The White Road

5

LOOKING BACK, I see a pattern in all that took place: a strange joining of disparate occurrences, a series of links between seemingly unconnected events stretching back into the past. I recall the honeycomb created by the imperfect layering of history, the proximity of what has gone before to that which now pertains, and I begin to understand. We are trapped not only by our own history but by the histories of all those with whom we choose to share our lives. Angel and Louis brought their pasts with them, as did Elliot Norton, as did I, and so it should have come as no surprise that just as current lives became interwoven, impacting on one another, so too pasts began to exert their pull, dragging innocent and guilty alike down beneath the earth, drowning them in brackish water, tearing them apart among the swollen buttresses of the Congaree.

And in Thomaston, the first link lay waiting to be uncovered.

The maximum security facility at Thomaston, Maine, looked reassuringly like a prison; at least, it looked reassuring as long as you weren’t a prisoner there. Anyone arriving in Thomaston with the prospect of long-term incarceration in his future was likely to feel his spirits sink at his first sight of the jail. It had high, imposing walls and the kind of solidity that came from being burned down and rebuilt a couple of times since it was first opened in the 1820s. Thomaston had been selected as the site for the state prison since it was roughly halfway up the coast and accessible by boat for the transportation of inmates, but it was now nearing the end of its working life. A Supermax facility known as the MCI, or Maine Correctional Institution, had been opened in Warren in 1992. It was designed to house the worst offenders in a state of near permanent lockdown, along with those prisoners with serious behavioral problems, and the new state prison would eventually be added on an adjoining tract of land. Until then, Thomaston was still home to about four hundred men, one of whom, since his suicide attempt, was now the preacher, Aaron Faulkner.

I recalled Rachel’s response when she heard that Faulkner had apparently tried to take his own life.

“It doesn’t fit,” she said. “He’s not that type.”

“So why did he do it? It’s hardly a cry for help.”

She chewed at her lip. “If he did it, he did it to further some aim. According to the newspaper reports, the wounds in his arms were deep, but not so deep that he was in immediate danger. He cut veins, not arteries. That’s not the action of a man who really wants to die. For some reason, he wanted out of Supermax. The question is, why?”

Now it seemed that I might have the opportunity to pose that question to the man himself.

I drove up to Thomaston after Angel and Louis had left for New York. I parked in a visitor’s space outside the main gate, then entered the reception area and gave my name to the sergeant of the guards at the desk. Behind him, and beyond the metal detector, was a wall of tinted reinforced glass concealing the main control room for the prison, where alarms, video cameras, and visitors were constantly monitored. The control room looked down on the visitation room to which, under ordinary circumstances, I would have been led for a face-to-face meeting with any of the men incarcerated in the facility.

Except these were not ordinary circumstances, and the Reverend Aaron Faulkner was far from being an ordinary prisoner.

Another guard arrived to escort me. I passed through the metal detector, attached my pass to my jacket, and was led to the elevator and the administration level on the third floor. This section of the prison was termed “soft side”: no prisoners were permitted here without escort, and it was separated from “hard side” by a system of dual air-locking doors that could not be opened simultaneously, so that even if a prisoner managed to get through the first door, the second would remain closed.

The colonel of the guards and the prison warden were both waiting for me in the warden’s office. The prison had swung between various regimes over the past thirty years: from strict discipline, rigidly enforced, through an ill-fated campaign of liberalism, disliked by the longer-serving guards, until finally it had settled at a midpoint that erred on the side of conservatism. In other words, the prisoners no longer spit at visitors and it was safe to walk through the general population, which was fine by me.

A bugle call sounded, indicating the end of rec time, and through the windows I could see blue-garbed prisoners begin to move across the yards toward their cells. Thomaston enclosed an area of eight or nine acres, including Haller Field, the prison’s playing field, its walls carved out of sheer rock. Unmarked, in a far corner beneath the walls, was the old execution site.

The warden offered me coffee, then played nervously with his own cup, spinning it around the table by its handle. The colonel of the guards, who was almost as imposing as the prison itself, remained standing and silent. If he was as uneasy as the warden, then he didn’t show it. His name was Joe Long and his face displayed all the emotion of a cigar store Indian.

“You understand that this is highly unusual, Mr. Parker,” the warden began. “Visits are usually conducted in the visiting area, not through the bars of a cell. And we rarely have the attorney general’s office calling to request that we facilitate alternative arrangements.” He stopped talking and waited for me to respond.

“The truth is, I’d prefer not to be here myself,” I said. “I don’t want to face Faulkner again, not until the trial.”

The two men exchanged a look. “Rumor is that this trial has all the makings of a disaster,” said the warden. He seemed tired and vaguely disgusted.

I didn’t answer, so he spoke to fill the silence.

“Which, I guess, is why the prosecutor is so anxious that you should talk to Faulkner,” he concluded. “You think he’ll give anything away?” The expression on his face told me that he already knew the answer but I gave him the echo he expected anyway.

“He’s too smart for that,” I said.

“Then why are you here, Mr. Parker?” asked the colonel.

It was my turn to sigh.

“Frankly, colonel, I don’t know.”

The colonel didn’t speak as he, along with a sergeant, led me through 7 Dorm, past the infirmary where old men in wheel-chairs were given the drugs they needed to maximize their life sentences. The 5 and 7 Dorms housed the older, sicker prisoners, who shared multibed rooms decorated with hand-lettered signs (“Get Use To It,” “Ed’s Bed”). In the past, older special prisoners like Faulkner might have been housed here, or placed in administrative segregation in a cell among the general population, their movements restricted, until a decision was made about them. But the main segregation unit was now at the Supermax facility, which did not have the capacity to offer psychiatric services to prisoners, and Faulkner’s attempts to injure himself appeared to require some form of psychiatric investigation. A suggestion that Faulkner be transferred to the Augusta Mental Health Institute had been rejected by the attorney general’s office, which did not want to prejudice any future jurors into making a pretrial association between Faulkner and insanity, and by Faulkner’s own lawyers, who feared that the state might use the opportunity to discreetly place their client under more elaborate observation than was possible elsewhere. Since the state regarded the county jail as unsuitable for holding Faulkner, Thomaston became the compromise solution.

Faulkner had attempted to cut his wrists with a slim ceramic blade that he had concealed in the spine of his Bible before his transfer to the MCI. He had kept it, unused, until almost three months into his incarceration. A guard on routine night rounds had spotted him and called for help just as Faulkner appeared to be losing consciousness. The result was Faulkner’s transfer to the Mental Health Stabilization Unit at the western end of Thomaston prison, where he was initially placed in the acute corridor. His clothing was taken away and he was given instead a nylon smock. He was placed under constant camera watch, as well as being monitored by a prison guard who noted any movement or conversation in a logbook. In addition, all communication was recorded electronically. After five days in acute, Faulkner was transferred to sub-acute, where he was allowed state blues to replace his smock, hygiene products (but no razors), hot meals, showers, and access to a telephone. He had commenced one-on-one counseling with a prison psychologist and had been examined by psychiatrists nominated by his legal team, but had remained unresponsive. Then he had demanded a telephone call, contacted his lawyers and asked that he be allowed to speak to me. His request that the interview should be conducted from his cell was, perhaps surprisingly, met with approval.

When I arrived in the MHSU, the guards were finishing off some chicken burgers left over from the prisoners’ lunches. In the unit’s main recreation area, the inmates stopped what they were doing and stared at me. One, a stocky, hunched man, barely five feet tall with lank dark hair, approached the bars and appraised me silently. I caught his eye, didn’t like what I felt, then looked away again. The colonel and the sergeant sat on the edge of a desk and watched as one of the unit’s guards led me down the corridor to Faulkner’s cell.

I felt the chill while I was still ten feet away from him. At first, I thought it was brought on by my own reluctance to face the old man, until I felt the guard beside me shiver slightly.

“What happened to the heating?” I asked.

“Heating’s on full blast,” he replied. “This place leaks heat like it’s blowing through a sieve, but never like this.”

He stopped while we were still out of sight of the cell’s occupant, and his voice dropped. “It’s him. The preacher. His cell is freezing. We’ve tried installing two heaters outside, but they short out every time.” He shifted uneasily on his feet. “It’s something to do with Faulkner. He just brings the temperature right down somehow. His lawyers are screaming a blue fit about the conditions, but there’s nothing we can do.”

As he concluded, something white moved to my right. The bars of the cell were almost flush with my line of sight, so that the hand that emerged appeared to have passed through a solid wall of steel. The long white fingers probed at the air, twitching and turning, as if they were gifted with the sense not only of touch, but of sight and sound as well.

And then the voice came, like iron filings falling on paper.

“Parker,” it said. “You’ve come.”

Slowly, I walked toward the cell and saw the moisture on the walls. The droplets glittered in the artificial light, gleaming like thousands of small silver eyes. A smell of damp arose from the cell and from the man who stood before me.

He was smaller than I remembered him, and his long white hair had been cut back close to his skull, but the eyes still burned with that same strange intensity. He remained horribly thin: he had not put on weight, as some inmates do when they switch to a diet of prison food. It took me a moment to realize why.

Despite the cold in the cell, Faulkner was giving off waves of heat. He should have been burning up, his face feverish, his body wracked with tremors, but instead there was no trace of sweat on his face, and no sign of discomfort. His skin was dry as paper, so that it seemed he was on the verge of igniting from within, and the flames that emerged would consume him and leave him as burned ash.

“Come closer,” he said.

Beside me, the guard shook his head.

“I’m good,” I replied.

“Are you afraid of me, sinner?”

“Not unless you can pass through steel.” My words brought back that image of the hand seemingly materializing in the air and I heard myself swallow hard.

“No,” said the old man. “I have no need of parlor tricks. I’ll be out of here, soon enough.”

“You think?”

He leaned forward and pressed his face against the cold bars.

“I know.”

He smiled and his pale tongue emerged from his mouth and licked at his dry lips.

“What do you want?”

“To talk.”

“About what?”

“Life. Death. Life after death; or, if you prefer, the death after life. Do they still come to you, Parker? The lost ones, the dead, do you still see them? I do. They come to me.” He smiled and drew in a long breath that seemed to catch in his throat, as if he were in the early stages of sexual excitement. “So many of them. They ask after you, the ones whom you have dispatched. They want to know when you’re going to join them. They have plans for you. I tell them: soon. He’ll be with you real soon.”

I didn’t respond to the taunts. Instead, I asked him why he had cut himself. He held his scarred arms up before me and looked at them, almost in surprise.

“Perhaps I wanted to cheat them of their vengeance,” he replied.

“You didn’t do a very good job.”

“That’s a matter of opinion. I’m no longer in that place, that modern hell. I have contact with others.” His eyes shone brightly. “I may even be able to save some lost souls.”

“You have anyone in mind?”

Faulkner laughed softly. “Not you, sinner, that is a certainty. You are beyond salvation.”

“Yet you asked to see me.”

The smile faded, then died.

“I have an offer for you.”

“You’ve got nothing to bargain with.”

“I have your woman,” came that low, parched voice. “I can bargain with her.”

I made no move toward him, yet he stepped back suddenly from the bars, as if the force of my stare had forced him to do so, like a shove to the chest.

“What did you say?”

“I’m offering you the safety of your woman, and your unborn child. I’m offering you a life untroubled by fear of retribution.”

“Old man, your fight now is with the state. You’d better save your bargains for the court. And if you mention those close to me again, I’ll-”

“You’ll what?” he mocked. “Kill me? You had your chance, and it won’t come again. And my fight is not only with the state. Don’t you remember: you killed my children, my family, you and your deviant colleague. What did you do to the man who killed your child, Parker? Didn’t you hunt him down? Didn’t you kill him like a mad dog? Why should you expect me to respond any differently to the death of my chidren? Or is there one rule for you, and another for the rest of humanity?” He sighed theatrically. “But I am not like you. I am not a killer.”

“What do you want, old man?”

“I want you to withdraw from the trial.”

I waited a heartbeat.

“And if I don’t?”

He shrugged. “Then I can’t be held responsible for the actions that may be taken against you, or them. Not by me, of course: despite my natural animosity toward you, I have no intention of inflicting harm upon you or those close to you. I have never hurt anybody in my life and have no intention of starting now. But there may be others who would take up my cause, unless it was made clear to them that I wished no such thing.”

I turned to the guard. “You hearing this?”

He nodded, but Faulkner merely turned his gaze impassively upon the guard. “I am merely offering to plead for no retaliation against you, but in any case Mr. Anson here is hardly in a position to be of assistance. He’s fucking a little whore behind his wife’s back. Worse, behind her parents’ back. What is she, Mr. Anson, fifteen? The law frowns upon rapists, statutory or otherwise.”

“You fuck!” Anson surged toward the bars, but I caught his arm. He spun at me, and I thought for a moment he was about to strike me, but he restrained himself and shook my hand off. I looked to my right and saw Anson’s colleagues approaching. He raised his hand to let them know that he was okay, and they stopped in their tracks.

“I thought you didn’t go in for parlor tricks,” I said.

“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?” he whispered. “The Shadow knows!” He laughed softly. “Let me go, sinner. Walk away, and I will do likewise. I am innocent of the accusations leveled against me.”

“This meeting is over.”

“No, it has only just begun. Do you remember what our mutual friend said before he died, sinner? Do you remember the words that the Traveling Man spoke?”

I didn’t reply. There was much about Faulkner that I despised, and much that I did not understand, but his knowledge of events about which he could not possibly know disturbed me more than anything else. Somehow, in some way that I was unable to recognize, he had inspired the man who killed Susan and Jennifer, confirming him on the path that he had chosen, a path that had led him at last to our door.

“Didn’t he tell you about hell? That this was hell, and we were in it? He was misguided in many ways, a flawed, unhappy man, but about that much he was correct. This is hell. When the rebel angels fell, this was the place to which they were consigned. They were blighted, their beauty taken away, and left to wander here. Don’t you fear the dark angels, Parker? You should. They know of you, and soon they will start to move against you. What you’ve faced until now is as nothing compared to what is approaching. Before them I am insignificant, a foot soldier sent ahead to prepare the way. The things that are coming for you are not even human.”

“You’re insane.”

“No,” whispered Faulkner. “I am damned for failure, but you will be damned alongside me for your complicity in that failure. They will damn you. Already they wait.”

I shook my head. Anson, the other guards, even the prison bars and walls seemed to melt away. There was only the old man and I, suspended in darkness. There was sweat on my face, a product of the heat he exuded. It was as if I had caught some terrible fever from him.

“Don’t you want to know what he said to me when he came? Don’t you care about the discussions that led to the deaths of your wife and your little girl? Somewhere deep inside of yourself, don’t you want to know of what we spoke?”

I cleared my throat. The words, when they came, felt coated in nails.

“You didn’t even know them.”

He laughed. “I didn’t need to know them. But you…Oh, we spoke of you. Through him, I came to understand you in ways that you didn’t even understand yourself. I am glad, in a way, that we had this opportunity to meet, although-”

His face darkened.

“We have both paid a high price for the intertwining of our lives. Divorce yourself now, from all of this, and there will be no more conflict between us. But continue on this road and I will be unable to stop what may occur.”

“Good-bye.”

I moved to walk away, but my struggle with Anson had brought me within Faulkner’s reach. His hand reached out and clasped my jacket and then, while I was off balance, pulled me closer to him. I turned my head instinctively, my lips apart to cry out a warning.

And Faulkner spit in my mouth.

It took me a moment to realize what had happened, and then I was striking out at him, Anson now pulling me away as I reached for the old man. The other guards came running toward us and I was hauled away, expelling the taste of Faulkner from my mouth even as he continued to howl out at me from his cell.

“Take it as a gift, Parker,” he called. “My gift to you, that you might see as I see.”

I pushed the guards away and wiped my mouth, then kept my head down as I walked past the recreation area, where those deemed to be no danger to themselves or others watched me from behind their bars. Had my head been raised, and my attention been focused elsewhere than on the preacher and what he had just done to me, then perhaps I might have seen the stooped, dark-haired man watching me more closely than the rest.

And as I left, the man named Cyrus Nairn smiled, his arms outstretched, his fingers forming a constant flow of words, until a guard looked his way and he stopped, his arms withdrawing back toward his body.

The guard knew what Cyrus was doing, but he paid him no heed. After all, Cyrus was a mute and that was what mutes did.

They signed.

I was almost at my car when I heard the sound of footsteps on the gravel behind me. It was Anson. He shifted uneasily.

“You okay?”

I nodded. I had washed my mouth out in the guards’ quarters with borrowed mouthwash, but I still felt as if some element of Faulkner was coursing through me, infecting me.

“What you heard in there-” he began.

I interrupted him. “Your private life is your own affair. It’s nothing to do with me.”

“What he said, it’s not like it seems.”

“It never is.”

A red glow began at his neck and spread into his features as if drawn by osmosis.

“Are you being smart with me?”

“Like I said, it’s your business. I do have one question. If you’re worried, you can check me for a wire.”

He considered the offer for a moment, then motioned to me to continue.

“Is what the preacher said true? I don’t care about the law or about why you’re doing it. All I want to know is: was he correct in the details?”

Anson didn’t reply. He just looked at his feet and nodded.

“Could one of the other guards have let it slip?”

“No. Nobody knows about it.”

“A prisoner, maybe? Somebody local who might have been in a position to spread a little jailhouse gossip?”

“No, I don’t believe so.”

I opened the car door. Anson seemed to feel the need to make some final macho comment. As in other things, he didn’t appear to be a man who believed in restraining his urges.

“If anyone finds out about this, you’ll be in a world of shit,” he warned. It sounded hollow, even to himself. I could see it in the mottling of his skin and the way in which he had to concentrate on straining the muscles in his neck so that they bulged over the collar of his shirt. I let him retrieve whatever dignity he thought he could salvage from the situation, then watched as he slowly padded back to the main door, seemingly reluctant to place himself in proximity to Faulkner once again.

A shadow fell across him, as if a huge winged bird had descended and were slowly circling above him. Over the prison walls, more birds seemed to hover. They were big and black, moving in lazy, drifting loops, but there was in their movements something unnatural. They glided with none of the grace or beauty of birds, for their thin bodies seemed almost to be at odds with their enormous wings, as though struggling with the pull of gravity, the torso always threatening to plummet toward the ground, the wings allowing the slide for a time before beating wildly to draw them back to the safety of the air.

Then one broke from the flock, growing larger and larger as it descended in a spiral, coming to rest at last on the top of one of the guard towers, and I could see that this was no bird, and I knew it for what it was.

The dark angel’s body was emaciated, its arms black mummified skin over slim bones, its face elongated and predatory, its eyes dark and knowing. It rested a clawed hand on the glass and its great wings, feathered in darkness, beat a low cadence against the air. Slowly, it was joined by others, each silently taking up a position on the walls and the towers, until it seemed at last that the prison was black with them. They made no move toward me but I sensed their hostility, and something more: their sense of betrayal, as if I were somehow one of them and had turned my back upon them.

“Ravens,” said a voice at my side. It was an elderly woman. She carried a brown paper bag in her hand, filled with some small items for one of the inmates: a son, perhaps, or a husband among the old men in 7 Dorm. “Never seen so many before, or so big.”

And now they were ravens: two feet tall at least, the fingered wing tips clearly visible as they moved upon the walls, calling softly to one another.

“I didn’t think they came together in those numbers,” I said.

“They don’t,” she said. “Not normally, nohow, but who’s to say what’s normal these days?”

She continued walking. I got in my car and began to drive away, but in the rearview mirror the black birds did not seem to decrease in size as I left them behind. Instead, they seemed to grow larger even as the prison receded, taking on new forms.

And I felt their eyes upon me as the preacher’s saliva colonized my body like a cancer.

My gift to you, that you might see as I see.

Apart from the prison and the prison craft shop there isn’t a whole lot to keep a casual visitor in Thomaston, but the town has a pretty good diner at its northern end, with homemade pies and bread pudding served piping hot to locals and those who come to talk after meeting their loved ones across a table or through a screen farther up the road. I bought another bottle of mouthwash at the drugstore and sluiced my mouth out in the parking lot before heading into the diner.

The small eating area with its mismatched furniture was largely empty, with the exception of two old men who sat quietly, side by side, watching the traffic go by, and a younger man in an expensively tailored suit who sat in a wooden booth by the wall, his overcoat folded neatly beside him, a fork resting among the cream and crumbs on his plate, a copy of USA Today beside it. I ordered a coffee and took a seat across from him.

“You don’t look so good,” said the man.

I felt my gaze drawn toward the window. I could not see the prison from where I sat. I shook my head, clearing it of visions of dark creatures crowding on prison walls, waiting. They were not real. They were just ravens. I was ill, nauseated by Faulkner’s assault.

They were not real.

“Stan,” I said, to distract myself. “Nice suit.”

He turned the jacket to show me the label inside. “Armani. Bought it in an outlet store. I keep the receipt in the inside pocket, just in case I get accused of corruption.”

My coffee arrived, and the waitress retreated behind the counter to read a magazine. Somewhere, a radio played sickly M.O.R. The Rush revival begins here.

Stan Ornstead was an assistant district attorney, part of the team assembled to prosecute the Faulkner case. It was Ornstead who had convinced me to face Faulkner, with the full knowledge of deputy D.A. Andrus, and who had arranged for the interview to be conducted at the cell so that I could see the conditions that he appeared to have created for himself. Stan was only a few years younger than I was and was considered a hot prospect for the future. He was going places; he just wasn’t going there fast enough for him. Faulkner, he had hoped, might have changed that situation, except, as the warden had indicated, the Faulkner case was turning into something very bad indeed, something that threatened to drag everyone involved down with it.

“You look kind of shaken up,” Stan said, after I’d taken a couple of fortifying sips from my coffee.

“He has that effect on people.”

“He didn’t give too much away.”

I froze, and he raised his palms in a what-you-gonna-do? gesture.

“They mike sub-acute cells?” I asked.

“They don’t, if you mean the prison authorities.”

“But somebody else has taken up the slack.”

“The cell has been lojacked. Officially, we know nothing about it.” “Lojacking” was the term used to describe a surveillance operation not endorsed by a court. More particularly, it was the term used by the FBI to describe any such operation.

“The Feebs?”

“The trenchcoats don’t have too much faith in us. They’re worried that Faulkner may walk on our beef so they want to get as much as they can, while they can, in case of federal charges or a double prosecution. All conversations with his lawyers, his doctors, his shrink, even his nemesis-that’s you, in case you didn’t know-are being recorded. The hope is that, at the very least, he’ll give something away that might lead them to others like him, or even give them a lead to other crimes he might have committed. All inadmissible, of course, but useful if it works.”

“And will he walk?”

Ornstead shrugged.

“You know what he’s claiming: he was kept a virtual prisoner for decades and had no part in, or knowledge of, any crimes committed by the Fellowship or those associated with it. There’s nothing to link him directly to any of the killings, and that underground nest of rooms he lived in had bolts on the outside.”

“He was at my house when they tried to kill me.”

“You say, but you were woozy. You told me yourself you couldn’t see straight.”

“Rachel saw him.”

“Yes, she did, but she’d just been hit on the head and had blood in her eyes. She herself admits that she can’t remember a lot of what was said, and he wasn’t there for what followed.”

“There’s a hole in the ground at Eagle Lake where seventeen bodies were found, the remains of his flock.”

“He says fighting broke out between the families. They turned on each other, then on his own family. They killed his wife. His children responded in kind. He claims he was over in Presque Isle on the day they were killed.”

“He assaulted Angel.”

“Faulkner denies it, says his kids did it and forced him to watch. Anyway, your friend says he won’t testify and even if we subpoena him any lawyer worth more than a dollar an hour would tear him apart. A credible witness he is not. And, with respect, you’re hardly an ideal witness either.”

“Why would that be?”

“You’ve been pretty free with that cannon of yours, but just because charges have been let slide doesn’t mean that they’ve disappeared off everybody’s radar. You can be damn sure that Faulkner’s legal team knows all about you. They’ll push the angle that you came tearing in there, shooting the place up and the old man was lucky to escape with his life.”

I pushed my coffee cup away. “Is that why you brought me here, to rip my story to shreds?”

“Do it here, do it in court, makes no difference. We’re in trouble. And maybe we have other worries.”

I waited.

“His lawyers have confirmed that they’re going to petition for a Supreme Court review of the bail decision within the next ten days. We think that the available judge may be Wilton Cooper, and that’s not good news.”

Wilton Cooper was only a few months shy of retirement, but he would continue to be a thorn in the side of the AG’s office until then. He was obstinate, unpredictable, and had a personal animosity toward the AG, the source of which was lost in the mists of time. He had also spoken out in the past against preventive bail and was quite capable of defending the rights of the accused at the cost of the rights of society in general.

“If Cooper takes the review, it could go either way,” said Ornstead. “Faulkner’s claims are bullshit, but we need time to amass the evidence to undermine them and it could be years before a trial. And you’ve seen his cell: we could keep him at the bottom of a volcano and it would still be cold. His lawyers have got independent experts who will claim that Faulkner’s continued incarceration is endangering his health, and that he will die if he remains in custody. If we move him to Augusta we could shoot ourselves in the foot in the event of an insanity plea. We don’t have the facilities for him at the Supermax, and where do we put him if we move him out of Thomaston? County? I don’t think so. So what we have right now is an upcoming trial with no reliable witnesses, insufficient evidence to make the case watertight, and a defendant who may be dead before we can even get him on the stand. Cooper would just be the icing on the cake.”

I found that I was clutching the handle of my coffee cup so tightly that it had left a mark on the palm of my hand. I released my grip and watched the blood flow back into the white areas. “If he’s bailed, he’ll flee,” I said. “He won’t wait around for a trial.”

“We don’t know that.”

“Yes, we do.”

We were both hunched over the table, and we both seemed to realize it simultaneously. Over near the window, the two old men had turned to watch us, their attention attracted by the tension between us. I leaned back, then looked at them. They returned to watching the traffic.

“Anyway,” said Ornstead, “even Cooper won’t set a bail below seven figures and we don’t believe that Faulkner has access to that level of funds.”

All of the Fellowship’s assets had been frozen, and the AG’s office was trying to follow the paper trail that might lead to other accounts undiscovered so far. But somebody was paying Faulkner’s lawyers, and a defense fund had been opened into which dispiriting numbers of right-wing crazies and religious nuts were pouring money.

“Do we know who’s organizing the defense fund?” I asked. Officially, the fund was the responsibility of a firm of lawyers, Muren amp; Associates, in Savannah, Georgia, but it was a pretty low-rent operation. There had to be more to it than a bunch of Southern shysters working out of an office with plastic chairs. Faulkner’s own legal team, led by Grim Jim Grimes, was separate from it. Stone features apart, Jim Grimes was one of the best lawyers in New England. He could talk his way out of cancer, and he didn’t come cheap.

Ornstead blew out a large breath. It smelled of coffee and nicotine.

“That’s the rest of the bad news. Muren had a visitor a couple of days back, a guy by the name of Edward Carlyle. Phone records show that the two of them have been in daily contact since this thing started, and Carlyle is a cosignatory on the fund checking account.”

I shrugged. “Name doesn’t ring a bell.”

Ornstead tapped his fingers lightly on the table in a delicate cadence.

“Edward Carlyle is Roger Bowen’s right-hand man. And Roger Bowen is-”

“A creep,” I finished. “And a racist.”

“And a neo-Nazi,” added Ornstead. “Yup, clock stopped sometime around 1939 for Bowen. He’s quite a guy. Probably has shares in gas ovens in the hope that things might pick up again on the old ‘final solution’ front. As far as we can tell, Bowen is the one behind the defense fund. He’s been keeping a low profile these last few years but something has drawn him out from under his rock. He’s making speeches, appearing at rallies, passing around the collection plate. Seems to me like he wants Faulkner back on the streets pretty bad.”

“Why?”

“Well, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”

“Bowen’s base is in South Carolina, isn’t it?”

“He moves between South Carolina and Georgia, but spends most of his time somewhere up by the Chattooga River. Why, you planning on visiting down there?”

“Maybe.”

“I ask why?”

“A friend in need.”

“The worst kind. Well, while you’re down there you could always ask Bowen why Faulkner is so important to him, though I wouldn’t recommend it. I don’t imagine you’re top of his wish list of friends he hasn’t met yet.”

“I’m not top of anybody’s wish list.”

Ornstead stood and patted me on the shoulder.

“You’re breaking my heart.”

I walked with him to the door. His car was parked right outside.

“You heard everything, right?” I asked. I assumed that Stan had been listening in to all that had passed between Faulkner and me.

“Yeah. We talking about the guard?”

“Anson.”

“Doesn’t concern me. You?”

“She’s underage. I don’t believe that Anson is going to be an influence for the better in her life.”

“No, I guess not. We can get someone to look into it.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

“Done. Now I got a question for you. What happened in there? Sounded like there was a scuffle.”

Despite the coffee, I could still taste the mouthwash.

“Faulkner spit in my mouth.”

“Shit. You going to need a test?”

“I doubt it, but I feel like swallowing battery acid to burn it out of my mouth and insides.”

“Why’d he do it? To get you pissed at him?”

I shook my head.

“No, he told me it was a gift, to help me see more clearly.”

“See what?”

I didn’t answer, but I knew.

He wanted me to see what was waiting for him, and what was coming for me.

He wanted me to see his kind.

6

THE MILITANT RACIST movement has never been particularly significant in terms of size. Its hard-core membership is probably 25,000 at most, augmented by maybe a further 150,000 active sympathizers and possibly another 400,000 fly-by-nighters, who offer neither money nor manpower but will tell you all about the threat to the white race posed by the coloreds and the Jews if you loosen them up with enough booze. More than half of the hard core comprises Klan members with the remainder consisting of skinheads and assorted Nazis, and the level of cooperation between the groups is pretty minimal, sometimes descending into a competitiveness bordering on outright aggression. Membership is rarely constant: people move in and out of the groups on a regular basis, depending on the requirements of employers, enemies, or the courts.

But at the head of each group is a cadre of lifelong activists, and even as the names of their movements change, even as they fight amongst themselves and shatter into smaller and smaller splinters, those leaders remain. They are missionaries, zealots, proselytizers for the cause, spreading the gospel of intolerance at state fairs, rallies, and conferences, through newsletters and pamphlets and late-night radio shows.

Of these men, Roger Bowen was one of the longest serving, and also one of the most dangerous. Born to a Baptist family in Gaffney, South Carolina, by the foothills of the Blue Ridge, he had passed through the ranks of any number of far-right organizations, including some of the most notorious neo-Nazi groups of the past twenty years. In 1983, at the age of twenty-four, Bowen had been one of three young men questioned without charge about their involvement in the Order, the secret society formed by the racist Robert Matthews and linked to Aryan Nations. During 1983 and 1984 the Order carried out a series of armored car and bank robberies to fund its operations, which included assorted arson attacks, bombings, and counterfeiting efforts. The Order was also responsible for the murders of the Denver talk show host Alan Berg and a man named Walter West, a member of the Order who was suspected of betraying its secrets. Eventually, all members of the Order were apprehended, with the exception of Matthews himself, who was killed during a shoot-out with FBI agents in 1984. Since there was no evidence to link Bowen to its activities he escaped prosecution, and the truth about the extent of Bowen’s involvement in the Order died with Matthews. Despite its comparatively small force of activists, the FBI’s operations against the Order had consumed one quarter of the bureau’s total manpower resources. The Order’s size had worked in its favor, making it difficult to infiltrate by outsiders and informers, the unfortunate Walter West excepted. It was a lesson that Bowen never forgot.

Bowen then drifted for a time before finding a home of sorts in the Klan movement, although by then it had been largely defanged by the activities of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program: klaverns had folded, its prestige had plummeted, and its average age had begun to drop as older members left or died. The result was that the Klan’s traditionally uneasy relationship with the trappings of neo-Nazism became less ambiguous, the new bloods being less fussy about such matters than the more senior members. Bowen joined Bill Wilkinson’s Invisible Empire, Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, but by the time the Invisible Empire disbanded in 1993, following an expensive lawsuit, Bowen had already established his own Klan, the White Confederates.

Except Bowen didn’t go recruiting members like the other Klans and even the Klan name was little more than a flag of convenience for him. The White Confederates never numbered more than a dozen individuals, but they wielded power and influence beyond their size and contributed significantly to the ongoing Nazification of the Klan in the 1980s, further blurring the traditional lines between the Klansmen and the neo-Nazis.

Bowen wasn’t a Holocaust denier either: he liked the idea of the Holocaust, the possibility of a force capable of murder on a previously unthought of scale, murder with a sense of order and planning behind it. It was this, more than any moral qualms, that had led Bowen to distance himself from the casual outrages, the sporadic outbursts of violence, that were endemic to the movement. At the annual Stone Mountain rally in Georgia he had even publicly condemned one incident, the beating to death of a middle-aged black man named Bill Perce in North Carolina by a group of drunken klavern rejects, only to hear himself booed off the platform. Since then, Bowen had avoided Stone Mountain. They didn’t understand him and he didn’t need them, although he continued to work behind the scenes, supporting occasional Klan marches in small towns on the Georgia-South Carolina border. Even if, as frequently occurred, only a handful of men took part, the threat of a march still gained newspaper coverage and bleats of outrage from liberal sheep, and contributed to the atmosphere of intimidation and distrust that Bowen needed for his work to continue. The White Confederates was largely a front, a piece of theater akin to the waves of a magician’s wand before a trick is performed. The real trickery was being performed out of sight, and the movement of the wand was not only unconnected with the illusion but largely immaterial to it.

For it was Bowen who was trying to heal the old enmities; Bowen who was building bridges over the divides between the Christian Patriots and the Aryans, the skinheads and the Klans; Bowen who was reaching out to the more vocal, and extreme, members of the Christian right; Bowen who understood the importance of unity, of intercommunication, of extending the funding base; and Bowen who now felt that, by bringing Faulkner under his protection, he could convince those who believed the preacher’s story to redirect their money toward him. The Fellowship had pulled in more than $500,000 dollars in the year before Faulkner’s arrest. It was small beans compared to the kind of cash flow enjoyed by the better-known televangelists but it represented serious income to Bowen and his kind. Bowen had watched the money flowing into Faulkner’s appeal fund: there was already enough to meet 10 percent of a low seven-figure bail and then some, and it was still coming in, but no bondsman would be crazy enough to cover Faulkner’s bail in the event of a review finding in his favor. Bowen had other plans, other irons in the fire. If they played it right, Faulkner could be out and vanished before the end of the month, and if rumors persisted that Bowen had squirreled him away to safety, then so much the better for Bowen. In fact, it wouldn’t much matter after that if the preacher lived or died. It would be enough that he remained unseen, and he could do that just as easily below ground as above it.

But Bowen also felt an admiration for what the old preacher and his Fellowship had achieved. Without resorting to the bank jobs that had undermined the Order, and with manpower never numbering more than four or five persons, he had carried out a campaign of murder and intimidation against soft targets for the best part of three decades and had covered his tracks brilliantly. Even the FBI and the ATF were still having problems connecting the Fellowship to the deaths of abortion doctors, outspoken homosexuals, Jewish leaders, and the other bugbears of the far right whose annihilation Faulkner was believed to have authorized.

It was strange, but Bowen had barely considered the possibility of allying himself to Faulkner’s cause until Kittim had appeared. Kittim was a legend among the extreme right, a folk hero. He had come to Bowen shortly after Faulkner’s arrest, and from there, the idea of involving himself with the case had just come naturally to Bowen. And if he couldn’t remember exactly what Kittim was reputed to have done, or even where he had come from, well, that hardly mattered. That was the way with folk heroes, wasn’t it? They were only partly real, but with Kittim beside him, Bowen felt a new sense of purpose, of near invincibility.

It was so strong that he hardly noticed the fear that he felt in the man’s presence.

Bowen’s admiration, spurred into action by Kittim’s arrival, had apparently appealed to Faulkner’s ego, for through his lawyers the preacher had agreed to nail his colors to Bowen’s mast, had even offered up funds from hidden accounts, untraceable by his persecutors, if Bowen could arrange his disappearance. More than anything else, the old man did not want to die in jail; he would rather be hunted for the remainder of his life than rot behind bars while awaiting trial. Faulkner had asked for just one further favor. Bowen had been kind of annoyed at this, given the fact that he was already offering to hide Faulkner from the law, but when Faulkner told him what he wanted Bowen had relaxed. It was just a small favor, after all, and would give Bowen almost as much pleasure as it would give Faulkner.

Bowen believed that, in Kittim, he had found just the man for the job, but he was wrong.

In truth, the man had found him.

Bowen’s truck pulled into the small clearing before the hut, just across the South Carolina state line in eastern Tennessee. The building was dark wood, four rough-hewn steps leading to a porch, two narrow windows on either side. It looked like a blockhouse, designed with defense in mind.

A man sat on a rocking chair to the right of the door, smoking a cigarette. This was Carlyle. He had short curly hair that had begun to recede when he was in his early twenties but had mysteriously arrested its retreat in his thirties, leaving him with a clown wig of fair hair around his domed skull. He was in good condition, like most of those whom Bowen kept close. He drank little, and Bowen couldn’t remember ever having seen him smoke before. He looked tired and ill. Bowen noticed the smell as he approached: vomit.

“You okay?” asked Bowen.

Carlyle wiped his lips with his fingers and examined the tips for any detritus. “Why? I got shit on me?”

“No, but you smell bad.”

Carlyle took a last drag on the cigarette, then carefully extinguished the butt on the sole of his boot. When he was satisfied that it was cold, he tore it to shreds and let the breeze carry the remains away.

“Where did we get this guy, Roger?” he asked when he was done.

“Who? Kittim?”

“Yeah, Kittim.”

“He’s a legend,” said Bowen. It had the sound of a mantra about it.

Carlyle ran a hand over his bare pate. “I know that. I mean, I think I know.” His features collapsed into uncertainty, then rebuilt themselves into an expression of disgust. “Anyway, wherever he came from, he’s a freak.”

“We need him.”

“We got by okay without him until now.”

“This is different. Did you get anything out of the guy?”

Carlyle shook his head.

“He doesn’t know anything. He’s just muscle.”

“You sure?”

“Believe me, if he knew anything he’d have told us by now. But that sick fuck keeps at him.”

Bowen wasn’t a great believer in Jewish conspiracies. Sure, there were wealthy Jews with power and influence, but they were pretty scattered when you looked at the big picture. Still, if Faulkner was to be believed, some old Jews in New York had tried to have him killed, and had dispatched a man to do it. That man was now dead, but Faulkner wanted to know who had sent him so that, when the time came, he could revenge himself upon them, and Bowen was of the opinion that it couldn’t hurt to know what they were up against. That was why they had taken the kid, pulled him from the streets of Greenville after he drew attention to himself by asking the wrong questions in the wrong places. After that, he had driven him up here, gagged and bound in the trunk of a car, and handed over to Kittim.

“Where is he?”

“Out back.”

As Bowen moved to pass him, Carlyle extended an arm to block his way.

“You eaten yet?”

“Not much.”

“Lucky you.”

The arm dropped. Bowen continued on around the side of the house until he came to an enclosed pen that had once been used to hold pigs. The stench of them still hung around it, thought Bowen, until he saw what lay on the bare ground at the center of the pen and realized that what he was smelling was not animal, but human.

The young man was naked and staked out in the sun. He had a short, neatly-trimmed beard, and his black hair was pasted to his skull with sweat and mud. A leather belt had been tied around his head. His teeth were visible, gritted against it, as the wounds he had suffered were widened and probed. The man stooped over him wore coveralls and gloves as he worked on the body, his fingers exploring the new cavities and apertures he had created with his blade, pausing occasionally as the staked man tensed and made soft mewling sounds from behind the gag before continuing his work. Bowen didn’t know how he had kept the kid on the ground alive, let alone conscious, but then Kittim was a man of many talents. He rose at the sound of Bowen’s approach, his body unfolding like that of a disturbed insect, and turned to face him.

Kittim was tall, six-two or six-three. The cap and glasses that he habitually wore almost obscured his features entirely, intentionally so because there was something wrong with Kittim’s skin. Bowen didn’t know precisely what it was, and he had never worked up the courage to ask, but Kittim’s face was a pinkish-purple color, with wispy clumps of hair attached to the flaking skull. He reminded Bowen of a marabou stork, built to feed on the dead and the dying. His eyes, when he chose to reveal them, were a very dark green, like a cat’s eyes. Beneath the coveralls his body was hard and slim, almost emaciated. His nails were neatly trimmed, and he was clean shaven. He smelled vaguely of meat and Polo aftershave.

And sometimes of burning oil.

Bowen looked beyond him to where the young man lay, then returned his attention to Kittim. Carlyle was right, of course: Kittim was a freak, and of Bowen’s small retinue only Landron Mobley, who was himself little better than a mad dog, appeared to feel any kind of affinity for him. It was not merely the torments being visited on the Jew that disgusted Bowen, but the sense of carnality that accompanied them. Kittim was aroused. Bowen could see it straining against the coveralls. For a moment, it caused anger to overcome Bowen’s underlying fear of the man.

“You enjoying yourself?” asked Bowen.

Kittim shrugged. “You asked me to find out what he knew.” His voice was like a broom sweeping across a dusty stone floor.

“Carlyle says he knows nothing.”

“Carlyle isn’t in charge here.”

“That’s right. I am, and I’m asking you if you’ve found out anything useful from him.”

Kittim stared at him from behind his shades, then turned his back on Bowen.

“Leave me,” he said, as he knelt to recommence his exploration of the young man. “I have not finished.”

Instead of departing, Bowen drew his gun from its holster. His thoughts were once again concentrated on this strange deformed man and the wraithlike nature of him and his past. It was as if they had conjured him up, he thought, as if he were a personification of all their hatreds and fears, an abstraction made flesh. He had come to Bowen, offering his services, and the knowledge of him had begun to seep into Bowen like gas into a room, half-remembered tales assuming a new substance around him, and Bowen had been unable to turn him away. What was it Carlyle had said? He was a legend, but why? What had he done?

And he didn’t seem interested in the cause, in the niggers and the faggots and the kikes whose very existence gave most of his kind the fuel they needed for their hatred. Instead, Kittim seemed distant from such matters, even while he was inflicting torments on a naked victim. Now Kittim was trying to tell him what to do, ordering him to leave his presence like Bowen was just some house nigger with a tray. It was about time that Bowen regained control of this situation and showed everybody who was boss. He stepped lightly around Kittim, then raised the gun and pointed it at the young man on the ground.

“No,” said Kittim softly.

Bowen looked over and-

And Kittim shimmered.

A sudden wave of intense heat seemed to pass over him, causing him to ripple behind its passage, and for an instant he was both Kittim and something else, something dark and winged, with eyes like those of a dead bird, reflecting the world without revealing any life within. His skin was loose and withered, the bones visible beneath it, the legs slightly bent, the feet elongated. The smell of oil grew stronger and, for an instant, Bowen understood. By doubting him, by allowing his own feelings of anger to break through, he had somehow permitted his mind to register an aspect of Kittim, the truth of him, that had remained hidden until now.

He’s old, thought Bowen, older than he looks, older than any of us could have imagined. He has to concentrate to hold himself together. That’s why his skin is the way it is, why he walks so slowly, why he keeps himself apart. He has to struggle to maintain this form. He’s not human. He is-

Bowen took a step back as the figure reconstituted itself, until once again he was staring at a man in coveralls with blood on his gloved hands.

“What’s wrong?” asked Kittim, and even in his confusion and fear Bowen knew better than to answer truthfully. In fact, he couldn’t have told the truth even if he wanted to because his mind was doing some pretty rapid work to shore up his threatened sanity and now he wasn’t sure what the truth was. Kittim couldn’t have shimmered. He couldn’t have changed. He couldn’t be what Bowen had thought, for an instant, he might be: a thing dark and winged, like a foul, mutated bird.

“It’s nothing,” said Bowen. He stared dumbly at the gun in his hand, then put it away.

“Then let me get back to work,” said Kittim, and the last thing Bowen saw was the fading hope in the eyes of the young man on the ground before Kittim’s thin form blocked him from view.

Bowen brushed past Carlyle on his way back to the car.

“Hey!” Carlyle reached out to grasp him, then drew back and allowed his hand to fall as he saw Bowen’s face.

“Your eyes,” he said. “What happened to your eyes?”

But Bowen didn’t reply. Later, he would tell Carlyle what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen, and in the aftermath of what was to come Carlyle would tell the investigators. But for now Bowen kept it to himself and his face registered no emotion as he drove away, not even when he stared into the rearview mirror and saw that the capillaries in his eyeballs had burst, his pupils now black holes at the center of red pools of blood.

Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn retreated back into the darkness of his cell. He was happier here than outside, mingling with the others. They didn’t understand him, couldn’t understand him. Dumb: that was the word a whole lot of people had used about Cyrus throughout his life. Dumb. Dummy. Mute. Schizo. Cyrus didn’t care too much about what they said. He knew that he was smart. He also, deep down inside, suspected that he was crazy.

Cyrus had been abandoned by his mother at nine and tormented by his stepfather until he was finally incarcerated for the first time at the age of seventeen. He could still recall some details about his mother: not love or tenderness-no, never that-but the look in her eyes as she grew to despise what she had brought into the world in the course of a difficult, complicated birth had remained with him. The boy was born hunched, unable to stand fully upright; his knees buckled as if he were laboring constantly beneath some unseen weight. His forehead was too large, overshadowing dark eyes, the irises nearly black. He had a flattened nose with elongated nostrils, and a small, rounded chin. His mouth was very full, the upper lip overhanging the lower, and it remained slightly open even in repose, making Cyrus appear always to be on the verge of biting.

And he was strong. There was thick muscle on his arms and shoulders and chest, tapering down to a narrow waist before exploding again at his buttocks and thighs. His strength had been his salvation; had he been weaker, prison would have broken him long before now.

The first sentence was handed down for aggravated burglary after he had entered the house of a woman in Houlton, armed with a homemade knife. The woman had locked herself in her room and called the cops, and they’d caught Cyrus as he tried to escape through a bathroom window. Through signing, Cyrus had told them that he was just looking for money to buy beer, and they’d believed him. He’d still pulled three years, though, and served eighteen months.

It was in the course of an examination by the prison psychiatrist that he was first diagnosed as schizophrenic, exhibiting what the psychiatrist told him were classic “positive” symptoms: hallucinations, delusions, strange patterns of thinking and self-expression, hearing voices. Cyrus had nodded along as all of this was explained to him through a signer, although he could hear perfectly well. He simply chose not to reveal the fact, much as it seemed that he had chosen, one night a long, long time before, no longer to speak.

Or perhaps the choice had been made for him. Cyrus was never entirely sure.

He was prescribed medication, the so-called first-generation anti-psychotics, but he hated their debilitating side effects and quickly learned to disguise the fact that he was no longer taking them. But more than the side effects, Cyrus hated the loneliness that came with the drugs. He despised the silence. When the voices resumed, he embraced them and welcomed them as old friends now returned from some faraway place with strange new tales to tell. When he was eventually released, he could barely hear the standard patter of the guard processing him over the clamor of the voices, excited at the prospect of freedom and the resumption of the plans they had so carefully rehearsed for so long.

Because for Cyrus, the Houlton affair had been a failure on two accounts: In the first place, he’d been caught. In the second, he hadn’t gone into the house for money.

He’d gone in for the woman.

Cyrus Nairn lived in a small cabin on a patch of land that his mother’s family had owned, close by the Androscoggin River, about ten miles south of Wilton. In the old days, people used to store fruit and vegetables in hollows dug into the bank, where the temperature would keep them fresh long after they’d been plucked or dug up. Cyrus had found these old hollows and strengthened them, then disguised the entrances using bushes and timber. The hollows had served as his retreat from the world when he was a boy. Sometimes, it almost seemed to him that he had been created to fit into them, that they were his natural home. The curvature of his spine; the short, thick neck; his legs, slightly bent at the knees: all seemed expressly designed to enable him to fit into those places beneath the riverbank. Now, the cold hollows hid other things, and even during the summer, the natural refrigeration meant that he had to go down on his hands and knees and sniff the earth before he could catch a hint of what lay beneath.

After Houlton, Cyrus had learned to be more careful. Each knife he made was used only once, then burned, and the blade buried far from his own property. In the beginning, he could go for a year, maybe more, without taking one, satisfying himself by crouching in the cool silence of the hollows, before the voices got too loud and he had to go a-hunting once more. Then, as he grew older, the voices became more insistent, their demands coming closer and closer together, until he tried to take the woman in Dexter, and she screamed and the men came and beat him. He got five years for that, but now the end was in sight. The parole board had been presented with the results of Cyrus’s Hare PCL-R evaluation, the test developed by a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia that was now widely regarded as the standard indicator of recidivism, violence, and the subject’s response to therapeutic intervention, and the board’s reaction had been positive. Within days Cyrus would be free to go, free to return to the river and his beloved hollows. That was why he liked the cell, the darkness of it, especially at night when he could close his eyes and imagine himself there once again, among the women and the girls, the perfumed girls.

He owed his release in part to his natural intelligence, for Cyrus, had the prison psychiatric services studied him further, would have provided some support for the theory that the genetic factors that contributed to his condition had also endowed him with a creative brilliance. But Cyrus had also received help in recent weeks from an unexpected source.

The old man had arrived in the MHSU, had watched Cyrus from behind his bars, and his fingers had begun to move.

Hello.

It had been so long since Cyrus had signed to another person other than a head doctor that he had almost forgotten how to converse, but slowly, then faster, he began to sign in return.

Hello. My name is-

Cyrus. I know your name.

How do you know my name?

I know all about you, Cyrus. You, and your little larder.

Cyrus had pulled back then and returned to his cell, where he lay huddled in the corner for the rest of the day while the voices shouted and argued over one another. But the next day he returned to the edge of the recreation unit, and the old man was waiting for him. He knew. He knew that Cyrus would come back to him.

Cyrus began to sign.

What do you want?

I have something to give you, Cyrus.

What?

The old man paused, then made the sign, the one that Cyrus made to himself in the darkness, when it all threatened to become too much for him and he needed some hope, something to cling to, something for which to yearn.

A woman, Cyrus. I’m going to give you a woman.

Barely yards away from where Cyrus lay, Faulkner knelt in his cell and prayed for success. He knew that by coming here he would find one that he could use. The ones in the other prison were no good to him; they were long-term prisoners, and Faulkner was not interested in long-termers. So he had injured himself, necessitating the transfer to the Mental Health Stabilization Unit and access to a more suitable population. He had expected it to be more difficult, but he had spotted Nairn instantly and had felt his pain. Faulkner tightened his fingers together, and the whispering of his prayers increased in volume.

The guard Anson approached the cell quietly, then paused as he stared down at the kneeling figure. His hand flicked in a neat, practiced movement and the ligature passed over the head of the praying man. Then, with a swift glance over his shoulder, Anson tugged and Faulkner was dragged, retching and clawing, to the bars. Anson pulled him up, then reached through the bars and gripped the old man’s chin.

“You fuck!” hissed Anson, keeping his voice low, for he had seen the men in Faulkner’s cell before the preacher was moved and suspected that some form of monitoring was in progress. Already, he had spoken to Marie and warned her to say nothing of their relationship in case his suspicions were correct. “You ever open your mouth ’bout me again and I’ll finish what you started, you understand?” His fingers dug into Faulkner’s dry, hot skin and felt the bone beneath, fragile and waiting to be broken. He released his grip, then allowed the rubber cord to slacken before he jerked it back again, banging the old man’s head painfully against the bars.

“And you better watch what you eat, you old cocksucker, because I’m gonna be playing with your food before you get it, ya hear?” Then he slipped the cord over Faulkner’s head and allowed him to fall to the ground. The preacher raised himself slowly and staggered to his bunk, drawing deep ragged breaths and touching the indentation on his neck. He listened as the guard’s footsteps faded away, then remaining seated and keeping his distance from the bars, he returned to his prayers.

As he sat, something on the floor seemed to draw his attention and his head turned to follow its movements. He watched it for a time then brought his foot down hard and firm upon it, before scraping the remains of the spider from his shoe.

“Boy,” he whispered, “I warned you. I warned you to keep your pets under control.”

From close by came a sound that might have been the hissing of steam or an exhalation of barely restrained rage.

And in his own cell, half asleep, the remembered smell of damp earth flooding his senses, Cyrus Nairn stirred as another voice was added to the chorus in his head. This one had been coming to him more and more regularly in the previous weeks, ever since he and the preacher had begun to communicate and share the details of their lives. Cyrus now welcomed the stranger’s arrival, feeling him stretch searching tendrils through his mind, establishing his presence and silencing the others.

Hello, said Cyrus, hearing in his head his own voice, the one no one else had heard in so many years, and signing his words by habit with his fingers.

Hello Cyrus, the visitor responded.

Cyrus smiled. He wasn’t sure what to call the visitor, because the visitor had lots of names, old names that Cyrus had never heard spoken before. But there were two that he used more than others.

Sometimes he called himself Leonard.

Mostly he called himself Pudd.

7

THAT NIGHT RACHEL watched me, unspeaking, while I undressed.

“Are you going to tell me what happened?” she asked at last.

I lay down beside her and felt her move in close to me, her belly touching my upper thigh. I placed my hand upon her and tried to sense the life inside.

“How are you feeling?” I asked.

“Great. Only puked a little this morning.” She grinned and poked me. “But then I came in and kissed ya!”

“Lovely. It’s a testament to your personal hygiene that I didn’t notice it being any more unpleasant than usual.”

Rachel pinched me hard at the waist, then raised her hand so that she could run it through my hair. “Well? You still haven’t answered my question.”

“He said that he wanted me-us, I guess, since you’ll be called too-to withdraw from the case and refuse to testify. In return, he promised to let us be.”

“Do you believe him?”

“No, and even if I did, it wouldn’t change anything. Stan Ornstead has doubts about my suitability as a witness, but I think he’s just edgy and those doubts really don’t extend to you anyway. We’ll be testifying whether we want to or not, but I got the feeling that Faulkner didn’t really care about our testimony and that he was pretty certain of making bail after the review. I don’t understand why he called me to him except to taunt me. Maybe he’s so bored in prison that he thought I’d provide some amusement.”

“And did you?”

“A little, but he’s kind of easily amused. There were other things too: his cell is freezing, Rachel. It’s almost as if his body is drawing all the warmth from its surroundings. And he baited one of the guards about a relationship with a young girl.”

“Gossip?”

“No. The guard reacted like he’d been struck in the face. I don’t think he’d shared that information with anybody. According to Faulkner, the girl is underage, and the guard confirmed as much to me later.”

“What are you going to do?”

“About the girl? I asked Stan Ornstead to set something in motion. That’s all I can do.”

“So what’s your conclusion about Faulkner? That he’s psychic?”

“No, not psychic. I don’t think there’s a word for what Faulkner is. Before I left him, he spit at me. Actually, he spit into my mouth.”

I felt her stiffen.

“Yeah, that’s kind of how I feel about it too. There isn’t enough mouthwash in the world to take that one away.”

“Why would he do that?”

“He told me it would help me to see better.”

“See what better?”

This was delicate ground. I almost told her then: about the black car, about the things on the prison walls, about the visions of lost children that I’d had in the past, about Susan and Jennifer visiting me from some place beyond. I so badly wanted to tell her, but I could not, and I did not understand why this should be. She sensed some of it, I thought, but chose not to ask. And if she had asked, how could I have explained it to her? I was still unsure myself about the nature of the gift that I had. I did not like to think that something in me drew these lost souls to me. It was easier, sometimes, to try to believe that it was a psychological disturbance, not a psychic one.

I was tempted too to call Elliot Norton and tell him that his troubles were his own, that I wanted no part of them, but I had made a promise to him. And as long as Faulkner remained behind bars, awaiting a decision on his bail, I believed that Rachel would be safe. Faulkner, I felt certain, would do nothing that might endanger the possibility of his release.

The black car was another matter. It was neither a dream, nor a reality. It was as if, for a brief moment, something that resided in a blind spot of my vision had drifted into sight, that a slight alteration of perception had permitted me to see that which usually existed unseen. And, for reasons that I did not fully understand, I believed that the car, real or imagined, did not represent a direct threat. Its purpose was more indistinct, its symbolism more ambiguous. Still, the thought that the Scarborough PD would be watching the house provided an added consolation, even if I thought it unlikely that police officers would be reporting sightings of a battered black Coupe de Ville.

There was also the matter of Roger Bowen. No good could come of a confrontation with him, but I was curious to see him, maybe to dig around a little and see what I could come up with. Most of all I felt a convergence of events, of which Elliot Norton’s case was a distinct yet linked part. I’m not a great believer in coincidence. I have found in the past that what passes for coincidence is usually life’s way of telling you that you’re not paying enough attention.

“He thinks the dead talk to him,” I said at last. “He thinks that there are deformed angels hovering above Thomaston prison. That’s what he wanted me to see.”

“And did you see them?”

I looked at her. She wasn’t smiling.

“I saw ravens,” I answered. “Scores of huge ravens. And before you consider making me sleep in the spare room, I wasn’t the only one that saw them.”

“I don’t doubt you,” said Rachel. “Nothing you could tell me about that old man would surprise me. Even locked up he gives me the creeps.”

“I don’t have to go away,” I told her. “I can stay here.”

“I don’t want you to stay here,” she replied. “That wasn’t what I meant. Give it to me straight: are we at risk?”

I thought about it. “I don’t think so. In the end, nothing’s going to happen until his lawyers appeal the bail decision. After that, we’ll have to reconsider. For now, the Scarborough PD’s guardian angel role is just a safeguard, although they may need a little unofficial backup.”

She opened her mouth to raise some fresh objection, but I covered her lips gently with my hand. Her eyes narrowed in reproach.

“Look, it’s as much for my sake as yours. If it comes it won’t be conspicuous or obtrusive, but I’ll sleep a little easier for it.”

I lifted my hand slightly from her mouth and prepared myself for the tirade. Her lips parted and I pressed my hand down again. She let out a resigned sigh, her shoulders sagging in defeat. This time, I took my hand away completely and kissed her on the lips. She didn’t respond at first, then I felt her lips part and her tongue move cautiously against mine. Her mouth opened wider, and I moved against her.

“Are you using sex to get what you want?” she asked, her breath catching a little as my hand brushed the inside of her thigh.

I raised my eyebrows in a poor imitation of hurt.

“Of course not,” I assured her. “I’m a man. Sex is what I want.”

I could taste her laughter on my tongue as we gently began the slow dance together.

In blackness I awoke. There was no car waiting, yet the road seemed newly empty.

I left the bedroom and walked softly down to the kitchen. I could no longer sleep. When I reached the final steps, I saw that Walt was sitting in the doorway to the living room. His ears were erect and his tail was beating slowly on the floor. He looked at me once, then returned his attention to the room beyond. When I scratched at his ear, he didn’t respond. Instead, his eyes remained fixed on a patch of darkness in the corner, denied light by the thick drapes but darker yet than it should have been, like a hole torn between worlds.

Something in that darkness had drawn the dog close to it.

I found the only weapon to hand-the letter opener on the coatstand-and palmed it, then stepped into the room, conscious of my nakedness.

“Who’s there?” I asked. At my feet, Walt let out a little whine, but it was more excitement than fear. I moved closer to the darkness.

And a hand emerged.

It was a woman’s hand, very white. Three horizontal wounds had been torn upon it so deeply that I could see the exposed bones in the fingers. The wounds were old, gray brown within, and the skin had hardened around them. There was no blood. The hand extended farther, palm facing out, fingers raised,

stop

and I knew that these wounds were only the first, that she had lifted up her hands against the blade but it had made its way to her face and her body despite them, and there were more cuts like this upon her, made unto death and beyond.

please

I stopped.

Who are you?

you’re looking for me

Cassie?

i felt you looking for me

Where are you?

lost

What can you see?

nothing

dark

Who did this to you? Who is he?

not one

many in one

Then I heard a whispering begin, and other voices joined with her own.

cassie let me speak let me talk to him cassie will he help us does he know cassie does he know my name cassie can he tell me my name cassie cassie can he take me away from here cassie i want to go home please i’m lost cassie please i want to go home

please

Cassie, who are they?

i don’t know

i can’t see them

but they’re all here

he put us all here

Then, from behind me, a hand touched my bare shoulder, and Rachel was beside me, her breasts against my back, the feel of the sheets cool against my skin. The voices were fading, barely audible, yet desperate and insistent.

please

And in her sleep, Rachel’s brow furrowed and she whispered softly:

“Please.”

8

I FLEW OUT of the Portland Jetport the next morning. It was early Sunday and the roads were still quiet when Rachel dropped me at the door of the terminal building. I had already called Wallace MacArthur to confirm that I was leaving and had passed on my cell phone and hotel numbers to him. Rachel had arranged a date for him with a friend of hers named Mary Mason, who lived out at Pine Point. Rachel knew her from the local Audubon Society and figured that she and Wallace would probably get along pretty well. Wallace had taken the trouble to check out her photo through the BMV and had professed himself pleased with his prospective mate.

“She looks good,” he told me.

“Yeah, well don’t get too cocky. She hasn’t seen you yet.”

“What’s not to love?”

“You have a pretty healthy self-image, Wallace. In anyone else it would come across as smugness, but you manage to pull it off.”

There was a noticeable pause before he asked:

“Seriously?”

Rachel leaned across and kissed me on the lips. I held her head close to mine.

“You take care of yourself,” she said.

“You too. You got your cell phone?”

She dutifully raised her phone from her bag.

“And you’re going to leave it on?”

She nodded.

“All the time?”

Pursed lips. Shrug. Reluctant nod.

“I’ll be calling to check.”

She punched me on the arm. “Go get on your plane. There are flight attendants waiting to be charmed.”

“Seriously?” I said, and instantly wondered if I had more in common with Wallace MacArthur than was really healthy.

She smiled. “Yep. You need all the practice you can get.”

Louis once told me that the New South was like the Old South, except everybody was ten pounds heavier. He was probably kind of bitter, and he certainly wasn’t a fan of South Carolina, often considered the most redneck state in the South after Mississippi and Alabama, although it had managed its racial affairs in a slightly more developed way. When Harvey Gantt became the first black student to go to Clemson College in South Carolina, the legislature, rather than opting for blockades and guns, grudgingly accepted that the time for change had come. Still, it was in Orangeburg, South Carolina, in 1968 that three black students were killed during demonstrations outside the whites-only All Star Bowling Alley; anyone over forty in South Carolina had probably gone to a segregated school; and there were still those who believed that the Confederate flag should fly over the state capitol in Columbia. Now they were naming lakes after Strom Thurmond, as if segregation had never happened.

I flew into Charleston International via Charlotte, which seemed to be a kind of clearinghouse for the runts of evolution and a dumping ground for the worst fashion excesses of the polyester industry. Fleetwood Mac was playing on the jukebox in the Taste of Carolina saloon, where overweight men in shorts and T-shirts drank light beers in a fog of cigarette smoke, the women beside them feeding quarters into the poker machines that stood on the polished wood of the bar. A man with a tattoo of a skull in joker’s regalia on his left arm gave me a hard look from where he sat, splay-legged, at a low table, the neck of his T-shirt soaked with sweat. I held his gaze until he belched and looked away with a studiedly bored expression on his face.

I checked the screens for my departure gate. There were planes flying out of Charlotte to places that nobody in his right mind would want to visit, the kind of places where the routes should have been strictly one-way, heading out of there to just about anywhere else, doesn’t matter, just get me a damn ticket. We boarded on time and I sat beside a big man with a Charleston Fire Department cap on his head. He leaned across me to look out at the military vehicles and aircraft on the Tarmac, and at a US Airways Express twin-prop that was taxiing toward the runway.

“Glad we’re on one of these here jets and not one of them little biddy planes,” he said.

I nodded as he took in the aircraft and the buildings of the main terminal. “I remember when Charlie was just a little old two-runway place,” he continued. “Hell, they was still building it. That was when I was in th’ army…”

I closed my eyes.

It was the longest short flight of my life.

Charleston International was near empty when we landed, the walkways and stores largely devoid of passengers. To the northwest, at Charleston AFB, gray green military aircraft stood in the afternoon sun, tensed like locusts prepared for flight.

They picked me up at the baggage claim, close by the car rental counters. There were two men, one of them fat and wearing a bright hemp shirt, the other older with slicked back dark hair, dressed in a T-shirt and vest beneath a black linen jacket. They watched me discreetly as I stood at the Hertz counter, then waited at the side door of the terminal building as I walked through the heat of the parking lot to the small marquee beneath which my rented Mustang was waiting. By the time I had the keys in my hand, they were sitting in a big Chevy Tahoe at the intersection with the main exit road and they stayed two cars behind me all the way to the interstate. I could have lost them, but there didn’t seem to be much point. I knew they were there, and that was what mattered.

The Mustang didn’t drive like my Boss 302. When I put my foot to the floor nothing happened for about a second while the engine woke up, stretched and scratched itself before eventually getting around to accelerating. Still, it had a CD player so I was able to listen to the Jayhawks as I drove along the neobrutalist stretch of I-26, “I’d Run Away” blaring as I took the North Meeting Street exit for Charleston.

Meeting Street is one of the main arteries into Charleston, leading straight into the heart of the business and tourist district, but its upper reaches are pretty unsavory. A black man sold watermelons by the side of the road from the back of a pickup, the fruit piled up neatly in rows, a sign advertising the Diamonds Gentleman’s Club rising up above him. The Mustang juddered over railroad tracks, past boarded-up warehouses and abandoned strip malls, drawing glances from kids shooting hoop on overgrown green lots and old men in porch chairs, the paint peeling from the fronts of the houses and weeds bursting through the cracks in the steps in a mockery of fruition. The only building that looked clean and new was the housing authority’s modern glass and redbrick office. It seemed to be inviting those who lived by its gift to storm it and steal all of the furniture and fittings. The Chevy stayed behind me the whole way. I slowed down once or twice, and did a full circle from Meeting, through Calhoun and Hutson and back on to Meeting again, just to bug the two men. They maintained their distance until I reached the courtyard of the Charleston Place hotel, then moved slowly away.

In the hotel lobby, wealthy blacks and whites dressed in their Sunday best stood talking and laughing in their postservice ease. Occasionally, calls were made for parties to head to the dining room, Charleston Place ’s Sunday brunch being a tradition for some. I left them to it and headed up the stairs to my room. It had a pair of queen beds and a view of the ATM at the bank across the street. I sat on the bed nearest the window and called Elliot Norton to let him know that I’d arrived. He let out a long sigh of relief.

“The hotel okay for you?”

“Sure,” I said, noncommitally. Charleston Place was certainly luxurious, but the bigger the hotel, the easier it is for strangers to gain access to the rooms. I hadn’t noticed anybody who looked particularly like hotel security, although they were probably present in a very discreet way, and the hallway had been empty apart from a chambermaid pushing a cart loaded with towels and toiletries. She hadn’t even looked at me.

“It’s the best hotel in Charleston,” said Eliot. “It’s got a gym, a pool. You prefer, I can book you in someplace where the roaches will keep you company.”

“I got followed from the airport,” I told him.

“Uh-huh.”

He didn’t sound surprised.

“You think they could be listening in on your calls?”

“I guess. I never bothered to have the place swept. Didn’t see the need. But it’s hard to keep a lid on anything in this town. Also, like I told you, my secretary left this week and she made it pretty clear that she didn’t approve none of some of my clients. Her last act was to make your hotel booking. Could be she let something slip.”

I wasn’t too concerned about the tail. People involved in the case were going to know I was here soon enough anyway. I was more worried about the possibility that somebody might find out our plans for Atys Jones and take action against him.

“Okay, just in case: no more calls to or from the hotel, your office, or your home. We’ll need clean cells for routine business. I’ll pick them up this evening. Anything sensitive can wait until we see each other in person.” Cells weren’t an ideal solution, but if we didn’t sign contracts, kept the numbers to ourselves, and used them carefully we would probably get away with it. Elliot gave me directions to his house again, which was about eighty miles northwest of Charleston, and I told him I’d be there later that afternoon. Before he hung up, he added: “I had another reason for checking you into the CP, apart from your comfort.”

I waited.

“The Larousses go there for Sunday brunch most weeks, catch up on gossip and business. You go down there now, you’ll probably see them: Earl, Earl Jr., maybe some cousins, business associates. Thought you might like to get a feel for them discreetly, but if someone tailed you from the airport, then I figure they may be checking you out as much as you’re checking on them. Sorry, bud. I fucked up there.”

I let it go.

Before I headed down to the lobby I checked the Yellow Pages and called a company named Loomis Car Rental. I arranged to have an anonymous Neon delivered to the parking garage within the hour. My guess was that anyone who was keeping tabs on me would be looking out for the Mustang, and I wasn’t about to make life too easy for a potential tail.

I spotted the Larousse group as it was coming out of the dining room. Earl Larousse, instantly identifiable from the newspaper photos I’d seen, wore his trademark white suit and a black silk tie, like a mourner at a Chinese funeral. He was about five-eight, bald and heavily built. Beside him stood a younger, slimmer version of himself, although there was a slight effeminacy to the son that was absent from the father. Earl Jr.’s slim frame was concealed beneath a billowing white shirt and a pair of black trousers that were too tight around the ass and thighs, making him look like a flamenco dancer on his day off. He had very fair hair, which rendered his eyebrows almost invisible, and I reckoned he had to shave about once a month. Five other people-three men, two women-were talking with them as they left the room. The party was quickly joined by an eighth person, the man with the slicked-back hair, who walked up to Earl Jr. and whispered discreetly in his ear before moving on. Immediately, Earl Jr. looked over at me. He said something to his father, then detached himself from the group and came over to me. I wasn’t sure what to expect but it certainly wasn’t to see his hand outstretched and a regretful smile on his face as he reached me.

“Mr. Parker?” he said. “Let me introduce myself: Earl Larousse Jr.”

I took his hand and shook it. “You usually have people followed from the airport?”

The smile wavered then resumed its post, this time the regret more pronounced.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “We were curious to see what you looked like.”

“I don’t understand.”

“We know why you’re here, Mr. Parker. We don’t necessarily approve, but we understand. We don’t want there to be problems between us. We understand you have a job to do. Our concern is that whoever is responsible for my sister’s death is punished with the full force of the law. For the moment, we believe that person to be Atys Jones. If that proves not to be the case, then we’ll accept it. We’ve made our statements to the police, and told them all we know. All we ask of you is that you respect our privacy and leave us in peace. We have nothing to add to what has already been said.”

It had the air of a rehearsed speech about it. More than that, I sensed a detachment about Earl Jr. Although he sounded sincere, if mechanical, his eyes were both mocking and slightly fearful. He wore a mask, although I didn’t yet know what lay behind it. Farther back, his father watched us, and in his face I saw hostility. For some unknown reason, it seemed to be directed at his son as much as at me. Earl Jr. turned and walked back to the group, and a shroud fell across his father’s anger as they made their way out of the lobby and into their waiting cars.

With nothing else to do I returned to my room, showered, ate a club sandwich, and waited for the car rental guy to arrive. When the call came from the desk I went down, signed the paperwork, and entered the parking garage. I put on my sunglasses and headed out, the sunlight gleaming off the windshield, but there was no sign of the Chevy and nobody seemed interested in me or the car. On the way out of town I stopped at a mall and bought two new cell phones.

Elliot Norton lived about two miles outside Grace Falls in a modest white faux Colonial with two pillars at its front door and a big porch running the full length of the first floor. It looked like the kind of place where the mint juleps would still have the julep mix dissolving in the glass. The large sheet of industrial plastic covering the hole in the roof did nothing to add an air of authenticity. I found Elliot around back, talking to a pair of men in coveralls who leaned against a van, smoking. The legend on the side of the van indicated that the two men were roofers from Dave’s Construction and Roofing out of Martinez, Georgia (“Want To Save? Call Dave!”). To their left was a pile of scaffolding, ready to be put in place so that work could commence the following morning. One of the men was idly tossing a piece of burnt, blackened slate from hand to hand. As I approached, he stopped and jutted his chin in my direction. Elliot turned a little too quickly, then left the two workmen and stretched out his hand to me.

“Man, am I glad to see you!” he smiled. Some of his hair had been scorched away on the left side of his head. What remained had been cut back in an effort to disguise the damage. There was gauze over his left ear and burn marks glistened along his cheek, chin, and neck. His left hand, where it was visible beneath a white tube bandage, was blistered.

“Don’t take this wrong, Elliot,” I said, “but you don’t look so good.”

“I know. Fire took out most of my wardrobe. Come on.” He reached behind my back and guided me toward the house. “I’ll buy you an iced tea.”

Inside, the house smelled badly of smoke and damp. Water had penetrated the floors above and damaged the plasterwork in the downstairs rooms, brown clouds now sweeping across the white skies of the ceilings. Some of the wallpaper had already begun to peel and I reckoned there was a good chance that Elliot would be forced to replace most of the timbers in the hallway. In the front room was an unmade sofa bed and clothes hung from the curtain rail or splayed themselves across the backs of chairs.

“You’re still living here?” I asked.

“Yup,” he replied, as he washed some ash from a pair of glass tumblers.

“You might be safer in a hotel.”

“I might be, but then the folks who did this to my house would probably come back and finish the job.”

“They could come back anyway.”

He shook his head. “Nah, they’re done, for now. Murder isn’t their style. If they’d wanted to kill me, they’d have done a better job first time round.”

He took a jug of iced tea from the refrigerator and filled the tumblers. I stood by the window and stared out at Elliot’s yard and the land beyond. The skies were empty of birds and the woods surrounding Elliot’s property were almost silent. Along the coast, the migrants were already in flight, the wood ducks joining the terns, the hawks and warblers and sparrows soon to follow. Here, farther inland, there was less evidence of their departure, and even the permanent residents were not as obvious as they formerly were, their spring mating songs ended and their bright summer plumage slowly fading to the mourning cloaks of winter. As if to make up for the absence of the birds and their colors, the wildflowers had begun to bloom now that the worst of the summer heat had departed. There were asters and sunflowers and goldenrods, and butterflies flocked to them, attracted by the predominance of yellows and purples. Beneath the leaves, the field spiders would be waiting for them.

“So when do I get to meet Atys Jones?” I asked.

“Be easiest if you talk to him after we get him out of county. We pick him up from the Richland County Detention Center late tomorrow, then switch him to a second car out back of Campbell ’s Country Corner to lose anyone with an interest in where we might be taking him. From there, I’ll drive him to the safe house in Charleston.”

“Who’s the second driver?”

“Son of the old guy whose gonna be taking care of him. He’s okay, knows what he’s doing.”

“Why not stash him closer to Columbia?”

“We got a better chance of keeping him safe down in Charleston, believe me. He’ll be over on the east side, in the heart of a black neighborhood. Anybody comes asking questions and we’ll hear about it in plenty of time to move him again if we have to. Anyhow, it’s a purely temporary arrangement. Could be that we’ll have to stash him somewhere more secure, maybe hire private security. We’ll see.”

“So what’s his story?” I asked.

Elliot shook his head and rubbed his eyes with dirty fingers. “His story is that he and Marianne Larousse had a thing going.”

“They were lovers?”

“Occasional lovers. Atys thinks she was using him to get back at her brother and her daddy, and he was pretty happy to go along with that.” He made a clicking noise with his tongue against his teeth. “I got to tell you, Charlie, my client ain’t exactly nature’s own charmer, if you catch my drift. He’s one hundred and thirty pounds of attitude with a mouth at one end and an asshole at the other, and most of the time I can’t tell which end is which. According to him, the night Marianne died they’d been screwing around in the front of his Grand Am. They had a fight, she ran off into the trees. He went after her, thought he’d lost her somewhere in the forest, then found her with her head beaten to a pulp.”

“Weapon?”

“Weapon of convenience: a ten-pound rock. Police arrested Atys with blood on his hands and clothes and fragments of rock and dust matching the weapon. He admits he touched her head and body when he found her and rolled the rock away from her skull. He’d smeared some blood on his face as well, but there was nothing consistent with the kind of blood splash you get from beating on someone with a rock. No traces of semen inside her, although they did pick up lubricant from a condom-Trojan-matching the ones found in Atys’s wallet. It looks like it was consensual sex but a good prosecutor might still be able to argue rape. You know, they get excited, then she tries to back off and he doesn’t take it so good. I don’t think it will hold up but they’ll be trying to bolster their case any way they can.”

“You think there’s enough there to sow seeds of doubt in a jury?”

“Maybe. I’m looking for an expert witness to testify on the blood splashes. The prosecution will probably find one who’ll say the exact opposite. This is a black man accused of killing a white girl from the Larousse clan. It’s all uphill on this one. Prosecutor will be looking at loading the jury with middle-income, middle-aged-to-elderly whites who’ll see in Jones the black bogeyman. Best we can hope to do is dilute it, but…”

I waited. There’s always a “but.” There wouldn’t be a story without one.

“There’s local history behind all this; the worst kind of local history.”

He flicked through the piles of files that lay on the kitchen table. I glimpsed police reports, witness statements, transcripts of the interviews conducted with Atys Jones by the police, even crime scene photographs. But I could also see photocopied pages from history books, cuttings from old newspapers, and books on slavery and rice cultivation.

“What you got here,” said Elliot, “is a regular blood feud.”

9

THE FIRST FILES were blue and contained witness statements and other material assembled by the police in the aftermath of Marianne Larousse’s death. The historical file was green. Beside it was a slim, white file. I opened it, saw more clearly the photographs that lay within, then closed it carefully. I was not yet ready to deal with the reports on Marianne Larousse’s body.

I had taken on a little defense work in Maine in the past, so I had a pretty good idea of what was ahead of me. Atys Jones would be the most important element, of course, at least to begin with. Defendants will often tell an investigator things that they haven’t even told their attorney, sometimes out of sheer forgetfulness or the stress surrounding their arrest, other times because they trust the investigator more than their lawyer, especially if their lawyer is a hard-pressed public defender already overwhelmed by his or her caseload. The rule of thumb is that any additional information is passed on to the attorney, whether favorable or prejudicial to the case. Elliot had already received some statements and testimonials from those who knew Jones, including schoolteachers and former employers, in an effort to form a favorable profile of his client that could be presented to the jury, so that was a little less donkey work for me to do.

I’d have to go over the police reports with Jones as these would provide the basis for the charges against him, but also because he might pick up on mistakes made or witnesses that had not been contacted. The police reports would also be useful to me in checking statements, since they usually contained the addresses and phone numbers of those to whom the police had spoken. After that, the real legwork would begin: all of those witnesses would have to be reinterviewed because the early police reports were rarely in depth, the cops preferring to leave the detailed interviewing for the prosecutor’s investigators or the primary detective. Signed statements would have to be obtained, and while most witnesses would be willing to talk fewer would be willing to sign their names to a summary of their comments without a struggle. In addition, it was likely that the prosecutor’s investigators had spoken to them already and they often had a way of intimating to witnesses that they should not talk to the defendant’s investigator, placing another barrier in the way. All things considered I had a busy time ahead of me, and I might be able to do little more than scratch the surface of the case before I had to return to Maine.

I pulled the green file toward me and flipped it open. Some of the material inside dated back to the seventeenth century, and the earliest origins of Charleston. The most recent cutting came from1981.

“Somewhere in here may be part of the reason why Marianne Larousse died, and why Atys Jones is going to be tried for her murder,” said Elliot. “This is the weight that they carried with them, whether they knew it or not. This is what destroyed their lives.”

He had been rummaging in his kitchen cabinets as he spoke, and he now returned to the table with his right fist tightly closed.

“But in a way,” said Elliot softly, “this is really why we’re here today.”

And he opened his fist to let a stream of yellow rice cascade onto the tabletop.

Amy Jones

Age 98 when interviewed by Henry Calder in Red Bank, S.C., from “The Age of Slavery: Interviews with Former North and South Carolina Slaves,” ed. Judy and Nancy Buckingham (New Era, 1989)

I was born a slave in Colleton County. My pappy name Andrew and my mammy name Violet. They belong to the Larousse family. Marster Adgar was a good marster to his slaves. Him had about sixty families of slaves before the Yankees come and made a mess out of their lives.

Old Missus tell all the colored people to run. She come to us with a bagful of silver all sew up in a blanket, ’cause the Yankees apt to take all they valuables. She tell us that she couldn’t protect us no longer. They broke in the rice barn and share the rice out, but they not enough rice there to feed all the colored people. Worst nigger men and women follow the army, but us stay and watch the other chillun die.

Us wasn’t ready for what come. Us had no education, no land, no cow, no chicken. Yankees come and take all us had away, left us with freedom. They give us to understand us as free as our master was. Couldn’t write, so us just had to touch the pen and tell what name us wanted to go in. After the war, Marster Adgar give us one-third of what us make, now that us free. Pappy dead just before my mammy. They stay right to plantation and dead there after they free.

But they tole me. They tole me about Old Marster, Marster Adgar’s pappy. They tole me what he done…

To understand the crop is to understand the history, for the history is Carolina Gold.

Rice cultivation began here in the 1680s, when the rice seed reached Carolina from Madagascar. They called it Carolina Gold because of its quality and the color of its hull, and it made the families associated withit wealthy for generations. There were the Englishmen-the Heywards, the Draytons, the Middletons and the Alstons-and the Huguenots, among them the Ravenels, the Manigaults and the Larousses.

The Larousses were scions of Charleston aristocracy, one of a handful of families that controlled virtually all aspects of life in the city, from membership in the St. Cecilia Society to the organization of the social season which lasted from November to May. They valued their name and reputation above all else, and safeguarded both with money and the influence that it bought. They could not have suspected that their great wealth and security would be undermined by the actions of a single slave.

The slaves would work from first light until last, six days each week, but did not work on Sundays. A conch shell was used to call in the laborers, its tones sweeping across the fields of rice now afire in the dying rays of the setting sun, the black shapes against them like scarecrows amid the conflagration. Their backs would straighten, their heads rise and, slowly, they would begin the long walk back to the rice barn and the shacks. They would feed on molasses, peas, corn bread, sometimes home-raised meat. They would sit in their homemade clothes of copper straw and white cloth at the end of the long day, and eat and talk. When a new delivery of wooden-soled shoes came, the women would soak the rawhide leather in warm water and grease them with tallow or meat skin so the shoes would slip onto their feet, and the smell would cling to their fingers when they made love to their men, the stench of dead animals mingling with the sweat of their lovemaking.

The men did not learn how to read or write. Old Marster was strict on that. They were whipped for stealing, or for telling lies, or for looking at books. There was a dirt house out by the swamp, where they used to carry those who had smallpox. Most of the slaves carried out there never returned. They kept the Pony in the rice barn, and when the time came for more serious punishments to be meted out the man or woman would be spreadeagled upon its frame, strapped down, and whipped. When the Yankees burned down the rice barn, there was blood on the floor where the Pony had stood, as if the very ground itself had begun to rust.

Some of the East African slaves brought with them an understanding of rice cultivation that enabled the plantation owners to overcome the problems faced by the original English colonists, who had found its cultivation troublesome. A task system was introduced on many plantations that allowed skilled slaves to work somewhat independently, enabling them to create free time to hunt, garden, or improve the situation of their families. The produce or products created could then be bartered by the slaves to the owner, and removed some of the pressure of providing for his slaves from him.

The task system created a hierarchy among the slaves. The most important bondsman was the slave driver, who acted as the mediator between the planter and the labor force. Beneath him were the trained artisans, the blacksmiths and carpenters and bricklayers. It was these skilled workers who were the natural leaders in the slave community, and consequently they had to be watched more closely for fear that they might foment unrest or choose to run away.

But the most crucial task of all fell to the trunk minder, for the fate of the rice crop lay in his hands. The rice fields were flooded when necessary with freshwater collected in reservoirs above the fields on higher ground. Salt water flowed inland with the tide, forcing the freshwater to the surface of the coastal rivers. It was only then that the low, wide floodgates could be opened to permit the freshwater to flow into the fields, a system of subsidiary gates allowing the water to run into the adjoining fields, a drainage technique whose correct application was a direct result of the involvement of African slaves. Any breach or break in the gates would permit salt water to enter the fields, killing the rice crop, so the trunk minder, in addition to opening and closing the main gates, was required to keep the trunks, the drainage ditches, and the canals in working order.

Henry, husband of Annie, was the trunk minder for the Larousse plantation. His grandfather, now dead, had been captured in January 1764 and taken to the out-factory of Barra Kunda in upper Guinea. From there, he was transported to James Fort on the River Gambia in October 1764, the main point of embarkation for slaves bound for the New World. He arrived in Charles Town in 1765, where he was purchased by the Larousse family. He had six children and sixteen grandchildren by the time he died, of whom Henry was the eldest grandson. Henry had married his young wife, Annie, six years previously, and they now had three young children. Only one, Andrew, would survive to maturity, and he would father his own children in turn, a line that would continue until the early twenty-first century, and end with Atys Jones.

They strapped Annie, wife of Henry, to the Pony one day in 1833, and they whipped her until the whip broke. But by then the skin on her back had been torn away, so they turned her and started in again on her front with a new whip. Their intention was to punish, not to kill. Annie was too valuable a commodity to be killed. She had been tracked down by a team of men led by William Rudge, whose descendant would later hang a man named Errol Rich from a tree in front of a crowd of onlookers in northeastern Georgia, and whose own life would come to an end at the hands of a black man on a bed of spilled whiskey and sawdust. Rudge was the “pattyroller,” the slave patroller whose job it was to hunt down those who chose to run. Annie had run after a man named Coolidge had held her over a tree stump and tried to rape her from behind when he found her out on a dirt road delivering beef from a cow that Old Marster had ordered killed the previous day. While Coolidge was tearing at her, Annie had taken a branch from the ground and stabbed him in the eye, partially blinding him. And then she had run, for nobody would care or believe that she had been defending herself, even if Coolidge had not claimed that the attack was unprovoked, that he’d found the nigger drinking stolen hooch by the side of the road. The pattyroller and his men had followed her and they took her back to Old Marster, and she was strapped to the Pony and whipped while her husband and their three children were forced to watch. But she did not survive the whipping, for she went into convulsions and died.

Three days later, Henry, husband of Annie and trusted trunk minder, flooded the Larousse plantation with salt water, destroying the entire crop.

They followed him for five days with a party of heavily armed men, for Henry had stolen a Marston pepperbox percussion pistol, and any man who was standing in the way when those six barrels discharged was likely to be meeting his maker that very day. So the riders held back and sent ahead a line of expendable Ibo slaves to track Henry, with the promise of a gold coin for the man who found their quarry.

They cornered Henry at last at the edge of the Congaree Swamp, not far from where a bar named the Swamp Rat now stands, the bar at which Marianne Larousse would be drinking on the night that she died, for the voice of the present contains the echo of the past. The slave who had found Henry lay dead on the ground, with ragged holes in his chest where the Marston had hit him at close range.

They took three metal rice samplers, hollow T-shaped devices with a sharp point on the end for digging into the ground, and they crucified Henry against a cypress tree and left him there with his balls in his mouth. But before he died, Old Marster drew up before him in a cart, and in the back of the cart sat Henry’s three children. The last sight Henry saw before his eyes finally closed was his youngest boy Andrew being led into the bushes by Old Marster, and then the boy’s cries commenced and Henry died.

That was how it began between the families of Larousse and Jones, masters and slaves. The crop was wealth. The crop was history. It had to be safeguarded. Henry’s offense lived on for a time in the memory of the Larousse family and was then largely forgotten, but the sins of the Larousses were passed down from Jones to Jones. And the past was transported into each new present, and it spread through generations of lives like a virus.

The light had begun to fade. The men from Georgia were gone. From the big oak tree outside the window a bat descended, hunting mosquitoes. Some had found their way into the house and now buzzed at my ear, waiting to bite. I swatted at them with my hand. Elliot handed me some repellent and I smeared it across my exposed skin.

“But there were still members of the Jones family working for the Larousses, even after what took place?” I asked.

“Uh-huh,” said Elliot. “Slaves died sometimes. It happened. The folks around them had lost parents, children too, but they didn’t take it quite so personal. There were some members of the Jones family who felt that what was done was done, and should be left in the past. And then there were others who maybe didn’t feel that way.”

The Civil War devastated the lives of the Charleston aristocracy, as it did the structures of the city itself. The Larousses were protected somewhat by their foresight (or perhaps by their treason, for they retained most of their wealth in gold and had only a small fraction tied up in Confederate bonds and currency). Still they, like many other defeated Southerners, were forced to watch as the surviving soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts regiment, or “Shaw’s Niggers” as they were known, paraded through the streets of Charleston. Among them was Martin Jones, Atys Jones’s great-great-grandfather.

Once again, the lives of these two families were about to collide violently.

The night riders move through the darkness, white against the black road. It will be many years before an olive-skinned man with slave marks on his legs will claim to have seen them as they will become, figures in negative, black on white, a reversal that would sicken these men were they to know of it now as they go about their business, their horses draped, guns and bullwhips banging dully against saddles.

For this is the South Carolina of the 1870s, not of the turn of a new millennium, and the night riders are the terror of these times. They roam upcountry, visiting their version of justice on poor blacks and the Republicans that support them, refusing to bow to the requirements of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. They are a symbol of the fear felt by the whites for the blacks, and much of the white population stands behind them. Already, the Black Codes have been introduced as an antidote to reform, restricting the rights of blacks to hold arms, to hold a position above farmer or servant, even to leave their premises or entertain visitors without a permit.

In time, Congress will fight back with the Reconstruction Amendment, the Enforcement Act of 1870, the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871. Governor Scott will form a black militia to protect voters in the 1870election, further enraging the white population. Eventually, habeas corpus will be suspended in the nine upcountry counties, leading to the arrest of hundreds of Klan members without due process, but for the present the law rides a draped horse and brings with it vengeance, and the actions of the federal goverment will be too late to save thirty-eight lives, too late to prevent rapes and beatings, too late to stop the burning and destruction of farms and crops and livestock.

Too late to save Missy Jones.

Her husband, Martin, had campaigned to bring out the black vote in 1870 in the face of intimidation and violence. He had refused to repudiate the Republican Party and had earned a whipping for his troubles. Then he had lent his support and his savings to the nascent black militia, and had marched his men through the town one bright Sunday afternoon, no more than one in ten of them armed but still an act of unparalleled arrogance to those who were fighting the tide of emancipation.

It was Missy who heard the riders approaching, Missy who told her husband to run, that this time they would kill him if they found him. The night riders had not yet harmed a woman in York County and Missy, although she feared the armed men, had no reason to believe that they would commence with her.

But they did.

Four men raped Missy Jones, for if they could not harm her husband directly then they would hurt him through his woman. The rape was without any physical violence beyond the violation itself, devoid, it seemed to the woman, even of an element of pleasure for the men who committed the act. Instead, it was as functional as the branding of a cow or the strangling of a chicken. The last man even helped her to cover herself up and gave her his arm as he escorted her to a kitchen chair.

“You tell him to behave himself, y’hear?” said the man. He was young and handsome and she saw in him something of his father and his grandfather. He had the Larousse chin, and the fair hair common to that family. His name was William Larousse. “We don’t want to be coming back through here again,” he warned her.

Two weeks later, William Larousse and two other men were ambushed outside Delphia by a group of masked assailants armed with cudgels. William’s companions fled but he remained, curled into a ball, as the blows rained down. The beating left him paralyzed, able to move only his right hand and unable to eat any food that had not been mashed to the consistency of paste.

But Missy Jones was unheeding of what had been done in her name. She had barely spoken to her husband when he returned from his hiding place, and rarely spoke again thereafter. Neither did she return to her husband’s bed, but slept instead among the animals in their small barn, reduced in her own mind to their level by the men who had raped her to hurt her husband, retreating slowly and irretrievably into madness.

Elliot rose and poured the remains of his coffee into the sink.

“Like I said, there were some who wanted to forget the past, and some who never forgot it, even to this day.”

He let the last words hang in the air.

“You think Atys Jones might have been one of those?”

He shrugged. “I think that some part of him liked the idea that he was fucking Earl Larousse’s daughter, and fucking over Earl by extension. I don’t even know if Marianne knew about the history between the two families. I guess it meant more to the Joneses than it did to the Larousses, if you catch my drift.”

“But their history is common knowledge?”

“There’s been some reporting on the history of the families in the newspapers by those with the energy to go digging, but not much. Still, I’d be surprised if some of the jurors don’t know about it, and it may come up at the trial. The Larousses have a name and a history that they safeguard religiously. Their reputation means everything to them. Whatever they might have done in the past, they now contribute to socially responsible causes. They support black charities. They supported integration in schools. They don’t decorate their houses with the flag of the Confederacy. They’ve made up for the sins of previous generations, but could be the prosecution will use old ghosts to claim that Atys Jones set out to punish them again by taking Marianne away from them.”

He stood and stretched.

“Unless, of course, we can find the person who did kill Marianne Larousse. Then we got us a whole new ball game.”

I put aside the copy of the photograph of Missy Jones, dead by her forties and lying in her cheap box-coffin, and sifted through the documents on the table once again until I came to the final cutting. It was a newspaper story dated July 12, 1981, and it detailed the disappearance of two young black women who had lived near the Congaree. Their names were Addy and Melia Jones, and after that night, when they were seen drinking together in a local bar, they were never heard of again.

Addy Jones was Atys Jones’s mother.

I held the cutting up for Elliot to see.

“What is this?”

He reached out and took it from me.

“This,” he said, “is the final puzzle for you. Our client’s mother and aunt disappeared nineteen years ago, and neither he nor anybody else has seen them since.”

That night, I drove back to Charleston with the radio tuned to a talk show out of Columbia, until the signal began to fade into hisses and distortion. The owner of a chain of barbecue restaurants had taken to flying a Confederate flag over his outlets. He was arguing that it was a symbol of Southern heritage, and maybe it was, except that in the past, the barbecue guy had worked on George Wallace’s presidential campaign and had found himself in federal court for violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964 after he refused to serve blacks in his restaurants. He even managed to win his case at trial level, only to be forced to integrate by a higher court. Since then he had apparently enjoyed a religious conversion but old habits seemed to be dying hard.

I thought of the flag as I drove through the darkness, about the families of Jones and Larousse, and the weight of history that was like a lead belt strapped to their bodies, dragging them always down to the bottom. Somewhere in that history, in the living past, was an answer to the death of Marianne Larousse.

But down here, in a place that seemed alien to me, the past assumed strange forms. The past was an old man draped in a red-and-blue flag, howling his defiance at the moon. The past was a dead hand on the face of the living. The past was a ghost garlanded with regrets.

The past, I would come to learn, was a woman in white with scales for skin.