The Unquiet

Shape without form, shade without colour

Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed

With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom

Remember us-if at all-not as lost

Violent souls, but only

As the hollow men…

– T. S. ELIOT, “THE HOLLOW MEN”

Chapter V

Merrick had promised us two days of peace, but I wasn’t prepared to gamble the safety of Rebecca and her daughter on the word of a man like that. I had seen his kind before: Merrick was a simmerer, his temper always on the verge of boiling over. I recalled the way he had reacted to my comment about the girl in the picture, and the warnings about his “personal” business. Despite his assurances, there was always the chance that he might go to a bar, down a couple of drinks, and decide now was the time to have another word with Daniel Clay’s daughter. On the other hand, I couldn’t spend all my time watching her. I needed to call in some help. I had few options. There was Jackie Garner, who was big and strong and well-meaning, but also had a couple of screws loose. In addition, where Jackie went two meat wagons on legs called the Fulci brothers usually followed, and the Fulcis were to subtlety what an egg beater was to an egg. I wasn’t sure how Rebecca Clay would take it if she found them standing on her doorstep. In fact, I wasn’t sure how the doorstep would take it either.

Louis and Angel would be preferable, but they were over on the West Coast for a couple of days, wine tasting in the Napa Valley. Clearly, I had sophisticated friends, but I couldn’t afford to leave Rebecca Clay unprotected until they returned. It seemed that I had no other choice.

Reluctantly, I called Jackie Garner.

I met him at Sangillo’s Tavern, a little place on Hampshire that was always lit up like Christmas inside. He was drinking a Bud Light, but I tried not to hold that against him. I joined him at the bar and ordered a sugar-free Sprite. Nobody laughed, which was kind of them.

“You on a diet?” asked Jackie. He was wearing a long-sleeved T-shirt that bore the logo of a Portland bar that had closed down so long ago its patrons had probably paid for their drinks in wampum. His hair was shaved close to his skull, and there was a faded bruise beside his left eye. His belly pressed tightly against the shirt so that a casual glance might have dismissed him as another fat guy at a bar, but Jackie Garner wasn’t that at all. In all the time that I’d known him no one had ever knocked him down, and I didn’t like to think about what had happened to whoever had left that bruise on Jackie’s face.

“I’m not in the mood for beer,” I said.

He raised his bottle, squinted at me, and announced, in a deep baritone: “This isn’t beer. This is Bud.”

He looked pleased with himself.

“That’s very catchy,” I said.

He smiled widely. “I’ve been entering competitions. You know, the ones where you think up a slogan. Like, ‘This isn’t beer. This is Bud.’” He picked up my Sprite. “Or, ‘This isn’t soda. This is Sprite.’ ‘These aren’t nuts. These are-’ Well, these are nuts, but you get the point.”

“I see a pattern emerging.”

“I figure it’s adaptable to any product.”

“Except nuts in bowls.”

“Pretty much.”

“Don’t see how it can fail. You busy these days?”

Jackie shrugged. As far as I could tell, he was never busy. He lived with his mother, did a little bar work a couple of days a week, and spent the rest of the time manufacturing homemade munitions in a tumble-down shack in the woods behind his house. Occasionally, someone would report hearing an explosion to the local cops. Even less occasionally, the cops would send a car along in the faint hope that Jackie had blown himself up. So far, they had been sorely disappointed.

“You need something done?” he asked. His eyes gleamed with new light at the prospect of potential mayhem.

“Just for a couple of days. There’s a woman who’s being bothered by a guy.”

“You want us to hurt him?”

“Us? Who’s us?”

“You know.” He gestured with his thumb at some indefinable place beyond the confines of the bar. Despite the cold, I felt a prickle of sweat on my forehead and aged about one year in an instant.

“They’re here? What are you, joined at the hip?”

“I told them to wait outside. I know they make you nervous.”

“They don’t make me nervous. They scare the hell out of me.”

“Well, they’re not allowed in here no more anyway. They’re not allowed anywhere, I guess, not since the, uh, the thing.”

There was a “thing.” Where the Fulcis were concerned, there was always a “thing.”

“What thing?”

“The thing over at the B-Line.”

The B-Line was just about the roughest joint in the city, a dive bar that offered a free drink to anyone who could produce a one-month AA badge. Getting banned from the B-Line for causing trouble was like getting thrown out of the Eagle Scouts for being too good with knots.

“What happened?”

“They hit a guy with a door.”

By comparison with some of the stories I had heard about the Fulcis, and the B-Line, that seemed comparatively minor.

“You know, that doesn’t sound so bad. For them.”

“Well, it was really a couple of guys. And two doors. And they took the doors off their hinges so they could hit the guys with them. Now they can’t go out so much no more. They’re kind of sore about it. But they don’t mind sitting in the lot here. They think the lights are pretty, and I bought them a couple of family-style takeouts from Norm’s.”

I took a deep, calming breath.

“I don’t want anybody hurt, which means I’m not sure that I want the Fulcis near this.”

Jackie scowled. “They’ll be disappointed. I told them I was meeting you, and they asked to come along. They like you.”

“How can you tell? Because they haven’t hit me with a door yet?”

“They don’t mean no harm. It’s just that the doctors keep changing their medication, and sometimes it don’t take like it should.”

Jackie spun his bottle sorrowfully. He didn’t have a lot of friends, and it was clear that he felt society had misjudged the Fulcis on a great many levels. Society, by contrast, was certain that it had the Fulcis down pat, and had taken all appropriate steps to ensure that contact with them was kept to a minimum.

I patted Jackie on the arm.

“We’ll find something for them to do, okay?”

He brightened. “They’re good guys to have around when things get messy,” he said, conveniently ignoring the fact that things tended to get messy precisely because they were around.

“Look, Jackie, this guy’s name is Merrick, and he’s been following my client for a week now. He’s been asking about her father, but her father has been missing for a long time, so long that he’s been declared legally dead. I cornered Merrick yesterday, and he said that he’d ease off for a couple of days, but I’m not inclined to trust him. He’s got a temper.”

“Was he carrying?”

“I didn’t see one, but that doesn’t mean anything.”

Jackie sipped his beer.

“How come he’s only showing up now?” he asked.

“What?”

“If this guy’s been missing so long, how come this other guy is only asking about him now?”

I looked at Jackie. That was the thing about him. Something definitely rattled in his head when he walked, but he wasn’t dumb. I’d considered the question of why Merrick was now asking about Daniel Clay, but not what might have prevented him from doing so before. I thought again of that tattoo on his knuckle. Could Merrick have been doing time since Daniel Clay disappeared?

“Maybe I can find that out while you’re watching the woman. Her name is Rebecca Clay. I’ll introduce you to her tonight. And look: keep the Fulcis away from face-to-faces with her, but if you want to have them close by, then that’s okay with me. In fact, it might not be a bad idea to let them be seen keeping an eye on the house.”

Even a man like Merrick was likely to be discouraged from approaching Rebecca by the sight of three big men, two of whom made the third look underfed.

I gave Jackie a description of Merrick and his car, including the tag number. “Don’t bank on the car, though. He may ditch it now that it’s been connected with him.”

“Century and a half a day,” said Jackie. “I’ll look after Tony and Paulie out of it.” He finished his beer. “Now, you gotta come out and say hello. They’ll be offended if you don’t.”

“And we wouldn’t want that,” I said, and I meant it, too.

“Damn straight.”

Tony and Paulie hadn’t arrived in their monster truck, which was why I hadn’t spotted them when I’d parked. Instead, they were sitting in the front of a dirty white van that Jackie sometimes used for what he euphemistically termed his “business.” As I approached, the Fulcis opened the van doors and climbed out. I wasn’t even sure how Jackie had managed to get them in there to begin with. It looked like the van had been assembled around them. The Fulcis weren’t tall, but they were wide, even double-wide. The kind of places that they shopped for clothes opted for practical over fashionable, so they were twin visions in polyester and leather blousons. Tony clasped my hand in one of his paws, smearing it with barbecue sauce, and I felt something pop. Paulie patted me softly on the back, and I almost coughed up a lung.

“We’re back in business, fellas,” announced Jackie proudly.

And for a brief moment, before common sense prevailed, I felt strangely happy.

I drove with Jackie over to Rebecca Clay’s house. She looked relieved to see me again. I made the introductions and told Rebecca that Jackie would be looking after her for the next few days, but that I’d also be around if anything came up. I think Jackie looked more like her idea of a bodyguard than I did, so she didn’t object. In the interest of almost full disclosure, I also told her that there would be two other men nearby in case of trouble, and gave her a rough description of the Fulcis that erred on the side of flattery without resorting to outright lies.

“Are three men really necessary?” she asked.

“No, but they come as a package. They’ll cost one-fifty a day, which is cheap, but if you’re worried about the cost, we can work something out.”

“It’s okay. I think I can afford it for a while.”

“Good. I’m going to try to find out more about Merrick while we have breathing space, and I’m going to talk to some of the people on your list. If we’re no closer to figuring out Merrick at the end of this two-day grace period, and he still won’t accept that you can’t help him, we’ll go to the cops again and try to have him picked up before running the whole thing by a judge. Right now, I know you’d prefer a more physical approach, but we need to exhaust the other possibilities first.”

“I understand.”

I asked after her daughter, and she told me that she’d arranged for Jenna to go to D.C. with her grandparents for a week. Her absence had been cleared with the school, and Jenna would leave first thing in the morning.

She walked me to the door and touched my arm.

“Do you know why I hired you?” she asked. “I used to date a guy called Neil Chambers. He was Jenna’s father.”

Neil Chambers. His father, Ellis, had approached me earlier in the year, seeking help for his son. Neil owed money to some men in Kansas City, and there was no way that he could pay the debt. Ellis wanted me to act as an intermediary, to find some way to solve the problem. I couldn’t help him, not then. I had suggested some people I thought might be able to work something out, but it was too late for Neil. His body was dumped in a ditch as a warning to others shortly after Ellis and I had spoken.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. Neil didn’t see Jenna much, hadn’t seen her in years to tell the truth, but I’m still close to Ellis. He and his wife, Sara, are the ones who are looking after Jenna this week, and he was the one who told me about you.”

“I turned him down. I couldn’t give him help when he asked for it.”

“He understood. He didn’t blame you. He still doesn’t. Neil was lost to him. Ellis knew that, but he loved him. When I told Ellis about Merrick, he said that I should talk to you. He’s not the kind of man to bear a grudge.”

She released her hold on my arm. “Do you think they’ll ever get the men who killed Neil?” she asked.

“Man,” I said. “It was one man who was responsible. His name was Donnie P.”

“Will anything ever be done about it?”

“Something was done,” I said.

She stared at me silently for a time.

“Does Ellis know?” she asked.

“Would it help him if he did?”

“No, I don’t think so. Like I told you, he’s not that kind of man.”

Her eyes shone, and something uncurled itself deep inside her, stretching sinuously, its mouth soft and red.

“But you are,” she said, “aren’t you?”

We found the girl in a glorified kennel in Independence, east of Kansas City and within sight and sound of a small airport. Our information had been good. The girl didn’t open the door when I knocked. Angel, small and apparently unthreatening, was beside me and Louis, tall, dark and very, very threatening, was at the back of the house in case she tried to run. We could hear someone moving inside. I knocked again.

“Who’s there?” The voice sounded cracked and strained.

“Mia?” I said.

“There’s nobody called Mia here.”

“We want to help you.”

“I told you: there’s no Mia here. You have the wrong address.”

“He’s coming for you, Mia. You can’t keep one step ahead of him forever.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Donnie, Mia. He’s closing in, and you know it.”

“Who are you? Cops?”

“You ever hear of a guy named Neil Chambers?”

“No. Why would I have?”

“Donnie killed him over a bad debt.”

“So?”

“He left him in a ditch. He tortured him, then he shot him. He’ll do the same to you, except in your case nobody is going to come knocking on doors to try to even things out later. Not that it will matter to you. You’ll be dead. If we can find you, then he can find you too. You don’t have much time left.”

There was no reply for so long that I thought she might have slipped away from the door. Then there was the sound of a security chain being removed, and the door was unlocked. We stepped into semidarkness. All the drapes were closed, and no lights burned in the room. The door slammed shut behind us and the girl named Mia retreated into the shadows so that we couldn’t see her face, the face that Donnie P. had beaten on for some offense that she had given him, real or imagined.

“Can we sit down?” I asked.

“You can sit, if you like,” she said. “I’ll stay here.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not so much, but I look bad.” Her voice cracked further. “Who told you I was here?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“It does to me.”

“Someone who’s concerned for you. That’s all you need to know.”

“What do you want?”

“We want you to tell us why Donnie did this to you. We want you to share what you know about him.”

“What makes you think I know something?”

“Because you’re hiding from him, and because the word is he wants to find you before you talk.”

My eyes were growing accustomed to the gloom. I could make out some of her features now. They looked distorted, her nose misshapen and her cheeks swollen. A shard of light from beneath the door caught the edge of her bare feet and the hem of a long red dressing gown. The varnish on her toenails was red too. It looked freshly applied. She removed a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of her gown, tapped one out, and lit it with a cigarette lighter. She kept her head down, her hair hanging over her face, but I still caught a glimpse of the scars that ran across her chin and her left cheek.

“I should have kept my mouth shut,” she said softly.

“Why?”

“He came around and threw two grand in my face. After all that he’d done to me, a lousy two grand. I was angry. I told one of the other girls that I had a way of getting even with him. I told her that I’d seen something I shouldn’t have. Next I hear, she’s sharing Donnie’s bed. Donnie was right. I am just a dumb whore.”

“Why didn’t you go to the cops with what you know?”

She drew on the cigarette. Her head was no longer lowered. Absorbed by the details of her story, she had briefly forgotten to hide her face from us. Beside me, I heard Angel hiss in sympathy as he caught sight of her ruined features.

“Because they wouldn’t have done anything about it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, but I do,” she said.

She took another drag on the cigarette and toyed with her hair. Nobody said anything. Eventually, Mia broke the silence.

“So now you say you’re going to help me.”

“That’s right.”

“How?”

“Look outside. Back window.”

She put her hand to her face and stared at me for a moment, then walked to the kitchen. I heard a soft swishing sound as she parted the curtains. When she returned, her demeanor had changed. Louis had that effect on people, especially if it seemed like he might be on their side.

“Who is he?”

“A friend.”

“He looks…” She tried to find the right word. “…intimidating,” she said at last.

“He is intimidating.”

She tapped her foot on the floor. “Is he going to kill Donnie?”

“We were hoping to find another way of dealing with him. We thought that you might be able to assist us.”

We waited for her to make her decision. There was a TV on in another room, probably her bedroom. It struck me that she might not be alone, and that we should have checked the house first, but it was too late now. Finally, she reached into the pocket of her gown and withdrew her cell phone. She tossed it across the room to me. I caught it.

“Open the picture file,” she said. “The ones you want are five or six photos in.”

I flicked through images of young women smiling together at a dinner table, of a black dog in a yard, and a baby in a high chair, until I came to the pictures of Donnie. The first showed him standing in a car park with another man, taller than he was and wearing a gray suit. The second and third pictures were different shots of the same scene, but this time the faces of the two men were a little clearer. The photos had been taken from inside a car because the frame of a door and a wing mirror were visible in two of them.

“Who is the second man?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I followed Donnie because I thought he was cheating on me. Hell, I knew he was cheating on me. He’s a dog. I just wanted to find out who he was cheating with.”

She smiled. The effort seemed to cause her pain.

“You see, I thought I loved him. How stupid is that?”

She shook her head. I could tell that she was crying.

“And this is what you have on him? This is why he wants to find you: because you have pictures of him on your phone with a man whose name you don’t know?”

“I don’t know his name, but I know where he works. When Donnie left him, the guy was joined by two other people, a woman and a man. They’re in the next picture.”

I flicked on, and saw the trio. They were all dressed for business.

“I thought they looked like cops,” said Mia. “They got in the car and drove away. I stayed with them.”

“Where did they go?”

“Thirteen hundred Summit.”

And then I knew why Donnie wanted Mia found, and why she couldn’t go to the cops with what she had.

Thirteen hundred Summit was the FBI’s Kansas City field office.

Donnie P. was an informer.

In a field off a deserted road in Clay County, where cars rarely traveled and only birds kept vigil, Donnie P., the man who killed Neil Chambers over a meat-and-potatoes debt, now lay buried in a shallow grave. It had taken one phone call to his bosses, one phone call and a handful of blurred photographs sent from an untraceable email account.

It was revenge, revenge for a boy I barely knew. His father wasn’t aware of what had happened, and I would not tell him, which raised the question of why I had done it. It didn’t matter to Neil Chambers, and it wouldn’t bring him back to his father. I guess I did it because I needed to strike out at something, at someone. I chose Donnie P., and he died for it.

As Rebecca Clay said, I was that kind of man.

That night, I sat on my porch, with Walter asleep at my feet. I wore a sweater under my jacket, and drank coffee from a Mustang travel cup that Angel had given me as a birthday present. The plumes of my breath mingled with the steam that rose from the coffee with each sip. The sky was dark, and there was no moon to guide the way through the marshes, no light to turn its channels to silver. The air was still, but there was no peace to the stillness, and once again I was aware of a faint smell of burning in the distance.

And then everything changed. I couldn’t say how, or why, but I sensed the sleeping life around me wake for an instant, the natural world troubled by a new presence yet afraid to move for fear of attracting attention to itself. Birds beat their wings in a flurry of concern, and rodents froze in the shadows cast by tree trunks. Walter’s eyes opened, and his muzzle twitched warily. His tail beat nervously upon the boards, then abruptly ceased, for even that slight disturbance in the night seemed too much.

I stood, and Walter whined. I walked to the porch rail and felt a breeze arise from the east, blowing in across the marshes, troubling the trees and causing the grass to flatten slightly as it passed over the blades. It should have brought with it the smell of sea, but it did not. Instead, there was only the scent of burning, stronger now, and then that faded, to be replaced by a dry stench, as of a hole in the ground that had recently been opened to reveal the hunched, wretched thing lying dead in the earth. I thought of dreams that I had had, dreams of a great mass of souls following the shining pathways of the marshes to lose themselves at last in the sea, like the molecules of river water drawn inexorably to the place where all things were born.

But now something had emerged, traveling from, not to, moving away from that world and into this one. The wind appeared to separate, as though it had encountered some obstacle and been forced to seek alternative paths around it, but it did not come together again. Its constituent parts flowed away in different directions, then, as suddenly as it had arisen, it was gone, and there was only that lingering odor to indicate that it had ever existed. Just for a moment, I thought I caught sight of a presence among the trees to the east, the figure of a man in an old tan coat, the details of his features lost in the gloom, his eyes and mouth dark patches against the pallor of his skin. Then just as quickly he was gone, and I wondered if I had truly seen anything at all.

Walter rose to his feet and walked to the porch door, using his paw to ease it open before disappearing into the safety of the house. I stayed, waiting for the night creatures to settle once more. I sipped at my coffee, but now it tasted bitter. I walked onto the lawn and emptied my cup on the grass. Above me, the attic window at the top of the house moved slightly in its frame, the rattle that it made causing me to turn around. It could have been the house settling, adjusting itself after the sudden breeze, but as I looked up at the window, the clouds briefly parted and moonlight at last shone upon the glass, creating the impression of movement in the room beyond. Then the clouds came together again, and the movement ceased a fraction after.

Just a fraction.

I went back inside and took the flashlight from the kitchen. I checked the batteries, then climbed the stairs to the top of the house. Using a hook on the end of a pole, I pulled down the steps leading to the attic. The light from the hallway penetrated reluctantly into the space, revealing the edges of forgotten things. I climbed up.

This attic was used for storage, nothing more. There were still some of Rachel’s things here, packed away into a pair of old suitcases. I kept meaning to send them on to her, or to take them with me when next I visited her and Sam, but to do so would be to admit, finally, that she was not coming back. I had left Sam’s cot as it was in her room for the same reason, another link to them that I did not wish to see disappear.

But there were other items here, too, belonging to those who preceded Rachel and Sam: clothes and toys, photographs and drawings, even gold and diamond jewelry. I had not kept much, but what I did keep was here.

afraid

I could almost hear the word spoken, as though a child’s voice had whispered softly in my ear, fearful of being heard yet anxious to communicate. Something small scuttled through the darkness, disturbed by the coming of the light.

They were not real. That was what I told myself again. A fragment of my sanity was jarred loose on the night that I found them, the night that they were taken from me. My mind was shaken up and was never the same again. They were not real. I created them. I conjured them up out of grief and loss.

They were not real.

But I could not convince myself, for I did not believe that it was true. I knew that this was their place, the refuge of the lost wife and the lost daughter. Whatever traces of them remained in this world clung tenaciously to the possessions stored amid the dirt and cobwebs, the fragments and relics of lives now almost gone from this world.

The flashlight chased shadows across the wall and floor. A thin layer of dust lay over everything: on boxes and cases, on old crates and old books. My nose and throat itched, and my eyes began to water.

afraid

That patina of dust lay also on the glass of the window, but it was not undisturbed. The flashlight picked out lines upon it as I approached, a pattern that formed itself into a message, carefully drawn in what might have been a child’s hand.

make them go away

My fingers touched the glass, tracing the curves and the uprights, following the shapes of the letters. There were tears in my eyes, but I could not tell if it was the dust that brought them or the possibility that here, in this room filled with regret and loss, I had found some trace of a child long gone, that her finger had made these letters and that, by touching them, I might in turn touch something of her.

please, daddy

I stood back. The flashlight’s beam showed me the dirt upon my fingers, and all of my doubts returned. Were the letters really there before I came, written by another who lived in this dark place, or had I given deeper meaning to random scratches upon the dirt perhaps left by Rachel or me, and in moving my finger upon them had somehow found a way to communicate something of which I was afraid, to give form and identity to a previously nameless fear? The rational side of me reasserted itself, erecting barricades and providing explanations, however unsatisfactory, for all that had occurred: for smells on the breeze, for a pale figure at the edge of the forest, for movement in the attic and words scratched in the dust.

Now the flashlight picked out the message, and I saw my face reflected in the glass, hovering in the night as though I were the unreal element, the lost being, so that the words were written across my features. so afraid.

They read:

HOLLOW MEN

Chapter VI

I slept badly that night, my dreams punctuated by recurrent images of eyeless men who yet could somehow see, and a faceless child curled up in ball in a darkened attic, whispering only the single word “afraid” to herself, over and over again. I checked in with Jackie Garner first thing. It had been a quiet night in Willard, and for that much I was grateful. Jenna had departed for D.C. with her grandparents shortly after seven, and Jackie had stayed with their car as far as Portsmouth while the Fulcis remained with Rebecca. There was no sign of Merrick, or of anyone else showing an unhealthy interest in the Clay family.

I went for a run to Prouts Neck, Walter racing ahead of me in the still morning air. This part of Scarborough was still relatively rural, the presence of the yacht club and the country club ensuring that the area retained a certain exclusivity, but elsewhere the town was changing rapidly. It had begun as far back as 1992, when Wal-Mart arrived near the Maine Mall, bringing with it minor irritations like the RV owners who were allowed to park overnight on the store’s lot. Soon, other big-box retailers followed Wal-Mart’s lead, and Scarborough started to become like many other satellite towns on the edge of larger cities. Now residents at Eight Corners were selling out to allow Wal-Mart to expand further, and, despite a cap on residential building permits, more and more families were moving into the area to take advantage of its schools and the town’s recreational pursuits, pushing property prices up and causing increases in taxes to pay for the infrastructure needed to support the new arrivals, who were taking root at four times the county average. In my darker moments, I sometimes saw what was once a fifty- four-square-mile town encompassing six distinct villages, each with its own distinct local identity, and the largest salt marsh in the state, becoming a single homogenous sprawl populated almost entirely by those with no concept of its history and no respect for its past.

There were two messages on my answering machine when I returned. One was from a guy in the DMV who charged me $50 for every search he ran on vehicle plates. According to him, Merrick’s car was a company vehicle recently registered to a law office down in Lynn, Massachusetts. I didn’t recognize the name of the firm, Eldritch and Associates. I scribbled the details on a notepad. Merrick could have stolen a lawyer’s car-and a call to the firm would quickly confirm whether or not a theft had occurred-or he might have been employed by the attorney or attorneys, which didn’t seem very likely. There was a third option: that the firm had provided Merrick with a car, either out of choice or at the instigation of a client, thereby offering at least some degree of protection if someone came around asking questions about what Merrick was doing, as the firm could offer client confidentiality as a defense. Unfortunately, if that was the case, the individual involved had underestimated Merrick ’s capacity for causing trouble, or just didn’t care.

I thought again about Merrick ’s sudden appearance so many years after Daniel Clay had vanished. Either some evidence had emerged recently to convince Merrick that Clay was still alive, or Merrick had been out of the loop for a long time and had just emerged to rattle a few cages. Increasingly, I was drawn to the view that Merrick might have been in jail, but I didn’t have his first name, assuming Merrick even was his real name. If I had it, I could run searches in corrections.com and bop.gov in the hope of turning up a release date. Still, I could make some calls and see if the name rang any bells, and there was always Eldritch and Associates although, in my experience, lawyers tended to be unhelpful at best in these situations. I wasn’t even sure that Merrick ’s pursuit of Rebecca Clay and the broken pane of glass would be enough to force some information out of them.

The second message was from June Fitzpatrick, confirming our dinner at Joel Harmon’s house the following night. I had almost forgotten about Harmon. It might be a wasted evening. Then again, I still knew next to nothing about Daniel Clay, apart from what his daughter had told me, and the little extra that I had found out from June. I would drive down to the Commonwealth early the next morning, see what I could wring out of Eldritch and Associates, and try to fit in a conversation with Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband before Harmon’s dinner. I remained aware that a clock was ticking, slowly counting down the minutes to Merrick ’s promised return and what was certain to be an escalation of his campaign of intimidation against Daniel Clay’s daughter.

Rebecca Clay sat in her employer’s washroom and wiped away her tears. She had just spoken to her daughter on the phone. Jenna had told her that she missed her already. Rebecca had told her that she missed her, too, but she knew that sending her away was the right thing to do.

The night before, she had walked into Jenna’s bedroom to make sure that she had packed everything that she needed for her trip. Jenna was downstairs reading. From her daughter’s bedroom window, Rebecca could see the man named Jackie sitting in his car, probably listening to the radio judging by the slight glow that came from the dashboard, illuminating his features. His presence made her feel a little better. She had also briefly met the other two men, the massive brothers who gazed adoringly at Jackie, hanging on his every word. Although big, they did not fill her with the same sense of assurance as Jackie did. They were intimidating, though, she had to give them that. One of her neighbors had been so disturbed by their presence that she had called the police. The cop who drove by in response had taken one look at the pair, recognized them for who they were, and immediately driven away without exchanging a single word with either of them. Nobody had seen a cop in the vicinity since.

All in Jenna’s room was neat and in its place, because that was the kind of girl her daughter was. Rebecca looked down at the little desk that Jenna used for homework, and for her painting and drawing. She had clearly been working on something quite recently, a sketch of some kind, for a pack of colored pencils lay open beside a couple of sheets of paper. Rebecca picked up one of the sheets. It was a drawing of their house, and two figures stood beside it. They were dressed in long tan coats, and their faces were pale, so pale that her daughter had used a white wax crayon to accentuate it, as though the paper itself was not sufficient to convey the depth of their pallor. Their eyes and mouths were black circles, draining light and air from the world. The same figures appeared in each of the drawings. They looked like shadows given form, and the fact that her daughter was imagining such beings had made Rebecca shudder. Perhaps Jenna had been more disturbed by the actions of the man named Merrick than she had pretended to be, and this was some manifestation of that fear.

Rebecca had gone downstairs to Jenna and shown her the drawings.

“Who are they supposed to be, honey?” she said, but Jenna had merely shrugged.

“I dunno.”

“I mean, are they supposed to be ghosts? They look like ghosts.” Jenna had shaken her head. “No, I saw them.”

“You saw them? How? How could you have seen something like this?”

She had knelt beside her daughter, genuinely troubled by what she was hearing.

“Because they’re real,” Jenna had replied. She had looked puzzled for a moment, then had corrected herself. “No, I think they’re real. It’s hard to explain. You know, it’s like when there’s a little fog, and it makes everything fuzzy, but you can’t see what’s making it fuzzy. Then I took a nap this evening after packing, and it was almost like I dreamed them, but I was awake because I was drawing them at the same time that I saw them. It was like I woke up with them still in my mind, and I had to put their images down on paper, and when I looked out of the window they were there, except-” She had paused.

“Except what? Tell me, Jenna.”

The girl had looked uncomfortable. “Except I could only see them if I didn’t look directly at them. I know it makes no sense, Mom, but they were both there and not there.” She took the drawing from her mother. “I think they’re kind of cool.”

“They were here, Jenna?”

Jenna had nodded. “They were outside. What did you think I meant?”

Rebecca’s hand went to her mouth. She felt ill. Jenna rose and hugged her and kissed her on the cheek.

“Don’t worry, Mom. It was probably just some weird mind thing. If it helps, I didn’t feel scared or anything. They don’t mean us any harm.”

“How do you know?”

“I just do. I kind of heard them, in my head, while I was sleeping or waking or whatever it was I was doing. They weren’t interested in us.”

Then, for the first time, Jenna had looked thoughtful, as though she had only just begun to understand how truly odd her words sounded.

Rebecca tried to stop her voice from trembling when she spoke. “Honey, who are they?”

The question distracted Jenna. She giggled. “That’s the weirdest part of all. I woke knowing who they were, like sometimes I’ll have a painting and a title in my head, both at the same time, and I won’t know where they came from. I made this first drawing, and I knew who those figures were almost before the pencil touched the paper.”

She held the drawing up before her, both admiring it and yet slightly concerned at what she had created.

“They’re the Hollow Men.”

Chapter VII

I had strawberries and coffee for breakfast. There was a Delgados CD, Universal Audio, in the stereo, and I let it play while I ate. Walter fooled around in the garden, relieved himself in the bushes, then came back inside and fell asleep in his basket.

When I was done eating, I spread the list of Daniel Clay’s former associates on the kitchen table, and added “Eldritch” to the bottom. Then I worked out a rough order in which to approach them all, starting with those who were local yet farthest from town. I began to make calls to arrange appointments, but the first three were washouts. The people in question had either moved, or were dead or, in the case of a third man, a former professor of Clay’s who had retired to Bar Harbor, were suffering from such severe Alzheimer’s that, according to his daughter-in-law, he no longer even recognized his own children.

I had better luck, of a sort, with the fourth name, an accountant named Edward Haver. He had died a decade earlier, but his wife, Ce-line, said that she wouldn’t mind talking about Clay, even over the phone, particularly when I explained that I had been hired by Clay’s daughter. She told me that she had always liked “Dan,” and had never found him to be anything other than good company. She and her husband had attended his wife’s funeral, back when Rebecca was only four or five. His wife had died of cancer. Then, twenty years later, her own husband had succumbed to a form of the same illness, and Daniel Clay had attended that funeral. For a time, she admitted, she thought that there might have been a chance that they would get together, for they had similar tastes, and she liked Rebecca, but it seemed that Clay had become used to living without a partner.

“And then he vanished,” she concluded.

I was about to press her about the circumstances of his disappearance, but in the end I didn’t have to.

“I know what people said about him, but that wasn’t Dan, not the Dan that I knew,” she said. “He cared about the children he counseled, maybe too much. You could see it in his face when he spoke about them.”

“He talked about his cases with you?”

“He never mentioned names, but sometimes he’d tell me about what a child had been through: beatings, neglect, and, well, you know, other things too. It was clear that it troubled him. He couldn’t bear to see a child hurt. I think that brought him into conflict with people sometimes.”

“What kind of people?”

“Other professionals, doctors who didn’t always see things the way that he did. There was one man named-oh, what was it again? I’ve seen his name somewhere recently-Christian! That’s it: Dr. Robert Christian, over at the Midlake Center. He and Dan were always disagreeing about things in papers that they wrote, or at conferences. I guess it was a small field that they worked in, so they were forever encountering each other and arguing over how best to deal with the children who came to them.”

“You seem to have a good memory for events that were sometime in the past, Mrs. Haver.” I tried not to make it sound like I was doubting her, or that I was suspicious in any way, although I felt a little of both.

“I liked Dan a lot, and we shared parts of our life over the years.” I could almost see her smiling sadly. “He rarely got angry, but I can still remember the look that used to come over his face when the subject of Robert Christian was raised. They were competing, in a way. Dan and Dr. Christian were both involved in evaluating allegations of child abuse, but each had a very different approach. I think Dan was a little less cautious than Dr. Christian, that’s all. He was inclined to believe the child from the start, on the grounds that his priority was the protection of children from harm. I admired that about him. He had a crusading impulse, and you don’t see that kind of devotion much anymore. Dr. Christian didn’t see his calling in the same way. Dan said Robert Christian was too skeptical, that he confused objectivity with distrust. Then there was some trouble. Dan gave an evaluation that turned out to be wrong, and a man died, but I guess you probably know about all that already. Afterward, I think, Dan was offered fewer evaluations, or maybe they stopped altogether.”

“Do you remember the name of the man who died?”

“I think it was a German name. Muller, perhaps? Yes, I’m almost sure that was the name. I would imagine that the boy involved must be in his late teens by now. I can’t imagine what his life has been like, knowing that his allegations led to his father’s death.”

I wrote down the name “Muller,” and drew a line connecting it to Dr. Robert Christian.

“Then, of course, the rumors started,” she said.

“The rumors of abuse?”

“That’s right.”

“Did he discuss them with you?”

“No, we weren’t really seeing much of each other by that time. After the death of Mr. Muller, Daniel became less sociable. Don’t get me wrong: he was never what you might call a party animal, but he would attend dinners, and sometimes he would come over here for a coffee or a glass of wine. That all stopped after the Muller incident. It did something to his confidence, and I can only imagine that the allegations of abuse shattered it entirely.”

“You didn’t believe them?”

“I saw how committed he was to his work. I could never believe the things some people said about Dan. It sounds like a cliché, but his problem was that he cared too much. He wanted to protect them all, but he couldn’t, in the end.”

I thanked her, and she told me to call her anytime. Before she hung up, she gave me some names of people to whom I might talk, but they were all on Rebecca’s list. Still, she was helpful, which was more than could be said for the next two people I called. One was a lawyer named Elwin Stark, who had acted for Clay as well as being his friend. I knew Stark to see around town. He was tall and unctuous, and favored the kind of dark-striped suits beloved of old-style mobsters and upmarket antiques dealers. It was true to say that he wasn’t the pro bono kind when it came to legal matters, and he seemed to apply the same principle to telephone conversations for which he wasn’t being paid. It was Stark who had dealt with the paperwork surrounding the declaration of Clay’s death.

“He’s gone,” Stark told me, after his secretary had left me hanging in the ether for a good fifteen minutes, then advised me that Stark wouldn’t have time to see me in person but might, just might, have two minutes free during which he could squeeze in a brief talk on the phone. “There’s nothing more to be said about it.”

“His daughter is having trouble with someone who disagrees. He doesn’t seem willing to accept that Clay is dead.”

“Well, his daughter has a piece of paper that says otherwise. What do you want me to tell you? I knew Daniel. I went fishing with him a couple of times a year. He was a good guy. A bit intense, maybe, but that came with the territory.”

“Did he ever speak about that territory with you?”

“Nope. I’m a business lawyer. That kid shit depresses me.”

“Do you still act for Rebecca Clay?”

“I did that one thing as a favor for her. I didn’t expect to be chased up by a PI for doing it, so you can safely say that I won’t be doing her any more favors. Look, I know all about you, Parker. Even talking to you makes me uneasy. No good can come from a lengthy conversation with you, so I’m ending this one now.”

And he did.

The next conversation, with an M.D. named Philip Caussure, was even shorter. Caussure was Clay’s former physician. It seemed like Clay had a lot of relationships that blended the personal with the professional.

“I have nothing to say,” said Caussure. “Please don’t bother me again.”

Then he hung up too. It seemed like a sign. I made one more call, but this time it was to secure an appointment with Dr. Robert Christian.

The Midlake Center was a short drive from where I used to live, just off the Gorham Road. It stood in a tree-shrouded lot, and looked like any other anonymous office building. It could have housed a lawyer’s office or a Realtor’s. Instead, it was a place for children who had suffered abuse or neglect, or who had made such allegations, or who were having those claims made on their behalf by others. Inside the main door was a waiting area painted in bright yellow and orange, with books for children of various ages lying on tables, and a play area in one corner, trucks and dolls and packets of Crayolas lying on its foam matting. There was also a rack of information leaflets on the wall, slightly higher than a child could reach, containing contact details for the local Sexual Assault Response Team and various social services.

The secretary behind the desk took my name and made a call. A minute or two later, a small, spry man with white hair and a neatly trimmed beard appeared at the door connecting the reception area to the clinic. He was probably in his early fifties, and dressed in chinos and an open-collared shirt. His handshake was firm, but he seemed a little cautious. He led me to his office, which was furnished in yellow pine and dominated by shelves of books and reports. I thanked him for seeing me at such short notice, and he shrugged.

“Curiosity,” he said. “It’s a long time since anyone has mentioned Daniel Clay to me, at least outside this branch of the medical community.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Just so we’re clear, I’ll be straight with you if you’re straight with me. Clay and I disagreed on certain matters. I don’t think he cared much for me. I didn’t care much for him. Professionally, most people believed that his heart was in the right place, for what it’s worth, at least until the rumors began circulating, but that element needed to be balanced by objectivity, which I don’t think Daniel Clay had in sufficient quantities for his opinions to be taken seriously.”

“I heard that you’d clashed,” I said. “That’s why I’m here. His daughter hired me. Someone has been asking about her father. She’s worried.”

“So now you’re going back over the trail, trying to find out why someone should be concerned about him so many years after his disappearance?”

“Something like that.”

“Am I under suspicion?” He smiled.

“Should you be?”

“There were certainly times when I would cheerfully have strangled him. He had a way of getting under my skin, both personally and professionally.”

“Would you care to explain?”

“Well, I guess to understand him, and what happened prior to his disappearance, you need to know something about what we do here. We perform medical examinations and psychological evaluations in cases where there are allegations of abuse of children, whether that abuse is physical or sexual, emotional or the result of neglect. A call comes through to Central Intake in Augusta. It’s referred to a supervisor, screened, then a decision is made on whether or not to send out a social worker. Sometimes that call may have originated with local law enforcement, or Child Protection Services. It may have come from a school, a parent, a neighbor, even from the child in question. The child is then referred to us for evaluation. We’re the main provider for this service in the state. When Daniel Clay first started performing evaluations, we were still finding our feet a little. Hell, everyone was. Now, things are a little better organized. We can do everything in this one building: examination, evaluation, initial counseling, interviewing of the child and the alleged perpetrator. It can all be handled here.”

“And before the center opened?”

“The child might have been examined by a doctor, then sent elsewhere for an interview and evaluation.”

“Which is where Clay came in.”

“Yes, but, again, I don’t think Daniel Clay was careful enough. It’s a delicate business, what we do, and there are no easy answers. Everyone wants a definite ‘yes’ or ‘no’-the prosecutors, the judges, obviously the people directly involved, like the parents or guardians-and they’re disappointed when we can’t always give it.”

“I’m not sure that I understand,” I said. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

Christian sat forward in his chair and opened his hands. They were very clean, the nails cut so short that I could see the soft, pale flesh at the fingertips.

“Look, we deal with eight to nine hundred children every year. In terms of sexual abuse, maybe five percent of those children will have positive physical findings, say small tears in the hymen or rectum. Many of those kids will be teenagers, and even if there are indications of sexual activity, it can be hard to tell if it was consensual or not. A lot of adolescent females can even be penetrated and still have a normal exam that reveals an unbroken hymen. If we do establish nonconsensual sex, then we often can’t tell who did it, or when. All we can say is that sexual contact did occur. Even in a very young child, there may be little or no evidence, especially taking into account the normal anatomical variations that may occur in children’s bodies. Physical findings that used to be considered abnormal have now come to be regarded as nonspecific. The only surefire way to establish sexual abuse is to test for STDs, but that assumes that the perpetrator was infected. If the test is positive, then abuse is a done deal, but even then, you’re no closer to establishing who did it, not unless you have DNA marking. If the perpetrator wasn’t infected with an STD, then you have nothing.”

“But what about the child’s behavior. Wouldn’t that change after abuse?”

“The effects vary, and there are no specific behavioral indicators to suggest abuse. We may see anxiety, difficulty sleeping, sometimes night terrors, where the child wakes up screaming, inconsolable, yet will have no memory of the event in the morning. There may be nail biting, the pulling out of hair, refusal to go to school, an insistence on sleeping with a trusted parent. Boys will tend to act out, becoming more aggressive, while girls will tend to act in, becoming withdrawn and depressed. But those types of behavior may also occur if, say, the parents are going through a divorce and the child is becoming stressed. By themselves, they don’t offer proof one way or the other of abuse. At least a third of abused children will have no symptoms whatsoever.”

I took off my jacket, then continued making notes. Christian smiled. “More complicated than you thought, isn’t it?”

“A little.”

“That’s why the evaluation process and the interview technique employed for it are so important. The professional can’t lead the child, which is what I believe Clay did in a number of cases.”

“Like the Muller case?”

Christian nodded. “The Muller case should be offered as a textbook example of all the things that can go wrong during the investigation of alleged child abuse: a child being manipulated by a parent, a professional who sets aside his objectivity as part of some misguided crusading impulse, a judge who prefers black-and-white to shades of gray. There are those who believe that the vast majority of sexual abuse allegations that arise during custody disputes in divorce cases are fabricated. There’s even a term for the child’s behavior in such disputes: Parental Alienation Syndrome, where a child identifies with one parent and in so doing alienates the other. The negative behavior toward the alienated parent is a reflection of the alienating parent’s own feelings and perceptions, not the child’s. It’s a theory, and not everyone accepts it, but looking back at the Muller case, it should have been clear to Clay that the mother was hostile and, had he asked more questions about her own medical background, he would have discovered that there were indications of personality disorder. Instead, he sided with her and appeared to accept the child’s version of events unquestioningly. The whole affair was a disaster for everyone concerned, and damaged the standing of those who work in the field. Worst of all, though, a man lost not only his family, but his life.”

Christian realized how tense he had become. He stretched, and said: “Sorry, I got us kind of sidetracked there.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I asked you about the Mullers. You were talking about interview techniques.”

“Well, it’s pretty simple, in one way. You can’t ask questions like ‘Has something bad happened to you?’ or ‘Did X touch you somewhere special or somewhere private?’ That’s particularly the case when you’re dealing with very young children. They may try to please the evaluator with the right answer just so they can leave. We also have instances of what’s called ‘source misattribution,’ where a kid may have heard something and applied it to himself, perhaps as a way of seeking attention. Sometimes, you may get a good disclosure from a younger child initially but find that the child then recants under pressure from, say, family members. It happens also with teenagers, where Mom has a new boyfriend who starts abusing the daughter but Mom doesn’t want to believe it because she doesn’t want to lose the guy who’s supporting her and would rather blame the child for telling lies. Teenagers in general bring with them their own challenges. They may lie about abuse for gain, but generally they’re pretty resistant to suggestion. The problem with them is that, if they have been abused, it can take a couple of sessions just to get the details from them. They won’t want to talk about it, maybe out of guilt or shame, and the very last thing they’ll want to discuss with a stranger is oral or anal abuse.

“So the evaluation has to be conducted with all of these elements borne in mind. My position is that I don’t believe anybody: I only believe the data. That’s what I present to the police, to the prosecutors, and to the judges if the case gets to court. And you know what? They get frustrated with me. Like I said, they want definite answers, but a lot of the time we can’t give them those answers.

“That’s where Daniel Clay and I differed. There are some evaluators out there who have almost a political position on abuse. They believe that it’s rampant, and they interview children with the presumption that abuse has occurred. It colors everything that follows. Clay became the go-to guy to confirm abuse allegations, whether in the first instance or where a lawyer decided to seek a second opinion on abuse. That was what got him into trouble.”

“Okay, can we go back to the Muller case for a moment?”

“Sure. Erik Muller. It’s a matter of record. The papers reported a lot of the details at the time. It was a nasty divorce case, and the wife wanted custody. It seems like she may have pressured her son, who was then twelve, into making allegations against his father. The father denied the allegations, but Clay offered a pretty damning evaluation. There still wasn’t enough evidence for the D.A. to indict, so it went to Family Court, where the burden of proof is lower than at criminal level. The father lost custody and killed himself a month later. Then the child recanted to a priest, and it all came out. Clay went before the Board of Licensure. It took no action against him, but the whole thing looked bad, and he ceased to do case evaluations shortly afterward.”

“Was that his decision, or was it forced upon him?”

“Both. He decided not to conduct evaluations again, but he would not have been offered them even had he decided to continue. By that time, we had been up and running for some time, so the burden of evaluation in most cases fell on us. Well, I say ‘burden,’ but it was one that we were willing to accept. We’re as committed to child welfare as Daniel Clay ever was, but we never lose sight of our responsibilities to all of those involved and, most of all, to the truth.”

“Do you know where the Muller boy is now?”

“Dead.”

“How?”

“He became an addict and died of a heroin overdose. That was, um, about four years ago, up in Fort Kent. I don’t know what happened to the mother. Last I heard, she was living somewhere in Oregon. She married again, and I think she has another child now. I hope she does better with this one than the last.”

It sounded like the Muller angle wasn’t going to lead anywhere. I moved on to the subject of the abuse of some of Clay’s patients. Christian seemed to have the details at his fingertips. Maybe he had gone over them before I arrived, or it could simply have been one of those cases that nobody was very likely to forget.

“Two cases of alleged abuse were referred to us in the space of three months,” said Christian, “each with similar elements: alleged stranger abuse, or abuse by someone apparently unknown to the child, and the use of masks.”

“Masks?”

“Bird masks. The abusers-three in one case, four in the other-disguised their faces with bird masks. The kids-the first a twelve-year-old girl, the second a fourteen-year-old boy-were abducted, one on the way home from school, the other while drinking beer by a disused railroad track, then taken to an unknown location, systematically abused over a period of hours, then dumped close to where they’d been abducted. The alleged abuse had occurred some years back, one in the mideighties and another at the start of the nineties. The first case emerged after a suicide attempt by the girl shortly before she was due to be married at the tender age of eighteen. The second came about when the boy went before the courts on a whole range of misdemeanor offenses and the lawyer decided to use the alleged abuse as mitigation. The judge wasn’t inclined to believe him, but when the two cases came to us, the similarities were impossible to ignore. These kids didn’t know each other and came from towns a hundred miles apart. Yet the details of their stories matched perfectly, even down to details of the masks used.

“You know what else they had in common? Both children had been treated by Daniel Clay in the past. The girl had made allegations of abuse against a teacher that turned out to be untrue, motivated by a belief that the teacher was secretly attracted to one of her friends. It was one of the rare instances where Clay’s evaluation did not find reason to support the allegations. The boy was sent to Clay after he’d engaged in inappropriate sexual contact with a ten-year-old girl in his class. Clay’s evaluation suggested possible indicators of abuse in the boy’s past, but went no further. Since then, we’ve uncovered six more cases with the bird element to them: three of those involved were former patients of Daniel Clay, but none of the cases took place after his disappearance. In other words, there have been no new reports of similar incidents since late 1999. That doesn’t mean that they haven’t occurred, but we haven’t heard about them. Most of the children involved were also, um, slightly troublesome in certain ways, which is why the allegations took so long to emerge.”

“Troublesome?”

“Their behavior was antisocial. Some had made allegations of abuse before, which may or may not have been true. Others had engaged in criminal activity, or had simply been allowed to run wild by parents or foster parents. Taken together, it might have made authority figures less willing to believe them, even if they had made an effort to talk about what had taken place, and police, especially male cops, tend to be reluctant to believe allegations of abuse from teenage girls in particular anyway. It also made the children in question vulnerable since nobody was inclined to look out for them.”

“Then before anyone could ask Clay about all of this in detail, he disappeared?”

“Well, most of the cases emerged subsequent to his disappearance, but that’s about right,” said Christian. “The problem for us is that we’ve had to wait for indications of similar abuse to come to us instead of being able to seek out the children for ourselves. There are issues of patient confidentiality, sealed records, even the natural dispersal of families and children that occurs over time. Any child who had undergone abuse similar to what I’ve outlined to you would be in his or her late teens at least by now, given that the victims of whom we’re aware were aged between nine and fifteen at the time when the abuse is alleged to have occurred. To put it simply, we can’t really place an advertisement in the newspapers asking people who may have been abused by men in bird masks to come forward. It just doesn’t work that way.”

“Any suggestion that Clay could have been one of the abusers?”

Christian let out a long breath. “That’s the big question, isn’t it? There were certainly rumors, but did you ever meet Daniel Clay?”

“No.”

“He was a tall man, very tall, six-six at least. Very thin. All in all, he was quite distinctive-looking. When we went back over those cases, none of the children involved described any of their alleged abusers in terms that could be applied to Daniel Clay.”

“So it could be a coincidence that some of these kids were his patients?”

“It’s certainly possible. He was well known for dealing with children who claimed to have been abused. If someone was sufficiently committed, then it’s possible that children could have been targeted because they were his patients. Perhaps someone among the various professions involved with the children along the way might also have leaked details, whether deliberately or accidentally, although our own inquiries have proved negative on that front. It’s all supposition, though.”

“Do you have any idea where these children are now?”

“Some of them. I can’t give you any details. I’m sorry. I could, perhaps, show you details of their allegations with their identities removed, but it won’t tell you much more than you already know.”

“I’d appreciate it if you would.”

He led me back to the reception area, then returned to his office. Twenty minutes later he returned with a handful of printed pages.

“This is all that I can give you, I’m afraid.”

I thanked him for the papers, and for his time. He told me to contact him if I needed anything more, and gave me his home number.

“Do you think Daniel Clay is dead, Dr. Christian?” I asked.

“If he was involved-and I’m not saying that he was-then he would not have wanted to face ruin, disgrace, and imprisonment. We may have disagreed on most things, but he was a proud, cultured man. Under the circumstances, he might have taken his own life. If he wasn’t involved in some way, well, why did he run? Perhaps the two events, the revelations of possible abuse and Clay’s disappearance, were entirely unconnected, and we are besmirching an innocent man’s reputation. I simply don’t know. It is strange, though, that no trace of Daniel Clay has ever been found. I work with the available data, and nothing more, but from the data I have before me, I’d have to say that Clay is dead. The question then is, did he take his own life or did someone deprive him of it?”

I left the Midlake Center and drove home. At my kitchen table, I read the sections of the case reports that Christian had given to me. As he had promised, they added little to what he had told me, except to make me despair, if I ever needed reminding, at what adults were capable of doing to children. The details of the abusers’ bodies were vague, especially given that, in a number of cases, the children had been blindfolded throughout the abuse, or had been so traumatized by it that they were unable to recall anything about the men themselves, but Christian was right: none of the available descriptions matched the physical appearance of Daniel Clay.

When I was done, I took Walter for a walk. He had matured a lot in the last year, even for a young dog. He was quieter and less skittish, although he was still but a shadow of his ancestors, the big hunting dogs owned by the original planters and settlers of Scarborough. My grandfather once told me of a traveling showman who stopped for a night at the house of the local ferryman. The showman was carrying a lion east, and a hunter proposed, after some liquor was taken, to match one of his dogs against the lion for a wager of a barrel of rum. The showman agreed and, in front of a gathering of townsmen, the dog was put in the lion’s cage. The dog took one look at the lion, sprang for its throat, then forced it onto its back and set about killing it. The showman intervened and paid the hunter the barrel of rum and fifty dollars to be allowed to shoot the dog in the cage before it tore the lion apart. Walter wasn’t the lion-killing kind, but he was my dog, and I loved him nonetheless. My neighbors, Bob and Shirley Johnson, looked after him for me if I had to go away for a few days. Walter didn’t mind staying with them. He was still free to roam his territory, and they spoiled him. They were retired and didn’t have a dog of their own, so Bob was always happy to take Walter for a stroll. It worked out well for everybody.

By now, we had reached Ferry Beach. It was late, but I needed the air. I watched Walter tentatively dip a paw into the water, then withdraw it rapidly. He barked once in reproof, then looked at me as if there was something that I could do to raise the temperature of the sea so he could splash away. He wagged his tail, then all of the hairs on his back seemed to rise at once. He grew very still and stared past me. His lips parted, exposing his sharp white teeth. He growled very low in his throat.

I turned. A man appeared to be standing among the trees. If I looked directly at him I could see only branches and spots of moonlight where I thought he was standing, but he seemed to appear more clearly when I looked at him with my peripheral vision, or if I tried not to focus on him at all. He was there, though. Walter’s reaction was evidence of that, and I still recalled the events of the night before: the glimpse I had caught of something at the edge of the forest before it faded away; a child’s voice whispering from the shadows; words scrawled on a dusty windowpane.

Hollow Men.

I didn’t have my gun. I had left the.38 in the car while I was talking to Dr. Christian and had not retrieved it before taking Walter out, while the Smith 10 was in my bedroom. I now wished I had either one of them with me, or maybe both.

“How you doing?” I called. I raised my hand in greeting. The man didn’t move. His coat was a dirty tan in color, so that it blended with the shadows and the sandy earth. Only a little of his face was visible: a hint of pale cheek, of white forehead and chin. His mouth and eyes were black pools, fine wrinkles visible where the lips might have been and at the edges of the dark sockets, as though the skin in those places had become shrunken and dried. I walked closer, Walter advancing beside me, hoping to see him more clearly, and he began to retreat into the trees, the darkness embracing him.

And then he was gone. Walter’s growls ceased. Warily, he approached the spot where the figure had been standing and sniffed at the ground. Clearly he didn’t like what he smelled there because his muzzle wrinkled, and he ran his tongue over his teeth as though trying to rid it of a bad taste. I walked on through the trees until I came to the boundary of the beach area, but there was no sign of anyone. I didn’t hear a car start. All seemed quiet and still.

We left the beach and walked home, but Walter stayed close to me all the way, only pausing at times to stare into the trees to our left, his teeth slightly bared as though waiting for the approach of some threat as yet unknown.

Chapter VIII

I drove down to Lynn the next morning. The sky was clear and blue, the color of summer, but the deciduous trees were bare, and the workers employed on the never-ending turnpike extension were wrapped in hooded sweaters and wore thick gloves to ward off the cold. I drank coffee on the ride and listened to an album of North African protest music. It drew disapproving looks when I stopped for gas in New Hampshire, where the sound of Clash songs being bellowed in Arabic was clearly regarded as evidence of unpatriotic leanings. The songs kept my mind off the figure glimpsed in the trees at Ferry Beach the night before. The memory of it evoked a curious response, as though I had witnessed something that I was not really meant to see, or had broken some taboo. The strangest part of it was that the figure had seemed almost familiar to me, as if I had at last encountered a distant uncle or cousin about whom I had heard a great deal but whom I had never before met.

I left the interstate for Route 1, as ugly a stretch of uncontrolled commercial development as could be found anywhere in the Northeast, and then took 107 North, which wasn’t much better, heading through Revere and Saugus toward Lynn. I passed the huge Wheelabrator waste management plant on the right, then GE Aviation, the big employer in the area. Used-car lots and vacant sites dotted the landscape as I entered Lynn, its streetlights adorned with Stars and Stripes banners welcoming all comers, each sponsored by a local business. Eldritch and Associates wasn’t among them, and when I came to their offices it wasn’t hard to see why. It didn’t look like a particularly prosperous operation, occupying the top two floors of an ugly gray building that squatted defiantly on the block like a mongrel dog. Its windows were filthy and nobody had refreshed the gold lettering upon them announcing the presence of a lawyer within in a long, long time. The premises were sandwiched between Tulley’s bar on the right, itself a pretty austere place that appeared to have been built to repel a siege, and some gray-green condos with businesses on the lower level: a nail salon, a store called Angkor Multi Services with signs in Cambodian, and a Mexican restaurant advertising pupusas, tortas, and tacos. At the end of the block was another bar that made Tulley’s look like it had been designed by Gaudi. It was little more than a doorway and a pair of windows, with the name above the entrance painted in jagged white letters by someone who might have been suffering from serious delirium tremens at the time, and who had offered to do the job in return for a hand-steadying drink. It was called Eddys, without the apostrophe. Maybe if they’d called it Steady Eddys, they might have gotten away with the sign on ironic grounds.

I wasn’t optimistic about Eldritch and Associates as I parked in Tulley’s lot. In my experience, lawyers didn’t tend to open up much for private investigators, and the previous day’s conversation with Stark hadn’t done much to change my opinion. In fact, now that I thought about it, my encounters with lawyers had been almost uniformly negative. Maybe I just wasn’t meeting enough of them. Then again, maybe I was just meeting too many.

The street-level door of Eldritch’s building was unlocked, and a narrow flight of battered steps led to the upper floors. The yellow wall to the right of the stairs had an extended greasy smear at the level of my upper arm where countless coat sleeves had brushed against it over the years. There was a musty smell that grew stronger the farther up I went. It was the odor of old paper slowly decaying, of dust piled upon dust, of rotting carpet and law cases that had dragged on for decades. It was the stuff of Dickens. Had the problems of Jarndyce and Jarndyce found their way across the Atlantic, they would have enjoyed familiar surroundings in the company of Eldritch and Associates.

I reached a door marked BATHROOM on the first landing. Ahead of me, on the second floor, was a frosted-glass door with the firm’s name etched upon it. I climbed on, careful not to place too much faith in the carpet beneath my feet, which was fatally undermined by an absence of enough nails to hold it in position. To my right, a further flight of steps led up into the dimness of the top floor. The carpet there was less worn, but it wasn’t much of a claim.

Out of politeness, I knocked on the glass door before entering. It seemed like the Olde Worlde thing to do. Nobody answered, so I opened the door and entered. There was a low wooden counter to my left. Behind it was a large desk, and behind the large desk was a large woman with a pile of big black hair balanced precariously on her head like dirty ice cream on a cone. She was wearing a bright green blouse with frills at the neck, and a necklace of yellowing imitation pearls. Like everything else there, she looked old, but age had not dimmed her affection for cosmetics or hair dye, even if it had deprived her of some of the skills required to apply both without making the final effect look less like an act of vanity than an act of vandalism. She was smoking a cigarette. Given the amount of paper surrounding her it seemed an almost suicidal act of bravado, as well as indicating an admirable disregard for the law, even for someone who worked for a lawyer.

“Help you?” she said. She had a voice like puppies being strangled, high and gasping.

“I’d like to see Mr. Eldritch,” I said.

“Senior or Junior?”

“Either.”

“Senior’s dead.”

“Junior it is, then.”

“He’s busy. He’s not taking on any new clients. We’re run off our feet already.”

I tried to imagine her even getting to her feet, let alone being run off them, and couldn’t. There was a picture on the wall behind her, but the sunlight had faded it so much that only a hint of a tree was visible in one corner. The walls were yellow, just like those on the stairway, but decades of nicotine accumulation had given them a disturbing brown tint. The ceiling might once have been white, but only a fool would have placed a bet on it. And everywhere there was paper: on the carpet, on the woman’s desk, on a second, unoccupied desk nearby, on the counter, on a pair of old straight-backed chairs that might once have been offered to clients but was now assigned to more-pressing storage duties, and on the full-length shelves that stood against the walls. Hell, if they could have found a way to store paper on the ceiling, they probably would have covered that as well. None of the documents looked like they’d been moved much since quills went out of fashion.

“It’s about someone who may be a current client,” I replied. “His name is Merrick.”

She squinted at me through a plume of cigarette smoke.

“ Merrick? Doesn’t ring a bell.”

“He’s driving a car registered to this firm.”

“How’d you know it’s one of ours?”

“Well, it was hard to tell at first because it wasn’t filled with paper, but it checked out in the end.”

Her squint grew narrower. I gave her the tag number.

“ Merrick,” I said again. I pointed at her phone. “You may want to call someone who isn’t dead.”

“Take a seat,” she said.

I looked around.

“There isn’t one.”

She almost smiled, then thought better about cracking the makeup on her face.

“Guess you’ll have to stand, then.”

I sighed. Here was more proof, if proof were needed, that not all fat people were jolly. Santa Claus had a lot to answer for.

She lifted the receiver and pressed some buttons on her beige phone.

“Name?”

“Parker. Charlie Parker.”

“Like the singer?”

“Saxophonist.”

“Whatever. You got some ID?”

I showed her my license. She looked at it distastefully, like I’d just taken my weenie out and made it do tricks.

“Picture’s old,” she said.

“ Lot of stuff ’s old,” I replied. “Can’t stay young and beautiful forever.”

She tapped her fingers upon her desk while she waited for an answer at the other end of the line. Her nails were painted pink. The color made my teeth hurt. “You sure he didn’t sing?”

“Pretty sure.”

“Huh. So who was the one who sang? He fell out of a window.”

“Chet Baker.”

“Huh.”

She continued drumming her nails.

“You like Chet Baker?” I asked. We were forming a relationship.

“No.”

Or maybe not. Mercifully, somewhere above us a phone was answered.

“Mr. Eldritch, there’s a-” She paused dramatically. “-gentleman here to see you. He’s asking about a Mr. Merrick.”

She listened to the answer, nodding. When she hung up she looked even unhappier than before. I think she had been hoping for an order to release the hounds on me.

“You can go up. Second door at the top of the stairs.”

“It’s been a blast,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “You hurry back now.”

I left her, like an overweight Joan of Arc waiting for the pyre to ignite, and went up to the top floor. The second door was already open and a small old man, seventy or more, stood waiting for me. He still had most of his hair, or most of someone’s hair. He wore gray pin-striped trousers and a black jacket over a white shirt and a gray pin-striped vest. His tie was black silk. He looked slightly unhappy, like an undertaker who had just mislaid a corpse. A faint patina of dust seemed to have settled upon him, a combination of dandruff and paper fragments, paper mostly. Wrinkled and faded as he was, he might almost have been made of paper himself, slowly crumbling away along with the accumulated detritus of a lifetime in the service of the law.

He stretched out a hand in greeting, and conjured up a smile. Compared to his secretary, it was like being greeted with the keys of the city.

“I’m Thomas Eldritch,” he said. “Please come in.”

His office was tiny. There was paper here, too, but less of it. Some of it even looked like it had been moved recently, and box files were stored alphabetically on the shelves, each carefully marked with a set of dates. They went back a very long time. He closed the door behind me and waited for me to sit before he took his own seat at his desk.

“Now,” he said, steepling his hands before him. “What’s this about Mr. Merrick?”

“You know him?”

“I am aware of him. We provided him with a car at the request of one of our clients.”

“Can I ask the name of the client?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. Is Mr. Merrick in some kind of trouble?”

“He’s getting there. I’ve been employed by a woman who seems to have attracted Merrick ’s attentions. He’s stalking her. He broke a window in her house.”

Eldritch tut-tutted. “Has she informed the police?”

“She has.”

“We’ve heard nothing from them. Surely a complaint of this kind would have made its way back to us by now?”

“The police didn’t get to talk to him. I did. I took the tag number from his car and traced it back to your firm.”

“Very enterprising of you. And now, instead of informing the police, you are here. May I ask why?”

“The lady in question is not convinced that the police can help her.”

“And you can.”

It sounded like a statement, not a question, and I had an uneasy sensation that Eldritch already knew who I was even before his secretary gave him my name. I treated it as a question anyway.

“I’m trying. We may have to involve the police if this situation persists, which I imagine might be embarrassing, or worse, for you and your client.”

“Neither we, nor our client, are responsible for Mr. Merrick’s behavior, even if what you say is true.”

“The police may not take that view if you’re acting as his personal car-rental service.”

“And they’ll get the same reply that I have just given you. We simply provided a car for him at a client’s request, and nothing more.”

“And you can’t tell me anything at all about Merrick?”

“No. I know very little about him, as I’ve said.”

“Do you even know his first name?”

Eldritch considered. His eyes were cunning and bright. It struck me that he was enjoying this.

“I believe it’s Frank.”

“Do you think that ‘Frank’ might have served some time?”

“I couldn’t possibly say.”

“There doesn’t seem to be very much that you can say.”

“I am a lawyer, and therefore a certain degree of discretion is to be expected by my clients. Otherwise, I would not have remained in this profession for as long as I have. If what you say is true, then Mr. Merrick’s actions are to be regretted. Perhaps if your own client were to sit down with him and discuss the matter, then the situation could be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction, as I can only assume that Mr. Merrick believes she may be of some assistance to him.”

“In other words, if she tells him what he wants to know, then he’ll go away.”

“It would be logical to assume so. And does she know something?”

I let the question dangle. He was baiting me, and wherever you found bait, you could be pretty certain that there was a hook hidden somewhere within it.

“He seems to think so.”

“Then it would appear to be the natural solution. I’m sure that Mr. Merrick is a reasonable man.”

Eldritch had remained impossibly still throughout our discussions. Only his mouth moved. Even his eyes appeared reluctant to blink. But when he said the word “reasonable” he smiled slightly, imbuing the word with an import that was entirely the opposite of its apparent meaning.

“Have you met Merrick, Mr. Eldritch?”

“I have had that pleasure, yes.”

“He seems to have a lot of anger in him.”

“It may be that he has just cause.”

“I notice that you haven’t asked me the name of the woman who is employing me, which suggests to me that you already know it. In turn, that would seem to indicate that Merrick has been in touch with you.”

“I have spoken to Mr. Merrick, yes.”

“Is he also a client of yours?”

“He was, in a sense. We acted on his behalf in a certain matter. He is a client no longer.”

“And now you’re helping him because one of your other clients has asked you to.”

“That is so.”

“Why is your client interested in Daniel Clay, Mr. Eldritch?”

“My client has no interest in Daniel Clay.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“I will not lie to you, Mr. Parker. If I cannot answer a question, for whatever reason, then I will tell you so, but I will not lie. I will repeat myself: to my knowledge, my client has no interest in Daniel Clay. Mr. Merrick’s line of inquiry is entirely his own.”

“What about his daughter? Is your client interested in her?”

Eldritch seemed to consider confirming it, then decided against it, but his silence was enough. “I could not possibly say. That is something you would have to discuss with Mr. Merrick.”

My nostrils itched. I could feel the molecules of paper and dust settling in them, as though Eldritch’s office were slowly making me part of itself, so that in years to come a stranger might enter and find us here, Eldritch and me, still batting questions and answers back and forth to no end, a thin layer of white matter covering us as we ourselves dwindled into dust.

“Do you want to know what I think, Mr. Eldritch?”

“What would that be, Mr. Parker?”

“I think Merrick is a dangerous man, and I think somebody has set him on my client. You know who that person is, so maybe you’ll pass on a message for me. You tell him, or her, that I’m very good at what I do, and if anything happens to the woman I’ve been hired to protect, then I’m going to come back here and someone will answer for what has taken place. Am I making myself clear?”

Eldritch’s expression did not alter. He was still smiling benignly like a little wrinkled Buddha.

“Perfectly, Mr. Parker,” he said. “This is purely an observation and nothing more, but it appears to me that you have adopted an adversarial position with regard to Mr. Merrick. Perhaps, if you were to be less confrontational, you might find that you have more in common with him than you think. It may be that you and he share certain common goals.”

“I don’t have a goal, beyond ensuring that no harm comes to the woman in my care.”

“Oh, I don’t think that’s true, Mr. Parker. You are thinking in the specific, not the general. Mr. Merrick, like you, may be interested in a form of justice.”

“For himself, or for someone else?”

“Have you tried asking him?”

“It didn’t work out so well.”

“Perhaps if you tried without a gun on your belt?”

So Merrick had spoken to him recently. Otherwise, how could Eldritch have known of my confrontation with him, and the gun?

“You know,” I said, “I don’t think I want to meet Merrick unless I have a gun close at hand.”

“That is, of course, your decision. Now, if there’s nothing else…”

He stood, walked to the door, and opened it. Clearly, our meeting was at an end. Once more, he extended his hand for me to shake.

“It’s been a pleasure,” he said gravely. In an odd way, he seemed to mean it. “I’m delighted that we’ve had a chance to meet at last. I’ve heard so much about you.”

“Would that be from your client as well?” I asked, and for an instant the smile almost slipped, fragile as a crystal glass teetering on the edge of a table. He rescued it, but it was enough. He seemed about to reply, but I answered for him.

“Let me guess,” I said. “You couldn’t possibly say.”

“Precisely,” he replied. “But if it’s any consolation, I expect that you’ll meet him again, in time.”

“Again?”

But the door had already closed, sealing me off from Thomas Eldritch and his knowledge just as surely as if a tomb door had closed upon him, leaving him with only his paper and his dust and his secrets for company.

Chapter IX

My visit to Thomas Eldritch hadn’t contributed significantly to my sense of inner well-being, although it had at least given me Merrick ’s first name. Eldritch had also carefully avoided any denial that Merrick might have done time, which meant that somewhere in the system there was probably a closetful of bones just waiting to be rattled. But Eldritch’s hint that I knew his client made me uneasy. I had enough ghosts in my past to know that I didn’t relish the prospect of any of them being raised.

I stopped for coffee and a sandwich at the Bel Aire Diner on Route 1. (I gave Route 1 this much: at least it had no shortage of spots where a man could eat.) The Bel Aire had survived in its current spot for more than half a century, a big old diner sign outside advertising its presence from the top of a forty-foot pole, the name written beneath in the original fifties cursive. The last I heard a guy called Harry Kallas was running the Bel Aire, and Harry had taken over the place from his father. Inside it were burgundy vinyl booths and matching stools at the counter, and a gray-and-white-tiled floor that boasted the kind of wear and tear associated with generations of business. There were rumors that it was due to close for redecoration, which I supposed was necessary if kind of sad. A TV was built into the wall at one end, but nobody was watching it. The kitchen was noisy, the waitresses were noisy, and the construction workers and locals ordering blue plate specials were noisy too.

I was finishing my second cup of coffee when the call came through. It was Merrick. I recognized his voice the moment I heard it, but no number was displayed on my cell phone.

“You’re a smart sonofabitch,” he said.

“Is that meant to be a compliment? If it is, you need to work on your technique. All that time in the can must have made you rusty.”

“You’re fishing. The lawyer didn’t give you shit.”

I wasn’t surprised that Eldritch had made some calls. I just wondered who had touched base with Merrick: the lawyer, or his client?

“Are you telling me that if I go searching for you in the system, I won’t find a record?”

“Search away. I ain’t gonna make it easy for you, though.”

I waited a heartbeat before asking my next question. It was a hunch, and nothing more.

“What’s the name of the girl in the picture, Frank?”

There was no reply.

“She’s the reason why you’re here, isn’t she? Was she one of the children seen by Daniel Clay? Is she your daughter? Tell me her name, Frank. Tell me her name, and maybe I can help you.”

When Merrick spoke again, his voice had changed. It was filled with quiet yet lethal menace, and I knew with certainty that this was a man who not only was capable of killing, but who had killed already, and that a line had been crossed at the mention of the girl.

“Listen to me,” he said. “I told you once already: my business is my own. I gave you time to convince that little missy to come clean, not to go nosing around in matters that don’t concern you. You’d better get back up to where you came from and talk her around.”

“Or what? I’ll bet that whoever called you about my visit to Eldritch told you to take it down a couple of notches. You keep harassing Rebecca Clay, and your friends are going to cut you loose. You’ll end up back in the can, Frank, and what good will you be to anyone then?”

“You’re wasting time,” he said. “You seem to think I was funnin’ with you about that deadline.”

“I’m getting close,” I lied. “I’ll have something for you by tomorrow.”

“Twenty-four hours,” he said. “That’s all the time you have left, and I’m being generous with you. Let me tell you something else: you and missy better start worrying if ’n I am cut loose. Right now, that’s the only thing holding me in check, apart from my general good nature.”

He hung up. I paid the check and left my coffee to grow cold. Suddenly, it didn’t seem like I had the time to linger over it after all.

My next visit was to Jerry Legere, Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband. I contacted A-Secure and was told that Legere was out on a job in Westbrook with Raymon Lang, and after only a little cajoling the receptionist let me know the location.

I found the company van parked in an industrial wasteland of mud and seemingly deserted premises, with a rutted track leading between them. It wasn’t clear if the site was half finished or in terminal decline. Building work had ceased some time before on a couple of incomplete structures, leaving sections of the steel supports jutting from the concrete like bones from the stumps of severed limbs. Puddles of filthy water stank of gas and waste, and a small yellow cement mixer was lying on its side in a patch of weeds, slowly decaying into rust.

Only one warehouse was open, and inside I found two men on the first floor of the empty two-story interior, a blueprint spread out on the ground in front of them as they knelt over it. This building, at least, had been finished, and there was fresh wire screening to protect its windows from any stones that might have been thrown. I knocked on the steel door, and the men both looked up

“Help you?” said one. He was about five years older than I was, big and strong-looking, but balding badly on top, although he kept his hair cut short enough to disguise the worst of it. It was petty and childish, I knew, but I always felt a brief surge of warmth inside when I met someone close to my own age who had less hair than I did. You could be king of the world and own a dozen companies, but every morning when you stared in the mirror your first thought would be, Damn, I wish I still had my hair.

“I’m looking for Jerry Legere.”

It was the other man who answered. He was silver-haired and ruddy-cheeked. Rebecca was six or seven years younger than I was, I guessed, and this man had a good ten or fifteen years on me. He was carrying some weight, and his jowls were sagging. He had a big, square head that looked a little too heavy for his body and the kind of mouth that was always poised to find something to scowl about: women, kids, modern music, the weather. He was wearing a checked lumberjack shirt tucked into old blue jeans and muddy work boots with mismatched laces. Rebecca was an attractive woman. True, we couldn’t always choose those with whom we fell in love, and I knew looks weren’t everything, but the union, however temporary, of the houses of Clay and Legere suggested that sometimes looks might actually be a real disadvantage.

“My name’s Charlie Parker,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. I’d like to talk to you if you can spare a few minutes.”

“Did she hire you?”

From the tone of his voice, “she” didn’t sound like anyone for whom he retained a high degree of affection.

“I’m working for your ex-wife, if that’s what you mean,” I replied.

His face cleared, but only slightly. At least it took a little weight off his scowl. It looked like Legere was having troubles with someone other than Rebecca. The effect didn’t last long, though. If there was one thing that could be said for Jerry Legere, it was that he wasn’t a man capable of keeping his thoughts hidden behind a poker face. He went from concern to relief, then descended into worry that bordered on a kind of panic. Each transition was clearly readable in his features. He was like a cartoon character, his face engaged in a constant game of catch-up with his emotions.

“What does my ex-wife need with a detective?” he asked.

“That’s why I’d like to talk to you. Maybe we could step outside.”

Legere glanced at the younger man, who nodded and returned to checking the blueprint. The sky was clear blue, and the sun shone down upon us, giving light but no warmth.

“So?” he said.

“Your wife hired me because a man has been bothering her.”

I waited for Legere’s face to conjure up a surprised expression, but I was disappointed. Instead, he settled for a leer that could have come straight from a villain in a Victorian melodrama.

“One of her boyfriends?” he asked.

“Does she have boyfriends?”

Legere shrugged.

“She’s a slut. I don’t know what sluts call them: fucks, maybe.”

“Why would you call her a slut?”

“Because that’s what she is. She cheated on me when we were married, then lied about it. She lies about everything. This guy you’re talking about, he’s probably some jerk who was promised a good time, then got upset when it didn’t arrive. I was a fool to marry a woman who was soiled goods, but I took pity on her. I won’t make that mistake again. Now I’ll screw ’em, but I won’t marry ’em.”

He leered once more. I waited for him to nudge me in the ribs, or give me an “aren’t we men of the world” wink, like in that Monty Python sketch. Your wife, eh? She’s a liar and a slut, right? They all are. Put like that, it wasn’t quite so funny. I recalled Legere’s earlier question-Did she hire you?-and the relief on his face when I told him that I was working for his wife. What did you do, Jerry? Who else did you annoy so much that she might require the services of a private detective?

“I don’t think this man is a rejected suitor,” I said.

Legere appeared to be about to ask what a suitor was, but then took the trouble to work it out for himself.

“He’s been asking about Rebecca’s father,” I continued. “He’s under the impression that Daniel Clay might still be alive.”

Something flickered in Legere’s eyes. It was like watching a djinn momentarily try to break free from the bottle, only to have the cork forcefully rammed home upon it.

“That’s bullshit,” said Legere. “Her father’s dead. Everyone knows that.”

“Everyone?”

Legere looked away. “You know what I mean.”

“He’s missing, not dead.”

“She had him declared. Too late for me, though. There’s money in the bank, but I won’t see any of it. I could have done with some of it right about now.”

“Times hard?”

“Times are always hard for the workingman.”

“You ought to put that to music.”

“I reckon it’s been done before. It’s old news.”

He turned on his heel and looked back at the warehouse, clearly anxious to be done with me and get back to work. I couldn’t blame him.

“So what makes you so sure that Daniel Clay is dead?” I asked.

“I don’t think I like your tone,” he replied. His fists clenched involuntarily. He became conscious of the reflex and allowed them to relax, then wiped the palms dry on the seams of his jeans.

“There’s nothing in it. I just meant that you seem pretty certain that he’s not coming back.”

“Well, he’s been gone a long time, right? Nobody has seen him in six years, and from what I hear, he left with the clothes on his back and nothing else. Didn’t even pack an overnight bag.”

“Did your ex-wife tell you that?”

“If she didn’t, I read it in the newspapers. It’s no secret.”

“Were you seeing her when her father went missing?”

“No, we hooked up later, but it didn’t last more than six months. I found out she was seeing other men behind my back, and I let the bitch go.”

He didn’t seem embarrassed to be telling me this. Usually when men discussed the infidelities of their wives or girlfriends, it came with a greater degree of shame than Legere was showing, the memories of the relationship underscored by an abiding sense of betrayal. They were also careful to whom they told their secrets, because what they feared most of all was that they would somehow be held accountable, that it would be adjudged that their failings had forced their women to seek their pleasures elsewhere, that they had been lacking in the ability to satisfy them. Men tended to see these matters distorted through the prism of sex. I’d known women to wander out of desire, but I’d known more who had cheated because with it came the affection and attention that they weren’t getting at home. Men, by and large, sought sex. Women traded it.

“I guess I wasn’t no innocent either,” he said, “but that’s the way of men. She had everything she needed. She had no call to do what she did. She threw me out of the house when I objected to how she was behaving. I told you: she’s a whore. They hit a certain age, and that’s it. They become sluts. But instead of admitting it, she turned it on me. She said I was the one who done wrong, not her. Bitch.”

I wasn’t sure that this was any of my business, but Rebecca Clay’s version of her marital difficulties was very different from her ex-husband’s. Now Legere was claiming that he was the injured party, and while Rebecca’s story had more of the ring of truth about it, perhaps that was simply because Jerry Legere made my skin crawl. But I could see no reason for him to lie. The story didn’t reflect well on him, and there was no mistaking his bitterness. There was a little truth somewhere in his story, however distorted it might have become in the telling.

“Have you ever heard of a man named Frank Merrick, Mr. Legere?” I asked.

“No, I can’t say that I have,” he replied. “ Merrick? No, it doesn’t ring a bell. Is he the guy who’s been bothering her?”

“That’s right.”

Legere looked away again. I couldn’t see his face, but his posture had changed, as though he had just tensed to avoid a blow. “No,” he repeated. “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

“Strange,” I said.

“What is?”

“He seems to know you.”

I had his full attention now. He didn’t even bother to hide his alarm.

“What do you mean?”

“He was the one who told me to talk to you. He said you might know why he was looking for Daniel Clay.”

“That’s not true. I told you, Clay’s dead. Men like him don’t just drop off the face of the earth only to pop up again later someplace else under a different name. He’s dead. Even if he wasn’t, there’s no way he’d be in contact with me. I never even met the guy.”

“This man, Merrick, was of the opinion that your wife might have told you things that she kept from the authorities.”

“He’s mistaken,” he said quickly. “She didn’t tell me nothing. She didn’t even speak about him much.”

“Did you think that was odd?”

“No. What was she gonna say? She just wanted to forget him. Nothing good would come from talking about him.”

“Could she have been in contact with him without you knowing, assuming that he was still alive?”

“You know,” said Legere, “I don’t think she’s that smart. You see this man again, you tell him that.”

“The way he was talking about you, it sounded like you might get the chance to tell him yourself.”

The prospect didn’t appear to give him much pleasure. He spit on the ground, then rubbed the spittle into the dust with his shoe just to give himself something to do.

“One more thing, Mr. Legere: what was the ‘Project’?”

If it was possible to freeze a man with a word, then Jerry Legere froze.

“Where did you hear that?”

The words were spoken almost before he realized it, and I could see instantly that he wished he could retract them. There was no anger left now. It had disappeared entirely, overwhelmed by what might almost have been wonder. He was shaking his head, as if in disbelief.

“It doesn’t matter where. I’d just like to know what it is, or was.”

“You got it from that guy, right? Merrick.” Some of his belligerence was already returning. “You come here, making accusations, talking about men I’ve never met, listening to lies from strangers, from that bitch I married. You got some nerve.”

His right hand shoved me hard in the chest. I took a step back and he started to advance. I could see him preparing to land another blow, this one harder and higher than the first. I raised my hands in a placa-tory gesture, and positioned my feet, my right foot slightly forward of the left.

“I’ll teach you some-”

I came off my left foot and hit him in the stomach with a door-breaker kick, following through with the full weight of my body. The force of the impact drove the air from his body and sent him sprawling backward in the dirt. He lay there gasping, clutching his hands to his belly. His face was contorted in pain.

“You bastard,” he said. “I’ll kill you for that.”

I stood over him.

“The Project, Mr. Legere. What was it?”

“Fuck you. I got no idea what you’re talking about.”

He forced the words out through gritted teeth. I took one of my cards from my wallet and dropped it on him. The other man appeared at the entrance to the warehouse. He had a crowbar in his hand. I raised a finger of warning to him, and he paused.

“We’ll talk again. You might want to think some on Merrick and what he said. You’re going to end up discussing this again with one of us, whether you like it or not.”

I started to walk back to my car. I heard him get to his feet. He called after me. I turned around. Lang was standing at the entrance to the warehouse, asking Legere if he was okay, but Legere ignored him. The expression on his face had changed again. It was still red, and he was having trouble breathing, but a look of low cunning had taken shape upon it.

“You think you’re clever?” he said. “You think you’re hard? Maybe you ought to make some inquiries, see what happened to the last guy who started asking about Daniel Clay. He was a private dick too, just like you.”

He put a lot of emphasis on the word “dick.”

“And you know where he is?” Legere continued. “He’s in the same fucking place as Daniel Clay, is where he is. Somewhere, there’s a hole in the fucking ground with Daniel Clay in it, and right next to it is another hole with a fucking snoop rotting to hell inside. So you go right ahead, you keep asking questions about Daniel Clay and ‘projects.’ There’s always room for one more. It don’t take much effort to dig a hole, and it takes less to fill it up again once there’s a body in it.”

I walked toward him. I was pleased to see him take a step back.

“There you go again,” I said. “You do seem certain that Daniel Clay is dead.”

“I got nothing more to say to you.”

“Who was the detective?” I asked. “Who hired him?”

“Fuck. You,” he said, but then he reconsidered. A broad, bitter grin creased his face. “You want to know who hired him? That bitch hired him, just like she hired you. She was fucking him too. I could tell. I could smell him on her. I bet that’s how she pays you, too, but don’t think you’re the first.

“And he asked all the same questions that you did, about Clay and ‘projects’ and what she said or didn’t say to me, and you’re gonna go the way he did. Because that’s what happens to people who go asking after Daniel Clay.”

He snapped his fingers.

“They disappear.” He wiped the dirt from his jeans Some of his false courage began to dissipate as his adrenaline failed him, and for a moment he looked like a man who had glimpsed his own future, and what he saw frightened him. “They disappear…”

Chapter X

I touched base with Jackie Garner when I got home. He told me that all was quiet. He sounded vaguely disappointed. Rebecca Clay said the same when I called her. There had been no sign of Merrick. He seemed to be keeping his word, and his distance, the phone call to me apart.

Rebecca was working in her office, so I drove over to speak to her, acknowledging Jackie’s presence outside with a small wave when I arrived. We ordered coffee at the little market beside the Realtor’s, and sat at the single table outside to drink it. Passing motorists looked at us curiously. It was too cold to be dining al fresco, but I wanted to talk to her while my conversation with her ex-husband was still fresh in my mind. It was time to clear the air.

“He said all that?” Rebecca Clay looked genuinely shocked when I told her of what had passed between Jerry and me. “But they’re all lies! I was never unfaithful to him, never. That wasn’t why we broke up.”

“I’m not saying he was telling the truth, but there was real bitterness behind his words.”

“He wanted money. He didn’t get it.”

“Is that why you think he married you? For money?”

“Well, it wasn’t for love.”

“And what about you? What was your reason?”

She shifted in her seat, her discomfort at discussing the subject manifesting itself physically. She looked even more tired and drawn than when I had first met her. I didn’t think she would be able to take the strain of what was happening for much longer without breaking in some way.

“I told you part of it,” she said. “After my father disappeared, I just felt completely alone. I was like a pariah because of the rumors about him. I met Jerry through Raymon, who installed the alarm system in my father’s house. They come back once a year to check that everything is working okay, and Jerry was the one who arrived to do the maintenance a few months after my father went away. I guess I was lonely, and one thing led to another. He was okay, at the start. I mean, he was never exactly a charmer, but he was good with Jenna, and he wasn’t a dead-beat. He was surprising, too, in some ways. He read a lot, and knew about music and movies. He taught me stuff.” She laughed humorlessly. “Looking back, I guess I replaced one father figure with another.”

“And then?”

“We got married kind of fast, and he moved into my father’s house with me. Things were fine for a couple of months. Jerry was hung up on money, though. It was always a big thing with him. He felt that he’d never been given an even break. He had all kinds of big plans, and no way to make them happen until he met me. He smelled cash, but there was none, or none that he could get his hands on. He started to harp on it a lot, and that caused arguments.

“Then I came home one night and he was bathing Jenna. She was six or seven at the time. He’d never done that before. It’s not like I had made it clear to him that he shouldn’t, or anything, but I just kind of assumed that he wouldn’t. She was naked in the bath, and he was kneeling beside her, outside the tub. His feet were bare. That was what freaked me out: his bare feet. Makes no sense, huh? Anyway, I screamed at him, and Jenna started crying, and Jerry stormed out and didn’t come back until late. I tried talking to him about what had happened, but he’d run up a head of steam by that point, fueled by a lot of booze, and he slapped me. It wasn’t hard or anything, but I wasn’t going to take a slap from any man. I told him to get out, and he did. He came back a day or two later, and he apologized and I guess we made up. He was real careful around me and Jenna after that, but I couldn’t shake off that image of him with my daughter naked beside him. He had a computer that he used for work sometimes, and I knew his password. I’d seen him enter it once when he was showing Jenna something on the Internet. I went into his files and, well, there was a lot of pornography. I know men look at that kind of stuff. I suppose some women do, too, but there was so much of it on Jerry’s computer, just so much.”

“Adults, or children?” I asked.

“Adults,” she replied. “All adults. I tried to stay quiet about it, but I couldn’t. I told him what I’d done and what I’d seen. I asked him if he had a problem. At first he was ashamed, then he got real angry, real, real angry. He screamed and shouted. He threw stuff. He started calling me all these names, like the ones he used when he was talking to you. He told me I was ‘soiled,’ that I was lucky anyone would want to touch me. He said other things too, things about Jenna. He said that she’d end up like me, that the apple never fell far from the tree. That was it, as far as I was concerned. He left that night, and things came to an end. He had a lawyer for a time, and he was trying to get an order made against my assets, but I didn’t really have any assets. After a while, it all dried up, and I didn’t hear from him or the lawyer again. He didn’t contest the divorce. He just seemed happy to be rid of me.”

I finished my coffee. A wind blew, sending dead leaves scurrying like children fleeing the approach of rain. I knew she hadn’t told me everything, that aspects of what had occurred would remain private, but some of what she had said explained Jerry Legere’s animosity toward his ex-wife, especially if he felt that he was not entirely to blame for what had occurred. There were truth and lies bound up together in what each of them was saying, though, and Rebecca Clay had not been entirely honest with me from the start. I pressed on.

“I mentioned the ‘Project’ that Merrick had spoken about to your ex-husband,” I said. “It looked like he had heard it referred to before.”

“It could have been something private that my father was engaged in-he was always doing research and reading journals, trying to keep up with changes in his profession-but it wouldn’t make sense for Jerry to know anything about it. I mean, they didn’t know each other, and I don’t even remember Jerry coming to check out the security system before my father died. They never met.”

But mention of the Project led me to the final question, and the one that was troubling me the most.

“Jerry told me something else,” I said. “He claimed that you hired a private investigator once before, to look into the your father’s disappearance. Jerry said that the man you hired disappeared in turn. Is that true?”

Rebecca Clay bit some dry skin from her bottom lip.

“You think I lied to you, don’t you?”

“By omission. I’m not blaming you, but I’d like to know why.”

“Elwin Stark suggested that I hire someone. It was about eighteen months after my father had vanished, and the police seemed to have decided that there wasn’t anything more that they could do. I spoke to Elwin because I was worried about Jerry’s lawyer, and I didn’t know what could be done to protect my father’s estate. There was no will, so it was going to be messy anyway, but Elwin said that a first step, if my father didn’t reappear, would be to have him declared legally dead after five years. Elwin’s view was that it would be helpful to hire someone to make further inquiries, as a judge might take that into account when it came to making the declaration. I didn’t have a whole lot of money, though. I was just starting out as a junior Realtor. I guess that determined the kind of person I could afford to hire.”

“Who was he?” I asked.

“His name was Jim Poole. He was just starting out too. He had done some work for a friend of mine-it was my friend April: you met her at the house-who suspected that her husband was cheating on her. It turned out that he wasn’t. He was gambling instead, although I don’t know if that was better or worse for her, but she seemed happy with Jim’s work. So I hired him and asked him to see if he could look into things, even see if he could discover anything new. He spoke to some of the same people that you did, but he didn’t find out anything more than we already knew. Jim might have mentioned something about a project at one point, but I probably didn’t pay a whole lot of attention. My father really did always seem to have some kind of article or essay on the back burner. He was never short of ideas for things to write about and research.

“Then, after a couple of weeks, Jim called to tell me that he was heading out of town for a few days and that he might have some news for me when he got back. Well, I waited for Jim to call again, and he never did. About a week later, the police came to see me. Jim’s girlfriend had reported him missing, and they were talking to his friends and his clients, although he didn’t have very many of either. They found my name among the files in his apartment, but I couldn’t help them. Jim hadn’t told me where he was going. They weren’t happy about that, but what more could I do? Jim’s car was found down in Boston shortly after, parked in one of the long-term lots near Logan. They found some drugs in the car-a bag of coke, I think-enough to suggest that he might have been dealing on the side. I think they figured that he’d gotten into some kind of trouble over the drugs, maybe with a supplier, and that he’d either fled because of it, or been killed. His girlfriend told the police that he wasn’t that kind of guy, and he would have found a way to get in touch with her, even if he was running from something, but he never did.”

“And what do you think?”

She shook her head. “I stopped looking for my father after that,” was all she said. “Is that enough of an answer for you?”

“And you didn’t tell me about Poole because you thought it might dissuade me from helping you?”

“Yes.”

“Was your relationship with Jim Poole purely professional?”

She stood up quickly, almost knocking her cup from the table. It splashed cold coffee between us that dripped through the holes in the table and stained the ground below.

“What kind of question is that? I bet that came from Jerry too, right?”

“It did, but now isn’t the time to get self-righteous.”

“I liked Jim,” she said, as if that answered the question. “He was having problems with his girlfriend. We talked, had a drink together once or twice. Jerry saw us in a bar-he used to call me sometimes when he’d been drinking, asking for another chance-and decided that Jim was getting in the way, but Jim was younger and stronger than him. There was some shouting, and a bottle was broken, but nobody got hurt. I guess Jerry’s still sore about it, even after all this time.”

She straightened the skirt of her business suit. “Look, I’m grateful for what you’ve done, but I can’t let this go on for much longer.” She gestured toward Jackie, as if he symbolized all that was wrong in her life. “I want my daughter back home, and I want Merrick off my back. Now that you know about Jim Poole, I’m not sure that I want you to keep asking questions about my father either. I don’t need to feel guilty about any more people, and every day seems to cost me, like, two days’ pay. I’d appreciate it if we could get this whole thing wrapped up as soon as possible, even if it means going to a judge.”

I told her that I understood, and I’d talk to some people about her options and call her to go through them with her as soon as I could. She headed back to her office to collect her things. I chatted with Jackie Garner and told him about the call from Merrick.

“What happens when our time runs out?” asked Jackie. “We just gonna wait for him to make a move?”

I told him it wouldn’t come to that. I also told him that I didn’t think Rebecca Clay would keep paying for much longer and that I was going to bring in some extra help in the hope of making more progress.

“The kind of help that comes from New York?” asked Jackie.

“Maybe,” I said.

“If the woman ain’t paying you, then how come you want to keep working?”

“Because Merrick isn’t going away, whether he gets what he wants from Rebecca or not. Plus I’m going to shake his tree a whole lot over the next day or two, and he’s not going to like it.”

Jackie looked amused. “Well, you need a hand, you let me know. It’s the boring stuff you have to pay me for. The interesting stuff I do for free.”

Walter was still wet with salt water from his walk with Bob Johnson when I got home, and seemed content to sleep in his basket away from the cold. I had a couple of hours to kill before I was to meet June Fitzpatrick for dinner, so I went onto the Press-Herald ’s Web site and browsed its archive for anything I could find on Daniel Clay’s disappearance. According to the reports, allegations of abuse had been received from a number of children who had been patients of Dr. Clay. At no point was there any implication that he was involved, but questions were clearly being asked about how he could have failed to notice that children whom he was assisting, each of whom had been abused before, were being abused again. Clay had declined to comment, other than to say that he was “very distressed” by the allegations, that he would make a full statement in due course, and that his main priority was assisting the police and social services with their own investigations with a view to finding the culprits. A couple of experts had come, somewhat reluctantly, to Clay’s defense, pointing out that sometimes it could take months or years to get an abuse victim to reveal the depth of what he or she had endured. Even the police were careful not to apportion blame on Clay, but reading between the lines of the story it seemed clear that Clay was taking some of that blame on himself anyway. There was such a scandal brewing that it was hard to see how Clay could have continued to practice, no matter what the outcome of any investigation was. One piece described him variously as “ashen-faced,” “hollow-eyed,” “gaunt,” and “close to tears.” There was a picture of Clay beside the piece, taken outside his house. He looked thin and stooped, like a wounded stork.

The detective quoted in one of the newspaper articles was Bobby O’Rourke. He was still a detective, as far as I knew, although he worked out of Internal Affairs. I got him at his desk just before he left for the day, and he agreed to meet me for a beer over in Geary’s within the hour. I parked on Commercial and found him seated in a corner, flipping through some photocopies and eating a hamburger. We had met a couple of times in the past, and I’d helped him to fill in the blanks in a case involving a Portland P.D. cop named Barron who had died under what could euphemistically be termed “mysterious circumstances” a few years before. I didn’t envy O’Rourke his job. The fact that he was with IA meant that he was good at his work. Unfortunately, it was work at which some of his fellow cops didn’t want him to be good.

He wiped his hands on a napkin, and we shook.

“You eating?” he asked.

“Nope. Going to dinner in an hour or two.”

“Anyplace flash?”

“Joel Harmon’s house.”

“I’m impressed. We’re going to be reading about you in the society columns.”

We spoke a little about the annual IA report that was about to be published. It was the usual stuff, mainly use-of-force allegations and complaints about the operation of police vehicles. The patterns remained pretty consistent. The complainants were typically young males, and the use-of-force incidents mostly related to breaking up fights. The cops had used only their hands to subdue the combatants, and the guys involved were mostly white and under thirty, so it wasn’t like senior citizens or the Harlem Globetrotters were being rousted. Nobody had been suspended for longer than two days as a result of complaints. All told, it wasn’t a bad year for IA. Meanwhile, the Portland P.D. had a new chief. The old chief had stepped down earlier in the year, and the city council had been considering two candidates, one who was white and local, and one who was black and from the South. Had the council gone for the black candidate, it would have increased by 100 percent the number of black cops in Portland, but instead it had opted for local experience. It wasn’t a bad decision, but some minority leaders were still sore. The old chief, meanwhile, was rumored to be considering a run for governor.

O’Rourke finished his burger and took a sip of his IPA. He was a slim, fit guy who didn’t look like burgers and beer usually accounted for too many of his calories.

“So, Daniel Clay,” he said.

“You remember him?”

“I remember the case, and what I didn’t recall I checked before I came over here. I only met Clay twice before he went missing, so there’s a limit to what I can tell you.”

“What did you think of him?”

“He seemed genuinely upset by what had happened. He looked to be in shock. He kept referring to them as his ‘kids.’ We started investigating, along with the state police, the sheriffs, the local cops, social services. The rest you probably know already: some points of correspondence came up in other cases over a period of time, and a number of those cases could be traced back to Clay.”

“You think it was a coincidence that Clay had worked with the kids?”

“There’s nothing to indicate that it wasn’t. Some of the children were particularly vulnerable. They’d been abused before, and most of them were in the very early stages of therapy and intervention. They hadn’t even got around to talking about the first series of abuses before the next began to happen.”

“Ever come close to an arrest?”

“No. A girl, thirteen years old, was found wandering in fields outside of Skowhegan at three in the morning. Barefoot, clothes torn, bleeding, no underwear. She was hysterical, babbling about men and birds. She was disoriented and didn’t seem to know where she’d been held or what direction she’d walked from, but she was clear on the details: three men, all masked, taking turns with her in what seemed to be an unfurnished room in a house. We got some DNA samples from her, but most of them were pretty messed up. Only a couple were clean, and they didn’t match anything on the databases. About a year ago we tried again as part of a cold case review, but still zip. It’s bad. We should have done better on it, but I don’t see how.”

“What about the kids?”

“I haven’t kept track of all of them. Some have come back on the radar. They were screwed-up kids, and they became screwed-up adults. I always felt sorry for them when I saw their names come up. What the hell kind of chance did they have after what was done to them?”

“And Clay?”

“He literally vanished. His daughter called us, said she was worried about him, that he hadn’t been home in two days. They found his car outside Jackman, up by the Canadian border. We thought he might have fled the jurisdiction, but there was no reason for him to do that, apart from shame, maybe. He’s never been seen again.”

I leaned back in my chair. I wasn’t much wiser than before I’d sat down. O’Rourke recognized my dissatisfaction.

“Sorry,” he said. “Bet you were hoping for a revelation.”

“Yeah, a blinding flash of light.”

“So how did this come up?”

“Clay’s daughter hired me. Someone has been asking questions about her father. It has her rattled. You ever hear of a man named Frank Merrick?”

Bingo. O’Rourke’s face lit up like the Fourth of July.

“Frank Merrick,” he said. “Oh yeah. I know all about Frank. Fatal Frank, they used to call him. He’s the guy, the one who’s shaking up Clay’s daughter?”

I nodded.

“Makes sense, in a way,” said O’Rourke.

I asked him why.

“Because Merrick ’s daughter was also a patient of Daniel Clay’s, except she went the same way he did. Lucy Merrick, that was her name.”

“She disappeared?”

“Reported missing two days after Clay, but it looks like she was gone for longer than that. Her foster parents were animals. Told the social workers she was always running away, and they’d just gotten tired of chasing her ass down. From what they could recall, they’d last seen her four or five days earlier. She was fourteen. I don’t doubt she was a handful but, you know, she was still a kid. There was talk of pressing charges against the foster parents, but nothing ever happened.”

“And where was Merrick when all this was going on?”

“In jail. Let me tell you: Frank Merrick is an interesting guy.” He loosened his tie. “Order me another beer,” he said. “Better get something for yourself too. It’s that kind of story.”

Frank Merrick was a killer.

That word had become so devalued through overuse that every mean little kid with a knife who overstepped the line and gutted a drinking buddy in a bar fight over some girl in a too-tight dress, every jobless no-hoper who ever held up a liquor store, then shot the guy earning seven bucks an hour behind the counter, whether through panic or boredom or just because he had a gun in his hand and it seemed a shame not to see what it could do, every one of them received the title of “killer.” It was used in the newspapers to drive up sales, in the courtrooms to drive up sentences, on cell blocks to make reputations and buy some breathing space from assaults and challenges. But it didn’t mean anything, not really. Killing someone didn’t make you a killer, not in the world through which Frank Merrick walked. It wasn’t something you did once, either by accident or design. It wasn’t even a lifestyle choice, like vegetarianism or nihilism. It was something that lay in your cells, waiting for a moment of awakening, of revelation. In that way, it was possible to be a killer even before you took your first life. It was part of your nature, and it would show itself in time. All that it took was a catalyst.

Frank Merrick had lived what seemed to be a regular guy’s life for the first twenty-five years or so. He’d grown up in a rough part of Charlotte, North Carolina, and he’d run with a tough crowd, but he straightened himself out. He trained as a mechanic, and no clouds followed him through life, and no shadows trailed in his wake, although it was said that he stayed in touch with elements from his past and that he was a man who could be relied upon to supply or dispose of a car at short notice. It was only later, when his true self, his secret self, began to emerge, that people remembered men who had crossed Frank Merrick and fallen between the cracks in the sidewalk, never to be seen or heard from again. There were stories of calls made, of trips to Florida and the Carolinas, of guns used once, then disassembled and thrown into canals and levees.

But they were just stories, and people will talk…

He married an ordinary girl, and he might have stayed married to her had it not been for the accident that changed Frank Merrick beyond all recognition, or perhaps it merely allowed him to shed the veneer of a quiet, introverted man who was good with his hands and knew his way around a car and to become something altogether odder and more frightening.

Frank Merrick was struck by a motorcycle one night as he crossed a street in the suburb of Charlotte where he lived. He was carrying a carton of ice cream that he had bought for his wife. He should have waited for the signal, but he was worried that the ice cream would melt before he could get it home. The motorcyclist, who was not wearing a helmet, had been drinking, but he was not drunk. He had also been smoking a little dope, but he was not high. Peter Cash had told himself both of those things before he climbed on his bike after leaving his buddies watching porn on the Betamax.

To Cash, it seemed as if Frank Merrick had materialized out of thin air, suddenly assuming form on the empty street, assembling himself out of atoms of night. The bike hit Merrick full on, breaking bones and rending flesh, the impact catapulting the motorcyclist onto the hood of a parked car. Cash was lucky to escape with a busted pelvis, and had he hit the windshield of the car with his unprotected head instead of his ass, he would, most assuredly, have died there and then. Instead, he remained conscious for long enough to see Merrick ’s mangled body jerking like a stranded fish on the road.

Merrick was released from hospital after two months, when his broken bones had healed sufficiently and his internal organs were no longer deemed to be in imminent danger of failure or collapse. He scarcely spoke to his wife and spoke even less to his friends until those friends finally ceased to trouble him with their presence. He slept little, and rarely ventured into the marital bed, but when he did he fell upon his wife with such ferocity that she grew to fear his advances and the pain that came with them. Eventually, she fled the house and, after a year or two, filed for divorce. Merrick signed everything without comment or complaint, seemingly content to shed every aspect of his old life, something within him cocooning itself while it transformed. His wife later changed her name and remarried in California, and never told her new husband the truth about the man who had once shared her life.

And Merrick? Well, it was believed that Cash was the first victim of the transformed man, although no evidence was ever produced linking him to the crime. The motorcyclist was stabbed to death in his bed, but Merrick had an alibi, supplied by some men out of Philly who, it was said, obtained services from Merrick in return. In the years that followed he picked up a little work with various crews, mainly on the East Coast, and gradually became the go-to guy when someone needed to be taught a last, fateful lesson, and when the necessity of deniability meant that the job had to be farmed out. The tally of bodies that had fallen at his hands began to mount. He had embraced at last his natural aptitude for killing, and it served him well.

In the meantime, he had other appetites. He liked women, and one of them, a waitress in Pittsfield, Maine, found herself pregnant after a night in his company. She was in her late thirties, and had despaired of ever finding a man, or of having a child of her own. She never even considered an abortion, but had no way of contacting the man who had impregnated her, and eventually she gave birth to a seemingly ordinary child. When Frank Merrick returned to Maine and looked the waitress up, she feared how he might respond to the news that he was a father, but he had held the child in his arms and asked her name (“Lucy, after my mom,” he was told, and he had smiled and told her that Lucy was a fine name.), and he had left money in the child’s cradle. Thereafter, on a regular basis, cash would arrive, sometimes delivered in person by Merrick, at other times arriving in the form of a money order. The child’s mother recognized that there was something dangerous about this man, something that should remain unexplored, and it always surprised her to see the devotion he showed toward the little girl, although he never stayed long with her. His daughter grew into child who sometimes had bad dreams, and nothing worse than that. But the little girl’s dreams began to filter into her waking life. She became difficult, even disturbed. She hurt herself, and she tried to hurt others. When her mother died-a massive pulmonary embolism took her as she swam in the sea so that her body was taken out by the tide and found days later, bloated and half-eaten by scavengers, by a pair of fishermen-Lucy Merrick was put into care. In time, the child was sent to Daniel Clay in an effort to curb her aggression and tendency toward self-harm, and he seemed to be making some progress with her until both he, and the girl, disappeared.

By then, her father had been in jail for four years. His luck ran out when he picked up five years for reckless conduct with a dangerous weapon, five years for criminal threatening with the use of a dangerous weapon, and ten years for aggravated assault, all to be served concurrently, after one of his prospective victims managed to shoot his way out of his home as Merrick was closing in on him with a knife, only for the vic to be hit by a patrol car as he was fleeing. Merrick only avoided a further forty-to-life after the state failed to prove premeditation-in-fact, and because he had no previous convictions for crimes using deadly force against the person. It was during this period that his daughter disappeared. The sentence wasn’t all served in the general population, either. A chunk of it, according to O’Rourke, was spent in Supermax, and that was real hard time right there.

After his release, he was sent for trial in Virginia for the killing of an accountant named Barton Riddick, who was shot once in the head with a.44 in 1993. Merrick was charged on the basis of bullet lead analysis by the FBI of rounds found in his car following his arrest in Maine. There was nothing to indicate that he had been at the scene of the killing in Virginia, or to link him physically to Riddick in any other way, but the chemical composition of the bullet that had passed through the victim, taking a chunk of skull and brain with it as it exited, matched bullets from the box of ammunition discovered in Merrick’s trunk. Merrick was facing the possibility of spending the rest of his life in prison, maybe even a death sentence, but his case was one of a number taken up by some law firms that believed the Bureau’s examiners had overstated the bullet lead analysis test results in a number of instances. The case against Merrick had been further weakened when the gun used in the killing was subsequently used in the murder of a lawyer in Baton Rouge. Reluctantly, the prosecutor in Virginia decided not to follow through on the charges against Merrick, and the FBI had since announced that it was abandoning bullet lead analysis. He had been released in October, and was now, to all intents and purposes, a free man, as he had served his sentence in full in the state of Maine, and no conditions had been applied to his release on the assumption that the Riddick charges would ensure he would never taste the air as a free man again.

“And now he’s back here,” concluded O’Rourke.

“Asking after the doctor who was treating his daughter,” I said.

“Sounds like a man with a grudge. What are you going to do?”

I took out my wallet and laid some bills on the table to cover our tab. “I’m going to have him picked up.”

“Will the Clay woman press charges?”

“I’ll talk to her about it. Even if she doesn’t, the threat of imprisonment might be enough to keep Merrick off her back. He won’t want to go back to jail. Who knows, the cops may even turn up something in his car.”

“Has he threatened her at all?”

“Only verbally, and just in the vaguest of ways. He broke her window, though, so he’s capable of more.”

“Any sign of a weapon?”

“None.”

“Frank’s the kind of guy who might feel a little naked without a gun.”

“When I met him he told me he wasn’t armed.”

“You believed him?”

“I think he’s too smart to carry a gun with him. As a convicted felon, he can’t be found in possession, and he’s already attracting a lot of attention to himself. He can’t find out what happened to his daughter if he’s locked up again.”

“Well, it sounds plausible, but I wouldn’t want to bet my life on it. The Clay woman still live in the city?”

“ South Portland.”

“I can make some calls if you want me to.”

“Every little bit helps. It would be good if we could have a temporary order in place by the time Merrick is picked up.”

O’Rourke said that he didn’t think it would be a problem. I had almost forgotten about Jim Poole. I asked O’Rourke about him.

“I remember something about it. He was an amateur, a correspondence-college private eye. Liked using a little weed, I think. Cops down in Boston figured there might have been a drug connection to his death, and I guess people up here were happy enough to go along with that.”

“He was working for Rebecca Clay when he disappeared,” I said.

“I didn’t know that. It wasn’t my case. Sounds like she might be unlucky to be around. She vanishes more people than the Magic Circle.”

“I don’t imagine lucky people attract the interest of men like Frank Merrick.”

“If they do, they don’t stay lucky for long. I’d like to be there when they bring him in. I’ve heard a lot about him, but I’ve never met him face-to-face.”

His beer glass had left a circle of moisture on the table. He traced patterns in it with his index finger.

“What are you thinking?” I asked.

“I’m thinking it’s a shame you have a client who believes she’s at risk.”

“Why?”

“I don’t like clusters. Some of Clay’s patients were being abused. Merrick ’s daughter was one of his patients.”

“Hence Merrick ’s daughter was being abused? It’s possible, but it doesn’t necessarily follow.”

“Then Clay disappears and so does she.”

“And the abusers are never found.”

He shrugged. “I’m just saying: having a man like Merrick asking questions about old crimes might make some people worried.”

“Like the people who committed those old crimes.”

“Exactly. Could be useful. You never know who might decide to take offense and make themselves known along the way.”

“The problem is that Merrick isn’t like a dog on a leash. He can’t be controlled. I’ve got three men looking out for my client as things stand. My priority is to keep her safe.”

O’Rourke stood. “Well, talk to her. Explain what you intend to do. Then let’s get him picked up and see what happens.”

We shook hands again, and I thanked him for his help.

“Don’t get carried away,” he said. “I’m in this because of the kids. And, hey, forgive me for being blunt, but if this thing goes up in smoke, and I find you lit the fuse, I’ll arrest you myself.”

It was time for me to drive out to Joel Harmon’s house. Along the way, I called Rebecca and shared with her most of what O’Rourke had told me of Merrick and what I was hoping to do the next day. She seemed to have calmed down a little since we last talked, although she was still intent on wrapping up our business with each other as soon as possible.

“We’ll arrange a meeting, then have him picked up by the cops,” I said. “The state’s protection-from-harassment law says that if you’ve been intimidated or confronted three or more times by the same person, then the cops have to act. I figure that incident with the window may also fall under terrorizing, and I spotted him watching you that day at Longfellow Square, so we have him for stalking as well. Either one of those would be enough to bring us under the cover of the law.”

“Does that mean I’ll have to go to court?” she asked.

“Make the harassment report first thing tomorrow. The report has to be made before a court complaint can be filed anyway. Then we can go to the District Court and get it to issue a temporary order for emergency protection after you’ve filed the complaint. I’ve already talked to someone about this, and everything should be in place for you by tomorrow evening.” I gave her O’Rourke’s name and number. “A date and time will be set for a hearing, and the summons and complaint will have to be served on Merrick. I can do that or, if you prefer, we can get the sheriff ’s department to do it instead. If he approaches you again once the order has been served, then that’s a Class D crime with a penalty of up to one year in jail and a maximum fine of a thousand dollars. Three convictions and he’s looking at five years.”

“It still doesn’t sound like enough,” she said. “Can’t they just put him away immediately?”

“It’s a delicate balance,” I said. “He’s overstepped the line, but not enough to justify serving time. The thing is, I believe that doing more time is the last thing he wants to risk. He’s a dangerous man, but he’s also had years to think about his daughter. He failed her, but he wants someone else to blame. I think he’s decided to start with your father, because he heard the rumors about him and wonders if something similar might have happened to his own child while she was in his care.”

“And because my father’s not around, he’s moved on to me.” She sighed. “Okay. Will I have to be there when they arrest him?”

“No. The police may want to talk to you later, though. Jackie will stay close to you, just in case.”

“Just in case it doesn’t go the way you’ve planned?”

“Just in case,” I repeated, not committing to anything. I felt that I’d let her down, but I couldn’t see what more I could have done. True, I could have banded together with Jackie Garner and the Fulcis to beat Merrick to a pulp, but that would have been to descend to his level. And now, after my conversation with O’Rourke, there was one more thing stopping me from using force against Frank Merrick.

In a strange way, I felt sorry for him.

Chapter XI

There were calls made that night. Perhaps that was what Merrick wanted all along. That was why he had made his presence at Rebecca Clay’s house so obvious, that was why he had left his blood on her window, and that was why he had set me on Jerry Legere. There were other incidents, too, that I did not yet know about. Four dead crows had been strung together and hung outside the offices occupied by Rebecca’s former lawyer, Elwin Stark, the previous night. Sometime that same night, the Midlake Center had been burglarized. Nothing was taken, but someone must have spent hours going through whatever files were at hand, and it would be a long time before it became clear what, if anything, had been removed from them. Clay’s former physician, Dr. Caussure, had been approached on his way to a bridge tournament by a man fitting Merrick ’s description. The man had boxed in Caussure’s car, then had rolled down the window of his red Ford and asked Caussure if he liked birds and if he was aware that his late patient and friend, Dr. Daniel Clay, had consorted with pedophiles and deviants.

It didn’t matter to Merrick if these individuals were involved or not. He wanted to create a climate of fear and doubt. He wanted to slip in and out of lives, sowing rumors and half-truths, knowing that, in a small city like Portland, word would spread, and the men he was hunting would soon be buzzing like bees in the presence of an imminent threat to the hive. Merrick thought that he had everything under control, or that he could deal with whatever arose, but he was wrong. He was being manipulated, just as I was, but nobody was really in control, not even Eldritch’s mysterious client.

And soon, people would start to die.

Joel Harmon lived in a big house off Bayshore Drive in Falmouth, with its own private jetty and a white yacht berthed close by. Portland used to be called Falmouth, back from the late seventeenth century when the Basque, St. Castin, led the natives in a series of attacks against the English settlements that resulted eventually in the burning of the town, until the end of the eighteenth century, when the city came into its own. Now the area that bore the old name was one of the Portland ’s most affluent suburbs, and the center of its boating activity. The Portland Yacht Club, one of the oldest in the country, was located on Falmouth Fore-side, sheltered by the long, narrow Clapboard Island, which was itself home to two private estates, throwbacks to the late nineteenth century when the railroad magnate Henry Houston built a ten-thousand-square-foot summer cottage on the island, his own small contribution to rendering the word “cottage” meaningless in this part of the world.

Harmon’s house stood on a raised promontory from which a green lawn sloped down to the water’s edge. There were walls on either side for privacy, and a lot of rosebushes in carefully regimented and sheltered beds. June had told me that Harmon was a fanatical rose-grower, fascinated by hybridization, and that the soil in his garden was constantly monitored and adjusted to facilitate his obsession. There were said to be roses in his beds that simply did not exist elsewhere and, unlike his peers, Harmon saw no reason to share his discoveries with others. The roses were for his pleasure, and his alone.

It was an unusually mild night, a trick of the season to lull the unwary into a false sense of security, and as June and I stood in his garden with the other guests, sipping predinner drinks, I took in Harmon’s house, his yacht, his roses, and his wife, who had greeted us as we arrived, her husband being occupied elsewhere in the party. She was in her early sixties, which made her about the same age as her husband, her gray hair interwoven with carefully dyed blond strands. Up close, her skin looked like molded plastic. She seemed to have trouble stretching it into any semblance of an expression, although her surgeon had clearly anticipated this problem and had carved her mouth into a permanent half smile, so that someone could have been telling her about the systematic drowning of puppies and kittens, and she would merely have looked slightly amused at the whole affair. There was a relic of the beauty that she might once have had still visible in her face, but it had been debased by her grim determination to hold on to it. Her eyes were dull and glassy, and her conversational skills would have made a passing child seem like Oscar Wilde.

Her husband, by contrast, was the model of a perfect host, dressed casually but expensively in a blue wool blazer and gray trousers, with a red cravat to add a touch of carefully cultivated eccentricity to the whole look. He was shadowed, as he shook hands and exchanged gossip, by a beautiful Asian-American girl, young and slim with the kind of figure that caused male jaws spontaneously to unhinge. According to June, she was Harmon’s latest squeeze, although officially she was his personal assistant. He had a habit of picking up young women, dazzling them with his wealth, then dropping them as soon as a new prospect appeared on the horizon.

“Doesn’t look like his wife objects to her presence too much,” I said. “Then again, it doesn’t look like she’s aware of anything beyond the promise of her next fix of prescription medication.”

Mrs. Harmon’s empty gaze swept across the guests at regular intervals, never resting on any of them but merely bathing them in the dull light of her regard, like the beam of a lighthouse picking out the ships in its ambit. Even when she had greeted us at the door, her hand like the cold, desiccated remains of a long-dead bird in my palm, she had barely made eye contact.

“I feel sorry for her,” said June. “Lawrie was always one of those women who was destined to marry a powerful man and provide him with children, but she had no inner life, or none that anyone could detect. Now her children are all grown-up, and she fills her days as best she can. She was beautiful once, but beauty was all she had. Now she sits motionless on the boards of various charities and spends her husband’s money, and he doesn’t object as long as she doesn’t interfere with the way he lives his life.”

I felt that I had Harmon down to a T: a self-indulgent man, with money enough to enable him to pursue his appetites and to sate them, even as his needs grew greater with each bite that he took. He came from a politically well-connected family, and his father had been an adviser to the Democrats, although the failure of a number of his businesses had left enough of a whiff of scandal on him that he never managed to get close enough to the bowl to feed with the big dogs. Harmon himself had been very politically active once, working on Ed Muskie’s campaign as a young man in ’71, even traveling with him on his visit to Moscow thanks to his father’s efforts, until it became clear that not only was Muskie not going to win the nomination, but it was probably a good thing that McGovern was going to clean his clock in the primaries. Muskie couldn’t keep his temper. He railed at journalists and staffers, and he did it in public. Had he won the nomination, it wouldn’t have been long before that side of him was revealed to the voters. So Joel Harmon and his family had quickly and quietly ditched Muskie, and any political idealism that he might have had was left by the wayside as he moved on to the pressing business of accumulating wealth and making up for his father’s business failings.

But according to June, Harmon was much more complex than he appeared: he gave generously to charity, not only publicly but privately. His views on welfare and social security made him almost a socialist by most American standards, and he remained a powerful, if discreet, voice in that regard, enjoying the ear of successive governors and state representatives. He was passionate about the city and state in which he lived, and it was said that his children were mildly disturbed by the ease with which he was dissipating what they considered to be their inheritance, their social conscience being considerably less well developed than their father’s.

I wanted to keep my head clear, so I sipped orange juice while the other guests drank champagne. I recognized one or two of those whom Harmon had invited. There was a writer named Jon Lee Jacobs, who penned novels about lobstermen and the call of the sea. He had a big red beard and dressed like the men in his books, except he came originally from a family of accountants in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was rumored to get seasick when he stepped in a puddle. The other familiar face was Dr. Byron Russell, a young shrink who made occasional appearances on Maine Public Radio and on local TV channels whenever a serious talking head was needed on matters relating to mental health. To Russell’s credit, he tended to be the voice of reason whenever he participated, often at the expense of some treacle-voiced woman with a bum degree in psychology from a college that operated out of a trailer, and who believed in the kind of touchy-feely platitudes that made depression and suicide seem like attractive alternatives to actually listening to her. Also present, interestingly, was Elwin Stark, the lawyer who had been so reluctant to speak to me earlier that week. I felt like telling him about Eldritch, who had talked to me for a lot longer, albeit without actually telling me a great deal more than I’d learned from a fraction of the time spent speaking with Stark, but initially Stark didn’t seem any happier to meet me in person than he had been to talk with me on the phone. Nevertheless, he eventually managed to be civil for a couple of minutes. He even apologized, in a way, for his earlier brusqueness. I could smell whiskey on his breath, even though he had champagne in his glass. Clearly, he had started earlier than the rest of the guests.

“I was having a hell of a day when you called,” he said. “The timing wasn’t great.”

“My timing is often bad,” I said. “And timing is everything.”

“You got it. You still nosing around in the Clay business?”

I told him that I was. He made a face, as though someone had just offered him a piece of bad fish. It was then that he told me about the dead crows.

“Freaked my secretary the hell out,” he said. “She thought it was the work of Satanists.”

“And what about you?”

“Well, it was different, I’ll give it that. Worst that ever happened to me before was a golf club being put through the windshield of my Lexus.”

“Any idea who was responsible?”

“I can guess who you think was responsible: the same guy who’s been giving Rebecca Clay a hard time. I knew you were bad luck the minute I heard your voice.” He tried to laugh it off, but it was clear that he meant it.

“Why would he target you?”

“Because he’s desperate, and my name was all over the documentation relating to her father. I passed on dealing with the probate, though. Someone else is looking after that.”

“Are you concerned?”

“No, I’m not. I’ve done my share of swimming with sharks, and I’ve lived. I’ve got people I can call on if I have to. Rebecca, on the other hand, only has people for as long as she can afford to pay them. You ought to let the whole business go, Parker. You’re just making things worse by stirring up the dirt at the bottom of the pond.”

“You’re not interested in the truth?”

“I’m a lawyer,” he replied. “What has the truth got to do with anything? My concern is the protection of my clients’ interests. Sometimes, the truth just gets in the way.”

“That’s a very, um, pragmatic approach.”

“I’m a realist. I don’t do criminal work, but if I had to defend you on a charge of murder, and you decided to plead not guilty, what would you expect me to do? Tell the judge that, all things considered, I thought that you’d done it, because that was the truth? Be serious. The law doesn’t require truth, only the appearance of it. Most cases simply rest on a version of it that’s acceptable to both sides. You want to know what the only truth is? Everybody lies. That’s it. That’s truth. You can take that to the preacher and get it baptized.”

“So do you have a client whose interests you’re protecting in the matter of Daniel Clay?”

He wagged his finger at me. I didn’t like the gesture, just like I didn’t care much for him calling me by my last name.

“You’re a piece of work,” he said. “Daniel was my client. So too, briefly, was his daughter. Now Daniel is dead. It’s done and dusted. Let him rest, wherever he is.”

He left us to go over and speak with the writer, Jacobs. June imitated Stark’s finger wag.

“He is right,” she said. “You really are a piece of work. Do you have any conversations that end happily?”

“Only with you,” I replied.

“That’s because I don’t listen to you.”

“There is that,” I conceded, as a waiter rang a bell, summoning us to dinner.

It seemed like there were to be twelve of us, all told, including Harmon and his wife, the additional numbers being made up by a female collage artist of whom even June had never heard, and three banker friends of Harmon’s from way back. Harmon spoke to us properly for the first time as we were walking to the dining room, apologizing for taking so long to get to us.

“Well, June,” he said, “I had despaired of ever seeing you again at one of my little evenings. I was worried that I might have offended you somehow.”

June waved him away with a smile. “I know you far too well ever to be offended by anything but your occasional lapses in taste,” she said.

She stepped aside so that Harmon and I could shake hands. He had it down to a fine art. He could have given lessons in the proper duration, the force of the grip, the width of the smile that accompanied it.

“Mr. Parker, I’ve heard a great deal about you. You lead an interesting life.”

“It’s not as productive as yours. You have a beautiful house, and a fascinating collection.”

The walls were decorated with an incredible variety of art, the positioning of each clearly the subject of considerable thought, so that paintings and drawings appeared both to complement and echo one another, even occasionally clashing where their juxtaposition would have a particular impact on the beholder. On the wall to the right of where we stood, a beautiful, if slightly sinister, nude of a young woman on a bed hung across from a much older painting of an aged man on the point of expiring on a very similar bed, his final moments witnessed by a physician and a gathering of relatives and friends, some bereft, some pitying, and some merely avaricious. Among them was a young woman whose face startlingly resembled the features of the nude opposite. Similar beds, similar women, seemingly separated by centuries but now part of the same narrative due to the proximity of the two images.

Harmon beamed appreciatively. “If you would enjoy it, I’ll happily show you around after dinner. One of the benefits of having somewhat eclectic taste, whatever June’s opinion of the direction it may sometimes take, is that there is usually something to satisfy everyone within its limits. I should be most interested to see what catches your eye, Mr. Parker, most interested indeed. Now come, dinner is about to be served.”

We took our seats at the dinner table. I was between Harmon’s girlfriend, whose name was Nyoko, and the collage artist. The artist had green streaks through her blond hair, and was attractive in a willowy, vaguely disturbing way. She looked like the kind of girl who had wrist-slashing potential, and not just her own wrists either. She told me her name was Summer.

“Summer,” I said. “Really?”

She scowled. I had barely sat down, and already someone was unhappy.

“It’s my true name,” she said. “My given name was an imposition. Discarding it in favor of my real identity freed me to pursue my art.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. Flake.

Nyoko was a little more in touch with objective reality. She was an art history graduate, and had only recently returned to Maine after two years spent working in Australia. When I asked her how long she had known Harmon, she had the self-awareness to blush slightly.

“We met at a gallery opening a few months back. And I know what you’re thinking.”

“Do you?”

“Well, I know what I’d be thinking if our positions were reversed.”

“You mean if I was seeing Mr. Harmon? He’s not really my type.”

She giggled.

“You know what I mean. He’s older than I am. He’s married, sort of. He’s wealthy, and I drive a car that probably cost less than the brandy Joel will have decanted after dinner. But I like him: he’s funny, he’s got good taste, and he’s lived a little. I let people think what they want.”

“Even his wife?”

“You’re pretty blunt, aren’t you?”

“Well, I’m sitting beside you. If his wife starts throwing knives around after her second glass of wine, I’d like to be sure that they’re aimed at you, not me.”

“She doesn’t care what Joel does. I’m not even sure that she notices.”

As if on cue, Lawrie Harmon glanced in our direction and managed to eke an extra quarter of an inch out of her smile. Her husband, who was sitting at the head of the table, patted her left hand reflexively, the way he might have petted a dog. But for a moment, I thought some of the dullness disappeared from her eyes, and something lanced through the fog, like a camera lens fixing on the perfect moment of clarity before an exposure. For the first time that night, her gaze lingered, but only on Nyoko. Then the smile leveled out slightly, and her attention moved on. Nyoko hadn’t noticed, distracted as she was by something Summer had said to her, although I wondered if she would even have registered the change, had she been watching.

Harmon nodded to one of the waiters who stood like white compass points in a circle around us, and dishes began to appear before us with quiet efficiency. There were still two empty chairs at the end of the table.

“Are we missing someone, Joel?” asked Jacobs. He had a reputation as someone who, given half a chance, would declaim endlessly about his own status as a visionary, someone who was in touch with nature and the grandeur of the ordinary man. Clearly, he’d sized up the rest of us and figured that we were going to be no competition, but he didn’t want some unknown quantity arriving and upstaging him. His beard twitched, as though something living within it had briefly shifted position, then he was distracted by the arrival of his duck terrine and commenced eating instead of wondering.

Harmon looked at the chairs, as if noticing them for the first time.

“Our children,” he said. “We had hoped that they might join us, but you know how kids are. There’s a party down at the yacht club. No offense meant to anyone here, but I think they decided that it provided more opportunities for mischief than a dinner with the folks and their guests. Now, please eat.”

It came a little late for Jacobs, who was already halfway through. To his credit, he paused awkwardly, then did a little shrug and continued working on the terrine. The food was good, although terrine of anything tended to leave me unimpressed. The main course of venison was fine, though, served as a navarin with juniper berries. There was a mousse of chocolate and lime for dessert, and coffee with petits fours to finish. The wine was a Duhard-Milon ’98, which Harmon described as costaud, or powerfully built, from one of the lesser Lafitte properties. Jacobs nodded sagely like he understood what Harmon was talking about. I sipped at my glass to be polite. It tasted a little rich for my blood, in every sense.

The conversation moved from local politics to art and, inevitably, to literature, the latter largely a result of Jacobs’s intervention, at which point he began to preen as he waited for someone to inquire about his latest magnum opus. Nobody seemed very keen to open the floodgates, but in the end Harmon asked, apparently more out of a sense of duty than any real interest. Judging from the summary that followed, Jacobs had not yet tired of mythologizing the common man, even if he had yet to get around to either understanding him or liking him.

“That man,” June whispered, as the plates were cleared and the guests began to move through a pair of double doors into a room furnished with comfortable chairs and couches, “is the most insufferable bore.”

“Someone gave me one of his books once,” I replied.

“Did you read it?”

“Started it, then figured I’d want the time back on my deathbed and I wouldn’t get it. I managed to lose the book instead. I think I dropped it in the sea.”

“A wise decision.”

Harmon appeared at my elbow.

“How about that tour, Mr. Parker? June, will you accompany us?”

June demurred. “We’ll only start fighting, Joel. I’ll let your new guest enjoy your collection without being bothered by my prejudices.”

He bowed to her, then turned back to me. “Can I offer you another drink, Mr. Parker?”

I lifted my half-finished wine. “I’m good, thank you.”

“Well, let’s proceed, then.”

We moved from room to room, Harmon pointing out pieces of which he was particularly proud. I didn’t recognize many of the names, but that was probably due more to my ignorance than anything else. I couldn’t say that much of Harmon’s collection was to my taste, though, and I could almost hear June’s expressions of dismay at some of the more outlandish additions.

“I hear you have a number of pieces by Daniel Clay,” I said, as we gazed at something that might have been a sunset or a suture.

Harmon grinned.

“June told me that you might ask after them,” he said. “I have two in a back office. Some of the others are in storage. I have a revolving collection, you might say. Too many pieces and too little space, even in a house this size.”

“Did you know him well?”

“We were at college together, and we kept in touch after graduation. He was a guest here on many occasions. I liked him a lot. He was a sensitive man. What happened was just terrible, both for him and for the children involved.”

He led me to a room at the back of the house, with high, recessed windows looking out over the sea. It was a combination of office and small library, with floor-to-ceiling oak shelves and an enormous matching desk. Harmon told me that Nyoko used it on the days when she was working in the house. There were only two paintings on the walls, one perhaps two feet by five feet, the other much smaller. The latter depicted a church steeple set against a backdrop of receding pines. It was hazy, the edges dulled, as though the whole scene was being filtered through a Vaseline-smeared lens. The larger painting showed the bodies of men and women writhing together, so that the canvas was a mass of twisting, shadowy flesh. It was startlingly unpleasant, more so because of the degree of artistry that had gone into its creation.

“I think I prefer the landscape,” I said.

“Most people do. The landscape is a later work, perhaps created two decades after the other. Both are untitled, but the larger canvas is typical of Daniel’s earlier work.”

I turned my attention back to the landscape. There was something almost familiar about the shape of the steeple.

“Is this a real place?” I asked.

“It’s Gilead,” said Harmon.

“As in the ‘children of Gilead ’?”

Harmon nodded. “Another of the dark spots on our state’s history. That’s why I keep it back here. I suppose I hold on to it more out of tribute to Daniel’s memory and the fact that he gave it to me than anything else, but it’s not something I’d want displayed in the more public areas of the house.”

The community of Gilead, named after one of the biblical cities of refuge, had been founded in the fifties by a minor timber baron named Bennett Lumley. Lumley was a God-fearing man, and he worried about the spiritual well-being of the men who worked in the forests below the Canadian border. He thought that if he could establish a town in which they and their families could live, a town without the distraction of booze and whores, then he could keep them on the straight and narrow. He instituted a building program, the most conspicuous element of which was a massive stone church designed to act as the centerpiece of the settlement, a symbol of its citizens’ devotion to the Lord. Gradually, the houses Lumley had built began to fill with timber workers and their families, some of whom were probably genuinely committed to a community based on Christian principles.

Unfortunately, not all of them felt the same way. Rumors began to emerge about Gilead, and about some of the things that went on there in the dark of night, but those were different times, and there was little that the police could do, especially as Lumley hampered any investigations, anxious to preserve the façade of his ideal community.

Then, in 1959, a hunter tracking deer through the woods near Gilead came across a shallow grave that had been partially disturbed by animals. The corpse of a newborn child was revealed: a boy, barely a day old when he died. He had been stabbed repeatedly with, it was later surmised, a knitting needle. Two other similar graves were later found nearby, each holding a small corpse, one male and one female. This time, the police arrived in force. Questions were asked; gentle and notso-gentle interrogations took place, but a number of the adults who had been living at the settlement had already fled by that stage. Three girls, one aged fourteen and two aged fifteen, were examined by doctors and found to have given birth to children in the previous twelve months. Lumley was forced to act. Meetings were convened, and influential men spoke to one another in the corners of clubs. Quietly, and without fuss, Gilead was abandoned and the buildings were either destroyed or began to fall into decay, all but the great, unfinished church, which was gradually colonized by the forest, its steeple turning to a pillar of green beneath layers of twisting ivy. Only one person was jailed in connection with what had occurred: a man named Mason Dubus, who was regarded as the senior figure in the community. He served time for child abduction and sex with a minor, after one of the girls who had given birth told police she had been a virtual prisoner of Dubus and his wife for seven years, having been taken from near her family home in West Virgina while out picking berries. Dubus’s wife escaped jail by claiming that she had been coerced into all that had occurred by her husband, and it was her evidence that helped to secure his conviction. She declined, or was unable, to tell the police anything more of what had taken place at Gilead, but it was clear from the testimony of some of the children, both male and female, that they had been subjected to continuous and sustained abuse both before and during the establishment of the Gilead settlement. It was, as Harmon had said, a dark chapter in the state’s history.

“Did Clay create many paintings like this one?” I asked.

“Clay didn’t create many paintings, period,” replied Harmon, “but of those that I’ve seen, a number certainly contain images of Gilead.”

Gilead had been situated just outside Jackman, and Jackman was where Clay’s car had been found abandoned. I reminded Harmon of that fact.

“I think Gilead was certainly an interest of Daniel’s,” he said cautiously.

“An interest, or more than that?”

“Do you mean was Daniel obsessed by Gilead? I don’t think so, but given the nature of his own work, it’s hardly surprising that he was curious about its history. He interviewed Dubus, you know. He told me about it. Daniel had an idea for a project concerning Gilead, I think.”

“A project?”

“Yes, a book about Gilead.”

“Was that the term he used? ‘Project’?”

Harmon thought for a moment. “I couldn’t say for sure, but it might have been.” He finished the last of his brandy and set the glass down on his desk. “I’m afraid I’m neglecting my other guests. We should return to the fray.”

He opened the door, allowed me to pass, then closed and locked it behind us.

“What do you think happened to Daniel Clay?” I asked him, the buzz of conversation from the other guests growing louder as we drew nearer to the room in which they were gathered.

Harmon stopped at the door.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can tell you this, though: Daniel wasn’t the kind of man to commit suicide. He might have blamed himself for what happened to those children, but he wouldn’t have killed himself over it. Yet if he was still alive, I believe he would have made contact with someone in the years since his disappearance, either with me or his daughter, or one of his colleagues. He hasn’t, though, not once.”

“Then you think he’s dead?”

“I believe he was killed,” Harmon corrected me. “I just have no idea why.”

Chapter XII

The party, if that was the right word for it, broke up shortly after ten. I spent most of the time in the company of June, Summer, and Nyoko, trying to sound like I knew a little about art, and failing, and considerably less time with Jacobs and two of the bankers, trying to sound like I knew a little about finance, and failing there too. Jacobs, the people’s writer, was very knowledgeable about high-risk bonds and currency speculation for someone who claimed to have the common touch. His hypocrisy was so blatant as to be almost admirable, in a way.

Slowly, the guests began to drift toward their cars. Harmon stood on his porch, despite the fact that it had grown suddenly colder, and thanked each of us for coming. His wife had disappeared after wishing us a polite good night. Nyoko was excluded from her farewells, and once again I was aware that, despite appearances, Lawrie Harmon was not quite as disengaged from the real world as the young Asian-American believed.

When it came to my turn to leave, Harmon placed his left hand upon my upper arm as his right hand gripped mine.

“You tell Rebecca that if there’s anything I can do for her, she just has to let me know,” he said. “There are a lot of people who would like to find out what happened to Daniel.” His face darkened, and his voice dropped in volume. “And not just his friends,” he added.

I waited for him to continue. He had a taste for the enigmatic.

“At the end, before he disappeared, Daniel changed,” Harmon went on. “It wasn’t just his troubles: the Muller case, the revelations of abuse. There was something else. He was certainly preoccupied the last time I saw him. Perhaps it was research, but what sort of research could have left him shaken in that way?”

“When did you last see him?”

“A week or so before he went missing.”

“And he gave you no indication of what was bothering him, his known difficulties apart?”

“None. It was just an impression that I got.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this back in your office?”

Harmon shot me a look that told me he wasn’t used to his decisions being questioned.

“I’m a careful man, Mr. Parker. I play chess, and I’m pretty good at it. It’s probably why I was a good businessman too. I’ve learned that it pays to take a little time to think before making a move. Back in the office, part of me wanted nothing more to do with Daniel Clay. He was my friend, but after what happened, after the rumors and the whispered allegations, I felt that it was best to distance myself from him.”

“But now you’ve changed your mind.”

“No, I haven’t. Part of me suspects that no good can come of your nosing around in this, but if it uncovers the truth about Daniel and lays the suspicions to rest, and gives his daughter some peace of mind along the way, then it could be that you’ll prove me wrong.”

He released his grip upon my hand and my arm. It seemed that we were done. Harmon was watching the writer’s car pull out of its parking slot on the driveway. It was an old Dodge truck-it was said that he drove a Mercedes back in Massachusetts, where he kept an apartment near Harvard-and Jacobs maneuvered it like it was a Panzer tank. Harmon shook his head in baffled amusement.

“You mentioned some others who might be interested in what happened to Clay, people apart from his friends or acquaintances.”

Harmon didn’t look at me.

“Yes. It’s not hard to figure out. There are people who believe that Daniel colluded in the abuse of children. I have two children. I know what I would do to anyone who harmed them, or anyone who allowed others to do so.”

“And what would that be, Mr. Harmon?”

He tore himself away from Jacobs’s increasingly frantic attempts to make a turn unaided by power steering.

“I’d kill him,” he said, and there was something in the way he said it, something so matter-of-fact, that I didn’t doubt him, not for one moment. I knew then that for all of his bonhomie, all of his fine wines and his pretty pictures, Joel Harmon was a man who would not hesitate to crush those who crossed him. And I wondered, for a moment, if Daniel Clay might not have been such a person, and if Joel Harmon’s interest in him was not entirely benign. Before I had a chance to follow that train of thought any further, Nyoko came over and whispered something in Harmon’s ear.

“Are you sure?” Harmon said.

She nodded.

Harmon immediately called to those who had reached their cars to stop. Russell, the shrink, patted the hood of Jacobs’s truck, indicating that he should cut the engine. Jacobs looked almost relieved to do so.

“It seems that there is an intruder in the grounds,” he said. “It might be best if you all stepped into the house for a moment, just to be safe.”

Everyone did as Harmon asked, albeit with some grumbling from Jacobs, who clearly felt a poem coming on and was anxious to commit it to paper before it was lost to posterity; that, or he was trying to hide his embarrassment at screwing up a simple turn. We all shuffled back into the library. Jacobs and Summer went to one of the windows and looked out on the expanse of neatly mown lawn at the back of the house.

“I can’t see anyone,” said Jacobs.

“Maybe we should stay away from the windows,” said Summer.

“He’s an intruder, not a sniper,” said Russell.

Summer didn’t seem convinced. Jacobs placed a reassuring arm around her shoulders and let it linger there. She didn’t object. What was it with poets, I wondered? It seemed that there was a certain type of woman who just buckled at the suggestion of an internal rhyme.

Harmon’s driver, housekeeper, and maid all lived in quarters adjoining the main house. The waiters, who were huddled together like startled doves, had been hired for the evening, and the cook lived in Portland and commuted to the house each day. The driver, whose name was Todd, joined us in the hallway. He was dressed casually in jeans and a shirt. He wore a leather jacket over the shirt and was carrying a gun. It was a Smith amp;Wesson nine-millimeter in a glitzy finish, but he held it in a way that suggested he knew how to use it.

“Mind if I tag along?” I asked Harmon.

“I don’t mind at all,” he said. “It’s probably nothing, but best to be sure.”

We walked through to the kitchen, where the cook and the maid were standing by a sink, staring out at the grounds through the little window above it.

“What is all this about?” asked Harmon.

“Maria saw someone,” said the cook. She was an attractive older woman, her dark hair tied back and covered with a white cap, her body lean and athletic. The maid was Mexican, and also slim and good-looking. Joel Harmon clearly allowed aesthetics to influence his hiring procedures.

Maria pointed. “Over by the trees, at the east wall,” she said. “A man, I think.”

She looked even more frightened than Summer. Her hands were shaking.

“Did you see anyone?” Harmon asked the cook.

“No, I was working. Maria called me over to the window. He could have taken off before I got there.”

“If there was someone out there, then he’d have set off the motion sensors,” Harmon said. He turned back to Maria. “Did the lights come on?”

She shook her head.

“ Lot of shadow back there,” said Todd. “You sure you weren’t mistaken?”

“No mistake,” she said. “I see him.”

Todd gave Harmon a look that was more resigned than concerned.

“We’re not going to find out anything in here,” I said.

“Bring up all of the lights,” Harmon told Todd. Todd went to a box of switches on the kitchen wall and flicked a line of them. Instantly the grounds were illuminated. Todd led the way out. I followed, picking up a flashlight from a rack on the wall along the way. Harmon hung back. After all, he didn’t have a gun. Regrettably, I didn’t have a gun either. It seemed rude to bring one to a stranger’s dinner party.

The lights took out most of the shadows in the garden, but there were still patches of dark under the trees by the walls. I used the flashlight to probe them, but there was nothing there. The ground was soft, but there was no sign of footprints. The surrounding wall was eight or nine feet high, and covered in ivy. Anyone climbing the wall would have damaged the ivy, but it appeared to be intact. We made a cursory search of the rest of the grounds, but it was obvious that Todd believed Maria had been mistaken.

“She’s kinda jittery at the best of times,” he said, as we walked back to where Harmon waited for us. “Everything is ‘Jesus’ and ‘ Madre de Dios.’ She’s a looker, though, I’ll give her that, but you got a better chance of getting laid by a busload of nuns.”

Harmon raised his hands in a “What’s happening?” gesture.

“Nada,” said Todd. “Not a sign.”

“A lot of fuss over nothing,” said Harmon. He headed back into the kitchen, shot Maria a disapproving glance, then went to release his guests. Todd followed. I stayed behind. Maria was putting plates into a big dishwasher. Her chin was trembling slightly.

“Can you tell me what you saw?” I said.

She shrugged.

“Maybe Mr. Harmon is right. Maybe I no see,” she said, although I could tell from the expression on her face that she didn’t believe her own words.

“Try me,” I said.

She stopped what she was doing. A tear caught in her eyelash, and she brushed it away.

“It was a man. He dress in clothes. Brown, I think. Muy sucio. His face? White. Pálido, sí?”

“Pale?”

“Sí, pale. Also-”

Now she looked frightened again. She touched her hands to her face and mouth.

“Here and here, nada. Nothing. Empty. Hueco.”

“Hueco? I don’t understand.”

Maria glanced over my shoulder. I turned to find the cook watching us.

“Della,” said Maria, “ayúdame a explicarle lo que quiere decir ‘hueco.’”

“You speak Spanish?” I asked her.

“Some,” she said.

“So, any idea what hueco might mean?”

“Uh, I’m not sure. I can try to find out.”

Della exchanged some words with Maria, who made gestures and signs to help her along. Eventually, she picked up a decorated ostrich egg that was used to hold pens and tapped her fingers lightly on the shell.

“Hueco,” said Maria, and the cook’s face briefly brightened before she too looked troubled, as though she had somehow misunderstood what was being said.

“Hueco means ‘hollow,’” she said. “Maria says he was a hollow man.”

Back in the hallway, June was waiting for me. Harmon hovered nearby, seemingly anxious to be rid of us all. Todd was on the phone in the hall. I heard him thank someone before he hung up. He clearly wanted to tell Harmon something, but wasn’t sure if he should wait until we were gone. I decided to nudge him.

“Anything wrong?”

He glanced at Harmon for permission to speak in the company of others.

“Well?” said his boss. “What did they say?”

“I called the Falmouth P.D.,” said Todd, directing the explanation to me as well as his employer. “Just seemed like it was worth checking to see if they’d spotted anything out of the ordinary. They usually keep a close eye on the houses along here.” By that, I presumed that he meant they kept a close eye on Joel Harmon’s house. He could have bought and sold most of his neighbors ten times over. “Someone reported a car cruising the area, maybe even parked for a while over by the eastern wall of the property, and got suspicious. By the time the cops came, the car was gone, but could be that it was connected to what Maria saw.”

“They get a make, a number?” I asked him.

Todd shook his head. “Just a medium-sized red car,” he said.

Harmon must have seen something in my face.

“Does that ring a bell with you?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “Frank Merrick, the man who was bothering Rebecca Clay, drives a red car. If I found the connection between you and Clay, then so could he.”

“Friendship,” Harmon corrected me, “not connection. Daniel Clay was my friend. And if this man Merrick wants to talk to me about him, then I’ll tell him just what I told you.”

I walked to the door and looked out at the pebbled driveway, illuminated by the lights of the house and the lamps that stood along the verge. It was Merrick, it had to be. But Merrick ’s description did not match that given by Maria of the man whom she had glimpsed in the garden. Merrick had come here, but he had not been alone.

Hollow.

“I’d be careful for the next few days, Mr. Harmon,” I said. “If you go out, keep Todd with you. I’d have your security system checked too.”

“All because of this one man?” asked Harmon. He sounded slightly incredulous.

“He’s dangerous, and he may not be just one man. As you said yourself, better to be safe.”

With that, June and I left. I drove, the electronic gates opening silently before us as we left the Harmon house behind.

“My,” said June, “you do lead an interesting life.”

I looked at her. “You think that was my doing?”

“You told Joel that the man in the car might have made the same connection that you did-or, rather, that I made for you-but there is another possibility.”

There was only the slightest hint of a rebuke in her voice. I didn’t need her to tell me why. I had figured it out for myself, even though I was reluctant to say it aloud in front of Harmon and had instead forced it back like bile in my throat. Just as I had tracked Merrick, so, too, perhaps Merrick was tracking me, and I had led him straight to Joel Harmon.

But I was also troubled by the appearance of the man in Harmon’s garden. It appeared that Merrick ’s inquiries about Daniel Clay had drawn something else, a man-no, men, I corrected myself, remembering a feeling like foul breezes separating before me, and letters scrawled in dust by a childlike hand-shadowing his movements. Was he aware of them, or was their presence something to do with Eldritch’s client? Yet it was hard to see half-glimpsed men climbing the rickety stairs to an ancient lawyer’s office, or dealing with the harridan who guarded the gateway to the upper levels of Eldritch’s business. What had seemed at first like a simple case of stalking had become infinitely stranger and more complex, and I was glad that Angel and Louis would soon be with me. Merrick’s deadline was about to expire and, while I had set in motion a plan for dealing with him, I was aware that he was, in a sense, the least of my worries. Merrick I could deal with. He was dangerous, but he was a known quantity. The Hollow Men were not.

Chapter XIII

Early the next morning, I was standing by the Portland Public Market’s parking lot. The temperature had plummeted overnight, and the weathermen were saying that it was likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future, which, in Maine terms, meant that it might begin to improve sometime around April. It was a damp cold, the kind that left clothing moist to the touch, and the windows of coffee shops, diners, even passing cars, were steamed up as the heat caused the moisture to evaporate, lending an uncomfortably claustrophobic atmosphere to anywhere but the least crowded of places.

While most people had the option of seeking shelter indoors, there were some who were not so fortunate. Already a queue had formed outside the Preble Street Resource Center, where the city’s poorest gathered each day to be served breakfast by volunteers. Some would be hoping to take a shower or do their laundry while they were there, or to pick up some fresh clothing and use a telephone. The working poor who couldn’t make it back for midday would be served a bag lunch so they wouldn’t go hungry later. In this way the center and its partners, the Wayside and Saint Luke’s soup kitchens, served over three hundred thousand meals every year to those who might otherwise have starved or have been forced to redirect money from rent or essential medicines just to keep body and soul together.

I watched them from where I stood, the line made up mostly of men, a few of them obviously veterans of the street, their layers of clothing filthy, their hair unkempt, while others were still a couple of steps away from homelessness. Some of the women scattered among them were hard-faced and large, their features distorted by alcohol and difficult lives, their bodies swollen by cheap, fatty foods and cheaper booze. It was also possible to pick out the new arrivals, the ones who had yet to grow accustomed to supporting themselves and their families with handouts. They did not talk or mix with the rest and kept their heads down or faced the wall, fearful of making eye contact with those around them, like new prisoners on a cell block. Perhaps, too, they were afraid to look up and lock eyes with a friend or neighbor, maybe even an employer who might decide that it wasn’t good for business to give work to someone who had to beg for breakfast. Nearly all of those in the line were in their thirties or older. It gave a false impression of the nature of the poor in a city where one in five of those under the age of eighteen lived below the poverty line.

Nearby were the Salvation Army’s Adult Rehabilitation Center, the Midtown Community Policing Center, and the city’s department of probation and parole. This area was a narrow channel through which most of those with a history of legal problems inevitably flowed. So I stood drinking a coffee from the market to keep me warm and waited to see if a familiar face might appear. Nobody paid me much attention. After all, it was too cold to worry about anyone but oneself.

After twenty minutes, I saw the man I was looking for. His name was Abraham Shockley, but on the street he was known only as “Mr. In-Between,” or “Tween” for short. He was, by any definition, a career criminal. The fact that he wasn’t very good at his chosen career hardly mattered to the courts. He had been charged in his time with possession of Class A drugs with intent to supply, theft by deception, larceny, operating under the influence, and night hunting, among other offenses. Tween had been fortunate that violence had never played a part in his crimes, so that he had, on more than one occasion, benefited from the fact that the offense in question fell into the category of “wobblers,” or crimes that were not statutorily defined as either felonies or misdemeanors, so that some offenses prosecuted as felonies were later reduced to misdemeanors by the trial court. The local cops had also put in a good word for Tween, when required, because Tween was everybody’s friend. He knew people. He listened. He remembered. Tween wasn’t a snitch. He had his own standards of behavior, his own principles, and he adhered to them as best he could. Tween wouldn’t rat anyone out, but he was the man to ask if you wanted a message passed on to someone who was keeping a low profile, or if you wanted to find an individual of ill repute for purposes other than putting him behind bars. In his turn, Tween acted as a go-between for those who were in trouble and wanted to cut a deal with a cop or a parole officer. He was a small but useful cog in the machinery of the unofficial justice system, the shadow courts in which deals were struck and blind eyes turned so that valuable time could be spent on more pressing matters.

He saw me as he took his place in the queue. I nodded to him, then walked slowly down Portland Street. After a few minutes, I heard footsteps approaching from behind, and Tween fell into step beside me. He was in his late forties and dressed cleanly, if shabbily, in yellow sneakers, jeans, two sweaters, and an overcoat with a vent that had split halfway up his back. His reddish brown hair was unevenly cut; people in Tween’s position didn’t waste their money on barbers. He lived rent-free in a one-room basement off Forest Avenue thanks to an absentee landlord who relied on Tween to keep an eye on his more unruly tenants, and to feed the building’s resident cat.

“Breakfast?” I said.

“Only if it’s Bintliff ’s,” he replied. “I hear they do a wicked good lobster eggs Benedict.”

“You do have a taste for the finer things in life,” I said.

“I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth.”

“Yeah, but you stole it from the kid in the next cradle.”

To their credit, nobody in Bintliff ’s gave us a second glance. We were seated in a booth upstairs, and Tween ordered enough food to fill him up for a day at least: fruit and OJ to begin, followed by toast, the lobster eggs Benedict of which he’d heard so much, extra home fries, then some muffins to finish, three of which were squirreled away in the pockets of his overcoat “for my buddies,” as he explained. While we ate, we spoke about books and local news and just about anything else that came to mind, except the reason why I had brought Tween here. It was the gentlemanly way to conduct business and Tween was always a gentleman, even when he was trying to steal the sole from somebody’s shoe.

“So,” he said, as he finished a fifth coffee, “you just bring me here to enjoy the pleasure of my company?” The coffee didn’t appear to have made him jittery, or at least no more jittery than he had been to begin with. If you handed Tween a bowl of cream to hold, it would turn to butter in the time it took to wind your wristwatch. He had so much nervous energy that it was tiring to be in his immediate vicinity for too long.

“Not just that,” I replied. “I’d like you to ask around, see if you can find anyone who might have known a guy called Frank Merrick, either in Thomaston or in Supermax. He did ten years, the final two or three in the Max, then got released and sent for trial in Virginia.”

“He anything special?”

“He’s not the kind of guy you’re going to forget easily. He had a reputation as a button man.”

“Rumor or solid?”

“I’m inclined to believe what I’ve heard.”

“Where is he now?”

“He’s here.”

“Renewing old acquaintances?”

“Could be. If he is, I’d like to know the names.”

“I’ll ask around. Shouldn’t take me too long. You got some quarters so I can call you?”

I gave him my business card, the change from my pocket, and fifty dollars in tens, fives, and ones so he could buy beer and sandwiches to oil the wheels. I knew how Tween worked. He’d helped me in the past. When he found someone who could cast some light on Merrick, as I was sure he would, he would hand me back my change and a handful of receipts, and only then would he look for payment. That was the way Tween worked in his “official” capacity, operating by one simple rule: you didn’t rip off anyone who looked like they might be on your side.

Merrick called me at midday. I’d been checking for signs of him all morning, but I didn’t see him or his red car. If he was smart, he’d have changed the car, but that assumed that Eldritch and his client were still prepared to bankroll him. I’d taken all of the precautions I could in case Merrick, or someone else, was keeping an eye on my movements. I was satisfied that no one was, not that day. In addition, Jackie Garner confirmed that all was still quiet where Rebecca Clay was concerned. But Merrick was on the phone, threatening to shatter that silence.

“Time’s up,” he said.

“You ever consider that you might get further with honey than vinegar?”

“Feed a man honey, and you get his love. Feed him vinegar, and you get his attention. Helps if you grab him by the balls too, and squeeze him some.”

“That’s very profound. You learn that in jail?”

“Hope you didn’t waste all that time finding out about me, else we’re going to have us a problem.”

“I didn’t come up with much, not on you and not on Daniel Clay either. His daughter doesn’t know any more than you do, but then she told you that already. You just didn’t want to listen.”

Merrick forced air through his nose in an imitation of amusement.

“Well, that’s unfortunate. You tell missy I’m disappointed in her. Better yet, I’ll tell her myself.”

“Wait. I didn’t say that I’d found nothing.” I needed leverage, something to draw him in. “I have a copy of the police file on Daniel Clay,” I lied.

“So?”

“It mentions your daughter.”

Now Merrick was silent.

“There’s some material in it that I don’t understand. I don’t think the cops did either.”

“What is it?” His voice sounded husky, as though something had suddenly caught in his throat.

I should have felt bad about lying. I was playing on Merrick ’s feelings for his missing child. There would be consequences when he found out the truth.

“Uh-uh,” I said. “Not over the phone.”

“So what do you suggest?” he asked.

“We meet. I give you a look at the file. I’ll tell you what I’ve learned. Then you go and do what you have to do, as long as it doesn’t involve Rebecca Clay.”

“I don’t trust you. I seen those cavemen you got guarding the woman. What’s to stop you from trying to turn them loose on me? I got no problem killing them if it comes down to it, but it would kind of hinder my investigations, you might say.”

“I don’t want their blood on my hands either. We meet in a public place, you read the file, and we go our separate ways. I’m warning you, though: I’m giving you a break because of your daughter. You show up again around Rebecca Clay, and this is all going to step up a notch. I guarantee that you won’t like what happens then.”

Merrick gave a theatrical sigh. “Now that you got the pissing competition out of the way, maybe you’d like to name a place.”

I told him to meet me at the Big 20 Bowling Center on Route 1. I even gave him directions. Then I started making my calls.

Tween got back to me at three o’clock that afternoon.

“I’ve found someone for you. He comes at a price.”

“Which is?”

“A ticket to tonight’s hockey game, and fifty bucks. He’ll meet you there.”

“Done.”

“Just leave his ticket for collection with my name on the envelope. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“How much do I owe you?”

“Hundred dollars sound fair?”

“It sounds fine.”

“I got some change for you too. I’ll give it to you when you pay me.”

“Has he got a name, this guy?”

“He has, but you can call him Bill.”

“Is he the nervous type?”

“He wasn’t until I mentioned Frank Merrick. I’ll see you around.”

Candlepin bowling is a New England tradition. The balls are smaller and lighter than in tenpin, and the pins are thinner: three inches in the middle and one and a half at the top and bottom. Getting a strike is more a matter of luck than skill, and it’s said that nobody has ever bowled a perfect ten-strike candlepin game. The best score recorded in Maine is 231 out of a possible 300. I’d never bowled over 100.

The Big 20 in Scarborough had been in existence since 1950, when Mike Anton, an Albanian by birth, founded it as Maine ’s largest and most modern bowling house, and it didn’t seem to have changed much since then. I sat on a pink plastic chair, sipped a soda, and waited. It was four-thirty on a Friday afternoon, and every lane was already in use, the ages of the players ranging from teenagers to seniors. There was laughter and the smell of beer and fried food and the distinctive sound of the balls rolling along the wooden alleys. I watched two old guys who barely spoke ten words to each other close in on 200 each, and when they failed to break the double century one of them expressed his disappointment in a single “Ayuh.” I sat in silence, the only lone male among groups of men and women, knowing that I was about to cross a line with Merrick.

My cell phone rang shortly before five, and a voice said, “We got him.”

Outside there were two Scarborough police cruisers and a trio of unmarked cars, one each from the Portland P.D., the South Portland P.D., and the Scarborough cops. A handful of people had gathered to watch the show. Merrick was facedown in the parking lot, his hands cuffed behind his back. He looked up at me as I approached. He didn’t appear angry. He just seemed disappointed. I saw O’Rourke nearby, leaning against a car. I nodded to him and made a call. Rebecca Clay answered. She was at the courthouse, and the judge was about to issue the temporary protection order against Merrick. I told her that we had him and that I’d be at Scarborough P.D. headquarters if she needed to contact me when she was done.

“Any problems?” I asked O’Rourke.

He shook his head.

“He walked right into it. Didn’t even open his mouth to ask what was going on.”

As we watched, Merrick was hauled to his feet and put in the back of one of the unmarked cars. He stared straight ahead as it pulled out.

“He looks old,” said O’Rourke. “He’s got something, though. I wouldn’t like to cross him. And I hate to tell you this, but I think you just have.”

“It didn’t seem like I had a whole lot of choice.”

“Well, at least we can hold him for a while and see what we get out of him.”

The length of time for which Merrick could be held would depend on the charges brought against him, if any. Stalking, defined as engaging in conduct that would cause a person to suffer intimidation, annoyance, or alarm, or to fear bodily injury, either to that person or a member of that person’s immediate family, was defined as a Class D crime. Similarly, terrorizing was a Class D, and harassment was a Class E. There was always the possibility of adding trespassing and criminal damage to the list, but taken altogether it meant that Merrick could be held only until the following Tuesday evening, assuming he didn’t get lawyered up, since D and E offenses allowed a suspect to be held for only forty-eight hours without charge, excluding weekends and holidays.

“You think your client will want to take this all the way?” asked O’Rourke.

“Do you want her to?”

“He’s a dangerous man. Seems kind of rude to lock him up for just sixty days, which is what he’ll get if the judge buys all the arguments in favor of putting him away. Might even be counterproductive, although if anyone asks, I didn’t say that.”

“You never struck me as the gambling type, you know that?”

“It’s not a gamble. It’s a calculated risk.”

“Based on what?”

“Based on Frankie’s reluctance to be jailed and your ability to protect your client.”

“So what’s the compromise?”

“We warn him off, make sure the order is ready to be served, and set him free. It’s a small city. He’s not going to disappear. We’ll arrange for someone to stick close to him for a while, and see what happens.”

It didn’t sound like the perfect plan. Nevertheless, it looked like I had just been given an extra ninety-six hours at most without Merrick to worry about. It was better than nothing.

“Let’s hear what he’s got to say for himself first,” I said. “You cleared it for me to watch?”

“Didn’t take much doing. Seems like you still have friends in Scarborough. You spot anything in what he says, then you let me know. You think he’ll call a lawyer?”

I thought about it. If he did decide to lawyer himself up, it would have to be through Eldritch, assuming the old man was licensed to practice in Maine, or had someone in the state who was prepared to do a little quid pro quo work when necessary. But I had a feeling that Eldritch’s support for Merrick had always been conditional, and Merrick ’s recent actions might have forced the lawyer to reconsider his position.

“I don’t think he’s going to talk much anyway.”

O’Rourke shrugged. “We could hit him with a telephone book.”

“You could, but I’d have to report you to IA.”

“Yeah, there’s that. I’d have to lose the paperwork on myself. Still, it’s Scarborough ’s turf. We can stand back and see how they handle it.”

He got in his car. The Scarborough cruisers were pulling away, the Portland cops close behind.

“You coming?” he asked.

“I’ll follow.”

He left, the crowd dispersed, and suddenly I was the only person in the parking lot. The cars rolled by on Route 1, and the neon Big 20 sign illuminated the lot, but behind me was the darkness of the marshes. I turned, gazing into it, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that, from its deepest reaches, something stared back at me. I walked to my car, started the engine, and tried to leave that sensation behind.

Merrick was seated in a small square room furnished with a white table bolted to the floor. There were three blue chairs around it, and Merrick sat in the one facing the door, the two empty chairs across from him. A wipe-clean board was attached to one wall, its surface covered with children’s doodles. There was a phone beside the door and, high in one corner, a video camera. The room was also wired for sound recording.

Merrick ’s hands had been cuffed, and the cuffs had in turn been chained through a D-ring on the table. He had been given a soda to drink from the machine beside the evidence technician’s office, but he hadn’t touched it. While the room didn’t have a two-way mirror, we were able to watch him on the computer monitor in a partitioned office close by the interview room. We weren’t alone. Although the alcove was big enough for four people at best, almost three times that number were crowded around the screen, trying to catch a glimpse of their new guest.

Detective Sergeant Wallace MacArthur was one of them. I knew him from way back. Through Rachel, I’d introduced him to his wife, Mary. In a way, I had nearly been responsible for her death, too, but Wallace had never held that against me, which was pretty Christian of him, all things considered.

“Not often we get a living legend in here,” he said. “Even the Feds have joined us.”

He jerked a thumb in the direction of the door, where Pender, the new SAC of the small Portland field office, was talking with a man whom I didn’t recognize but whom I took to be another agent. I had been introduced to Pender once at some policeman’s benefit in Portland. As far as the Feds went, he seemed okay. Pender nodded to me. I nodded back. At least he hadn’t tried to have me thrown out, which was reason to be thankful.

MacArthur shook his head in something like admiration. “ Merrick ’s old school,” he said. “They don’t make ’em like him anymore.”

O’Rourke grinned emptily. “Yeah, what have we come to when we can look at someone like him and think, hell, he’s not so bad? He just popped them, neatly and cleanly. No torture. No women. No kids. Just men that somebody figured had it coming.”

Merrick kept his head down. He did not look up at the camera even though he must have known that we were watching him.

Two Scarborough detectives entered the room, a beefy guy named Conlough and a woman named Frederickson, who had made the formal arrest at the Big 20. As soon as they began to question him, Merrick, contrary to expectations, looked up and answered them in soft, civil tones. It was almost as though he felt the need to justify and defend himself. Perhaps he was right. He had lost his daughter. He had the right to ask where she might be.

Conlough: What’s your interest in Rebecca Clay?

Merrick: None, beyond who her daddy is.

C: What’s her father to you?

M: He treated my little girl. Now she’s gone. I want to find out where she is.

C: You think you can do that by threatening a woman? Real big guy, huh, stalking a defenseless woman?

M: I didn’t threaten anyone. I didn’t stalk anyone. I just wanted to ask her some questions.

C: So you do that by trying to bust into her house, breaking her window?

M: I didn’t try to bust into her house, and the window was an accident. I’ll pay for the damage

C: Who put you up to this?

M: Nobody. I don’t need no one to tell me that what happened ain’t right.

C: What’s not right?

M: That my daughter could disappear and nobody give a rat’s ass about finding her.

Frederickson: Maybe your daughter ran away. From what we hear, she was having problems.

M: I told her I’d look out for her. She had no cause to run away.

C: You were in jail. How were you going to look out for her from a cell?

M: (silent)

F: Who gave you the car?

M: A lawyer.

F: Which lawyer?

M: The lawyer Eldritch, down in Massachusetts.

F: Why?

M: He’s a good man. He thinks I got the right to ask questions. He got me out of trouble in Virginia, then helped me when I came back up here.

C: So he gives you a car out of the goodness of his heart. What is he, St. Vincent de Paul’s lawyer?

M: Maybe you should ask him.

C: Don’t worry, we will.

“We’ll talk to the lawyer,” said O’Rourke.

“You won’t get much from him,” I said.

“You’ve met him?”

“Oh yeah. He’s old-school too.”

“How old?”

“So old they built the school out of wattle and daub.”

“What did he tell you?”

“Pretty much what Merrick just said.”

“You believe him?”

“That he’s a good guy who gives away cars to deserving causes? No. Still, he said that Merrick had been one of his clients, and there’s no law against loaning a car to your client.”

I didn’t tell O’Rourke that Eldritch had another client, one who seemed to be covering Merrick ’s tab. I figured he could find that out for himself.

A call came through from the evidence technician. Merrick ’s car was clean. There were no weapons, no incriminating papers, nothing. Frederickson emerged from the interview room to consult with O’Rourke and the FBI man, Pender. The man who had been talking with Pender listened in, but said nothing. His eyes flicked to me, regarded me for a moment, then returned to Frederickson. I didn’t like what passed between us with that look. O’Rourke asked me if there was anything that I thought we should put to Merrick. I suggested asking him if he was working alone, or if he had brought other men with him. O’Rourke seemed puzzled, but agreed to suggest the question to Frederickson.

F: Ms. Clay has taken out a court order against you. Do you understand what that means?

M: I understand. It means I can’t go near her no more, else you put my ass back in jail.

F: That’s right. You going to abide by that order? You don’t plan to, and you can save us all some time right now

M: I’ll abide by it.

C: Maybe you’ll think about leaving the state too. We’d like you to do that.

M: I can’t promise nothing on that front. I’m a free man. I done my time. Got a right to go where I choose.

C: That include hanging around houses up in Falmouth?

M: I ain’t never been to Falmouth. Hear it’s real nice, though. I like being by the water.

C: Car like yours was seen around there last night.

M: Lots of cars like mine. Red is a real popular color.

C: Nobody said it was a red car.

M: (silent)

C: You hear me? How come you knew it was a red car?

M: Car like mine, what else would it be? If ’n it was a blue car, or a green car, then it wouldn’t be like mine. Have to be a red car to be like mine, just the way you said it.

F: You loan your car out to other people, Mr. Merrick?

M: No, I don’t.

F: So if we find out that it was your car-and we can do that, you know; we can take casts, canvass witnesses-then it would have to be you behind the wheel, right?

M: I guess so, but since I wasn’t there, it’s moot.

F: Moot?

M: Yeah, you know what “moot” means, Officer. Don’t need me to explain it to you.

F: Who are the other men with you?

M: (confused) Other men? The hell you talking about?

F: We know you’re not here alone. Who did you bring with you? Who’s helping you? You’re not doing all this without others.

M: I always work alone.

C: And what kind of work would that be?

M: (smiling) Problem solving. I’m a lateral thinker.

C: You know, I don’t think you’re being as cooperative as you should be.

M: I’m answering your questions, ain’t I?

F: Maybe you’ll answer them better after a couple of nights in jail.

M: You can’t do that.

C: Are you telling us what we can and can’t do? Listen, you may have been a big shot once upon a time, but that doesn’t count for anything up here.

M: You got no more cause to hold me. I told you I’d abide by that order.

F: We think you need some time to reflect on what you’ve been doing, to, uh, meditate on your sins.

M: I’m done talking to you. I want to call me a lawyer.

That was it. The interrogation was over. Merrick was given access to a phone. He called Eldritch who, it emerged, had taken the Maine bar exam, along with its equivalents in New Hampshire and Vermont. He told Merrick not to answer any more questions, and arrangements were made to transfer Merrick to the Cumberland County Jail, since Scarborough no longer had holding cells of its own.

“The lawyer won’t be able to get him out until Monday morning at the earliest,” said O’Rourke. “The judges do like to keep their weekends clear.”

Even if Merrick was charged, it was likely that Eldritch would arrange bail for him if it was still in the interests of Eldritch’s other client that Merrick should be free, just as it seemed to be in O’Rourke’s interests. The only person whose interests might not be well served by Merrick’s freedom was Rebecca Clay.

“I have some people keeping watch over Ms. Clay,” I told O’Rourke. “She wants to cut them loose, but I think she may need to reconsider, just until we get a sense of how Merrick reacts to all this.”

“Who are you using?”

I shifted awkwardly in my seat.

“The Fulcis, and Jackie Garner.”

O’Rourke laughed, attracting surprised glances from the men around him.

“No way! That’s like using a pair of undercover elephants, and their ringmaster.”

“Well, I kind of wanted him to see them. The object of the exercise was to keep him away.”

“Hell, they’d keep me away. Probably kept the birds away too. You really do pick entertaining friends.”

Yeah, I thought, but he didn’t know the half of it. The really entertaining ones had just arrived.

Chapter XIV

The streets were thick with buses by the time I made it back from Scarborough to the Cumberland County Civic Center: yellow school buses, Peter Pan Trailways, in fact just about anything that had wheels and could accommodate more than six people. The Pirates were on a roll. Under coach Kevin Dineen they were at the top of the Atlantic Division of the AHL’s Eastern Conference. Earlier in the week they had beaten their nearest rivals, the Hartford Wolf Pack, 7-4. Now it was the turn of the Springfield Falcons and it looked like about five thousand fans had made their way to the Civic Center for the game.

Inside the arena, Crackers the Parrot was entertaining the crowd. To be more accurate, he was entertaining most of the crowd. There were some people just didn’t want to be entertained.

“This has got to be the dumbest game ever,” said Louis. He was dressed in a gray cashmere coat over a black jacket and trousers, his hands thrust deep into the pockets of the coat, his chin buried in the folds of his red scarf. He acted like he’d just been forced out of a train somewhere in the middle of Siberia. His mildly Satanic beard had been dispensed with, and his hair was even more ruthlessly cut back than usual, its gray touches now barely visible. He and Angel had arrived earlier that day. I had bought a couple of extra tickets in case they wanted to come along to the game, but Angel had somehow managed to pick up a cold in Napa and was back at my place feeling sorry for himself. That left Louis as my reluctant escort for the evening.

Things between us had changed over the last year. In a way, I had always been closer to Angel. I knew more about his past, and when I was, however briefly, a cop, I had done what I could to help and protect him. I had seen something in him-even now I found it hard to explain precisely what it was, but perhaps it was a kind of decency, an empathy with those who had suffered, albeit one filtered murkily through his criminality-and had responded to it. I had seen something in his partner, too, but it was very different. Long before I had fired a gun in anger, Louis had killed. At first, he had done so out of a rage of his own, but he had quickly discovered he had a talent for it, and there were those who had been willing to pay him to utilize that ability on their behalf. He was once, I thought, not so different from Frank Merrick, although his moral compass had become surer than Merrick ’s had ever been.

Yet Louis was also, I knew, not so different from me. He represented a side of me that I had long been reluctant to acknowledge-the urge to strike out, the impulse toward violence-and his presence in my life had forced me to come to terms with it, and, through that accommodation, to control it. In turn, I thought that I had given him an outlet for his own anger, a way of engaging with, and altering, the world that was worthy of him as a man. We had seen things in this last year that had changed both of us, confirming suspicions that we had both held about the nature of the honeycomb world but had rarely shared. We had found a common ground, however hollow it might have sounded beneath our feet.

“You know why you don’t see no black men playing this game?” he continued. “A) Because it’s slow. B) Because it’s dumb. And C) Because it’s cold. I mean, look at these guys.” He flicked through the pages of the official program. “Most of them ain’t even American. They’re Canadian. Like you don’t have enough slow-ass white men of your own, you got to import them from Canada.”

“We like giving jobs to Canadians,” I said. “It gives them the chance to earn some real dollars.”

“Yeah, I bet they send it back to their families, like in the Third World.” He watched with obvious disdain as the mascot frolicked on the ice. “Parrot is more of an athlete than they are.”

We were seated in Block E, right in the center overlooking the circle. There was no sign of Bill, the man Tween was putting our way, although it was clear from what Tween had said that he was likely to be the cautious type where Merrick was concerned. If he was smart, he would be watching us even now. He would be reassured to learn that Merrick was behind bars for a few days. It had bought us all a little more time, for which I was grateful, at least until I was forced to explain the subtle nuances of hockey to a man who thought sport started and finished on a basketball court or an athletics track.

“Come on,” I said. “That’s not fair. Wait until they get on the ice. Some of these guys are pretty fast.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” said Louis. “Carl Lewis was fast. Jesse Owens was fast. Even Ben Johnson was fast on his chemical ass. The Popsicles, on the other hand, they not fast. They like snowmen on flat tin cans.”

An announcement was made advising spectators that “obscene or abusive language” would not be tolerated.

“You can’t swear?” said Louis incredulously. “The fuck kind of sport is this?”

“It’s just for appearances,” I said, as a man with kids on either side of him glanced up at Louis disapprovingly from below, considered saying something, then thought better of it and contented himself with pulling his kids’ hats down over their ears.

Queen’s “We Will Rock You” was played, followed by Republica’s “Ready to Go.”

“Why is so much sports music shit?” asked Louis.

“This is white people’s music,” I explained. “It’s supposed to suck. That way, black people can’t show them up by dancing to it.”

The teams hit the ice. There was more music. As usual, prizes were given out all through the first period: free burgers and mall discounts, the occasional T-shirt or cap.

“Give me a break,” said Louis. “They got to give shit away just to keep folks in their seats.”

By the end of the first period, the Pirates were 2-0 up from Zenon Konopka and Geoff Peters. There was still no sign of Tween’s guy.

“Maybe he’s asleep somewhere,” suggested Louis. “Like here.”

Just as the teams emerged for the second period, a small, hard-looking man in an ancient Pirates jacket moved into the row from the right. He had a goatee and wore silver-rimmed glasses. His head was covered by a black Pirates hat, and his hands were hidden in the pockets of his jacket. He looked like any one of hundreds of other people in the crowd.

“Parker, right?” he said.

“That’s right. You’re Bill?”

He nodded but didn’t take his hands out of his pockets.

“How long have you been watching us?” I asked.

“Since before the first period,” he replied.

“You’re being pretty careful.”

“I figure it doesn’t hurt.”

“Frank Merrick’s in custody,” I said.

“Yeah, well I didn’t know that, did I? What did they get him for?”

“Stalking.”

“They’re going to charge Frank Merrick with stalking?” He snorted in disbelief. “Give me a break. Why don’t they add jaywalking, or not having a license for his dog?”

“We wanted him held for a while,” I said. “The ‘why’ didn’t matter.”

Bill looked past me to where Louis was sitting. “No offense meant, but a black guy kind of stands out at a hockey game.”

“This is Maine. A black guy stands out just about anywhere.”

“I suppose, but you could have made him blend in some.”

“Does he look like the kind of guy who’s gonna wear a pirate’s hat and wave a plastic cutlass?”

Bill looked away from Louis.

“I guess not. A real cutlass, maybe.”

He sat back and didn’t say anything more for a time. With 3:18 to go in the second period, Shane Hynes hit a rocket from the right point. A minute and a half later, Jordan Smith made it 4-0. It was all over.

Bill stood.

“Let’s go get a beer,” he said. “That’s four consecutive wins, nine wins in ten games. Best start since the ninety-four-to-ninety-five inaugural, and I had to watch that in jail.”

“That count as cruel and unusual punishment?” asked Louis.

Bill gave him the eye.

“He’s not a fan,” I said.

“No shit.”

We walked outside and picked up three microbrews in plastic glasses. There was a steady stream of people already leaving the arena now that it looked like the Pirates had sewn everything up.

“I appreciated the ticket, by the way,” he said. “I don’t always have the funds to come here no more.”

“No problem,” I said.

He waited expectantly, his eyes fixed on the bulge in my jacket where my wallet was visible. I took it out and paid him the fifty. He folded the bills carefully and placed them in a pocket of his jeans. I was about to ask him about Merrick when, from inside the arena, came the unmistakable response to a Falcons’ goal.

“Goddammit!” said Bill. “We jinxed ’em by leaving.”

So it was back to our seats to wait for the start of the third period, but at least Bill was content to talk for a while about his time in Supermax while we did so. The Supermax system was designed to take out of the general population prisoners who were deemed to be especially violent, or escape risks, or a threat to others. Often, it was used as a form of punishment for those who broke the rules, or who were found with contraband. The Maine Supermax was opened in 1992 in Warren. It had one hundred maximum-security, solitary-confinement cells. With the closure of the old Thomaston State Prison at the start of the century, the new eleven-hundred-inmate prison was eventually built around the Supermax, like fortress walls around a citadel.

“We were both in the Max at the same time, Merrick and me,” he said. “I was doing twenty for burglary. Well, burglaries. You believe that? Twenty years. Goddamn killers get out in less. Anyway, the cops busted me for possession of a screwdriver and some wire. I only had the stuff to repair my goddamn radio. Told me I was an escape risk and sent me to the Max. After that, things got crazy. I hit a cop. I was pissed at him. I paid for it though. I stayed in the Max for the duration. Fuckin’ cops. I hate them.”

Inmates routinely referred to the prison guards as “cops.” After all, they were part of the same law enforcement edifice as the police, the prosecutors, and the judges.

“Bet you’ve never seen the inside of the SMU,” said Bill.

“Nope,” I said. The Supermax was off-limits to just about everyone who wasn’t a prisoner or a guard, but I’d heard enough about it to know that it wasn’t a place I ever wanted to be.

“It’s bad,” said Bill, and from the way he said it I knew that I wasn’t going to hear some exaggerated, hard-luck ex-con’s story. He wasn’t trying to sell me anything. He just wanted someone to listen.

“It stinks: shit, blood, puke. Stuff is on the floor, on the walls. Snow comes under the doors in winter. The vents make this noise all the time, and there’s something about it. You can’t block it out. I used to stuff toilet paper in my ears to try to stop myself from hearing it. I thought it was going to drive me nuts. It’s twenty-three-hour lockdown with one hour a day, five days a week, in the kennel. That’s what we call the exercise yard: thing is six feet wide, thirty feet long. I should know: I measured it myself for five years. Lights are on twenty-four/seven. There’s no TV, no radio, just noise and white light. They don’t even allow a man a toothbrush. They give you this useless fucking piece of plastic for your finger, but it’s not worth a damn.”

Bill opened his mouth and pointed with his finger at the gaps in his yellow teeth.

“I lost five teeth in there,” he said. “They just fell out. When you get down to it, the Max is a form of psychological torture. You know why you’re in there, but not what you can do to get out again. And that’s not the worst of it. You fuck up badly enough, and they send you to the ‘chair.’”

That I knew about. The “chair” was a restraining device used on those who managed to push the guards too far. Four or five guards wearing full body armor and carrying shields and Mace would storm a prisoner’s cell to perform the “extraction.” He would be Maced, pushed to the floor or onto his bed, then handcuffed. The cuffs would then be connected to leg irons and his clothes cut from his body, and then the prisoner would be carried, naked and screaming, to an observation room and there bound to a chair with straps where he would be left for hours in the cold. Incredibly, the prison authorities argued that the chair wasn’t used for punishment but only as a means of controlling inmates who were a threat to themselves or others. The Portland Phoenix had obtained a tape of an extraction, as all such operations were recorded by the prison, ostensibly to prove that the prisoners were not being mistreated. According to those who had seen it, it was hard to imagine how extractions and the chair qualified as anything other than state-sanctioned violence bordering on torture.

“They did it to me once,” said Bill, “after I coldcocked the cop. Never again. I kept my head down after that. That was no way to treat a man. They did it to Merrick, too, more than once, but they couldn’t break Frank. It was always the same reason, though. It never varied.”

“What do you mean?”

“ Merrick was always being punished for the same thing. There was a kid in there, name of Kellog, Andy Kellog. He was crazy, but it wasn’t his fault. Everybody knew it. He’d been fucked with as a child, and he never recovered. Spoke about birds all the time. Men like birds.”

I interrupted Bill.

“Wait a minute, this kid Kellog had been abused?”

“That’s right.”

“Sexually abused?”

“Uh-huh. I guess the men who did it wore masks or something. I recalled Kellog from his time in Thomaston. Some of the others in the Max did too, but nobody ever seemed to know for sure what had happened to him. All we knew was that he’d been taken by the ‘men like birds,’ and not once either. A couple of times, and that was after others had been at him already. What was left when they were done with him wasn’t worth a nickel curse. Kid was medicated to hell and back. Only man who seemed to get through to him was Merrick, and I got to tell you, that was a surprise to me. Merrick wasn’t no social worker. He was hard. But this kid, man, Merrick tried to look out for him. It wasn’t no faggot thing either. First man who said that to Merrick was also the last. Merrick near took his head off, tried to force it through the bars of his cell. Nearly succeeded, too, until the cops came and broke it up. Then Kellog got transferred to the Max for throwing shit at guards, and Merrick, he found a way to go there too.”

“ Merrick deliberately got himself transferred to the Supermax?”

“Yep, that’s what they say. Until Kellog went, Merrick had minded his own business, kept his head down, apart from those occasions when someone stepped out of line and threatened the kid or, if he was really dumb, tried to move up the order by knocking heads with Merrick. But after Kellog was transferred, Merrick did everything he could to rile the cops until they had no choice but to send him to Warren. Wasn’t much that he could do for the kid there, but he didn’t give up. He talked to the cops, tried to get them to send a mental health worker to check up on Kellog, even managed to talk the kid down once or twice when it seemed like he was going to get himself sent to the chair again. Guards took him out of his cell on occasion just so he could reason with the kid, but it didn’t always work. I tell you, Kellog lived in that chair. Maybe he still does, for all I know.”

“Kellog is still in there?”

“I don’t think he’s ever gonna get out, not alive. I think the kid wants to die. It’s a miracle he isn’t dead already.”

“What about Merrick? Did you talk to him? Did he tell you anything about himself?”

“Nah, he was a loner. Only man he had time for was Kellog. I got to talk to him some, when our paths crossed on the way to the infirmary or to and from the kennel, but over the years we talked about as much as you and I have done tonight. I knew about his daughter, though. I think that was why he was looking out for Kellog.”

The final period started. I could see Bill’s attention immediately begin to transfer itself to the ice.

“I don’t understand,” I said. “What did Merrick ’s daughter have to do with Kellog?”

Reluctantly, Bill turned away from the action for the last time.

“Well, his daughter had gone missing,” he said. “He didn’t have much to remember her by. A couple of photographs, a drawing or two that the girl sent to him in jail before she disappeared. It was the drawings that attracted him to Kellog because Kellog and Merrick ’s daughter, they’d drawn the same thing. They’d both drawn men with the heads of birds.”