The Charlie Parker Collection 2

by John Connolly

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Angel let his fingers drop.

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

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

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

  32

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

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

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

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

  “Hunters,” I replied.

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

  “Men,” said Louis simply.

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

  “Are you Caswell?” I asked.

  “Who’s asking?”

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

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

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

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

  “We wanted to ask you some questions.”

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

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

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

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

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

  “What if I did? It’s my land.”

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

  “There’s no law against it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “People, that’s all,” he said.

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

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

  “And its history didn’t trouble you?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Then who are you scared of?”

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

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

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

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

  “How about Daniel Clay?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Who is this?”

  “We met earlier. My name is Parker.”

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

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

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

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

  “From Frank Merrick.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  It did have wooden floors.

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

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