Nocturnes

I

The Grady house is not easy to find. It lies on a county road that winds northwest from 201 like a reptile crawling off to die, the road dragging itself between steep banks of pine and fir, gradually becoming harder and harder to navigate as Tarmac gives way to cracked concrete, concrete to gravel, gravel to dirt, as if conspiring to discourage those who would look upon the blue-gabled house that waits at its end. Even then there is a final barrier for the curious to overcome, for the pitted trail that leads at last to its door has become wild and overgrown. Fallen trees have not been cleared and creepers and vines have exploited the natural bridges, thorny briers and stinging nettles joining with them to create an ugly wall of green and brown. Only the most tenacious will make their way farther, carving a path through the vegetation or working their way over ditches and rocks, tripping upon roots that seem barely to cling to the earth, the trees they sustain prey to the mildest of storms.

Those who progress will find themselves in a yard of gray soil and foul-smelling weeds, the edge of the forest ending in a remarkably uniform tree line some twenty feet from the house, so that nature itself appears reluctant to extend its reach any closer. It is a simple, two-story arrangement, with a gabled attic window above the second floor. A porch runs along three sides, a decrepit swing chair to the east hanging askew by a single rope. Dead leaves lie curled inward like the remains of insects, piled up against the windows and doors. The mummified husk of a wren is buried beneath them, its body sunken and its feathers fragile as ancient parchment.

The windows of the Grady house have long been covered over with wood, and the front and back entrances have been fortified by the addition of steel doors. Nobody has damaged them, for even the most daring of pranksters steer clear of the building itself. Some come out to look, and to drink beer in its shadow, as if to goad its dæmons into taking action against them, but like small boys taunting a lion through the bars of its cage they are brave only as long as there is a barrier between themselves and the presence in the Grady house.

For there is a presence there. Perhaps it does not have a name, or even a form, but it exists. It is composed of misery and hurt and despair. It is in the dust on the floors and in the fading paper that peels slowly from the walls. It is in the stains on the sink and in the ashes of the last fire. It is in the damp upon the ceiling and in the blood upon the boards. It is in everything, and it is of everything.

And it waits.

It is strange how John Grady’s name is rarely spoken except in reference to killings committed by others. No books have been written about him, even in this age of insatiable curiosity about the darkest among us, and the nature of his crimes remains unexplored in the popular imagination. True, if one is prepared to delve into the journals of criminology or the textbooks of violent crime, then there will be attempts to come to grips with John Grady, but all of them will fail. John Grady is inexplicable, for to explain him one must first know about him. There must be facts: a background, a personality. There must be schoolmates and fellow workers; an absent father, an overbearing mother. There must be trauma and conflicted sexuality. For John Grady, there are none of these things.

He arrived in Maine in 1977, and he bought a house. His neighbors dropped by, and he invited them inside to take a look around. The house was old, but John Grady clearly had some experience in construction for he was tearing out walls, laying new floors, filling in cracks, and replacing old plumbing. His neighbors never stayed long, as John Grady was clearly a busy man, albeit one with dubious taste. The original expensive wallpaper was already gone, and a cheap, un-adorned replacement had been put up in its stead. The paste Grady used was of his own creation, and it stank, giving visitors another reason not to prolong their stay. Grady was doing all the work alone. He would talk about his plans for the house, and it was clear that he had already created it in his mind. He spoke of red drapes and deep velvet couches, of claw-toed bathtubs and mahogany dining tables. It was, he said, a labor of love, yet people looked up at that cheap paper, and smelled the rank substance that he had used to raise it, and quickly put Grady down as a fantasist.

John Grady stole children. He took the first, little Mattie Bristol, from North Anson in the autumn of 1979; the second, Evie Munger, from Fryeburg in the spring of 1980; the third, Nadine Lincoln, from South Paris, in the summer of 1980; Denny Maguire, the fourth victim, and the only one to survive, as he walked from school in Belfast in the third week of May 1981; and his final victim, Louise Matheson, while she was walking from her home in Shin Pond to the house of her best friend, Amy Lowell, on May 21, 1981.

That was his mistake, for Amy was so excited about her friend’s impending arrival that she was hiding in the woods at the verge of her house, hoping to leap out and surprise her. She watched Grady’s Lincoln pull up alongside her friend, saw the man inside lean over to speak to her, and then found herself unable to move as Grady’s big hand grabbed Louise by the hair and dragged her into the car. Amy’s parents heard her screaming, and within minutes the police were on their way, already mounting a search for a red Lincoln.

They did not have to look far. The abduction of Louise Matheson was a crime of opportunity for John Grady. His previous victims had been taken from towns elsewhere in the state, then brought west to be killed, but Shin Pond was barely ten miles from the Grady house. John Grady’s appetites had become increasingly hard to sate, and the release that he gained from their appeasement did not last as long as it once had. It is possible to imagine him, on the day that Louise Matheson was abducted, prowling the roads, his hunger gnawing at him, perhaps promising himself that he was only trying to distract himself from his appetites by taking a ride, that he did not really intend to seek out another victim.

John Grady was a tall, thin man. His hair was graying prematurely and cut close to his scalp, which served only to make his face seem even longer than it was. A calcium deficiency in his youth had given his chin an unfortunate prominence, one that he tried to hide by keeping his head low. He always wore a suit when out in public, set off by a bright bow tie and dark suspenders. There was something dated about him. His suits, though clean, gave the impression of having dwelt for some time in an attic or a thrift store. The shirts were a little frayed at the collars and cuffs. The bow ties looked faded rather than fresh, and bore wrinkles and stains that suggested many years of use.

John Grady had long fingers and large hands. Amy Lowell told the police that, when he gripped her friend’s head, the man’s fingers had closed on it entirely like the talons of a great bird, extending almost to her eyes. Despite her shock, Amy Lowell gave the police a good description of the individual who had taken Louise Matheson, and the vehicle that he drove. There were those who recalled John Grady’s ownership of a red Lincoln, and the police arrived at the Grady house and found the car. Nobody answered their knocks to the door, and a debate ensued on the porch steps of the Grady house concerning the nature of probable cause. It was curtailed by the sound, real or imagined, of a child’s cry, and the door was kicked in.

John Grady was standing in the hallway of his house. His great work remained uncompleted, and there were ladders and drapes everywhere. His left hand was on the handle of the door to his basement, and he held a gun in his right. Before he could be stopped, he darted through the basement door and locked it behind him. He had reinforced it specifically for such an eventuality, replacing the flimsy original with sturdy oak and strengthening it with steel bands and a security bar. It took the police twenty minutes to break it down.

When they entered the basement, Louise was dead. Slumped on the floor beside her was another child, a little boy. He was still alive, but unconscious from hunger and dehydration. This was Denny Maguire.

John Grady stood over them both with his gun to his head. His last words, before he pulled the trigger, were:

“This is not a house. This is a home.”

II

Winter was here. The north wind had almost stripped the last of the leaves from the trees, leaving only a sprinkling of foliage to threaten the dominion of the evergreens. Clusters of young beeches trembled beneath the canopy, and sugar maple seedlings lay sprinkled through the forests like lost gold. There was a kind of silence now in the woods, as animals prepared to slumber, or to die.

In Portland, the trees of the Old Port were festooned with white lights, and a Christmas tree burned brightly farther up on Congress. It was cold, although not as cold as the winters I recalled from my childhood. When I was young, we would spend New Year’s at my grandfather’s house in Scarborough. He and my father would share whiskey and war stories, for they were both policemen, although my grandfather had retired many years before. My mother would listen indulgently to tales that she had heard told over and over again, then hustle me off to my bed. Outside, the snow would gleam with a bluish tinge, lit by a bright moon in a clear, dark sky. I would sit at my window, wrapped in a blanket, and stare at it, following its contours, basking in the otherworldliness of it. Even on the darkest of nights, when the moon was invisible, the snow seemed to hold light within it. To the child gazing at it from his window, it glowed from deep inside, and I would fall asleep with the curtains open so that its unsullied beauty was the last thing I saw before my eyes closed, the voices of those whom I loved distantly rising and falling in low cadence.

In time, those voices from my past would be stilled. My grandfather, my parents, all were gone now. I found that I became what I had most feared when I was a child: a man whose blood ran only in his own veins, a figure without visible ties to those who had brought him into this world. And when I tried to anchor myself with a family of my own, that too was taken from me, and I drifted, and was lost for a time in places without names.

Yet at last I learned to recognize that I was not entirely alone, and that there were deep connections binding me to all that I had known. I had to come back to this place to find them, to reveal them where they had always lain, waiting beneath fallen leaves and compacted snow in the memory of a child seated by a window. My past and my present were here in this northern place, and, I hoped, my future too. Soon I would be a father again, for my lover Rachel was due to give birth in the coming weeks. I felt part of a circle slowly completing itself in this region of my childhood, and I thought that I would always remain here. During the long winter months, I would bitch and moan with the best of the old men. I would complain when my wheels became mired in mud during the spring thaw, or when filthy piles of iced snow upon shady corners continued their slow melt into March, sullying the streets in a futile rearguard action against the coming of spring. I would strike out at mosquitoes and greenheads during the summer, and watch my lawn disappear beneath brown leaves in fall.

Occasionally, even now, I would hear one of my neighbors joke about heading for Florida, that this was the last damn winter he could endure in the cold Northeast, but I knew that the speaker would never leave. It was part of the game we all played, the dance of which we were all a part. I could not live without seasons, for in seasons are reflected the rhythms of our existence: of birth and maturity, of decline and decay, yet always with the promise of renewal for those who remain. Perhaps I would alter my attitude as I grew older, as the winters took a greater toll upon me and the north wind brought with it a reminder only of my own mortality. I wondered, sometimes, if that was part of the appeal of Florida or Arizona for those in their later years: cut off from the seasons, it was possible to forget the rhythm that governed one’s life, even as one’s feet still moved to complete the final steps of the dance.

My prospective client was late, but I didn’t really care. Up on Middle Street, the Half Moon Jug Band was playing carols to cheer the shoppers. I could hear the music from where I sat in JavaNet on Exchange, surrounded by kids playing with the computers. I kind of liked JavaNet, even if the geek quotient tonight was a little greater than I would have preferred. It had decent coffee, and some comfortable armchairs. It was also a pretty good place to meet people, as most of those sharing space were too caught up with internet dating or email to bother with what was happening around them. Its window was also a good spot for people-watching, and outside of Newbury Street in Boston or just about anywhere below 14th Street in Manhattan, the window of JavaNet on Exchange was one of my favorite places from which to watch the world pass by. I had already counted at least three women who, if I hadn’t been perfectly happy with Rachel, would probably have refused to have anything to do with me, and rightly so. I had also seen Maurice (pronounced “Maur-reese”) Gardner, who was something of a local celebrity among those of us with a blacker than average sense of humor, since Maurice had once shot and superficially wounded a Santa Claus at the mall. Maurice claimed that Santa had snuck up on him, while Santa, when he gave evidence at Maurice’s trial, claimed that he had merely been heading for the men’s room beside the mall office. Since Maurice was hopped off his head at the time on coke riffed with Persian Brown, a combination likely to make even Buddha a little edgy, the judge sided with Santa Claus and Maurice was locked up for a while for his own protection and to ensure that Christmas did not become a time of mourning for traumatized junior patrons of the mall stores. Maurice was now clean, taking his medication, and working as second mate on a lobster boat. In a nice circularity of events, he volunteered each Christmas to play Santa Claus at some out-of-town children’s charity. From what I heard, he felt it was the least that he could do to make up for his past sins.

I like Portland. It has all the advantages of a city, but still feels like a small town. There’s an eccentricity to it, and a strength of character. It has more coffee shops than maybe any city its size rightfully needs, and there are one or two bars that could slide into the sea and make this a classier place by their absence, but that’s okay. It has a little movie theater that plays mostly foreign imports, and the downtown Nickelodeon has promoted itself back to first-runs. The Public Market is still going, and there are decent bookstores and a big library. All told, it’s not such a bad place to have on your doorstep, and when it preyed on my nerves-as it sometimes did-I had the reassurance that I didn’t actually live here. I could retreat back to my house on the Scarborough marshes within minutes, and watch the sun set on still waters.

Some clown in a bad suit waved at me from the street, and I gave him a noncommittal nod in return. It took me about three minutes to recall him as the real estate salesman who had once tried to convince Rachel and me that our lives would be improved by living in his sinkhole new development out Saco way. Since then, he had experienced some misfortune in his life. He had been screwing his secretary on the side, and when his wife found out she screwed him. His business went to the wall and he was threatened with jail when it emerged that he had been frugal with the information he had provided to the IRS. Both his wife and his secretary gave evidence against him, which says a lot about the kind of person that he was. A couple of the Saco houses had also subsided when a passing child sneezed too loudly, and all kinds of legal storms were now brewing on that front as well. But there he was, a shopping bag from Country Noel in one hand, waving to a man he barely knew but had once tried to rip off with a bad property deal.

Really, you had to love Exchange Street.

My client was now twenty minutes late and counting, but it still didn’t matter. There was life around me; life, and the promise of new life to come. Most of those on the streets were locals, reclaiming the Old Port from the tourists now that summer was gone and the leaf watchers had departed. I could see a group of skater kids dressed in hooded sweats and oversized jeans trying to pretend that the encroaching cold wasn’t bothering them. I guessed that about half of them would be receiving antibiotics and TLC from their moms before the week was out, but they wouldn’t share that fact with their buddies.

I had dropped some cash over at Bull Moose earlier, and now flicked idly through my purchases. Some of them would probably be okay with Rachel, I guessed: the Notwist, and maybe Thee More Shallows. I wasn’t too sure how she would feel about And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, but I’d heard some of their stuff on one of the more vibrant local radio stations and liked it a lot. It was also a cool name for a band, which counted for something. I figured that if I could find a T-shirt with the band’s name on it, I might be allowed to hang out with the slacker kids for a while, at least until the cops came by and decided to haul me in for my own safety.

My client arrived at 6.25 P.M. I knew him by his clothing. He had told me to expect a man in a gray suit with a gray-black tie, a black overcoat protecting him from the cold, and that was what I got. He looked younger than I expected, although I guessed that he was probably close to seventy by now. I decided not to share my Trail of Dead CD with him. I thought it might be pushing things a little on our first meeting. I raised a hand to let him know who I was, and he threaded his way through the computer stations to take a seat with me at the window, casting some suspicious glances at some of the, well, more “sheltered” patrons.

“It’s okay,” I said. “They won’t hurt you.”

He looked a little uncertain, but gave them the benefit of the doubt. “Frank Matheson,” he said, stretching out his hand. It was a big hand, scarred in places. A huge callus stretched across his palm from the base of his thumb. I could feel it as I shook his hand. Matheson owned a machine tool company over in Solon, and was a reasonably wealthy man, but he had clearly come by it through hard graft. I bought him a coffee-black, no sugar-and rejoined him at the window.

“I’m surprised that you don’t have an office,” he said.

“If I had an office I’d have to paint it, then buy chairs and a desk. I’d have to think about what to put on the walls. People would judge me on the quality of my furnishings.”

“And what do they judge you on now?”

“The quality of other people’s coffee. It’s pretty good in this place.”

“You meet all of your clients here?”

“Depends. If I’m not sure about them, I meet them in Star-bucks. If I’m really not sure about them, I meet them at a gas station, maybe offer them a couple of Milk Duds to break the ice.”

A look of confusion crossed his face, as though a small warning light had just tripped in his brain. I get that look a lot.

“You come highly recommended,” he said, apparently to reassure himself rather than to compliment me.

“Probably people I brought to this place.”

“Plus I’ve read about you in the newspapers.”

“Yet still you’re here.”

He made a wavering gesture with his right hand. “I’ll admit that not all of it was complimentary.”

“I believe it’s called ‘balanced reporting.’ ”

Matheson allowed himself a smile, although I still wasn’t certain that the little warning light had extinguished itself entirely. He sipped his coffee, lifting the cup with that callused right hand. It trembled slightly. His left had never ceased clutching the leather attaché case on his lap.

“I should tell you why I’m here,” he said. “I suppose I should start with my family. My-”

I interrupted him.

“Is this about your daughter, Mr. Matheson?”

He didn’t look too surprised. I guessed that it happened a lot. It probably took a little while for the name to register with some people, but they’d get there in the end. I imagined Frank Matheson, sitting in his office with a prospective customer, seeing the eyes narrow, the hands move awkwardly.

Was your daughter Louise Matheson? Jesus, I’m sorry, that was a terrible thing that happened. Death was too good for that guy, what was his name? Grady, yeah.

John Grady.

“In a way,” said Matheson.

He opened his case.

“I brought some material along, just in case you didn’t know about what happened, or needed some background.”

Inside, I could see a plastic folder. It contained copies of newspaper clippings and photographs. He didn’t remove it.

“I know about it,” I said.

“It was a long time ago. You must have been very young when it occurred.”

“It was a famous case, and people here don’t forget things like that too easily. They stay in the memory, and get passed along. Maybe it’s right that they should.”

He didn’t reply. I knew that his daughter was always in his memory, frozen in death at the age of ten. I wondered if he ever tried to picture what she might have been like had she lived, how she might have looked, what she might be doing with her life. I wondered if he ever saw other young women on the street, and in their faces caught glimpses of his own departed child, a faint trace of her, as though she were briefly inhabiting the body of another, trying to make contact with her family and the life denied her.

Because I saw my own dead child in the children of others, and I did not believe that I was alone in experiencing my loss in such a way.

“I know about you as well,” said Matheson. “That’s why I want to hire you. I believed you’d understand.”

“Understand what, Mr. Matheson?”

He reached into his case and withdrew a brown envelope. He slid the envelope toward me. It was unsealed. Inside was a single piece of unfolded paper, glossy on one side. I removed it and looked at the copy of the black-and-white photograph on the sheet. It showed a child, a little girl. The photo had been taken from a distance away, but the child’s face was clear. She was holding a softball bat, her attention focused on an unseen ball beyond the limits of the picture. The girl wasn’t wearing a helmet, and her brown hair hung loose around her shoulders. Even at a distance, and allowing for the relatively poor quality of the photo, she was a beautiful child.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“I don’t know.”

I looked at the photograph again. There was nothing in it to indicate where it might have been taken. There was just the girl, the bat, and grass and dark trees in the distance. I turned the sheet over, but the reverse side was blank.

“Where’s the original?”

“The cops at Two Mile Lake have it.”

“You want to tell me how you came by it?”

He took the photograph from me and carefully placed it on the counter ledge before putting the envelope on top of it so that it was entirely covered.

“You know who owns the Grady house?”

“No, but I could hazard a guess.”

“Which would be?”

“That you own the Grady house.”

He nodded. “The bank put it up for sale about two years after my Louise’s murder. There were no other bidders. I didn’t pay very much for it. Under other circumstances, you might even have said that I got a bargain.”

“You left it standing.”

“What would you have expected me to do: raze it?”

“It’s what a lot of folks would have done.”

“Not me. I wanted it to remain as a monument to what was done to my daughter and to those other children. I felt that if it was removed from the earth, then people would start to forget. Does that make sense to you?”

“It doesn’t have to make sense to me. It doesn’t have to make sense to anyone but you and your family.”

“My wife doesn’t understand. She never has. She thinks that all traces of John Grady should have been wiped away. She doesn’t need anything to remind her of what happened to Louise. It’s always with her, every single day.”

Matheson seemed to retreat from me for a moment, and I watched his relationship with his wife reflected in his eyes like a rerun of a desolate old movie. In some ways, it was a miracle that they had stayed together. Both as a policeman and as an investigator, I had seen marriages disintegrate under the burden of grief. People speak about a shared sorrow, but the death of a child is so often not apportioned in the same way between a father and a mother. It is experienced simultaneously, but the grief is insidious in its individuality. Couples drown in it, sinking beneath the surface, each unable to reach out and touch the other, incapable of seeking solace in the love that they feel, or once felt, for each other. It is particularly terrible for those who lose an only child. The great bond between them is severed, and in some cases they simply drift away into loneliness and isolation.

I waited.

“Can I ask you what you did with your house, after what happened?” he asked.

I knew the question would come.

“I sold it.”

“Have you ever been back there?”

“No.”

“You know who lives there now?”

“A young couple. They have two children.”

“Do they know that a woman and a child were killed in that house?”

“I guess that they do.”

“You think it troubles them?”

“I don’t know. Maybe they feel that what happened there once can never happen again.”

“But they’d be wrong. Life doesn’t abide by such simple rules.”

“Do you feel that way about the Grady house, Mr. Matheson?”

His fingers trailed across the envelope, seeking to find the lineaments of the face of the unknown girl hidden beneath. I thought again of new-fallen snow, and how I once believed I could see the outlines of faces beneath it, like the shapes of skulls beneath white skin. That was later, when I left behind the child I once was and those whom I loved began to fall away.

“You asked me where I found the photograph, Mr. Parker. I found it in the mailbox of the Grady house. It was in a torn envelope. The envelope had been sealed, then opened by someone to get at what was inside. Judging by the marks on the envelope, I’d guess there was more than one photograph in it originally. The shape of the remaining photograph didn’t quite match the marks of the bulge in the envelope. That’s how I knew.”

“Do you check the mailbox often?”

“Nope, just occasionally. I don’t go to the house much anymore.”

“When did you find the photograph?”

“One week ago.”

“What did you do?”

“I took it to the police.”

“Why?”

“It was a photograph of a little girl, placed in the mailbox of a house once owned by a child killer. At the very least, someone has a sick sense of humor.”

“Is that what the police think?”

“They told me that they’d see what they could do. I wanted them to go to the newspapers and the TV people, get this little girl’s picture shown across the state so that we could find out who she is, and-”

“And warn her?”

He drew a breath, and his eyes closed as he nodded.

“And warn her,” he echoed.

“You think she’s in danger, because someone put a photo of her in Grady’s mailbox?”

“Like I said, at the very least the person who put that picture there has a disturbed mind. Who would even want to link a little girl with that place?”

I slipped the envelope away and looked at the print of the child’s picture again.

“Was the photograph old, Mr. Matheson?”

“I don’t think so. It looked recent to me.”

“And the photograph itself was black-and-white, not just the copy that you made?”

“That’s right.”

“Anything on the back to indicate that it came from a lab? You know, any identifying marks, brand names?”

“It was Kodak paper, that’s all I know.”

That paper could be purchased in any camera store in the country. Whoever took the photograph had probably developed it in his own home or garage. It was simple enough to do, with the right equipment. That way, there was no chance of a curious lab worker spying suspicious photographs of playing children and calling in the cops to investigate the individual behind the camera.

The child really was beautiful. She looked happy and healthy, and the intensity of her concentration on the ball about to head her way made me smile.

“What would you like me to do, Mr. Matheson?”

“I want you to see if you can discover who this girl is. I want you to talk to her parents. I’ll come with you, when you find them. They should know about this.”

“That’s going to be difficult. Have you spoken to the police?”

“They won’t tell me anything, except that it’s under investigation and that I shouldn’t worry. They said it was probably nothing.”

Maybe they were right. There were those who might find amusing or arousing the idea of associating a little girl’s image with the memory of a child killer, but their actual potential for harm was likely to be limited. And yet someone had gone to the trouble of snapping at least one photograph of an unsuspecting little girl, and if Matheson was right in his suspicions, then there were probably more photos, some perhaps of this child, but some possibly of other children.

“I was also wondering if you might watch the Grady house for a while, just in case the person who left this picture comes back.”

Wintering at the Grady house didn’t sound like the best way to get into the Christmas spirit. I tried not to let my reluctance show, but it was hard.

“Have you seen any signs of damage to the house,” I asked, “any indications that someone might have tried to get inside?”

“Nope, it’s sealed up good and tight. I have a set of keys, and the police at Two Mile have another set. I gave it to them after some lunatic tried to get onto the roof and start a fire there a couple of years back. I don’t know if they’ve been inside since I gave them the photograph.”

I touched the picture of the little girl with my fingertips. My fingers brushed the image of her hair.

“It’s kind of an obvious question, but have you seen anybody hanging around the property, or has anyone displayed excessive interest in what went on there?”

“Well, we had some trouble with a man named Ray Czabo, but the chief warned him off. I don’t think he’s been back since. You know him?”

Matheson couldn’t have missed the pained look that crossed my face. Voodoo Ray Czabo was a death tourist from Maine, a haunter of crime scenes. He liked taking pictures of places in which people had died. When the cops were finished with their work, he would sometimes remove “souvenirs” from the location and try to hawk them on the Net. Ray Czabo and I had history. He had visited the house in Brooklyn in which my wife and daughter were killed, and had stolen from outside the door the carved wooden block upon which the house number was engraved.

I got it back, though.

Since then, Ray had kept out of my way, even though he now lived up in Bangor, in a small house off Exit 48 close by Husson College.

“Yeah, I know Ray Czabo,” I said.

The Grady house would appeal to someone like Ray. I felt pretty certain that he’d been down there on more than one occasion. He must have found it galling to be denied access to its secrets.

“Was Ray the only one?”

Matheson was holding something back. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps he wanted to be certain that I was going to take the case before he told me, but I’d learned that lesson the hard way. Now I liked to know what I was getting into before it all began to fall down around my ears.

“There was another man, a few days ago. He came to the plant. You should understand, Mr. Parker, that very few people know about my ownership of the Grady house. Officially, the title is held by a company that shares its address with a particularly litigious firm of lawyers in Augusta. They’re not even my own lawyers. They were sourced independently. Yet this man arrived at my office and told my secretary he was interested in placing a large order. He seemed to know what he was talking about, so she called me. I was out on the floor at the time, and I came back to meet him.

“The first thing that struck me was that he wasn’t there to buy anything from my company. He was dressed in a thread-bare coat, there were stains on his trousers, and the sole was coming away from his left shoe. I couldn’t tell the last time his shirt had been properly washed, and he wore a dead man’s tie. Don’t get me wrong: in my business, I see a lot of people who work with their hands, and I’m not afraid to get my own hands and clothes dirty. But that’s, I don’t know, honest dirt, hard won and nothing for a man to be ashamed of. This guy, though, he was just plain filthy. I almost threw him out of my office before he had a chance to open his mouth. Maybe I should have.”

“What did he look like?”

“Tall. Taller than you. His hair was black, and long. It was hanging over his shirt collar. It was receding pretty badly, and he hadn’t shaved in a couple of days. His skin was very white. Don’t recall the color of his eyes, if that’s the kind of detail you need to know. His fingertips and nails were stained yellow. I guess he was a smoker, but he didn’t light up while he was with me.”

“He give you a name?”

“No. I introduced myself, shook his hand-although I kind of regretted doing it-but he didn’t give me a card or a name. He just told me he had come about a delicate matter.

‘I believe that you are the owner of the Grady house.’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘I think that you do. There is a debt outstanding upon the house. An opportunity is about to arise for its payment.’

‘I told you: I think you have the wrong man.’

“I tried to convince him, but the guy just didn’t want to listen. He knew that the Grady house belonged to me. I don’t know how, but he did. When I checked with the lawyers, they told me that there had been no formal inquiries about the house for years, apart from a couple of media hounds howling down the phone on the anniversary of Grady’s death. Next thing I know, he’s rattling off details of the purchase: the price, the date the final agreement was signed, even the name of the bank manager at the time. It was like he had a file in front of him and was just reading the stuff from it. I was so surprised, I couldn’t even speak for a minute. Then I started to get angry. I mean, what business did this guy have coming in to my office and demanding payment for bills that were nothing to do with me anyway? It was all that I could do to stop myself climbing over the desk and dragging him out of the office by his collar.”

“Why didn’t you?” I asked. Matheson looked like he could still handle himself.

“I’m not that kind of man,” he replied, but there was an unspoken “and” hanging in the air.

I waited. It came.

“He didn’t look like much: thin, dirty, unhealthy, but I got the feeling that he was stronger than he looked. I think that if I’d tried to lay a hand on him he would have hurt me. Not badly, maybe, but he would have enjoyed humiliating me. There was a malice to him, y’know? This all probably sounds cockeyed to you, but once my anger started to die down I began to get worried. Scared, even.”

I told him it didn’t sound cockeyed at all, that I had met men like that. They wanted you to descend to their level, and once you were down there they would try to finish you. If you were going to take them on, then you had to be prepared to endure some pain, and to inflict it back in spades.

Matheson continued: “So I told him that even if what he said was true, he should call up the Farmers’ Mutual Bank and ask them about it. Payments owing to him from John Grady were no business of mine. He didn’t seem to agree.

‘I am a collector, Mr. Matheson. I collect debts, but I also have an interest in other items. In lieu of the debt left outstanding by the previous owner, I will accept some small item of furniture from the house. It will barely cover my expenses, but in this case a token gesture will be sufficient. The house contains a number of ornate mirrors. If you give one of them to me, I will consider you to have discharged any responsibilities you may have in this matter.’

“That was exactly how he spoke,” said Matheson. “He spoke like a damn lawyer. Well, I’d had enough of him by then, so I told him to get the hell out of my office or I’d call the cops. He had any more questions, he could discuss them with my legal people, or with the Farmers’ Mutual, but I didn’t want to see him again.”

“What did he say?”

“He didn’t move. He just looked at his fingernails for a while before he stood, said that he was sorry I felt that way, and told me that he would deal with the matter through ‘other channels.’ Then he left.”

“Did you get a look at his car?”

“There wasn’t one. He left on foot.”

“And he gave you no contact name, no number?”

“Nothing. He just told me he was a collector.”

“Did you talk to the police about this?”

“I told Chief Grass in Two Mile, but he said there were probably a whole lot of debts left unpaid when John Grady died. He took down the description I gave him, but he said there wasn’t much that he could do unless the collector came back, or used threats.”

“Did you feel as if he was threatening you in your office? He did speak of going through ‘other channels’ for his payment.”

“I suppose it could have been a threat. I didn’t take it that way.”

“And he never mentioned what the debt was, or whom he was representing?”

“No.”

“Do you think this man might be the one responsible for placing the photograph in the mailbox?”

“It’s possible, but I can’t see why he would do it. He certainly didn’t mention anything to do with pictures.”

Matheson asked if I wanted another coffee. I said yes, if only to give me a little time to think. His story about the collector made me uneasy, and I didn’t particularly want to sit in my car watching an old house night after night, waiting for some lowlife in old clothes who got kicks from planting the pictures of children in a dead child murderer’s mailbox, but something about that photograph of the girl was drawing me in. I had this much in common with Matheson: both of us had lost a daughter, and neither of us was prepared to stand idly by if another child was potentially in danger. Looking back, I guess I knew I would take the case as soon as he showed me the picture of the little girl with the bat in her hands.

When he came back, I told him my rates. He offered to pay me in advance, but I explained that I’d bill him after the first week. If I was making no progress after two weeks, then I’d have to leave it to the cops. Matheson agreed and prepared to depart. He left the photograph of the unknown girl with me.

“I made lots of copies,” he said. “If you hadn’t agreed to do this, I was going to post them in stores, on telephone poles, anywhere they might be seen.”

“How many copies did you make?” I asked.

“Two thousand,” he replied. “They’re in the trunk of my car. You want some?”

I took one hundred of them, and left him with the rest.

I just hoped that we wouldn’t have cause to use them.

III

The house was silent and dark when I returned home. Rachel was attending a meeting of the Friends of the Scarborough Public Library, and I didn’t expect her back until later. I stood at the door for a moment and looked out upon the marshes. The great migratory exodus was almost complete, and the quiet of the grasses was now relatively undisturbed for much of the day. The sounds of the birds that remained with us stood out more clearly than before as a consequence, and in recent days I thought I had heard grackles and cowbirds and goldfinches. I wondered if there was an added lightness to their calls now, triggered by an awareness that the population of raptors was now depleted, as some of the hawks and harriers would inevitably have followed their prey south. Then again, the hunters that had stayed would now be competing for a more limited food supply. When the snows came, hunger would start to gnaw at them.

The move here, following the sale of my grandfather’s old house a few miles away, was a good one, tarnished only by an incident earlier in the year that had led to the drowning of a man out on the marshes. Rachel didn’t like to talk about it, and I didn’t push her on the subject. I wanted very badly for us to be happy here. Perhaps, after all that had gone before, I wanted that happiness too much.

As I opened the door, Walter, our Lab retriever, emerged guiltily from my little office, where I was pretty certain he’d been curled up on the couch, then tried to divert my attention by covering me with dog spit. I briefly considered shouting at him for putting hairs on my favorite resting place, then realized from his slightly shameful posture that he already knew he wasn’t supposed to be on it and that, frankly, we both understood that if he hadn’t been deep in dog sleep when I arrived he would have been smart enough to make a dash for his basket before I even managed to get my key in the lock. Instead, I contented myself with letting him out into the yard, then closing the door behind him while I made a sandwich from cold cuts.

I put A History of Sport Fishing, the album I’d bought by Thee More Shallows, on the CD player in the kitchen before sitting down at the table to eat, until the sound of Walter’s paw plaintively scratching at the glass caused me to relent and head out onto the porch instead. Walter had me down pat. He knew I couldn’t stay mad at him for long. Pretty soon, he’d be throwing sticks and I’d be running to fetch them. I fed him about a quarter of my sandwich, even as I recalled Rachel reading me an article about dog training that said that you shouldn’t feed your dog scraps from the table, or allow him to jump up and lick you, because that made him believe he was the alpha male.

“Walter doesn’t think he’s the alpha male,” I protested at the time, sort of lamely now that I come to think of it. I looked to Walter for confirmation, which probably wasn’t the smartest move on my part if I was trying to claim superiority. Walter, hearing his name, was looking back and forth between us, as if trying to figure out which one of us was going to relent first and just hand over a set of keys and the deed to the house.

“Hah!” was Rachel’s response. She has a way of saying “Hah!” that pretty much skewers any possible dissent, like a skeptical python that’s just been told to cough up the rabbit and send it merrily on its way.

Rachel had patted her bump and said, “I hope you’re listening to this. That’s your daddy talking. He thinks he’s the alpha male, but just shoot goo-goo eyes at him and he’ll buy you a car.”

“I didn’t buy you a car,” I pointed out, “and you shot goo-goo eyes at me all the time.”

“I didn’t want a car,” she said. “I have a car.”

“So why did you shoot goo-goo eyes at me?”

“Because I wanted something else.”

“And what was that?”

“I wanted you.”

I thought for a moment.

“You know,” I said, “that would be really cute if it wasn’t kind of sinister.”

“Yes,” she said, smiling. “It would, wouldn’t it?”

I glanced at my watch. Rachel would be back soon. The house always felt very empty when she wasn’t around. In the background, a track from the album faded out, the singer repeating over and over something about the people we choose to leave being the ones whom we see all the time, all the time. I fed Walter my last piece of sandwich.

“Just don’t let Rachel know I did that,” I told him. “Please.”

The Grady house was quiet. A breeze stirred the trees, and disturbed the pile of dry leaves beneath which the dead wren rested. Matheson stood at the bottom of the steps leading up to the porch, and shined his flashlight upon the house. He checked the locks on the doors, and the wood that covered the windows. There was a SIG Compact in a holster on his belt. He had begun carrying it shortly after the man he now thought of as The Collector came to his office and demanded payment of an old debt.

The sound of approaching footsteps came to him, but he did not turn around. The beam of a second flashlight joined his own.

“Everything okay?” asked the patrol cop. He had seen Matheson pull up at the Grady house, and had offered to accompany him up the dark road. Matheson had been grateful for the offer.

“I think so,” said Matheson.

“It’s getting colder.”

“Yes. Snow is coming.”

“It’ll make it easier to tell if anyone’s been snooping around here.”

Matheson nodded, then turned to go. The cop followed him, then stopped short. He turned his flashlight upon the woods.

“What is it?” asked Matheson.

“I don’t know.”

He inched forward, his hand already drawing his gun. Matheson added his own light to the cop’s, and together they scanned the trees. Suddenly there was the sound of movement in the undergrowth, and a gray shape with red underparts darted through the low greenery before disappearing into the shadows.

Both men let out a long, relieved breath.

“Fox,” said the cop. “That wasn’t good for my nerves.”

He replaced his pistol and headed back to his car. Matheson remained staring into the woods for a moment more, then followed him. They made their farewells, and both cars drove away.

There was silence for a time before the figure of a man detached itself from a bank of pines in the darkest reaches of the woods and approached the Grady house. He stood at the very edge of the tree line, then began circling the building, never once straying from the safety of the woods, as though the ground beyond them was somehow unsafe to tread upon. He made one full circuit of the property, then a second, slower this time, seemingly searching for something that had been lost. Eventually, he stopped as he faced the eastern side of the house. He knelt, and, using a pocketknife, commenced digging beneath a small cairn of pebbles that lay almost hidden by grass at the verge of the yard. After he had dug about six inches into the earth, a pale totem was revealed: the skull of a dog. Symbols and lettering had been carved into the bone.

The man sat back on his haunches, but he did not touch the skull. Instead, he let out a suppressed hiss of anger and disgust. Carefully, making sure that his hands did not come into contact with the dog’s remains, he replaced the earth upon it, then folded the knife and put it back in his pocket. In total, The Collector had counted eight such cairns, each representing a compass point.

It was as he had suspected: the house was impregnable.

He retreated into the forest, and then was gone.

Later that night, I watched from our bed as Rachel undressed in the moonlight. She eased the straps of her slip over her shoulders and let it fall to the floor, then stared at her reflection in the mirror, turning first to one side, then the other. The moonlight touched the swelling of her belly and cast the shadow of her breasts upon the wall.

“I’m big,” she said.

“Bigger.”

I ducked my head just in time to avoid being hit by a shoe.

“I look like a whale.”

“Whales are lovable. Everybody loves whales, except the Japanese and the Norwegians, and I’m neither. Come to bed.”

She finished undressing and slipped under the covers, then lay awkwardly on her side, looking at me.

“Did you meet your client?”

“Yep.”

“Did you take the job?”

“Yep.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not tonight. It’s nothing bad, so don’t start worrying. It’ll keep until the morning.”

Rachel grinned.

“So whatcha wanna do now?” she said.

She leaned forward and kissed me lightly on the lips. Softly, I kissed her back.

“It’s okay,” she said. “I can’t get pregnant.”

“Very funny.”

“I’ll even let you be the alpha male.”

“I am the alpha male.”

Her hand moved slowly down my chest and on to my stomach.

“Of course you are, darling,” she whispered. “Of course you are…”

IV

The town of Two Mile Lake lay in the middle of hard-scrabble land, three miles northeast of the towns of Bingham and Moscow. Here the Kennebec River fed into Wyman Lake before proceeding on its way toward the coast, enlarged further by countless small streams and tributaries. This area was part of the “Bingham Purchase,” named after a Philadelphia landowner named William Bingham who owned so much of the state at the end of the eighteenth century as to be able to bequeath his heirs sufficient to cover half of Massachusetts. There was even a territory dam named after him on the Kennebec, which put him right up there with Hoover.

North of Two Mile Lake, up by the confluence of the Kennebec and Dead Rivers, lay The Forks, one of those strange Maine places where the past and the present appeared to have reached an uneasy accommodation. The Forks was still technically a plantation-in Maine terms, an unorganized township-and had once been the center of a resort area in the nineteenth century. Now rafters came here, attracted by the effect of the Harris Hydroelectric Station on the water flow. New inns and stores stood alongside the old Marshall Hotel, with its neon COCKTAILS sign, and the stuffed animals in Berry’s General Store. From The Forks, 201 headed north to Canada along the Arnold Trail, striking out into the wilderness just like old Benedict himself did on his way to Quebec at the end of the eighteenth century, with Jackman as the only decent-sized stop along the way.

Two Mile Lake must have envied some of the comparative prosperity enjoyed by its northern neighbor. It wasn’t entirely clear how the town had come by its name, as there was no body of water worthy of the name closer than Wyman Lake. Two Mile had a kind of standing pond on the northern edge of town, and if you were particularly foolhardy you might take a chance on swimming in it, or eating something that came out of it, but it was no more than a couple of hundred feet at its widest point. Instead, the only conclusion that anyone could reach about the town’s name was that if you headed north from it, then you’d head right back south again after two miles, because there was nothing there to see. In essence, Two Mile Lake was two miles away from nowhere.

I followed 16 through Kingsbury and Mayfield Corner, then headed up Dead Water Road a ways until I reached the town’s southern limits. I kept my foot to the pedal and pretty soon I was at the town’s northern limits. In between I passed a couple of stores, a school, a pair of churches, a police station, and the remains of a dead dog. I wasn’t sure what had killed the dog, but boredom seemed like a good guess.

I parked beside the gray municipal building and headed inside. The local cops shared the premises with the town council, a fire truck, a garbage truck, and what looked like a charity store, its windows grimly festooned with old men’s suits and old women’s bingo dresses. At the little office inside the door I gave my name to the elderly secretary, who looked old enough to remember William Bingham in pantaloons. Then I gave it to her again, as she’d managed to forget it somewhere between hearing it and looking for a pen with which to write it down. Behind her, an overweight woman with frizzy black hair typed slowly on a computer, the expression on her face suggesting that someone had forced her, on pain of death, to suck repeatedly on a sour lemon. They seemed like the kind of women who considered it their sacred duty to be unhappy and regarded anyone with a smile on his face as mired in unimaginable vice. I smiled, and tried to give the impression that I only engaged in imaginable vices. In return, the secretary directed me to an uncomfortable plastic chair. When I sat on it, it teetered to the left, forcing me to shift my weight to the right or tumble straight back out the door.

After a couple of minutes, a man appeared in the doorway of the room to my left. He wore a brown uniform shirt and neatly pressed brown trousers. According to the badge at his breast, his name was Grass. The local stoners probably laughed themselves blue in the face, at least until Grass got up close and personal with them. He was a big man in his fifties, and he still looked fit. There was no paunch, and when he shook my hand I felt one of my knuckles pop. His face was deeply tanned, making his gray mustache and hair seem all the more startling. He should have lost the mustache, I thought: without it, and wearing a hat, he could have passed for early forties.

“I’m Wayne Grass,” he said. “Chief of police.”

“Charlie Parker,” I said. “I’m a private investigator.”

“I know who you are,” he said. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

I followed Grass into his office. It was tidy, with flowers growing in pots on the windowsill. There was a picture of a woman and two children on his desk. The woman was very pretty and looked a lot younger than Grass. The kids, a boy and a girl, were in their early teens.

“My family,” he said, spotting the direction of my glance.

“Recent picture?”

“Just last year. Why?”

“No reason,” I said.

“My wife is a little younger than I am, if that’s what you mean.”

“Nice work,” I said.

Grass grinned and reddened. He offered me coffee. I declined, and he settled back into his chair.

“So what can I do for you, Mr. Parker?”

“I’ve been hired by a man named Frank Matheson. He’s worried about a photograph that he found in the mailbox of a house that he owns. It’s the photograph of a child. The house is the old Grady house.”

I waited, watching the smile on Grass’s face melt away.

“I’m disappointed,” he said at last.

“Why would you be disappointed?”

“I told Frank Matheson that I’d take care of it, and I will, but I’m not going to let him scare some little girl and her parents half to death, and maybe start a panic among others, just because he found a picture in a mailbox.”

“You think that’s what he wants to do?”

“I don’t know what he wants, but that will be the result. We need to tread softly on this thing. We’ll circulate the picture, see what comes up. Hell, it may not even have been taken in the state. That photograph could have come from anywhere. But if Frank Matheson or anyone else goes to the newspapers and the TV stations and starts telling them that this little girl’s picture was placed in a dead child killer’s mailbox, what do you think is going to happen?”

“Maybe you’ll find the girl.”

“Or maybe we’ll be accused of starting a panic over nothing, of overreacting to what’s probably just a sick practical joke. Next thing, I’ve got the media down here showing images of the Grady house, and then the freaks will start to arrive. Maybe the whole shitstorm will give one of them an idea, and then we really will be looking for an endangered child. Like I said, we’re going to work at getting the photograph out to local and state law enforcement, then school boards. We find that little girl, then we can just take her parents quietly to one side and tell them what we know, which is squat.”

In one way, I knew Grass was right. The whole affair had to be handled delicately, and there was no point in frightening a little girl and her family over what might be nothing. But I realized that Grass was approaching the issue from one perspective, and Matheson was approaching it from another: Grass believed that the child probably wasn’t in any danger, because there was no evidence to suggest otherwise, but, heightened (or, perhaps, tormented) by his own loss, Matheson’s instincts told him that the child was at risk. I was stuck in the middle, wanting to believe Grass, but half persuaded by Matheson’s concerns.

“Were there any prints on the envelope?”

“None, apart from Matheson’s, and we don’t suspect him of putting an envelope in his own mailbox and then bringing it to us.”

I agreed that it didn’t sound likely, mainly in an effort to diffuse what felt like growing tension between us. Small-town cops don’t like people questioning their decisions. Even big-city cops don’t like it very much, but they tend to be less protective of their patch.

“Have you been out to the Grady house recently?” I asked Grass.

“We check it pretty regularly. The place is locked down tight. I was back there after Frank Matheson found the photograph. There was nothing out of the ordinary.”

“When you say ‘we’…?”

“We have four officers in total, myself included: three male, one female. They’re good people.”

“So sometimes one of them will go by there and open up the house?”

“Well, occasionally. Mostly, I do it myself. Easier that way. I don’t have to worry about the keys getting lost, or someone getting spooked.”

“Spooked?”

“You know what happened in that house. It’s not a place to visit unless you have to. It’s got a bad feel about it, and always will have. It stinks too. Something in the paints and pastes that Grady used. It just seems to get worse and worse. After twenty years, I’m used to it. It doesn’t get to me so much. Someone else, someone new…”

He trailed off.

We sat like that, in silence, until I stood and thanked him for his time.

“Like I said, it was my pleasure, but I don’t know what more you can do for Mr. Matheson.”

“I’m not sure either,” I said. “I think I’ll just nose around. If I find out anything, I’ll let you know. I’d appreciate it if you could see your way clear to doing the same.”

I gave him a card. He placed it carefully in his wallet, then gave me a card of his own in return from a little dispenser on his desk.

“You going to take a look at the Grady house while you’re up here?” he asked.

“I think I will, since I’ve come all this way.”

“You want me to go out there with you?”

“I believe I’ll be okay.”

He nodded to himself, like a man who feels secure in the conclusion that he has just reached.

“I guess this is the point in the conversation where you tell me that you don’t scare easy,” he said.

“Being scared isn’t the problem,” I replied. “It’s not running away that’s the hard part.”

The Grady house was much as I remembered it from the news reports of the time: a little more overgrown with ivy, perhaps, its windows now boarded up and a pair of padlocked steel doors preventing access through either the front or back of the house, but these were relatively cosmetic changes. The Grady house was ugly when it was built, even foreboding in its way, although I felt certain that this impression was mostly a consequence of my knowledge of its past. I circled the house, checking the windows and the doors to see if they had been tampered with in any way, then returned to the mailbox and gave it a cursory check. It was empty, apart from some dead insects and a faded flyer offering free soda and fries with every pizza delivery.

I walked back up to the house and took a set of keys from my pocket. Frank Matheson had given them to me when I agreed to take on the job. I unlocked the outer steel door and pulled it open. The door behind it had a fan of stained glass dominating its upper third, and opened easily to the touch. Inside, the hallway was covered with a coating of dust, and cobwebs draped the chandelier in the center of the ceiling. There were no bulbs in its sockets. To my right, I caught my reflection in the mirror on a battered coatrack, the sole furnishing in the hallway. Footsteps had disturbed the dust relatively recently. I guessed that Grass or Matheson had left them when they came to check on the house.

To my left was what would once have been a receiving room. It contained no furniture, but an ornamental marble fireplace against the far wall had been left untouched. There was another mirror here, although its reflection was slightly off. I approached it and saw that it was angled toward the covered window. A length of shiny new chain led from the back of the mirror to an old nail driven into the plaster. Maybe the original chain had broken, and someone had seen fit to rehang the mirror. It seemed like an odd thing to do.

A pair of sliding doors led into what was probably once the dining room, again empty of furnishings apart from a fireplace matching the one in the receiving room, and another mirror, this time angled to the floor and once again with a new chain. There were mirrors too, I discovered, on the back of the kitchen doorway facing into the hallway; in the kitchen itself; on the first and second landings of the upper floors; and in every bedroom. There were mirrors on the walls of the upper floors, in the bathroom, and even in the attic when I checked it using a rickety stepladder. Most were old, but some looked like more recent additions, untainted by the decay of the nitrates.

I went back downstairs and checked the kitchen and the downstairs bathroom. The sink in the kitchen was stained and reeked of stagnant water and rotting matter in the pipes. By contrast, the sink in the bathroom was comparatively clean. Nobody would be drinking from it in a hurry, but compared to the kitchen sink it was a model of good hygiene. Someone had wiped it down in recent months, or had at least allowed the faucets to run. Maybe someone had used it to wash up after checking the house, because my own hands were already black with dust and filth.

The only door in the entire house that appeared to be locked was the door leading down into the basement where John Grady had made his last stand before shooting himself. I tried all of my keys on the lock, with no result, then made a mental note to ask Frank Matheson about it when next we spoke. A full-length mirror hung on the basement door. I checked my reflection in it. I was going kind of gray, I thought. Old age was going to be a gentle slide for me.

As I turned, I felt my head swim a little. I had been conscious of a vague chemical scent in the air when I entered the house, but now it seemed to have suddenly grown stronger. This would be a bad place to stay for any length of time, I thought. With the windows boarded up and the doors sealed, there was no fresh air to dispel whatever miasma hung about the house. After only fifteen minutes, I was already experiencing the beginnings of a headache.

I was about to leave when a noise from the front of the house alerted me. There was a man on the step, his hand on his gun. It took a moment for my eyes to distinguish his brown uniform against the afternoon sun. He was in his forties, and running to seed. His stomach bulged over his belt, and there were sweat stains beneath his armpits.

“Who are you?” he said.

Instinctively, I raised my hands.

“My name’s Charlie Parker. I’ve been employed by Frank Matheson, the owner of this house, to look into some things. I spoke to Chief Grass earlier today. He’ll vouch for me.”

“Okay, I want you to step outside here.”

He backed away from me, his hand still poised on the butt of his gun. “You got some ID?”

I nodded, walking slowly toward him, my hands still raised.

“It’s in my jacket pocket, outside left.”

I always kept it there. At the risk of being pickpocketed, it meant that I was never in danger of making a nervy cop or security guard any more nervous than he already was by reaching inside my coat. I got to the doorway, moved on to the porch, then took the three steps down to the yard.

“Take your ID out,” said the cop. “Slowly.”

The cop still hadn’t drawn his gun.

I took out my wallet, flipped through it to my PI’s license, then let him take a good look at it. When he was satisfied he allowed his hand to drift from his weapon for the first time. He introduced himself as Ed O’Donnell, one of the part-timers from Two Mile Lake.

“Chief Grass told me you’d been asking questions,” he said. “I just didn’t expect to find you in the house so soon. I got the impression the chief would be happier if you didn’t spend too much time nosing around in there either.”

“Why would that be?”

“I think he’d prefer it if this house was gone. It’s a reminder of the past.”

“You go in a lot?”

“Nah, although I met Frank Matheson here last night when we were both taking a look over the place. I saw your car parked down the road as I was passing. You seen enough?”

“Pretty much,” I said. “Cellar door is locked, though. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you?”

“Nothing, except that it’s where they found Grady’s body. The other kid he took, Denny Maguire, was down there too. I suppose it’s something that Grady didn’t kill him as well. It was Chief Grass who took him out of the house, wrapped up in his jacket. He was just a state trooper then. A photographer got a snap of them coming out. It’s kind of a famous picture around here. Since then, the chief has always kept an eye on this place. It’s personal for him, after what he saw.”

“You have any idea what happened to the Maguire kid?”

“Denny? Sure, he works down in Moscow at a bar called the Desperate Measure. It’s over on Main. He doesn’t talk much about what happened that day, though.”

“No, I don’t imagine he would.”

I looked back at the house. Its boarded-up windows reminded me of closed eyes on the brink of an awakening.

“You ever see anyone hanging around here?”

He shrugged. “Kids, mostly, but they tend to stay away from the house itself.”

“Mostly?”

“What?”

“You said ‘kids, mostly.’ Sounds like there might have been others.”

“Tourists. Thrill seekers.”

“Ray Czabo?”

“Couple of times. He’s harmless.”

“What about a guy taller than me; thin; long dark hair? He probably looked kind of dirty.”

O’Donnell shook his head.

“Doesn’t ring any bells.”

I thanked him for his time. He watched me lock the door, then waited until I was in my car and driving away before he followed me from the property.

The Desperate Measure was the kind of bar most people wouldn’t set a fire in, never mind a foot. A green shamrock barely stood out from the dirty white of the illuminated sign outside, and the bar’s windows were small beveled panes of blue and orange. It was a place where men went to drink and think about hitting other men, and where women went to drink and think about hitting men as well. Inset into the door was a small square of glass, barred like the entrance to a keep, presumably so those within could check on anyone seeking entry once the door was locked. It wasn’t clear why they felt the need to check. Nobody outside could be any more threatening than the people who were drinking inside.

Half the seats at the bar were already taken, although it was not yet four in the afternoon. The customers were mainly men between their late thirties and late fifties, seated alone or in pairs. There was no conversation. A TV was bolted to the wall at the far end of the bar, further anchored in place by a pair of steel rods that partially obscured the edges of the screen. It was tuned to a news channel, but the sound was down. Most of the people in the Desperate Measure looked as if they’d heard just about all the bad news they wanted to hear in their lives.

A sad lineup of domestic beers stood above the register like deserters waiting for the firing squad, with a single dusty bottle of Zima bringing up the rear, as out of place here as one of the patrons might have been on Castro Street during Gay Mardi Gras. There was a pretty good selection of bourbon, a couple of bottles of brandy, and one bottle of Tia Maria that didn’t appear to have been touched since the Cold War.

I took a seat at the end of the bar nearest the door, two stools away from a man in a lumberjack shirt who kept flicking at the loose fingernail of his middle finger with the end of his thumb. Each time he did so, the nail raised up from the skin, barely held in place at the cuticle. I wondered if it hurt. In another life, I might have been tempted to ask, but I’d learned that a man who doesn’t care much about idly inflicting pain on himself sometimes considers it a pleasant change to inflict pain on somebody else. I figured the nail would come out eventually, and then he could start on another finger. It would never be the same, though. There’s nothing like losing your first nail.

The barman made his way down the counter.

“What can I get you?”

“You got coffee?”

“We got it, but you don’t want to drink it.”

He indicated a pot of something stewing away on a hot plate. It looked as though it might have gone on fire at some point in the past, and was currently considering reigniting just to break the monotony.

“OJ is fine, then.”

He poured my juice into a clean glass and placed it before me.

“I’m looking for Denny Maguire,” I said. “He around?”

“You found him,” said the barman.

I tried to keep the surprise from my face. My guess was that Denny Maguire must be in his thirties by now, but the guy behind the bar looked twenty years older than that. In a way, he was the flip side of Chief Grass. If the chief, like Dorian Gray, had a bad portrait of himself hidden in the attic, then Denny Maguire’s appearance gave some indication of what it might look like.

“My name’s Charlie Parker,” I said, for the third time that day. “I’m a private investigator. You need to see some ID?”

I asked because when you’re in a place like the Desperate Measure, then producing anything that might lead the customers to mistake you for a cop and showing it to the barman was likely to lead to some awkward questions, or worse, for both of you.

“I believe you,” he said. “Why would a man lie about something like that?”

“I could be doing it to gain the esteem and respect of strangers.”

“It’ll take a little more than a piece of card and some attitude to get that here.”

“Maybe I should have shot a bear.”

“Maybe. You want to tell me why a private investigator is asking after me?”

I could see that Fingernail Man had found something to divert his attention from his own decaying fingers, so I suggested to Maguire that maybe we could talk somewhere away from the bar. He agreed, and summoned a woman who was reading a magazine at one of the deuces over by the men’s room.

“I got five more minutes,” she said.

“Bill me,” said Maguire.

The woman shook her head in disgust, killed her cigarette, and made her way slowly to the bar.

“You have to keep them motivated,” I said.

“Motivated? It’s all I can do to keep her moving.”

He made his way along the bar, grabbed a soda from the cooler, and patted the woman on the ass as he went by.

“I’m gonna bill you for that an’ all,” she said.

“Uh-huh,” said Maguire. “You got change of a dollar?”

“Asshole.”

Maguire took a seat across from me, lit up a cigarette, and laid its tip beside the still-smoldering remains of the waitress’s butt.

“So?”

“I’ve been hired by a man named Frank Matheson,” I said.

Maguire gave me nothing.

“You know who Frank Matheson is?” I said.

“I know. What’s it to me?”

“He’s concerned that someone with knowledge of the history of the Grady house may have gotten some ideas from what happened there in the past. He’s afraid that the someone in question may have targeted a child.”

“Like I said, what’s it to me?”

“What happened there took place before my time. I got some of it from the newspapers, a little more from Matheson, a little less from the chief over in Two Mile Lake. I was hoping you could tell me more.”

“Because I was there, you mean?”

“Yes. Because you were there. You were there when John Grady died.”

Maguire waited for a while before answering. He watched the woman moving behind the bar, joshing sourly with one or two of the regulars who had perked up some now that they were being exposed to a little female company. He seemed to take in the grim walls, the faded posters on the walls, the hole that someone had punched in the door of the men’s room.

“You know, I own this place,” he said at last. “Bought it three years ago from a man named Gruber. He was a German Jew. Never could understand why he had a shamrock on the sign. When I asked him, he told me that nobody ever lost money on a bar that looked Irish. Didn’t matter what happened once you got inside. Kind of people who come into a place like this, they’re not too concerned about decor. They want to drink, drink some more, have one for the road, then stagger home and be left to themselves from start to finish. So when Gruber said he was going to retire, I bought it, because it suited my disposition. I like being left to myself. I don’t like people asking about my present or my past. Why do you think I’d make an exception for you?”

Now it was my turn to pause before answering. There was a game being played, and I think Maguire knew it. I had come here in part to find out what he could tell me about the Grady house, because to understand the present you have to understand the past. But I also wanted to take a look at him. He was the only child to have entered the Grady house and survived, and I didn’t like to think about the kinds of scars that experience had left upon him. While those who have been abused in the past, or who have suffered in the way that he had, do not automatically themselves become abusers, it does happen, and it was something that needed to be considered.

“I came here to look into your eyes,” I said.

Maguire met my gaze levelly.

“And what do you see?”

“I know what I don’t see: I don’t see a man who has been transformed by his own pain into the very thing that caused that pain to begin with.”

“You thought I might have been behind whatever is troubling Frank Matheson.”

He said it softly, but without blame or anger.

“I had to consider it.”

He took a long pull on his cigarette, releasing the smoke slowly through his nostrils. Along with the fumes, some of the suspicion seemed to ease from his body.

“What made him hire a private investigator?”

I handed him one of the copies of the photograph, the unknown girl caught in her pose, ready and waiting for the ball to be released, for her chance to strike at it. Maguire picked it up and examined it for a time.

“Do you recognize her?” I asked.

“No. Where did it come from?”

“Matheson found it in the mailbox of the Grady house. He doesn’t know why it was left there. He thought that it might be some kind of tribute to John Grady.”

Maguire was quiet for a long time. I knew that at the end of his silence, he would either stand up and tell me to leave or open up to me. The decision would be his to make, and if I spoke before he reached it I felt certain I would get nothing from him.

“An offering,” said Maguire.

“Perhaps.”

“He used that word, you know, when I was with him. He called the Matheson girl that. He said she was an ‘offering.’ ”

“An offering to what?”

“I don’t know. Maybe to whatever he believed made him do the things that he did. He talked all the time I was there, but only some of it was addressed to me. I don’t remember so much of it. I was too scared to listen while I was conscious, and when I came to he was dead. I’ve blanked out most of the rest. I didn’t do so good in high school so they sent me to a doctor, a shrink, and he said I needed to confront what happened in that house, but I prefer it the way it is. Hidden. Locked up, just like I was.”

It wasn’t for me to comment on how he chose to deal with what he had endured, but I had a brief flash of a barred cellar door, and inside a small boy was being tormented by John Grady, over and over again. Whatever front he presented to the world, that was the reality of what was hidden inside Denny Maguire’s head.

He retrieved his cigarette from the ashtray, took a drag on it, and continued.

“Mostly,” he said, “he spoke to something that I couldn’t see.”

“What else do you remember?”

“The mirrors. There were mirrors on every wall. I could see him reflected in them. It was like the room was filled with John Gradys. I remember that, and I remember the remains of the other children. They were sitting over by the far wall. I don’t like to recall how they looked. He talked to them too, sometimes, in a way.”

“Do you recall anything about Louise Matheson?”

He shook his head.

“I think I heard the shot that killed her, but I was pretty far gone by then.”

“Why did he keep you alive?”

Maguire pretended to think about the question, but I guessed it was one that had troubled him all his life, ever since Grass had led him from that terrible place.

“I was the only boy he took,” he said. “He spoke to me some, told me about himself, about the house he wanted to create. He hated the little girls, but me, I was different. I still think he’d have killed me, in the end, or maybe just let me fade away and die. Could be he saw something of himself in me. I hope to Jesus he was wrong, but I think that’s what he believed.”

The cigarette had almost burned down to the filter. A column of ash toppled like a condemned building and exploded into dust upon the tabletop.

“Can you remember anything else that he said?” I asked.

He looked at me, then stubbed out the cigarette and rose.

“Like I told you, I don’t remember the details. I do recall that he didn’t talk directly to the other children,” he said.

It sounded as if there was dust caught in his throat.

“He talked to their reflections in the mirrors. He talked to them like they were inside the mirrors, and if those policemen hadn’t come, then he’d have been talking to me that way too. I’d have been lost in there with them.”

And in the gloom of his grim little bar, Denny Maguire began to cry.

The streets around the Desperate Measure were quiet as I walked back to the parking lot at the rear of the bar. I wasn’t sure that I was learning much that I hadn’t already suspected: John Grady was a vile human being, and all those who had come into contact with him remained tainted by his touch.

When I turned the corner, I saw a man leaning against the hood of my Mustang. He was smoking a cigarette in his right hand while the fingers of his left tapped a delicate rhythm against the bodywork. I knew who he was, even as he watched my approach, his eyes lost deep in his domed skull and his lank hair hanging like an afterthought at the back of his head.

“Can I help you?” I said.

The Collector had turned to watch my approach. He looked sickly in the yellow glow of the single light that illuminated the lot, and appeared to be dressed in the same clothes that he had worn to his interview with Matheson. I could see the sole of his shoe gaping like a fish’s mouth.

“I think you can,” he said, “and perhaps I can help you in return.”

“I can give you the address of a good tailor,” I said. “He might also know someone who can fix your shoe. After that you’re on your own.”

The Collector glanced down, as if noticing his ruined sole for the first time.

“Well, well,” he said. “Look at that.”

He shot a plume of smoke into the night air. It went on for a long time, as though he were manufacturing it deep inside his lungs.

“You want to step away from my car?”

The Collector considered it for a moment. Just when it seemed as if I’d have to drive off with him draped across the hood, he tossed his cigarette to the ground and stamped it out with his good shoe, then moved a couple of feet away from my car.

“My apologies,” he said. “You work for Mr. Matheson.”

“I think we have a misunderstanding,” I said. “I wasn’t offering to exchange information in return for you finding someplace else to rest.”

I stood by the Mustang, but I didn’t take out my keys. If I tried to open the car door, then I might have to take my eyes off the man in the lot for an instant, and I didn’t want to do that. Matheson was right. The Collector’s appearance, his greasy hair combined with his filthy clothes, was a distraction, a ruse to fool the unwary. His movements were slow and precise because he chose to make them that way. When he wanted to, I sensed, he could move very quickly indeed, and his old coat and tattered trousers concealed strong bones and lean, stringy muscles.

“I suspect Mr. Matheson told you about me.”

I didn’t reply. I wasn’t going to reveal anything to him.

“I know about the picture,” he said.

Everything changed.

“What picture?”

“The picture of the little girl.”

“Do you know who she is?”

He shook his head.

“Do you know who took the photograph?”

Again, he shook his head.

“Then you’re no use to me. Go find another dark place to haunt.”

I made a show of fiddling with my keys.

“She’s at risk,” said The Collector. “If you give me what I want, some of that risk will diminish.”

I wondered if he had taken the photograph, if its placement in the mailbox was all part of his efforts to receive payment for whatever old debt he believed he was owed.

The Collector was smart. He was waiting for me when I reached that conclusion. “But she is not at risk from me,” he said. “I have no interest in children. I merely want my debt paid.”

I took a couple of steps toward him. He didn’t appear threatened.

“And what debt is that?”

“It’s a private matter.”

“Are you working for somebody?”

“We all work for somebody, Mr. Parker. Suffice it to say that John Grady attempted to secure a certain asset before he died. He partially succeeded. A token gesture will be enough to undo the damage. Your client is unwilling to make that gesture.”

“The debt is not his to pay. He has no obligation to you, and even if he had, I don’t see how paying it diminishes the ‘risk’ to the girl in the photograph.”

The Collector lit another cigarette. In the flare of the match, his eyes filled with flames.

“This is an old and wicked world. John Grady was a foul man, and the Grady house is a foul place. Such places retain a residue that can pollute others. If you help me, then some of that pollution may be removed.”

“What do you want?”

“A mirror, from the Grady house. It has many mirrors. One will not be missed.”

“Why don’t you just take one yourself?”

“The house is secured.”

“Not so secure that a man couldn’t get into it if he wanted something badly enough.”

“I am not a thief,” said The Collector.

It was more than that. For the first time, his eyes shifted from mine. He was scared of the house. No, not scared, but wary. For whatever reason, he was unable to enter the house himself.

“I think you need to talk to the lawyers, or the bank,” I said. “Talk to somebody, anybody, but just don’t talk to me again. I can’t help you.”

As I spoke, I opened the car door. He remained standing, isolated in the middle of the lot, watching me.

I closed the door and put the key in the ignition. When I looked up, The Collector was gone, or so I thought until the tapping came at my side window. He was close to the glass, so close that I could see the lines in his face and the veins running beneath his pale skin. It looked too thin, as though only the slimmest of membranes concealed the bloody redness beneath.

“I will collect,” he said. “Remember that.”

I gunned the engine and pulled out so quickly that he was forced to throw himself back against the big Toyota in the next space. He hung in the rearview mirror like an infected wound in the flesh of the night, and then I turned the corner and he disappeared from my sight.

There was no moon over Scarborough as I drove home. Great swaths of cloud hid the light. Soon the marshes would flood, and a fresh round of feeding and dying would begin. I wondered what effect that cycle might have on me, and if the water in my own body might somehow be prey to the revolutions of a chunk of dead rock in space. Perhaps it affected my behavior, making me act in odd and unpredictable ways. Then I thought of Rachel, and what she might say if I shared those thoughts with her: she would tell me that my behavior was odd and unpredictable anyway, and that nobody would notice a difference if they tried to make a lunar connection.

Our first child was due, and every time my cell phone buzzed I expected to hear Rachel’s voice telling me that it was time. I had long given up cosseting her, for not only was she fiercely independent, but she saw in my actions an attempt to guard against the loss of another child. My daughter and my wife had been stolen from me only a few years before. I was not sure that I could live if another was taken from me. Sometimes that made me overprotective of those I now held dear.

I stopped my car before entering the driveway to our home. I thought of Matheson and his wife: how did they see themselves now, I wondered? Was one still a father, a mother when one’s child was dead? A wife who has lost her husband becomes a widow, and a husband bereaved of his wife a widower, but there was no name for what one became when one’s only child was wrenched from this world. But perhaps it didn’t matter: in my own mind I was still her father, and she was still my child, and regardless of the world in which she now dwelt, that would always be. I could not forget her, and I knew that she had not forgotten me.

For she came to me still. In the lost time, in the pale hours, in those moments between waking and sleeping when the world was still forming around me, she was there. Sometimes her mother was with her, cloaked in shadows, a reminder of my duty to them, and to those like them. I used to dream of being at peace, of no longer experiencing these visions. Now I know that it is not meant for me, not now, and that my peace will only come when I close my eyes and at last take my place beside them in the darkness.

Rachel was lying on the couch, reading, her hand resting on her belly and her long red hair descending in a braid across her left shoulder. I kissed her forehead, then her lips. She placed my hand alongside hers, so that I could feel the child within.

“You think the kid is planning to leave anytime soon?” I asked. “If the baby stays there any longer we can start charging rent.”

“Get used to saying that,” she said. “You’ll be asking the same question until our child goes to college. Anyway, I’m the one who has to carry another person around inside me. It’s about time you started shouldering some of the burden.”

I went to the kitchen and took a soda from the fridge. “Yeah, what about all the ice cream I have to keep bringing home? It doesn’t float here on its own.”

“I heard that.”

I stood at the kitchen door and waved a carton of Len Libby’s orange sherbet at her.

“Tempted? Huh? Do we want a little spoonful for the road?”

She threw a cushion at me.

“How I ever allowed you to get close enough to impregnate me I really don’t know. I guess it was a moment of weakness. Literally a moment, in your case.”

“Harsh,” I said. “You’re not including cuddling time.”

I sat down beside her and she folded herself into me as best she could. I shared my soda with her, despite her hurtful comments about my alleged lack of stamina.

“So how did it go?” she asked.

I told her about my day: the cops, the Grady house, my conversation with Maguire. None of it added up to very much. Rachel had spent some time going through the files Matheson had left with me. Now that the birth was imminent, she was not taking on any new academic or professional work, and consequently the Grady case offered her an opportunity to stretch some underused psychologist’s muscles.

“Mirrors,” said Rachel. “Conversations with an unseen other. A display of victims yet without any real interaction. No actual sexual or physical abuse of the children, beyond the final act of taking their lives. Even then, he seemed determined to put them through as little pain as possible: a single blow to the head to render them unconscious, then suffocation.”

“Then there’s the house,” I said. “He had great plans for it, yet never did much to improve it from what I can see. All he did was start wallpapering and put too many mirrors on the walls.”

“And what do you think he saw in them?” asked Rachel.

“He saw himself. What does anyone see in a mirror?”

She pursed her lips and shrugged. “Do you see yourself when you look in a mirror?”

I had the feeling that I often got with Rachel, that she had somehow moved three steps ahead of me while I was being distracted by a passing cloud.

“I-”

I stopped as I tried to consider the question properly.

“Well,” I said at last. “I see a version of myself.”

“Your reflection is informed by your own self-image. In effect, you create part of what you see. We are not as we are. We are as we imagine ourselves to be. So what did John Grady see when he looked in the mirror?”

I saw again the house. I saw its unfinished walls, its filthy sinks, its decaying carpets. I saw the cheap sticks of furniture, the empty bedrooms, the warped boards.

And I saw the mirrors.

“He saw his house,” I said. “He saw his house as he wished it to be.”

“Or as he believed it to be, in another place.”

“In the world beyond the glass.”

“And maybe that world was more real to him than this one.”

“So if the house was more real in that world, then…”

“Then so was he. Perhaps that’s who he was talking to while he was waiting to kill Denny Maguire. Maybe he was talking to John Grady, or what he perceived to be the real John Grady.”

“And the children?”

“What did Denny Maguire say: that he never spoke directly to them?”

“He said that Grady spoke to their reflections in the glass.”

Rachel shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve never heard anything quite like that before.”

She moved in closer to me.

“You will be careful, won’t you?” she asked.

“He’s dead,” I said. “There’s a limit to the harm dead men can do.”

In the Grady house, something stirred. Dust was raised in ascending spirals. Papers rustled in empty grates. It was the north wind, whistling through rotting frames and broken boards, that created the sense of movement in the silent rooms. It was the north wind that made doorknobs rattle, and doors creak. It was the north wind that caused coat hangers to jangle against one another in locked closets, and dirty glasses to clink in closed kitchen cupboards.

And it was the north wind that made the trees move, creating faint shadows that fell through cracks in the boarded windows, their shapes drifting across the old mirror above the fireplace in the dining room, the world reflected in its depths subtly different from our own, the shape moving within it finding no companion in the old house. There should have been photographs on the mantel, for there were photographs in its reflection in the glass. Instead, the mantel within the house itself was empty.

It was the wind, then, that had carried these black-and-white images of unknown children through the glass and into another world.

It was the wind, just the wind.

V

Surveillance is difficult work. Even the worst doughnut head, the kind of guy who wore a hockey helmet to school in case he fell over, is going to catch someone who’s watching him regularly for any length of time. The cops are lucky. It’s harder for a suspect to spot a handful of people on his tail than just one, and cops can split the job up between them, give one another a break, and generally help the other guy to remain on alert throughout, because surveillance, as well as being difficult, is also tedious, and the mind tends to wander. A good surveillance detail therefore requires a lot of manpower, which is why even the cops tend to sit on their hands some when the subject comes up. Taking two or more cops off regular duties to watch some jerk who may or may not be worthy of the attention has a knock-on effect on morale, overtime, and probably crime in general.

Private investigators generally don’t have the luxury of surveillance teams, and their clients aren’t always so wealthy that they can afford to hire a whole bunch of operatives to cover a job, so checking up on someone can be difficult work. The Grady house detail was different. The house wasn’t about to go anywhere, or attempt to make a break for freedom through the woods. Nevertheless, watching it continuously was going to be a problem, which meant that someone would have to be found to share the burden. To be done well, even a simple task like monitoring an empty old house required someone with patience, self-discipline, a steady nerve, and an eye for detail, someone who didn’t spook easily and who would know how to handle himself if anything went down.

In the absence of such an individual, I needed someone with a lot of time on his hands.

I knew just the person.

“Surveillance, huh?” said Angel.

Angel and his partner, Louis, were the closest thing to real friends that I had. Admittedly, they were morally suspect, and Angel had the kind of temperament that might have been helped by a little pharmaceutical intervention, but then I couldn’t claim to be perfect either. Most men end up with the friends that they deserve, but I figured that I could probably get away with a lot during the rest of my life and still have some cause for complaint about the ones that I’d been handed. Most of the time, they lived together in an apartment on the Upper West Side, where Louis’s natural tendency toward order and minimalism fought a valiant but losing battle against his partner’s fascination with clutter and bargain clothing. It was all very yin and yang, but when I offered that theory to Angel he pretended that I was talking about Siamese twins and regaled me with anecdotes of a sexually fascinating, if politically incorrect, nature. When I shared a similar view with Louis, he threatened to send Angel to stay with me, just to see how long Rachel and I would tolerate a little of Angel’s yang. Given that Rachel sometimes made Louis look like a slob, I imagined that wouldn’t be very long.

I could hear music playing in the background as Angel and I spoke. It sounded terrible.

“What the hell are you listening to?”

“A progressive rock compilation. I’m trying to get in touch with my muse by listening to music from my past.”

I was almost afraid to ask. Almost.

“You have a muse? What is she, some kind of community service muse? Did the court order her to help you?”

Angel chose to ignore me.

“I’m considering writing my memoirs. I mean, I’m gonna have to change some shit around, maybe alter names to protect the guilty, play with dates and timescales and stuff. I bought a book, one of those ‘How to Write a Bestseller’ guides. There’s some good advice in there. Guy who wrote it is a bestselling writer himself, knows what he’s talking about.”

“You ever hear of the guy who wrote it?”

There was a pause.

“Nope, least not until I bought his book.”

“So why do you think he’s a bestselling writer if you haven’t heard of him?”

“There’s a lot of people I haven’t heard of, doesn’t mean to say that they’re not what they say they are. Says on the cover he’s a bestselling writer.”

“So what’s he written?”

There came the sound of pages being flipped in a thin, overpriced book.

“He’s written-”

“Yep?”

“Hey, I’m looking. He’s written…Okay, he’s written a bestselling book on how to write bestsellers. That what you wanted to hear? Happy now?”

I heard the sound of a book being cast to one side with some force. Still, I figured he’d retrieve it as soon as I hung up the phone, but he probably wouldn’t get much further on his memoirs than the first chapter. I certainly hoped that he wouldn’t.

“This surveillance thing you want me to do, it’s on a house?”

“Uh-huh.”

“An empty house?”

“Yes.”

“What did the house do: spy on its neighbors?”

“I suspect it of stealing underwear from clotheslines.”

“Knew a guy who did that once. He’d steal them, clean them, fold them, then deliver them back to the house with a note describing all the work that he’d done, with some care tips for the owners. He told the judge he was worried about hygiene. Judge advised the prison governor to let him work in the laundry. We had the cleanest overalls in the state. Starchy too.”

Angel had spent too long in prisons; a lot of hard time. He rarely spoke about them, and it was rarer still that he joked about them. It meant that he was happy in his life, for the moment, and for that I was grateful. He had endured a lot in recent months.

“That’s a nice story. You about done?”

“Doesn’t sound like a job looking at an empty house has too many prospects.”

“If you turn out to be good at it, we’ll promote you to a job watching occupied houses. Look, no offense meant, but you’ve burgled enough properties. You must have some experience of watching them.”

“Nice. You call me up, ask for my help, and now you insult me. Got any other skeletons from my past you want to throw in my face?”

“It would be like emptying a crypt. I don’t have that kind of time.”

“How much does this job pay?”

“A dollar a day and all the peanuts you can eat.”

“Salted or roasted?”

“Salted.”

“Sounds good. When can I start? And, hey, can I bring a friend?”

My next call was to Clem Ruddock. Clem retired from the state police a couple of years back and, like some cops do, bought himself a bar in a place where the temperature never dipped below seventy in winter. Unfortunately for Clem, he was living testament to my belief that some people are just born to die in Maine. He never quite settled in Boca so he sold a half share in the bar to an ex-cop from Coral Gables and headed back north. Now he divided his time between Florida and a duplex in Damariscotta, near his daughter and his grandchildren. Clem’s answering machine told me that he wasn’t home, but left me with a cell phone number to try instead.

“What are you, a surgeon?” I asked him, when I eventually got through to him. “What does a retired guy need a cell phone for anyway?”

He was driving. I could hear the purr of his engine in the background.

“I guess you didn’t hear,” said Clem. “I took up pimping to make ends meet. Got me some girls in a trailer off 295. I’m thinking about franchising, you got some money to spare.”

“I’m sorry, my money’s all tied up in monkey porn. It’s a growing market. You got time to talk?”

As it turned out, Clem was on his way down to Portland to meet with his lawyer. Sometimes things work out that way. I arranged to meet him for a hamburger lunch in Rosie’s down in the Old Port. He told me I was cheap. I told him that he was paying, so I was even cheaper than that. After all, I wasn’t the one with two homes, and a bar in Florida.

Rachel was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking through a magazine and nibbling on a bagel. Walter was waiting midway between his basket and Rachel, clearly keen to try his luck at scamming some food from her plate but reluctant to risk being shouted at for his trouble. When I came in, he seemed to decide that the balance had suddenly tipped in his favor, and used sniffing my hand as a pretext to close in on the table.

“You’ve been feeding him scraps again,” said Rachel, without looking up.

“What did you do, shine a light on him until he broke down and confessed?”

“We’re sending out mixed signals. It’s confusing him.”

“He’s just confused by why you don’t love him as much as I do,” I said.

“Oooh, that’s low. Is that how you plan to earn the love of your child, with bribery and treats?”

“Start as you mean to continue. It worked with the dog. And with you.”

I leaned over and kissed her on the lips.

“I have to go,” I said. “I’ll be back for dinner, and I’ll keep the cell on.”

Her eyes drifted toward the inside of my jacket. The butt of the gun was just visible to her, but she made no comment.

“Just be careful,” she said, and returned to her magazine. As I left the house, I looked back and saw her slip a piece of bagel into Walter’s mouth. He rested his head on her lap in return and she stroked him gently, her eyes no longer on her reading but staring through the kitchen window at the marshes and the trees beyond, as though the glass had turned to water and she could see once again the face of the drowning man beneath its surface.

The Collector was looking for Ray Czabo. The name had come up in the course of The Collector’s own investigation into the Grady house, and he was anxious to talk to the man in question. He made no moral judgments on Voodoo Ray’s gruesome hobby: in his experience, human beings were capable of far worse than stealing mementos from crime scenes. What interested him was the possibility that Ray had found a way into the house, and that perhaps he had managed to secure a trinket for himself in the process. If it was the right kind of souvenir, then The Collector’s work would be done.

But Ray Czabo was proving difficult to find, and there was now a stranger in his house. The Collector usually believed in adopting the direct approach, but the young man who appeared to be servicing Mrs. Czabo in her husband’s absence looked troublesome. More to the point, The Collector had discovered that this was a case of “like father, like son,” and that Mrs. Czabo’s lover enjoyed the protection of a small but efficient criminal operation.

The Collector had been careless, assuming that his old car and his run-down appearance would allow him to pass unnoticed unless he chose otherwise. He was beginning to wonder if Mrs. Czabo might have conspired with her boyfriend to remove her husband from the scene, whether through threats or actual violence. He was thinking this over as he returned to his car, having followed the lover back to his father’s base, when a man emerged from behind a Dumpster and blocked his progress.

“You want to tell me what you’re doin’?” said the man. He was slightly overweight, and wore a black leather jacket and blue jeans. His face bulged in all the wrong places, as though every bone had been broken and then badly reset. His name was Chris Tierney, and he had a reputation as a hard man, an enforcer. The Collector had no time for this. He tried to slip by but Tierney pushed him back, advancing a step as he did so.

“I asked you a question,” he said.

The Collector remained silent.

“Fuck you,” said the man, finally. “You’re coming with me.”

He moved in on the slim, greasy-looking individual with the yellowed fingers, this stick figure dressed in rags who had tried to bulldoze his way past him, but instead of backing away, the raggedy man moved forward to meet him. Tierney felt an impact at his chest and his body was raised up until only the tips of his toes remained on the ground. He curled over his attacker’s hand as the shock of the blow began to dissipate, only to be replaced by a sharp pain. Tierney tried to speak, and blood ran from his mouth and flowed over his lips and chin. His fingers clutched at The Collector’s hand and found the hilt of the knife. He tried to say something, although there was nothing to be said.

The Collector touched his left hand to the dying man’s lips.

“Shhh,” he said. “Hush. It’s all right. Nearly there, now. Nearly there.”

The knife thrust hard once more, and the life left Tierney in a rush of air and blood.

Clem hadn’t changed since last I saw him. His hair had turned white while he was in his thirties, so he appeared not to have aged much apart from the wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. He still had the remnant of a tan from his most recent trip south, and he’d lost a little weight.

“You look good,” I said.

“I eat healthy, when I have no other option,” he said, then ordered a cheeseburger with extra fries, hold the mayo. “It’s the mayo that kills you,” he added.

Clem was one of a network of cops who had remained friends with my grandfather after he left the force and who had extended their goodwill to his grandson. Back in Manhattan, there were cops who would cross the street to avoid me, even if that street was mined. Up here, there were other, older loyalties to be considered.

We spoke about nothing in particular until after we had eaten, then sat back in our chairs by the window and watched the cars and people passing by. Nobody seemed in too much of a hurry to get anywhere, and it was still early enough in December for the prospect of Christmas to seem more welcome than stressful.

“You remember John Grady?” I said at last.

It struck me that I hated saying his name. It seemed to pollute the very air, seeping out through the window frame to poison the festive atmosphere outside.

“John Grady,” said Clem.

He took a mouthful of beer, then held it for a time, as though using it to wash the mention of Grady from his mouth.

“You have a habit of resurrecting old ghosts,” he said. “I think you have a morbid interest in dead killers.”

“Well, some of them didn’t turn out to be quite as dead as people believed.”

“You do seem to enjoy a gift for waking them, that’s for sure. John Grady, though, he’s not coming back. I watched him die.”

“You were there?”

I knew Clem had been involved in the investigation, but not that he’d witnessed Grady’s final moments.

“When the little Matheson girl was taken, we got the first half-decent lead in months. It was a foolish thing for him to have done, pulling her like that, but I guess by then he couldn’t control his appetites anymore. We got to the house, but it was too late for her.”

He took another sip of beer and looked beyond me to where his own reflection lay suspended in the window.

“That one stays with me. I can’t remember more than a handful of cases in twenty-five years that make me want to break my fist against a wall, but that’s one of them. Too many ‘if onlys.’ If only we’d been quicker to make the connection with Grady’s car. If only we’d been able to break that door down. If only…

“Anyway, we got there, and found Grady with the gun already pointed at his head. If it wasn’t so horrible, it might almost have been funny. After all, there we were with our guns pointed at him, threatening to shoot, and there he was with a gun in his hand ready to blow his own head off and save us the trouble. Only one way it was going to end, I guess.

“I remember what he said before he died: ‘This is not a house. This is a home.’ Still don’t know what he meant by that. The place looked less like a home than anywhere I’ve ever been. Sticks of furniture, half-painted walls, cheap wallpaper already starting to peel. There was dust and filth and damn mirrors on every wall. Those mirrors, they completely threw me. It seemed like there was movement everywhere: our reflections, the reflections of our reflections. I’ve never been so jumpy in all my life.

“I was pretty close to Grady when he pulled the trigger. I recall his face, and his eyes. You know, what he did was beyond belief, as terrible a thing as I’ve seen in all my life, but he was a tormented man. I could see it on him. His skin was covered with some kind of rash. There were sores all over his mouth, and his eyelids were swollen and puffy. He was just this haunted, sick creature. I was the closest man to him. I saw myself reflected in his eyes and, I swear, I knew what he was about to do and I wanted to stop him: not because I cared if he lived or died, but because I had this feeling that if he died at that moment, then somehow he’d take a part of me with him, because I was trapped in his gaze. Makes no sense, does it? I was so wired at the time, so freaked out by all those mirrors, that the fear just kind of hit me. I didn’t think it through. Suddenly, it was just there.

“Anyway, he kind of looked to his right and saw his reflection in the mirror, and his face changed. He looked almost relieved. Then he pulled the trigger, and the mirror just disappeared in a shower of blood and glass. That was it for him. We found the bodies with him in the basement, and the little Maguire kid, who was drifting in and out of consciousness. The best thing that can be said about what happened to those kids is that the M.E. figured they died quickly, but this is children we’re talking about. Jesus, what are we reduced to when we have to console ourselves with the idea of a fast end to their sufferings?”

He raised his bottle for another beer. I was on coffee. I don’t drink much anymore. I don’t have the taste for it.

“I can’t believe all that stuff just came out,” said Clem. “Strange what you keep inside, almost without knowing.”

I thought of Denny Maguire, carried from the house in the arms of a policeman, wrapped in a stranger’s coat. I got the feeling that he probably hadn’t slept well after he closed up the bar on the night that we spoke. Then again, I guessed Denny Maguire had rarely slept peacefully since the day John Grady stole him from his family and brought him to that house. He had kept it all inside too, and it had turned him into an old man before his time.

Clem’s beer arrived, but he didn’t touch it.

“I just told you all that, and I don’t even know why you’re asking about him.”

I briefed him on Matheson, and the photograph of the little girl.

“Children,” he said, quietly. “It’s always children with you.”

I didn’t respond. I didn’t want to.

“Some cops, they have a thing,” he continued. “Cases of one kind just seem to come their way more than others. They don’t go looking for them. They just kind of happen upon them. With some, it’s domestics; others, it’s rapes. They develop a way of looking at them that’s different from the rest, and then it’s like they attract them. With you, I guess, it’s children. Must be hard for you, after what happened.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

“You believe in God?”

“I don’t know. If He exists, then I don’t understand what He’s doing.”

“If He doesn’t exist, then we’re lost. I look around, I think about men like Grady and what he did, and I wonder sometimes if there’s anybody beyond this who really cares. And then, it’s like the fog clears for a couple of seconds, and I see a pattern. No, not even a pattern, just the possibility of one.”

“You see the hand of God?”

He laughed, and tapped his cheekbone with his finger.

“Cop’s eyes: I see his fingerprints. I see patterns on the glass. You get older, you start thinking about these things. If there is a God, then you and He are going to be having a serious talk in the near future, so you start thinking about what you might say. Mostly, you figure you’re going to be saying ‘Sorry.’ A lot.”

Clem seemed to remember what he was doing here.

“I’m rambling. You say Grass is looking into this thing?”

“He’s skeptical. He says he wants to be discreet, in case he freaks out some family for no good reason, or starts a panic among parents.”

“Grass is a straight arrow. He was a young man when the Grady thing happened but, like me, he was there at the end. I don’t think it will ever leave him. From what I hear, he takes his stewardship of the place pretty personally. He doesn’t want to remind people of what happened there, and I suppose he’s right to take that view. Next thing you know, it’s on a death trip tourist trail, or somebody takes it into his head to torch the place. No bad thing, if you ask me. I don’t understood why Matheson wanted to keep the house to begin with. But, like I said, the Grady house is now Grass’s patch. He’s taken on the burden of it.”

I wondered if Clem was right. Grass, Denny Maguire, even Clem himself-all seemed to carry with them some remnant of what had taken place in the Grady house, like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps wiping it from the earth would help to bring some relief to them and to all those whose lives had been touched by John Grady. Even Matheson must have begun to reconsider his urge to preserve it as a monument, now that it had found a way to extend its reach into an unknown girl’s life.

“Anything else you can tell me?” I asked.

“There’s not much more to tell,” he said. “Grady was a blank slate. I don’t even know if that was his real name. His fingerprints weren’t on record, and nobody came forward after his death to claim his body. He cost the state a funeral and a cheap cross.”

He pushed the bottle of beer away from him.

“Don’t know why I ordered this. I drink more than one bottle in the afternoon and I’m napping for the rest of the day. I’m already finding it hard to think of details that might be helpful to you. I suppose the only thing I can add is that we took some material from the house-books, mostly-that was kind of odd.”

“Odd how?”

“It was woo-woo stuff. You know: witchcraft, dæmons, pictures of those star things.”

“Pentagrams.”

“Yeah, trust you to know the name for them. It wasn’t low-end stuff, either. Some of those books were pretty old. I hear they made some money for the widows and orphans when they were sold.”

“They were sold off?”

“Well, there was no reason to hold on to them in the first place, since Grady was dead, and it wasn’t like there was going to be a trial or anything. Someone put them to one side and forgot about them, and they lay around in a basement for twenty years. Then there was that big clearout last fall. I went over to take a look, just in case there was anything worth holding on to as a souvenir. Those books turned up, and someone decided to get a valuation on them. The word went out to some of the dealers in the state, and literally the next day a guy showed up to take a look at them. He offered a thousand dollars for the lot, and walked out with them five minutes later.”

“Do you know who bought them?”

“I can find out for you right now, if you want.”

He took out his cell and tapped in a phone number.

“See, I did have a use for this after all,” he said, as his call was answered. “Hi, can you put me through to Detective Brian Harrison, please?”

I didn’t know Harrison. He came on the line and he and Clem exchanged greetings for a while and caught up on news of mutual friends. Eventually, Clem asked him about the sale of the Grady books. After a lot of “uh-huhs” he thanked Harrison, promised to meet him for a drink, then hung up.

“Wouldn’t you know it?” he said. “There had to be a woo-woo angle. The guy who bought the books claimed to be working for Bowe amp; Heinrich. He said he was Milton Bowe’s nephew.”

Bowe amp; Heinrich was a well-known firm of rare-book dealers based in Bangor.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Bowe amp; Heinrich never heard of him.”

“Milton Bowe arrived at state police headquarters a day later to take a look at the books himself, but they were already gone by then. He was pretty pissed at what happened. He didn’t like the idea of some weirdo impersonating his nephew, or stealing books from under his nose.”

“Weirdo?”

“He looked like a tramp. Some of these collector types do, I hear. They spend more money on books and antiques than they do on clothes. This guy had an old coat and a shoe that was speaking to him. He paid in cash, though: ten hundred-dollar bills, which was probably more than Bowe would have paid, the cheap bastard. If this guy committed a crime, it was a victimless one.”

I didn’t need to ask Clem any more about the buyer. I knew who he was.

“You decided how you’re going to handle this thing?” Clem asked.

I gave a noncommittal reply. I wasn’t sure yet what I could do, other than dig up old memories and watch as the dust they raised settled itself on the Grady house.

“Well, you need help, you let me know,” said Clem.

We stood to leave. I picked up the check, despite ribbing Clem earlier about his wealth.

“It’s taken care of,” he said. “I left my credit card behind the bar.”

“You didn’t have to do that.”

“Hey, it was good to see you. I don’t get to talk to someone thirty years younger than me so often now. Makes me feel like less of an old fart.”

The weather had turned chill. My breath hung like an unfulfilled promise in the afternoon air.

“Have you ever been back to the Grady house?” I asked Clem, as we walked to our cars.

“Nope. No cause to go there. Even if I had to go back, I wouldn’t stay too long. There’s something unhealthy in the atmosphere of the place. You’ve been there; you know what I’m talking about. I didn’t know better, I’d say that there were chemicals in the walls and the floors. In the days after Grady killed himself, most of the men who spent time in the house complained of nausea and vomiting. I had headaches for weeks afterward. That was more than twenty years ago. It could be that it’s not as strong now, but I don’t doubt that it’s still there.”

His words brought back my own disorientation after spending a little time in the Grady house. Clem was right. Whatever had infected the house was still present, engaged in a process of slow decay like the half-life of radioactive waste.

We parted on Commercial. Clem gripped my hand tightly in both of his.

“No ‘if onlys,’ ” he said. “Remember that. Don’t let anything happen to that little girl. There are too many lost children. You know that better than anyone else. There are just too many lost children…”

VI

I drove up to Bangor that afternoon. Voodoo Ray Czabo and his wife had moved back up to Maine so that she could be closer to her mother, which proved that not only was Ray kind of unpleasant, he was also dumb as well. When a woman like Edna Czabo says she wants to be closer to her mother, then you might as well start packing your bags and looking for a bachelor apartment, because no good can come of it. The talk was that Ray Czabo’s marriage was on the rocks.

Ray was a skinny guy who dressed neatly, smelled nice, and could be superficially charming when the necessity arose, but his fascination with suffering and the vicarious pleasure-and actual profit-he derived from it left him a couple of rungs below blowflies on the moral ladder. I’d never had the joy of making Mrs. Czabo’s acquaintance, but from what I heard she made Ray seem like good company.

There were two vehicles in the driveway, a sensible Nissan and a souped-up Firebird, when I pulled up outside the Czabos’ nondescript single-story house, surrounded by similarly anonymous houses with marginally newer paintwork. The grass in the yard was patchy and unkempt, and the trees and bushes that bordered their property hadn’t been pruned that year. Light was already fading as I walked up to the door and pressed the buzzer. After a couple of minutes, the door was opened by a woman in a pale blue bathrobe. Her feet were bare, her hair was tousled, and she had the smoking butt of a cigarette in her hand. I picked out the remains of lipstick at the corners of her mouth, and her chin and cheeks were red and irritated.

“Mrs. Czabo?” I said.

“That’s me.”

She finished the cigarette, seemed to look for somewhere to put it out, then contented herself with tossing it onto the step by my feet. I stamped it out for her.

“I was looking for your husband.”

“Who are you?”

I showed her my license.

“My name’s Charlie Parker. I’m a private-”

“Yeah, I know all about you. You broke Ray’s nose.”

“I didn’t break his nose. He ran into a wall.”

“He ran into a wall because he was running away from you.”

I conceded the point.

“I still need to talk to him.”

“What’s he done now? Dug up a corpse?”

“I just have some questions for him. He’s not in any trouble.”

“Yeah, well, Ray don’t live here no more. He moved out a couple of months ago.”

“You know where he is?”

She picked at something between her teeth. Her fingers emerged clutching a short hair. I tried not to think of its possible origins.

“He does his thing, I do mine. I don’t pay no heed to his business.”

I heard a toilet flush in the house and a man appeared in the hallway with a towel wrapped around his waist. He was younger than Mrs. Czabo by a decade, which made him about my age, but he looked bulkier and stronger than I was. He glanced at me, then asked her if everything was okay.

“I’ll holler if I need you,” she said. Her tone made it clear that it would be a sorry day when she needed his help.

“I just want an address,” I said.

She shook her head.

“Cocksucker,” she said. “You hear me?” Her voice was low, and I could smell the staleness on her breath.

“Ray said you were a cocksucker, and he was right. That’s all you are. So why don’t you just get the fuck out of here and leave us all in peace?”

“Gee,” I said, “you’re a nice lady.”

She made a gesture using her tongue and her right hand, just in case I wasn’t clear on what being a cocksucker entailed, then closed the door in my face.

My cell phone rang as I walked down Edna Czabo’s garden path. I didn’t recognize the number on the caller display. It turned out to be Denny Maguire.

“Can you talk?” he asked.

I leaned against my car and looked at the Czabo house. A drape twitched in one of the front windows.

“Sure,” I said.

“Look, this could be nothing. You asked me if I remembered anything that Grady said while I was in that basement. Like I told you, I was pretty out of it before they rescued me, so most of it’s a blur, but I do recall him telling me that he was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

“He said that he was going to be punished for what he’d done to those kids, and for what he was going to do to me eventually, I guess. He said that he was damned, but that he wouldn’t go without a fight. He told me that he’d taken precautions. I didn’t know what he meant. I thought later that he was talking about the way he’d reinforced the basement door, but now I’m not so sure.”

The drape twitched again in the front window, this time with a little more force.

“There was always black paint on his hands,” Denny continued, “and he was hanging paper and working on the house all of the time. I remember that most of the walls had been covered while I was kept in the basement, because he’d nearly finished the job when the police came for him. There were other things, odd things. During the first days, there was a pile of bones in the corner of the basement. He told me that they came from dogs. Later, he took them away and buried them.”

“He told you this?”

“Yeah. His hands were dirty, and he must have seen me looking at them. He said that he’d been working in his yard, burying the bones. That was when he first began talking about the precautions he was taking, and about how he wasn’t going to be pulled from his home without a fight.”

The front door of the Czabo house opened, and the bulky young man appeared on the step. He was now dressed in baggy jeans and a hooded sweat top. There were scuffed sneakers on his feet.

“I don’t know if any of that is helpful,” said Denny.

“It may be,” I said. “Listen, Denny, I have to go, but thanks for that. I’ll let you know how things work out.”

I killed the connection just as the man I took to be Edna Czabo’s lover reached the end of the path.

“Who were you talking to?” he asked. His voice was a little high, and softer than I’d expected.

“Your mother,” I replied. “She says you’re to come home and stop screwing around with other men’s wives. Oh, and she wants you to pick up some milk along the way.”

He didn’t look too pleased at the reply, but he didn’t make a move either, although I could see his hands almost involuntarily tense into fists. He was probably smarter than he looked, which made me wonder what he was doing with Edna Czabo.

“Why are you looking for Ray?” he asked.

“I have some questions for him.”

“Ray doesn’t come around here much.”

“Did you scare him away?”

“It’s all over between him and Edna. He moved out.”

“So she told me. Do you know where he is?”

“Edna says he’s in Bangor someplace. I don’t know where.”

“That’s not very helpful,” I said. “So if you didn’t come out here to help, why did you come out?”

His head jerked back slightly in the direction of the house, and the woman within.

“Did she send you out to frighten me?” I asked.

He had the decency to look embarrassed.

“We just don’t want any trouble. I don’t want any trouble.”

I sized him up. A man who says he doesn’t want trouble has usually experienced trouble before, and has a pretty good expectation of experiencing it again. If Ray Czabo had done something wrong, then I could just be the first of any number of people who might come knocking on his wife’s door, the cops among them.

“You got a name?” I said.

“Tillman,” he said. “Casey Tillman.”

“Anything to Gunnar Tillman?”

He nodded. “He’s my old man.”

“I thought I saw a resemblance.”

Gunnar Tillman was bad news, the kind of minor-league hood that places like Bangor threw up occasionally like a piece of rotten fish. He was involved in drugs, prostitution, and maybe a little smuggling of immigrants across the Canadian border, if the stories were to be believed. I could understand now why his son didn’t want the cops sniffing around his affairs.

“You see much of him?” I asked.

“As little as I can.”

I didn’t know if that was true. From what I’d heard of Gunnar Tillman, he made the decisions on the extent of his involvement in people’s lives. It seemed unlikely that he’d accept any form of rejection from his own son.

I handed Casey Tillman my card.

“You think of anything, or if you hear from Ray, let me know. I wasn’t lying to you: Ray’s not in any trouble that I know of, but I do need to talk to him. If you’re being straight with me, then I won’t say anything about you to the cops unless circumstances change and there’s no way to avoid it.”

Tillman slipped the card into a pocket of his jeans.

“Nice car,” he said, pointing with his chin at my Mustang. “I run an auto shop in Orono. You ever need some work done, you give me a call. It’s under my name in the book.”

With that, he turned and walked back to the house. Edna Czabo met him at the door. I wondered if we should have staged a fight, just for appearances’ sake. I settled for trying to look shaken. She seemed happy with that, but shot me another orally suggestive gesture before she slammed the door, just in case I’d forgotten my place.

I got Ray Czabo’s new address from a detective named Jeff Weis over in the Bangor PD. Ray had a habit of leaving his business cards around in the hope that someone might give him a call if something juicy came up. They rarely did, as most Maine cops regarded Voodoo Ray as low enough to ride a rat, but you had to admire his capacity for optimism. Since his separation, he had been living in a first-floor apartment over by the Bangor municipal golf course. It was the kind of place where kids rode bicycles down the hallways and there was a constant smell of burnt fat in the air. There was no reply when I rang his doorbell, so I headed around to the front of the building and peered in through his window. I saw a TV, some true-crime magazines on a coffee table, and stacks of cardboard boxes filled with files. Some of the top boxes had been overturned, and their contents left on the floor. That wasn’t like Ray Czabo. He was a meticulous man. I knew that from my own personal encounter with him, when I had forced him to hand over the souvenir he had taken from my house, his nose still bleeding upon the floor. There had been nothing out of place in his office then. Everything was clean and dusted.

The top window was open to allow a little air in. I looked around to make sure nobody was watching, then slipped on my gloves and hoisted myself up onto the sill. I reached in to open the latch on the main window, then entered Voodoo Ray’s apartment. It was cold inside. The bed in the apartment’s sole bedroom was neatly made, and the kitchen was tidy apart from a cup soaking in the sink. The dishcloth on the rack was bone dry, and so was the towel hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Maybe Ray didn’t take a lot of showers, or maybe he hadn’t been home in a while.

I examined the papers on the floor. They were mostly reports of serious crimes clipped from newspapers and magazines, some of them with handwritten pages of notes appended by Ray. One or two of the cases were familiar to me. Most, being out of state, were not. Apart from the disordered files, there was nothing suspicious about Ray’s apartment. I closed the window and went to the front door to let myself out. My foot hit something light, which spun across the carpet and bounced against the wall.

I picked up the black plastic case from the floor. It was an empty film canister.

Papers spilled on the floor, and a film canister by the door: they were small things, and could be dismissed as the carelessness of a man in a hurry. If it was Ray’s doing, then I wondered why he had been in such a rush to leave, and if the photographs he had taken included one of a little girl with a baseball bat in her hand. I hadn’t seen any developing equipment in Ray’s closet, but that didn’t mean that he wasn’t responsible for the picture. The other possibility was that someone had searched Ray’s house before me, and that among the items that person had removed was at least one roll of film.

I left the apartment, closing the door gently behind me, then stuck my card underneath it in case Ray came back. I still had questions I wanted to ask him about the Grady house. As I stood, the door across from Ray’s opened and an elderly man in a clean blue shirt peered out from across a security chain.

“I’ll call the police,” he said.

“Why?” I said.

He squinted at me.

“You shouldn’t be in there. That’s Mr. Czabo’s apartment.”

I had to admire the old guy. There were few neighbors in this kind of place with the courage to stand up for those around them.

I showed him my ID.

“I’m a private investigator. I got no reply from inside, so I thought I’d leave my card for Ray.”

The old man gestured with his hand. I handed him my wallet. He looked at it for a time, pursed his lips while he considered its authenticity, then handed it back to me.

“I guess you’re straight,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “Have you seen Mr. Czabo around lately?”

The old guy shook his head.

“Not for a while. Last time I saw him, it was when he had the trouble.”

“Trouble?”

“Two men came. A little fella and a big fella. The little fella was older, but younger than me. They shouted some at Mr. Czabo, then went outside and kicked in the side of his car. I was going to call the police then as well, but Mr. Czabo told me not to. He said it was a misunderstanding.”

“When was this?”

“A while back. Could have been three weeks, maybe more.”

“Do you remember anything else about the men involved?”

“The older one was small, with white curly hair and too many gold chains for a man his age. The other one was just huge. No neck. Looked like a throwback to the cavemen.”

The older man sounded like Gunnar Tillman. I figured his companion for the hired help.

I thanked Voodoo Ray’s neighbor again.

“Well,” he said, as his door began to close, “I give a damn. This place will go to shit if people don’t look out for each other.”

“You’re a dying breed,” I said.

“Maybe, but I’m not dead yet,” he replied, and then he closed the door.

A few minutes from Ray’s place was a strip mall, anchored by a large drugstore. It was a slim chance, but I pulled into the lot and parked outside the store. The photo desk was beside the registers, staffed by a bored-looking teenager in a bright yellow polo shirt.

“Hi,” I said. “I think my wife left some photos in here maybe a week ago. We can’t find the receipt, but we’d really like our pictures.”

“You sure she left them in here?”

I did my best impression of a frustrated husband.

“She thinks this is where she left them to be developed. She’s distracted at the moment. We’re expecting our first baby.”

I wasn’t sure which was worse: lying or embellishing the lie with the truth. The photo guy didn’t seem to care much either way.

“What’s the name?” he said.

“Czabo.”

He flicked wearily through the envelopes behind the counter. About halfway through, he stopped and removed two of them from the cabinet.

“Czabo,” he said. “Two rolls.”

He didn’t ask for ID. I thanked him and paid for the pictures, then walked out of the store feeling like a spy.

I opened the envelopes in the car. One batch of photographs contained pictures of Ray’s buddies in a bar, a couple of empty landscapes that might have been a crime scene or an attempt by Ray to get in touch with nature, and two photos of some damage to the wing of a green car that was probably Ray’s. I guessed it was the result of Gunnar and his goon kicking in the wing. The damage didn’t look too serious, and the pictures were probably for insurance purposes.

The second set of photographs began with five scenes of Ray’s house, the one currently occupied by his wife and her toy boy. Casey Tillman was in each of the pictures, mostly getting into or out of his car, or greeting Edna Czabo with a kiss and an embrace. It looked like Ray wasn’t as happy about staying out of his wife’s affairs as she appeared to be about staying out of his.

Casey was also in two more photographs, this time taken outside the garage that bore his name. There were two other men in the pictures with him. One looked like the Missing Link, assuming the Missing Link had learned to tie its own shoelaces. The other was Gunnar Tillman. He was much smaller than his son, and any weight he was carrying was still more muscle than fat. His hair was white and curly, and contrasted nicely with his winter tan. He was wearing a golf sweater and shiny sweat pants. Gold jewelry glittered in the sunlight at his wrist and around his neck. Gunnar Tillman clearly shopped at Hoods-R-Us.

It wasn’t a good idea for Ray Czabo to be shooting clandestine photographs of Tillman, but maybe he hoped to win back his wife by showing her that her lover hadn’t entirely cut off relations with his criminal father. Somehow I felt Ray was clutching at straws. Edna Czabo had a new man in her life, one that was a lot younger than the old one, and with a little grit to him. Since she wasn’t running for the presidency, or leading her local Girl Scout troop, I didn’t think she would be too concerned about him meeting up with his old man occasionally.

The last photographs were all images of the Grady house, taken from every possible angle short of dangling upside down from the drainpipe. According to the digital date imprinted in the right-hand corner of the frames, they were all shot a couple of weeks before, in the space of about fifteen minutes. Ray had even managed to photograph the interior of the house through cracks in the window boards. I quickly flicked through them once, and saw nothing to make them stand out in any way. I went through them again, this time more slowly, and found a detail in the second-to-last photo that made me pause.

It was the photograph Ray had taken by pressing the camera to the boards. Most of the image was obscured by the reflection of the flash on the glass, but the left-hand side was relatively clear. It showed the mirror on the wall of the reception room, the same mirror that I had seen when I first entered the house.

Reflected in the glass was the shape of a man. I could just make out his back, which was clothed in a dark jacket, but his face was not visible. His reflection was turned away from the camera. I flicked back through the images one more time, to confirm what I had seen, then laid them to one side.

In Ray Czabo’s photographs, all the doors and windows in the Grady house were clearly padlocked from the outside. There was no way that anyone could be inside.

Yet someone was.

That night Rachel complained of pains in her stomach, so I took her to Maine Medical and spent two hours in the waiting room while the doctors looked her over. I read the newspapers for a time, but they seemed to be filled with suffering and I didn’t need to read about people dying while Rachel was in pain.

Eventually, the doctors let her out. They told us that there was nothing to be concerned about, and that everything looked fine. We got home at about 2 A.M., and Rachel began crying shortly after. I couldn’t console her, and she couldn’t seem to bring herself to speak, so I held her in my arms until her crying stopped and she at last fell asleep, her final moments of wakefulness punctuated by small hiccuping sobs.

The next morning she acted as if nothing had happened, and I didn’t know what else to do except to let her be.

VII

They arrived at the Portland airport shortly after 10 A.M. Its official title was the Portland International Jetport, which had a kind of Buck Rogers ring to it, although futurism and Portland weren’t concepts that sat easily together. I kind of liked it that way.

They were getting older, I realized. We all were. True, the changes in Angel, the new pain lines in his face and the creeping gray in his previously soot-black hair, were too sudden to go unnoticed, but his partner was also graying slightly. Louis’s satanic beard was slowly speckling with white, and there was now also a considerable dusting of it in his hair. He caught me looking at him.

“What?” he said.

“You’re going seriously gray,” I said.

“I don’t think so.”

“Hate to break it to you.”

“Like I said, I believe you’re mistaken.”

“You can take steps. You don’t have to just sit back and let it happen.”

“I don’t have to sit back and do nothin’, because there’s nothin’ to let happen.”

“Okay, if you say so. But you know, you let that hair grow out some and you can sign on as Morgan Freeman’s stunt double.”

“He has a point,” chipped in Angel. “Morgan ain’t as young as he used to be. Studios would probably pay good money for a younger guy who just looks as old as Morgan Freeman.”

Louis stopped at the door leading out of the terminal building.

“You going to sulk?” I asked him.

“Maybe he’s just forgotten where he’s going. That happens as you get-”

For an older man, Angel could still move pretty quickly when he wanted to, so Louis’s Cole Haan missed him by an inch.

The first time.

We sat at a table in the Bayou Kitchen, a tiny little diner over on Deering that until recently had only opened for lunch but now did weekend dinners as well. It could seat maybe twenty people, and its counter was piled high with sauces that carried warnings advising that they shouldn’t be used by pregnant women or people with heart complaints. The food was good, and in winter it was mainly locals who went there.

Angel was still rubbing his shin occasionally and casting hurt glances at Louis, so it was left to me to do most of the talking. I told them a little more of the history of the Grady house, and about my encounters with Chief Grass, Denny Maguire, and Gunnar Tillman’s boy, among others.

“You sure Maguire’s clean?” asked Louis.

“I didn’t get anything bad from him.”

“You tell Matheson about him?”

“No.”

I had spoken with Matheson that morning. He told me that he had a key for the basement in the house, and he thought that the cops had one too, but he hadn’t realized that there was no copy on the set of keys he had given to me. He promised to get one to me by the end of the day. He also told me that he’d had a shouting match with Chief Grass after Grass had questioned the wisdom of hiring me.

“Matheson is edgy enough as it is,” I said. “The last thing I need is for him to start bothering Maguire about the past.”

“What about Czabo?”

“I’d call him a suspect, but there hasn’t been a crime. Still, the photo in the mailbox isn’t his style. He’s a watcher, not a doer.”

“And the antiques guy?”

“The Collector?” I had begun to think of him by that name. After all, I had no other. “He told me he had nothing to do with the photograph. He said he just wanted a mirror from the house, but he knows something.”

“Could be he’s a grave robber, like Voodoo Ray,” said Angel.

“Maybe if you just gave him a mirror, he’d tell you what he knows,” suggested Louis.

“I don’t think so. Anyway, nothing in the house is mine to give away.”

“You think he’s a threat?”

I put my hands up in the air.

“A threat to what? To us? We haven’t done anything. For once, we’re free and clear. Nobody hates us on this case.”

“Yet,” said Angel.

“Always happens, though,” said Louis.

“If only they took the time to get to know us a little better,” said Angel.

“I’ve taken the time to get to know you a little better,” I said, “and look where it got me. You’re on the payroll, by the way, so it’s not a charity case. Matheson signed off on the surveillance.”

Louis finished off his jambalaya, soaking up the last of the sauce and rice with some fresh bread.

“For how long?”

“As long as it takes, was what he said. I told him we’d give it a week, then review our options.”

“Sounds like it could be nothing,” said Louis. “A photograph in a mailbox, that’s all you got?”

“That’s all.”

I reached into my pocket and removed a copy of the Matheson picture. I carefully unfolded it, then pushed it slowly across the table.

“But do you want to take the chance?”

The two men looked at the image of the young girl. Angel answered for both of them.

“No,” he said. “I guess not.”

Later that afternoon they stopped by the house to say hi to Rachel. She was a little distant, but neither of them remarked upon it. I thought that she was just tired after the night before, but it was the first sign of troubles to come. The pain and danger that she had endured by remaining with me, and the fears that she felt for herself and our child, seemed to her to be rendered more acute by the presence of two men who were friends yet who always carried with them a potential for violence. They reminded her of what had befallen her in the past, and what might befall the child she carried. Looking back, perhaps they also caused her to reflect on my own capacities, and the possibility that I might always draw violent men to me. She had attempted to explain these things to me before, and I had tried to reassure her as best I could. I hoped that, in time, her worries would fade. I think she hoped so too, even though she feared that they would not. I wanted to ask her again about the visit to the hospital, and the tears that followed, but there was no time. Instead, I held her and told her I’d be home before midnight, and she squeezed me and said that would be fine.

I drove to Two Mile Lake as the afternoon light began to dim, Angel and Louis following behind. It was dark by the time we arrived, and the bare trees slept over us as we passed the Grady house and took the next turning on the right. The road led up to a run-down, single-storey farmhouse. Like the Grady house itself, it had been bought by Matheson after his daughter’s disappearance. It seemed to me that he wanted to seal off the whole area from the possible depredations of strangers, as though his loss were inextricably tied up with the very fabric of the Grady house, with its surrounding fields and with the buildings that had silently borne witness to the events that had occurred in their purview. Perhaps he envisaged her, lost and alone, desperately trying to seek a doorway back into the world that she knew, and felt that any change to the place from which she had vanished would make it impossible for her to return; or maybe this was all simply one great monument, an ornate offering upon which her name and the names of the other children were deeply inscribed yet never seen.

I opened the door to the farmhouse and led Angel and Louis inside. It had been cleaned recently, for there was little dust on any of the surfaces. Most of the rooms remained empty, apart from the kitchen, where there was a table and four chairs, and the sitting room, which contained a sofa bed and a radiator. In one of the bedrooms there were some ladders and tins of varnish and paint. An envelope on the table, addressed to me, contained a set of keys to the Grady house for Angel and Louis, and a single key with a note from Matheson identifying it as the one for the basement.

“Nice,” said Angel, as he took in his surroundings. “Very minimalist.”

“Who knows that we’re here?” asked Louis.

“We do, and so does Matheson.”

“The cops?”

“No. Anyone asks, you tell them you’re here to do some work on the house and Matheson will back you up, but this place is pretty much invisible from the road so we shouldn’t be bothered. You two will take the lion’s share of the duty-twenty-four on, twelve off. There’s a motel about three miles out of town. I’ve rented a room there for the next week. This place has no hot water, and we can’t risk too many lights. There are blackout shades in the kitchen, so if you want to read, then that’s the place. There’s a radio and TV in there too.”

I led them to the back bedroom. There, a single window looked down upon the Grady house, framed by a gap in the trees. It would be hard for anyone to approach it from north, south, or east without being seen, and the west side of the house had no point of entry.

“There it is,” I said.

“You been in there?” asked Angel.

“Yes. Do you want to check it out?”

Among the items left by Matheson was a plan of the house. Louis spread it out on the floor and examined it.

“Is this accurate?”

I looked it over.

“Looks like it. There’s not much to add. Mirrors on the walls. Some old furniture, but most of it is stacked away, so the floors are clear.”

Louis shrugged. “Maybe we’ll take a look in daylight if we get bored.”

We watched the shape of the house, darker yet against the night sky.

“So we wait,” he said.

“We wait.”

Nothing happened that night. I drove home to Rachel after a couple of hours, then returned the following evening. It set the pattern for the week that followed. Sometimes I would stay with them for a couple of hours after they arrived to relieve me, sitting at the window and talking with Angel while Louis rested or read, the Grady house before us like a dark hand raised against the sky.

Conversations with Angel were not always a good idea.

“Are me and Louis the only gay men you know?” he asked, on the second night.

“You’re certainly the most irritating gay men I know.”

“We bring color into your life. Seriously, you got any other gay friends?”

I considered the question.

“I don’t know. It’s not like you all wear lavender loon pants and Village People T-shirts, or introduce yourselves with ‘Hey, I’m Dan and I’ll be your token homosexual for the evening.’ Just like I don’t walk up to people, shake their hands, and tell them, ‘I’m Charlie, and I’m proud to be a heterosexual.’ It worries people.”

“It would sure worry me.”

“Well, you wouldn’t be my target market.”

“You have a target market? What is it: the needy? Needy heterosexuals. ‘The Needy Heterosexuals.’ It sounds like a band.”

“Anyway, in answer to your question, I don’t know how many of my acquaintances are gay men. Maybe a couple. Plus I don’t have ‘gaydar.’ I think that’s a gay preserve.”

“I think gaydar’s a myth. It’s all kind of confusing, now that straight men are dressing nice and using skin care products. Kind of muddies the waters.”

I looked at him.

“But you’re a gay man and you don’t dress nice. Plus, if you use skin care products you’re using them on a part of your body that I can’t see, and you have no idea how happy I am to be able to say that.”

“You telling me I look straight? If I look straight, how come straight women never hit on me?”

“You’re lucky anybody ever hit on you, looking the way you do. Don’t blame straight women for keeping their distance.”

Angel grinned.

“But still, you’re happy to call me ‘friend.’ ” He reached over and patted my arm.

“I didn’t say I was happy about it, and get your hands off me. I have a suspicion about where they’ve been.”

He backed off.

“You and Rachel okay?” he asked.

“We had a scare the other night. She had pains. The doctors took a look at her and told her she was fine.”

“She was kind of funny with us. Distant.”

“It was a long night.”

“You sure that’s all it was?”

“Yes,” I said. “Pretty sure.”

When I was alone, I kept myself alert with a radio and caffeine, or cleared my head a little by taking a walk around the property when I was certain everything was quiet. Once or twice I saw Officer O’Donnell make a cursory check of the Grady house, but he didn’t even glance up at the farmhouse on the slope above.

On the seventh day, as I was heading home, I got a call from Detective Jeff Weis, the cop who had given me Voodoo Ray’s new bachelor address.

“Bet you didn’t have any luck finding Ray Czabo,” he said.

“How’d you know?”

“Because they just found him.”

I pulled over to the side of the road.

“Something tells me that he’s not about to be talking to me anytime soon.”

“Not unless you’re psychic. Somerset County Sheriff called it in about an hour ago. His body was buried over by Little Ferguson Brook, mile or two east of Harmony. Looks like he’s been there for a while, so you’re probably off the hook.”

“I wasn’t aware that I was on the hook.”

“There you go. You were innocent and you didn’t even know it.”

I thanked Weis for the tip, then got back on the road and headed for Harmony. It wasn’t too hard to find the location of the discovery. I just followed a state police patrol car until I came to a cluster of vehicles by a small metal bridge off Main Stream Road. I tried to pick out someone I might know, but they were all unfamiliar faces. Instead, I settled for showing my license to the Somerset County deputy who was trying to move me on, and asked to speak to the detective in charge. After a couple of minutes, a balding man in a blue Wind-breaker broke away from the group standing by the riverbank and came over to talk to me.

“Help you?” he said.

“Charlie Parker,” I said.

He nodded. One thing about gaining a reputation in Maine, for better or worse, was that most of the cops at least knew my name.

“Bert Jansen,” he said. “You’re off your turf.”

“I get around.”

I gestured toward the riverbank.

“I hear you may have found Ray Czabo.”

Jansen didn’t respond immediately, then seemed to decide “What the hell?” and echoed Ray’s name.

“What’s your interest in Czabo?”

“I went looking for him about a week ago. His wife said he’d moved out, but when I called by his new place there was no reply. I left my card. You’ll find it underneath his door when you search his apartment.”

“Why were you looking for him to begin with?”

I decided there was no percentage in not being open with Jansen.

“I’m working for a man named Matheson. His daughter died in the Grady house. Matheson thinks someone may be developing an unhealthy interest in the house, and the local cops told me that they’d rousted Ray from the property a couple of times. I wanted to ask him what he was doing, or what he might have seen when he was there.”

Jansen took out his notebook and began writing. “And this was when?”

“A week ago Wednesday.”

He made some more notes, then asked me if I minded hanging around for a while. I told him I had no problem with that.

“You have any idea how long he’s been down there?” I asked.

“Nope. My guess would be a week or more. He’s pretty bloated up.”

“Cause of death?”

“Shot in the head. Three close entry wounds, no exits. Scoop his brains out and you could use his head for a bowling ball. Probably a two-two.”

I’d never cared much for Ray Czabo, but he didn’t deserve to end up dead. Three shots to the head also sounded like overkill. One shot with a.22 will leave the bullet rattling around inside, tearing up tissue until it runs out of steam. Ray must really have annoyed someone to end up with three of them in his skull.

“I guess he wasn’t shot here.”

“Wouldn’t think so. It’s a long way to transport someone just to shoot them. Our guess is he was killed someplace else, then driven out here and buried in a shallow grave. A dog dug up his hand. It hasn’t rained in a while, but there’s a whole bunch of it due.”

I knew what Jansen was saying. The rain would come and the river would rise, covering the burial site. Then, with winter settling in, it would freeze over until March, maybe even April. By the time the thaws came, there would be no evidence left that the ground had ever been disturbed.

I went back to my car, turned on the radio, and listened to NPR until the M.E. arrived. I watched her descend to the body and then, finally, the corpse was taken from the riverbank in a white bodybag. Jansen came over to speak to me shortly after and told me that the M.E. estimated that Czabo had been in the ground for up to two weeks, then let me go. I called Rachel, told her I’d be a little late, then headed for Orono.

Orono is a college town, housing part of the University of Maine. It has an intimate feel to it, and most people know one another’s names, so the first guy I stopped was able to direct me to Casey Tillman’s garage.

The second thing I noticed once I got there was the Lexus parked outside. The first thing I noticed was the Missing Link, who had to step aside before I could see the Lexus. Link wasn’t much more than six feet tall, but he was probably the same width across. His head looked too small for the rest of his body-in fact, it looked too small, period-but I suspected that he hadn’t been hired for his brain power. He had slightly Asian features, and his dark hair was tied back in a ponytail. He also seemed to have shopped in the same hoods’ store as his boss, except his clothes came from the “big man” section.

“We’re closed,” he said, when I stepped from the Mustang. “Come back later.”

“I’m here to see Casey,” I told him. “You haven’t eaten him, have you?”

Link blinked. I figured him for the kind of guy who heard a joke at midnight, and started laughing at about 8 A.M. I kept walking until I was standing in the garage’s entrance. Link lumbered after me and stopped me from going any farther by the simple measure of standing in front of me and tapping me in the chest with his index finger. It barely involved him stretching a tendon, but it nearly sent me sprawling in the gutter.

“You got a problem with your hearing?” he said.

Inside the garage’s office, I could see Gunnar Tillman talking to his son. His voice was raised and he was doing a lot of finger pointing. Casey looked over his father’s shoulder, saw me, and raised a hand to stop the older man’s diatribe. Gunnar turned around and glared at me. He didn’t look happy, but I didn’t think it was personal. Gunnar Tillman wasn’t someone whose smiling muscles got a lot of exercise.

Casey stepped from behind his desk and walked toward me.

“What are you doing here?” he asked.

“Ray Czabo’s dead,” I said.

“I know. Edna called me.”

“And you called your father.”

“I figured he should know.”

Link stood beside us, looking from me to Casey and back again. He reminded me of my dog, but without the capacity to learn. I was about to ask him to give us a little breathing space when the issue became redundant.

Gunnar Tillman pushed his way between Casey and Link. I had five or six inches on him, but it didn’t make me feel any better. Gunnar pretty much sweated bad vibes.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked.

“It’s okay, Pop, he’s-”

Casey’s intervention was cut short by Gunnar’s left hand, which slapped his son hard on the right cheek. Casey took a step backward. His eyes teared with pain and humiliation.

“I wasn’t talking to you,” said Gunnar. His voice was perfectly even, as though he had not even registered the blow he had delivered to his son.

He turned his attention back to me.

“You see what you made me do,” he said. “He’s my son, and I care about him, but you made me hit him. I don’t even know you, so you better believe that I’ll fuck you up good if you don’t start answering my questions. Now who are you?”

“My name’s Parker. I’m a private investigator.”

“So?”

“Ray Czabo’s dead.”

“And?”

“Your son is seeing Czabo’s wife.”

“You saying he had something to do with this?”

“I don’t know. Did he?”

Gunnar reached behind his back and pulled a gun on me. The muzzle looked very big, and very black.

“You’ve got some fucking mouth,” he said.

Casey tried to calm his father down.

“Jesus, Pop, come on. Don’t do this.”

“You got no right to say things like that, you hear me?” said Gunnar.

His son reached out and patted him on the back, gradually forcing the gun down with his right hand.

“It’s okay,” he said. “He didn’t mean anything by it. Let me talk to him.”

Gunnar was slowly coming off the boil. He let out some deep breaths.

“You watch your mouth,” he told me.

He put the gun back in the waistband of his trousers and walked over to a Dodge with a yawning hood. He slammed the hood down and leaned his hands upon it, his head bowed. His son watched him until he was certain that Gunnar had regained control of his temper, then said in a low voice:

“I had nothing to do with it.”

“Your old man visited Czabo. From what I hear, he threatened him. There were witnesses.”

Casey swallowed and shook his head in frustration.

“I knew Ray was following me around. I saw him take some pictures. I tried to warn him off, but he wouldn’t listen. He said I was coming between him and his wife. My pop found out-”

“Found out, or was told?”

Casey reddened. He was, I realized, an even weaker man than he seemed.

“I thought he could get Billy over there to talk some sense into Ray. You know, I do some things for my pop. I look after cars for him. Some of them, well, they may have ownership issues, you know what I’m saying? Ray needed to be warned off, or else things would get really bad for him.”

“Things did get really bad for him. Someone shot him in the head.”

“My pop didn’t do it.”

“You’re sure?”

Casey’s voice lowered.

“He doesn’t need that kind of heat. He’s getting older now. The stuff they say about him, most of it’s not true anymore. He only has a couple of guys on the payroll, and mostly what they do is drive my old man to lunch. He fences some cars, distributes a little pot for the college kids, but that’s about it. He’s small time now, but if they caught him they’d put him away, and he doesn’t want to die in jail. He didn’t kill Ray Czabo. Neither did I. When the cops come calling, we’ll tell them that.”

I looked over at Gunnar. He was coughing. It was suddenly clear that what I had mistaken for his efforts to control his temper were actually attempts to get his breathing back in order. He sounded sick. Billy was now beside him, holding a cup of water to the old man’s lips.

“He can be a prick but he’s still my father,” said Casey.

His eyes pleaded for understanding.

“And-”

Casey put a hand on my shoulder, as though to guide me away from the garage. I let him do it.

“We lost a guy, Chris Tierney,” he said.

“When?”

“Week or so back. Stabbed in the heart.”

The name sounded vaguely familiar. I recalled a story from the Press Herald about a stabbing in Orono. It hadn’t mentioned Gunnar Tillman.

“The story I read said Tierney was mugged in the parking lot of a bar. His body was hidden under trash bags.”

“That’s where they found him.”

“So where did he die?”

“Near here. My father had him moved.”

It explained why Gunnar was so jumpy.

“Any idea who might have done it?”

Casey shook his head.

“Nobody has that kind of problem with my pop. Like I told you, he’s not into all that stuff now.”

I didn’t believe Casey, but it didn’t matter.

“There was a guy,” said Casey. “Billy said he’d seen him around. Thin, kind of greasy, long coat, looked like a bum, but a bum couldn’t have taken out Chris. No way.”

I let him think that, even as I walked to my Mustang and remembered the sound that The Collector’s fingers had made as they danced upon its body.

Detective Jansen called again later that day, when I was about to head over to Two Mile Lake to relieve Angel and Louis.

“You say you were over at Czabo’s place?” he asked.

“That’s right.”

“And you left your card?”

“I slipped it under the door. Why?”

“There was no card there when we searched the apartment. The landlord says that he hasn’t been near the place, and his wife told us that she doesn’t have a key. By the way, she spoke highly of you.”

“I’ll bet. Do you like her for this?”

“I don’t like her, period. If Czabo hadn’t been hit more than once, I would have put this down as a suicide.”

“Does she have an alibi?”

“Yeah. His name’s Casey Tillman. He’s a mechanic. He claims they went to New Hampshire a few weeks back for a couple of days’ R amp; R. If the dates match, they may be in the clear. We’re checking it. Tillman says there was no bad blood between him and Czabo. I’m inclined to believe him. The only thing suspect about him is his taste in women.”

I wondered if Jansen had made the connection between Casey Tillman and his father. I recalled my promise to Tillman not to mention it unless I had to. I decided to keep it, for the present. Neither did I mention the photographs taken by Ray Czabo that I had in my possession. I hadn’t yet figured out a way to tell Jansen about them without landing me in serious trouble. Instead, I thanked him for keeping me informed. Jansen replied by letting me know that he wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart, and he expected me to reciprocate. I told him that sharing was at the heart of any good relationship. He said he’d rather have a relationship with Ray Czabo’s old lady, then hung up.

I thought about Ray Czabo on the way to Two Mile. He was no angel, and his actions in the past had led to him being beaten up more than once, usually with some justification, but it was unlikely that his ghoulish tendencies would lead someone to kill him. I recalled The Collector, standing in the flickering light behind Denny Maguire’s bar. I wondered if he kept a gun under those layers of old clothes along with a knife.

Then again, Jansen might be wrong about Ray’s estranged wife, but I didn’t think so. A woman who has just killed her husband, or conspired in his death, is not going to be too concerned about an old injury to him caused by someone else. When Mrs. Czabo reminded me of my first encounter with her husband, the one that had left him with a broken nose, she seemed genuinely aggrieved on his behalf. She could simply have been putting on an act for my benefit, but I could see no percentage for her in that.

All I knew for sure was that Ray Czabo’s death roughly coincided with the appearance of the photograph in the mailbox of the Grady house, and that someone had returned to his apartment after I’d been there, maybe to resume the search for something that had been missed the first time, or to ensure that there was no evidence left lying around. My guess was that, when the cops arrived, the apartment was neat and tidy, and the boxes that I had seen dislodged had been restored to their rightful place.

If all of those events were linked, then a possible conclusion was that one of Ray’s excursions down to Two Mile had coincided with the appearance of the individual responsible for the photo in the mailbox, and that person had killed Ray in order to ensure that he didn’t tell anyone what he had seen. If that was the case, then Matheson had been right all along to worry. Pranksters don’t shoot people with a.22, because it’s hard to laugh with holes in the top of your head. The man-and I had no doubt that it was a man-who placed the picture of an unknown girl at the Grady house was deadly serious about what he was doing.

It was time to talk to Chief Grass again, but when I called I was told that he wasn’t available. I left a message for him, but he didn’t call back.

VIII

By the tenth day, the surveillance was taking its toll upon me. Unlike Angel and Louis, I could not take a break and divide the duty with someone else, and my body clock was completely confused. Even though I slept when I returned home to Rachel, or grabbed a couple of hours on the sofa bed once Angel and Louis arrived, I still found myself drifting at times. Colors appeared too bright, and sounds were either muffled or painfully clear. Sometimes I was unable to tell if I was dreaming or waking. I spoke to Matheson once or twice, and informed him that what we were doing was untenable in the long term. I agreed to complete the second week of surveillance, once I had spoken to Angel and Louis and secured their consent, but it seemed like a lost cause. I was considering taking up Clem Ruddock on his offer of some help, especially as Rachel was due any day now and I wanted to be with her. I spent most of my time worrying about her. My cell phone was always close at hand, its ring tone muted but still audible, even in sleep.

On the tenth night, I saw a figure moving among the trees beside the Grady house.

I had heard no car approach, although in my shattered state I couldn’t be certain that I had not simply missed its approach. I rose and made my way through the farmhouse, stopping to retrieve my gun from the holster hanging on the back of the unmade sofa bed. It felt both strange and familiar in my hand, for it had been months since I had held it with even the vaguest intention of putting it to use. Finally, I made a call to Angel and Louis. If I was just being jumpy, the worst they could do was shout at me a little.

I left through the front door, pulling it closed silently behind me so that the wind would not catch it and alert the presence in the woods to my approach. I made my way down the slope, sticking close to the trees, until I could smell the rotting of timbers and faint odor of smoke that hung about the place. I circled the trees, hoping to come up on the intruder from behind, but when I reached the spot where I had seen him he was gone, and there was only a stamped-out cigarette butt where I felt certain that The Collector had recently stood.

I retreated to the periphery of the forest, shielding myself behind a tree, and scanned the property. I could see no sign of movement. It didn’t make me feel any less nervous. After a while, I made my way to the Grady house, keeping my back to its walls. I checked the sides, then approached the window of the old receiving room at the front of the house, to the left of the door. I thought of the figure in the mirror, caught by Ray Czabo’s flashbulb, but when I pressed my face to the crack in the wood I could see nothing in the darkness.

I stepped away, and aimed my flashlight at the steel door barring entry to the house. The padlock was gone. I moved closer, and tested the door by pulling it toward me. It opened with some resistance, and a lot of noise. The main door behind it was already ajar. I pushed it open a little farther and stepped back, not sure what to expect, but there was no sound from within. After a couple of seconds spent debating my choice of career, I stepped inside.

The smell of rot was stronger now, as was the chemical stench of the wallpaper pastes. A large strip of paper had come loose from the wall of the entrance hall since I had been there last, and it hung at an angle like a bookmarked page, exposing the damp plaster beneath. I shined the flashlight on it and saw what looked like fragments of letters and drawings beneath the paper. I pulled the strip away.

The wall was covered in writing and symbols, none of them familiar to me. I thought that the language might have been Latin, but the script was so faded it was impossible to tell. I tore another strip from the wall, and more writing was revealed, this time adorned with circles and stars. There was a purpose to this, but I could not guess what it might be. The smells of the house, seemingly intensified by my action in pulling away the paper, made me feel ill. I jammed a handkerchief to my nose and tried to breathe shallowly through my mouth as I moved toward the dining-room door. I pushed at it with my foot and entered.

The connecting doors between the two rooms were open, as though in expectation of some great party that would now never take place. The mirrors stared down upon dusty floors and torn drapes. They should have reflected what I saw, but they did not. Instead, I saw in their decaying glass the gleam of lighted chandeliers, and expensive, hand-printed paper on the walls. The drapes were no longer faded and ripped, but vibrant and fresh. There were thick carpets upon the floors, and a dining table set for two people.

I felt my shoe scuff the dust upon the bare boards under my feet. There was nothing in this room but filth and dead bugs, yet in the mirror I saw the house as it might have been. I passed through the connecting doors into the receiving room, and there glimpsed thick couches and matching smoking chairs, and walls lined with books, all reflected in the depths of the mirrors upon the walls.

It’s his house, I thought. It’s Grady’s house, as he saw it in his own mind.

I felt a presence behind me, but when I turned I saw only my own reflection in the mirror in the hallway, set against the wonders of the ornate rooms at my back. But something else was there, waiting in the glass. I sensed it, even as my vision swam and a coughing racked my body as the stench of old glue and damp seemed to grow stronger.

Then I noticed for the first time that the door to the basement was no longer closed and locked. I knew there was another mirror on the door, and that if I looked into its face I would see more figments of John Grady’s imagination, somehow wheedling their way into my consciousness.

“Who’s there?” I called.

And a voice answered, and I thought it sounded like the voice of a little girl.

I’m here, it said. Can you see me?

I moved the flashlight, trying to find the source of the voice.

Here. I’m here. Behind you.

And when I spun there was a mirror, and in the mirror I saw a child, her hair matted and dirty, her red dress torn. Farther back I saw another little girl, with pale cheeks and torn skin. The girl who had spoken pressed herself to the mirror as though it were glass, and I saw her skin flatten against it.

He’s here, she said. He never left.

From the corner of my eye I saw a darkness pass across the mirror in the dining room. It was the figure of a man, blurred like a bad projection. It moved quickly, shifting from mirror to mirror, progressing toward the hallway.

He’s coming, said the little girl, and then she and her companion were gone.

I raised my gun. It seemed that everywhere I looked there was movement, and I thought I heard a child’s voice raised in fear.

I shook my head. Now the sounds came from below me, from the basement, and I made my way toward them. In the mirror upon the door, I saw myself trapped in the Grady house that never was. The stairs to the basement descended before me. The flashlight beam illuminated strands of cobweb, the stone floor, and a single chair that stood beneath the empty light socket. It was small, too small for an adult to use, but the perfect size for a child. There were more mirrors on the walls here, but they showed no beautiful furnishings, no carpets or drapes. This was Grady’s killing place, and he had no need of beauty here. I passed from mirror to mirror, my light angled away from the glass. I saw myself reflected, again and again and again.

And for a brief instant I saw another man’s face, suspended behind mine, before it retreated once again into the shadows. I raised my gun, aimed it at the glass-

Then stopped. There came the sound of footsteps above me, approaching the cellar door through the main hallway. I killed the flashlight and retreated into the darkness, just as another light came from above. I heard a man’s breathing, and the creaking of the banister rail as he placed his weight upon it, and then his figure came into view. He was a big man, and over his left shoulder he carried a sack. The sack was moving.

“Almost there,” he said.

The flashlight jogged in his hand as he reached the floor of the basement. Gently, he placed the sack on the ground, then unscrewed the head of the flashlight so that its bulb became a candle, and in its glow I saw his face.

“Don’t move,” I said, as I emerged from the darkness by the stair.

Chief Grass didn’t look as surprised as he should have done, under the circumstances. Instead, his eyes had a slightly glazed look to them. I saw the gun in his left hand, previously hidden from me by the sack. It was lodged against the head of the child inside.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he said. “He won’t like it.”

“Who won’t like it?” I said.

“Mr. Grady. He doesn’t like strangers in his home.”

“What about you? Aren’t you a stranger too?”

Grass snickered. It was an unpleasant sound.

“Oh no,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for a long, long time. It took a while for Mr. Grady to begin to trust me, but once he did, well, everything was fine. We talk a lot. He’s lonely. I brought him some company, some new blood.”

He kicked the sack, and the child within gave a muffled cry.

“What’s her name?” I asked.

“Lisette,” replied Grass. “She’s very pretty, but then, you’ve seen her picture.”

Pretty.

I heard a distant voice echo the word, and in the mirror at Grass’s back I saw John Grady reflected. His fingertips pressed against the glass, flattening as the dead child’s skin had done, and he stared down at the shape of the little girl moving feebly in the sack. I saw his prominent chin, curved and jutting, his neat hair, the little stained bow tie at his neck. His lips moved constantly in a litany of desire, the words now unintelligible but their import clear.

“It’s the house, Grass,” I said. “It’s making you do this. It’s wrong. You know it’s wrong. Put the gun down.”

Grass shook his head. “I can’t,” he said. “Mr. Grady-”

“Grady is dead,” I said.

“No, he’s here.”

“Listen to me, Grass. Something in this house has affected you. You’re not thinking clearly. We need to get you out. I’m taking the girl, and then we’re all going to leave.”

For the first time, Grass looked uncertain.

“He told me to bring her. He chose her. Out of all the girls I showed him, he chose this one.”

“No,” I said. “You imagined it. You’ve spent too long here. Everything about this place is poisonous, and somehow it’s burrowed into your mind.”

Grass’s gun wavered slightly. He looked from me to the girl on the ground, then back again.

“It’s infected your thoughts, Grass. You don’t want to hurt this little girl. You’re a cop. You have to protect her, just like you protected Denny Maguire. Let her go. You must let her go.”

But I was not sure that I believed all that I was saying, for I saw John Grady’s eyes turn upon me in the mirror, and his lips formed the single word:

No.

Grass seemed to hear it, and the doubt left his eyes. He forced the gun harder against the girl’s skull, then lifted the sack up, holding his prize beneath his arm as he began retreating up the stairs. I followed him all the way, reaching the top of the steps as he moved into the hallway, his back to the wall as he made for the safety of his vehicle parked outside.

Two figures blocked the doorway.

“Now where do you think you’re going?” said Louis. He stood on the porch with his gun raised before him. Angel knelt below him, his own gun pointed at Grass. Seconds later, I added a third.

Grass stopped, caught between us.

“Let her go,” I said. “It’s all over.”

Grass was shaking his head, muttering something that I couldn’t understand. He stared straight ahead and saw his reflection in the mirror. I couldn’t see what he was looking at because the angle was wrong, but it was clear from the expression on his face that I wasn’t the only one hallucinating in the Grady house.

“Chief, you rescued Denny Maguire from here,” I said. I could hear the desperation in my voice. “Remember? You brought him out. You saved his life. You saved a child’s life. You’re not a killer. This is not you. It’s the house. Listen to me. It’s not your fault. It’s something in the house.”

Slowly, Grass released his grip on the sack and let it fall to the floor, although his gun remained pointing at it. I could hear the girl crying, but I thought that I could also hear another voice. It was whispering, spilling foul words into Grass’s ear.

“Don’t listen to him,” I said. “Please. Just put the gun down.”

Grass’s face crumpled. He began to cry, and I was reminded of Denny Maguire weeping in his bar: two men, linked by the evil of John Grady.

“Chief,” I said.

He raised the gun and pointed it at the mirror before him.

“Put it down,” I said.

Grass was sobbing now.

“This is not a house,” he said.

He cocked the pistol-“This is not a house,” he repeated-and turned to look at me as the gun suddenly swung toward him, the muzzle coming to rest against his temple.

“This is-”

He pulled the trigger, and the walls went red.

IX

The figure behind the mirror stared at me as I knelt down and undid the rope that held the sack closed. The girl from the picture lay inside, her hands and feet tied and a red bandana gagging her mouth. I undid the gag first, then her hands and feet, but I did not let her look at the mirror behind me, or at the body of the man who had brought her to this place.

“I want you to go with my friends,” I said. “They’ll take care of you until I come out.”

She was crying, and she tried to hold on to me, but I forced her gently away into Angel’s arms.

“It’s okay,” he said, as he led her away. “Nobody’s going to hurt you now.”

I watched her until she was gone from sight. Louis remained in the doorway, waiting.

I approached the glass, my gun raised. John Grady’s dead eyes grew large and his lips moved faster and faster.

“Lights out,” I said, then fired.

And the mirror shattered as the process of erasing John Grady’s image from the world began.

X

Two days later, I watched as a team of workmen removed every remaining mirror from the Grady house and placed them in the back of one of Matheson’s trucks. Matheson himself was beside me, watching all that was being done.

One of the workmen approached us and said: “We were pretty careful with those mirrors. They’re antiques. Could be worth some money, you was to restore them some.”

“They’re going to be destroyed,” I said.

The workman looked to Matheson in the hope of an alternative response.

“You heard the man,” said Matheson.

The workman shrugged, then returned to loading the mirrors.

“You think he really believed that Grady wanted him to bring a child to the house?” asked Matheson.

“Yes,” I said. “I think he really believed it.”

“What about Ray Czabo?”

“Grass had a two-two. My guess is it will match the bullets that killed Czabo. We’ll know tomorrow for sure.”

Two workmen came out, carrying one of the basement mirrors.

“You never did tell me what you saw in there,” said Matheson.

I looked at him. I recalled the face of John Grady, and the children in the dark reaches of the glass. Fumes and tiredness, I thought, just fumes and tiredness.

“I saw reflections,” I said.

He stared at me for a time, then nodded.

“Okay, then. Reflections.”

We counted the mirrors, to make sure none was missing. When we were done, Matheson climbed in the cab and drove off. I followed him back to his plant. Over in a brownstone building at the back of the lot was an industrial fumace. Matheson parked the truck outside it.

“You sure about this?” asked Matheson.

“I think so,” I replied.

“I’ll get some of the boys to give us a hand.”

He left me and headed for the main building. I leaned against the truck and watched the light fade. Already, it was growing dark. The wind was colder now. Soon, the snows would arrive.

I didn’t even see the blow coming. One moment I was looking at the sky, and the next I was lying on the ground, bright flashes exploding in my vision. I started to rise, but my balance was shot. I fell back upon the ground and tried not to retch.

The Collector stood above me. There was an old leather blackjack in his hand.

“I’m sorry,” he said.

I opened my mouth to speak, but nothing emerged. Instead, I watched in silence as he took a small, gilded mirror from the back of the truck.

I reached out a hand. I think I managed to say “No.” Whatever sound I made, it caused him to look down on me.

“Burning won’t be enough,” he said. “He will still be free.”

He knelt down beside me and turned the glass toward me.

“Look,” said The Collector.

I couldn’t focus. My image swam in the glass, but it did not swim alone. I saw John Grady, but not as he once was, not as he was in his pictures, or as he looked before my bullet struck the mirror in his basement. I thought I saw fear, or perhaps it was my own face that I saw. I do not know.

“He owes a soul,” said The Collector. “He was damned, and his soul is forfeit.”

“Who are you?” I asked, but he did not reply. Later, I would find the paperwork that The Collector had completed when he bought John Grady’s old books at the police sale. The name at the bottom was written in marvelously ornate script. It was quite beautiful. The man who claimed to be a nephew of one of Maine’s leading book merchants had signed himself “Mr. Kushiel.” Curiously, the address he gave was that of the old state prison at Thomaston, which now no longer stands. I was tempted, for a brief moment, to look up his name, to discover its derivation, but I did not. Instead, I prayed only that I would never see him again, for any jail in which Kushiel played a part lay far deeper than the ruins of Thomaston.

But that was later. For now, I was lying bleeding on the ground, and The Collector was standing above me, the mirror tucked firmly beneath his arm. By the time Matheson returned he was long gone, and John Grady’s debt was about to be paid for eternity.

XI

On December 12, Rachel gave birth to our daughter. We named her Samantha, “Sam” for short. I was there when she was born. I held her in my arms, and smelled the blood upon her as the past and the present came together, interweaving, combining, binding me to what I was and what I had become.

One child born, another saved. Perhaps Clem Ruddock was right. It is children with me, and there is a pattern to be seen, if I choose to look closely for it. There is a pattern, and I am part of it. She also has a role to play, for my new daughter will share her birthday with the anniversary of her half-sister’s death, and the death of the woman who was once my wife.

There is a pattern.

I am not afraid.

I tell myself I am no longer afraid.