Dark Hollow

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

The years tumble by like leaves driven before the breeze, intricate and veined, fading from the green of recent memory to the gold autumnal shades of the distant past. I see myself as a child, as a young man, as a lover, a husband, a father, a mourner. I see old men around me in their old men pants and their old men shirts; old men dancing, their feet moving delicately, following a pattern lost to those younger than them; old men telling tales, their liver-spotted hands moving before the fire, their skin like crumpled paper, their voices soft as the rustle of empty corn husks.

An old man walks through the lush August grass with wood in his arms, brushing away loose bark with a gloved hand; an old man, tall and unbowed, with a halo of white hair like an ancient angel, a dog stepping slowly beside him, older, in its way, than the man himself, its gray-beard muzzle flecked with foam, its tongue lolling, its tail swinging gently through the warm evening air. The first patches of red are showing in the trees, and the clamor of the insects has begun to subside. The ash trees, the last to unfurl their leaves in spring, are now the first to let them fall to the ground. Pine needles decay on the forest floor and the blackberries are ripe and dense as the old man passes by, at one with the rhythms of the world around him.

These are the things he does, open-coated, firm footsteps leaving the clear imprint of his passing as he goes: the woodcutting, relishing the weight of the ax in his hands, the perfection of the swing, the fresh crack as the blade splits the sugar maple log, the sweep of the head to clear the two halves, the careful positioning of the next log, the heft of the ax, the feel of his old man muscles moving, stretching, beneath his old man shirt. Then the piling, wood on wood, fitting one to the other, shifting, turning, forming the pile so that it remains steady, so that none will fall, so that not even one will be lost. Finally, he stretches the sheeting, a brick at each corner to hold it in place, always the same bricks for he is, and has ever been, a methodical man. And when the time comes in winter to set the fire, he will return to his pile and bend down, the buckle of the belt on his old man pants digging into the softness of his belly, and he will remember that it was firm once, when he was a young man, when the belt held a gun and a nightstick and cuffs, and his badge shone like a silver sun.

I will be old too, and I will be this man, if I am spared. I will find a kind of happiness in repeating his motions, in the aptness of the action as I feel the circle closing, as I become him, as he made her, who made me. And in doing what he once did, in front of that same house, with the same trees moving in the wind, the same ax in my hand cleaving the wood beneath its blade, I will create an act of remembrance more powerful than a thousand prayers. And my grandfather will live in me, and the ghost of a dog will taste the air with its tongue, and bark at the joy of it.

Now it is his hands that I see moving before the fire, his voice that tells the tale, about Caleb Kyle and the tree with the strange fruit at the edge of the wilderness. He has never told me the tale before and he will never tell me how it ends, because it has no end, not for him. It is I who will finish the tale for him, and I who will complete the arc.

Judy Giffen was the first to disappear, in Bangor in 1965. She was a slim girl, nineteen, with a mane of dark hair and soft red lips with which she tasted men, savoring them like berries. She worked in a hat shop and went missing on a warm April evening redolent with the promise of summer. They searched and they searched, but they didn't find her. Her face looked out from ten thousand newspapers, frozen in her years as surely as if she had been trapped in amber.

Ruth Dickinson from Corinna, another thin beauty, with long blonde hair that hung to her waist, was next to go, in late May when she was just short of her twenty-first birthday. To their names would be added Louise Moore from East Corinth, Laurel Trulock from Skowhegan, and Sarah Raines from Portland, all disappearing within a period of not more than a few days in September. Sarah Raines was a schoolteacher and, at twenty-two, the eldest of the women to disappear. Her father, Samuel Raines, had been to school with Bob Warren, my grandfather, and Sarah was Bob's goddaughter. The last to go missing was an eighteen-year-old student named Judith Mundy, who disappeared after a party in Monson in the first week of October. Unlike the others, she was a chubby, plain girl, but by then people had figured out that there was something very wrong and the break in the pattern didn't seem so important. A search was organized for the Mundy girl to the north and a lot of folks helped out, some, like my grandfather, from as far south as Portland. He drove up on a Saturday morning but, by then, all hope was pretty much gone. My grandfather joined a small party out by Sebec Lake, a few miles east of Monson. There were only three men, then two, then just my grandfather.

That evening, he got himself a room in Sebec and had dinner in a bar outside town. It was bustling, what with all the people who had been out looking for Judith Mundy, and the newspapermen and the police. He sat drinking a beer at the counter when a voice beside him said:

"You know what all this fuss is about?"

He turned and saw a tall, dark-haired man with a knife slash for a mouth and bleak, unloving eyes. There was a trace of the south in his voice, he thought. He wore tan corduroy pants and a dark sweater pitted with holes, through which patches of a dirty yellow shirt were visible. A brown slicker hung to his calves, and the toes of heavy black boots peered from under the too-long cuffs of his pants.

"They're looking for the girl who's gone missing," replied my grandfather. The man made him uneasy. There was something in his voice, he recalled, something sour-sweet, like syrup laced with arsenic. He smelled of earth and sap and something else, something he couldn't quite place.

"You think they're gonna find her?" A light flickered in the man's eyes, and my grandfather thought that it might have been amusement.

"Maybe."

"They ain't found the others."

He was watching my grandfather now, his face solemn but the strange glimmer still in his eyes.

"No, they haven't."

"You a cop?"

My grandfather nodded. There was no point in denying it. Some people just knew.

"You're not from around here, though?"

"No. I'm from Portland."

"Portland?" said the man. He seemed impressed. "And where you been searching?"

"Out by Sebec Lake, the south shore."

"Sebec Lake's nice. Me, I prefer the Little Wilson Stream, up there by the Elliotsville Road. It's pretty, worth a look if a man had the time. Lot of coverage on the banks." He gestured for a whiskey, tossed some coins on the bar, then drained the glass in a single mouthful. "You going back out there again tomorrow?"

"I guess."

He nodded, wiping the back of his right hand across his mouth. My grandfather saw scarring on the palm, and dirt beneath the fingernails. "Well, maybe you'll have better luck than them other fellas, seeing as how you're from Portland and all. Sometimes it takes new eyes to see an old trick." Then he left.

That Sunday, the day when my grandfather found the tree with the strange fruit, dawned crisp and bright, with birds in the trees and blossoms by the shining waters of Sebec Lake. He left his car by the lake at Packard's Camps, showed his badge and joined a small party, made up of two brothers and a cousin from the same family, that was heading for the northern shore. The four men searched together for three hours, not talking much, until the family returned home for Sunday lunch. They asked my grandfather if he wanted to join them, but he had wrapped sourdough bread in a napkin with some fried chicken, and he had a thermos of coffee in his backpack, so he turned down their offer. He returned to Packard's Camps and ate seated on a stone by the bank, the water lapping behind him, and watched rabbits skipping through the grass.

When the other men didn't return, he got in his car and began to drive. He took the road north till he came to a steel bridge that crossed the waters of the Little Wilson. Its roadway was a series of grilles through which could be seen the brown rushing torrent of the stream. Across the bridge the road sloped upward before splitting in two, heading for Onawa and Borestone Mountain along the Elliotsville Road to the northwest and Leighton to the east. On each side of the river, the trees grew thickly. A hermit thrush shot from a birch and looped across the water. Somewhere, a warbler called.

My grandfather did not cross the bridge, but parked his car by the side of the road and followed a rough trail of stones and dirt down to the riverbank. The water was fast moving, and there were rocky outcrops and fallen branches to negotiate as he began to walk, so that he had to step into the flow at times to bypass them. Soon, there were no more houses on the slopes above him. The bank grew increasingly wild, and he was forced more and more often to take to the water in order to continue upriver.

He had been walking for almost thirty minutes when he heard the flies.

Ahead of him, a huge slab of rock rose up from the bank, its end almost tapering to a point. He climbed it, using its ridges and alcoves for footholds and handholds, until he reached the plateau. To his right was the river, to his left a space in the trees through which the buzzing sounded louder. He walked through the gap, over which the trees hung in an arch like the entry into a cathedral, until he reached a small clearing. The sight that met him made him stop short and caused his food to erupt from his gut in a rush.

The girls hung from an oak, an old, mature tree with a thick, gnarled trunk and heavy extended branches like splayed fingers. They turned slowly, black against the sun, their bare feet pointing at the ground, their hands loose by their sides, their heads lolling. A fury of flies surrounded them, excited by the stench of decay. As he moved toward them, he could make out the color of their hair, the twigs and leaves caught in the strands, the yellowing of their teeth, the eruptions on their skin, their mutilated bellies. Some were naked, while tattered dresses still clung to the others. They pirouetted in midair, like the ghosts of five dancers no longer restricted by the pull of gravity. A heavy, rough rope around the neck of each anchored the girls to the branches above.

There were only five. When the bodies were taken down and identified, Judith Mundy's was not among them. And when she didn't appear, when no trace was ever found of her, it was decided that whoever was responsible for the deaths of the five others had probably had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Mundy girl. It would be more than thirty years before that piece of reasoning was proved wrong.

My grandfather told the police about the man in the bar and what he had said. The details were taken down and it was found that a man roughly fitting that description had been seen in Monson about the time of Judith Mundy's disappearance. There were similar descriptions of a fellow in Skowhegan, although folks differed about his height, or the color of his eyes, or the cut of his hair. This anonymous man was a suspect, for a time, until something broke in the case.

Ruth Dickinson's clothes, soiled with blood and grime, were found in a shed in Corinna owned by the family of Quintin Fletcher. Fletcher was twenty-eight and somewhat retarded. He made a little money by selling handicrafts he created from wood picked up in the forest, traveling around the state by Greyhound bus with his case of wooden dolls, toy trucks and candlesticks. Ruth Dickinson had complained to his family and, later, to the police, that Fletcher had followed her on occasion, leering and making lewd suggestions. After he tried to touch her breast at a county fair the police told his family that they would have him put away if he approached the Dickinson girl again. Fletcher's name came up in the course of the investigation into the girls' deaths. He was questioned, the house searched, and the discovery made. Fletcher started crying, claiming that he didn't know where the clothing came from, that he hadn't hurt anybody. He was remanded for trial and placed in a secure unit in Maine State Prison, for fear that someone might try to get to him if he was kept locally. He might still have been there now, making toys and nautical gifts for the store out on U.S.1 that sells prisoners' crafts, but for the fact that a trusty, who was related distantly to Judy Giffen, attacked Fletcher when he was undergoing a checkup in the prison infirmary and stabbed him three times in the neck and chest with a scalpel. Fletcher died twenty-four hours later, two days before his case was due to go to trial.

And there it lay, for most people at least: the killings ended with Fletcher's capture and subsequent death. But my grandfather couldn't forget the man in the bar, and the glimmer in his eyes, and the reference to the Elliotsville Road. For months afterward, he countered hostility and the desire to mourn and forget with quiet persistence and sensitivity. And what he got was a name, which folks had heard but couldn't quite remember how, and sightings of the man from the bar in each town where a girl had been lost. He mounted a campaign of sorts, speaking to any newspaper or radio show that would listen, putting across his view that the man who had killed the five girls and used them to decorate a tree was still at large. He even convinced some people, for a time, until the family of Quintin Fletcher weighed in behind him and folks took a turn against the whole affair, even his old friend Sam Raines.

In the end, the hostility and indifference became too much for him. Under some pressure, my grandfather left the force and took up construction and then woodworking to support his family, carving lamps and chairs and tables and selling them through the H.O.M.E. service for cottage industries run by the Franciscan nuns in Orland. He carved each piece of work with the same care and sensitivity he had used to question the families of the girls who died. He only spoke of the affair once thereafter, that night in front of the fire with the smell of the wood on him and the dog sleeping at his feet. The discovery he had made on that warm day had blighted his life. It haunted him in his sleep, the possibility that the man who had killed those girls had somehow escaped justice.

After he told me the tale, I knew that on those occasions when I found him sitting on the porch, his pipe cold between his lips, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the sunset, he was thinking about what had taken place decades before. When he pushed away food almost untouched, after reading in the papers about some young girl who had strayed from home and not yet been found, he was back on the Elliotsville Road, his feet wet in his boots and the ghosts of dead girls whispering in his ear.

And the name that he found all those years before had, by then, become a kind of talisman in towns in the north, although no one could figure out how that might have happened. It was used to scare bad children who wouldn't do what they were told, who wouldn't go to sleep quietly or who headed off into the woods with their friends without telling anyone where they were going. It was a name spoken at night, before the light was switched off and the hair tousled by a familiar hand, the soft scent of a mother's perfume lingering after a final good night kiss: "Be good now and go to sleep. And no more trips into the forest, else Caleb will get you."

I can see my grandfather poking at the logs in the fire, letting them settle before he adds another, the sparks flying up the chimney like sprites, the melting snow sizzling in the flames.

"Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle," he intones, repeating the words of the children's rhyme, the fire casting shadows on his face. "If you see him, run a mile."

And the snow hisses, and the wood cracks, and the dog whimpers softly in his sleep.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

St. Martha's stood on its own grounds, surrounded by a stone wall fifteen feet in height and guarded by wrought-iron gates from which black paint bubbled and flaked in preparation for a slow, fluttering fall to the earth and snow below. The ornamental pond was filled with leaves and trash, the lawn was overgrown and the trees had not been pruned for so long that the branches of some intertwined with those of their neighbors, creating a woven canopy beneath which the grass had probably died. The building itself was grimly institutional: four floors of gray stone with a gabled roof beneath which a carved cross betrayed its religious origins.

I drove to the main entrance and parked in a space reserved for staff, then walked up the granite steps and into the home itself. To one side stood the security guard's booth where the old woman had cold-cocked Judd before racing off to her death. Straight ahead was a reception desk where a female attendant in a white coat was busy rearranging some papers. Behind her, a door opened into an office lined with books and files. The attendant was a plain-faced woman with white, doughy cheeks and dark eye shadow that made her look like a Mardi Gras skeleton. She had no name tag on her lapel; close up, her coat was stained at the breast and white threads hung like cobwebs from the fraying collar. Willeford had been right: the place smelled of overboiled vegetables and human waste, unsuccessfully masked by disinfectant. All things considered, Emily Watts might have done the smart thing by making a break for the woods.

"Can I help you?" said the woman. Her face was neutral but her voice had the same tone as the young man at Meade Payne's place. It made "help" sound like a dirty word. The way she said "you" wasn't much better.

I gave her my name and told her that Chief Martel had called ahead to arrange for me to talk to someone about the death of Emily Watts.

"I'm sorry, but Dr. Ryley, the director, is at a meeting in Augusta until tomorrow." She sounded superficially pleasant, but her face told me that anyone asking about Emily Watts was about as welcome as Louis Farrakhan at a Klan dinner. "I told the chief, but you'd already left." Now her face matched her tone, with the addition of a look of malicious amusement at the trip I'd been forced to make unnecessarily.

"Let me guess," I said. "You can't let me talk to anyone without the director's permission, the director isn't here and you have no way of contacting him."

"Exactly."

"Happy to save you the trouble of saying it."

She bristled and gripped her pen tightly, as if in preparation for ramming it into my eye. From out of the security booth stepped a pudgy guy in a cheap, badly fitting uniform. He pulled on his hat as he walked toward me, but not quickly enough to hide the scars at the side of his head.

"Everything okay here, Glad?" he asked the woman behind the desk. Glad: some people were just like a big finger raised to the universe.

"Now I am scared," I said. "Big security man and no old lady to protect me."

He blushed a deep red and sucked in his stomach a little.

"I think you'd better leave. Like she said, there's nobody here who can help you."

I nodded and pointed to his belt. "I see you got a new gun. Maybe you should get a lock and chain for it. A passing child might try to steal it."

I left them in the reception area and walked back into the grounds. I felt a little petty for picking on Judd but I was tired and antsy and the mention of the name Caleb Kyle after all those years had thrown me. I stood on the grass and looked up at the stained, unlovely facade of the home. Emily Watts's room was at the western corner, top floor, according to Martel. The drapes were drawn and there were bird droppings on the window ledge. In the room beside it, a figure moved at the window and an elderly woman, her hair pulled back in a bun, watched me. I smiled at her but she didn't respond. When I drove away, I could see her in the rearview, still standing at the window, still watching.

I had planned to stay another day in Dark Hollow, since I hadn't yet spoken to Rand Jennings. The sight of his wife had stirred up feelings in me that had been submerged for a long time: anger, regret, the embers of some old desire. I remembered the humiliation of lying on the toilet floor as Jennings's kicks rained down on me, his fat friend snickering as he held the door closed. It surprised me, but part of me still wanted a confrontation with him after all that time.

On my way back to the motel I tried to call Angel using the cell phone but I seemed to be out of range. I called him instead from a gas station, where I was told that Dark Hollow was a virtual black spot for cell phone communications due to ongoing problems with trees and aerials. The newly installed telephone in the Scarborough house rang five times before he eventually picked up.

"Yeah?"

"It's Bird. What's happening?"

"Lots, none of it good. While you've been doing your Perry Mason thing up north, Billy Purdue was spotted in a convenience store down here. He got away before the cops could pick him up but he's still in the city, somewhere."

"He won't be for long, now that he's been seen. What about Tony Celli?"

"Nothing, but the cops found the Coupe De Ville in an old barn out by Westbrook. Louis picked it up on the police band. Looks like the freak show ditched his wheels for something less showy."

I was about to tell him what little I had learned when he interrupted.

"There's something else. You got a visitor here, arrived this morning,"

"Who is it?"

"Lee Cole."

I was surprised, given the deterioration of my friendship with her husband. Maybe she had hopes of rebuilding bridges between Walter and me, but that didn't seem a good enough reason to track me down in Maine.

"Did she say what she wanted?"

There was a hesitation in Angel's voice, and I immediately felt my stomach turn. "Kinda. Bird, her daughter Ellen is missing."

I drove back immediately, doing a steady eighty as soon as I hit I-95. I was almost on the outskirts of Portland when the cell phone rang. I picked it up, half expecting it to be Angel again. It wasn't.

"Parker?" I recognized the voice almost immediately.

"Billy? Where are you?"

Billy Purdue's voice was panicky and scared. "I'm in trouble, man. My wife, she trusted you, and now I'm trusting you too. I didn't kill them, Parker. I wouldn't do that. I couldn't kill her. I couldn't kill my little boy."

"I know, Billy, I know." As we spoke, I kept repeating his name in an effort to calm him and develop whatever tentative trust he might have toward me. I tried to put Ellen Cole out of my mind, at least for the present. I would deal with that as soon as I could.

"The cops are after me. They think I killed 'em. I loved 'em. I'd never have hurt 'em. I just wanted to keep 'em." His voice bubbled on the edge of hysteria.

"Okay, Billy," I said. "Look, tell me where you are and I'll come and get you. We'll take you somewhere safe and we can talk this thing through."

"There was an old guy at their place, Parker. I saw him watching it, that night the cops picked me up. I was trying to look out for them, but I couldn't." I wasn't even sure that he had heard my offer of help, but I let him talk as I drove past the Falmouth exit about three miles from the city.

"Did you recognize him, Billy?"

"No, I never seen him before, but I'd know him if I saw him again."

"Okay, Billy, that's good. Now tell me where you are and I'll come and get you."

"I'm at a phone box on Commercial, but I can't stay here. There's people, cars. I've been hiding out in the Portland Company complex at Fore Street, down by the locomotive museum. There's a vacant building just inside the main entrance. You know it?"

"Yeah, I know it. Go back inside. I'll be there as soon as I can."

I called Angel again and told him to meet me, with Louis, at the corner of India and Commercial. Lee Cole was to be left at Java Joe's. I didn't want her at the house in case Tony Celli, or anyone else, decided to pay a visit.

There was no one else around when I arrived at the corner of India and Commercial. I pulled into the parking lot of the old India Street Terminal at One India, the car nestling in the shadow of the old three-story building. As I stepped from the car, the first drops of rain began to fall, a heavy, skin-soaking volley that exploded dramatically on the hood of the car and left splashes the size of quarters on the windshield. I walked around the terminal, past a picnic table and a single-story office building, painted red, until I was on the harbor side, looking out over the dark waters. Thunder rumbled, and on Casco Bay, a ship was frozen in a flash of lightning. Ahead of me, on a restored stretch of line used to give tourists a taste of a narrow-gauge railway, stood a flatbed car with a storage tank on top, marking the start of the line. A row of locked cargo containers was ranged behind the car. To my right was the Casco Bay ferry terminal, the dinosaur body of a blue eighteen-ton crane standing above it on four spindly legs like a mutilated bug.

I was about to turn back to my car when, from behind me, I heard a noise on the gravel and a familiar voice said: "Bad weather for birds. You should be curled up in your coop." The voice was accompanied by the cocking of a hammer on a pistol.

I slowly raised my hands from my coat and turned to see Mifflin, Tony Celli's harelipped enforcer, smiling crookedly at me. He held a Ruger Speed Six in his hand, the rounded butt gripped hard in his stubby fist.

"It's like déjà vu all over again," I said. "I'll have to park someplace else in the future."

"I think your parking problem is about to be solved. Permanently. How's your head feel?" The smile was still fixed in place.

"Pretty good. Hope I didn't hurt your foot too badly."

"I get the soles made special to absorb impact. I didn't feel a thing." He was close to me, maybe only six or seven feet away. I didn't know where he had come from; maybe he had been waiting in the shadows behind One India all along, or had followed me to the meeting place, although I couldn't figure out how he might have known about it. Behind me, the rain made cracking noises as it hit the water.

Mifflin nodded in the direction of the lot. "See you got your Mustang fixed."

"Accidents will happen. That's why I have insurance."

"You should have saved your money, spent it on dames. You ain't gonna need a car no more, unless they have demolition derbies in hell."

He raised the gun and his finger tightened on the trigger. "Bet your insurance doesn't cover you for this."

"Bet it does," I said, as Louis appeared from behind the red office building, his dark hand gripping Mifflin's gun arm tightly as I moved quickly to my left. Louis's right hand pressed the barrel of a SIG into the soft jowl of the would-be assassin.

"Gently," said Louis. "Wouldn't want that thing to go off and scare somebody, make them loose off a shot into someone else's fat jaw."

Mifflin carefully removed his finger from within the guard and slowly eased the hammer down. Angel joined Louis and took the Ruger from the gunman's hand.

"Hi, gorgeous," he said, pointing it at Mifflin's head. "That's a big gun for a little guy."

Mifflin said nothing as Louis eased the SIG away from his mouth and slipped it into the side pocket of his dark overcoat, his hand still gripping the gunman's arm. Louis made a sudden, swift movement and there was a hard, sharp crack as he broke Mifflin's right arm at the elbow, then struck the smaller man's head twice against the side of the building. The gunman folded to the ground. Angel disappeared and returned a minute later driving the Mercury. He flipped the trunk and Louis dumped Mifflin's prone form inside. Then we followed the car as Angel drove to the end of the Island parking lot, close by a gap in the fencing that led to the edge of the dock. When we had stopped, Louis took Mifflin's body from the trunk, dragged him to the edge, and threw him into the sea. There was a loud splash as he hit the water, the noise quickly drowned by the steady sound of the rain.

Louis would have regarded me as weak, I think, if I had said it, but I regretted the death of Mifflin. Certainly, the fact that he had been about to kill me indicated that Tony Celli felt my limited usefulness was now at an end. If we had let him live, he would have come back and tried again, probably with more guns to back him up. But the finality of that soft splash made me weary.

"His car's parked a block away," said Angel. "We found this on the floor." In his hand was a mobile VHF three-channel receiver, maybe five inches wide and an inch and a half in width, designed to draw power from the car battery. If there was a receiver, then there had to be a transmitter.

"They bugged the house," I said. "Probably while I was in Celli's room. I should have known, when they didn't kill me."

Angel shrugged, and tossed the receiver into the sea. "If he was here, then his friends are already on their way to the complex," he said. To my left, Fore Street wound north, parallel to the harbor, and I could see the silhouettes of the Portland Company buildings in the distance.

"We'll follow the railway line, come in from the harbor side," I said. I drew my gun and clicked off the safety, but Louis tapped me on the shoulder as I did so and withdrew a Colt Government Model.380 from his right coat pocket. From his inside pocket, he produced and fitted a suppressor. "You use your Smith & Wesson and anything goes down, they can trace it back to you," he said. "Use this, and we can dump it later. Plus, it'll be a whole lot quieter." Not surprisingly, Louis knew his guns: semiautomatics chambered for subsonic ammunition are about the only pistols that function effectively with a suppressor. If the Hertz people knew the kind of luggage Louis was keeping in their car, they'd have suffered a collective seizure.

Louis handed his SIG to Angel, took a matching.380 from his left pocket and once again fitted a suppressor. His actions should have alerted me to what would happen later-not even Louis just "happened" to be carrying a pair of silenced weapons-but I was too concerned about Billy Purdue to give it much thought.

Louis and I walked down the line, Angel behind us. Rust-red railroad tracks lay in forgotten piles beside ties that were pitted and knotted, the wood almost black in places. Beyond the storage yards, where old wrecking balls lay side by side and concrete supports bled rust from their innards, wooden pilings moved in the tide like the remains of a primeval forest.

The Portland Company complex stood across from the marina, its entrance marked by the Sandy River Railroad car used to carry the tourists, its red guard's car and green carriages now standing silent. The complex had served the railroads once, when the Portland Company had built engines and steam locomotives, but it closed in the seventies and the buildings had now been redeveloped as a business park. Inside the yard, an old black steel tractor with a restored chimney stood at the entrance to the Narrow Gauge Railroad Museum. The building, like all those in the complex, was redbrick, and three stories at its highest point, with a machine tool company housed in a similar, though larger, structure behind it, the two connected by a closed walkway. To the left of the museum was a long building that housed some kind of yacht service, I seemed to remember, and a second, similar building used by a fiberglass company.

At the southern end of the yard was another, three-story building, the windows on the ground floor boarded up, the windows on the other levels obscured by wire screens, where Billy Purdue had said he was hiding. There was no doorway on the harbor side but the northern end had a wooden, shedlike structure that housed the main door. A roadway wound past the doorway and sloped upward to the visitor entrance to the complex on Fore Street. The whole place appeared deserted and the rain fell hard and unforgiving upon it. The drops sounded like stones beating on the roof of the museum, where a side door stood open. Silently, I indicated it and Louis, Angel and I made our way into the building.

Inside, beneath a vaulted ceiling, deserted railroad cars stood in rows: green Wicasset and Quebec cars, green and red Sandy River cars from Franklin County, a green-and-yellow Bridgton and Saco, and, to our right, an old Railbus with an REO Speedwagon chassis from the Sandy River line.

Beside the Railbus, a body lay curled, its long dark coat gathered around it like a shroud. I turned it over, steeling myself for the sight of Billy Purdue. It was not him. Instead, the contorted features of Berendt, Mifflin's square-headed sidekick, stared back at me, a dark, ragged exit wound in his forehead. I could smell singed hair. On the floor of the museum, blood and dust congealed.

Louis's shadow fell across me. "You think Billy Purdue did this?"

I swallowed, and the sound was huge in my ears. I shook my head and he nodded silently to himself.

We made our way left, passing between two Edaville cars on our way to the museum office. There was no one else in the building, but the steel door at the front entrance banged noisily against the frame as the wind blew and the rain continued to fall.

In the darkness beneath the walkway connecting the tool works and the museum building, a black Ford sedan was parked, its windows obscured by the falling rain. I recognized it from the crime scene outside Rita Ferris's apartment.

"It's the feds," I said. "They must have found Celli's guys."

"That, or they were listening in on you as well," muttered Louis.

"Great," said Angel. "Is there anybody who isn't here? Billy Purdue's so fucking popular, he should have his own holiday."

The rear door of the car opened and a figure in a dark raincoat stepped out, head down, closing the door softly behind him. He walked quickly in our direction, one hand deep in his pocket, the other holding a black umbrella above his head. A light from the tool works briefly illuminated him as he passed through its beam.

"And this would be…?" said Angel wearily.

"Eldritch, the Canadian cop. Stay here."

I stepped from the shadows and Eldritch stopped, a puzzled look on his face as he tried to place me.

"Parker?" he said at last. "You want to bring your friends out of the shadows too?"

From behind me, Louis and Angel appeared and stood beside me, Louis regarding Eldritch with relaxed interest.

"Well, you going to get out of this rain?" asked the Canadian.

"After you, officer," I replied. Something had caught my eye over by the Ford when Eldritch stepped from the car, the interior light casting a faint glow on the ground below. There was a small pool of red beneath the driver's door, which was not fully closed, and, as I watched, something dripped steadily from the crack.

Eldritch stepped by me, one hand still holding the umbrella, exposing a gold cuff link and a white shirtsleeve. There was a dark spot spreading on the cuff as he turned to watch my progress toward the car.

I glanced back at Louis but something else had caught his eye.

"You got something on your collar, officer," he said quietly, as Eldritch stood beneath the light.

Eldritch's shirt collar showed above the lapel of his coat. At its edge, and just above the knot of his tie, there were spots of black, like soot. But as Louis spoke, Eldritch lowered his umbrella, trying to block my view as he made his move, the gun visible to me only briefly as he removed his right hand from his pocket. I could see Louis already raising his own gun as Eldritch began to turn, the umbrella now tumbling in midair between them, Angel to one side looking on. But I fired first, the bullet tearing a hole in the umbrella and hitting Eldritch low on the thigh, the gunshot masked by the suppressor and the driving rain. I fired again, this time hitting him in the side. The gun fell from his hand and he tumbled against the wall of the museum, sliding down with his back against it until he sat on the ground, his teeth gritted in pain and his hand clutching at the red stain which was spreading across the front of his raincoat. Beside him, Louis picked up his gun by slipping a pen through the trigger guard and examined the weapon with professional detachment.

"Taurus," he said. "Brazilian. Looks like our friend might have vacationed in South America."

I walked to the car. There were two star-shaped bullet holes in the windshield surrounded by twin sunbursts of blood. I opened the driver's door with a gloved hand and stepped back as Agent Samson fell sideways onto the ground, a dark hole at the bridge of his ruined nose where the bullet had exited. Beside him, Agent Doyle's forehead rested against the dashboard, blood pooling at his feet. Both were still warm.

Carefully, I lifted Samson into the car, closed the door and walked back to where Angel and Louis stood over the bleeding man.

"Abel," said Louis. Despite his pain, the man on the ground regarded us with dark, hateful eyes, but didn't speak.

"He's not going anywhere," I said. "We put him in the trunk of the Ford, call the cops, let them take care of him after we're done."

But neither Angel nor Louis appeared to be listening to me. Instead, Angel shook his head and tut-tutted: "A man your age dyeing his hair," he said to Abel. "That's just vanity."

"And you know what they say about vanity," said Louis softly.

Abel looked up at him, his eyes widening.

"Vanity kills," concluded Louis. Then he shot him once, the Colt jumping in his hand. Abel's head bumped against the wall behind him, his eyes closed tightly, and then his chin slumped forward on his chest.

For the first time in my life, I touched Louis in anger. Reaching out, I pushed him hard on the chest. He took a step back, his expression unchanged.

"Why?" I shouted. "Why did you kill him? Jesus, Louis, do we have to kill everybody?"

"No," said Louis. "Just Abel and Stritch."

And then I understood why Louis and Angel had come here, and the realization was like a punch in the stomach.

"It's a contract," I said. "You took on the hit." I knew now why Leo Voss had been killed, why Abel and Stritch had chosen this time to recede into the shadows, and it was only partly to do with the opportunity offered by Billy Purdue and the money he had stolen. Abel and Stritch were running, and they were running from Louis.

He nodded once. Beside him, Angel looked at me with a kind of sorrow, but also determination. I knew whose side he was on.

"How much?" I asked.

"A dollar," said Louis simply. "I'd have taken fifty cents, but the man didn't have no change."

"A dollar?" It was strange, but I almost smiled despite myself. He had taken a dollar, yet their lives were worth even less than that. I looked back at Abel's body and thought of the two agents in the car and the real Eldritch, who had probably never made it as far as Maine.

"They're that bad, Bird," said Angel. "These guys are the fucking worst. Don't let them come between us."

I shook my head. "You should have told me, that's all. You should have trusted me."

Now Louis spoke. "You're right. It was my call. I called wrong."

He stood before me, waiting for me to respond, and I knew why he had kept it from me. After all, I was an ex-cop, with cop friends. Maybe Louis still had doubts. I had saved Angel's life while he was in prison and, in return, they had stood by me when Jennifer and Susan were killed, had put their own lives on the line in the hunt for their killer and the killers of others, and asked nothing in return. I had no reason to doubt them; they, on the other hand, a burglar and an assassin, could be forgiven for having concerns about me.

"I understand," I said at last.

Louis nodded his head once in response, but in that gesture and the look in his eyes he said all that he needed to say.

"Okay," I said. "Time to find Billy Purdue." And as we walked to the vacant building, the rain falling heavily now, I took a last look at Abel's body and shivered slightly. His huddled form, and the remains of Berendt in the railroad museum, were mute testament to the fact that the squat, grotesque figure of Stritch could not be far away.

There were two cars parked farther up on Fore Street, across from a new development of gray wood houses half-clad in red brick. It was too dark to see if anyone remained inside the vehicles. When we reached the main door to the unoccupied building, the lock had already been broken open and the door stood slightly ajar. Staying close to the wall, I peered around the corner to the front of the building. There, the windows on the top floor were boarded up, while a wooden walkway led from the grass border to a locked door on the second story. Because of the gradient of the slope, the ground floor was actually below the grass, its windows masked with more screens.

I came back to where Angel and Louis were waiting by the door, where we agreed that Angel should leave us and return in the Mercury, so that if we came out with Billy Purdue we could leave quickly.

Inside the door was a flight of stairs, dusty and littered with old newspaper. They led up to the second floor, to a kind of storage bay supported by steel columns. Behind the stairs was a series of empty offices and work areas, all quiet and unlit. The warehouse still smelled faintly of wood, although now the pervading odor was one of dampness and decay. Louis had a flashlight but didn't light it for fear of drawing attention to us.

From where we stood, I could see that mounds of rotted timber still lay in one corner near the stairs. Water dripped from the ceiling as the rain fell through the warehouse roof and gradually leaked through to the floors below. We moved behind the stairway and into the first of the series of workshops, empty apart from some wooden benches and a broken plastic chair. Through the sound of the pouring rain and dripping water I could hear a noise from the other side of the wall as we neared a doorway. I motioned Louis to the left and took up a position at the right wall until I could partially see into the room beyond. Then, slowly, I inched my way forward, peering in quickly and then carefully progressing when nobody tried to blow my head off.

I was in one of a pair of what were once adjoining offices. There was a faint smell of smoke from the room, which came from a pile of smoldering wood and trash in the far corner. In the corner opposite, something moved.

I spun quickly and tightened my finger on the trigger.

"Don't shoot," said a raw, cracked voice, and a figure gradually emerged from where it had been crouching in the darkness. It wore plastic bags over its feet, its legs were encased in dirt-encrusted denims and a coat with no elbows was tied around its waist with a length of string. Its hair was long and unkempt, its beard gray but streaked with nicotine yellow. "Please, don't shoot. I didn't mean no harm by starting the fire."

"Move to your right. Quickly." Through a crack in one of the wooden panels on the windows, a weak glow shone from a streetlight. The old man moved until he was caught in its beam. His eyes were small and dull. Even from twelve feet away I could smell the booze, and other things too.

I held him in my sights for a moment longer, then gestured to my right with the gun as Louis appeared in the doorway. "Get out of here," I said. "It's not safe."

"Can I collect my stuff?" He pointed at a heap of meager possessions stacked in a shopping cart.

"Take what you can carry, then go." The old guy nodded his thanks and began to pick up items from the cart: a pair of boots, some soda cans, a pile of copper wire. Some he put back again, others he seemed to want to think about. As he considered a single Reebok sneaker, a deep voice behind me said: "Old man, you got five seconds to get your shit out of here, else the coroner be sorting it for you." Louis's comment seemed to focus the old guy's mind; seconds later he was running past us with a tangled collection of wire, boots and cans in his arms.

"You won't steal anything, will you?" he asked Louis as he prepared to go.

"No," replied Louis. "You done took all the good stuff."

The old guy nodded happily and started to scurry out, Louis shaking his head as he went. The old man paused at the doorway. "Them other fellas went upstairs," he said simply, then left.

We moved quickly but carefully through that level until we reached a pair of parallel staircases at the far end of the building, one at each corner. I heard footsteps above us, moving carefully across the floor. Between the stairs was a set of twin doors to the yard outside. A length of broken chain lay on the ground and a half brick held one of the doors open. Louis took the right-hand stairway, I took the left. As I climbed, I kept to the sides of the stairs to minimize the risk of stepping on a weak or rotted step. I needn't have bothered. The rain was falling with a renewed ferocity and the old building echoed and hummed with its sound.

We met at a kind of mezzanine, where a single wide set of steps led up to the second story. Louis moved ahead, while I stayed a little farther behind. I watched as he pushed open a swinging door, a dirty, wire-mesh window at head level, and began his search of the floor. I had decided to move on to the third story when there was the sound of movement from below. I looked down over the stair rail and a man stepped into my line of vision, striking a match to light a cigarette. In the flash of illumination I recognized him as one of Tony Celli's crew from the hotel room, left to guard the door from outside, but instead taking shelter from the rain. Above me, a floorboard creaked gently, then another: at least one of Celli's men had progressed to the top floor.

As I watched Tony Clean's man smoke his cigarette, something caught my attention to my left. The windows on the mezzanine, which would once have looked out onto the lot below, were now boarded up and no light shone through them. The only illumination came from a jagged hole in the wall, ringed with damp where the plaster surrounding an old air-conditioning unit had given way and fallen in a heap to the floor below, taking the unit with it. The hole created a kind of murky pool of light between two masses of dark at either side. In one of those unlit areas, I sensed a presence. A pale figure flickered, like a piece of paper gently tumbling. I moved forward, my heart pounding and the gun heavy in my hand.

From out of the blackness, a face appeared. Its eyes were dark, with no whites showing, and a dark necklace seemed to hang around its neck. Slowly, its mouth became visible, the zigzagging black thread sealing it shut. Beneath it, the mark left by the rope was deeply indented on her skin. She watched me for a moment, then seemed to turn in on herself, and there was only emptiness where she had been. I felt a cold sweat on my back and a feeling of nausea swept over me. I gave one more look at the patch of darkness, then turned away just as a sudden soft cry of pain came from below me.

I paused on the first step, and waited. Around me the rain fell and water dripped. There was the sound of a shoe softly scuffing on the wood below and then a man drifted into view on the right-hand stairway, wearing a tan raincoat from which a bald head emerged like a toadstool. Stritch raised his strange, melted-wax features and his strange, colorless eyes regarded me for a moment. Then his too-wide mouth broke into a smile from which all humor was absent and he withdrew back beneath the mezzanine. I wondered if he knew yet that Abel was dead, or how much of a threat he considered me.

The answer came within seconds as the rounds tore through the soft damp wood of the stair rail, splinters spearing the gloom. I sprang up the remaining steps, the bullets following me as Stritch tried to gauge my position from the sounds I made. I felt something tug at the tail of my coat as I reached the top of the steps and knew that he had come close, very close, with at least one of his shots.

I got to the second floor and headed the same way Louis had gone. There was in a kind of lobby inside the door, with an old raised receiving desk to my right behind which lay another storage bay, part of a succession of small bays that led to the back of the building, each connected by a single doorway so that, if the light had permitted, I could have seen straight through to the far wall of the warehouse. Even from where I was standing, I could see that the bays still contained battered desks and broken chairs, rolls of rotting matting and boxes of discarded paperwork. Two corridors stretched away on either side, one directly in front of me and one to the right. I guessed that Louis was already making his way down the right-hand corridor so I moved quickly down the other, casting anxious glances over my shoulder to see if Stritch had appeared yet.

A burst of gunfire came from ahead of me and to my right, answered by two softer shots fired in close succession. I heard voices shouting and running footsteps, the noises echoing around the old building. At a doorway to my right, a figure in a black leather jacket lay slumped on the floor, blood pooling around its head. Louis was already making his mark but he didn't know that Stritch was somewhere behind us, and it was important that he was told. I moved back into the corridor in time to see a flash of tan move behind the receiving desk. I stepped sideways, moving past the prone form of Tony Celli's man until I could see beyond the top of the desk, but there was no sign of Stritch. I stepped quickly to the doorway of the next bay and peered around the door frame in time to receive the muzzle of a silenced pistol in my right temple.

"Shit, Bird, I almost blew your head off," said Louis. In the semidarkness he was almost invisible in his dark clothes, with only his teeth and the whites of his eyes showing.

"Stritch is here," I said.

"I know. Caught a glimpse of him, then got distracted by you."

Our discussion was interrupted by the sound of more firing ahead of us, the same gun shooting each time, loosing off three shots with no return of fire. There was more shouting and then a burst of automatic fire, followed by footsteps running up a flight of stairs. Louis and I exchanged a nod and began to make our way toward the back of the building, one of us at each side of every door frame to give us a clear view of the room beyond and the section of corridor at either side. We kept moving until we reached an open service elevator, in which another of Tony Celli's men lay dead. Alongside the elevator, a single flight of stairs wound up to the top level, where Stritch had presumably gone ahead of us. We were on the second step when I heard a sound behind me that was chillingly familiar: the twin clicks of a cartridge being jacked into a pump-action shotgun. Louis and I turned slowly, our guns held up and away to our sides, to find Billy Purdue standing before us. His face was streaked with dirt, his clothes soaked through, and on his back was a black knapsack.

"Put your guns down," he said. Somehow, he had found a way to hide from his pursuers, and from us, among the old furniture and office waste. We did as we were told, casting cautious looks both at Billy's gun and the staircase above us.

"You brought them here," he said, his voice shaking with anger. "You sold me out." There were tears running down his cheeks.

"No, Billy," I said. "We came to get you to safety. You're in a lot of trouble here. Put the gun down and we'll try to get you out of it."

"No. Fuck you. There's nobody here for me now." With that, he fired two bursts from the shotgun, spraying the wood and plaster behind us and forcing us to dive to the ground. When we looked up again, splinters and grit in our hair, Billy was nowhere to be seen but I could hear his running footfalls as he headed back in the direction in which we had come. Louis immediately sprang to his feet and moved after him.

More shots came from the floor above as I rose, automatic fire followed by a single shot. I took the steps slowly, my neck craned to one side, my hands slick with sweat. At the top of the stairs, beside the elevator, another of Celli's men lay huddled in a corner. Blood flowed from the bullet wound in his neck. There was something else about him too, something I almost did not see.

His trousers were opened, the zipper pulled down, and his genitals partially exposed.

Before me was a doorway, and beyond the doorway was total darkness. In that darkness, I knew that Stritch waited. I could smell his cheap, sickly cologne and the dark, earthy odor he used it to conceal. I could sense his watchfulness, the tendrils he sent out to test the air around him for prey. And I could feel his desire, the sexual charge he took from hurting and bringing lives to an end, the aberrant sexuality that had led him to touch and expose the young man in the corner as he lay dying.

And I knew with absolute certainty that if I set foot beyond that doorway Stritch would take me and kill me, and that he would touch me as I died. I felt the shadows move around me, and a child laughed in the dim reaches below. It seemed to summon me back from the brink, or perhaps it was my own fear making me believe that was the case. I chose to leave Stritch in the darkness and return to the light.

Louis approached as I made my way backward down the stairs. His pants were torn at the knee, and he was limping slightly. "I slipped," he said, spitting the words from his mouth. "He got away. What about Stritch?"

I indicated the floor above. "Maybe Tony Celli will do you a favor."

"You think?" said Louis, in a tone that said he didn't believe it was likely. He looked at me more closely. "You okay, Bird?"

I moved past him so that he could not see my face. I was ashamed at my weakness, but I knew what I had felt, and what I had seen in the blood red eyes of a dead woman.

"My concern is Billy Purdue," I said. "When Stritch finds out that his buddy is dead, he won't go anywhere until he's settled the score. You'll get another chance."

"I'd prefer to take this one," he replied.

"It's pitch black up there. You set foot on that top floor, and he'll kill you."

Louis remained standing, watching me, but he did not speak. In the distance, I heard the wail of approaching sirens. I saw Louis hesitate, balancing the risk of the police and the shadows on the floor above with the opportunity to try to take out Stritch. Then slowly, with just one glance back to the stairs leading up to the darkness of the third floor, Louis followed me.

We reached the main bay where we had met the old man. "We go out the front, we may run into Tony Celli's wheelmen, or the cops," I said. "And if Billy went out that way, then he's already dead."

Louis nodded in agreement and we headed down to the door at the back of the warehouse, where the man Stritch had killed lay half in, half out of the doorway, one arm across his eyes as if he had glimpsed the heart of the sun. Across the lot, I could see the Mercury. It growled into life as Angel shot across the lot and turned the car, then stopped to allow us to get in.

"Any sign of Billy?"

"No, least none that I saw. You two okay?"

"Fine," I said, although I was still shaken by the fear I had felt on the top floor. "Stritch was in there. Came from the back of the building."

"Seems like everybody knows your business except you," remarked Angel as we tore out of the lot and followed the tracks back in the direction of India Street. Just before they ended, he swung the wheel to the right and sped through the gap in the wire fence to bring us into the parking lot at One India. He killed the lights as sirens wailed and two black and white police cars raced up Fore Street. Then we waited to see if Billy Purdue might show.

While we sat in silence, I tried to piece together what had happened. The feds had either been monitoring my phone or had managed to find some trace of Tony Celli's crew. When they moved, Abel contacted Stritch and told him where to go, with the intention of joining him after taking care of the feds. With three different groups of men after him in one enclosed space, Billy Purdue had still managed to get away.

And I thought too of the figure I had glimpsed in the shadows. Rita Ferris was dead and, soon, the snow would be falling on her grave. Yet something of her still remained, her presence like a ripple on still water.

No one came toward us on foot from the direction of the complex. If any of Tony Celli's men had survived, I figured that they would head north instead of coming straight back into town and risk meeting the cops.

"You think he's still in there?" I asked Louis.

"Who? Stritch? If he is, it's because he's dead, and I don't believe Tony Celli has anyone that good on his side, assuming anyone was left alive in there," replied Louis. Again, I caught that thoughtful look in his eyes as he examined my face in the rearview mirror.

"I tell you this," he said. "He knows now that Abel is dead, and he's gonna be real pissed."

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Louis and Angel dropped me at my Mustang, and then followed me to Java Joe's. I felt drained, and sick inside. I thought of the look in Abel's eyes before he died, and the sight of the young gunman violated at the moment of his death, and an old man loaded with sneakers and copper wiring running into the cold, wet night.

At the coffee shop, Louis and Angel decided to stay outside in the Mercury drinking take-out mochas. Lee Cole was seated by the window, her jeans tucked into shin-high fur-lined boots and a white wool top buttoned to the neck. As she stood to greet me, the light caught the streaks of silver in her hair. She kissed me softly on the cheek and held me tightly. Her body started to shake and I could hear her sobbing into my shoulder. I pushed her gently away, my hands on her shoulders, and watched as she shook her head in embarrassment and searched through her pockets for a tissue. She was still beautiful. Walter was a lucky man.

"She's gone, Bird," she said, as she sat. "We can't find her. Help me."

"But she was with me only a few days ago," I said. "She stopped off here for a few hours with her boyfriend."

She nodded. "I know. She called us from Portland, told us she was heading on with Ricky. Then she rang us one more time on the way to some place farther north and that was the last we heard from her. She was under strict instructions to call us each day, just so we'd know she was okay. But when we didn't hear…"

"Have you been in touch with the police?"

"Walter has. They think she may have run off with Ricky. Walter argued with her about him last month, about how she should be concentrating on her study and not on chasing boys. You know how Walter can be, and retirement hasn't made him any more tolerant."

I nodded. I knew how he could be. "When you get back, call Special Agent Ross in the FBI's Manhattan office. Mention my name. He'll make sure that Ellen's name is in the NCIC database." The National Crime Information Center kept records of all missing persons, adults and juveniles, reported to the police. "If it isn't, it means that the police aren't doing what they should be doing, and Ross may be able to help you with that as well."

She brightened up a little. "I'll ask Walter to do it."

"Does he know you're here?"

"No. When I asked him to contact you, he refused. He's already been up there, trying to put pressure on the local police. They told him that the best thing to do would be to wait, but that's not Walter. He drove around, asking in the other towns, but there was no sign. He got back yesterday, but I don't think he's going to stay. I told him I had to get out of the house for a while, and that my sister would stay by the phone. I had the flight already booked. I'd tried calling you on the cell phone, but I could never seem to get through. So I came up here, and the police in Scarborough told me where you lived. I don't know…" She trailed off, then began again. "I don't know all that happened between you and Walter. I know some of it and I can guess at more, but it has nothing to do with my daughter. I left him a note on the refrigerator. He'll have found it by now." She stared out the window, as if visualizing the discovery of the note and Walter's response to its contents.

"Is there any chance that the police might be right, that she has run away?" I asked. "She never seemed like that kind of kid and she didn't seem troubled at all when I met her, but people get funny sometimes when love enters the equation."

She smiled for the first time. "I remember what that feels like. I may be older than you, but I'm not dead yet." The smile disappeared as her words set off a chain reaction in her head, and I knew she was trying not to picture what might have happened to Ellen. "She didn't run away. I know her and she would never do that to us, no matter how badly we had fought with her."

"What about the kid-Ricky? I get the impression that their eyes met from opposite sides of the track."

Lee didn't seem to know much about Ricky beyond the fact that his mother had left the family when he was three and his father had raised him and his three sisters by holding down two dead-end jobs. He was a scholarship student-a little rough and ready, she admitted, but she didn't believe that there was any malice in him or that he would have been party to some elopement.

"Will you look for her, Bird? I keep thinking that she's in trouble somewhere. Maybe they went hiking and something went wrong, or somebody…" She stopped abruptly and reached out to take my hand. "Will you find her for me?" she repeated.

I thought of Billy Purdue and of the men hunting him, of Rita and Donald, of a hand emerging from a mass of wet, rotting leaves. I felt a duty to the dead, to the troubled young woman who had wanted to create a better life for herself and her child, but she was gone and Billy Purdue was drifting toward some kind of reckoning from which I couldn't save him. Maybe my duty now was to the living, to Ellen, who had looked after my little girl for the brief span of her life.

"I'll look for her," I said. "You want to tell me where she was going when she made the call?"

As she spoke, the world seemed to shift on its axis, throwing strange shadows across familiar scenes, turning everything into an off-kilter version of its former self. And I cursed Billy Purdue because, somehow, in some way that I couldn't yet comprehend, he was responsible for what had happened. In Lee's words, once-distant worlds eclipsed one another and indistinct shapes, like plates moving beneath the earth, came together to form a new, dark continent.

"She said she was heading for a place called Dark Hollow."

I brought her to the Portland Jetport in time to catch her flight to New York, then drove back to the house. Angel and Louis were in the front room, watching a sleazy talk show marathon on cable.

"It's 'I Can't Marry You, You're Not a Virgin,'" said Angel. "At least they're not claiming to be virgins, else it'd be 'I Can't Marry You, You're a Liar.'"

"Or 'I Can't Marry You, You're Ugly,'" offered Louis, sipping a bottle of Katahdin ale, his feet stretched out before him on a chair. "Man, how they get the freaks for this show? They trawl the crowds at truck pulls?" He hit the remote, muting the sound on the TV.

"How's Lee doing?" asked Angel, suddenly serious.

"She's holding together, but only just."

"So what's the deal?"

"I've got to head north again, and I think I'm going to need you two to come with me. Ellen Cole was last heard from on the way to Dark Hollow, the same place Billy Purdue grew up, for a time, and the place I think he's heading back to now."

Louis shrugged. "Then that's where we going,"

I sat down in an easy chair beside him. "There may be a problem."

"Jeez, Bird," said Angel, "we're not exactly starved for problems as it is."

"This problem have a name?" asked Louis.

"Rand Jennings."

"And he would be?"

"Chief of police in Dark Hollow."

"And he doesn't like you because?" said Angel, taking up the baton from Louis.

"I had an affair with his wife."

"You the man," said Louis. "You could fall over and make hitting the ground look complicated."

"It was a long time ago."

"Long enough for Rand Jennings to forgive and forget?" asked Angel.

"Probably not."

"Maybe you could write him a note," he suggested. "Or send him flowers."

"You're not being helpful."

"I didn't sleep with his wife. In the helpful stakes, that puts me a full length clear of you."

"You see him last time you were up there?" asked Louis.

"No."

"You see the woman?"

"Yes."

Angel laughed. "You're some piece of work, Bird. Any chance you might keep the mouse in its hole while we're up there, or you planning to renew old acquaintances?"

"We met by accident. It wasn't intentional."

"Uh-huh. Tell that to Rand Jennings. 'Hi Rand, it was an accident. I tripped and fell into your wife.'" I could still hear him laughing as he headed for his bedroom.

Louis finished his beer, then lifted his feet from the chair and prepared to follow Angel. "We screwed up tonight," he said.

"Things got screwed up. We did what we could."

"Tony Celli ain't gonna give up on this thing. Stritch neither."

"I know."

"You want to tell me what happened on the top floor?"

"I felt him waiting, Louis. I felt him waiting and I knew for sure that if I went in after him, I'd die. Despite evidence to the contrary, I don't have a death wish. I wasn't going to die at his hands, not there, not anywhere."

Louis remained at the door, considering what I had told him. "If you felt it, then that's the way it was," he said at last. "Sometimes, that's all the difference there is between living and dying. But if I see him again, I'm taking him down."

"Not if I see him first." I meant it, regardless of all that had taken place and the fear that I had felt.

His mouth twitched in one of his trademark semismiles.

"Bet you a dollar you don't."

"Fifty cents," I replied. "You've already earned half your fee."

"I guess I have," he said. "I guess I have."

Louis and Angel left early the next morning, Louis for the airport and Angel to scout around Billy Purdue's trailer to see if he could find anything that the cops might have missed. I was about to lock up the house when Ellis Howard's car bumped into my drive and then Ellis himself stepped heavily from the car. He took a look at my bag and gestured at it with a thumb.

"Going somewhere?"

"Yep."

"You mind telling me where?"

"Yep."

He slapped his hand gently on the hood of my Mustang, as if to transfer his frustration into the metal of the car. "Where were you yesterday evening?"

"On my way back from Greenville."

"What time'd you get back into town?"

"About seven. Should I call a lawyer?"

"You come straight home?"

"No, I parked up and met someone in Java Joe's. Like I said: should I call a lawyer?"

"Not unless you want to confess to something. I was going to tell you what happened out at the Portland Company complex last night, but maybe you already know, seeing as how your Mustang was down by the harbor last night."

So that was it. Ellis was fishing. He had nothing, and I wasn't about to break down and beg for mercy.

"I told you: I was meeting someone."

"This person still in town?"

"No."

"And you don't know anything about what happened at the complex last night?"

"I try to avoid the news. It affects my karma."

"If I thought it would help, your karma would be kicking its heels in a cell. We found four bodies in that complex, all of them associates of Tony Celli, plus two dead feds and a mystery caller."

"Mystery caller?" I asked, but I was thinking of something else. By my count, there should have been five bodies in the complex. One of Tony's men had survived and escaped, which meant there was a good chance that Tony Celli knew Louis and I had been in the building.

Ellis looked closely at me, trying to assess how much I knew. As he spoke, he waited for a reaction. He was disappointed.

"We found the Toronto cop, Eldritch, dead. Three bullets, two different guns. The one to the head was an execution shot."

"I'm waiting for the but."

"The but is that this guy wasn't Eldritch. His ID says he was, his prints and his face say he wasn't. Now I've got the Toronto PD howling at me to find their missing man, I've got a bunch of feds who are very interested in the John Doe who killed two of their agents, and I have four members of Boston's finest crew using up morgue space that the morgue can't afford to give them. The ME is considering relocating here permanently, seeing as how we're such good customers and all. Plus Tony Celli hasn't been seen since his night at the Regency."

"He stiff on the bill?"

"Don't, Bird. I'm not in the mood. Don't forget that Willeford is still missing and, until you came along, he knew as much about Billy Purdue as anyone."

I let it pass without comment. I didn't want to think of what I might have brought down on Willeford. Instead, I said: "Bangor turn up anything on Cheryl Lansing?"

"No, and we're no further on the killing of Rita Ferris and her son. Which brings me to my second reason for calling. You want to tell me again what you were doing in Bangor? And then Greenville?"

"Like I told Bangor, Billy Purdue hired someone to trace his parents. I thought that maybe he might try to follow that trail now that he's in trouble."

"And is he following that trail?"

"Someone is."

Ellis moved toward me, his bulk menacing, his eyes more so. "You tell me where you're going, Bird, or I swear to God I'll arrest you here and now and let ballistics take a look at that gun of yours."

I knew that Ellis wasn't kidding. Even though the silenced guns now lay at the bottom of Casco Bay beside Mifflin, I couldn't afford to delay the search for Ellen Cole. "I'm heading north to a place called Dark Hollow. The daughter of a friend of mine has gone missing. I'm going to try to find her. Her mother was the person I met at Java Joe's last night."

Some of the anger went out of his face. "Is it a coincidence that Dark Hollow is Billy Purdue's country?"

"I don't believe in coincidences."

He patted the hood one more time, and seemed to reach a decision. "Neither do I. You stay in touch now, Bird, y'hear?"

He turned and walked back to his car.

"Is that it?" I said. I was surprised to see him let it go so easily.

"No, I guess it isn't, but I don't see what more I can do." He stood at the open door of the car, and watched me. "Frankly, Bird, I'm balancing the benefits of hauling you in and grilling you, assuming you'd tell us anything, against the benefits of having you wandering around and looking under rocks. So far, the scales are tipping in favor of the second option, but only just. You remember that."

I waited a heartbeat.

"Does this mean you've decided against recruiting me, Ellis?"

He didn't reply. Instead, he shook his head and drove away, leaving me to think about Tony Celli and Stritch and an old man in a harbor bar, drinking beers and waiting for the new world to sweep him away.

I had told Ellis some of the truth, but not all. I was going to Dark Hollow, and would be there by nightfall, but first Louis and I would pay a visit to Boston. There was a slight possibility that Tony Celli might have taken Ellen Cole, perhaps in the hope of using her as leverage if I found Billy Purdue before he did. Even if that was not the case, there were some things to be clarified before we went up against Celli again. Unlike the members of his crew, Tony was a made guy. It was important that everybody understood the potential repercussions if we were forced to confront him.

Before I left to meet Louis at the airport, I stopped off at the Kraft Mini-Storage at Gorham. There, in three adjoining units, was what I had retained of my grandfather's possessions: some furniture; a small library of books; some silver plates; a brass screen for a fireplace; and a series of boxes filled with old paperwork and files. It took me fifteen minutes to locate what I was looking for and take it back to the car: a manila expanding file, held closed by a piece of red ribbon. On the index tab, written in my grandfather's ornate script, were the words Caleb Kyle.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Al Z operated out of an office above a comic book store on Newbury Street. It was an odd location, but it suited him to be in a place where tourists browsed among chichi clothes stores, sipped exotic teas or browsed in galleries. It was busy, there were too many people around for anyone to cause trouble, and he could send out for flavored coffees or scented candles anytime he wanted.

Louis and I sat outside a Ben & Jerry's ice cream parlor across from Al Z's brownstone office, eating chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and drinking large coffees. We were the only people sitting outside, mainly because it was so cold that my ice cream hadn't even begun to melt yet.

"You think he's noticed us?" I asked, as my fingers gave up their efforts to hold the spoon without shaking.

Louis sipped his coffee thoughtfully. "Tall, handsome black male and his white boy sittin' outside eatin' ice cream in the fuckin' winter? I think someone must have noticed us by now."

"I'm not sure I like being called 'boy,'" I mused.

"Get in line, whitey. We got a three-hundred-year start on that particular grievance."

At a window above the comic book store, a shadow moved.

"Let's go," said Louis. "It wasn't for the damn cold, brothers be running the world by now."

At the top of a flight of steps, next to the window of the store, there was a buzzer beside a wooden, windowless door. I pressed the buzzer and a voice answered simply: "Yes?"

"I'm looking for Al Z," I said.

"No Al Z here," replied the voice, all in a fast flow of heavily accented English so that it came out as "Noalseeher." It was followed by a click and the intercom went silent.

Louis hit the buzzer again.

"Yes," said the same voice.

"Man, just open the damn door, okay?"

The intercom clicked off, then buzzed, and we passed through, the reinforced door springing shut behind us. We walked up four flights of stairs to where a plain, unvarnished door stood open. A figure leaned against the window beyond, small and bulky, its hand resting midway between its neck and its belt, ready to move for the gun if necessary. The only ornamentation on the wall was a cheap-looking black and white clock, which softly ticked away the seconds. I figured the surveillance camera was probably hidden behind it. When we entered the room and saw the television screen on Al Z's desk showing only an empty stairwell, I realized I was right.

There were four men in the room. One was the short bulky guy, his skin yellow as a beeswax candle, who had watched us from the doorway. An older man, his flesh heavy at the jowls like a basset hound's, sat on a worn leather sofa to the left of the doorway, his legs crossed, a white shirt and red silk tie beneath his black suit. His eyes were hidden by small, round-framed sunglasses. Against the wall, a young buck leaned with his thumbs hooked into the empty belt loops of his pants, holding his silver-gray jacket away from his sides to reveal the butt of a H &K semiautomatic at his waist. His gray suit pants were baggy, narrowing to pipe-cleaner thinness where they met his silver-tooled cowboy boots. The eighties revival was obviously still in full flow where he came from.

Louis was looking straight ahead as if the room was empty apart from the fourth man who sat behind a teak desk inlaid with green leather, the desktop clean apart from a black telephone, a pen and notebook and the TV screen, which kept up its unceasing vigil on the stairs.

Al Z looked like a well-groomed undertaker on vacation. His thin silver hair was swept back from the broad expanse of his forehead and slicked tightly to his skull. His face was craggy and wrinkled, the eyes dark like opals, the lips thin and dry, the nostrils on his long nose slim and strangely elongated, as if he had been bred for his powers of smell. He wore a three-piece suit of autumn hues, the fabric a mix of reds and oranges and yellows, finely interwoven. His white shirt was open at the neck, the collar narrow pinpoint, and there was no tie. In his right hand he held a cigarette; his left lay flat on the desk, the nails short and clean, but not manicured. Al Z acted as the buffer between the upper reaches of the organization and the lower. He solved problems, when they arose. It was his gift to be a problem solver, but there was no point in a manicure if your hands were always going to be dirty.

There were no chairs in front of his desk, and the man in the dark suit remained spread across the sofa, so we stayed standing. Al Z nodded at Louis, then looked long and appraisingly at me.

"Well, well, the famous Charlie Parker," he said at last. "If I knew you were coming, I'd have worn a tie."

"Everybody knows you, how you gonna make any money as a private dick?" muttered Louis. "Hiring you for undercover work be like hiring Jay Leno."

Al Z waited for him to finish before turning his attention from me to Louis. "If I knew you were bringing equally distinguished company, Mr. Parker, I'd have made everybody else wear a tie too."

"Long time no see," said Louis.

Al Z nodded. "I got bad lungs." He waved the cigarette gently as he spoke. "The New York air don't agree with me. I prefer it up here."

But there was more to it than that: the mob was no longer what it once had been. The world of The Godfather was history before the film ever hit the screen, the image of the Italians already sullied by their involvement in the heroin epidemic of the seventies, and since then walking disaster areas like John Gotti Jr. had debased it even further. RICO-the racketeer-influenced and corrupt organization laws-had put an end to the construction shakedowns, the garbage collection monopolies, and the mob control of the Fulton Street Fish Market in New York. The heroin-smuggling business that had operated out of pizza parlors was gone, busted by the FBI in 1987. The old bosses were dead, or in jail.

Meanwhile, the Asians had spread from Chinatown, crossing the divide of Canal Street into Little Italy, and the blacks and the Latinos now controlled operations in Harlem. Al Z had smelled death in the air and had receded even further into the background, to the north, watching events in New York while dealing with the problems of the troubled New England operation. Now he sat in a bare office above a comic book store in Boston, and tried to maintain some element of stability in what little remained. That was why Tony Clean was so dangerous: he believed the old myths and still saw the potential for personal glory in the tattered remnants of the organization. His actions threatened to bring down heat on his associates at a time when the organization was in a weakened position. His continued existence endangered the survival of everyone around him.

To our left, the young gun eased himself from the wall. "They're carrying, Al," he said. "You want me to lighten their load?"

From the corner of my eye, I saw Louis's eyebrow raise itself about a quarter of an inch. Al Z caught the gesture, and smiled gently.

"I wish you luck," he said. "I don't think either of our guests are the kind to give up their toys so easily."

The young gun's glow of confidence flickered, as if he was unsure whether or not he was being tested. "They don't look so tough," he said.

"Look harder," said Al Z.

The gunslinger looked but his powers of perception left a lot to be desired. He glanced once again at Al Z, then made a move toward Louis.

"I wouldn't, if I were you," said Louis softly.

"You ain't me," said the younger man, but there was a hint of wariness in his voice.

"That's true," said Louis. "I was you, I wouldn't be dressed like no crack pimp."

A bright light flashed in the young man's eyes. "You talk to me like that, you fuckin' nig…" The word died in a kind of gasp in his throat as Louis's body twisted, his left hand closing tightly on the man's neck and propelling him backward, his right quickly slipping the gun from the Italian's belt holster and tossing it to the floor. The young man gurgled once as he hit the wall, spittle flying from his lips as the air was forced from his body. Then slowly, his feet began to lift from the floor; first his heels, then his toes, until the only thing holding him upright was Louis's unyielding left hand. His face turned pink, then deep red. Louis did not release his grip until a hint of blue began creeping into his lips and ears, then the fingers of his hand opened suddenly and the gunman sank to the ground, his hands fumbling at the collar of his shirt as he struggled to draw painful, choking breaths into his parched lungs.

During the whole incident, nobody else in the room had moved, because Al Z hadn't given any indication that they should. He looked at his struggling soldier the way he might have looked at a one-clawed crab dying on a beach, then returned his attention to Louis.

"You'll have to excuse him," he said. "Some of these boys, they learn their manners and their speech patterns in the gutter." He turned his attention to the bulky man at the door, waving his cigarette at the figure on the floor, who now lay with his back against the wall, his eyes dazed and weak. "Take him to the bathroom, get him a glass of water. Then try to explain to him where he went wrong."

The bulky guy helped the younger man to his feet, and accompanied him outside. The big man on the sofa didn't move. Al Z got to his feet and walked over to the window where he stood for a moment, watching the street below, before turning and resting against the windowsill. The three of us were now on the same level, and I recognized the gesture of good manners after what had taken place.

"Now, what can I do for you gentlemen?" he asked.

"A girl came to visit me a few days ago," I began.

"Lucky you. The last time a girl came to visit me, it cost me five hundred dollars."

He smiled at his joke.

"This girl is the daughter of a friend of mine, an ex-cop."

Al Z shrugged. "Forgive me, but I don't understand how this concerns me."

"I had an encounter with Tony Clean after the girl's visit. It kind of hurt, but I don't think Tony got much more satisfaction out of it than I did."

Al Z took a long drag on his cigarette, then exhaled the smoke in a noisy sigh through his nose. "Go on," he said, wearily.

"I want to know if Tony took the girl, as leverage maybe. If he has her, he should hand her back. He doesn't need cop trouble. Not on top of everything else," I added.

Al Z rubbed the corners of his eyes and nodded without speaking. He looked to the fat man on the sofa. The fat man's head moved slightly, the eyes impossible to see behind his shades.

"Let me get this straight," said Al Z at last. "You want me to ask Tony Clean if he has kidnapped an ex-cop's daughter and, if he has, you want me to tell him to hand her back?"

"If you don't," said Louis quietly, "we have to make him do it ourselves."

"You know where he is?" replied Al Z. I was aware of the air in the room quickly becoming charged.

"No," I said. "If we knew that, maybe we wouldn't be here. We figured you might." But something in the way Al Z had asked that last question told me that he didn't know, that Tony Clean was operating in some place beyond Al Z's control, and I guessed that Al Z was weighing up his position even before we arrived. That was the purpose of the fat man on the sofa. That was why he had not been asked to leave, because he wasn't the kind of man anyone asked to leave a room. He was the kind who did the asking. Things were coming apart for Tony Clean, a fact that Al Z seemed to confirm with his next words.

"Under the circumstances, it would be unwise for you to involve yourselves in this matter," he said softly.

"Under what circumstances?" I replied.

He puffed out some smoke. "Private business matters, the kind you should leave private. If you don't back off, we might have to push you."

"We might push back."

"You can't push back if you're dead."

I shrugged. "Getting us there might be the hard part." It was handbags at ten paces, but the underlying threat in Al Z's voice was coming through loud and clear. I watched as he stubbed out his butt in a cut glass ashtray with more force than was strictly necessary.

"So you're not going to keep out of our affairs?" he asked.

"I'm not interested in your affairs. I have other concerns."

"The girl? Or Billy Purdue?"

He surprised me for a moment, but not for long. If there was a pulse, then Al Z had his finger on it and he would only remove his finger when the pulse stopped.

"Because if it's Billy Purdue," he continued, "then we may have the seeds of a difficulty."

"The missing girl is a friend, but Rita Ferris, Billy's ex-wife, was my client."

"Your client's dead."

"It goes beyond that."

Al Z pinched his lips. To his right, the fat man on the sofa remained as impassive as a Buddha.

"So you're a man of principle," said Al Z. He tackled the word principle like it was a peanut shell he was crushing beneath his heel. "Well, I'm a man of principle too."

I didn't think so. Principles are expensive things to maintain and Al Z didn't look like he had the moral resources to support any. In fact, Al Z didn't look like he could work up the moral resources to take a leak on a burning orphanage.

"I don't think your principles and mine would qualify for the same definition," I said at last.

He smiled. "Maybe not." He turned to Louis. "And where do you stand on all this?"

"Beside him," said Louis, inclining his head gently in my direction.

"Then we have to reach an accommodation," Al Z concluded. "I'm a pragmatist. You step lightly in this matter, and I won't kill you unless I have to."

"Likewise," I said. "Seeing as how you've been so hospitable and all." Then we left.

Outside, it was cold and overcast.

"What do you think?" asked Louis.

"I think Tony's out there on his own, and maybe he hopes he can sort this mess out before Al Z loses his patience. You think he has Ellen?"

Louis didn't reply immediately. When he did, his eyes were hard. "He does or he doesn't, somehow it all ties in with Billy Purdue. Means it's gonna end bad for someone."

We walked around to Boylston and hailed a cab. As it pulled up, Louis slid in and said, "Logan," but I raised a hand.

"Can we take a detour?"

Louis shrugged. The cab driver shrugged too. It was like bad mime.

"Harvard," I said. I looked at Louis. "You don't have to come. I can meet you at the airport."

Louis's eyebrow rose half an inch. "Nah, I'll tag along, 'less you think I'm going to cramp your style."

The cab dropped us off at the monolithic William James Hall, close by Quincy and Kirkland. I left Louis in the lobby and took the elevator to room 232, where the psychology department had its office. My stomach felt tight, and there was sweat on my palms. At the office, a polite secretary told me where Rachel Wolfe's office was located, but she also told me that Rachel wouldn't be in that day. She was at a seminar out of town, and wouldn't be back until the following morning.

"Can I take a message?" she asked.

I considered turning around and walking away, but I didn't. Instead, I reached into my wallet and took out one of my cards. On the back, I wrote the new telephone number for the Scarborough house and handed the card to the secretary. "Just give her this, please."

She smiled. I thanked her, and I left.

Louis and I walked back to Harvard Square to catch a cab. He didn't speak until we were on our way to Logan.

"You do that before?" he asked, with just the faintest hint of a smile.

"Once. I never got that far the last time, though."

"So, you, like, stalking her, right?"

"It's not stalking if you know the person well."

"Oh." He nodded deeply. "Thanks for clearing that one up. Never really understood the distinction before."

He paused before he spoke again. "And what you trying to do?"

"I'm trying to say I'm sorry."

"You want to get back with her?"

I tapped my fingers on the window. "I don't want it to be the way it is between us, that's all. Frankly, I don't know what I'm doing and, like I told your significant other, I'm not even sure that I'm ready yet."

"But you love her?"

"Yes."

"Then life will decide when you're ready." He didn't speak again.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Angel met us at the airport, and we drove to the food court at the Maine Mall to eat before we headed north.

"Shit," said Angel, as we drove down Maine Mall Road. "Look at this place. You got your Burger King, your International House of Pancakes, your Dunkin' Donuts, your pizza parlors. You got your four main food groups right here on your doorstep. Live here too long and they'll be rolling you from one place to the next."

We ate Chinese in the food court of the mall and told Angel about our encounter with Al Z. In return, he produced a crumpled letter addressed to Billy Purdue, care of Ronald Straydeer.

"Cops and the feds did a pretty good job, but they didn't deal with your buddy Ronald the right way," he said.

"You talked to him about his dog?" I asked.

"Talked about his dog, then ate some stew." He looked a little queasy.

"Roadkill?" I knew that Ronald wasn't above scavenging, despite the state's laws on taking roadkill. Myself, I couldn't see the harm in using a deer or squirrel for food instead of letting it rot by the side of the road. Ronald did a pretty mean venison steak, served with beets and carrots preserved by burying them in sand.

"He told me it was squirrel," said Angel, "but it smelled like skunk. It didn't seem polite to ask. Seems this letter came for Billy about a week back, but Ronald hadn't seen him to give it to him."

The letter was postmarked Greenville. It was short, little more than an extension of good wishes, some details of renovations to the house and some stuff about an old dog that the writer still had around the place and with which Billy Purdue seemed to have been familiar when it was a pup. It was signed, in his old man's scrawl: "Meade Payne."

"So they stayed in touch all these years," I remarked. It seemed to confirm what I had thought: if Billy Purdue was going to seek help from anyone, it would be Meade Payne.

We drove nonstop to Dark Hollow, Angel and Louis shooting ahead in the Mercury. The mists gathered as I went farther north, so that journeying from Portland to Dark Hollow was like moving into a strange, spectral world, where house lights glowed dimly and the beams of headlights assumed their own, lancelike solidity; where road signs announced towns that existed only as scattered dwellings without any hub or center. There was more snow forecast, I knew, and soon the snowmobilers would arrive in numbers to hurtle along the Interstate Trail system. But for now, Greenville was still quiet as I drove through, sand mixed with snow by the side of the road, and I passed only two cars on the uneven, pitted surface of Lily Bay Road on the way to Dark Hollow.

When I arrived at the motel, Angel and Louis were already checking in. The same woman with the blue-rinse hair who had greeted me earlier in the week stood behind the desk, examining their details on a single registration card. Beside her, a brown cat slept on the counter, curled in on itself with its nose almost touching its tail. Angel was doing the talking while Louis examined a series of battered tourist booklets in a rack. He glanced at me when I came in, but didn't acknowledge my presence further.

"You gentlemen sharing a room?" asked the blue-rinse woman.

"Yes, ma'am," replied Angel, with a look of homely wisdom on his face. "A dollar spared is a dollar made."

The woman glanced at Louis, resplendent in a black suit, black coat and white shirt. "Your friend a preacher?" she said.

"Kind of, ma'am," said Angel. "He's strictly Old Testament, though. An eye for an eye, and stuff like that."

"That's nice. We don't get many religious folks staying here."

Louis's face had the long-suffering look of a saint who has just heard that the rack is to be tightened.

"If you're interested," the woman continued, "we got a Baptist service tonight. You're welcome to join us."

"Thank you, ma'am," said Angel, "but we prepare to engage in our own forms of worship."

She smiled understandingly. "Long as it's quiet and doesn't disturb the other guests."

"We'll do our best," intervened Louis, taking the key.

The woman recognized me as I approached the desk. "Back again? You must like it here in Dark Hollow."

"I hope to get to know it better," I replied. "Maybe you can help me with something."

She smiled. "Sure, if I can."

I handed her a photo of Ellen Cole, the small, ID kind taken in a photo booth. I'd had it blown up on a color copier so that the picture was now eight-by-ten size. "You recognize this girl?"

The woman looked at the picture, squinting her eyes behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. "Yes, I do. She in some kind of trouble?"

"I hope not, but she's missing and her parents have asked me to help them find her."

The woman turned her attention back to the picture, nodding as she did so. "Yes, I recall her. Chief Jennings was asking about her. She stayed here with a young man for one night. I can get you the date, if you like."

"Would you, please?"

She took a registration card from a green metal card box and examined the details. "December fifth," she said. "Paid by credit card made out in the name of Ellen C. Cole."

"Do you recall anything that happened, anything out of the ordinary?"

"No, nothing important. Someone had suggested to them that they visit here, someone they gave a ride to from Portland. That's about all. She was nice, I remember. He was kind of a surly kid, but they can be that way at that age. I should know: raised four of my own and they were meaner than wharf rats until they were twenty-five."

"Did they give any indication of where they might be heading after they left here?"

"North, I guess. Maybe up to Katahdin. I don't know, frankly, but I told them that, if they had some time to spare, they should drive out and watch the sunset on the lake. They seemed to like the idea. It's a pretty sight. Romantic, too, for a young couple like that. I let them check out late in the afternoon, just so they wouldn't have to be rushing to pack."

"And they didn't say who recommended that they see Dark Hollow?" It seemed an odd thing to suggest. Dark Hollow didn't have that much going for it.

"Sure they did. It was an old guy they met along the way. They gave him a ride up here, and I think maybe he met up with them before they left."

I felt my stomach turn a little. "Did they mention his name?"

"No. Didn't sound like anybody from around here, though," she said. Her brow furrowed a little. "They didn't seem concerned about him or nothing. I mean, what harm could an old man do?" I think she meant the question to be rhetorical when she started out, but by the end I don't think it sounded that way to either of us.

She apologized, told me she didn't know any more, then gave me directions to the lakeshore viewing point, about a mile or two outside the town, on a tourist map. I thanked her, left my bag in my room and knocked on the door of the room next door, now occupied by Angel and Louis. Angel opened the door and let me in. Louis was hanging up his suits in the battered brown closet. I put the old man to the back of my mind. I wasn't about to leap to conclusions, not yet.

"What do people do for fun around here?" asked Angel, sitting down heavily on one of the two double beds in the room. "This place sees less action than the pope."

"Endure the winter," I said. "Wait for the summer."

"Fulfilling existence, if you're a tree."

Louis finished arranging his clothes and turned to us. "Find out anything?"

"The manager remembers Ellen and her boyfriend. She told them to go watch the sunset out of town, then reckons they went north."

"Maybe they did go north," said Louis.

"Rangers up in Baxter State Park have no record of them, according to Lee Cole. Apart from that, the options up north are limited. Plus, the woman at the desk says they gave some old guy a ride up here, and it was this old man who suggested that they stay in Dark Hollow."

"Is that a bad thing?"

"I don't know. Depends on who he was. It could be nothing." But I thought of the old man who had tried to take Rita Ferris at the hotel, and the figure of the old man Billy Purdue claimed to have seen the night that his family was taken from him. And I thought too of something Ronald Straydeer had said when he misheard my comment as we stood before Billy Purdue's trailer, discussing a man he might or might not have seen on his property.

You're getting old.

Yuh, he could have been old.

"So what now?"

I shrugged glumly. "I'm going to have to talk to Rand Jennings."

"You want us to come along?"

"No, I have other plans for you two. Take a ride out to the Payne place, see what's going on."

"See if Billy Purdue's turned up, you mean," said Angel.

"Whatever."

"And if he has?"

"Then we go and get him."

"And if he hasn't?"

"We wait, until I'm certain that Ellen Cole isn't in some kind of trouble here. Then…" I shrugged.

"We wait some more," finished Angel.

"I guess," I replied.

"That's good to know," he said. "At least I can plan what to wear."

The Dark Hollow Police Department lay about half a mile beyond the northern end of the town. It was a single-story brick building with its own generator in a concrete bunker at its eastern side. The building itself was quite new, a consequence of a fire a couple of years back that had destroyed the original structure just off the main street.

Inside it was warm and brightly lit, and a sergeant in long sleeves stood behind a wooden desk filling in some forms. His shiny name badge said "Ressler," so I figured he was the same Ressler who had watched Emily Watts die. I introduced myself and asked to see the chief.

"Can I ask what it's in connection with, sir?"

"Ellen Cole," I replied.

His brow furrowed a little as he picked up the phone and dialed an extension number. "There's a guy here wants to talk to you about Ellen Cole, chief," he said, then put his hand over the receiver and turned back to me. "What did you say your name was again?"

I hadn't said it the first time, but I gave it to him and he repeated it into the phone. "That's right, chief. Parker. Charlie Parker." He listened for a moment, then looked at me again, sizing me up. "Yeah, that sounds about right. Sure, sure." He put the phone down then reappraised me without saying anything.

"So, does he remember me?" I asked.

Ressler didn't reply, but I got the feeling that the sergeant knew his chief well and had detected something in his voice that put him on his guard. "Follow me," he said, unlocking a dividing door to the left of the desk and holding it to one side to let me pass. I waited while he relocked it, then followed him between a pair of desks and into a small, glass-walled cubicle. Behind a metal desk, on which lay trays of papers and a computer, sat Randall Jennings.

He hadn't changed too much. True, he was grayer and had put on a little weight, his face now slightly puffy and the beginnings of a double chin hanging down below his jawline, but he was still a good-looking man, with sharp brown eyes and wide, strong shoulders. It must have hurt his ego, I thought, when his wife had commenced an affair with me.

He waited for Ressler to leave and close the door of the office before he spoke. He didn't ask me to sit down and didn't seem troubled by the fact that, standing, I could look down on him.

"I never thought I'd see your face again," he said at last.

"I guessed by the way you said good-bye," I replied.

He didn't respond, just rearranged some papers on his desk. I wasn't sure if the gesture was meant to distract him, or me. "You're here about Ellen Cole?"

"That's right."

"We don't know anything about it. She came, she left." He raised his hands in a gesture of helplessness.

"That's not what her mother thinks."

"I don't care what her mother thinks. What I'm telling you is what we know, same thing I told her father when he was up here."

It struck me that I must just have missed Walter Cole, that we might even have been in town at the same time. I felt a twinge of sorrow that he had been forced to come up here alone, fearing for his daughter's safety. I would have helped him, had I known.

"The family's filed a missing person's report."

"I'm aware of that. I had a federal agent chewing my ear over a nonexistent NCIC filing." He looked hard at me. "I told him it was a long way from New York to Dark Hollow. We do things our own way up here."

I didn't respond to his bout of territorial spraying. "Are you going to act on the report?" I persisted.

Jennings stood up, the knuckles of his large hands resting on his desk. I had almost forgotten what a big man he was. There was a gun in a holster at his belt, a Coonan.357 Magnum out of St. Paul, Minnesota. It looked shiny and new. I guessed that Rand Jennings didn't have much cause to use it way up here, unless he sat on his porch and took potshots at rabbits.

"Am I having trouble making myself understood?" he said softly, but with a hint of suppressed anger. "We've done what we can. We have responded to the missing person report. Our view is that the girl and her boyfriend may have run away together and, so far, we have no reason to suspect otherwise."

"The manager of the motel said they were heading north."

"Maybe they were."

"All that's north is Baxter and Katahdin. They never made it there."

"Then they went someplace else."

"There may have been someone else with them."

"Maybe there was. All I know is that they left town. If they were still here, I'd know about it."

"I can see now why you never made detective."

He flinched, and his face flushed red. "You don't know the first damn thing about me," he said. The anger was distinct now as he pronounced his next words slowly and with deliberate emphasis. "If you'll excuse me, we have some real crimes to deal with."

"Really. Someone stealing Christmas trees? Maybe trying to screw a moose?"

He walked around the desk and came close to me as he passed by to open the door of his office. I think he half expected me to take a step back from him, but I didn't.

"I hope you're not planning on looking for trouble here," he said. He could have been talking about Ellen Cole, but his eyes said he was talking about someone else.

"I don't have to look for trouble," I replied. "I stay still long enough, trouble finds me."

"That's because you're dumb," he said, still holding the door open. "You don't pay attention to the lessons life teaches you."

"You'd be surprised how much I've learned."

I prepared to leave his office, but his left hand shot out to block me. "Remember one thing, Parker: this is my town and you're a guest. Don't abuse the privilege."

"So it's not a case of 'what's mine is yours?'"

"No," he said, with menace. "No, it isn't."

I left the building and walked to my car, the wind now howling through the trees and biting at my bare fingers. Above me, the sky was dark. As I reached the Mustang, an old green Nissan Sunny pulled into the lot and Lorna Jennings stepped from the car. She was wearing a black leather jacket with a big fur collar and blue jeans tucked into the same boots she had been wearing the last time we met. She didn't see me until she had begun to walk toward the main entrance. When she did spot me, she stopped short for a moment before coming over, casting an anxious glance at the illuminated doorway as she did so.

"What are you doing here?" she asked.

"Talking to your husband. He wasn't very helpful."

She raised an eyebrow at me. "Are you surprised?"

"No, not really, but it's not about me. A girl and a young man are missing and I think somebody here may know what happened to them. Until I find out who that might be, I'm going to be around for a while."

"Who are they?"

"The daughter of a friend, and the girl's boyfriend. Her name is Ellen Cole. You ever hear Rand mention her?"

She nodded. "He said he'd done what he could. He thinks they may have eloped."

"Young love," I said. "It's a beautiful thing."

Lorna swallowed and ran a hand through her hair. "He hates you, Bird, for what you did. For what we did."

"That was a long time ago."

"Not for him," she said. "Or me."

I was sorry I'd mentioned young love. I didn't like the look in her eyes. It made me nervous. But I surprised myself by asking the next question.

"Why are you still with him, Lorna?"

"Because he's my husband. Because I have nowhere else to go."

"That's not true, Lorna. There's always somewhere else."

"Is that an offer?"

"Nope, it's just an observation. You take care," I began to walk away, but she reached out and stopped me by placing her hand on my arm.

"No, you be careful, Bird," she said. "He hasn't forgiven you, and he won't."

"Has he forgiven you?" I asked.

There was something in her face as she spoke, something that reminded me of that first afternoon we spent together and the warmth of her skin against mine. "I didn't want his forgiveness," she said. Then she smiled sadly and left me.

I spent the next hour wandering around the stores in Dark Hollow, showing Ellen Cole's photograph to anyone who'd take the time to look. They recalled her at the diner, and in the drugstore, but nobody had seen them leave and no one could confirm whether or not they left with another man, or speculate as to whom that person might have been. It grew colder and colder as I walked, my coat wrapped tightly around me, the lights of the stores casting a yellow glow on the snow.

When I had exhausted every avenue of inquiry, at least for the present, I went back to my room, showered, and changed into a pair of denims and a shirt and sweater before pulling on my overcoat and preparing to meet Angel and Louis for dinner. Angel was already outside the room, drinking coffee and blowing puffs of white breath into the air like an unhealthy steam engine.

"You know, it's warmer out here than it is in that room," he said. "I lost a layer of skin from my feet, the tiles in the bathroom are so cold."

"You're too sensitive for this world. Who would have thought it?"

He snorted unhappily and stamped his feet while alternating the coffee cup from hand to hand, each time putting his free hand under the opposite armpit.

"Stop," I said. "You're going to make it rain. Any sign of activity out at Meade Payne's place?"

He came to a relative standstill. "None that we could see without knocking on the door and asking for cookies and a glass of milk. Caught a sight of the young guy and Payne eating supper, but they were alone, far as we could see. You have any luck with Jennings?"

"No."

"You surprised?"

"Yes and no. He's got no reason to help me, but this isn't about me. It's about Ellen and her boyfriend, but I could see in his eyes that he would use them to get at me, if he could. I don't understand him. He's suffered. I know he has. His wife took up with another man behind his back, a man ten years younger than him, but he's still with her, and it's hell for both of them. It wasn't as if Rand was old, or cruel, or impotent. He had what it took; or, maybe, he had it according to his own definition of it. I took something away from him, and he won't ever forgive me for it. But how can he not feel for Ellen Cole, for Ricky, for their families? No matter how much he hates me, they have to matter." I kicked idly at the dirt on the ground. "Sorry, Angel. I'm thinking out loud."

Angel tossed the remains of his coffee into a mound of frozen, compacted snow. I could hear the soft hiss as it hit the ice, as the coffee corrupted the whiteness of its crystals one by one.

"Suffering isn't enough, Bird," said Angel softly. "So he's suffered: big fuckin' deal. Get in line with the rest of us suckers. It's not enough to suffer, and you know that. What matters is that you understand that others suffer, and some of them suffer worse than you could ever do. The nature of compassion isn't coming to terms with your own suffering and applying it to others: it's knowing that other folks around you suffer and, no matter what happens to you, no matter how lucky or unlucky you are, they keep suffering. And if you can do something about that, then you do it, and you do it without whining or waving your own fuckin' cross for the world to see. You do it because it's the right thing to do.

"From what you say, this Rand Jennings doesn't have a compassionate bone in his body. All he feels is self-pity, and he doesn't understand any suffering but his own. I mean, look at his marriage. There are two of them in it, Bird; whatever you may have felt for her, she's stayed with him this long, and if you hadn't turned up like a fire in February then everything would be just the way it was. He'd be unhappy and she'd be unhappy and they'd be unhappy together, and it seems like they've set their own boundaries on what is and is not going to happen to change that situation.

"But he's selfish, Bird. He only thinks of his own hurt, his own pain, and he blames her for it, and you, and, by extension, the world. He doesn't care about Ellen Cole, or Walter, or Lee. He's all full up pissing and cursing at the bum hand he thinks life has dealt him, and that hand ain't never gonna change."

I looked at him, at his unshaven profile, the wisps of dark hair curling out from under his dark wool hat, the empty coffee cup forgotten in his hand. He was a mass of contradictions. It struck me that I was taking life lessons from a five-six semiretired burglar whose boyfriend, not twenty-four hours earlier, had executed a man against a brick wall. My life, I reflected, was taking some strange turns.

Angel seemed to sense what I was thinking, because he turned to me before he spoke again. "We've been friends for a long time, you and me, maybe even without either of us realizing it. I know you and, for a time, you weren't far off becoming like Jennings and a million others like him, but I know now that's not going to happen. I'm not sure how things changed and I don't think I want to know most of it. All I know is that you're becoming a compassionate man, Bird. That's not the same as pity, or guilt, or trying to pay off some debt to fortune or to God. It's feeling other people's pain as your own, and acting to take that pain away. And maybe, sometimes, you have to do bad things to do that, but life doesn't balance easy. You can be a good man and perform bad actions, because that's the nature of things. People who believe otherwise, well, they're just timeservers, because they spend so much time wrestling with their consciences that nothing gets done, and nothing changes, and the innocent and the defenseless, they just keep getting hurt. In the end you do what you can, maybe what you have to do, to make things better. Your heart isn't going to be weighed against a feather in the next life, Bird. My guess is they use something heavier, otherwise we'll all end up in hell."

He smiled at me, a small, wintry smile that said he knew the cost of following that philosophy. He knew, because he was following it himself: sometimes with me, sometimes with Louis, but always, always according to what he believed was right. I wasn't sure that what he said could be applied to me. I made moral judgments in what I did, but I didn't believe that I was always entitled to do so and I knew that I had not yet managed to purge myself of the guilt and grief I felt. I acted to ease my own pain and, in doing so, I sometimes managed to ease the pain of others. That was as close to compassion as I thought I could get, for the present.

From the far end of town came the sound of sirens, gradually drawing nearer. Red-and-blue lights flashed across the buildings on the main street as a cruiser tore around the corner and headed in our direction at high speed. It screeched a hard left at the intersection and drove by. In the front seat of the car I could see the figure of Randall Jennings.

"Must be a doughnut sale on," remarked Angel.

A second car came down the main street, spun on its rear tires as it made the turn, then headed after the first vehicle.

"With free coffee," he added.

I tossed my keys in my hand, then nudged Angel off the hood of the Mustang, where he had just taken up a position. "I'm going to take a look. You want to come along?"

"Nah. I'm a-waitin' for Black Narcissus to finish making himself lovely for us. We'll hold off for you, burn some furniture to keep warm."

I followed the lights of the lead cars as they glanced against the trees, the branches like hands outstretched over the road. After a mile I caught up with the cruisers as they headed up into the forest through a private logging company road, the wooden barrier thrown to one side to enable the cars to pass. Beside the barrier stood a man wearing a wool hat and a parka. A path wound down behind him to a small house on the edge of the company land. I figured that maybe it was he who had made the call to the police.

I stayed close behind the rear car, watching its taillights as it swerved and dipped along the narrow, rutted track. Eventually the cruisers came to a halt beside a Ford truck with a Ski-Doo in back, a huge bearded man with a belly like a pregnant woman's standing beside it. Jennings emerged from the lead car, Ressler stepping out of the car behind at the same time accompanied by another patrolman. Flashlights blinked into life and the line of three cops headed over to the back of the truck and peered inside. I took my own Maglite from the trunk and walked over to them. As I went, I heard the bearded man say:

"I didn't want to leave him out there. There's snow coming on, means he might have been lost till the thaw."

Faces turned toward me as I approached, one of them that of Rand Jennings.

"The fuck are you doing here?" he said.

"Collecting berries. What you got?"

I shone my flashlight beam into the bed of the truck, although what was there didn't need the extra illumination. It needed darkness and dirt and a headstone six feet above it.

It was a man's body, laid out on a sheet of tarpaulin, his mouth wide open and filled with leaves. His eyes were closed and his head was twisted at an unnatural angle. He lay, crumpled and broken, amid the tools and plastic containers in the truck, his hair touching the empty gun rack.

"Who is he?"

For a moment, I didn't think Jennings was going to answer. Then he sighed and said:

"It looks like Gary Chute. He was a surveyor for the timber company. Daryl here found him when he was out checking some traps. Came upon his truck back a ways as well, couple of miles from the body."

Daryl looked like he was about to deny the traps part of the statement. His mouth opened briefly then closed again at a look from Jennings. Daryl looked kind of slow, I thought. His eyes were dull and his brow low, and his mouth, though closed, was in continual motion, as if he was worrying at the inside of his bottom lip with his teeth.

Beside him, Ressler was flicking through the dead man's wallet.

"It's Chute all right," he said. "No cash in the wallet, though. Credit cards are still here. You take it, Daryl?"

Daryl shook his head wildly from side to side. "No, I didn't touch nothin'."

"You sure?"

Daryl nodded his assent. "Sure," he said. "I'm sure." Ressler didn't look like he believed him, but he didn't say anything more.

"Why didn't anyone look for him?" I asked, although, from what Martel had told me, I could guess the answer.

"He's a freelance consultant," said Jennings. "He wasn't due to report until next week and his wife only got worried a day or two ago, when he didn't show like he'd promised. I hope you're not trying to imply anything here, Parker. I've had just about my fill of you."

I ignored him and turned to Daryl. "How did you find him?"

"Huh?"

"I mean, what position was he in?"

"Lying at the bottom of a ridge, near buried by the snow and the leaves," replied Daryl. "Looked like he just slipped, hit some stones and trees on the way down, then caught his neck on a root. Must have snapped like a twig." Daryl smiled uneasily, unsure that he had said the right thing.

It didn't sound very likely, especially with the money missing from his wallet. "You say there was snow and leaves on him, Daryl?"

"Yessir," said Daryl eagerly. "Branches too."

I nodded, and shone my flashlight on the body once again. Something caught my attention at his wrists and I let the light linger for a moment before flicking it off. "It's a shame he was moved," I said.

Even Jennings had to agree. "Shit, Daryl, you should have left him where he was, then let the wardens go and get him."

"I couldn't leave him out there," said Daryl. "It weren't decent."

"Maybe Daryl's right. If it snows, and it will, we could have lost him until the spring," said Ressler. "Daryl says he found the body at Island Pond, wrapped it in the tarp and hauled it back ten miles to his truck with his Ski-Doo. Island Pond's quite a ways from here and, according to Daryl, the road turns into one big snowdrift way before you reach the pond."

I glanced at Daryl with new respect; there weren't many men who'd haul the body of a stranger for miles. "No way anyone can head out there in the dark, assuming we could even find the place," concluded Jennings. "Anyway, this is a matter for the wardens and the state police, but not us. We'll arrange to have him taken to Augusta in the morning, let the ME take a look at him, but that's the end of our responsibility."

I looked up, beyond the trees and into the black night sky. There was a sense of heaviness, as of a weight above us about to fall. Ressler followed my gaze.

"Like I said, Daryl was right. Snow's coming."

Jennings gave Ressler a look that said he didn't want any more details of the discovery spoken of in front of Daryl and, especially, me. He slapped his hands together sharply. "Okay, let's go." He leaned into the bed of the truck and covered Gary Chute's body with the tarp, using pieces of scrap metal, a wheel iron and the butt of a shotgun to hold it in place. He crooked a finger at the patrolman.

"Stevie, you ride in the bed here, make sure that tarp doesn't come off." Stevie, who looked about eleven, shook his head unhappily then climbed carefully into the truck, squatting down beside the body. The other cops went back to their cars, leaving only Jennings and me.

"I'm sure we all appreciate your assistance, Parker."

"Funny, but I don't think you mean that."

"You're right, I don't. Stay out of my way, and out of my business. I don't want to have to tell you that again." He tapped me once on the chest with a gloved finger, then turned and walked away. The cruisers started almost in unison and formed a convoy with the truck-one ahead, one behind-as Gary Chute was brought back to Dark Hollow.

Leaves and branches, as well as snow, had covered Chute's body, according to Daryl. If his death was accidental, and Daryl had taken the money from his wallet, then that didn't make too much sense. The trees were bare, and it had been snowing pretty regularly over the last week or so. Snow would have covered the body, but not leaves and branches. Their presence indicated that someone could have been trying to hide Gary Chute's body.

I walked back to my car and thought of what I had seen in the flashlight's glow: red marks on the dead man's wrists. Those marks weren't made by a fall, or by animals, or frost.

They were rope burns.

When I got back to the motel, Angel and Louis were gone. There was a note under my door, written in Angel's strangely neat hand, telling me that they had gone to the diner and would see me there. I didn't follow them. Instead, I went down to the motel reception desk, filled two plastic cups with coffee and returned to my room.

Chute's death continued to bother me. It was unfortunate that it had been Daryl who found the body, even if he had acted with the best of intentions. Chute's truck could probably have served as a rough marker for the crime scene but now its integrity had been fatally compromised by Daryl's removal of the body.

Maybe it was nothing, but on a map I marked roughly where Gary Chute's body had been found at Island Pond. Island Pond was about forty miles northeast of Dark Hollow. The only way to reach that area was along a private road, which required a permit for use. If someone had killed Gary Chute, he'd have to have taken that road to get to him, following him into the wilderness. The other possibility was that whoever killed him was in the wilderness already, waiting for him. Or…

Or maybe Chute was unlucky enough to see someone, or something, that he shouldn't have. Maybe whoever killed him didn't go into the wilderness after him, but was coming back out again. And, if that was the case, then the first place that person would arrive at was Dark Hollow.

But that was all speculation. I needed to get my thoughts in order. On a page of my notebook, I noted all that had happened since the night that Billy Purdue had stuck his knife in my cheek. Where there were links, I formed dotted lines between the names. Most of them came back to Billy Purdue, except Ellen Cole's disappearance and the death of Gary Chute.

And in the center of the list was a white space, empty and clean as new-fallen snow. The other names and incidents circled around it, like planets around a sun. I felt the old instinct, the desire to impose some pattern on incidents that I did not yet fully understand, some form of explanation that might begin to lead me to an ultimate truth. When I was a detective in New York, dealing with the deaths of those whom I had not known, with whom I had no direct connection, to whom I had no duty beyond that of the policeman whose task it is to find out what happened and to ensure that someone pays for the crime, I would follow the threads of the investigation as I had laid them out and when they led nowhere, or proved simply to be false assumptions, I would shrug and return to the core to follow another thread. I was prepared to make mistakes in the hope that I would eventually find something that was not an error.

That luxury, the luxury of detachment, was taken away from me when Susan and Jennifer died. Now they all mattered, all of the lost, all of the gone, but Ellen Cole mattered more than most. If she was in trouble, then there was no room for error, no time to make mistakes in the hope that they would lead to some final reckoning. Neither could I forget Rita Ferris and her son, and at the thought of her I looked instinctively over my shoulder and toward the dark rectangle of the window, and I recalled a weight on my shoulder, cold but not unyielding; the touch of a familiar hand.

There was too much happening, too many deaths revolving around the white space at the center of the page. And in that space, I put a question mark, dotted it carefully, then extended the dots down to the bottom of the page.

And there I wrote the name Caleb Kyle.

I should have gone out to eat then. I should have found Angel and Louis and gone to a bar where I could have watched them drink and flirt oddly with each other. I might even have had a drink, just one drink… Women would have gone by, swaying gently as the alcohol took hold of their bodies and minds. Perhaps one of them might have smiled at me, and I might have smiled back and felt the spark that ignites when a beautiful woman focuses her attention on a man. I could have had another drink, then another, and soon I would have forgotten everything and descended into oblivion.

The anniversary was approaching. I was aware of it as a dark cloud on the horizon, moving inexorably to engulf me in memories of loss and pain. I wanted normality, yet it continued to hang beyond my reach. I wasn't even sure why I had gone to Rachel's office, except that I knew that I wanted to be with her even though my feelings for her made me feel sick and guilty, as if I was somehow betraying Susan's memory. With these thoughts, after all that had happened over the past few days, and after allowing my mind to explore the nature of the killings that had occurred in both the recent and distant past, I should not have remained alone.

Tired and so hungry that my appetite had faded entirely away to be replaced by a deeper, gnawing unease, I undressed and showered, then climbed into my bed, pulling the sheets over my head and wondering how long it would take me to fall asleep. Just long enough, it emerged, to get that thought out.

I awoke to a noise, and a faint, unpleasant odor that took me a few moments to identify. It was the smell of rotting vegetation, of leaves and mulch and standing water. I rose from my pillow and wiped the sleep from my eyes, my nose wrinkling as the smell of decay grew stronger. There was a clock radio on the nightstand-the time read 12:33 A.M.-and I checked it in case the alarm might somehow have switched itself on during the night, but the radio was silent. I looked around the room, conscious now of a strangeness to the light, a tinge of unfamiliar color that should not have been present.

There was singing coming from my bathroom.

It was low but sweet, the sound of two voices combining to sing the same song, a song that sounded like a nursery rhyme, the words muffled by the closed bathroom door.

And from beneath the door, a green light seeped, its form rippling across the cheap carpet. I pushed back the covers and stood naked on the floor, but felt no cold, no chill, and began to walk toward the bathroom. As I did so, the smell grew stronger. I could feel it adhering to my skin and hair, as if I were bathing in its source. The singing rose in volume, the words now clear, the same three syllables repeated over and over again in high, girlish tones.

Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle

I was almost at the point where the tendrils of light from beneath the door reached their farthest extension. From behind the door came the sound of water softly lapping.

Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle

I stood for a second at the periphery of the green light, then placed one bare foot in its pool.

The singing stopped as soon as my foot touched the floor, but the light remained, moving slowly, viscously, across my bare toes. I reached forward and carefully turned the handle of the door. I pulled it open and stepped onto the tiles.

The room was empty. There were only the white surfaces, the neat pile of towels above the toilet, the sink with its low-grade soaps still wrapped, the glasses with their paper covers, the flower-speckled curtain over the bath pulled almost completely across…

The light came from the behind the curtain, a sickly, green glow that shone with only a vestige of the power of its original source, as if it had fought its way through layers and layers of obstacles to offer what little illumination it could. And in the quiet of the room, broken only by the soft lapping of water from behind the curtain, it seemed as if something held its breath. I heard a soft giggle, smothered by a hand, the laugh echoed by another, and the water behind the curtain lapped more loudly.

I reached out a hand, gripped the plastic and began to pull it quickly across. There was some resistance, but I continued to open the curtain until the interior of the bath was completely exposed.

The bath was full of leaves, so full that they reached up to the faucets. They were green and red, brown and yellow, amber and gold. There was aspen and birch, cedar and cherry, maple and basswood, beech and fir, and their shapes twisted and overlapping in a riot of decay.

A shape moved beneath the leaves, and bubbles broke upward. The vegetation shifted and something white began to rise to the surface, a long, slow ascent as if the water was far deeper than it could possibly be. As it neared, it seemed to separate into two figures, their hands held as they rose, their long hair spreading and flowing as they came, their mouths open, their eyes blind.

Then a doll's head broke through the leaves and I glimpsed, once again, gray skin and a stained blouse.

I let the curtain drop and backed away, but the wet tiles betrayed me. And as I fell, their shades moved behind the curtain and I backed away on my hands and heels, my fingers and toes scrabbling for purchase until I awoke once again, the sheets in a pile at the end of the bed, the mattress exposed and a bloody hole in its fabric where I had torn through it with my nails.

A hammering came at the door.

"Bird! Bird, you okay in there?" It was Louis's voice.

I crawled from my bed and found that I was shivering uncontrollably. I struggled with the chain on the door, my fingers fumbling at the catch, and then, at last, it was open and Louis was standing there before me in a pair of gray sweatpants and a white T-shirt, his gun in his hand.

"Bird?" he repeated. There was concern in his eyes, and a kind of love. "What's the matter?"

Something bubbled in my throat, and I tasted bile and coffee.

"I see them," I said. "I see them all."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I sat on the edge of my bed, my head in my hands, and waited while Louis went to the office and poured two cups of coffee from the eternally brewing pot. As he passed by his own room I heard him exchange words with Angel, although he was still alone when he closed the door behind him, shutting out the cold night air. He handed me one of the cups, and I thanked him before sipping from it silently. From outside came the soft tapping of snow falling on my window. He didn't talk for a time, and I felt him considering something in his mind.

"I ever tell you about my Grandma Lucy?" he said at last.

I looked at him in surprise. "Louis, I don't even know your surname," I replied.

He smiled dimly, as if it was all he could do to recollect what it might have been himself. "Anyways," he continued, and the smile faded, "Lucy, she was my gran'momma, my daddy's momma, not much older than I am now. She was a beautiful woman: tall, skin like day fading into night. She wore her hair down, always. I never recall her wearing it no other way but down, it tumbling over her shoulders in dark curls. She lived with us until the day she died, and she died young. The pneumonia took her, and she faded away in shakes and sweats.

"There was a man who lived in the town, and his name was Errol Rich. Ever since I knew him, he just wasn't a man to turn the other cheek. When you were black, and you lived in that kind of town, that's the first thing you learned. You always, always, turned the other cheek, 'cause if you didn't, weren't no white sheriff, no white jury, no bunch of redneck assholes with ropes ready to tie you to the axle of a truck and drag you along dirt roads till your skin came off, weren't none of them going to see it no other way but a nigger gettin' above himself, and settin' a bad example to all the other niggers, maybe gettin' them all riled up so's that white folks with better things to do would have to go out some dark night and teach them all a lesson. Put some manners on them, maybe.

"But Errol, he didn't see things that way. He was a huge mother. He walked down the street and the sun wasn't big enough to shine around his shoulders. He fixed things-engines, mowers, anything that had a moving part and the hand of man could find a way to save. Lived in a big shack out on one of the old county roads, 'long with his momma and his sisters, and he looked them white boys in the eye, and he knew they was afraid.

"Except, this one time, he was driving by a bar out by Route 101 and he heard someone call out "Hey, nigger!" and the cracked old windshield of his truck, it just exploded in. They threw a big old bottle through it, full of all the piss those assholes could work up between 'em. And Errol, he pulled over, and he sat there for a time, covered in blood and glass and piss, then he climbed out of the cab, took him a length of timber maybe three feet long from the bed of his truck, and he walked over to where them good ol' boys were sitting on the stoop. There was four of 'em, including the owner, a pig of a man called Little Tom Rudge, and he could see them freeze up as he came.

"'Who threw that?' says Errol. 'You throw that, Little Tom? 'Cause if you did, you better tell me now, else I'm gonna burn your shit-heap down to the ground.'

"But nobody answered. Them boys, they was just struck dumb. Even together in a bunch and all liquored up, they knew better than to mess with Errol. And Errol, he just looked at them for a time, then he spat on the ground and he took that length of timber and threw it through the window of the bar, and Little Tom, there wasn't nothing he could do. Least of all, not then.

"They came for him the next night, three truckloads of 'em. They took him in front of his momma and his sisters and brought him to a place called Ada's Field, where there was a black oak tree that was maybe a century old. And when they got there, half the town was waitin' for 'em. There was women there, even some of the older children. Folks ate chicken and biscuits, and drank soda pop from glass bottles, and talked about the weather, and the coming harvest, and maybe the baseball season, like they was at the county fair and they was waitin' for the show to start. All told, there was more than a hundred people there, sittin' on the hoods of their cars, waitin'.

"And when Errol came, his legs and hands were tied and they hauled him up onto the roof of an old Lincoln that was parked under the tree. And they put a rope around his neck, and tightened it. Then someone came up and poured a can of gasoline over him, and Errol looked up, and he spoke the only words he said since they took him, and the only words he would ever say again on this earth.

"'Don't burn me,' he said. He wasn't asking them to spare him, or not to hang him. He wasn't afraid of that. But he didn't want to burn. Then I guess maybe he looked up into their eyes and saw that what was to be would be, and he bowed his head and he started to pray.

"Well, they grabbed the rope around his neck and they pulled it so that Errol was balancing on the tips of his toes on the roof of the car, and then the car started and Errol hung in the air, twisting and thrashing. And someone came forward with a burning torch in his hand and they burned Errol Rich as he hung, and those people, they listened to him scream until his lungs burned and he couldn't scream no more. And then he died.

"That was at ten after nine, on a July night, maybe three miles away from our house, right on the other side of town. And at ten after nine, my Grandma Lucy, she rose from her chair by the radio. I was sittin' at her feet. The others, they was in the kitchen or in bed asleep, but I was still with her. Grandma Lucy, she walked to the door and stepped out into the night, wearin' nothin' but her nightdress and a shawl, and she looked out into the woods. I followed her, and I said: 'Miss Lucy, what's the matter?' But she didn't say nothin', just kept on walkin' until she was about ten feet away from the edge of the trees, and there she stopped.

"And out in the darkness, among the trees, there was a light. It didn't look like no more than a patch of moonlight but, when I tried to find it, there was no moon, and the rest of the woods was dark.

"I turned to Grandma Lucy and I looked at her eyes." Louis stopped, and his own eyes flickered closed briefly, like a man recalling a pain that has been forgotten for a long time. "Her eyes were on fire. In her pupils, right in the deepest blackness at the center, I could see flames. I could see a man burning, like he was standing before us, sheltered by the trees. But when I looked into the darkness, there was only that patch of light, nothin' more.

"And Lucy, she said: 'You poor boy, you poor, poor boy,' and she started to cry. When she cried, it was like her grief put out the flames, because the burning man in her eyes started to fade until, in the end, he was gone, and the patch of light in the woods, that was gone too.

"She never spoke about what happened to nobody else, and she told me not to tell either. But I think my momma knew. Least, she knew that Lucy had some kind of gift that nobody else had. She could find the shades in the places nobody else could find, the places where nobody else would look. And the things that moved through the shadows, the folks passing on their way, she saw them too."

He stopped. "Is that what you see, Bird?" he asked softly. "The shades?"

I felt cold at my fingertips and in my toes. "I don't know," I replied.

"Because I recall what happened back in Louisiana, Bird," he continued. "You saw things back there that nobody else saw, I know that. I could sense it from you, and it scared you."

I shook my head slowly. I couldn't admit to what I didn't want to believe myself. I sometimes thought-maybe even hoped-that I had been unhinged by grief, that the loss of my wife and child had made me mentally ill, emotionally and psychologically disturbed, so troubled by guilt that I was haunted by images of the dead conjured up by my sick mind. Yet I had seen Jennifer and Susan first after meeting Tante Marie Aguillard in Louisiana, after she had told me what had happened to them when she could not possibly have known. The others came later, and they spoke to me in my dreams.

Now, as I saw Rita and Donald, my own Jennifer, felt my Susan's hand upon me, I half hoped that it was the fact that the anniversary was almost on me, that remembered grief had wormed its way into the recesses of my mind and had started to trouble me again. Or maybe it was a product of guilt, the guilt I felt at wanting Rachel Wolfe, the guilt I felt at wanting the chance to start over again.

There is a form of narcolepsy in which sufferers literally daydream, the dreams of REM sleep coming upon them in the course of their daily lives, so that the real and the imagined become one and the worlds of sleeping and waking collide. For a time, I thought I might have been a victim of something similar but I knew, deep down inside, that this was not the case. Two worlds came together for me, but they were not the worlds of sleeping and waking. No one slept in these worlds, and no one rested.

I told some of this to Louis, as he watched me quietly from a chair in the corner. I now felt a little ashamed at my outburst, at bringing him in here to listen to my ravings. "Maybe I just have bad dreams, that's all. But I'll be okay, Louis. I think I'll be okay. Thank you."

He looked me hard in the eyes, then stood and walked to the door. "Anytime." He opened the lock, then paused.

"I'm not the superstitious kind, Bird. Don't go makin' that mistake about me. But I know what happened that night. I could smell burning. I could smell the leaves on fire."

And with that he returned to his room.

Still the snow fell, the crystals turning to ice on my window. I watched them form, and thought of Cheryl Lansing's granddaughters, and Rita Ferris, and Gary Chute. I didn't want Ellen Cole to join them, or Billy Purdue either. I wanted to save those who remained.

In an effort to distract myself, I tried to read. I had just about finished a biography of the earl of Rochester, an English dandy who had boozed and whored his way to an early grave in the time of Charles II, writing some great poetry while he did so. I read the final pages lying on my bed beneath the yellow light from the wall lamp, warm air humming into the room. It seemed that in 1676, Rochester had been involved in the slaying of a constable and had gone into hiding, disguising himself as a quack physician named Dr. Alexander Bendo who sold medicines made out of clay, soot, soap and pieces of old wall to the suckers of London, none of whom ever guessed the true identity of the man they trusted with their most intimate secrets, and with the most private parts of their wives' bodies.

Old Saul Mann would have liked Rochester, I thought. He would have appreciated the element of disguise, the possibility of one man taking on the identity of another in order to protect himself, then conning the very people who were searching for him. I fell asleep to the soft patter of snow on glass and dreamed of Saul Mann, wrapped in a cloak of moons and stars, his cards spread on a table before him, waiting quietly for the great game to begin.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The snows that came that night were the first heavy falls of the winter. They fell on Dark Hollow and Beaver Cove, on Moosehead Lake and Rockwood and Tarratine. They sugarcoated Big Squaw Mountain and Mount Kineo, Baker Mountain and Elephant Mountain. They turned the Longfellows into a white scar that ran across the back of Piscataquis. Some of the smaller ponds froze, creating a layer of ice as thin and treacherous as a traitor's blade. The snow sat heavy on the evergreens and the ground below lay silent and undisturbed, save for the sound of branches giving way reluctantly beneath the weight they carried, the compressed flakes falling heavily to the drifts below as snow welcomed back snow. In my disordered, disturbed sleep, I felt the snow falling, sensed the change in the atmosphere as the world was shrouded in white and the night waited for the exquisite perfection of winter's work to be revealed in the slow-dawning light of day.

Quite early, I heard a snowplow moving down the main street of the town and the slow, careful progress of the first cars, their chains making a distinctive noise on the road. The room was so cold that beads of moisture turned the windows to shattered glass, miraculously restored by the sweep of a hand. I looked out on the world, at the tracks of the cars, at the first people walking on the streets, their hands deep in their pockets or by their sides, the bulk of their layers of sweaters and shirts, thermals and scarves, forcing them to move with a comical unfamiliarity, like children thrust into new boots.

I approached the bathroom with unease, but all was quiet and clean within. I showered, keeping the water as hot and powerful as I could stand, then dried myself quickly, my teeth already chattering as the temperature cooled the drops on my body. I pulled on jeans, boots, a thick cotton shirt and a dark wool sweater, added a coat and gloves, and stepped out into the crisp, cold morning air. Beneath my feet, the snow crunched and shifted, my progress marked by the impression of my footsteps behind me. I knocked twice, sharply, on the door of the next room down.

"Go away," said Angel's voice, the force of his words undiminished by the fact that they came through about four layers of blankets. I felt a moment of guilt at having woken them the night before, and tried to keep my mind off the conversation I had had with Louis.

"It's me," I replied.

"I know. Go away."

"I'm heading over to the diner. I'll see you there."

"I'll see you in hell first. It's cold outside."

"It's colder in there."

"I'll take my chances."

"Twenty minutes."

"Whatever. Just go away."

I was about to head for the diner when something about my car distracted me. From the window of my room it had seemed that its red lines were only partially obscured by the snow, for flashes of color showed through as if a hand had wiped away some of the snowfall. But that wasn't why the snow on my car was streaked with red.

There was blood on the windshield. There was blood also on the hood, and a long line of it ran from the front of the car, across the driver's door and the rear window, before pooling below the trunk. I walked through the snow, feeling it crunch beneath my feet. At the back of the car, beside the right rear wheel, lay a pile of mangled brown fur. The cat's mouth was open, and its tongue hung over its small white teeth. A red wound ran across its belly, but most of its blood seemed to be on my car.

To my left, I heard the office door slam and watched as the manager walked over to me. Her eyes were red from crying.

"I already called the police," she said. "I thought, when I saw her first, that you'd hit her with your car, but then I saw the blood and knew that couldn't be. Who'd do something like that to an animal? What kind of a person could take pleasure in hurting it so?" She began to cry again.

"I don't know," I said.

But I did know.

It took me three knocks to get Angel to the door. He stood shivering as I told him about the cat, Louis behind him listening silently.

"He's here," said Louis, finally.

"We don't know that for sure," I replied, but I knew he was right. Somewhere close by, Stritch was waiting.

I left them and walked across to the diner. It was ten after eight, and it was already almost full, warm air circulating with the smell of fresh coffee and bacon, voices raised at the counter and in the kitchen. For the first time, I noticed the Christmas decorations, the Coca-Cola Santa Claus, the tinsel and the stars. It would be my second season without them. I felt almost grateful for Billy Purdue, maybe even for Ellen Cole, for giving me something on which to concentrate my mind. All of the energy I might have poured into grieving, into anger and guilt, into fearing the anniversary, I now put into the search for these two people. But that gratitude was a brief, passing thing, an ugly betrayal of the people involved, and I quickly felt disgusted with myself for using someone else's sufferings to alleviate my own.

I took a booth and watched the people passing by. When the waitress came, I ordered only coffee. The sight of the cat and the thought of Stritch trailing us had ruined my appetite. I found myself closely examining the faces of the people in the diner, as if Stritch might somehow have mutated himself, or stolen their form. There were a couple of timber company men across from me, eating plates of ham and eggs and already talking about Gary Chute.

I listened and learned, for the world of the northern wilderness was on the verge of change. An area of almost one hundred thousand acres of forest, owned by a European paper company, was about to be harvested. The area had last been logged in the thirties and forties and now it had matured again. For the last decade, the company had been restoring roads and bridges in preparation for the big lumber trucks with their claw-shaped hydraulic lifts that would move into the wilderness, enabling the transportation of the pine, spruce and fir, the maple and birch, to begin. Chute, a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono, was one of those responsible for checking the roads, the tree growth and the likely boundaries for the logging.

The laws relating to forestry had changed since the last cutting. Then, the companies had cleared all of the land, causing silting that killed fish, displaced animals and led to serious erosion. Now they were obliged to cut in a checkerboard pattern, leaving half the forest for another twenty to thirty years so that the habitats could grow again. Already there were signs of early cuts, where the deer and moose would feed on the raspberries, willow and alders that sprang up to fight for the new light. And so the days of the undisturbed northern wilderness were now numbered, and soon men and machines would be making their way into its vastness. Gary Chute had been the first of many, and it struck me that his job must have taken him into areas where few people had set foot in decades.

Across the street, Lorna Jennings stepped from her green Nissan, wearing a white padded jacket buttoned and tied over black denims and black, calf-length boots. I wondered how long she had been there: there were no exhaust fumes around the car, and despite the fact that there was little traffic on the street, the tracks of her tires had been crossed by a number of other vehicles.

She stood at the curb, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and looked over at the diner. Her eyes moved along the windows until they came to where I sat, a mug of coffee in my hand. She seemed to consider me for a moment, then walked across the road, entered the diner and took a seat opposite me, unbuttoning her jacket as she sat. Beneath it, she wore a red, turtleneck sweater that tightly followed the sweep of her breasts. One or two people looked over at her as she sat, and words were exchanged.

"You're attracting attention," I said.

She blushed slightly. "The hell with them," she said. She wore a trace of pink lipstick and her hair hung loose to the nape of her neck, strands falling gently near her left eye like dark feathers from a bird's wing. "Some of them know you were out there last night, when they found the body. People have been asking why you're here."

She ordered, and a waitress brought her coffee and a bagel, with some thin slices of bacon on a separate plate, then gave each of us a sly look before stepping away. Lorna ate the bagel unbuttered, holding it in her left hand while her right picked up pieces of bacon that she nibbled at daintily.

"And what answer have they got?"

"They've heard that you're looking for a girl. Now they're trying to figure out if you had any reason to be interested in the disappearance of the timber company man." She stopped and took a sip of coffee. "Well, have you?"

"Is that you asking, or Rand?"

She grimaced. "You know that's a low blow," she said quietly. "Rand can ask his own questions."

I shrugged. "I don't think Chute's death was accidental, but that's for the ME to confirm and I don't see any connection between him and Ellen Cole." That wasn't completely true. They were connected by Dark Hollow and the dark line of a road drawn through the wilderness upon which Chute's death hung like a single red bead.

"But there have been other deaths as well, some of them tied up with a guy called Billy Purdue. He was one of Meade Payne's boys, once upon a time."

"You think he might be here?"

"I think he might try to get to Payne. There are people after him, bad people. He took money that didn't belong to him and now he's running scared. I think Meade Payne is one of the only people left whom he can trust."

"And where do you fit in?"

"I was doing some work for his wife. Ex-wife. Her name was Rita Ferris. She had a son."

Lorna's brow furrowed, then her eyes closed briefly and she nodded as she remembered the name. "The woman and child who died in Portland, that was them, wasn't it? And this Billy Purdue, he was her ex-husband?"

"Uh-huh, that's them."

"They say he killed his own family."

"They say wrong."

She was silent for a time, then said: "You seem very sure of that."

"He wasn't the kind."

"And do you know 'the kind?'" She was watching me carefully now. There were conflicting emotions in her eyes. I could sense them coming from her, just as I had sensed the snow falling softly in the night. There was curiosity, and pity, and something else, too, something that had lain dormant for many years, a feeling repressed and now gradually being released. It made me want to draw back from her. Some things were best left in the past.

"Yes, I do. I know the kind."

"You know, because you've killed them."

I waited a heartbeat before I answered. "Yes."

"Is that what you do now?"

I smiled emptily. "It seems to be part of it."

"Did they deserve to die?"

"They didn't deserve to live."

"That's not the same thing."

"I realize that."

"Rand knows all about you," she said, pushing away the remains of her food. "He spoke about you last night. Actually, he shouted about you, and I shouted back." She sipped her coffee. "I think he's afraid of you." She looked out on to the street, refusing to look directly at me and instead staring at my reflection in the glass. "I know what he did to you, in that men's room. I always knew. I'm sorry."

"I was young. I healed."

She turned back to me. "I didn't," she said. "But I couldn't leave him, not then. I still loved him, or thought I did. And I was young enough to believe that we had a chance together. We tried to have children. We thought it might make things better. I lost two, Bird, the last one only a year ago. I don't think I can carry to term. I was so useless, I couldn't even give him a child." She tensed her lips, and brushed her hair back from her forehead. There was a deadness about her eyes.

"Now I dream about walking away, but if I leave, I leave with nothing. That's the understanding we have, and maybe that's the way it'll have to be. He wants me to stay, or so he says, but I've learned a lot too these last few years. I've learned that men hunger. They hunger and they want, but after a while they stop feeling that hunger for what they have so they look elsewhere. I've seen the way he stares at other women, at the girls in their tight dresses when they come through town. He thinks that one of them will fill whatever he aches for, but they can't and then he comes back and says that he's sorry, that he knows now. But he only knows for as long as the guilt is sharp and alive, and then it passes and he starts to want again.

"Men are so stupid, so self-absorbed. Each of them thinks he's different, that this ache, this emptiness inside him, is unique to him and him alone, and that it somehow excuses whatever he does. But it doesn't, and then he blames the woman for somehow holding him back, as if, without her, he would be better than he is, more than he is. And the hunger grows and, sooner or later, it starts to feed on itself and the whole sorry mess falls apart like muscle and tendon separated from the bone."

"And don't women hunger too?" I asked.

"Oh, we hunger all right. And, most of the time, we starve. At least, we do around these parts. You hunger too, Charlie Parker. And you want, maybe more than most. You wanted me, once, because I was different, because I was older and because you shouldn't have been able to have me, but you could. You wanted me because I seemed unobtainable."

"I wanted you because I loved you."

Lorna smiled at the memory. "You'd have left me. Maybe not immediately-it might have taken years-but you'd have left me. As I got older, as the wrinkles started to appear, when I dried up inside and you found I couldn't have children, when some pretty thing came along and flashed you a smile and you started to think, 'I'm still young, I can do better than this.' Then you'd have gone, or strayed and come back with your tail between your legs and your dick in your hand. And I couldn't have taken that pain, Charlie, not from you. I'd have died. I'd have curled up and died inside."

"That shouldn't have been the reason that you stayed with him." I stopped myself, because no good could come of this. "Anyway, that was in the past. What's done is done."

She looked away, and there were furrows of hurt at her brow. "Were you ever unfaithful to your wife?" she asked.

"Only with a bottle."

She laughed softly, and looked up at me from beneath her hair. "I don't know whether that's better or worse than a woman. Worse, I think." The smile disappeared but a kind of tenderness stayed in her eyes. "You were full of pain, even then. How much more pain have you taken on since?"

"It wasn't of my choosing, but I was to blame for what led to it."

It seemed as if all of the other people around us had faded away, had become mere shadows, and the small circle of daylight around the table represented the boundary of the world, with darkness beyond in which pale figures drifted and flickered like the ghosts of stars.

"And what did you do?" And softly, so softly, I felt her hand touch my own.

"Like you say, I hurt people. And now I'm trying to make up for what I've done."

And in the gloom around us, the figures seemed to draw closer, but they were not the folks eating in a small-town diner, filled with gossip and the tiny tendernesses of a close-knit community. They were the figures of the lost and the damned, and there were those among them whom I had once called friend, lover, child.

Lorna stood and around us the diner came into focus again, and the specters of the past became the substance of the present. She looked down upon me and my hand burned gently where she had touched me.

"'What's done is done,'" she said, repeating my words. "Is that how you feel about us?"

It seemed that the lines between our past and our present had become blurred, somehow, and we were digging at old wounds that should have healed long before. I didn't reply, so she shrugged on her jacket, took five bucks from her purse and left it on the table. Then she turned and walked away, leaving me with the memory of her touch and the faint lingering of her scent, like a promise made but not yet fulfilled. She knew that Rand would hear that we had been seen together, that we had spoken at length in the diner. I think, even then, she was pushing him. She was pushing us both. I could almost hear the clock ticking, counting down the hours and minutes until their marriage finally self-destructed.

In front of her, the door opened and Angel and Louis stepped into the diner. They glanced at me, and I nodded back. Lorna caught the gesture as she left, and as she passed, she acknowledged them with a small smile. They sat opposite me as I watched her cross the street and head north in her white jacket, her head low like a swan.

Angel called for two coffees and whistled softly as he waited for them to arrive. He was whistling "The Way We Were."

After they had eaten breakfast, I went over with them in detail the discovery of Chute's body the night before and we divided out what we were going to do that day. Louis would head up to the lake and try to find a vantage point from which to continue watching the Payne house, since the previous night's scouting party had proved unproductive. Before heading out, he would drop Angel in Greenville, where we had arranged for him to rent an ancient Plymouth at a gas station. From Greenville, he would head out to Rockwood, Seboomook, Pittston Farm and Jackman, West Forks and Bingham, all of the towns to the west and southwest of Moosehead Lake. I would take Monson, Abbot Village, Guilford and Dover-Foxcroft to the south and southeast. In each town, we would show photographs of Ellen Cole, checking stores and motels, coffee shops and diners, bars and tourist information offices. Wherever possible, we would talk to local law enforcement and the old-timers who occupied their favorite booths in the bars and diners, the ones who would be sure to notice strangers in town. It would be tiring, frustrating work, but it had to be done.

I noticed Louis was edgy as we spoke, his eyes moving swiftly around the diner and out onto the street beyond.

"He won't come at us in daylight," I said.

"Could have taken us last night," he replied.

"But he didn't."

"He wants us to know he's here. He likes the fear."

We said nothing more about him.

Before heading down to my assigned towns, I decided to follow the route Ellen and her boyfriend might have taken on the day they left town. On the way, I stopped off at a service station and got a mechanic to fit the Mustang with chains. I wasn't sure how bad the roads might get as I headed north.

I kept glancing in my rearview mirror as I drove, conscious now that Stritch might be somewhere in the area, but no cars followed me and I passed no other vehicle on the road. A couple of miles outside the town was a sign for the scenic ridge. The road up to it was steep and the Mustang struggled a little on some of the bends. Two minor roads snaked east and west at one point but I stuck with the main route until it came to a small parking lot that looked out over an expanse of hill and mountain, with Ragged Lake shimmering to the west and Baxter State Park and Katahdin to the northeast. The parking lot marked the end of the public access road. After that, the roads were for the use of the timber company, and would have played hell with the shocks of most cars. The land was startling in its whiteness, cold and beautiful. I could see why the woman at the motel had sent them up here, could imagine how wonderful the lake looked when it was bathed in gold.

I came back down to the intersection, where the minor road to the east was thick with snow. It went on for about a mile before ending in fallen trees and thick scrub. The land at either side was heavily wooded, the trees dark against the snow. I drove back and took the western road, which gradually veered northwest to skirt the edge of a pond. The pond was maybe a mile long and half a mile wide, its banks surrounded by skeletal beech and thick pine. By its western bank, a small trail wended its way through the trees. I left the car and followed it on foot, the ends of my jeans quickly becoming heavy and wet.

I had walked for maybe ten minutes when I smelled smoke and heard a dog barking. I left the trail and climbed an incline through the trees, which revealed, at its peak, a small house, maybe no more than two rooms wide. It had an overhanging roof and a narrow porch and square, four-pane windows from which old paint flaked. The house itself might have been white once but most of the paint had now disappeared, leaving only patches below the eaves and on the window frames. Three or four large rubber garbage cans, the kind used for recycling by businesses, stood to one side of the house. On the other was an old yellow Ford truck. The rusting hulk of a blue Oldsmobile, its tires long gone, its windows thick with dirt, stood about five feet from the Ford. I caught some movement inside, and then a small black mongrel dog, its tail docked and its teeth bared, sprang through the open window from the backseat and moved quickly toward me. It stopped two or three feet from me and barked loudly.

The door of the house opened and an old man with a thin beard appeared. He wore blue overalls and a long, red raincoat. His hair was straggly and matted and his hands were almost black with dirt. I could see the hands clearly, because they were clutching a Remington A-70 pump-action shotgun, which was pointing in my direction. When the dog saw the old man emerge, its barking increased in volume and ferocity and its stumpy tail wagged frenziedly from side to side.

"What do you want here?" said the old man, in a voice that was slightly slurred. One side of his mouth remained immobile when he talked, and I figured he had some kind of nerve or muscle damage to his face.

"I'm looking for someone, a young woman who may have been around here a couple of days back."

The old man almost grinned, exposing a mouthful of yellow-stained teeth, broken, on both the top and bottom rows, by gaps. "Don't get young women around here no more," he said, the gun not moving from me. "Don't got the looks."

"She was blonde, about five-five. Her name was Ellen Cole."

"Didn't see 'em," said the old man, and he waved the gun at me. "Now get off my property."

I didn't move. Beside me, the dog lashed out and nipped at the end of my pants. I was tempted to kick it, but I figured it would latch on to my leg in an instant. I didn't take my eyes from the old man as I considered what he had just said.

"What do you mean 'them'? I only mentioned the girl."

The old man's eyes narrowed as he realized his mistake. He jacked a shell into the shotgun, driving the small dog wild. It gripped the wet end of my jeans tightly and tugged with its sharp white teeth.

"I mean it, mister," he said. "You just take your leave and don't come back, else I'll shoot you now and take my chances with the law." He whistled to the dog. "Come away now, boy, I don't want you gettin' hurt." The dog instantly turned and ran back to the Oldsmobile, its powerful back legs propelling it through the open window. It watched me from the front seat, still barking.

"Don't make me come back, old man," I said quietly.

"I didn't make you come here to begin with, and I sure ain't makin' you come back. I got nothing to say to you. Now I'm tellin' you for the last time: get off my land."

I shrugged, turned and walked away. There was nothing more to be done, not without the risk of getting my head shot off. I looked back once to find him still standing on the porch, the shotgun in his hands. I had other people to talk to, but I figured I'd be back out to see that old man again.

That was my first mistake.

CHAPTER TWENTY

After I left the old man I drove south. His words bothered me. It could have been nothing, I supposed; after all, he might have seen Ricky and Ellen together in town, and the news that someone was concerned that they were missing would have spread pretty quickly, even as far as the boondocks where the old man lived. If it turned out there was more to it than that then I knew where to find him, if I needed to.

I made my tour of the towns, Guilford and Dover-Foxcroft taking more time than the others, but I came up with nothing. I stopped at a pay phone to call Dave Martel in Greenville and he agreed to meet me at St. Martha's in order to pave the way with Dr. Ryley, the director. I wanted to talk to him about Emily Watts.

And Caleb Kyle.

"I hear you've been asking about the Cole girl," he said, as I prepared to hang up.

I paused. I hadn't been in contact with him since I arrived back in Dark Hollow. He seemed to detect my puzzlement.

"Hey, it's a small place. News gets around. I had a call from New York early this morning, asking about her."

"Who was it?"

"It was her father," continued Martel. "He's on his way back up here. Seems he got into a shouting match with Rand Jennings, and Jennings told him to keep away from Dark Hollow if he wanted to help his daughter. Cole called me to see if I could tell him anything that Jennings wouldn't. Probably called the county sheriff and CID as well." CID was the Criminal Investigations Division of the state police.

I sighed. Giving Walter Cole an ultimatum was like telling the rain to fall up instead of down.

"He say when he was going to arrive?"

"Tomorrow, I guess. I think he's going to stay here, instead of in the Hollow. You want me to give you a call when he gets here?"

"No," I said. "I'll find out soon enough." I told him a little about the background to the case, and how I had become involved at Lee's instigation, not Walter's. Martel gave a small laugh.

"Hear you were out there when they found Gary Chute as well. You sure lead a complicated life."

"You hear anything more about it?"

"Daryl brought the wardens out to where he found Chute-hell of a trip, from what I hear-and the truck's being brought back for examination, soon as they can clear a road through the snow. The body's on its way to Augusta. According to one of the part-timers who was down here this morning, Jennings seemed to think there was some bruising to the body, like he'd been beaten before he died. They're going to question the wife, see if she might have run out of patience with him and sent someone to take care of him."

"Pretty lame."

"Pretty," he agreed. "I'll see you at the home."

Martel's car was already pulled up outside the main entrance to St. Martha's when I arrived, and he and Dr. Ryley were waiting for me by the reception desk.

Dr. Ryley was a middle-aged man with good teeth, a well-cut suit and the oily manner of a casket salesman. His hand was soft and moist when I shook it. I had to resist the temptation to dry my palm on my jeans when he had detached himself from me. It wasn't hard to see why Emily Watts had taken a shot at him.

He told us how much he regretted what had happened and advised us on the new security measures that had been introduced as a result, which seemed to consist of nothing more than locking the doors and hiding anything that could be used to knock out the guards. After some to-ing and fro-ing with Martel, he agreed to let me speak to Mrs. Schneider, the woman who occupied the room next to that of the late Emily Watts. Martel decided to wait in the lobby, in case we spooked the old lady by arriving as a team. He sat, drew a second chair in front of him with the tip of his shoe, then put his feet up and seemed to fall asleep.

Mrs. Erica Schneider was a German Jew who fled to America with her husband in 1938. He was a jeweler and brought enough gems with him to enable him to set up in business in Bangor. They had been comfortable too, she told me, at least until he died and the bills that he had been hiding from her for the best part of five years resurfaced. She was forced to sell their house and most of her possessions, then fell ill from stress. Her children had put her in the home, arguing that most of them were within visiting distance anyway, although this didn't mean that any of them actually bothered to visit her, she said. She spent most of her time watching TV or reading. When it was warm enough, she walked in the grounds.

I sat beside her in her small, neat room with its carefully made bed, its single closet filled with old, dark dresses, its dressing table covered with a limited selection of cosmetics that the old woman still carefully applied each morning, as she turned to me and said: "I hope I die soon. I want to leave this place."

I didn't reply. After all, what could I say? Instead, I said: "Mrs. Schneider, I'll try to keep what's said here today between us, but I need to know something: did you call a man named Willeford in Portland and talk to him about Emily Watts?"

She said nothing. I thought for a moment that she might start to cry, because she looked away and seemed to be having trouble with her eyes. I spoke again. "Mrs. Schneider, I really need you to help me. Some people have been killed, and a young girl is missing, and I think that maybe these things are connected to Miss Emily in some way. If there's anything at all you can tell me, anything that might assist me in bringing this thing to a close, I would appreciate it, I truly would."

She gripped and twisted the cord of her dressing gown in her hands, wincing. "Yes," she replied, at last. "I thought it might help her." The cord drew tighter and there was fear in her voice, as if the rope was tightening not around her hands, but around her neck. "She was so sad."

"Why, Mrs. Schneider? Why was she sad?"

The hands still worked at the cord as she replied. "One night, perhaps a year ago, I found her crying. I came to her, and I held her, and then she spoke to me. She told me that it was her child's birthday-a boy, she said, but she had not kept him, because she was afraid."

"Afraid of what, Mrs. Schneider?"

"Afraid of the man who fathered the child," she said. She swallowed and looked to the window. "What harm can it do to talk of these things now?" she whispered softly, more to herself than to me, then turned her face to mine. "She told me that, when she was young, her father… Her father was a very bad man, Mr Parker. He beat her and forced her to do things, you understand? Sex, ja? Even when she was older, he would not let her leave him, because he wanted her near him."

I nodded, but stayed silent as the words tumbled out of her like rats from a sack.

"Then another man came to her town, and this man made love to her, and took her to his bed. She did not tell him about the sex, but, in the end, she told him about the beatings. And this man, he found her father in a bar and he beat him, and told him that he must never touch his daughter again." She emphasized each word with a wag of her finger, carefully spacing each syllable for maximum emphasis. "He told her father that if anything happened to his daughter, he would kill him. And because of this, Miss Emily fell in love with this man.

"But there was something wrong with him, Mr. Parker, in here-" She touched her head. "-and in here." Her finger moved to her heart. "She did not know where he lived, or where he came from. He found her when he wanted her. He went missing for days, sometimes weeks. He stank of wood and sap and once, when he came back to her, there was blood on his clothes and under his nails. He told her that he hit a deer in his truck. Another time, he told her that he was hunting. Two different reasons he gave, and she started to feel afraid.

"That was when the young girls began to disappear, Mr. Parker: two girls. And once, when she was with him, she smelled something on him, the smell of another woman. His neck, it was scratched, torn, as if by a hand. They argued, and he told her that she was imagining things, that he had cut himself on a branch.

"But she knew it was him, Mr. Parker. She knew it was him who was taking the girls, but she could not tell why. And now, now she was pregnant by him, and he knew this. She had been so scared to tell him, but when he learned about it he was so pleased. He wanted a son, Mr. Parker. This he told her: 'I want a son.'

"But she would not hand over a child to such a man, she told me. She grew more and more afraid. And he wanted the child, Mr. Parker, he wanted it so badly. Always, always he was asking her about it, warning her against doing anything that might damage it. But there was no love in him or, if there was, it was a strange love, a bad love. She knew that he would take the child, if he could, and she would never see it again. She knew he was a bad man, worse even than her father.

"One night, when she was with him, in his truck by her father's house, she told him that she was in pain. In the toilet outside, she had a newspaper, and in the newspaper was-" She struggled for the words. "Guts, blood, waste. Again, you understand? And she cried and smeared the blood on herself and put it in the bowl and called for him and told him, told him that she had lost his baby."

Mrs. Schneider stopped again, and took a blanket from her bed, which she wrapped around her shoulders to ward off the cold. "When she told him this," she continued, "she thought that he would kill her. He howled, Mr. Parker, like an animal, and he raised her by the hair, and he hit her, again and again and again. He called her 'weak' and 'worthless.' He told her that she had killed his child. Then he turned and walked away and she heard him in the woodshed, moving among the tools her father kept there. And when she heard the sound of the blade, she ran away from the house and into the woods. But he followed her, and she could hear him coming through the trees. She stayed quiet, not even breathing, and he went past her, and he did not come back again, not ever.

"Later, they found the girls hanging from the tree, and she knew that he had left them there. But she never saw him again and she went to the sisters here, at St. Martha's, and I think that she told them why she was afraid. They sheltered her until she had the boy, and then they took the child away from her. After that, she was never the same and she came back here, after many years, and the sisters, they took care of her. When the home was sold, she used what little money she had to stay here. It is not an expensive place, this, Mr. Parker. This you can see." She waved her hand at the dull little room. Her skin was thin as paper. Sunlight dripped like honey through her fingers.

"Mrs. Schneider, did Miss Emily tell you the name of the man, the man who fathered her child?"

"I do not know," she replied.

I sighed softly but, as I did so, I realized that I had not given her time to finish, that she had more to say.

"I know only his first name," she continued. She moved her hand gently in the air before me, as if conjuring up the name from the past.

"He was called Caleb."

Snow falling, inside and out; a blizzard of memories. Young girls turning in the breeze, my grandfather watching them, rage and grief welling up inside him, the smell of their decay wrapped around him like a rotting cloak. He looked at them, a father and husband himself, and he thought of all the young men that they would not kiss, the lovers whose breath they would not feel against their cheeks in the dead of night and whom they would never comfort with the warmth of their bodies. He thought of the children they would never have, the potential within them for the creation of new life now stilled forever, the gaping holes at their bellies where their wombs had been torn apart inside them. Within each one, there had existed possibilities beyond imagining. With their deaths, an infinite number of existences had come to an end, potential universes lost forever, and the world shrank a little at their passing.

I stood and walked to the window. The snowfall made the grounds look less forbidding, the trees less bare, but it was all an illusion. Things are what they are, and changes in nature can only hide their true essence for a time. And I thought of Caleb, moving into the comforting darkness of the forest as he raged at the death of his unborn child, betrayed by the too-thin, too-weak body of the woman he had protected and then inseminated. He took at least three after her in rapid succession, fueling his fury until it was spent, then hung them with his earlier victims like trimmings on a tree to be found by a man who was not like him, a man who was so far removed from him that he felt the deaths of each of these young women as a personal loss. For Caleb's was a world in which things mutated into their opposites: creation into destruction, love into hate, life into death.

Five deaths, but six girls missing; one remained unaccounted for. In my grandfather's file, her name had been marked on a sheaf of pages, upon which her movements on the day she disappeared had been minutely reconstructed. A picture of her was stapled to the corner of the bundle: plump, homely Judith Mundy, a hardness to her passed down by generations of people who had worked thin, unforgiving soil to create a foothold and scratch a living from this land. Judith Mundy, lost and now forgotten, except by the parents who would always feel her absence like an abyss into which they shouted her name without even an echo in reply.

"Why would this man do such a thing to these girls?" I heard Mrs. Schneider ask, but I had no answer for her. I had stared into the faces of people who had killed with impunity for decades, and still I did not know the reasons for what they did. I felt a pang of regret at the loss of Walter Cole as a colleague. This was what Walter could do: he could look inside himself and, secure in his sense of his own innate rightness, he could create an image of that which was not right, a tiny tumor of viciousness and ill will, like the first cell colonized by a cancer from which he could construct the progress of the entire disease. He was like a mathematician who, when faced with a simple square on a page, plots its progress into other dimensions, other spheres of being beyond the plane of its current existence, while remaining ultimately detached from the problem at hand.

This was his strength and also, I thought, his weakness. Ultimately, he did not look deeply enough because he was afraid of what he might find within himself: his own capacity for evil. He resisted the impulse to understand himself fully that he might understand others better. To understand is to come to terms with one's potential for evil as well as good, and I did not think that Walter Cole wanted to believe himself capable, at whatever level, of doing deeds of great wrong. When I had performed acts that he found morally unacceptable, when I had hunted down those who had done evil and, by doing so, had done evil myself, Walter had cut me adrift, even though he had used me to find those individuals and knew what I would do when I found them. That was why we were no longer friends: I acknowledged my culpability, the deep flaws within myself-the pain, the hurt, the anger, the desire for revenge-and all of these things I took and used. Maybe I killed a little of myself each time I did so; maybe that was the price that had to be paid. But Walter was a good man and, like many good men, his flaw was that he believed himself to be a better one.

Mrs. Schneider spoke again. "It was the mother, I think," she said, softly.

I leaned against the windowpane and waited for her to continue.

"Once, when this man, this 'Caleb,' was drunk, he told Miss Emily of his mother. She was a hard woman, Mr. Parker. The father, he had left them out of fear of her. She beat her boy, beat him with sticks and chains, and she did worse things too. And later, when she was done, she would hurt him. She would drag him by the legs, or the hair, and kick him until he coughed blood. She chained him outside, like a dog, naked, in rain, and snow. All this, he told Miss Emily."

"Did he tell her where all this took place?"

She shook her head. "Maybe south. I don't know. I think…"

I didn't interrupt as her brow furrowed and the fingers of her right hand danced in the air before me.

"Medina," she said at last, her eyes ablaze in triumph. "He said something to Miss Emily about a Medina."

I noted down the name. "And what happened to his mother?"

Mrs. Schneider twisted in her chair to look at me. "He killed her," she said simply.

Behind me, the door opened as a nurse brought in a pot of coffee and two cups, along with a tray of cookies, presumably at the instigation of Dr. Ryley. Mrs. Schneider looked a little surprised, then took on the role of hostess, pouring my coffee, offering sugar, cream. She pressed cookies on me, which I refused, since I figured she might be grateful for them later. I was right. She took one for herself, carefully put the rest in two napkins from the tray and placed them in the bottom drawer of her dressing table. Then, as the snow clouds gathered once again in the skies above and the afternoon grew dark, she told me more about Emily Watts.

"She was not a woman who talked very much, Mr. Parker, only that one time," she said in her carefully pronounced English, which still carried traces of her roots in her w's-"vas," "voman"-and in some of her vowels. "She said 'hello,' or 'good-night,' or spoke of the weather, but no more. She never again talked of the boy. The others here, if you ask them, even if you step into their rooms for a moment, they will talk of their children, their grandchildren, their husbands, their wives." She smiled. "Just as I did to you, Mr. Parker."

I was about to say something, to tell her that I didn't mind, that it was interesting, the least I could do, something half-meant and well intended, when she raised a hand to stop me. "Don't even begin to tell me that you enjoyed it. I am not a young girl who needs to be humored." The smile remained as she said it. There was something in her, some relic of old beauty, that told me that in her youth many men had humored her, and had been glad to do so.

"So she did not talk of such things," she went on. "There were no photographs in her room, no pictures, and since I have been here, since 1992, all she has ever said to me is, 'Hello, Mrs. Schneider,'

'Gutt Morning, Mrs. Schneider,'

'Is a fine day, Mrs. Schneider.' That was all, nothing else, except for that one time, and I think she was ashamed of it later, or perhaps afraid. She had no visitors, and never spoke of it again, until the young man came."

I leaned forward, and she imitated the movement, so that we were only inches apart. "He came some days after I made the call to Mr. Willeford, after I saw his notice in the newspaper. We heard shouting from downstairs and then the sound of running. A young man, a big man, with large, wild eyes, came past my door and burst into Miss Emily's room. Well, I was afraid for her, and for me, but I took my stick-"She pointed to a walking stick with a head carved into the shape of a bird and a metal tip at the end."-and I followed him.

"When I came to the room, Miss Emily was sitting at her window, just as I am now, but her hands were like, ach, like this." Mrs. Schneider put her hands flat on her cheeks and opened her mouth wide in an expression of shock. "And the young man, he looked at her and he said only one word. He said to her: 'Momma?' Like that, like a question. But she only shook her head and said, 'No, no, no,' again and again. The boy, he reached out for her, but already she was moving away from him, back, back, until she was in the corner of her room, down on the floor.

"Then I heard from behind me the sound of the nurses. They brought with them the fat guard, the one Miss Emily hit on the night she ran off, and I was bundled out of the room while they took the boy away. I watched him as they took him, Mr. Parker, and his face… Oh, his face was like he had seen someone die, someone he loved. He cried and called out again, 'Momma, Momma,' but she did not reply.

"The police arrived, and they took the boy away. A nurse, she came to Miss Emily and she asked her if it was true, what the boy had said. And Miss Emily told her, 'No,' that she does not know what he is talking about, that she has no son, no child.

"But that night, I heard her crying for so long that I thought she would never stop. I went to her and held her. I told her that it was okay, that she was safe, but she said only one thing."

She paused and I saw that her hands were shaking. I reached out and stilled them and she moved her right hand, slipping it over mine and holding it tightly, her eyes closed. And I think, for a moment, I became her son, her child, one of those who never visited and who had left her to die in the cold north as surely as if they had hauled her into the forests of Piscataquis or Aroostook and abandoned her there. Her eyes reopened and she released my hand. Her own hands were still once again when she did so.

"Mrs. Schneider," I said gently. "What did she say?"

"She said: 'Now he will kill me.'"

"Who did she mean? Billy, the young man who came to her?" But I think I already knew the real answer.

Mrs. Schneider shook her head. "No, the other. The one she was always afraid would find her, and nobody could help her, or save her from him."

In her words, I heard the echo of other words, words heard in a dream on a dark night, words whispered to me by someone who no longer had a voice.

"It was the one who came later," concluded the old woman. "He learned of what had happened, and he came."

I waited. Something brushed softly against the window and I watched a snowflake drift down the pane, melting as it went. "It was the night before she ran away. It was cold that night. I remember, I had to ask for an extra blanket, it was so cold. When I woke, it was dark, black, with no moon. And I heard a noise, a scraping from outside.

"I climbed from my bed and the floor was so chilly that I-ah!-I gasped. I went to the window and drew the curtain a little, but I could see nothing. Then the sound came again, and I looked straight down and…"

She was terrified. I could feel it coming off her in waves, a deep abiding fear that had shaken her to her core.

"There was a man, Mr. Parker, and he was climbing up the pipe, hand over hand. His head was down, and turned away from me, so I could not see him. And, anyway, it was so dark that he was only a shadow. But the shadow reached the window of Miss Emily's room and I could see him pushing at it with one hand, trying to force it up. I heard Miss Emily scream, and I screamed too, and ran into the hallway calling for a nurse. And all the time, I can hear Miss Emily screaming and screaming. But when they came, the man was gone and they could find no trace of him in the grounds."

"What kind of man was he, Mrs. Schneider? Tall? Short? Big? Small?"

"I told you: it was dark. I could not see clearly." She shook her head in distress as she tried to remember.

"Could it have been Billy?"

"No." She was definite about that. "It was the wrong shape. It was not as big as him." She lifted her hands in imitation of Billy's large shoulders. "When I told Dr. Ryley about the man, I think he believed that I was imagining things, that we were two old women frightening each other. But we were not. Mr. Parker, I could not see this man clearly, but I could feel him. He was no thief come to steal from old women. He wanted something else. He wanted to hurt Miss Emily, to punish her for something she did long ago. The boy Billy, the boy who called her 'Momma,' he started something by coming here. Perhaps, Mr. Parker, I started it, by calling this man Willeford. Perhaps it is all my fault."

"No, Mrs. Schneider," I said. "Whatever happened to cause this started a long time ago."

She looked at me then with a kind of tenderness before she reached out and laid a hand softly on my knee to emphasize what she said next. "She was afraid, Mr. Parker," she whispered. "She was so afraid that she wanted to die."

I left her, alone with her memories and her guilt. Winter, the thief of daylight, caused lights to twinkle in the distance as Martel and I walked to our cars.

"Did you learn anything?" he asked.

I didn't reply immediately, but thought back on all that I had learned. In my mind, I saw newspaper reports of the disturbance at the home and heard the gossip of locals as they spoke of the man who had come looking for his lost mother. And their whispers traveled north on the wind, into the forest, into the wilderness.

"Could a man survive out there?" I asked Martel at last.

Martel's brow furrowed. "Depends on how long he's out there, what kind of clothing and supplies-"

"That's not what I mean," I interrupted. "Could he survive for a long time, for years, maybe?"

Martel thought for a moment. When he spoke, he didn't mock the question but answered it seriously, and he rose in my estimation for doing so. "I don't see why not. People have been surviving out there since the country was settled. There are still the remains of farmhouses to prove it. It wouldn't be an easy existence, and I guess he'd have to go back to civilization once in a while, but it could be done."

"And no one would disturb him out there?"

"Most of it hasn't been touched in the best part of fifty years. Go far enough into the forest and not even hunters or wardens are likely to bother you. You think someone went in there?"

"Yes, I do." I shook his hand and opened the door of the Mustang. "Trouble is, I think he's come out again."

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

I had the scent of him then, had begun to feel the knowledge of him creep over me, but I needed more if I was to understand him, if I was to hunt him down before he found Billy Purdue, before he killed again. I was so close to making the connection: it hung just beyond my reach like the name of a half-remembered melody. I needed someone who could take my own half-formed suspicions and mold them into a coherent whole, and I knew of only one person whom I trusted that much.

I needed to talk to Rachel Wolfe.

I drove back to Dark Hollow, packed an overnight bag and placed the file on Caleb Kyle at the top. Louis and Angel returned in their separate cars as I was leaving. I explained what I was doing then started to drive to Bangor to catch the flight to Boston.

I was just outside Guilford when, three cars ahead of me, I spotted a yellow Ford truck, its exhaust belching dirty fumes onto the road. I accelerated past it, glancing idly at the driver as I did so. In the cab sat the old man who had threatened me with his shotgun. I stayed ahead of him for a time, then pulled into a gas station at Dover-Foxcroft to let him pass. I stayed four or five cars behind him all the way to Orono, where he drove into the parking lot of a run-down mall and stopped outside a store called "Stuckey Trading." I checked my watch. If I delayed any longer, I'd miss my flight. I watched the old man as he removed a couple of black sacks from the bed of his truck and headed into the store, then I slapped the steering wheel once in frustration and accelerated toward Bangor and the airport.

I knew that Rachel Wolfe was holding tutorials at Harvard while the college funded research she was conducting into the link between abnormal brain structures and criminal behavior. She no longer engaged in private practice and, as far as I knew, was no longer assisting with criminal profiling.

Rachel had acted as an unofficial adviser on a number of cases for the NYPD, including the Traveling Man killings. That was how I met her, how we became lovers, and it was what eventually tore us apart. Rachel, whose policeman brother had died at the hands of a disturbed gunman, believed that by exploring the criminal mind she could prevent the same thing happening to others. But the Traveling Man's mind had been unlike any other, and the hunt for him had almost cost Rachel her life. She had made it known that she did not wish to see me, and until recently, I had respected that wish. I did not want to cause her any more pain, yet now I felt that I had nowhere else to turn.

But there was more to it than that, I knew. Twice in the last three months I had gone to Boston with the intention of finding her, or trying to reestablish what we had lost, but each time I had turned back without talking to her. Leaving my card on that last visit, with Louis waiting downstairs in the lobby, was as close as I had come to contacting her. Perhaps, in some way, Caleb Kyle would provide a bridge between us, a professional conduit that might also allow the personal to run alongside it. I think, also, that I was afraid, fearful of facing the winter on my own.

On the flight, I added what I had learned from Mrs. Schneider to my grandfather's file, writing carefully in block capitals. I scanned the photos as I went, noting the details of these young women now long dead, their lives more carefully documented by my grandfather after they were gone than by anyone while they were alive. In many ways, he knew them and cared about them as much as their own parents. In some cases, he cared about them more. He outlived his own wife by almost twenty years, and outlived his daughter by twelve. He had lived to mourn a lot of women, I thought.

I remembered something he said to me, after I became a policeman. I sat beside him in the Scarborough house, matching coffee mugs on the table, and watched as he examined my shield, the light reflecting on his spectacles as he twisted and turned it in his hand. Outside, the sun shone, but the house was cool and dark.

"It's a strange vocation," he said at last. "These rapists, and murderers, thieves and drug peddlers, we need them to exist. Without them, we'd have no purpose. They give our professional lives meaning.

"And that's the danger, Charlie. Because, somewhere down the line, you'll meet one who threatens to cross over, one you can't leave behind when you take off your badge at the end of the day. You have to fight it, or else your friends, your family, they all become tainted by his shadow. A man like that, he makes you his creature. Your life becomes an extension of his life, and if you don't find him, if you don't bring him to an end, he'll haunt you for the rest of your days. You understand me, Charlie?"

I understood, or thought I did. Even then, as he came to the end of his life, he was still tainted by his contact with Caleb Kyle. He hoped that it would never happen to me, but it did. It happened with the Traveling Man and, now, it was happening again. I had inherited the monkey on my grandfather's back, his ghost, his demon.

After I made my additions, I went through the file again, trying to feel my way into my grandfather's mind and, through his efforts, into the mind of Caleb Kyle. At the end of the file was a folded sheet of newspaper. It was a page from the Maine Sunday Telegram dating from 1977, twelve years after the man my grandfather knew as Caleb Kyle had blinked out of existence. On the page was a photograph taken in Greenville of a representative of the Scott Paper Company, which owned most of the forest north of Greenville, presenting the steamboat Katahdin to the Moosehead Marine Museum for restoration. In the background people grinned and waved, but farther back a figure had been caught, his face turned to the camera, a box containing what might have been supplies held in his arms. Even from a distance, he appeared tall and wiry, the arms holding the boxes long and thin, the legs slim but strong. The face was nothing more than a blur, ringed carefully in red felt-tip.

But my grandfather had enlarged it, then enlarged it again, and again, and again, each enlargement placed behind the preceding picture. And from the page a face grew, bigger and bigger until it took on the size and dimensions of a skull, the ink turning the eyes into dark pits, the face a construct of tiny black and white dots. The man in the picture had become a specter, his features indistinguishable, unrecognizable to anyone except my grandfather. For my grandfather had sat beside him in that bar, had smelled him, had listened as this man directed him to a tree where dead girls twisted in the breeze.

This, my grandfather believed, was Caleb Kyle.

At the airport, I called the psychology department at Harvard, gave them my ID number and asked them if Rachel Wolfe was due to teach that day. I was informed that Ms. Wolfe was due to give a tutorial to psychology students at 6 P.M. It was now 5:15 P.M. If I missed Rachel on campus, or if she canceled her tutorial, there were people who could get a residential address for me but it would take time, and time, I was rapidly coming to realize, was something I just didn't have. I climbed into a cab and my fingers beat an impatient tattoo on the window all the way to Harvard Square. A UC election banner hung outside the Grafton pub and a lot of the kids on the streets wore student election badges on their bags and coats as I headed across the campus to the junction of Quincy and Kirkland. I sat in the shadow of the Church of the New Jerusalem, across from the William James Hall, and waited.

At 5:55 P.M. a figure dressed in a black wool overcoat, anklelength boots and black trousers, her red hair tied back with a black and white ribbon, walked down Quincy and entered the James Hall. Even at a distance, Rachel still looked beautiful and I caught one or two male students sneaking looks at her as she passed. I kept a short distance behind her as I followed her into the entrance hall and watched her take the stairs to seminar room 6 on the lower ground floor, just to make sure that she wasn't going to cancel and leave. I followed her as she entered the seminar room and closed the door, then I took a seat in a plastic chair with a view of the door and waited.

After an hour, the tutorial ended and students began to stream out, notebooks clutched to their chests or poking out of their bags. I moved aside to let the last student leave, then stepped into a small classroom dominated by a single big table, with chairs arranged around it and against the walls. At the head of the table, beneath a blackboard, sat Rachel Wolfe. She was dressed in a dark green sweater with a man's white shirt beneath it, the collar turned up around her neck. As always, she wore some light makeup, carefully applied, and a dark red lipstick.

She looked up expectantly, a half-smile on her face that froze as soon as she saw me. I closed the door gently behind me and took the first vacant seat at the table, which was just about as far away from her as I could get.

"Hi," I said.

She didn't speak for a moment before very deliberately putting her pens and notes away in a leather attaché case. Then she stood and started to shrug on her coat. "I asked that you not try to contact me," she said, as she struggled to find her left sleeve. I stood and walked over to her, and held the sleeve out so she could get her arm in. I felt kind of sleazy intruding on her space that way, but I also felt a momentary twinge of resentment: Rachel had not been the only one hurt in Louisiana in the hunt for the Traveling Man. The resentment quickly passed, to be replaced by guilt as I recalled the feel of her in my arms, her body racked by sobs after she was forced to kill a man in the Metairie cemetery. Once again, I saw her raising the gun, her finger tightening on the trigger, fire leaping from the muzzle as the gun bucked in her hands. Some deep, unquenchable instinct for survival had kicked in on that awful summer day, fueling her actions. I think that now, when she looked at me, she recalled what she had done, and she felt a fear of what I represented: that capacity for violence that had briefly exploded into existence within her and whose embers still glowed redly in her dark places.

"Don't worry," I said, lying a little. "I'm here for professional reasons, not personal ones."

"Then I certainly don't want to hear about it." She turned, her case beneath her arm. "Excuse me, I have work to do."

I put out a hand to touch her arm, and she glared at me. I withdrew it. "Rachel, please. I need your help."

"Please, let me leave. You're blocking my way."

I moved back and she shuffled past me, her head down. She had the door open when I spoke again. "Rachel, listen to me, just for a moment. If not for me, then for Walter Cole."

She stopped at the door, but didn't turn around. "What about Walter?"

"His daughter Ellen is missing. I'm not sure, but it may have something to do with a case I'm working on. It may also be connected somehow to Thani Pho, the student who was killed last week."

Rachel paused, then took a deep breath, closed the door and sat down in the seat I had previously occupied. Just to keep things equal, I sat down in her seat.

"You have two minutes," she said.

"I need you to read a file, and give me an opinion on it."

"I don't do that anymore."

"I hear you're working on a study about the connection between violent crime and brain disorders, something involving brain scans."

I knew a little more than that. Rachel was involved in research into dysfunctions in two areas of the brain, the amygdala and the frontal lobe. As I understood it from reading a copy of an article she had contributed to a psychology journal, the amygdala, a tiny area of tissue in the unconscious brain, generates feelings of alarm and emotion, allowing us to respond to the distress of others. The frontal lobe is where emotions are registered, where self-consciousness emerges and plans are constructed. It is also the part of the brain that controls our impulses.

In psychopaths, it was now believed, the frontal lobe failed to respond when confronted with an emotional situation, possibly due to a failure in the amygdala itself or in the processes used to send its signals to the cortex. Rachel, and others like her, were pressing for a huge brain-scan survey on convicted criminals, arguing that they could reveal a connection between brain damage and psychopathic criminal behavior.

She frowned. "You seem to know a lot. I'm not sure that I like the idea of you keeping tabs on me."

I felt that twinge of resentment again. I felt it so strongly that my mouth twitched involuntarily. "It's not like that, but I see your ego is still strong and healthy."

Rachel smiled slightly, a tiny, fleeting thing. "The rest of me isn't quite so robust. I'm going to be scarred for life. I'm in therapy twice weekly and I've had to give up my own practice. I still think of you, and you still frighten me. Sometimes."

"I'm sorry." Maybe it was my imagination, but there was something in that pause, in that sometimes, that implied she thought of me in other ways too.

"I know. Tell me about this file."

And I did, giving her a brief run through the history of the killings, adding some of what Mrs. Schneider had told me and some of what I suspected, or had guessed, myself. "Most of it is in here." I raised the battered manila folder. "I'd like you to take a look, see what you can come up with."

She reached out and I slid the file to her across the long table. She flicked quickly through the handwritten notes, the carbon copies, the photographs. One of them was a crime scene photo taken by the banks of the Little Wilson. "Oh my God," she whispered, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, there was a new light in them, the spark of professional curiosity but also something else, something that had attracted me to her in the first place.

It was empathy.

"It could take a couple of days," she said.

"I don't have a couple of days. I need it tonight."

"Not possible. I'm sorry, but I couldn't even begin to do it in that time."

"Rachel, no one believes me. No one will accept that this man could ever have existed or, worse, could still be alive now. But he's out there. I can feel him, Rachel. I need to understand him, in however small a way. I need something, anything, to make him real, to bring him out of that file and to form a recognizable picture of him. Please. I've got this jumble of details in my head, and I need someone to help me make sense of it. There's no one else I can turn to and, anyway, you're the best criminal psychologist I know."

"I'm the only criminal psychologist you know," she said, and that smile came again.

"There's that as well."

She stood. "There's no way I'll have anything for you tonight, but meet me tomorrow at the Coop bookstore, at, say, eleven o'clock. I'll give you what I have then."

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome." And with that she was gone.

I stayed where I always stayed when I was in Boston, in the Nolan House over on G Street in south Boston. It was a quiet bed-and-breakfast, with antique furniture and a couple of okay restaurants close by. I checked in with Angel and Louis, but there was no movement in Dark Hollow.

"You see Rachel?" asked Angel.

"Yes, I saw her."

"She okay?"

"She didn't seem too pleased to see me."

"You bring back bad memories."

"Story of my life. Maybe someday, someone will see me and think happy thoughts."

"Never happen," he said. "Hang loose, and tell her we were asking after her."

"I will. Any move out at the Payne house?"

"The younger guy went into town to buy milk and groceries, that's about all. No sign of Billy Purdue, or Tony Celli, or Stritch, but Louis is still acting funny. Stritch is around here somewhere, that much we can be sure of. Sooner you're back here, the better."

I showered, put on a clean T-shirt and jeans, and found a copy of the Gousha deluxe road atlas from 1995 among the guidebooks and magazines in the hallway of the Nolan House. The Gousha listed eight Medinas-Texas, Tennessee, Washington, Wisconsin, New York, North Dakota, Michigan and Ohio-and one Medinah, in Illinois. I ruled out all of the northern towns in the hope that my grandfather was right about Caleb's southern roots, which left Tennessee and Texas. I tried Tennessee first. No one in the Gibson County sheriff's office recalled a Caleb Kyle who might or might not have killed his mother on a farm sometime in the 1940s but, as a deputy told me helpfully, that didn't mean it didn't happen, it just meant that nobody around could recall it happening. I made a call to the state police, just on the off chance, but got the same reply: no Caleb Kyle.

It was approaching eight-thirty when I started calling Texas. Medina, it emerged, was in Bandera County, not Medina County, so my first call to the Medina County Sheriff didn't get me very far. But I hit lucky on the second call, real lucky, and I couldn't help wondering how my grandfather would have felt had he got this far and learned the truth about Caleb Kyle.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

The sheriff's name was Dan Tannen, a deputy told me. I waited to be transferred to the sheriff's own office. After a couple of clicks on the line, a female voice said: "Hello?" "Sheriff Tannen?" I asked. It was a good guess.

"That's me," she said. "You don't sound surprised."

"Should I be?"

"I've been mistaken for the secretary a couple of times. Pisses me to hell, I tell you. The Dan is short for Danielle, for what it's worth. I hear you're asking about Caleb Kyle?"

"That's right," I said. "I'm a private investigator, working out of Portland, Maine. I'm-"

She interrupted me to ask: "Where did you hear that name?"

"Caleb?"

"Uh-huh. Well, more particularly Caleb Kyle. Where'd you hear that name?"

That was a good question. Where did I begin? With Mrs. Schneider? With Emily Watts? With my grandfather? With Ruth Dickinson and Laurel Trulock and the three other girls who ended up dangling from a tree by the banks of the Little Wilson?

"Mister Parker, I asked you a question." I got the feeling that Sheriff Tannen was likely to be holding on to her post for some time.

"I'm sorry," I said. "It's complicated. I heard it for the first time when I was a boy, from my grandfather, and now I've heard it twice in the last week." And then I told her what I knew. She listened without making any comment, and when I had finished telling my story there was a long pause before she spoke.

"It was before my time," she said, at last. "Well, some of it was. The boy lived out in the Hill Country, maybe four miles southeast of here; him and his momma. He was born, best as I can recall without looking up a file, in 1928 or '29, but he was born Caleb Brewster. His pappa was a Lyall Brewster who went off to fight Hitler and ended up dying in North Africa and the two of them, Caleb and his mother, were left to fend for themselves. Plus, Lyall Brewster never got around to marrying Bonnie Kyle, Bonnie Kyle being his mother's name. You see, that was why I was interested in hearing you say Caleb Kyle. There aren't many people who'd know him by that name. Fact is, I've never heard him called by that name. He was always Caleb Brewster here, right up until the time he killed his mother.

"She was the devil's own bitch, according to those that knew her. Kept herself to herself, and the boy beside her. But the boy was smart, Mr. Parker: at school, he raced ahead in math, reading, just about anything he put his mind to. Then his mother decided that she didn't like the fact that he was attracting attention to himself and took him out of school. Claimed she was teaching him herself."

"You think there was abuse?"

"I think there were stories. I recall someone telling me that they once found him wandering naked on the road between here and Kerrville, covered in dirt and hog shit. Police brought him home to his momma in a blanket. Boy couldn't have been more than fourteen or fifteen. They heard him yelpin' as soon as the door closed behind 'em. She sure took the stick to him, I reckon, but as for anything else…"

She paused again, and I heard her gulping liquid at the other end of the line. "Water," she said, "case you're wondering."

"I wasn't."

"Well, whatever. Anyway, I don't know about sexual abuse. It came up at the trial, but it came up at the Menendez brothers' trial as well, and look where it got them. Like I said, Mr. Parker, Caleb was smart. Even at sixteen, seventeen, he was smarter than most of the people in this town."

"You think he made it up?"

She didn't answer for a time. "I don't know. But if there was abuse, then he was smart enough to try to use it as mitigation. You have to remember, Mr. Parker, that people didn't talk about it so much in those days. The fact of someone bringing it up was unusual. In the end, I guess we'll never know for certain what happened in that house.

"But there was more to Caleb Brewster than intelligence. People around here recall that he was mean, or worse than mean. He tortured animals, Mr. Parker, and hung their remains from trees: squirrels, rabbits, even cats and dogs. There was no evidence to tie him to it, you understand, but folks knew it was him. Maybe he got tired of killing animals, and decided to move up a step. There was other stuff too."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, let's take this in the order it happened. Two or three days after that incident on the road, Caleb Brewster killed his mother and fed her remains to the hogs. Sheriff Garrett and another deputy came up to check on the boy and found him sitting on the porch, drinking sour milk from a jug. There was blood in the kitchen, on the walls and on the floor. Boy still had the knife beside him. Bonnie Kyle's clothing was in the hog pen, along with some bones, which was pretty much all that the hogs had left of her, apart from a small silver ring. One of the hogs had passed it out in its stool. I think they got it in the Frontier Museum over in Banderas now, alongside two-headed lambs and Indian arrowheads."

"What happened to Caleb?"

"He was tried as an adult, then sent down."

"For life?"

"Twenty years. He got out in sixty-three or sixty-four, I think."

"Was he rehabilitated?"

"Rehabilitated? Fuck, no. I reckon he was off the scale before he ever killed her, and he never got back on it again. But someone saw fit to release him, taking into account the extenuating circumstances. He'd served his time and they couldn't keep him locked up forever, no matter how good an idea that might have been. And, like I said, he was smart. He kept his nose clean in prison. They thought he was getting better. Myself, I think he was waiting."

"He came back to the Hill Country?" I asked, although I already sensed the answer to the question.

Again, there came that pause. This time, it remained unbroken for what seemed like a long time.

"The house was still standing," began Tannen. "I remember him coming back into town on the Greyhound-I was maybe ten or eleven-and Caleb walking out toward the old house, and folks stepping onto the other side of the street and then watching him as he passed. I don't know how long he spent there. Couldn't have been more than a couple of nights, but…"

"But?"

She sighed. "A girl died. Lillian Boyce. They reckon she was the prettiest girl in the county, and they were probably right. They found her down by the Hondo Creek, near Tarpley. She'd been cut up pretty bad. That wasn't the worst of it, though."

I waited, and it seemed to me that I knew what was coming, even before she said it.

"She was hung from a tree," she said. "Like someone wanted her to be found. Like she was a warning to us all."

The line seemed to hum, and the cell phone was hot in my hand, as Sheriff Tannen concluded her story. "When we found her, Caleb Brewster had gone again. There's still a warrant outstanding, far as I know, but I didn't think anyone would ever get to serve it.

"At least, I didn't until now."

After I hung up, I sat on my bed for a time. There was a deck of playing cards on a bookshelf in the room and I found myself shuffling it, the edges of the cards blurring before my eyes. I saw the queen of hearts and drew her from the deck. Hanky-poo, that was what Saul Mann used to call "Find the Queen." He would stand at his felt-covered trestle-table, seemingly talking to himself as he arranged the cards before him, flipping one card over with the rim of another. "Five gets you ten, ten gets you twenty. "He didn't even seem to notice the punters slowly gathering, attracted by the sure movement of his hands and the promise of easy money, but he was always watching. He watched and he waited, and slowly, surely, they came to him. The old man was like a hunter who knows that, at some point, the deer must surely cross his path.

And I thought too of Caleb Kyle, staring at the remains of the girls he had torn apart and hung from trees. A memory came to me, a recollection of a legend told of the Emperor Nero. It was said that after Nero killed his own mother, Agrippina the Younger, he ordered that her body be opened, so that he could see the place from which he had come. What motivated this action is unclear: morbid obsession, perhaps, or even the incestuous feelings that the ancient chroniclers ascribed to him. It may even have been the case that he hoped to understand something of himself, of his own nature, by gazing upon the site of his own origin.

He must have loved her once, I thought, before it all turned to fury and rage and hate, before he found it in himself to take her life and rend her to pieces.

And, for a brief moment, I felt a kind of pity for Caleb, a sorrow for the boy he once was and a hatred for the man that he became.

I saw shadows falling from trees, and a figure moving north, ever north, like the needle on a compass. Of course he would have headed north. North was as far away from Texas as he could get after avenging himself on the community that had seen fit to jail him for what he had done to his mother.

But there was more to it than that, it seemed. When my grandfather was a boy, the priest would read the gospels at the north side of the church because north had always been perceived as an area that had not yet seen God's light. It was the same reason why they buried the unbaptized, the suicides and the murderers on northern ground, outside the boundaries of the church walls.

Because north was unknown territory.

North lay the darklands.

The next morning, the bookstore was crowded with students and tourists. I ordered coffee and read a copy of Rolling Stone that someone had left on a chair until Rachel arrived, late as usual. She still wore her black coat, this time with blue denims and a sky-blue V-neck sweater. Beneath it, her blue-and-white striped Oxford shirt was buttoned to the neck. Her hair hung loose on her shoulders.

"Are you ever early?" I asked, as I ordered her a coffee and a muffin.

"I was up until 5 A.M. working on your damned file," she replied. "If I was charging you for my time, you couldn't afford me."

"Sorry," I said. "I can barely afford the coffee and muffin."

"You're breaking my heart," she said, but it seemed that her attitude had softened a little since the day before, although it could have been wishful thinking on my part.

"You ready for this?" she asked.

I nodded, but before she went on I told her what I had learned from the sheriff in Medina and how Caleb had taken his mother's name to escape his past.

She nodded to herself. "It fits," she said. "It all fits."

The coffee arrived and she added sugar, then unwrapped the muffin, tore it into bite-sized pieces and began to talk.

"Most of this is guesswork and supposition. Any decent law enforcement officer would laugh me out of his building, but since you're neither decent nor a law enforcement officer, you'll take what you can get. Plus, everything you've given me is also based on guesswork and supposition, with a little superstition and paranoia thrown in." She shook her head in bemusement, then grew serious as she opened her wire-bound notebook. Line upon line of closely written text lay before her, dotted here and there with yellow Post-its. "Most of what I'm going to tell you, I think you know already. All I can do is to clarify it for you, maybe put it into some kind of context.

"If this man does exist-at least, if the same man, Caleb Kyle, is responsible for all of these killings-then you're dealing with a textbook psychopathic sadist. Actually, you're dealing with worse than that, because I've never encountered anything like this in the literature, or in clinical work, certainly not all in one package. By the way, this file doesn't record any killing after 1965. Even allowing for the newspaper photograph, have you taken into account the possibility that he might be dead, or maybe imprisoned again for other crimes? Either could explain the sudden cessation of killing."

"He could be dead," I admitted, "in which case this is all a waste of time and we're dealing with something else entirely. But let's assume that he wasn't imprisoned. If the sheriff was right, and Caleb was as smart as she believed, then he wasn't going back to prison again. Plus my grandfather checked at the time-it's in the file-and I know that he consulted on a random basis in the intervening years, although he would have been looking for Caleb Kyle, not Caleb Brewster."

She shrugged. "Then you have two further possibilities: either he continued to kill, but his victims are all listed as missing persons if they've been missed at all or…"

"Or?"

Rachel tapped the top of her pen on her notebook, beside a word encircled in a red ring. "Or else he's been dormant. The possibility that some serial killers, if that's even what he is, enter periods of dormancy is one that's being considered by the FBI's Investigative Support Unit, the folks in the Criminal Profiling and Consultation Program. You know this, because I've told you about it before. It's a theory, but it might explain why some killings just cease without anyone ever being apprehended. For some reason, the killer reaches a point where the need to find a victim isn't so strong, and the killings stop."

"If he's been dormant until now, then something just woke him up," I said. I thought of the timber company surveyor, heading into the wilderness to pave the way for the forest's destruction, and what he might have encountered in that forest. I recalled too Mrs. Schneider's story, followed up by a piece in the newspaper, and Willeford's old-style investigation, where you knocked on doors and pinned up notices and put the word around until it filtered down to the person you were trying to reach; and the newspaper story about Billy Purdue's arrest at St. Martha's. If you put out honey, you shouldn't be surprised when the wasps come.

"It's tenuous, but those are the possibilities you have to consider," Rachel continued. "Okay, let's look at the original killings. First, although it may only be a minor point, the location where the bodies were found was important. This Caleb Kyle determined how soon they would be found, where they would be found and by whom. It was his way of controlling and participating in the search. The original killings may have been disorganized-we'll never know for sure, since we don't know where they were killed-but the display of the bodies was very organized. He wanted to be part of some element of the discovery. My guess is that he was watching your grandfather right up to the moment when he found the women.

"As for the killings themselves, then if what the Schneider woman told you is true, which depends in turn on the truth of what Emily Watts told her, Kyle was already killing during their relationship. The extent of decay on each of the five bodies differed: Judy Giffen and Ruth Dickinson were killed first, with a gap of almost one month between them. But Laurel Trulock, Louise Moore and Sarah Raines were killed in rapid succession: the ME's report indicated that Trulock and Moore could have been killed in the same twenty-four-hour period, with Raines killed no more than twenty-four hours later again.

"My guess is that each of these girls-or certainly the last three-were physically similar to Emily Watts. They were slim, delicate girls: more passive than Emily, maybe, who was strong when the need arose, but still of a type. You encountered revenge rapes when you were a policeman, didn't you?"

I nodded.

"A man argues with his wife, or his girlfriend, storms out of the house and takes out his anger on a complete stranger," continued Rachel. "In his mind, all women bear collective responsibility for the perceived faults of one woman, and therefore any woman can be disciplined and punished for the real or imagined slight or the overstepping of whatever boundaries the rapist has established in his mind as acceptable behavior for a woman.

"Well, Caleb Kyle is like those men, but this time it went much further. The ME found no evidence of actual sexual assault on the three later victims, but-and here we're into classic morbid fear of female sexuality territory-there was some damage to the sexual organs, presumably inflicted by the same instrument that was used to make stab wounds to the belly and to destroy the womb of each victim. In fact, what's interesting is that, in the cases of Giffen and Dickinson, he stabbed them after they had been dead for almost one month, probably after he killed the other three girls, or shortly before."

"He went back to them after he thought she had lost the baby."

"Exactly. He was punishing them because Emily Watts's body had betrayed him by losing his child: many women being punished for the faults of one. My guess would be that he had punished other women before, perhaps for different reasons."

She fed herself a piece of muffin and sipped her coffee. "Now, when we go back to the ME's report, we find evidence that each of the girls was tortured before death. There were fingernails missing, toes and fingers broken, teeth removed, cigarette burns, bruising inflicted by what may have been a coat hanger. That might be significant, but not for now. In the case of the last three victims, the torture inflicted is significantly more extreme. These girls suffered a lot before they died, Bird." Rachel looked at me solemnly, and I could see the pain in her eyes, pain for them and the memory of her own pain.

"According to the victim profiles collated by your grandfather, these young women were gentle, from good homes, maybe a little asocial. Most of them were shy, sexually inexperienced. Judy Giffen appeared to have had some sexual experience. My guess is they probably pleaded with him before they died, thinking they could save themselves. But that was what he wanted: he wanted them to cry and to scream. There may be a connection there between aggression and fulfillment. He experienced a sexual excitement from their pleas, but he also hated them for pleading, and so they died."

Her eyes were bright now, her excitement at trying to worm her way into this man's consciousness obvious in the movement of her hands, the speed with which she spoke, her intellectual pleasure in making startling, unexpected connections, yet balanced by her abhorrence of the acts she was discussing. "God," said Rachel, "I can almost see his PET scan: temporal lobe abnormalities associated with sexual deviancy; distortion in the frontal lobe leading to violence; low activity between the limbic system and the frontal lobes, indicating a virtual absence of guilt or conscience." She shook her head, as if she was marveling at the behavior of a particularly nasty bug. "He's not asocial, though. These girls may have been shy, but they weren't stupid. He would have to be skilled enough to gain their trust, so the intelligence fits.

"As for Kyle's social background, if what he told Emily Watts is true, he was abused physically and possibly sexually in childhood by a mother figure who told him that she loved him during or after the abuse, and then punished him afterward. He had little nurture or protection and was probably taught self-sufficiency the hard way. When he was old enough, he turned on his abuser and killed her, before moving on to others. With Emily Watts, something different happened. She was herself a victim of abuse, then she became pregnant. My guess is that he would have killed her anyway, as soon as she had the child. From what she said, he wanted the child."

She took a sip of coffee and I used it as an opportunity to interrupt.

"What about Rita Ferris and Cheryl Lansing? Could he have been responsible for their deaths?"

"It's possible," said Rachel. She regarded me quietly, waiting for me to find a connection.

"I'm missing something," I said at last. "That's why you look like the cat that got the cream."

"You're forgetting the mutilation of the mouths. The damage inflicted on the wombs of those girls in 1965 was meant to convey a message. The mutilations were a signifier. We've seen damage to victims used in that way before, Bird." The smile went away, and I nodded: the Traveling Man.

"So, once again, three decades later, we have mutilations, in this case directed to the mouths of victims and in each case meant to signify something different. Rita Ferris's mouth was sewn shut. What does that mean?"

"That she should have kept her mouth shut?"

"Probably," said Rachel. "It's not subtle, but whoever killed her wasn't interested in subtlety."

I considered what Rachel had said for a moment before I figured out what it might mean. "She called the cops on Billy Purdue and they took him away." That could have meant that he had been watching the house the night Billy was arrested, making him the old man that Billy claimed to have seen the night Rita and Donald were killed, maybe even the same old man who had attacked Rita at the hotel.

"In Cheryl Lansing's case," continued Rachel, "her jaw was broken and her tongue torn out. I'm pushing the envelope a little here, but my guess is that she was being punished for not speaking."

"Because she was party to the concealment of the child's birth."

"That would seem to be a plausible explanation. In the end, regardless of what made Caleb Kyle this way, and regardless of signifiers and whatever grievances he may feel, he's a killing machine, completely without remorse."

"But he felt something for the loss of his child."

Rachel almost leapt from her chair. "Yes!" She beamed at me the way a teacher might beam at a particularly bright pupil. "The problem, or the key, is the sixth girl, the one who was never found. For a whole lot of reasons, most of which would probably result in me being ostracized by my peers if I stated them in print, I think your grandfather was right when he suspected that she was also a victim, but he was wrong in the type of victim."

"I don't understand."

"Your grandfather assumed that she had also been killed but had not been displayed for some reason."

"And you don't." But I could see where she was going, and my stomach tightened at the possibility. It had been at the back of my mind for some time and, maybe, at the back of my grandfather's. I think he hoped that she was dead, because the other option was worse.

"No, I don't believe she was killed, and it comes back to the torture inflicted on those girls. This wasn't simply a means of gaining satisfaction and fulfillment for this man: it was a test. He was testing their strength, knowing at the same time, but perhaps not admitting it to himself, that they would fail his test because they simply weren't strong enough.

"But look at the profile of Judith Mundy. She's strong, well built, a dominant personality. She didn't cry easily, could handle herself in a fight. She would pass that kind of test, to the extent that he probably didn't have to hurt her very much to realize that she was different."

Rachel leaned forward and the expression on her face changed to one of deep abiding sorrow. "She wasn't taken because she was weak, Bird. She was taken because she was strong."

I closed my eyes. I knew now what had happened to Judith Mundy, why she had not been found, and Rachel knew that I had understood.

"She was taken as breeding stock, Bird," she said quietly. "He took her to breed on."

Rachel offered to drive me to Logan, but I declined. She had done enough for me, more even than I felt I had a right to ask. As I walked alongside her across Harvard Square, I felt a love for her made all the more intense by the fact that I believed she was slipping further and further away from me.

"You think this man Caleb may be connected to the disappearance of Ellen Cole?" she asked. Her arm brushed against mine, and for the first time since I had come to Boston, she did not pull away from the contact.

"I don't know for sure," I replied. "Maybe the police are right. Maybe her hormones got to her and she did run away, in which case I'm not sure what I'm doing. But an old man found her and drew her to Dark Hollow and, like I keep telling people, I don't believe in coincidences.

"I have a feeling about this man, Rachel. He's come back, and I think he's returned for Billy Purdue and to avenge himself on everyone who helped to hide him. I think he killed Rita Ferris. It may have been out of jealousy, or to cut Billy off so that he'd have no other ties, or because she was going to leave him and take the boy with her. I don't think that Donald was meant to die. Caleb would have wanted his grandson alive but, somehow, Donald became involved in the struggle. My guess is that he was fatally injured when Caleb tried to push him away."

Something caught in my throat at the memory of Donald, and I didn't speak again until we reached the square. I put out my hand to Rachel. I didn't kiss her because I didn't feel that I had the right. She took my hand and held it tightly.

"Bird, this man feels he has some dispensation to avenge himself on anyone who crosses him because he believes that he's been wronged. I've just labeled him as psychopathic." In her eyes, there was concern, and more.

"In other words, what's my excuse?" I smiled, but it went no deeper than my mouth.

"They're gone, Bird. Susan and Jennifer are dead, and what happened to them and to you was a terrible, terrible thing. But every time you make someone pay for what was done to you, you hurt yourself and you risk becoming the thing you hate. Do you understand?"

"It's not about me, Rachel," I replied softly. "At least, not entirely. Someone has to stop these people. Someone has to take responsibility." There was that echo again.

they are all your responsibility.

Her hand moved gently over mine, her fingers on my fingers, her thumb rubbing lightly on my palm, then she touched my face with her free hand. "Why did you come here? Most of what I told you, you could have figured out for yourself."

"I'm not that smart."

"Don't bullshit a bullshitter."

"So it's true what they say about psychologists."

"Only the New Age ones. You're avoiding the question."

"I know. You're right: some of it I had guessed, or half-guessed, but I needed to hear it back from someone else, otherwise I was afraid that I was going crazy. But I'm also here because I still care about you, because when you walked away you took something from me. I thought that this might be a way of getting closer to you. I wanted to see you again. Maybe, deep down, that's all it was." I looked away from her.

Her grip tightened on my hand. "I saw what you did, back in Louisiana. You didn't go there to find the Traveling Man. You went there to kill him, and anyone who stood in your way got hurt, and got hurt badly. Your capacity for inflicting violence scared me. You scared me."

"I didn't know what else to do, not then."

"And now?"

I was about to answer when her finger touched the scar on my cheek, the mark left by Billy Purdue's blade. "How did this happen?" she asked.

"A man stuck a knife blade in me."

"And what did you do?"

I paused before answering. "I walked away."

"Who was he?"

"Billy Purdue."

Her eyes widened, and it was as if something that had been curled inside her to protect itself gradually began to unfurl. I could see it in her, could feel it in her touch.

"He never had a chance, Rachel. The odds were stacked against him from the start."

"If I ask you a question, will you answer me honestly?" she said.

"I've always tried to be honest with you," I replied.

She nodded. "I know, but this is important. I need to be sure of this."

"Ask."

"Do you need the violence?"

I thought about the question. In the past, I had been motivated by personal revenge. I had hurt people, had killed people, because of what had been done to Susan and to Jennifer, and to me. Now that desire for revenge had dwindled, easing a little every day, and the spaces it left as it receded were filled with the potential for reparation. I bore some responsibility for what happened to Susan and Jennifer. I didn't think that I would ever come to terms with that knowledge, but I could try to make up for it in some small way, to acknowledge my failings in the past by using them to make the present better.

"I did, for a time," I admitted.

"And now?"

"I don't need it, but I will use it if I have to. I won't stand by and watch innocent people being hurt."

Rachel leaned over and kissed me gently on the cheek. Her eyes were soft when she pulled away.

"So you're the avenging angel," she said.

"Something like that," I replied.

"Good-bye, then, avenging angel," Rachel whispered softly.

She turned and walked away, back to the library and her work. She didn't look back, but her head was down and I could feel the weight of her thoughts.

The plane rose from Logan, heading upward and north through the cold air, heavy cloud surrounding it like the breath of God. I thought of Sheriff Tannen, who had promised to hunt up the most recent pictures available of Caleb Kyle. They would be thirty years old, but at least they would be something. I took the blurred newspaper photo of Caleb from my grandfather's folder and looked at it again and again. He was like a skeleton slowly being fleshed out, as if the process of decay were being gradually, irrevocably reversed. A figure that had been little more than a name, a shape glimpsed in the shadows, was assuming an objective reality.

I know you, I thought. I know you.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I arrived in Bangor early that afternoon, picked up my car in the airport parking lot and started back for Dark Hollow. I felt like I was being pulled in ten different directions, yet somehow each one seemed to lead me back to the same place, to the same conclusion, by different routes: Caleb Kyle had come back. He had killed a girl in Texas shortly after his release from prison, probably as an act of revenge against a whole community. Then he had assumed his mother's name and headed north, far north, eventually losing himself in the wilderness.

If Emily Watts had told the truth to Mrs. Schneider-and there was no reason to doubt her-then she had given birth to a child and hidden it because she believed its father to be a killer of young women, and sensed that this man wanted the child for his own purposes. The leap required was to accept that this child might be Billy Purdue, and that his father could be Caleb Kyle.

Meanwhile, Ellen Cole and her boyfriend were still missing, as was Willeford. Tony Celli had gone to ground, but was undoubtedly still searching for some trace of Billy. He had no choice: if he did not find Billy, he would be unable to replace the money he had lost and he would be killed as an example to others. I had a suspicion that it was already too late for Tony Clean, that it had been too late from the very moment that he had purchased the securities, maybe even from the time when the thought of using someone else's money to secure his future first crossed his mind. Tony would do whatever he had to do to track Billy down, but everything he did, all of the violence he inflicted and all of the attention it drew to himself and his masters, made it less and less likely that he would be allowed to live. He was like a man who, trapped in the darkness of a tunnel, focuses his mind on the only illumination he sees before him, unaware that what he believes to be the light of salvation is, in reality, the fire that will consume him.

There were other reasons, too, to be fearful. Somewhere in the darkness, Stritch waited. I imagined that he still wanted the money but, more than that, he wanted revenge for the death of his partner. I thought of the dead man in the Portland complex, violated in his last moments by Stritch's foulness, and I thought too of the fear that I had felt, the certainty that I could have allowed death to embrace me in those shadows if I had chosen to do so.

There remained also the old man in the forest. There was still the chance that he knew something more than he had told me, that his remark about the two young people was based on more than gossip he had overheard in the town. For that reason, there was one stop to be made before I returned to Dark Hollow.

At Orono, the store was still open. On the sign above the door, the words "Stuckey Trading" were illuminated from below, the name written in script. Inside, it smelled musty and felt oppressively warm, the AC making a noise as if glass were grinding in its works while it pumped stale air through its vents. Some guys in biker jackets were examining secondhand shotguns while a woman in a dress that was new when Woodstock convened flicked through a box of eight-tracks. Display cases held old watches and gold chains, while hunting bows stood upright on a rack beside the counter.

I wasn't sure what I was looking for, so I browsed from shelf to shelf, from old furniture to almost-new car-seat covers, until something caught my eye. In one corner, beside a rack of foul-weather clothing-old slickers mainly, and some faded yellow oilskins-stood two rows of shoes and boots. Most of them were ragged and worn, but the Zamberlans stood out immediately. They were men's boots, relatively new and considerably more expensive than the pairs surrounding them, and some care had obviously been lavished on them recently. Someone, probably the store owner, had cleaned and waxed them before putting them out for sale. I lifted one and sniffed the interior. It smelled of Lysol, and something else: earth, and rotting meat. I lifted the second boot and caught the same faint odor from it. Ricky had been wearing Zamberlans on the day they came to visit me, I recalled, and it wasn't often that boots so fine turned up in an out-of-the-way secondhand goods store. I brought the pair of boots to the counter.

The man behind the register was small with thick, dark artificial hair that seemed to have come from the head of a department store mannequin. Beneath the wig, at the back of his neck, wisps of his own mousy-colored strands peered out like mad relatives consigned to the attic. A pair of round eyeglasses hung from a string around his neck and lost themselves in the hairs of his chest. His bright red shirt was half unbuttoned and I could see scarring at the left side of his chest. His hands were thin and strong looking, with the little finger and ring finger of his left hand missing from just above the first joint. The nails on the fingers that remained were neatly clipped.

He caught me looking at his mutilated left hand and raised it in front of his face, the twin stumps of the lost fingers making his hand look as if he was trying to form a gun with it, the way little kids do in the school yard.

"Lost them in a sawmill," he explained.

"Careless," I replied.

He shrugged. "Blade damn near took the rest of my fingers as well. You ever work in a sawmill?"

"No. I always thought my fingers looked okay on my hands. I like them that way."

He looked at the stumps thoughtfully. "It's strange, but I can still feel them, y'know, like they're still there. Maybe you don't know how that feels."

"I think I do," I said. "You Stuckey?"

"Yessir. This is my place."

I put the boots down on the counter.

"They're good boots," he said, picking up one with his unmutilated hand. "Won't take less than sixty bucks for 'em. Just waxed 'em, buffed 'em and put 'em out for sale myself not two hours ago."

"Smell them."

Stuckey narrowed his eyes and put his head to one side. "Say what?"

"I said, 'Smell them.'"

He looked at me oddly for a few moments, then took one boot and sniffed the inside tentatively, his nostrils twitching like a rabbit's before the snare.

"I don't smell nothin'," he said.

"Lysol. You smell Lysol, don't you?"

"Well, sure. I always disinfect ' em before I sell 'em. Don't nobody want to wear boots that stink."

I leaned forward and raised the second boot in front of him. "You see," I said softly, "that's my question. What did they smell of before you cleaned them?"

He wasn't a man who was easily intimidated. He thrust his body forward in turn, six knuckles on the counter, and arched an eyebrow at me. "Are you some kind of nut?"

In a mirror behind the counter, I saw that the bikers had turned around to watch the show. I kept my voice low. "These boots, they had earth on them when you bought them, didn't they? And they smelled of decay?"

He took a step back. "Who are you?"

"Just a guy."

"You was just a guy, you'da bought the durned boots and been gone by now."

"Who sold you the boots?"

He was becoming belligerent now. "That's none of your goddamned business, mister. Now get out of my store."

I didn't move. "Listen, friend, you can talk to me, or you can talk to the cops, but you will talk, understand? I don't want to make trouble for you, but if I have to, I will."

Stuckey stared at me, and he knew that I meant what I said. A voice interrupted before he could respond. "Hey, Stuck," said one of the bikers. "You okay back there?"

He raised his battered left hand to indicate that there wasn't a problem, then returned his attention to me. There was no trace of bitterness when he spoke. Stuckey was a pragmatist-in his line of business, you had to be-and he knew when to back down.

"It was an old fella from up north," he sighed. "He comes in here maybe once a month, brings stuff that he's found. Most of it's junk, but I give him a few bucks for it and he goes away again. Sometimes, he brings in something good."

"He bring these in recently?"

"Yesterday. I gave him thirty bucks for 'em. Brought in a backpack too, Lowe Alpine. I sold it straight off. That was about it. He didn't have nothin' else to offer."

"This old guy from up Dark Hollow way?"

"Yeah, that's right, Dark Hollow."

"You got a name?"

His eyes narrowed again. "Just tell me, mister, what are you: some kind of private cop?"

"Like I said, I'm just a guy."

"You got a lot of questions for someone who's just a guy." I could sense Stuckey digging his heels in again.

"I'm naturally curious," I said, but I showed him my ID anyway. "The name?"

"Barley. John Barley."

"That his real name?"

"The hell do I know?"

"He show you any identification?"

Stuckey almost laughed. "You seen him, you'd know he wasn't the kind of fella carries no ID."

I nodded once, took out my wallet and counted six ten-dollar bills onto the counter. "I'll need a receipt," I said. Stuckey filled one out quickly in sloped capitals, stamped it, then paused before handing it to me.

"Like I told you, I don't want no trouble," he said.

"If you've told me the truth, there won't be any."

He folded the receipt once and put it in a plastic bag with the boots. "I hope you won't take this personal, mister, but I reckon you make friends 'bout as easy as a scorpion."

I took the bag and put my wallet back in my coat. "Why?" I asked. "You sell friendship here too?"

"No, mister, I sure don't," he said, and there was a finality in his tone. "But I don't reckon you'd be buying any even if I did."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

It was already dark when I began the journey back to Dark Hollow. Snow was drifting across the road to Beaver Cove and beyond, where the narrow, winding, tree-lined road led to the Hollow. The snow seemed to glow in the headlights, small golden fragments of light tumbling down, as if heaven itself was disintegrating and falling to earth. I tried to call Angel and Louis on the cell phone, but it was a useless effort. As it turned out, they were already at the motel when I got back. Louis answered the door dressed in black pants with a razor-sharp crease and a cream-colored shirt. I could never figure out how Louis kept his clothes so neat. I had shirts that had more creases than Louis's while they were still in the box.

"Angel's in the shower," he said, as I stepped past him into their room. On the television screen, a reporter mouthed silently before the White House lawn.

"What's seldom is wonderful."

"Amen to that. If it was summer, he'd be attracting flies."

It wasn't true, of course. Angel may have looked like someone who was barely on nodding terms with soap and hot water, but he was, all things considered, remarkably clean. He just looked more crumpled than most people. In fact, he looked more crumpled than just about anyone I knew.

"Any movement over at the Payne place?"

"Nothing. The old man came out, went back in again. The boy came out, went back in again. After the fourth or fifth time, the novelty started to wear off. No sign of Billy Purdue, though, or anyone else."

"You think they knew you were out there?"

"Maybe. Didn't act like it, which could go either way. You got anything?"

I showed him the boots and told him of my conversation with Stuckey. Angel came out of the shower at that moment, wrapped in four towels.

"Shit, Angel," said Louis. "The fuck are you, Mahatma Gandhi? What you use all the towels for?"

"It's cold," he whined. "And I got marks on my ass from that car seat."

"You gonna get marks on your ass from the toe of my shoe, you don't get me some towels. You just dry your scrawny white ass and haul it down to the desk, ask the lady for more towels. And you better make damn sure they soft, Angel. I ain't rubbin' my back with no sandpaper."

While Angel dried himself and dressed, muttering softly as he did so, I told them in detail about my encounters with Rachel, Sheriff Tannen and Erica Schneider, and what I had learned of Billy Purdue's visit to St. Martha's.

"Seems like we accumulatin' a whole lot of information, but we don't know what it means," remarked Louis, when I was done.

"We know what some of it means," I said.

"You think this guy Caleb really exists?" he asked.

"He was real enough to kill his mother, and maybe another local girl the best part of two decades later. Plus, those girls who died in '65 weren't killed by a mentally handicapped man. The display of the bodies was a lot of things-a gesture of contempt, a means to shock-but it was also an attempt at an act of madness. I think it was designed to make people think that only a madman could have done it, and the planting of an item of clothing at Fletcher's house gave them the madman they were looking for."

"So where did he go?"

I sat down heavily on one of the beds. "I don't know," I said, "but I think he went north, into the wilderness."

"And why didn't he kill again?" added Angel.

"I don't know that either. Maybe he did, and we just never found them." I knew that hikers had been murdered on the Appalachian Trail, and I'd heard that others had gone missing and never been found. I wondered if, somehow, they might have left the trail, hoping for a shortcut, and encountered something much worse than they had ever imagined.

"Or it could be he was killing before he ever arrived in Maine, but nobody ever traced the deaths back to him," I continued. "Rachel thought that he might have entered a period of dormancy, but recent events may have conspired to change that."

Angel took one of the Zamberlans and held it in his hands. "Well, we know what this means, assuming these once belonged to Ellen Cole's boyfriend." He looked at me, and there was a sadness in his eyes. I didn't want to answer him, or to acknowledge the possibility that if Ricky was dead, then Ellen could be dead too.

"Any sign of Stritch?" I asked.

Louis bristled. "I can almost smell him," he said. "The woman at the desk is still pretty cut up about her cat, no pun intended. Cops are blaming it on kids."

"What now?" said Angel.

"I go see John Barley," I replied, the obvious falsity of the name grating even as I said it, but Louis shook his head.

"That's a bad idea, Bird," he said. "It's dark, and he knows the woods better than you do. You could lose him, and any way of finding out how he came by these boots. Plus, there's his damn dog: it'll warn the old man, and then he'll start shooting, and could be you'll have to shoot back. He's no good to us dead."

He was right, of course, but it didn't make me feel any better. "At dawn, then," I said, but reluctantly. Unspoken between us was the possibility that I had already encountered Caleb Kyle, and had turned away from him because he had threatened me with a gun.

"Dawn," Louis agreed.

I left them and went back to my own room, where I dialed Walter and Lee Cole's house in Queens. Lee picked up on the third ring, and in her voice was that mixture of hope and fear that I had heard in the voices of hundreds of parents, friends and relatives, all waiting for word of a missing person.

"Lee, it's me."

She said nothing for a moment but I could hear her footsteps, as if she was moving the phone out of earshot of someone. I guessed it was Lauren. "Have you found her?"

"No. We're in Dark Hollow, and we're looking, but there's nothing yet." I didn't tell her about Ricky's boots. If I was wrong about what might have happened to him, or mistaken about the ownership of the boots, it would only be worrying her unnecessarily. If I was right, then we would know the rest soon enough.

"Have you seen Walter?"

I told her I hadn't. I figured he was probably in Greenville by now, but I didn't want to see him. He would only complicate matters, and I was finding it hard enough to keep my emotions in check as it was.

"He was so angry when he found out what I'd done." Lee started to cry, her voice breaking as she spoke. "He said that people get hurt when you get involved. They get killed. Please, Bird, please don't let anything happen to her. Please."

"I won't, Lee. I'll be in touch. Good-bye."

I hung up and ran my hands over my face and through my hair, letting them come to rest eventually at the knots in my shoulders. Walter was right. People had been hurt in the past when I became involved in situations, but they got hurt mainly because those people also chose to involve themselves. Sometimes you can push folks one way or the other, but they take the most important steps on their own initiative.

Walter had principles, but he had never been put in a position where those principles might have to be compromised to safeguard those he loved, or to avenge them when they were taken from him. And now he was close to Dark Hollow, and a situation that was already difficult and complicated was likely to get worse. I sat with my face in my hands for a time, then undressed and showered, my head down and my shoulders exposed to allow the water to work like fingers on my tired, tense muscles.

The phone rang as I was drying myself. It was Angel. They were waiting for me so that we could head off and eat together. I wasn't hungry, and my concerns for Ellen were muddling my thought processes, but I agreed to join them. When we arrived at the diner, there was a sign on the door announcing that it had closed early. There was some kind of charity event in the Roadside Bar that night to raise funds for the high school band and everyone and anyone was going to be in attendance. Angel and Louis exchanged a look of profound unhappiness.

"We got to help the band if we want to eat?" asked Louis. "What kind of peckerwood town is this? Who we got to pay off if we want to buy a beer? The PTA?" He examined the sign a little more closely. "Hey, a country-and-western band: 'Larry Fulcher and the Gamblers.' Maybe this town ain't such a dump after all."

"Lord, no," said Angel, "not more shit-kicker music. Why can't you listen to soul music like anyone else of your particular ethnic persuasion? You know, Curtis Mayfield, maybe a little Wilson Pickett. They're your people, man, not the Louvin Brothers and Kathy Mattea. Besides, not so long ago people used that country shit as background music when they were hanging your people."

"Angel," said Louis patiently, "nobody ever hung no brother to a Johnny Cash record."

There was nothing for it but to head down to the Roadside. We went back to the motel and I got my car keys. When I came out of my room, Louis had added a black cowboy hat with a band of silver suns to his ensemble. Angel put his hands on his head and swore loudly.

"You got the rest of the Village People in there too?" I asked. I couldn't help but smile. "You know, you and Charley Pride are plowing a pretty lonely furrow with that black country-and-western routine. The brothers see you dressed like that and they may have words to say."

"Brothers helped to build this great country, and that 'country-and-western routine,' as you put it, was the soundtrack to generations of workers. Wasn't all Negro spirituals and Paul Robeson, y'know. Plus, I like this hat." He gave the brim a little flick with his fingers.

"I was kind of hoping you two could maintain a low profile while we were here, unless it's absolutely necessary that you do otherwise," I said, as we got into the Mustang.

Louis sighed loudly. "Bird, I'm the only brother from here to Toronto. Less I contract vitiligo between this motel and the high school band scam, ain't no way that I can be low profile. So shut up and drive."

"Yeah, Bird, drive," said Angel from the backseat, "'else Cleavon Little here will get his posse on your ass. The Cowpokes with Attitude, maybe, or Prairie Enemy…"

"Angel," came the voice from the passenger seat. "Shut up."

The Roadside was a big old place done in dark wood. It was long, windowed and single storied at the front with a gabled entrance in the center that rose up above the rest like the steeple of a church. There were plenty of cars parked in the lot, with more around the sides stacked up almost to the woods. The Roadside was at the western edge of town; beyond it was dark forest.

We paid our five-dollar cover charge at the door-"Five dollars!" hissed Angel. "This a mob place?"-and made our way into the bar itself. It was a long cavernous room, almost as dark inside as it was outside. Weak lights hung on the walls and the bar was lit sufficiently so that drinkers could see the labels on the bottles, but not the sell-by date. The Roadside was a lot bigger than it looked from the outside and the light died just beyond the limits of the bar and the center of the dance floor. It stretched maybe three hundred feet from the door to the stage at the far end, with the bar on a raised platform at the center. Tables radiated from it into the dimness at the walls, which were lined in turn by booths. At the edges, the Roadside was so dark that only pale moon faces were visible, and then only when their owners stepped into a pool of light. Otherwise, they were only vague shapes moving against the walls, like wraiths.

"It's a Stevie Wonder bar," said Angel. "The menu's probably in braille."

"It's pretty dark," I agreed. "Drop a quarter here, it'll be worth ten cents by the time you find it."

"Yeah, like Reaganomics in miniature," said Angel.

"Don't say nothing bad about Reagan," warned Louis. "I have good memories of Ron."

"Which is probably more than Ron has," smirked Angel.

Louis led the way to a booth over by the right-hand wall, close to one of the emergency doors that stood halfway down each of the Roadside's walls. There was probably at least one other door at the back, behind the stage. At present, that stage was occupied by what seemed to be Larry Fulcher and the Gamblers. Louis was already tapping his feet and nodding his head in time to the music.

In fact, Larry Fulcher and his band were pretty good. There were six of them, Fulcher leading on the mandolin, guitar and banjo. They played "Bonaparte's Retreat" and a couple of Bob Wills songs, "Get With It" and "Texas Playboy Rag." They moved on to the Carter Family with "Wabash Cannonball" and "Worried Man Blues," "You're Learning" by the Louvin Brothers and then did a neat version of "One Piece at a Time" by Johnny Cash. It was an eclectic selection, but they played well and with obvious enthusiasm.

We ordered burgers and fries. They came in red plastic baskets with a liner on the bottom to hold in the grease. I felt my arteries hardening as soon as I smelled the food. Angel and Louis drank some Pete's Wicked. I had bottled water.

The band took a break and people flooded toward the bar and the bathrooms. I sipped some water and scanned the crowd. There was no sign of Rand Jennings, or his wife, which was probably a good thing.

"We should be out at Meade Payne's place now," said Louis. "Billy Purdue arrives, he ain't gonna do it in a parade float in daylight."

"If you were out there now, you'd be freezing and you wouldn't be able to see a thing," I said. "We do what we can." I felt like the whole situation was slipping away from me. Maybe it had always been slipping away, right from the time I took five hundred dollars from Billy Purdue without ever questioning where he might have found it. I still felt certain that Billy would make his way to Dark Hollow, sooner or later. Without Meade Payne's cooperation there was always the chance that he could slip past us, but my guess was that Billy would hole up with Meade for a time, maybe even try to make for Canada with his help. Billy's arrival would disturb the routine out at the Payne place, and I had faith in the ability of Angel and Louis to spot any such disturbance.

But Billy was still a comparatively minor concern next to Ellen Cole although, in some way that I hadn't yet figured out, there had to be a connection between them. An old man had guided them up here, perhaps the same old man who had shadowed Rita Ferris in the days before her death, maybe even the same old man who had once been known as Caleb Brewster by the people of a small Texas town. Dark Hollow was just too small a place for those kinds of occurrences to take place randomly.

As if on cue, a woman pushed her way through the throng at the bar and ordered a drink. It was Lorna Jennings, her bright red sweater like a beacon in the crowd. Beside her stood two other women, a slim brunette in a green shirt and an older woman with black hair, wearing a white cotton top decorated with pink roses. It seemed to be a girls' night out. Lorna didn't see me, or didn't want to see me.

There was a burst of applause and Larry Fulcher and his band came back onstage. They burst into "Blue Moon of Kentucky" and the dance floor instantly became a mass of movement, couples swinging each other across the floor, smiles on their faces, the women spinning on their toes, the men twisting them expertly. There was laughter in the air. Groups of friends and neighbors stood talking, beers in hand, enjoying a night of community and kinship. Above the bar, a banner thanked everyone for supporting the Dark Hollow High School Band. In the shadows, younger couples kissed discreetly while their parents practiced foreplay on the dance floor. The music seemed to grow in volume. The crowd began to move faster. The sound of glass breaking came from the bar, accompanied by a burst of embarrassed laughter. Lorna stood beside a pillar, the two women on either side silent now as they listened to the music. In the shadows at the walls, figures moved, some barely more than indistinct shapes: couples talking, young people joshing, a community relaxing. Here and there, I heard talk of the discovery of Gary Chute's body but it wasn't personal and it didn't interfere with the night's festivities. I watched a man and woman seated at the bar across from Lorna as they kissed hard, their tongues visible where their mouths met, the woman's hand snaking down her partner's side, down, down…

Down to where a child stood before them, lit by a circle of light that seemed to come from nowhere but within himself. While couples moved close by, and groups of men walked through the crowds carrying trays of beer, the child still held a space to itself and no one came close or broke the shell of light that surrounded him. It lit his blond hair, brought up the color of his purple rompers, made the nails of his tiny hands shine as he raised his left hand and pointed into the shadows.

"Donnie?" I heard myself whisper.

And from the darkness at the far side of the bar, a white shape appeared. Stritch's mouth was open in a smile, the thick, soft lips splitting his face from side to side, and his bald head gleamed in the dim light. He turned in the direction of Lorna Jennings, looked back at me, and drew his right index finger across his neck as he moved through the crowd toward her.

"Stritch," I hissed, springing from my seat. Louis scanned the crowd, already rising, his hand reaching for his SIG.

"I don't see him. You sure?"

"He's on the other side of the bar. He's after Lorna."

Louis went right, his hand inside his black jacket, his fingers on his gun. I moved left, but the crowd was thick and unyielding. I pushed my way through, people stepping back and yelling as their beer spilled. ("Buddy, hey buddy, where's the fire?") I tried to keep Lorna's red sweater in view, but I lost it as people passed into my line of vision. To my right, I could just make out Louis moving through the couples at the edge of the dance floor, his progress attracting curious glances. To my left, Angel was making his way around the bar in a wide arc.

As I neared the counter, the men and women were packed tightly, calling for drinks, waving money, laughing, caressing. I pushed through, spilling a tray of drinks and sending a thin, acned young man tumbling to his knees. Hands reached for me and angry voices were raised, but I ignored them. A barman, a fat, dark-skinned man with a thick beard, raised a hand as I climbed onto the bar, my feet slipping on the wet floor.

"Hey, get down from there," he called, then stopped as he saw the Smith & Wesson in my hand. He backed off, making for the phone at the end of the bar.

Now I could see Lorna clearly. Her head turned as I rose above her, other heads turning too, their eyes wide. I spun to see Louis fighting his way through the pack at the bar, scanning the crowd, trying to catch a glimpse of that white, domed head.

I saw him first. He was maybe ten or twelve people back from Lorna, still moving in her direction. Once or twice people looked his way, but they were distracted by the sight of me on the bar, the gun hanging from my right hand. Stritch smiled at me again, and something flashed in his hand: a short, curved blade, its point wickedly sharp. I made a jump from the bar to the central section where the cash registers and bottles stood, then a second jump, which put me almost beside Lorna, glasses flying from my feet and shattering on the floor. People moved away from me and I heard screaming. I stepped from the bar and pushed my way to her.

"Move back," I said. "You're in danger here."

She was almost smiling, her brow furrowed, until she saw the gun in my hand. "What? What do you mean?"

I looked past her to where I had last seen Stritch, but he was receding from sight, losing himself once again in the crowd. Then a head appeared as Louis stood on a table, trying to keep low enough to avoid making himself a target for a shot. He turned to me and gestured to the center exit. On the stage, the band kept playing, but I could see them exchanging worried looks.

To my left, burly men in T-shirts were moving toward us. I grabbed Lorna by the shoulders. "Take your friends and stay close to the bar. I mean it. I'll explain later." She nodded once, the smile no longer on her face. I think I knew why. I think she had caught a glimpse of Stritch and had seen in his eyes what he had intended to do to her.

Using my shoulders, I started to make my way to the center exit. A small flight of steps led up to it and I could see a waitress at the door, a pretty girl with long, dark hair, frowning uncertainly as she watched what was happening at the bar. Then a figure appeared beside her, and the white, domed head broke into a smile. A pale hand lost itself in her hair and the blade flashed beside her head. The waitress made an attempt to tear herself away and fell to her knees as she did so. I tried to raise my gun but people were jostling me, heads and arms obscuring my vision. Someone-a young man with a football player's build-tried to grab my right arm, but I struck him in the face with my elbow and he moved back. Just as it seemed that we were powerless to prevent the girl from getting her throat cut, a dark object spun through the air and shattered as it struck Stritch's head. To my left, Angel stood on a chair, his hand still raised from where he had released the bottle. I saw Stritch stumble backward, blood already pouring from the multiple cuts in his face and head, as the waitress tore herself away and tumbled down the steps, leaving a garland of hair in her attacker's hand. The door behind Stritch swung open and, in a blur of movement, he disappeared into the night.

Louis and I were only seconds behind him. We reached the steps at almost the same instant. Behind us, blue uniforms appeared at the main door and I could hear shouting and screams.

Outside, beer kegs stood stacked to one side of the door, a green trash can at the other. Ahead of us was the edge of the forest, gilded by the big lamps that lit the side of the bar. Something white moved into the darkness beyond, and we moved after it.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The silence of the woods was startling, as if the snow had muted nature, stifling all life. There was no wind, no night-bird sounds, only the crunch of our shoes and the soft snap of unseen twigs buried beneath our feet.

I closed my eyes hard, willing them to adjust to the dark light of the forest, my hand supporting me against a tree trunk. Around us, mostly hidden by the snowdrifts, tree roots snaked over the thin soil. Louis had already fallen once, and the front of his coat was speckled with white.

Behind us, noises and shouting came from the direction of the bar, but no one followed as yet. After all, it was still unclear what had happened: a man had waved a gun; another man had thrown a bottle and injured a third; some people thought they had seen a knife, a fact that the waitress would surely confirm. It would take them a while to find flashlights and for the police to organize a pursuit. Occasionally, a weak beam of light flashed yellow behind us, but soon the thickening trees blocked its path. Only a sickly moonlight that fell wearily through the branches over our heads provided any illumination.

Louis was close by me, close enough so that we remained in each other's sight. I raised a hand and we stopped. There was no sound ahead of us, which meant that Stritch was either picking his steps carefully or had stopped and was waiting for us in the shadows. I thought again of that doorway in the Portland complex, that certainty I had that he was there and that, if I went after him, he would kill me. This time, I resolved, I would not back down.

Then, from my left, I heard something. It was soft, like the sound of evergreen leaves brushing against clothing, followed by the soft compression of snow beneath a footfall, but I had heard it. From Louis's expression, I could tell that he had noticed it too. A second footfall came, then a third, moving not toward us, but away from us.

"Could we have gotten ahead of him?" I whispered.

"Doubt it. Could be someone from the bar."

"No flashlight, and it's one person, not a group."

But there was something else about it. The noise was careless, almost deliberately so. It was as if someone wanted us to know that he or she was out there.

I heard myself swallow loudly. Beside me, Louis's breath briefly threw a thin mist across his features. He looked at me and shrugged.

"Keep listening, but we best get moving."

He stepped out from behind the trunk of a fir and the sound of a shot shattered the silence of the forest, sending bark and sap shooting into the air beside his face. He dived for the ground and rolled hard to his right until he was shielded by a natural depression, from which the blunt edge of a rock nosed its way out of the snow.

"Night vision," I heard him say. "Fuck these professionals."

"You're supposed to be a professional," I reminded him. "That's why you're here."

"Keep forgetting," he replied, "what with being surrounded by amateurs and all."

I wondered how long Stritch had been watching us, waiting to make his move. Long enough to see me with Lorna, and to understand that some kind of bond existed between us. "Why did he try to take her in such a public place?" I wondered aloud.

Louis risked a look around the edge of the stone, but no shots came. "He wanted to hurt the woman, and for you to know it was him. More than that, he wanted to draw us out."

"And we followed him?"

"Wouldn't want to disappoint him," replied Louis. "I tell you, I don't think the man gives a fuck about that money anymore."

I was getting tired of hugging the big fir. "I'm going to make a move, see how far I can get. You want to take another peep out of your hole and cover me?"

"You the man. Get going."

I took a deep breath and, staying low, began to zigzag forward, tripping on two concealed roots but managing to keep my feet as Stritch's gun barked twice, kicking up snow and dirt by my right heel. It was followed by a burst of fire from Louis's SIG that shattered branches and bounced off rocks but also seemed to force Stritch to keep his head down.

"You see him?" I yelled, as I squatted down, my back to a spruce and my breath pluming before me in huge clouds. I was starting to warm up at last, although, even in the darkness, my fingers and hands appeared to be a raw, vivid red. Before Louis could reply, something off-white whirled in a copse of bushes ahead and I opened fire. The figure retreated into the darkness. "Never mind," I added. "He's about thirty feet northeast of you, heading farther in."

Louis was already moving. I could see his dark shape against the snow. I sighted, aimed and fired four shots into the area where I had last seen Stritch. There was no return fire and Louis was soon level with me but about ten feet away.

And then, again to my left but this time farther ahead, there came the sound of movement in the woods. Someone was moving quickly and surefootedly toward Stritch.

"Bird?" said Louis. I raised a hand quickly and indicated the source of the noise. He went silent, and we waited. For maybe thirty seconds nothing happened. There was no noise, not even a footstep or the falling of snow from the trees. There was nothing but the sound of my heart beating and the blood pumping in my ears.

Then two shots came in close succession followed by what sounded like two bodies impacting. Louis and I moved at the same instant, our feet freezing, our legs held high so that they would not drag in the snow. We ran hard until we burst through the copse, our hands raised to ward off the branches, and there we found Stritch.

He stood in a small, stony clearing doused in silver moonlight, his back to us, his toes barely touching the ground, his hands gripping the leafless trunk of a fallen pine that lay at an upward angle in the snow, supported by hidden rocks beneath the drifts. From the back of his tan raincoat, something thick and red had erupted that glistened darkly in the light. As we approached him, Stritch shuddered and seemed to grip the tree harder, as if to force himself off the sharp tip on which he had been impaled. A fine spray of blood shot from his mouth and he groaned as his grip weakened. He turned his head at the sound of our footsteps and his eyes were large with shock, his thick, moist lips spread wide against gritted teeth as he tried to hold himself upright. Blood coursed from the wounds in his head, dark rivers of it flowing over his pale features.

As we were almost upon him, his mouth opened and he cried out as his body shuddered hard for the last time, his grip failing, his head falling forward and coming to rest against the gray bark of the tree.

And as he died, I scanned the glade, conscious that Louis was doing the same, both of us acutely aware that beyond our line of sight someone was watching us, and that there was a kind of joy in what he saw, and in what he had done.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

I sat in Rand Jennings's office in the Dark Hollow police department and watched the snow falling on the windowpane against the early morning darkness. Jennings sat across from me, his hands steepled together, the fingertips resting in the small roll of fat that hung beneath his chin. Behind me stood Ressler, while outside the office uniformed patrolmen, mostly part-timers called in for the occasion, ran back and forth down the hallway, bumping into one another like ants whose chemical signalers had been interfered with.

"Tell me who he was," said Jennings.

"I already told you," I said.

"Tell me again."

"He called himself Stritch. He was a freelance operator: murder, torture, assassination, whatever."

"What's he doing attacking waitresses in Dark Hollow, Maine?"

"I don't know." That was a lie, but if I told him it was an attempt to gain revenge for the death of his partner then Jennings would have wanted to know who killed the partner and what part I had played in the whole affair. If I told him that then the chances were that I would be locked up in a cell.

"Ask him about the nigra," said Ressler. Instinctively, the muscles on my shoulders and neck tightened and I heard Ressler snicker behind me. "You got a problem with that word, Mr. Big Shot? Don't like to hear a man being called a buck nigra, especially if he's your friend?"

I took a deep breath and brought my rising temper under control. "I don't know what you're talking about, but I'd like to hear you talk like that in Harlem."

Ressler grew redder as Jennings unsteepled his hands and jabbed an index finger at me. "Again, I'm calling you a liar, Parker. I got witnesses saw a colored follow you out that door; same colored checked into the motel with a skinny white guy in tow the day you arrived; same colored who paid cash in advance on the room, the room he shared with the same skinny white guy who hit this man Stritch with a bottle; and the same colored…" His voice rose to a shout. "The same fucking colored who has now left his motel and disappeared into the fucking ether with his buddy. Do you hear me?"

I knew where Angel and Louis had gone. They were at the India Hill Motel on Route 6 outside Greenville. Angel had checked in and Louis was lying low. They would eat out of the McDonald's nearby and wait for me to call.

"Like I said, I don't know what you're talking about. I was alone when I found Stritch. Maybe someone else followed me out, thought that I might need some help catching this guy but, if he did, then I didn't see him."

"You're full of shit, Parker. We got three, maybe four sets of prints running in the direction of that clearing. Now I'm going to ask you again: why is this guy attacking waitresses in my town?"

"I don't know," I lied, again. If the conversation had been a horse, someone would have shot it by now.

"Don't give me that. You spotted the guy. You were moving after him before he even went for the girl." He paused. "Assuming it was Carlene Simmons he was after to begin with." His face took on a thoughtful expression, and his eyes never left my face. I didn't like him. I never had, and what had passed between us gave neither of us any particular reason to mend our fences, but he wasn't dumb. He stood and went to the window, where he stared out into the blackness for a time. "Sergeant," he said at last, "will you excuse us?"

Behind me, I heard Ressler shift his weight and the soft, deliberate tread of his footsteps as he walked to the door and closed it quietly behind him. Jennings turned to me then and cracked the knuckles of his right hand by crushing them in his left.

"I took a swing at you now, not one man outside this room would try to stop me, even if he wanted to. Not one man would interfere." His voice was calm, but his eyes burned.

"You take a swing at me, Rand, you better hope someone tries to interfere. You might be glad of the help."

He sat on the edge of his desk, facing me, his right hand still cupped in his left and resting on his thighs. "I hear you been seen around town with my wife." He wasn't looking at me now. Instead, all his attention seemed to be focused on his hands, his eyes examining every scar and wrinkle, every vein and pore. They were old man's hands, I thought, older than they should have been. There was a tiredness about Jennings, a weariness. Being with someone who doesn't love you just so no one else can have her takes its toll on a man. It takes its toll on the woman too.

I didn't respond to his statement, but I could tell what he was thinking. Things come around sometimes. Call it fate, destiny, God's will. Call it bad luck if you're trying to keep a dying marriage frozen so that it doesn't decay any further. I think Rand's marriage had been like that: something that he willed to be the way it was, frozen in some half-alive world waiting for the miracle that would bring it back to life. And then I had arrived like the April thaw and he had felt the whole construct start to melt around his ears. I had nothing to offer his wife, at least nothing that I was prepared to give. What she saw in me, I wasn't sure. Maybe it was less to do with me than with what I represented: lost opportunities, paths untaken, second chances.

"You hear what I said?" he asked.

"I heard."

"Is it true?" He looked at me then, and he was scared. He wouldn't have called it that, wouldn't even have admitted it to himself, but it was fear. Maybe, somewhere deep inside, he did still love his wife, although in such a strange way, in a manner that was so disengaged from ordinary life, that it had ceased to have any meaning for either of them.

"If you're asking, then you already know."

"You trying to take her away from me again?"

I almost felt pity for him. "I'm not here to take anyone away from anyone else. If she leaves you, she does so for her own reasons, not because a man from her past bundles her off against her will. You got a problem with your wife, you deal with it. I'm not your counselor."

He shifted himself off the desk and his hands went to his sides, forming fists as they did so. "Don't talk smart to me, boy. I'll…"

I rose and moved forward, so that we were face-to-face. Even if he tried to hit me now, there would be no space for him to give the swing momentum. I spoke softly and distinctly. "You won't do anything. You get in my way here and I'll take you down. As for Lorna, it's probably best that we don't even talk about her, because, like as not, it'll get ugly and one of us will get hurt. Years ago, that was me taking your kicks on a piss-covered floor while your buddy looked on. But I've killed men since then, and I'll kill you if you cross my path. You got any more questions, chief, or you want to charge me, you know where to find me."

I left him, collected my gun from the desk, and prepared to drive back to the motel. I felt raw and filthy, my feet still cold and damp in my shoes. I thought of Stritch, writhing and struggling against the gray wood, raised up on his toes in a vain, futile effort to survive. And I thought of the strength it had taken to force him onto the tip of that dead tree. Stritch had been a squat, powerful man with a low center of gravity. People like that are hard to move. The collar of his raincoat had been torn where his killer had gripped him, using his own body weight against him, building up the momentum necessary to impale him on the tree. We were looking for someone strong and fast, someone who perceived Stritch as a threat to himself.

Or to someone else.

A cold wind rippled the main street of Dark Hollow and sprinkled the car with a fine dusting of snow as the motel drew into view. I walked to my room, put my key in the lock and turned it, but the door was already unlocked. I stepped to the right, unholstered my gun and gently eased the door fully open.

Lorna Jennings sat on my bed, her shoes off and her knees pulled up to her chin, the main illumination in the room coming from the lamp by the bedside. Her hands were clasped around her shins with the fingers intertwined. The television was on, tuned to a talk show, but the volume was down to near zero.

She looked at me with something that was almost love, and nearly hate. The world that she had created for herself there-a cocoon of indifference surrounding buried feelings and the dying heart of a poor marriage-was falling apart around her. She shook her head, her eyes still fixed on me, and seemed on the verge of tears. Then she turned away toward the window that would soon be shedding bleak winter light into the room.

"Who was he?" she said.

"His name was Stritch."

Near her bare feet, her thumb and index finger pushed her wedding ring almost to the end of her finger and spun it there, back and forth, before it eventually slipped off, to be held instead between her fingertips. I didn't think it was a good sign.

"He was going to kill me, wasn't he?" Her voice was matter-of-fact, but something trembled beneath it.

"Yes."

"Why? I'd never seen him before. What had I ever done to him?" She rested her left cheek on her knee, waiting for my response. There were tears running down her face.

"He wanted to kill you because he thought you meant something to me. He was looking for revenge, and he saw his chance to take it."

"And do I mean something to you?" Her voice was almost a whisper now.

"I loved you once," I said simply.

"And now?"

"I still care enough about you not to let anyone hurt you."

She shook her head, lifted it from her knees and put the heel of her right hand to her face. She was crying openly now.

"Did you kill him?"

"No. Someone else got to him first."

"But you would have killed him, wouldn't you?"

"Yes."

Her mouth was curled down in pain and misery, tears falling from her face and gently sprinkling the sheets. I took a tissue from the box on the dresser and handed it to her, then sat beside her on the edge of the bed.

"Jesus, why did you have to come here?" she said. Her body was racked by sobs. They came from so deep inside her that they interrupted the flow of her words, like little caesuras of hurt. "Sometimes, whole weeks went by when I didn't think about you. When I heard you got married, I burned inside, but I thought that it might help, that it might cauterize the wound. And it did, Charlie, it really did. But now…"

I reached out to her and touched her shoulder, but she pulled away. "No," she said. "No, don't." But I didn't listen. I moved fully onto the bed, kneeling beside her now, and drew her to me. She struggled, and slapped me open-handed on my body, my face, my arms. And then her face was against my chest, and the struggling eased. She wrapped her arms around me, her cheek hard against me, and a sound came through her gritted teeth that was almost a howl. I moved my hands across her back, my fingertips brushing the strap of her bra beneath her sweater. It rose up slightly at the end, exposing a moon-sliver of skin above her jeans and the lace decoration of her underwear beneath the blue denim.

Her head moved slightly beneath my chin, her cheek rubbing against the skin on my neck and progressing upward, never losing contact, until it was against my own cheek. I felt a surge of lust. My hands were shaking, as much a delayed reaction from the pursuit of Stritch as her closeness to me. It would have been so easy to go with the moment, to re-create, however briefly, a moment of my youth.

I kissed her softly on the temple, then drew away.

"I'm sorry," I said. I stood and moved to the window. Behind me, I heard her move to the bathroom and the door closing, the hiss of the faucets. For a brief instant I had been a young man again, consumed with desire for something I had no right to have. But that young man was gone, and the one who had taken his place no longer had the same intensity of feeling for Lorna Jennings. Outside, the snow fell like years, blanketing the past with the unblemished whiteness of possibilities untold.

I heard the bathroom door reopen. When I turned around, Lorna was standing naked before me.

I looked at her for a moment before I spoke. "I think you left something in the bathroom," I said. I made no move toward her.

"Don't you want to be with me?" she asked.

"I can't, Lorna. If I did, it would be for the wrong reasons and, frankly, I'm not sure I could deal with the consequences."

"No, it's not that," she said. A tear trickled down her cheek. "I've grown old. I'm not like I was when you knew me first."

It was true: she was not as I remembered her. There were dimples on her upper thighs and buttocks, and small folds of fat at her belly. Her breasts were less firm and there was soft flesh beginning to hang on her upper arm. The faint trace of a varicose vein wormed its way across the upper part of her left leg. On her face, there were fine wrinkles around the mouth and a triad of lines snaked away from the corner of each eye.

And yet, while the years had transformed her, were changing her even now, they had not made her any less beautiful. Instead, as she grew older, her femininity had been enhanced. The fragile beauty of her youth had withstood the harsh winters of the north and the difficulties of her marriage by adapting, not fading, and that strength had found expression in her face, in her body, lending her looks a dignity and maturity that had been buried before and had only occasionally displayed itself in her features. As I looked into her eyes and her gaze met mine, I knew that the woman I had loved, for whom I still felt something that was almost love, remained untouched within.

"You're still beautiful," I said. She watched me carefully, trying to be certain that I was not trying to blind her with kind lies. When she saw that I was telling the truth, her eyes closed softly as if she had just been touched deep inside but could not tell whether she felt pain or pleasure.

She covered her face with her hands and shook her head. "This is kind of embarrassing."

"Kind of," I agreed.

She nodded and went back into the bathroom. When she emerged, fully-clothed. she walked straight to the door. I followed her, reaching it as she touched the handle. She turned before opening it, and rested her hand against my cheek. "I don't know," she said, her forehead resting gently against my shoulder for a moment. "I just don't know."

Then she slipped out of the room and into the morning light.

I slept for a time, then showered and dressed. I looked at my watch as I strapped it to my wrist, and a pain lanced through my stomach unlike anything I had felt in months. In all that had happened-the hunt for traces of Caleb Kyle, the encounter with Rachel, the death of Stritch-I had lost track of the days.

It was December eleventh. The anniversary was one day away.

It was past three when I ate dry toast and coffee at the diner, and thought of Susan, and the rage I felt at the world for allowing her and my daughter to be taken from me. And I wondered how, with all of this pain and grief coiled inside me, I could ever begin again.

But I wanted Rachel, I knew, and the depth of my need for her surprised me. I had felt it as I sat opposite her in Harvard Square, listening to her voice and watching the movements of her hands. How many times had we been together? Twice? Yet, with her, I had felt a peace that had been denied me for so long.

I wondered too at what I might bring upon her, and upon myself, if the relationship was allowed to develop. I was a man moon-haunted by the ghost of his wife. I had mourned for her, and I still mourned for her. I felt guilt at my feelings for Rachel, at what we had done together. Was it a betrayal of Susan's memory to want to start over? So many feelings, so many emotions, so many acts of revenge, of attempted recompense, had been concentrated into the last twelve months. I felt drained by them, and tormented by the images that crept unbidden into my dreams and my waking moments. I had seen Donald Purdue in the bar. I had seen him as clearly as I had seen Lorna naked before me, as clearly as I had seen Stritch impaled on a tree.

I wanted to start again, but I didn't know how. All I knew was that I was moving closer and closer to the edge, and that I had to find some way to anchor myself before I fell.

I left the diner then drove down to Greenville. The Mercury was parked at the back of the motel beneath a copse of trees, making it almost invisible from the road. I didn't think Rand would come after Angel and Louis, not as long as he had me, but it didn't hurt to take precautions. As I parked, Angel opened the door to room six, moved aside to let me in, then closed the door behind him.

"Well, look at you," he said, a wide grin on his face.

Louis lay on one of the room's two double beds, reading the latest issue of Time. "He right, Bird," he said. "You the man. Pretty soon, you and Michael Douglas both be in one o' them sex clinics and we be reading about you in People magazine."

"We saw her arriving as we left," said Angel. "She was in kind of a state. I didn't see there was anything else I could do but let her in." He sat alongside Louis. "Now I just know you're going to tell us that you and the chief sat down and talked this thing out and he said, 'Sure, you can sleep with my wife, because she really loves you, not me.' Because, if you didn't, then, pretty soon, you're going to be even less welcome there than you are already. And, frankly, you're currently about as welcome as a dead man's feet in summertime."

"I didn't sleep with her," I said.

"She come on to you?"

"You ever hear of sensitivity?"

"It's overrated, but I'll take that as a yes and assume that you didn't respond. Jeez, Bird, you got the self-restraint of a saint."

"Let it go, Angel. Please."

I sat on the edge of the second bed, and put my head in my hands. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes tightly. When I looked up again, Angel was almost beside me. I lifted my hand to let him know that I was okay. I went to the bathroom and soaked my face with cold water before returning to them.

"As for the chief, I haven't been run out of town yet," I said, picking up the conversation where we had left off. "I'm a witness-cum-suspect in the unsolved murder of an unidentified man in the Maine woods. Jennings asked me to stick around, shoot the breeze. He did tell me something else as well: the ME hasn't officially delivered his report yet, but it's likely to confirm that Chute was beaten badly before he was killed. From the marks on his wrists, it looked like someone hung him from a tree to do it." The investigation into the death would be conducted out of CID III's headquarters in Bangor, Jennings had told me, but Dark Hollow itself was likely to be crawling with cops by the following morning.

"Louis made some calls, touched base with a few of his associates," said Angel. "He found out that Al Z and a contingent of Palermo irregulars flew into Bangor last night. Seems like Tony Celli just ran out of time."

So they were closing in. There was a reckoning coming. I could feel it. I went to the door and looked out on the quietness of the India Hill Mall, at the tourist information office and the deserted parking lot. Louis came over and stood beside me.

"You called that boy's name in the bar last night, just before you saw Stritch," he said.

I nodded. "I saw something, but I don't even know what it was." I opened the door and stepped outside. He didn't pursue the subject.

"So what now?" said Louis. "You dressed up like you ready for an Arctic adventure."

"I'm still going after the old man to find out how he came to sell Ricky's boots to Stuckey."

"You want us to tag along?"

"No. I don't want to spook him any more than I have to, and it's better if you stay out of Dark Hollow for a while. After I've spoken to him, maybe then we can decide how to proceed. I can handle this one on my own."

But I was wrong.