Dark Hollow

EPILOGUE

It is December twentieth. Soon Christmas will be here. Scarborough is a place of ice cream fields and sugar-frosted trees, with colored illuminations at the windows of the houses and holly wreaths at the doors. I have cut a fir in the yard, one of a crop my grandfather planted in the year that he died, and have placed it in the front room of the house. I will add small white lights to it on Christmas Eve, as an act of remembrance for my child, so that if she is watching me from the darkness among the trees she may see the lights and know that I am thinking of her.

Above the fireplace, there is a card from Walter and Lee and a small, gift-wrapped box from Ellen. Next to it is a postcard from the Dominican Republic, unsigned but with a message written by two different hands: "This communicating of a man's self to his friends works two contrary effects; for it redoubleth joys, and cutteth griefs in halves." The quotation is not attributed. I will call them when they return, when the interest in the events that took place in Dark Hollow has begun to recede.

Finally, there is a note. I recognized the handwriting on the envelope when it arrived and felt a kind of wrench in my heart as I opened it. The message said only: "Call me when you can. I miss you." Beneath this line, she had written her home telephone number and the number of her parents' house. She had signed it: "Love, Rachel."

I sit by my window and I think again of the winter dead, and of Willeford. He had been found two days before, and I felt the news of his loss with a sharp pain. For a time, after he disappeared, I had half suspected the old detective. I had done him an injustice, and I think, in a way, I had brought death upon him. His body had been buried in a shallow grave at the back of his property. According to Ellis Howard, he had been tortured before he died, but they had no indication of who might have been responsible. It could have been Stritch, I thought, or it could have been some of Tony Celli's crew, but I think, deep down, that he died because of the old man, Caleb Kyle, and I guessed that maybe it was Caleb's son Caspar who had killed him.

Willeford's name had been attached to the search for Billy Purdue's parents. It was his number that the old woman, Mrs. Schneider, had called. If she could find him, then so could Caleb, and Caleb would have wanted to know all that Willeford knew. I hoped that the alcohol had dulled his pain, had made him a little less frightened as the end came. I hoped that he had told all that he knew as quickly as he could, but I knew that was probably a false hope. There had been something of the old honor, the old courage, about Willeford. He would not have given up the boy so easily. I had a vision of him, sitting in the Sail Loft, his whiskey and his beer before him, an old man adrift in the present. He thought that it was progress that would spell his end, not some demon from the past that he had raised by doing a good turn for a lost, troubled young man.

And I think of Ricky, and the grinding noise that the trunk of the car made as it was opened, and the sight of him huddled beside the spare tire, and of how he had tried to save Ellen in the last moments before he died. I wished him peace.

Lorna Jennings left Dark Hollow, and Rand. She called me to tell me she was leaving for Florida to spend Christmas with her mother before looking for a new place to live. The machine took the message, although I was in the house when she called and could hear her voice against the soft whirring of the tape. I didn't pick up. It was better that way, I thought.

And the man known as Caleb Kyle has been buried in a patch of ground to the north of a churchyard outside Augusta, alongside the boy he called Caspar, and prayers were said for their souls. A few days later, a man was seen at the graveside, a big man with pain in his eyes. He stood in the snow and looked at the shape of the newly disturbed earth beneath it. To his left, the sun faded from the sky, leaving streaks of red across the clouds. The man had a small pack on his back, and a piece of paper with the date of his court appearance written upon it by his bail bondsman. It was an appearance he would never make, and the bondsman knew it. Some of Al Z's money had bought his complicity, and his silence. Al Z could take the loss, I thought.

This was the second cemetery that Billy Purdue had visited that day, and he would never be seen in either again. Billy Purdue would never be seen anywhere again. He would disappear, and no trace of him would ever be found.

But I think I know where Billy Purdue went.

He went north.

Two days after the anniversary of Susan and Jennifer's death, I attended mass at St. Maximilian Kolbe and listened as their names were read out from the altar. The next day, the fifteenth, I visited the grave. There were fresh flowers laid upon it-from Susan's parents, I supposed. We had not spoken since her death, and I think they still blamed me for what had happened. I blamed myself, but I was making reparation. That was all that I could do. That was all any of us could do.

On the night of the fifteenth, they came to me. I awoke to the noise of them in the woods, sounds that were not sounds but the slow joining of worlds within worlds, and I walked to my porch and stood, but I did not descend to them.

Among the shadows, behind the trees, a host of figures moved. At first, they might have been the light shifting as the wind stirred the branches, phantasms of hands and faces, for they were silent as they came forward for me to bear witness. They were young girls, and their dresses, once torn and stained with blood and dirt, were now intact and glowed from within, clinging to soft, slightly rounded bellies that might, once before and long ago, have caused the young men to twist in the seats of their bright red cars, to whistle at them from their vinyl booths, to lean across and whisper to them, to playfully block their escape as they basked in the light from their eyes. The moonlight shone on the soft down of their arms, the gentle movement of their hair, the soft glistening at their lips; the girls in their summer dresses, gathered together in the new-fallen snow.

And farther behind them, others emerged: old women and old men, nightdresses fluttering, stained dungarees war-painted with flecks and dashes of enamel, their gnarled hands traced with thick veins like the roots of the trees clinging to the earth beneath their feet. Young men stood aside for them, their hands joined with those of their women; there were husbands and wives, and young lovers, once violently separated, now together once more. Children moved between their legs, solemn and watchful, carefully making their way to the boundary of the woods; children with the broken bones in their fingers now miraculously restored, children who had been wrenched apart in dark, pain-filled cellars now restored to beauty, their eyes bright and knowing in the winter darkness.

A whole host of the dead gathered before me, their numbers stretching back into the shadows, back into the past. They did not speak but only watched me, and a kind of peace came over me, as if the hand of a young woman had touched me gently in the night, whispering to me that I should sleep.

for now

And beside the rail, where the old man had sat with his dog, where my mother had leaned, still beautiful despite the years, I stood and felt their eyes upon me. A small hand gripped mine and when I looked down I could almost see her, radiant and new, a small beauty revealed against the gentle luminosity of the snow.

And a hand touched my cheek and soft lips met mine, and a voice said:

sleep

And I slept.