot.

There were three other people beside her at the dock on Commercial Street, all with their eyes fixed on the little diesel boat, which was currently occupied by Thorson and his crewman. Thorson didn’t appear to be in too much of a hurry to get going. Macy thought he looked kind of hung over and figured that she could probably arrest him for some form of seagoing violation if she chose, but she guessed that nobody would thank her for it. Maybe if she took out her gun and forced him at gunpoint to get his ass in gear, then she might get their support and admiration. It was cold on the dock and the wind nipped painfully at her nose and ears.

“Cap’n,” said the man beside her, “what the hell are we waiting for?”

“Supplies,” said Thorson. “I promised Huddie Harris that I’d carry over some machine parts. His sister said she’d carry them along before five.”

“It’s five-fifteen now.”

“Ayuh.”

That was it, thought Macy. Thorson’s “ayuh” was the equivalent of a shoulder shrug, a complete abdication of responsibility. He had promised Huddie his parts, Huddie had probably promised him a couple of six-packs and some cash in return, and nobody was going to be allowed to get in the way of their arrangement. She kicked at a stone and pushed her hands deeper into her pockets as a woman wearing a quilted jacket shuffled along the dock pulling a beat-up metal box on wheels. Erin Harris; she lived in Portland but spent weekends out on Dutch with her brother. Macy recalled her face from an altercation outside the Eastland Hotel a month or two back, when the wife of one of Erin’s sometime boyfriends had decided that enough was enough and that Erin should quit messing with her man. Macy found it kind of difficult to figure out what the man in question saw in either of the women because Erin Harris was ugly on the outside and uglier still on the inside, but she was a bargain compared to the woman with whom she had been slugging it out that night. Barron had tried to intervene but Erin Harris had taken a swing at him and Macy had been forced to spray her. Maced by Macy, as Barron had put it later. It had all been kind of ugly. Macy kept her head down and watched quietly as the box was passed down to Thorson. Erin shot a glance at Macy as she passed. There was no disguising the hostility in her face. Macy didn’t look away.

“Okay,” said Thorson. “All aboard. We’re good to go.”

The four passengers climbed aboard the ferry, three occupying the wooden benches on the lower deck while Macy took a seat on the exposed upper deck. Minutes later they were heading out to sea, the gulls crying above them and gray waves breaking at the bow. Macy was already in uniform. An L. L. Bean backpack lay at her feet. She had taken Barron’s advice and brought a couple of books with her, as well as a Discman and a bunch of CDs. She slipped a CD into the player as Portland grew smaller behind her, the first bars of the Scud Mountain Boys’ “Freight of Fire” filling her ears as the spray splashed her face, the lead singer Joe Pernice advising her to bring her guns and all her ammunition; and she felt the weight of the pistol beneath her jacket and smiled as she recalled Barron’s tales of giants and the bones of men buried beneath pine trees.

Dupree was dealing with another reporter, one who was clearly trying to kill time during the early shift. This one was calling from Florida, so at least the interview didn’t have to be conducted face-to-face, which was something. Like most beat cops, Dupree had a natural distrust of reporters. There had been an accident down in the Keys a couple of days earlier in which three teenagers had drowned after a stolen car went off a bridge. The reporter was trying to pull together a feature about the danger of wayward teens and the accident on Dutch was a good tie-in.

“Yeah, the boy was dead when we got there,” said Dupree. “There was nothing we could do for him. The girl was badly injured. She died at the scene.” He grimaced even as he said the words, then listened to the next inevitable question about what safety measures had been introduced in the aftermath.

“We’re doing everything we can to ensure that a tragedy like this never happens again. We’re looking at ring-fencing the entire area, maybe sowing the slopes with scrap metal to stop anyone taking a car up there again.”

It should have been done years before, thought Dupree. I should have forced them to do it, but they wanted to leave the emplacement as it was, and anyway, kids will be kids. There had never been an accident on the slope before the deaths of Wayne Cady and Sylvie Lauter. It was just one of those things.

The reporter thanked him, then hung up. The clock on the wall read 6:25 A.M. The ferry would be due in soon, bringing with it his partner for the next twenty-four hours. Barker was already down at the little jetty, smoking a cigarette and kicking his heels impatiently, Lockwood sitting quietly beside him.

Dupree wondered again about Sharon Macy. The arrival of a new face was always difficult. The older cops were used to Joe by now, but the younger ones could never hide their feelings toward him when they encountered him for the first time; usually it was just surprise, sometimes amusement, and very occasionally a kind of uneasiness. He knew that there were those who referred to him as a freak. In addition, rookies and trainees rarely got sent out to the islands, but the rotation had been hit by illness, family obligations, and amassed vacation time. The department was filling in the gaps with whatever it had.

He climbed into the Explorer and drove down to the dock, trying to pick out the ferry in the semidarkness. The ferry service was subsidized by a small tax levied on the island’s residents each year. Nobody ever complained about the tax; they valued their independence, but the islanders still needed the safety net that Portland provided, with its stores and hospitals and movie theaters and restaurants. In the event of a medical emergency, like that time Sarah Froness had fallen off her roof and broken her back while stringing up Christmas lights, the cops on duty could radio for a helicopter pickup from the baseball diamond north of Liberty. It had taken the chopper crew just thirty minutes to get to Dutch on that occasion, and Sarah Froness could still be seen ambling into the market to buy her weekly supply of trash magazines and six-for-five beers, although she didn’t go climbing ladders on December 1 anymore and she walked a little more gingerly than before. Sylvie Lauter hadn’t been so lucky, and Dupree blamed himself for what had occurred. He replayed the events of that night over and over, wondering what might have happened if they had gotten to the crash site a little earlier, if old Buck Tennier had made the call as soon as he’d noticed the revving of the car’s engine instead of waiting until he heard the crash. But it wasn’t his fault. Dupree and the other cops should have patrolled the area more often, making it too risky for the wilder kids to use it. But Sanctuary was still a big island for a pair of cops to cover. They couldn’t be everywhere, and now two young people were dead.

Sanctuary: he had found himself using that name more often in recent days, not only when he was talking to older islanders like Amerling or Giacomelli, but also to visitors and new residents. He had even caught himself using the name when he was speaking with the reporter earlier that morning. He always thought of it as Sanctuary in his own mind, but over the years he had managed to make a distinction between that name and its official name in his day-today work. Sanctuary was its past, Dutch was its present. The fact that he was increasingly slipping into the old usage indicated a leaching of the past into his perception of the island, an acknowledgment of its grip upon him, upon all of them.

He thought of Sylvie Lauter’s final moments, of her pain and of the blood that had stained his clothing. He thought too of the autopsy and the peculiarities it had uncovered; there had been damage to the back of Sylvie Lauter’s tongue and throat, as if something had been forced into her mouth. Maybe she and Wayne had been arguing or fooling around before the crash, and somehow she had managed to wound herself. As he had told Jack and Amerling, gray matter had been found in one of the cuts, and had subsequently been identified as wing material from a moth: Manduca quinquemaculata, the tomato hornworm moth, a member of the sphinx moth family. Dupree had never seen one, and didn’t even know what the insect looked like until a specimen was sent to him from a sympathetic university researcher up in Orono. It had a four-inch wingspan and a large body that tapered almost to a point. Five or six pairs of yellow spots ran down its abdomen. There was a kind of beauty to its wings, which, even on this dead specimen, seemed to shimmer, but overall Dupree thought the insect ugly, the markings on its body and its strange pointed tail making it seem like some peculiar hybrid of moth and reptile.

He had no idea how fragments of that kind of insect, however small, could have found their way into Sylvie Lauter’s mouth. Most moths were dead by July or August. This moth’s season was June to September, but it was now January and no moth could survive the temperatures on the island. He had asked around, but nobody on the island bred moths. Killed plenty of them, sure, but didn’t breed them. Yet somehow Sylvie Lauter had come into contact with a tomato hornworm, the same species of moth that Dupree had found in the Newton woman’s bedroom and that now lay dead in its jelly jar beside the original specimen from Orono. It was peculiar, he told himself, but nothing more. For a second, he almost believed it.

Now the ferry could be clearly seen, a finger trail of diesel fumes rising behind it. Joe took his binoculars from the floor and trained them on the boat. It was still too far away to distinguish faces, but he counted six people onboard. He experienced a tingling in his fingers. His feet felt too big for his shoes, and despite the cold, the Explorer felt stuffy and warm. He rolled down the window, and as the icy breeze hit his face, he realized that he was sweating.

The ferry passed Fort Gorges, rust seeping in tear trails from the bars on its windows, then followed the mail-boat route between the Diamonds and Peaks, passing Pumpkin Knob on the right, then Long Island, before leaving Great Chebeague on its left and moving into Luckse Sound, skirting Chebeague once again as it headed into Broad Sound, slaloming between Bangs and Stave, Bates and Ministerial, the tiny islands that dotted Casco Bay, so many of them that they had been christened the Calendar Islands because it was once erroneously believed that there were 365 in all.

Slowly, a larger island began to emerge, rising slightly at its wooded center, the white finger of an observation tower visible at its highest point, a small, unmanned lighthouse at its northeastern extreme: Dutch Island, although Macy preferred the old nomenclature of Sanctuary. Macy had been curious about why Sanctuary should have remained in the jurisdiction of Portland. After all, Long Island, which was closer to the shore, was the responsibility of the Cumberland County Sheriff ’s Department. Sanctuary, meanwhile, was farther out, beyond even Jewell Island.

Barron had shrugged when she’d asked. “It goes way back,” he said. “It’s tied up with the first settlers and with the ones who came after. It’s to do with the Duprees as well. They used to be pretty wealthy, and they funded a lot of development in Portland, particularly after the fire of eighteen sixty-six. That money’s gone now, but the ties remain. The folks out on Dutch voted to remain under Portland’s jurisdiction, they pay taxes, and with Melancholy Joe out there being a martyr and doing more than his fair share, it doesn’t cost the city too much.”

Macy could see a black-and-white Explorer parked above the passenger shelter. The slowly rising sun shone on the windshield.

The giant was waiting.

The ferry docked and Macy shouldered her bag. Erin Harris was the first to disembark. Her brother was waiting for his machine parts beside a red Dodge truck. She could see the family resemblance, since they were both ugly and both looked like men. He glanced once at Macy, recalling her from his efforts to bail his sister out, but there was no hostility in his look. After all, it was his sister she had maced, not him, and it didn’t look as if he was too fond of her anyway. She spotted the two cops, Barker and Lockwood, and exchanged some words of greeting. They wished her luck, she thanked them, and then headed up to the Explorer.

The door of the vehicle opened and a man climbed out. Her first instinct was to wonder how he had managed to get into the Explorer to begin with. His great frame unfolded like that of some huge dark insect, until he towered almost two feet over her. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of shades and he wore no cap. He extended a hand the size of a shovel blade.

“Joe Dupree,” he said.

She allowed her own hand to be briefly engulfed in his, like a little fish being swallowed up by an eel.

“Sharon Macy.”

He released her hand. “Put your stuff in the back. You want the tour?”

“Sure. Do we get to stop and take pictures?”

He laughed briefly. It sounded, she thought, like tectonic plates might sound as they rubbed against one another beneath the earth.

“I think you can safely leave your camera in your bag.”

They did a U-turn, then headed up the short road that led from the jetty to the main intersection. Dupree hung a left.

“You always meet the ferry?”

“Try to. It’s more important in summer than winter. We get a lot of people through here in July and August. I was only kidding about the pictures. This place is beautiful in summer and there are some pretty expensive summer homes dotted around the island. Mantle, the guy who runs the Fable computer company? He has a house here. Big Time Warner executive named Sandra Morgan owns a cottage out by Beech Cove, and there are a couple of others too. They’d be real pissed if someone trashed their houses.”

He pulled in at the redbrick municipal building.

“We do it all out here. There’s a doctor comes out from the mainland two afternoons a week, and Doc Bruder is still here, although he’s officially retired, but we’re the first point of contact. We’re also the fire department, game wardens, school patrol, crossing guards, and dogcatchers.”

He left the Explorer. Macy followed. The sliding garage doors were open, revealing four vehicles parked inside. “Medcu Fourteen,” said Dupree, pointing at the ambulance inside the door. “If an emergency arises, we go out in this, do what we can to get the patient comfortable, then get them to the ferry landing or, in a really urgent case, out to the baseball diamond for a chopper pickup.”

He moved on to the red fire trucks, and patted the first.

“This is Engine Fourteen. We use it mostly to pump water. Over there is Ladder Fourteen, the primary attack vehicle. That’s what we take out to fires while we’re waiting for the local volunteers to get organized. That smaller truck in the corner is Tank Fourteen. Basically, it’s just a big bucket on wheels. We take it out to those places on the island that don’t have hydrants.”

“Are there many of those?”

“A couple,” he said, in a tone of voice suggesting that half the island was probably without hydrants. He carried on into the station house. There was an open area with a table and two chairs, some books and magazines on the table. To the left was the communications center: a radio, a computer, a bulletin board pasted with notices, reminders and scribbled notes. A large map of the island dominated one wall.

“We have a secretary?”

“Nope. All nine-one-one calls go through the dispatch center in Portland, but most people just call us direct. Paperwork, filing, well, we do that ourselves.”

Across the main reception area was a second room, housing an emergency generator, various pieces of equipment, and a locker containing a single shotgun.

“This is it for weapons?” said Macy.

“We don’t have too much call for SWAT teams out here,” said Dupree. “Last time I used this was to kill a rabid raccoon. It had been so long since I’d fired it, I was just grateful that it didn’t blow up in my face.”

Macy took the Mossberg pump-action from his hands. It had been cleaned recently, she noticed.

“Doesn’t look so bad,” she said.

“I gave it a pretty good cleaning a day or two back,” said Dupree.

She glanced at him, alerted by his tone.

“Why, something happen?”

“No,” he said. “But you never know.”

He wasn’t smiling.

“Guess not,” she said.

Upstairs was a sofa bed, a TV, some chairs, a small kitchen area, and a bathroom with a shower stall and toilet.

“No cells,” she said.

“Nope. If we make an arrest, we call Portland. They send out a boat and take the prisoner back. Until then, there are two steel loops in the main reception area. I’ve had to use them a handful of times.”

“We’ve only got one patrol vehicle?”

“We used to have a golf cart as well, but it broke down. I live about two hundred feet from here and I’ve got my own Jeep if we need another vehicle. Come on, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and introduce you to some people.”

As Macy followed him from the building she rubbed her fingers together, feeling the oil on her skin. She couldn’t be certain, but from the smell of the shotgun it had been fired recently.

Somebody had been practicing.

Dupree introduced her to the folks at the market, to the Tooker sisters at the diner (Nancy Tooker half-jokingly warned her to stay away from “her” Berman), to Dale Zimmer and Jeb Burris, and, finally, to Larry Amerling. By then it was time for lunch, and Dupree suggested to Macy that she take the Explorer and drive around the island in the company of the postmaster while he made some calls. Amerling, the old Lothario, was quite content to spend his lunch hour in the company of an attractive young woman, especially one who had read his book.

“If he tries anything,” Dupree warned her, “shoot him.”

“What if she tries anything with me?” Larry protested.

Dupree looked hard at Macy. “You get that desperate, shoot yourself.”

There was no road leading directly to the Site, which was surrounded on three sides by patches of bog. Instead, Dupree parked at the top of Ocean Street, which ran north from Island Avenue almost to the center of the island, and walked along the trail toward the burial ground. The forest was mainly evergreens, but there were also scattered maples and beech and hemlock. Amerling was right; the trail was obscured by the fallen branches and the last dry leaves, but tan winter maleberry had also encroached, some of its round seed capsules cracking beneath his feet, along with gray-black winterberry bushes and tattered larches. Within ten minutes, Dupree was in trouble. The trail had virtually disappeared, and only his own knowledge of the island enabled him to continue in what he thought was the right direction. It came as a shock to him when he found himself approaching a stretch of road and realized that, somehow, he had walked southwest instead of southeast, and was now back on Ocean Street, except maybe half a mile below where he had started.

Frustrated, he retraced his steps and found that he had mistaken a secondary walking trail for the main path, for bushes and briers had obscured the principal artery so effectively that there was no way to distinguish it from the rest of the forest unless one knew where to look. He hacked a way through using his Maglite and continued along the path, almost losing his way twice more when it once again began to disappear. As he drew nearer to the Site, he noticed that more and more trees were dying, and that the patch of bog at the island’s center appeared to be increasing in size. Still water lay like a black mirror, almost level with the narrow causeway formed by the trail as it crossed the marsh. If heavy rains came in the spring, the trail would be submerged. Here the greenery was at least understandable, leaf retention being reasonably common among bog plants. Bog rosemary, bog laurel, and labrador tea grew steadily beside green tubular pitcher plants, the remains of insects still trapped in their inner pools. The trees here appeared stunted, their trunks lost beneath the encroaching bog. Others had their shallow roots layered with a dark green sphagnum moss and lush, creeping vines. The life here was hidden, visible only to those who were patient and knowledgeable enough for it to reveal itself: back swimmers and beetles, dragonfly larvae and mayfly nymphs, and smaller mammals like voles and squirrels moved busily through this world. What seemed quiet and dead was secretly alive; wary, but alive.

And yet there were no birds. Increasingly, Dupree was aware of the silence created by their absence. It was so quiet that the snapping of the twigs beneath his feet rang like small-arms fire in the forest, and his breathing sounded loud enough to be heard offshore. He continued to walk, leaving the bog behind him and entering the deepest part of the forest. At last, he could see ahead of him the shapes of stones through the trees. Once again there appeared to be some recent growth of briers and shrubs along the trail, but these were not green. In fact, their branches broke dryly in his hand when he touched them. They seemed dead, and long dead, yet somehow they were still growing.

He was almost at the entrance to the Site when he saw movement. A patch of gray drifted between the trees, perhaps fifty feet ahead of him, at the farthest edge of the Site. It seemed to hang in the air for a moment, then was absorbed into a tree trunk. An image of Jack’s painting flashed in his mind, with its gray shapes that were almost figures. It was an illusion, that was all. Still, he removed his gun from its holster, but kept it pointed toward the ground as he forced his way through the final curtain of briers and branches and found himself standing before the remains of the settlement. Even from this angle he could see what once were the corners of houses, the remains of chimneys, the frames of doors. In winter the patterns were more noticeable, for during the summer the rich greenery of the island obscured the man-made forms. Some unexplained growth had also occurred here, although not to the same extent as on the trail. At the very center of the Site stood the stone cross that his ancestor had raised, almost as tall as Dupree himself. The names of those who had died here were etched upon it, for most of the graves were unmarked and there were those whose remains had never been found, among them the settlers who had been cast into the marsh. Dupree thought that he had never seen this place so silent, so still.

He advanced, walking carefully around the tilted gravestones, until he reached the cross. He rested his hand upon it to draw a breath, then pulled it away as though it were a column of heated metal. He took three steps back and looked up at the cross, then slowly extended his hand again and allowed it to come to rest on the stone.

He had not been mistaken. The cross was vibrating. He could almost hear it hum.

Dupree knelt, maintaining his contact with the stone all the way down. The intensity of the vibration seemed to increase as he neared the ground. Finally, he laid a palm flat upon the earth and felt the pulse resonate through his fingers, passing along his arm and into his body until his ears rang with it and his own heart seemed to beat in time with the reverberation. It was like standing above a mine and feeling the rhythmic throbbing of the machinery far below.

From the trees at the edge of the Site, the flash of gray came again. Dupree rose and moved toward it, the gun now extended before him.

Twenty feet.

Fifteen.

Ten.

Something touched his face. He fell back a step, nearly loosing off a shot in his surprise, his left hand swinging and striking a glancing blow at the thing in the air. He looked down and saw the moth lying stunned upon the ground, its narrow, pointed wings moving slightly. It was another hornworm. There were more of them on the tree trunk ahead of him, the yellow spots on their abdomens like mold on the bark. Slowly, the insect on the ground rose, then joined its fellows on the tree. As Dupree drew closer, he could distinguish moths upon the branches around him, moths upon the stones, moths hidden in the tangles of the dead briers. Dupree had never encountered anything like it before. They did not belong on this island at any time, for even in the summer there were no tobacco plants, no potato plants or tomato plants, upon which they might feed. In winter, their extinction was guaranteed. They should not be here, thought Dupree.

They should be dead.

Then he turned and saw that his surroundings-the remains of the houses, the grave markers, even the great cross-were now entirely obscured by the insects, their slow movements seeming to bring the stones to life. Dupree could hear the moths brushing against one another, the sound of them like a soft whispering carried on the breeze. With the back of his hand, he touched those on the nearest tree and felt their wings trembling against his skin, but not a single insect fled from his touch or took to the air.

Small fragments of their tissue adhered to his fingers, coating them lightly with a pale dust. He thought that he could taste them in his mouth, just as Sylvie Lauter must have tasted them in her final moments.

Dupree stood silently among them as the sun crossed the sky and the clouds lowered, until at last he left that place, the pitch of the whispering increasing in intensity as he went before abruptly ceasing entirely, as though some secret, half-heard conversation had concluded at last in unity and resolve.

Chapter Nine

Barron was having a very bad day.

In fact, Barron was having his second bad day in a row. The first had commenced with the phone call from Boston, advising him that his services would be required in the very near future. Barron had tried to explain to the man on the other end of the line that this wasn’t a good time for him, that he was under pressure. The appearance of Parker in the bar had rattled him badly. He had no idea how much the private detective knew, or even suspected, but Barron feared his persistence. He wanted to keep his head down and behave like a model cop for a while. Still, he told the caller nothing about Parker. He was afraid that they might scent trouble and feed him to the department. They had photographs. Christ, they had a video. Barron would have to eat his gun, because there was no way he was doing jail time. No way.

Then there was Terry Scarfe. Part of Barron’s deal with the Russians was that he would look out for Scarfe. Scarfe had contacts. He was a fixer. Scarfe also owed them, and he couldn’t pay them back if he was stuck in jail. Barron knew that they had their hooks in Scarfe until his dying day, and that he would never be permitted to pay in full the debt that he owed. Barron understood this because he feared that he was in the same terrible position. What worried Barron was that Scarfe knew about him, and Scarfe was a screwup. The dipshit had run from him that night he was on patrol with Macy. If he had kept his head down, they might well have passed by him. Instead, Barron had been forced to chase him, to search him, and then to empty him out because the moron was carrying. If another patrol had picked him up ten minutes later and found his stash, Barron might have been compelled to explain how he had missed it during his search, assuming Scarfe didn’t hand him over on a plate to save his own skin. True, he could have argued that Scarfe had been clean during the first search, and nobody would have been able contradict him, but there was still the danger of arousing suspicion.

Then there was Macy to contend with. Barron didn’t know how much Macy had seen during his search of Scarfe, but trainee cops had buckled under pressure in the past and Barron didn’t know if Macy would be a stand-up girl if push came to shove. Even if she kept her mouth shut, Barron didn’t like the idea of Macy having anything on him.

The Russian didn’t listen to Barron’s objections. He was bought and paid for. He was to wait for a call. When that call came the following morning, it marked the start of Barron’s second bad day.

Because the call came from Scarfe.

Dupree made it back to town in time for the arrival of the twelve-thirty P.M. ferry, still shaken by his experience at the Site. Amerling was right. Things were happening, and there was nothing that they could do except hold on tight during the ride and pray that it was over quickly.

He smelled perfume close by. He looked to his left and saw that Marianne Elliot was beside him, smiling shyly. There was a knapsack on her back, and she was sipping coffee from a steel travel mug.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi. You going over to the mainland?”

“I’ve got some things to do,” she said. “I’ll get the ferry back this evening.”

“And Danny?”

“He’s still with Bonnie Claeson. I dropped by to say hi. I think he’s forgiven me for last night. Anyway, I promised to bring him back something from Portland and he seemed happy with that.”

She touched his sleeve.

“I had a good time with you last night,” she said quietly.

“Thank you.”

“You’re supposed to say that you had a good time too,” she teased.

“I had the best time,” he said.

She leaned in the window, kissed him quickly on the lips, then headed toward the dock. Over by the diner, Nancy Tooker, who had witnessed the exchange, raised her hand and gave him a cheerful wave.

Dupree tried to sink deeper into his seat.

Barron met Scarfe in the parking lot behind the Levi’s store in Freeport. It was relatively quiet there, and most of the cars had out-of-state tags. They sat in Barron’s Plymouth, watching the lot.

“They’re coming in today,” said Scarfe. “They want to meet you.”

“No way,” said Barron.

“I don’t think you’re in a position to argue.”

Barron’s right hand lashed out, catching Scarfe on the side of the face. Scarfe’s head struck the passenger window.

“Don’t you ever talk to me like that again! The fuck you think you are, talking to me that way?”

He stared straight ahead, gripping the wheel tightly, working at the plastic. Scarfe said nothing. Barron wanted to scream, to rage at the injustice of it all. He was a cop. These people had no right to put him through this. He could smell Scarfe beside him. He stank of sweat and unwashed clothes and desperation. Barron needed to get away from him.

“Give me the keys.”

Scarfe handed over the keys to an Isuzu Trooper parked out at the Maine Mall. The Trooper, sourced by Scarfe, was scanner equipped. Barron was to use the Trooper for his part of the job, then just leave the keys in it and walk away. Scarfe would take care of its disposal.

“Now get out of the car,” said Barron.

Scarfe climbed out silently. There was a red mark on his left cheek, and his left eye was tearing.

“You didn’t have to hit me,” he said.

“I know,” said Barron. “I did it because I wanted to.”

Then he drove away.

Chapter Ten

They ditched the vans at a wrecking yard just outside Brockton and prepared to pick up some replacements. Powell and Tell took care of the details, although Powell, who had grown fond of driving the Econoline, expressed his regret at seeing it go.

“Well, maybe we could hold on to it, just for you,” suggested Tell. “We could get something written along the side, like ‘We Are the Guys You’re Looking For!’ ”

They watched as the Econoline’s roof collapsed inward under the pressure of the crane’s jaws. Glass shattered, and the van shuddered as if in pain. It reminded Powell of the way a man’s face will crumple when he’s shot.

“Yeah, you’re right. Still, we had some good times in that van.”

Tell tried to figure out if Powell was joking, but couldn’t. “You need to make some more friends, man,” he said.

They headed for the battered trailer that functioned as the lot’s office. It smelled bad. An ancient gray filing cabinet spewed yellowed paper from an open drawer, and the carpet was dotted with cigarette burns. Nicotine-smeared blinds obscured the windows.

“Looks like business is booming,” said Powell. “You guys must be planning to float on the stock exchange pretty soon.”

There were three men waiting for them, and none of them smiled. Two pieces of ex-Soviet muscle stood at either side of a third man, who sat behind a cheap plastic desk. The seated man was wearing a plaid jacket over a vile sports shirt. The other men favored leather blouson jackets, the sort that bad disc jockeys wore to public events. Even Powell, who still missed the days when a guy could wear the sleeves of his pastel jacket rolled up to his elbows, thought the men were kind of badly dressed.

Tell, meanwhile, was trying to figure out where the guys were from. Dexter had told him that the main man was Russian, so he figured the others were probably Russian too. They were dressed like shit, which was kind of a giveaway. Tell didn’t know what it was about the new breed of immigrant criminals, but they had the dress sense of fucking lizards. Everything had to shine. If these guys were making money, they were spending it all on acrylics.

The seated man had skin like a battlefield. He’d tried to mask the damage with a beard but it was scraggly and untidy. His hair was thinning unevenly. A patch of pink showed over his left ear. Tell wondered if the guy had some kind of disease, and was relieved that he hadn’t been forced to shake his hand. He had introduced himself as Phil. Yeah, right, thought Tell: Phil, short for Vladimir.

“Dexter didn’t come himself, no?” asked Phil.

“Dexter’s kind of busy right now,” said Tell.

“I’m offended that he would not take the time to visit an old friend.”

“You get his Christmas card? ’Cause I know he sent it.”

“No card,” said Phil.

“Well, that’s a shame,” said Tell.

“Yes,” said Phil. “It is.”

He looked genuinely hurt.

Tell was getting antsy. Dexter had warned him to stay cool, Shepherd too, but Phil was beginning to get on his nerves and he’d been in his company for only a couple of minutes.

“We’re in kind of a hurry here,” said Tell.

“Yes, always hurry,” said Phil. “Too much rush.”

“It’s the way of the world,” said Powell. “People don’t take the time to stop and smell the roses.”

Tell looked at him, but Powell appeared to be genuine. The only thing Tell was smelling in here was rotting carpets and cheap aftershave.

“Your friend know,” said Phil. “He understand.”

Tell was going to have words with Powell once they got outside. He didn’t want Powell to start thinking of himself as some kind of mystic.

Phil picked up a brown envelope from the desk and tossed it to Tell. “Two vans,” he said.

“We wanted three.”

“No three. Two only. No time.”

“Too much rush,” said Tell.

Phil smiled for the first time. “Yes, yes, too much rush. You tell Dexter to come see me.”

Tell raised the envelope in farewell, and tried to smile back. “Yeah, you bet.”

He and Powell turned to leave. They were at the door when Phil said: “And, hey!”

Tell looked back. Phil was now standing, and all three men had guns in their hands.

“You tell him to bring my money when he comes,” Phil said. “And you tell him to hurry.”

Macy was enjoying Larry Amerling’s company. She could tell that he was used to charming the pants off the women who came by the post office (literally, in some cases, she felt certain), but he was funny and knowledgeable and Macy was already beginning to get some sense of the geography of the island.

Amerling told her to hang a right and they followed the road uphill until they came to the main lookout tower. It had five stories, four of them with horizontal slit windows on three sides, a concrete lip overshadowing each window. There was a single chimney at the top. Five glass-strewn steps led up to the reinforced-steel doorway. The door was open.

“Kids,” said Amerling. “Joe tries to keep the towers locked up, but they just break right back in again.”

“Mind if I take a look?” asked Macy.

“Hold your nose,” said Amerling. “I’ll stay here and smoke a cigarette.”

They both got out of the Explorer. Amerling walked down to the road to light up, stealing a glance back at Macy as she climbed the steps. Fine-looking woman, thought Amerling. If I was only…

He tried to make the calculation, then gave it up as too depressing.

Macy pushed the door open and stepped inside. To her left, the words “Toilet Here” had been spray-painted on the wall over what had once served as a fireplace. She decided not to look down. There were no windows on this level, and the floor was bare concrete. To her left, a flight of concrete steps led up to the next level. She took them and came to the second floor. The slit windows were masked with layers of Plexiglas, and dead insects were trapped inside. Macy continued to climb until the concrete steps were replaced with wooden stairs to the top floor. A ladder hung down from a square access door leading to the roof. She climbed up and slipped the bolt.

The wind hit her as she stepped onto the roof, causing her jacket to flap outward like the wings of a startled bird. She zipped it up and walked to the edge. The tower stood high above even the tallest trees, and from her vantage point she could see the Cove, the smaller towers along the coastline, the neighboring islands, ships heading out to sea, even the mainland itself in the distance. The air smelled clean and fresh, with a faint hint of smoke, but the skies were heavy and gray and there was a bitingly cold edge to the wind. She turned to her right and saw Amerling smoking his cigarette. He looked up and waved, and she raised a hand in return until she was distracted by the sight of a blue truck rolling up the road. It was in bad shape, because gray-blue exhaust fumes not only curled from the pipe but seemed to envelop the vehicle entirely. That can’t be right, Macy thought. He’s moving fast, and the wind is blowing against him anyway. How can the fumes surround him in that way?

Then, as she watched, the truck slowed and the smoke appeared to peel away, forming two columns that faded into the forest to the left and right and then dispersed. Macy waited for a moment or two longer, still unsure as to quite what she had seen, then climbed back down the ladder and headed to the door.

She didn’t notice the crude drawings of dying men and burning houses carved into the concrete with a piece of discarded stone, or the length of white hair caught in the bottom rung of the ladder.

Or the child’s cloth doll that watched her impassively from the corner of the room, its body shimmering as the moths moved upon it.

The truck had pulled up alongside Larry Amerling. The man leaning out of its window wore a dirty green windbreaker and a Sea Dogs baseball cap. His face was permanently tanned from years of working outdoors, but his nose was red and swollen and veins had broken badly across his cheeks. He made a sucking sound with his teeth as Macy approached and allowed his eyes to linger on her thighs and crotch. She was relieved to note that Amerling looked embarrassed on the man’s behalf.

“This here’s Carl Lubey,” said Amerling. “He lives up the road. Carl, this is Officer Macy.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Lubey. He made it sound like an invitation to his bed.

Macy contented herself with a nod and gave no indication that the man’s name meant anything to her. So this was the brother of the man Dupree had killed. She hated herself for agreeing with Barron’s assessment, but if his brother had been anything like Carl, then Dupree might have done society a favor. Carl Lubey was making her skin crawl.

“You got something wrong with your truck?” she asked him.

“Truck’s running fine,” he replied.

“Seemed to me like you were producing a lot of fumes. You ought to get it looked at.”

“Don’t need looking at. I told you, truck’s fine.”

“If you say so. It happens again and you could be looking at a citation.”

Lubey made that sucking noise through his teeth again.

“You want to come over, maybe help me clean out my pipes, you let me know,” he said. He winked broadly at her, then put the truck in gear and went on his way. This time, there was only a hint of exhaust smoke.

“Does he live alone out there?” asked Macy.

“Does Carl look like the kind of guy who has women beating down his door? Yeah, he’s alone. I don’t think he ever got over-”

He stopped.

“I know about it,” said Macy.

“Yeah, well, then you understand. He always did have a lot of bitterness inside him. What happened to his brother just added a little extra piss to his vinegar, if you’ll excuse the phrase. Pardon me saying it, but it didn’t look like there was anything wrong with his truck.”

Macy shook her head. “When he was coming up the road, it seemed like he was surrounded by gray smoke. Then it just sort of…faded away. It was real odd.”

She turned to Amerling but he was looking away, staring at the road Carl Lubey had just taken, as if hoping to see some trace of the smoke for himself.

“I’d best be getting back,” he said. He stomped his cigarette out on the ground, then picked up the butt and put it in the pocket of his jacket. “Mail won’t sort itself.”

They drove in silence for a time, until Macy said, “I couldn’t see the Site from the top of the tower. That’s what they call it, isn’t it, the Site?”

Amerling took a moment to reply.

“Trees keep it hidden.”

“Even in winter?”

“Even in winter. There’s a lot of evergreens out here.”

“It’s over to the south, isn’t it?”

“That’s right, but you can’t get there by car, and even on foot you need to know where you’re going. At this time of year, with the light fading so early, I’m not even sure I could find it.”

“Another time, then,” said Macy.

“Sure,” Amerling lied. “Another time.”

Moloch saw Dexter staring back at him in the rearview. Leonie and Dexter sat up front, Braun behind them, and Moloch farther back. There was a hollow panel in the floor, big enough for a man to lie in, if necessary, although if he was there for longer than a couple of minutes, he’d probably suffocate. Moloch knew it was for weapons, maybe even drugs. It was a last resort for him in the event of a police search, and nothing more.

“You okay?” asked Dexter.

Moloch nodded. They had been traveling for about three hours, and his back ached. They had passed the toll booth at the New Hampshire state line shortly after nine and entered Maine. The traffic was light, most of it headed south toward Boston. They took the Kittery exit, and pulled up outside the Kittery Trading Post. Braun and Leonie went inside, leaving Moloch to rage alone silently.

As they had drawn closer and closer to Maine, Moloch had felt a pain building in his head. He found himself drifting into sleep, his eyes closing and his chin nodding to his chest, until a charge like a jolt of electricity forced him back into waking once again. But in those glancing moments of semirest, his body racked by exhaustion, he was tormented by visions, images of pasts both known and unknown, at once familiar and strange.

He saw himself as a small boy, hands pressed against the window of a black car as it pulled away from a suburban house, the boy’s bicycle momentarily forgotten, his fingers brushing the glass as the car sped up, a man struggling in the backseat, his eyes wide with panic, two men holding him down. The man’s hand reached out, as if somehow the boy could save him, but nobody could save him.

Dad?

No, not Dad, not really, but the closest he had come to finding one, a foster father and a foster mother on a street of identical houses, each with a small square of green lawn, its quiet disturbed only by the hiss of sprinklers and, now, the noise of the car as it pulled away from the curb.

Inside the house, the woman was crying. She lay slumped in a corner of the kitchen, blood running from her nose and mouth. She had been baking a cake, and now flour and broken eggs covered the floor around her. The boy went to her, and she took him in her arms and held him to her.

The next day, more men came, and they were forced to leave the house. The boy fled with his not-mother, moving from town to town, watching her as she grew more and more desperate, descending into some terrible dark place all her own, where men came and pounded on her body and left piles of ragged bills on the dresser when they were done. And the boy wondered, as he grew older: Who am I, and where have I come from, if I am not of this woman?

Then there were other women-mothers, sisters, daughters-flashing before him, and he heard half-familiar names spoken. He was in a house by a lake. He was on a streetcar, a man holding his hand.

He was on the island, and his voice was whispering: Know me, wife.

Moloch jerked into wakefulness again. Dexter was now reading a newspaper. Moloch closed his eyes again.

This is not my past. It is a past, but it is not mine. I am more than this.

The island returned to him and he smelled the sea and the pines, and he heard a sound as of a moth tapping on glass, struggling to escape the darkness.

Or to return to it.

The others returned about a half hour later. They had bought warm clothing, waterproofs, and a selection of minor weaponry: knives, mainly; a handheld ax; and a hunting bow for Dexter. As for guns, they already had what they needed.

Powell handed Dexter the bow case. Dexter opened it and removed the big bow contained within.

“I don’t understand why you need that,” Moloch said. He still felt groggy and ill. He needed sleep, proper sleep. The tapping sound that he had heard in his dream had not gone away now that he was awake. Instead, it remained there, like water trapped in his inner ear.

“It’s not about needing. I like the feel of a bow.”

“You ever kill a man with a bow?” asked Powell.

“No. Killed one with an arrow, though.” Dexter grinned.

“You really think we’re going to need all this stuff up here?” Braun asked Moloch.

Moloch shook his head, as much in answer as in an effort to rid himself of the infernal noise in his head.

“We get there, find her, make her return my money, then we kill her. We don’t want to make trouble for ourselves and bring them down upon us. If everything goes according to plan, we’ll have her before they even know we’ve been there.”

“So, like I asked, why do we need all of this?”

Moloch looked at him the way he might have looked at a slow child.

“Because nothing ever goes according to plan,” he said simply.

The ferry to Portland contained just two passengers: an old man going to see his oncologist, and Marianne. She missed Danny and wished that he were with her, but she had to visit the banks and he would quickly have become bored with the waiting and the filling out of forms.

Bonnie had asked her little about her date, apart from inquiring whether it had gone well. She told her that Danny and Richie had enjoyed their evening together, and she didn’t mind if he stayed with her for the best part of another day. Richie had cheered at the news. Richie was a wonderful kid-she could never think of him as anything but a kid-and the people on the island looked out for him. In some ways, Dutch was the best environment for a boy like him. No harm could come to him, and in the close-knit community, he knew affection and support. To Danny, he was almost like a big brother, even though Danny, who was a smart boy, recognized that his playmate was different and that, in some ways, Danny had to look out for Richie more than Richie had to watch out for Danny.

But she had warned Danny not to follow Richie when he went exploring on the island. She knew that Richie liked to ramble through the woods and that Bonnie had given up trying to discourage him from doing so because Richie would go anyway, sneaking out of the house and sending her wild with worry. Better that he told her where he was going than to have him simply disappear without a word. While Marianne liked Richie, she knew that he was incapable of looking after her son, and Danny had been told, on pain of eternal grounding and loss of his allowance for the rest of his life, not to go anywhere with Richie unless Bonnie went along too.

Ahead of her, she could see the boats bobbing at the docks on Commercial. Resigned now to a day without Danny, she was looking forward to getting a few things done. She planned to visit her hairdresser, eat a leisurely lunch, maybe even head out to the Maine Mall for a while. She would have the best part of four hours to herself.

But first, there was the money to take care of. Once that was done, she would breathe a little easier. She was wearing a money belt beneath her sweater, and while she would certainly have preferred not to have to carry so much cash around, Portland’s streets didn’t worry her. She would not be walking them at night.

Behind her, gray clouds gathered. There would be snow by morning, according to the Weather Channel. She had checked the forecast before leaving, and the worst of the weather would not hit until much later that night. Thorson had announced that the ferry would leave Portland at six-thirty that night, with a final sailing at ten. She would probably make the six-thirty, or else the last sailing with time to spare, and she and Danny would be locked up safely at home by the time the snows came.

In her kitchen, Bonnie Clauson was watching CNN while chopping vegetables for dinner. She thought that she might make something special, since Danny was with them: a pot roast, perhaps, and a pumpkin pie.

On the TV, she could see a vehicle being pulled from a river somewhere in the south. It looked hot down there, and the backs of the policemen’s shirts were dark with sweat. She wondered if Mike, her current boyfriend, might be persuaded to chip in some cash so that they could take Richie away this summer. She’d ask him when she saw him next weekend. Mike drove trucks for a living and was sort of quiet, but he was patient with Richie and kind to her, and that was enough for Bonnie for the present.

Now the picture had changed, and a man’s face filled the screen. He looked handsome, she thought, apart from his eyes. They were sort of narrow, an impression accentuated by the thin vertical lines that ran down each cheek, and the intelligence in them was marred by contempt. Maybe it was just the law he despised, she mused, but she didn’t think so. She figured this guy hated just about everything.

Bonnie turned the TV up in time to hear his name.

Moloch. Wasn’t that a biblical name? It sounded kind of biblical. Bonnie wasn’t much of one for churchgoing or Bible thumping, but the name gave her the creeps. She went back to preparing her food. The soaps would begin soon, her “stories” as her mother used to call them.

Soon she forgot all about the man named Moloch.

But her son did not. He continued to stare at the television with rapt attention, watching the parade of faces. There was the man with the piercing eyes, and the black man, and the young man with the blond hair. Their pictures had been on TV a lot lately.

Richie sat very still and took them all in.

They arrived in Portland shortly before one. Moloch had by now moved into the front bench seat, sick of being incarcerated in the back of the van. The changes he had made to his appearance meant that only someone who took the time to examine him very closely would even begin to connect him with the face on the news reports, and if Moloch found someone examining him that closely, well, that person wouldn’t live long enough to tell anyone what he or she had seen.

They pulled up on Commercial and looked out to sea. Close by was the dock for the Dutch Island ferry. There was nobody onboard. Braun had gone to check the schedule.

“Last sailing is at ten,” he said when he returned. “Ferry comes back to the mainland first thing tomorrow morning.”

Moloch considered this. “For now, we rest up, get some motel rooms away from the center of town. We can talk about it again after we meet Scarfe.”

Dexter nodded. There was a Days Inn out by the mall. He’d seen the sign on the way into town. Dexter liked Days Inns. Once you got used to the fact that they all looked the same, they became a little like home.

Marianne had no problems at the banks. In total, she withdrew some $8,000 from three separate accounts, depositing each wad of notes carefully in the belt beneath her sweater. When she was done, she treated herself to a cab ride out to the Maine Mall, and allowed herself to be pampered in the hairdresser’s for a couple of hours. Then, feeling better than she had in many months, she ate Chinese food at the mall’s food court, then walked across the parking lot to T. J. Maxx, where she bought herself a DKNY leather jacket that, according to the tag, had been reduced by $300. She bought new sneakers for Danny and added them to the Harry Potter trading-card game in her bag.

She considered going to the movies. It had been so long since she’d sat in a movie theater to watch something that wasn’t a cartoon or a kids’ comedy. Maybe she could make the twilight showing over at the Maine Mall Cinema. She glanced at her watch, saw that it was just after six-ten, and broke into a trot as she headed for the theater.

“What the fuck is wrong with her mouth?” said Dexter.

He and Braun were watching a pay-per-view movie in their motel room. Tom Cruise was some kind of deformed guy in love with a Spanish chick with dark hair. Tom had dumped Cameron Diaz for the dark-haired chick, which made no sense to Dexter at all, especially since the dark-haired chick seemed to have picked up the wrong mouth somewhere along the line.

“Well?” he said to Braun. “Look at it.”

“Looks good to me,” said Braun. Dexter had run out of movies to watch on his DVD player, and had turned on the TV. Braun couldn’t concentrate on his book with the movie playing, so he had resigned himself to watching the screen. There was nothing else for them to do anyway, not until Scarfe contacted them.

“Nah. I ain’t saying she ain’t pretty or nothing. Hell, I’d fuck her for free. But her mouth…I don’t know, it’s just too big for her face. Who is she, anyway?”

“Penelope Cruz.”

“She married to him or something?”

“No, Cruz with a z. I hear he’s dating her, though.”

“Fucking Tom Cruise. You think it’s true about him?”

“What? That he’s-”

“Yeah.”

“No. You think he could be going out with her if he was?”

“It might be a front.”

“Hell of a front. Hell of an ass too.”

“Yeah, but that mouth. It just looks wrong…”

Tell and Shepherd were sitting in the IHOP beside the Days Inn, eating pancakes with lots of sugar and butter and cinnamon on top. Shepherd was listening to Tell. Tell was full of shit sometimes, but it was kind of interesting shit.

Like, there they were in the IHOP, and this guy had rolled by in his wheelchair. He was wearing khakis and one of those black POW/ MIA T-shirts. His legs were gone from the knees down, and his trousers were pinned up. His arms were huge. Shepherd figured the guy must be pushing himself up the side of mountains to get arms that big. Then Tell said: “You know my brother was a cripple?”

“No shit?”

“Lost a leg in Vietnam, couple of months before Tet.”

“Which leg?”

“Right leg.”

“No shit?”

“Came home on crutches with one trouser leg pinned up, just like that guy, except he still had one leg. He was real upset.”

“Man had a right to be upset, he lost a leg.”

“Sure. Terrible thing, losing a limb. He stayed in his room, drinking, sleeping in his own filth. Wasn’t nobody could get through to him. Then he got this phone call. Ed Sullivan-you remember Ed Sullivan?”

“Yeah, he was a strange-looking guy. Head and body didn’t look like they matched.”

“He had short arms, was what it was. Anyway, Ed was a big supporter of the war, and he wanted he should do his part, so he invited some vets on to the show and my brother was one of them. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“So he went to the show?”

“Hell, yeah, he went. He and his buddies were flown in, driven to the studio in big limousines, given front-row seats, the whole deal. They’d all lost limbs in Vietnam-arms and legs and shit. Ed insisted that all the guys should be cripples, otherwise they could be just anybody, you know? Anyhow, during the dress rehearsal for the show, Ed calls for the lights and cameras to be pointed at them, and he starts making a big fuss, and the audience starts whooping and hollering. So Ed looks at the boys, and smiles that big smile he had, and tells them to take a bow. I mean, it’s Ed Sullivan, telling them to take a bow. So my brother and his buddies, they stand up to take their bow.”

“Yeah? So they stand up…?”

“And my brother fell over. He only had one leg. He stood up, kind of wavered for a second, then went sideways. Banged his head. Most of the other guys who’d lost legs managed to stay upright by supporting themselves on their seats, although they all looked kind of unsteady. Not my brother, though. He was gonna stand up straight and take a bow if Ed Sullivan told him to. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“A man’s got to love another man to try to stand straight on one leg just because he told him to do it. Your brother must have been kind of pissed at Ed, though.”

“No, he wasn’t pissed at all. Fact was, he said he kind of appreciated someone treating him like he still had both legs. So after that my brother got himself a false leg. He wanted to be able to stand upright next time someone important told him to. He used to take it off to sleep, though. That’s how he died. There was a fire in his apartment block, and when the alarms went off there was smoke and shit, and he died trying to find his false leg. He didn’t want to be no cripple hobbling out. He wanted to preserve his dignity. The Ed Sullivan Show taught him that. He loved Ed Sullivan.”

“No shit.”

“No shit.”

Shepherd thought that was kind of interesting. That was what he meant about Tell.

“We did a bank job once, over in Pensacola,” said Shepherd, not wanting to be outdone in the storytelling stakes. “Spent two weeks casing the bank. This was in the old days, before all them new security systems, and lasers and shit.”

“It was a different time. Man needs a degree to take down a bank now.”

“Yeah, they do make it hard for a man these days, and no mistake. Anyway, we get to the bank, morning of the job. Manager goes in, his staff after him, and we come in behind them before they got a chance to close the door.”

“And?”

“And there’s two guys with masks already in there, waiting to hold up the bank. They’d come in through the roof during the night, and they were standing in there when the manager arrived.”

“No shit?”

“Well, we were kind of perturbed, you know? We must have been casing the same bank during that same two weeks, and we never saw each other.”

“Can happen.”

“Surely can. So we got this moment, right, where we’re looking at them wearing their masks, and they’re looking at us wearing our masks, and the manager and his people are looking at all of us. So I say, ‘The fuck are you doing? This is our bank.’ And this other guy says: ‘The fuck it is. We spent a month on this job.’ ”

“Bullshit.”

“No, I don’t think so. Coming in through the roof, that takes some planning.”

Tell relented. “I guess.”

“So there’s a standoff, until I say, ‘Well, why don’t we split the take?’ and the two guys look at each other and kind of shrug, and say, ‘Okay.’ ”

“So you split the take?”

“Fifty-fifty, seeing as how they’d had to come in through the roof and all.”

“That was damn Christian of y’all.”

“Yep, mighty white. Like you said, it was a different time. That happened now, there’d be a bloodbath. But people had principles then. They had standards.”

“So y’all went away happy?”

“Kind of. The two guys got to their car and we held them up, took their share of the cash.”

“Survival of the fittest.”

“Absolutely. We didn’t kill them, though.”

“Course not. You had standards.”

“Damn straight. It was a different time.”

“You said it. A different time. More pancakes?”

“Sure,” said Shepherd. “Why not?”

Willard stood in the parking lot of the Days Inn, smoking a cigarette. There was the IHOP maybe one hundred feet away, where Shepherd and Tell were eating. Willard could see them at the window. They hadn’t asked him to come along with them. They were probably talking about him at this very minute, plotting how to get him out of the way. Willard wasn’t too worried about Tell, but Shepherd and Dexter were real threats, maybe Braun too.

Willard hated Shepherd, Dexter, and Braun.

He pulled the baseball cap lower on his head and looked at himself in the side mirror of the van. With his blond hair covered, and a thin growth of beard, he didn’t look too much like the picture of him that they were showing on TV. Moloch had warned him against going out, but Willard wanted some air.

He started walking and had almost finished his cigarette by the time he reached the sidewalk. He took a last long drag on the butt and watched the woman approach. She stood at the entrance to the theater parking lot. Willard registered the disappointment on her face.

“It’s closed,” he said. Willard thought that it looked like it had been closed for some time, a couple of months at least.

She looked at him. She said nothing for a moment or two, then replied:

“I’d forgotten.”

“I think there’s another theater somewhere around here,” said Willard. He had seen something about it in the guest-services book in his room.

“Yeah,” said the woman. “I know. I’ll just give it a miss.”

Willard smiled his best smile-“You take care now”-and wondered what it would be like to cut her.

Marianne smiled back and turned away. She walked quickly, but not too quickly. She didn’t want to give anything away, even as her insides churned and she thought: Willard. It’s Willard.

They’re here.

It was only coincidence that had exposed her to the man named Willard. It was during the last days, when she was becoming more and more fearful of Moloch and his ways. She thought that he might in turn be growing suspicious of her, that he was concerned by what she might know and of what might happen if the police forced her to reveal any knowledge of his activities, or if she chose to do so of her own volition. One day, one week before the date she had chosen for her escape, she had seen Willard sitting in a car outside their house, and knew that Moloch had told him to watch her. She recognized the pretty young man from his photograph in the newspaper, the one linking him to the death of the older woman, and from one previous occasion, when she had arrived early for a rare dinner with her husband and had seen him at the bar, talking intently to Willard, his mouth almost touching the younger man’s ear, so that she had thought at first that they might be lovers. She had kept her distance, and had approached her husband only after the other man had gone.

It was Karen Meyer who told her the young man’s name, after Marianne explained how she had seen Willard waiting near the house. That was why she hadn’t been in touch. Karen had been angry. It was their next-to-last meeting, arranged in advance to clear up any remaining details or concerns. They were standing in a single stall in the ladies’ room at the mall.

“You took a risk coming here, a risk to both of us.”

“No, I didn’t. He followed me for two days. He didn’t know I’d spotted him, and I gave him no indication that I knew. I behaved like an angel, and I know that’s what he told Edward.”

Karen relaxed a little.

“Who is he?” asked Marianne.

“His name is Willard. I don’t know anything more than that about him. He just looks pretty. There’s something wrong with him, though, real deep down. Look in his eyes and you’ll find yourself dying in a thousand different ways, with his hands on you right to the end. You see him coming for you again and you take off, you hear me? You take off and you never look back. We’ll come up with another way to get the stuff to you, but you see Willard coming up your garden path and he’s only going to be coming for one reason. He might drop by to check up on you again before then, so act naturally over the next few days. Don’t give them any cause to suspect.”

And that was what she had done, walking calmly, ignoring the presence of the man her husband might be planning to have kill her. On the last day, the day of Moloch’s bank job, she knew she was safe. Willard would be with him, or close to him, but it was not until she was two hundred miles from the city, Danny asleep in his seat, that she began to relax even slightly. She continued to move from city to city, town to town, never staying long in any one location, before settling at last upon the island, the place to which she had decided to flee many months before after reading a feature about the Maine islands in a travel magazine, content that, for now, her trail was unlikely to be uncovered.

But she had never forgotten Willard, or the potential threat that her husband, even incarcerated, might pose to her. It could have been merely a coincidence, of course, that Willard was now up north, far from home, but she didn’t think so. No, they were here, and they were coming for her, for if they were in Portland, then they knew she was on the island, and soon they would arrive on it. As she walked away from Willard-not too fast, not too slow-she tried to retrace their steps, figuring out how they had found her. Only two people could have told.

Karen.

And her sister.

Marianne walked to Maine Mall Road and tried to hail a cab, using the opportunity to pause and glance back to where Willard still stood. He was not looking at her. Then he turned, and his eyes seemed to alight on her face. Marianne waited for him to head into the IHOP, or back toward the motel. Instead, Willard began to walk quickly along the sidewalk.

He was heading straight for her.

Willard didn’t talk much. He guessed that a lot of folks considered him dumb, seeing as how he had never been much for school, and maybe they thought he was afraid to open his mouth because people might laugh at what came out. But Willard wasn’t afraid of anyone, and those who might have felt the urge to laugh at him would quickly have suppressed it as soon as they looked in Willard’s eyes. Sure, Willard had trouble with reading, and he wasn’t so good with figures, but he had the instincts and intelligence of a natural hunter, combined with a curiosity about the nature of pain and hurt when applied to others.

He had sensed something from the woman when she had looked at him. It was more than the natural fear that he frequently recognized in women: the care they took not to get themselves trapped alone with a stranger; the grip with which they held on to their purses; the casual look around the smarter ones took as they prepared to open their car door in the parking lot. No, this was different, keener. Separated, thought Willard, with a husband who isn’t taking it too well; or maybe trying to avoid a boyfriend who doesn’t want to split from her, because then he’ll have to find someone else to beat on. Willard’s nostrils were almost twitching as she stood before him. He liked the scent of her. It aroused the predator in him.

He wasn’t so sure about her hair, though. She’d dyed it some dowdy color that didn’t suit her, streaking it more than altering it entirely. He couldn’t figure out why she’d do something like that, except he’d heard on TV that it was kind of the fashionable thing to do a few years ago. If so, this woman needed to get back on the fashion train, because it was surely leaving the station without her.

Willard watched her walk away. She had slim legs, and a nice ass beneath her coat. He could see the shape of it as she pulled the coat against herself. On another occasion, he might have followed her, learned more about her, just in case he decided to visit her at some point in the future, but Moloch had warned him after the incident with the woman in the bedroom. Willard hadn’t liked the way Moloch spoke to him. Neither had he appreciated the look that had passed between Moloch and Dexter afterward, like a principal and a teacher agreeing on the unspoken decision to expel an errant student from school.

Willard saw the woman try to hail a cab. She looked anxious. Strange, he thought. She walks to the movie theater from the mall, and now she suddenly has to get a cab? He rubbed his foot across the still-smoldering cigarette butt, crushing it into the sidewalk. And then there was that hair: it was shitty, almost as if it was designed to make her look more common than she was. There was a good-looking woman under there, but she seemed to be deliberately trying to hide her presence. A mental picture flashed: a woman standing beside Moloch at the state fair, the woman smiling uneasily. Willard tried setting the image of the woman with the dyed hair beside Moloch’s wife.

Shit.

Marianne saw the cab at almost the same instant that Willard began to speed up his progress. The lights were changing to amber over by Chili’s restaurant, and the cabdriver seemed inclined to stop. She waved her hand frantically, causing cars to honk their horns as she ran across the road, and saw the driver glance to his right, where a competitor was exiting from the Hampden Inn with an empty cab. In that second, he made his decision and hit the accelerator, shooting through the lights as they turned to red in his rearview mirror. He pulled in alongside her and she clambered in, just as Willard started to run.

“Commercial,” said Marianne. “Please, and quickly.”

The cabdriver glanced in the rearview as he got ready to pull out, and spotted Willard.

“Hey,” he said, “you know this guy?”

Marianne looked back. Willard was running between the traffic, dodging the oncoming hoods almost gracefully. He was maybe thirty feet from the cab.

“A guy I once dated,” she said. “I really don’t want to talk to him. There’s ten bucks in it for you.’

“For an extra ten, I’ll date him myself,” said the cabdriver. He swung out and shot away from the curb. Marianne heard a noise from behind, like fingers vainly dragging along the trunk of the cab, but she did not look back.

Willard stood on the curb, watching the cab head off toward Portland. Had the lights at the mall entrance gone red, then he might have caught up with them, but the cab had a free run to the main intersection. Willard took a deep breath and debated whether or not he should tell Moloch what had occurred. He might have been wrong about the woman, of course, but the look on her face as she had seen him approach through the back window of the cab told him that his suspicions were correct. It was her. She knew who he was, and if she knew that, then she must also know that they had come for her at last. The shock on her face told him one more thing: she didn’t know that Moloch was free, otherwise she wouldn’t have been trying to pass an idle evening with some shitty movie.

He had to tell Moloch. Already, the woman would be preparing to run again.

Willard was surprised by how calm Moloch appeared to be, at least initially. As it turned out, the calm didn’t last long.

“You’re certain it was her?” said Moloch.

“Pretty sure. Her hair is different, and she looked kind of dowdy, but I saw her face as that cab pulled away. She knew me.”

“How? There’s no way that she could have known who you are.”

“Maybe she picked up on me when I was tailing her, back before she ran.”

“If she did, then you’re the shittiest tail I ever knew.”

Willard bridled at the insult but said nothing.

“You should have caught her. Now she knows we’re here.”

“Where can she go? There’s no way she could have made the ferry.”

“You think that’s the only boat down there? They have water taxis. She could go to another island and get someone to bring the kid to her. You think we have time to scour every island for her? Get the others. Describe her to them, and set them to looking for her in town. If nobody has found her by seven, we bring everything forward.” Willard left him. Moloch called Braun in his room. Braun listened, then hung up.

“We need to get going,” he told Dexter.

“The hell are you talking about?” asked Dexter. “This shit is only starting to get good.”

“Willard saw the wife. He thinks she made him.”

Dexter swore, then turned off the TV. They packed up and joined Moloch and the others in his room. Shepherd and Tell had just arrived. Tell still had sugar on his sweater.

“An extra twenty-five thousand for the one who finds her,” said Moloch. He looked at Willard. “And I want her intact, you hear?”

Willard didn’t even nod, but he could see Dexter grinning at him. Once again, he recalled the look that had passed between Dexter and Moloch. Willard decided that he was going to have to deal with Dexter, and sooner rather than later.

The cab dropped Marianne on Commercial, footsteps from the ferry dock. The dock was empty and she could see the lights of the ferry disappearing into the evening darkness. She swore and felt the fear wash over her. It almost reduced her to tears. She tried to hold herself together.

They would be expecting her to head back to the island, if only to get Danny. Maybe if she could get someone to pick up Danny and get him off the island, then she could avoid going back to Dutch at all. Briefly, she considered calling the cops and telling them everything, but Marianne was afraid that they would take Danny away from her, perhaps even jail her. No, the cops were not yet an option.

Except…

She dialed 911 and told the dispatcher that she had seen a man out by the mall who looked like the guy on TV, you know, the blond guy. She gave an accurate description of Willard’s dress, right down to the baseball cap, then hung up.

That would give them something to think about.

She didn’t have much time. She dropped some coins in the slot and rang Bonnie Claeson’s number. The phone rang three times and then was picked up.

“Hello?” she said.

There was static on the line, but it wasn’t regular static. It ebbed and flowed. At first, it sounded a little like soft cotton being rubbed between someone’s fingers. For an instant, an image came to her unbidden: an insect beating its wings, while around it a host of others did the same in preparation for some great flight.

Then the line died.

She tried again, and got only a busy signal. She tried three more numbers, including Jack’s, with the same result.

Finally, Marianne gripped her bag and ran for a water taxi, just as the first flurries of snow began to fall.

Shepherd arrived first at the pier, only to see the water taxi disappearing from sight, a tiny puff of smoke seeming to mock him as it went. He removed a pair of binoculars from his pack and found the woman in the prow of the boat. She was, as far as he could make out, the only passenger. As he stared at her, she looked back toward the pier and he was certain that she was looking at him. He thought he could read fear in her eyes.

Tell appeared beside him, and Shepherd smiled.

“She’s going home.”

Willard’s instincts were honed to perfection. He saw the patrol car before the cop inside could spot him, and slipped into the Starbucks in the Old Port, stripping himself of his coat and hat as he went. He didn’t know who they were looking for, but he could guess. The woman had seen him, and she had called the cops to make life difficult for him.

Willard didn’t care. Life had always been difficult for him.

He ordered a coffee, then slipped back out onto the streets and lost himself from view.

As soon as Willard told him of his encounter with Marianne, Moloch called Scarfe and headed for the meeting place he had suggested, the rocky outcrop by the twin lights in Cape Elizabeth. The rocks and the small beach were deserted. With the approaching storm, even the locals had retreated to their homes.

There were two men waiting on the beach, snow already whitening their shoulders and hair. One was Scarfe. The other was Barron.

“So this is the tame cop?”

Moloch looked at the policeman with a mixture of distaste and amusement. Barron was wearing jeans, sneakers, and a padded jacket. He looked uneasy.

“I’m not your tame cop,” he said.

“What would you prefer to be called? Pedophile cop? Child molester cop? Please, let me know. I want you to be as comfortable as possible in your dealings with me.”

Barron’s face flushed, but he didn’t reply.

“You should have been more careful, Officer. Your tastes have made you the bitch of anyone to whom your creditors choose to offer you.”

“Just tell me what you want,” said Barron softly.

Moloch turned to Scarfe. “I’ve heard a lot about you, none of it very impressive. I advise you not to let me down. Now, tell me about the island.”

For the next ten minutes, Scarfe detailed all that he had discovered from Carl Lubey, including the presence and routines of the giant cop, Joe Dupree, and the reported arrival that morning of the rookie cop Macy. (“A rookie?” Moloch had interrupted. “Maybe our luck is holding.”)

“And the woman, Marianne Elliot?”

“She’s out there. Her house is over on the southeastern shore. There aren’t too many other houses around there. The boy is with her.”

“Does she have a boyfriend?” asked Moloch.

Scarfe swallowed.

“Lubey says she’s been seen around with the cop Dupree. They had dinner together last night.”

Moloch motioned him to continue, but he looked unhappy at the development.

“There’s a boat waiting for you down at the Marine Company. You go in after dark on the northern shore, some ways from the woman’s house. There are no good landings over where she is, except for a little inlet that belongs to an old painter guy who watches the bay like a hawk. You try coming in that way and if he spots you, he’ll start making calls. The sea there is threaded with rocks anyway. Even experienced sailors steer clear of it. You need to stay as far as possible from the dock on Island Avenue on your way in, and from any houses along the shore. Like the painter, people on the island keep a close eye on what happens there, and who comes and goes. The northeastern shore is virtually unpopulated, though. Lubey will meet you at the landing. He has a truck. He’ll take you to the woman’s house, then bring you back to the boat when your business is done. He doesn’t want money. He has one favor to ask.”

“Go on.”

“He wants you to kill Dupree if you get the chance.”

“No cops,” interrupted Barron. “Nobody gets hurt, that was the deal.”

“I don’t remember making a deal with you, Officer,” said Moloch. “You will do as you’re told, or your superiors will receive information that will end your career and make you the whore of every disease-ridden rapist that your state’s prison system can put your way. Don’t interrupt us again.”

He turned back to Scarfe.

“I make no promises about the cop.”

“It might be easier to get rid of him at the start.” It was Leonie.

Moloch bit at his lip. If the cop was seeing his wife, then the cop deserved what was coming to him. There was nothing worse than the thought of another man inside his wife.

Scarfe unfolded papers from his pocket. “This is a map of the island. I’ve made some copies. It’s kind of rough, but it shows the main roads, the town, and the location of the woman’s house and those of her nearest neighbors.”

Moloch took the map, examined it, then folded it and handed it, along with the copies, to Leonie.

“I couldn’t help but notice that you said ‘you’ in your detailing of the arrangements made. ‘You’, not ‘us.’ That worries me.”

“I’ve done what you asked me to do.”

“You’re coming with us.”

“You don’t need me.”

“You know about boats, and you know this area. Some of my associates have experience of such matters, but these are unfamiliar waters and there is bad weather approaching. And if your friend Mr. Lubey lets us down, we will have someone to fall back on. Heavily.”

Scarfe nodded.

“I understand.”

Moloch turned to Barron.

“Your role in this affair is simple, Officer. You monitor the police bands. If there is even a hint of police activity that might concern us, I want you to nullify it. I understand that there is no cell phone coverage on the island?”

“There are pockets, but only close to town. The eastern shore is out of range.”

“You will take up a position on the dock. If our return is jeopardized in any way, you will signal us with your headlights as we return to land. Is that clear?”

“That’s all?”

“For now. Mr. Scarfe, you’ll come with us. Our departure is imminent.”

Moloch, Dexter, and Willard dropped Leonie and Braun on Commercial. The two older men sat in the van close by the Casco Bay Ferry Terminal while Willard stayed in the shadows and watched the approaches along Commercial. The plan was virtually unchanged: one group would make for the island with Scarfe, while Leonie and Braun would follow by water taxi and land at the Cove, as the late ferry crossing had been canceled due to Thorson’s innate caution and the early arrival of the snow. Barron would keep an eye on all new arrivals, just in case the woman managed to slip by them and make it back to Portland.

“I didn’t want her to see us before we came,” Moloch said to Dexter. “I didn’t want her to know. I wanted to see the shock on the bitch’s face myself.”

“You’ll still see it. I reckon she has a lot of shock left in her.”

Moloch didn’t look so happy, Dexter thought. He had been sleeping badly. Dexter had heard him crying out. That happened to men who had been jailed, Dexter knew. Even after their release, part of them always remained incarcerated, and that was the part that intruded on their dreams.

Dexter, meanwhile, had his own worries.

“I don’t like this whole island deal,” he said. “Too many things can go wrong. I don’t like having just one escape route. I don’t like having to leave the same way I came in. And we don’t know shit about this Lubey guy.”

“We have a boat. One of us will stay with it the whole time. Like I told you, we can take her and be gone before anyone even knows we’ve been there. We just need to stay out of trouble. As for Lubey, he’s a driver, nothing more.”

“Do you trust the cop?”

“No, but I think he’s too frightened of the consequences to cross us. Plus, our friends in Boston have promised him a little gift for his cooperation. His fear and his lust should combine to keep him in line.”

“And the policeman out on the island?”

“When they get there, Braun and Leonie will kill him, if only for having the temerity to fuck my wife.”

“And Willard?”

Something like regret flashed across Moloch’s features.

“No pain,” he said. “I want him to feel no pain.”

In the shadows, Willard was looking at a small map of the bay held behind a protective Plexiglas screen. He had changed his clothes and was now wearing a tourist’s fleece with a lobster on the front. He had darkened his hair in a men’s room with a kit he had bought in a drugstore, and it was now a shimmering black. With the index finger of his right hand, he traced the route of the ferry, following each little dot as carefully as if he were tracing the route onto paper. His finger stopped on the island, then he jerked it back suddenly.

A spider was crawling across the map. Its body covered the island. Somehow, the spider had found its way inside the case and now it was trapped, vainly seeking a way out. Maybe it had been trying to shelter from the cold, but now the case would be its tomb. There would be no insects in there for it to feed on and eventually it would grow thin and die. Willard watched it crawl, its legs occasionally slipping on the surface of the map, causing the spider to drop an inch or two before its silk arrested its slide. At last it crawled back up to the top-right-hand corner of the case and huddled there, waiting for its end.

Willard’s mouth was dry. He looked up from the map and stared out to sea, trying to find light in the distance, but he could not. His stomach felt bad. He was concerned about Dexter and Shepherd, but he was worried too about the island. Willard had a survivor’s instincts, and now that little inner voice on which he had relied for so long was telling him to leave, to make his escape while he still could. But Willard wasn’t going to run. Deep inside, he still trusted Moloch. He wanted to trust him. He needed him. He lived for the light of Moloch’s approval. It was his weakness. Willard was crazy, crazier than even he himself knew, crazier even than Moloch suspected, but, deep down, he just wanted to be loved.

Chapter Eleven

Powell was having trouble with the boat guy. He was fat and old and dumb, with grease stains on his shirt. He didn’t smell so good. Powell had to turn his face away anytime the guy spoke to him, his breath was so bad. Powell just hoped his boat didn’t stink as bad as he did. Powell wasn’t happy on the sea. He didn’t need any encouragement to puke on boats, but he suspected that the stench from this guy’s boat might be about to give him a little push in the right direction, just for good luck.

The boat was a fifteen-footer, with a small, enclosed wheelhouse barely big enough for two men. Powell knelt down close to it, took a sniff, and backed off. It reeked of rotting fish and the boat guy’s breath, as if it were so toxic that it had stuck to the hull and cabin like gum. Powell had read somewhere that all smells are particulate, which meant that tiny little molecules of the boat guy’s stench were now wending their way through his nasal passages. It made Powell even more irritated with the boat guy than he already was, and Powell had been pretty pissed at him before he even got within ten feet of his stinking boat. The guy wasn’t even supposed to be here, but he had started to worry about his boat being taken out in bad weather and had come down to the dock to express his concerns. Now Powell was left to clear up the mess before Moloch and the others arrived, because if they got here first, then the boat guy was dead. The way Powell saw it, the last thing this operation needed was more dead people. They already had enough corpses to form a conga line from here to Virginia. Scarfe had assured Powell that the boat guy would keep his mouth shut, just as he had done in the past. Powell hoped that, for his sake, the boat guy started shutting up pretty soon, because Powell was beginning to feel seriously nauseous.

“You got paid, right?” said Powell. “I know, ’cause Scarfe says he did it.”

“Yeah, I got paid. I got the money right here.”

“So?”

“That boat is worth more than you paid me.”

“We’re renting it,” said Powell, his patience wearing thin as paper. “We don’t have to pay you what the boat is worth. That’s why it’s called ‘renting’ and not ‘buying.’ ”

“But suppose something happens to it. Scarfe said-”

The fat guy looked over Powell’s shoulder to where Scarfe stood in the shadows. Scarfe looked away. The boat guy was on his own. Powell reached out and grabbed his shoulder in order to keep him focused, then instantly regretted touching him.

“I could give a rat’s ass what Scarfe said. With luck, you’ll have your boat back tonight. Four, five hours, tops. We’ve been more than generous. You got insurance, right?”

“Yeah, I got insurance, but insurance never pays like it should.”

“Why are you telling me? Go write your congressman. All I want is the boat.”

“It’s nothing illegal, is it?”

Powell looked hard at the guy. “Are you for fucking real? Where do you get off asking a question like that? You want me to tell you?”

The boat guy started to back off. “No, I don’t want to know.”

“Then take your money and get your fat, stinking ass out of my sight. This piece of shit is all fueled up, right?”

“Sure, it’s ready to go.”

“Okay, then. We have any problems with this, and we’re not going to be looking for a refund, you understand? We’re going to want a different level of compensation.”

“I understand. You’ll have no problems with her.”

For a moment, Powell looked confused.

“How do you know-” he began, then stopped. The boat, he was talking about the boat. Shit. Powell let out a deep breath.

“No problems with her,” he echoed. “Good. Now go buy yourself some Tic Tacs.”

Moloch, Dexter, and Willard arrived shortly after the boat guy had gone on his way, and Tell and Shepherd emerged from out of the shadows. They had wrapped up warm in preparation for the crossing, and had put on the waterproofs purchased in Kittery. The wind had picked up in the last half hour. The snow blew hard against their faces. Powell noted with some amusement that the snowflakes were settling neatly along the lines of Tell’s cornrows, contrasting nicely with his dark skin. Powell thought that it made the little man look kind of decorative, Dexter too come to think of it. He didn’t consider sharing this observation with them. He suspected that they wouldn’t find it funny.

“Storm coming in with a vengeance,” said Scarfe.

“Good,” said Moloch. “So are we.”

Powell, Shepherd, and Dexter clambered down into the boat after Moloch, Scarfe following, then Willard. Scarfe started the motor. He glanced behind him, watching the four men shrug themselves into life jackets, then take their seats on the plastic benches, Powell alone and holding on grimly to the side. Tell untied the boat, tossed the rope down to the deck, then clambered aboard.

Moloch stood beside Scarfe in the wheelhouse. Scarfe was looking at the sky and the thickening snow. The docks around them were already nearly lost to sight and the sea beyond was a vision in static. They were alone on the water.

“How long will it take us to get across?” asked Moloch.

“There’s a head wind, and visibility sucks. We’ll have to take it slow. We don’t hit anything and nothing hits us, then we’ll make it in under two hours.”

“She could have been there and gone by the time we get to her.”

Scarfe shook his head. “Uh-uh. She’s facing the same difficulties as we are, plus I reckon that there’s going to be no more traffic into and out of the island until morning. The ferry is bedded down for the night. Thorson is no Captain Crunch. He won’t take her out if there’s even a smell of danger. Unless she gets someone to take her off the island in a private boat, and I don’t think that’s going to happen, then she’s stuck there. Problem is, we may be stuck there too.”

Moloch raised his hand, gripped Scarfe’s chin, and turned the smaller man’s face to his.

“That’s not going to happen. You understand?”

Scarfe’s reply was muffled because Moloch’s grip was so tight, but it was clear that he knew where he stood. Moloch released his grip, and Scarfe pulled the boat away from the dock.

Already, Powell’s face was gray. Across from him, Dexter took a package from his pocket and unwrapped it, revealing a meatball sub. As the boat moved away, Powell’s cheeks bulged.

“Don’t puke on my shoes,” warned Dexter.

Powell didn’t.

He puked on his own shoes.

Braun and Leonie had some trouble convincing the water taxi to take them over to Sanctuary. The guy didn’t want to go, but Leonie, who had read up on the island during the hours at the Days Inn, gave him a sob story about being a cousin of Sylvie Lauter, and how she had come hundreds of miles to console Sylvie’s mother. Leonie’s tale would have broken a softer man, but the boatman looked like he was made of teak, with a mahogany heart. Braun stayed out of it, figuring that if they both began to work on the guy, they would intimidate themselves out of a ride.

Leonie gave him $150. The boatman relented. She watched him fold the bills and place them in a waterproof wallet that hung on a string around his neck, then tuck the wallet under his shirt. Satisfied, she turned away.

Leonie had none of the scruples of Powell and Braun. She did not like leaving loose ends.

She would get the money back from him when she killed him.

Marianne sat beneath the awning of her water taxi, her arms curled tightly around her, her chin buried beneath folds of coat and scarf. She was shaking uncontrollably. The boatman, thinking her cold, offered her coffee from his flask and she thanked him and wrapped her gloved fingers around the tin cup.

But still she shook.

She had tried calling her sister before the boat left, but the phone had only rung. She had called Karen Meyer, with the same result. She knew in her heart that both were dead, that she had cost them their lives. It was her fault, all her fault.

But if she died, then Danny would also die, and it would all have been in vain. There was still a chance for them, if she could get to Danny in time. Thorson had canceled his final sailing, and appealing to his better nature was not an option. She knew his reputation and doubted if he would make even one leg of the journey and risk being stranded in Portland. Even if he was willing to go to sea, Marianne feared that someone would be watching the ferry in case she tried to escape, certainly from the mainland and possibly from the island itself.

But there were others who might be prepared to take them off the island, if not as far as the mainland, then at least to one of the larger neighboring islands. Carl Lubey had a boat and sometimes made runs if someone was in enough trouble and was prepared to pay him handsomely for it. He was an option, although the idea of being at his mercy was unappealing. Her other option was Jack the painter. He also had a boat, and she knew that he cared for Danny. If he was sober, he was their best chance.

There were lights to her right and left: the houses on nearby islands, their windows hanging suspended in the darkness like fissures in the fabric of the night or the promise of new worlds. She fantasized about taking Danny and disappearing through one of them, sewing it closed behind her so that nobody could ever find them again. The lights disappeared as the snow thickened and the wind picked up. The little boat tossed on the waves and she held tightly to the ropes, spray drenching her face and chilling her hands. She wore the boatman’s spare oilskins, but water was still finding its way through. She thought of her son, and she thought too of Joe Dupree. She could turn to him, but the risks were too great. She would be forced to reveal the truth about herself and she couldn’t do that.

But there was another reason that she was unwilling to ask him for help. She had seen Willard, and knew that Moloch must be close by. There would be others too, perhaps not as bad as her husband and the pretty, dangerous boy-man, but bad enough.

Joe Dupree was not strong enough to stand against them.

If she turned to him for help, they would kill him.

They would kill them all.

Dupree stood at the station house door and watched the snow fall. Already, Island Avenue was empty. The stores had closed early and the Rudder and Good Eats would not be opening for business. The ferry would return to port any minute now and Thorson would kill the lights on the dock and hang out a “Sailing Canceled” sign. The snow was already sticking to the sidewalks, the shadows of the flakes made huge by the glow of the streetlights as they descended. No cars were moving anywhere on the island. The risks of ending up in a ditch or, worse, taking a tumble into the cold sea were too great.

He heard footsteps behind him. Macy was wrapped up warm. She had added an extra sweater to her uniform, and her hands were double wrapped in a pair of woolen gloves and a leather pair from the station locker.

“No luck,” she said. She had been trying to raise Portland on the radio for the last hour, but there was only static. The phone line, meanwhile, had exchanged a dial tone for a steady hum. Dupree had wandered over to check with Larry Amerling in his house behind the post office, but his phone was also without a proper tone. It looked as if the entire island was going into communication meltdown.

“Did you get out to the Site?” Amerling asked Dupree as the policeman prepared to leave.

“Yes, I went out there.”

“And?”

“There were moths. A lot of moths.”

“That’s all?”

Dupree debated telling him about the vibrations in the ground, then decided against it. The postmaster looked edgy enough as things stood.

“That’s all, and after this snow I don’t think we’ll be seeing too many more moths on the island until the summer. Stay warm, Larry. I’ll check in with you at the post office tomorrow morning.”

He left the postmaster, pulling the front door closed behind him. A moment or two later, he heard the sound of the dead bolts locking.

Now, beside him, he saw Macy trying to dial a cell phone number. The display showed a ringing phone symbol, indicating that it was attempting to make a connection, then returned to the Verizon home screen. The aerial strength indicator read virtually nil. Even the reception on the TV in the rec room was terrible.

“Guess we batten down the hatches,” she said.

“Guess so.”

He didn’t even look at her.

Quiet time, she thought. I can do quiet time. I just wish you’d close the damn door.

Macy’s day had been spent on largely mundane matters. There was the B &E that turned out to be nothing more than an embarrassed husband who had climbed in through the kitchen window while dead drunk the previous night, broken plates, and knocked over the portable TV in the kitchen, then fallen asleep in the spare room because he was afraid of waking his wife, unaware that she had popped enough sleeping pills to allow half of San Francisco to sleep through an earthquake. His wife had eventually come to, spotted the damage, and called the cops. The first her husband knew about it all was when Macy arrived at their door while he was throwing up in the john. The woman began hollering at her husband and calling him ten types of asshole while he just held his head in pain and shame.

Macy left them to it.

Apart from the happy couple, she had issued a warning to the owners of a scrawny mongrel dog that was trying to bite passing cars, and talked to a couple of kids who were smoking and probably drinking (they’d hidden the beer cans somewhere in the undergrowth, but Macy was damned if she was going to go beating the bushes with a stick for a couple of Miller High Lifes) out by the old gun emplacement. She’d taken their names, then told them to haul their asses back home. One girl, dressed in a black leather motorcycle jacket and combat pants, with a Korn T-shirt underneath and a spiked dog collar around her neck, hung back.

“Are you going to tell my mom and dad?” she asked Macy. The girl’s name, according to her driver’s license, was Mandy Papkee.

“I don’t know. You got any reason why I shouldn’t?”

“We weren’t doing any harm. We just came out here to remember Wayne and Sylvie.”

Macy knew about the accident on the island the week before. A lot of the people she had met that day insisted on talking about it, if only to assure her that things like that didn’t happen very often on Dutch. Sometimes, the older ones said “on Sanctuary,” reinforcing the seemingly dual nature of the island’s existence.

“You knew them?”

“Everybody knows everyone else out here,” said Mandy. “I mean, duh, it’s an island.”

“Duh?” repeated Macy, pointedly.

“Sorry,” said Mandy. “Look, we’re not going to be back out here, not for a long time. I can promise that.”

“Why?”

“Because it gives us the creeps. This was, like, a stupid dare. We shouldn’t have come here. It just feels wrong.”

“Because of what happened to your friends?”

“Maybe.”

Mandy clearly didn’t want to say anything more, but she looked around at the trees, as if half expecting Sylvie and Wayne to emerge bloodied from the undergrowth, looking for a beer and a toke.

“Look, just give us a break, okay?”

Macy relented. “Okay,” she said, and watched Mandy follow her friends back to the road. Something flitted across the grass toward Macy’s feet. It was a moth, an ugly gray one. Macy flicked her foot at it and the moth flew away. She strolled over to the damaged tree against which the stolen car had finally come to rest and saw the little shrine that had been raised in memory of the dead teenagers. She touched nothing. By the time she got back to the Explorer, Mandy and the other kids were gone.

That was about as interesting as things got. For the most part, she drove around the island, familiarizing herself with its roads and trails, talking to people as they went about their daily business. Occasionally she made contact with Dupree, but he seemed distracted. When the light began to fade, she returned to the station house and stayed there.

She went upstairs to the little galley kitchen beside the rec room, poured chicken soup from a can into a plastic bowl, then placed the bowl in the microwave. She took a book from her pack, lay back on the sofa, and started to read. There was still some time to kill before the ferry arrived.

Out on Sunset Road, Doug Newton checked on his mother. Her breathing was shallow and the dark patches around her eyes were like new bruises. He touched the old woman’s skin with the backs of his fingers. She felt cold, even though the radiators were turned up as high as they would go. Doug went to the hall closet and took out another comforter. He laid it on her bed, tucking it in beneath her chin, then walked to the alcove window and looked out onto his yard. The exterior lights were on and he could see the snow falling and the shapes of the trees slowly emerging as the flakes came to rest upon them. Beyond, there was only darkness.

Doug tugged at the lock on the window. It was firmly closed, as were all the windows in the house. He recalled what he believed he had seen: a little girl at his mother’s half-open window, her fingers prising at the gap to widen it. When Doug had entered the room, the girl had stared at him for no more than a second or two, then retreated. By the time Doug reached the window, she was gone from sight. The girl was five or six years of age, or so he had told Joe Dupree, but Doug had said that last part with a slight tremor of doubt in his voice, because the girl might have had the body of a child, but her eyes were much older, and her mouth was all wrong. It was very round, like it was about to give a kiss.

The funny thing about it was that Joe Dupree, old Melancholy Joe himself, hadn’t laughed at him, or accused him of wasting police time the way that other cop Tuttle had. Instead, Joe had told him to do just what he was doing: keep his mother warm, and keep the doors and windows locked, just in case.

Just in case.

Doug went back downstairs, turned on the TV, and tried to watch a game show through a snowstorm worse than the one outside.

On Church Road, Nancy and Linda Tooker were arguing over the dogs. They’d taken the collie and the German shepherd indoors because of the snow, but now the dogs just wouldn’t stop whining. Nancy had opened the kitchen door to see if they wanted to go back out, but the dogs had instead retreated farther into the house and were now lying in the darkness at the top of the stairs, still crying.

“It was you who wanted pedigree dogs,” said Nancy. “Damn things are too highly strung. I told you.”

“Can it!” said her sister. She was trying to connect to AOL, but with no success. Eventually, the screen just froze and she was forced to unplug the computer from the wall. When she tried to restart it, nothing happened.

“Nancy,” she said. “I think I broke the computer.”

But Nancy wasn’t listening. Instead, she watched through the kitchen window as gray shapes danced across the snow. Her sister joined her, and together they stood in silence as the insects flew among the snowflakes, seemingly untroubled by the wind that shook the windows and caused closed doors to strike against their frames. Once or twice they banged against the glass and the Tookers got a clear look at the ugly moths.

Without consulting each other, the two sisters locked all the doors, secured the windows, and took their places with the dogs.

In his little bedroom, Carl Lubey wrapped himself up warm and pulled on a pair of steel-capped boots. The wind tugged at the windows of his house, causing them to rattle furiously. What little warmth there was seeped out through countless cracks and gaps in the woodwork. Ron was the one with the talent for houses, not Carl. Carl was the mechanic; Ron was the builder, the handyman. Now his brother was gone and Carl was left alone to deal with the wind and the rain and the snow as best he could.

He went to his bedside locker and removed the Browning. It had a shitty plastic grip plate that was supposed to look like wood but didn’t, and the magazine catch jammed on occasion, but Carl wasn’t fussy. He didn’t think he’d have much call to use it, not if the visitors came through for him. If things went like they were supposed to, his brother would sleep easy in his grave tonight.

At the heart of the island, close by the Site, there was movement among the trees and beneath the earth. Despite a wind that blew hard from the west, shrubs bent toward the east, and flurries of snow rose in spirals and formed shapes that almost resembled the bodies of men, before they disintegrated and tumbled gently toward the ground. Seen from above, it might have appeared that gray light was seeping out from the ground, or a thin, dirty smoke that left no mark on the snow.

There were no more whispers. Now the wind sounded like voices, and the voices were joyful.

Chapter Twelve

Macy spotted the ferry pulling into port from her vantage point on the second floor. Its arrival had been delayed by the weather, Thorson unwilling to push the ferry’s speed into little more than double figures. The faint streamer of smoke was barely visible through the thickening snow, although Thorson had lit the boat itself like a Christmas tree. It almost hurt her eyes to look at it.

“Ferry’s in,” she called to Dupree.

He was catching up on paperwork in the little office. The doors leading outside were now firmly closed and the heating had kicked in enough to enable him to remove his jacket.

“You don’t have to go,” he said. “I’m pretty sure it’s my turn.”

“Nah, I’m dressed for it. Besides, it will give me something to do.”

“Thanks,” he said, and returned to his reports.

The wind had picked up force and the snow blew directly into her face, stinging her cheeks. She removed the windshield cover from the Explorer and tossed it on the passenger seat, then started the engine and drove carefully down to the dock, parking over by the passenger shelter until the ferry came in. The chains on the wheels made a ratcheting sound on the road, and the snowplow attachment that she and Dupree had fitted on earlier that evening rattled against the grille.

A handful of passengers disembarked from the ferry, all of them apparently locals who raced for their own cars or caught rides from friends or family. Macy watched them leave, then saw another, smaller vessel heading into port. The water taxi docked and a harried-looking woman was helped out by the boatman. There seemed to be some argument, and Macy was about to head over and intervene when the boatman abruptly turned away, cast off, and headed out of port. He paused briefly to exchange some words with Thorson, who leaned over from his roost to talk, then continued on his way.

The woman did a double take when she saw the Explorer, then headed straight up the hill to where her car was parked. Macy followed, pulling in alongside her as she fumbled with her car keys.

“Everything okay, ma’am?”

The woman looked at her and tried to smile.

“Yes, thank you, everything’s fine. I’m just late to pick up my son, that’s all. He’ll be worried.”

Macy smiled, as if she really understood what it was like to have a child waiting for her to return, but the woman was no longer looking at her. Instead, she was staring over Macy’s shoulder, looking back out to sea. Macy glanced in her rearview mirror, but the ferry was the only boat in sight. The water taxi was already lost amid the snow.

“Can I ask your name, ma’am?”

The woman jerked as if she’d just been hit with an electric shock.

“Marianne Elliot,” she said. “My name is Marianne Elliot.”

“Were you having trouble with the taxi?”

“Just a disagreement about the fare, that’s all. In the end, I paid a little over the odds, but it’s a bad night. It was good of him to take me over after I missed the ferry.”

Macy examined the woman’s face but saw no reason to doubt her story. She patted the car roof and moved back.

“Well, Miss Elliot, you take care on the road. I know you’re in a hurry, but you want to get back to your son safe and sound, don’t you?”

For the first time, the woman seemed to truly notice her.

“Yes,” she said. “More than anything else in the world.”

Thorson was sipping coffee in the cabin of the ferry when Macy came onboard.

The captain offered her his flask and a spare cup, but she declined.

“You’re not making another crossing, right?” she asked. Dupree had told her to check, although he had been pretty certain that Thorson would not be taking the ferry out again.

Thorson stared out into the night. He even looks like a ferry captain, thought Macy: white beard, red cheeks, yellow oilskins. He was a good captain, according to Dupree; in all its long history, there had never been an accident involving Thorson’s ferry. He was just more respectful of the sea than most.

“You kidding? There’s already a small-craft advisory in place, and even the Casco Bay ferries are going to stop running in an hour. There won’t be a boat on the water after that. Soon as I finish my coffee I’m heading home, and that’ll be me done until the morning.”

“Okay, just thought I’d make sure. Say, you know the captain of that water taxi that came in just now?”

“Yeah, that’s Ed Oldfield. I was surprised to see him out so far on a night like this.”

“He say anything to you about the woman he brought over?”

“Marianne? No, just that she seemed to want him to wait for her and take her back to Portland. He wouldn’t do it. If he waited any longer he’d be stuck here overnight, and he’s got a family at home on Chebeague.”

Macy thanked him and returned to the Explorer, then headed back through town toward the station house. Dupree was still hunched over his desk, painstakingly typing details into the primitive-looking computer on his desk as he tried to avoid hitting two keys simultaneously with his big fingers. He looked up as Macy entered, brushing snow from her jacket.

“Anything unusual?”

“A few locals, and a water taxi. Just one passenger onboard. She said her name was Marianne Elliot.”

Macy picked up on the look that crossed Dupree’s face.

“You know her?”

“Yeah,” he said.

Was he blushing, she wondered?

“She’s a friend.”

“She was in quite a hurry. Said she was late to pick up her kid. Thorson said he thought she might be trying to get back to the mainland tonight.”

Dupree frowned. “Nobody’s going back to Portland tonight. Maybe I’ll take a run by her place later, make sure she’s okay.”

Despite herself, Macy felt one of her eyebrows arch.

“What?” said Dupree.

“Nothing,” said Macy, trying to sound innocent. “Nothing like a concerned, active police force.”

“Yeah.” He sounded dubious. “Speaking of concerned and active, you mind taking a short ride out?” Dupree was worried about Marianne now. He couldn’t understand why she would want to return to Portland before morning, unless there was something wrong. He’d use his own Jeep to drop in at her place as soon as he had finished his paperwork.

“No problem, but that snow is falling pretty heavily and the wind is picking up some. Soon, it’s going to start to drift.”

“I don’t want you to make a full circuit of the island, not in this weather. Larry Amerling told me you were out by the main watchtower today. You think you can find it again?”

“It’s easy enough to find: take a right on Division and straight on till morning, right?”

“That’s it. Heard you ran into Carl Lubey while you were out there.”

“He was charming. Still single too. Quite a catch.”

“Yeah, like catching rabies. Could you swing by Lubey’s place?” He pointed it out to her on the wall map. “It’s a shithole, so you can’t miss it, even in this weather. Couple of rusted-out cars in the drive and a big screw-you satellite dish in the yard. Last night, I had to roust him from the bar along with a mainland lowlife named Terry Scarfe. According to Thorson, Terry didn’t come back over today, but I still don’t like the fact that he and Lubey were spending time together.”

Macy zipped up her jacket and got ready to go, but Dupree stopped her.

“I guess you already know it, but Carl Lubey is the brother of a man I shot. I killed him. Carl’s a sleazebag, but he’s harmless alone. If I go out there, I’ll only rile him up, and the next thing we know we’ll have him cuffed to the chair over there, smelling up the place until morning. I hate to do this to you on your first night and all, but it will put my mind at rest if I know that Carl Lubey is tucked up safe in his bed. The tree coverage should mean that the road is still okay, but you run into any problems and you just come right back, y’hear?”

Macy told him that she would. Secretly, she was pleased to be leaving the station house. The TV wasn’t working properly and she was likely to be cooped up inside until morning. One last trip out would kill some time and leave her with more of her book to read. She drove carefully up Island Avenue until she left the street lamps behind, then put her headlights on full and followed the coast toward Division.

Carl Lubey was not tucked up safe in his bed, although he was starting to wish that he was. Curiously, he was thinking about Macy, just as Macy was now thinking about him, because he was staring into the innards of his truck, a truck that right now just would not start.

The cop had warned him. She said she’d seen it billowing fumes, but he just hadn’t listened.

Son of a bitch.

It had been driving okay earlier in the day, but now, just when he needed it to run, the engine was turning over with a click. The battery was new, so it couldn’t be that. Inside his garage, with the lamp hanging from the hood, Carl took a rag and wiped the oil from his hands. It could be the starter, he figured, but that would take time to repair and he didn’t have that kind of time. He had people to meet, and if Scarfe was telling the truth, they were the kind of people who wouldn’t take kindly to being kept waiting. He didn’t want them to wait, either. The sooner they got what they wanted, the sooner he would get what he wanted, which was a big dead policeman.

Carl was a coward. He knew he was a coward, although sometimes, when he was liquored up, he liked to tell himself that he was just smart, and that men like him, smaller and weaker than those around them, had to find other ways to fight back when people did them a bad turn. If that meant stabbing them in the back, then so be it. If they hadn’t crossed him, they wouldn’t have had to worry about their backs anyway.

Carl’s brother was different-strong and hard and, hell, maybe even kind of mean, but a real man, one who had stood up for his little brother time and time again. And because Ron had been a stand-up guy for Carl, when the time came, Carl had been a stand-up guy for him.

Carl still remembered the call. They’d both been out drinking in Portland, and Ron had headed off with some woman he’d picked up in Three-Dollar Dewey’s. She looked kind of familiar to Carl. According to Ron, she was Jeanne Aiello, all grown up. Generations of Aiellos had lived out on Dutch until Jeanne’s parents had grown tired of the isolation and had left for more “civilized” surroundings. Now little Jeanne was back in Maine, working in one of those tourist stores in the Old Port, and seemed real happy to be making Ron’s acquaintance once again.

Carl left them to it, and because he was still thirsty and had a beer appetite, he took a cab out to the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue and got himself a big basket of wings. It wasn’t Carl’s favorite bar, owing to the fact that the Portland cops liked to drink there, but he was hungry and the Bear was one of the few bars that served food late at night. He was halfway through his wings when his cell phone started ringing and he heard his brother’s voice when he answered the call. Ron wasn’t panicked, though, or afraid. He just told Carl to get in a cab and head over to Windham, and Carl had done just that, leaving the cab about a half mile from the address his brother had given him, as he had been instructed to do. Ron was waiting at the door of the house when he got there, and waved his brother in quickly. There were cuts on his face.

The woman was lying on the bathroom floor, and her face was all torn up. The mirror above the sink was shattered and there was a big shard of it in her eye. Smaller pieces were embedded in her cheeks and her forehead. Carl looked at his brother’s right hand and saw that some of the woman’s hair was still caught in his nails.

“I just lost it, man,” said Ron. “I don’t know what happened. She brought me back here and we was drinking, fooling around. We head for the bedroom and I try to get it on and next thing she’s pushing me away, calling me an animal. We started fighting, she ran to the bathroom, and then I was just pushing her against the wall and I couldn’t stop.”

He began to cry.

“I couldn’t stop, Carlie. I couldn’t stop.”

It was Carl’s finest moment. He told his brother to go find some rubber gloves and cleaning products, anything that could help them clear the scene. While Ron wiped everything, Carl wrapped the woman in sheets, then double-bagged her with black plastic garbage sacks, using tape to bind her tight as a fly’s ass. They washed everything down, until the house was cleaner than it had ever been before, then filled a suitcase with clothes, makeup and what little jewelry they could find. There wasn’t much that could be done about the broken mirror, so Carl just removed the last pieces from the frame and put a small vanity mirror from the bedroom on the bathroom sink. That way, he hoped, anyone who saw it would think that Jeanne had broken the bathroom mirror herself and was content to use the vanity mirror until she got around to replacing it. They put the suitcase and the body in the trunk of her car and drove down to their boat. Jeanne was loaded into the cabin and covered with a tarp, and then Carl parked her car on India Street and walked back to rejoin his brother. When they were half an hour out of port, they weighted her body with Carl’s old toolbox, which they kept in the boat for emergencies, and then dumped her overboard. She was never seen again by any living person, her body descending beneath the waves, lost to the eyes of the world and watched only by the ghost of a boy, for this was his place.

Jeanne Aiello was reported missing by her parents two days later, but by then her car had already been found. The cops were suspicious, maybe because Carl and Ron had gone a little overboard with their cleaning, leading the cops to wonder why a woman seemingly intent on heading off without telling anyone where she was going would clean her house so assiduously before she left. But there was no body for them to examine, and the description of the man with whom she had left the bar was so general that half the guys in Portland could have filled the bill. It looked as if Carl and Ron had managed to get away, literally, with murder.

But the relief was only temporary. It pained Carl to see the deterioration in his brother. He stopped working, started drinking more, and began talking gibberish about the woods. That was what frightened Carl most, the stuff about the forest. His brother was spending more and more time in the woods. He liked to hunt deer, and before the cull in ’99, the island had been nearly overrun with them. Nobody objected much to folks shooting them and filling up their freezers with the meat, although there was no way that Ron and Carl had a freezer big enough for all the dead meat Ron had created in the woods. But Ron wasn’t even hunting anymore. He would just head out into the woods with a couple of six-packs or a bottle of sour mash, and when he returned he would be carrying on conversations that had clearly begun a long time before, and were the continuation of some ongoing argument.

“No, I tell you, I ain’t done it. It weren’t my fault. No, no, no. You got to let me be now, y’hear?”

He also stopped shaving and combing his hair, because doing those things meant looking in mirrors, and Ron didn’t like looking in mirrors anymore, because Ron’s reflection wasn’t the only one he saw when he looked in the glass.

On the night that Ron died, Carl had left him to go meet up with some people down at the Rudder. Ron had seemed pretty lucid, clearer at least than he had been in months.

“Hey, little brother,” he said as Carl headed for the door. His brother was sitting slumped in an easy chair, staring at the fire. “I been thinking. I forced you to do a bad thing that night with the woman. I shouldn’t have made you get involved.”

“You’re my brother,” said Carl. “I’d do anything for you.”

“They’re gonna make me pay,” said Ron. “I have to pay for what I done. There are boundaries that you’re not supposed to overstep. They won’t tolerate that, so you have to pay.”

“Who? Who’s going to make you pay?”

But Ron didn’t seem to hear him.

“But I figure that if I pay, maybe that’ll be enough. Maybe they won’t want no more. Maybe they’ll leave you be.”

But when Carl tried to get more out of him, Ron had drifted off into a boozy sleep.

He remembered sitting at a table in the Rudder, not drinking much because he was so disturbed by his brother’s words. He heard the sound of the approaching chopper, then someone came in and said that Snowman, that cop with the dumb name, had been shot, and that-

And then the guy had looked at Carl, and Carl had known.

They said later that his brother had been shooting at the houses nearby, that he was all fired up over some imaginary boundary dispute with his neighbors, but Carl never believed that was true. Ron wasn’t shooting at houses when he died, and the boundaries of which he spoke had nothing to do with hedges or lawns. He was shooting at the things he imagined were speaking to him in the woods, and it was the transgression of their boundaries that led to his death. It was bullshit, of course. Ron’s mind had just collapsed under the weight of his guilt. But since then Carl had kept well clear of the woods that surrounded his house, sticking to the roads and the main paths. Whatever had tormented his brother might have been all in his head, but Carl recalled an incident a week or two back, shortly after the fourth anniversary of Ron’s death, when he was out in the yard bringing in supplies from his truck and he looked out into the forest and saw someone watching him from among the trees. Carl didn’t panic, though. Instead, he laid the brown paper bags down on the ground and, never taking his eyes off the figure in the woods, removed his shotgun from its case in the back of his truck. He loaded it up with the truck shielding him, then headed for the trees.

The figure was dressed all in gray, and seemed to shimmer.

“Who are you?” asked Carl, as he drew closer.

And then the figure had exploded, shards of it spreading in all directions, into the trees, into the sky, along the ground.

And toward Carl.

Carl turned his face away and shielded himself with one arm. He felt things striking him, felt them moving as they did so. When at last he lowered his arm, there was nothing before him but darkness and trees, but something was caught in the folds of his coat. It fluttered and beat against him, until he released it and allowed it to fly free.

It was a moth, a gray moth. Somehow, Carl had managed to disturb a whole bunch of them in the trees. That was the only excuse he could find, even as he backed toward his truck and recalled the shape that they had somehow formed: the shape of a woman.

That was all beside the point. Joe Dupree, the freak cop, had killed Carl’s brother, and now there would be payback for what he had done. For the chance of revenge, Carl was prepared to risk a trip into the woods. After all, he would not be going in alone.

Carl looked at his watch, hissed in irritation, and returned to the engine of his truck.

The first boat, piloted by Scarfe, came in sight of Cray Cove shortly before nine. They could barely see the island through the wall of snow, but Scarfe knew what he was doing. Without him, they would have run aground on rocks and drowned before they even came within sight of land.

Despite the weather, Scarfe had enjoyed being in command of a boat again. Being on the sea was one of the things he had missed most while locked up. Scarfe’s father knew about boats, and had passed on that knowledge to his son. As soon as the diesel engine began to turn over, and the vibrations commenced beneath his feet, Scarfe was at home. Under other circumstances, he would have cranked the boat faster as soon as they were out on the bay. Instead, he throttled down and kept a steady pace across the water in the face of the wind, until at last they came to the jetty. Powell tied the boat up, and, with a hint of regret, Scarfe cut the engine. He looked out on the silhouette of the island, barely visible through the falling flakes, and thought again that it was strange to see an outer island so thickly forested. Most of them boasted little more than sawgrass and burdock, but Sanctuary was different. Sanctuary had always been different.

The snow, thought Moloch, was a mixed blessing: the weather would keep other people indoors, and permit them to move about with greater ease, but there was now the risk of some of them getting separated and lost. And if anyone did spot them, they would have a hard time explaining why they were wandering around in a near blizzard.

Yet as soon as he set foot on the island, Moloch’s fears seemed to dissipate. Images flashed through his mind, pictures from his dreams and other, less familiar thoughts. He saw trails hidden from the eyes of others. He recalled the names of trees and plants. A great wave of understanding broke upon him.

I know this place.

I know it.

Moloch gestured to Dexter, Powell, Shepherd, and Scarfe, inviting them to follow him. Tell said nothing. Willard just watched them quietly.

“You stay here for now,” Moloch told Tell and Willard. “Watch the boat. When we get back, we’ll need to leave fast.”

Then they moved away, slowly fading into the gathering whiteness.

The water taxi was within sight of the island when Leonie appeared at the boatman’s shoulder. The crossing had been rough, and both she and Braun were wet and cold, their heads and shoulders sprinkled with snow.

“How do you find your way in from here?” Leonie asked.

The boatman shrugged. “The worst is past. This is easy. A child could do it. Truth is, I could put this boat in anywhere along here. Dock is just as good a place as any.”

He smiled, and she smiled back. She was a good-looking woman. It was nice to see a mixed-race couple happy together, he thought. He looked over to the little parking lot by the shelter, expecting to see the shape of the police Explorer, but it wasn’t there. No call for it, he supposed, now that Thorson’s ferry was docked.

“You folks are looking for a place to stay, the motel’s over there,” he said, pointing to his right. The motel had four rooms, and backed onto a slope that led down to the small, rocky cove that gave the town its name. “If there’s nobody around, call over at the bar. Jeb Burris owns both. His house is just behind it.”

Leonie thanked him, then added: “Looks quiet.”

“Yeah, sure doesn’t look like there’s anyone around.”

Leonie stepped away, raised her silenced pistol, and shot the boatman in the head.

Willard watched the group of men depart. Cray Cove was a small inlet with a jetty made of rocks that jutted out a little from the shore. It was secluded and Willard could make out no lights on the shore. A pathway led up from the stony beach and he could see flashlights dancing, the only visible sign of the ascent to the road above.

During the crossing, Moloch had sat beside him and told him that he would not be joining them.

“You don’t trust me,” said Willard.

Moloch touched the younger man’s shoulder. “I’m concerned about you, that’s all. Maybe you’ve been forced to do too much this last week. I just want you to bring it down a couple of notches, take a breather. As for trust, it’s Tell I don’t trust, not you. We’ve never worked with him before. If things go wrong and he tries to leave without us, you take him apart, you hear?”

Willard nodded, and Moloch left him and returned to the wheelhouse.

Willard wanted to believe him. He wanted to believe him so badly. He might have stifled his doubts too, had it not been for Dexter. As Dexter had disembarked, he had glanced back at Willard and Willard had understood that as far as Dexter was concerned, it was the last time that they would look upon each other.

Dexter had even smiled at him.

The five men were making slow progress on the track, slipping on the new-fallen snow and stumbling into one another. Dexter reached the top before the others, followed closely by Powell. Moloch, Shepherd, and Scarfe were some way behind.

It was Dexter who saw the man first. He was standing at the doorway of a small, three-story tower with slit windows, one gloved hand shielding his eyes so he could better see the lights of the approaching men. Dexter’s first impression was that the man was pulling a face at him, taunting him, but then Dexter spotted the heavy lids, the muted curiosity in the eyes, the slight slackness at the jaw.

“We got trouble,” said Dexter.

Richie Claeson liked snow more than just about anything else in the world. He thought about waking Danny and asking him to come out with him, but then he reconsidered. Danny was small, and didn’t know the woods like he did, so Richie dressed quietly, then put on his boots, his thick coat, and his hat and gloves, and headed out. He didn’t tell Momma. She was asleep in front of the TV and he didn’t want to wake her. Anyway, she would tell him no, and he didn’t want that. He wanted to see the island in the snow, but instead of heading directly through the forest, he had stuck close by the road until he found himself upon the shore.

Richie usually felt no threat from the woods, and he was, though he would never have been able to put it in such terms, acutely sensitive to danger, a consequence of his condition that had kept him safe from harm on those occasions when he was at risk from older boys or, once, while he was in Portland with his mother and an old man had tried to entice him into an alleyway with the promise of discarded comic books. He had smelled the threat the old man posed, a stale scent of raddled discharges and unwashed clothing, and had walked away, keeping his head down, his left side to the wall, his eyes slightly to the right in case the man should choose to follow him.

The woods were different. They were safe. There was a presence in the woods, although Richie had long believed that he had no reason to be afraid of it. The woods still smelled as woods should, of pine and fallen leaves and animal spoor, but there was a stillness to them, a watchfulness that made him feel safe, as if some stronger, older being was watching over him, just as Mrs. Arbinot in the kindergarten had tried to look out for him before they took Richie away from the other children and put him in the special school in Portland. He liked the special school. He made friends there for the first time, proper friends. He even kissed a girl, Abbie, and recalled with embarrassment the feelings that she had aroused in him, and how he had half-shuffled away from her to disguise his growing discomfort.

But the woods had changed in recent times. In the past, Richie had caught glimpses of the boy, the one who stood at the water’s edge staring out at the sea, the boy who left no footprints on the wet sand. Richie had tried calling to him, and waving, but the boy never looked back, and eventually Richie had given up trying to talk to him. Sometimes he saw the boy in the woods, but mostly the boy stayed by the shore and watched the waves break. The boy didn’t frighten Richie, though. The boy was dead. He just didn’t want to leave the island, and Richie could understand that. Richie didn’t want to leave the island either.

But the Gray Girl did frighten Richie. He had seen her only two or three times, hanging in the air, her feet not quite touching the ground, her eyes like the backs of black beetles that had crawled into her head and nested in her sockets, but she scared Richie bad enough to make him piss his pants. The Gray Girl was angry, angry with everyone who lived because she wanted to be alive too. The boy was waiting for something, but the little Gray Girl didn’t want to wait. She wanted it now. So Richie had begun to stay away from the Site, where the woods were thickest, and from the tall watchtower at the center of the island. He used to like the big watchtower a lot. From the top, he could see for miles and miles, and the wind would blow his hair and he could taste the sea on his tongue when he opened his mouth. But that was the Gray Girl’s place now. Joe Dupree came by to check on it, and he would make sure that the door was locked, but the Gray Girl didn’t like it when the door was locked so she found ways to open it again. The Gray Girl wanted the door open, because if it was open, then people might come in.

And if people came in, and they weren’t too careful, then they might get to play with the Gray Girl.

She was the worst, but there were others too, and the area around the tower and the cross belonged to them. To go in there now would be like standing in front of a train. The train wouldn’t mean to hit you, wouldn’t have any intention of hurting you, but if you got in its way, it would kill you as it hurtled toward its destination. That was what the woods now felt like to Richie: a dark tunnel, with a train rushing through it, ready to smash anything in its path.

But the shore was still safe, and there were trees beneath which to shelter. Except tonight the snow had started to fall really heavily, heavier than Richie had ever seen it fall before, and the wind had grown very strong and had blown the snow into Richie’s eyes. He had sought cover in one of the old observation towers, a little one by the road, hoping to wait out the bad weather. Then the boat had come. He could barely make it out until it got close to shore, but he heard the men as they reached land.

And suddenly, he was afraid.

He wanted to go home.

He left the shelter of the tower just as the black man appeared and saw him.

Tell’s voice brought Willard back. He could no longer perceive Moloch and the others, for they had now ascended the slope, but he thought that he could still catch glimpses of their flashlight beams through the snow. There was a pain in Willard’s belly. It made him want to curl up in a ball, like a little child. His eyes stung and he felt tears creep down his cheeks.

“I said, you want to stow these away?”

Willard wiped his face hurriedly as Tell handed him a stack of life jackets. He pointed to the storage chest at the stern of the little boat.

“In there.”

Willard took the jackets in his arms, then knelt down to store them. Behind him, he heard Tell rummaging in his pack, then sensed the little man moving close behind him. He looked over his shoulder and into the barrel of the pistol. Tell’s own gun, a Colt.45, was still in his belt. The gun in his hand was a one-shot.22, silenced to hell and back.

No noise, that was Moloch’s instruction to Tell. No noise and no pain.

“You’re a crazy bastard, you know that?” said Tell. “You gave us all the fucking creeps.”

Willard didn’t blink as the trigger was pulled.

“He’s a dummy,” said Dexter.

Powell looked at him.

“What did you say?”

“The guy’s a dummy,” repeated Dexter. “He’s handicapped.”

Richie stood across the road from them, but didn’t move. Powell squinted against the snow and saw the man’s face, except now that he looked, the man seemed younger, more a kid than an adult. But Dexter was right. The kid, or man, or whatever the hell he was, was retarded.

“What are we going to do with him?” asked Powell.

“Take him back to the boat, I guess,” said Scarfe. “Let Tell keep an eye on him until we got to go, then turn him loose.”

He heard a scrabbling sound behind him, and turned to see Moloch hauling himself up the last stretch of trail with the aid of a sapling.

Moloch looked at Richie, and Richie stared back.

“Bad men,” said Richie.

“What did he say?” asked Powell.

Richie began to walk quickly away, but they could hear him muttering to himself.

“He recognized me,” said Moloch.

“The fuck could he do that? Dex said he was a dummy.”

“I don’t know how. TV maybe. Stop him.”

Dexter and Powell began to move after him, but the snow was thicker up here on the exposed road, and they struggled and slipped as they tried to catch up with him.

“Hey, wait up!” called Dexter, but Richie kept his head down, his face set determinedly. It was the face he wore when other boys taunted him, or tried to show him pictures of naked ladies.

It was the face he wore when he was afraid, and trying not to cry.

“Bad men,” he whispered to himself. “Badmenbadmenbadmen.”

Behind him, he heard the black man swear loudly as he stumbled.

Richie started to run.

Carl Lubey was beginning to panic. He had tried everything he knew and there was still no sign of life from the truck. As a last resort, he’d decided to change the battery. He was lifting the spare from the back of the garage when the radio in the truck exploded into life, almost deafening him with the last bars of “Freebird.” The radio was permanently tuned to the island’s amateur station, run by Dickie Norcross out of his attic, except Dickie broadcast only between the hours of two and six, and it was now well past Dickie’s good-bye time.

“And that one’s going out to all the folks on the island who are battening down the hatches for a hard night ahead,” said the disc jockey’s voice. It sounded strangely familiar to Carl. It wasn’t Dickie Norcross, not by a long shot. Dickie had a kind of high-pitched voice, and tended to limit his voice-overs to birthday greetings and obituaries. This was a woman’s voice.

“Especially Carl Lubey over there in the deep, dark forest, who’s having trouble with his truck. Ain’t ya, Carlie?”

The voice was distorted, as though the woman had just put her mouth right over the mike.

“This one’s for you, Carl,” said the voice, and then the first bars of “Freebird” commenced. “Freebird”: his brother’s favorite song.

“It’s all ‘Freebird,’ all night,” continued the DJ, and Carl knew the voice, recalled it from that night in the Old Port when his brother had leaned into little Jeanne Aiello as their voices rose in harmony over the sound of some piece of southern-rock shit playing on the jukebox.

Carl Lubey grabbed a crowbar and smashed the radio with one blow, sending the dead woman’s voice back into the void from which it had issued.

“Fuck!” said Dexter. The dummy was disappearing from sight. Even in his bright orange winter clothing he would soon be lost in the snow. Already he was little more than a blur among the falling snowflakes, but for some reason he was staying away from the woods. Instead, Dexter could see him silhouetted against the cliff edge some forty feet above the water, running with a strange, awkward gait, his elbows held rigid against his sides.

Dexter drew his bow from his back and notched one of the heavy Beman Camo Hunter arrows against the string. The head was triangular, with three blades extending out from the central point.

“What are you doing?”

Dexter felt Scarfe’s hand on his arm, distracting him from the coldness of the arrow against his cheek.

“Get your hand off me, man.”

“He’s handicapped. He’s no threat to us.”

“I said get your hand off me.”

“Do as he says.” It was Moloch.

Scarfe’s hand remained on the black man’s arm for a second or two longer, then fell away.

Dexter aimed, then released the arrow.

Richie could no longer hear the men behind him. Maybe he was safe. Maybe they were letting him go. He thought of his mother, and began to cry. His mother often told him that he wasn’t a little kid anymore, that he was a man, and that men didn’t cry, but he was frightened, and he wanted to be back at home, back in his bed. He wanted to be asleep. He wanted-

Richie felt a push at his back, as if a great hand had shoved him forward, and then a searing pain tore straight through the center of his being and erupted from his chest. He staggered, and looked down. His fingertips brushed the blades as his mind tried to register what he was seeing.

It was an arrow. In him. Through him. Hurt.

Richie did a little pirouette on the tips of his toes, then fell from the cliff into the waiting sea. The circuit was completed, and so it would begin as it had begun once before, many years ago, with the loss of a boy and the arrival of men upon the island. Sanctuary’s long wait was over. It was the beginning, and the end.

All over the island the power failed and the lights went out, and Sanctuary was plunged into darkness.

Carl Lubey knocked his beer from the rickety table by his easy chair and cursed the blackness. There was still a faint glow from the TV, which was always left on, but it was fading rapidly. The thick drapes were drawn on all the windows, as they always were, because Carl didn’t like the thought of anybody peering inside and seeing his business. He shuffled across the carpet, barking his shin painfully against the table and then catching his foot on a cable and almost sending himself sprawling on the floor, until his right hand found the switch on the wall and gave it a few futile flicks. Nothing. Not that he’d expected anything to happen, but Carl was kind of an optimist at heart and liked to think that sometimes the easiest solution was the best. To others, especially those who’d made the mistake of trusting Carl to fix their siding or pave their driveways, Carl was a lazy, corner-cutting creep. Carl preferred “optimist” himself. It had a nicer ring to it.

Carl had gone inside to pour himself a stiff drink, and then the lights had gone out. The incident with the radio had unnerved him, but the more he thought about it, the more he figured it was one of the island assholes jerking him around. He couldn’t figure out who it might be, or how they might have done it, but it was the only explanation he could come up with. Now, lost and disoriented in his own house, he vowed revenge on whoever it was.

In the kitchen he found a flashlight, but the batteries were dead. He rummaged in the drawers until he came across a pack of candles and a box of matches. He lit a candle and jammed it into the top of an empty beer bottle to keep the wax from dripping onto his hand.

Carl heard a fluttering sound against the window, then a shadow flew above him. It was a moth, excited by the light from the candle. Carl watched it until it came to rest briefly on the kitchen sink. It was a big bastard, its long body dotted with small yellow orbs. The moth had no right to be in Carl’s kitchen. Hell, it had no right to be alive at all, now that winter had come. He was so rattled that he failed to connect it with the moths he had glimpsed in the forest the week before, the moths that had briefly assumed the shape of a woman.

Instead, Carl crushed the insect with the base of the empty beer bottle.

The fuse box was in the basement, along with a bunch of spare fuses. Mind, it could be something as simple as the main switch tripping. After all, Carl had wired the place up himself and sometimes, like on the odd occasion when he decided to take a proper shower, the act of turning on the water would cause every light in the place to switch off, as well as the refrigerator.

Shit, thought Carl. He had the best part of half a cow in the freezer in his basement, and he didn’t want to take the chance of his winter feed turning to maggot food if the cold spell broke. He raised the candle and headed toward the basement. He had almost reached the door when he heard the noises coming from below. They were soft, hardly there at all, as though someone was moving very slowly and carefully through the accumulation of garbage and stolen goods that Carl kept stored down there. There was somebody in his basement, maybe the same somebody who had caused the switches to trip, plunging Carl into darkness so he’d be easier to subdue. Carl had no idea who that someone might be, but he wasn’t taking any chances.

He drew the Browning from his belt and opened the basement door.

Macy was about a ten-minute ride from Carl Lubey’s house when her engine failed. She stopped the Explorer and stepped out onto the road, the snowflakes gathering on her hair. All that was visible to her were the snow and the shapes of the trees around her. She got back into the vehicle and tried the radio, but there was no response. No static, no crackle, nothing. She turned the key in the ignition and received only a click in return, then banged her hands impotently against the wheel before resting her forehead against the plastic. She had three choices: she could stay here, which was hardly a choice at all; she could head back toward town and try to hook up with Dupree; or she could keep going toward Lubey’s house and check him out, just as Dupree had asked her to do, and then use his phone to call for help or get him to tow her back to town with his truck. She got out again, took a flashlight and an emergency pack from the trunk, and began walking in the direction of Lubey’s place.

Carl Lubey opened the basement door toward him, keeping away from the exposed opening. There was no other way into or out of the basement, and only two small windows in the walls, neither of which was large enough to admit anything bigger than a small child. In any case, both of those windows were firmly locked, to prevent rodents or forest mammals from making their home in Carl’s basement.

There was now silence below. He wondered if it might have been his imagination, or the occasional shifting of materials that occurs in such spaces, a consequence of drafts and rot. Carl took a breath and registered, for the first time, the stink in the room. It was a dense, damp smell, like stale seawater. Something else hung behind it, something more unpleasant, a kind of stagnancy, and Carl was reminded of the time he and Ron had found a dead seal on the beach, bloated and rotten. Carl hadn’t been able to eat for two days afterward because the stench of the dead seal seemed to cling to his skin and the insides of his nostrils.

It made no sense to Carl. It was snowing outside, and the days preceding had been fiercely cold. Nothing decayed in this cold. Even Carl’s beef might survive a couple of days if the weather held out. But the smell was there, he was sure of it. It trickled into the hallway now and began to adhere to his clothes, but it was definitely coming from the basement. Maybe the pipes had burst down there, soaking the stacked newspapers and cardboard boxes, even his brother’s old clothes, the ones Carl hadn’t had the heart to get rid of.

Carl stepped through the doorway. The candle illuminated the wooden stairs leading down into the basement and cast a faint glow into the sunken room itself. He heard the first step creak beneath his feet as he moved forward, the circle of light from the candle expanding as he advanced, catching the whitewashed walls, the shelves stacked with paints and tools, the boxes piled on top of one another, the more valuable items-a couple of portable TVs, some toasters and VCRs-off to one side, draped with a tarp.

There was movement there. Carl was sure of it.

“Hey, you down there! Come out, now. I can see you. No point in hiding.”

The figure retreated back into the shadows beneath the steps.

“Come on, now,” Carl repeated. He tried to catch a glimpse of the shape through the slats of the stairs. “I won’t hurt you, but you’re making me real nervous. Come out or I don’t know what I might do.”

Carl moved down two more steps, and the basement door slammed closed behind him. He turned, and felt his feet slide out from under him. For a moment, he teetered on the very edge of the step, then his balance failed him and he tumbled down the remaining stairs.

As he fell, his thought was: Hands. I felt hands on my legs.

Scarfe stared hard at Dexter but kept his mouth closed until the big man spoke to him.

“You got something to say?” asked Dexter.

“We could have taken him alive.”

“You think? I could barely see the fucking guy to take the shot. If I hadn’t taken it, we’d have lost him.”

“You didn’t have to kill him.”

Dexter looked to Moloch to intervene, but Moloch was already moving past them, following the road as it sloped down, the road at his right and the sound of the sea to his left.

“Listen,” said Dexter to Scarfe. “I got six more arrows. You keep fucking with me and one of them might just have your name on it.”

“You’re forgetting something.”

“What’s that?”

Scarfe was red with cold and righteous indignation. It made him forget how much Dexter frightened him. “I’m not a dummy running away from you,” he said. “You’ll find me a little harder to kill.”

Dexter sprang for Scarfe, but the smaller man was too fast for him. He slipped past Dexter, drawing his gun as he did so. Within seconds, Dexter was staring down the barrel of the Glock. The gun was shaking in Scarfe’s hand.

“You done fucked up now,” said Dexter.

“You’re the one with a gun aimed at him.”

“Then you better use it, pussy boy, or else I’m going to kill you.”

Scarfe heard movement behind him, and the sound of a hammer cocking.

“Let it go,” said Moloch. “Both of you, let it go.”

Scarfe lowered his gun. Dexter made a move for him, but Powell reached out and held him back by extending his forearm in front of his chest.

“I won’t forget that,” said Dexter.

Scarfe, his burst of adrenaline receding, backed away. Shepherd, who had stayed quiet throughout, followed Moloch to the edge of the forest.

“He should be here,” he said. “Lubey should be here.”

“It’s the weather,” said Moloch. “It’s just delayed him.”

He called to Scarfe, but Scarfe wasn’t looking at him. Instead, he was staring down at the sea below.

“Hey,” he said softly, yet there was something in his tone that made Moloch and the others approach him, even causing Dexter to forget his animosity in order to follow his gaze.

“Hey,” repeated Scarfe. “The guy, he’s still alive.”

Carl Lubey lay on his back among the newspapers and the fallen boxes, slowly coming to. His head ached. He didn’t know how long he had been out, but he guessed it had been no more than a minute or two. There was light coming from somewhere close by, and an acrid smell.

Burning.

He turned his head and saw the flames licking at the newspapers beneath the basement stairs. Carl tried to raise himself, but there was a weight across his chest and he couldn’t feel his legs. He reached out and encountered no obstacle, merely a coldness in the air that chilled his fingers despite the growing heat. The flames were licking against the back wall, devouring paper and clothing and old suitcases. Soon they would reach the shelves of paints and spirits.

Carl saw more flames flicker in the darkness to his left. He couldn’t figure out how the fire had spread over there, because it was as far away as you could get from the conflagration over by the far wall, yet he could clearly discern flares of light close to the floor. They were slowly moving toward him, but they weren’t increasing in size and he could feel no warmth. Instead, they seemed to hang in midair, like sparks carried on a breeze.

And suddenly Carl understood that what he was looking at was not fire but the reflection of fire, caught in shards of mirror that were now drawing closer and closer to him, the smell of dead fish and rotting seaweed growing stronger, filling his nostrils with the stench of decay. A woman’s ruined face emerged from the shadows and Carl opened his mouth as the flames reached the paint and turpentine on the shelves, and his final agony was lost in a great roar.

Chapter Thirteen

Dupree leaned back in his chair and stretched. Chair and bones alike made cracking noises, so he stopped in midextension and carefully eased himself back toward the desk. If he broke the chair, he would have to requisition another and that would mean dealing with the jibes, because the wiseasses in supplies would assume-correctly-that his great bulk had taken out the item of furniture in question. In the end, it would be easier for everyone if he just bought his own damn chair.

He checked his watch and shuffled his completed paperwork to one side of the desk. None of it had been very urgent, but he had allowed untyped reports to pile up these last few weeks and the blizzard had given him an excuse to remain at the station house and catch up on the mundane details of speeding offenses, DUIs, and minor fender benders. The reports had also allowed him to forget, for a while, his worries about the island. The time spent immersed in the routines of day-to-day life had enabled him to put those concerns into perspective. When Macy returned, he would take a drive over to Marianne’s house and make sure she was okay. He wanted to know why she had been in such a rush to get back to Portland, and enough time had elapsed since the arrival of the water taxi to make it look as if he wasn’t checking up on her too closely. It might have been something to do with Danny, but if Danny was really sick, then Marianne would have been in touch with him to arrange emergency transportation. All in all, it was a puzzler.

He heard the main station door open and footsteps in the reception area. Dupree had asked headquarters to consider putting in a counter to section off the office from the public area, but so far nothing had been done. It wasn’t a big deal at this time of year, but during the summer, when the incidence of petty thefts, lost children, and stolen bicycles took a sudden sharp rise, there could be up to a half dozen people crowding around the office door.

He left his desk and stepped out into reception. To his right, a pretty black woman with an Afro was running the fingers of her left hand along the side of Engine 14. She wore a hooded waterproof jacket and blue jeans tucked into shin-high boots. The fake fur lining of her hood was spangled with melting snow.

“Can I help you, ma’am?”

The woman looked at him, and her eyes widened.

“My, aren’t you the big one?” said Leonie.

Dupree didn’t react. “Like I said, can I help you with something, ma’am?”

“Sure, baby, you can help me,” she said. She turned away from the engine and he saw the silenced pistol in her hand. “You can help me by taking the thumb and middle finger of your left hand and lifting that gun from your holster. You think you can do that?”

Dupree caught movement to her right as a man appeared from the shadows behind the fire trucks. He was redhaired and wrapped up tightly against the cold in a padded blue coat, but Dupree could see that he was a big man even without the padding. He too had a gun in his hand, the silencer like a swollen tumor at its muzzle, and it was also pointing in Dupree’s direction.

“Now,” said Braun. “Do it.”

Slowly, Dupree moved his hand to his holster, flipped the clasp, and drew the gun out using his thumb and middle finger, as he had been told. The two strangers didn’t tense as he performed the action and he felt his heart sink. He had only read about people like this in newspapers and internal memoranda.

They were killers. Real, stone-cold killers.

“Lay it down on the floor, then kick it toward me,” said the man.

Dupree did as he was told. The man stopped the gun with his foot as it reached him. Beside him, the woman closed the door to the station house and turned the lock.

“Who are you?” asked Dupree.

“Doesn’t matter,” said Braun. “Tell me where your partner is at.”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t fuck with me.”

“She’s out on patrol. I don’t know where she is exactly.”

“Call her.”

The man and woman moved in unison, keeping the same distance from each other as they advanced on Dupree in a ten-to-two position.

“She’s out of radio contact.”

Braun fired his gun, aiming to Dupree’s left. The shot blew a hole in the computer screen on the desk behind him.

“Why would you think I’m fucking with you, Andre? I want you to call her and bring her in.”

Dupree didn’t know if the radio was still out, but he had no plans to use it even if it was functioning again. Macy would be no match for these people if he brought her back here. The way things were looking, he was no match for them himself.

“I can’t do that,” said Dupree.

“You mean you won’t do it.”

“Comes down to the same thing. Why are you doing this?”

Braun smiled regretfully.

“You shouldn’t have fucked his wife,” he said.

He raised his gun and sighted down the barrel.

“You really shouldn’t have fucked his wife.”

Then, without warning, the lights went out.

Doug Newton was sitting downstairs in his favorite chair when the power died. His first reaction was that of most people on the island: he reached for a flashlight so he could check the fuse box. When the flashlight wouldn’t work, he went scouting for candles, eventually finding a pack of tea lights behind the spare bulbs in the kitchen cabinet. He dropped a tea light in an ashtray, lit it, then took a second candle and placed it on a saucer. His mother would be frightened if she woke and found that her TV wasn’t working. She liked the light from the tube, found it comforting. Her greatest fear, Doug believed, was that she might be alone when she died, and she would rather die with Nick at Nite than nobody at all.

Doug had just begun to climb the stairs when the candles flickered slightly and he felt the blast of cold air: a window was open. At the same instant a shuffling sound came from above, then a tapping that sounded like small bare feet running on boards.

Finally, he heard his mother cry out.

Doug knew that the cops, with the possible exception of Joe Dupree, hadn’t believed him when he’d told them about the little girl. Hell, Doug wasn’t too sure that he believed it himself, but he’d seen it and he was pretty certain his mother had seen it too, although she later convinced herself that it was just a dream. Ever since then, as he had admitted to Dupree, Doug had kept a pistol by his bedside and a loaded shotgun beside the hat stand in the hallway. He put the two tea lights down on the hall table and picked up the shotgun. Light filtered through the small square window at the first landing as he ascended the stairs, but he didn’t really need it. Doug knew this house: he’d been born here, lived here, and would die here, if he had his way.

His mother’s room was the second on the right. The door was slightly ajar, as it always was, and Doug thought that he could see shadows moving against the wall. From inside came the sounds of thrashing, and what might have been his mother softly whimpering.

Doug hit the door at a run, the shotgun at his shoulder.

The sheets had been thrown back from his mother’s bed and lay piled on the floor. Snow was blowing in through the open window, the flakes billowing and colliding with one another before falling gently on the carpet. The Gray Girl crouched over Doug’s mother, her mouth pressed against the old woman’s lips, while his mother’s thin arms and skeletal hands pushed at her, trying to force her away. Her hands caught in the folds of the Gray Girl’s gown, which appeared to move independently of the limbs it concealed. It seemed to be part of the girl, as though her body had fused with the shroud in which she had been interred, creating a new skin that hung over her arms like wings.

As Doug entered, the Gray Girl disengaged herself from his mother and swiveled her head in the direction of the intruder. He saw then that she was old, desperately old, a child in form only. Her hair, blond from a distance, was now clearly silver-white. Her cheeks were sunken and Doug perceived bone protruding through the parched skin below her eyes, which were entirely black. Her mouth was strangely rounded and Doug was reminded of a lamprey, a creature designed by nature to adhere to another creature and draw the life from it. Beneath the girl, he saw his mother’s face, her lips trembling and tears falling from her face. Her breathing was barely audible, and as Doug moved toward the bed, the light faded from her eyes and he heard the rattle in her throat as she died.

The Gray Girl hissed at Doug, and he saw the rage in her black eyes at what Doug had done, the distraction of his presence depriving her of that which she sought. Her hand reached out, her fingers little more than bone wrapped in tattered parchment.

And Doug fired.

The force of the blast blew the Gray Girl from the bed and tossed her against the wall. She rolled when she hit the floor, then rose up again and stood before him, framed by the window. The shot had torn holes through her gown and the skin beneath, but no blood came, and there was only a smear of gray tissue where she had struck the wall. She stood and regarded Doug with a malevolence that made him want to run and hide, to curl himself up into a ball in a closet until she went away. For an instant, Doug pictured himself cocooned, listening in the darkness, then hearing the pad of those feet as they approached and halted before his hiding place, the door being drawn slowly open as-

Doug fired again, and the gray child disintegrated into a cloud of moths.

The room was filled with snowflakes and insects and broken glass, and the sound of Doug Newton crying for his dead mother, and for himself.

Nancy Tooker was descending warily to the kitchen to get some food for her sister and the dogs when the lights went out. She was a big woman, as Officer Berman had not failed to notice, and once she missed her step, there was no way that she could keep her balance. She tumbled awkwardly down the stairs, striking the slate floor hard with her head and coming to rest with a sigh. Her sister cried out her name, then used both the wall and the stair rail to support herself as she descended to Nancy’s side. After a moment’s hesitation, the dogs followed.

There was blood flowing from a wound in Nancy’s head. A shard of bone had broken through the skin of her left arm and her left ankle was clearly broken. Her breathing was very shallow and Linda feared that her sister had done herself some internal damage that only a hospital could ascertain. She went to dial the station house number, but the line was dead. She switched the phone off, powered it up, then tried again, but there was still no tone.

Linda ran to the living room, where she removed the cushions from the armchairs and couches, and did her best to make her sister comfortable. She was afraid to move her, and wasn’t sure that she could have even if she’d wanted to, for Linda was sixty or seventy pounds lighter than her sister. Instead, she gingerly raised Nancy’s head and slipped a cushion beneath it, then tried to do the same for her arm and ankle. During the whole operation, Nancy moaned softly only once, when Linda placed a pair of cushions beneath her leg. That worried Linda more than anything else, because moving that leg should have hurt Nancy like a bitch. She went to the hall closet and removed all the coats she could find, then laid them across her sister to keep her warm. Their nearest neighbors were the Newtons, just on the other side of Fern Avenue. If she could get to them, she could use their phone, assuming that the problem with the phones hadn’t affected the whole island. She didn’t want to think about what might happen to Nancy if that were the case. Someone would just have to drive over to Joe Dupree and tell him what had happened so he could call for help from the mainland.

She leaned in close to her sister, stroked her hair from her eyes, and whispered to her.

“Nancy, I’m going to go for help. I won’t be gone but five minutes.”

Linda kissed her sister’s brow. It was clammy and hot. She stood and shrugged on her own overcoat. At her feet, the dogs began to turn in circles, alternately barking and whining.

“No, you dumb mutts, this isn’t a walk.”

But the dogs weren’t following her to the door. Instead, they were moving back from it. Max, the German shepherd, went down on his front paws, his tail between his legs, and began to growl. Something of their fear returned to Linda as she looked back at them.

“The hell is wrong with you both?” she asked.

She opened the front door, and the Gray Girl pounced.

For a moment, there was confusion in the station house. The blinds had been drawn in Dupree’s office and the heavy cloud cover meant that there was no moonlight. With the loss of the street lamps, the small station house was suddenly plunged into darkness. The suppressed guns spat softly, but Dupree was already moving. Braun and Leonie heard a door opening in the far-right-hand corner of the office. Both fired toward the sound.

“Go around,” said Leonie. “Don’t let him get into the woods.”

Braun ran into the street, then hung a left and made for the rear of the station. Silently, Leonie advanced toward the back room. Her night vision was already improving and she could see the shape of the doorway ahead of her. She stopped to the right of the frame and listened. There was no sound from inside. Leonie crouched down and risked a glance inside. She saw a big water tank with a small generator behind it. Oilskins were hanging from hooks on the wall. There were two lockers, one of them open. Beyond them, the back door stood ajar and snow was already beginning to cover the floor.

Leonie moved slowly into the room. To her right was a narrow gap between the tank and the wall. The open mouth of a pipe was visible in the gap. Leonie paused for a moment and the pipe belched fire. She heard the bellow of the shotgun as her being ignited in pain, and then a voice was calling her name. Braun. It was Braun. She tried to speak, but no words would form. She felt herself sliding down the wall.

“Bra-”

There was blood in her mouth.

“Br-”

The monstrous form of the giant emerged from the shadows in the corner of the room, the very darkness come to life. There came the sound of another load being jacked, but already she knew that he would have no call for it. Leonie’s fingers brushed the gun upon the floor beside her, and she was no longer dying in an alien place. She was a young girl walking across a patch of waste ground, the revolver like a warm hand upon her belly, spreading tendrils of heat through her body and filling her with pleasure and power. She felt a great pressure build inside her, pain and remembrance intertwining like lovers in her mind. Her lips parted in a kind of ecstasy, and her eyes closed as the life left her body, her final breath briefly catching in her throat before at last it found its release.

Braun was almost at the corner when he heard the shotgun blast. Ahead of him, he could see the open back door of the station house. There were no footprints in the snow.

“Leonie,” he cried out instinctively. There was no reply.

Braun looked toward the forest. The big cop could be anywhere inside the station house. If he approached the doorway, Braun would make an easy target. He retreated instead, making his way in a wide arc into the trees at the back of the station. He moved as quietly as he could, the snow muffling his footfalls. The doorway was empty, but it was dark inside and he could see no movement within. Then the reinforced steel door closed suddenly, propelled shut by the force of Dupree’s shoe, and Braun swore loudly. He couldn’t leave the cop alive in there. He would call for help, and next thing he knew there would be a blue army arriving on the island. Braun prepared to move just as a noise came from close by. He spun rapidly, his back to the station house. There was something big in the trees: a deer, perhaps, or maybe the rookie had come back and was already behind him.

The sound came again but this time it was far to his right. His first thought was that, whatever it was, it was moving quickly, but that was swiftly followed by the realization that nothing could move that fast through the woods. He would have heard branches rustling, twigs snapping, even in the snow. Now there was more than one and the disturbances seemed to be coming from above his head, as though some great bird were flying unseen through the trees.

Braun rose and started moving backward, trying to keep both the woods and the station house in sight, his gun panning across the trees. There were figures moving in the darkness. They were gray, seemingly iridescent, like moonlight shining on the fur of animals, and they glided across the snow or flitted through the gaps between the branches of the evergreens. Then one of the shapes seemed to halt and he caught a glimpse of gray skin and a reflection of himself in a dark pupil.

And teeth. Rotting yellow teeth.

“What the fuck?”

The gray shape curled in on itself, like paper crumpled in a fist, then moved swiftly toward him. Braun started firing, but the thing kept on coming. Braun staggered out of the cover of the woods and turned to see Joe Dupree leaning against the wall of the station, the shotgun at his shoulder. He dove to the ground as the shotgun bucked in Dupree’s hands. Bark and splinters exploded from the tree trunk above Braun’s head. He heard a second shot, and felt a pull at his left arm. He looked down to see blood above his elbow and part of his forearm reduced to red meat by the blast. A searing white heat began to burn its way through his upper body.

Braun staggered into the forest, and the gray shapes followed.

Linda Tooker wasn’t a particularly fast mover. Even during rush hour in the diner (which never numbered more than a dozen people, yet still put the sisters under pressure) she served at a slower pace than her sister cooked, which meant lukewarm sandwiches and cool soup for everyone. Yet in the instant after she registered the approaching figure-its tattered skin, its black eyes, its mouth like a sucking wound-she reacted faster than she had since high school. She slammed the door in the Gray Girl’s face and felt the wood strike her, but the gap wouldn’t close. She looked to her right and saw the child’s fingers caught between the door and the frame. The nails were sharp and yellowed and there was no flesh on the bones. They looked like twigs wrapped in burnt paper, delicate enough to be snapped off by a heavy door.

Except the fingers weren’t snapping.

They were gripping.

Linda felt her feet begin to slide on the floor as the door was pushed inward. That’s not possible, she thought. No child could be so strong. There must be someone else out there, someone helping her. Then a second hand materialized in the growing breach, this time braced against the frame, and the Gray Girl’s face appeared, her black eyes focused not on Linda but on her sister.

“No!” shouted Linda. She jammed her right foot against the last stair, placed her forearm against the door, and swung her fisted right hand with all her force into the child’s face. She heard bone crack as the blow struck, and the child’s head rocked slightly. Then it was back in the opening again, the gray skin open across the nose to reveal the dirty bone beneath. The punch appeared only to have angered her, increasing her strength, for she pushed with renewed force, Linda’s legs giving way, the gap now almost big enough to permit the child’s whole body to enter. Linda heard herself sob as her strength failed and the door opened wide.

A dark blur shot by her from the hallway and she felt the dog’s fur brush against her shoulder as Max leaped and struck the Gray Girl, his jaws tearing at her throat as his weight knocked her away from the doorway. Linda slammed the door shut behind them, locking and bolting it, then sliding down its length until she came to rest on the floor. The collie, Claude, began to scratch at the door, trying to reach its companion. From outside she heard scuffling noises in the snow, and Max’s growls.

Then the dog howled sharply once, and all was quiet.

Chapter Fourteen

The five men stood on the edge of the shallow cliff, the stony beach some forty feet below them, and stared at the figure that stood amid the waves. Its features could not be distinguished, but there was no mistaking the arrow that pierced its torso. It remained still, despite the force of the water rolling in from behind. To its right was a rocky outcrop, blocking the pierced man from the view of Tell and Willard, on the boat.

“No way,” said Dexter. “No fucking way. I’ve taken a black bear with one of those arrows. There’s no way he can still be alive.”

Moloch regarded the sea in silence, then turned to Shepherd.

“Go down there and finish him.”

Shepherd shook his gray head once.

“Not me,” he said. “No.”

“I don’t think you heard me correctly. You seem to have turned an order into a request.”

Shepherd remained impassive. He had been watching Moloch carefully throughout the boat journey, growing more and more troubled by what he was seeing, and in the short time since their arrival on the island, his concerns had only increased. He had seen Moloch’s eyes glaze over when nobody was looking, his lips moving, forming unspoken words. During the ascent of the slope, Moloch had slipped more times than any of the others and his eyes seemed to be focused less on the climb than on the thin scrub and brush that had found purchase among the rocks. When they had reached the top, it had taken Dexter to alert him to the presence of the retarded man. Moloch had not been looking at the tower, or at the man in the bright orange vest. His gaze was fixed on the woods, and his lips were moving again. This time, Shepherd could distinguish words and phrases.

We move on.

Did they tell you to keep watch for me?

I told you I’d return.

The last was repeated, again and again, over and over like a mantra.

I told you I’d return. I told you I’d return. I told you-

“Like I just told you, not me,” Shepherd said. He didn’t break eye contact with Moloch, but he was aware of the gun in the other man’s hand. Throughout their confrontation, Shepherd’s own hand rested lazily against the folding stock of the Mossberg Persuader that hung from a leather strap on his shoulder. He had jacked a load as soon as they’d landed and his finger was inches from the trigger. Shepherd did not know what would happen if he was forced to kill Moloch. He guessed that he would have to take out Dexter too. Powell could go either way, he figured. Scarfe didn’t concern him. Scarfe just wanted to get out of this alive.

Moloch considered the other man carefully, then seemed to reach a decision.

“This once,” he said.

Shepherd nodded, and Moloch turned to Powell. Dexter, Shepherd noticed, had notched another arrow on his bow during the standoff. Shepherd wondered if it had been meant for him. We may yet find out, he thought.

“You do it, then follow,” Moloch told Powell.

“Shit,” said Powell, gesturing at Dexter, “it was this asshole couldn’t kill him, and now I got to go down there?”

Dexter didn’t react to the taunt. In the space of a couple of minutes, four white men had managed to get in his face, each one in a different way: Scarfe had laid a hand on him; Powell had insulted him; Shepherd had almost forced Dexter to kill him; and a retarded man with an arrow through his chest simply refused to die. Faced with so many possible targets, Dexter’s wrath had simply diffused, briefly leaving him more puzzled than angry.

“Just do it,” Moloch told Powell. “And quietly.”

Powell sighed theatrically and removed his gun from its holster. He rummaged in the pockets of his jacket until he found the suppressor, then attached it to the muzzle. Moloch’s insistence on silence puzzled him. There was nobody out here to hear a shot, and anyway, even if someone was outside, the wind and snow would muffle any noise. Still, Powell wasn’t about to argue with Moloch. Like Shepherd, he found Moloch’s behavior peculiar, but he wasn’t going to risk taking a bullet in order to point it out.

“How will I find you when I’m done?”

“There’s a path through the forest. You’ll pick it up behind the tower. Stay on it and it will lead you straight to us. For now, we move on.”

When he said the words, he looked puzzled.

We move on.

Shepherd said nothing, but his finger found the trigger guard of the Mossberg and remained there.

“We’re not waiting for Carl Lubey?” asked Scarfe.

“He’s not here and I want to get off the road and out of sight,” said Moloch. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re on a tight schedule. We’ll make for his place and take it from there.”

“There’s a snowstorm blowing,” said Scarfe. “And you don’t know the island.”

“You’re wrong,” said Moloch. “I know this island very well.”

Scarfe shook his head in disbelief and looked to the other men for support, but they were already preparing to follow their leader. Powell, meanwhile, shot Dexter a look of disgust, then began to descend the rocks, toward the beach. Scarfe watched him go until Dexter grasped his arm.

“By my reckoning, pussy,” he said, “you got no lives left.”

Dexter released him and spit once into the snow by Scarfe’s foot. Scarfe shot one last look at the figure that stood among the waves before adjusting his pack on his shoulder and following Moloch, Shepherd, and Dexter across the white road that skirted the woods. He expected Moloch to stop and look at a map or check a compass, but instead he moved purposefully into the trees. Within minutes, the four men were heading for the center of the island on an old trail that wound its way through the forest. While they walked, Scarfe unfolded his map from his pocket and tried to read it, hampered by darkness and snow and wind. It was a struggle, but he eventually confirmed what he had suspected from the moment they had found the trail.

It wasn’t detailed on the map.

Somehow, Moloch had found an unmarked path.

Moloch drifted. Sometimes he was beside Dexter, moving through a white forest, the snow melting on his face and hair. At other times there was no snow, just a harsh wind and frost upon the ground, and there were other men around him, dressed in furs and hand-stitched hides. Eventually, the two worlds began to coexist, like transparencies laid one upon the other, and he was both Moloch and someone else, a man at once known and unknown. Moloch was confused but not frightened by the sensation, for what he felt more than anything else was a sense of belonging, a feeling of returning. This was not home. This was not a place of solace or comfort. There was no shelter for him here, but it was the beginning. Here Moloch, or whatever he truly was, had flamed into being. Whatever else might happen here, he would at last reach an understanding of himself, and those torn pictures that had tormented him in so many dreams would reform themselves, enabling him to see himself as he truly was.

He was coming to recognize that all this was meant to be. His wife was always going to flee here, and he was always going to follow. Men would come with him, for men had come with him before, because that was the way it had always been. It had been taken out of his hands and all that he could do was follow the path to its end, and to the final revelation that awaited him.

It took Powell only minutes to half climb, half slide his way down the slope to the rocky beach. When he reached the bottom, he was breathing heavily, and his hands stung from the cold. His finger was almost numb as he inserted it beneath the trigger guard. He advanced to the shoreline and raised the gun, resting its barrel against his forearm.

The man with the arrow through his torso stood in the water. The sea was just below the level of his chest, but the waves that billowed against him had no effect. He remained entirely still, his orange jacket glowing luminously in the faint light that somehow contrived to penetrate the dense clouds above. Powell could even see the point of the arrow, gleaming, just above the water.

He’s dead, thought Powell. He’s dead, but he’s just too dumb to realize it. He’s like a dinosaur, waiting for the message to penetrate to his brain. Well, I’ll help it along. I’ve got an express delivery for him, going straight to his head.

Powell sighted, then squeezed off two shots in quick succession and watched in satisfaction as twin puffs of red sprang from the breast of the figure among the waves.

The man didn’t fall.

Powell lowered the gun and waited. It appeared to him that the injured man had drawn closer to the shore. It looked like he had moved forward a clear five feet or more, as the water was now approaching the level of his navel. Powell took aim again and emptied the clip into the injured man. He thought he saw him buck slightly at the impact of the bullets, but that was the only sign Powell got that he had struck home.

He ejected the empty clip, replaced it, then advanced into the sea. The cold was intense, but he shrugged it away. Instead he concentrated on the head of the man, moving toward him steadily despite the waves, and with every step he took he fired a shot. The last one struck the top of the guy’s head when Powell was barely five feet away. His chin lay against his chest, and no movement came from him. Powell could see the wounds left by the bullets, could even see something white glistening through a hole in the man’s skull.

He’s dead now, Powell told himself. There’s something holding him in place-soft sand, maybe, or rocks, or even the remains of a boat-but he’s dead for sure. Whatever is anchoring him there, it sure as hell isn’t free will.

At that moment, Powell became aware of a presence to his rear. He looked back to see a boy watching him from the shore. The boy’s clothing looked dated, and the waves worshiped at his bare feet. His skin was pale and he held his hand to his throat, as if remembering some ancient hurt. Powell was about to speak to him when the dead man in the sea raised his head, a sharp clicking noise in his throat alerting the gunman to the movement. Powell slowly turned to face him, then rocked back on his heels, trying to steady himself against the twin impacts of shock and water. It was the dummy, but not the dummy. The distortion in his face-the drooping mouth, the too-wide eyes, the sheer strangeness of his features’ composition-was now gone, and the man before him was, well, handsome, and his eyes gleamed with newfound intelligence.

Powell fumbled for a new clip, but the coldness and the damp caused his fingers to betray him and the clip slipped from his grasp and dropped into the sea with a soft splash. He looked down to follow its progress, then raised his eyes in time to see a huge wave rising up behind the dead man who stood before him. It lifted him off his feet and propelled him at speed toward Powell, his body riding the crest, carried forward like a piece of driftwood before it slammed into the gunman. Powell screamed as he felt the point of the arrow enter his chest, the dead man’s arms enveloping him, his face pressed hard against Powell’s, his mouth twisted into a smile.

The wave broke over them and they disappeared beneath the sea.

Carl Lubey’s home was already engulfed in flames by the time Macy reached it. She had seen the smoke rising and had smelled it on the wind, which caused her to speed up her progress toward the house. She made a couple of halfhearted efforts to get close to the front door, then gave up as the heat forced her back. Her main concern was the possibility that the fire might reach the forest, but Lubey had cleared his land of trees in order to allow space for his garden, thereby creating a natural firebreak. With luck, the break, combined with the heavily falling snow, would be enough to contain the conflagration. But somebody needed to be told about it, just in case.

Macy took the radio from her belt and tried, for the third time since she’d left her vehicle, to raise someone on the system. On the first two occasions, the radio had been dead, clicking emptily just like the ignition in the car. Now, as she stood within sight of Lubey’s burning home, she could hear static. She brought the handset close to her mouth and spoke.

“This is Macy. Do you read me? Over.”

She tried again, using her call sign. “This is six-nine-one. Over.”

Static, nothing more. She was about to replace the handset when its tone changed. Slowly, she raised the radio to her ear and listened.

It wasn’t static now. Perhaps it had never been. It seemed to her that what she was hearing was an irregular hissing sound, like someone constantly adjusting escaping gas. She listened harder, and thought she distinguished patterns and pauses, a kind of cadence.

Not static, and not hissing.

But whispers.

At the edge of the forest, Moloch and his men watched the sky glow above the tips of the trees. Their flashlights were dead and now, as they paused before the distant conflagration, Dexter took the opportunity to change the batteries, using the spares in his pack. Nothing happened. The flashlight remained dark.

“Those batteries were fresh from the store,” said Dexter. Scarfe tried changing the batteries in his own flashlight, and found that it too remained dead.

“Bad batch,” he said. “Looks like we’re shit out of luck.”

He took his Zippo from the pocket of his jacket, lit it, then held it close to the map. His finger pointed to details.

“I figure we’re here. Best I can reckon it, Carl’s house is over there.”

He raised his hand and pointed toward the flames.

“Since his place is the only one in that section of the island, that means-”

Dexter finished the sentence for him.

“That either we got a forest fire, which don’t seem likely, or right now Lubey’s house is just about the warmest place to be on this island. Explains why he didn’t make it to the rendezvous. A man’s likely to be distracted if his house is burning down around his ears.”

“People will come,” said Scarfe. “The cops run the fire department. Dupree will be here soon.”

“I don’t think so,” said Moloch, interrupting for the first time. He regarded Scarfe for a moment, until the smaller man’s mouth gaped in understanding and he looked away.

Moloch traced his finger across the woods on the map.

“We keep going, then take a look at what’s going on from cover. We need Lubey’s truck if we’re going to get out of here ahead of the cops. The fire will be our marker.”

Dupree was looking to the east, where a faint red glow hovered above the trees. Larry Amerling stood beside him. The old postmaster’s house was nearest the station and he had heard the gunfire. Dupree had almost turned his gun on him, for Braun had headed into the forest only moments before and Dupree had been about to follow him when the postmaster had intervened. Amerling took a look at the body of the woman in the generator room. He emerged pale and gulping cold air.

“We need to get some men over to that fire,” said Dupree, “but there’s at least one armed man out there, and probably more.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Something he told me before the lights went out. I want you to go and get Frank Macomber and as many of the fire crew as you can round up. The phones are out, so you’ll have to do it door-to-door. Make sure Frank brings a gun. Then I want you to come back here and try to contact someone on the radio. If you don’t get any results within the next half hour, then start sending up distress flares from the dock. We need to keep people indoors and off the streets as well.”

Already Dupree could see some of those who lived off Island Avenue approaching the station house to inquire about the power cuts. Among them was big Earl Kruhm, who had a good head on his shoulders.

“Earl can take care of that,” said Amerling. “Nobody’s going to argue with him.”

“Talk to him,” said Dupree. “Make sure he understands that folks could be in danger if they don’t stay indoors. It shouldn’t be too hard to convince them, what with the blizzard and all. And, Larry, tell Frank and the firemen to stay out of the forest as much as they can, you hear? Make sure they keep to the trails.”

Amerling nodded and went to get his car. He came back minutes later, just as Dupree was filling his pockets with shotgun shells.

“Joe, my car won’t start. It’s dead.”

Dupree looked at him, almost in irritation, then took the keys to Engine 14 from a hook in his office and tried to start the truck. It turned over with a click.

“No radios, no phones, no cars, no power,” he said.

“No help,” said Amerling.

“It’s begun, hasn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“I felt it out at the Site, but I didn’t tell you. I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t want to worry you.”

Amerling managed a twisted smile. “Wouldn’t have made a difference anyway, but thanks for sparing my feelings.”

“Macy’s out there,” said Dupree. “She was headed for Carl Lubey’s place before that fire started.”

He felt a rush of concern for the young woman. He hoped that she hadn’t taken it into her head to do something stupid when she’d seen the fire. At least she didn’t seem like the type for futile heroics. He put out of his mind the terrible possibility that the fire and Macy might be connected, and that she might be hurt, or worse.

“We stick to the plan,” he told Amerling. “Go door-to-door. They’re going to have to head for that fire on foot and do what they can once they get there.”

He hefted the shotgun onto his shoulder and started for the door.

“Where are you going?”

“I’m going after the dead woman’s partner. After that, I’m heading for Marianne Elliot’s place. I think she’s in serious trouble.”

Amerling watched him go, but he didn’t say what was on his mind.

I think we’re all in serious trouble.

Time melted.

Scarfe felt it more acutely than the rest. They should have been at Lubey’s house by now, but instead they were still walking through the woods, and the glow of the fire was no longer always visible to them. Even Moloch seemed to realize it. He paused and stared around him, momentarily confused.

“We’re lost,” said Scarfe.

“No,” said Moloch. “We’re still on the trail.”

“Then the path is going in circles.”

“Powell should have caught up by now,” said Dexter.

Moloch nodded. “Head back down the trail, see if he’s on his way.”

Dexter left at speed and Moloch drew the map from inside his jacket. Scarfe, after a moment’s hesitation, joined him in examining it, while Shepherd leaned against a tree and said nothing.

“We got on the trail about here,” said Scarfe, indicating with a finger, “and Lubey’s place is here. That’s fifteen minutes on a good day, twenty or more in weather like this.”

“It has to be close. Maybe we passed it.”

But when they looked up, the light from the fire was still ahead of them.

“Makes no sense,” said Scarfe. He looked to Shepherd for support, but Shepherd was not looking at him. He was staring into the forest, his hands shielding his eyes. Moloch called his name.

“I thought I saw something,” said Shepherd. “Out there.”

He pointed into the depths of the woods. Scarfe squinted, but could see nothing. The snow was blowing in his face, making it difficult to distinguish even the shapes of the more distant trees. He could smell smoke, though.

“It’s the fire,” he said. “Maybe you saw smoke.”

No, thought Shepherd, not smoke. He was about to say more when Dexter returned from his brief reconnaissance.

“There’s no sign of him,” he told Moloch.

Moloch kicked at the newly fallen snow. “If he’s lost, he’ll find his way back to the boat.”

“If he’s lost,” echoed Dexter.

“You think a dummy with an arrow through him took him? Fuck him. If he got washed away, so much more money for the rest of you. We keep going.”

They shouldered their weapons and followed Moloch deeper into the forest.

Chapter Fifteen

Marianne was still shaken by her encounter with the new female cop. She had been afraid that the woman would make her follow her to the station house, that something in her face or behavior had revealed the truth of her situation. She could see it in the cop’s face. Why else would she have come after her?

She knows I’m running. She knows I’ve been bad. She’ll make me go with her and I’ll break down and tell them everything and they’ll take Danny away and I’ll go to jail for stealing the money and-

Marianne forced herself to stay calm. She fumbled with the car key a couple of times before she managed to fit it into the ignition, and watched in the mirror as the cop seemed to pause and consider her once again. Then the key clicked into place and the engine purred into life. Marianne was maybe a little too heavy on the gas as she drove away, but the cop appeared content to let her go. She relaxed a little when she saw the Explorer move down toward the ferry, until the enormity of the situation she was dealing with came back to her, and she gripped the wheel so tightly that the veins stood out on her hands, the knuckles blanching beneath the skin.

She had been so distracted these last few days that she hadn’t bothered to watch anything on TV except light comedies, and her absence from the market meant that she hadn’t picked up a newspaper since the previous weekend. Something terrible had happened and now he was free, because he would not allow others to punish her on his behalf. No, he would want to do it himself. If they were in Maine, then he was with them. They had found her, and Moloch was probably already on his way to the island. Maybe he even had men here already, waiting for her. She would get back to Bonnie’s and find Danny crying, in the grip of strangers, and Bonnie and Richie hurt or dead. There would be nothing for her to do but comfort her son while they sat and waited for Moloch to come. She thought again of her sister, Patricia, and her useless husband, whom she suspected of cheating on her yet with whom she continued to stay because, despite it all, she loved him and felt that there was still something worthwhile and decent within him. Perhaps she was right, for when she had told them both of her plan to run, and reminded them that if she ran, then they would have to run too, they had accepted it with equanimity, and Bill had held his wife’s hand and told his sister-in-law that they would support her in any way they could. True, Bill had lost his job, and there was nothing to keep them where they were, but Marianne could still not disguise her surprise at his reaction. The memory of it made her ashamed, for she knew in the quiet dark places of her heart that they were both dead, and that they had died because of her. Yet part of her suspected that they were not the reason that Moloch had found her. Bill didn’t know her exact location, and Patricia would never tell.

Marianne wiped away mucus and tears with the heel of her hand.

Patricia would never tell. She would die before she told.

Jesus, Pat, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry. I was so scared of him. I thought I had no other choice. He hurt me, and he was starting to hurt Danny. I should have killed him, but I’d have gone to jail and I’d never have seen Danny grow up. But now, if I could go back, I would murder him. I would take a knife to him in his sleep and stab him until the blood dripped through the mattress to the floor beneath. I would cut him again and again for all that he had done to us. I would tear him apart with the blade until his face was unrecognizable. I would do all of this to protect Danny, except-

Except that sometimes when she awoke in their bed during those final months, the room rich with darkness or the first dawn light seeping through the drapes, she would turn to him and find him awake, staring lazily at her, as if daring her to take him on, as though guessing the thoughts that were in her head and inviting her to test her strength against him. Then, when she did not respond, he would draw her to him and, without tenderness, work himself inside her, his hands pinning her arms to the bed. No words would be exchanged, no intimacies spoken. It was simply his way of letting her know that he could do with her as he wished, that she was alive by his grace alone, and that such grace was not without its limits.

Had she stayed with him she would have been dead within the year, of that she was certain. He might have let Danny live, but what life would he have had with such a man? So they ran, and in doing so contaminated every life that they touched, and now Patricia and Bill were dead because of them.

Then there was Karen. They had stayed in touch and Marianne had recently sent her a photo of Danny on his last birthday, a smear of chocolate cake across his face and a cardboard crown on his head, his name spelled out on it in colored letters. She had sent the photograph from Boston during a shopping trip, her first foray out of Maine since they’d arrived there, sunglasses permanently perched on her nose to hide her eyes, her hair tied up tight in a bun, her face unadorned by makeup and therefore, she thought, unremarkable. She had called Karen a little later that evening from a telephone at South Station before catching her bus back north. The number that Karen had given her was a private, unlisted second line. Only a handful of people, family and friends mostly, had the number. If she was away from the phone, the call was automatically redirected to her private cell. Day or night, Karen would answer a call that came through on one of those phones.

But when Marianne had called earlier, there had been no reply. Did Karen tell, she wondered? Probably, but not willingly. Marianne felt no bitterness, no anger, that Karen had revealed their location to Moloch. Instead, there was only the same terrible guilt that she felt over her sister and Bill. Her stupidity and her selfishness had exposed them to terrible harm, and they had paid the ultimate price for their affection for her. She hoped only that Karen had told all that she knew early on and had spared herself some pain at the end.

Now Bonnie’s house was coming into view. Marianne braked and killed the lights, but the house was quiet as she approached, only her friend’s rust-bucket Plymouth in the drive. Through the living room window she could see Bonnie snoozing in front of the television. She pulled up hard outside the window, the gravel beneath the wheels making a sound like the breaking of waves, then she ran to the door and knocked hard. It took Bonnie a couple of seconds to get to the door.

“Where’s Danny?” she said when she was facing the older woman.

Bonnie stepped back to let her in. “He’s in bed. You can leave him there if you like. Hey, honey-” She reached for Marianne, but Marianne pulled away from her and headed for the stairs. “What’s the matter?”

She took the steps two at a time, Bonnie close behind. Marianne pushed the bedroom door hard and saw one empty bed in the twinbed room. In the other, Danny lay sleeping. She sagged back against the wall, put her hands on her knees, and lowered her head in relief.

“Aw, hell,” said Bonnie. “Richie must have sneaked out. I don’t believe that boy. I’ll have to call Joe and get him to keep an eye out for him.”

Marianne laid a hand on her wrist.

“I need to get Danny out of here before you call anyone, Bonnie.”

“But Richie is out there.”

“He’s always out there, Bon. I need to get Danny away from here.”

“Why? Have I done something wrong?”

“Bonnie, I can’t explain it all, not now, but there are men coming and they’re going to make trouble for Danny and me. I need to get us both away from the house, then find a way off the island.”

Bonnie looked distraught. “Honey, you’re making no sense. What men? If you’re in trouble, we have to call the police.”

Marianne shook her head. She wanted to grab Bonnie and force her to understand. She wanted to strike out at someone and ease some of her rage and fear. Most of all, she wanted to take Danny in her arms and get him away from here. They were coming. Moloch and his men were coming. For all she knew, they were already moving purposefully toward her home, trying to smell her out.

“No, no police. I did something bad a few years ago. I had to do it. I had to get Danny away and keep us both safe. Now I have to move again. Bonnie, please, help me get him dressed.”

Bonnie reached out and took her by the shoulders. “Look,” she said. “If there’s one thing I know about, it’s men, men gone bad or men who were bad to begin with. If these people have tracked you down once, then they can do it again. You can’t run away for the rest of your life. You need to talk to Joe. You need to trust him.”

“Bonnie, I broke the law. I took money that didn’t belong to me. If I can get off the island with Danny, I can make this okay.”

“Honey, you can’t get off the island. It’s snowing hard, in case you haven’t noticed. They’ve taken all the boats off the water. It was on the news. No taxi is going to come all the way out here now, and nobody on the island is going to take a boat out in this weather. It’s too risky.”

Marianne almost gave up then. It was all too much. She should stop running. She should tell Joe everything. Better still, she should just lie down in front of her house, Danny in her arms, and wait for them to find her. Then it would all be over and they could rest at last, together.

“Bonnie,” she said, and this time the tone in her voice made the older woman flinch. “I have to go.”

Tell stared down the barrel of the gun at Willard. The sound of the hammer clicking emptily still seemed to hang in the air. Tell felt it echoing through his brain. Looking into Willard’s eyes, he knew that it sounded his death knell as surely as if it were he that was looking into the muzzle of the gun and the weapon was about to discharge a shot straight into his brain. He swallowed, then swiped the barrel wildly at Willard. Willard dodged it easily and something flashed in his hand. Tell experienced a fierce pain in his belly as the blade entered. Willard rose, forcing the blade up as he did so, and the tearing began. Tell could smell Willard’s breath against his face. It smelled sweet, like cheap perfume.

“I could see it in your eyes,” Willard whispered. “I could smell what you were planning to do before we ever left the dock. It was seeping through your pores with your sweat. You should never have let that gun out of your sight.”

Tell shuddered against the blade, his hands clutching tightly at Willard’s shoulders.

“He told you to do this, didn’t he? He told you to kill me.”

Tell tried to speak, but only blood came from his mouth.

“Good-bye,” said Willard as Tell died against him.

Marianne had Danny, bleary-eyed and irascible at being woken from his sleep, dressed within five minutes. She left Bonnie standing at her front door, looking anxiously after her as she headed for their house. They would need clothes, toiletries. Most of all, they would need the money. She strapped Danny into his seat and glanced at her watch. There wasn’t much time left. She started the car and hit the headlights. Behind her, Danny had already dozed off to sleep again.

God, Danny, I’m sorry for this. I’m so sorry.

As soon as Marianne was gone from sight, Bonnie Claeson went straight to the liquor cabinet and poured herself a vodka. She looked at it, then on impulse walked to the kitchen and poured the drink down the sink.

She was worried about Marianne and Danny, but more than that, she was worried about Richie. He probably hadn’t gone far, and nothing had ever happened to him during his wanderings on the island. He knew it well and usually stayed close to the roads and trails. But the weather was turning real bad and that was a factor her son wouldn’t have taken into account on his latest nocturnal ramble. No, she had to call Joe, for all of their sakes.

She walked into the hallway, picked up the phone, and began to dial, then stopped. There was no dial tone. She replaced the receiver and tried again, but it remained silent.

No, not quite silent. She could hear faint noises. It was like holding a shell to one’s ear and hearing, if only ever so faintly, the sound of the sea.

Then she heard Richie’s voice.

Momma! Momma! Bad men. Badmenbadmenbadmenbadmenbad-

“Richie!” she called.

A high-pitched wailing tone, a kind of electronic scream, almost shredded her eardrum and she thrust the phone away. When it had receded, she brought the receiver back to her ear.

“Richie?” She was crying now, and felt the certainty of his loss like a great darkness that covered her, wrapping itself around her body and head, suffocating her in its depths. Then the darkness became real as the lights went out and the TV died and the buzz of the refrigerator stopped, like the life of an insect suddenly cut short.

And in the midst of her sorrow and pain, she heard a sound like a sudden exhalation of breath, as though a great many souls had found at last the release that they had sought for so long.

Marianne was barely on the road when the engine of her car failed.

“No!” she cried. “Not now.”

She tried to start it again, but the car was dead. She could go back to Bonnie and ask to borrow her Plymouth, but by now Bonnie would have called the police and she would argue with her again, or insist that she needed to find Richie first, and there would be more delays, and Joe would come, and then there would be no way out.

She opened her door, then Danny’s, and began pulling him from his car seat.

“No, Mommy, I’m tired.”

“I’m sorry, Danny, really I am.”

She held him in her arms and started to run.

It was Shepherd who went astray first. He was bringing up the rear, the bulk of Dexter like a great black bear before him. The shapes in the forest had unnerved him. Scarfe might have been right: it could have been smoke from the fire, or even shadows cast by it from the topmost trees. He had glimpsed them only briefly, but it had seemed to him that they were moving against the wind, walking parallel to their own group. He tried to tell Dexter as they walked, but Dexter was only mildly concerned.

“Could be locals on their way to help at the fire,” he said. “We can take care of them at the house, or avoid them. Doesn’t matter.”

Shepherd didn’t think it would be that simple. They looked almost like men, but Shepherd could have sworn that they were wearing furs, and even out here people had probably given up on furs a long time ago.

As they continued along the trail, Shepherd spent more and more time looking behind him, or to either side, and less time trying to keep Dexter in sight. The snow grew thicker and the bear shape ahead grew fainter, distinguishable only from the trunks of the trees by its movement. Shepherd stumbled on a hidden stone and landed on his hands and knees in the snow. When he stood up, there was no one in front of him, and the trail was gone.

“Shit,” he said. He put his hands to his mouth and whistled, then waited. There was no response. He whistled again, then tried calling. He didn’t care about the barely glimpsed figures now. He had a gun and anybody who was out here with them would have to be crazier than-

Than Moloch, he heard himself finish. Because Moloch was crazy. They all knew it, even if none of them had the guts to say it out loud. This obsession with the woman had led them into alien territory during just about the worst snowstorm that Shepherd had ever encountered. What they had here was a full-on blizzard, with Shepherd now stuck on his lonesome in the heart of it, and he was one hundred percent pissed at this turn of events. He had come for the promise of easy money, the lure of $100,000 for a couple of days’ work. That money could buy him a lot: a small house somewhere cheap and quiet, maybe a share in a business. Like Dexter and Braun, Shepherd was tired. He’d done time, and as you got older, jail time aged you faster. Even as the years inside passed slowly, infinitesimally slowly, the aging process seemed to accelerate. Dexter had seen young men come out old from a nickel stretch, and older men come out dying after a dime. Shepherd wasn’t sure that he could survive another spell inside. This was to have been his final gamble, Dexter’s and Braun’s too, he guessed, except that Dexter had changed since they’d last met. Now he spent his spare time staring into space or watching those damn DVDs in which everybody went down in a blaze of glory at the end. Dexter had given up hope, and now Shepherd wasn’t sure that he was any saner than Moloch. His was just a better organized form of insanity.

Shepherd looked at the compass on his watch. If he headed northeast, back the way they had come, he could find the road and then follow it to the boat. The way things were going, that boat was going to be a regular hot spot for lost men. He made one last effort to summon the others, then turned around and headed back toward the sea.

Dexter noticed Shepherd’s absence first, but the wind had found renewed force and was now howling into their faces. When he opened his mouth to speak, snowflakes began to colonize it like bugs on a summer’s day.

“Hey!” he shouted. Moloch and Scarfe paused.

“Shepherd ain’t back there.”

Moloch, buffeted by the wind, the snow thick around his boots, joined Dexter.” How long?”

“I don’t know. I checked just now and he was gone.”

Scarfe joined them, placed his fingers to his lips, and whistled. The sound was loud and shrill, even allowing for the dampening effect of the falling snow. There was no reply. Dexter leaned close to Moloch’s ear.

“This is turning to shit.”

“What do you suggest we do?”

“Go back.”

“No.”

“We’re down to three men and we got no means of communication. I say we head back to the boat and wait this thing out.”

“Then what? You think they won’t clear the roads come morning?”

“First light, man. First light and we can do this thing, be gone before the people on the island start making breakfast.”

“She knows we’re here. First light, she’ll be gone. Worse, maybe she’ll figure that the best thing to do is to come clean with the cops. She does that, my friend, and we are royally fucked. We go on.”

“Listen-”

Moloch shoved him hard.

“We go on! The bitch is running now. We don’t have much time.”

It didn’t take Shepherd long to figure out that he was lost. After all, the forest should have been thinning out by now. Instead, it seemed to him thicker than ever, even though he was still heading northeast according to the compass. He was forced to push low foliage back from his face. His gloves were sticky with sap and his cheeks were scarred by errant branches. The only consolation was that the snow was not as heavy on the ground, the great trees above and around him sheltering him from the worst of it.

He leaned against a tree trunk, took out his Zippo and lit up, keeping the cigarette shielded in his palm. He took a long drag, closed his eyes, then released the smoke through his nostrils.

When he opened his eyes, there were three men moving through the forest about fifty feet ahead of him. Shepherd whistled loudly but they didn’t respond, so he flicked the butt into the snow and started to go after them. He had closed the gap by about twenty feet when the man bringing up the rear turned around.

It wasn’t Dexter.

First of all, Dex had been wearing a black jacket and green combat pants. This guy was wearing some kind of hooded arrangement made from skins and fur. His face wasn’t visible beneath the hood. When he stopped, the other men paused too, and all three of them stared back at Shepherd.

Then the man bringing up the rear raised his weapon, and even through the snow Shepherd could see that it was an old, old gun, a muzzle loader.

Shepherd dived for cover as the gun flashed and smoke rose and a noise like cannon fire echoed through the forest. When Shepherd looked up, the men were spreading out. He could see the one who had fired at him reloading as he moved, his hand ascending and descending as he pressed the ball down.

Shepherd aimed his own weapon and fired two shots. He didn’t give a damn about the need for silence or for concealment of their presence. Right now, his need was to survive. Shepherd saw one of the men rise and he fired again, the shot tearing through the layer of furs, and watched with satisfaction as he went down.

And rose again.

“No way,” said Shepherd. “That’s not possible.”

They were surrounding him. He could see one of them trying to flank him, to get behind him and cut off his retreat. Shepherd retreated, firing as he went, using the trees for cover. Twice he heard the great eruptions of the muzzle loaders, and one shot came so close that he felt its heat against his cheek as it passed.

He had been backing away for about a hundred feet when he found himself in the clearing. To his rear were a number of rough-hewn houses built from tree trunks. There were six or seven in all. In the doorway of one he spied a woman’s body, naked from the waist down. There was blood on her face and neck. Other bodies lay nearby, in various states of undress and mutilation. He could smell burning.

“No,” he said aloud, remembering the layout of the island from Moloch’s map. “I was going toward the boat. This is-”

The south. I could not have gone so far astray.

The image faded, and now he was surrounded only by broken rocks and old graves and a huge stone cross that cast its shadow on him.

He registered the shot at almost the same instant as his belly exploded in agony. His dropped his shotgun and fell to his knees, clutching his stomach. His body began to burn, as though wreathed in flame. The pain was too much. He took his hands away to examine the wound, but his jacket was intact.

But I feel pain. I feel pain.

He heard snow crunching beneath approaching footsteps and looked up to see the three figures closing in on him, their heads low and hooded, their weapons held at port arms. Two of them paused while the third moved forward, so close now to Shepherd that the wounded man could smell the stink of dead animals that rose from the hunter. He tried to crawl away and felt a hand grip his leg, pulling him back. Shepherd searched inside his jacket and found the butt of his Colt. He twisted and raised the weapon, aiming it at the man who was dragging him backward, then emptied five shots into him.

The hunter released him and lowered the hood of furs from his head.

“Aw fuck,” said Shepherd, as he saw at last what had come for him. His disintegrating mind registered pale, withered skin, and blue lips, and eyes that burned cold red with a fearsome, implacable fury. Here were the true hunters, unbound by time and space, traversing the centuries in their quest for vengeance, seeking final reparation for old sins.

Shepherd started to cry. They should never have come here. It was a mistake, a terrible mistake.

“Aw fuck aw fuck aw fuck aw fuck…”

He placed the barrel of the gun against his skull.

“Aw fuck aw fuck aw-”

And fired.

Moloch and his men heard the sound of the shotgun blasts and the final shot as Shepherd turned his gun upon himself. Dexter and Moloch exchanged a glance, but said nothing.

Willard, moving along the road, skirting the outer reaches of the forest, paused as he too heard the shots, then began to run faster. He wanted answers, and dead men could tell him nothing. He also wanted to believe in Moloch, to be reassured that Tell had acted on the wishes of Dexter and Shepherd and not those of Moloch himself. If Moloch was in trouble, then he would need Willard’s help. Willard would show his loyalty, and Moloch would reward it with his love.

And Sharon Macy, trying to warm herself before the flames rising from Lubey’s house, heard them as well. They sounded some way off. She stared into the forest, its outer reaches now lit by the fire, and tried to discern movement within, but there was nothing. Keeping away from the flames, she circled the house and retreated into the shadows.

Moloch had grown quieter. Dexter watched him as they progressed toward the fire, but didn’t say what was on his mind. They had lost two men already. Maybe Moloch was right. Perhaps Powell had just given up and headed back to the boat, and Shepherd had done the same, but Dexter didn’t think so. That wasn’t like either man. They had been approached because Dexter knew that they would stand firm. For Shepherd it was primarily about the money, for Powell the promise of a little action. But they had also come because there were few opportunities for men like them to strike back at all that they hated, to break a prisoner loose, to hunt down a betrayer, to kill a cop. Their discipline was almost military. They were not the kind of men to turn back at the first sign of trouble.

Moloch swiped at something unseen in the air, as though swatting away a fly. No, thought Dexter, not a fly.

More like unwanted company.

There were voices in Moloch’s head. They were whispering to him, saying things in a mocking, familiar tone, but he couldn’t understand the words. And each time he felt his footing slip, and reached out to grasp a tree or a rock for support, he seemed to endure a kind of mental flash.

Blood.

Men among the trees.

A woman beneath him, dying as blade and man moved in unison.

And darkness; the sensation of being trapped in a mine, or a tunnel network, or a honeycomb.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and thought:

Gray. They’re gray.

“You okay?”

It was Dexter.

“I’m good,” he said. “I’m-”

They’re gray, and they carry lights.

“-real good.”

Braun was leaving a trail of blood on the snow. There was nothing he could do to stop it. He’d tried to stem the flow, but the cop’s shot had torn up his arm badly. Despite the cold, he was sweating and feverish. He wanted to rest, to lie back against a rock and let sleep come, but Dupree was following him. He had caught a glimpse of him through the trees, and had considered waiting for him in the darkness in the hope of ambushing him, but he was afraid that if he stopped to rest he might lose consciousness and become an easy target.

And he wasn’t running only from Dupree. When he paused briefly to catch his breath and examine his copy of the crude map while leaning against a big fir, the snow thick on his shoulders and bright red hair, he heard a whispering and saw the gray shapes moving along the ground, trying to get ahead of him and cut off his escape. He was delirious with pain, he told himself. His mind was playing tricks on him, forcing him to believe that figures were crawling along the ground, clutching at roots and stones with emaciated hands as they pulled themselves across the earth.

Braun checked the compass attachment on his watch. All he knew was that if he continued due east, he would reach the heart of the island, and from there a trail, hacked through the forest for tourists, would lead him close by Lubey’s house. He broke through a bank of evergreens and found himself in a clearing filled with dead trees, most of them little more than white staves, their branches long since decayed. Some had fallen sideways, to be supported here and there by their stronger fellows, creating archways over the trail. Braun tested the black ground on either side of the causeway and felt his foot begin to sink. It was beaver bog, he figured, or something similar. He began moving, anxious to get back under the cover of the trees again. Out here, he was a sitting duck for the cop.

Braun was halfway across the bog when he realized that the gray figures were no longer shadowing him. When he looked back, he thought he glimpsed a single pale shape moving across the snow, like a crazed hound chained to a post walking over and over the same ground. Braun raised his gun and fired off a shot. He didn’t care about the cop now, didn’t care about Moloch or the woman or the money. Braun just didn’t want to die out here, among these things.

He became aware of new movement around him. The surface of the marsh rippled, the forms of what swam beneath visible briefly when they broke the surface. Braun fired down at one and something gushed darkly, then fell away. He heard a slithering sound behind him and spun just in time to see a dark body sliding back into the bog, blackened, withered feet glimpsed beneath the wetness of its shroud, its hips still round, a halo of white hair pooling briefly on the surface of the bog before sinking back into its depths.

It’s a woman, thought Braun.

No, it was a woman.

Then a voice spoke, and he turned to see Dupree using a tree for cover, his shotgun pointing directly at Braun.

“I said, ‘Drop it.’ ”

Braun started to giggle.

Dupree couldn’t figure out what the gunman was doing. He had seen him pause in the middle of the trail, then begin firing wildly at the trees and the bog. Maybe he was hallucinating from the pain of his wound. If so, his unpredictability would make him even more dangerous. He made his move when the man turned quickly, seemingly distracted by something on the ground behind him. Dupree took up a position against the biggest fir he could find, then shouted a warning.

The man turned.

Dupree gave him a second warning.

The man laughed, then raised his gun and fired in the policeman’s direction.

Dupree pulled the trigger and blew him into the marsh.

Braun’s lower body took the force of the blast, and he fell backward, his feet slipping from beneath him. The trees tilted crazily and he was lost for a moment in snowflakes, suspended between the path and the blackness below. Then his back hit the water and his head disappeared into the murk. He tasted rot and decay, and even as the pain began to separate body from mind, life from death, he attempted to raise himself up. His face cleared the surface and he spit mud and vegetation from his mouth. He tried to open his eyes, but his vision was blurred. He could see the shape of the cop, Dupree, the gun held to his shoulder as he approached him along the path, and he could sense movement in the marsh to his right and left as the black beings converged upon him.

The cop was right above him now. Braun was dying. He could feel it as a gathering darkness, punctured by slivers of red, like wounds in burnt skin. It was coming slowly, too slowly. The things in the bog were faster. They would get to him first, and Braun didn’t want that. He didn’t want to go that way.

With a last surge of effort, Braun raised his gun from the water and died in the shotgun’s merciful roar.

Moloch cleared the trees first and stood looking at the remains of Carl Lubey’s burning house. The garage door was open and he could see the truck inside, the hood gaping, the shape of the cab behind it making it seem like the flaming skull of some great bird. Scarfe and Dexter took up positions at either side of him. Nobody spoke for a moment.

“Looks like our ride’s gone,” said Dexter.

Scarfe shielded his face from the heat of the flames and thought about running. He’d take his chances with the Russians back in Boston. They were brutal, but at least they weren’t crazy. It was supposed to be simple: Scarfe would do the groundwork, set them up with Carl Lubey, and take off. Then Scarfe found himself pushed into the role of boatman and now there were cops being killed, and handicapped men shot with arrows, and his buddy Carl’s place was burning like a bonfire at Halloween, with Carl, he felt sure, burning right along with it. Scarfe didn’t hold out much hope for the woman they were hunting either, nor her boy. The money wasn’t going to be enough for Moloch. Whatever she’d done to him, Scarfe figured it must have been pretty bad.

There was a rustle of bushes to Scarfe’s right and a female cop appeared. Her gun was in her hand. Scarfe looked at her, then Moloch and Dexter followed his lead.

Scarfe recognized Macy at the same instant that she recognized him.

“Aw, this is just great,” said Scarfe.

Dexter didn’t even wait for the cop to speak. He just started shooting.

I was too slow, thought Macy, dumb and slow, but the black man had moved so fast, forcing her to run. Then the others had joined in, and the forest around her was now alive with falling branches, shredded leaves, and the hiss of bullets melting snow. Macy hit a rock with her foot and went tumbling down the slope at the rear of Carl Lubey’s property, wrenching her ankle painfully before at last coming to rest among a pile of trash and discarded metal. She was in Lubey’s private dump, and it stank. Macy got to her feet, but her ankle almost instantly collapsed beneath her weight, so she leaned against a tree for support. Above her, she heard the men moving, but the trees on the slope shielded her from the light of the fire.

There was another blast of gunfire. Macy pressed her face hard into the tree and drew her body in as close as she could to the trunk. A bullet blew bark inches from her face and she closed her eyes a second too late to avoid being momentarily blinded by a spray of wood and sap. It got into her mouth and she coughed, trying desperately to mask the sound with the sleeve of her jacket.

But the men heard her.

A thrashing came from the trees above as one of them began to descend.

Macy, hurt and afraid, headed into the forest.

They sent Scarfe.

According to Moloch’s map and the late Carl Lubey’s directions, they were pretty close to his wife’s house. Scarfe could take care of the cop while they got the woman. They would wait for Scarfe at her house, then find a car and head back to the boat.

It sounded simple.

Even Scarfe thought it sounded easy, except he had no intention of coming back to the woman’s house. Scarfe wasn’t really a killer. He’d never killed anybody, but he was pretty certain that he could do it if he had to. The cop knew who he was. If she got away, Scarfe would be in serious shit. Maine didn’t have the death penalty, but he’d die behind bars as an accomplice to murder if the cop lived to tell what she’d seen. Scarfe was a weak man and a coward, but he was quite capable, under those circumstances, of killing a cop.

The ground was now rising beneath Macy’s feet, the slope gradually becoming more pronounced so that she could feel the effort of the climb in her right leg. She was trying to keep her weight off her left foot, although the pain was not as intense now. It was a pretty bad sprain, but at least the ankle wasn’t broken. That said, her pursuer was gaining on her. She couldn’t see well enough in the snow to pick him out but she could hear him. There was only one, but uninjured and perhaps better armed than she was.

Ahead of her, a tall structure blotted out the descending snow: the island’s main observation tower, the one she had explored during her introductory tour earlier that day. Watching for rocks and stray roots, she made her way toward it.

The rusted iron door stood partially open. She had slipped the bolt earlier, she recalled, and had wrapped the chain around it. Someone had been there since then. From behind came the sounds of her pursuer. She couldn’t keep running. Her ankle hurt too badly. After a moment’s hesitation, she entered the tower, feeling broken glass crunch beneath her feet. There was no bolt on the inside of the door. To her right, the flight of concrete steps led up to the second level. She followed them, then stopped.

A moth was bouncing against one of the windows. She looked up and in the faint light saw more of the insects fluttering around the room. One of them brushed against her face and she slapped it away, feeling it against her palm and then instinctively rubbing her hand against her leg as if she risked contamination from its touch.

A noise came from somewhere above her. It sounded like boards creaking beneath the weight of a footfall. Macy’s bowels churned. She shouldn’t have come in here. The realization hit her with the force of a fist. Everything about the place felt wrong. She was like a rat caught in a maze with no prize at the end of it, or an insect teetering on the edge of a jar of sugared water.

The sound came again, clearer now. She imagined that she heard someone crying. It sounded like a little girl.

“Hey?” called Macy softly. “Hey, are you okay?”

Scarfe saw a gray shape in the shadows, moving close to the ground. He raised his gun, then pivoted swiftly to his right as he registered a second presence in the trees, then a third behind him, the shapes in a state of constant movement, circling him from the shelter of the forest.

“Who’s there?” he whispered, more to himself than to anyone else. Then, louder: “Who’s there?”

The sound of the wind in the trees was almost deafening. A mist appeared to rise before him and he thought that he could discern figures and, for a second, even faces. Then the figures spread out, moving faster, trying to surround him.

Scarfe ran, the ground rising before him, until he came to the clearing, and the tower.

Macy walked across the floor and stood at the base of the next flight of steps. All was darkness above, but she could see, faintly, the edges of the wooden floor. She reached out a hand to steady herself against the wall, then recoiled instantly as she felt movement on her skin. There were more moths up here. As she looked closer, she saw that they entirely covered the wall beside the ascending stairs. Macy took a step back and a figure passed across the top of the steps. She had a fleeting image of something small and gray, with white-blond hair. A tattered gown seemed to hang from it, as though she were shedding a skin.

It was a girl, a little girl dressed in gray.

The crying came again.

“Honey, come on down,” said Macy. “You don’t have to be afraid.”

“No, you come up.”

But Macy didn’t move. The voice was not that of a child. It was older. It sounded sick. There was desire in that voice, despite the tears, and hunger. Macy stood still, undecided, and again the image of a honey pot came to her.

Then her decision was made for her. There came a gunshot, followed by a second. Moments later she heard the door beneath her slam closed, and then there was silence.

Willard was unusual in many ways, not the least of which was his total lack of imagination. He didn’t read books, didn’t like movies, didn’t even watch much TV. He didn’t need to live in a fantasy world created by others. Instead, Willard moved through this world and carved his own reality from it.

Yet even Willard felt that there was something wrong with this island. There was a buzzing in his head, like an out-of-tune radio. He thought that he sensed movement around him but when he looked closer there was nothing. Willard felt as if he were the subject of a conversation that he couldn’t quite hear, or the punch line of a joke that had not yet been told.

He considered his options. He could go back to the boat and return to the mainland, but he didn’t know much about boats, and even if he could get it started, he didn’t think he could even find the mainland in this weather. But he also had scores to settle and questions to be answered. When Willard had all the information at his disposal, he would then decide what moves to make against the others.

Macy went down the stairs as quietly as she could, carefully placing each foot so that she did not slip. She listened carefully, and once or twice she believed she heard heavy breathing, the sound of a man recovering from sudden, unaccustomed exertion. She kept her back against the wall, trying to listen to both what was below her and what was above.

A shadow moved across the Plexiglas of the window and Macy, puzzled, found her attention distracted. The shadow came again, and Macy was aware of a darkness hovering beyond the window, out of sight yet still capable of stealing what little light she had. The gun in her hand made a regular arc, first pointing down toward the unknown man below, then swinging up toward the shadows above, and the child who was not a child. The darkness in the stairway was almost liquid, pouring from the walls and oozing down the stairs. She was halfway down when she heard a soft hiss and the Gray Girl’s hand emerged from the shadows and pushed her.

Macy lost her footing and stumbled down the last of the concrete steps.

The porch light was out and the house was in complete darkness as Marianne at last reached her home. Even the night-lights that came on automatically as the day faded were out.

They’re here. They’ve cut off the power and they’re here.

But then she looked to her right, where Jack’s house lay, and saw that it too was dark. That never happened, for the old man stayed awake until the wee hours, working in his studio. She saw him, sometimes, when she couldn’t sleep during the warm summer months and sat outside on her porch, watching him working on his terrible paintings. It was a power failure, that was all, although it didn’t explain her car dying. Coincidence, she decided. After all, what other reason could there be?

She found her keys, opened the door, then slammed it closed behind her with the heel of her shoe. She carried Danny upstairs and laid him on his bed, then took two bags from her closet and began thrusting clothes into them, her own first, then Danny’s. She grabbed some toys and books and placed them in his bag, then zipped it closed.

Finally, she pulled down the attic stairs and headed up. Her flashlight wasn’t working, and she was almost certain that she’d filled her bag with a selection of mismatched clothing, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was the knapsack that lay hidden under piles of trash and junk at the rear of the attic. She stepped carefully, one hand raised ahead of her so that she would not bump her head on the eaves. Kneeling down, she began tossing bags and boxes away until beneath her fingers she felt the canvas straps on the bag. She dragged it out, hauled it to the edge of the attic door, then tipped it down into the hallway.

It landed with the kind of sound that only three quarters of a million dollars can make.

Scarfe too had seen the shadows outside. Panicked, he held his gun in a double-handed grip and tried to catch the figures as they moved beyond the windows.

Then two noises came together: a scuffling from the staircase across from him, and a rattle as something thrust itself against the door from outside. Torn between the two threats, Scarfe retreated against the wall just as Macy’s voice called out: “Police! Drop your weapon.”

And then the door flew open, and the man in her sights turned to stare at what lay beyond. He raised his weapon and fired. Macy, aware only of the gun and the threat that it posed, fired at the same time, and watched the man buck against the wall, then slide down, the gun falling from his hand.

Macy advanced toward Scarfe and kicked his gun away with her foot. The doorway was empty. Only snow was entering. The shot had taken him clean in the chest and he was bleeding from the mouth. She tried to open his jacket but his hand gripped hers as he tried to speak.

“Tell me,” said Macy. “Tell me why you’re here.”

“Elliot,” Scarfe whispered. “Moloch!”

He was staring straight at her, pulling her closer, and then his gaze shifted to a point over her shoulder and his grip tightened. She was already turning when she felt a presence close by, flitting moth-like in the shadows.

The Gray Girl hung in the air behind her, moving swiftly back and forth, trying to find some means of access to the dying man. Macy could see her eyes, jet black within her wrinkled skin, and the edges of her teeth almost hidden beneath the lips of her rounded mouth.

She raised her gun as Scarfe began to spasm beside her. His nails dug into her painfully. The Gray Girl darted forward, then retreated again as Macy shielded the dying man’s body from her. Scarfe coughed once, and his fingers relaxed their grip as the life passed from him. Macy watched as the child’s features contorted with rage, her head and arms trembling with the depth of her anger, and then she seemed to sink back into the shadows in the corner. Seconds later, a flight of moths burst from the darkness and disappeared into the night, forming a mist that moved against the direction of the wind, heading deeper and deeper into the forest, making for the very heart of the island.

Chapter Sixteen

Dexter and Moloch left Carl Lubey’s burning house behind them, traveling southwest until they came to a road, banks of firs standing like temple columns at either side.

“You want the map?” asked Dexter.

“I know where we’re going,” said Moloch. He sounded distracted, almost distant. “We need to spread out, take them from every angle.”

Dexter stared at him.

“Spread out how? There’s just you and me.”

Moloch acted like a man suddenly awakened from a strange dream. Once again, the sensation of worlds overlapping came to him, but it was accompanied by an uncomfortable feeling of separation. Moments earlier, he had been surrounded by men, men willing to act at his command. He had strength and authority. Now there was only Dexter, and Moloch himself was weakening. Increasingly, he was troubled by the sense that he was less alive here than he was in the past, that each time he flipped between worlds he left more of himself behind in an earlier life.

“They haven’t come back yet?” he asked.

“Who, Shepherd and Scarfe? No, they ain’t back yet.”

Moloch nodded, then pointed. “Her house is just over that rise. Shouldn’t take us more than-”

He glanced at his watch. It had stopped.

“You know what time it is?”

Dexter wore a Seiko digital. No numerals showed on its face.

“I don’t know. It’s not working right.”

“It doesn’t matter,” said Moloch, but again Dexter detected a wavering note in his voice. Don’t fall apart on me now, man, he thought, not after all this time.

The wind was dying down now, the snow falling a little less thickly. They leaped a small ditch that ran along the side of the road, now almost entirely filled with snow, and stepped out onto the trail. In doing so, they almost ran into the woman. She let out a little yelp of surprise, then saw their guns and started to back away.

“Now, where are you going?” said Dexter. He advanced upon her, gripped her by the hair, and dragged her back to Moloch.

Bonnie Claeson had given up on the phone, on her car, and on Joe Dupree. She had given up on everything. Something had broken inside her when she’d heard her son’s voice echoing down a dead telephone line, and so she had retreated into a beautiful illusion. Richie, her sad, troubled, loving son, was out in the snow alone, probably tired and afraid. She had to find him and bring him home. She wore only an open coat over her sweater and jeans, and her clothing was now crusted white with flakes Her cheap boots had not protected her feet, yet she did not feel the cold. She was lost to herself, and now she only wished for her son to appear out of the darkness, his orange jacket bright against the snow, his face filled with relief and affection as his mother came for him and drew him to her.

“I’m searching for my boy,” she said. “Have you seen him?”

She looked first at Dexter, then at Moloch, examining their faces. They seemed familiar to her. Briefly, her clouded mind was illuminated by a flash of clarity. She shook her head and moved away from the two men, never allowing her eyes to leave their faces.

They were Richie’s bad men, the men from the TV. She heard her son’s voice crying out its last words to her.

Momma! Momma! Bad men. Badmenbadmenbadmenbadmenbad-

Dexter saw the recognition in her eyes.

“Shit,” he said, “now we’re gonna-”

The gunshot came from so close to his head that he recoiled in shock, his ears ringing. The woman crumpled to the ground and began to bleed on the snow. Beside him, Moloch holstered his gun.

“We could have taken her with us,” said Dexter. “She could have helped us.”

“You going soft on me, Dex?” came the reply, and Dexter was sure now that Moloch was mad. In the unspoken threat he heard the death sentence being passed on Willard, the abandonment of Powell, Shepherd, and Scarfe to their fates, and the single-minded obsession that had brought them to this place. It was no longer about money, or a woman, or a child. Moloch might once have thought that it was, but it wasn’t. He had come here for some unknowable reason of his own, and those who stood alongside him were expendable.

We’re going to die here, Dexter realized. I think I always knew, and just hoped that it wouldn’t be true, but it will end here. I have no choice now but to follow it to its end, and to embrace it when it comes.

“No,” said Dexter. “I ain’t going soft.”

He walked over to where the woman lay and looked down on her. She was lying very still. Her eyes blinked and he saw her chest rise and fall, blood spreading from the wound on her left breast. Her lips formed a word.

“Richie,” she whispered, for the boy was beside her now. He had always appeared wondrous to her, always kind, but now he seemed transformed, his features perfectly sculpted and his eyes alive with an intelligence that he had never known in life.

“Richie,” she repeated. He reached out his hand to her and took it in his own, and he drew her to him and carried her away so that she would not feel the pain of the final bullet.

Marianne was on her doorstep when she heard the shots. They came from close by. Two overnight bags, crammed full of clothing, lay by her feet, and the knapsack hung over her shoulder. Danny sat on top of one of the bags, still drowsy. When he heard the shots, he looked up briefly, then resumed his previous position, his head cupped in his hands, his eyes nearly closed.

“Come on, Danny, we have to go.”

“Where?” There was that whining tone to his voice, and for the first time she lost her temper with him.

“We’re going to Jack’s. Now get up, Danny! I mean it! You get up or I’m going to give you such a spanking that you won’t be able to sit for a week. Do you hear me? Get up!”

The boy started to cry, but at least he was on his feet. Marianne took a bag in each hand, then gave him a little swipe with one of them, propelling him toward the door. She pulled it closed behind her with her toe, then urged him on down the path to Jack’s house. Once they got to Jack’s, she could convince the old man to take them off Dutch. Even if they got only as far as one of the neighboring islands, it would be enough. All that mattered was that they get away from here. The weight of the gun in her coat pocket slapped painfully against her leg as she walked, but she didn’t care. It had been in the knapsack with the money. She had cleaned and oiled it only twice in the years since she had fled, following instructions from a gun magazine, and had never fired it, not even on a range. She would use it, though, if she was forced to do so. This time there would be no fear. She would take his dare. She was stronger than he had ever suspected, stronger than even she had known. She would kill him, if she had to, and some secret part of her hoped that she would be given that opportunity.

From the top of the rise, Moloch and Dexter watched them leave the house, but they were not the only ones. Far to their right, almost at the edge of Jack’s property, a pretty man with blond hair stood among the trees and admired once again the shape of the woman’s legs, the swell of her breasts beneath her open coat, the way her jeans hugged her groin. In her way, she was to blame for all that had happened to him, for his rejection and abandonment by the man he admired so much. She had deceived him, betrayed his beloved Moloch, and he would make her pay. He vaguely recalled Moloch’s warning that she was not to be harmed, but he had the hunger upon him now. He would first make her tell him where the money was, and then he would finish her.

After all, Willard had needs too.

Jack heard the banging on his kitchen door as he dozed in his armchair. He had tried to paint, but nothing came. Instead, he found himself drawn again and again to the painting with the two figures burned upon it, his fingers tracing their contours as he tried to understand how they had come to be. Then the lights had gone out and the heat with them. The small fire faded in the grate and he noticed only when the cold began to tell on his bones. There was no wood left by the fireplace, so he grabbed his coat and opened the door, preparing to risk the cold in order to replenish his stock from the store of firewood in the shed.

But as he stood at the door, he became aware of a presence beyond the house.

No, not a single presence, but many presences.

“Who’s there?” he called, but he expected no reply. Instead, he thought he saw a shadow move against the wind, gray upon the white ground, like a cobweb blown, or an old cloak discarded. There were more shadows to his left and right. They seemed to be circling the house, waiting.

“Go away,” he said, softly. “Please go away.”

He closed and locked the door then, and checked all the windows. He took a blanket from his bed, wrapped it around his shoulders, and sat as close as he could to the dying embers of the fire. He thought that he might have slept for a time, for he dreamed of shadows moving closer to the great picture window, and faces pressed against the glass, their skin gray and withered, their lips thin and bloodless, their eyes black and hungry. They tapped at the glass with their long nails, the tapping growing harder until at last the glass exploded inward and they descended upon him and began to devour him.

Jack’s eyes flicked open. He could still hear the banging and for a moment he found himself unable to distinguish between dream and reality. Then he heard Marianne Elliot calling his name and he struggled to his feet, his joints stiff from sitting slumped against the chair. He walked to the kitchen door and saw the faces of Marianne and Danny, the woman scared and panicky, the boy drowsy and his face streaked with tears. He opened the door.

“Come in,” he said. “What’s wrong?”

She dropped the bags she was holding, then knelt down and hugged the boy close to her.

“I’m sorry for shouting at you, Danny. I’m so sorry.”

The boy began to cry again, but at least he hugged her back. Marianne, the boy’s head cradled against her neck, looked imploringly at Jack.

“We need to get off the island.”

“There’s no way you can get away from here until this snow thins out some more,” he said.

“We can’t wait that long.”

Jack said nothing. She understood that he wanted more from her.

“Danny,” she said, “go inside and lie down for few minutes.”

The boy did not need to be told twice. He passed by the old man and headed for the couch, where he instantly fell asleep.

“I’ve told some lies,” she said when she saw her son curl up with his eyes closed. “My husband isn’t dead. He was put in prison. I betrayed him to the police so that Danny and I could get away from him. And…I took money from him. A lot of money.”

She opened the knapsack and showed Jack the wads of notes. His mouth opened slightly in surprise, then closed with a snap.

“I’m not sure how he got it all, but I can guess, and so can you. Now he’s here on the island and he’s brought men with him. They’re close. I heard shots.”

She reached out and took the painter’s hand.

“My car is dead, but you have a boat. I need you to get us away from here, even just to one of the other islands. If we don’t leave, they’ll find us and they’ll kill me and take Danny away.”

She paused.

“Or they may kill Danny too. My husband, he never had any love for Danny.”

The old man looked back at the swing door of the kitchen, beyond which the boy lay sleeping.

“You told Joe Dupree any of this?”

Marianne shook her head.

“He’ll help you, you know that. He’s different.”

“I was afraid, afraid that they’d put me in jail or take Danny from me.”

“I don’t know enough about the law to say one way or the other, but it seems to me that they’d be a little more sympathetic than that.”

“Just take us off the island, please. I’ll think about telling someone once we’re away from here.”

Jack bit his lip, then nodded. “Okay, we can try. This all your stuff?”

“It’s all that I had time to pack.”

Jack took a bag in each hand, then kicked the knapsack and said: “You’d best look after that yourself.”

They entered the living room, Jack leading. Marianne was so close behind him when the shot came that Jack’s blood hit her in the face before he fell to the floor. There was a wound at his shoulder. He clutched it with his hand, his teeth clenched as he trembled and began to go into shock. Danny awoke and started crying loudly, but she could not go to him. She could not move.

All that she could do was stare impotently at her husband, even as Dexter frisked her and took the gun from her coat. He raised it so that Moloch could see it.

Moloch grinned.

“Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just not happy to see me?” Moloch asked.

He stepped closer to her and struck her hard with his right hand, sending her sprawling on a rug. She lay still for a moment, then crawled across the floor to Danny and gathered him in her arms.

“You’d better make that last,” said Moloch. “You don’t have much time left together.”

Moloch stared at his reflection in the painting, his face seeming to hang suspended above the dark waves that the old man had painted, the twin arms of the outcrops like horns erupting from his head, almost touching above his hair. He moved on to the next, a watercolor filled with blues and greens, before returning to the first. The waves in this version were very dark, almost black, white peaks breaking through, like the pale bodies of drowning men. A sliver of moonlight cast a weak silver glow across the skies above. There were no stars.

“I like this one,” he said.

Jack, seated on the floor, his hands bound before him with a length of clothesline, peered up at the intruder. He was deathly pale, apart from a smear of blood across his cheek. In the murk of the room, the blood appeared black against the pallor of his face, creating a strange resemblance between the artist and the work of art before which Moloch now stood.

“You go away and you can have it for free,” said Jack.

Moloch’s mouth twitched, the only sign he gave that he might be enjoying the joke.

“Something I’ve learned,” he said. “You get nothing for free in this life. Although I can say, with some certainty, that if you fuck with me, money is never likely to be a worry for you again.”

Dexter stood behind the couch. The appearance of the woman and the money seemed to have concentrated Moloch’s mind some. He was no longer rambling. Dexter began to experience a faint hope that they might somehow get out of this alive. His hand rested on the back of Danny’s neck in what might have been almost a protective way, were it not for the fact that the tips of his fingers were digging painfully into the boy’s skin, almost cupping his spine.

“Make him stop,” said Marianne. “He’s your son. Make him stop hurting him.”

Moloch walked toward the boy, who attempted to shrink back but found himself anchored to the spot by the force of Dexter’s hand. Moloch reached out and touched the back of his hand to the boy’s cheek.

“You’re cold,” he said. “If you’re not careful, you’ll catch your death.”

He glanced at Marianne.

“He doesn’t look much like me. You sure he’s mine? Maybe he’s something that you and that dyke bitch cooked up between you with a turkey baster. She’s dead, by the way, but I suspect you knew that already.”

Marianne’s eyes blinked closed. She bit her lip to try to keep from crying.

“Actually, I got to tell you that a lot of people are dead because of you. Your sister, her husband, fuck knows how many people on this island, all because you were a greedy bitch who screwed over her own husband. You try that out for size, see how it fits on your conscience.”

He turned to Dexter.

“How long have we been here?”

“Ten, fifteen minutes, maybe.”

“We can’t afford to wait any longer for the others, but now that we have a boat a little closer to home”-Moloch kicked Jack’s leg, causing the old man to flinch-“it looks like I have some time to kill, in a manner of speaking.”

He reached out to Marianne, lifted her up by the arm, and started to guide her toward the bedroom. Danny tried to hold on to her, but Dexter’s hand kept him rooted to the couch.

“I’ve been waiting a long time to see you again,” he whispered. He grabbed her left breast and squeezed it painfully. “Look upon this as a conjugal visit.”

Marianne tried to pull away from him. Instead he thrust her forward, sending her staggering into the hallway.

“There was a time,” said Moloch, “when you used to beg me for what I’m about to give you.” He pushed her against the wall, the length of his body pressed hard against her, and clasped her cheeks in his hands, forcing her mouth into the shape of a kiss. He composed his own features into an expression of sadness.

“Maybe you’ve just forgotten the good times,” he said. “You know, I can promise you that in all the years we’ve spent apart, I’ve never been with another woman.”

He forced his mouth over hers. She struggled, making small moans of disgust against his lips. Then her body began to relax, her mouth now working along with his. His hand relaxed its grip upon her cheeks.

Marianne bit him hard in one single movement of her jaws, almost severing his bottom lip, her teeth meeting where they cut through the flesh. Moloch howled. He hit her across the side of the head with his fist and she tumbled to her right, falling against a small table and sending a bowl of fresh-cut flowers crashing to the ground.

Danny screamed.

Moloch held his hand to his wounded mouth, cupping the blood that was pouring from the cut. He stared at himself in the hall mirror, then looked down at Marianne. His words were distorted as he tried to talk without moving his ruined lip, but she understood. They all did.

“I’m going to cut you for that,” he said. “After I’ve fucked you, I’m going to cut you to pieces. And then I’m going to start on the boy.”

He took his knife from his belt, flicked the blade open, then advanced on her. He caught her by the hair and began to drag her down the hallway, Danny screaming all the time, Jack struggling against his bonds.

Then the sliding doors exploded and blood shot from Dexter’s chest. He tried to turn, and a second shot sent him sprawling into the fireplace. He rolled away from the red glow of the ashes. A third shot hit him in the small of the back, and he finally lay still.

Willard entered through the ruined glass, shards crunching beneath his feet.

“Y’all look surprised to see me,” he said.

Joe Dupree was almost within sight of Jack’s house when he heard the shots and the shattering of glass. Marianne’s house had been empty. He figured that she must have taken Danny over to Jack’s. He was approaching the house from the west, so the big windows were on the opposite side and he could not see what was transpiring inside.

He tightened his grip on the shotgun and began to circle the house.

Moloch smiled at Willard.

“I knew you’d make it,” he said.

Willard looked confused.

“You told them to kill me.”

Moloch shook his head. “No, that was Dexter’s decision, and he didn’t tell me about it until we were in trouble. I wanted to kill him for it, but by then I needed all the help I could get. There’s something on this damn island, something that wants us all dead, and we need to stick together if we’re going to get off it alive.”

Willard looked at the older man, and Moloch could see that he wanted to believe him. Whatever love Willard had for anything in this world, he had for Moloch.

“You hadn’t killed Dexter, I’d have killed him myself once we got to land. I won’t shed tears for him.”

Despite the agony of his lip, Moloch tried to seem compassionate and concerned about Willard’s own pain. It appeared to work. The gun, trained on Moloch, wavered, then fell.

“Thank you, Willard,” said Moloch.

Willard nodded.

“Where we at?” he asked.

Moloch shook Marianne hard, by the hair. “My wife and I were about to make love, but now I’ve decided to go straight to the afterglow.”

“What happened to your mouth?”

Moloch smiled, his teeth red. “Love bite,” he said, then looked to Jack. “You got a first-aid kit?”

“In the kitchen, under the sink.”

Moloch inclined his head toward the kitchen. “Go in, see what you can find for my mouth,” he told Willard.

Willard took one last look at Dexter, lying unmoving on the floor, then headed for the kitchen, tucking his gun into his belt. The only sign of doubt he exhibited was his reluctance to turn away from Moloch. He was still looking back at him as the kitchen door swung closed on its hinges, hiding him from the view of those in the living room, and Joe Dupree’s great hand closed around his throat. Willard tried to reach for his gun, but the giant’s left hand plucked it from its belt and laid it gently on the top of the refrigerator.

Willard’s feet began to rise from the ground. He tried to make a sound, but Dupree’s grip was too strong. He kicked out with his feet, hoping to hit the walls or the door and alert Moloch, but the giant held him in the very center of the large kitchen, away from anything that might allow Willard to give his presence away. Willard stretched for the giant’s face, but his arms were too short. Instead, he dug his nails into the Dupree’s hand, tearing and gouging, even as he felt his eyes bulging from his face, his lungs burning. Spittle shot from his mouth, and he began to shudder.

Then the giant’s grip tightened, and the small bones in Willard’s neck started to snap.

Outside, Moloch’s head turned sharply toward the kitchen.

“Willard?” he called. “You okay in there.”

He discarded his knife. Keeping a grip on Marianne’s hair, he drew his own gun. He pressed it hard against her temple, moving her slowly toward the living room. He saw Jack look to his right, the boy too. Moloch risked a look around the corner.

The female cop was standing at the ruined window. Her gun was raised. She fired. The glass on the painting closest to Moloch’s head shattered.

At the same instant, Dupree emerged from the kitchen, his great bulk filling the doorway as he crouched slightly to enter the room. Moloch instantly drew Marianne up to her full height and forced her against him, using her body as a shield, the barrel of the gun now pushed hard into the soft flesh beneath her chin. Only Dupree could see him. Macy stood uncertainly at the window. Moloch adjusted his line of sight so that he could see the hall mirror and Macy’s reflection in its surface.

“Peekaboo,” he said. “I see you. You stay right there, missy.”

Dupree remained still, the shotgun pointed at Moloch. The two men confronted each other for the first time, brought together by forces neither fully understood, and bound together by circumstances barely recognized: their shared knowledge of the woman who stood between them; their links to the island and its strange, bloody heritage; and finally, their own curiously similar situations, for they were both men out of place in the world and only Sanctuary could hold out to them a promise of belonging.

“Let her go,” said Dupree. “It’s over.”

“You think?” said Moloch. “I reckon it’s just beginning.”

“Your people are all dead, and you’ll never be allowed to leave this place. Let her go.”

“Uh, no. I don’t think that’s going to happen. My wife and I have just been reunited after a long absence. We’ve got a lot of catching up to do.”

Moloch jerked Marianne’s head back and, despite the pain that it caused him, kissed her cheek, leaving a bloody smear on her skin.

“I bet she didn’t tell you about me. I’m shocked. People got to be honest right from the start, otherwise what hope is there for two lovers in this world?”

Marianne kept her eyes away from Dupree, afraid to look at his face. To her left, she could see Macy, her gun moving as she waited for Moloch to make himself a target for her.

“Yeah, I know all about you and my wife. I don’t like a man who milks through another man’s fence, no matter what he’s been told, but I’m inclined to forgive you. After all, she used you.”

Dupree couldn’t hide his confusion.

“What did you think, that she was attracted to you, you fucking freak? This isn’t beauty and the beast. This is real life. She took us both for a ride, but hey, don’t beat yourself up over it. She’s smarter than I gave her credit for, and there’s no denying that she’s a looker. Not for too much longer, maybe, but right now most men would give a lot to split this particular piece of white oak. She used you, used you as a lookout, an early-warning system so she could take off with my money when the time came.”

Marianne tried to speak, but the gun pressed so hard into her skin that she felt sure it would push through into her mouth. Now, at last, she allowed herself to stare into Dupree’s face as she tried to communicate with him, to express her shame, her regret, her fear, and her feelings for him.

They’re lies. He’s telling lies. I never wanted to hurt anyone, least of all you.

“She’ll try to deny it, but it was there in her head. I know her. Hell, I was married to her for long enough, and she still fucked me over. Maybe she even thought that you might protect her if things went wrong. Well, she was right about that much at least, because here you are.”

In the mirror, Moloch saw Macy attempt to move off, making for the front door to cut off another line of escape. “Missy, I said I could see you. You move another fucking inch and I’ll blow my bitch wife’s brains all over the ceiling.”

Macy stopped.

“Put the shotgun down,” Moloch told Dupree. “You can get rid of the Smith on your belt as well. I won’t even waste my time counting to three.”

Dupree, against all his instincts, did as he was told, laying the shotgun down gently on the floor, followed by his Smith & Wesson.

“You too, missy,” said Moloch. He kept his back to the wall so that he could see Macy clearly. She didn’t move.

“You think I’m fucking with you? Do it!”

Macy began to lower the gun slowly as Moloch’s attention flicked back to Dupree.

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re a freak, a giant pretending to be a knight in shining armor. But you don’t read your fairy stories, Mr. Giant.”

The gun moved suddenly from Marianne’s face, its barrel now pointing at Dupree.

“At the end of the story, the giant always dies.”

He pulled the trigger, and the policeman’s throat blossomed like a new flower.

It seemed to happen slowly for Joe Dupree. He thought that he could almost see the bullet as it moved, tearing a path through the cold air. It entered his skin in tiny increments, fractions of inches, ripping through flesh and bone, exiting just to the right of his spine. He fell backward through the kitchen door, coming to rest close to Willard’s body. He tried to breathe, but already his throat was flooding with blood. The kitchen door was held open by his feet and he saw Marianne spin and strike at Moloch’s injured mouth, then throw herself against him in an effort to dislodge his gun. He saw Macy moving through the living room, her gun extended, her face turning in horror toward him. He watched Moloch push Marianne away, then run for the door, firing as he did so, his wife scrambling for the cover of the corner as the bullets sent plaster and paint flying from the walls.

Then he was gone, Macy uncertain whether to follow him or tend to her wounded comrade. She ran to Dupree, limping slightly, favoring her right foot.

“Stay with me, Joe,” she began. “We’ll get help.”

He reached out, took her shirt in his hand, then pushed her away.

Still she paused. He could not speak, but he pointed his hand in the direction of the fleeing man. She nodded and headed after Moloch, stopping just once to look back at the dying policeman.

Marianne came to him. She was crying. The boy was behind her, staring at the two men on the kitchen floor.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

She tried to remove her coat in order to lay it on him, but he gripped her hand and brought it instead to his lips.

“No,” she whispered. “We have to keep you warm.”

But then she registered the blood spreading behind his head, flowing from the exit wound hidden from them, and she knew.

“No,” she repeated, softer now. “Don’t do this.”

The giant coughed and began to spasm. She tried to hold him down but his great weight was too much for her. His body jerked as he clawed at the floor, an irregular clicking noise emerging from the back of his throat.

Then the spasming stopped, and Joe Dupree’s eyes widened as he died, as though in sudden understanding of the nature of this world.

Chapter Seventeen

Moloch ran.

He was conscious of movement around him-branches whipping in the wind, dead leaves pirouetting, and the shapes that lingered at the limits of his perception, not caring now whether he noticed them or not, merely content to shadow his progress through the forest. There was blood on his shirt and face; he could feel it cooling upon him in the night air. His lip ached, the pain like needles in his mouth each time he drew a breath. He heard the sounds of pursuit coming from behind and knew that the female cop was coming after him. He thought of all that he wanted to do to the woman, all of the hurt that he desired to inflict on her and on his wife. At least he’d put an end to the big cop. That was something.

His head struck a broken branch, almost severed by the actions of the storm, and he cried out as he fell back against the tree. When the pain in his mouth and head had subsided, he took a breath and stumbled along a narrow pathway that wound through a patch of marshland, until finally he found himself in a clearing in the middle of the forest. Low stones lay half buried in the ground and a simple stone cross stood at its center. He moved slowly forward until he was facing the monument. It was still possible to read the names on it, and he found his hand reaching out to trace the letters, his bloodied finger outstretched. He touched the stone and-

Men. Forest. Shooting. Women.

Woman.

The fillings in his mouth tingled and he felt suddenly lightheaded. He staggered back as the ground began to crumble under his feet. Visions of suffering and death assailed him. He felt flesh beneath his fingers, and smelled powder on the air. A noise came from below as the earth gave way beneath him, and Moloch tumbled into blackness.

Marianne turned Danny away from Joe Dupree’s body, hiding his face in the folds of her jacket just as days-years?-before she had allowed him to shield himself from the reality of a bird’s death. Willard’s body lay in a corner, partly concealed by the breakfast counter. Danny wouldn’t stop crying. He was holding on to her so tightly that his nails were drawing blood. Behind them, Jack had raised himself and now stood at the kitchen door. She found a knife in a drawer and used it to cut the bindings on his hands, then gently removed Danny’s fingers from her legs.

“I want you to stay here with Jack, okay?”

Danny let out a loud wail and tried to claw his way back to her, but she kept him at arm’s length and pushed him into the old man’s arms. Jack held him as firmly as he could, folding his uninjured arm across Danny’s chest. Marianne picked up Dupree’s gun from the floor, then headed for the front door.

“I’ll be back before you know it, Danny. You look after Jack for me.”

But Danny could only cry, and in the confusion and shock of the moment, none of them noticed that Dexter’s body was gone.

Moloch fell for what seemed like a long, long time, yet the distance could have been only twenty feet, for when he hit the bottom he could still see a ragged hole above him, loose earth spilling down from the edges, snowflakes joining it in its descent. Dim light filtered down, bathing him in a patina of gray, like one who was already fading from this world. The impact made him gag, and he lay for a moment tasting bile and blood in his mouth.

Moloch smelled damp earth. He reached out a hand blindly and felt it brush against ragged hair.

Woman. A woman’s hair.

He instantly drew his hand back, forcing the fear from himself. The cop was coming. If he stayed here and waited to be found, he would be trapped like an animal. He needed to find a way out. He needed to know what was around him.

He advanced into the shadows, grateful now for the improvements forced upon his vision by hours of struggling through the snowstorm without flashlights. He discovered that he had been touching the exposed roots of vegetation. Moloch released a spluttering laugh of relief, then heard it die in his mouth as he began to take in his surroundings.

He was in a semicircular hollow of earth and stone, about fifteen feet in diameter. At its extremities were openings, large enough for a man to crawl through on his belly. Moloch approached the widest of the entrances and carefully reached inside, disturbing some beetles as he felt the ends of more tree roots dangling from the top of the tunnel. He listened. From beyond he could hear the sound of flowing water. He glanced back toward the hole through which he had fallen, then took another look at the walls of earth and stone that descended from it. There was no way that he could climb them. Either he stayed here and waited to be found or he took his chances in one of the tunnels. Moloch had no fear of enclosed spaces-even prison had not troubled him in that way-but he still felt uneasy about committing himself to the hole before him. He might have trouble squeezing through if it narrowed significantly farther on, and he had no idea how, or for what purpose, the tunnels had been constructed. Still, there was the sound of water, which could mean that the tunnel led to the bank of a river or stream, and he thought that he could make out a faint light ahead.

He made his decision.

He got down on his knees and entered the hole.

Twenty feet above, Macy entered the clearing. She was still feeling the shock of Dupree’s death and of her own actions in the tower. Until tonight, she had never fired her gun in the line of duty, and had barely had cause to draw it from its holster. Now a man had died at her hands and another was fleeing from her, and Joe Dupree was dead because she hadn’t been fast enough.

Joe Dupree was dead because of her.

Her foot struck stone. She looked down at the monument protruding from the ground, at the others surrounding it, and at the raised stone cross at the center of the little cemetery. She was reluctant to enter the clearing. Her quarry was still armed, and she was unwilling to risk exposing herself. She crouched down low and tried to scan the forest.

There was blood on the snow by the cross.

She swallowed, then headed toward the middle of the site. She was almost upon it when her foot treaded air and she stumbled, her leg disappearing into the hole. She fell backward, then scuttled away from the gap, anticipating gunfire from below, but no sound came. She counted to five, then inched forward again. The opening was new. She could see damp earth, and the tree roots were moist when she touched her fingers to them. She risked a quick glance below, barely allowing the top of her head to appear over the rim of the hole in order to provide the smallest possible target. She could see nothing but fallen earth, broken branches, and a light dusting of snow down below.

Joe Dupree’s killer was down there. He had to be.

She was about to descend when a hand gripped her shoulder. She looked up to see Marianne Elliot behind her.

“Don’t,” said Marianne. “You have to get out of here. We both have to get out of here. Now.”

Even in the falling snow, the trail left by Moloch and Macy had been easy for Marianne to discern. They were heading toward the Site. Marianne followed them carefully, checking the woods ahead and always trying to use trees for cover, but could not see either of them. They were too far ahead.

She was almost at the clearing when something brushed by her feet. She looked down and saw a gray shape moving swiftly past her, tattered clothing hanging on mummified skin, wisps of hair protruding from beneath the folds of its shroud. It appeared to float slightly above the ground, leaving no trace of its passage, while its thin hands used rocks and tree trunks to pull itself along, like a diver exploring the seabed. Marianne shrank from it and her legs touched another shape as it swept by her, seemingly oblivious to her presence.

She raised her head and saw that she was surrounded. Pale forms moved across the forest floor, some as big as men, others as small as children. She caught indistinct glimpses of faces lost in the folds of gowns and shrouds, flashes of torn feet, broken skin, and large, dark eyes. Rooted to the spot, she tried to scream, but no sound came.

Then a voice spoke, and it was her voice, yet it did not come from her.

“Leave,” the voice said, and Marianne thought that she felt a hand brush against her skin and she saw-

A man descending upon her, Moloch, yet not Moloch, and she felt him enter her, and the blade beginning its work, cutting and tearing at her. She was dying, and others were dying around her.

The voice came again, a soft woman’s voice.

“Leave.”

And the gray shapes continued to weave around her, disappearing beneath rocks and under tree trunks, descending through all the dark, hollow places and into the world below.

The last to sink away was a woman. Marianne could see the swell of breasts beneath her clothing, and her long hair gently brushing the snow. Before she descended, the woman stared back at her, and Marianne looked into her own face. It was a face ruined by old wounds, its nose broken and its cheekbones shattered, its eyes a deep black, as though colonized by some terrible cancer, but it was still a face that closely resembled her own.

Then the woman found a gap between the roots of a great beech tree, and was gone.

Dexter had made it to the edge of the old man’s yard, half stumbling, half crawling until he reached the treeline. He had jammed wads of bills, now soaked with red, into the waistband of his pants. Ahead of him he could see a narrow pathway leading from the cliff edge to the shore. The boat would be down there. If he could get to it, he would take his chances on the sea. If he stayed on the island, he would be found, or he would die.

He leaned against a tree trunk to catch his breath, but when he tried to rise again he found that he could not. His body had taken too many shots. He had lost too much blood. He was weakening.

Dexter slid down the bark until he came to rest on the ground. The blizzard was easing, he noticed. The snow was falling more gently now. He stretched his legs out before him and removed the money from his pants. The bills were smeared so thickly with his blood that he could barely read the denominations. He removed the band from one of the wads, spread the notes in his hand, and watched the wind spirit them away, some carried up into the air, others dancing across the snow.

Dexter noticed other shapes moving among the discarded bills. One came to rest on his leg. He reached down and gently touched the moth’s wings. It fluttered against his fingers, then took flight. He watched it, following its progress until it came to rest upon a small girl who stood among the trees, watching him. Dexter could see her long, pale hair, but her face was lost in shadow. She looked almost like a moth herself, Dexter thought. A cloak hung over her shoulders, so that when she extended her arms, they took on the appearance of wings.

“Hey,” said Dexter. “You think you could help me?”

He swallowed.

“I want to get down to the water. I have money. You could buy yourself something nice.”

He extended one of the remaining wads of bills toward her. The girl moved forward.

“That’s it,” said Dexter. “Come on now. You help me get out of here and I’ll-”

The Gray Girl’s feet were not touching the ground. She floated toward Dexter, her arms wide and her dark eyes gleaming, her skin wrinkled and decayed. Dexter opened his mouth to scream and the Gray Girl’s lips closed on his. Her hands gripped his head and her knees pinned his arms to the trunk of the tree. Blood poured from the meeting of their mouths as Dexter shook, the life slowly being drawn from him and into the Gray Girl, a life taken in return for the life stolen from her.

And then the Gray Girl drew back from the dead man, her dark eyes closing briefly in ecstasy, moths falling dead around her as she followed her companions at last into the depths.

Moloch was ten feet into the tunnel now, and rather than narrowing, it seemed to have increased in size. He paused and listened. If the cop decided to come down after him, he would be in real trouble, but he didn’t believe that she would. It was a considerable drop down. Moloch was surprised that he hadn’t injured himself in the fall. No, she would wait, maybe look for a rope. She would not risk being trapped beneath the earth with him. He moved on.

He had progressed five or six feet more when he thought that he heard movement behind him. He stopped, and found only silence.

Jittery. I’m getting jittery.

Then he heard it again, clearer now. For a second, he thought it was falling earth, and panic hit him as he imagined the tunnel collapsing around him, trapping him. He listened harder and realized that what he was hearing was scraping, the slow movement of earth beneath nails and hands, the same sounds that he himself had probably been making since he had begun moving through the tunnel. He tried to turn his head, but the tunnel was still too narrow to allow him to see clearly behind him.

The cop. It had to be the cop. She had come down after all. Maybe she had brought rope with her, or had found some among the detritus of the forest.

Shit.

He started to pull himself forward again, faster now. He was certain that he could hear water. Hell, he could even smell it. Cool air was coming through the tunnel. He felt it on his face, took a deep breath-

And then it was gone. Moloch stopped again. The airflow had ceased. He had heard no sounds of collapse. Something had deliberately blocked the tunnel.

The sounds from behind were drawing closer, and now another smell had taken the place of the river and the forest, a stench like old meat left to boil in a pot for too long, of offal and waste. He found himself retching from it. Light filtered through the tunnel. It was silver, almost gray. He was grateful for it, even if he could not identify its source. He didn’t want to be trapped down here in the darkness with-

With what?

He tried to turn his head again and found that he now had enough space to peer behind him. The tunnel wall curved slightly but he could still hear the sound. It was closer now, he thought. If it was the cop, she would give him some warning.

If it was the cop.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

The sound stopped, but he sensed that his pursuer was at the very edge of the tunnel wall, barely out of sight.

“I got a gun,” he said. “You better back out now. I hear you following me, I’ll use it.”

The light seemed to grow stronger around him. There were gray-white worms emerging from the earth of the tunnel wall, coiling around it, probing…

Then Moloch saw the nails on the ends of the pale fingers, and the wounds on the back of the hand, wounds that would never heal. There was movement everywhere now, above and below. Earth dropped onto his head from above as something scrabbled across one of the higher tunnels. It was like a honeycomb, teeming with dark life.

Moloch heard himself sobbing with fear, even as he turned and found himself gilded in silvery light.

And in the final seconds of life granted to him, he saw the woman’s face, her skin gray parchment, her hair a handful of strands clinging to the skull, the roots of her teeth exposed by the retreating gums and the parted lips. He could make out the cuts in her face, the damage inflicted by fist and knife. The lamp in her hands radiated dimly, for in the darkest places even the dead need light.

He smelled her breath, fetid and rank, and he heard her voice-“Know me, husband”-as the light died and he was enveloped in darkness.

“He’s down there,” said Macy. “There’s nowhere he can go.”

But Marianne was pulling her back.

“You don’t understand,” she said. “There’s something else down there too.”

Macy looked at her. She remembered the tower, and the floating child, and the look on Scarfe’s face as he stared out into the forest and saw what was pursuing him.

Macy began to run. A rumbling sound came from the ground below her, and she felt the earth begin to give way beneath her. She increased her speed, Marianne beside her, the two women racing as the ground around the Site collapsed, taking the stones and the cross and the remnants of the settlement with it, smothering Moloch’s final cries in the thunder of its destruction.

Chapter Eighteen

Barron sat in the SUV over by the Portland Marine Company, an empty coffee container from the 7-Eleven on Congress in the cup holder by his right hand, the radio playing some Cheap Trick for the night owls. Once or twice prowl cars had passed his way, but he’d hunched down low in his seat and the cops hadn’t even slowed, the SUV just another vehicle parked in the lot. The snow was still falling, although the wind had died down some. The SUV was warm, the heat on full blast, but he had kept his gloves and coat on just the same.

Barron had spent most of his evening trying to reach a decision about Parker, the private detective who was nosing around. People listened when Parker spoke, and it was only a matter of time before somebody with real authority started paying attention to his noises about a sexual predator at work in the area, possibly a predator in a uniform.

The men in Boston were his only option. He was their tame cop, in so deep with them now that he could never escape. If they heard he was under threat, then they might be prepared to deal with his problem for him. The Russians didn’t give a rat’s ass about reputation, or influence. They were in it for the money, and anything that threatened their sources of income, or their carefully cultivated contacts, would be annihilated without a moment’s thought. He had once hoped that they might let him go, but it had been a faint hope. If that was the case, he might just have to resign himself to the fact and take advantage of the situation.

He glanced again at the dashboard clock: almost midnight. All was quiet. If Scarfe’s buddies did come back to the port, it looked like they would be able to do so without interference. Barron had even spotted one or two ships, dense with lights, braving the bay as the snow began to ease and the wind faded from a howl to a whisper. The streets were deserted and Scarfe’s battered Grand Am was parked not ten feet from where he sat, along with two vans. They had wheels. They were free and clear once they got back to Portland. Barron had done all that he could be expected to do. He had waited, he had kept an ear to traffic on the two police bands. He had his cell phone ready, the number he had been given by the men in Boston written on a napkin and not stored in the phone’s memory just in case any of this came back to bite him on the ass.

Then his scanner burst into life, and next thing Barron knew there was a chopper being readied for a run to Dutch, the Coast Guard was moving in, and there were enough armed police heading for the water to mount an invasion. Barron started his engine and drove.

It had all turned to shit, just as he had expected.

Barron ditched the SUV at Hoyt’s Pond, then retrieved his own car and headed home. He spent the next two hours pacing his apartment floor, wondering if he should run, fearing that his colleagues were already coming for him, sold out by Scarfe to save himself. After a while, he just had to know. He returned to Commercial and contrived to bump into one of the detectives from headquarters, who gave him the lowdown on the situation. Dupree was dead, killed by persons yet to be identified. Some, maybe all, of those responsible were also dead, but they were still searching the island. Macy had blooded herself: Terry Scarfe, who appeared to be tied in with those involved, had died at her hands. Barron was particularly happy to receive this last piece of information. If he had survived, Scarfe would have fed him to the department like fish bait.

Barron returned to his apartment relieved and began to feel the old urge gnawing at him, brought on in part by his relief at what he had learned about the events on Dutch. His appetites had forced him to risk his job and jail time for men he didn’t know, yet he was still unable to control his urges. Lipska, the little Polack who acted as Boston’s representative in Maine, had promised him some payback if he did as he was told, even as he was blackmailing him in another’s name. Barron felt saliva flooding his mouth and the welcome ache building at his groin. He made the call.

“Yeah, it’s me. Something went wrong, and the cops moved on the island.”

He gave Lipska a summary of what little he knew. “Now I want what’s coming to me.”

He sighed when he heard the other man’s reply.

“Yeah, I know I still got to pay, but you promised me something fresh, with a little off the top for my time.”

Barron grinned.

“Man, you crack me up, you really do. I’ll be waiting.”

Barron’s apartment lay off Forest, close to the university. It took up the entire top floor of the building, the rooms below rented out to students, and nurses from Maine Medical. They paid their rent to Barron although they didn’t know it. He used an agency. To them, he was just another tenant. Barron didn’t want them bothering him with their shit.

He took a beer from the fridge, walked to the bathroom, and lit some candles, then ran a bath, testing the water with his fingers to make sure the temperature was okay. He wanted it just a little too hot, so that it would have cooled down just enough by the time the package arrived. He stripped, put on a robe, then turned some music on low. He was just heading back to the kitchen for another beer when there was a knock at his door. There had been no buzzer, no voice over his intercom. He went to his bedside table and took out his gun, keeping it to his side and slightly behind his back as he approached the door. He looked out of the peephole, then relaxed and opened the door.

There was a boy standing before him, fifteen or sixteen at most, just the age Barron liked. He had dark hair and pale skin, with reddish-purple smudges beneath his eyes. Truth be told, Barron thought he looked kind of ill, and for a moment he was worried that maybe the kid had the virus, but Lipska had assured him that he was clean, and that was one thing about Lipska: he didn’t lie about shit like that.

“How’d you get up? I leave the door open? I must have left the door open.” Barron heard himself babbling, but hell, the kid had something. He was almost otherworldly. Barron felt certain that tonight was going to be special. He stepped aside to let the kid enter, noticing his faded, crude trousers, his rough cotton shirt, his bare feet. Bare feet? The hell was Lipska thinking, on a night like this?

“You leave your shoes at the front door?” Barron asked.

The boy nodded. He smelled clean, like the sea.

“Yeah, bet they got real wet. Maybe tomorrow we’ll head out, buy you some sneakers.”

The boy didn’t reply. Instead, he looked toward the bathroom. Steam was rising from the tub.

“You like the water?”

The boy spoke for the first time.

“Yes,” he said.

He followed the older man into the bathroom, his thumbs rubbing against his fingers, tracing the grooves that the waves had worn into his skin like an old song waiting for the touch of the Victrola needle to bring it alive.

“I like the water very much.”

Lipska arrived forty minutes later and tried the buzzer. There was no reply. He tried twice more, then tested the door with his hand. It opened at his touch. He gestured to the boy waiting in the car, and the young man stepped out. He wore jeans, a white T-shirt, and a black leather jacket. He was shivering as he followed Lipska into the house.

The door to Barron’s apartment was open when they reached it. Lipska knocked once, then again, harder this time. The door unlatched beneath the pressure of his hand. Inside there was water on the floor; just a little, as if someone had left the shower or the bath without properly drying off first. To Lipska’s left, the bathroom door stood half open and he heard the sound of the tap dripping. The only light came from there.

“Barron?” he called. “Barron, man, you in there? It’s Lipska.”

He walked to the bathroom door and pushed it open. He took in the naked man, his knees above the surface of the water, his head below it, eyes and mouth open, one arm dangling over the edge of the tub; registered too the faint tang of saltwater that hung in the air.

He turned to the boy, who had remained standing at the door.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Don’t I get my money?” said the boy.

“I’ll give you your money,” said Lipska. “Forget you were ever here. Just forget you were ever here…”

Lipska led the boy down the stairs and out into the street, then stopped as two uniformed policemen advanced toward him, a plainclothes detective walking close beside them. Behind the cops, he saw the private detective named Charlie Parker leaning against a Mustang. Parker’s face was expressionless as the uniforms separated Lipska from the boy. Only when Lipska was cuffed did Parker step away from the car and join the cops.

“What’s this about?” said Lipska.

“I think you know what this is about,” said Parker.

“No,” said Lipska. “I don’t.”

Parker leaned in close to Lipska’s face.

“It’s about Barron,” he said. “It’s about children.”