The Unquiet

Prologue

This world is full of broken things: broken hearts, broken promises, broken people. This world, too, is a fragile construct, a honeycomb place where the past leaches into the present, where the weight of blood guilt and old sins causes lives to collapse and forces children to lie with the remains of their fathers in the tangled ruins of the aftermath.

I am broken, and I have broken in return. Now I wonder how much hurt can be visited upon others before the universe takes action, before some outside force decides that enough has been endured. I once thought that it was a question of balance, but I no longer believe that. I think that what I have done was out of all proportion to what was done to me, but that is the nature of revenge. It escalates. It cannot be controlled. One hurt invites another, on and on until the original injury is all but forgotten in the chaos of what follows.

I was a revenger once. I will be one no more.

But this world is full of broken things.

The Guesser removed the fold of bills from his pocket, licked his thumb, and discreetly counted the day’s takings. The sun was setting, shedding itself in shards of burning red like blood and fire on the water. There were still people moving along the boardwalk, sipping sodas and eating hot buttered popcorn, while distant figures strolled along the beach, some hand in hand with another and some alone. The weather had altered in recent days, the evening temperature dropping noticeably and a sharp wind, a herald of a greater change to come, toying with the grains of sand as dusk descended, and the visitors no longer lingered as they once did. The Guesser felt his time there drawing to a close, for if they would not pause, then he could not work, and if he could not work, then he was no longer the Guesser. He would just be a small man standing before a rickety assemblage of signs and scales, trinkets and baubles. Without an audience to witness their display, his skills might as well not exist. The tourists had begun to thin, and soon this place would hold no appeal for the Guesser and his fellows: the hucksters, the nickel-a-ride merchants, the carnies, and the flimflam men. They would be forced to depart for more rewarding climes, or hole up for the winter to live on the summer’s earnings.

The Guesser could taste the sea and the sand upon his skin, salty and life-affirming. He never failed to notice it, even after all these years. The sea gave him his living, in its way, for it drew the crowds to it, and the Guesser was waiting for them when they came, but his affinity for it ran deeper than the money that it brought him. No, he recognized something of his own essence in it, in the taste of his sweat that was an echo of his own distant origins and the origin of all things, for he believed that a man who did not understand the lure of the sea was a man who was lost to himself.

His thumb flipped expertly through the bills, his lips moving slightly as he ran the count in his head. When he was done, he added the sum to his running total, then compared it with his earnings from the same time last year. He was down, just as last year had been down from the year before, and that year less than its predecessor in turn. People were more cynical now, and they and their children were less inclined to stand before a strange little man and his primitive-looking sideshow. He had to work ever harder to earn even less, although not so little that he was about to consider giving up his chosen profession. After all, what else would he do? Clear tables at a buffet, maybe? Work behind the counter at Mickey D’s like some of the more desperate retirees that he knew, reduced to cleaning up after mewling infants and careless teenagers? No, that wasn’t for the Guesser. He had been following this path for the best part of forty years, and the way he felt he figured he was good for a few more yet, assuming he was spared by the great dealer in the sky. His mind was still sharp, and his eyes, behind the black-framed lenses, were still capable of taking in all that he needed to know about his marks in order to continue to make his modest living. Some might term what he had a gift, but he did not call it that. It was a skill, a craft, honed and developed year upon year, a vestige of a sense that was strong in our ancestors but had now been dulled by the comforts of the modern world. What he had was elemental, like the tides and currents of the ocean.

Dave “the Guesser” Glovsky had first arrived in Old Orchard Beach in 1948, when he was thirty-seven years old, and since then both his pitch and the tools of his trade had remained largely unchanged. His little concession on the boardwalk was dominated by an old wooden chair suspended by chains from a set of R. H. Forschner scales. A yellow sign, hand-painted roughly with a squiggly line drawing of Dave’s face, advertised his occupation and his location, just for those folks who maybe weren’t entirely sure where they were or what they were seeing once they got there. The sign read: the guesser, palace playland, old orchard beach, me.

The Guesser was a fixture at Old Orchard. He was as much a part of the resort as the sand in the soda and the saltwater taffy that sucked the fillings from teeth. This was his place, and he knew it intimately. He had been coming here for so long, plying his trade, that he was acutely aware of seemingly inconsequential changes to his environment: a fresh coat of paint here, a mustache shaved there. Such things were important to him, for that was how he kept his mind keen and that, in turn, was how he put food on the table. The Guesser noticed all that went on around him, filing the details away in his capacious memory, ready to extract that knowledge at the very moment when it would most profit him to do so. In a sense, his nickname was a misnomer. Dave Glovsky did not guess. Dave Glovsky noticed. He estimated. He gauged. Unfortunately, Dave “the Noticer” Glovsky did not have quite the same ring about it. Neither did Dave “the Estimator,” so Dave “the Guesser” it was, and Dave “the Guesser” it would stay.

The Guesser would guess your weight to within three pounds, or you won a prize. If that didn’t salt your bacon-and there were folks who didn’t particularly want their weight broadcast to a good-humored crowd on a bright summer’s day, thank you for asking and be about your business, just as the Guesser wasn’t overly anxious to test the strength of his scales by dangling three hundred pounds of all-American womanhood from them just to prove a point-then he was equally happy to take a swing at your age, your birth date, your occupation, your choice of car (foreign or domestic), even the brand of cigarettes that you favored. If the Guesser proved to be incorrect, then you went on your merry way clutching a plastic hair clip or a small bag of rubber bands, happy in the knowledge that you’d beaten the funny little man with his crooked, childlike signs-weren’t you the smart one?-and it might take you a while to figure out that you’d just paid the man fifty cents for the pleasure of knowing something that you already knew before you arrived, with the added bonus of receiving ten rubber bands that cost about one cent wholesale. And it could be that maybe you looked back at the Guesser, wearing his white “Dave the Guesser” T-shirt, the letters ironed on in black at the concession stand farther along the boardwalk as a favor to Dave because everybody knew the Guesser, and you figured that maybe the Guesser was a very smart guy indeed.

Because the Guesser was smart, smart in the way that Sherlock Holmes was smart, or Dupin, or the little Belgian, Poirot. He was an observer, a man who could ascertain the main circumstances of another’s existence from his clothes, his shoes, the way he carried his cash, the state of his hands and his fingernails, the things that caught his interest and attention as he walked along the boardwalk, even the minute pauses and hesitations, the vocal inflections and unconscious gestures by which he revealed himself in a thousand different ways. He paid attention in a culture that no longer put any value upon such a simple act. People did not listen or see, but only thought that they listened and saw. They missed more than they perceived, their eyes and ears constantly attuned to novelty, to the next new thing that might be thrown at them by TV, the radio, the movies, discarding the old before they had even begun to understand its meaning and its value. The Guesser was not like them. He belonged to a different order, to an older dispensation. He was attuned to sights and smells, to whispers that sounded loud in his ears, to tiny odors that tickled at the hairs in his nose and showed up as lights and colors in his mind. His sight was only one of the faculties that he used, and often it played a subsidiary role to the rest. Like early man, he did not rely on his eyes as his primary source of information. He trusted all his senses, utilizing them to the fullest. His mind was like a radio, constantly tuned to even the faintest transmissions of others.

Some of it was easy, of course: age and weight were relatively simple for him. Cars were pretty much a done deal, too, at least at the beginning when most of the people who came to Old Orchard for their vacations did so in American-made cars. It was only later, in the eighties and nineties, that imports would become more prevalent, but even then, the odds were still about fifty-fifty.

Occupations? Well, sometimes useful details might emerge in the course of the pitch, as the Guesser listened to their greetings, their answers, the way they responded to certain key words. Even while he was listening to what they were saying, Dave was examining their clothes and skin for telltale signs: a worn or stained shirt cuff on the right hand indicated someone who might have a desk job, and a lowly one if they had to wear their work shirt on vacation, while a closer examination of their hands might reveal the impression of a pen upon the thumb and index finger. Sometimes, there was a slight flattening to the fingertips on one or both hands, the former perhaps suggesting that here was someone who was used to pounding an adding machine, the latter almost certainly the sign of a typist. Chefs always had little burns on their forearms, grill marks on their wrists, calluses upon the index fingers of their knife hands, healed and semihealed lines upon their flesh where the blades had nicked them, and the Guesser had yet to meet a mechanic who could scrub every trace of oil from the grooves of his skin. He could tell a cop simply by looking at him, and military types might just as well have arrived in full regalia.

But observation without memory was useless, and the Guesser was constantly taking in details from the crowds that thronged the seashore, from fragments of conversations to flashes of possessions. If you decided to light up, then Dave would remember that the pack was Marlboro and that you were wearing a green tie. If you parked your car within sight of his concession, then you were “red suspenders Ford.” Everything was compartmentalized in case it might prove useful, for although the Guesser never really lost out on his bets, there was the small matter of professional pride and also the necessity of providing a good show for the watching folks. The Guesser hadn’t survived at Old Orchard for decades just by guessing wrong, then fobbing off the tourists with rubber bands by way of apology.

He pocketed his earnings and took a last look around before he prepared to close up. He was tired, and his head hurt a little, but he would miss being here once the crowds were gone. The Guesser knew that there were those who bemoaned the state of Old Orchard and felt that the beautiful beach had been ruined by a century of development, by the arrival of roller coasters and fun houses and merry- go-rounds, by the smell of cotton candy and hot dogs and suntan lotion. Maybe they were right, but there were plenty of other places for folks like that to go, while there weren’t so many where people could come for a week with their kids and live relatively cheaply while enjoying the sea, the sand, and the pleasure of trying to beat men like the Guesser. True, Old Orchard wasn’t like it once was. The kids were tougher, maybe even a little more dangerous. The town was looking more tawdry than before, and there was a sense of innocence lost rather than innocence recaptured. Ocean Park, the family-oriented religious resort that was part of Old Orchard, now looked increasingly like a throwback to another era, when education and self-improvement were as much a part of one’s vacation time as amusement and relaxation. He wondered how many of those who came here to drink cheap beer and eat lobster from paper plates knew of the Methodists who had formed the Old Orchard Campground Association back in the 1870s, sometimes attracting crowds of ten thousand or more to hear speakers extoll the benefits of a virtuous, sin-free life. Good luck trying to convince today’s tourists to give up an afternoon of sunbathing to listen to stories from the Bible. You didn’t have to be Dave the Guesser to figure out the odds on that one.

Nevertheless, the Guesser loved Old Orchard. Through his little concession, he had been privileged to meet men like Tommy Dorsey and Louis Armstrong, and he had the pictures on his wall to prove it. But while those encounters represented the great peaks of his career, his dealings with ordinary people had given him consistent pleasure and allowed him to stay young and sharp inside. Without people, Old Orchard would have meant far less to him, sea or no sea.

The Guesser was already putting away his signs and his scales when the man approached; or perhaps it would be truer to say that the Guesser became aware of his approach before he even saw the man, for his long-departed ancestors had not relied on their senses to play guessing games in flame-lit caves. No, they had required these senses to stay alive, to warn them of the coming of predators and enemies, and so their continued survival was dependent upon their constant engagement with the world around them.

Immediately, the Guesser turned casually and began taking in the stranger: late thirties, but looking older than his years; his blue jeans looser than was the current fashion; his T-shirt white but stained slightly at the belly; his boots heavy and suited to a motorcycle, not a car, yet without the wear on the soles that might have come from riding a hog; his hair dark and greased back in a D.A.; his features sharp and almost delicate; his chin small, his head compressed as if from long suffering beneath a great weight placed upon it, the bones in his face shaped like a kite beneath his tanned skin. He had a scar below his hairline: three parallel lines, as though the tines of a fork had been inserted into his flesh and dragged down toward the bridge of his nose. His mouth was crooked, permanently downturned on one side and upturned slightly on the other, giving the impression that the symbolic masks of drama had been bisected and their disparate halves fused together over his skull. The lips were too big. They might almost have been called sensuous, but this was not a man whose demeanor spoke of such things. His eyes were brown, but flecked with tiny white flaws, like stars and planets suspended in their darkness. He smelled of eau de cologne and, lurking beneath, the rank stink of rendered animal fats, of blood and decay and waste voided in the final moment when living became dying.

Suddenly, Dave the Guesser wished that he had decided to pack up fifteen minutes earlier, that his concession stand were firmly locked and bolted, and that he had already put as much distance between him and his beloved scales and signs as it was possible for a man of his advancing years to do. But even as he tried to break eye contact with the new arrival, he still found himself analyzing him, drawing information from his movements, his clothing, his scent. The man reached into one of the front pockets of his denims and drew from it a steel comb, which he raked through his hair with his right hand, his left following along behind to smooth down any stray strands. He cocked his head slightly to the right as he did so, as though sizing himself up in some mirror visible only to him, and it took the Guesser a moment to realize that he himself was that mirror. The stranger knew all about Dave and his “gift,” and even as he willed himself to stop, the Guesser was separating the preening man into his constituent parts, and the man was aware of what was being done and was enjoying seeing himself refracted through the older man’s perceptions.

Clean, pressed denims, but with dirt on the knees. The stain on the T-shirt, like dried blood. The earth beneath the nails. The smell. Sweet God, the smell…

And now the stranger was in front of him, and the comb was being eased back into the tight sheath of his pocket. The smile widened, all false bonhomie, and the man spoke.

“You the guessin’ man?” he asked. His accent had an element of the South to it, but there was Down East there as well. He was trying to hide it, but Dave’s ear was too acute. The touch of Mainer to it wasn’t native, though. No, this was a man who could blend in, when he chose, who picked up the speech patterns and mannerisms of those around him, camouflaging himself the way-

The way predators did.

“I’m all done for today,” the Guesser said. “Tired out. I got nothing left.”

“Ah, you got time for one more,” came the reply, and the Guesser knew that he was not being cajoled. He was being told.

He looked around, seeking a distraction, an excuse to depart, but now it seemed as if the stranger had cleared a space for himself, for there was no one else within earshot, and the attention of those who passed was clearly directed elsewhere. They looked at the other concessions, at the sea, at the shifting sands. They looked at distant cars and the unfamiliar faces of those who passed them by. They looked at the old boardwalk and at their feet and deep into the eyes of husbands and wives whom they had long since ceased to find interesting but who now held inside them some previously unsuspected, if fleeting, source of fascination. And had one suggested to them that they had somehow decided to turn their attention away from the little Guesser and the man who now stood before him, they would have dismissed the idea without appearing to give it a moment’s serious thought, but to an observant person-to someone like Dave the Guesser-the fleeting expression of unease upon their faces as they spoke would have been enough to give the lie to their protestations. In that moment, they had become a little like the Guesser, some ancient, primal instinct woken from dormancy on a bright summer evening with the sun setting bloodily in the west. Maybe they truly didn’t realize that they were doing it, or perhaps self-respect and self-preservation prevented them from acknowledging it, even to themselves, but they were giving space to the man with the slicked-back hair. He exuded menace and threat and harm, and just to acknowledge his existence was to risk drawing attention to oneself. Better, then, to look away. Better for another to suffer, for a stranger to incur his displeasure, than to have him take an interest in one’s own affairs. Better to keep walking, to get into one’s car, to drive away without a single backward glance for fear that one might find him staring into one’s eyes, his lazy half smile slowly widening as he memorized faces, the numbers on a license plate, the color of the paintwork, the dark hair of a wife, the budding body of an adolescent daughter. Better to pretend, then. Better not to notice. Better that than to wake up in the night to find such a man staring down at you, blood warm upon him and a telltale light coming from a nearby bedroom, something dripping softly upon the bare floorboards within, something that was once alive there now alive no longer…

Dave knew then that this man was not so different from himself. He was an observer, a cataloger of human characteristics, but in the stranger’s case the observations were a prelude to harm. And now there were only the sounds of waves breaking, and voices fading, and the noises of the fairground rides dulling and muting as the stranger spoke, his tone insisting upon the attention of the listener to the exclusion of all else.

“I want you to guess somethin’ about me,” he said.

“What do you want to know?” said the Guesser, and all pretense of goodwill departed from his own voice. It would serve no purpose here. They were equals, of a sort.

The man closed his right hand into a fist. Two quarters rose from between his clenched fingers. He raised the hand toward Dave, and Dave removed the coins with fingers that barely trembled.

“Tell me what I do for a livin’,” said the stranger. “And I want you to make your best guess. Your very best guess.”

Dave heard the warning. He could have come up with something harmless, something innocent. You dig roads, maybe. You’re a gardener. You-

You work in an abattoir.

No, too close. Mustn’t say that.

You tear things apart. Living things. You hurt and you kill and you bury the evidence beneath the ground. And sometimes they fight back. I see the scars around your eyes, and in the soft flesh beneath your jaw. There’s a cluster of rough strands just above your forehead, and an inflamed patch of red at its base where the hair hasn’t grown back properly. What happened? Did a hand get free? Did fingers grasp in desperation and tear a clump from your head? And even in your pain, was there not a part of you that relished the struggle, that enjoyed having to work for its prize? And what of those incisions below your hairline, what of them? You are a violent man, and violence has been visited upon you. You have been marked as a warning to others, so that even those who are foolish and distracted might know you when you come. Too late for the one who did it, perhaps, but a warning nonetheless.

A lie might be the death of him. Maybe not now, maybe not even a week from now, but the man would remember, and he would return. Some night, Dave the Guesser would go back to his room, and the stranger would be sitting in an easy chair in the darkness opposite the window, taking long drags from a cigarette in his left hand, his right toying with a blade.

“Glad you could make it at last. I been waitin’ for you. You remember me? I asked you to guess somethin’ about me, but you guessed wrong. You gave me a child’s toy as a prize, a prize for beating the Guesser, but that ain’t prize enough for me, and you was wrong to think that it was. I figure I ought to correct your misapprehension. I figure you really ought to know what I do for a livin’. Here, let me show you…”

The stranger turned his hands slowly for Dave, displaying the palms, then the backs of the hands, and finally the almost delicate fingers, a thin sliver of dirt visible beneath the tip of each nail.

“So tell me,” he said. “Tell me true.”

Dave looked him in the eye.

“You cause pain,” said Dave.

The stranger looked amused.

“Is that so?” he said. “You hurt people.”

“Uh-huh?”

“You’ve killed,” and Dave both heard himself say the words and saw himself from without. He was floating apart from the scene unfolding before him, his soul already anticipating the separation from this life that was to come.

The stranger shook his head and looked at his own hands, as though quietly astonished at what they had revealed.

“Well,” he said at last, “I reckon that’s worth fifty cents of any man’s money, and no mistake. That’s quite the tale. Quite the tale.” He nodded to himself. “Uh-huh,” he said softly. “Uh-huh.”

“You want to claim a prize?” said Dave. “You can have a prize if I guessed wrong.”

He gestured behind him at the rubber bands, the hair clips, the packs of balloons.

Take one. Please take one. Take ’em all, anything you want, just get away from me. Walk away and keep walking and never, ever come back here. And if it’s any consolation, know that I’ll never forget the smell of you or the sight of you. Not ever. I’ll keep it with me, and I’ll always be watching for you in case you come again.

“Nah,” said the stranger. “You keep ’em. I was entertained. You entertained me.”

He backed away from Dave the Guesser, still nodding, still softly “uh-huh”-ing.

Just as the Guesser felt certain he was about to be rid of him, the stranger stopped.

“Professional pride,” he said suddenly.

“Pardon me?” said the Guesser.

“I think that’s what we got in common: we take pride in what we do. You could have lied to me, but you didn’t. I could have lied to you and taken one of them shitty balloon packs, but I didn’t do that either. You respected me, and I respected you in return. We’re men, you and I.”

The Guesser didn’t reply. There was nothing to say. He tasted something in his mouth. It was sour and unpleasant. He wanted to open his mouth and breathe in the salt sea air, but not yet, not while the stranger was nearby. He wanted to be rid of him first, for fear that some of his essence might enter him in that single breath, polluting his being.

“You can tell folks about me, if you like,” said the stranger. “I don’t much care either way. I’ll be long gone before anybody takes it into his head to come looking for me, and even if they do find me, what are they gonna say? That some little sideshow huckster in a cheap T-shirt told them to look me up, that maybe I might have somethin’ to hide or a story to tell?”

His hands busied themselves retrieving his pack of cigarettes from his jeans. The pack was battered, and slightly flattened. He shook a slim brass lighter from within, then followed it with a cigarette. He rolled the cigarette between his finger and thumb before lighting up, the lighter and the pack disappearing back into his pocket.

“Maybe I’ll be through here again someday,” he said. “I’ll look you up.”

“I’ll be here,” said the Guesser.

Come back if you like, then, you animal. Make no mistake, I’m scared of you, and I believe that I have good cause to be, but don’t think I’m going to show it. You won’t get that satisfaction, not from me.

“I hope so,” said the stranger. “I surely do hope so.”

But the Guesser never saw him again, although he thought of him often, and once or twice in his remaining years, as he stood on the boardwalk and appraised the passing crowds, he was conscious of eyes upon him and he felt certain that, somewhere nearby, the stranger was watching him, perhaps in amusement or, as the Guesser often feared, perhaps with regret for ever allowing the truth about himself to be revealed in such a way, and with the desire to undo that mistake.

Dave “the Guesser” Glovsky died in 1997, nearly fifty years after he had first arrived in Old Orchard Beach. He spoke of the stranger to those who would listen, of the stink of fats that arose from him and the dirt beneath his nails and the copper stains upon his shirt. Most of those who heard merely shook their heads at what they believed was just another attempt by the showman to add to his own legend; but some listened, and they remembered, and they passed on the tale so that others might be watchful for such a man in case he returned.

The Guesser, of course, had been right: the man did come back in the years that followed, sometimes for his own purposes and sometimes on the orders of others, and he both took and created life. But when he returned for the last time, he drew the clouds around him like a cloak, darkening the skies as he came, seeking death and the memory of a death in the faces of others. He was a broken man, and he would break others in his anger.

He was Merrick, the revenger.

Chapter I

It was an overcast late November morning, the grass splintered by hoarfrost, and winter grinning through the gaps in the clouds like a bad clown peering through the curtains before the show begins. The city was slowing down. Soon the cold would hit hard, and, like an animal, Portland had stored its fat for the long months ahead. There were tourist dollars in the bank; enough, it was hoped, to tide everyone over until Memorial Day. The streets were quieter than they once were. The locals, who coexisted sometimes uneasily with the leaf peepers and outlet shoppers, now had their home almost to themselves once more. They claimed their regular tables in diners and coffee shops, in restaurants and bars. There was time to pass idle conversation with waitresses and chefs, the professionals no longer run ragged by the demands of customers whose names they did not know. At this time of year, it was possible to feel the true rhythm of the small city, the slow beating of its heart untroubled by the false stimulus of those who came from away.

I was sitting at a corner table in the Porthole, eating bacon and fried potatoes and not watching Kathleen Kennedy and Stephen Frazier talking about the secretary of state’s surprise visit to Iraq. There was no sound from the TV, which made ignoring it a whole lot easier. A stove fire burned next to the window overlooking the water, the masts of the fishing boats bobbed and swayed in the morning breeze, and a handful of people occupied the other tables, just enough to create the kind of welcoming ambience that a breakfast venue required, for such things rely on a subtle balance.

The Porthole still looked like it did when I was growing up, perhaps even as it had since it first opened in 1929. There were green-marbled linoleum tiles on the floor, cracked here and there but spotlessly clean. A long, wooden counter, topped with copper, stretched almost the entire length of the room, its black-cushioned metal stools anchored to the floor, the counter dotted with glasses, condiments, and two glass plates of freshly baked muffins. The walls were painted light green, and if you stood up, you could peer into the kitchen through the twin serving hatches divided by a painted “Scallops” sign. A chalkboard announced the day’s specials, and there were five beer taps serving Guinness, a few Allagash and Shipyard ales, and, for those who didn’t know any better, or who did and just didn’t give a rat’s ass, Coors Light. There were buoys hanging from the walls, which in any other dining establishment in the Old Port might have come across as kitsch but here were simply a reflection of the fact that this was a place frequented by locals who fished. One wall was almost entirely glass, so even on the dullest of mornings the Porthole appeared to be flooded with light.

In the Porthole you were always aware of the comforting buzz of conversation, but you could never quite hear all of what anyone nearby was saying, not clearly. This morning about twenty people were eating, drinking, and easing themselves into the day the way Mainers will do. Five workers from the Harbor Fish Market sat in a row at the bar, all dressed identically in blue jeans, hooded tops, and baseball caps, laughing and stretching in the warmth, their faces bitten red by the elements. Beside me, four businessmen had cell phones and notepads interspersed with their white coffee mugs, making out as if they were working but, from the occasional snatches that drifted over to me and could be understood, seemingly more interested in singing the praises of Pirates coach Kevin Dineen. Across from them, two women, a mother and daughter, were having one of those discussions that required a lot of hand gestures and shocked expressions. They looked as if they were having a ball.

I liked the Porthole. The tourists don’t come here much, certainly not in winter, and even in summer they hadn’t tended to disturb the balance much until someone strung a banner over Wharf Street advertising the fact that there was more to this seemingly unpromising stretch of waterfront than met the eye: Boone’s Seafood Restaurant, the Harbor Fish Market, the Comedy Connection, and the Porthole itself. Even that hadn’t exactly led to an onslaught. Banner or no banner, the Porthole didn’t scream the fact of its existence, and a battered soda sign and a fluttering flag were the only actual indication of its presence visible from the main drag of Commercial. In a sense, you kind of needed to know that it was there to see it in the first place, especially on dark winter mornings, and any lingering tourists walking along Commercial at the start of a bitter Maine winter’s day needed to have a pretty good idea of where they were headed if they were going to make it to spring with their health intact. Faced with a bracing nor’easter, few had the time or the inclination to explore the hidden corners of the city.

Still, off-season travelers sometimes made their way past the fish market and the comedy club, their feet echoing solidly on the old wood of the boardwalk that bordered the wharf to the left, and found themselves at the Porthole’s door, and it was a good bet that the next time they came to Portland, they would head straight for the Porthole again, but maybe they wouldn’t tell too many of their friends about it because it was the kind of place that you liked to keep to yourself. There was a deck outside overlooking the water, where people could sit and eat in summer, but in winter they removed the tables and left the deck empty. I think I liked it better in winter. I could take a cup of coffee in hand and head out, safe in the knowledge that most folks preferred to drink their coffee inside where it was warm, and that I wasn’t likely to be disturbed by anyone. I would smell the salt, and feel the sea breeze on my skin, and if the wind and the weather were right, the scent would remain with me for the rest of the morning. Mostly, I liked that scent. Sometimes, if I was feeling bad, I didn’t care so much for it, because the taste of the salt on my lips reminded me of tears, as if I had recently tried to kiss away another’s pain. When that happened, I thought of Rachel, and of Sam, my daughter. Often, too, I thought of the wife and daughter who had gone before them.

Days like that were silent days.

But today I was inside, and I was wearing a jacket and tie. The tie was a deep red Hugo Boss, the jacket Armani, yet nobody in Maine ever paid much attention to labels. Everyone figured that if you were wearing it, then you’d bought it at a discount, and if you hadn’t and had paid ticket instead, then you were an idiot.

I hadn’t paid ticket.

The front door opened, and a woman entered. She was wearing a black pantsuit and a coat that had probably cost her a lot when she bought it but was now showing its age. Her hair was black, but colored with something that lent it a hint of red. She looked a little surprised by her surroundings, as though, having made her way down past the battered exteriors of the wharf buildings, she had expected to be mugged by pirates. Her eyes alighted on me and her head tilted quizzically. I raised a finger, and she made her way through the tables to where I sat. I rose to meet her, and we shook hands.

“Mr. Parker?” she said.

“Ms. Clay.”

“I’m sorry I’m late. There was an accident on the bridge. The traffic was backed up a ways.”

Rebecca Clay had called me the day before, asking if I might be able to help her with a problem she was having. She was being stalked, and, not surprisingly, she didn’t much care for it. The cops had been able to do nothing. The man, she said, seemed almost to sense their coming, because he was always gone by the time they arrived, no matter how stealthily they approached the vicinity of her house when she reported his presence.

I had been doing as much general work as I could get, in part to keep my mind off the absence of Rachel and Sam. We had been apart, on and off, for about nine months. I’m not even sure how things had deteriorated so badly, and so quickly. It seemed like one minute they were there, filling the house with their scents and their sounds, and the next they were leaving for Rachel’s parents’ house, but, of course, it wasn’t like that at all. Looking back, I could see every turn in the road, every dip and curve, that had led us to where we now were. It was supposed to be a temporary thing, a chance for both of us to consider, to take a little time out from each other and try to recall what it was about the other person with whom we shared our life that was so important to us we could not live without it. But such arrangements are never temporary, not really. There is a sundering, a rift that occurs, and even if an accommodation is reached, and a decision made to try again, the fact that one person left the other is never really forgotten, or forgiven. That makes it sound like it was her fault, but it wasn’t. I’m not sure that it was mine either, not entirely. She had to make a choice, and so did I, but her choice was dependent upon the one that I made. In the end, I let them both go, but in the hope that they would return. We still talked, and I could see Sam whenever I wanted to, but the fact that they were over in Vermont made that a little difficult. Distances notwithstanding, I was careful about visiting, and not just because I didn’t want to complicate an already difficult situation. I took care because I still believed that there were those who would hurt them to get at me. I think that was why I let them leave. It’s so hard to remember now. The last year had been…difficult. I missed them a great deal, but I did not know either how to bring them back into my life, or how to live with their absence. They had left a void in my existence, and others had tried to take their place, the ones who waited in the shadows.

The first wife, and the first daughter.

I ordered coffee for Rebecca Clay. A beam of morning sunlight shone mercilessly upon her, exposing the lines in her face, the gray seeping into her hair despite the color job, the dark patches beneath her eyes. Some of that was probably due to the man she claimed was bothering her, but it was clear that much of it had deeper origins. The troubles of her life had aged her prematurely. From the way her makeup had been applied, hurriedly and heavily, it was possible to guess that here was a woman who didn’t like looking in the mirror for too long, and who didn’t like what she saw staring back at her when she did.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been here before,” she said. “ Portland has changed so much these last few years, it’s a wonder that this place has survived.”

She was right, I supposed. The city was changing, but older, quirkier remnants of its past somehow contrived to remain: used bookstores, and barbershops, and bars where the menu never changed because the food had always been good, right from the start. That was why the Porthole had survived. Those who knew about it valued it, and made sure to pass a little business its way whenever they could.

Her coffee arrived. She added sugar, then stirred it for too long.

“What can I do for you, Ms. Clay?”

She stopped stirring, content to begin speaking now that the conversation had been started for her.

“It’s like I told you on the phone. A man has been bothering me.”

“Bothering you how?”

“He hangs around outside my house. I live out by Willard Beach. I’ve seen him in Freeport too, or when I’ve been shopping at the mall.”

“Was he in a car, or on foot?”

“On foot.”

“Has he entered your property?”

“No.”

“Has he threatened you, or physically assaulted you in any way?”

“No.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“Just over a week.”

“Has he spoken to you?”

“Only once, two days ago.”

“What did he say?”

“He told me that he was looking for my father. My daughter and I live in my father’s old house now. He said he had some business with him.”

“How did you respond to that?”

“I told him that I hadn’t seen my father in years. I told him that, as far as I was aware, my father was dead. In fact, since earlier this year he’s been legally dead. I went through all of the paperwork. I didn’t want to, but I suppose it was important to me, and to my daughter, that we finally achieved some kind of closure.”

“Tell me about your father.”

“He was a child psychiatrist, a good one. He worked with adults too, sometimes, but they had usually suffered some kind of trauma in childhood and felt that he could help them with it. Then things started to change for him. There was a difficult case: a man was accused of abuse by his son in the course of a custody dispute. My father felt that the allegations had substance, and his findings led to custody being granted to the mother, but the son subsequently retracted his accusations and said that his mother had convinced him to say those things. By then it was too late for the father. Word had leaked out about the allegations, probably from the mother. He lost his job and got beaten up pretty badly by some men in a bar. He ended up shooting himself dead in his bedroom. My father took it badly, and there were complaints filed about his conduct of the original interviews with the boy. The Board of Licensure dismissed them, but after that my father wasn’t asked to conduct any further evaluations in abuse cases. It shook his confidence, I think.”

“When was this?”

“About six years ago, maybe a little more. It got worse after that.” She shook her head in apparent disbelief at the memory. “Even talking about it, I realize how crazy it all sounds. It was just a mess.” She looked around to reassure herself that nobody was listening, then lowered her voice a little. “It emerged that some of my father’s patients were sexually abused by a group of men, and there were questions asked again about my father’s methods and his reliability. My father blamed himself for what happened. Other people did too. The Board of Licensure summoned him to appear for an initial informal meeting to discuss what had happened, but he never made it. He drove out to the edge of the North Woods, abandoned his car, and that was the last anyone ever saw or heard of him. The police looked for him, but they never found any trace. That was in late September 1999.”

Clay. Rebecca Clay.

“You’re Daniel Clay’s daughter?”

She nodded. Something flashed across her face. It was an involuntary spasm, a kind of wince. I knew a little about Daniel Clay. Portland is a small place, a city in name only. Stories like Daniel Clay’s tended to linger in the collective memory. I didn’t know too many of the details, but like everyone else I’d heard the rumors. Rebecca Clay had summarized the circumstances of her father’s disappearance in the most general terms, and I didn’t blame her for leaving out the rest: the whispers that Dr. Daniel Clay might have known about what was happening to some of the children with whom he was dealing, the possibility that he might have colluded in it, might even have engaged in abuse himself. There had been an investigation of sorts, but there were records missing from his office, and the confidential nature of his vocation made it difficult to follow up leads. There was also the absence of any solid evidence against him, but that didn’t stop people from talking and drawing their own conclusions.

I looked closer at Rebecca Clay. Her father’s identity made her appearance a little easier to understand. I imagined that she kept herself to herself. There would be friends, but not many. Daniel Clay had cast a shadow upon his daughter’s life, and she had wilted under its influence.

“So you told this man, the one who’s been stalking you, that you hadn’t seen your father for a long time. How did he react?”

“He tapped the side of his nose and winked.” She replicated the gesture for me. “Then he said, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’ He told me that he’d give me some time to think about what I was saying. After that, he just walked away.”

“Why would he call you a liar? Did he give any indication that he might know something more about your father’s disappearance?”

“No.”

“And the police haven’t been able to trace him?”

“He melts away. I think they believe I’m making up stories to get attention, but I’m not. I wouldn’t do that. I-”

I waited.

“You know about my father. There are those who believe that he did something wrong. I think the police believe it too, and sometimes I wonder if they think I know more than I do about what happened, and that I’ve been protecting my father for all this time. When they came to the house, I knew what was on their minds: that I did know where he was, and somehow I’ve been in contact with him over the years.”

“And have you?”

She blinked hard, but she held my gaze.

“No.”

“But now it seems like the police aren’t the only ones who doubt your story. What does this man look like?”

“He’s in his sixties, I think. His hair is black. It looks dyed, and it’s in kind of a quiff, the way those ’fifties rock stars used to wear their hair. He has brown eyes, and there’s scarring here.” She pointed to her forehead, just below her hairline. “There are three parallel marks, like someone dug a fork into his skin and dragged it down. He’s short, maybe five-five or so, but stocky. His arms are real big, and there are folds of muscle at the back of his neck. He mostly wears the same clothes: blue jeans and a T-shirt, sometimes with a black suit jacket, other times with an old black leather jacket. He has a paunch, but he’s not fat, not really. His nails are very short, and he keeps himself real clean, except-”

She stopped. I didn’t disturb her as she tried to figure out the best way of formulating what she wanted to say.

“He wears some kind of cologne. It’s wicked strong, but when he was speaking to me, it was like I caught a hint of whatever it was masking. It was a bad smell, a kind of animal stench. It made me want to run away from him.”

“Did he tell you his name?”

“No. He just said that he had business with my father. I kept telling him my father was dead, but he shook his head and smiled at me. He said he wouldn’t believe any man was dead until he could smell the body.”

“Have you any idea why this man should have turned up now, so many years after your father’s disappearance?”

“He didn’t say. It could be that he heard news of the legal declaration of my father’s death.”

For probate purposes, under Maine law, a person was presumed dead after a continuous absence of five years during which time he had not been heard from and his absence had not been satisfactorily explained. In some cases, the court could order a “reasonably diligent” search, the notification of law enforcement and public welfare officials about the details of the case, and require that a request for information be posted in the newspapers. According to Rebecca Clay, she had complied with all the conditions that the court had set, but no further information about her father had emerged as a result.

“There was also a piece about my father in an art magazine earlier this year, after I sold a couple of his paintings. I needed the money. My father was a pretty talented artist. He spent a lot of time in the woods, painting and sketching. His work doesn’t go for much by modern standards-the most I ever got for one was a thousand dollars-but I’ve been able to sell some from time to time when money was scarce. My father didn’t exhibit, and he produced only a relatively small body of work. He sold by word of mouth, and his paintings were always sought after by those collectors familiar with him. By the end of his life he was receiving offers to buy work that didn’t even exist yet.”

“What kind of paintings are we talking about?”

“Landscapes, mostly. I can probably show you some photographs if you’re interested. I’ve sold them all now, apart from one.”

I knew some people in Portland ’s art scene. I thought I might ask them about Daniel Clay. In the meantime, there was the matter of the man who was bothering his daughter.

“I’m not just concerned for my own sake,” she said. “My daughter, Jenna, she’s just eleven. I’m afraid to let her out of the house alone now. I’ve tried to explain to her a little of what’s been happening, but I don’t want to frighten her too much either.”

“What do you want me to do about this man?” I said. It seemed like a strange question to ask, I knew, but it was necessary. Rebecca Clay had to understand what she was getting herself into.

“I want you to talk to him. I want you to make him go away.”

“That’s two different things.”

“What?”

“Talking to him and making him go away.”

She looked puzzled. “You’ll have to excuse me,” she said. “I’m not following you.”

“We need to be clear on some things before we begin. I can approach him on your behalf, and we can try to clear all of this up without trouble. It could be that he’ll see reason and go about his business, but from what you’ve told me it sounds like he’s got some notions fixed in his head, which means that he might not go without a fight. If that’s the case, either we can try to get the cops to take him in, and look for a court order preventing him from approaching you, which can be hard to get and even harder to enforce, or we can find some other way to convince him that he should leave you alone.”

“You mean threaten him, or hurt him?”

She seemed to quite like the idea. I didn’t blame her. I had met people who had endured years of harassment from individuals, and had seen them worn down by tension and distress. Some of them had resorted to violence in the end, but it usually just led to an escalation of the problem. One couple I knew had even ended up being sued by the wife’s stalker after the husband threw a punch in frustration, further entangling their lives with his.

“They’re options,” I said, “but they leave us open to charges of assault, or threatening behavior. Worse, if the situation is not handled carefully, then this whole affair could get much worse. Right now, he hasn’t done more than make you uneasy, which is bad enough. If we strike at him, he may decide to strike back. It could put you in real danger.”

She almost slumped with frustration.

“So what can I do?”

“Look,” I said, “I’m not trying to make out that there’s no hope of resolving this painlessly. I just want you to understand that if he decides to stick around, then there are no quick fixes.”

She perked up slightly. “So you’ll take the job?”

I told her my rates. I informed her that, as a one-man agency, I wouldn’t take on other jobs that might conflict with my work on her behalf. If it became necessary to call on outside help, I would advise her of any additional costs that might arise. At any point, she could call a halt to our arrangement, and I would try to help her find some other way of handling her problem before I left the job. She seemed content with that. I took payment up front for the first week. I didn’t exactly need the money for myself-my lifestyle was pretty simple-but I made a point of sending some money to Rachel every month even though she said it wasn’t necessary.

I agreed to start the following day. I would stay close to Rebecca Clay when she headed out to work in the mornings. She would inform me when she was leaving her office for lunch, for meetings, or to go home in the evening. Her house was fitted with an alarm, but I arranged to have someone check it out, just in case, and to fit extra bolts and chains if necessary. I would be outside before she left in the morning, and I would remain within sight of the house until she went to bed. At any time she could contact me, and I would be with her within twenty minutes.

I asked her if, by any chance, she might have a photograph of her father that she could give me. She had anticipated the request although she appeared slightly reluctant to hand it over after she had taken it from her bag. It showed a thin, gangly man wearing a green tweed suit. His hair was snow-white, his eyebrows bushy. He wore a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles, and he had a stern, old-fashioned air of academia about him. He looked like a man who belonged amid clay pipes and leather-bound volumes.

“I’ll have some copies made and get it back to you,” I said.

“I have others,” she replied. “Hold on to it for as long as you need to.”

She asked me if I would keep an eye on her while she was in town that day. She worked in real estate and had some business to attend to for a couple of hours. She was worried that the man might approach her while she was in the city. She offered to pay me extra, but I declined. I had nothing better to do anyway.

So I followed her for the rest of the day. Nothing happened, and there was no sign of the man with the dated quiff and the scars upon his face. It was tedious and tiring, but at least it meant that I did not have to return to my house, my not-quite-empty house. I shadowed her so that my own ghosts could not shadow me.

Chapter II

The revenger walked along the boardwalk at Old Orchard, close to where the Guesser’s concession had stood for summer upon summer. The old man was gone now, and the revenger supposed that he was probably dead; dead, or no longer capable of performing the feats that he once had, his eyes unable to see as clearly, his hearing muffled and decayed, his memory too fragmented to record and order the information being fed to it. The revenger wondered if the showman had remembered him until the end. He thought that might have been the case, for was it not in the man’s nature to forget little, to discard nothing that might prove useful?

He had been fascinated by the Guesser’s talent, had watched him discreetly for an hour or more before he had eventually approached him for the first time on that cool evening close to summer’s end. It was an extraordinary talent to find in such a small, strange-looking little man, surrounded by cheap trinkets in a simple booth: to be able to tell so much at a glance, to deconstruct an individual almost without thinking, forming a picture of his life in the time that it took most people to glance at a clock. From time to time he had come back to this place, and had hidden himself in the crowds, watching the Guesser from a distance. (And even then, had the little man not been aware of him? Had he not seen him scan the crowds uneasily, seeking the eyes that examined him too closely, his nostrils twitching like a rabbit sensing the approach of the fox?) Perhaps that was why he had come back here, as if by some faint chance the Guesser had chosen to remain in this place, seeing out the winter close by the water’s edge instead of fleeing it for warmer climes.

If the revenger had found him here, what would he have said? Teach me. Tell me how I may know the man whom I seek. I will be lied to. I want to learn how to recognize the lie when it comes. Would he have explained why he had come back to this place, and would the little man have believed him? Of course he would, for a lie would not slip past him.

But the Guesser was long gone, and so the revenger was left only with the memory of their single meeting. There had been blood on his hands that day. It had been a comparatively simple task to accomplish: a vulnerable man laid to rest, a man who might have been tempted to barter what he knew for protection from those who sought him. From the moment that he had fled, his time left on this earth had been counted in seconds and minutes, hours and days, and no more than that. As five days became six, he had been found, and he had been killed. There was fear at the end, but little pain. It was not for Merrick to torture or torment, though he did not doubt that, in those final moments, as the victims understood the implacable nature of the one who had come for them, there had been torment enough. He was a professional, not a sadist.

Merrick. That was his name then. It was the name on his record, the name that he had been given at birth, but it now meant nothing to him. Merrick was a killer, but he killed for others, not himself. It was an important distinction. A man who killed for his own purposes, his own ends, was a man at the mercy of emotions, and such men made mistakes. The old Merrick had been a professional. He was detached, disengaged, or so he told himself, although in the quiet after the kill, he sometimes allowed himself to acknowledge the pleasure that it gave him.

But the old Merrick, Merrick the killer, no longer existed. Another man had taken his place, dooming himself in the process, but what choice was there? Perhaps the old Merrick had been dying from the moment his child was born, his will weakened and ultimately broken by the knowledge that she was in the world. The revenger thought again of the Guesser, and of the moments they had passed together in this place.

If you looked at me now, old man, what would you see? You would see a man without a name, a father without a child, and you would see the fire of his rage consuming him from within.

The revenger turned his back on the sea, for there was work to be done.

The house was silent when I returned, a brief welcome bark from my dog, Walter. I was grateful for that. Since Rachel and Sam had left, it seemed that those other presences, long denied, had found ways to colonize the spaces once occupied by the two who had taken their place. I had learned not to answer their call, to ignore the creaking of boards or the sound of footsteps upon the bedroom ceiling, as though presences paced the attic space, seeking what was once theirs among the boxes and cases that filled the room; to dismiss the gentle tapping upon the windows when darkness came, choosing instead to call it something other than what it was. It sounded like branches stirred by the wind, their very tips glancing against the glass, except that there were no trees near my windows, and no branch had ever tapped with such regularity or such insistence. Sometimes I would awaken in the darkness without quite knowing what had disturbed my rest, conscious only that there had been sound where no sound belonged, and perhaps faintly aware of whispered words trailing off as my conscious mind began reerecting the barriers that sleep had temporarily lowered.

The house was never truly empty. Something else had made its home there.

I should, I know, have spoken to Rachel about it long before she left. I should have been honest with her and told her that my dead wife and my lost daughter, or some phantasms that were not quite them, would not give me peace. Rachel was a psychologist. She would have understood. She loved me, and she would have tried to help me in whatever way she could. It may be that she would have spoken of residual guilt, of the mind’s delicate balance, of how some suffering is so great and so terrible that a full recovery is simply beyond the capacities of any human being. And I would have nodded and said: Yes, yes, it is so, knowing that there was some truth in what she said and yet that it was not enough to explain the nature of what had occurred in my life since my wife and child were taken from me. But I did not say those words, afraid that to speak them aloud would be to give what was occurring a reality I did not want to acknowledge. I denied their presence, and my doing so tightened their grip upon me.

Rachel was very beautiful. Her hair was red, her skin pale. There was much of her in Sam, our daughter, and just a little of me. When last we spoke, Rachel told me that Sam was sleeping better now. There were times, while we had lived together beneath this roof, when her sleep had been disturbed, when Rachel or I would wake to the sound of her laughter, and occasionally her tears. One or the other of us would check on her and watch as she reached out with her small hands, snatching at unseen things in the air before her, or as she turned her head to follow the progress of figures that only she could see, and I would notice that the room was cold, colder than it should have been.

And Rachel, I thought, although she said nothing, noticed it too.

Three months before, I had attended a talk at the Portland Public Library. Two people, a doctor and a psychic, had debated the existence of supernatural phenomena. Frankly, I was slightly embarrassed to be there. I seemed to be keeping company with some people who didn’t wash often enough and who, judging by the questions that followed the session, were intent upon accepting as true every manner of mumbo jumbo, of which the spirit world appeared merely to be one small part, taking its place alongside angels who looked like fairies, UFOs, and alien lizards in human form.

The doctor spoke of auditory hallucinations that, he said, were by far the most common experienced by those who spoke of ghosts. Older people, he continued, particularly those with Parkinson’s, sometimes suffered from an ailment called Lewy body dementia, which caused them to see foreshortened bodies. That explained the prevalence of stories in which the spirits allegedly glimpsed appeared to be cut off at the knees. He spoke of other possible triggers, of diseases of the temporal lobe, of tumors and schizophrenia, and of depression. He described hypnagogic dreams, those vivid images that come to us in the spaces between sleeping and waking; and yet, he concluded, he still could not entirely explain away all reported supernatural experiences using science alone. There was too much that we did not know, he said, about the workings of the brain, about stress and depression, about mental illness and the nature of grief.

The psychic, by contrast, was an old fraud, full of the nonsense that seems to come with the worst of her kind. She spoke of beings with unfinished business, of seances and messages from the “world beyond.” She had a cable TV show and a premium-rate telephone line, and she performed her routine for the poor and the gullible at community halls and Elk lodges across the Northeast.

She said that ghosts haunt places, not people. I think that is a lie. Someone once told me that we create our own ghosts, that, as in dreams, each one of them is a facet of ourselves: our guilt, our regrets, our grief. Perhaps that may be an answer, of sorts. Each of us has our ghosts. Not every one of them is of our own creation, and yet they find us all, in the end.

Rebecca Clay sat in her kitchen. There was a glass of red wine before her, although it remained untouched, and all of the lights were extinguished.

She should have asked the detective to stay with her. The man had never approached her house, and she was confident in the security of its doors and windows and the efficiency of its alarms, particularly after they had been checked by a consultant recommended by the detective, but as the night had drawn in such precautions began to seem insufficient, and now she was aware of every noise in the old building, every settling of boards and rattling of cupboards as the wind played through the house like an errant child.

The window above the kitchen sink was very dark, quartered by the white frame, with nothing visible beyond. She might have been floating through the blackness of space, with only the thinnest of barriers separating her from the vacuum beyond, were it not for the gentle exclamation of unseen waves breaking upon the beach. For want of something better to do, she brought the glass to her lips and sipped carefully, noticing just too late the musty smell that arose from the wine. She grimaced, then spit it back into the glass and rose from the table. She walked to the sink and poured the liquid away before turning on the faucet and washing the red splashes from the metal. Leaning down, she sipped water straight from the flow, cleansing her mouth of the taste. It reminded her, uncomfortably, of the way her ex-husband had tasted, and the rankness of his kisses in the night as their marriage entered its final, terminal decline. She knew that he had detested her then just as much as she now hated him and he had wanted to be rid of this burden that they shared. Rebecca had no longer wished to offer her body to him, and had felt not even the tiniest residue of the attraction she had once enjoyed, but he had found a way to separate love and need. She wondered, sometimes, of whom he fantasized as he moved upon her. Sometimes, his eyes grew vacant, and she knew that even as his body was bound to hers, his true self was far away. At other times, though, there was an intensity to his gaze, a kind of loathing as he stared down at her that made the sexual act feel like a violation. There was no love in it then, and as she looked back upon those years, she found it hard to remember if there had ever been love there.

She had tried to do the same, of course, to conjure up images of past or potential lovers to make the experience less unpleasant, but they were too few, and they brought with them their own troubles, and in the end she had simply given up. Her appetites had faded to such a degree that it was easier just to think of other things entirely, or to look forward to the time when this man would be gone from her life. She could not even recall why she had wanted to be with him to begin with, and he with her. She supposed that, with a young daughter and all that had happened with her father, she had just desired some stability for a time, but he had not been the man to give it to her. There had been a debased element to his attraction to her, as though he saw something within her that was corrupted, and he had enjoyed touching it by entering her.

He had not even liked her daughter very much, the product of a relationship begun before she was fully ready to have one. (And who knows, perhaps she was never meant to have a proper relationship, not really?) Jenna’s father had drifted away. He had seen his child only a handful of times, and then only in the early years. He would not even recognize her now, Rebecca thought, then realized that she was thinking of him as if he were still alive. She tried to feel something for him, but she could not. His life had ended prematurely on a dark minor road far from home, his body dumped in a ditch, his hands tied roughly behind his back with fuse wire, blood soaking into the soft ground to feed the small scurrying things that burrowed up from below to scavenge upon him. He had not been good for her. He had probably not been good for very much at all, which was why he had ended up the way he did. He had never been one to keep his promises, to make good on his commitments. It was inevitable, she supposed, that one day he would encounter someone who would not forgive him his trespasses and would instead extract a final, grim payment from him.

For a time Jenna had asked a lot of questions about him, but in recent years they had become fewer and fewer until at last they were either forgotten, or she elected to keep them unspoken. She had not yet worked out how to inform Jenna that her father was dead. He had been killed earlier that year, and she had not found the right opportunity to talk with Jenna of his death. She was deliberately putting it off, she knew, yet still she waited. Now, in the darkness of her kitchen, she decided that when Jenna next raised the subject of her father, she would tell her daughter the truth about him.

She thought again about the private detective. In a sense, Jenna’s father was the reason that she had approached him. Jenna’s paternal grandfather had talked of the detective. He had wanted him to look for his son, but the detective had turned him down. She thought that the old man might have felt bitterness toward him, especially after the way things had worked out, but he had not. Perhaps he understood that his son was already a lost cause, even if he refused to surrender himself to the consequences of that understanding. If he had no faith in his son, then how could he expect another, a stranger, to believe in him instead? So he did not blame the detective for declining to help him, and Rebecca had remembered his name when the stranger came asking about her own father.

The faucet was still running, so she began to pour the rest of the bottle down the sink. The water circled around the drain, stained with red. Jenna was asleep upstairs. Rebecca was making plans to send her away if the detective could not quickly rid her of the stranger’s attentions. So far, the man had not approached Jenna, but she was concerned that such a situation might not last, and he would use the daughter to get at the mother. She would tell Jenna’s school that the child was sick, and she would deal with the repercussions when the time came. Then again, perhaps she might simply tell them the truth: that a man was bothering her, that Jenna might be at risk if she stayed in Portland. Surely they would understand.

Why now? she wondered. It was the same question the detective had asked her. Why, after so many years had gone by, would someone come asking about her father? What did he know about the circumstances of the disappearance? She had tried to ask him, but he had only tapped his forefinger against his nose in that knowing way of his before saying: “It ain’t his disappearance I’m interested in, missy. It’s another’s. He’ll know, though. He’ll know.”

The stranger had spoken of her father as though he were certain that he was still alive. More to the point, he seemed to think that she knew it too. He wanted answers she could not give him.

She lifted her head and saw herself reflected in the window. The sight gave her a sudden shock so that she jerked slightly, the face before her turning from a single image to a double through a flaw in the glass. But when she had regained her composure, the second image still remained. It was like her, yet not like her, as though she had somehow shed her skin as a snake might, and the discarded membrane had settled upon the features of another. Then the figure outside drew closer and the impression of a doppelgänger faded, leaving only the stranger in a leather jacket, his dark hair slick with grease. She heard his voice, distorted by the thickness of the glass, but she could not understand his words.

He pressed his hands against the glass, then slid the palms down until the tips of his fingers were resting against the window frame. He pushed, but the lock inside held. His face contorted in anger, and he bared his teeth.

“You get away from me,” she said. “You get away now, or so help me-”

His hands withdrew, and then Rebecca saw a fist punch its way through the glass, shaking the frame and showering the sink with fragments. She screamed, but the sound was caught up in the screeching of the alarm. Blood coursed down the shattered pane as the stranger pulled his hand back through the glass, not even attempting to avoid the jagged edges that ripped at his skin, tearing red channels across his palms and severing veins. He stared at the wounded fist, as if it were a thing beyond his control, surprising him with its actions. She heard the phone ring and knew that it was the monitoring company. If she didn’t reply, the police would be called, and someone would be sent to check up on her.

“I shouldn’t ought to have done that,” said the man. “I apologize.” But she could barely hear him over the shrieking of the alarm. He tilted his head to her. It was a strangely respectful gesture, almost old-fashioned in its courtliness. She stifled the urge to giggle, fearful that if she started to laugh she would never stop, that she would descend into hysteria and never surface from it again.

The phone stopped, then began to ring again. She made no move toward it. Instead, she watched as the stranger retreated, leaving her sink covered with his blood. She smelled it as, slowly, it combined with the stink of the corked wine to create something terrible and new, lacking only a chalice from which it might be sipped.

Chapter III

I sat at Rebecca Clay’s kitchen table, watching as she cleaned the broken glass from the sink with a brush and pan. There was still blood on the windowpane. She had notified the cops immediately after calling me, and a South Portland cruiser had arrived shortly before I did. I had identified myself to the patrolman and listened as Rebecca gave her statement, but otherwise I had not interfered in any way. Her daughter, Jenna, sat on a sofa in the living room, clutching a china doll that looked like it might once have belonged to her mother. The doll had red hair and wore a blue dress. It was obvious that it was an old and cherished possession. The mere fact that the girl was seeking comfort from it at this time attested to its value. She did not seem as shaken as her mother, appearing more puzzled than disturbed. She also struck me as both older and younger than her years: older in appearance yet younger in her demeanor, and I wondered if perhaps her mother sheltered and protected her a little too much.

There was another woman sitting with Jenna. Rebecca introduced her as April, a friend who lived nearby. She shook my hand and said that, since I was there and Jenna seemed okay, she’d go home so that she wouldn’t be in the way. Rebecca kissed her on the cheek, and they hugged, then April leaned back and held Rebecca at arm’s length. A look passed between them, one that spoke of shared knowledge, of years of friendship and loyalty.

“You call me,” said April. “Anytime.”

“I will. Thanks, hon.”

April kissed Jenna good-bye, then left.

I watched Jenna while Rebecca walked the cop around the outside of the house, pointing out the place where the stranger had stood. The child would grow up to be a very beautiful young woman. There was something of her mother in her, but it was rendered more striking by a slim, aquiline grace that came from elsewhere. I thought I saw something of her grandfather in her as well.

“You doing okay?” I asked her.

She nodded.

“When something like this happens, it can be kind of scary,” I continued. “It’s happened to me, and I was scared.”

“I wasn’t scared,” she said, and her tone was so matter-of-fact that I knew she wasn’t lying.

“Why not?”

“The man didn’t want to hurt us. He’s just sad.”

“How do you know that?”

She just smiled and shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Have you spoken to him?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know that he doesn’t mean you harm?”

She looked away, that almost beatific smile still on her face. The conversation was clearly over. Her mother came back inside with the cop, and Jenna told her that she was going back to bed. Rebecca hugged her and told her that she’d check on her later. Jenna said good-bye to the cop and me, then went upstairs to her room.

Rebecca Clay lived in an area known as Willard. Her house, a compact but impressive nineteenth-century structure in which she had grown up, and to which she had returned after her father’s disappearance, stood on Willard Haven Park, a dead end that ran perpendicular to Willard Beach, a few steps across Willard Haven Road. When the cop eventually left, promising that a detective would call either later that night or the next morning, I took a look around, walking in his footsteps, but it was clear that the man who had broken the glass was long gone. I followed a trail of blood to Deake Street, which ran parallel to Willard Haven Park on the right, then lost it where he had climbed into a car and driven away. I called Rebecca Clay from the sidewalk, and she gave me the names of some of the neighbors who lived within sight of where the car had been parked. Only one of them, a middle-aged woman named Lisa Hulmer, who sported the kind of look that suggested she might consider the description “whorish” a compliment, had seen anything, and even that wasn’t much help to me. She remembered a dark red car parked across the street, but she couldn’t tell me the make or the tag number. She did invite me into her home, though, and suggested that I might like to join her for a drink. I had clearly disturbed her in the act of consuming a jug of something fruity and alcoholic. When she closed the front door behind me, it reminded me uncomfortably of a cell slamming shut on a condemned man.

“It’s a little early for me,” I said.

“But it’s after ten-thirty!”

“I’m a late sleeper.”

“Me too.” She grinned and arced an eyebrow in what would only have passed for a suggestive manner if you were especially susceptible to suggestion, like a dog or a small child. “Once you get me into bed you just can’t get me out of it.”

“That’s…nice,” I said, for want of a better word.

“You’re nice,” she said. She swayed a little and fiddled with a seashell chain that hung between her breasts, but by then I had opened the door and was backing out of the house before she shot me with a dart and chained me to a wall in her basement.

“Did you find out anything?” Rebecca Clay asked me when I got back to her house.

“Not much, apart from the fact that one of your neighbors is in heat.”

“Lisa?” She smiled for the first time since I’d arrived. “She’s always in heat. She even propositioned me once.”

“You’re making me feel less special,” I said.

“I suppose I should have warned you about her, but-” She waved a hand at the broken window.

“Well, she was the only one who saw anything. She said there was a red car parked outside her house for a while, but the lighting isn’t so good there. She could be mistaken.”

Rebecca threw the last of the glass in her trash can and put the brush and pan in a closet. She then called a glazier, who promised to be out to her first thing in the morning. I helped her to tape some plastic over the damaged pane and, when all of that was done, she made a pot of coffee and poured each of us a cup. We both stayed standing while we drank.

“I don’t trust the police to do anything about this,” she said.

“Can I ask why?”

“They haven’t been able to do anything about him so far. Why should this time be any different?”

“This time he busted through a window. That’s criminal damage. It’s escalating. There’s blood, and the blood could be useful to the cops.”

“How? So they can use it to identify him if he kills me? By then it may be a little late for me. This man isn’t scared of the police. I was thinking about what you told me when we first met, about how this man might have to be forced to leave me alone. I want you to do that. I don’t care how much it costs. I have some money. I can afford to pay you to do it, and whomever else you want to hire to help you. Look at what he did here. He’s not going to go away, not unless someone makes him. I’m afraid for myself, and I’m afraid for Jenna.”

“Jenna seems like a very self-possessed girl,” I said, hoping to distract her from the subject until she had calmed down.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that she didn’t seem particularly frightened or shaken by what happened.”

Rebecca frowned. “I guess she’s always been that way. I’ll talk to her later, though. I don’t want her bottling something up just because she doesn’t want to upset me.”

“Can I ask where her father is?”

“Her father’s dead.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It’s okay. He never had much to do with her anyway, and we weren’t married. But I meant what I said: I want this man stopped, whatever it takes.”

I didn’t reply. She was angry and frightened. Her hands were still shaking from the shock of the incident. There would be time to talk in the morning. I told her that I’d stay if it made her feel better. She thanked me and made up the sofa bed in her living room.

“Do you carry a gun?” she asked as she prepared to head up the stairs to her bedroom.

“Yes.”

“Good. If he comes back, use it to kill him.”

“That’ll cost extra.”

She looked at me and for a moment I could tell that she was wondering if I was serious. Worryingly, I thought that she might even have been willing to pay.

The glazier arrived shortly after seven to replace the broken pane. He took a look at the sleeper couch, the busted window, and me, and clearly decided that he was entering the aftermath of a domestic dispute.

“It happens,” he whispered to me conspiratorially. “They throw stuff, but they don’t mean it to hit you, not really. Still, always pays to duck.”

I thanked him. It was probably good advice in any case. He nodded pleasantly to Rebecca and went about his work.

When he was done, I followed Rebecca’s Hyundai as she drove Jenna to school, then kept behind her all the way to her office. She worked a stone’s throw from where she lived, at Willard Square, just by the junction of Pillsbury and Preble. She had told me that she planned to be in the office until lunchtime, then had properties to visit in the afternoon. I watched her go inside. I had tried to keep a discreet distance from her while she drove. I hadn’t yet seen any sign of the man who was following her, but I didn’t want him to spot me with her, not yet. I wanted him to try to get close to her again, so that this time I could be waiting. If he was good, though, he’d pick me out easily, and I had already resigned myself to the fact that I would need to bring in more bodies if this thing was to be done right.

While Rebecca worked in her office, I drove back to Scarborough, walked and fed Walter, then showered and changed my clothes. I switched cars, substituting the Mustang for a green Saturn coupe, bought coffee and a Danish in Foley’s Bakery on Route 1, and headed back to Willard. Willie Brew’s auto shop in Queens had sourced the coupe for me and sold it on for what seemed like less than it must have cost to buy the tires. It was useful as a backup at times like this, but driving it made me feel like a rube.

“Somebody die in it?” I had asked Willie when he had first presented it to me as a possible second car.

Willie had made a show of sniffing the interior.

“I think it’s damp,” he had answered. “Probably. Maybe. Anyway, at what I’m asking for it, the corpse could be stuck to the seat and it would still be a bargain.”

He was right, but it remained kind of embarrassing to drive. Then again, it was hard to be inconspicuous in a 1969 Mustang Boss 302. Even the dumbest criminal is likely to look in his rearview at some point, and think, I wonder is that the same ’69 Mustang with go-faster stripes that was behind me earlier? Hey, maybe I’m being followed!

I checked in with Rebecca by phone, then took a walk around Willard to clear my head a little more and to pass some time. Sleeping on a couch with a cold wind whistling through a broken window wasn’t conducive to a good night’s sleep. Even after my shower, I still felt out of sync.

People across the water in Portland tended to look down some on South Portland. It had been a city for only a hundred years or so, which made it a baby by Maine standards. The building of the Million Dollar Bridge, the construction of Interstate 295, and the opening of the Maine Mall had taken away some of its charm by forcing local businesses to close, but it still had a character all its own. The area in which Rebecca Clay lived used to be called Point Village, but that was way back in the 1800s and by the time South Portland became a separate entity from Cape Elizabeth in 1895 it had become known simply as Willard. It was home to ships’ captains and fishermen, descendants of whom still lived in the area to this day. During the last century, a man named Daniel Cobb used to own a lot of the land around here. He grew tobacco and apples and celery. It was also said that he was the first person to grow iceberg lettuce in the East.

I walked down Willard Street to the beach. The tide was out, and the sand changed color dramatically from white to dark brown where the sea’s advance had halted. To the left, the beach stretched in a half-moon, ending at the Spring Point Ledge Light which marked the dangerous ledge on the west side of the main shipping channel into Portland Harbor. Beyond lay Cushing Island and Peaks Island, and the rust-streaked façade of Fort Gorges. To the right, a set of concrete steps led up to a pathway along the promontory that ended in a small park.

A trolley line used to run down Willard Street to the beach in summer. Even after the trolley stopped running, an old refreshment stand remained near what used to be the end of the line. It dated back to the 1930s, and it was still selling food as late as the 1970s, when it was called the “Dory” and the Carmody family passed out hot dogs and fries through its window to the beachgoers. My grandfather sometimes brought me there as a child, and he told me that the stand had once been part of the empire of Sam Silverman, who was kind of a legend in his time. It was said that he kept a monkey and a bear in a cage in order to attract people to his businesses, including the Willard Beach Bath House and Sam’s Lunch. The Carmodys’ hot dogs had been pretty good, but they couldn’t really match up to a bear in a cage. After we had spent a little time on the beach, my grandfather would always take me over to Mr. and Mrs. B’s store, the Bathras Market, on Preble Street, where he would order some Italian sandwiches to bring home for supper and Mr. B would carefully record the sale on my grandfather’s tab. The Bathras family had the most famous tab in South Portland, so that it seemed like every customer settled bills there on a weekly or biweekly basis, with cash rarely changing hands for small items.

I wondered if it was nostalgia that caused me to reflect warmly on something as simple as a grocery store or an old refreshment stand. That was part of it, I supposed. My grandfather had shared these places with me, but now both he and they were gone, and I would not have the opportunity to share them with another. Still, there were other places and other people. Jennifer, my first child, had never been given the chance to see them, not really. She was too young when she and her mother came up here with me, and before she was old enough to appreciate what she was encountering she was dead. But there was still Sam. Her life was just beginning. If I could keep her safe from harm, then, in time, she might be able to join me on a stretch of sand, or on a quiet street along which trolleys used to rumble, or by a river or on a mountain path. I could pass on some of these secrets to her, and she could hold them to herself and know that the past and the present were speckled with brightness, and that there was light as well as shade in the honeycomb world.

I turned back toward Willard Haven Road, following the slatted path across the sand, then stopped. Halfway up Willard Street, a red car sat idling by the curb. The windshield was almost reflective, so that when I looked at it I saw only the sky. As I began to approach, the driver put it into reverse, backing slowly up Willard, keeping the distance between us constant, then found space to turn and headed for Preble. The car was a Ford Contour, probably a midnineties model. I didn’t get the number of the plate. I couldn’t even be sure that inside was the man who was stalking Rebecca Clay, but I had a feeling it was he. I guessed that it had been too much to hope that he might not have connected me to her yet, but it wasn’t a disaster. My presence might be enough to rattle his cage. It wouldn’t frighten him off, but it might make him try to frighten me off instead. I wanted to meet him face-to-face. I wanted to hear what he had to say. Until then, I couldn’t begin to solve Rebecca Clay’s problem.

I walked back up Willard Street to where my car was parked. If the guy had made me, then at least I wouldn’t have to drive the Saturn any longer, so that was some cause for celebration. I called Rebecca and told her that I thought the man who was bothering her might be nearby. I gave her the color and the make of the car and told her not to leave the office, even for a short time. If her plans changed suddenly, she was to call me, and I would come and get her. She informed me that she planned to eat lunch at her desk, and she had called Jenna’s principal and asked that Jenna be allowed to wait with his secretary until she came to pick her up. The fact that Rebecca was staying at her office for a while gave me an hour or so to play around with. While she had told me a little about her father, I wanted to find out more, and I thought I knew someone who might be able to help.

I headed into Portland and parked across from the Public Market. I picked up two coffees and some scones from the Big Sky Bakery, on the grounds that it always paid to arrive somewhere with a bribe in hand, and headed over to the Maine College of Art on Congress. June Fitzpatrick owned a pair of galleries in Portland, and a black dog that took a dim view of anyone who wasn’t June. I found June in her gallery space in the college, setting up an exhibition of new work against its pristine white walls. She was a small, enthusiastic woman with a voice that had lost only a little of its English accent during her years in Maine, and a good memory for faces and names in the art world. Her dog barked at me from a corner, then contented itself with keeping a close eye on me in case I decided to snatch a canvas.

“Daniel Clay,” she said, as she sipped her coffee. “I remember him, although I’ve only ever seen a couple of examples of his work. He fell into the category of the gifted amateur. It was all very…tortured initially, I suppose you’d say: intermingled bodies, pale with eruptions of reds and blacks and blues, and all sorts of Catholic iconography going on in the background. Then he stopped doing those and moved on to landscapes. Misty trees, ruins in the foreground, that kind of thing.”

Rebecca had shown me some slides of her father’s work earlier that day, along with the single canvas she had retained. It was a painting of Rebecca as a child, although it was a little dark for my liking, the child a pale blur amid gathering shadows. I confessed to June that I hadn’t been very impressed with the rest of his work either.

“They’re not to my taste, it must be said. I always thought his later work was one step above paintings of moose and yachts, but then it wasn’t really an issue. He sold privately and didn’t exhibit, so I never had to find a polite way of saying ‘No.’ There are one or two people in Portland who were quite serious collectors of his work, though, and I know he gave away some of his paintings to friends. His daughter occasionally sells some of those that are still in her possession, and a couple of potential buyers usually come out of the woodwork. I think most of those who collect him probably knew him personally, or are attracted by the mystery surrounding him, for want of a better term. I heard that he stopped painting entirely sometime before he went missing, so I suppose they have a certain rarity value.”

“You remember anything about his disappearance?”

“Oh, there were rumors. There wasn’t much in the newspapers about the circumstances-the local press tends to be circumspect about such things at the best of times-but most of us knew that some of the children he’d been trying to help were subsequently abused again. There were people who wanted to blame him, I suppose, even among those who were prepared to believe that he wasn’t directly involved.”

“You have an opinion on it?”

“There can be only two views: Either he was involved or he wasn’t. If he was, then there’s nothing more to say. If he wasn’t, well, I’m no expert, but it can’t have been easy getting some of those kids to talk about what happened to them to begin with. Perhaps the additional abuse just pushed them further and further into their shells. I really can’t say.”

“Did you ever meet Clay?”

“Here and there. I tried to speak with him at a dinner we both attended, but he didn’t say very much. He was quiet and distant, very soft-spoken. He appeared overburdened by life. That would have been very shortly before his disappearance, so in this case appearances may not have been deceptive.”

She broke off to give instructions to a young woman who was hanging up a canvas by the window.

“No, no, that’s upside down!”

I looked at the canvas, which appeared to be a painting of mud, and not pretty mud either. The young woman looked at the canvas. The young woman then looked at me.

“How can you tell?” I said, and heard my words echoed. The young woman and I had both spoken at precisely the same moment. She smiled at me, and I smiled back. I then did a rough calculation of the difference in our ages and decided that I should limit myself to smiling at people who were born before 1980.

“Philistines,” said June.

“What’s it supposed to be?” I asked her.

“It’s an untitled abstract.”

“Does that mean the artist doesn’t know what it is either?”

“Possibly,” June conceded.

“Back to Daniel Clay. You said that the people who collected his work probably knew him. Any idea who some of those people might be?”

She walked over to the corner and absentmindedly scratched her dog behind the ear. The dog barked at me again, just to disabuse me of any notions I might have had about joining in.

“Joel Harmon is one.”

“The banker?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

“I know of him,” I said.

Joel Harmon was the retired president of IBP, the Investment Bank of Portland. He was one of those credited with rejuvenating the Old Port during the eighties, and his picture still appeared in newspapers whenever the city threw a celebration of something or other, usually with his wife on one arm and a crowd of slavering admirers surrounding them, all aroused by the lingering smell of fresh dollar bills. His popularity could fairly be ascribed to his wealth, his power, and the attraction those two elements generally arouse in those with significantly less of either. It was whispered that he had an “eye for the ladies,” even though his looks came pretty far down on the list of his attributes, probably somewhere between “can carry a tune” and “cooks spaghetti.” I’d seen him around, but we’d never been introduced.

“He and Daniel Clay were friends. I believe they might have met at college. I know that Joel bought a couple of Clay’s paintings after he died, and was given others as gifts during his lifetime. I suppose he passed Clay’s test of suitability. Clay was very particular about those to whom he sold or gave his work. I can’t imagine why.”

“You really didn’t like his paintings, did you?”

“Or him, I guess. He made me uneasy. There was something peculiarly joyless about him. Joel Harmon is having a dinner party in his house later this week, by the way. They’re a pretty regular occurrence, and I have a standing invitation anytime I wish to attend. I’ve put some interesting artists his way. He’s a good customer.”

“Are you asking me to be your date?”

“No, I’m offering to be yours.”

“I’m flattered.”

“You should be. Perhaps you’ll get to see some of Clay’s paintings. Just try not to offend Joel too grievously, there’s a dear. I have bills to pay.”

I assured June that I would be on my best behavior. She didn’t look impressed.

Chapter IV

I drove back to Scarborough and dumped the Saturn, instantly feeling ten years younger in the Mustang, or at least ten years less mature, which wasn’t the same thing at all. I called Rebecca Clay to confirm that she was still planning to leave at the agreed time, then asked her to get someone to walk her to her car. She was due to look at a vacant storefront on Longfellow Square, so I waited for her in the parking lot behind Joe’s Smoke Shop. There were fifteen or sixteen cars parked there, none of them occupied. I found a space that allowed me a view of Congress and the square, bought a grilled chicken sandwich with green peppers at Joe’s sandwich counter, then ate in the car while I waited for Rebecca Clay to arrive. A couple of homeless guys with shopping carts stood smoking in the alley beside the lot. Neither of them matched the description of the man who was following Rebecca.

She called me when she was passing the bus depot at St. John, and I told her to park in front of the building she was visiting. The woman who was trying to rent the first-floor space was waiting outside for her when she arrived. The two of them entered together, and the door closed safely behind them. The windows were large and clean, and I could see both of them clearly from where I sat.

I didn’t notice the squat man until he went through an odd routine while lighting a cigarette. He seemed to have appeared from out of nowhere to take up a spot on one of the metal crash barriers outside the lot. He was holding a cigarette vertically between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand and rotating it gently, probably to get a smoother draw, and his attention was entirely fixed on the women across the street. Still, there was something sensual about the motion of his fingers, a product, perhaps, of the way he was staring so intently at Rebecca Clay through the window of the store. After a time he slid the cigarette slowly into his mouth, wetting it against his lips for a moment before applying a match to the tip. Then, instead of simply throwing the match away, or blowing it out, he held it between the same thumb and forefinger as before and allowed the flame to burn down toward the tips of his fingers. I waited for him to discard it as the pain increased, but he did not. When the end of the match was no longer visible, he released his grip upon it and allowed it to fall into the palm of his hand, where it burned into blackness against his skin. He turned his hand, allowing the charred wood to fall upon the ground. I clicked off a picture of him on the little digital camera that I kept in the car. As I did so, he looked around, seemingly aware now that the attention of another was fixed upon him in turn. I slid down farther in my seat, but I had caught a glimpse of his face, and had seen the three parallel scars on his forehead of which Rebecca had spoken. When I looked back he appeared to be gone, but I sensed that he had merely retreated into the shade offered by Joe’s building, for I saw a wisp of smoke carried out upon the street by a stray breeze.

Rebecca emerged from the store, carrying some papers. The other woman was beside her, talking and smiling. I called Rebecca on her cell and told her to keep smiling as she listened.

“Turn your back to Joe’s Smoke Shop,” I said. I didn’t want the watcher to see her reaction when I told her that I had spotted him. “Your fan is over at Joe’s. Don’t look in that direction. I want you to cross the street and go into Cunningham Books. Just act casual, like you have some time to kill. Stay there until I come and get you, okay?”

“Okay,” she said. She sounded only a little frightened. To her credit, she did not pause or even betray any emotion by a change of expression. She shook hands with her client, glanced left, then right, and proceeded to cross casually to the bookstore. She walked straight inside, as though that had been her intention all along. I got out of my car and headed quickly to the front of Joe’s. There was nobody outside. Only the butt of a cigarette and the fragmented remains of a match indicated that the squat man had ever been there. The tip had been squeezed flat. Something told me that it might well have been glowing redly when the fingers were applied to it. I could almost smell the scorching of skin.

I looked around and saw him. He had crossed Congress and was walking toward the center of town. He turned right onto Park, and I lost sight of him. I figured that his car was probably there, and he would wait for Rebecca to leave the bookstore before either following her or approaching her again.

I walked to the corner of Park and risked a glance down the street. The squat man was at the door of the red Ford, his head down. I stayed low and used the parked cars to approach him from the opposite side of the street. I had my.38 in a holster at my belt-it was a little more discreet than my big Smith 10 for work like this-but I was reluctant to show it. If I was forced to confront the watcher with a gun in my hand, then whatever chance I had of reasoning with him would evaporate, and the situation would deteriorate before I had even begun to understand its nature. I had an image of this man burning himself, and the apparent ease with which he had done it. It suggested an individual who had a considerable tolerance for pain, and such tolerance was usually hard-earned. A face-to-face with him would have to be delicately handled.

A Grand Cherokee turned down Park, an archetypal soccer mom at the wheel, and as it passed I slipped behind it and approached the Ford from the driver’s side. I could make out the outline of his quiff and the folds of muscle at the back of his neck as he sat at the wheel, fumes already emerging from the exhaust. His hands rested on the steering wheel, the fingers of the left tapping a rhythm upon the plastic. The right hand was roughly bandaged. Bloodstains showed through the fabric. At last, I let him see me approach. I kept my arms out and my fingers splayed slightly, but I was ready to scuttle for cover if his hands left the wheel. The problem for me was that once I got close enough to talk to him, there would be nowhere for me to run. I was relying on the fact that there were people around and the hope that he would see no percentage in reacting with hostility until he heard what I had to say.

“How you doing?” I said.

He peered lazily at me, as though it were all that he could do just to rouse himself enough to respond. He had another cigarette between his lips, and a blue pack of American Spirit rested on top of the dashboard in front of him.

“Fine,” he said. “Just fine.”

He raised his right hand to his mouth, drawing on the cigarette so that the tip glowed brightly. He looked away from me and stared through the windshield.

“Thought someone was paying me mind,” he said. “I see you got a gun.”

The bulge of the.38 was barely visible beneath my jacket, unless someone knew what he was looking for.

“Can’t be too careful,” I said.

“You don’t need to worry about me. I don’t carry a gun. I got no call for one.”

“I guess you’re just a gentle soul.”

“Nah, I can’t claim that. The woman hire you?”

“She’s concerned.”

“She has no cause to be. If she tells me what I want to know, I’ll be on my way.”

“And if she doesn’t, or if she can’t?”

“Well, that’s two different things, ain’t it? One can’t be helped, and one can.”

His fingers shifted from the wheel. Instantly, I was reaching for the gun at my waist.

“Whoa, whoa!” he said. He held his hands up in mock surrender. “I done told you, I got no gun.”

I kept my hand close to the butt of the pistol. “I’d still prefer it if your hands stayed where I can see them.”

He shrugged exaggeratedly, then allowed his palms to rest against the top of the wheel.

“Do you have a name?” I asked.

“I have lots of names.”

“That’s very mysterious of you. Try one and see how it fits.”

He seemed to give the issue some thought.

“ Merrick,” he said at last, and something in his face and his voice told me that this was as much as I was likely to get from him where names were concerned.

“Why are you bothering Rebecca Clay?”

“I ain’t bothering her. I just want her to be straight with me.”

“About what?”

“About her father.”

“Her father’s dead.”

“He ain’t dead. She got him declared dead, but that don’t mean nothing. You show me the worms crawling in the sockets of his eyes, then I’ll believe he’s dead.”

“Why are you so interested in him?”

“I got my reasons.”

“Try sharing them.”

His fingers tightened on the wheel. There was a small India-ink tattoo on the knuckle of his left middle finger. It was a crude blue cross, a jailhouse tattoo.

“I don’t think so. I don’t like strangers questioning me about my business.”

“Well, then you’ll know just how Ms. Clay feels.”

His teeth worried at the inside of his lower lip. He kept his gaze fixed straight ahead. I could feel the tension building up inside him. I had allowed my hand to drift to the butt of my gun, and my own forefinger was now extended above the trigger guard, ready to slip into place if necessary. Then the tightness released itself from Merrick ’s body. I heard him exhale, and he seemed to grow smaller and less threatening.

“You ask her about the Project,” he said softly. “You see what she says.”

“What is the ‘Project’?”

He shook his head.

“Ask her, then come back to me. Maybe y’ought to talk to her ex-husband too, while you’re about it.”

I didn’t even know that Rebecca Clay had been married. I was only aware that she hadn’t married the father of her child. Some investigator I was.

“Why would I do that?”

“A husband and wife, they share things. Secret things. You talk to him, and it could be you’ll spare me the trouble of talking to him myself. I’ll be around. You won’t have to come looking for me, because I’ll find you. You got two days to make her tell me what she knows, then I lose my patience with y’all.”

I gestured at his wounded hand.

“It seems to me like you lost your patience once already.”

He looked at the bandaged limb and stretched the fingers, as if testing the pain in the wounds.

“That was a mistake,” he said softly. “I didn’t mean to strike out like that. I’m being sorely tested by her, but I don’t mean to do her harm.”

Maybe he believed that was true, but I didn’t. There was a rage inside Merrick. It pulsed redly, animating his eyes and keeping every muscle and sinew in his body taut with barely suppressed emotion. Merrick might not mean to hurt a woman, might not set out to do it, but the blood on his hand said all that needed to be said about his capacity to control his impulses.

“I lost my temper, is all,” he continued. “I need her to tell me what she knows. It’s important to me.” He drew on his cigarette again. “And since we’re getting all friendly here, you didn’t give me your name.”

“It’s Parker.”

“What are you, a private cop?”

“You want to see my license?”

“No, a piece of paper won’t tell me nothing that I don’t already know. I don’t want trouble from you, sir. I’ve come here with business to conduct, business of a personal nature. Maybe you can make that little lady see reason so I can conclude it and be on my way. I hope so, I surely do, because if you can’t, then you’re no good to either of us. You’ll just be in my path, and I might have to do something about that.”

He still had not looked at me again. His eyes were fixed on a small photograph that hung from the rearview mirror. It was a picture of a girl with dark hair, perhaps Jenna Clay’s age or a little older, the image encased in plastic to protect it. A cheap crucifix dangled beside it.

“Who is she?” I asked.

“That doesn’t concern you.”

“Nice-looking kid. How old is she?”

He didn’t reply, but I had clearly struck a nerve. This time, though, there was no anger, just a kind of disengagement.

“If you told me something of why you’re here, then maybe I could help you,” I persisted.

“Like I told you, sir, my business is personal.”

“Then I guess we’ve nothing left to discuss,” I said. “But you need to stay away from my client.” The warning sounded hollow and unnecessary. Somehow, the balance had shifted.

“I won’t trouble her no more, least of all, not until you talk to me again.” He reached down for the ignition key, no longer intimidated by the gun, if he had ever really been in the first place. “But here’s two warnings for you in return. The first is that when you start asking about the Project, you’d best keep a keen eye in your head because the others are going to hear about it, and they won’t like it that people are looking into it. They won’t like it one little bit.”

“What others?”

The engine sputtered into life.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” he said.

“And the second warning?”

He raised his left hand and clenched it into a fist, so that the tattoo stood out starkly against the white of his knuckle.

“Don’t interfere. You do, and I’ll leave you for dead. Mark me now, boy.”

He pulled away from the curb, the exhaust pumping thick blue smoke into the clear fall air. Before it was entirely engulfed by fumes, I caught a glimpse of his license plate.

Merrick. Now, I thought, we’ll see what we can find out about you in the next two days.

I walked back to the bookstore. Rebecca Clay was seated in a corner, flicking through an old magazine.

“Did you find him?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She flinched. “What happened?”

“We talked, and he went away. For now.”

“What does that mean, ‘for now’? I hired you to get rid of him, to make him leave me alone permanently. Are you saying he’s going to come back?”

Her voice was steadily rising, but there was a tremor beneath it. I walked her from the store.

“Ms. Clay,” I said, “I told you that a warning might not be enough. This man has agreed to stay away from you until I make some inquiries. I don’t know enough about him to trust him entirely, so I’d suggest that, for the moment, we continue to take every precaution. I have people whom I can call, so there will always be someone watching over you while I try to find out more about him, if that will make you rest any easier.”

“Fine. I think I’ll send Jenna away for a while, though, until this is all over.”

“That’s a good idea. Does the name ‘ Merrick ’ mean anything to you, Ms. Clay?”

We had reached her car.

“No, I don’t believe so,” she said.

“That’s our friend’s name, or that’s what he told me. He had a photograph of a little girl in his car. It might have been his daughter. I was wondering if she was one of your father’s patients, assuming she shared his surname.”

“My father didn’t discuss his patients with me. I mean, not by name. If she was referred to him by the state, then there might be a record of her somewhere, I guess, but you’ll have trouble getting anyone to confirm it. It would be breach of confidentiality.”

“What about your father’s patient records?”

“My father’s files were placed with the court after his disappearance. I remember that there was an attempt to get a court order authorizing some of his colleagues to examine them, but it failed. Access can only be obtained through an in camera review, and they’re rare. The judges have been reluctant to grant them, in order to protect the privacy of the patients.”

It seemed time to broach the subject of her father and the accusations made against him.

“This is a difficult question for me to ask, Ms. Clay,” I began.

She waited. She knew what was coming, but she wanted to hear me say it aloud.

“Do you believe that your father abused the children in his care?”

“No,” she said firmly. “My father didn’t abuse any of those children.”

“Do you think he enabled others to do so, perhaps by feeding them information about the identities and whereabouts of vulnerable patients?”

“My father was devoted to his work. When they stopped sending children to him for evaluation, it was because it was felt that he was no longer sufficiently objective. His inclination was to believe the children from the outset, and that was what got him into trouble. He knew what adults were capable of doing.”

“Did your father have many close friends?”

Her brow furrowed.

“A few. There were some professional colleagues too, although most didn’t stay in touch after he disappeared. They wanted to put as much distance as possible between my father and themselves. I didn’t blame them.”

“I’d like you to make a list: business associates; college buddies; people from the old neighborhood; anyone with whom he maintained regular contact.”

“I’ll do it as soon as I get home.”

“By the way, you didn’t tell me that you were once married.”

She looked surprised. “How did you find out?”

“ Merrick told me.”

“Jesus. It didn’t seem important to tell you. It didn’t last long. I don’t see him anymore.”

“What’s his name?”

“Jerry. Jerry Legere.”

“And he isn’t Jenna’s father?”

“No.”

“Where would I find him?”

“He’s an electrician. He works all over. Why do you want to talk to him?”

“I’m going to talk to a lot of people. That’s how these things work.”

“But that’s not going to make this man, this Merrick, go away.” Her voice was rising again. “That’s not why I hired you.”

“He’s not going to go away, Ms. Clay, not yet. He’s angry, and that anger has something to do with your father. I need to find out the connection between your father and Merrick. To do that, I’m going to have to ask a lot of questions.”

She folded her arms on the roof of her car and laid her forehead against them.

“I don’t want this to drag on,” she said, her voice slightly muffled by her posture. “I want things to go back to the way they were. Do what you have to do, talk to whomever, but make it stop. Please. I don’t even know where my ex-husband lives anymore, but he used to do some work for a company called A-Secure, and he probably still does. They install security systems in businesses and homes. A friend of Jerry’s, Raymon Lang, does a lot of the maintenance on the systems, and he used to put business Jerry’s way. You’ll probably find Jerry through A-Secure.”

“ Merrick thinks that you and your ex-husband might have spoken about your father sometime in the past.”

“Well, of course we did, but Jerry doesn’t know anything about what happened to him. I can tell you that for sure. The only person Jerry Legere ever cared about was himself. I think he believed that my father would turn up dead somewhere and he could start spending the money that would come to me.”

“Was your father wealthy?”

“There’s a good six-figure sum still tied up in probate, so, yes, I suppose you could say that he was comfortable. Then there’s the house. Jerry wanted me to sell it, but obviously I couldn’t because it wasn’t mine to sell. In the end, Jerry just got tired of waiting, and of me. It was mutual, though. Jerry wasn’t exactly a great catch.”

“One last thing,” I said. “Did you ever hear your father mention something about a ‘project,’ or ‘the Project’?”

“No, never.”

“Have you any idea what that might mean?”

“None.”

She raised her head and got into her car. I stayed behind her all the way to her office, then remained there until it was time for her to collect Jenna. The principal escorted the girl to the door of the school, and Rebecca spent a little while talking to him, presumably to explain why Jenna would not be in class for a while, then I followed them both back to the house. Rebecca parked in the drive and kept the car doors locked while I checked every room. I went back to the front door and indicated that everything was okay. Once she was inside, I sat in the kitchen and watched while she put together a list of her father’s friends and colleagues. It wasn’t very long. Some, she said, were dead, and others she could not remember. I asked her to let me know if she thought of any additions, and she assured me that she would. I told her that I would deal with the issue of extra protection that evening and would call her with the details before she went to bed that night. With that, I left her. I heard her turning the key in the lock behind me, and a series of electronic beeps as she entered the alarm code to secure the house.

Already, the daylight had departed. The waves broke on the shore as I walked to my car. Usually, I found it restful, but not now. There was an element missing, something out of kilter, and the late-afternoon air carried the scent of burning upon it. I turned to the water, for the smell was coming off the sea, as though a distant ship were aflame. I looked for its glow upon the horizon, but there was only the rhythmic pulse of the lighthouse, the movement of a ferry upon the bay, and the lit rooms in the houses on the islands beyond. Everything spoke of calm and routine, and yet I could not shake my sense of unease as I made my way home.