The Unquiet

Revenge proves its own excutioner

– JOHN FORD, THE BROKEN HEART

Chapter XXX

It is often said that there are two Maines. There is the Maine of the summer tourists, the Maine of lobster rolls and ice cream, of yachts and boat clubs, a Maine that occupies a neat strip of coastline about as far north as Bar Harbor, with high hopes and property prices to match, apart from those towns without the good looks or good fortune to attract the tourist dollar, or those that have seen their industries fade and die, marooning them in a lake of prosperity. The rest of Maine derisively refers to the inhabitants of this region as “flatlanders” or, in even darker moments, dismisses them entirely as residents of “ Northern Massachusetts.”

The other Maine is very different. It is a Maine primarily of forests, not ocean, dominated by “the County,” or Aroostook, which has always seemed a separate entity due to its sheer size, if nothing else. It is northern and inland, rural and conservative, and its heart is the Great North Woods.

But those woods had begun to change. The big paper companies, once the backbone of the economy, were slowly relinquishing their hold on the land, recognizing that there was more money in property than raising and cutting trees. Plum Creek, the nation’s largest paper company, which owned nearly five hundred thousand acres around Moosehead Lake, had earmarked thousands of those acres for a massive commercial development of RV parks, houses, rental cabins, and an industrial park. For those in the south, it represented the despoiling of the state’s greatest area of natural beauty; but for those in the other Maine, it meant jobs and money and an influx of new blood into dying communities.

The reality was that the forest canopy hid the fastest-growing poverty rate in the nation. Towns were shrinking, schools were getting smaller, and the bright young hopes of the future were leaving for York and Cumberland, for Boston and New York. When the mills shut down, high-paying jobs were replaced by minimum-wage labor. Tax revenues fell. Crime, domestic violence, and substance abuse increased. Long Pond, once bigger than Jackman, had virtually died with the closure of its mill. Up in Washington County, almost within sight of the summer playground of Bar Harbor, one in five people lived in poverty. In Somerset, where Jackman lay, it was one in six, and a steady stream of people made their way to Youth and Family Services in Skowhegan, seeking food and clothing. In some areas, there was a waiting list of years for a Section 8 voucher, at a time when rural rental assistance and funding for Section 8 was steadily falling.

Yet Jackman, oddly, had prospered in recent years, in part because of the events of 9/11. Its population had fallen rapidly during the 1990s, and half of its housing units had been vacant. The town still had its lumber mill, but the changing nature of tourism meant that those who now headed north came in camper vans, or rented cabins and cooked for themselves, leaving little money in the town. Then the planes hit, and suddenly Jackman found itself on the front line of the fight to secure the nation’s borders. U.S. Customs and Border Protection doubled its manpower, house prices shot up, and, all things considered, Jackman was now in a better position than it had been for a long time. But even by Maine standards, Jackman remained remote. The nearest courthouse was in Skowhegan, sixty miles to the south, and the cops had to come up to Jackman from Bingham, almost forty miles away. It was, in its strange way, a lawless place.

Just as we came out of Solon, the Kennebec appeared before us. There was a sign by the side of the road. It read: “Welcome to Moose River Valley. If you don’t stop, smile on the way through.”

I looked at Louis.

“You’re not smiling,” I said.

“That’s ’cause we’re stopping.”

I guessed that statement could be taken a number of ways.

We didn’t head into Jackman that night. Instead, we pulled off the road a little way outside town. There was an inn on a small hill, with motelstyle rooms, a tiny bar beside the reception area, and a restaurant with long benches designed to feed the hunters who gave it a reason to exist in winter. Angel had already checked in, although he was nowhere to be seen. I went to my room, which was simply furnished and had a small kitchen area in one corner. There was underfloor heating. It was stiflingly hot. I turned off the heating, ignoring the warning that it would take twelve hours for the system to warm the room to its maximum again, then went back to the main building.

Angel was at the bar, a beer before him. He was sitting on a stool, reading a newspaper. He didn’t acknowledge me, although he saw me enter. There were two men to his left. One of them looked at Angel and whispered to his friend. They laughed unpleasantly, and something told me that this exchange had been going on for a time. I drifted closer. The one who had spoken was muscular and wanted people to know it. He wore a tight green T-shirt crisscrossed by the suspenders attached to his orange hunter’s oilskins. His head was closely shaved, but the ghost of his widow’s peak stood out like an arrow upon his forehead. His friend was smaller and heavier, his T-shirt worn bigger and looser to hide his gut. His beard looked like an unsuccessful attempt to disguise the weakness of his chin. Everything about him spoke of concealment, of his awareness of his failings. Although he was grinning, his eyes flicked uneasily from Angel to his colleague, as though the pleasure he was taking in the casual tormenting of another was tinged by relief that he was not the victim this time, a relief qualified by the knowledge that the muscular man could turn just as easily on him, and if he did so, it would probably not be for the first time.

The big man tapped a fingertip on Angel’s newspaper.

“You okay, buddy?” he said.

“Yeah, I’m good,” said Angel.

“I’ll bet.” The man made an obscene gesture with his hand and tongue. “I’m sure you’re real good.”

He laughed loudly. His friend joined in, a puppy barking with the big dog. Angel kept his eyes on his newspaper.

“Hey, I don’t mean nothing by it,” said the man. “We’re just having a little fun, that’s all.”

“I can see that,” said Angel. “I can tell that you’re a fun guy.”

The man’s smile died as the sarcasm started to burn.

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked. “You got a problem?”

Angel sipped his beer, closed his paper, and sighed. His main aggressor moved in closer, his friend muscling in alongside him. Angel spread his hands wide and patted both men gently on the chest. The barman was doing his best to stay out of the affair, but I could see him watching what was taking place in the mirror above the register. He was young, but he had still seen all of this before. Guns, beer, and the smell of blood was a combination guaranteed to bring out the worst in ignorant men.

“Get your fucking hands off me,” said the first man. “I asked you a question: you got a problem, because it seems to me like you have a problem. So, do you?”

Angel seemed to consider the question. “Well,” he said, “my back aches, I’m stuck in the boonies with a bunch of crackers with guns, and I’m not always sure that I’m with the right man.”

There was momentary confusion.

“What?” said the big man.

Angel mirrored his expression, then his face cleared. “Oh,” he said. “You mean, do I have a problem with you?” He made a dismissive gesture with his right hand. “I don’t have a problem with you at all,” he said. “But my friend behind you, on the other hand, I think he may have a big problem with you.”

The larger man turned around. His buddy had already backed away, giving Louis space at the bar.

“How you doin’?” said Louis, who had entered the bar shortly after me, and had spotted what was happening just as quickly as I had done. I was now standing alongside him, but it was clear that he was the main attraction.

The two men took in Louis and weighed up their options. None of them looked good. At least one of them involved a world of hurt. The alpha male made his choice, opting for the loss of a little dignity over something that might ultimately prove terminal.

“I’m doin’ good,” he said.

“Then we all happy,” said Louis.

“I guess so.”

“Looks like they about to serve up dinner.”

“Yeah, looks like it.”

“I guess you better be getting along. Wouldn’t want to miss your vittles.”

“Uh-huh.”

He tried to slip past Louis, but came up short against his fat friend, who hadn’t moved, and was forced to elbow him out of the way. His face was growing purple with humiliation. The friend risked one more look at Louis, then trotted along after the bald man.

“Looks like you picked a good place to stay,” I said to Angel. “A little heavy on the testosterone, maybe, and you could have some trouble filling your dance card, but it’s cute.”

“You took your fucking time getting up here,” said Angel. “You know, there’s not a whole lot to do once night falls, and it gets dark like someone just threw a switch. There isn’t even a TV in the room.”

We ordered hamburgers and fries, opting not to join the parties of hunters in the next room, and moved to a table beside the bar.

“You find out anything?” I asked Angel.

“I found out that nobody wants to talk about Gilead, is what I found out. Best I could get was from some old ladies tending the cemetery. According to them, what’s left of Gilead is now on private land. A guy named Caswell bought it about fifteen years ago, along with another fifty acres of woodland around it. He lives close by. Always has. Doesn’t entertain much. Not a Rotarian. I took a trip up there. There was a sign, and a locked gate. Apparently, he doesn’t like hunters, trespassers, or salesmen.”

“Has Merrick been here?”

“If he has, then nobody saw him.”

“Maybe Caswell did.”

“Only one way to find out.”

“Yeah.”

I watched the hunters eating and picked out the two men who had targeted Angel. They were seated in a corner, ignoring the others around them. The bigger man’s face was still red. There were a lot of guns around the place, and a lot of machismo to go with them. It wasn’t a good situation.

“Your friends from the bar?” I said.

Angel nodded. “Phil and Steve. From Hoboken.”

“I think it might be a good idea to send them on their way.”

“It’ll be a pleasure,” said Angel.

“By the way, how’d you know their names?”

Angel slipped his hands into his jacket pockets. They emerged holding two wallets. “Old habits…”

The lodge was constructed around a hollow, with the bar and reception building on the higher ground by the road, and the rooms and cabins at the bottom of the slope beyond it. It wasn’t difficult to find out where the resident homophobes were staying, as each guest was forced to carry his key on a fob cut from the trunk of a small tree. The key had been lying in front of the two guys as they taunted Angel. They were in cabin number fourteen.

They left the table about fifteen minutes after their meal was over. By that time, Angel and Louis were gone. The two men didn’t look at me as they departed, but I could feel their anger simmering. They had drunk seven pints of beer between them during and after their meal, and it was only a matter of time before they decided to seek some form of retribution for being bested at the bar.

The temperature had dropped suddenly with nightfall. In the shaded places, that morning’s frost had not yet melted. The two men walked quickly back to their cabin, the bigger man leading, the small bearded man behind. They entered to find that their hunting rifles had been disassembled and now lay in pieces on the floor. Their bags were beside the guns, packed and locked.

To their immediate left stood Louis. Angel was seated at the table beside the stove. Phil and Steve from Hoboken took in the two men. Phil, the larger and more aggressive of the two, seemed about to say something when he saw the guns in the hands of the two visitors. He closed his mouth again.

“You know there isn’t a cabin number thirteen?” said Angel.

“What?” said Phil.

“I said, you know that there isn’t a cabin number thirteen in this place? The numbers jump from twelve to fourteen, on account of how nobody wants to be in number thirteen. But this is still the thirteenth cabin, so you’re really in number thirteen after all, which is how come you’re so unlucky.”

“Why are we unlucky?” Phil’s natural animosity was returning, beefed up with some of the Dutch courage from the bar. “All I see is two shitheads wandered into the wrong cabin and started to fuck with the wrong guys. You’re the unlucky ones. You have no idea who you’re screwing with here.”

Beside him, Steve shifted uneasily on his feet. Appearances to the contrary, he was smart enough, or sober enough, to realize that it wasn’t a good idea to rile two men with guns when you had no guns at all, at least none that could be reassembled in time to make them useful.

Angel took the wallets from his pocket and waved them at the two men.

“But we do,” he said. “We know just who you are. We know where you live, where you work. We know what your wife looks like, Steve, and we know that Phil seems to be separated from the mother of his children. Sad, Phil. Pictures of the kids, but no sign of Mommy. Still, you are kind of a prick, so it’s hard to blame her for giving you the bullet.

“You, on the other hand, know nothing about us other than the fact that we’re here now, and we got good reason to be aggrieved with you on account of your big mouths. So this is what we propose: you put your shit in your car, and you start heading south. Your buddy there can do the driving, Phil, ’cause I can tell you’ve had a few more than he has. When you’ve driven, oh, maybe a hundred miles, you stop and find yourselves a room. Get a good night’s sleep. Tomorrow, you head back to Hoboken, and you’ll never see us again. Well, you’ll probably never see us again. You never know. We might feel the urge to visit someday. Maybe there’s a Sinatra tour we can take. Gives us an excuse to drop by and say ‘hi’ to you and Steve. Unless, of course, you’d like to give us a more pressing reason to follow you down there.”

Phil made one last play. His pigheadedness was almost admirable.

“We got friends in Jersey,” he said meaningfully.

Angel looked genuinely puzzled. His reply, when it came, could have come only from a New Yorker.

“Why would somebody boast about something like that?” he asked. “Who the fuck wants to visit Jersey anyway?”

“Man means,” said Louis, “that he got ‘friends’ in Jersey.”

“Oh,” said Angel. “Oh, I get it. Hey, we watch The Sopranos too. The bad news for you, Phil, is even if that were true, which I know it’s not, we are the kind of people that the friends in Jersey call, if you catch my drift. It’s easy to tell, if you look hard enough. You see, we have pistols. You have hunting rifles. You came here to hunt deer. We didn’t come here to hunt deer. You don’t hunt deer with a Glock. You hunt other things with a Glock, but not deer.”

Phil’s shoulders slumped. It was time to admit defeat. “Let’s go,” he said to Steve.

Angel tossed him the wallets. He and Louis watched as the two men loaded up their bags and the pieces of the rifles, minus the firing pins, which Angel had thrown into the forest. When they were done, Steve took the driver’s seat, and Phil stood at the passenger door. Angel and Louis leaned casually on the rail of the cabin, only the guns suggesting that this wasn’t merely a quartet of acquaintances exchanging final farewells.

“All of this because we were having a little fun with you at the bar,” said Phil.

“No,” said Angel. “All of this because you’re assholes.”

Phil got in the car, and they drove away. Louis waited until their lights had faded, then tapped Angel gently on the back of the hand.

“Hey,” he said, “we never get calls from Jersey.”

“I know,” said Angel. “Why would we want to talk to anyone in Jersey?”

And, their work done, they retired to bed.

Chapter XXXI

The next morning, we headed north into Jackman. We got stuck waiting for a truck to reverse at the Jackman Trading Post, even in November its display of T-shirts hanging outside like laundry drying. To one side of it was an old black-and-white with a mannequin in the driver’s seat, which was as close as anyone was going to get to a sighting of a cop this far north.

“They ever have cops up here?” asked Louis.

“I think there used to be a policeman in the sixties or seventies.”

“What happened to him? He die of boredom?”

“I guess it is kinda quiet. There’s a constable now, far as I know.”

“Bet the long winter nights just fly by for him.”

“Hey, they had a killing once.”

“Once?” He didn’t sound impressed.

“It was a pretty famous story at the time. A guy named Nelson Bart-ley, used to own the Moose River House, got shot in the head. They found his body jammed under an uprooted tree.”

“Yeah, and when was this?”

“Nineteen nineteen. There was rum-running involved somehow, I seem to recall.”

“You telling me there’s been nothing since then?”

“Most people in this part of the world take their time about dying, if they can,” I said. “You may find that startling.”

“I guess I move in different circles.”

“I guess so. You don’t like rural life much, do you?”

“I had my fill of rural life when I was a boy. I didn’t care much for it then. Don’t figure it’s improved much since.”

There were also twin outhouses beside the trading post, one on top of the other. On the door of the upper outhouse was written the word “Conservative.” On the door of the lower one was the word “Liberal.”

“Your people,” I said to Louis.

“Not my people. I’m a liberal Republican.”

“I’ve never really understood what that means.”

“Means I believe people can do whatever they want, as long as they don’t do it anywhere near me.”

“I thought it would be more complex than that.”

“Nope, that’s about it. You think I should go in and tell them I’m gay?”

“If I was you, I wouldn’t even tell them you’re black,” said Angel, from the backseat.

“Don’t judge this place by that outhouse back there,” I said. “That’s just to give the tourists something to laugh at. A small town like this doesn’t survive, even prosper some, if the people who live here are bigots and idiots. Don’t make that mistake about them.”

Incredibly, this silenced both of them.

Beyond the trading post, and to the left, the impressive twin steeples of St. Anthony’s Church, built from local granite in 1930, loomed against the pale gray sky. The church wouldn’t have looked out of place in a big city, but it seemed incongruous here in a town of a thousand souls. Still, it had given Bennett Lumley something to aim for in the creation of Gilead, and he had determined that the spire of his church would exceed even that of St. Anthony’s.

Jackman, or Holden as it was originally known, was founded by the English and the Irish, and the French came down to join them later. Back where the Trading Post lay used to be part of an area called Little Canada, and from there to the bridge was the Catholic part of town, which was why St. Anthony’s was on the eastern side of the river. Once you crossed the bridge, that was Protestant territory. There was the Congregational church, and the Episcopalians, too, who were the Protestants it was okay to like if you were a Catholic, or so my grandfather used to say. I didn’t know how much the place had changed since then, but I was pretty certain that the old divide still remained, give or take a couple of houses.

The red Jackman station house stood by the railway line that cut through the town, but it was now privately owned. The main bridge in town was being repaired, so a detour took us over a temporary structure and into the township of Moose River. On the right was the modest Moose River Congregational Church, which bore the same relationship to St. Anthony’s as the local Little League team bore to the Red Sox.

Eventually, we came to the sign for Holden Cemetery, across from the Windfall Outdoor Center, its blue school buses, now empty, lined up sleepily outside. A dirt-and-stone road led down to the cemetery, but it looked steep and slick with ice, so we left the car at the top of the road and walked the rest of the way. The road led past a frozen pond on one side and a patch of beaver bog on the other, before the gravestones of the cemetery appeared on a hill to the left. It was small, and bordered by a wire fence, with an unlocked gate wide enough for one person to pass through at a time. The graves dated as far back as the nineteenth century, probably to the days when this was still just a settlement.

I looked at the five stones nearest the gate, three large stones, two small. The first read “Hattie E., wife of John F. Childs” and gave the dates of her birth and death: April 11, 1865, and November 26, 1891. Beside her stood the two smaller stones: Clara M. and Vinal F. According to the stone, Clara M. was born on August 16, 1895, and died just over a month later on September 30, 1895. Vinal F.’s time on this earth was even briefer: born on September 5, 1903, he was dead by September 28. The fourth stone was that of Lillian L., John’s second wife and presumably the mother of Clara and Vinal. She was born on July 11, 1873, and died less than a year after her son, on May 16, 1904. The last stone was that of John F. Childs himself, born September 8, 1860, and died, having outlived two wives and two children, March 18, 1935. There were no other stones nearby. I wondered if John F. had been the last of his line. Here, in this tiny cemetery, the story of his life was laid bare in the space of five carved pieces of rock.

But the stone we were looking for stood in the farthest southern corner of the cemetery. There were no names upon it, and no dates of birth or death. It read only the children of gilead, followed by the same word carved three times:

INFANT

INFANT

INFANT

and a plea to God to have mercy on their souls. As unbaptized children, they would originally have been laid to rest outside the cemetery, but it was clear that at some point in the past the position of the cemetery fence had been discreetly altered in this corner, and the Children of Gilead now lay within its boundaries. It said a lot about the people of the town that quietly, and without fuss, they had embraced these lost infants and allowed them to rest within the precincts of the graveyard.

“What happened to the men who did this?” asked Angel. I looked at him and saw the grief etched on his face.

“Men and women,” I corrected him. “The women must have known and colluded in what happened, for whatever reason. Two of those children died of unknown causes, but one was stabbed with a knitting needle shortly after birth. You ever hear of a man stabbing a child with a knitting needle? No, the women covered it up, whether out of fear or shame, or something else. I don’t think Dubus was lying about that much. Nobody was ever charged. The authorities examined three girls and confirmed that they’d given birth at some point in the recent past, but there was no evidence to connect those births with the bodies that they found. The community got together and claimed that the children were given up for private adoption. There was no paperwork for the births, which was a crime in itself, but one that nobody felt the urge to prosecute. Dubus told the investigators that the kids were sent to somewhere in Utah. A car came along, he said, collected them, then disappeared into the night. That was the story, and it was only years later that he recanted and claimed that the mothers of the girls who had given birth had killed the infants. Anyway, a week or so after the bodies were found, the community had already broken up, and people were going their separate ways.”

“Free to abuse somewhere else,” said Angel.

I didn’t reply. What was there to say, particularly to Angel, who had been a victim of such abuse himself, farmed out by his father to men who took their pleasures from the body of a child? That was why he was here now, in this cold cemetery in a remote northern town. That was why they were both here, these hunters among hunters. It was no longer a question of money for them, or their own convenience. That might once have been true, but it was true no longer. They were here now for the same reason that I was: because to ignore what had happened to children in the recent and distant pasts, to turn away and look elsewhere because it was easier to do so, was to be an accomplice to the crimes that were committed. To refuse to delve deeper would be to collude with the offenders.

“Somebody’s tended to this grave,” said Angel.

He was right. There were no weeds, and the grass had been cut back so that it would not obscure the marker. Even the words on the stone had been enhanced with black paint so that they would stand out.

“Who takes care of a fifty-year-old grave?” he asked.

“Maybe the man who now owns Gilead,” I replied. “Let’s go ask him.”

About five miles along the 201, beyond Moose River and past the Sandy Bay town line, a sign pointed north to the Bald Mountain Hiking Trail, and I knew that we were nearing Gilead. Without Angel’s prior knowledge, the site itself would have been difficult to find. The road we took had no name. It was marked only by a sign reading private property and, as Angel had said, an additional warning listing those who were particularly unwelcome. About a half mile up the road was a gate. It was locked, and a fence disappeared into the forest on either side.

“ Gilead ’s in there,” said Angel, pointing north into the woods. “Maybe another half mile or more.”

“And the house?”

“Same distance, but straight up the road. You can see it from farther up that track.” He pointed to a rutted dirt trail that followed the fence southeast.

I pulled the car to the side of the road. We climbed over the gate and immediately cut into the forest.

We had walked for fifteen or twenty minutes when we came to the clearing.

Most of the buildings still remained. In a place where wood was the main building material, Lumley had chosen to use stone for a number of the houses, so confident was he that his ideal community would last. The dwellings varied in size from two-room cottages to larger structures comfortably capable of housing families of six or more. Most had fallen into ruin, and some had clearly been burned, but one appeared to have been restored to some degree. It had a roof, and its four windows were barred. The front door, a solid piece of rough-hewn oak, was locked. All told, the community could not have numbered more than a dozen families at its peak. There were many such places in Maine: forgotten villages, towns that had withered away and died, settlements founded on misplaced faith in a charismatic leader. I thought of the ruins of Sanctuary, out on Casco Bay, and of Faulkner and his slaughtered flock in Aroostook. Gilead was another in a long and ignominious line of failed ventures, doomed by unscrupulous men and base instincts.

And above it all loomed the great steeple of the Savior’s Church, Lumley’s rival to St. Anthony’s. The walls had been built, the steeple raised, but the roof had never been placed upon it, and no one had ever worshiped within its walls. It was less a tribute to God than a monument to one man’s vanity. Now the forest had claimed it for its own. It was smothered in ivy, so that it appeared as though nature itself had built it, creating a temple from leaves and tendrils, with grass and weeds for its floor and a tree for a tabernacle, for a shagbark hickory had grown where the altar might have stood, spreading its bare arms like the skeletal remains of a deranged preacher, stripped of his flesh by the cold wind as he railed against the world, his bones browned by the actions of the sun and the rain.

Everything about Gilead spoke of loss and decay and corruption. Had I not been aware of the crimes that were committed here, the children who had suffered, and the infants who had died, it would still have left me feeling uneasy and soiled. True, there was a kind of grandeur to the half-built church, but it was without beauty, and even nature itself seemed to have been corrupted by its contact with this place. Dubus was right. Lumley had chosen badly for the site of his community.

As Angel moved to examine the church more closely, I stopped him with my hand.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“Don’t touch any of the plants,” I said.

“Why not?”

“They’re all poisonous.”

And it was true: it was as though every foul weed, every noxious flower, had found a home here, some of which I had never seen before this far north, or clustered together in this way. There was mountain laurel, with its shredded, rusty bark, its pink-and-white flowers, dotted with red like the blood of insects and with stamens that responded to the touch like insects or animals, now absent. I saw white snakeroot, some of its flowers still in their final bloom, that could render cow’s milk fatal to drink if the animal fed upon the plant. Near a patch of marsh, iced over at its banks, water hemlock, all toothed leaves and streaked stems, beckoned, each part of it potentially lethal. There was jimson weed, which belonged more properly in fields, and celandine, and stinging nettles. Even the ivy was poison. No birds would ever come here, I thought, not even in summer. It would always be a silent, desolate place.

We stared up at the massive steeple, its peak higher even than the trees around it. Sections of the alcove windows glared darkly over the forest through layers of ivy, and the empty alcove intended to house the bell was now almost entirely covered by the plant. There were no doors, merely rectangular gaps at the base of the steeple and at one side of the church itself, and no glass filled the windows. Even to attempt to enter would be to invite cuts and stings from the weeds and nettles that blocked the way, although when I looked closer it did appear that someone had, at some point, cut a way through, for the weeds were taller and thicker at the sides. To the west of the church, I saw the remains of a trail that had been cut through the forest, its path clear from the absence of tall trees. That was how they had transported the building materials into the forest, but half a century later all that was left was a divide conquered by shrubs.

We walked over to the intact house. I nodded to Angel, and he began working on the lock.

“Hasn’t been opened in a while,” he said. He took a small can of WD-40 from his jacket pocket, sprayed the lock, then went at it again. After several minutes, we heard a click. He applied pressure to the door with his shoulder, and it creaked open.

There were two rooms inside, both empty. The floor was concrete, and was clearly not part of the original structure. The sun, which had struggled for so long to shine through the filthy glass, now took the opportunity afforded by the open door to bathe the interior with light, but there was nothing to see and nothing to illuminate. Louis tapped one of the windows lightly with his knuckle.

“It’s Plexiglas,” he said. He traced his finger around the edge of the frame. It looked like someone had once tried to chip away at the cement holding it in place. They hadn’t gotten far, but the evidence of the failed attempt still remained.

He leaned in closer to the glass, then knelt, trying to get a clearer look at something that his sharp eyes had picked out.

“Look here,” he said.

There were tiny marks scratched upon it in the bottom right-hand corner. I moved my head in an effort to see what they might be, but it was Angel who deciphered them first.

“L. M.,” he said.

“Lucy Merrick,” I said. It had to be. There were no other markings on the walls or the windows. Had the letters been carved by a kid seeking a thrill, there would have been other initials, too, other names. But Gilead was not a place to come to alone, not willingly.

And I knew then that this was where they had taken Andy Kellog and, later, Merrick ’s daughter. Andy Kellog had come back damaged, traumatized, but still alive. Lucy Merrick, though, had never returned. Instantly, the air in the house smelled stale and dead to me, infected by what I knew in my heart had occurred in its rooms.

“Why here?” said Louis, softly. “Why did they bring them here?”

“Because of what happened before,” said Angel. He touched his finger to the marks made by Lucy on the glass, tracing each one carefully and tenderly in an act of remembrance. I thought of my own actions in the attic of my house, reading a message written in dust. “It added to the pleasure, knowing they were repeating something that had been done in the past, like they were continuing a tradition.”

His words echoed Christian’s talk of “clusters.” Was that what lay behind Clay’s fascination with Gilead? Did he want to re-create the events of half a century before, or did he help others to do so? Then again, perhaps his interest was not prurient or lascivious. Maybe he wasn’t to blame in any way for what had happened, and only his professional curiosity drew him to this site deep in the woods, haunting his memory and finding form in the pictures that Merrick had torn apart on Joel Harmon’s wall, and that Mason Dubus proudly displayed on his. But I was starting to believe that less and less. If men had sought to re-create the original crimes here, then perhaps they would have sought out their instigator, Mason Dubus. I was aware that we were following a path trodden by Clay, tracing the marks that he had left as he moved north. He had given one of his precious artworks to Dubus. It did not seem like a mere act of thanks. It was closer to a gesture of respect, almost of affection.

I walked through the two rooms, looking for any further trace of Lucy Merrick’s presence in that house, but there was none. There had probably been mattresses once, blankets, even some books or magazines. There were light switches on the walls, but the sockets were bare of bulbs. I saw marks in the upper corner of the second room, where a metal plate of some kind had been held in place, a neat hole drilled below them. A larger hole in the wall, since filled in but its shape still visible, indicated the spot where a stove had once stood, and the fireplace had long ago been bricked up. Lucy Merrick had disappeared in September. It must already have been cold up here. How did she stay warm, if this was where they had kept her? I could find no answer. Everything had been removed, and it was clear too that these rooms had not been used for many years.

“They killed her here, didn’t they?” asked Angel. He was still by the window, his fingers maintaining contact with the carved letters on the glass, as though by doing so he could somehow touch Lucy Merrick herself and comfort her, so that, wherever she was, she might know that someone had found the marks she had left and was grieving for her. The letters were small, barely there. She did not want the men who had abducted her to see them. Perhaps she believed they would provide proof of her story when she was released, or did she fear, even then, that she might never be freed, and she hoped these letters might provide some sign in case anyone cared enough about her to try to discover her fate?

“They didn’t kill any of the others,” I said. “That’s why they wore masks, so they could let them go without worrying about being identified. They might have taken it a step further, or something could just have gone wrong. Somehow, she died, and they cleared away any sign that anyone had ever been here, then locked it up and never came back again.”

Angel let his fingers drop.

“Caswell, the guy who owns the land, he must have known what was happening.”

“Yes,” I said softly. “He must have known.”

I turned to leave. Louis was ahead of me. He stood, framed in the doorway, dark against the morning sunlight. He opened his mouth to speak, then stopped. The sound had carried clearly to each of us. It was a shotgun shell being jacked. A voice spoke. It said: “Boy, you better not move an inch, or I’ll blow your damn head off.”

Chapter XXXII

Angel and I stood silently in the house, unwilling to move or speak. Louis remained frozen in the doorway, his hands outstretched from his sides to show the man beyond that they were empty.

“You come out slowly now,” said the voice. “You can put your hands on your head. Them fellas inside can do the same. You won’t see me, but I can see you. I tell you now, just one of you moves, and Slick here in his fancy coat will have a hole where his face used to be. You’re trespassing on private property. Might be that you have guns too. Not a judge in the state will convict if you make me kill you while you’re armed.”

Louis slowly stepped out of the doorway and stood with his hands on the back of his head, facing out into the woods. With no choice, Angel and I followed. I tried to find the source of the voice, but there was only silence as we stepped from the shelter of the house. Then a man emerged from a grove of fetterbush and hoptree. He was dressed in green camouflage pants and a matching jacket, and armed with a Browning 12-gauge. He was in his early fifties, big but not muscular. His face was pale and his hair was too long, squatting untidily on his head like a filthy mop. He didn’t look as if he had slept properly in a long time. His eyes were almost falling out of his head, as though the pressure on his skull was too much for them to bear, and the sockets were so rimmed with red that the skin seemed to be slowly peeling away from the flesh beneath. There were fresh sores on his cheeks, chin, and neck, flecked with red where he had cut them as he tried to shave.

“Who are you?” he said. He held the gun steady, but his voice trembled, as though he could project confidence only physically or vocally, but not both at once.

“Hunters,” I replied.

“Yeah?” He sneered at us. “And what do you hunt without a rifle?”

“Men,” said Louis simply.

Another crack opened in the man’s veneer. I had a vision of the skin beneath his clothing crisscrossed with tiny fractures, like a china doll on the verge of shattering into a thousand pieces.

“Are you Caswell?” I asked.

“Who’s asking?”

“My name is Charlie Parker. I’m a private investigator. These are my colleagues.”

“My name’s Caswell all right, and this is my land. You got no business being here.”

“In a way, our business is exactly why we’re here.”

“You got business, you take it to a store.”

“We wanted to ask you some questions.”

Caswell raised the muzzle of the gun slightly and fired off a round. It went some distance over our heads, but I still flinched. He jacked another load, and the eye of the gun maintained its unblinking vigil on us once again.

“I don’t think you heard me. You’re in no position to ask questions.”

“Talk to us, or talk to the police. It’s your choice.”

Caswell’s hands worked on the grip and stock of the rifle. “The hell are you talking about? I got no problems with the police.”

“Did you fix up this house?” I indicated the building behind us.

“What if I did? It’s my land.”

“Seems like a curious thing to do, fixing up a ruin in a deserted village.”

“There’s no law against it.”

“No, I guess not. Might be a law against what was done in it, though.”

I was taking a chance. Caswell might try to shoot us just for goading him, but I didn’t think so. He didn’t look the type. Despite the shotgun and the camo clothing, there was something soft about him, as though someone had just armed the Pillsbury Doughboy.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, but he retreated a step from us.

“I mean what was done in Gilead,” I lied, “and those children who were killed.”

A peculiar range of emotions played themselves out in dumb show upon Caswell’s face. There was shock first of all, then fear, followed by a slow-dawning realization that I was talking about the distant, not the recent, past. I watched with satisfaction as he tried unsuccessfully to disguise his relief. He knew. He knew what had happened to Lucy Merrick.

“Yeah,” he said. “I reckon so. That’s why I try to keep folks away from here. Never know what kind of people it might attract.”

“Sure,” I said. “And what kind of people might they be?”

Caswell didn’t manage to answer the question. He had talked himself into a corner, and now he planned to bluster his way out.

“People, that’s all,” he said.

“Why did you buy this place, Mr. Caswell? It seems like an odd thing to have done, given all that happened here.”

“There’s no law against a man buying property. I’ve lived up here all my life. The land came cheap, on account of its history.”

“And its history didn’t trouble you?”

“No, it didn’t trouble me one bit. Now-”

I didn’t let him finish. “I’m just wondering, because something is clearly troubling you. You don’t look well. You look kind of stressed, to tell the truth. In fact, you seem downright frightened.”

I’d hit the bull’s-eye. The truth of what I had said manifested itself in Caswell’s reaction. The little cracks opened wider and deeper, and the gun tilted slightly toward the ground. I could sense Louis considering his options, his body tensing as he prepared to draw on Caswell.

“No,” I whispered, and Louis relaxed without question.

Caswell became aware of the impression he was creating. He drew himself up straight and raised the stock of the gun to his shoulder, sighting down the barrel, the slatted rib along the top of the Browning like the raised spine of an animal. I heard Louis give a low hiss, but I was no longer worried about Caswell. He was all front.

“I’m not scared of you,” he said. “Don’t make that mistake.”

“Then who are you scared of?”

Caswell shook his head to free some drops of moisture that clung to the ends of his hair. “I think you’d better be getting back to your car, you and your ‘colleagues.’ Keep your hands on your head too while you do it, and don’t come around here again. You got your first and last warning.”

He waited for us to begin walking, then started to retreat into the woods.

“You ever hear of a Lucy Merrick, Mr. Caswell?” I called to him. I paused and looked back over my shoulder, still keeping my hands on my head.

“No,” he said. There was a pause before he spoke again, as though he were trying to convince himself that the name had not been spoken aloud. “I never heard that name before.”

“How about Daniel Clay?”

He shook his head. “Just walk on out of here. I’m done talking to you.”

“We’ll be back, Mr. Caswell. I think you know that.”

Caswell didn’t answer. He kept retreating, moving deeper and deeper into the forest, no longer caring if we were moving or not, just trying to put as much distance between himself and us as he could. I wondered who Caswell would call, once he was back in the safety of his own house. It didn’t matter anymore. We were close. For whatever reason, Caswell was falling apart, and I had every intention of speeding up the process.

That afternoon, I got talking to the young guy behind the bar at the lodge, the one who had witnessed the altercation between Angel and the men from Jersey. His name was Skip, although I didn’t hold that against him, and he was twenty-four and taking his master’s degree in community planning and development at USM. Skip’s father was part-owner of the place, and he told me that he worked there during the summer, and whenever he could spare time in hunting season. He planned on finding a job in Somerset County once he had finished his degree. Unlike some of his peers, he didn’t want to leave. Instead, he hoped to find a way to make it a better place in which to live, although he was smart enough to realize that the odds were currently stacked against the region.

Skip told me that Caswell’s family had lived in these parts for three or four generations, but they’d always been dirt poor. Caswell sometimes worked as a guide during the season, and the rest of the year he picked up jobs as a general handyman, but as the years had gone by he had let the guide work slip, although he was still in demand when repairs needed to be done to local houses. When he had bought the Gilead tract, he’d paid for it without taking out a bank loan. The land hadn’t exactly been cheap, despite what Caswell had told us, even if its history hadn’t made it the most attractive of propositions, and it was more money than anyone expected Otis Caswell to come up with, but he hadn’t bitched about the price or even attempted to bargain with the Realtor, who was selling it on behalf of the descendants of the late Bennett Lumley. Since then, he had posted his no trespassing notices and kept himself pretty much to himself. Nobody bothered him up there. Nobody had cause to.

There were two possibilities, neither of which reflected well on Caswell. The first was that someone had given him the money to make the purchase in order to keep their interest in the land secret, after which Caswell turned a blind eye to the uses to which the restored house was being put. The other possibility was that he was an active participant in what occurred there. Either way, he knew enough to make him worth pursuing. I found his number in the local directory and called him from my room. He picked up on the second ring.

“Expecting a call, Mr. Caswell?” I asked.

“Who is this?”

“We met earlier. My name is Parker.”

He hung up. I dialed again. This time three or four rings went by before he picked up the phone.

“What do you want?” he said. “I told you: I got nothing to say to you.”

“I think you know what I want, Mr. Caswell. I want you to tell me about what went on in that empty house with the Plexiglas windows and the strong door. I want you to tell me about Andy Kellog and Lucy Merrick. If you do that, then maybe I can save you.”

“Save me? Save me from what? What are you talking about?”

“From Frank Merrick.”

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Don’t call here again,” said Caswell. “I don’t know a Frank Merrick, or any of them other names you said.”

“He’s coming, Otis. You’d better believe that. He wants to know what happened to his daughter. And he’s not going to be reasonable like my friends and me. I think your buddies are going to cut you loose, Otis, and leave you to him. Or maybe they’ll decide that you’re the weak link, and do to you what they did to Daniel Clay.”

“We didn’t-” began Caswell, then caught himself.

“Didn’t what, Otis? Didn’t do anything to Daniel Clay? Didn’t kill him? Why don’t you tell me about it.”

“Fuck you,” said Caswell. “Fuck you to hell and back.”

He hung up. When I called a third time nobody picked up. The phone just rang and rang at the other end, and I pictured Otis Caswell in his white-trash house, his hands over his ears to block out the sound, until at last the ringing changed to a busy signal as he removed the connection from the wall.

Night descended. Our encounter with Caswell marked the beginning of the end. Men were heading northwest, Merrick among them, but the sands of his life were slowly trickling away, not through the neck of some old hourglass but from the palm of his own hand, his fingers clasped tightly against his skin as the dry grains slipped through the gap below his little finger. By asking questions about Daniel Clay, he had shortened the span of his existence. He had held open his hands and accepted the sands, knowing that he would be unable to hold them for long, that now they would peter away twice as fast. He had merely hoped that he could stay alive long enough to discover his daughter’s final resting place.

And so, as darkness fell, Merrick found himself in the Old Moose Lodge. Its name sounded quaint, evoking images of wooden floors, comfortable chairs, friendly Maine hosts to greet the guests, a roaring log fire in the lobby, rooms that managed to be clean and modern while never losing touch with their rustic roots, and breakfasts of maple syrup, bacon, and pancakes, served by smiling young women at tables overlooking placid lakes and mile upon mile of evergreen forest.

In fact, nobody had ever stayed in the Old Moose Lodge, at least not in a bed. In the past, men might have slept off their drunks in a back room, but they had done so on the floor, so stupefied by alcohol that comfort mattered less than a place in which to lie flat and allow the blankness they had been seeking to overwhelm them. Now even that small concession had been taken away for fear that the lodge’s liquor license, annual speculation about the renewal of which provided regular fodder for the local newspaper, and most of the populace, might finally be removed if it was found to be operating as a crash pad for drunks. Still, the impression created by its name was not entirely inapt.

It did have wooden floors.

Merrick sat at a deuce near the back of the bar, facing away from the door but with a mirror on the wall in front of him that allowed him to see all those who entered without anyone immediately being able to spot him. Although the bar was warm, causing him to sweat profusely, he did not take off his heavy tan suede coat. In part, it enabled him to keep the gun in its pocket within easy reach. It also meant that the wound in his side, which had begun to bleed again, would not be visible if it soaked through the bandages and into his shirt.

He had killed the Russians just beyond Bingham, where Stream Road branched off the 201 and followed the path of the Austin Stream toward Mayfield Township. He had known that they would come. The killing of Demarcian alone might have been enough to draw them to him, but there were also grudges outstanding against him relating to a pair of jobs at the beginning of the nineties, one in Little Odessa, the other in Boston. He was surprised that they had not made a move on him in prison, but the Supermax had protected him by isolating him, and his reputation had done the rest. After the killing of Demarcian, word would have spread. Calls would have been made, favors requested, debts wiped out. Perhaps he should not have killed Demarcian, but the little man with the withered arm had repelled him, and he was a link in the chain of events that had taken Merrick ’s daughter from him. If nothing else, the lawyer Eldritch had been right about that much. If the price to be paid for Demarcian’s death was more killing, then Merrick was willing to oblige. They would not stop him from reaching Gilead. There, he felt certain, he would find the answers that he sought.

He wondered how the Russians had found him so quickly. After all, he had changed his car, yet here they were, those two men in their black 4x4. Merrick reflected that perhaps he should not have left Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband alive, but Merrick was not a man who killed without some cause and, as far he could tell, Legere knew nothing. Even his ex-wife had not trusted him enough to share anything about her father with him.

But Merrick was also certain that, almost since his quest had begun, his progress was being shadowed and his every move watched. He thought of the old lawyer in his paper-filled office, and his unseen benefactor, the mysterious other who had instructed Eldritch to help him, who had provided funds, a place to hide, and information. The lawyer had never provided a satisfactory explanation for his willingness to aid Merrick, and Merrick’s distrust of him had quickly grown, leading him to distance himself from the old man as soon as was feasible, the period of his recent brief incarceration apart. Yet even after that, when he was taking care to cover his tracks, there were times when he had felt himself being watched, sometimes when he was in a crowd, trying to lose himself in a mall or a bar, and other times when he was alone. He thought that he had caught a glimpse of a man once, a ragged figure in an old black coat, who was examining Merrick thoughtfully through a cloud of cigarette smoke but, when he tried to follow him, the man had vanished, and Merrick had not seen him again.

Then there were the nightmares. They had begun in the safe house, shortly after Merrick had been given the car and the money by Eldritch: visions of pale, wasted creatures, their eye sockets black, their mouths lipless and wrinkled, all dressed in soiled tan coats, old mackintoshes with buttons missing and reddish brown stains on the collars and the sleeves. Merrick would awaken in the darkness, and in that moment between sleeping and consciousness he thought that he could almost see them receding from him, as though they had been leaning over him while he slept, no breath emerging from their mouths, only a stale smell of something old and noxious lodged deep within themselves. Since he had abandoned the safe house, the dreams had come less often, but there were still nights when he ascended from the depths of sleep to a crawling sensation on his skin and a faint stench that had not been there when he closed his eyes.

Had Eldritch, reckoning Merrick to be a liability, told the Russians where he was, facilitated by the other, or by the man in the ragged black coat? Were this man and Eldritch’s client one and the same? Merrick did not know, and it no longer mattered. It was all nearing an end, and soon there would be peace.

The Russians had been careless. He had seen them coming, watching in the rearview as they hung three or four cars back, occasionally overtaking when it was necessary to keep him in sight. He had pulled over at one point to see if they would pass him, and they had, keeping their eyes fixed straight ahead, scrupulously ignoring him as he spread a map upon the steering wheel and pretended to trace his route with a finger, too many trucks passing for them to be able to take him while he was stopped. He had let them go, then pulled out after a few minutes had gone by. He saw them ahead, hanging back in the slow lane, hoping that he would pass them again, and he obliged. After a couple of miles, he turned onto Stream Road, and from there found a dirt track that would suit his purpose. He followed it for over a mile, past abandoned shacks set back from the road, past a double-wide trailer and cars slouched on tireless rims, until even those humble tokens of human habitation disappeared, and the road became rougher yet, bouncing him in his seat and causing his spine to ache. When there was only forest before and behind, to north and south, east and west, he cut the engine. He could hear them approaching. He got out of the car, leaving the driver’s door open, and moved into the trees, heading back in the direction in which he had come until the Russians appeared. They stopped when they came to his abandoned car. He could almost guess the conversation that was taking place within. They would have known that they had followed him into a trap. The only question for them was how to free themselves from it while ensuring Merrick ’s death and their own survival. Crouched in the undergrowth, Merrick saw the one in the passenger seat, the man with red hair, look over his shoulder. Their options were limited. They could reverse and leave, hoping to catch him again on the road, whether he tried to escape on foot or by car; or they could get out, one from each side, and try to hunt him on foot. They would be at their most vulnerable when they opened the doors, but their reasoning would be that if he opened fire on them, he might hit one of them at most, if he was lucky, and in doing so he would expose his position.

In the end, Merrick did not wait for them to open the doors. As soon as the redheaded man looked away Merrick lunged out of the bushes and began firing through the rear window; once, twice, three times, and as it disintegrated he saw a wash of blood appear on the windshield and the driver collapse sideways. His partner opened the passenger door and dropped to the ground, firing at Merrick as the older man advanced, for there was no retreating now. Merrick felt a tug at his side and a sensation of numbness, followed by a searing, red-hot pain, but still he fired, experiencing a surge of satisfaction as the body of the second Russian jerked on the ground, and the shooting stopped.

He advanced on the slumped figure slowly, feeling the blood flowing down his side, soaking his shirt and his pants. He kicked the Russian’s gun away and stood over him. The redheaded man was lying on his side against the right rear wheel. There was a wound beneath his neck and another almost dead in the center of his chest. His eyes were half-closed, but he was still breathing. Gasping at the pain of his injury, Merrick bent down, picked up the Russian’s Colt, then searched the pockets of the man’s jacket until he found a wallet and a spare magazine for the pistol. The name on the driver’s license was Yevgeny Utarov. It meant nothing to him.

Merrick took the $326 from the wallet and jammed it into his own pocket, then tossed the wallet on the dying man’s lap. He spit on the ground and was happy to see that there was no blood in the sputum. Nevertheless, he was angry at himself for being wounded. It was the first time he had been hit in many, many years. It seemed to speak to him of the slow march of time, of his age and his impending mortality. He swayed slightly on his feet. The movement seemed to distract the man named Yevgeny from the fact of his own dying. His eyes opened wider, and he tried to say something. Merrick stood over him.

“Give me a name,” he said. “You got time in you yet. Otherwise, I’ll leave you here to die. It’ll be slow, and that pain you’re feeling will get worse. You give me a name, and it’ll go easier on you.”

Utarov whispered something.

“Speak up, now,” said Merrick. “I ain’t bending down again.”

Utarov tried once more. This time, the words sounded like blades being whetted against rough stone deep in his throat.

“Dubus,” he said.

Merrick shot the Russian twice more in the chest, then staggered away, leaving a trail of blood behind him on the road like squashed berries. He leaned against his car and stripped to the waist, exposing the wound. The bullet was lodged deep in the flesh. In the past, there were men whom he could have called upon to help him, but they were all gone now. He tied his shirt around his waist to stem the bleeding, then put his coat and jacket on over his naked torso and got back in the car. He slipped the Smith 10, with only three rounds left, back under the driver’s seat, and placed the Colt in the pocket of his coat. Turning the car back toward the main road was agony, and the ride along the trail caused him to grit his teeth so that he would not have to hear himself cry out, but he managed it. He drove for three miles before he found a veterinary practice, and there he made the old man whose name was on the sign outside remove the bullet while Merrick held a gun on him. He did not pass out from the pain, but it was a close thing.

Merrick knew who Dubus was. Somehow, all of this had started with him, had begun the first time Dubus forced himself upon a child. He had brought his appetites with him to Gilead, and from there they had spread. Merrick held a gun to the veterinarian’s head and asked him if he knew where Mason Dubus lived, and the old man told him, for Dubus was well-known in the region. Merrick locked the veterinarian in the basement, with two pint bottles of water and some bread and cheese so that he could keep body and soul together. He promised the vet that he would call the cops within twenty-four hours. Until then, he would just have to amuse himself as best he could. He found a bottle of Tylenol in a medicine cabinet and helped himself to some rolls of clean dressing and a pair of fresh pants from the old man’s closet, then left and continued on his journey, but driving was hard. The Tylenol took some of the edge off the pain, though, and at Caratunk he turned off the 201 again, as the vet had told him to do, and came at last to Mason Dubus’s house.

Dubus saw him coming. In a way, Dubus had been expecting him. He was still talking on his cell phone when Merrick shot the lock from the front door and entered the house, already dripping the spots of blood on the pristine floor. Dubus pressed the red button to end the call, then dropped the phone on a chair beside him.

“I know who you are,” he said.

“That’s good,” said Merrick.

“Your little girl is dead.”

“I know that.”

“Soon, you’ll be dead too.”

“Maybe, but you’ll be dead sooner.”

Dubus pointed a trembling finger at Merrick. “You think I’m going to plead with you for my life? You think I’m going to help you?”

Merrick raised the Colt. “No, I don’t,” he said, and he shot Dubus twice. As the old man lay spasming on the floor, Merrick picked up the cell phone and redialed. The phone was answered after two rings. There was no voice, but Merrick could hear a man breathing. Then the connection was ended. Merrick put the phone on the floor and left the house, Dubus’s final breaths slowly fading from hearing as he left him to die.

Dubus listened to Merrick ’s footsteps, then the noise of a car driving away. There was a great weight on his chest, studded with pain, as though a bed of nails had been laid upon him. He stared at the ceiling. There was blood in his mouth. He knew that he was only moments away from death. He began to pray, to ask God to forgive his sins. His lips moved soundlessly as he tried to remember the right words, but he was distracted by memories, and by his anger at the fact that he should die this way, the victim of a killer who would shoot an unarmed old man.

He felt cold air, and there came a sound from behind him. Someone approached, and he thought that Merrick had come back to finish him off, but when he moved his head he saw, not Merrick, but the end of a filthy tan coat, and old brown shoes stained with dirt. There was a stench in the air, and even in the time of his dying it made him gag. Then there were more footsteps to his left, and he was aware of presences behind him, of unseen figures watching him. Dubus tilted his head, and saw pale features, and black holes gaping in withered skin. He opened his mouth to speak, but there were no more words left to say, and no more breaths left in his body.

And he died with the Hollow Men in his eyes.

Merrick drove for miles, but his vision began to blur, and the pain and the loss of blood had weakened him. He made it as far as the Old Moose Lodge and there, fooled, like so many others in the past, by the name’s false promise of a bed, he stopped.

Now he was sitting at the deuce, drinking Jack Daniels on top of the Tylenol, snoozing a little in the hope that he might recover some of his strength so that he could continue on to Gilead. Nobody bothered him. The Old Moose Lodge actively encouraged its customers to take the occasional short rest, as long as they got back to drinking when they were done. A jukebox played honky-tonk music, and the glass eyes of dead animals stared down at the patrons from the walls, while Merrick drifted, unsure if he was sleeping or waking. At some point, a waitress asked him if he was okay and Merrick nodded, pointing to his whiskey glass to order another, even though he had barely touched the first. He was afraid that they might ask him to move on, and he wasn’t ready to do that yet.

Waking. Sleeping. Music, then no music. Voices. Whispers.

daddy

Merrick opened his eyes. There was a little girl sitting across from him. She had dark hair, and her skin was broken where the gas had erupted from within. A bug was crawling across her forehead. He wanted to brush it away, but his hands wouldn’t move.

“Hi, honey,” he said. “Where you been?”

There was dirt on the little girl’s hands, and two of her fingernails were broken.

waiting

“Waiting for what, honey?”

for you

Merrick nodded. “I couldn’t come until now. I was-They had me locked up, but I was always thinking about you. I never forgot about you.”

i know. you were too far away. now you’re near. now I can come to you.

“What happened to you, darlin’? Why’d you go away?”

i fell asleep. i fell asleep, and i couldn’t wake up.

There was no emotion in her voice. Her eyes never blinked. Merrick noticed that the left side of her face was cherry red and purple, marked by the colors of lividity.

“Won’t be long now, honey,” he said. He found the strength to move his hand. He reached for her, and felt something cold and hard against his fingers. The whiskey glass toppled on the table, distracting him for a moment so that when he looked back the girl was gone. The whiskey flowed around his fingers and dripped onto the floor, and the waitress appeared, and said, “I think maybe you ought to be heading home now,” and Merrick nodded, and replied, “Yeah, I think maybe you’re right. It’s time to go home.”

He stood, feeling the blood squelch in his shoe. The room began to spin around him, and he gripped the table to give himself some support. The sensation of giddiness went away, and he was aware once again of the pain in his side. He looked down. The side of his trousers was soaked a deep red. The waitress also saw the stain.

“Hey,” she said. “What-”

And then she looked into Merrick ’s eyes and thought better of asking the question. Merrick reached into his pocket and found some bills. There was a twenty and a ten among them, and he threw them all on the waitress’s tray.

“Thank you, darlin’,” he said, and now there was a kindness in his eyes, and the waitress was uncertain whether he thought that he was talking to her or to another who had taken her place in his mind. “I’m ready now.”

He walked from the bar, passing through the ranks of dancing couples and noisy drunks, of lovers and friends, moving from light to darkness, from the life within to the life beyond. When he stepped outside, the cool of the night air made him reel again for a moment, then cleared his head. He took his keys from his jacket pocket and headed for his car, each step forcing more blood from his wound, each step taking him a little closer to the end.

He stopped at the car and used his left hand to support himself against the roof while his right fitted the key into the lock. He opened the door and saw himself reflected in the glass of the side window, then another reflection joined his, hovering behind his shoulder. It was a bird, a monstrous dove with a white face and a dark beak and human eyes buried deep in its sockets. It raised a wing, but the wing was black, not white, with claws at the end that held something long and metal in their grip.

And then the wing began to beat with a soft swishing sound, and he felt a new, sharp pain as his collarbone was broken by a blow. He twisted, trying to get to the gun in his pocket, but another bird appeared, this time a hawk, and this bird was holding a baseball bat, a good old-fashioned Louisville Slugger designed, if held in the right hands, to knock that baby right out of the ballpark, except now the Slugger was aimed at his head. He couldn’t duck to avoid the blow, so he raised his left arm instead. The impact shattered his elbow, and the wings were beating and the blows were raining down upon him, and he dropped to his knees as something in his head came apart with a noise like bread breaking, and his eyes were filled with red. He opened his mouth to speak, although there were no words for him to form, and his jaw was almost torn from his face as the crowbar swung in a lazy arc, felling him like a tree so that he lay flat on the cold gravel while the blood flowed and the beating went on, his body making strange, soft sounds, bones moving inside where bones had no right to move, the framework within fracturing, the tender organs bursting.

And still he lived.

The blows stopped, but the pain did not. A foot slid under his belly, levering him upward so that he flopped onto his back, resting slightly against the open door, half in, half out of the car, one hand lying useless by his side, the other thrown back into the interior. He saw the whole world through a red prism, dominated by birds like men and men like birds.

“He’s gone,” said a voice, and it sounded familiar to Merrick.

“No he ain’t,” said another. “Not yet.”

There was hot breath close to his ear.

“You shouldn’t have come here,” said the second voice. “You should have just forgot about her. She’s long dead, but she was good while she lasted.”

He was conscious of movement to his left. The crowbar struck him just above the ear and light shone through the prism, refracting the world in a red-tinged rainbow, turning it to splinters of color in his fading consciousness.

daddy

Almost there, honey, almost there.

And still, still he lived.

The fingers of his right hand clawed at the floor of the car. They found the barrel of the Smith IO, and he tugged it free of the tape and flicked at it until he could reach the grip, pulling it toward him, willing the blackness to lift, if only for a moment.

daddy

In a minute, honey. Daddy’s got something he has to do first.

Slowly, he drew the gun to him. He tried to lift it, but his wounded arm would not hold the weight. Instead, he allowed himself to fall on his side, and the pain was almost beyond endurance as splintered bone and torn flesh shuddered from the impact. He opened his eyes, or perhaps they had always been open, and it was just the new waves of pain provoked by the movement that caused the mist briefly to lift. His cheek was flat against the gravel. His right arm was outstretched before him, the gun lying on the horizontal. There were two figures ahead of him, walking side by side perhaps fifteen feet from where he lay. He shifted his hand slightly, ignoring the feeling of his fractured bones rubbing against one another, until the gun was pointing at the two men.

And, somehow, Merrick found the strength within himself to pull the trigger, or perhaps it was the strength of another added to his own, for he thought he felt a pressure on the knuckle of his index finger as though someone were pressing softly upon it.

The man on the right seemed to do a little jog, then stumbled and fell as his shattered ankle gave way. He shouted something that Merrick could not understand, but Merrick ’s finger was tightening on the trigger for the second shot and he had no time for the utterances of others. He fired again, the target larger now, for the injured man was lying on his side, his friend trying to lift him, but the shot was wild, the gun bucking in his hand and sending the bullet over the recumbent figure.

Merrick had the time and the strength to pull the trigger one last time. He fired as the blackness descended, and the bullet tore through the forehead of the wounded man, exiting in a red cloud. The survivor tried to drag the body away, but the dead man’s foot caught in a storm drain. People appeared at the door of the Old Moose Lodge, for even in a place like this the sound of gunfire was bound to attract attention. Voices shouted, and figures began to run toward him. The survivor fled, leaving the dead man behind.

Merrick exhaled a final breath. A woman stood over him, the waitress from the bar. She spoke, but Merrick did not hear what she said

daddy?

i’m here, Lucy.

for Merrick was gone.

Chapter XXXIII

While Frank Merrick died with his daughter’s name upon his lips, Angel, Louis, and I decided on a course of action to deal with Caswell. We were in the bar, the remains of our meal still scattered around us, but we weren’t drinking.

We agreed that Caswell appeared close to some form of breakdown, although whether caused by incipient guilt or something else we could not tell. It was Angel who put it best, as he often did.

“If he’s so overcome with guilt, then why? Lucy Merrick has been missing for years. Unless they kept her there for all that time, which doesn’t seem too likely, then why is he so conscience-stricken now, all of a sudden?”

“ Merrick, perhaps,” I said.

“Which means somebody told him that Merrick has been asking questions.”

“Not necessarily. It’s not like Merrick has been keeping a low profile. The cops are aware of him, and thanks to Demarcian’s killing, the Russians are too. Demarcian was involved somehow. Merrick didn’t just pick his name out of a hat.”

“You think maybe these guys were sharing images of the abuse, and that’s the connection to Demarcian?” asked Angel.

“Dr. Christian said that he hadn’t heard of anything involving men with bird masks turning up in photos or on video, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing like that out there.”

“They would have been taking a chance by selling it,” said Angel. “Might have risked drawing attention to themselves.”

“Maybe they needed the money,” said Louis.

“But Caswell had enough to buy the Gilead land outright,” I replied. “It doesn’t sound like money was an issue.”

“But where did the cash come from?” asked Angel. “Had to have come from somewhere, so maybe they were selling this stuff.”

“How much does it go for, though?” I said. “Enough to buy a patch of unwanted land in a forest? The barman said that the land wasn’t exactly given away for free, but it didn’t cost the earth either. He could have bought it for the equivalent of nickels and dimes.”

Angel shrugged. “Depends what they were selling. Depends how bad it was. For the kids, I mean.”

None of us said anything more for a time. I tried to create patterns in my mind, to put together a sequence of events that made sense, but I kept losing myself in contradictory statements and false trails. More and more, I was convinced that Clay was involved with what had occurred, but how, then, to balance that with Christian’s view of him as a man who was almost obsessed with finding evidence of abuse, even to the detriment of his own career, or Rebecca Clay’s description of a loving father devoted to the children in his charge? Then there were the Russians. Louis had asked some questions and discovered the identity of the redheaded man who had come to my house. His name was Utarov, and he was one of the most trusted captains in the New England operation. According to Louis, there was paper out on Merrick, a piece of unfinished business relating to some jobs he had undertaken against the Russians sometime in the past, but there were also rumors of unease in New England. Prostitutes, mainly those of Asian, African, and Eastern European origin, had been moved out of Massachusetts and Providence and told to lie low, or they had been forced to do so by the men who controlled them. More specialized services had also been curtailed, particularly those relating to child pornography and child prostitution.

“Trafficking,” Louis had concluded. “Explains why they took the Asians and the others off the streets and left the pure American womanhood to take up the slack. They’re worried about something, and it’s connected to Demarcian.”

Their appetites would have stayed the same, wasn’t that what Christian had told me? These men wouldn’t have stopped abusing, but they might have found another outlet for their urges: young children acquired through Boston, perhaps, with Demarcian as one of the points of contact? What then? Did they film the abuse and sell it back to Demarcian and others like him, one operation funding another? Was that the nature of their particular “Project”?

Caswell was part of it, and he was weak and vulnerable. I was certain that he had put in a call as soon as he had encountered us, a plea for help from those whom he had assisted in the past. It would have increased the pressure on all of them, forcing them to respond, and we would be waiting for them when they came.

Angel and Louis went to their car and drove up to Caswell’s place, parking out of sight of the road and his house to take the first watch. I could almost see them there as I went to my room to get some sleep before my turn came, the car dark and quiet, perhaps some music playing low on the radio, Angel dozing, Louis still and intent, part of his attention on the road beyond while some hidden part of him wandered unknown worlds in his mind.

In my dreams, I walked through Gilead, and I heard the voices of children crying. I turned to the church and saw that there were young girls and boys wrapped in stinging ivy, the creepers tightening on their naked bodies as they were absorbed into the green world. I saw blood on the ground, and the remains of an infant wrapped in swaddling clothes, points of red seeping through the cloth.

And a thin man crawled out of a hole in the ground, his face torn and ruined by decay, his teeth visible through the holes in his cheeks.

“Old Gilead,” said Daniel Clay. “It gets in your soul…”

The call came through on the phone in my room while I was sleeping. It was O’Rourke. Since there was no cell phone coverage in Jackman, it had seemed like a good idea to let someone know where I was in case anything happened back east, so both O’Rourke and Jackie Garner had the number of the lodge. After all, my gun was still out there, and I would bear some responsibility for whatever Merrick did with it.

“ Merrick ’s dead,” he said.

I sat up. I could still taste food in my mouth, but it tasted of dirt, and the memory of my dream was strong. “How?”

“Killed in the parking lot of the Old Moose Lodge. It sounds like he had an eventful final day. He was busy, right up to the end. Mason Dubus was shot dead yesterday with a ten-millimeter bullet. We’re still waiting on a ballistics match, but it’s not like people get shot here every day, and not usually with a ten. Couple of hours ago, a Somerset County sheriff ’s deputy found two bodies on a side road just out of Bingham. Russians, it looks like. Then they got a call from a woman who found her father locked in his basement a couple of miles north of the scene. Seems the old guy was a vet-the animal kind, not the war kind-and a man matching Merrick’s description forced him to treat a gunshot wound and give him directions to Dubus’s house before locking him up. From what the vet said, the wound was pretty serious, but he sewed it and strapped it as best he could. It looks like Merrick continued northwest, killed Dubus, then had to stop at the lodge. He was bleeding badly by then. According to witnesses, he sat in a corner, drank some whiskey, talked to himself, then headed outside. They were waiting for him there.”

“How many?”

“Two, both wearing bird masks. Ring any bells? They beat him to death, or near enough to it. I guess they thought the job was done when they left him.”

“How long did he survive?”

“Long enough to take your gun from under the driver’s seat and shoot one of his attackers. I’m going on what I’ve been told, but the cops at the scene can’t figure out how he managed it. They broke just about every bone in his body. He must have wanted to kill this guy real bad. He got him with one in the left ankle, then one in the head. His pal tried to drag him away, but he got the dead guy’s foot caught in a drain, so he had to leave him.”

“Did the vic have a name?”

“I’m sure he did, but he wasn’t carrying a wallet. That, or his friend removed it before he left to try to cover his tracks. You want, maybe I can make some calls and arrange for you to take a look at him. He’s down in Augusta now. ME’s due to conduct an autopsy in the morning. How you liking Jackman? I never took you for the hunting kind. Not animals, anyhow.”

He stopped talking, then repeated the name of the town. “Jackman,” he said, thoughtfully. “The Old Moose Lodge is kind of on the way to Jackman, I guess.”

“I guess,” I echoed him.

“And Jackman’s pretty close to Gilead, and Mason Dubus was the big dog when Gilead was open for business.”

“That’s about it,” I said neutrally. I didn’t know if O’Rourke was aware of Merrick ’s act of vandalism at Harmon’s house, and I was sure he didn’t know about Andy Kellog’s pictures. I didn’t want the cops up here dancing all over the site, not yet. I wanted to break Caswell for myself. I now felt that I owed it to Frank Merrick.

“If I can work it out, you can bet that soon a lot of other cops will have worked it out too,” said O’Rourke. “I think you may be having some company up there. You know, I might feel bad if I thought you’d been holding out on me, but you wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“I’m figuring it out as I go along, that’s all,” I said. “Wouldn’t want to waste your time before I was certain of what I knew.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” said O’Rourke. “You give me a call when you go to look at that body.”

“I will.”

“Don’t forget, now; otherwise, I really might start to take things personally.”

He hung up.

It was time. I called Caswell. It took him four rings to pick up. He sounded groggy. Given the hour, I wasn’t surprised.

“Who is this?”

“It’s Charlie Parker.”

“I told you, I got nothing-”

“Shut up, Otis. Merrick is dead.” I didn’t tell him that Merrick had managed to kill one of his attackers. It was better that he didn’t know, not yet. If Merrick had been killed at the Old Moose last night, then anyone who was planning on hitting Jackman afterward would have been here by now, and would have run into Angel and Louis; but we had heard nothing, which meant that Merrick’s killing of one of the men had scared them off for the moment. “They’re closing in on you, Otis. Two men attacked Merrick on the 201. I’d say that they were on their way up here when they took him, and this is their next stop. It could be that they’ll try and take my friends and me out, but I don’t think they’re that brave. They took Merrick from behind, with bats and bars. We carry guns. Maybe they do too, but we’re better than they are, I guarantee it. It’s like I told you, Otis: you’re the weak link. They get rid of you, and they can remake the chain stronger than it was before. Right now, I’m your best hope for making it alive to daybreak.”

There was silence on the other end of the line, then what sounded like a sob.

“I know you didn’t mean to hurt her, Otis. You don’t look like the kind of man who’d hurt a little girl.”

This time the crying was clearer. I pressed on.

“These other men, the ones who killed Frank Merrick, they’re different from you. You’re not like them, Otis. Don’t let them drag you down to their level. You’re not a killer, Otis. You don’t kill men, and you don’t kill little girls. I can’t see it in you. I just can’t.”

Caswell drew in a ragged breath. “I wouldn’t hurt a child,” he said. “I love children.”

And there was something in the way he said it that made me feel filthy inside and out. It made me want to bathe in acid, then swallow what was left in the bottle to purge my insides.

“I know,” I said, and I had to force the words from my mouth. “I bet you take care of those graves out at Moose River too, don’t you? I’m right, aren’t I?”

“Yes,” he said. “They shouldn’t ought to have done that to little babies. They shouldn’t ought to have killed them.”

I tried not to think about why he thought that they should have been spared, why they should have been allowed to grow into young children. It wouldn’t help, not now.

“Otis, what happened to Lucy Merrick? She was there, wasn’t she, in that house? Then she disappeared. What happened, Otis? Where did she go?”

I heard him sniffing, could see him wiping his nose on his arm.

“It was an accident,” he said. “They brought her here and-”

He stopped. He had never had to put a name to what he did to children before, not to someone who was not like him. This was not the time to make him.

“There’s no need to tell me that, Otis, not yet. Just tell me how it ended.”

He did not reply, and I feared that I had lost him.

“I did bad,” said Caswell, like a child who had soiled itself. “I did bad, and now they’ve come.”

“What?” I didn’t understand. “There are men there now?” I cursed the lack of coverage up here. Maybe I should have gone straight to Angel and Louis, but I remembered Caswell’s sweaty hands on his shotgun. He might have been on the verge of a breakdown, but there was always the risk that he could be willing to take someone with him when he finally fell apart. According to Angel, his cottage had barred windows and a heavy oak door, like the cottage in which Lucy Merrick had been held. Breaking in without being shot at would have been anything from difficult to impossible.

“They’ve been here all along,” Caswell continued, the words slipping from his mouth in near whispers, “least for this past week, maybe more. I don’t recall properly. It feels like they’ve always been here, and I don’t sleep so good now because of them. I see them at night, mostly, out of the corner of my eye. They don’t do nothing. They just stand there, like they’re waiting for something.”

“Who are they, Otis?” But I already knew. They were the Hollow Men.

“Faces in shadow. Old dirty coats. I’ve tried talking to them, asking them what they want, but they don’t answer, and when I try to look straight at them, it’s like they’re not there. I have to make them go away, but I don’t know how.”

“My friends and I will come up there, Otis. We’ll take you somewhere safe. You just hold on.”

“You know,” said Caswell faintly, “I don’t think they’ll let me leave.”

“Are they there because of Lucy, Otis? Is that why they’ve come?”

“Her. The others.”

“But the others didn’t die, Otis. That’s right, isn’t it?”

“We were always careful. We had to be. They were children.”

Something sour bubbled in my throat. I forced it back down.

“Had Lucy been with you before?”

“Not up here. A couple of times someplace else. I wasn’t there. They gave her pot, booze. They liked her. She was different somehow. They made her promise not to tell. They had ways of doing that.”

I thought of Andy Kellog, of how he had sacrificed himself to save another little girl.

They had ways…

“What happened to Lucy, Otis? What went wrong?”

“It was a mistake,” he said. He had grown almost calm, as though he were talking about a minor fender bender, or an error on his taxes. “They left her with me after…after.” He coughed, then went on, again letting what was done to Lucy Merrick, a fourteen-year-old girl who had lost her way, remain unsaid. “They were going to come back the next day, or could be it was a couple of days. I don’t remember. I’m confused now. I just had to look after her. She had a blanket and a mattress. I fed her, and I gave her some toys and some books. But it got real cold all of a sudden, real cold. I was going to bring her up to my place, but I was afraid that she might see something up there, something that would help them to identify me when we let her go. I had a little gasoline generator in the house, so I turned it on for her and she went to sleep.

“I had a mind to check on her every few hours, but I dozed off myself. When I woke up, she was lying on the floor.” He started sobbing again, and it took him almost a minute before he could continue. “I smelled the fumes when I got to the door. I wrapped a cloth around my face, and I still could hardly breathe. She was lying on the floor, and she was all red and purple. She’d been sick on herself. I don’t know how long she’d been dead.

“I swear, the generator had been working fine earlier. Maybe she’d tried to tinker with it. I just don’t know. I didn’t mean for it to happen. Oh God, I didn’t mean for it to happen that way.”

He started to wail. I let him cry for a while, then interrupted him.

“Where did you put her, Otis?”

“I wanted her to rest somewhere nice, near God and the angels. I buried her behind the steeple of the old church. It was the closest I could get to hallowed ground. I couldn’t mark the place or nothing, but she’s there. I sometimes put flowers on the spot in summer. I talk to her. I tell her I’m sorry for what happened.”

“And the private detective? What about Poole?”

“I had nothing to do with that.” He sounded indignant. “He wouldn’t walk away. He kept asking questions. I had to make a call. I buried him in the church too, but away from Lucy. Her place was special.”

“Who killed him?”

“I’ll confess my own sins, but I won’t confess another man’s. It’s not for me to do.”

“Daniel Clay? Was he involved?”

“I never met him,” Otis replied. “I don’t know what happened to him. I just heard the name. You remember now: I didn’t mean for it to happen the way it did. I just wanted her to be warm. I told you: I love children.”

“What was the Project, Otis?”

“The children were the Project,” he replied. “The little children. The others found them and brought them up here. That’s what we called it: the Project. It was our secret.”

“Who were those other men?”

“I can’t tell you. I got nothing more to say to you.”

“Okay, Otis, we’re going to come up there now. We’ll take you somewhere safe.”

But now, as the last minutes of his life slipped slowly by, the barriers that Otis Caswell had erected between himself and the reality of what he had done seemed to fall away.

“Nowhere’s safe,” he said. “I just want it to end.” He drew in a deep breath, stifling another sob. It seemed to give him some strength. “I gotta go now. I gotta let some men in.”

He put the phone down, and the connection was broken. I was on the road five minutes later, and at the spot where the trail to Caswell’s place joined the main road in ten. I flashed my lights where I knew Louis and Angel to be, but there was no sign of them. Farther ahead, the gate was open and the lock busted. I followed the trail to the house. There was a truck parked outside. Louis’s Lexus was beside it. The front door to the house was open, a light shining outside.

“It’s me,” I called.

“In here,” replied Louis, from somewhere to my right.

I followed his voice into a sparsely furnished bedroom. It had whitewashed walls. Exposed beams ran along the ceiling. Otis Caswell was hanging from one of them. There was an overturned chair on the floor, and drops of urine were still falling from his bare feet.

“I was out taking a leak,” said Angel. “I saw-” He struggled to find the words. “I saw the door was open, and I thought I saw men go in, but when we got up here there was nobody but Caswell, and he was already dead.”

I stepped forward and rolled up each sleeve of his shirt in turn. His skin was bare of tattoos. However else he was involved, Otis Caswell was not the man with the eagle on his arm. Angel and Louis looked at me, but said nothing.

“He knew,” I said. “He knew who they were, but he wouldn’t tell.”

Now he was dead, and that knowledge had died with him. Then I remembered the man killed by Frank Merrick. There was still time. First, though, we searched the house, carefully going through drawers and closets, checking the floors and the skirting for any hiding places. It was Angel who found the stash, in the end. There was a hole in the wall behind a half-empty bookcase. It contained bags of photographs, most printed from a computer, and dozens of unmarked videocassettes and DVDs. Angel leafed through a couple of the pictures, then put them down and stepped away. I glanced at them, but did not have the stomach to go through them all. There was no need. I knew what they would contain. Only the faces of the children would change.

Louis gestured at the cassettes and DVDs. There was a metal stand in one corner, dominated by a new flat-screen TV. It looked out of place in Caswell’s home.

“You want to look at these?”

“No. I have to leave,” I said. “Clean down anything you’ve touched, then you get out of here too.”

“You going to call the cops?” asked Angel.

I shook my head. “Not for a couple of hours.”

“What did he tell you?”

“He said that Merrick’s daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He buried her behind the steeple in the forest.”

“You believed him?”

“I don’t know.” I looked at Caswell’s face, purple with blood. I could feel no pity for him, and my only regret was that he had died without revealing more.

“You want us to stay close?” asked Louis.

“Go back to Portland, but stay away from Scarborough. I need to look at a body, then I’ll call you.”

We went outside. The air was still, the forest quiet. There was an alien scent in the air. Behind me, I heard Louis sniff.

“Someone’s been smoking,” he said.

I walked past Caswell’s truck, over short grass and a small vegetable patch, until I came to where the forest began. After a few steps I found it: a roll-up, discarded in the dirt. I lifted it carefully and blew on the tip. It glowed red for an instant, then died. Louis appeared beside me, Angel close behind. They both had guns in their hands. I showed them the cigarette.

“He was here,” I said. “We led him to Caswell.”

“There’s a mark on the little finger of Caswell’s right hand,” said Angel. “Looks like there was a pinkie ring once. No sign of it now.”

I stared into the darkness of the forest, but I had no sense of the presence of another. The Collector was gone.

O’Rourke had done as he had promised. He had left word with the ME’s office to say that I might be able to identify the dead man. I was at the office by seven, and was joined soon after by O’Rourke and a pair of state police detectives, one of whom was Hansen. He didn’t speak as I was led into the icebox to view the body. In total, there were five bodies set to go under the ME’s knife: the unidentified man from the Old Moose Lodge, Mason Dubus, the two Russians, and Merrick. They were so pressed for space that the two Russians were being stored at an undertaker’s office nearby.

“Which one is Merrick?” I asked the ME’s assistant.

The man, whose name I did not know, pointed at the body nearest the wall. It was covered with a white plastic sheet.

“You feeling sorry for him?” It was Hansen. “He killed four men in twelve hours with your gun. You ought to be feeling sorry, but not for him.”

I said nothing. Instead, I stood over the body of Merrick’s killer. I think I even managed to keep my face expressionless when the man’s face was revealed, the red wound on the right side of his forehead still messy with dirt and congealed matter.

“I don’t know him,” I said.

“You sure?” asked O’Rourke.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said, as I turned away from the body of Jerry Legere, Rebecca Clay’s ex-husband. “He’s nobody I know.”

They would come back to haunt me, of course, all of the lies and half-truths. They would cost me more than I could then have imagined, although perhaps I had been living on borrowed time for so long that I shouldn’t have been surprised at the consequences. I could have given the detectives all that I knew. I could have told them about Andy Kellog and Otis Caswell and the bodies that might be buried within the walls of a ruined church, but I did not. I don’t know why. I think that maybe it was because I was close to the truth, and I wanted to reveal it for myself.

And even in that I was to be disappointed, for what, in the end, was the truth? Like the lawyer Elwin Stark had said, the only truth was that everybody lied.

Or perhaps it was because of Frank Merrick. I knew what he had done. I knew he had killed, and would have killed again if he had been allowed to live. I was still bruised and sore from where he had punched me, and I was aware of a lingering resentment at the way he had humiliated me in my own home. But in his love for his daughter, and in his single-minded obsession with discovering the truth behind her disappearance, and with punishing those responsible for it, I saw something of myself reflected.

Now that Lucy Merrick’s resting place had been revealed, the rest of the men who had led her to that place remained to be found. Three of those involved-Caswell, Legere, and, it now seemed, Dubus-were dead. Andy Kellog had recalled four masks, and I had seen no tattoos on the arms of Caswell or of Legere. The man with the eagle, the one who Andy felt was the leader, the dominant one, was still alive.

I was climbing into my car when a piece fell into place. I thought of the damage to one corner of the cottage in which Lucy Merrick had died, the holes in the wall and the marks where screws had once held something in place, and recalled part of what Caswell had said to me on the phone. It had bothered me at the time, but I was too intent upon squeezing him for more information to notice it. It came back to me now-“I had a mind to check on her every few hours, but I dozed off myself. When I woke up, she was lying on the floor.”-and I found the connection.

Three were dead, but now I had another name.

Chapter XXXIV

Raymon Lang lived between Bath and Brunswick, on a small patch of land off Route 1, close by the northern bank of the New Meadows River. I’d taken a cursory look at Lang’s home when I got there just before nine. He hadn’t done much with his property, apart from plant a tan trailer home on it that looked, at first sight, like a strong sneeze might blow it away. The trailer sat high off the ground. In a cursory nod to aesthetics, a kind of picket fence had been erected between the bottom of the trailer and the earth, masking the dirt and pipes beneath.

I had managed only three or four hours’ sleep that night, but I was not tired. The more I thought about what Caswell had told me before he died, the more convinced I was that Raymon Lang was involved in the abduction of Lucy Merrick. Caswell had told me that he had seen Lucy lying on the floor, dying or already dead. The question was: how had Caswell known? How could he have seen her when he had woken up? After all, had he been in the cabin with her, then he too would have died. He hadn’t fallen asleep there. He was sleeping back in his own place, which meant that there was a way of watching the cabin from his home. There was a camera. The mark in the corner of the cabin wall indicated where the camera had been. And whom did we know who put cameras in places? Raymon Lang, helped by his old buddy Jerry Legere, regrettably, no longer with us. A-Secure, the firm for which Lang worked, had also installed the security system at Daniel Clay’s house, which now seemed less like a coincidence than before. I wondered how Rebecca would take the news of her ex-husband’s death. I doubted that she would be overcome by grief, but who could be certain? I had seen wives weep themselves into a stupor over the sickbeds of abusive husbands, and children cry hysterically at the funerals of fathers who had torn stripes in their thighs and buttocks with a belt. Sometimes, I didn’t think they even understood why they were in tears, but grief was as good a name as any to give to their reason.

I guessed that Lang was also the other man involved in the killing of Frank Merrick. According to eyewitnesses, a silver or gray car had been seen leaving the scene, and from where I sat I could see Lang’s silver Sierra shining through the trees. The cops hadn’t picked it up on the road to the Old Moose Lodge as they headed north, but that didn’t mean anything. In the panic after the shooting, it might have taken the cops a while to get witness statements, by which time Lang could have driven as far as the highway. Even if someone had reported seeing a car during the initial 911 call, Lang would still have had time to get at least as far as Bingham, and there he would have enjoyed the choice of three routes: 16 north, 16 south, or to continue on the 201. He would probably have kept going south, but there were enough side roads after Bingham to enable him to avoid dozens of cops if he was lucky and kept his cool.

I was parked by the side of a gas station about fifty feet west of Lang’s drive, drinking coffee and reading the Press Herald. There was a Dunkin’ Donuts attached to the gas station, with seating for only a handful of customers, which meant that it wasn’t unusual to see people eating in their cars. It meant that I wasn’t likely to stand out while I was watching Lang’s place. After an hour, Lang emerged from the trailer, and the patch of silver started to move as he turned onto the main road and headed in the direction of Bath. Seconds later, Louis and Angel followed him in the Lexus. I had my cell phone close to hand in case it turned out to be just a short trip, even though Lang had his toolbox with him when he was walking to his car. I still gave him a half hour, on the off chance that he decided to head back for some reason, then left my car where it was and cut through the trees to get to the trailer.

Lang didn’t seem to keep a dog, which was good news. It’s hard to perform a little breaking and entering while a dog is trying to rip your throat out. The trailer door didn’t look like much, but I still didn’t have Angel’s ability to pick a lock. Frankly, it’s a lot harder than it looks, and I didn’t want to spend half an hour squatting in front of Lang’s door, trying to open it with a pick and tension tool. I used to own an electric rake, which did the job just as well, but the rake got lost when my old Mustang was shot up a few years back, and I’d never bothered to replace it. Anyway, the only reason a private detective might keep a rake in his car would be in order to bust illegally into someone’s place, and if my car was searched for any reason by the cops it would look bad, and I might lose my license. I didn’t need Angel to help me break into Lang’s trailer, because I didn’t plan on leaving Lang in any doubt that his place had been searched. At the very least, it would rattle him, and I wanted him rattled. Unlike Caswell, Lang didn’t look like the kind of guy who was going to reach for a noose when things got tough. Instead, if Merrick ’s fate was any indication, he was the kind to lash out. The thought that Lang might not be guilty of anything never really crossed my mind.

For the purposes of breaking into Lang’s trailer, I had a crowbar under my coat. I forced it between the door and the frame of the trailer, then kept pushing until the lock broke. The first thing that struck me about the interior of Lang’s trailer was that it was stiflingly hot inside. The second was that it was tidy, and therefore not what I had expected from a single man’s trailer. To the left was a galley-style kitchen with a table beyond it, surrounded by a three-sided couch arrangement that took up the entire lower quarter of the trailer. To the right, just before the sleeping area, was a La-Z-Boy recliner and an expensive Sony wide-screen television, beneath which stood a matching DVD, a DVD recorder, and a twin VCR. There were tapes and DVDs on a shelf beside it: action movies, some comedies, even a couple of Bogart and Cagney classics. Under them was a selection of porn on both DVD and video. I glanced at some of the titles but they seemed like pretty average fare. There was nothing related to children, but then I supposed that most of the stuff involving children was probably packaged to look like something else anyway; that, or it was buried on other tapes or disks so that it would not be found in the event of a casual search. I turned on the TV and picked some of the porn at random, skipping forward in case anything unusual was to be seen, but it was just as advertised. I could have spent an entire day trying to go through all the movies in the hope that I might find something, but there didn’t seem to be much point. It was also kind of depressing.

Next to the TV was a Home Depot computer desk, and a new PC. I tried accessing the computer but it was password protected. I turned it off and went through the books on the shelves and the magazines stacked beneath a small corner table. Again, there was nothing, not even porn. It was possible that Lang had other material hidden elsewhere, but after searching the entire trailer, I couldn’t find any trace of it. All that was left was the laundry basket in the spotless bathroom, which seemed to be full of Lang’s dirty T-shirts, underwear, and socks. I tipped it onto the floor just in case, but all it left me with was a pile of stained clothing and the smell of stale perspiration. In every other way, Lang appeared to be clean. I was disappointed, and for the first time I started to doubt my actions in relation to him. Maybe I should have called the cops. If there was incriminating material on his computer, then they could have found it. I had also managed to contaminate the trailer, so that even if they found evidence that Lang had been involved in Merrick’s killing-a bloodstained baseball bat, or a splattered bar-it wouldn’t take much of a lawyer to argue that I could have planted the weapons, assuming I confessed what I knew to the cops. For the moment, it seemed like Lang was a dead end. I would just have to wait and see how he reacted to the break-in.

I looked out of the window to make sure there was nobody approaching, then opened the door and prepared to head back to my car. It was only when my foot touched the gravel, and I glanced at the picket fence, that I realized that, while I had searched the inside of the trailer, I hadn’t checked underneath. I went around to the rear, out of sight of the road, then knelt and squinted through the fencing.

There was a large metal container, seven or eight feet in length and four feet in height, under the trailer. It seemed to be bolted to the underside. I did a full circuit with the flashlight and could see no sign of a door, which meant that the only way in was through the trailer itself. I went back inside and examined the floor. It was carpeted from wall to wall in a thick brown fabric that looked like wet dog fur. I went over it with my fingers and felt rough patches and gaps. I dug my fingers into one of the gaps and pulled. There was the crackle of Velcro releasing, then the carpet came away. I was looking down at a two-foot-by-two-foot trapdoor, with locks at either side. I took off my coat and went to work with the crowbar, but this time it wasn’t as easy as it had been with the door. It was steel, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t raise it enough to press home the crowbar. I sat back down on the floor and considered my options. I could leave things as they were, replace the carpet, and try to come back another time, which would give Lang ample opportunity to remove anything incriminating once he realized that someone had broken into his place. I could call the cops, in which case I’d have to explain just what I thought I was doing busting into the man’s trailer to begin with. Assuming they were even able and willing to get a warrant to search Lang’s trailer, the metal box might just be storing the manuscript of his great novel, or his late mother’s dresses and jewelry, and I’d be facing jail time on top of everything else.

I called Angel.

“Where is he?”

“Bath Iron Works,” he said. “I can see him from where we are. Looks like there’s some problem with the monitors for their surveillance system. He’s checking cables and opening shit. Should be a while.”

“Disable his car,” I said. “Two tires should be enough. Then come back here.”

A half hour later, they were with me at Lang’s place. I pointed Angel to the door in the floor and he went to work. He didn’t speak once, not even when, five minutes later, he cracked the first lock and shortly after, the second. He didn’t speak when a flat metal storage shelf was revealed, containing unmarked videocassettes, DVDs, computer disks, and plastic files with transparent pages within, each page containing images of naked children, sometimes with adults and sometimes with other children. He didn’t speak when he released the shelf using a pair of clasps at either end, raising it up to uncover a boxlike cell in which was crouched a small girl wrapped in layer upon layer of blankets, her eyes blinking in the light, some old dolls scattered around her alongside chocolate bars, cookies, and a box of breakfast cereal. He didn’t speak when he saw the bucket she was forced to use as a toilet, or the circular opening in the wall, covered by a grille, that allowed air into the prison.

He only spoke when he leaned down and reached out a hand to the frightened girl.

“It’s okay now,” he said. “We won’t let nobody hurt you again.”

And the child opened her mouth and howled.

I called the cops. Angel and Louis left. There was only me and a ten-year-old girl with sallow skin whose name appeared to be Anya. She wore a cheap necklace around her neck with those four letters picked out in silver upon it. I put her in the front seat of my car and she sat there unmoving, her face turned away from the trailer, her eyes fixed on a spot on the car floor. She couldn’t tell me how long she had been held there, and I could only get confirmation of her name and her age out of her in thickly accented English before she went silent again. She said she was ten years old. I doubted that she trusted me, and I didn’t blame her.

While she sat in the car, lost in her own thoughts, I went through Raymon Lang’s album of photographs. Some of them were very recent: Anya was among the children pictured, masked men on either side of her. I looked closely at one of the photographs and thought I saw, on the arm of the man on the right, what might have been the yellow beak of a bird. I flicked back through the rest, the tones and colors changing as the pictures grew older, Polaroids taking the place of computer images before their place was taken in turn by the oldest of the photographs: black-and-white pictures, probably developed by Lang himself in a home darkroom. There were boys and girls, sometimes photographed alone and at other times with men, their identities hidden by bird masks. It was a history of abuse that spanned years, probably decades.

The oldest images in the album were photocopies, their quality poor. They showed a young girl on a bed, two men taking turns with her, the pictures cropped to remove their heads. In one of the photos, I thought I saw a tattoo on the arm of one of the men. It was blurred. I imagined that it could be cleaned up, and that when it was it would reveal an eagle.

But one of the photographs was different from the rest. I looked at it for a long time, then removed it from its plastic sleeve and carefully rearranged the other images to disguise what I had done. I tucked the picture beneath the rubber mat on the floor of my car, then sat on the cold, hard gravel with my head in my hands and waited for the police to come.

They arrived out of uniform and in a pair of unmarked cars. Anya watched them coming and curled up fetally, repeating a single word over and over in a language that I did not recognize. It was only when the doors of the first car opened, and a pair of women emerged, that Anya started to believe she might be safe. The two women approached us. The passenger door of my car was open, and they could see the little girl just as she could see them. I hadn’t wanted Anya to feel she had simply been moved from one cell to another.

The first cop squatted before her. She was slim, with long red hair tied back tightly on her head. She reminded me of Rachel.

“Hi,” she said. “My name is Jill. You’re Anya, is that right?”

Anya nodded, recognizing her name, if nothing else. Her face began to soften. Her lips turned down at the corners, and she started to cry. This wasn’t the animal response that had greeted Angel. This was something else.

Jill opened her arms to the little girl, and she fell into them, burying her face in the woman’s neck, her body jerking with the force of her sobs. Jill looked over Anya’s shoulder at me, and nodded. I turned away and left them to each other.

Chapter XXXV

Bath isn’t a very beautiful town when seen from the water, but then most places dependent upon one form of heavy industry rarely are, and nobody ever designed a shipyard with aesthetics in mind. Still, there was something majestic about its massive cranes and the great ships that the yards still turned out at a time when most of its rivals had seen shipbuilding either collapse entirely, or become a mere shadow of its former grandeur. The shipyard might have been ugly, yet it was an ugliness born not of decay but of growth, with four hundred years of history behind it, four centuries of noise and steam and sparks, of wood replaced by steel, of sons following fathers with skills that had been passed down for generations. The fate of Bath and the fate of the shipyard were forever intertwined in a bond that could never be severed.

Like any town where large numbers of people traveled to work for one major employer, parking was an issue, and the huge lot at King Street, right at the intersection with Commercial and nearest to the main north gate to the yard, was packed with cars. The first shift was about to end, and buses idled nearby, waiting to transport those who came from out of town and preferred to avoid the hassle of parking either by dispensing with their cars entirely or by leaving them in the suburbs. A sign warned that the Bath Iron Works was a defense contractor and all photography was prohibited. Over the employee entrance was another sign that read: through these gates pass the best shipbuilders in the world.

The cops had gathered at the Riverside Sports Club. There were a dozen, all told, a mix of Bath P.D. and state police, all of them in plain clothes. In addition, two cruisers lurked out of sight. The yard’s own security people had been advised that an arrest was imminent, and at their request it had been decided to take Raymon Lang as he emerged into the parking lot. He was being watched continuously, and the yard’s head of security was in direct contact with Jill Carrier, the state police detective who had taken Anya into her arms, and who was in charge of apprehending Lang. I was parked in the lot, with a clear view of the gates. I’d been allowed to tag along on condition that I stayed out of sight and took no part in what occurred. I had spun the cops quite a story to tell them how I’d come to find the little girl in Lang’s trailer, and how I had come to be at the trailer to begin with, but in the end I had to admit to lying during the viewing of Legere’s body. I was in trouble, but Carrier had been kind enough to let me see the Lang thing through to its end, even if one of the conditions she attached was to have a plainclothes officer seated beside me at all times. His name was Weintraub, and he didn’t say very much, which was fine with me.

At 3:30 p.m., the gates opened with a rumble, and men began to pour out, all dressed near identically in baseball caps and jeans, and lumberjack shirts open over T-shirts, each carrying his flask and his lunch pail. I saw Carrier speaking on her cell phone, and half a dozen of the cops broke away from the main group, Carrier leading, and began to ease their way through the throng of men. Over to the right, I saw Raymon Lang emerge from a turnstile carrying his long metal toolbox. He was dressed just like the shipbuilders and was smoking the end of a cigarette. As he took a final drag and prepared to throw the butt to the ground, he saw Carrier and the others approaching, and he knew immediately who they were and for whom they had come, a predator immediately aware of other, more powerful predators descending upon him. He dropped the toolbox and started to run, heading east away from his pursuers, but a Bath P.D. cruiser appeared and blocked the road out of the lot. Lang altered direction, weaving in and out of cars, even as the second cruiser appeared and uniforms moved in on him. Now Carrier was closing, faster and more lithe than the men she was with. She had her gun in her hand. She ordered Lang to stop. Lang turned, and reached behind his back, his hand searching for something beneath his shirt. I heard Carrier give him a final warning to put his hands up, but he did not. Then I saw the gun buck in Carrier’s hand, and heard the shot as Lang spun and fell to the ground.

He died on the way to the hospital. He did not speak as the paramedics struggled to save his life, and nothing was learned from him. They stripped him of his shirt as they placed him on a gurney, and I saw that his arms were bare of tattoos.

Raymon Lang had been unarmed. There seemed to have been no reason for him to reach behind his back, no reason for him to draw Carrier’s fire upon himself. I think, though, that in the end he just didn’t want to go to jail, perhaps out of cowardice, or perhaps because he couldn’t bear to be separated from children for the rest of his life.