The Wolf in Winter

1

The house was studiedly anonymous: not too large or too small, and neither particularly well kept nor in any sense dilapidated. Situated on a small patch of land not far from the outskirts of the city of Newark, Delaware, in the densely populated county of New Castle, the town had taken a hit when the Chrysler Newark assembly plant closed in 2008, along with the nearby Mopar distribution center. However, it was still the home of the University of Delaware, and 20,000 students can spend a lot of money if they put their minds to it.

Newark was an unsurprising choice of location for the man we were hunting. It was close to the borders of three states — Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Maryland — and only two hours from New York City by car. Then again, it was just one of any number of rat’s nests that he had established for himself, acquired over the years by the lawyer who protected him. The only distinguishing feature of this property lay in the degree of power consumption: the utility bills were steeper than for the others we had discovered. This one looked like it was used regularly. It was more than a storehouse for elements of his collection. It was a base of sorts.

He called himself Kushiel, but we knew him as the Collector. He had killed a friend of ours named Jackie Garner at the end of the previous year. The Collector would have called it an eye for an eye in his version of justice, and it was true that Jackie had made an appalling error, one that resulted in the death of a woman close to the Collector. In revenge, the Collector had shot Jackie down without mercy while he was unarmed and on his knees, but he had also made it clear that we were all under his gun now. We might have been hunting the Collector for what he had done to one of ours, but we also knew that it was only a matter of time before he decided we might be less of a threat to him with six feet of earth above our heads. We intended to corner and kill him long before it came to that.

A light burned in one room of the house. The others were all dark. A car stood in the driveway, and its arrival had alerted us to the possibility of the Collector’s presence. We had placed a dual wireless break-beam alert system in the undergrowth halfway up the drive. The system was timerbased, so an alert would only be sent to our phones if the two beams were not broken twice within a ten-minute period. In other words, it allowed for deliveries, but a vehicle that entered the property and remained on it for any length of time would trigger the alarm.

Of course, this assumed that the Collector would not arrive on foot, or by cab, but we figured he had too many enemies to leave his escape routes to chance, and he would keep at least one well-maintained vehicle. A windowless garage stood to the right of the house, but we had not risked breaking into it when we first discovered the existence of the property. Even planting the little wireless infrared transmitters was a calculated gamble, and had only been undertaken after a sweep of the yard revealed no similar alarm system beyond whatever was used to secure the house itself.

‘What do you think?’ said Louis.

His dark skin caught something of the moonlight, making him seem even more a creature of the night than usual. He wore dark cotton trousers cinched at the ankles, and a black waxed cotton Belstaff jacket from which all of the buckles and buttons had been removed and replaced by non-refective equivalents. He looked cool, but then he always looked cool.

‘My legs are cramping up, is what I think,’ said Angel. ‘If we don’t make a move soon, you’ll have to carry me in there on a sedan chair.’

Angel didn’t care about cool. His clothing was functional and unlabeled. He just preferred things that way. His gray hair was hidden beneath a black beanie. Without the cap, he looked his years. He was older than Louis and I, and had grown quieter and more cautious in recent times. Mortality shadowed him like a falcon mantling its wings over dying prey.

We squatted in the grass by the side of the road, Angel to my left and Louis to my right, each of us armed with a suppressed Glock 9mm loaded with subsonic ammunition. We’d lose something in velocity, but if we found the Collector we’d be working at close range. There were properties to the east and west of the house, and the area was quiet. We didn’t want to bring local law enforcement down on our heads by replicating the sound of the Gunfght at the O.K. Corral. All three of us also carried Russian-made anti-fog gas masks. They had cost less than Louis’s boots, but they hadn’t let us down yet.

‘You two take the back,’ I said. ‘I’ll cover the front.’

Louis reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced a tear gas grenade. Angel had a second, and I had two more.

‘Try not to get shot before you’ve thrown them,’ Angel told me.

‘I’ll try not to get shot after I’ve thrown them as well,’ I said.

It wasn’t an ideal situation. We’d need to break glass to get the grenades into the house, and hope that we didn’t take fire in the process. If the Collector was cornered, and chose to take his chances inside, then Angel and Louis would have to go in and get him, or flush him out to where I would be waiting. Grenade launchers might have been more effective, but your average grenade launcher tended to attract a certain amount of attention in the suburbs, and was hard to hide under a jacket, even one as expensive as Louis’s. The other option might have been to try and break down the doors and come in shooting like gangbusters, but we risked looking kind of stupid — and kind of dead — if the doors were reinforced or booby-trapped in any way. The Collector was very protective of his health.

This was the third of the Collector’s nests that we had targeted, and we were becoming almost accomplished by this point. We went in fast, and hit both sides of the house simultaneously, the panes of three windows shattering as one. The grenades delivered a combination of military-grade pepper spray and tear gas, and could cover a range of over 20,000 cubic feet in under a minute. Anyone who was in those rooms when they exploded wouldn’t be staying there for long.

I was edgy before the first grenade went in, but I was doubly so as I prepared to toss the second. If shots were going to come, they would come now, but there was no reaction from inside the house. After a minute I heard more glass breaking. Angel and Louis were going in through a window, not through the door. It was a calculated risk: expose yourself while climbing in through the busted frame, or try the door and hope that it wasn’t wired. They’d opted for the former. I pulled back from the front of the house and took cover behind the car in the drive. It was a midsize Chevy sedan, the kind that an accountant might drive. The interior was pristine, and the seats were bare.

Nothing happened. There were no shouts, and no gunshots. I could hear doors banging open in the house, but no more than that. After three minutes, my cell phone rang. It was Louis. He was breathing heavily. Behind him I could hear Angel coughing.

‘He’s gone,’ said Louis.

We allowed the gas to disperse before heading back inside. This house was better furnished than the others we had seen. There were books on the shelves — political biographies and modern histories for the most part — and an effort had been made to decorate the rooms. The wood floors were partly covered by cheap but tasteful rugs, and abstract prints hung on some of the walls. The kitchen closets contained canned goods, rice, pasta, a couple of jars of instant coffee, and a bottle of Martell XO cognac. A small portable refrigerator hummed on the floor. Inside were candy bars, fresh milk and a six-pack of diet soda. A TV in the living room was hooked up to a DVD player, but there was no cable connection. A copy of that day’s Washington Post lay on the floor by the single armchair. Beside it was a mug of coffee, still warm. We must have missed him by minutes, seconds.

My eye caught an object hanging from the reading lamp by the chair. It was a bear claw necklace. The Collector had taken it from Jackie’s truck either before or after he killed him. It had once hung from Jackie’s rearview mirror. It was his good-luck token, but his luck had still run out. In the end, everyone’s luck does.

The Collector always kept souvenirs of his kills. He had not abandoned this one lightly. It was a message for us: a taunt, or perhaps a gesture of recompense, depending upon how one chose to take it.

I stepped carefully to the window and risked a glance at the small backyard. Two houses backed on to this one, and in the distance I saw the lights of Newark. I could feel him out there. He was watching us. He knew that we wouldn’t come after him on foot over unfamiliar ground, and at night. He was waiting to see what we would do next.

‘We got more trinkets,’ I heard Angel say.

He joined me at the window, his back to the wall. Even in the darkness, he didn’t want to make a target of himself. In his gloved hand he held a gold charm bracelet, a photograph of a young woman in an ornate silver frame, and a baby shoe that had been cast in bronze, each a token of a life taken.

‘How did he get out?’ I asked.

‘Through the back door?’

‘It’s still locked from the inside,’ I said. ‘The front door was the same way. And you had to break a window to get in. They only open at the top, and a child could barely ft through the gap.’

‘In here,’ said Louis from the main bedroom.

We joined him there. Like all of the other rooms in the house, it had a low ceiling. A hole for an A/C unit had been cut in the wall by the main window, but there was no unit in place, and the hole appeared to have been boarded up. A chair stood beneath. Louis climbed on it and tested the board. It was hinged at the top, and moved like a pet door with the pressure of his hand. The hole looked small, but then Louis flipped up the frame surrounding it, and suddenly the space was big enough to allow an average-sized man to squeeze through.

‘Bet the board on the other side is hinged too,’ said Louis. ‘He crawled out of here like the bug he is.’

He stepped down from the chair. The night was clear. No clouds obscured the moon.

‘He’s out there, isn’t he?’ he said.

‘Probably.’

‘Can’t go on like this. Eventually he’s going to get tired of running.’

‘Maybe. Who knows how many of these bolt-holes he has? But somewhere there’s one that matters more than the others, more even than this one. That’s where he’s keeping the lawyer.’

The lawyer Eldritch steered the Collector in the direction of those who had, in his eyes, forfeited the right to life — perhaps even the right to their immortal souls. He presented the case for the prosecution, and the Collector took care of the punishment. But Eldritch was injured in the same incident that had killed the woman and brought the Collector down on Jackie, and the Collector had spirited the old lawyer away. Who knew, Eldritch might even be dead. If that were the case, then the Collector would be off the leash entirely. If nothing else, Eldritch held his hunting dog in some form of check.

‘We going to keep looking for this refuge?’ asked Louis.

‘He killed Jackie.’

‘Maybe Jackie brought it on himself.’

‘If you believe that, then we all bring it on ourselves.’

‘That might just be true.’

Angel joined us.

‘Why hasn’t he hit back? Why hasn’t he tried to take us out?’

I thought that I had the answer.

‘Because he believes that he violated his own code when he killed Jackie. Jackie’s life wasn’t his to take, whatever mistakes he might have made. Somewhere in what passes for his conscience, the Collector suspects that we may have earned the right to come after him. It’s like Louis said: maybe we all bring it on ourselves.

‘And then, like us, the Collector is just a pawn in a greater game. He might know more about the rules of it than we do, but he has no idea of the state of play, or how close anyone is to winning or losing. He’s afraid to kill us in case it tips the balance against him, although who knows how long that situation will continue.’

‘What about us?’ said Angel. ‘If we kill him, will there be blowback?’

‘The difference is that we don’t care,’ I said.

‘Oh,’ said Angel. ‘I must have missed that memo.’

‘Basically it said “Fuck ‘em if they ain’t on our side”,’ Louis explained.

‘Yeah, I would have remembered seeing that one,’ said Angel. ‘So we keep hunting him until we corner him, or until he just rolls over and dies?’

‘We hunt him until he tires, or we tire,’ I said. ‘Then we’ll see how it plays out. You got anything better to do?’

‘Not lately. Not ever, to be honest. So what now?’

I looked again into the darkness beyond the house.

‘If he’s out there, let’s give him something to watch.’

While Angel went to retrieve our car, Louis and I broke into the Chevy and pushed it against the door of the house. I could already smell the gas from the stove in the kitchen as Louis doused the interior of the Chevy with the Collector’s cognac, saving about one third of it. He stuck a kitchen rag in the neck of the bottle, and shook it to soak the material. When he was sure that the road was clear, Angel signaled Louis with his headlights, and Louis lit the rag, tossed the bottle into the car and ran.

The Chevy was already burning as we drove away, but the two explosions — the first from the car, the second from the house itself — came sooner than anticipated and occurred almost simultaneously, catching us by surprise. We didn’t stop to watch the fireball rise above the trees. We just kept driving, taking Telegraph Road into Maryland as far as the intersection with Route 213, then headed north into Pennsylvania. We handed the car over to a woman in Landenberg, took possession of our own vehicles and separated without another word, Louis and Angel heading for Philly while I drove north to the Turnpike.

On the outskirts of Newark, a man in a dark coat watched fire trucks pass. The sleeve of his coat was torn, and he limped slightly as he walked, favoring his right leg. The lights of the trucks briefly illuminated his thin face, his dark, slickedback hair and the thin trickle of blood that ran from his scalp. They had come close to catching him this time, so very close …

The Collector lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply as his house burned.

2

The wolf was a young male, alone and in pain. His ribs stood out beneath his rust brown fur, and he limped as he drew closer to the town. The wolf’s pack had been annihilated by the shores of the St Lawrence River, but by then the urge to roam had already taken him, and he had just begun moving south when the hunters came. His had not been a large pack: a dozen animals in all, led by the alpha female that was his mother. They were all gone now. He had escaped the slaughter by crossing the river on winter ice, flinching at the sounds of gunfire. He came across a second, smaller group of men as he neared the Maine border, and sustained an injury to his left forepaw from a hunter’s bullet. He had kept the wound clean, and no infection had set in, but there was damage to some of the nerves, and he would never be as strong or as fast as he once had been. The injury would bring death upon him, sooner or later. It was already slowing him down, and slow animals always became prey in the end. It was a wonder that he had come so far, but something — a kind of madness — had driven him ever onward, south, south.

Now spring was approaching, and soon the slow melting of snow would commence. If he could just survive the remainder of winter, food would become more plentiful. For now, he was reduced to the status of a scavenger. He was weak from starvation, but that afternoon he had picked up the scent of a young deer, and its spoor had led him to the outskirts of the town. He smelled its fear and confusion. It was vulnerable. If he could get close enough to it, he might have enough strength and speed left to take it down.

The wolf sniffed the air, and picked up movement among the trees to its right. The deer stood motionless in a thicket, its tail raised in warning and distress, but the wolf sensed that he was not the cause of it. He tested the air again. His tail moved between his legs, and he drew back, his ears pinned against his head. His pupils dilated, and he exposed his teeth.

The two animals, predator and prey, stood united in fear for a moment, and then retreated, the wolf heading east, the deer, west. All thoughts of hunger and feeding had left the wolf. There was only the urge to run.

But he was wounded, and tired, and winter was still upon him.

A single light burned in Pearson’s General Store & Gunsmithery. It illuminated a table around which sat four old men, each of them concentrating on his cards.

‘Jesus,’ said Ben Pearson, ‘this is the worst hand I’ve ever seen. I swear, if I hadn’t watched it dealt myself, I’d never have believed it. I didn’t even know cards went this low.’

Everybody ignored him. Ben Pearson could have been holding four aces dealt by Christ Himself and he’d still have been bitching. It was his version of a poker face. He’d developed it as a way of distracting attention from his regular features, which were so expressive as to give away his every passing thought. Depending upon the story that one was telling, Ben could be the best or worst audience a man might wish for. He was almost childlike in his transparency, or so it seemed. Although now in his seventies, he still had a full head of white hair, and his face was comparatively unlined. It added to his air of youthfulness.

Pearson’s General Store & Gunsmithery had been in Ben’s family for four generations in one form or another, and yet it wasn’t even the oldest business in the town of Prosperous, Maine. An alehouse had stood on the site of what was now the Prosperous Tap since the eighteenth century, and Jenna Marley’s Lady & Lace had been a clothing store since 1790. The names of the town’s first settlers still resounded around Prosperous in a way that few other such settlements could boast. Most had roots back in Durham and Northumberland, in the northeast of England, for that was where Prosperous’s first settlers had originally come from. There were Scotts and Nelsons and Liddells, Harpers and Emersons and Golightlys, along with other more singular names: Brantingham, Claxton, Stobbert, Pryerman, Joblin, Hudspeth …

A genealogist might have spent many a profitable day scouring the town’s register of births and deaths, and some had indeed journeyed this far north to investigate the history of the settlement. They were received courteously, and some cooperation was offered, but they invariably left feeling slightly dissatisfied. Gaps in the town’s annals prevented full and thorough research, and making connections between the settlers of Prosperous and their ancestors back in England proved more difficult than might first have been expected, for it seemed those families that departed for the shores of the New World had done so in their entirety, leaving few, if any, stray branches behind.

Of course, such obstacles were hardly unfamiliar to historians either amateur or professional, but they were frustrating nonetheless, and eventually the town of Prosperous came to be regarded as a dead end, genealogically speaking, which perfectly suited the inhabitants. In that part of the world they were not unusual in preferring to be left untroubled by strangers. It was one of the reasons why their forefathers had traveled so far into the interior to begin with, negotiating treaties with the natives that tended to hold more often than not, giving Prosperous a reputation as a town blessed by the Lord, even if its inhabitants declined to allow others to share in their perceived good fortune, divinely ordained or otherwise. Prosperous did not invite, nor welcome, new settlers without specific connections to the northeast of England, and marriages outside the primary bloodlines were frowned upon until the late nineteenth century. Something of that original pioneering, self-sufficient spirit had transmitted itself down the generations to the present population of the town.

Now, in Pearson’s General Store, cards were exchanged and bets were placed. This was nickel-and-dime poker in its most literal sense, and it was a rare evening when any man went home with his pockets more than a dollar or two lighter or heavier. Still, bragging rights for the rest of the week could be gained from a good run of cards, and there had been times when Ben Pearson’s fellow players had chosen to avoid his store for a couple of days in order to let Ben’s triumphalism cool a little.

‘I’ll raise you a dime,’ said Calder Ayton.

Calder had worked alongside Ben Pearson for the best part of half a century, and envied him his hair. He owned a small share in the store, a consequence of a brief period of financial strife back in the middle of the last century when some of the townsfolk had allowed their attention to wander, what with the war and all, and old, careful habits had been set aside for a time in the hope that they might eventually be abandoned entirely. But they’d learned the foolishness of that way of thinking, and the older inhabitants had not forgotten the lesson.

Thomas Souleby pursed his lips and gave Calder the cold eye. Calder rarely went above a nickel unless he had a straight at least, and he’d flipped his dime so fast that Thomas was certain he was holding a flush or better. They always played with one-eyed royals as wild cards, and Thomas had caught a glimpse of Calamity Jane squinting at him from Calder’s hand — Thomas not viewing it as cheating if someone was careless enough to display his hand to all and sundry. It was what had made him a good businessman in his day, back when he was working in corporate acquisitions. You took whatever advantage came your way, and you milked it for all it was worth.

‘I’m out,’ said Luke Joblin.

At sixty he was the youngest of the quartet, but also the most influential. His family had been in real estate ever since one caveman had looked at another and thought, ‘You know, his cave is much bigger than mine. I wonder if he’d see his way to moving out. And if he doesn’t see his way to moving out, I’ll just kill him and take his cave anyway.’ At which point some ancient seed of the Joblin clan had spotted an opportunity to make a percentage on the deal, and perhaps prevent some bloodshed along the way.

Now Luke Joblin made sure that real estate in Prosperous stayed in the right hands, just as his father and grandfather and great-grandfather had done before him. Luke Joblin knew the state’s zoning and land use regulations backwards — not surprising, given that he’d helped to write most of them — and his eldest son was Prosperous’s Code Enforcement Officer. More than any other family, the Joblins had ensured that Prosperous retained its unique character and identity.

‘The hell do you mean, you’re out?’ said Ben Pearson. ‘You barely looked at those cards before you dropped them like they was poisoned.’

‘I got nothing but a hand of culch,’ said Luke.

‘You got nearly a dollar of mine from the last eight hands,’ said Thomas. ‘Least you can do is give a man a chance to win his money back.’

‘What do you want me to do, just hand your money over to you? I got no cards. This is a game of strategy: you gamble when you’re strong, you fold when you’re weak.’

‘You could try bluffing,’ said Thomas. ‘You could at least make some kind of effort.’

It was always like this between them. They liked each other well enough, but the pleasure each derived from the other’s company was directly proportionate to the degree of pickle they could give over the course of an evening.

‘I brought the whisky,’ Luke pointed out. ‘It wasn’t for me, you’d be drinking Old Crow.’

There were murmurs of agreement.

‘Ayuh, this one’s a sippa,’ said Calder, laying on the accent with a trowel. ‘Wicked good.’

Each man took it in turn to provide a bottle for the weekly poker night, although it usually sufficed for two evenings, and it was a point of pride to bring along something that satisfied all tastes to a degree. Luke Joblin knew Scotch better than any of them, and that night they were drinking an eighteen-year-old from Talisker, the only distillery on the Isle of Skye. It was a little spicy for Thomas’s palate, but he had to admit that it was far superior to The Glenlivet, which had been his selection some weeks earlier. Then again, Thomas had never been one for hard liquor, and preferred wine. He gave the whisky a second swirl out of habit, and took a small mouthful. He was starting to like it more and more. It certainly grew on a fella.

‘Maybe I’ll let you off this once,’ said Thomas.

‘That’s generous of you,’ said Luke.

In the end, Calder took the pot with a flush, just as Thomas had anticipated. Thomas was taking a mauling that night. If things kept going the way they were, he’d have to break another dollar.

By unspoken consent they rested for a while. Talk turned to local matters: business dealings, rumors of romances and problems in the town that needed to be addressed. Tree roots were just about coming through the sidewalk on Main Street, and the town office needed a new boiler. A dispute had also arisen over the old Palmer house, with three families seeking to acquire it for their children. The Palmers, a private couple even by the standards of the town, had died without issue, and represented the end of their line in Prosperous. The proceeds of their estate were to be dispersed between various charities, with a portion going also to the town’s central fund. But living space was at a premium in Prosperous, and the Palmer house, although small and in need of some repair, was much coveted. In any ordinary community, market forces would have been allowed to prevail, and the house would have gone to the highest bidder. Prosperous, though, did not operate that way. The decision on the sale of the house would be made according to who was owed it, who had the best claim upon it. Discussions would be held, and a consensus reached. The family that eventually acquired the house would make some reparation to the others. Luke Joblin would get his commission, of course, but he would earn it.

In effect, the poker night functioned as an unofficial meeting of most of the board of selectmen. Only Calder Ayton did not contribute to the discourse. Meetings bored him, and whatever Ben Pearson decided was always fine with him. Old Kinley Nowell, meanwhile, was absent on this occasion, laid up in hospital with pneumonia. There was a general feeling that Kinley didn’t have long left on this earth. Possible replacements had to be considered, and Ben now raised the matter with his fellow selectmen. After some back and forth, it was decided that some younger blood wouldn’t hurt them, and the elder Walker girl, Stacey, should be approached, once the first selectman had given her consent. Hayley Conyer — she didn’t care to be called a selectwoman, didn’t approve of that kind of nonsense — was not one for poker games or whisky evenings. Ben Pearson said that he would talk to Hayley in the morning and sound her out, but he told the others that he didn’t anticipate any refusal, or any problems with the nomination. Stacey Walker was a clever girl, and a good lawyer, and it never hurt to have lawyers on call.

Thomas Souleby wasn’t so sure. He felt sure that Hayley Conyer would object, and she retained a rarely used power of veto when it came to nominations for the board. Conyer was a strong woman who preferred the company of men, and had no particular sense of obligation to others of her sex who might be a threat to her position. She wouldn’t welcome the arrival of someone as young and vibrant as Stacey Walker, and Thomas believed that, in the case of the Walker girl, Conyer might well have a point. He had his own ambitions to lead the board once Conyer was gone, whenever that might be, and had worked long and hard to ensure that he would have as little competition as possible. Stacey Walker was a just a mite too clever, and too ambitious, for Thomas’s liking. While he frequently clashed with Conyer, he would not object to her using her veto to shoot down the Walker nomination. Someone more suitable could be found; someone more substantial, more experienced.

Someone more malleable.

Thomas stretched and took in the old store, with its curious mix of expensive artisan products alongside the regular items that you could buy for half the price in a Hannaford or a Shaw’s. Ben certainly wasn’t shy with his pricing, Thomas would give him that, but there was also the matter of convenience, and exchanging gossip, and supporting local businesses to consider. It was important for the town that money stayed within its precincts wherever possible. Once cash started leaking out, Prosperous would be financially sound in name only. For the early settlers, the name had been part prayer, part aspiration. Now it was a reflection of the reality of the town’s situation: it had the highest per capita income in Maine, a fact that might not have been immediately apparent were a visitor to judge it on appearances alone. Prosperous maintained a low profile, and did not call attention to itself.

The four men were seated at the western side of the store, where Calder had set up some tables beside a picture window that looked out on his yard and the woods beyond. In summer there were picnic benches at which to sit, but for now icy snow still lay on the grass, and the air was pierced by a damp chill that made an old man’s bones hurt. To Thomas’s left, a locked door led into the gun shop, and beyond that was the gunsmithery itself. A tattered and yellowed sign on the door advised that an upfront deposit of $30 was required for each weapon accepted for service, with a further $25 levied if the weapon was presented without the required magazine. Thomas didn’t even know why the sign was still in place. The only people who presented Ben Pearson with weapons to be serviced were locals, and they were hardly likely to forget that they’d left them with Ben. Similarly, if they neglected to bring along the magazine, then they could just drop by with it later in the day.

Thomas’s wife Constance used Ben’s services occasionally — she had been a competitive rife shooter for most of her life, and hadn’t been far off Olympic standard as a young woman, although the gap between what she could do and what was required might as well have been as deep and wide as an abyss at that level — but she was one of the exceptions in Prosperous. Even allowing for those who hunted, the town had one of the lowest rates of gun ownership in the state. The gunsmith element of Ben Pearson’s business was little more than a hobby for him. He kept only a small range of rifles and pistols for sale, mostly high-end stuff, but he seemed to enjoy the metalwork aspect of the job, the threading and futing and jeweling. He was also reputed to make very fine custom-built stocks, if that was what floated your boat.

Thomas yawned and checked his watch. The whisky had gone to his head, and he was wishing for his bed. He glanced to his right. The light from their table illuminated only a few feet of snow on the yard outside. Beyond was darkness.

Something pale flickered in the shadows. It looked like a moth. As Thomas watched, it grew larger and larger. It took on the form of a young woman wearing a stained white dress, the color of it nearly lost against the snow so that he thought he might almost have been dreaming her. Her feet were bare as she ran, and there were leaves caught in her dark hair. Closer and closer she came. Thomas opened his mouth to speak, but no words emerged. He rose from his chair just as the girl impacted against the glass, shaking it in its frame. Her fingernails were torn. They left trails of blood on the window.

‘Help me,’ she cried. ‘Please help me.’

Her words turned to clouds on the air, and the wind snatched them and bore them into the listening woods.

3

Miles to the south, in the city of Portland, a homeless man was dying.

His name was Jude — no second name, just Jude — and he was well known both to his fellow street people and to those in law enforcement. He was not a criminal, although there were some in Portland who seemed to regard being homeless as a criminal act, punishable by the withdrawal of services and support until death took care of the problem. No, Jude had always been law-abiding, but he had spent so long on the streets that he knew every nook and cranny of them, every crack in the sidewalk, every raised brick. He listened carefully to the reports from others of his kind — the appearance of strangers among them, men of vicious demeanor, or the news of abandoned properties that had previously provided some shelter and were now being used by dealers of narcotics — and traded that information with the police. He did not do so for his own benefit, although there were times when the nights were cold and he was offered the comfort of a cell in which to rest, or even a ride to South Portland or further afield if a cop was feeling particularly generous or bored.

Jude functioned as a kind of father figure for the homeless of the city, and his relationship with the police allowed him to intervene on behalf of men and women who sometimes found themselves in trouble with the law for minor infractions. He also acted as a go-between for the operators of the city’s homeless services, keeping an eye on those who were most at risk and therefore least likely to maintain a consistent relationship with anyone who might be in a position to help them. Jude knew where everyone slept, and at any time he could name the number of homeless in the city to within a handful of people. Even the worst of them, the most violent and troubled, respected Jude. He was a man who preferred to go a little hungrier himself, and share what he had with a brother or sister, than see another starve.

What Jude declined to share with others was much of his own history, and he rarely sought anything beyond the most basic assistance with his own needs. He was clearly an educated man, and the backpack he wore on his shoulders always contained a book or two. He was well-versed in the great works of fiction, but preferred history, biography and works of social commentary. He spoke French and Spanish, some Italian and a little German. His handwriting was small and elegant, not unlike its practitioner. Jude kept himself clean, and as neatly turned out as his situation allowed. The Goodwill stores on Forest Avenue and out by the Maine Mall, and the Salvation Army on Warren Avenue, all knew his sizes by heart, and would often put aside items that they thought he might appreciate. By the standards of the streets, one might even have said that Jude was something of a dandy. He rarely spoke of any family, but it was known that he had a daughter. Of late, she had become a topic of conversation among Jude’s few intimates. It was whispered that Jude’s daughter, a troubled young woman, had fallen off the radar again, but Jude spoke little of her, and refused to bother the police with his private concerns.

Because of his efforts, and his decency, the city’s advocates for the homeless had tried to find Jude some permanent housing, but they soon learned that something in his character rendered him ill suited to settling down. He would stay in his new home for a week, or a month, and then a social worker would respond to a complaint and find that Jude had given up his apartment to four or five others, and had himself returned to the streets. In winter, he would seek a bed at the Oxford Street shelter or, if no such bed was available, as was often the case when the weather was harsh, he would lie down on a thin mat on the floor of the nearby Preble Street community center, or take a chair in the lobby of Portland’s general assistance office. On such nights, with the temperature at seventeen degrees and the wind so cold that it penetrated his layers of wool and cotton, of newspaper and flesh, right to his bones, he would wonder at those who claimed that Portland was too attractive to the homeless because it found a place for anyone who sought shelter. But he would consider, too, the flaws in his own personality that rendered him unable to accept the comforts that he sought for others. He knew that it meant he would die on the streets. He was not surprised, therefore, by the fact that death had now come for him at last, but merely by the form it had taken.

He had been living in the basement of a rundown and gutted condo near Deering Oaks for a week or more. He was eating little, apart from what he could scavenge and what the shelters provided, trying to balance the need to save money with the basic requirements of staying alive.

He would be of no use to her if he died.

Was it genetic? Had he passed on his own flaw, his destructive love affair with the streets, to his only daughter? In his colder, more logical moments, he thought not. He had never had difficulties with drugs or alcohol. Substance addiction was not in his nature. His daughter, by contrast, started using shortly after Jude left home, or so her mother had told him before all communication between them ceased. His wife had died hating him, and he could hardly blame her. She would tell him that she did not know what she had done wrong, what grave offense she had given that caused her husband to leave her and their child, for she could not accept that she had done nothing. Something had broken inside him, that was all. He had walked away from everything — his job, his family, even his dog — because, had he not done so, he would have taken his own life. His was a psychological and emotional disturbance of untold, awful depth, mundane and yet tragic in that very ordinariness.

He had tried talking to his daughter, of course, but she would not listen. Why should she? Why should she take lessons in life from a man who had been unable to come to terms with happiness, with being loved? She threw his failings back in his face, as he knew she would. If he had stayed, if he had been a true father, then perhaps she too might have remained where she was, and this beast would not have taken her in its clutches and slowly drained the life from her. You did this to me, she said. You.

But he had done what he could for her, in his way. Just as he kept careful watch on those in his charge on Portland’s streets, so others did the same for his daughter, or attempted to. They could not save her from herself, and she had a selfdestructive urge that was kin to her father’s fractured nature. Whatever had come from her mother’s estate went into her arm or the arms of others, or briefly lined the pockets of boyfriends who were one step above pimps and rapists.

Now she had traveled north. He had heard reports of her in Lewiston, in Augusta, then Bangor. News from an old homeless woman, traveling south, was that she was clean and seeking somewhere to live, as a place of her own would be the first step toward finding a job.

‘How did she look?’ Jude asked.

‘She looked well. She’s pretty, you know that? Hard, but pretty.’

Yes, he thought. I know that. Pretty, and more than pretty.

She is beautiful.

So he took the bus north, but by then all trace of her was gone. There was talk, though. She had been offered a job. A young woman living and working at the Tender House, a shelter for homeless mothers and their children in Bangor, had spoken with her, so Jude was told when he called. His daughter had seemed excited. She was going to take a shower, buy some new clothes, maybe get a haircut. A couple, a nice older couple, needed someone to help maintain their house and their big yard, perhaps cook a meal or two, or drive them places when the need arose. For the sake of their own security, and to calm any concerns that the girl might have, they told her that they’d drop by the local police department on the way to the house, just so that she could confirm they were on the level and meant her no harm.

‘They showed me a picture of their house,’ Jude’s daughter told the young woman from the Tender House. ‘It’s beautiful.’

What was the name of this town, Jude asked his informant.

Prosperous.

Its name was Prosperous.

But when Jude traveled to Prosperous, and went to the police department, he was told that no such girl had ever passed through its doors, and when he asked on the streets of the town about his daughter he was met with professions of ignorance. Eventually the police came for him. They drove him to the town limits, and told him not to return, but he did. The second time he got a night in a cell for his troubles, and it was different from the cells in Portland or Scarborough because he was not there of his own volition, and the old fears came upon him. He did not like being shut in. He did not like locked doors. It was why he roamed the streets.

They drove him to Bangor the next morning and escorted him onto the bus. He was given a final warning: stay out of Prosperous. We haven’t seen your daughter. She was never here. Quit bothering people, or next time you’ll be up before a judge.

But he was determined not to stay away. There was something wrong in Prosperous. He felt it on that first day in the town. The streets had made him sensitive to those that carried a bad seed inside them. In Prosperous, one of those seeds had germinated.

None of this he shared with others, and certainly not the police. He found excuses to remain silent, although one in particular came more naturally than others: his daughter was a drifter, an addict. Such people routinely disappeared for a while before turning up again. Wait. Wait and see. She’ll come back. But he knew that she would not return, not unless someone went looking for her. She was in trouble. He sensed it, but he could not bring himself to speak of it. His vocal cords froze on her name. He had been on the streets for too long. The illness that caused him to leave his family had left him unable to open himself up, to express weakness or fear. He was a locked box inside which tempests roiled. He was a man enshadowed by himself.

But there was one whom he trusted, one to whom he might turn an investigator, a hunter. He worked for money, this man, and with that realization came a kind of release for Jude. This would not be charity. Jude would pay for his time, and that payment would buy him the freedom he needed to tell his daughter’s story.

This night, his final night, he had counted his money: the handful of notes that he had hidden in a box in the damp earth of the basement; the small savings he had entrusted to one of the social workers, reclaimed that day; and a bag of filthy bills and coins, just a small fraction of the loans that he had given out to others and now repaid at a quarter on the dollar by those who could afford to do so.

He had just over $120, enough to get him beaten up by some, or killed by others. Enough, he hoped, to hire the detective for a couple of hours.

But now he was dying. The rope, suspended from a ceiling beam, was tightening around his neck. He tried to kick, but his legs were being held. His arms, previously restrained by his sides, were now released, and he instinctively raised his hands to the noose. His fingernails were ripped from his flesh, but he barely felt the pain. His head was exploding. He felt his bladder release, and knew that the end was coming. He wanted to cry out to her, but no words came. He wanted to tell her that he was sorry, so sorry.

The final sound that he made was an effort to speak her name.

4

It was left to Thomas Souleby to calm the girl down. He had four daughters of his own, and they, in turn, had so far gifted him only with female grandchildren, so he had more experience of placating women than anyone else in the room. This particular woman needed more placation than most: her first act, after they had let her in through the back door of the store, was to grab the nearest knife and keep them at bay. None of Thomas’s offspring had ever pulled a knife on him, although he wouldn’t have put it past one or two of them during their teenage years.

‘Easy, honey,’ he said. He stayed out of range of the knife, and spoke as softly as he could. ‘Easy now. What’s your name?’

‘Annie,’ she replied. ‘Call the police. Please, just call the police.’

‘We will,’ he said, ‘but we just—’

‘Now!‘ she screamed, and the sound just about busted Calder Ayton’s hearing aid.

‘Okay, we’re calling them,’ said Thomas. He motioned to Ben, who already had his cell phone in hand. ‘But what are we supposed to tell them?’

‘You tell them that some bitch and her fucker husband locked me in a basement, and fattened me up like a pig for slaughter,’ she said. ‘That’s what you tell them.’

Thomas looked at Ben, and shrugged.

‘You maybe don’t have to use those exact words,’ Thomas told him.

Ben nodded, and started dialing.

‘Put it on speaker, Ben,’ said Thomas, ‘just so Annie here knows we’re on the up and up.’

Ben tapped the screen on his phone, and turned the volume to maximum. They all listened to it ring. On the third tone, a voice broke in.

‘Chief Morland,’ it said.

The girl seemed to relax at the sound of the voice, but Thomas could still see her casting glances over his shoulder, staring out the picture window in the direction from which she had come. She couldn’t know how long it would be before her captors noticed that she was gone and came looking for her. She didn’t trust four old coots to keep her safe.

‘Lucas, this is Ben Pearson over at the store. We got a girl here in some distress. She says her name is Annie, and that someone has been holding her in a basement. I’d appreciate it a whole lot if you could get here real soon.’

‘On my way,’ said the chief. ‘Tell her to sit tight.’

The connection was cut.

‘How far away is the police station?’ asked Annie.

‘Less than a mile, but I called the chief on his cell phone,’ said Ben. ‘He could be closer than that, or a little farther away, but this isn’t a big town. It won’t be long before he’s here.’

‘Can we get you something, honey?’ said Thomas. ‘You want water, or coffee? We got whisky, if that helps. You must be freezing. Ben, find the girl a coat.’

Ben Pearson moved to the rack to get one of the men’s coats. His motion brought him almost within reach of the knife, and the girl slashed at the air in warning.

‘Jesus!’ said Ben.

‘You stay back!’ she warned. ‘All of you, just keep back. I don’t want anyone to come near me, not until the police get here, you understand?’

Thomas raised his hands in surrender.

‘Anything you say, but I can see that you’re shivering. Look, Ben will go to the rack and slide a coat across the floor to you. None of us will come near you, okay? Seriously, nobody here is in a hurry to get cut.’

The girl considered the offer, then nodded. Ben took his big old L.L.Bean goose down parka from the rack and slid it across the floor. The girl squatted and, never taking her eyes from the four men, slipped her left arm into the sleeve. She rose, and in one quick movement changed the knife from her right hand to her left so that she could put the parka on fully. The men remained completely still while she did so. The girl then moved sideways across the room to the poker table, poured herself a glass of the whisky and tossed it back in one gulp. Luke Joblin looked slightly pained.

‘These people who held you captive,’ said Thomas. ‘Did you get a look at them?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know their names?’

‘No.’ The girl relented, and soon the words were tumbling from her lips. ‘They weren’t the ones who brought me here first, though. They were an older couple, David and Harriett Carpenter, if those were even their real names. They showed me some ID when we first met, but what do I know about IDs? As soon as we got to the outskirts of this shithole, they handed me over to another couple, younger than them. They were the ones who kept me in their damn basement. I know their faces. They didn’t even bother to keep them hidden from me. That’s how I knew they were going to kill me in the end. Others came too. I caught them looking at me through the slit in the door. I pretended to be asleep, but I saw some of their faces as well.’

Thomas shook his head in disbelief, and sat down heavily. Ben Pearson looked to the woods, just as the girl had done, waiting for figures to appear out of the gloom, hellbent on dragging her back to captivity. Luke Joblin watched the young woman, his expression unreadable. Calder Ayton’s attention was drawn to the wrinkles on his hands. He traced them with the tips of his index fingers — first the left, then the right — as though surprised to find this evidence of his aging. No further words were spoken, no more reassurances given. This was Morland’s business now.

Annie walked over to the register, where she could keep an eye on the parking lot outside the store. Blue lights shone in the distance. The police were on their way. She watched the four men, but they seemed stunned into inaction. She was in no danger from them.

An unmarked Crown Vic pulled into the lot, a flashing blue light on its dashboard. Although Ben had killed the outside spots when he closed the store, there were motion-activated lights set above the porch. Those lights now illuminated the lot, bathing Chief Morland in their glow as he stepped from the car.

‘I feel sick,’ said Annie. ‘I need to go to the bathroom.’

‘The chief has just arrived, honey,’ said Thomas.

‘It’s the whisky,’ said the girl. ‘It’s done something to my stomach.’

She bent over, as if in pain.

‘I need to puke or shit, I don’t know which.’

Ben didn’t want her to do either in his place of business so he directed her to a door at the rear of the store. It led into his own private quarters, where he sometimes stayed the night, particularly if he was working late in the gunsmithery. His house was less than a mile away, but since the death of his wife it felt too big and empty for him. He preferred the store. That was his place now.

‘It’s the second door on the left,’ he said. ‘You take your time. You’re safe now.’

She headed into the back of the store, her hand over her mouth, seconds before the chief entered. He was a big man, six foot three and topping out at about 200 pounds. He was clean-shaven, and his eyes were gray, like the cold ashes of old fires. He had been Prosperous’s chief of police for nearly a decade, and had taken over the job from his father. Before that, he served his apprenticeship in the Maine State Police. That was how he always described it: ‘my apprenticeship’. Everyone knew that Prosperous was the only place that mattered. He walked with just the slightest of limps, a consequence of a car accident near Augusta back in the day. No one had ever suggested that his injured limb might impact upon his ability to carry out his job, and the chief had never given anyone cause to do so.

‘Where is she?’ he asked.

‘In the bathroom,’ said Ben. ‘She wasn’t feeling good.’

Morland had been in Pearson’s store often enough to know it nearly as well as he did his own house. He went straight through to the bathroom and knocked on the door.

‘Miss?’ he called. ‘My name is Lucas Morland, and I’m the chief of police here in Prosperous. Are you okay in there?’

There was no reply. A cold breeze flipped the ends of Morland’s trousers against his shoes and legs. It was coming from under the bathroom door.

‘Shit,’ he said.

He stepped back, raised his right foot and kicked hard against the lock. The lock held, but the jamb broke on the second attempt. The door opened to reveal an empty bathroom. The small window above the toilet gaped open. Morland didn’t even waste time trying to look out. The girl would already be seeking the cover of darkness.

Thomas Souleby was following behind the chief, and was almost bowled over by him as he moved back into the store.

‘What is it?’ he asked, but Morland didn’t answer. He was trying to hide the pain in his left leg. This damn weather always played hell with it, and he’d be glad when summer came. He stomped into the parking lot and turned left at the corner of the store. Pearson’s was close to the intersection of two roads: the front faced north on the main road into Prosperous while to the west was the highway. Morland’s eyesight was good, even in the dark, and he could see a figure moving fast between two copses of trees, making for the highway. The road crested a hill at Prosperous’s western boundary. As he watched the girl, the lights of a truck appeared on the hill.

If she reached it, he was lost.

Annie ran.

She’d been so close to safety, or so she’d thought, and then the cop had appeared. She’d recognized him at once: the shape and size of him, but most of all the way that he limped. She’d seen him twice before. The first time was just after the handover, when she’d been brought to the basement. She’d fought against them as they carried her from the truck, and the cloth across her eyes had slipped a little. The cop had been there, supervising the operation, following on behind as they brought her to her cell. The second was on one of the occasions when they permitted her to shower, although they always kept her hands and feet manacled. She had glanced to her right as she left her basement cell, and caught a brief glimpse of the man with the gray eyes at the top of the stairs before the door closed. On neither occasion had he been in uniform, otherwise she would have known better than to let the old geezers call the cops.

The couple had kept her well fed. That, at least, was something. She had strength, perhaps more than she’d had in many years. There was no alcohol in her system, and she was clean of drugs. Her own speed surprised her.

Annie saw the truck at the same time that Morland did. If she could get to the highway in time, she could stop it and beg for a ride to another town. There was a chance that the cop might come after them, but any truck driver in his right mind would be able to see her bare, bloodied feet and her tattered nightgown, and know that something terrible had befallen her. If that wasn’t enough to convince him, she was sure that her story would do the rest. He — or she, if she was lucky enough to be picked up by a woman — could take her to the cops in Bangor, or to the nearest state police troop house. The truck driver could haul her to the FBI in Washington DC for all Annie cared. She just wanted to get away from this godforsaken town.

The ground began to slope upward as she neared the road. She stumbled slightly as her feet hit a rock, and there was a terrible, sharp pain. She’d broken the big toe on her right foot. She was sure of it. It slowed her down, but it didn’t stop her. The truck was still some distance away, but she was going to reach the highway long before it passed her spot. She was prepared to stand in the middle of the road and risk being hit if that was what it took to stop it. She’d rather die quickly under its wheels than be taken back to that basement.

Something pushed her from behind and she fell to the ground. An instant later she heard the shot, and there was a pressure in her chest, followed by a burning that set her lungs on fire. She lay on her side and tried to speak, but only blood flowed from between her lips. The truck passed barely an arm’s length from where she lay, the driver oblivious to her dying. She stretched her fingers towards it, and felt the breeze of its passing. The burning inside her was no longer fiery but cold. Her hands and feet were growing numb, the ice spreading inward to the core of her being, freezing her limbs and turning her blood to crystals.

Footsteps approached, and then two men were looking down on her. One was the limping cop, the other the old man who had given her his coat. He was holding a hunting rife in his arms. She could see the rest of his friends following behind. She smiled.

I got away. I escaped. This wasn’t the ending that you wanted.

I beat you, you fuckers.

I—

Ben Pearson watched the life depart the girl, her body deflating as its final breath left it. He shook his head in sorrow.

‘And she was a good one too,’ he said. ‘She was scrawny, but they were feeding her up. If we were lucky, we could have got ten years or more out of her.’

Chief Morland walked to the road. There were no more vehicles coming their way. There was no chance that they would be seen. But what a mess, what a godawful mess. Somebody would answer for it.

He rejoined the others. Thomas Souleby was closest in height to himself. These things mattered when you were dealing with a body.

‘Thomas,’ he said, ‘you take her left leg. I’ll take the right. Let’s get this all cleaned up.’

And together the two men dragged the remains of Annie Broyer, lost daughter of the man named Jude, back to the store.

5

They saw the cars pull into their drive and knew that they were in trouble.

Chief Morland was leading, driving his unmarked Crown Vic. The dash light wasn’t flashing, though. The chief wasn’t advertising his presence.

The chief’s car was followed by Thomas Souleby’s Prius. A lot of folk in Prosperous drove a Prius or some other similarly eco-conscious car. Big SUVs were frowned upon. It was to do with the ethos of the town, and the importance of maintaining a sustainable environment in which to raise generations of children. Everybody knew the rules, unofficial or otherwise, and they were rarely broken.

As the cars pulled up outside the house, Erin gripped her husband’s hand. Harry Dixon was not a tall man, nor a particularly handsome one. He was overweight, his hair was receding and he snored like a drill when he slept on his back, but he was her man, and a good one, too. Sometimes she wished that they had been blessed with children, but it was not to be. They had waited too late after marriage, she often thought, and by the time it became clear that the actions of nature alone would not enable her to conceive, they had settled into a routine in which each was enough for the other. Oh, they might always have wished for more, but there was a lot to be said for ‘enough’.

But these were troubled times, and the idyllic middle age they had imagined for themselves was under threat. Until 2011, Harry’s construction company had weathered the worst of the recession by cutting back on its full-time employees and paring quotes to the bone, but 2011 had seen the company’s virtual collapse. It was said that the state had lost 4800 jobs in March of that year alone, which contributed to making Maine the nation’s leader in lost jobs. They’d both read about the arguments between the Maine Department of Labor and the Maine Center for Economic Policy, the latter basing its figures on higher Bureau of Labor Statistics job loss figures that the former refuted. As far as the Dixons were concerned, that was just the state’s Department of Labor trying to sweep the mess under the carpet. It was like telling a man that his feet are dry when he can feel the water lapping at his chin.

Now Harry’s company was little more than a one-man operation, with Harry quoting for small jobs that he could complete with cheap labor, and bringing in skilled contractors by the hour as he needed them. They could still pay their mortgage, just about, but they’d cut back on a lot of luxuries, and they did more and more of their buying outside Prosperous. Erin’s halfsister Dianne and her surgeon husband had helped them out with a small lump sum. They were both hospital consultants, and were doing okay. They could afford to lend a hand, but it had hurt the couple’s pride to approach them for a loan — a loan, what was more, that was unlikely to be discharged anytime soon.

They had also tapped the town’s discretionary fund, which was used to support townsfolk who found themselves in temporary financial trouble. Ben Pearson, who was regarded as one of the board’s more approachable members, had taken care of the details, and the money — just over $2000 — had helped the Dixons out a little, but Ben had made it clear that it would have to be paid back, in cash or in kind. If it wasn’t, then the board would start delving more deeply into their situation, and if the board stared snooping it might well find out about Dianne. That was why the Dixons had agreed, however reluctantly, to keep the girl. It would serve as repayment of the loan, and keep their relationship with Dianne a secret.

Erin had only discovered her halfsister’s existence some three years earlier. Erin’s father had left Prosperous when she was little more than an infant, and her mother had subsequently remarried — to a cousin of Thomas Souleby, as it happened. Her father hadn’t been heard from again, and then, at the end of 2009, Dianne had somehow tracked Erin down, and a tentative if genuine affection had sprung up between them. It seemed that their father had created a whole new identity for himself after he left Prosperous, and he never mentioned the town to his new wife or his child. It was only following his death, and the death of her mother, that Dianne had come across documents among her father’s possessions that explained the truth about his background. By then she was on her second marriage — to a man who, coincidentally or through the actions of fate, lived in the same state that had spawned her father, and not too far from the town and life that he had fed.

Erin had professed complete ignorance of the reasons why their father might have gone to such lengths to hide his identity, but when Dianne persisted Erin hinted at some affair with a woman from Lewiston, and her father’s fear of retribution from his wife’s family. None of it was true, of course — well, none of the stuff about the affair. Her father’s fear of retribution was another matter. Nevertheless, she made it clear to Dianne that it would be for the best if she kept her distance from Prosperous, and didn’t go delving into the past of their shared father.

‘Old towns have long memories,’ Erin told Dianne. ‘They don’t forget slights.’

And Dianne, although bemused, had consented to leaving Prosperous to its own business, aided in part by her halfsister’s willingness to share with her what she knew of their father’s past, even if, unbeknownst to Dianne, Erin had carefully purged all that she offered of any but the most innocuous details.

So Erin and Harry were the poor relatives, bound to Dianne and her husband by the shade of a father. They were content to play that role, though, and to keep the existence of Dianne and her husband hidden from the citizens of Prosperous. Unspoken between them was the fact that they might have need of Dianne at some point in the future, and not only for money, for the Dixons wanted nothing more than to leave Prosperous, and that would be no easy task. The board would want to know why. The board would investigate. The board would almost certainly find out about Dianne, and the board would wonder what secrets Erin Dixon might have shared with her halfsister, the daughter of a man who had turned his back on the town, who had stolen its money and, perhaps, whispered of the deal it had made to secure itself.

Keeping all their fears from Dianne and her husband was not easy. To further complicate matters, Harry and Erin had asked for the money to be paid in cash. She could still remember the look on Dianne’s face: puzzlement, followed by the dawning realization that something was very wrong.

‘What kind of trouble are you two in?’ she asked them, as her husband poured the last of the wine and gave them the kind of disapproving look he probably reserved for patients who neglected to follow his postoperative advice and then seemed surprised when they started coughing blood. His name was Magnus Madsen, and he was of Danish extraction. He insisted on the pronunciation of his first name as ‘Maunus’, without sounding the ‘g’, and had resigned himself to correcting Harry’s literal pronunciation whenever they met. Harry just couldn’t seem to manage ‘Mau-nus’, though. That damned ‘g’ kept intruding. Anyway, it wasn’t as if Magnus Madsen was fresh off a Viking longship. There were rocks that hadn’t been in Maine as long as the Madsens. His family had been given plenty of time to learn to speak English properly, and drop whatever airs they’d brought with them from the old country.

‘We’d just prefer it if people in Prosperous didn’t know that we were having serious difficulties,’ said Harry. ‘It’s a small town, and if word got out it might affect my chances of bidding successfully for work. If you pay us in cash, then we can make pretty regular lodgments into our account until we find our feet again, and nobody will be any the wiser.’

‘But surely any dealings you have with your bank are entirely confidential,’ said Magnus. ‘Couldn’t you ask your bank manager for an extended line of credit? I mean, you’re still working, and you must have paid off the bulk of your mortgage by now. That’s a nice house you have, and it’s worth a fair sum, even in these difficult times. It’s hardly like asking for an unsecured loan.’

There was so much that Harry wanted to say at that point, but it could have been summarized as ‘You and I do not live in similar worlds’. Those words ‘unsecured loan’ bit at him as well, because that was precisely what they were asking of Magnus and Dianne, but mostly he knew that Magnus had no conception of the way in which the town of Prosperous worked. If he did, it would turn his hair white.

And shortly after that, he’d be dead.

Magnus and Dianne gave them the money in the end, and Harry used it to pump up the deposits being made at the bank, but the borrowed cash was almost gone now, and he didn’t think that his in-laws could be tapped again. In any normal situation, Harry and Erin would have sold up and moved on. Sure, they’d take a bit of a hit on the house, but with a little luck they might come out of it with a high five-or low six-figure sum once the mortgage was paid off. They could start again, maybe rent for a while until the economy recovered.

But this wasn’t a normal situation. They knew that they probably weren’t the only ones in the town who were suffering; there were rumors, and more than rumors. Even Prosperous wasn’t entirely immune from the vagaries of the economy, just as, throughout its history, it had never been completely protected from conflict or financial turmoil or the anger of nature. Yet it had always been better protected than most. The town took steps to ensure that was the case.

‘What do you think happened?’ Erin now whispered to her husband, as they watched the men approach. ‘Did she get away?’

‘No,’ said Harry. ‘I don’t believe she did.’

If she had escaped, then these others wouldn’t be here on their doorstep. There were only two possibilities. The first was that the girl had been captured before she could leave Prosperous, in which case the chief was going to be mad as hell with them for failing to keep her locked up, and they could only hope that the girl had sense enough to keep any suspicions about the ease of her escape to herself. The second possibility was that she was dead, and Harry found himself wishing that the latter was true. It would be easier for all of them.

They didn’t give the chief time to knock on the door. Harry opened it to find Morland with his fist raised, and he flinched instinctively in anticipation of the blow. There was a doorbell, but it wouldn’t have been like Lucas Morland to use it under the circumstances. A sharp knock was much more psychologically effective.

Harry opened the door wide to admit them, the chief with his face set hard and Thomas Souleby looking more disappointed than angry, as though Harry and Erin were teenagers who had failed some crucial parental test.

‘We know why you’re here,’ said Harry.

‘If you know why we’re here,’ said the chief, ‘then why didn’t you call us to tell us about the girl?’

‘We only just found out she was gone,’ said Erin. ‘We were about to call, but—’

She looked to her husband for help.

‘But we were frightened,’ he finished for her.

‘Frightened of what?’

‘That we’d let you down, that we’d let the whole town down. We knew you’d be angry.’

‘Did you try looking for her?’

‘Sure,’ said Harry. ‘I mean, no, not yet, but we were about to. See, I’d put my boots on.’ He pointed down at his feet, which were, indeed, booted. He never wore footwear in the house — Erin bitched about the carpets — but he’d put his boots on that night, just in case it all went to hell. ‘I was ready to head out when you arrived.’

‘Did you find her?’ said Erin. ‘Please tell me that you found her.’

She was good, Harry gave her that. It was just what she should have said, just what the chief would have expected to hear.

Morland didn’t reply. He was leaving them to stew for a while, waiting to see what they might reveal to him. They’d have to step carefully now. What would the girl have said when she was caught? What would she have told them?

Nothing, Harry figured. She’d have kept quiet. That was why he and Erin had simply left the doors mostly unsecured, and gone about their business. If the girl were caught, they’d have deniability.

Morland leaned against the kitchen table and folded his arms.

‘How did it happen?’ he asked.

‘It was my fault,’ said Erin. ‘I left the door unlocked. I didn’t mean to. Sometimes, if I knew she was asleep, I’d just shoot the bolt and let the shackle hang loose on the mechanism. I was tired, though, and I think I may have forgotten to put the padlock on, and the bolt wasn’t properly in place. She must have worked the bolt free from the inside. I found a piece of cloth on the floor that she could have used. Maybe she tore it from her nightgown.’

‘How did she know that you hadn’t locked the door?’ asked Souleby.

Damn you, thought Harry. I always felt you were too smart for anyone’s good. Souleby, the miserable bastard, reminded Harry of an old stork, all beak and limbs.

‘I don’t know,’ said Erin. ‘My guess is that she never gave up trying to escape. She probably tried the door every time I left the room, and this time she just got lucky.’

‘Got lucky, huh?’ said Morland.

He permitted himself a little smile.

‘Show me the door,’ he said. ‘Explain it all to me again.’

They went down to the basement, and Erin showed him the cell, and the bolt, and the padlock. Just as she had told him, there was a piece of white material on the floor, stained with grease from the bolt. The chief examined it, and toyed with the bolt and padlock for a while.

‘Get inside,’ he said to Erin.

‘What?’

‘Go on. Get inside that cell.’ He handed her the strip of cloth. ‘And take this with you.’

She did as she was told. The chief closed the door on her and slid the bolt, but did not secure it with the padlock.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘open it.’

The saliva dried up in Harry’s mouth. He would have prayed, but he had long since stopped believing in God. The continued existence of Prosperous was one of the strongest arguments he could come up with against the possibility of a benevolent deity watching over humankind.

After a couple of attempts, Erin managed to get the cloth through the gap between the door and the frame, and over the bolt. There was, though, no way that she could pull the other end back in. Harry closed his eyes. This was it.

A thin shaft of broken wood poked through the gap, caught

the strip of cloth, and pulled it back through to the other side of the cell door. Slowly, Erin began to twist it back and forth. The bolt moved: not by much, but it moved. With some perseverance, it would only be a matter of time before Erin managed to unlock the door from the inside, just as she claimed the girl had done.

Morland stared at Harry. Despite what he had witnessed, Harry knew that the chief still didn’t quite believe what he had been told. If he was expecting Harry to crack, though, he was going to be disappointed, not unless he resorted to torture, and even Morland was probably above that.

‘Let her out,’ he told Souleby, and Souleby pulled the bolt.

Erin stepped out of the cell, flushed but triumphant.

‘Where did you get the wood?’ said the chief.

‘It was on the floor by the girl’s bed,’ she said. ‘I saw it when I was trying to figure out how she did it.’

She handed him the fragment of pine. The chief tested it with his finger, then went to the bed and found the spot from which it had been taken.

‘Looks new,’ he said.

‘She hasn’t been gone but an hour,’ said Erin.

‘Uh-huh.’ Chief Morland took the stick in both hands and snapped it. It was the first outward demonstration that he had given of the rage he was feeling.

‘You still haven’t told us if you found her,’ said Harry.

‘Oh, we found her all right,’ said the chief.

‘Where is she?’

‘In the trunk of my car.’

‘Is she—?’

‘Is she what?’

‘Is she … dead?’

The chief didn’t answer immediately. He closed his eyes and wiped his face with his right hand. His shoulders sank. That was when Harry knew that they were okay, for now.

‘Yes, she’s dead,’ said Morland finally. ‘Just not the right kind of dead. You got a shovel?’

‘Sure,’ said Harry. ‘In my toolshed.’

‘Good,’ said the chief. ‘Because you’re going to help me bury her.’

6

I had a ticket for the 8:55 PM fight with US Airways out of Philadelphia, if I chose to use it, but I realized that I would either kill myself trying to make it, or end up with a ticket for speeding. Neither possibility particularly appealed to me, so I changed my fight to 9:30 AM the following morning and checked into a motel off Bartram Avenue. I had dinner in a bar that was one step up from eating food off the street, but I didn’t care. Once the adrenaline had stopped flowing after the events in Newark, I had experienced a comedown that left me shaking and nauseous. It didn’t matter what I ate: it would have tasted foul anyway, but I thought I needed something in my stomach. In the end, I left most of the food on the plate, and what I ate didn’t stay in my system for long once I was back in my room.

In truth, such reactions were becoming increasingly common as the years went on. I suppose I had always been frightened as I faced situations like that night’s — anyone who has found himself looking down the barrel of a gun, or confronting the possibility of injury or death, and claims to have done so without fear is either a liar or insane — but the more often you do it and survive, the more aware you become that the odds are inevitably swinging against you. If cats could count, they’d start getting nervous around the time they put paid to their fifth life.

I also wanted to watch Sam, my daughter, grow up. She was long past those early years when children, though cute, don’t do a whole lot except babble and fall over, much like a certain type of really old person. I found her endlessly fascinating, and regretted the fact that I was no longer with Rachel, her mother, although I didn’t think Rachel was about to move back in just so I could spend more time with Sam. Then again, I didn’t want Rachel to move back in, so the feeling was mutual. Still, with Rachel and Sam in Vermont, and me in Portland, arranging to spend time with my daughter took some planning. I supposed that I could always move to Vermont, but then I’d have to start voting Socialist, and finding excuses to secede from the Union. Anyway, I liked Portland, and being close to the sea. Staring out over Vermont’s Lake Bomoseen wasn’t quite the same thing.

I checked my cell phone messages as I lay on the bed. There was only one, from a man in Portland named Jude. He was one of a handful of the local street folk who’d proved helpful to me in the past, either by providing information or the occasional discreet surveillance service, as people tended not to notice the homeless, or pretended not to. Naturally there was no callback number for Jude. Instead, he had suggested leaving a message with the folk at the Portland Help Center or on the bulletin board at the Amistad Community on State Street to let him know when I might be available to meet.

I hadn’t seen Jude around in a while, but then I hadn’t really been looking for him. Like most of Portland’s homeless, he did his best to stay off the streets in winter. To do otherwise was to risk being found frozen in a doorway.

Me, I wasn’t doing so badly. Work had picked up over the winter because I’d developed a nice sideline in process serving. It wasn’t glamorous work, but it paid reasonably well, and occasionally required the exercise of more than a handful of brain cells. The day before I’d headed down to Newark to join Angel and Louis, I’d cashed a check for $2000, including a goodwill bonus payment, for just one job. The subject of the subpoena was an investment analyst named Hyram P. Taylor who was involved in the initial stages of serious and hostile divorce proceedings with his wife, who was represented by my lawyer — and, for the most part, my friend — Aimee Price. Hyram was such a compulsive fornicator that even his own lawyer had privately acknowledged the possibility of his client possessing a penis shaped like a corkscrew, and eventually his wife had just become tired of the humiliation. As soon as she fled for divorce, Hyram set about hiding all records relating to his wealth, and moving said wealth as far from the reach of his wife as possible. He even abandoned his office in South Portland and tried to go to ground, but I tracked him down to the apartment of one of his girlfriends, a woman called Brandi who, despite having a stripper’s name, worked as an accountant in New Hampshire.

The problem was that Hyram wouldn’t so much as pick up a piece of paper from the street for fear that it might be attached to an unseen piece of string ending in the hand of a process server. He didn’t go anywhere without Brandi in tow, and she was the one who paid cash for newspapers, groceries and drinks in bars. Hyram didn’t put his hand on anything if he could help it. He probably had Brandi check him before he peed in the morning, just in case someone had attached a subpoena to his manhood while he slept.

His weakness — and they all have a weakness — was his car. It was how I found him. He drove a six-liter black Bentley Flying Spur Speed: ten miles to the gallon in the city, 0–60 in 4.8 seconds, and $200,000 worth of vehicle, at the very least. It was his pride and joy, which was probably why he stood up so suddenly that he poured coffee over himself when I walked into the Starbucks on Andrews Road and asked if anyone owned a hell of a nice Bentley because I’d just knocked off the wing mirror on the driver’s side.

Hyram wasn’t a slim man, but he could move fast when the need arose, even with hot coffee scalding his thighs. He went past me at full sail and arrived at his car to find that, sure enough, the mirror was hanging on only by wires to the body of the car. It had been harder to knock off than I’d anticipated, requiring two blows from a hammer. The Bentley might have been expensive, but it was clearly built well.

‘I’m real sorry,’ I told him when I arrived to find him stroking the car as though it were a wounded animal that he was trying to console. ‘I just wasn’t looking. If it’s any help, I got a brother who runs an auto shop. He’d probably give you a good deal.’

Hyram seemed to be having trouble speaking. His mouth just kept opening and closing without sound. I could see Brandi hurrying across the parking lot, still trying to struggle into her coat while juggling her coffee and Hyram’s jacket. Hyram had left her in his wake, but she’d be with us in seconds. I needed to hook Hyram before she got here, and while he was still in shock.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘here are my insurance details, but if you could see your way clear to just letting me pay cash to cover the damages, I’d surely be grateful.’

Hyram reached out for the paper in my hand without thinking. I heard Brandi cry out a warning to him, but by then it was too late. His fingers had closed on the subpoena.

‘Mr Taylor,’ I said, ‘it’s my pleasure to inform you that you’ve just been served.’

It said a lot about Hyram P. Taylor’s relationship with his car that he still seemed more upset by the damage to it than he was by being in receipt of the subpoena, but that situation didn’t last long. He was swearing at me by the time I got to my own car, and the last I saw of him was Brandi flinging her coffee at his chest and walking away in tears. I even felt a little sorry for Hyram. He was a jerk, but he wasn’t a bad guy, whatever his wife might have thought of him. He was just weak and selfish. Badness was something else. I knew that better than most. After all, I’d just burned a man’s house down.

I made a note to get in touch with Jude, then turned out the light. The post-adrenaline dip had passed. I was now just exhausted. I slept soundly as, back in Portland, Jude twisted on his basement rope.

7

Harry Dixon and Chief Lucas Morland drove to the burial site in Morland’s car. There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation between them. The last body Harry had seen was that of his own mother, and she’d been eighty-five when she passed on. She’d died in a hospice in the middle of an October night. The call had come to Harry at 3:00 AM, informing him that his mother’s last hours on earth were approaching and perhaps he might like to be with her when she went, but by the time he got to her she was already dead. She was still warm, though. That was what Harry remembered the most, the nurse telling him that he ought to touch her, to feel his mother’s warmth, as though warmth equated to life and there might still be something of her inside that shell. So he placed his hand on her shoulder, for that appeared to be what was expected of him, and felt the warmth gradually leave her, the spirit slowly departing until at last there was nothing left but cold.

He had never, he realized, seen anyone who wasn’t supposed to be dead. No, that wasn’t right, but he couldn’t put it any better to himself. It had been his mother’s time to go. She was sick and old. Her final years had mostly been spent sleeping, misremembering, or forgetting entirely. Only once in her last months of life could he recall her speaking with any lucidity, and then he had just been thankful that they were alone together in the room. He wondered if, in her dementia, she had spoken of such matters to the nurses. If she did, they must have dismissed them as the ravings of an old woman on her way to the grave, for nobody had ever mentioned them to him. Those words came back to him now.

‘I saw them do it once,’ she had said, as he sat beside her in an uncomfortable hospice chair. ‘I wanted to look. I wanted to know.’

‘Really?’ he replied, only half-listening, practiced in the art of nodding and ignoring. He was thinking of his business, and money, and how it had all gone so wrong for Erin and him when it continued to go well for so many others, both within and beyond the boundaries of Prosperous. After all, he and Erin played their part in the business of the town. They did as they were asked, and did not complain. How come they were suffering? Weren’t the benefits of living in Prosperous supposed to be distributed equally among all? If not, then what was the point of being part of the community in the first place?

And now his mother was rambling again, dredging up some inconsequential detail from the mud of her memories.

‘I saw them take a girl. I saw them tie her up and leave her, and then—’

By now he was listening to her. Oh, he was listening for sure, even as he cast a glance over his shoulder to make sure that the door was closed.

‘What?’ he said. ‘Then what?’ He knew of that which she spoke. He had never seen it himself, and didn’t want to see it. You weren’t supposed to ask; that was one of the rules. If you wanted to know for sure, you could become a selectman, but selectmen in Prosperous were chosen carefully. You didn’t put yourself forward. You waited to be approached. But Harry didn’t want to be approached. In a way, the less he knew, the better, but that didn’t stop him wondering.

‘Then—’

His mother closed her eyes. For a moment he thought that she might have fallen asleep, but as he watched a tear crept from her right eye and her body began to shake. She was crying, and he had never seen his mother cry, not even when his father had died. She was a hard woman. She was old Prosperous stock, and they didn’t show frailty. If they had been frail, the town would not have survived.

Survived, and bloomed.

‘Mom,’ he said. ‘Mom.’

He took her right hand in his, but she shook it away, and only then did he realize that she was not crying but laughing, giggling at the memory of what she had witnessed. He hated her for it. Even in her slow dying, she had the capacity to horrify him. She stared at him, and she could see by his face how appalled he was.

‘You were always weak,’ she said. ‘Had your brother lived, he would have been stronger. He would have become a selectman. The best of your father’s seed went into him. Whatever was left dribbled into you.’

His brother had died in the womb three years before Harry was born. There had been a spate of miscarriages, stillbirths and crib deaths during the same period, a terrible blight upon the town. But the board of selectmen had taken action, and since then Prosperous had been blessed with only healthy, live children for many years thereafter. But his mother had never ceased to speak of Harry’s dead brother. Earl: that was the name she had given him, a melancholy echo of the status he might have attained had he lived. He was the Lost Earl. His royal line had died with him.

There were times in her dotage when Harry’s mother called him Earl, imagining, in her madness, a life for a son who had never existed, a litany of achievements, a great song of his triumphs. Harry suffered them in silence, just as he had endured them throughout his life. That was why, when his mother’s end approached at last, he had left Erin in bed, put on his clothes and driven for two hours to get to the hospice on a miserable fall night to be with his mother. He simply wanted to be certain that she was dead, and few things in their relationship had given him greater pleasure than feeling the warmth leave her body until just the withered husk of her remained. Only consigning her to the flames of the crematorium had been more rewarding.

‘You still awake there?’ said Morland.

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘I’m awake.’

He didn’t look at the chief as he spoke. He saw only his reflection in the glass.

I look like my mother, he thought. In Prosperous, we all look like our parents, and sometimes we look like the children of other folks’ parents too. It’s the gene pool. It’s too small. By rights it shouldn’t be deep enough to drown a kitten, and every family should have a drooling relative locked away in an attic. I guess we’re just blessed, and he smiled so hard, and so bleakly, at his choice of the word ‘blessed’ that he felt his bottom lip crack.

‘You’re very quiet,’ said the chief.

‘I never had to bury anyone before.’

‘Me neither.’

Now Harry did look at him.

‘You serious?’ he said.

‘I’m a cop, not an undertaker.’

‘You mean nothing like this has ever happened before?’

‘Not to my knowledge. Seems this may be the first time.’

It didn’t make Harry feel any better. There would be repercussions. This trip with the chief was only the beginning.

‘You didn’t tell me what happened to the girl,’ said Harry.

‘No, I didn’t.’ The chief didn’t speak again for a time, stringing Harry along. Then: ‘Ben Pearson had to shoot her.’

‘Had to?’

‘There was a truck coming. If she’d stopped it, well, we would have had an even more difficult situation than the one we’re currently in.’

‘What would you have done?’ asked Harry.

The chief considered the question.

‘I’d have tried to stop the truck, and I’d have been forced to kill the driver.’

He turned his gray eyes on Harry for a moment.

‘And then I’d have killed you, and your wife too.’

Harry wanted to vomit, but he fought the urge. He could taste it at the back of his throat, though. For the first time since he had gotten in the car with Morland, he felt frightened. They were in the darkness out by Tabart’s Pond, just one of many locations around Prosperous named after the original English settlers. There were no Tabarts left now in Prosperous. No Tabarts, no Mabsons, no Quartons, no Poyds. They’d all died early in the history of the settlement, and the rest had seemed set to follow them before the accommodation was reached. Now Harry was about to dig a grave in a place named after the departed, the lost, and a grave could accommodate two as easily as one.

‘Why?’ said Harry. ‘Why would you have killed us?’

‘For forcing me to do something that I didn’t want to do. For making life harder than it already is. For screwing up. As an example to others. You take your pick.’

The chief made a right turn onto a dirt road.

‘Maybe I’ll have another look at that lock on your basement when we’re done,’ he said. ‘Something about all this doesn’t sit quite right with me. Kinda like the lock itself, it seems.’

He grinned emptily at Harry. The beams of the headlights caught bare trees, and icy snow and—

‘What was that?’ said Harry. He was looking back over his right shoulder.

‘Huh? I didn’t see nothing.’

‘There was something there. It was big, like an animal of some kind. I saw its eyes shining.’

But the chief was paying him no attention. As far as Morland was concerned, Harry’s ‘something’ was just a ruse, a clumsy attempt to distract him from the business of the basement door. But Morland wasn’t a man to be turned so easily. He planned to walk both Harry and his wife through their versions of the escape. He’d do it over and over again until he was either satisfied with their innocence or convinced of their guilt. He was against entrusting the girl to them from the start, but he’d been overruled. He wasn’t a selectman, even though he could sit in on the board’s meetings. No chief of police had ever been a selectman. It was always felt that it was better to have the law as an instrument of the board’s will.

The board had wanted to test Harry and Erin Dixon. Concerns were being raised about them — justifiable concerns, it now appeared. But it was a big step from doubting the commitment of citizens of Prosperous to taking direct action against them. In all of the town’s history, only a handful of occasions had arisen when it became necessary to kill one of their own. Such acts were dangerous, and risked sowing discontent and fear among those who had doubts, or were vulnerable to outside influence.

Morland now regretted telling Harry Dixon that he might have killed his wife and him. He didn’t like Dixon, and didn’t trust him. He’d wanted to goad him, but it was a foolish move. He’d have to reassure him. He might even have to apologize and put his words down to his justifiable anger and frustration.

But the test wasn’t over. The test had only just begun. Harry Dixon would have to make amends for his failings, and Morland was pretty sure that Harry Dixon wouldn’t like what that would entail, not one little bit.

‘So what was it that you thought you saw?’ said Morland.

‘I believe I saw a wolf.’

8

The ground was hard. Not that Harry should have been surprised: he’d lived in Penobscot County for long enough to have no illusions about winter. On the other hand, he’d never had to dig a grave, not in any season, and this was like breaking rocks.

Morland left him to his own devices at the start. The chief sat in his car, the driver’s door open but the heat on full blast, and smoked a series of cigarettes, carefully stubbing each one out in the ashtray. After a while, though, it became clear that Harry would be hacking at the ground until summer if he was forced to make the grave alone, and so Morland opened the trunk of his car and removed a pickax from it. From where he was standing, Harry caught a glimpse of something wrapped in transparent plastic sheeting, but he didn’t look for long. He figured he’d have seen more than enough of it by the time this night was over.

Morland broke the ground with the pickax, and Harry cleared the earth away with the shovel. They worked without speaking. They didn’t have energy to spare. Despite the cold, Harry felt sweat soaking into his shirt. He removed his coat and was about to hang it on the low branch of a tree when Morland told him to put it in the car instead. Harry assumed it was because the car would keep his coat warm, until Morland made it clear that Harry’s health and well-being were the last things on his mind.

‘With luck, she’ll stay down here and never be found,’ said Morland, ‘but you never know. Prepare for the worst and you won’t be disappointed. I’ve seen crime scene investigators put a man behind bars for the rest of his life on the basis of a thread left on a branch. We take no chances.’

Morland wasn’t concerned about leaving tracks on the ground. It was too hard for that. Neither was he worried about being seen. Nobody lived nearby, and anyone who might be passing would, in all likelihood, be a citizen of Prosperous, and would know better than to go sticking a nose into Chief Morland’s affairs if he or she was foolish enough to come and investigate in the first place. Anyway, by now news of what had happened to the girl would have been communicated to those who needed to know. The roads around Prosperous would be quiet tonight.

They continued to dig. When they got to three feet, they were both too exhausted to go further. The chief was a big, strong man, but Harry Dixon was no wilting flower either: if anything he’d grown fitter over the previous year, now that he was required to be more active on his construction sites than he had been in decades. It was one of the few good things to come out of the financial mess in which he found himself. He had spent so long supervising, and ordering, and taking care of paperwork, that he had almost forgotten the pleasure of actual building, and the satisfaction that came with it — that, and the blisters.

Morland went to the car and took a Thermos of coffee from the back seat. He poured a cup for Harry, and drank his own directly from the neck. Together they watched the moon.

‘Back there, you were kidding about the wolf, right?’ said Morland.

Harry was wondering if he might have been mistaken. At one time, there had been wolves all over Maine — grays and easterns and reds — and the state had enacted wolf bounties until 1903. As far as he could recall, the last known wolf killing in the state was back in 1996. He remembered reading about it in the newspapers. The guy had killed it thinking it was a large coyote, but the animal weighed over eighty pounds, twice the size of the average coyote, and had the markings of a wolf, or wolf hybrid. There had been nothing since then, as far as he was aware: sightings and rumors, maybe, but no proof.

‘It was a big animal, and it had a doglike head, that’s all I can say for sure.’

Morland went to light another cigarette, but found that the pack was empty. He crushed it and put it carefully into his pocket.

‘I’ll ask around,’ he said. ‘Wouldn’t be a wolf, but if there’s a coyote in the woods we’d best let folks know, tell them to keep a watch on their dogs. You done?’

Harry finished the last of the coffee and handed the cup back to the chief. He screwed it back on and tossed the Thermos to the floor of his car.

‘Come on, then,’ said Morland. ‘Time to put her in the ground.’

The trunk light shone on the plastic, and the girl inside it. She was lying on her back, and her eyes were closed. That was a mercy at least. The exit wound in her chest was massive, but there was less blood than Harry might have expected. The chief seemed to follow the direction of his thoughts.

‘She bled out on the snow of Ben Pearson’s yard,’ he said. ‘We had to shovel it up and spread some more around to hide what we’d done. Take her legs. I’ll lift from the head.’

It was difficult to get her out of the trunk. She hadn’t been a well-built girl, which was why the decision had been made to feed her up first, but now Harry knew for the first time what was meant by ‘dead weight’. The heavy-duty plastic was slippery, and Morland struggled to get a grip. Once she was out of the car he had to drop her on the ground, put his foot under her to raise her upper body, and then wrap his arms around her chest to carry her, holding her to him like a sleeping lover. They stood to the right of the grave, and on the count of three they tossed her in. She landed awkwardly in a semi-seated position.

‘You’d best get down there and straighten her,’ Morland told Harry. ‘If the hole was deeper I’d be inclined to let it go, but it’s shallow as it is. We don’t want the ground to sink and have her head peeping up like a gopher’s.’

Harry didn’t want to get in the grave, but it didn’t seem as though he had much choice. He eased himself down, then squatted to grip the ends of the plastic. As he did so, he looked at the girl. Her head was slightly lower than his, so that she seemed to be staring up at him. Her eyes were open. He must have been mistaken when he first saw her lying in the trunk. Perhaps it had been the reflection of the internal light, or his own tiredness, but he could have sworn …

‘What’s the problem?’ said Morland.

‘Her eyes,’ said Harry. ‘Do you recall if her eyes were open or closed?’

‘What does it matter? She’s dead. Whether we cover her up with her eyes wide open or squeezed shut is going to make no difference to her or to us.’

He was right, thought Harry. He shouldn’t even have been able to see her eyes so clearly through the plastic, but it was as though there was a light shining inside her head, illuminating the blue of her irises. She looked more alive now than she had in the basement.

He shook the thought from his head, and pulled sharply on the plastic. The girl was dragged fat. He didn’t want to see her face again, so he turned away from it. He’d tried. She’d been given a better chance than any of the others, of that he was certain. It wasn’t his fault that Ben Pearson had put an end to her hopes.

Suddenly all of the strength was gone from his body. He couldn’t haul himself from the grave. He could barely raise his arms. He looked up at Morland. The chief had the pickax in his hands.

‘Help me up,’ said Harry, but the chief didn’t move.

‘Please,’ said Harry. His voice cracked a little, and he despised himself for his weakness. His mother was right: he was half a man. If he’d been gifted with real courage, he’d have put the girl in his car, driven her to the state police in Bangor, and confessed all to them, or at least dropped her off in the center of the city where she’d be safe. Standing in the grave, he imagined a scenario in which the girl agreed to keep quiet about what had occurred, but it fell apart as soon as he saw himself returning to Prosperous to explain her absence. No, he’d done the best that he could for her. Anything more would have damned the town. Then again, it was already as close to damnation as made no difference.

He closed his eyes, and waited for the impact of the pickax on his head, but it never came. Instead, Morland grabbed Harry’s right hand, leaned back, and their combined strength got him out of the grave.

Harry sat on the ground and put his head in his hands.

‘For a second, I thought you were going to leave me down there,’ he said.

‘That would be too easy,’ said Morland. ‘Besides, we’re not done yet.’

And Harry knew that he was not referring to the filling in of the grave alone.

The girl was gone, covered by the earth. The ground had clearly been dug up, but Morland knew that whatever remained of the winter snows to come would take care of that. When the thaw came in earnest, the ground would turn to mire. As it dried, all traces of their activity would be erased. He just hoped that they’d buried the girl deep enough.

‘Shit,’ he said.

‘What is it?’ said Harry.

‘We probably should have taken her out of the plastic. Might have helped her to rot quicker.’

‘You want to dig her up again?’

‘No, I do not. Come on, time to go.’

He wrapped the blade of the shovel and the head of the pickax in plastic bags, to keep the dirt off the trunk of his car. Tomorrow he’d clean it inside and out, just to be sure.

Harry had not moved from his place beside the grave.

‘I have a question,’ he said.

Morland waited for him to continue.

‘Isn’t there a chance that she might be enough?’ said Harry.

Morland might have called the look on Harry’s face hopeful, if the use of the word ‘hope’ were not an obscenity under such circumstances.

‘No,’ said Morland.

‘She’s dead. We killed her. We’ve given her to the earth. Why not? Why can’t she be enough?’

Chief Morland closed the trunk before he replied.

‘Because,’ he said, ‘she was dead when she went into the ground.’

9

It was just after five on the evening after my return to Portland when I arrived at the Great Lost Bear on Forest Avenue. The bar was buzzing, as it always was on Thursdays. Thursday was showcase night, when the Bear invited a craft brewery to let folk taste its wares, always at a discount and always with a raffle at the end. It really didn’t take much to keep customers loyal, but it always amazed me that so many businesses couldn’t work up the energy to make the minimal extra effort required.

I found Dave Evans, the Bear’s owner, marshaling the troops for the assault to come. I hadn’t worked there in a while. Like I said, business had been good for me in recent months, maybe because, like the Bear, I tended to go the extra mile for my clients. In addition, some ongoing litigation relating to the purchase of my grandfather’s old house on Gorham Road had been settled in my favor, and a lump sum had found its way into my accounts. I was solvent, and likely to remain so for the foreseeable future. Still, I liked to keep my hand in at the Bear, even if it was only once or twice a month. You hear a lot from people in bars. Admittedly, most of it is useless, but the occasional nugget of information creeps through. Anyway, my presence would allow Dave to take the rest of the night off, although he was strangely reluctant to leave.

‘Your buddies are here,’ he said.

‘I have buddies?’

‘You used to. I’m not sure if the word still applies where those two are concerned.’

He indicated a corner of the bar which was now looking significantly smaller than it used to thanks to the addition of two massive men in polyester jogging suits: the Fulci Brothers. I hadn’t seen them since Jackie Garner’s funeral. His death had hit them hard. They had been devoted to him, and he had looked out for them as best he could. It was hard for men so large to keep a low profile, but somehow they’d managed it in the months since Jackie’s death. The city might even have breathed a bit easier for a while. The Fulcis had a way of sucking the oxygen from a room. They had a way of knocking it from people too. Their fists were like cinder blocks.

Dave’s concern was understandable, therefore. But despite their appearance, and an undeniable propensity for violence that seemed resistant to all forms of pharmaceutical intervention, the Fulcis were essentially brooders by nature. They might not brood for very long, but they did tend to take some time to consider which bones they might enjoy breaking first. The fact that they’d stayed away from me for so long meant that they’d probably been considering the fate of their friend with a certain degree of seriousness. That either boded well for me, or very badly.

‘You want me to call someone?’ said Dave.

‘Like who?’

‘A surgeon? A priest? A mortician?’

‘If they’ve come here to cause trouble over Jackie, you may need a builder to reconstruct your bar.’

‘Damn, and just as the place was coming together.’

I worked my way through the crowd to reach their table. They were both sipping sodas. The Fulcis weren’t big drinkers.

‘It’s been a long time,’ I said. ‘I was starting to worry.’

To be honest, I was still worrying, and maybe more than before, now that they’d shown up at last.

‘You want to take a seat,’ said Paulie.

It wasn’t a question. It was an order.

Paulie was the older, and marginally better adjusted, of the two brothers. Tony, his younger sibling, should have had a lit fuse sticking out of the top of his head.

I took the seat. Actually, I wasn’t too worried that the Fulcis might take a swing at me. If they did, I wouldn’t know a lot about it until I woke up, assuming I ever did, but I’d always gotten along well with them, and, like Jackie, I’d tried my best to help them where I could, even if it meant just putting in a word with local law enforcement when they stepped over the line. They’d done some work for me over the years, and they’d put themselves in harm’s way on my behalf. I liked to think that we had an understanding, but Timothy Treadwell, that guy who was eaten by the grizzlies he’d tried to befriend, probably felt the same way until a bear’s jaws closed on his throat.

Paulie looked at Tony. Tony nodded. If it was going to turn bad, it would do so now.

‘What happened to Jackie, we don’t blame you for it,’ said Paulie.

He spoke with great solemnity, like a senior judge communicating a long-considered verdict.

‘Thank you,’ I said, and I meant it, not only because my continued good health appeared assured for now, but because I knew how important Jackie was to them. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they’d held some residual grudge against me, but there would be none. With the Fulcis, it was all or nothing. We had a clean slate.

‘Jackie done something very bad,’ said Tony, ‘but that didn’t mean he should have been shot down from behind because of it.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Jackie was a good guy,’ Tony continued. ‘He took care of his mom. He looked out for us. He—’

Tony choked. His eyes were tearing up. His brother patted him on a muscled shoulder.

‘Whatever we can do,’ said Paulie, ‘whatever help you need to find the man who did this, you let us know. And any time you want us to step up for you, you just call. Because Jackie would have stepped up, and just because he ain’t around no more don’t mean we ought to let these things slide, you understand? Jackie wouldn’t have wanted that.’

‘I hear you,’ I said.

I reached out and shook their hands. I didn’t even wince, but I was relieved to get the hand back.

‘How’s his mom doing?’ I asked.

Jackie’s mother had been diagnosed with Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease the previous year. Her illness was the only reason Jackie had committed the acts that led to his death. He just needed the money.

‘Not so good,’ said Paulie. ‘Even with Jackie she would have struggled. Without him …’

He shook his head.

Jackie’s insurance company had invoked a clause in his life policy relating to criminal activity, arguing that his death had resulted from participation in a criminal enterprise. Aimee Price was fighting the case on a pro bono basis, but she didn’t believe that the insurance company was going to modify its position, and it was hard to argue that it didn’t have a point. Jackie was killed because he screwed up: he was careless, somebody died, and vengeance fell. I made a mental note to send a check to Jackie’s mother. Even if it only helped a little, it would be something.

The Fulcis finished their drinks, nodded their goodbyes and left.

‘You’re still alive,’ said Dave, who’d been keeping one eye on proceedings, and another on his bar, in case he didn’t get to see it again in its present form.

‘You seem pleased.’

‘Means I get my night off,’ said Dave, as he pulled on his overcoat. ‘Would have been hard to leave otherwise.’

I enjoyed that evening in the Bear. Perhaps it was partly relief at not having incurred the wrath of the Fulcis, but in moving between the bar and the floor I was also able to empty my head of everything but beer taps, line cooks and making sure that, when Dave returned the next morning, the Bear would still be standing in more or less the same condition as it had been when he left it. I drank a coffee and read the Portland Phoenix at the bar while the night’s cleanup went on around me.

‘Don’t tax yourself,’ said Cupcake Cathy, as she nudged me with a tray of dirty glasses. ‘If you strained something by helping, I don’t know how I could go on living.’

Cathy was one of the wait staff. If she was ever less than cheerful, I had yet to see it. Even as she let off some steam, she was still smiling.

‘Don’t make me fire you.’

‘You can’t fire me. Anyway, that would require an effort on your part.’

‘I’ll tell Dave to fire you.’

‘Dave just thinks we work for him. Don’t disillusion him by making him put it to the test.’

She had a point. I still wasn’t sure how the Bear operated, exactly: it just did. In the end, no matter who was nominally in charge, everyone just worked for the Bear itself. I finished my coffee, waited for the last of the staff to leave and locked up. My car was the only one left in the lot. The night was clear and the moon bright, but already there was a layer of frost on the roof. Winter was refusing to relinquish its hold on the northeast. I drove home beneath a sky exploding with stars.

Over by Deering Oaks, the door to Jude’s basement opened.

‘Jude, you in here?’

A lighter fared. Had there been anyone to see, it would have revealed a man layered in old coats, with newspaper poking out of his laceless boots. The lower half of his face was entirely obscured by beard, and dirt was embedded in the wrinkles on his skin. He looked sixty, but was closer to forty. He was known as Brightboy on the streets. He once had another name, but even he had almost forgotten it by now.

‘Jude?’ he called again.

The heat from the lighter was burning his fingers. Brightboy swore hard and let the fame go out. His eyes were getting used to the dark, but the basement was shaped like an inverted ‘L’, which meant that the moonlight only penetrated so far. The dogleg to the right remained in darkness.

He hit the lighter again. It was a cheap plastic thing. He’d found a bunch of them, all still full of food, in a garbage can outside an apartment building that was being vacated. In this kind of weather, anything that could generate heat and fame was worth holding on to. He still had half a dozen left.

Brightboy turned the corner, and the light caught Jude’s booted feet dangling three feet above the ground. Brightboy raised the fame slowly, taking in the reddish-brown overcoat, the green serge pants, the tan jacket and waistcoat, the cream shirt and the carefully knotted red tie. Jude had even managed to die dressed like a dandy, although his face was swollen and nearly unrecognizable above the knot on his tie, and the noose that suspended him above the floor was lost in his flesh. A backless chair was on its side beneath his feet. To its right was a wooden box that he had been using as a nightstand. His sleeping bag lay open and ready next to it.

On the box was a plastic bag filled with bills and coins.

The lighter was again growing hot in Brightboy’s hand. He lifted his thumb, and the fame disappeared, but the memory of its light danced in front of his eyes. His left hand found the bag of money. He put it carefully in his pocket, then dragged Jude’s pack into the moonlight and rifled it for whatever was worth taking. He found a flashlight, a deck of cards, a couple of pairs of clean socks, two shirts fresh from Goodwill and a handful of candy bars just one month past expiration.

All these things Brightboy transferred to his own pack. He also took Jude’s sleeping bag, rolling it up and tying it to the base of his pack with string. It was better than his own, newer and warmer. He didn’t even think about Jude again until he was about to leave. They had always got along okay, Brightboy and Jude. Most of the other homeless avoided Brightboy. He was untrustworthy and dishonest. Jude was one of the few who tried not to judge him. True, Brightboy had sometimes found Jude’s obsession with his appearance to be an affectation, and he suspected it helped to make Jude feel superior to the rest of his brothers and sisters on the streets, but Jude had been as generous with Brightboy as he had been with everyone else, and rarely had a harsh word passed between them.

Brightboy thumbed the lighter and held it aloft. Jude seemed frozen in place. His skin and clothing were spangled with frost.

‘Why’d you do it?’ said Brightboy. His left hand dipped into his pocket, as though to reassure himself that the money was still there. He’d heard that Jude had been calling in loans. Brightboy himself had owed Jude two dollars. It was one of the reasons he’d come looking for him; that, and a little company, and maybe a swig of something if Jude had it to spare. Someone had said that Jude wanted the money urgently, and it was time to pay up. Jude rarely asked for anything from the rest of his kind, so few resented him calling in his debts, and those that had it paid willingly enough.

So why would a man who had succeeded in putting together what Brightboy guessed to be $100 at least suddenly give up and take his own life? It made no sense, but then a lot of things made no sense to Brightboy. He liked his street name, but he had no conception of the irony that lay behind it. Brightboy wasn’t smart. Cunning, maybe, but his intelligence was of the lowest and most animal kind.

Whatever had led Jude to finish his days at the end of a rope, he had no need for money where he now was, while Brightboy was still among the living. He walked to St John Street, ordered two cheeseburgers, fries and a soda for $5 at the drive-thru window of McDonald’s, and ate them in the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant. He then bought himself a six-pack of Miller High Life at a gas station, but it was so cold outside that he had nowhere to drink the beers. With no other option available, he headed back to Jude’s basement and consumed them while the dead man hung suspended before him. He unrolled Jude’s sleeping bag, climbed into it and fell asleep until shortly before dawn. He woke while it was still dark, gathered up the bottles for their deposit and slipped from the basement to seek out breakfast. He stopped only to make a 911 call from a public phone on Congress.

It was the least that he could do for Jude.

10

Jude died without enough money to pay for his own funeral, so he was buried by the city at the taxpayers’ expense. It cost $1500, give or take, although there were those who resented spending even that much to give a decent burial to a man who seemed to them to have been nothing but a burden on the city for most of his life. The only consolation they could derive was that Jude was unlikely to trouble them for a handout again.

He was interred in an unmarked grave at Forest City Cemetery in South Portland when the medical examiner had finished with his body. A funeral director recited a psalm as his cheap coffin was lowered into the ground, but unlike most city cases, he did not go to his rest unmourned. Alongside the cemetery workers stood a dozen of Portland’s homeless, men and women both, as well as representatives of the local shelters and help centers who had known and liked Jude. I was there too. The least that I could do was to acknowledge his passing. A single bouquet of flowers was laid on the ground above him once the grave had been filled in. Nobody lingered. Nobody spoke.

The medical examiner’s opinion was that Jude’s injuries were consistent with asphyxiation, with no indication of a suspicious death. The investigation was ongoing, though, and the police and the attorney general were under no obligation to accept the ME’s opinion as gospel. Still, in this case it was unlikely that the Portland PD would reject it. When a homeless man died at the hands of another, it was usually in a brutal manner, and there was little mystery to it. Jude, despite the care that he took with his appearance, was a troubled man. He suffered from depression. He lived from meal to meal, and handout to handout. There were more likely candidates for suicide, but not many.

If there was anything unusual about his case, it was that the medical examiner had found no trace of drugs or alcohol in Jude’s system. He was clean and sober when he died. It was a minor detail, but still worthy of notice. Those who choose to take their own lives often need help with the final step. Either they set out with the intention of killing themselves, and find something to relax them in those last hours and minutes, or the mood induced by alcohol or narcotics is the trigger for the act. Suicide isn’t easy. Neither, whatever the song might say, is it painless. Jude would have learned that as he kicked at the air from the end of a rope. I don’t know how much help booze might have been under the circumstances, but it couldn’t have made his situation any worse.

To be honest, I let Jude slip from my mind after the funeral. I’d like to say that I was better than everybody else, but I wasn’t. He didn’t matter. He was gone.

Lucas Morland pulled up in front of Hayley Conyer’s home on Griffin Road. It wasn’t the biggest house in Prosperous, not by a long shot, but it was one of the oldest, and, being partly stone built, conveyed a certain authority. Most of it dated from the end of the eighteenth century, and by rights it should probably have been listed on the National Register of Historic Places, but neither generations of Conyers nor the citizens of Prosperous had seen ft to nominate the house. The town didn’t need that kind of attention. The old church presented them with enough problems as it was. Anyway, the Conyer house wasn’t particularly noteworthy in terms of its situation or design, and had no interesting historical associations. It was just old, or at least old by the standards of the state. The leading citizens of Prosperous, cognizant of their heritage, of their links to a far more ancient history back in England, took a more nuanced view of such matters.

Hayley Conyer’s Country Squire station wagon stood in the drive. There seemed to be even more bumper stickers on it than Morland remembered: Obama/Biden; a ‘No Tar Sands in Maine’ protest badge; ‘Maine Supports Gay Rights’ over a rainbow fag; and a reminder that sixty-one percent of the electorate had not voted for the current governor of the state. (Blame the state’s Democrats for that, thought Morland: trust them to split their own vote and then act surprised when it came back to bite them on the ass. Jesus, monkeys could have handled the nomination process better.) The station wagon was so ancient that it was probably held together by those stickers. He’d heard Hayley arguing with Thomas Souleby about the car, Souleby opining that the old gas-guzzler was causing more environmental pollution than a nuclear meltdown, and Hayley responding that it was still more environmentally friendly than investing in a new car and scrapping the Ford.

Morland’s own Crown Vic had been acquired by him from the Prosperous Police Department back in 2010 while it was still in perfect running order. By then Ford had announced that it would cease production of the Police Interceptors in 2011, and Morland decided to secure one of the department’s Crown Vics for himself before his officers drove the feet into the ground. The Crown Vic had two tons of rear wheel drive, and a V-8 engine under the hood. If you crashed in a Crown Vic you had a better chance of walking away alive than in a lighter patrol car like the increasingly popular Chevy Caprice. The car was also spacious, and that meant a lot to a big man like Morland. The sacrifice was getting only thirteen miles to the gallon, but Morland reckoned the town could afford that small gesture on his behalf.

Hayley appeared on her porch as Morland was musing on his car. She was still a striking woman, even as she left seventy behind. The chief could remember her in her prime, when men had circled her like insects, fitting around her as she went about her business. She did her best to ignore them or, if they grew too persistent, swatted them away with a flick of her hand. He had no idea why she had never married. That rainbow bumper sticker on her car might have caused some folk to suggest an explanation, but Hayley Conyer was no lesbian. She was, if anything, entirely asexual. She had committed herself to the town: it was hers to have and to hold, to love and to cherish. She had inherited her duty to it, for more members of the Conyer family than any other in Prosperous had served on the board. Hayley herself had been the chief selectman for more than four decades now. There were those who whispered that she was irreplaceable, but Morland knew better. Nobody was irreplaceable. If that were true, then Prosperous would never have thrived for so long.

But in the still, dark corners of his mind, Morland was starting to feel that it might be for the best if Hayley Conyer made way for another. It would take her death to do it, for she would never relinquish control while there was still breath in her body, but it was time that the Conyer reign came to a close. There was a lot to be said for the discipline of married life. It forced one to learn the art of compromise, and to remedy the flaws in one’s nature. Morland himself was still a work in progress after two decades of marriage, but he liked to think that his wife might be as well. Hayley Conyer, on the other hand, simply grew more resolute in her self-belief, more intransigent in her views and more ready to embrace the use of dictats to get her way. She was helped by the rules of the board, which gave the chief selectman the equivalent of two votes. It meant that even if the board was evenly divided on an issue, Hayley’s side would triumph, and she could force a stalemate with only one other selectman on her side. It was also a simple fact that the rest of the board combined had less testosterone than she had. It was increasingly left to Morland to try to deal with Hayley, and to encourage her to moderate her behavior, but he had been having less and less success in recent months. A body left hanging in a Portland basement was testament to that.

‘I was just admiring your car,’ said Morland.

‘You going to tell me that I need to replace it too?’ she said.

‘Not unless pieces of it start coming off on the highway and injuring folk, although that’s starting to seem increasingly likely.’

She folded her arms over her chest, the way she did at meetings when she wanted to let people know that she had given up listening to their arguments, and her decision was made. She wasn’t wearing a brassiere, and her breasts hung low beneath her shirt. With her flowered skirt and her sandaled feet and her long gray hair held back by a scarf, she came across as the typical earth mother, all bean sprouts and wheatgrass and organic milk. It wasn’t entirely inapt, even if it didn’t even hint at the hardness beneath.

‘It’s mine,’ she said, ‘and I like it.’

‘You’re only holding on to it because the Thomas Soulebys of this world keep telling you to get rid of it,’ he said. ‘If they started stroking it and admiring it, you’d sell it for scrap in a heartbeat.’

Her scowl softened. Morland still had a way of disarming her that so many others did not. His father had enjoyed the same gift. Daniel Morland’s relationship with Hayley Conyer had been almost flirtatious, at least when his wife wasn’t around. Whether Hayley chose to embrace sexual activity or not, she was still an attractive woman, and Alina Morland wasn’t about to stand by and let her husband play patty-cake with her just to ensure the smooth running of the town. Neither had Alina been concerned at the power Hayley wielded as chief selectman, because that was all politics, and this was about a wife and her husband. The town could have decided to make Hayley Conyer its official queen, and Alina would still have knocked her crown off for stirring even the slightest of sexual feelings in her husband.

This demonstrated one of the curious truths about Prosperous: in most things it ran pretty much like any other town of similar size. It had its rivalries, its intrigues. Men cheated on their wives, and wives cheated on their husbands. Hugo Reed didn’t talk to Elder Collingwood, and never would, all over an incident with a tractor and a garden gate some forty years earlier. Ramett Huntley and Milisent Rawlin, although superficially polite to each other, were obsessed with their bloodlines, and both had made regular pilgrimages back to the northeast of England over the years in an effort to trace their lineages back to royalty. So far neither had been successful, but the search went on. In Prosperous, business as usual was the order of the day. The town differed only in one crucial way from the rest, and even that had become a version of normal over the centuries. It was surprising what folk could accustom themselves to, as long as they were rewarded for it in the end.

‘You want some tea, Lucas?’ said Hayley.

‘Tea would be good,’ said Morland.

In Prosperous, you were more likely to be offered tea than coffee. It was a hangover from the old country. Ben Pearson was probably the only storeowner for fifty miles who regularly ran out of loose leaf Earl Grey and English Breakfast, and Yorkshire Tea teabags. And, damn, was there trouble when he did.

Inside, Hayley’s home resembled a Victorian house museum: dark wood antique furniture, Persian rugs, lace tablecloths, overstuffed chairs and wall upon wall of books. The chandeliers were late nineteenth-century reproductions by Osler & Faraday of Birmingham, based on a classic eighteenth-century Georgian design. Morland thought them excessively ornate, and ill suited to the house, but he kept that opinion to himself. Still, sitting at Hayley’s dining table always made him feel like he was preparing for a séance.

Hayley boiled some water and set the tea to brew. The teapot was sterling silver, but the tea would be served in mismatched mugs. China would have been an affectation too far. She poured milk into each of the mugs, not bothering to ask Morland how much he wanted, or whether he might prefer to do it himself. By now she knew his habits and preferences almost as well as his own wife. She added the tea, then found some shortbread biscuits and emptied four on a plate. Biscuits, not cookies: it said so on the packaging, which was also decorated with Highland cattle, tartans and ancient ruins.

They sipped their tea, nibbled the shortbread, and spoke of the weather and the repairs that would have to be made to the town office once winter was gone, before moving on to the real business of the afternoon.

‘I hear they buried that hobo,’ said Hayley.

Morland wasn’t sure that the man named Jude had been a hobo, strictly speaking. As far as he knew, hobos were migratory workers. Technically, Jude had been a bum.

‘Apparently so,’ said Morland.

‘Has there been any fuss?’

‘Not that I’ve heard.’

‘I told you there wouldn’t be. I had to listen to all of that bitching and moaning for nothing.’

Morland didn’t dispute the point. He had done all his arguing when the decision of the board had been communicated to him, but by then it was too late. He’d tried to talk Hayley around, but on that occasion she had proved immune to his charms.

‘It would have been preferable if he’d just disappeared,’ said Morland.

‘That would have cost more — a lot more. Books have to be balanced.’

‘It might have been worth it. I don’t think anyone would have come looking for a missing homeless man, and it’s hard to prove the commission of a crime without a body.’

‘Nobody’s trying to prove that a crime was committed. A hobo hanged himself, and that’s the end of it.’

Not quite, thought Morland. Hayley was thinking like a selectman, Morland like a lawman.

‘The problem, as I see it, is that we now have two dead bodies to no good end,’ said Morland.

‘Ben told me that he had no choice but to shoot the girl. You agreed.’

Yet I didn’t agree to the killing of her father, Morland was about to say, but he killed the words before they reached his tongue.

‘This town has survived, and flourished, by being careful,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to tell me that!’ said Hayley. A little blood found its way into her pale cheeks. ‘What do you think I’ve been doing all these years? Every decision I’ve made has been with the best interests of the town at heart.’

I’ve made, he noticed, not we’ve made. He wondered if this was how all despots began. At some point, someone had to speak truth to power. Then again, those who did frequently ended up with their heads on stakes.

‘I’m not questioning your commitment to the town, Hayley. Nobody is. But two dead from the same family could attract attention.’

‘One dead,’ she corrected him. ‘There’s one body, not two. Has the girl even been reported missing yet?’

‘No,’ he conceded.

‘And she won’t be either, because the only one who might have been concerned about her is now in the ground. By acting as we did, we solved the problem, or we would have if that damn fool Dixon hadn’t let the girl go.’

‘That’s an interesting choice of words,’ said Morland.

He hadn’t raised his suspicions with Hayley before now. He wanted to let them percolate some before he started pouring them out. Hayley nibbled on her shortcake, her tiny white teeth chipping away at it with the action of a hungry rodent.

‘You think he’s telling lies about what happened?’ she said.

‘I tried using a scrap of material to open the bolt from the inside, like he and Erin claimed the girl did.’

‘And?’

‘It worked.’

‘So?’

‘It took a while, and I had to use a piece of wood to pull the cloth in and form a loop, just as Erin Dixon did when I put her in the basement and asked her to demonstrate how the girl might have escaped. She told me she’d found the wood on the floor, and that the girl must have broken it off the bed. She showed me the bed, and there was a long splinter of wood missing that matched the piece in Erin’s hand.’

‘I’m waiting for a “but”.’

‘But there was blood on the floor by the bed when I let Erin out, and it was fresh.’

‘Could it have been the girl’s? She couldn’t have been gone for but an hour by then.’

‘If it was, the blood would have congealed.’

‘If it was Erin’s blood, maybe she cut herself when she was examining the wood.’

‘Maybe.’

Hayley set her shortbread down by her mug. She seemed to have lost her taste for sweetness.

‘Why would they have let her go?’

‘I don’t know. There are rumors about Harry’s business.’

‘I’ve heard. I’ve been concerned since they took that loan.’

‘The paint on his house needs a new coat, and that old truck of his might just be the only vehicle in Prosperous that’s in worse shape than yours. I didn’t have time to take a good look around his kitchen when I visited, but I saw that some groceries had been unpacked and hadn’t yet been put away. They’re buying cheap bread, generic pasta, a couple of packs of chicken joints that were about to expire but would be okay if you froze them, that kind of thing.’

‘They could have been for the girl. They weren’t going to be feeding her filet mignon.’

‘It just doesn’t sit right with me.’ He regarded her closely. ‘It sounds to me like you’re trying to defend them.’

‘I’m not defending anyone,’ said Hayley. ‘I’m trying to understand. If what you’re suggesting is true, we have a major problem on our hands. We’ll have to act, and that could cause unrest in the town. We don’t turn on our own.’

‘Not unless our own start turning on us.’

‘I still can’t figure out why they’d want to release her.’

‘Pity? Guilt?’

‘It’s not like we were asking them to kill her,’ said Hayley. ‘They just had to take care of her until we were ready. She was too thin. All this might have been avoided if Walter and Beatrix hadn’t brought us a junkie.’

‘It’s been a long time since we’ve had to find someone,’ said Morland. ‘It’s harder now. The safest way is to take the vulnerable, the lost, the ones that nobody will miss. If that means junkies and whores, then so be it.’

‘Junkies and whores may not be good enough.’

‘It’s been many years, Hayley. Some people are wondering if it might not be necessary at all.’

She fared up.

‘Who? Tell me!’ Her eyes grew sly. ‘The same ones who are whispering about my “commitment” to the town?’

He should have stepped more carefully. She heard everything, turning the details over in her mind and examining them the way a jeweler might consider gemstones before deciding which to keep and which to discard.

‘I know there are some who are starting to doubt me,’ she said.

Hayley stared at Morland, as though willing him to confess that he himself had been guilty of such thoughts, but he did not. She leaned over the table and grasped his hand. Her skin was cold, and its look and feel reminded him of the cheap chicken cuts at the Dixon house.

‘That’s why this is so important,’ she said. ‘If I’m to go, I want to leave knowing the town is secure. I want to be sure that I’ve done all that I can for it.’

She released her grip on him. She had left marks on the back on his hand, as if to remind him that she was still strong and should not be underestimated.

‘What do you suggest?’ he said.

‘We talk to the Dixons. We tell them to find us another girl, fast. And no junkie either: we want someone clean and healthy. If they come through for us, we’ll see what more the town can do to help them out if they’re in trouble.’

‘And if they don’t?’

Hayley stood and started clearing the table. She was tired of talking with him. The discussion was over.

‘Then they’re a threat to the security of the town. There’s still money in the discretionary fund, thanks to the decision not to disappear the hobo.

‘And,’ she added, ‘our friends will be grateful for the work.’

11

I was sitting at a table in Crema Coffee Company on Commercial when the man who called himself Shaky found me. It was just after nine in the morning, and while a steady stream of people kept the baristas busy, most of the tables remained empty. It was that time of day when folk wanted to order and go, which suited me just fine. I had a nice sun-dappled spot by the window, and copies of the New York Times and the Portland Press Herald. Crema had one of the best spaces in town, all bare boards and exposed brickwork. There were worse places to kill an hour. I had a meeting later in the morning with a prospective client: trouble with an ex-husband who hadn’t grasped the difference between keeping a protective eye on his former wife and stalking her. It was, depending upon whom you asked, a thin line. Neither did he appear to understand that, if he really cared about his wife, he should pay her the child support that he owed. On such misunderstandings were hourly rates earned.

Shaky wore black sneakers, only slightly frayed jeans, and an overcoat so big it was just one step away from being a tent. He looked self-conscious as he entered Crema, and I could see one or two of the staff watching him, but Shaky wasn’t about to be dissuaded from whatever purpose he had in mind. He made a beeline for my table.

It wasn’t just Shaky who called himself by that name, apparently everyone on the streets did. He had a palsied left hand that he kept close to his chest. I wondered how he slept with it. Maybe, like most things, you just got used to it if you had to endure it for long enough.

He hovered before me, the sunlight catching his face. He was clean-shaven, and smelled strongly of soap. I might have been mistaken, but it struck me that he’d tidied himself up and dressed in his best clothing to come here. I remembered him from the funeral. He was the only one present to shed a tear for Jude as he was lowered into the ground.

‘You mind if I sit down?’ he asked.

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Would you like a coffee?’

He licked his lips, and nodded. ‘Sure.’

‘Any preference?’

‘Whatever’s the biggest, and the warmest. Maybe sweet too.’

Since I was mainly a straight filter kind of guy, I had to rely on the girl behind the counter to guide me on warm and sweet. I came back with a maple latte and a couple of muffins. I wasn’t too hungry, but Shaky probably was. I picked at mine to be polite while Shaky went back to the counter and loaded up his latte with sugar. He tore into the muffin as soon as he resumed his seat, then seemed to realize that he was in respectable company and nobody was likely to try and steal the snack from him, so he slowed down.

‘It’s good,’ he said. ‘The coffee as well.’

‘You sure there’s enough sugar in there for you?’ The stirrer was pretty much standing up by itself in the coffee.

He grinned. His teeth weren’t great, but the smile somehow was.

‘I always did have a sweet tooth. I guess it’s still in there somewhere. I done lost most of the rest.’

He chewed some more muffin, holding it in his mouth for as long as he could to savor the taste.

‘Saw you at the cemetery,’ he said, ‘when they put Jude in the ground. You’re the detective, right?’

‘That’s correct.’

‘You knew Jude?’

‘A little.’

‘What I heard. Jude told me that he did some detecting for you, couple of times.’

I smiled. Jude always did get a kick out of being asked to help. I could hear some skepticism in Shaky’s voice, just a hint of doubt, but I think he wanted it to be true. He kept his head down as he stared up at me, one eyebrow raised in anticipation.

‘Yes, he did,’ I said. ‘Jude had a good eye, and he knew how to listen.’

Shaky almost sagged with relief. Jude hadn’t lied to him. This wasn’t a wasted errand.

‘Yeah, Jude was smart,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t nothing happened on the streets that Jude didn’t know about. He was kind, too. Kind to everyone. Kind to me.’

He stopped eating, and in an instant he looked terribly lonely. His mouth moved soundlessly as he tried to express emotions that he had never shared aloud before: his feelings for Jude, and about himself now that Jude was gone. He was trying to put loss into words, but loss is absence and will always defy expression. In the end, Shaky just gave up and slurped noisily at his latte to cover his pain.

‘You were friends?’

He nodded over the cup.

‘Did he have many friends?’

Shaky stopped drinking and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

‘No. He kept most people at a distance.’

‘But not you.’

‘No.’

I didn’t pursue it. It was none of my business.

‘When did you last see him alive?’

‘Couple of days before he was found in that basement. I was helping him to collect.’

‘Collect?’

‘Money. He was calling in the debts he was owed, and he asked me to help. Everyone knew that me and him was close, and if I said I was working on his behalf then it was no word of a lie. He put it all down on paper for me. As I’d find someone I’d cross the name off the list, and record how much they’d given me.’

He reached into one of his pockets and produced a sheet of paper, which he carefully unfolded and placed before me. On it was a list of names written neatly in pencil. Beside most of them, in a considerably messier hand, figures were scrawled: a couple of dollars, usually, and no sum more than two bucks.

‘Sometimes I’d get to a person after he did, and maybe they’d already have paid up, and maybe they wouldn’t have. Jude was soft, though. He believed every hard luck story because it was his way. Me, I knew some of them was lying. As long as they was breathing, they was lying. I made sure that if they could, they paid.’

I took the piece of paper and did a little rough addition on the numbers. The total didn’t come to much: $100, give or take some change. Then I realized that, while it wasn’t much to me, $100 could get a man beaten to a pulp if he fell in with the wrong company. It might even be enough to bring death upon him.

‘What did he want the money for?’ I said.

‘He was looking for his daughter. Told me she used to be a junkie, but she was straightening out. Last he heard she was up in Bangor looking for work, and seems like she found some. I think—’

He paused.

‘Go on.’

‘I think she’d come up here because she wanted to be near him, but not so near that it would be easy for him,’ said Shaky. ‘She wanted him to come find her. Jude had abandoned her momma and her way back, and he knew that the girl blamed him for everything that had gone wrong in her life since then. She was angry at him. She might even have hated him, but when there’s blood involved love and hate aren’t so different, or they get all mixed up so’s you can’t tell one from the other. I guess he was considering moving up to Bangor and having done with it. But Jude didn’t like Bangor. It’s not like here. They tore the heart out of that city when they built the mall, and it never recovered, not the way Portland did. It’s a bad place to be homeless, too — worse than here. But Jude wanted to make it up to the girl for what he’d done, and he couldn’t do it from Portland.’

‘How long did it take you and Jude to get the money together?’

‘A week. Would have taken him a month if he’d been working alone. I ought to get me a job as a debt collector.’

He used the forefinger of his right hand to pull the scrap of paper back to him.

‘So my question is—’ he began, but I finished it for him.

‘Why would a man who had just spent a hard week calling in his debts, and who is fixated on mending his relationship with his daughter, hang himself in a basement just when he’s managed to get some cash together?’

‘That’s right.’

‘So, what: he was going to give his daughter the money, or use it to move to Bangor?’

‘Neither,’ said Shaky. ‘If I understood him right, I think he was hoping to hire you to find her.’

He seemed to remember that he still had his coffee. He drank half of what remained in one gulp, and turned an eye to the muffin on my plate. I pushed it towards him.

‘Go ahead,’ I said. ‘I’m not as hungry as I thought.’

We spoke for an hour, sometimes about Jude, sometimes about Shaky himself. He’d served in the military, and that was how he had come by his bad arm: it was nerve damage of some kind caused by a jeep tire exploding.

‘Not even a proper wound,’ as Shaky told me. ‘I used to lie about it to make myself sound brave, but it just don’t seem worth the effort no more.’

At the end of our conversation, two things were clear to me: Shaky knew Jude better than almost anyone else in Portland, and he still didn’t really know him at all. Jude had only shared the barest of information about his daughter with Shaky. To Shaky, it seemed as though the more troubles his friend encountered, the more reluctant he was to seek help with them, and that was how men ended up dying alone.

I bought Shaky another maple latte before I left, and he gave me instructions for how best to reach him. As with Jude, he used the Amistad Community and the good folk at the Portland Help Center for such communications. I then drove to South Portland to meet my prospective client at her home, and she gave me details of where her husband was working, where he was living, just how much of an asshole he now was and just how much of an asshole he didn’t used to be. She didn’t want to involve the police for her children’s sake, and she hated her lawyer. I was the least bad of the remaining options, although she did ask if I knew someone who would break her husband’s legs once I had made it clear that this wasn’t something I was prepared to take on, or not without a better reason.

Since I had nothing else to do, I went to visit the errant husband at his office in Back Cove, where he was a partner in some hole-in-the-wall financial advice and investment business. His name was Lane Stacey, and he didn’t look pleased when he discovered that I wasn’t there to give him money to invest. He did some hollering and grandstanding before it became clear to him that I wasn’t about to be intimidated back on to the street. A calm demeanor always helped in these situations; calmness, and having a good forty pounds on the man on the other side of the argument.

Like the Bentley-owning Hyram P. Taylor, Stacey wasn’t a bad guy. He wasn’t even as priapic as Hyram. He was lonely, he missed his wife and kids and he didn’t think anybody else would be willing to have him. His wife had just fallen out of love with him, and he, to a lesser degree, with her, although he had been more willing to keep things going as they were in order to secure a roof over his head and have someone around to nurse him when he caught cold, and maybe sleep with him occasionally. Eventually I ended up having lunch with him at the Bayou Kitchen, where I explained to him the importance of not stalking his wife, and of paying to support his children. He, in turn, confessed he’d been hoping to force her to take him back by starving her — and his kids — into submission, which went some ways toward explaining why his fears that he might not find anyone else to put up with him had some basis in truth. By the time lunch was over I’d secured some guarantees about his future behavior, and he’d tried to sell me on a short-term bond so risky that it was little more than a personal recession waiting to happen. He took my rejection on the chin. He was, he said, ‘optimistic’ about the country’s financial future, and saw only great times ahead for his business.

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

‘Everybody loves the promise of a quick buck,’ he said, ‘and the sucker store never runs out of stock.’

He had a point.

After all, I’d just paid for lunch.

12

A couple of calls gave me the name of the detective whose name graced the file on Jude’s case. It came as both good and bad news. The good news was that I knew the detective personally. The bad news was that I had once kind of dated her. Her name was Sharon Macy, and ‘dated’ might have been too strong a word for the history between us. She’d come into the Bear a couple of times when I was bartending, and we’d had dinner once at Boda on Congress, which was not far from her apartment on Spruce Street. It had ended with a short kiss, and an agreement that it might be nice to do it again sometime soon. I wanted to, and I think she did too, but somehow life got in the way, and then Jackie Garner died.

Sharon Macy was an interesting character, assuming you were content to accept the Chinese definition of ‘interesting’ as resembling a kind of curse. Some years earlier, she was temporarily stationed on an island called Sanctuary out in Casco Bay when a group of hired guns with a grudge came calling, and a lot of shooting had resulted. Macy came through unscathed, but she blooded herself along the way, and had acquired no small degree of respect as a cop with clean kills. As a result she hadn’t been destined to stay in uniform for long, and no one was surprised by her move to detective. She worked in the Portland PD’s Criminal Invesigation Division, and was also heavily involved in the Southern Maine Violent Crimes Task Force, which investigated serious incidents in the region.

Macy’s cell phone was off when I called her number, and I didn’t bother to leave a message yet. She wasn’t at her apartment when I went by, but a neighbor said that she had gone to drop off her laundry at the eco place on Danforth. The guy at the laundromat confirmed that she’d been in, and said that he thought she might be waiting in Ruski’s while he did a fast wash-and-fold for her.

Ruski’s was a Portland institution, opening early and serving food until late. It had long been a destination for those whose working hours meant that breakfast was eaten whenever they happened to want it, which was why Ruski’s served it all day. On Sundays it was a magnet for regulars, including cops and firefighters from anywhere within an easy drive of Portland who wanted somewhere dark and friendly in which to kill an afternoon. It boasted darts, a pretty good jukebox, a shortage of places to sit, and it never changed. It was what it was: a neighborhood bar where the prices were better than the food, and the food was good.

Macy was sitting by the window when I walked up, drinking and chatting with a patrol cop named Terrill Nix. I knew Nix a little because one of his brothers was a cop out in Scarborough. Nix was in his late forties, I guessed, and probably already thinking about cashing out. His hair was thinning, and his face had assumed a default expression of pained disappointment. The remains of a hangover special — hash, toast, eggs, home fries — lay on the plate beside him, but he didn’t look like he was trying to beat down a hard night. His eyes were bright and clear. He could probably see all the way to retirement.

Macy looked like Macy: small, dark, with quick eyes and an easy smile. Damn. I tried to remember why I hadn’t called her again. Oh yeah. Life, whatever that was. And some dying.

Nix spotted me before Macy did, as she had her back to the door. He nudged Macy’s left leg with his right foot to alert her. It didn’t look as though there was anything between them, just two cops who had happened to cross paths in Ruski’s, where cops crossed paths with one another all the time. Anyway, Nix’s wife would have emasculated him and left him to bleed out before decorating the hood of her car with the pieces if she even caught a whiff of another woman on him, not to mention the fact that Nix’s brother had married Nix’s wife’s sister. The whole family would have helped to weigh down his corpse in the Scarborough marshes.

‘Charlie,’ said Nix. ‘Detective Macy, do you know Charlie Parker, our local celebrity PI?’

Macy’s initial surprise at seeing me gave way to a lopsided grin.

‘Yes, I do. We had dinner once.’

‘No shit?’ said Nix.

‘Mr Parker never called for a second date.’

‘No shit?’ said Nix, again. He clucked at me like a disappointed schoolmarm. ‘Hurtful,’ he opined.

‘Uncouth,’ said Macy.

‘Maybe he’s here to make amends.’

‘I don’t see any flowers.’

‘There’s always the tab.’

‘There is that,’ said Macy. She hadn’t taken her eyes off me since I’d come in. She wasn’t flirting, but she was enjoying herself.

‘So if he’s not here to apologize for blowing you off, why is he here?’ said Nix.

‘Yes, why are you here?’ said Macy.

‘He’s going to put trouble on someone’s plate,’ said Nix.

‘Are you going to put trouble on someone’s plate?’ said Macy.

‘Not if I can help it,’ I said, just happy to be getting a word in at last now that Nichols & May had paused for breath. ‘I had a couple of questions about the Jude case. Your name came up in connection with it.’

Nix and Macy exchanged a look, but Nix left it up to Macy to comment if she chose. She was, after all, the detective.

‘Small world,’ said Macy.

‘Really?’ I said.

‘Nix was first responder,’ said Macy. ‘And there is no “Jude case” — unless,’ she added, ‘you know different.’

‘It was a nice, clean hanging,’ said Nix, and I knew what he meant. You took those ones when they came along. They were paperwork, and not much else.

I pointed at their bottles, which were mostly suds. ‘You want another?’

Nix was drinking a Miller High Life. There was something about Ruski’s that made people want to do strange stuff like drink High Life. Macy was on Rolling Rock. Both of them agreed to let me spend my money on them, and Nix wondered aloud if buying a drink constituted a second date in my world. I ignored the peanut gallery and ordered the drinks, along with a Rolling Rock for myself as well. I tried to remember the last time I’d ordered a Rolling Rock, but couldn’t. I suspected a fake ID might have been involved.

Nix, I noticed, had the sports section of the Press Herald beside him, open to the basketball page.

‘You a fan?’ I asked.

‘My kid’s a Yachtsman,’ he said.

The Yachtsmen were Falmouth High’s basketball team. The previous season they’d taken the kind of beating from their local rivals Yarmouth that usually requires years of therapy to overcome: 20–1 in the regional final. They had looked dead and buried, but so far this season they’d only been beaten once, by York, and had won their first sixteen games by an average margin of more than twenty points. Now they had the state final in their sights, and Coach Halligan, who had also taken Falmouth to nine state soccer titles in his twenty-six-year career, was a candidate for sainthood.

‘Better season than last,’ I said.

‘They got stronger kids this year,’ said Nix. ‘My boy plays soccer too, and he skis. Kid is built like a racehorse, and he’s got another year left. He’s ready for the move to Class A.’

He took a long tug on his beer. Once again, he was leaving it to Macy to do the heavy lifting.

‘So, what do you want to know about Jude?’ said Macy.

‘How was he found?’

‘911 call from a public phone on Congress. No name given. We figure it was one of his homeless buddies.’

‘Anything odd about it?’

She looked to Nix, who thought about the question. ‘It was an unfinished dirt basement, L-shaped, so kind of split in two by the angle of the walls. It looked like someone else had slept in there that night. There was a depression in the earth, and we found a couple of beer caps. Whoever it was had also taken a dump, and used a copy of that day’s newspaper to clean himself off. But the ME’s report said that Jude had been dead for at least thirty-six hours when we found him. You do the math.’

‘Somebody spent a night with the corpse.’

‘They maybe slept with their back to it, but yeah. You know, it was wicked cold, and if you don’t have anywhere else to go …’

‘What about his possessions?’

‘Sleeping bag was gone,’ said Macy, ‘and it looked like his pack had been rifled for valuables.’

‘Any money found?’

‘Money? Like what kind of money?’

‘Probably more than a hundred dollars. Not much in the normal scheme of things, but a lot to a guy like that.’

‘People have died for less.’

‘Amen.’

‘No, there was no money. What, you think he might have been killed for it?’

‘Like you said, people have died for less.’

‘Sure,’ said Macy, ‘but it’s hard to hang a man who’s struggling against it, and harder still to make it look like a suicide. The ligature marks were consistent with the downward momentum of the body, and the ME found no excessive injury to the neck. The victim did scratch at the rope, but that’s not unusual.’

‘Any idea where the rope might have come from?’

‘Nope. It wasn’t new, though. Like Jude, it had been around the block a couple of times. It has been cut to make the noose.’

‘At the funeral I heard that he had no alcohol or narcotics in his body.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Which is unusual.’

‘Depends on how you read it,’ said Nix. ‘If you’re talking Dutch courage then, yes, you might have expected him to take something to ease the pain. On the other hand, if you’re looking for evidence of a homicide made to look like a hanging suicide, then some drugs or alcohol might be useful if you wanted to subdue the victim first.’

I let it go.

‘The money is the other thing,’ I said.

‘How come?’ said Macy. She was interested now. I could see it in her eyes. A lot of detectives wouldn’t have cared much to have a snoop question a neat, closed case, but Macy wasn’t one of them. I doubted if she had ever been that kind of cop, and whatever happened out on Sanctuary had done nothing to change her. If anything, it had simply strengthened that aspect of her character. She hadn’t told me much about what had occurred on the island beyond what was already in the official record, and I hadn’t pressed her on it, but I’d heard stories. Sanctuary was a strange place, even by the standards of this part of the world, and some of the bodies from that night had never been found.

‘Jude went to a lot of trouble to collect it,’ I said. ‘It seems that he was worried about his daughter. Her name was Annie: ex-junkie, trying to go straight, living in a shelter up in Bangor. He was trying to reestablish a relationship with her when she disappeared. He was worried about her. The money was to help him search for her. In fact, I think he might even have hoped to hire me with the cash.’

‘What would it have bought him?’ said Nix. ‘A couple of hours?’

‘I’d have given him a discount.’

‘Even so.’

‘Yeah.’

Nix took another hit on his beer. ‘Well, chances are that whoever slept in the basement and cherry-picked Jude’s possessions also took the money. I don’t think they’d have gone to the trouble of trying to stage it as a suicide, though. A homeless person would have been more likely to use fists or a blade. It wouldn’t have taken much to put Jude down. He wasn’t a strong guy.’

‘It still doesn’t explain,’ I said, ‘why a man who has gone to the trouble of calling in his debts, and who is concerned about his daughter, should end it all in a basement and leave her to whatever trouble she was in. And as you said, Jude wasn’t a strong man. A breeze could have lifted him off the street. A big man, or two big men, could have held him for long enough to hoist him up on a chair, put a rope around his neck and kick the chair out from under him. They’d have left marks on his body, I guess. Couldn’t not have.’

I was thinking aloud now. Macy set aside her beer unfinished.

‘You got a couple of minutes?’ she said to me.

‘Sure.’

‘You want to head down to Rosie’s, I’ll join you there for one more. I got some laundry to pick up along the way.’

Nix decided to stay in Ruski’s for another beer. He knew better than to tag along, regardless of any history between Macy and me. If she chose to share more about Jude’s death with a PI, then that was her business. He didn’t want, or need, to know.

I did cover his tab, though, including his drink for the road. He sighed theatrically as I left.

‘And I bet you won’t even call,’ he said. ‘I just feel so … used.’

13

Harry and Erin Dixon were deep in discussion when they heard the car approach.

‘We have to leave,’ said Erin.

‘And go where?’ said Harry.

‘I don’t know. Anywhere. We could promise not to tell if they just let us go and didn’t follow.’

Harry tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t stop himself. The idea that Prosperous had survived for so long just by allowing those who were uncomfortable with its edicts to leave was so preposterous as to be beyond belief. Erin, of all people, should have known that. They had hunted her father, Charlie Hutton, for years, and they had never given up. He had been clever and lucky. He was also been a teller at the bank, so he didn’t leave with his pockets empty, for he raided the town’s discretionary fund before he ran. The money bought him time, and some room to maneuver. It allowed him to set himself up with a new identity and a new life, but Harry was sure that he spent his days fearing every knock on the door and searching the faces on the street for the gaze that lingered too long.

Charlie hadn’t been afraid that they’d set the police on him. That wasn’t the way Prosperous worked. Anyway, the money that he stole didn’t officially exist, and the fund was used for purposes about which it was better that the law knew nothing. What had always stayed with Harry was that Erin’s father had never told. He could have gone to the police and tried to explain the nature of Prosperous, but it was so fantastic that he would have risked being dismissed as a madman. Even if they had chosen to believe him, there were no bodies to which he could point, no shallow graves to be dug up and bones to be exhumed. Harry wondered how deep you’d have to go to find the victims of Prosperous, if anything of them truly remained at all. Any searchers would have given up long before they first struck rock, and some of the bodies probably lay even deeper than that. And then there was the fact that rarely did it happen more than once in every twenty or thirty years, and those responsible kept the secret of it to themselves. To descry any kind of pattern would be almost impossible, and the names of those who had been taken were forgotten as soon as they were below ground. In many cases, they had never been known at all.

But there was another probable reason why Erin’s father had remained silent, a deeper reason: he was bound to Prosperous, and one didn’t slough off one’s loyalties to a place so old, and so strange, with any ease. He stayed loyal to the town even as he sought to put as much distance between him and it as possible, how he could not deny the truth of it, even if he wanted no further part.

But the town learned from what had happened with Charlie, and steps were taken to ensure that it wouldn’t occur so easily again. It kept a close watch on its inhabitants in the guise of caring for their well-being, and it bound them together with bonds of matrimony, of familial and business loyalties, and of fear.

‘You want to be like your father?’ said Harry, once his laughter had ceased. He hadn’t cared much for the sound of it. It held a distressingly lunatic tone. ‘You want to be hunted all your life?’

‘No,’ she said softly. ‘But I don’t want to stay here either.’

But Harry wasn’t listening to her. He was on a roll now.

‘And he had money. We have nothing. You don’t think they’re watching our spending habits, our patterns of deposits and withdrawals? They know, or at least they suspect. We’re vulnerable, and that means they’re concerned about how we might act. No, we have no choice. We have to wait this out. We have to hope that our situation improves. When it does, we can start putting money away. We can plan, just like Charlie must have done. You don’t leave Prosperous on a whim. You don’t—’

And then there came the sound of a car. Lights washed over the house, and the words died in Harry Dixon’s mouth.

14

Rosie’s wasn’t too dissimilar from Ruski’s, but your chances of getting a seat in Rosie’s were greater than in Ruski’s simply because Rosie’s had more chairs. I didn’t want another beer so I ordered coffee instead, and watched the cars go by on Fore Street. Music was playing, a song that I thought I recognized, something about seas of charity and unchosen exiles. I called Rachel while I waited, and she put me on to Sam. We chatted for a while about events in elementary school, which seemed to involve a lot of painting, and a certain amount of argument with a boy named Harry.

‘His mom and dad named him after Harry Potter,’ Sam explained. She didn’t sound as though she approved. A whole generation of adults who had dressed up as wizards when they should have known better now seemed destined to inflict whimsy on their offspring. I wasn’t a big fan of whimsy. Whimsical people were the type who got run over by cars without anybody really noticing or caring that much beyond the damage to the vehicle, which was usually minimal anyway, whimsical folk being kind of lighter than most.

‘He draws lightning on his forehead,’ said Sam.

‘Does he?’ I said.

‘Yeah. He says it’s real, but it comes off when you rub hard.’

I decided not to ask how she knew this, although I was pretty certain that however she’d discovered it, the boy named Harry had been an unwilling participant in the experiment. Talk moved on to the trip to Florida she was taking the following weekend, where she and Rachel would join Rachel’s parents in their new winter vacation home. Rachel’s current boyfriend Jeff wouldn’t be going along with them, Sam informed me.

‘Oh,’ I said, keeping my voice as neutral as possible. I didn’t like Jeff, but it didn’t matter. Jeff liked himself enough for both of us.

‘Daddy!’ said Sam. ‘You don’t have to pretend you’re sad.’

Jesus.

‘Are you sure you’re just in elementary school?’ I said. ‘You’re not studying psychology on the side?’

‘Mom knows psycottagy,’ said Sam.

‘Yes, she does.’ Not enough of it to avoid dating a jackass like Jeff, but solving other people’s problems was often easier than taking care of your own. I considered sharing that insight with Rachel, but decided against it. Maybe I was learning at last that discretion was the better part of valor. ‘Just put your mom back on. I’ll see you when you get back.’

‘Bye. Love you,’ said Sam, and my heart broke a little.

‘Bye, hon. Love you too.’

I chatted with Rachel for a minute or two more. She seemed happy. That was good. I wanted her to be happy. If she was happy, Sam would be happy. I just wished Rachel could be happy with someone other than Jeff. It reflected badly on her good taste, but then there were those who might have said the same about her time with me.

‘What are you working on?’ asked Rachel.

‘Nothing much. Process serving. Errant husbands.’

‘Is that all? It won’t keep you from mischief for long.’

‘Well, there’s this thing with a homeless guy too. He hanged himself, and I can’t figure out why.’

‘I’ll bet he didn’t pay you in advance.’

‘You know, it’s funny you should say that, but someone in this city might have the money that he would have used to pay me.’

‘Do I need to tell you to be careful?’

‘No, but it always helps.’

‘I doubt that, but for the sake of your daughter …’

‘I’ll be careful.’

‘You in a bar?’

‘Rosie’s.’

‘Ah. A date?’

Macy arrived. She had some photocopied pages in one hand and a mug in the other. Like me, she had sought coffee.

‘No, I wouldn’t say that.’

Rachel laughed. ‘No, you wouldn’t, would you? Go on, get lost.’

I hung up. Macy had been hanging back in an effort to give me privacy. Now she stepped forward and laid the papers on the table as she sat.

‘You can read,’ she said, ‘but I’m not leaving them with you, okay?’

‘Understood.’

It was the ME’s report on Jude’s body. I could probably have bargained a look at it from the ME’s office, but this saved me the trouble of a trip to Augusta.

The rope used in the hanging was cotton, with a running knot placed over the occipital region. Rope fibers and remnants had been found on a table nearby, along with marks in the wood consistent with the cutting action of a sharp knife.

‘Did you find a knife at the scene?’ I asked Macy.

‘No, but it could have been with the other possessions that were taken.’

‘I guess.’

Rigor mortis and postmortem staining on both legs, distal portion of upper limbs, and area of waist above the belt line. Both eyes partially open; conjunctiva congested and cornea hazy. Mouth partially open, tongue protruding.

I moved on to the ligature mark. The ME found that it encircled the whole neck apart from a small gap beneath the knot, consistent with the drag weight of the body. The ligature ran backward, upward and toward the occipital region. The ligature marks were slightly wider on the left of the neck than the right, but only by about a fifth of an inch. Dissection of the neck revealed no evidence of fracture of the thyroid cartilage or hyoid bone, as is often the case in forced strangulation, which seemed to rule out the possibility that Jude had been attacked. Likewise, there was no extravasion — forced flow — of blood in the neck tissues. The ME had concluded that the cause of death was asphyxia due to suicidal hanging by ligature.

The only other noteworthy inclusion in the report was a list of bruises, scars and abrasions to Jude’s body. They were considerable enough to make me wince. As if to compound the issue, Macy slid another sheet of paper across the table. It was a color copy, and the quality wasn’t great. This was a small mercy, given what the two photographs on it revealed about the battering that Jude had taken over the years. Falls, fights, beatings: all were recorded on a map of skin and flesh, and all concealed beneath the trappings of a thrift-shop dandy. Anyone who was dumb enough to imagine that life on the streets of Portland was some kind of state-funded outdoor vacation just needed one look at the picture of Jude’s torso and limbs to be set straight.

‘The ME says some are recent, but most are pretty old,’ said Macy. ‘One or two might have been received in the hours prior to his death. These ones here are interesting.’

She pointed with her finger to marks on Jude’s upper right and left arms.

‘What are they?’

Macy handed over a final sheet. She had a fair for the dramatic. The pictures showed enlargements of the marks.

‘They look like grips,’ I said, ‘as though someone held him hard from behind.’

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Macy. ‘But it doesn’t mean they’re connected to his death. This was a man who took knocks on a regular basis.’

‘You going to ask around?’

‘I wasn’t until you showed up. Look, I still think he took his own life, but I’ll admit that you’ve raised enough questions to make me wonder again about why he did it. Might be useful if we could find the contents of his pack, though, or better still, talk to whoever made that call. You never know what we might learn.’

‘You try asking around?’

‘Nix did, as best he could. If anybody knew anything, they were keeping quiet. But if I came across a dead man, and then rifled his belongings and stole what little money he had, I’d probably keep quiet about it too.’

Macy gathered up the photocopies and finished her coffee.

‘So, you doing much pro bono work these days?’

‘No, but I hear it’s good for the soul.’

‘Which is why you’ll keep on this — for the good of your soul, and the fact that you think you might owe Jude some hours?’

‘Whatever I owe him, it’s not hours,’ I said.

‘You still have my number?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. I thought you might have lost it, seeing as how you never called and all.’

‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Don’t be. It was a good dinner, and you did pay for it.’

‘It was, but I still should have called. I don’t know why I didn’t.’

‘I do,’ she said. ‘The same things that stopped me from calling you. Life. Death.’

She stood.

‘You know how to find me,’ she said. ‘I’d appreciate a heads-up if you learn anything.’

‘Done,’ I said.

She turned back briefly as she walked away.

‘It was good seeing you again.’

‘And you,’ I said.

I watched her go. A couple of other guys did too. Damn.

15

Morland sat on one side of the kitchen table, Hayley Conyer to his right. Harry and Erin sat on the other side, facing them. The Dixons had never entertained Hayley in their home before. They had never entertained her anywhere. Neither had they ever set foot in her house. They had heard that it was beautiful and ornate, if gloomy. Erin was secretly pleased that, while their own home might not have been anything special, it wasn’t lacking in cheer. The kitchen was bright, and the living room that connected to it was even brighter. There was a shadow over all of it now, though. Hayley Conyer seemed to have brought something of the night in with her.

‘You have a lovely home,’ she said, in the manner of one who was surprised at how far the little people could stretch a nickel, but still wouldn’t want to live like them.

‘Thank you,’ said Erin.

She had made coffee. She had a vague recollection that Hayley Conyer preferred tea, but she deliberately hadn’t offered her any. She wasn’t even sure that there was tea in the house. If there was, it had been there for so long that nobody would want to drink it.

‘I noticed that the paint on your windows is faking,’ said Morland. ‘You ought to do something with it before it gets much worse.’

Harry’s smile didn’t waver. It was a test. Everything was a test now, and the only thing that mattered in a test was not failing.

‘I was waiting for winter to pass,’ he said. ‘It’s hard to paint a window frame when your hands are shaking with cold. You’re liable to end up with windows that you can’t see much out of.’

Morland wasn’t about to let it go.

‘You could have taken care of it last summer.’

Harry was finding it hard to keep his smile in place.

‘I was busy last summer.’

‘Yeah?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Making a living. Is this an interrogation, Chief?’

Hayley Conyer intervened.

‘We’re just worried about you, Harry. With this downturn in the economy, and the way it’s hit construction, well, you’re more … vulnerable than most. Businesses like your own must be suffering.’

‘We’re getting by,’ said Erin. She wasn’t going to let her husband be cornered alone by these two. ‘Harry works hard.’

‘I’m sure he does,’ said Conyer.

She pursed her lips, and then pulled from memory the semblance of a concerned expression.

‘You see, it’s the job of the board to protect the town, and the best way we can do that is by protecting the people of the town.’

She didn’t look at Harry. She had her eyes on Erin. She spoke to Erin as though to a slow child. She was goading her, just as Morland had goaded Harry. They wanted a reaction. They wanted anger.

They wanted an excuse.

‘I understand that, Hayley,’ said Erin. She didn’t allow even a drop of sarcasm to pollute her apparent sincerity.

‘I’m glad. That’s why I asked Chief Morland here to look into your affairs some, just to be sure that all was well with you.’

This time, Erin couldn’t conceal her anger.

‘You what?’

Harry placed a hand on her arm, leaning into it so that she felt his weight.

Calm, calm.

‘Would you mind explaining to me what that means?’ said Harry.

‘It means,’ said Morland, ‘that I talked to some of your suppliers, and your subcontractors. It means that, when the mood has struck me, I’ve followed you around these last few weeks. It means that I’ve had a meeting with Allan Dantree at the bank, and we had a discreet conversation about your accounts.’

Harry couldn’t help but close his eyes for a moment. He’d tried so hard, but he’d underestimated Morland, and Hayley Conyer, and the board. He wasn’t the first to have tried to hide his difficulties, and he wouldn’t be the last. He should have known that, over the centuries, the town had learned to spot weakness, but he had exposed himself by applying to the town’s fund for that loan. Perhaps they’d all just been more alert than usual to strange patterns, to blips in behavior, because of the economy. So many folk were struggling in the current climate. That was why the board had acted. That was why they had taken the girl.

‘Those are our private affairs,’ said Erin, but her voice sounded hollow even to herself. In Prosperous nothing was private, not really.

‘But what happens when private difficulties affect all?’ said Hayley, still speaking in that maddeningly reasonable, insidiously patronizing tone. God, Erin hated her. It was as though cataracts had been removed from her eyes, the old clouded lenses replaced by ones that were new and clear. She saw the town as it really was, saw it in all its viciousness, its selfregard, its madness. They had been brainwashed, conditioned by centuries of behavior, but it was only when it arrived at their own door in the form of the girl that Harry and Erin had realized they could no longer be a part of it. Releasing the girl was an imperfect solution, the action of those who were still not brave enough to take the final step themselves and hoped that another might do it for them. The girl would go to the police, she would tell her story, and they would come.

And what then? The girl would have been able to give them a description of Walter and Beatrix, and of Harry and Erin. All four would have been questioned, but Walter and Beatrix wouldn’t have buckled under interrogation. They had been responsible for finding and taking the last two girls, but they were now nearing death. They were as loyal to the town as Hayley Conyer, and they weren’t likely to roll over on it in the final years of their life. At best, it would have been their word against that of Harry and Erin.

They threatened us. They told us to get them a girl or they’d burn our house down. We’re old. We were frightened. We didn’t know what they wanted with the girl. We didn’t ask …

And Hayley Conyer, and the selectmen, and Chief Morland? Why, there’d be nothing to connect them to the girl, nothing beyond the word of Harry and Erin Dixon, who’d kept her trapped in their basement before leaving a door unlocked, and it could be that they’d done that only because they’d lost the courage to follow through on whatever it was they had planned for her. It would still have left them open to felony charges of kidnapping and criminal restraint, a Class A crime, or a Class B if the prosecution accepted that they’d voluntarily released the victim alive and in a safe place, and not suffering from serious bodily injury. It was the difference between ten years behind bars and thirty years, but it would still have been more time than either of them wanted to spend in a cell.

And maybe, just maybe, someone might have believed their story.

But, no, that was the greatest fantasy of all.

‘Harry? Erin? You still with us?’

It was Morland speaking.

Erin looked at her husband. She knew that their thoughts had been running along similar lines.

What if, what if …

‘Yes,’ said Harry. ‘We’re listening.’

‘You’re in financial difficulties — far more serious difficulties than you chose to share with Ben when you asked for a loan — and you tried to keep them from us.’

There was no point in denying it.

‘Yes, that’s true.’

‘Why?’

‘Because we were ashamed.’

‘Is that all?’

‘No. We were frightened as well.’

‘Frightened? Frightened of what?’

There was no going back now.

‘Frightened that the town might turn against us.’

Now Hayley Conyer spoke again.

‘The town does not turn against its own, Harry. It protects them. That’s the reason for its existence. How could you doubt that?’

Harry squeezed the bridge of his nose with the index finger and thumb of his right hand. He could feel a migraine coming on.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘With all that was going on, with all of our problems …’

‘You lost faith,’ said Conyer.

‘Yes, Hayley, I suppose we did.’

Conyer leaned over the table. Her breath smelled of mints and dying.

‘Did you let the girl go?’ she asked.

‘No,’ said Harry.

‘Look me in the eye and tell me true.’

Harry took his hand away from his nose and stared Conyer down.

‘No, we did not let the girl go.’

She didn’t want to believe him. He could see that. Just like Morland, she had her suspicions, but she couldn’t prove them, and the town wouldn’t allow her to move against them without proof.

‘All right, then,’ she said. ‘The question is, where do we go from here? You’ll have to make amends, both of you.’

The pain was pulsing in Harry’s head now, and with it came the nausea. He knew what was coming. He’d known right from the moment that Morland had arrived at their house with the body of the girl in the trunk of his car. He wanted to tell them of the dreams he’d been having, but he bit the words back. He hadn’t even told his wife about them. In his dreams the girl wasn’t dead. They’d put her in the grave alive, because dead girls didn’t open their eyes. She was alive and scratching at the plastic below the ground, and somehow she had managed to tear through it and dig her way out, except when she emerged she really was dead. She was a being transformed, a revenant, and when she opened her mouth she spewed darkness, and the night deepened around her.

‘What do you want us to do?’ said Harry, but he asked only because it was what was expected of him. He might as well have been reading from a script.

Hayley Conyer patted his hand. It was all that he could do not to yank it away at her touch.

‘Find us another girl,’ said Conyer. ‘And quickly.’

16

I got to the Preble Street Soup Kitchen just as the dinner service was coming to an end. A woman named Evadne Bryan-Perkins, who worked at the Portland Help Center, a mental health and community support facility on Congress, had directed me to the kitchen. Shaky had given me her name as a contact person, but she told me that she hadn’t seen him in a day or two, and suggested that he might drop by Preble Street for a bite to eat.

Preble Street served three meals per day not only to the city’s homeless, but to seniors and families who were struggling to get by on welfare. That added up to almost 500,000 meals per year, but the meals were just a starting point. By getting people in the door, the staff was in a position to help them with housing advice, employment and healthcare. At the very least, they could give them some clean, warm socks, and that meant a lot during winter in Maine.

One of the volunteers, a young woman named Karyn, told me that Shaky had been through earlier in the evening, but had finished his meal and headed back out almost immediately after. This was unusual for him, she said. He was more sociable than some, and he usually appreciated the company and warmth of the shelter.

‘He hasn’t been the same since his friend Jude died,’ she said. ‘They had a bond between them, and they looked out for each other. Shaky’s talked to us a little about it, but most of it he’s kept inside.’

‘Do you have any idea where he might have gone?’

Karyn called over another volunteer, this time a kid of about college age.

‘This is Stephen,’ she said. ‘He was one of the coordinators of this year’s homeless survey. He might be able to help you.’

She went back to cleaning tables, leaving me with Stephen. He was a tall young man. I pretty much had to lean back just to look him in the eye. He wasn’t as open as Karyn had been. He had his arms crossed as he spoke to me.

‘Can I ask why a private detective is looking for Shaky?’ he said.

‘He came to talk to me about Jude’s death. I think he set tumblers falling in my mind. If I’m to take it any further, then there are some questions that he might be able to help me answer. He’s in no trouble. I give you my word on that.’

I watched him consider what I’d told him before he decided that I wasn’t about to make Shaky’s existence any more difficult, and he loosened up enough to offer me coffee. Between the beer I’d had in Ruski’s, and the coffee in Rosie’s, I was carrying more liquid than a camel, but one of the first things I learned when I started out as a cop was always to accept if someone you were trying to talk with offered you a coffee or a soda. It made them relax, and if they were relaxed then they’d be more willing to help you.

‘Karyn mentioned something about a survey,’ I said, as we sipped coffee from plastic cups.

‘We’re required by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to do a census of the homeless each year,’ said Stephen. ‘If we don’t know how many folk need help, then we can’t work out budgets, staffing, even how much food we’re likely to require over the months to come. But it’s also a chance to make contact with the ones who’ve avoided us so far, and try to bring them into the fold.’

I must have looked puzzled.

‘You’re wondering why anyone who’s hungry would pass up the chance of a hot meal, right?’ said Stephen.

‘I guess it doesn’t make much sense to me.’

‘Some people who take to the streets don’t want to be found,’ he said. ‘A lot of them have mental health issues, and if you’re a paranoid schizophrenic who believes that the government is trying to kill you, the last thing you’re going to want to do is turn up at a shelter where someone might start prying into your business. Then there are others who are just plain scared. Maybe they’ve gotten into a fight with someone in the past, and they know that there’s a knife out there looking to sink itself into them, or they’ve had a bad experience with the authorities and now prefer to keep their heads down. So, for one night of the year, we go out in force looking under bleachers and behind Dumpsters, and we try to reach out. I mean, we’re out there at other times of the year too, but the sustained focus of survey night, and the sheer weight of volunteers on the streets, means that we get a hell of a lot done in a few hours.’

‘So where does Shaky hang out?’

‘Shaky likes to come into the shelter, if there’s a mat available to sleep on. He hasn’t been in so much since Jude died, which means that he’s either set up camp somewhere off the interstate, probably around Back Cove Park, or he’s sleeping at the rear of one of the businesses on Danforth or Pleasant, where the cops can’t see him. That’s where I’d look.’

He toyed with his coffee cup. He wanted to say more. I didn’t hurry him.

‘Did you know Mr Jude?’ he eventually asked.

I’d never heard anyone call Jude ‘Mister’ before. He was always just Jude. It made me warm more to the kid.

‘A little,’ I said. ‘I’d sometimes put money his way if I needed someone to watch a car or an address for a while. He never let me down.’

‘He was a smart man, and a good one too,’ said Stephen. ‘I could never quite figure out how he’d ended up in the situation he was in. Some of the men and women here, I can see it. There’s a trajectory you can reconstruct. But not in Mr Jude’s case. The best I can tell, there was a weak bolt in the machinery, and when it broke, the whole mechanism ground to a halt.’

‘You’re not an engineering student by any chance, are you?’

He grinned for the first time. ‘Know a man by his metaphors.’

‘You sound as though you liked Jude,’ I said.

‘Uh-huh, I did. Even in the midst of his own troubles, he still had time for others. I tried to follow his lead by helping him in turn.’

‘You’re talking about his daughter?’

‘Yeah, Annie. I was kind of keeping an eye on her for him.’

‘Really?’

‘Because of my work with the shelter here, I was in a position to talk to others in the same business. I made an occasional call to the Tender House in Bangor, where Annie was staying, just so I could reassure Mr Jude that she was doing okay. When she disappeared, I—’

He stopped.

‘You felt responsible?’

He nodded, but didn’t speak.

‘Did Jude say anything to make you believe he felt the same way?’

‘No, never. It wasn’t in his nature. It didn’t help, though. It didn’t make me feel any less guilty.’

Stephen was clearly a good kid, but he had the egotism of youth. The world revolved around him, and consequently he believed he had the power to change how it worked. And, in the way of the young, he had made another’s pain about himself, even if he did so for what seemed like the best of reasons. Time and age would change him: if they didn’t, he wouldn’t be working in soup kitchens and shelters for much longer. His frustrations would get the better of him, and force him out. He’d blame others for it, but it would be his own fault.

I thanked him and left my cell phone number with him, just in case I couldn’t find Shaky, or he chose to come into the shelter for the night after all. Stephen promised to leave a note for the breakfast and lunch volunteers as well, so that if Shaky arrived to eat the next day they could let me know. I used the men’s room before I left, just to ensure that my bladder didn’t burst somewhere between the shelter and Back Cove. An old man was standing at one of the sinks, stripped to the waist. His white hair hung past his shoulders, and his body reminded me of the images I’d seen of Jude’s poor, scarred torso, like some medieval depiction of Christ after He’d been taken down from the cross.

‘How you doing?’ I said.

‘Livin’ the dream,’ the old man replied.

He was shaving with a disposable razor. He removed the last of the foam from his cheek, splashed water on his face and rubbed his skin to check that it was smooth.

‘You got any aftershave?’ he asked.

‘Not with me,’ I said. ‘Why, you got a date?’

‘I haven’t been on a date since Nixon was president.’

‘Another thing to blame him for: ruining your love life.’

‘He was a sonofabitch, but I didn’t need no help on that front.’

I washed my hands and dried them with a paper towel. I had money in my pocket, but I didn’t want to offend the old man. Then I thought that it was better to risk hurting his feelings. I left a ten on the sink beside him. He looked at it as though Alexander Hamilton might bite him if he tried to pick it up; that, or I might ask him to bite me as part of some bizarre sexual fetish.

‘What’s that for?’ he said.

‘Aftershave.’

He reached out and took the ten.

‘I always liked Old Spice,’ he said.

‘My father wore Old Spice.’

‘Something stays around that long, it has to be good.’

‘Amen,’ I said. ‘Look after yourself.’

‘I will,’ he said. ‘And, hey?’

I looked back.

‘Thanks.’

17

It’s a full-time job being homeless. It’s a full-time job being poor. That’s what those who bitch about the underprivileged not going out there and finding work fail to understand. They have a job already, and that job is surviving. You have to get in line early for food, and earlier still for a place to sleep. You carry your possessions on your back, and when they wear out you spend time scavenging for replacements. You only have so much energy to expend, because you only have so much food to fuel your body. Most of the time you’re tired and sore, and your clothes are damp. If the cops find you sleeping on the street, they move you on. If you’re lucky, they’ll give you a ride to a shelter, but if there are no beds free, or no mats available on the floor, then you’ll have to sleep sitting upright in a plastic chair in an outer office, and the lights will be on full because that’s what the fire code regulations require, so you go back out on the streets again because at least there you can lie down in the dark, and with luck you’ll sleep. Each day is the same, and each day you get a little bit older and a little bit more tired.

And sometimes you remember who you once were. You were a kid who played with other kids. You had a mother and a father. You wanted to be a fireman or an astronaut or a railroad engineer. You had a husband. You had a wife. You were loved. You could never have imagined that you would end up this way.

You curl up in the darkness and you wait for death to kiss you a final, blissful goodnight.

Shaky was back on the streets. He’d been tempted to stay at one of the shelters and find a mat on which to sleep. His arm ached. It always pained him in winter, leaving him with months of discomfort, but it had been hurting more since Jude died. It was probably — what was the word? He thought and thought — ‘psychosomatic’, that was it. It had taken him a good minute to recall it, but Jude would have known the word instantly. Jude knew about history, and science, and geography. He could tell you the plot of every great novel he’d ever read, and recite whole passages of them from memory. Shaky had once tested him on a couple. He’d jokingly remarked that, for all Shaky knew, Jude could have been making up all of those quotations off the top of his head. Jude had responded by claiming that Shaky had impugned his honor — that was the word he’d used, ‘impugned’ — and there had been nothing to do but for the two of them to head down to the Portland Public Library on Congress, where Shaky had pulled The Great Gatsby from the shelves, along with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lolita, The Grapes of Wrath, As I Lay Dying, Ulysses and the poems of Longfellow and Cummings and Yeats. Jude had been able to quote chunks of them without getting a word wrong, without a single stumble, and even some of the librarians had come over to listen. By the time he got on to Shakespeare, it was like being in the presence of one of those old stage actors, the kind who used to wash up in small towns when there were still theaters in which to perform, their costumes and props in one truck, the cast in another, and put on revues, and comedies, and social dramas, or maybe a condensed Shakespeare with all of the dull parts removed, leaving only the great moments of drama: ghosts, and bloodied daggers, and dying kings.

And there was Jude in his old checked suit and two-tone shoes, the heels worn smooth and cardboard masking the holes in the soles, surrounded by curious readers and amused librarians. He was lost in words, lost in roles, someone other than himself for just a little while, and Shaky had loved him then, loved him as he basked in the glow of pleasure that emanated from Jude’s face, loved him as his eyes closed in reverie, and he said a prayer of gratitude for the presence of Jude in his life even as he wondered how one so clever and so gifted could have ended up scavenging in Dumpsters and sleeping on the streets of a city forever shadowed by winter, and what weakness in Jude’s being had caused him to turn away from his family and his home and throw himself to the winds like a leaf at the coming of fall.

Shaky’s pack weighed heavily on him. He thought again about the shelter. He could have left his belongings there — even without a bed for him, someone might have been willing to look after them — and returned to pick them up later, but increasingly he found the presence of others distressing. He would look at the familiar faces, but the one he sought was no longer there, and the presence of the rest only reminded him of Jude’s absence. How long had they been friends? Shaky could not remember. He had lost track of the years a long time ago. Dates were of no consequence. He was not marking wedding anniversaries, nor the birthdays of children. He left the years behind him, discarded without a thought like old shoes that could no longer fulfill even his modest needs.

He was near Deering Oaks now. He kept returning there, coming back to the place in which Jude had breathed his last. He was a mourner and a pilgrim. He stopped outside the house, its windows now boarded. Someone had placed a new lock and bolt on the basement door since Jude’s death: the police, he assumed, or the owner, assuming it was still owned by a person and not a bank. Crime scene tape had been placed across the door, but it was now torn. It drifted in the night’s breeze.

Shaky had no sense of Jude at the house. That was how he knew that Jude had not taken his own life. Shaky didn’t believe in ghosts. He didn’t even believe in God, and if he turned out to be wrong, well, he and God would have some words about the dogshit hand that Shaky had been dealt in life. But Shaky did have a certain sense about people and places. Jude had it too. You needed it if you wanted to survive on the streets. Shaky instinctively knew who to trust, and who to avoid. He knew the places in which it was safe to sleep and the places, though empty and apparently innocuous, in which it was best not to rest. Men and women left their marks as they moved through life, and you could read them if you had a mind to. Jude had left his mark in that basement, his final mark, but it didn’t read to Shaky like the mark of a man who had given in to despair. It read to Shaky like the mark of one who would have fought if he’d had the strength, and if the odds had not been against him.

He walked down to the basement door and took the Swiss Army knife from his pocket. It was one of his most valuable possessions, and he maintained it well. There was one blade that he kept particularly sharp, and he used it now to make two signs on the stonework beside the door. The first was a rectangle with a dot in the center, the old hobo alphabet symbol for ‘danger’. The second was a diagonal line joined halfway by a smaller, almost perpendicular line. It was the warning to keep away.

He spent the rest of the night asking questions. He did it carefully and discreetly, and he approached only those whom he trusted, those he knew would not lie to him or betray him. It had taken him a while to figure out what he should do. Talking to the detective had crystallized it for him. Someone had taken Jude’s money, and the contents of his pack. It might have been those responsible for his death, but it didn’t seem likely that they’d then call in his hanging corpse to the cops. Neither would they have taken the money if they wanted his death to appear like a suicide. Anyway, from what Shaky had learned, Jude was dead for a day or more before his body was found.

All this suggested to Shaky that the person who had called in the killing, and the person who had taken the money and rifled Jude’s belongings, were one and the same, and it seemed to Shaky that it might well be one of their own, a street person. One of the city’s homeless had either stumbled across Jude’s sleeping place by accident or, more likely, had gone looking for Jude to begin with. The word was out: Jude was calling in his loans. He needed money. The unknown person could have been seeking out Jude in order to pay his debts, but equally there were those on the street who would not be above hunting Jude down in order to steal whatever cash he had managed to accumulate. It didn’t matter: either way someone had found Jude hanging in that basement, and looted his belongings in the shadow of his corpse.

Shaky well knew that $127 was a lot of money for someone who struggled by on a couple of bucks a day. The instinct would be to celebrate: booze or perhaps something stronger; and fast food — bought, not scavenged. Alcohol and narcotics made people careless. Rumors would start to circulate that one of their own had enjoyed a windfall.

By the time he returned to his tent at Back Cove Park, Shaky had a name.

Brightboy.

18

The next morning Shaky didn’t join the line for breakfast at the shelter. He kept his distance and fingered the note in his pocket. It had been pinned to the bulletin board at Preble Street. The detective wanted to talk. Shaky had memorized the number, but he still kept the note, just in case. He knew that the years on the streets had raddled his brain. He would sometimes look at a clock face, and see the hands pointing at the numbers, and be unable to tell the time. He could be in a store, the price of a six-pack or a bottle of liquor clear to read on the sign, his change laid out in his hand ready to pay, and fail to make the connection between the cost of the booze and the money in his possession.

Now, as he stood in the shelter of a doorway on Cumberland Avenue, he repeated the cell phone number over and over to himself. He had considered calling the detective and telling him what he knew, but he wanted to be sure. He wanted to present the detective with hard evidence. He wanted to prove himself, both for his own sake and for Jude’s, so he stood in the shadows and watched his fellow homeless gather for breakfast.

It didn’t take him long to spot Brightboy. He arrived shortly before eight, his pack on his back. Shaky’s keen eyes were drawn to Brightboy’s boots. They were tan Timberlands, better than what Brightboy usually wore. It was possible that he’d found them, but equally they were the kind of Goodwill purchase that even a moron like Brightboy might have the sense to make while he had money in his pocket. A good pair of boots would keep your feet warm and dry, and make days spent walking the streets a little easier. He watched Brightboy exchange greetings with those whom he knew, but for the most part he kept to himself. Brightboy had always been a loner, partly out of choice but also because he couldn’t be trusted. There were those with whom one could leave a pack and know that it would be safely looked after, that its contents would not be searched and its valuables — socks, underwear, a candy bar, a can opener, a permanent water bottle — looted. Brightboy was not such a man, and he had taken beatings in the past for his thievery.

Shaky had learned that Brightboy had been on a drunken tear these last few days, and a serious one too: Mohawk 190 Grain Alcohol and Old Crow bourbon, bottle after bottle of it. As was his way, Brightboy had declined to share the contents of his portable liquor cabinet. Had he done so, there might not have been quite so many whispers of discontent.

Shaky didn’t follow Brightboy into the shelter, but instead waited on the street and nibbled on a bagel from the previous day’s bake. Shaky was known in most of the city’s bakeries and coffee shops, and rarely left them without having something to eat pressed upon him. He was careful to spread his lack of custom evenly, and by now he had his weekly routine down: this place on Monday morning, this one Tuesday, this one Wednesday … They had grown to expect him, and if he missed a visit questions would be asked of him when he returned. What happened? Were you ill? You doing okay? Shaky always answered honestly. He never played sick when he wasn’t, and he never lied. He didn’t have very much, which made retaining some semblance of dignity and honor all the more important.

Brightboy emerged an hour later. Shaky knew that he’d have eaten, and used the bathroom. He would probably have half a bagel or a piece of toast wrapped in a napkin in his pocket for later. Shaky let Brightboy get some distance ahead of him, then followed. When Brightboy stopped to talk to a woman known as Frannie at Congress Square Park, Shaky slipped into the Starbucks across the street and took a seat at the window. With his damaged arm, and the slight stoop that came with it, he felt like the unlikeliest spy in the world. Undercover Elephant would have been less conspicuous. It was fortunate that it was Brightboy he was following. Brightboy was dumb and self-absorbed. He was nearly as bad as the regular folk in his failure to notice what was going on around him.

Portland was changing. The old Eastland Hotel was being renovated by a big chain — Shaky had lost count of the number of new hotels and restaurants the city had added in recent years — and it looked like part of Congress Park, the old plaza at Congress and High, would be sold to the hotel’s new owners. A Dunkin’ Donuts had once stood at the corner of Congress Park, and it became a gathering spot for the city’s homeless, but it was long gone now. The businesses that had occupied the space over the years sometimes seemed to Shaky as transient as some of those who frequented its environs. Over the years it had been a laundry, a Walgreens, the Congress Square Hotel and, way back, a wooden row house. Now it was a brick-and-concrete space with a sunken center and a few planting beds, where people like Brightboy and Frannie could conduct their business.

Brightboy’s encounter with Frannie ended with the woman screaming abuse at him, and Brightboy threatening to punch her lights out. Shaky wished him luck. Frannie had been on the streets for a decade or more, and Shaky didn’t even want to think about the kind of treatment she’d endured and survived in that time. The story was that she’d once bitten off the nose of a man who’d tried to rape her. This was subsequently described as an exaggeration: she hadn’t bitten off all of his nose, said those who knew of such matters, just the cartilage below the nasal bone. Shaky figured that it must have taken her a while because Frannie didn’t have more than half a dozen teeth in her head worth talking about. He had a vision of her holding on to the guy by his ears, gnawing away at him with her jagged shards. It gave him the shivers.

He kept after Brightboy for two hours, watching him search for coins in pay phones and around parking meters, and halfheartedly rummaging through garbage cans for bottles and soda cans to redeem. At the intersection of Congress and Deering Avenue Brightboy took a detour on Deering past Skip Murphy’s sober house. He lingered outside for a time, although Shaky didn’t know why. Skip’s only accepted those who were in full-time employment, or students with some form of income. More to the point, it only took in those who actually wanted to improve themselves, and Brightboy’s best chance of improving himself lay in dying. Maybe he knew someone in there, in which case the poor bastard in question would be well advised to give Brightboy a wide berth, because Shaky wouldn’t have put it past Brightboy to try and drag someone who had embarked on a twelve-step back down to his own level. It was the only reason why Brightboy might offer to share a drink. Misery loved company, but damnation needed it.

Brightboy moved on, Shaky trailing him, and at last they came to Brightboy’s stash, where he kept the stuff that he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, carry. There were some who used a shopping cart to haul their possessions, but they were mostly the ones who tried to make a bit extra by scavenging. Brightboy didn’t have that kind of resolve. He had hidden whatever was worth keeping behind a warehouse on St John Street, stashing it in the bushes beside a Dumpster that didn’t look like it had been emptied since plastic was invented. He was crouched over the bushes when Shaky turned the corner, and so intent on whatever he was doing that he didn’t hear him approach.

‘Hey,’ said Shaky.

Brightboy was squatting with his back to Shaky. He looked over his shoulder, but didn’t try to get up. Shaky could see his right hand moving in the bushes.

‘Hey,’ said Brightboy in reply. His hand kept searching. Shaky knew that it had found what it was seeking when he saw Brightboy smile. Glass flashed in the sunlight as Brightboy withdrew his hand. He started to rise, but Shaky was too quick for him. Some might have called him a cripple behind his back, but he was far from it. His left foot was forward, his right moving in a strong arc to join and then pass it. The toe of his boot caught Brightboy in the side of the head. Brightboy gave a single yelp and fell sideways. The empty bottle of Old Crow fell from his hand and rolled across the ground. Shaky aimed a second kick at Brightboy, just to be sure, and because he wanted to. He had never liked Brightboy. Jude hadn’t cared much for him either, even if his personal code of ethics forbade him from turning his back on him. Jude’s attitude toward Brightboy was proof positive to Shaky that his late friend had not been without flaw.

This time, Shaky landed a glancing blow to Brightboy’s chin. Brightboy started to crawl away, and Shaky finished him off with a toe to the groin from behind. Brightboy stopped moving and lay on the ground, cupping himself with his hands as he moaned softly.

The previous night’s breeze was no more, and the day was still. Shaky began to search Brightboy’s possessions. It took him only a minute to find Jude’s old canvas bag. Jude had used it to transport what he called his ‘essentials’: wipes, toothbrush, comb and whatever book he happened to be reading at the time. It was small enough to carry easily, and big enough to take any treasures he might scavenge along the way, while he left his main pack in a locker at Amistad. Brightboy must have swept Jude’s valuables into it before he left the basement.

Shaky sank down against the Dumpster. The sight of the bag, the feel of it in his hands, brought home to him with renewed clarity that Jude was gone. Shaky started to cry. Brightboy looked up at him from the ground. His eyes were glazed, and he was bleeding from the mouth.

‘You took this from him,’ said Shaky. ‘You took it from him while his body was still warm.’

‘His body weren’t warm,’ said Brightboy. ‘It was cold as shit.’

He tried to sit up, but his balls still hurt. He lay down again, rocking with pain, but managed to keep talking.

‘Anyway, Jude would have wanted me to have it. He couldn’t take it with him. If he could’ve talked, he’d have told me so.’

God, Shaky hated Brightboy. He wished that he’d kicked him hard enough to drive his balls up into his throat and choke him.

‘Even if he’d given this to you, you wouldn’t have deserved to have it,’ Shaky told him.

Inside the bag he found the last of Jude’s money — $43, still wrapped in the same rubber band — and Jude’s toothpaste and comb. The wipes were gone. Strangely, the book Jude had been reading at the time of his death, an architectural history of early churches in England, was also among the books stolen by Brightboy. Jude had ordered it specially, Shaky remembered. The people at Longfellow Books had found a paperback copy for him, and refused to accept payment for it. Jude had picked it up days before he died, just after returning from his most recent trip north. Shaky had put it down to another manifestation of Jude’s magpie intellect, but his friend had been different about this book. He hadn’t wanted to discuss it with Shaky, just as he hadn’t wanted to tell him exactly where he’d gone when he’d left Portland those final two times.

‘Bangor?’ Shaky had pressed him.

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Your daughter still up there, you think?’

‘No, I believe she went … someplace else.’

‘You find her?’

‘Not yet.’

Jude had begun to mark the pages as he read. Shaky flicked through them, and some bus tickets fell out. He tried to grab them, but at that moment the wind came up again from out of nowhere and snatched the tickets away. It blew them into some briars, and Shaky tore the skin on his right hand trying to retrieve them. He almost gave up, but he hadn’t come this far to let anything slide that might help the detective. He knelt down and reached into the bush, ignoring the pain and the damage to his coat.

‘Damn you,’ he whispered. ‘Damn bushes.’

‘No,’ said a voice behind him. ‘Damn you, you fuck.’

The sunlight caught the bottle of Old Crow again. This time it didn’t roll away, but shattered against Shaky’s skull.

Shaky came back to consciousness as the paramedic tended his wounds. Later he would learn that a driver had come into the lot to turn, and spotted him lying on the ground. The driver had believed him dead.

‘We’ll need to get you stitched up,’ said the paramedic.

He and his colleague wore blue plastic gloves that were stained with Shaky’s blood. Shaky tried to rise but they held him down.

‘You stay there. We got you.’

Shaky felt something in his right hand. He looked and saw the bus tickets crumpled in his fist. Carefully he put them in the pocket of his coat, and felt his fingers brush against the piece of paper with the detective’s number on it.

‘You got someone we can call?’ said the paramedic, and Shaky realized that they didn’t know he was homeless. He had laundered his clothes only a day earlier, and showered and shaved at Amistad while they were drying.

‘Yes,’ said Shaky, and despite the blow to the head he recited the detective’s cell phone number from memory before promptly losing consciousness again.

19

By the time I got to Maine Medical a doctor had picked the shards of glass out of Shaky’s scalp and stitched him up. He was woozy from the mild sedative that they’d given him but he wasn’t going to be kept in overnight. X-rays had revealed no sign of skull fracture. He’d just have a hell of a headache, and his scalp looked like it had been sewn together by Victor Frankenstein.

He silently pointed me to his possessions, which were contained in a plastic bag. The nurse told me that, before his lights went out behind the warehouse, he insisted that the medics retrieve his book. That was in the bag as well.

‘A history of early English churches?’ I said, waving it at Shaky as he lay on the gurney, his eyes heavy. ‘I have to say that I’m surprised.’

Shaky swallowed hard and gestured at the water pitcher nearby. I poured him a glass and held it to his mouth. He only dribbled a little.

‘It was a friend’s,’ he said.

‘Jude’s?’

He nodded, but it clearly made his head hurt because he winced and didn’t try to do it again.

‘Coat,’ he said.

I went through the pockets of his coat until I found the bus tickets, along with the scrap of paper containing my cell phone number. The tickets were for two Portland — Bangor round trips with Concord, and then two further onward round trips on the Cyr Bus Line that connected Bangor to Aroostook and points between, this time from Bangor to Medway in Penobscot County.

‘Where did he get the money for these tickets?’ I asked Shaky. ‘From earlier loans he called in?’

‘Guess so,’ said Shaky. ‘And bottles and cans.’

Portland’s homeless, like most people in their position, made a little money by scouring the trash for drink containers. Tuesday evenings were particularly profitable, since Wednesday was pickup day for recycling.

‘Did he say why he wanted to go to Medway?’

‘No.’

‘But it must have been something to do with his daughter?’

‘Yeah. Everything had to do with his daughter these last few weeks.’

I looked again at the tickets. The main reasons to go to Medway were hunting, fishing, snowmobiling and skiing, and I couldn’t see Jude doing any of those, whether they were in season or not. Perhaps his daughter had ended up there, but at this time of year there wasn’t a whole lot happening. The snow might eventually start melting, but a lull would follow before the summer tourists started arriving.

I flicked through the book. There was something there, something that I couldn’t quite grasp. It danced at the edge of my awareness. Maine and English churches.

Then it came to me: a tower with an ancient church, an English church.

‘Prosperous,’ I said aloud, and a nurse gave me a curious glance. ‘But what the hell would Jude be doing in Prosperous?’

It didn’t take long for the police to find Brightboy. He’d bought himself a half gallon of Caldwell Gin and found a quiet spot in Baxter Woods in which to drink it. He hadn’t even bothered to ditch the items that he’d taken from Jude’s basement. After they cuffed him and put him in the back of the car, Brightboy told them, without prompting, that he wasn’t sorry for hitting Shaky with the empty Old Crow bottle.

‘I’d have hit him with a full one,’ he said, ‘if’n I could have afforded to.’

When he was questioned at Portland PD headquarters, once he’d sobered up some, Brightboy could add little to the sum of knowledge about Jude’s death, and Shaky didn’t want to press charges over the assault, arguing that ‘Jude wouldn’t have wanted me to.’ Then again, Jude was dead, and he wasn’t the one who’d been smacked over the head with the Old Crow.

A bed was reserved for Shaky at one of the shelters, and the staff had agreed to keep an eye on him for any signs of concussion. He looked comfortable when I spoke to him about Brightboy, but an emergency shelter didn’t seem like the best place in which to try to recover from a head injury. As good fortune had it, Terrill Nix was one of the respondents to the initial assault, and between us we agreed to see if something could be done to move Shaky up the housing placement list in return for his efforts in tracking down Brightboy.

The police continued to question Brightboy about Jude, and what he might or might not have seen in the basement. Brightboy didn’t prove too helpful on that count — not out of unwillingness, but because he had seen nothing beyond Jude’s corpse and the consequent open season on his possessions. The cops could have charged Brightboy with petty theft, for the total value of the cash and items taken from the basement was less than $500, and for interfering with a possible crime scene, but in the end the decision was made just to put him back on the streets. The court and prison systems were overburdened as it was, and a spell behind bars was unlikely to impact much on Brightboy one way or another.

Macy joined Nix while I was at the hospital, and I mentioned the bus tickets to her, and the book on church architecture.

‘What the hell would someone like Jude be doing in Prosperous?’ she said.

‘You know,’ I replied, ‘those were almost precisely my own words.’

‘Let me guess,’ said Macy. ‘You’re going to pay a visit to Prosperous in the near future.’

‘Probably.’

‘I’ve talked to my lieutenant,’ said Macy, ‘and his view is that this is all just complicating what should be kept simple. We have enough to keep us busy for the next twelve months without adding Jude to the list. He thinks we should let it slide for now. I’ll keep an open mind on it, though. If you find out anything solid, you let me know. Terrill?’

She looked to Nix for his view. I had to admire the way that she worked. There were detectives who wouldn’t have bothered to cut a patrolman in on a discussion like this, let alone seek his opinion. The potential downside was that it could make the detective look indecisive, or lead to a situation where patrol cops might feel they had the right to drop in their two cents’ worth without an invitation, but I got the impression Macy wouldn’t have those problems. She didn’t give too much. She gave just enough.

Nix took the path of least resistance.

‘The more I sleep on it, the more it looks like Jude took the drop of his own free will. I spoke to one of the psychiatrists at the Portland Help Center. He said that Jude suffered from depression for most of his life. It was one of the reasons why he couldn’t hold down the permanent housing they tried to find for him. He’d just get depressed and head back to the streets.’

I understood their position. Jude wasn’t a pretty USM sophomore, or a nurse, or a promising high school student, and the narrative of his death, however incomplete, had already been written and accepted. I’d been there myself, once upon a time.

‘Did someone ask Brightboy about a knife?’ I said. I was still troubled by how Jude had cut the rope, assuming he had even done so himself.

‘Shit,’ said Macy.

She slipped away and made a call. When she returned, she looked troubled.

‘Brightboy had a penknife in his possession when we picked him up, but he says it’s his own. He didn’t recall seeing a knife at the scene. He could be lying, though, and he admits that he was out of his skull for most of the time he was in that basement. I don’t think Brightboy remembers much of anything, even at the best of times.’

But she seemed to be talking to convince herself more than me. I let it go. The seed was planted. If it took root, all the better.

Macy left with Nix. I watched her go. A passing doctor watched her too.

‘Damn,’ he said.

‘Yeah,’ I replied. ‘My sentiments exactly.’

The next time I saw Macy, I was dying.

20

A pall hung over the house of Harry and Erin Dixon after the departure of Chief Morland and Hayley Conyer. A visit from either one of them would have been enough to unnerve the Dixons at the best of times, for they were the two most powerful citizens in Prosperous, even allowing for the fact that Morland did not sit on the board. But a visit from both of them, especially under the circumstances, was sufficient to push Harry and Erin to breaking point.

They had let the girl go because they wanted to be free of this madness — and perhaps because she reminded them of a daughter that they had never had, but for whom they had always wished — and now they were being drawn deeper into the town’s insanity just because they had tried to do the right thing. In a way, Erin thought, it might be the shock to the system that they needed. Something of their torpor, their acquiescence to the town’s edicts, had already been challenged, or else they could not have acted as they had in freeing the girl. Now, faced with the prospect of kidnapping a replacement, any remaining illusions they had were being profoundly dissipated.

As their vision grew clearer, so too did their desperation to get away from Prosperous increase, but so far neither had spoken about what was being asked of them. To a greater, in the case of Harry, or lesser extent, in the case of his wife, they were like children, hoping that, by ignoring the problem, it might go away, or some other solution might present itself. Harry, in particular, had sunk into denial. He found himself almost wishing that some stray girl — a waif, a runaway — might pass through Prosperous, or be picked up at the side of the road by one of the selectmen: a safe, older man like Thomas Souleby or Calder Ayton who would offer her a ride into town and buy her soup and a sandwich at Gertrude’s. He would excuse himself to go to the men’s room, and a conversation would ensue behind closed doors. A woman would approach the girl, a mother figure. Concern would be expressed for her. A place to stay would be offered, if only for a night or two until she had a chance to clean herself up. There might even be work for her in Gertrude’s, if she wanted it. Gertrude’s was always shorthanded. Yes, that would work; that would do it. That would take the pressure off Harry and Erin, and they could continue to plan for their eventual escape. Yes, yes …

A day went by. Harry avoided speaking with his wife, finding excuses to be away from her. That was not how their marriage had survived for so long. True, Harry might sometimes be a reluctant participant in conversations about feelings, hurt or otherwise, but he had come to accept their value. While Erin could not know the direction of his thoughts, she understood him well enough to guess them.

Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me …

He sometimes quoted that particular piece of scripture — Luke 22:42, if she remembered correctly — in times of mild difficulty, like when she asked him to take out the trash if it was raining or, occasionally — and annoyingly — when they were about to make love. Her husband had his weaknesses. She had no illusions about them, just as, she assumed, he was aware of her own in turn, although she liked to think that hers were venal, and of less consequence. Harry disliked confrontation, and was poor at making serious decisions. He preferred to have the responsibility for the latter taken from him by circumstance, for then he would not be to blame if the consequences were negative. Erin had never said it aloud, but some of their financial problems might have been avoided had her husband demonstrated a little more backbone, a pinch more ruthlessness.

But would she have loved him as much if he had? Ah, there was the rub.

Like her husband, she attended church every Sunday. Most of the people of Prosperous did. They were Baptists and Methodists and Catholics. Some had even embraced roadside churches whose denominations were unclear even to their adherents. They believed, and yet did not believe. They understood the difference between the distant and the immanent, between the creator and what was created. But Erin derived more consolation from the rituals than her husband. She could feel him zoning out during services, for he had little or no interest in organized religion. Sunday worship was a form of escape for him, but only in the sense that it gave him some peace and quiet in which to think, daydream or, occasionally, nap. But Erin listened. She didn’t agree with all that she heard, but so much of it was unarguable. Live decently, or else what was the point in living at all?

And the people of Prosperous did live decently, and in most matters they behaved well. They gave to charity. They cherished the environment. They tolerated — no, embraced — gays and lesbians. Entrenched conservatives and radical liberals all found their place in Prosperous. In return, the town was blessed with good fortune.

It was just that, sometimes, the town needed to give fortune a push.

But had her husband listened a little more attentively to what was being said at services, and perhaps read the Bible instead of just picking up random quotations from it, he might have recalled the second part of that verse he so loved to throw her way as she began to nuzzle his neck late at night.

nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done.

It was the town’s will that had to be done.

‘We need to talk about it,’ said Erin as they sat at the table to eat an early dinner. She had made a pot roast, but so far neither of them had done more than pick at it.

‘There’s nothing to talk about,’ said Harry.

‘What?’ She stared at her husband with absolute incredulity. ‘Are you out of your mind? They want us to abduct a girl. If we don’t, they’ll kill us.’

‘Something will turn up,’ said Harry. He forced himself to eat some of the pot roast. It was strange — or maybe it wasn’t strange at all — but ever since he and Chief Morland had buried the girl, Harry had experienced something of a turn against meat. He was consuming a lot of cheese, and bread smeared with peanut butter. The pot roast tasted so strong that he had to force himself not to spit it back on the plate. Somehow he managed to chew it for long enough to enable him to swallow. He separated the meat from the vegetables and potatoes, and proceeded to eat them instead.

‘They won’t kill us,’ he said. ‘They can’t. The town has survived by not hurting its own. The board knows that. If they kill us, then others will start to fear that it might be their turn next. The board will lose control.’

Or they’ll tighten it, thought Erin. Sometimes it was necessary to make an example, just to keep the rest in line, and most of those in town — the ones who knew, the ones who participated — would have little time for anyone who put the present and future of Prosperous at risk. Any townsfolk who might have some sympathy for the Dixons’ predicament were those most like themselves, the ones who were secretly struggling. But there was no chance of them turning against Prosperous once the Dixons were gone, not as long as Chief Morland and Hayley Conyer didn’t show up at their door and demand that they go hunting for a young woman. Young men didn’t work as well. Prosperous had learned that a long time ago.

‘You’re wrong,’ said Erin. ‘You know you are.’

He wouldn’t look up at her. He speared half a potato with his fork and stuffed it into his mouth.

‘What would you have me do?’ he asked.

‘We have to tell someone.’

‘No.’

‘Listen to—’

‘No!’

She shrank back from him. Harry rarely ever raised his voice — not in joy, and certainly not in anger. That was one of the reasons she had been so attracted to him. Harry was like a strong tree: he could be buffeted by storms, but he always remained rooted. The downside of his disposition was that tendency not to act but to react, and then only when no other option presented itself. Now he found himself in a situation that he had always hoped to avoid, and since he did not know how to extricate himself from it he had responded with inertia, combined with a peculiar misplaced faith in a combination of good luck and the possibility of a change of mind on the part of the board.

‘I’m dealing with it,’ said Harry.

His voice had returned to its usual volume. That brief flash of anger, of energy, was gone, and Erin regretted its passing. Anything was better than this lassitude.

Before she could continue, there was a knock on their door. They had heard no car approaching, and had seen no lights.

Harry got up. He tried not to think of who might be out there: Morland, asking to look at their basement again, querying further the manner of the girl’s escape; or Hayley Conyer, come to check on their progress, to see if they’d started trawling the streets yet.

But it was neither of them. On the doorstep stood Luke Joblin’s son, Bryan. He had a bag at his feet. Bryan was twenty-six or twenty-seven, if Harry remembered correctly. He did some lifting work for his father, and was good with his hands. Harry had seen some furniture that Bryan had made, and was impressed by it. The boy had no real discipline, though. He didn’t work at developing his gifts. He didn’t want to be a joiner, or a carpenter or a furniture maker. Mostly he just liked hunting, in season and out: anything from a crow to a moose, Bryan Joblin was happy to try and kill it.

‘Bryan?’ said Harry. ‘What are you doing out here?’

‘My dad heard that you might need some help,’ said Bryan, and Harry didn’t like the gleam in his eye. He didn’t like it one little bit. ‘He suggested I ought to stay with you for a week or two. You know, just until you get back on top of things again.’

It was only then that Harry saw the rife case. A Remington 700 in .30–06. He’d seen Bryan with it often enough.

Harry didn’t move. He felt Erin’s presence behind him, and it was only when she put her hand on his shoulder that he realized he was trembling.

‘There’s no problem, is there, Mr Dixon?’ said Bryan, and his tone made it clear that there was only one right answer to the question.

‘No, there’s no problem at all,’ said Harry.

He stepped back to admit Bryan. The boy picked up his bag and gun and stepped inside. He greeted Erin with a nod — ‘Mrs Dixon’ — and the food on the table caught his attention.

‘Pot roast,’ he said. ‘Smells good.’

Erin had not taken her eyes off Harry. Now they looked at each other across the Joblin boy, and they knew.

‘I’ll show you to your room, Bryan,’ said Erin, ‘and then you can join us for a bite to eat. There’s plenty to go around.’

Harry watched her lead him down the hall to the spare room. When they were both out of sight, Harry put his face in his hands and leaned back against the wall. He was still standing in that position when Erin returned. She kissed his neck and buried herself in the scent of him.

‘You were right,’ he whispered. ‘They’re turning on us.’

‘What will we do?’

He answered without hesitation.

‘We’ll run.’

21

The wolf was in agony. The injury to his limb was worsening. In his earlier pain and fear, he had traveled far from the place of his pack’s destruction, but now he was having trouble walking even a short distance. Somewhere in the depths of his consciousness, the wolf recognized the fact of his own dying. It manifested as a gradual encroachment of darkness upon light, a persistent dimming at the edges of his vision.

The wolf feared men, dreading the sound and scent of them, remembering still the carnage they had wrought by the banks of the river. But where men gathered, so too was there food. The wolf was reduced to scavenging among trash cans and garbage bags, but in doing so he was eating better than he had in weeks. He had even managed to take a small mongrel dog that had ventured too far into the woods. The wolf could hear the noise of men calling and whistling as he tore the dog’s throat apart, but the prey’s body was light enough to clamp in his jaws and carry away. He took it far from the sounds of pursuit, and consumed it until just fur and bone remained.

But the wolf remained hungry.

Now it was night, and his nose was twitching. He smelled decaying meat. He came to the place where the scent was strongest, and found that the ground was soft and broken.

Ignoring the ache in his wounded leg, he started to dig.