The Killing Kind

THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier…

There are few surviving photographs of Faulkner (certainly none taken after 1963) and few records of his past, so our knowledge of him is largely limited to the evidence of those who heard him speak or encountered him in the course of one of his healing missions.

He was a tall man with long dark hair and a high forehead, blue eyes beneath dark, straight eyebrows, and pale, almost translucent skin. He dressed in the garb of a working man-jeans, sometimes overalls, rough cotton shirts, boots-except when he was preaching. At those times he favored a simple black suit with a white collarless shirt buttoned to the neck. He wore no jewelry and his only concession to religious adornment was an ornate gold crucifix that hung around his neck as he spoke. Those who had the opportunity to examine it closely describe it as extremely finely made, with tiny faces and limbs carved into the body of the cross. The face of the Christ figure was almost photographically detailed, with the sufferings of the crucified man so clear and minutely rendered as to be disturbing, his agony beyond doubt.

I have been able to find no record of Faulkner in any of the established schools of divinity, and inquiries to churches, major and minor, have also failed to yield any clue as to the origins of his religious education, if any. His earlier life is barely documented, although we do know that he was born Aaron David Faulkner, the illegitimate son of Reese Faulkner and Embeth Thule of Montgomery, Alabama, in 1924. He was an undersized child, with seriously impaired sight in his left eye that would later render him unsuitable for military service, but he began to grow quickly in his midteens. According to those neighbors who remember him this physical growth was accompanied by a change in his personality, from shy and somewhat awkward to dominant and imposing. He lived alone with his mother until her death shortly before his sixteenth birthday. Following her funeral, Aaron Faulkner left Montgomery and never returned.

The next four years, up to the time of his marriage, are a blank, with some possible exceptions. An Aarn [sic] Faulkner was charged with assault in Columbia, South Carolina, in 1941, following an incident in which a prostitute named Elsa Barker was apparently pelted with rocks, sustaining injuries to her head and back. Barker failed to appear in court to give evidence, and her statement to the police being deemed unreliable, the case was dismissed. No trace of Elsa Barker was ever found again.

One other incident is worthy of note. In 1943, a family of three named Vogel from Liberty, Mississippi, went missing from their farm. They were found, two days after the search began, buried in a shallow grave one mile from their property. Quicklime had been used on the bodies. According to police reports, a young drifter had been staying with them in the days prior to their disappearance. The Vogels had taken him in because he seemed to be a religious man. None of the neighbors ever saw him or met him, but they recalled his name: Aaron. After their deaths, it was found that the Vogels were unmarried and their daughter was illegitimate. Among those questioned in the course of the investigation was Aaron Faulkner, following his apprehension at a motel in Vicksburg. He was released after three days due to lack of evidence.

(While there is no direct link between the deaths of the Vogels and the attack on, and subsequent disappearance of, the prostitute Elsa Barker, it is my contention that both incidents display signs of a violent response to perceived sexual transgression, possibly linked to sublimated sexual desire: respectively, the Vogels' unmarried relationship and the birth of their illegitimate daughter, with its echoes of Faulkner's own parentage, and the activities of Barker. I believe that Faulkner's later attempts to restrain and regulate sexual relationships at the Eagle Lake community represent a similar pattern of behavior.)

Following his marriage in 1944, Faulkner worked with a printer named George Lemberger in Richmond, Virginia, and remained with him for the next twelve years while earning a reputation as an untrained preacher. A dispute over his preaching activities, combined with allegations that Faulkner had forged Lemberger's signature on a check, eventually led to his departure from Lemberger's printing firm in early 1957, and he subsequently went north, accompanied by his wife and two children. For some time between 1958 and 1963, he eked out a living as an itinerant preacher, eventually establishing small congregations of worshipers in the Maine towns from which the original group of sixteen was drawn. He supplemented his income by working, at various times, as a printer, a laborer, and a fisherman.

Faulkner initially made his headquarters in a rooming house on Montgomery Street in Portland, Maine, owned by a cousin of the Jessops. He conducted services in the dining room, sometimes preaching to as many as thirty people. It was as a result of those first, lengthy, sermons that his reputation spread, leading to Faulkner enjoying a small but extremely devoted following.

Faulkner was not a preacher in the hellfire-and-brimstone mode. Instead, he drew his listeners to him with a tone of quiet insinuation, gradually worming his way into their consciousness. (If this description appears unnecessarily pejorative, it should be noted that the retrospective recollections of those to whom I spoke are largely negative where Faulkner is concerned. While it is clear that he exerted a great influence while he spoke, and that there were enough people willing to follow him to enable him to establish a much bigger community than the original Eagle Lake settlement, had he chosen to do so, there were many who felt an uneasiness around him.)

His wife, Louise, was by all accounts a strikingly beautiful woman, with dark hair only marginally longer than that of her husband. She did not associate with the Preacher's congregation: if he was approached after the service, she would remain standing behind him, listening to what passed between the Preacher and the supplicant, without passing comment or participating in any way. It seems to have been her constant unspeaking presence at her husband's side that made people wary of her, although two witnesses spoke of her intervening physically when her husband was accused of perpetrating acts of fraud during a healing service in Rumford, Maine, in 1963. She did so entirely in silence, but her strength and the nature of her intervention was sufficient to enable those who saw it to recall it in detail almost forty years later. Nevertheless, she always deferred to her husband and exhibited no signs of disobedience toward him, in line with fundamentalist religious doctrine.

Louise's own family, the Dautrieves, originally came from east Texas and were Southern Baptists. According to the recollection of family members, they appear to have been largely supportive of her decision to marry Faulkner, who was only nineteen when they met, regarding him as a man of good faith although he was not himself a Baptist. After their marriage there was little direct contact between Louise and her family, and surviving relatives say that there was no contact at all once she left for Eagle Lake.

Privately, most believe that she is now dead.

12

RACHEL WAS ALREADY BACK in her apartment when I returned from my encounter with Mickey Shine. She greeted me with a peck on the lips.

“You have a good day?” she asked.

Under the circumstances, “good” was probably a relative concept.

“I found out some stuff,” I replied neutrally.

“Uh-huh. Good stuff, or bad stuff?”

“Um, kind of bad, but nothing I hadn't suspected already.”

She didn't ask if I wanted to talk more about it. Sometimes it struck me forcefully that Rachel knew me very well while I hardly seemed to know her at all. I watched her open her bag and produce one of her wire-rimmed notebooks, from which she removed a single printed page.

“I don't think that what I have to tell you qualifies as good news either,” she said. “Some folks at the chemistry department examined that business card. They E-mailed me the results. I guess they thought it might be a little technical to explain over the phone.”

“And?”

“The card was infused with a fluid called cantharidin, concentrated cantharidin,” she continued. “It's sometimes used in medical procedures to produce blistering. One portion of the top right-hand corner had been lightly waxed, presumably so this Mr. Pudd could hold it without affecting his own skin. As soon you took it in your hand, your body heat and the moisture on your fingers activated the cantharidin and you started to blister.”

I thought about it for a moment.

“So he used some kind of medical product on the card,…” I began, but Rachel shook her head.

“No, I said it was used for medical purposes, but the substance on the card was a very specific form of the toxin, produced, according to the research assistant who examined it, only by ‘certain vesicating arthropods.’ It's blister beetle venom. The man who gave it to you must have harvested the venom, concentrated it, then applied it to the card.”

I recalled Mr. Pudd's smile as I held the card in my hand.

You're also irritating, but it doesn't say that on your card either.

Oh, but it does, in its way.

I also thought of Epstein, and the substance that had been injected into him.

“If he harvested beetle venom, then I suppose he could harvest other types as well?” I asked Rachel.

“Such as?”

“Spider venom, maybe?”

“I called the lab after I received the message to clarify one or two details about the procedure, so I don't see why not. As I understand it, the beetle venom could have been extracted using some form of electric shock to provoke the insect into releasing the toxin. Apparently, the harvesting of spider venom is a little trickier. The spider has to be sedated, usually by cooling it with carbon dioxide, then put under a microscope. Each time it's shocked, it produces a tiny amount of venom, which can then be collected. You can usually shock an individual spider three or four times before it has to be put out to pasture.”

“So you'd need a whole lot of spiders to produce a reasonable amount of venom?”

“Probably,” she replied.

I wondered how many spiders had been milked in order to kill Yossi Epstein. I also wondered why anyone would bother. After all, it would have been far easier, and less conspicuous, simply to have killed Epstein in a more conventional way. Then I remembered Alison Beck, and how she must have felt as the widows struggled in her mouth and the recluses moved around her in the small, enclosed space of the car. I recalled the look in Mickey Shine's eyes as he spoke of the spiders in the bathtub, and the wounds gouged in his skin by their bites. And I thought of my own feelings as the blisters appeared on my skin, and the sensation of Mr. Pudd's thin, hairy fingers brushing against my own.

He did it because it was fun, because he was genuinely curious about the effects. He did it because to be preyed upon by a small, dark, consuming creature, multilegged and many-eyed, terrified his victims in ways that a bullet or a knife could not, and gave a new intensity to their sufferings. Even Epstein, who endured death by injection, had felt something of this pain as his muscles spasmed and cramped, his breathing began to fail, and his heart at last gave way under the pressure on his body.

It was also a message. I was certain of that. And the only person for whom that message could be meant was Jack Mercier. Epstein and Beck were in the photograph on his wall, and Warren Ober's law firm had been handling Epstein's legal challenge to the IRS tax exemption granted to the Fellowship. I knew then that I had to return to Maine, that somehow Grace Peltier's death was linked to moves that her father and others had been making against the Fellowship. But how could Pudd and those who aided him have known that Grace Peltier was Jack Mercier's daughter? There was also the question of how a woman who was researching the history of a long-departed religious group ended up trying to corner the leader of the Fellowship. I could only find one answer: someone had pointed Grace Peltier in the direction of the Fellowship, and she had died because of it.

I tried calling Mercier again as Rachel went to take a shower, but I got the same maid and a promise that Mr. Mercier would be told that I had called. I asked for Quentin Harrold and was similarly informed that he was not available. I was tempted to throw my cell phone to the ground and stamp on it, but I figured I might need it, so I contented myself with tossing it in disgust on Rachel's couch. It wasn't as if I had anything to tell Mercier anyway, or certainly nothing that he didn't already know. I just didn't like being kept in the dark, especially when Mr. Pudd was occupying space in that same darkness.

But there was another reason that I had yet to learn for Mr. Pudd's killing methods, a tenet that had its roots in the distant past, and in other, older traditions.

It was the belief that spiders were the guardians of the underworld.

The Wang Center, on Tremont, was just about the most beautiful theater on the upper East Coast, and the Boston Ballet was, given my limited experience, a great company, so the combination was pretty hard to resist, especially on a first night. As we walked past Boston Common, a band played in the window of Emerson College's WERS radio station, the crowds heading to the theater district pausing briefly to examine the contorted face of the singer. We collected our tickets at the box office and walked into the ornate marble and gold lobby, past the booths hawking Cleopatra memorabilia and souvenir books. We had seats in the front row, far left, of the orchestra box-close to the back of the theater and slightly raised above the rows of seats ahead, so that nobody could obscure our view. The red and gold of the theater was almost as opulent as the stage design, giving the whole affair an air of restrained decadence.

“You know, when I told Angel we were coming here he asked me if I was sure I wasn't gay,” I whispered to Rachel.

“What did you say?”

“I told him I wasn't dancing the damn ballet, I was just going to watch it.”

“So I'm just a means of reassuring you about your heterosexuality?” she teased.

“Well, a very pleasurable means…”

Above and to my right, a figure entered one of the front-row seats on the level above ours, at the farthest extremity of the U-shaped upper tier. He moved slowly, easing himself gently into his chair before adjusting his hearing aids. Behind him, Tommy Caci folded Al Z's coat, then poured a glass of red wine for his boss before taking the seat directly behind him.

The Wang is an egalitarian theater; there are no closed boxes, but some sections are more private than others. The area where Al Z sat was known as the Wang box; it was partially shielded by a pillar, although it was open to the aisle on the right. The adjacent seats were empty, which meant that Al had booked the entire section for the first-night show.

Al Z, I thought, you old romantic.

The lights went down as the audience grew quiet. Rimsky-Korsakov's music, arranged for the ballet by the composer John Lanchbery, filled the huge space as the evening's entertainment commenced. Handmaidens danced around Cleopatra's bedchamber while the queen slept in the background and her brother Ptolemy and his confidant Pothinus plotted her downfall. It was all brilliantly done, yet I found myself drifting during the whole first half, my mind occupied by images of crawling things and the final, imagined moments of Grace Peltier's life. I kept seeing:

A gun close to her head, a hand buried in her hair to hold her steady as a finger tightened on the trigger. It is her finger, but pressed against it is another. She is dazed, stunned by a blow to the temple, and cannot fight as her arm is maneuvered into position. There is no blood from the blow, and anyway the entry wound will tear apart the skin and bone, disguising any earlier injury. It is only when the cold metal touches her skin that she realizes, finally, what is happening. She strikes out and opens her mouth to scream…

There is a roar in the night, and a red flame bursts from her head and sheds itself over the window and the door. The light dies in her eyes and her body slumps to the right, the smell of burning in the air as her singed hair hisses softly.

There is no pain.

There will never be pain again.

I felt a pressure on my arm and found Rachel looking at me quizzically, the ballet on stage reaching its preintermission climax. In her bedchamber, Cleopatra was dancing for Caesar, seducing him. I patted Rachel's hand and saw her scowl at the patronizing nature of the gesture, but before I could explain, a movement to my far right attracted my attention. Tommy Caci had risen, distracted, and was reaching inside his jacket. Before him, Al Z continued watching the ballet, apparently unaware of what was going on behind. Tommy moved away from his seat and disappeared into the aisle.

Onstage, the assassin, Pothinus, appeared in the wings, looking for his moment to strike at the queen, but Cleopatra and Caesar danced on, oblivious. The music swelled as a figure took the seat behind Al Z, but it was not Tommy Caci. Instead, it was thinner, more angular. Al Z remained engrossed in the action, his head moving in time to the music, his mind filled with images of escape as he sought briefly to forget the darker world he had chosen to inhabit. A hand moved, and something silver gleamed. Pothinus shot out from the wings, sword in hand, but Caesar was quicker and his sword impaled Pothinus through the stomach.

And in the box above, Al Z's body tensed and fluid shot from his mouth as the figure leaned over him, one hand on his shoulder, the other close to the base of his skull. From behind, it would appear as if they were talking, nothing more, but I had seen the blade flash, and I knew what had happened. Al Z's mouth was wide open, and as I watched, Mr. Pudd's gloved hand closed upon it and he held him as he shook and died.

Then Mr. Pudd seemed to stare down to where I sat before draping Al Z's coat across the old man's shoulders and receding into the shadows.

Onstage, the curtain was falling and the audience had burst into applause, but I was already moving. I climbed over the edge of the orchestra box and ran up the aisle, the doors flying open noisily before me. To my left, a flight of stairs, topped by an eagle clock, led up to the next level. I took them two at a time, brushing aside an usher as I drew my gun.

“Call an ambulance,” I said as I passed. “And the police.”

I heard the sound of his footsteps echoing on the marble as I reached the top of the stairs, my gun raised ahead of me. An exit door stood open and the counterweighted fire escape, which descended under body weight, was rising back up. Below me was a loading dock, from which a car was already speeding, a silver Mercury Sable. Its side faced me as it turned onto Washington Street, so I didn't get the license number, but there were two figures inside.

Behind me, the seats were emptying for the intermission, and one or two people glanced out the open door. These doors were all alarmed, so security would be up here soon to find out who had opened them, and why. I retreated inside and moved to the front row where Al Z still sat. His head hung down, his chin on his chest, the coat draped loosely across his shoulders to hide the bulge of the blade's handle. The handle anchored him to his seat, preventing him from falling facedown. Blood flowed from his mouth and drenched the front of his white dress shirt. Some of it had fallen into his wineglass in a final, terrible act of consecration. I couldn't see Tommy Caci.

Behind me, two Wang Center security staff appeared, but they backed off at the sight of the gun in my hands.

“You call the police?”

They nodded.

Across the aisle to my right, a door stood slightly ajar. I gestured to it. “What's in there?”

“VIP lounge,” one of the security guards answered.

I looked down to the base of the door and saw what looked like the toe of a shoe in the gap. Gently, using my elbow, I pushed it open.

Tomy Caci lay facedown on the floor, his head to one side and the edge of the wound at his throat clearly visible. There was a lot of blood on the floor and on the walls. He had probably been taken from behind when he left his seat and entered the lounge. Beyond him was a bar, with some couches and chairs, but the room looked empty.

I stepped back into the aisle as two blue uniforms appeared behind me, advancing with their weapons drawn. I heard the order to drop my gun amid the audience's cries of surprise and fear. I immediately did as I was told and the two cops descended on me.

“I'm a private detective,” I said as one of them pushed me against the wall and frisked me while the other checked out Tommy Caci, then moved toward the body in the front row.

“It's Al Z,” I told him when he came back, and I felt a kind of sadness for the old thug. “He won't be bothering you again.”

I was interviewed at the scene by a pair of detectives named Carras and McCann. I told them all that I had seen, although I didn't tell them what I knew of Mr. Pudd. Instead, I described him in as much detail as I could and said that I had recognized Al Z from a previous case.

“What case would that be?” asked McCann.

“Some trouble last year in a place called Dark Hollow.”

When I mentioned Dark Hollow, the scene of Tony Celli's death at the hands of the man now dead beside us, their faces cleared, McCann even offering to buy me a drink at some unspecified date in the future. Nobody mourned Tony Celli's passing.

I stood beside them at the main door of the theater as the audience was fed through a rank of policemen, each member being asked if he or she had seen anything before being told to supply an ID and telephone number. At police headquarters I gave a statement sitting beside McCann's messy desk, then left my cell-phone number and Rachel's address in case they needed to speak to me again.

After they let me go, I tried calling Mickey Shine at the florist's but there was no reply and I was told that his home number was unlisted. Another call and five minutes later, I had a home telephone number and address for one Michael Sheinberg at Bowdoin Street, Cambridge. There was no reply from that number either. I left a message, then hailed a cab and took a ride out to Cambridge. I asked the cab to wait as I stepped out onto the tree-lined street. Mickey Shine lived in a brownstone apartment block, but there was no answer when I tried his bell. I was considering breaking and entering when a neighbor appeared at a window. He was an elderly man in a sweater and baggy blue jeans and his hands shook from some nervous condition as he spoke.

“You lookin' for Mickey?”

“Yes, I am.”

“You a friend of his?”

“From out of town.”

“Well, sorry, but he's gone. Left about an hour ago.”

“He say where he was going?”

“No sir, I just saw him leave. Looks like he may be gone for a couple of days. He had a suitcase with him.”

I thanked him and got back in the cab. The news of Al Z's death would have traveled fast and there would be a lot of speculation as to who might have been behind it, but Mickey knew. I think he knew what would happen from the moment he received the call that I was coming and realized that it was, at last, time for the reckoning.

The cab dropped me back at Jacob Wirth's on Stuart, where Rachel was waiting along with Angel and Louis. There was a sing-along in progress around the piano as people who had been deaf since birth mugged “The Wanderer.” We left them to it and made our way a few doors up the street to Montien, where we sat in a booth and picked uneasily at our Thai food.

“He's good,” said Louis. “Probably been keeping tabs on you since you arrived.”

I nodded. “Then he knows about Sheinberg, and you two. And Rachel. I'm sorry.”

“It's a game with him,” said Louis. “You know that, don't you? The business card, the spiders in the mailbox. He's playin' with you, man, testin' you. He knows who you are, and he likes the idea of goin' up against you.”

Angel nodded in agreement. “You got a reputation now. Only surprise is that every psycho from here to Florida hasn't caught a bus and headed for Maine to see just how good you really are.”

“That's not very reassuring, Angel.”

“You want reassurance, call a priest.”

Nobody spoke for a time, until Louis said, “I guess you know we be joinin' you in Maine.”

Rachel looked at me. “I'll be coming too.”

“My guardian angels,” I said. I knew better than to argue with any of them. I was glad, too, that Rachel would be close. Alone, she was vulnerable. Yet once again I found this beautiful, empathic woman reading my thoughts.

“Not for protection, Parker,” she added. Her face was serious, and her eyes were hard. “I'm coming because you'll need help with Marcy Becker and her parents, and maybe the Merciers too. If the fact that I'm with you and the odd couple makes you feel better, then that's a plus, nothing more. I'm not here just so you can save me.”

Angel smiled at her with both admiration and amusement. “You're so butch,” he hissed at Rachel. “Give you a gun and a vest and you could be a lesbian icon.”

“Bite me, stubby,” she replied.

It seemed to have been decided. I raised a glass of water, and they each lifted their beers in response.

“Well,” I said, “welcome to the war.”

13

THE NEXT MORNING, the front page of the Herald was dominated by a pretty good picture of Al Z slumped in his seat at the Wang, beside the headline “Gangland Leader Slain.” There are few words that newspaper subeditors like better than “gangland” and “slain,” except maybe “sex” and “puppy,” and the Herald had opted to display them in a point size so large there was barely enough room for the story.

Tommy Caci's throat had been cut from left to right. The wound was so deep that it had severed both of the common carotid arteries and the external and internal jugulars, virtually decapitating him. Mr. Pudd had then stabbed Al Z through the back of the head with a long, thin blade, which punctured his cerebellum and sliced into his cerebral cortex. Finally, using a small, very sharp knife, he had made an angled incision about three quarters of the way up the middle finger of Al Z's right hand and sliced off the top joint.

I learned this not from the Herald, but from Detective Sergeant McCann who rang me on my cell phone as I sat at Rachel's breakfast table reading the newspapers. Rachel was in the bathtub, humming Al Green songs out of key.

“Guy had some balls, taking out two men in a public place,” commented McCann. “There are no cameras on the fire exits, so we got no visual apart from your description. Some guy in the loading bay took the license; came from an Impala stolen two days ago in Concord, so zilch there. The killer had to gain access to the VIP lounge using a key card, so we figure he came prepared with one he made himself. It's not that hard to run one up, you know what you're doing. Al Z went to every first night-he may have been a mean, crooked son of a bitch, but he had class-and he always sat in or near those seats, so it wasn't too difficult to guess where he'd be. As for the missing finger joint, we're guessing it's a calling card and we're checking VICAP for equivalent MOs.”

He asked me if I remembered anything else from the previous night-I knew it wasn't simply a courtesy call-but I told him that I couldn't help him. He asked me to stay in touch, and I assured him that I would.

McCann was right; Pudd had taken a huge risk to get to Al Z. Maybe he had no choice. There was no way to get at Al Z in his office or his home, because he was always surrounded by his people and his windows were designed to repel anything smaller than a warhead. At the theater, with Tommy behind him and hundreds of people around him, he could have been forgiven for feeling secure, but he had underestimated the tenacity of his killer. When the opportunity presented itself, Pudd seized it.

It struck me that Pudd might also be tying up loose ends, and there were only so many reasons why someone felt compelled to do that. Primary among them was as a preparation for disappearance, to ensure that there was nobody left to continue the hunt. My guess was that if Pudd chose to vanish, then nobody would ever find him. He had survived this long even with a price on his head, so he could evaporate like dew after sunrise if he chose.

Something else bothered me; it looked like bugs weren't the only things that Pudd liked to collect. He also wanted skin and bone, removing joints and sections of skin from each of his victims. His taste in souvenirs was distinctive, but Pudd didn't strike me as the kind of man who would mutilate dead bodies just so he could put the pieces in jars and admire them. There had to be a better reason.

I sat at the breakfast table, the newspapers now abandoned, and wondered if I should simply turn over all I knew to the police. Not that what I knew was a great deal, but the deaths of Epstein, Beck, Al Z, and Grace Peltier were all connected, linked either to the Fellowship itself or to actions that Grace's biological father, Jack Mercier, was taking against it. It was about time for a serious face-to-face talk with Mr. Mercier, and I didn't think that either of us was going to enjoy it very much. I was about to pack my bag in preparation for my return to Scarborough when I got my second call of the morning, and from a not entirely unexpected source. It was Mickey Shine. Caller ID could only tell me that the number he was calling from was private, and concealed.

“You see the papers?” he asked.

“I was there,” I told him.

“You know who did it?”

“I think it was our mutual acquaintance.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. “How did he find out about your meeting with Al?”

“He may have been keeping tabs on us,” I conceded. “But it could also be that he was aware of Al Z's interest in him for some time, and that my investigation precipitated a course of action he'd been planning for some time.” He had learned from his pets that if something starts tugging at the farthest reaches of your web, then it's a good idea to find out what that might be and, if you can, to make it stop.

“You weren't out at your apartment last night,” I continued. “I checked up on you.”

“I left town as soon as I heard. Somebody called me about Al's death, a friend from way back, and I knew it had to be Pudd. Nobody else would dare make a move like that against Al Z.”

“Where are you?”

“New York.”

“Think you can lose yourself there, Mickey?”

“I have people down here. I'll make some calls, see what they can do for me.”

“We need to talk some more before you disappear. I get the feeling you haven't told me all that you know.”

I thought he would demur. Instead, he admitted: “Some I know, some I'm just guessing.”

“Meet me. I'll come down to you.”

“I don't know…”

“Mickey, are you going to keep running from this guy for the rest of your life? That doesn't sound like much of an existence.”

“It's better than being dead.” He didn't sound too sure.

“You know what he's doing, don't you?” I asked him. “You know what the threat of being ‘written’ means. You've figured it out.”

He didn't reply immediately, and I half expected to hear the connection being ended.

“The Cloisters,” he said suddenly. “Ten tomorrow. There's an exhibition in the Treasury you might want to take a look at before I get there. It'll answer some of your questions, and I'll try to fill in the gaps. But you're not there at ten and I walk away. You'll never see me again.”

With that, he hung up.

I booked a ticket on the Delta shuttle to La Guardia, then called Angel and Louis at the Copley. Rachel and I met them for coffee in the Starbucks on Newbury before I caught a cab to Logan. I was in New York by 1:30 P.M. and checked into a double room in the Larchmont on West Eleventh Street in the Village. The Larchmont wasn't the kind of place Donald Trump was likely to be frequenting but it was clean and inexpensive, and unlike most New York budget hotels, its double rooms weren't so small that you had to step outside to change your mind. In addition, it had a security-locked front entrance and a doorman the size of the Flatiron Building, so unwanted visitors would be kept to a minimum.

The city was unseasonably hot and humid, and I was soaked in sweat by the time I reached the hotel. The weather was due to break that night, but until then the A/C would be on full blast throughout the city, while those too poor to afford it made do with cheap fans. After a quick shower in a shared bathroom, I caught a cab uptown to West Eighty-sixth Street. B'Nai Jeshurun, the synagogue with which Yossi Epstein had until recently been involved, had an office on West Eighty-ninth, close by the Claremont Riding Academy, and it seemed that while I was in Manhattan it might be useful to try to find out a little more about the murdered rabbi. The noise of children leaving P.S.166 echoed in my ears as I walked to the synagogue's office, but it was a wasted trip. Nobody at B'Nai Jeshurun seemed able to tell me much more than I already knew about Yossi Epstein, and I was referred instead to the Orensanz Center on Norfolk Street on the Lower East Side, where Epstein had relocated after his falling-out with the Upper West Side congregation.

To avoid the rush hour traffic I took the subway from Central Park West as far as Broadway and East Houston, which left me sweating again, then strolled along Houston, past Katz's Deli and storefront operations selling garbage masquerading as antiques, until I came to Norfolk Street. This was the heart of the Lower East Side, a place that had once been full of scholars and yeshivas, of anti-Hasidic Lithuanians and the rest of the first wave of Russian Jews, who were regarded by the already settled German Jews as backward Orientals. It was said that Allen Street used to belong to Russia, there were so many Russian Jews there. People from the same town formed associations, became tradespeople, saved so their kids could go to college and better themselves. They shared their neighborhoods uneasily with the Irish, and fought with them on the streets.

Now those times were largely gone. There was still a workers' co-op on Grand Street, a few Jewish bookstores and skullcap manufacturers between Hester and Division, one or two good bakeries, of course, and Katz's, the last of the old-style delis, now staffed almost entirely by Dominicans, but most of the Orthodox Jewish community had moved to Borough Park and Williamsburg, or to Crown Heights. The ones who were left were mainly too poor or too stubborn to retreat to the suburbs or Miami.

The Orensanz Center, the oldest surviving synagogue in New York, once known as the Anshe Chesed, the People of Kindness, seemed to belong to another, distant time. Built by the Berlin architect Alexander Saltzer in 1850 for the German Jewish congregation, and modeled on the cathedral of Cologne, it dominated Norfolk Street, a reminder of the past still extant in the present. I entered through a side door, walked along a dark entrance lobby, and found myself in the main, neo-Gothic hall among elegant pillars and balconies. Dim light filtered in through the windows, turning the interior to the color of old bronze and casting shadows over flowers and white ribbons, the remnants of a wedding held some days earlier. In one corner, a small man with white hair, dressed in blue overalls, was sweeping paper and broken glass into a corner. He stopped his work as I walked over to him. I produced my ID and asked if there was anybody who might be willing to talk about Yossi Epstein.

“Nobody here today,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.” He resumed his sweeping.

“Maybe there's somebody I can call?” I persisted.

“Call tomorrow.”

I wasn't getting very far on looks and good manners alone. “Mind if I take a look around?” I asked and, without waiting for a reply, began to walk toward a small flight of stairs leading down to the basement. I found a locked door with a card pinned to it expressing sorrow at the death of Epstein. A bulletin board to one side listed times of services and Hebrew classes, as well as a series of lectures on the history of the area. There wasn't much more to see, so after ten minutes of unsuccessful snooping around the rest of the basement, I brushed the dust from my jacket and walked back up the stairs.

The old guy with the broom had disappeared. Instead, there were two men waiting for me. One was young, with a red skullcap that looked too small for his head and a head that looked too small for his shoulders. He wore a dark shirt and black jeans and, judging by his expression, wasn't one of the people of kindness. The man beside him was older, with thinning gray hair and a thick beard. He was dressed more traditionally than his friend-white shirt and black tie beneath a black suit and overcoat-but didn't look significantly kinder.

“Are you the rabbi?” I asked him.

“No, we are not connected with the Orensanz Center,” he replied, before adding: “You think everyone who dresses in black is a rabbi?”

“Does that make me anti-Semitic?”

“No, but carrying a gun into a synagogue might.”

“It's nothing personal, or even religious.”

The older man nodded. “I'm sure it's not, but it pays to be careful-with such matters. I understand you are a private detective. May I see some form of identification, please?”

I raised my hand and slowly reached into my inside pocket for my wallet. I gave it to the young guy, who handed it in turn to the older man. He examined it for a good minute, then folded it and handed it back to me.

“And why is a private detective from Maine asking about the death of a New York rabbi?”

“I think Rabbi Epstein's death may be connected to a case I'm investigating. I hoped that somebody might be able to tell me a little more about him.”

“He's dead, Mr. Parker. What more do you need to know?”

“Who killed him would be a start, or doesn't that concern you?”

“It concerns me a great deal, Mr. Parker.” He turned to the younger man, nodded, and we watched as he walked from the hall, closing the door softly behind him. “What is this case you are investigating?”

“The death of a young woman. She was a friend of mine, once.”

“Then investigate her death and leave us to do our own work.”

“If her death is connected to that of the rabbi, it might be in both of our interests for you to help me. I can find the man who did this.”

“The man,” he repeated, emphasizing the second word. “You seem very certain that it was a man.”

“I know who he is,” I said simply.

“Then we both know,” he replied. “The matter is in hand. Steps have been taken to deal with it.”

“What steps?”

“An eye for an eye, Mr. Parker. He will be found.” He drew closer to me, and his eyes softened slightly. “This is not your concern. Not every unlawful death is fuel for your anger.”

He knew who I was. I could see it in his face, my past reflected back upon me in the mirrors of his eyes. There had been so much newspaper coverage of the deaths of Susan and Jennifer, and the final violent end of the Traveling Man, that there would always be those who remembered me. Now, in this old synagogue, I felt my personal loss exposed once again, like a mote of dust caught in the sunlight pouring through the windows above.

“The woman is my concern,” I said. “If the rabbi's death is connected, then that becomes my concern too.”

He shook his head and gripped my shoulder lightly.

“Do you know what tashlikh is, Mr. Parker? It is a symbolic act, the casting of bread crumbs onto the water, symbolizing the sins of the past, a burden with which one no longer chooses to live. I think you must find it in yourself to lay aside your burdens before they kill you.”

He began to walk away, and was almost at the door when I spoke.

“ ‘This was said by my father, and I am the atonement for where he rests.’ ”

The old man stopped and stared back to me.

“It's from the Talmud,” I said.

“I know what it is,” he almost whispered.

“This isn't about revenge.”

“Then what is it about?”

“Reparation.”

“For your father's sins, or your own?”

“Both.”

He seemed to lose himself in thought for a few moments, and when the light returned to his eyes a decision had been made.

“There is a legend told of the Golem, Mr. Parker,” he began, “an artificial man made of clay. The Rabbi Loew created the first Golem, in Prague, in fifty-three forty. The rabbi formed him from mud and placed the shem, the parchment bearing the name of God, in his mouth. The rabbi is justified in legend for creating a creature capable of defending Jews against the pogroms, against the wrath of their enemies. Do you believe that such a creature can exist, that justice can be served by its creation?”

“I believe that men like him can exist,” I replied. “But I don't think justice always plays a part in their creation, or is served by their actions.”

“Yes, perhaps a man,” said the old Jew softly. “And perhaps justice, if it is divinely inspired. We have dispatched our Golem. Let the will of God be done.” In his eyes I could see the ambivalence of his response to what had been set in train; they had sent one killer to track another, unleashing violence against violence, with all of the risks that such an act entailed.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“My name is Ben Epstein,” he answered, “and I am the atonement for where my son rests.”

The door closed gently behind him, its sound in the empty synagogue like a breath exhaled from the mouth of God.

Lester Bargus is alone behind the counter of the store on the day he dies, the same day on which I meet Yossi Epstein's father. Jim Gould, who works for Bargus part-time, is out back fieldstripping a pair of stolen H amp;K semiautomatics, so there is nobody in the rear storeroom, where a pair of TV screens show the interior of the store from two angles, one from a visible camera above the door, the other from a lens hidden inside the shell of a portable stereo kept on a shelf behind the register. Lester Bargus is a careful man, but not careful enough. His store is miked, but Lester Bargus doesn't know that. The only people who know are the ATF agents who have been monitoring Bargus's illegal gun operation for the best part of eleven days.

But on this particular day business is slow, and Bargus is idly feeding crickets to his pet mantid when the door opens. Even on the oddly angled black-and-white recordings made by the cameras, the new arrival seems strangely out of place. He is dressed in a black suit, shiny black shoes, and a thin black tie over a white shirt. On his head he wears a black hat, and a long black coat hangs to the middle of his calves. He is tall and well built. His age is hard to gauge; he could be anything from forty to seventy.

But it is only when the few clear images obtained by the cameras are frozen and enhanced that his strangeness becomes truly apparent. The skin is stretched taut on his face and he appears to be almost entirely without flesh, the striations of the tendons in his jaw and neck clearly visible through his skin, his cheekbones like shards of glass below dark eyes. He has no eyebrows. The ATF agents who later examine the tape suspect at first that he may simply be so fair that his hair does not show up, but when the images are enlarged they reveal only slightly roughened skin above his eyes, like old scar tissue.

His appearance obviously shocks Lester Bargus. On the tape, he can be seen taking a step back in surprise. He is wearing a white T-shirt with a Smith amp; Wesson logo on the back, and blue jeans with a lot of room around the crotch and the ass. Maybe he is hoping to grow into them.

“Help you?” His voice on the recording is cautious but hopeful. Especially on a slow day, a sale is a sale, even if it does come from a freak.

“I am looking for this man.” The accent makes it clear that English is only a second language, possibly even a third. He sounds European; not German, but Polish maybe, or Czech. Later, an expert will identify it as Hungarian, with Yiddish inflections to certain words. The man is a Jew, originally from Eastern Europe but with some time spent in the west of the continent, probably France.

He takes a photograph from his pocket and pushes it across the counter toward Lester Bargus. Lester doesn't even look at the photograph. All he says is: “I don't know him.”

“Look at it.” And his tone tells Lester Bargus that it doesn't matter what he does or does not say from now on, because nothing can save him from this man.

Lester reaches out and touches the photograph for the first time, but only to push it away. His head does not move. He still has not looked at the photograph, but while his left hand is in sight his right is moving to grasp the shotgun that rests on the shelf beneath the counter. He has almost reached it when the gun appears. Firearms will later identify it as a Jericho 941, made in Israel. Lester Bargus's right hand returns to the counter alongside his left, and both hands start to tremble in unison.

“For the last time, Mr. Bargus, look at the photograph.”

This time, Lester does look down. He spends some time staring at the photograph, weighing up his options. It's obvious that he knows the man in the picture and that the gunman is aware of this fact because the gunman wouldn't be there otherwise. On the tape, it's almost possible to hear Lester gulp.

“Where do I find this man?” During the whole encounter, the expression on the gunman's face has not altered. It is as if the skin is so tight across his skull that simply to talk requires a huge effort. The palpable menace of the man is obvious even from the black-and-white recording. Lester Bargus, forced to deal with him face-to-face, is terrified beyond belief. It is audible in his voice when he speaks what will be his second-to-last sentence on this earth.

“He'll kill me if I tell you,” says Bargus.

“I will kill you if you don't.”

Then Lester Bargus says his last words, and they reveal a prescience that I didn't think Lester would ever have. “You're going to kill me anyhow,” he says, and something in his voice tells the gunman that this is all he is ever going to get out of Lester.

“Yes,” says the gunman. “I am.”

The shots sound incredibly loud after the conversation that has just taken place, but also distorted and muted as the sound levels fail to cope with them. Lester Bargus jolts as the first bullet takes him in the chest, then keeps bucking and spasming as the rest of the shots tear into him, the static-ridden thunderclaps coming again and again until it seems that they will never end. There are ten shots, then there is a noise and a movement from the left of the picture as part of Jim Gould's body appears in the frame. Two more shots come and Gould falls across the counter as the gunman springs across it and darts into the rear of the store. By the time the ATF agents reach the scene, he is gone.

On the counter, now soaked with Lester Bargus's blood, the photograph remains. It is a picture of a group of demonstrators outside an abortion clinic in Minnesota. There are men and women holding placards, some obviously screaming their protests as police try to hold them back while others stand openmouthed in shock. To the right of the picture, the body of a man lies slumped against a wall as medics crowd around him. There is black blood on the pavement and on the wall behind him. At the fringe of the group another man has been caught in the act of walking away, his hands in the pockets of his overcoat, tiny hoods of skin shrouding his eyes as he looks back toward the dying man, his face inadvertently revealed to the camera. A red circle has been drawn around his head.

In the photograph, Mr. Pudd is smiling.

The man who killed Lester Bargus had flown into Logan Airport one day earlier and entered the country on a British passport, claiming to be a businessman interested in buying stuffed animals. The address he gave to immigration officials was later revealed to be the site of a recently demolished Chinese restaurant in Balham, south London.

The name on the passport was Clay Daemon.

He was the Golem.

14

THAT NIGHT, as the bodies of Lester Bargus and Jim Gould were taken to the morgue, I headed over to Chumley's on Bedford, the Village's best bar. Technically it was between Barrow and Grove, but even people who'd been going there for the best part of a decade still had trouble finding it on occasion. There was no name outside, just a light over the big door with the metal grate. Chumley's had started life as a speakeasy during Prohibition, and it had maintained its low profile for over seventy years. On weekends it tended to attract the kind of young bankers and dotcommunists who all wore blue shirts with their suits, on the grounds that nonconformists like them had to stick together, but during the week Chumley's was still recognizable as the bar that Salinger, Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill, Orson Welles, and William Burroughs used to frequent as a change from the White Horse or Marie's Crisis.

The clouds hung low over the Village as I walked, and there was a terrible stillness in the air that seemed to communicate itself to the people on the streets. Laughs were subdued; couples bickered. The crowds emerging from the subway wore tense, fractious expressions, their shoes too tight, their shirts too thick. Everything felt damp to the touch, as if the city itself were slowly perspiring, expelling filth and waste through every crack in every sidewalk, every fissure in every wall. I looked to the sky and waited for the thunder, but none came.

Inside Chumley's, the Labradors lounged uneasily on the sawdust-strewn floor and people stood at the tiny bar or disappeared into the darkened alcoves at the far end of the room. I took a seat at one of the long benches by the door and ordered a hamburger and a Coke.

It seemed like a long time since I had been back in the Village, as if decades rather than months had passed from the day that I left my apartment to travel back to Maine. Old ghosts waited for me on these corners: the Traveling Man at the corner of St. Mark's in the East Village, the phone booth still marking the place where I had stood after he sent me my daughter's remains in a jar; the Corner Bistro, where Susan and I used to meet when we were dating; the Elephant amp; Castle, where we had brunch on Sundays in the early months of our relationship, heading uptown afterward to walk in Central Park or browse in the museums.

Even Chumley's was not immune, for were these not the same dogs that Susan used to stroke while she waited for her drink, the same dogs that Jennifer once held after her mother told her how beautiful they were and we took her to meet them as a treat? All of these places were potential bubbles of hurt waiting to be pricked, releasing the memories sealed within. I should have felt pain, I thought. I should have felt the old agony. But instead, I experienced only a strange, desperate gratitude for this place, for the two fat old dogs and for the unsullied memories with which they had left me.

For some things should never be allowed to fade away. It was both good and proper that they should be recalled, that a place should be found for them in the present and the future so that they became a precious part of oneself, something to be treasured instead of something to be feared. To remember Susan and Jennifer as they once were, and to love them for it, was no betrayal of Rachel and of what she meant to me. If that was true, then to find a way to live a life in which lost loves and new beginnings could coexist was not to besmirch the memory of my wife and child. And in the quiet of that place I lost myself for a time, until one of the Labradors waddled sleepily over and nosed at my hand for attention, his dog jowls shedding warm spit on my pants and his soft eyes closing happily beneath the weight of my hand.

I had found a copy of the Portland Press Herald in Barnes amp; Noble at Union Square, and while I ate, I scanned the pages for reports on Eagle Lake. There were two: one was a description of the ongoing difficulties in uncovering the remains, but the main piece announced the suspected identities of two of the dead. They were Billy Perrson and Vyrna Kellog, and they were both homicide victims. Billy Perrson had died from a gunshot wound to the back of the head. Vyrna Kellog's skull had been crushed, apparently with a rock.

Slowly, the truth about the fate of the Aroostook Baptists was being revealed. They had not dispersed, scattering themselves to the four winds and taking with them the seeds of new communities. Instead they had been murdered and consigned to a mass grave on a patch of undeveloped land; and there they had remained, trapped in a forgotten cavity of the honeycomb world, until spring daylight had found them.

Was that why Grace had died-because in breaking through the dead layers obscuring the past, she had found out something about the Aroostook Baptists that nobody was ever supposed to discover? More and more I wanted to return to Maine, to confront Jack Mercier and Carter Paragon. I felt that my pursuit of Mr. Pudd was drawing me away from the investigation into Grace's death, yet somehow Pudd and the Fellowship had a part to play in all that had occurred. He was linked to her passing in some way, of that I was certain, but he wasn't the weak link. Paragon was, and he would have to be confronted if I was to understand what had driven someone to end Grace's life.

But first, there was Mickey Shine. I had checked the Village Voice and found the exhibition listings. The Cloisters, which housed the Metropolitan Museum's medieval collection, was hosting a visiting exhibition on artistic responses to the Apocalypse of St. John. An image of Jack Mercier's bookshelf flashed before my eyes. It seemed that the Met and Mercier currently shared an interest in books and paintings about the end of the world.

I left Chumley's shortly after ten, patting the sleeping dogs one last time for luck as I went. The warm, damp smell of them was still on my hands as I walked beneath the shrouded sky, the noise of the city seeming to rebound back on itself from above. A shadow moved in a doorway to my right, but I paid it no heed and allowed it to move unchallenged behind me.

I passed through the streetlights, and my footsteps echoed hollowly on the ground beneath my feet.

Bone is porous; after years of burial, it will assume the same color as the soil in which it has been interred. The bones by St. Froid Lake were a rich brown, as if the Aroostook Baptists had become one with the natural world around them, an impression reinforced by the small plants that grew between the remains, fed by decay. Rib cages had become trellises for creeping roots, and the concavity of a skull acted as a nursery for small green shoots.

Their clothing had largely rotted away, since most of it had been made from natural fibers and could not survive decades of burial in the manner of synthetic materials. Water stains on the surrounding trees indicated that the land had flooded on occasion, adding extra layers of mud and rotting vegetation, compressing the bones of the dead farther and farther into the soil. The field recovery, the separation of bone from earth, human from animal, child from adult, would be a painstaking process. It would be completed on hands and knees, with aching backs and cold fingers, all supervised by the forensic anthropologist. State police, sheriff's deputies, wardens, even some anthropology students were drafted to assist with the dig. Since the ME's office had only one vehicle, a Dodge van, with which to transport remains, local undertakers and the National Guard were assisting in the removal of the bodies to nearby Presque Isle, from where Bill's Flying Service would take them down to Augusta.

At St. Froid Lake, orange aluminum arrows, the trademark of the deputy chief ME, had been used to create an archaeological square, enclosed and protected by lengths of string. An array of seemingly primitive but ultimately necessary equipment had been brought to bear on the scene: line levels to measure the depth of the remains below the surface; flat-bladed shovels and trowels with which to dig, aware always that the bones could be damaged by a careless movement; handheld screens for sifting small pieces of evidence-a quarter-inch mesh screen first, followed by a standard window screen; tapes; graph paper for drawing a site map depicting the area as seen from above, the position of the remains being added to the map as they were uncovered; plastic bags, bright blue heavy-duty body bags, and waterproof pens; metal detectors to search for guns or other metallic debris; and cameras, to photograph items and artifacts as they were revealed.

As each artifact was uncovered it was photographed, then marked and sealed, an adhesive label attached to the container detailing the case number, the date and time of discovery, a description of the item, its location, and the signature of the investigator who had recovered it. The item was then transported to a secure evidence storage facility, in this case the offices of the ME in Augusta.

Soil samples were taken from the carefully piled earth and bagged. Had the soil by the lake been only slightly more acidic, the remains might simply have vanished and the only sign that they had ever been there would have come from the flourishing plant life above, nourished by flesh and bone. As it was, animal predation, erosion, and scattering had resulted in missing and damaged limbs, but sufficient evidence remained to be examined by the specialists assembled by the ME's office. They included-in addition to the forensic anthropologist, the ME's own permanent staff, and the scientists at the state lab in Augusta-an anatomist, three dental teams to act as forensic odontologists, and the radiologist at the Maine General Medical Center in Augusta. Each would bring to bear his or her own specialist knowledge in a formal identification of the remains.

The remains had been identified as human by an examination of the intact bones, and the sex of the victims would be confirmed by further examinations of the skull, pelvis, femur, sternum, and teeth, where teeth could be found. Age estimates of those victims under the age of twenty-five, accurate to within one year or so, would be made from teeth, where teeth remained, and from the appearance and fusion of the ossification centers and epiphyses, the end parts of the long bones, which grow separately from the shaft in early life. In the case of older bones, radiological examinations of the trabecular pattern in the head of the humerus and femur, which remodels with age, would be used, in addition to changes in pubic symphysis.

Height would be calculated by measuring the femur, tibia, and fibula of the victims, arm bones being less reliable in such cases. Dental remains would be used to make a preliminary racial determination, dental characteristics associated predominantly with particular races enabling the likelihood of the victims being Caucasoid, Negroid, or Mongoloid to be assessed.

Finally, dental records, radiological examination of the remains for evidence of fractures, and comparative DNA tests would all be brought to bear in an effort to make positive identifications of the personal identities of the victims. In this case, facial reconstruction and photosuperimposition (the overlaying of a photograph of the suspected victim over a transparency of the skull, now largely done on-screen) might have assisted the investigation, since photographs existed of the suspected victims, but the state had made no budgetary provisions for photosuperimposition techniques, mainly because those with their hands on the purse strings didn't really understand what the process entailed. They didn't understand the mechanics of DNA testing either. They didn't have to; they just knew that it worked.

But in this case, the investigators had assistance from an unexpected and bizarre source. Around the neck of each victim was found the remains of a wooden board. Some had decayed badly, although it was believed that electronic scanners, electrostatic detection apparatuses, or low-angle light could reveal traces of whatever had been indented on the wood. But others, particularly on the higher ground, were still semi-intact. One of them lay below the head of a small boy buried beside a fir tree. The roots of the tree had grown through and around his remains, and his recovery would be one of the most difficult to achieve without damaging the bones. Beside him was another, smaller skeleton, preliminarily identified as a female of about seven years, for the metopic suture along the frontal bone of her skull had not yet fully disappeared. The bones of their hands were intermingled, as if they had clasped each other in their final moments.

The boy's remains lay semiexposed, the skull clearly visible, the mandible detached and lying to one side. There was a small hole where the occipital and parietal bones met at the back of his head but no corresponding exit wound in the frontal bone, although a small fragment appeared to have been dislodged from the supraorbital foramen, the ridge of bone above the right eye, by the emerging bullet.

The indentation on the block of wood by his skull, hacked into the grain with a child's hand, read:

JAMES JESSOP

SINNER

THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier…

It is unclear when the first signs of difficulty began to appear in the new settlement.

Each day, the community rose and prayed at first light, then assisted in the completion of the houses and farm structures for the settlement, some of which were built of clapboard from old Sears Roebuck mail-order kits originating from the 1930s, while the Faulkners' dwelling was a used steel Lustron. Faulkner retained control of the finances, and food was limited, since the Preacher believed in the benefits of fasting. Prayers were said four times daily, with Faulkner preaching one sermon at breakfast and a second following the main meal in the evening.

Details of day-to-day life for the Aroostook Baptists were obtained by talking to local people who had some limited contact with the community, and from occasional letters sent by Elizabeth Jessop, Frank Jessop's wife, to her sister, Lena, in Portland. These letters were, in effect, smuggled out of the settlement. Elizabeth reached an agreement with the landowner whereby, for a small fee, he would check the hollow of an oak tree at the verge of the settlement every Tuesday and ensure that whatever mail found there was posted. He also agreed to collect and deliver any responses received.

Elizabeth paints a picture of a harsh but joyful first three months, filled with a sense that the Aroostook Baptists were like the pioneers of another age, creating a new world where there had once been wilderness. The houses, although basic and somewhat drafty, were built quickly, and the families had brought some simple furnishings with them in trailers. They raised pigs and chickens and had five cows, one of which was with calf. They grew potatoes-this area of Aroostook was prime potato-growing country-broccoli, and peas and harvested apples from the trees on the property. They used rotting fish to fertilize the land and stored the produce they had brought with them in underground caverns dug beneath the banks, where the springwater kept the air at the same low temperature all year around, acting as a natural refrigerator.

The first signs of tension arose in July, when it became apparent that the Faulkners and their children were keeping themselves apart from the other families. Faulkner took a larger share of the produce as the leader of the community and he refused to release any of the funds that the families had brought with them, a sum amounting to at least $25,000. Even when Laurie Perrson, the daughter of Billy and Olive Perrson, took seriously ill with influenza, Faulkner insisted that she be treated within the community. It was left to Katherine Cornish, who had some rudimentary medical skills, to treat the girl. According to Elizabeth's letters, Laurie barely survived.

Animosity grew toward the Faulkners. Their children, whom Faulkner insisted should be called only Adam and Eve, bullied the younger members of the community; Elizabeth refers darkly to random acts of cruelty perpetrated on both animals and humans by the Faulkner children. Clearly, her reports caused her sister concern, for in a letter dated August 7, 1963, Elizabeth attempts to reassure Lena, arguing that their difficulties “are as nothing compared to the sufferings endured by the Mayflower pilgrims, or those hardy souls who journeyed west in the face of hostility from the Indians. We trust in God, who is our savior, and in the Reverend Faulkner, who is our guiding light.”

But the letter also contains the first reference to Lyall Kellog, with whom it appears that Elizabeth was becoming infatuated. It seems that the relationship between Frank Jessop and his wife was predominantly nonsexual, although whether as a result of marital strife or some physical incapacity is not known. In fact, the affair between Lyall and Elizabeth may already have begun by the time of the August letter, and had certainly progressed enough by November for Elizabeth to describe him to her sister as “this wonderful man.”

It is my view that this affair, and its repercussions once it became known within the community, contributed greatly to the disintegration of the settlement. What is also clear, from the subsequent letters of Elizabeth Jessop, is that Louise Faulkner played a major role in this disintegration, a role that appears to have surprised Elizabeth and may, in the end, have brought Louise into bitter conflict with her own husband.

15

THE PASSENGER ELEVATOR at the 190th Street subway station was decorated with pictures of kittens and puppies. Two potted plants with Stars and Stripes sprouting from the soil hung from the ceiling and a small stereo unit played relaxing music. The elevator operator, Anthony Washington, who was responsible for the unusual ambience of the 190th Street elevator, sat at a small desk in a comfortable chair and greeted many of the passengers by name. The MTA once tried to make Anthony strip his elevator of its decorations, but a campaign by the press and the public forced the Transit Authority to back down. The paint flaked from the ceiling of the 190th Street station, it smelled of urine, and there was a steady stream of dirty water running between the tracks. All things considered, those who used the subway were pretty grateful for Anthony's efforts and felt that the MTA should be pretty damn grateful too.

It was just after 9:15 A.M. when Anthony Washington's elevator reached ground level and I emerged at the entrance to Fort Tryon Park. The weather had broken. The thunder had commenced shortly after dawn, the rains following within the hour. It had now been falling continuously for almost four hours, warm, hard rain that had caused umbrellas to sprout up like mushrooms across the city.

There was no bus waiting at the curb to take visitors to the Cloisters, although it hardly mattered, since I seemed to be the only person heading in that direction. I wrapped my coat around me and began to walk up Margaret Corbin Drive. Outside the small café on the left of the road, a group of sanitation men huddled together, sheltering from the rain while drinking cups of coffee. Above them loomed the remains of Fort Tryon, which defended itself against Hessian troops during the War of Independence with the aid of Margaret Corbin herself, the first American woman to take a soldier's part in the battle for liberty. I wondered if Margaret Corbin was tough enough to stand against the troops of junkies and muggers who now roamed the scene of her triumph, and figured that she probably was.

Seconds later, the bulk of the Cloisters was before me, the New Jersey shoreline to my left, traffic streaming across the George Washington Bridge. John D. Rockefeller Jr. had given this land to the city and reserved the hilltop for the construction of a museum of medieval art, which was eventually opened in 1938. Portions of five medieval cloisters were integrated into a single modern building, itself reminiscent of medieval European structures. My father had first taken me there as a child, and it had never ceased to amaze me since. Surrounded by its high central tower and battlements, its arches and pillars, you could briefly feel like a knight-errant, as long as you ignored the fact that you were looking out at the woods of New Jersey, where the only damsels in distress were likely to be robbery victims or unwed mothers.

I walked up the stairs to the admissions area, paid my $10, and stepped through the entrance door into the Romanesque Hall. There were no other visitors in the rooms; the comparatively early hour and the bad weather had kept most of them away, and I guessed that I was one of only a dozen or so people in the whole museum. I passed slowly through the Fuentidueña Chapel, pausing to admire the apse and the huge crucifix hanging from the ceiling, then made my way through the St. Guilhem and Cuxa Cloisters toward the Gothic Chapel and the stairs to the lower level.

I had about ten minutes before I was due to meet Mickey Shine, so I headed for the Treasury, where the museum stored its manuscripts. I entered through the modern glass doors and stood in a room ringed by panels from the choir stalls at Jumièges Abbey. The manuscripts were stored in glass cases and opened at particularly fine examples of the illuminator's art. I stopped for a time at a beautiful book of hours, but most of my attention was reserved for the visiting exhibits.

The book of Revelation had been the subject of manuscript illumination since the ninth century, and although Apocalypse cycles were produced originally for monasteries, they were also being made for wealthy secular patrons by the thirteenth century. Some of the finest examples had been gathered together for this exhibition, and images of judgment and punishment filled the room. I spent some time looking at various medieval sinners being devoured, torn apart, or tormented on spikes-or, in the case of the Winchester Psalter depiction of Hell Mouth, all three at once, while a dutiful angel locked the doors from the outside-before passing on to examples of Dürer's woodcuts, Cranach's work for Martin Luther's German translation of the New Testament, and Blake's visions of red dragons, until I eventually reached the item at the center of the display.

It was the Cloisters Apocalypse, dating from the early part of the fourteenth century, and the illustration on the opened page was almost identical to that which I had found on the Fellowship's literature. It depicted a multieyed beast with long, vaguely arachnid legs slaughtering sinners with a spear while Christ and the saints looked on impassively from the right-hand corner of the page. According to the explanatory note in the case, the beast was killing those whose names did not appear in the Lamb of God's Book of Life. Below it was a translation of an illustrator's note added in Latin in the margins: “For if the names of the saved are to be recorded in the Book of Life, shall not also the names of the damned be written, and in what place may they be found?”

I heard the echo of the threat made by Mr. Pudd against Mickey Shine and his family: their names would be written. The question, as the illuminator had posed, was, Written where?

It was now ten, but I could see no sign of Mickey Shine. I left the Treasury, walked through the Glass Gallery, and opened a small unmarked door that led out into the Trie Cloister. The only sound, apart from the fall of the rain, came from the trickling of water in the fountain at the center of the marble arcades, dominated in turn by a limestone cross. To my right, an opening led out to the exposed Bonnefont Cloister. When I stepped through it, I found myself in a garden, the Hudson River and the New Jersey shoreline in front of me, the tower of the Gothic Chapel to my far right. To my left was the main wall of the Cloisters itself, a drop of maybe twenty feet leading to the ground below. The other two sides of the square consisted of pillared arcades.

The garden had been planted with shrubs and trees common in medieval times. A quartet of quince trees stood in the middle, the first signs of the yellow fruit now appearing. Valerian was overshadowed by the huge leaves of black mustard; nearby grew caraway and leek, chive and lovage, madder and Our-Lady's-bedstraw, the last two constituent ingredients in the dyes used by artists for the manuscripts on display in the main body of the museum.

It took me seconds to notice the new addition to the garden. Against the far wall, beside the entrance to the tower, grew an espaliered pear tree, its shape resembling a menorah. The bare branches were like hooks, six of them growing out from the main artery of the tree. Mickey Shine's head had been impaled on the very tip of that central artery, turning him to a creature of both flesh and wood. Tendril-like trails of coagulating blood hung from the neck, and the rain damped the pallor of his features as water pooled in the sunken sockets of his eyes. Tattered skin blew softly in the wind, and there was blood around his mouth and ears. His ponytail had been severed during the removal of his head and the loose hair now stuck lankly to his gray-blue skin.

I was already reaching for my gun when the thin, spiderlike shape of Mr. Pudd emerged from the shadow of the arcade to my right. In his hand he held a Beretta fitted with a suppressor. My hand froze. He told me to move my hands away from my body, slowly. I did.

“So here we are, Mr. Parker,” he said, and the eyes behind their dark hoods gleamed with a hostile intensity. “I hope you like what I've done with the place.”

His left hand gestured to the tree. Blood and rain pooled at its base, creating a dark reflection of what lay above. I could see Mickey Shine's face shimmer as the raindrops fell, seeming to add life and expression to his still features.

“I found Mr. Sheinberg in a nickel-and-dime hotel,” he continued. “When they discover what's left of him in his bathtub, I fear it will be merely a nickel hotel.”

And still the rain fell, soaking me through my coat. It would keep the tourists away, and that was what Mr. Pudd wanted.

“The idea was mine,” he said. “I thought it was appropriately medieval. The execution-and it was an execution-was the work of my… associate.”

Farther to my right, still sheltered by the arcade, the woman with the mutilated throat stood against a pillar, an open rucksack on the stone before her. She was watching us impassively, like Judith after disposing of the head of Holofernes.

“He struggled a great deal,” elaborated Mr. Pudd, almost distractedly. “But then, we did start from the back. It took us some time to hit the vertebral artery. After that, he didn't struggle quite so much.”

The weight of the Smith amp; Wesson beneath my coat pressed against my skin, like a promise that would never be fulfilled. Mr. Pudd returned his attention fully to me, raising the Beretta slightly as he did so.

“The Peltier woman stole something from us, Mr. Parker. We want it back.”

I spoke at last. “You were in my house. You took everything that I had.”

“You're lying. And even if you are not, I suspect you know who does have it.”

“The Apocalypse?” It was a guess, but a good one. Mr. Pudd's lips twitched once, and then he nodded. “Tell me where it is, and you won't feel a thing when I kill you.”

“And if I don't tell you?” From the corner of my eye, I saw the woman produce a gun and aim it at me. As she moved, so too did Mr. Pudd. His left hand, which had been concealed in the pocket of his coat until then, appeared from the folds. In it, he held a syringe.

“I'll shoot you. I won't kill you, but I will disable you, and then…” He raised the syringe and a stream of clear liquid issued from the needle.

“Is that what you used to kill Epstein?” I asked.

“No,” he answered. “Compared to what you will endure, the unfortunate Rabbi Epstein passed comfortably into the next world. You're about to experience a great deal of pain, Mr. Parker.”

He angled the gun so that it was pointing at my belly, but I wasn't looking at the gun. Instead, I watched as a tiny red dot appeared on Mr. Pudd's groin and slowly began to work its way upward. Pudd's eyes dropped to follow my gaze and his mouth opened in surprise as the dot continued its progress over his chest and neck before stopping in the center of his forehead.

“You first,” I said, but he was already moving. The first bullet-blew away a chunk of his right ear as he loosed off a shot in my direction, the rain hissing beside my face as the heat of the slug warmed the air. Then three more shots came, tearing black holes in his chest. The bullets should have ripped through him, but instead he lurched backward as if he had been punched hard, the impact of the shots sending him tumbling over the wall.

Shards of stone sprang up close to my left leg and I heard the dull sound of the suppressed shots echoing around the arcade. I drew my gun, dove for the cover of the chapel tower, and fired at the pillar where the woman had been standing, but she had stooped low and was scuttling toward the door to the Glass Gallery, her gun bucking as shots came at her from two directions: from the wall where I stood and from the arcade where Louis's dark form was moving through the shadows to intercept her. The door to the gallery opened behind her and she disappeared inside. I was about to follow when a bullet whistled past my ear and I dived to the ground, my face buried in the clump of Our-Lady's-bedstraw. Across from me, Louis leaped over the wall of the arcade as I raised myself up and crawled behind the main wall. I took a deep breath and peered over.

There was nobody there. Pudd was already gone, a smear of blood on some flattened grass the only indication of his former presence.

“Follow the woman,” I said. Louis nodded and ran to the gallery, his gun held discreetly by his side. I climbed onto the wall and then jumped, landing heavily on the ground and rolling down the slope. I sprang up quickly when I came to a stop, the gun outstretched, but Pudd was nowhere to be seen. I moved west, following the trail of blood along the main wall of the Cloisters, until somewhere at the far side of the building I heard a shot fired, then another, followed by the squealing of tires. Seconds later, a blue Voyager sped down Margaret Corbin Drive. I ran to the road, hoping for a clear shot, but an MTA bus turned the corner at the same time and I held my fire for fear of hitting the bus or its passengers. The last thing I saw as the Voyager disappeared was a figure slumped forward on the dashboard. I wasn't certain, but I thought it was Pudd.

Brushing the grass from my pants and coat, I put my gun away and walked swiftly around to the main entrance. A gray-suited museum guard lay slumped against the wall, surrounded by a crowd of newly arrived French tourists. There was blood on his right arm and leg, but he was conscious. I heard the sound of footsteps on the grass behind me and turned to see Louis standing in the shade of the wall. He had obviously made a full circuit of the complex after pursuing the woman in order to avoid passing through the museum again.

“Call nine-one-one,” he said, staring up the road the Voyager had taken. “That's one nasty bitch.”

“They got away.”

“No shit. Got myself tangled up in the damn tourists. She shot the guard to make them panic.”

“We hurt Pudd,” I said. “That's something.”

“I hit him in the chest. He should be dead.”

“He was wearing a vest. The shots blew him off his feet.”

“Shit,” he hissed. “You planning on staying around?”

“To explain Mickey Shine's head on a tree? I don't think so.” We climbed onto the MTA bus, its driver oblivious to the furor at the main door, and sat in separate seats as he pulled away. For a brief moment, as he turned onto the main road, he was able to see the entrance to the Cloisters and the crowd around the fallen guard.

“Something happen?” he called back to us.

“I think somebody fainted,” I said.

“Place ain't that pretty,” he replied, and he said nothing more until he dropped us at the subway station. There was a cab turning at the curb, and we told the driver to head downtown.

I dropped Louis off at the Upper West Side, while I continued down to the Village to collect my overnight bag. When I was done, I dropped into the Strand Book Store on Broadway and found a companion volume for the Cloisters exhibition. Then I sat in a coffee shop on Sixth Avenue, leafing through the illustrations and watching the people go by. Whatever Mickey Shine had guessed or suspected had died with him, but at least I now knew what Grace Peltier had taken from the Fellowship: a book, a record of some kind, which Mr. Pudd acknowledged to be an Apocalypse. But why should a biblical text be so important that Pudd was willing to kill to get it back?

Rachel was still in Boston, and would join me in Scarborough the following day. She had refused an offer of protection from Angel and an offer of a Colt Pony Pocketlite from Louis. Unbeknownst to her, she was being discreetly watched by a gentleman named Gordon Buntz and one of his associates, Amy Brenner. They'd given me a professional discount, but they were still eating up Jack Mercier's advance. Meanwhile, Angel was already in Scarborough; he had checked into the Black Point Inn at Prouts Neck, which gave him the freedom to roam around the area without attracting the attention of the Scarborough PD. I'd given him a National Audubon Society field guide to New England; armed with a pair of binoculars, he was now officially the world's least likely bird-watcher. He had been monitoring Jack Mercier, his house, and his movements since the previous afternoon.

Outside Balducci's, a black Lexus SC400 pulled up to the curb. Louis was sitting in the driver's seat. When I opened the door, Johnny Cash was solemnly intoning the words to Soundgarden's “Rusty Cage.”

“Nice car,” I said. “Your bank manager recommend it?”

He shook his head sorrowfully. “Man, I tell you, you need class like a junkie need a hit.”

I dumped my bag on the leather backseat. It made a satisfyingly dirty sound, although it was nothing compared to the sound Louis made when he saw the mark it left on his upholstery. As we pulled away from the curb, Louis took a huge contraband Cuban cigar from his jacket pocket and proceeded to light up. Thick blue smoke immediately filled the car.

“Hey!” I said.

“Fuck you mean, ‘Hey’?”

“Don't smoke in the car.”

“It's my car.”

“Your secondary fumes are a danger to my health.”

Louis choked on a mouthful of smoke before raising one carefully plucked eyebrow in my direction. “You been beaten up, shot twice, drowned, electrocuted, frozen, injected with poisons, three of your damn teeth been kicked out of your head by an old man everybody thought was dead, and you worried about secondary smoke? Secondary smoke ain't no danger to your health. You a danger to your health.”

With that, he returned his attention to his driving.

I let him smoke the cigar in peace.

After all, he had a point.

THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier…

Faulkner's main claim to fame, apart from his association with Eagle Lake, was as a bookbinder, and particularly as a maker of Apocalypses, ornately illustrated versions of the book of Revelation, the last book of the New Testament, detailing St. John's vision of the end of the world and the final judgment. In creating these works, Faulkner was part of a tradition dating back to the Carolingian period of the ninth and tenth centuries, when the earliest surviving illustrated Apocalypse manuscripts were created on the European continent. In the early thirteenth century richly illuminated Apocalypses, with texts and commentaries in Latin and French vernacular, were made in Europe for the powerful and wealthy, including high churchmen and magnates. They continued to be created even after the invention of printing, indicating a continued resonance to the imagery and message of the book itself.

There are twelve “Faulkner Apocalypses” extant and, according to the records of Faulkner's supplier of gold leaf, it is unlikely that Faulkner made more than this number. Each book was bound in hand-tooled leather, inlaid with gold, and illustrated by hand by Faulkner, with a distinctive marking on the spine: six horizontal gold lines, set in three sets of two, and the final letter of the Greek alphabet: Ω for omega.

The paper was made not from wood but from linen and cotton rags beaten in water into a smooth pulp. Faulkner would dip a rectangular tray into the pulp and take up about one inch of the substance, draining it through a wire mesh in the base of the tray. Gently shaking the tray caused the matted fibers in the liquid to interlock. The sheet of partially solidified pulp was then squeezed in a press before being dipped in animal gelatin to size it, thereby enabling it to hold ink. The paper was bound in folios of six to minimize the buildup of thread on the book's spine.

The illustrations in Faulkner's Apocalypses were drawn largely from earlier artists, and remain consistent throughout. (All twelve are in the private ownership of one individual, and I was permitted to examine them at length.) Thus, the earliest of the Apocalypses is inspired by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528), the second by medieval manuscripts, the third by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553) and so on, with the final extant book featuring six illustrations based on the work of Frans Masereel (1889-1972), whose Apocalypse cycle drew on images from World War II. According to those who had dealings with him, it appears that Faulkner was attracted to apocalyptic imagery because of its connotations of judgment, not because he believed it foretold a Second Coming or a final reckoning. For Faulkner, the reckoning had already begun; judgment and damnation were an ongoing process.

Faulkner's Apocalypses were created strictly for wealthy collectors, and the sale of them is believed to have provided much of the seed funding for Faulkner's community. No further versions made by Faulkner's hand have appeared since the date of the foundation of the Eagle Lake community.

16

LOUIS DROPPED ME AT MY HOUSE before heading for the Black Point Inn. I checked in with Gordon Buntz to make sure Rachel was okay, and a quick call to Angel confirmed that nothing out of the ordinary had occurred at the Merciers', with the exception of the arrival of the lawyer Warren Ober and his wife. He had also spotted four different types of tern and two plovers. I arranged to meet up with both Angel and Louis later that night.

I had been checking my messages pretty regularly while in Boston and New York, but there were two new ones since that morning. The first was from Arthur Franklin, asking if the information his pornographer client, Harvey Ragle, had proffered was proving useful. In the background, I could hear Ragle's whining voice: “I'm a dead man. You tell him that. I'm a dead man.” I didn't bother to return the call.

The second message came from ATF agent Norman Boone. Ellis Howard, the deputy chief over in the Portland PD, once told me that Boone ruled the ATF like a king, but with none of the associated charm. He had left his home and cell-phone numbers. I got him at home.

“It's Charlie Parker. How can I help you, Agent Boone?”

“Why, thank you for returning my call, Mr. Parker. It's only been…” At the other end of the line, I could imagine him ostentatiously checking his watch. “Four hours.”

“I was out of town.”

“You mind telling me where?”

“Why, did we have a date?”

Boone sighed dramatically. “Talk to me now, Mr. Parker, or talk to me tomorrow at One City Center. I should warn you that I'm a busy man, and my patience is likely to be more strained by tomorrow morning.”

“I was in Boston, visiting an old friend.”

“An old friend, as I understand it, who ended up with a hole in his head halfway through a performance of Cleopatra.”

“I'm sure he knew how it ended. She dies, in case you hadn't heard.”

He ignored me. “Was your visit connected in any way to Lester Bargus?”

I didn't pause for a second, although the question had thrown me.

“Not directly.”

“But you visited Mr. Bargus shortly before you left town?”

Damn.

“Lester and I go way back.”

“Then you'll be heartbroken to hear that he is no longer with us.”

“ ‘Heartbroken’ maybe isn't the word. And the ATF's interest in all this is…?”

“Mr. Bargus made a little money selling spiders and giant roaches and a lot of money selling automatic weapons and other assorted firearms to the kind of people who have swastikas on their crockery. It was natural that he would come to our attention. My question is, Why did he come to your attention?”

“I was looking for somebody. I thought Lester might have known where he was. Is this an interrogation, Agent Boone?”

“It's a conversation, Mr. Parker. If we did it tomorrow, face-to-face, then it would be an interrogation.”

Even with a telephone line separating us, I had to admit that Boone was good. He was closing in on me, leaving me with almost no room to turn. I was not going to tell him about Grace Peltier, because Grace would bring me on to Jack Mercier, and possibly the Fellowship, and the last thing I wanted was the ATF going Waco on the Fellowship. Instead, I decided to give him Harvey Ragle.

“All I do know is that a lawyer named Arthur Franklin called me and asked me to speak to his client.”

“Who's his client?”

“Harvey Ragle. He makes porn movies, with bugs in them. Al Z's people used to distribute some of them.”

It was Boone's turn to be thrown. “Bugs? The hell are you talking-about?”

“Women in their underwear squashing bugs,” I explained, as if to a child. “He also does geriatric porn, obesity, and little people. He's an artist.”

“Nice types you meet in your line of work.”

“You make a pleasant change from the norm, Agent Boone. It seems that an individual with an affinity for bugs wants to kill Harvey Ragle for making his sicko porn movies. Lester Bargus had supplied the bugs and also seemed to know something about him, so I agreed to approach him on behalf of Ragle.”

The improbability of it was breathtaking. I could feel Boone wondering just how far he was being taken for a ride.

“And who is this mysterious herpetologist?”

Herpetologist. Agent Boone was obviously a Scrabble fan.

“He calls himself Mr. Pudd, and I think that strictly speaking he may be an arachnologist, not a herpetologist. He likes spiders. I think he's the man who killed Al Z.”

“And you approached Lester Bargus in the hope of finding this man?”

“Yes.”

“But you got nowhere.”

“Lester had a lot of anger in him.”

“Well, he's a lot calmer now.”

“If you had him under surveillance, then you already know what passed between us,” I said. “Which means there's something else that you want from me.”

After some hesitation, Boone went on to explain how a man traveling under the name of Clay Daemon had walked into Lester's store, demanded details of an individual in a photograph, and then shot Lester and his assistant dead.

“I'd like you to take a look at the photograph,” he said.

“He left it?”

“We figure he's got more than one copy. Hired killers tend to be pretty professional that way.”

“You want me to come in? It could be tomorrow.”

“How about now?”

“Look, Agent Boone, I need a shower, a shave, and sleep. I've told you all I can. I want to help, but give me a break.”

Boone relented slightly. “You got E-mail?”

“Yes, and a second line.”

“Then stay on this one. I'll be back.”

The line went quiet, so I turned on my desktop and waited for Boone's E-mail to arrive. When it did, it consisted of two pictures. One was the photograph of the abortion clinic shooting. I spotted Mr. Pudd immediately. The other was a still taken from the video camera in Lester Bargus's store, showing the killer Clay Daemon. Seconds later, Boone was back on the line.

“You recognize anyone in the first picture?”

“The guy on the far right is Pudd, first name Elias. He came out to my house, asking why I was nosing around in his business. I don't know the man in the video still.”

I could hear Boone clicking his tongue rhythmically at the other end of the line, even as I gave him the contact number I had for Ragle's lawyer. “I'll be talking to you again, Mr. Parker,” he said at last. “I have a feeling you know more than you're telling.”

“Everybody knows more than they're telling, Agent Boone,” I replied. “Even you. I have a question.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Who's the injured man in the first photograph?”

“His name was David Beck. He worked for an abortion clinic in Minnesota, and he's a dead man in that photograph. The killing forms part of the VAAPCON files.”

VAAPCON was the code name for the joint FBI-ATF investigation into abortion-related violence, the Violence Against Abortion Providers Conspiracy. The ATF and the FBI have a poor working relationship; for a long time the FBI had resisted involving itself in investigating attacks on doctors and abortion clinics, arguing that it didn't fall within their guidelines, which meant that the investigation of allegations of a conspiracy of violence was left in the hands of the ATF. That situation changed with the formation of VAAPCON and the enactment of new legislation empowering the FBI and the Justice Department to act against abortion-related violence. Yet tensions between the FBI and the ATF contributed to the comparative failure of VAAPCON; no evidence of a conspiracy was found, and agents took to dubbing the investigation CRAPCON, despite signs of growing links between right-wing militias and antiabortion extremists.

“Did they ever find his killer?” I asked.

“Not yet.”

“Like they haven't found his wife's killer.”

“What do you know about it?”

“I know she had spiders in her mouth when she was found.”

“And our friend Pudd is a spider lover.”

“The same Pudd whose head is circled in this photograph.”

“Do you know who he's working for?”

“Himself, I'd guess.” It wasn't quite a lie. Pudd didn't answer to Carter Paragon, and the Fellowship as the public knew it seemed too inconsequential to require his services.

Boone didn't speak for a time. His last words to me before he hung up were, “We'll be in touch.”

I didn't doubt it.

I sat in front of the computer screen, flicking between both images. I picked out a younger Alison Beck holding her dead husband, her face contorted with grief and his blood on her shirt, skirt, and hands. Then I looked into the small, hooded eyes of Mr. Pudd as he slipped away through the crowd. I wondered if he had fired the shots or merely orchestrated the killing. Either way, he was involved, and another small piece of the puzzle slipped into place. Somehow, Mercier had found Epstein and Beck, individuals who, for their own reasons, were prepared to assist him in his moves against the Fellowship. But why was Mercier so concerned about the Fellowship? Was it simply another example of his liberalism, or were there other, deeper motives?

As it turned out, a possible answer to the question pulled up outside my door in a black Mercedes convertible thirty minutes later. Deborah Mercier, wearing a long black coat, stepped alone and unaided from the driver's seat. Despite the encroaching darkness she wore shades. Her hair didn't move in the breeze. It could have been hair spray, or an act of will. It could also have been that even the wind wasn't going to screw around with Jack Mercier's wife. I wondered what excuse she had come up with for leaving her guests back at the house; maybe she told them they needed milk.

I opened the door as she reached the first step to the porch. “Take a wrong turn, Mrs. Mercier?” I asked.

“One of us has,” she replied, “and I think it might be you.”

“I never catch a break. I see those two roads diverging in a forest, and damn if I don't take the one that ends at a cliff edge.”

We stood about ten paces apart, eyeing each other up like a pair of mismatched gunfighters. Deborah Mercier couldn't have looked more like a WASP if her coat had been striped with yellow and her eyes had been on the sides of her head. She removed her glasses and those pale blue eyes held all the warmth of the Arctic Sea, the pupils tiny and receding like the bodies of drowned sailors sinking into their depths.

“Would you like to come inside?” I asked. I turned away and heard her footsteps on the wood behind me. They stopped before they reached the door. I looked back at her and saw her nostrils twitch a little in mild disgust as her gaze passed over the interior of my home.

“If you're waiting for me to carry you over the threshold, I ought to tell you that I have a bad back and we might not make it.”

Her nostrils twitched a little more and her eyes froze over entirely, trapping the pupils at the size of pinpoints. Then, carefully, the heels of her black pumps making a sound like the clicking of bones on the floorboards, she followed me into the house.

I led her to the kitchen and offered her coffee. She declined, but I went ahead and started making a pot anyway. I watched as she opened her coat and sat down, revealing a tight black formal dress that ended above her knees. Her legs, like the rest of her, looked good for forty-something. In fact, she would have looked good for forty, and not bad for thirty-five. She removed a pack of cigarettes from her bag and lit up with a gold Dunhill lighter. She took a long drag on the cigarette, then blew a thin stream of smoke through her pursed lips.

“Feel free to smoke,” I said.

“If I was concerned, I'd have asked.”

“If I was concerned, I'd make you put it out.”

Her head turned a little to one side, and she smiled emptily. “So you think you can make people do what you want?”

“I believe we may have that in common, Mrs. Mercier.”

“It's probably the only thing we do have in common, Mr. Parker.”

“Here's hoping,” I replied. I brought the coffee pot to the table and poured myself a cup.

“On second thought, I will have some of that coffee,” she said.

“Smells good, doesn't it?”

“Or maybe everything else in here smells so bad. You live alone?”

“Just me and my ego.”

“I'm sure the two of you are very happy together.”

“Ecstatic.” I found a second cup and filled it, then took a carton of skimmed milk from the refrigerator and placed it between us.

“I'm sorry, I don't have any sugar.”

She reached into her bag again and produced some Sweet'n Low. She added it to the coffee and stirred it before tasting it carefully. Since she didn't fall to the floor clutching her throat and gasping, I figured it was probably okay. She didn't say anything for a time; she just sipped and smoked.

“Your house needs a woman's touch,” she said at last, as she took another drag on her cigarette. She held in the smoke until I thought it would come out her ears.

“Why, you do cleaning as well?”

She didn't reply. Instead, she finally released the smoke and dropped the remains of the cigarette into the coffee. Classy. She didn't learn that at the Madeira School for Girls.

“I hear you were married once.”

“That's right, I was.”

“And you had a child, a little girl.”

“Jennifer,” I replied, keeping my tone as neutral as possible.

“And now your wife and child are dead. Somebody killed them, and then you killed him.”

I didn't respond. My silence didn't appear to concern Mrs. Mercier.

“That must have been very hard for you,” she continued. There was no trace of sympathy in her voice but her eyes were briefly thawed by what might have been amusement.

“Yes, it was.”

“But you see, Mr. Parker, I still have a marriage, and I still have a child. I don't like the fact that my husband has hired you, against my wishes, to investigate the death of a girl who has nothing to do with our lives. It is disturbing my relationship with my husband, and it is interfering with the preparations for my daughter's wedding. I want it to stop.”

I noticed the emphasis on “my” daughter but didn't comment. For the final time, she took something from her handbag. It was a check.

“I know how much my husband paid you,” she said, passing the folded check across the table toward me, her red nails like eagle's talons dipped in a rabbit's blood. “I'll pay you the same amount to walk away.”

She withdrew her hand. The check lay on the table between us, looking lonely and unloved.

“I don't believe you're so wealthy that you can afford to turn down that kind of money, Mr. Parker. You were willing to take it from my husband, so you should have no difficulty in accepting it from me.”

I made no move for the check. Instead, I poured myself some fresh coffee. I didn't offer any to Mrs. Mercier. I guessed from the floating cigarette butt that she'd had enough.

“There's a difference. Your husband was buying my time, and whatever expertise I could offer. You, on the other hand, are trying to buy me.”

“Really? Then, under the circumstances, my offer is particularly generous.”

I smiled. She smiled back. From a distance-a really long distance-we might have looked like we were having a good time. It seemed like the right moment to put an end to that misapprehension.

“When did you find out that Grace was your husband's child?” I asked. I experienced a brief surge of satisfaction as her face paled, and her head rocked back a little as if she'd been slapped.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” she replied, but she didn't sound convincing.

“For a start, there's the breakup of your husband's partnership with Curtis Peltier seven months before her birth and his willingness to spend a significant amount of money employing me to investigate the circumstances of her death. Then, of course, there's the resemblance. It must have been like a kick in the guts every time you saw her, Mrs. Mercier.”

She stood up and grabbed the check from the table. “You're a mean bastard,” she hissed.

“That might hurt a little more if it came from somebody else, Mrs. Mercier, but not from you.” I reached forward suddenly and clamped her wrist tightly in my right hand. For the first time, she looked scared.

“It was you, wasn't it? It was you who told Grace about the Fellowship. Did you set her on their trail knowing what they would do to her? I don't believe that your husband said anything to her about it, and her thesis dealt with the past, not the present, so there was no reason for her to start prying into the organization. But you must have been aware of what your husband was doing, of the moves he was making against them. What did you say to her, Mrs. Mercier? What information did you give her that led those people to kill her?”

Deborah Mercier bared her teeth at me and her fingernails raked across the back of my hand, immediately drawing blood. “I'll make sure my husband ruins your life for what you just said to me,” she snarled, as I released her hand.

“I don't think so. I think when he finds out that you sent his daughter to her death, then it's your life that won't be worth living.”

I stood as she snatched up her bag and started for the hallway. Before she could reach the kitchen door, I blocked her with my arm.

“There's one more thing you should know, Mrs. Mercier. You and your husband have set in motion a chain of events that you can't control. There are people out there who are prepared to kill to protect themselves. So you should be glad that your husband is paying me because, as of now, I'm the best chance you have of finding those people before they come after both of you.”

She stared straight ahead as I spoke. When I had finished, I lowered my hand and she walked quickly to the door. She left it open behind her, and I watched as she started the Mercedes and turned it quickly onto the road. I looked down at my hand and the four deep parallel lines she had left on it. Blood ran down my fingers and pooled at the nails and I thought, for a moment, that they looked a lot like Deborah Mercier's. I cleaned the cuts under the faucet, then put on my jacket and a pair of leather gloves to cover the wound, grabbed my keys, and headed out to my car.

I should have asked her for a ride, I thought, as I followed the lights of her car all the way to Prouts Neck. I kept far enough back so as not to arouse her suspicion, but I was still close enough to make the security barrier before it closed behind her.

There were five or six cars in the parking lot when I pulled up. Mrs. Mercier had already disappeared into the house and the porn star with the mustache was lumbering forward from the porch. He was wearing an earpiece and he had a radio mike attached to his lapel. I guessed that security had been stepped up somewhat after Epstein's death.

“This is a private party,” he said. “You'll have to leave.”

“I don't think so,” I replied.

“Then I'll have to make you leave,” he said. He looked happy at the prospect, and poked a finger into my chest to emphasize the point.

I grabbed the finger with my left hand, gripped his wrist tightly with my right, and pulled. There was a soft pop as the finger dislocated, and the porn star's mouth opened wide in pain. I turned him around, pulling his arm behind his back, and shoved him hard into the side of the Mercedes. His head banged emptily against it and he collapsed on the ground, holding his uninjured hand against his scalp.

“If you're a good boy, I'll fix your finger on my way out,” I said.

A couple of other security guards were moving toward me when Jack Mercier appeared on the steps and called them off. They stopped and formed a loose circle around me, like wolves waiting for the signal to fall upon their prey.

“It seems like you've invited yourself to my party, Mr. Parker,” said Mercier. “I guess you'd better come in.”

I walked up the steps and followed him through the house. It didn't look like much of a party. There was a lot of expensive booze floating around on trays and a handful of people stood about in nice clothes, but nobody seemed to be having a very good time. A man I recognized as Warren Ober put down his champagne flute and started to follow us.

Mercier led me into the same book-lined room in which we had sat the previous week, the rhombus of sun now replaced by a thin trickle of moonlight. The bug was gone, probably already devoured by something bigger and meaner than it could ever be. There were no coffee cups brought this time. Jack Mercier wasn't offering me his hospitality. His eyes were red rimmed and he had shaved himself badly, so that patches of bristle remained under his chin and below his nostrils. Even his white dress shirt looked wrinkled, and sweat patches showed beneath his armpits when he took off his jacket. His bow tie was slightly crooked, and despite his cologne I thought I detected a sour smell.

I walked straight to the photograph of Mercier and Ober with Beck and Epstein, and removed it from the wall. I threw it to him and he caught it awkwardly in his arms. “What haven't you told me?” I said, as the door opened and Ober entered. He closed it behind him and both of us looked at Mercier.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, Mr. Mercier, what were the four of you doing that could have drawn these people down on you? How do you think Grace became involved?”

He recoiled visibly at the question.

“And why did you hire me, because you must have known who was responsible for her death?”

He didn't say anything at first, just sat down heavily in an armchair across from me and put his head in his hands. “Did you know that Curtis Peltier was dead?” he asked me, in tones so soft they were almost inaudible.

I felt an ache in my stomach and leaned back against the table to steady myself.

“Nobody told me.”

“He was only found this evening. He'd been dead for days. I was going to call you as soon as my guests left.”

“How did he die?”

“Somebody broke into his house, tortured him, then slit his arms in his bathtub.”

He looked up at me, his eyes demanding pity and understanding. In that instant, I almost struck Jack Mercier.

“He never knew, did he?” I said. “He didn't know anything about the Fellowship, about Beck or Epstein. The only thing that mattered to him was his daughter, and he gave her everything he could. I saw the way he lived. He had a big house that he couldn't keep clean, and he lived in his kitchen. Do you even know where your kitchen is, Mr. Mercier?”

He smiled. It wasn't a nice smile. There was no compassion in it, no kindness. I doubted if any voter had ever seen Jack Mercier smile like that. “My daughter, Mr. Parker,” he growled. “Grace was my child.”

“You're deluded, Mr. Mercier.” I couldn't keep the disgust from my voice.

“I stayed out of her life because that was what we all agreed, but I was always concerned for her. When she applied to the scholarship fund, I saw a chance to help her. Hell, I'd have given her the money even if she'd wanted to take surfing at Malibu Tech. She intended to study religious movements in the state during the last fifty years, and one in particular. I encouraged her to do that in order to have her near me while she studied the books in my collection. It was my fault, my mistake.

“Because we didn't know about the link, not then,” he said, and the weight of his guilt fell upon him like an executioner's blade.

“What link?”

Behind us, Warren Ober coughed. “I have to advise you, Jack, not to say anything more in Mr. Parker's presence.” He was using his best, five-hundred-dollar-per-hour voice. As far as Ober was concerned, Grace's death was immaterial. All that mattered was ensuring that Jack Mercier's guilt remained private, not public.

The gun was in my hand before I even knew it. Through a red haze I saw Ober backing away and then the muzzle of the gun was buried in the soft flesh beneath his chin. “You say one more word,” I whispered, “and I won't be held responsible for my actions.”

Despite the fear in his eyes, Ober spat the next six words. “You are a thug, Mr. Parker,” he said.

“So are you, Mr. Ober,” I replied. “The only difference is that you're better paid than I am.”

“Stop!”

It was the voice of an emperor, a voice used to being obeyed. I didn't disappoint it. I removed the gun from Ober's chin and put it away.

“Safety was on,” I told him. “Can't be too careful.”

Ober adjusted his bow tie and started calculating the man-hours required to ruin me in court.

Mercier poured himself a brandy and another for Ober. He waved the decanter at me, but I declined. He handed Ober a glass, took a long sip from his own, then resumed his seat and began talking as if nothing had happened.

“Did Curtis tell you about our respective familial connections to the Aroostook Baptists?”

I nodded. Behind me, a cloud passed over the moon and the light that had shone into the room was suddenly lost in its shadow.

“They were lost for thirty-seven years, until now,” he said softly. “I believe that the man responsible for their deaths is still alive.”

The first hint that Faulkner was alive had come in March, and it arrived from an unlikely source. A Faulkner Apocalypse was offered for auction, and Jack Mercier had acquired it, just as he had successfully acquired the twelve other extant examples of Faulkner's work. While he spoke, he removed one from his cabinet and handed it to me.

Faulkner had the talent of a medieval illuminator, using decorated letters interweaved with fantastic animals to begin each chapter. The ink was iron gall, the same mix of tannins and iron sulfate used in medieval times. Each chapter contained illustrations drawn from ornate works similar to the Cloisters Apocalypse, images of judgment, punishment, and torment executed in a detail that bordered on the sadistic.

“This was the first Apocalypse, inspired by Cranach, and the illustrations and calligraphy are consistent throughout,” explained Mercier. “Other Faulkner Apocalypses are influenced by later illustrators, such as Meidner and Grosz, and the script is correspondingly more modern, although in some ways equally beautiful.”

But the thirteenth Apocalypse acquired by Mercier was different. An adhesive had been used on the pages before stitching because the weight of the paper was lighter than before and the binder appeared to have experienced some difficulty in applying the stitches. Mercier, a bibliophile, had spotted traces of the adhesive shortly after his purchase and had sent the book to be examined by a specialist. The calligraphy and brush strokes on the illustrations were authentic-Faulkner had created the Apocalypse, without doubt-but the adhesive was of a type that had been in production for less than a decade and had been used in the original construction of the book and not during any later repairs.

Faulkner, it seemed, was alive, or at least he had been until comparatively recently, and if he could be found then an answer to the riddle of the disappearance of the Aroostook Baptists might at last be within reach.

“To be honest, my interest was in the books, not the people,” said Mercier, an admission that hardened my growing dislike for him. “My familial connections to Faulkner's flock added an extra frisson, but nothing more. I found the nature of his work fascinating.”

It was the source of the thirteenth Apocalypse that led Mercier to the Fellowship; it emerged, after investigation, that it had been sold through a firm of third-rate Waterville lawyers by Carter Paragon, to cover his gambling debts. But rather than pounce on Paragon, Mercier decided to wait and put pressure on his organization by other means. He found Epstein, who had already suspected that the Fellowship was far more dangerous than it appeared and was willing to be the nominal challenger of its tax-exempt status. He found Alison Beck, who had witnessed the killing of her husband years before and who was now pressing for the case to be reopened and a full investigation made into a possible link to the Fellowship, based on threats received from its minions in the months before David Beck's death. If Mercier could tear apart the front that was the Fellowship, then what was behind it might at last be revealed.

Meanwhile, Grace's work on the Aroostook Baptists had continued. Mercier had largely forgotten about it, until her life was ended in the sound of a gunshot that sent owls shooting from the trees and small animals scurrying into the undergrowth. Then Peltier had come to him, and the bond that linked them both to Grace had drawn them uneasily together.

“She went after the Fellowship, Mr. Mercier, and she died for it.”

He looked at me, and I saw his eyes desperately try to veil themselves in ignorance. “I don't know why she went after them,” he continued, a denial of an accusation that had not yet been made. Something bubbled in his voice, as if he was struggling to keep his bile down.

“I think you do,” I said. “I think that's why you hired me-to confirm what you already suspected.”

And at last I saw the veil tear and fall from his eyes in flames. He seemed about to utter some further denial, until a female voice was heard outside the door and the words melted like snowflakes on his tongue.

Deborah Mercier burst into the room. She looked at me in shock, then at her husband.

“He followed me here, Jack,” she said. “He broke into our house and assaulted our staff. Why are you sitting there drinking with him?”

“Deborah,…” Mercier began, in what might, in other circumstances, have been soothing tones but now sounded like the whispered assurances of an executioner to a condemned man.

“Don't!” she screamed. “Just don't. Have him arrested. Have him thrown out of the house. I don't care if you have him killed, but get him out of our lives!”

Jack Mercier stood and walked over to his wife. He held her firmly by the shoulders and looked down, and for the first time she seemed smaller and less powerful than he.

“Deborah,” he repeated, and drew her to him. Initially it seemed like a gesture of love, but as she struggled in his grip it became the opposite. “Deborah, what have you done?”

“I don't know what you mean,” she said. “What do you mean, Jack?”

“Please, Deborah,” he said. “Don't lie. Please don't lie, not now.”

Instantly, her struggles ceased and she began to cry.

“We have no further need of your services, Mr. Parker,” said Mercier, as her body shook. His back was to me as he spoke, and he made no effort to turn. “Thank you for your help.”

“They'll come after you,” I said.

“We'll deal with them. I intend to hand the Faulkner Apocalypse over to the police after my daughter's wedding. That will be an end to it. Now, please, leave my house.”

As I walked from the room, I heard Deborah Mercier whisper, over and over again, “I'm sorry, Jack, I'm sorry.” Something in her voice made me look back, and the glare from a single cold eye impaled me like a butterfly on a pin.

The porn star wasn't anywhere to be found as I left, so I couldn't reset his finger. I was about to get in my car when Warren Ober walked down the steps behind me and stood in the shell of light from the open door.

“Mr. Parker,” he called.

I paused and watched as his features tried to compose themselves into a smile. They gave up the struggle at the halfway point, making him look like a man who has just tasted a bad piece of fish.

“We'll forget about that little incident in the study, so long as you understand that you are to take no further part in investigating Grace Peltier's death or any events connected with it.”

I shook my head. “It doesn't work that way. As I already explained to Mrs. Mercier, her husband just bought my time and whatever expertise I could bring to the case. He didn't buy my obedience, he didn't buy my conscience, and he didn't buy me. I don't like walking away from unsolved cases, Mr. Ober. It raises moral difficulties.”

Ober's face fell, his carefully ordered features crumbling under the weight of his disappointment. “Then you'd better find yourself a good lawyer, Mr. Parker.”

I didn't reply. I just drove away, leaving Ober standing in the light like a solitary angel waiting to be consumed by the darkness.

Jack Mercier hadn't hired me to find out who had killed Grace, or that was not his primary reason for hiring me. He wanted to find out why she had been looking into the Fellowship to begin with, and I think he had suspected the answer all along, that he had seen it in his wife's eyes every time Grace was mentioned. Deborah Mercier wanted Grace to go away, to disappear. She and Jack already had a daughter together; he didn't need another. Through her husband, she knew just how dangerous those involved in the Fellowship could be, and she fed Grace to them.

I parked in the guest lot of the Black Point Inn and joined Angel and Louis in the big dining room, where they were sitting at a window, their table littered with the remains of what looked like a very enjoyable, and pretty expensive, dinner. I was happy to see them spending Mercier's money. It was tainted by its contact with his family. I ordered coffee and dessert, then told them all that had taken place. When I had concluded, Angel shook his head.

“That Deborah Mercier, she's some piece of work.”

We left the table and moved into the bar. Angel, I couldn't help but notice, was still wearing the red boots, to which he had added a pair of substandard chinos and a white shirt with a twisted seam. He caught me looking at the shirt and smiled happily.

“TJ Maxx,” he said. “Got me a whole new wardrobe for fifty-nine ninety-five.”

“Pity you didn't climb into it and throw yourself in the sea,” I replied.

They ordered beers, and a club soda for me. We were the only people in the bar.

“So what now?” asked Louis.

“Tomorrow night we pay a long overdue visit to the Fellowship,” I replied.

“And until then?”

Outside, the trees whispered and the waves broke whitely on Crescent Beach. I could see the lights of Old Orchard floating in the darkness like the glowing lures of strange, unseen sea creatures moving through the depths of black oceans. They called me to them, these echoes of the past, of my childhood and of my youth.

Like those nightmarish, colorless predators, the past could devour you if you weren't careful. It had consumed Grace Peltier, its dead hand reaching up from the mud and silt of a lake in northern Maine and pulling her down. Grace, Curtis, Jack Mercier: all of them linked together by the dreams, disappearance, and eventual exhumation of the Aroostook Baptists. Grace wasn't even born when they vanished, yet part of her had always been buried with them, and her short life had been blighted by the mystery of their disappearance.

Now, a misstep, a minor accident, had revealed the truth about their end. They had emerged into the world, breaking through the thin crust that separated present from past, life from death.

And I had seen them.

“I'm going north,” I said. “Somehow, this is all connected with the Aroostook Baptists. I want to see the place where they died.”

Louis looked at me. Beside him, Angel was silent.

It was happening again, and they knew it.

THE SEARCH FOR SANCTUARY

Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier…

The precise nature and extent of Lyall and Elizabeth's relationship must remain, perforce, largely unknown, but it is reasonable to assume that it included a significant element of sexual attraction. Elizabeth was a pretty woman, aged thirty-five at the time she joined the community. It is hard to find early pictures of her in which she is not smiling, although later photographs find her a more somber presence beside the unsmiling form of her husband, Frank. Elizabeth came from a small, poor family but appears to have been a bright young woman who, in a more enlightened (or liberal) community, and under less constrained financial circumstances, might have been given the space that she needed to grow. Instead, she made her match with Frank Jessop, fifteen years her senior but with some land and money to his name. It does not appear to have been a particularly happy union, and Frank was troubled with ill health in the years following the birth of their first child, James, which created a further rift between husband and wife.

Lyall Kellog was two years Elizabeth's junior and seventeen years younger than her own husband. Pictures that remain of Lyall show him to have been a stocky individual of medium height with slightly blunt features-in other words, by no means a conventionally handsome man. From all accounts he seems to have been quite happily married, and Elizabeth Jessop must have exerted an unusually strong influence for him not only to risk his marriage and the wrath of the Reverend Faulkner but to contravene his own strong religious beliefs.

Those who knew Lyall recall him as a gentle, almost sensitive man who could argue what sometimes seemed to others to be obscure points of religious belief with those considerably more educated than himself. He owned a large number of biblical tracts and commentaries, and was prepared to travel for a day to listen to a particularly notable speaker. It was on one of these trips that he first encountered the Reverend Faulkner.

Meanwhile, Faulkner's grip on the community had tightened by November 1963. Like Sandford before him, he demanded absolute obedience and forbade any contact with those outside the community, except for one period in the first weeks of winter when he asked each family to write to relatives in order to solicit donations of food, clothes, and money. Since most of the families were estranged from their own relatives, these letters proved largely useless, although Lena Myers did send a small sum of money.

The only relative to attempt to contact members of the community directly was a cousin of Katherine Cornish. He brought a sheriff's deputy to the settlement, fearing that some harm had befallen his kinfolk. Katherine Cornish was permitted a brief meeting with him, under Faulkner's supervision, to ease his fears. According to Elizabeth Jessop, the Cornish family was then punished by being forced to spend the night in an unheated barn, praying constantly. When they fell asleep, they were awakened by cold water thrown on them by “Adam,” Leonard Faulkner.

Letter from Elizabeth Jessop to her sister, Lena Myers, dated November 1963 (used by kind permission of the estate of Lena Myers)

Dearest Lena,

Thank you for your generosity. I am sorry I have not written sooner like I promised but things are hard here. I feel like Frank is watching me all the time and waiting for me to make a mistake. I don't think he knows for sure but I guess maybe I have been acting different.

I still see L. when I can. Lena, I have been with him again. I have prayed to God to aid me, but so help me I see him in my dreams and I want him. I feel like this cannot end well but I am powerless to stop it. It has been a long time, Lena, since a man touched me like that. Now that I have tasted the fruit I want no other. I hope that you understand.

There is bad feeling among the pilgrims. Some of them have been talking against Preacher Faulkner because of his ways. They say that he is too hard and there is even talk of asking him to return some of the money we gave him, just enough so that folks will have enough to fall back on if need be. There is trouble too with the boy and the girl. The girl has been ill, and her voice is now almost gone. She can no longer sing at suppertime, and the Preacher proposes to use some of our money to pay for a doctor for her. Laurie Perrson almost died for want of a doctor, but he will not let his own child suffer. Billy Perrson called him a hypocrite to his face.

But the boy is the worst of them. He is evil, Lena. There is no other word for him. James had a kitten. He brought it with him from Portland. It used to feed on field mice and what we could spare from our own table. It was a pretty little brown thing and he called it Jake.

Yesterday, Jake went missing. We searched the house but could find no trace of him. When the time came for James to take his daily lessons at the Preacher's house he slipped away and went looking for his kitten instead. We didn't know he had gone until Lyall heard him crying in the forest and went to see what was ailing him.

He found James standing by a shed in the woods. It used to be an old outhouse for some property that had burnt down years before and the children were told that it was out of bounds to them for fear that they might get up to badness if they were allowed near it. Lyall told me that the boy was just standing at the door to the shed, shaking and crying.

Someone had tied Jake by the neck to a nail set into the floor of the shed. The rope was only two or three inches long and the kitten was lying almost flat on the floor. There were spiders all over it, Lena, little brown spiders just the size of a quarter like no one had ever seen before. They were crawling over the kitten's mouth and eyes and the kitten was scratching and mewing and damn near choking itself on the rope. Then Lyall said the kitten went into convulsions and died, just like that.

Lyall swears that he saw the boy Adam hanging-around that shed where he had no business being and he told the Preacher so. But the Preacher spoke the commandments to him and warned him of the punishments of bearing false witness against his neighbor. The menfolk supported Lyall and the Preacher warned them not to set their hearts against him. All the time the boy Adam just watched and didn't speak a word but Lyall says the boy smiled at him and Lyall thought that maybe if the boy could have found a way to tie him to a nail and let the spiders feed on him as well then he would have.

I don't know what will happen here, Lena. Winter is coming on and I can only see things getting harder for us, but with the Lord's help we will prevail. I will pray for you and yours. My love to you all.

Your sister,

Elizabeth

P.S. I enclose a newspaper clipping. Make of it what you will.

VICTIM OF DROWNING TRAGEDY TO BE BURIED TODAY

(from the Bangor Daily News , October 28, 1963)