‘You’re getting old,’ I said.
‘Yuh, he could have been old,’ replied Ronald, seemingly mishearing me.
‘What did you say?’
But he had already lost interest. ‘I ever tell you about my dog?’ he began, and I figured that Ronald had told me just about everything I might find useful.
‘Yeah, Ronald,’ I said, as I walked back to the car. ‘Maybe we’ll talk about him again, another time.’
‘You don’t mean that, Charlie Parker,’ he said, but he smiled as he spoke.
‘You’re right,’ I smiled back, ‘I don’t.’
That night, cold rain fell like nails on my newly-shingled roof. It didn’t leak, not even from the parts that I had done. I felt a deep satisfaction as I drifted off to sleep, the wind rattling the windows and causing the boards of the house to creak and settle. I had spent many years falling asleep to the sounds of those boards, to the gentle murmur of my mother’s voice in the living room beyond, to the rhythmic tapping of my grandfather’s pipe on the porch rail. There was still a mark on the rail, an ochre stain of tobacco and worn wood. I had not painted over it, a sentimental gesture that surprised me.
I can’t recall why I awoke, but some deep sense of disquiet had penetrated through my REM sleep and drawn me back into the darkness of night. The rain had stopped and the house seemed peaceful, but the hairs on the back of my neck were almost rigid and my perceptions were immediately razor-sharp, the mugginess of sleep dispelled by the instinctive knowledge that some danger was near.
I slipped silently from my bed and pulled on a pair of jeans. My Smith & Wesson lay in its holster by my bed. I removed the gun and thumbed the safety. The bedroom door was open, the way I had left it. I pulled it a little farther, the well-oiled hinges moving silently, and carefully placed a foot on the bare boards of the hallway.
My foot hit something soft and wet and I drew it back immediately. The moonlight shone through the windows beside the front door, bathing the hallway in a silvery light. It illuminated an old coatrack, and some paint cans and a ladder that lay to my right. It also shone on a set of muddy footprints that ran from the back door, through the kitchen, up to my bedroom door and then into the living room. The mark of my bare foot lay in the print nearest the bedroom door.
I checked the living room and the bathroom before making my way to the kitchen. I could feel my heart thumping in my chest and my breath was white in the cold night air. I counted to three in my head then came in fast through the kitchen door, the gun panning around the room.
It was empty, but the back door was open slightly. Someone had jimmied the lock then made his way – I assumed it was male by the size of the boot prints – through the house, and watched me while I slept. I recalled the bald-headed grotesque I had encountered the day before and the thought of him observing me from the shadows made me sick to my stomach. I opened the back door fully and scanned the yard. Leaving the kitchen and porch light off, I slipped on a pair of work boots that I kept in the kitchen beside the door, then stepped outside and walked once around the house. There were more prints on the porch and in the mud below. At my bedroom window they turned slightly, where the visitor had stood watching from outside.
I went back into the house, dug out my Maglite and threw on a sweater, then traced the tracks through the mud and out onto the road. There had been little traffic and it was still possible to see where the boot marks petered out on the tarmac. I stood on the empty road, looking left and right, then returned to the house.
It was only when I turned on the kitchen light that I noticed what lay on the table in the corner of the room. I picked it up using a piece of paper towel and turned it over in my hand.
It was a small wooden clown, its body made up of a series of brightly painted rings which could be removed by twisting the clown’s smiling head off. I sat looking at it for a time, then placed it carefully in a plastic bag and left it by the sink. I locked the back door, checked all the windows and returned to bed.
I must have drifted off into an uneasy sleep at some point, because I dreamed. I dreamed that I saw a shape moving through the night, black against the stars. I saw a tree standing alone in a clearing and shapes moving beneath it. I smelt blood and sickly-sweet perfume. Squat, white fingers moved across my bare chest.
And I saw a light die, and I heard a child crying in the darkness.
Chapter Six
The first grey light of dawn had appeared at the window and the ground had frozen again when I rose and returned to the kitchen. I looked at the shape of the clown in the bag, its contours masked, its long red nose jutting through the white plastic, its colours dimly visible like a faded ghost of itself.
I slipped on my running gear and started for US 1. Before I left, I made sure all the doors and windows were locked, something that I didn’t ordinarily do. I turned onto Spring Street and headed south to the Mussey Road intersection, the red brick exterior and the white wood steeple of the Scarborough First Baptist Church to my left and the 8 Corners store straight ahead. I continued down Spring onto 114 and kept going, the road quiet, the pine trees whispering above me. I passed Scarborough High School on my right, where I had attended school after moving to Maine, even getting a few games with the Redskins one spring when half the team went down with flu. To my left, the parking lot of the Shop n Save was silent, but there was already traffic ahead on the untidy strip of US 1. It had always been untidy: by the time zoning began in the 1980s, it was too late to save it. Then again, maybe it’s in the nature of US 1 to be this way, because it looks the same in just about every place I’ve been.
When I first arrived in Scarborough there was only one mall in the town, the Orion Center. It had the Mammoth Mart department store, which was kind of like Woolworths, and Martin’s grocery store, and a Laundromat and a liquor store, the kind my grandfather used to refer to as a ‘Dr Green’s’ from the days when they were all painted uniformly green in compliance with the regulations of the state liquor commission.
At Dr Green’s we bought Old Swilwaukee and Pabst Blue Ribbon – the legal drinking age was still eighteen then, not that it mattered – to drink on Higgins Beach, down at the quiet end beside the bird sanctuary, where the piping plover marks its territory with a song like small bells tolling.
I remember, in the summer of eighty-two, trying to convince Becky Berube to lie down on the sand there with me. I was unsuccessful, but it was that kind of summer, the kind that makes you think you’re going to die a virgin. Becky Berube has five kids now, so I guess she learned to lie down pretty quickly after that. We drove sixties’ automobiles – Pontiac convertibles, MGs, Thunderbirds, Chevy Impalas and Camaros with big V-8 engines; even, in one case, a Plymouth Barracuda convertible. We took summer jobs at the ClamBake at Pine Point, or as waiters and busboys at the Black Point Inn.
I recall a fight at the Orion Center, one hot summer night when a group of us clashed with some kids from Old Orchard Beach who had journeyed north up US i seeking just such a turn of events. Words had been exchanged, then threats, then blows. I had not been able to handle myself, not then, and had taken a fierce shot to the nose from a guy whose name I never learned, someone we had never seen before and would never see again, somebody’s cousin from Chicago. He had mean, dumb eyes, I recalled, and wore bleach-stained denims and an Aerosmith T-shirt beneath a black leather biker jacket.
His fist headed for the bridge of my nose as surely and certainly as a wrecking ball cleaving the air before it strikes a condemned building, the cartilage buckling beneath the onslaught when the punch landed. It was a bad break and I fell to the ground, my blood warm on my face. Around me the scuffling continued, and someone ended up curled into a ball on the ground taking kicks to the belly and head, but the events came to me dully through a mist of pain and fear and nausea. The fight broke up as the final blows, the last threats and promises, were exchanged, but I stayed kneeling on the ground, my hands cupped around my busted nose, tears mingling with blood.
Anthony Hutchence, ‘Tony Hutch’, who had wrestled before he came to Scarborough High and would wrestle again when he went on to study in the University of New England, who would have competed in the Olympics had it not been for a back injury, carefully moved my hands from my face and cupped my cheeks in his palms, examining my face with a detached professionalism born out of his own experience both on and off the mat. Then he called two pairs of arms to him, and they held my hands and my head as he reset my nose using his thumbs.
The pain was shocking, almost profound. Lightning shot through my head and my vision turned white, then bright, hard red. I screamed, but I do not even recall what I screamed, only that the sound was like no other I had ever heard before. And then the needle-sharp pain receded into a dull, hard ache, and Tony Hutch stepped back, and there was blood on his thumbs and I knew that the lines and whorls of them were clear on the skin of my face.
But, after that, the fear of my nose breaking would never be the same again. I knew the pain, and had no desire to court it, but the way I felt about it had changed: I had coped, and I would cope again, if the need arose. But there would never be the same shock, the same powerlessness, the same hurt. All of that was behind me, and I was stronger for it. When Jennifer and Susan died, something similar occurred, but this time it killed something inside me; instead of strengthening me, I think it cut off part of me forever.
I crossed US 1 at Amato’s Italian restaurant and continued down Old County Road, through the salt marshes that flooded once a month with the phases of the moon, and past the Maximilian Kolbe Catholic Church until I reached the cemetery. My grandfather was buried on Fifth Avenue, a joke he liked to share with my grandmother after they bought the plot. They lay there together now, and while I rested I cleared some of the weeds away and said a small prayer for them.
When I got back to the house I put on a pot of coffee, ate some grapefruit and thought again about what had happened the night before. It was almost nine by the clock on the wall when Ellis Howard arrived at my door.
Ellis looked like lard poured into a flexible, vaguely human-shaped mould and left to set. Wrapped in a brown sheepskin coat, the deputy chief in charge of the Portland Police Department’s Bureau of Investigations climbed, with some difficulty, from his car. The detective division of the Portland PD was divided into sections dealing with Narcotics and Vice, Crimes Against Persons, Crimes Against Property, and Admin., with Ellis pretty much in charge, assisted by a detective lieutenant and four sergeants, each with responsibility for a section. In total, there were twenty-two officers involved, and four evidence technicians. It was a small, efficient division.
Ellis rolled up to the porch, like a bowling ball that someone had wrapped in fur to keep the frost out. He didn’t look like he could move at even half the pace of a bowling ball, didn’t look like he could run to save his life or anyone else’s. But then Ellis’s job wasn’t to run around and, anyway, looks could be deceptive. Ellis watched and thought and asked questions and watched and thought some more. Little got past Ellis. He was the kind of man who could eat soup with a fork and not spill a drop.
His wife was a fearsome woman named Doreen, who wore her makeup so thick that you could have carved your initials into her face without drawing blood. When she smiled, which wasn’t too often, it was as if someone had just stripped a section of peel from an orange. Ellis seemed to tolerate her the way saints tolerated the rack although I guessed that, deep down, really deep down, he still didn’t like her very much.
Instead, Ellis found his solace in work and baseball statistics. Without blinking, Ellis could tell you the only game in Major League history in which two men threw no-hit balls against each other for nine innings or more – May second, 1917, when Fred Toney of the Reds and Hippo Vaughn of the Cubs went through nine innings until Larry Kopf hit a clean single in the tenth and came home on a Jim Thorpe roller – or the details of Lou Gehrig’s performance in the Yanks’ four-game sweep of the 1932 World Series: three homers, eight RBIs, a .529 batting average and a 1.118 slugging mark. Babe Ruth may have got the press, but it was Lou Gehrig whom Ellis remembered. Lou had his beloved Eleanor, Ellis had Doreen. That seemed just about to sum things up for Ellis.
I stood aside to let him enter the house. I didn’t have a whole lot of choice. ‘Looking good, Ellis,’ I said. ‘The doughnut diet is really paying dividends.’
‘I see you got someone to fix your roof,’ he replied. ‘Know you were from the city, only man in the durned state doing roofing in the winter. Do any of it yourself?’
‘As a matter of fact, yes.’
‘Jesus, maybe we’d be safer talking outside.’
‘Funny guy,’ I said, as he sat down heavily in a kitchen chair. ‘Maybe you should be more concerned about the floor collapsing under you.’
I poured him some coffee. He sipped it and I noticed that his face had grown serious, almost sad.
‘Something wrong?’
He nodded. ‘Very. You know Billy Purdue?’
I guessed that he knew the answer to that question already. I fingered the scar on my cheek. I could feel the edges of the stitches beneath my finger.
‘Yeah, I know him.’
‘Heard you had a run-in with him a few days back. He say anything to you about his ex-wife?’
‘Why?’ I wasn’t about to get Billy into trouble unnecessarily, but I already had a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach.
‘Because Rita and her child turned up dead this morning in her apartment. No sign of forced entry and no one heard a thing.’
I breathed out deeply and felt a sharp pang of sorrow as I recalled Donald’s hand on my finger, as I remembered the touch of his mother’s hand on my cheek. A burning anger at Billy Purdue coursed through my system as I briefly, instinctively, assumed his guilt. The feeling didn’t last long but the intensity of it remained with me. I thought: why couldn’t he have stood by them? Why couldn’t he have been there for them? Maybe I didn’t have the right to ask those questions; or maybe, given all that had happened in the last year, nobody else had a greater right.
‘What happened to them?’
Ellis leaned forward and rubbed his hands together with a soft, rustling sound.
‘From what I hear, the woman was strangled. The boy, I don’t know. No obvious signs of sexual assault on either.’
‘You haven’t been at the apartment?’
‘No. This was supposed to be my day off, but I’m on my way now. ME’s already on the scene. Unlucky for him, he was in Portland for a wedding.’
I stood up and walked to the window. Outside, the wind brushed the evergreens and a pair of black-capped chickadees flew high into the sky.
‘You think Billy Purdue killed his own child and his ex-wife?’ I said.
‘Maybe. He wouldn’t be the first to do something like it. She called us three nights ago, said he was hanging around outside, shouting, roaring drunk, demanding to be let in to see her. We sent a car and took him in, let him cool off for a time, then told him to keep away from her or we’d lock him up. Could be he decided that he wasn’t going to let her leave him, whatever it took.’
I shook my head. ‘Billy wouldn’t do that.’ But I had some doubts, even as I said it. I recalled that red glare in his eyes, and the way that he had almost choked the life from me in his trailer, and Rita’s belief that he would do anything to stop her from taking his son away from him.
Ellis was keeping pace with my thoughts. ‘Maybe, maybe not,’ he said. ‘That’s a nice scar you got on your cheek. You want to tell me how you came by it?’
‘I went to his trailer to try to get some child-support money. He threatened to take a baseball bat to me, I tried to stop him and things got a little out of hand.’
‘Did she hire you to get her money?’
‘I did it as a favour.’
Ellis turned his mouth down at the corners. ‘A favour,’ he repeated, nodding to himself. ‘And when you were doing this . . . favour,
did he say anything to you about his ex-wife?’ There was an edge to Ellis’s voice now.
‘He said he wanted to look out for her, for them both. Then he asked me if I was sleeping with her.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I told him no.’
‘Probably the right answer, under the circumstances. Were you sleeping with her?’
‘No,’ I said, and looked hard at him. ‘No, I wasn’t. You pick up Billy yet?’
‘He’s gone. No sign of him at the trailer and Ronald Stray deer hasn’t seen him since day before yesterday.’
‘I know. I was out there last night.’
Ellis arched an eyebrow. ‘Want to tell me why?’
I told him about my encounter with the white-faced freak at the inn and later at Java Joe’s. Ellis took out his notebook and wrote down the number of the Coupe de Ville. ‘We’ll run it through the system, see what comes up. Anything else I should know?’
I went to the sink unit and handed him the plastic bag with the clown toy in it. ‘Someone came into the house last night when I was sleeping. He took a look around, watched me for a time, then left this.’
I opened the bag and placed it on the table in front of Ellis. He took an evidence glove from his pocket, then reached in and touched the toy clown gently.
‘I think you’ll find that it’s Donald Purdue’s.’
Ellis looked at me. ‘And where were you last night?’
‘Jesus, Ellis, don’t ask me that.’ I could feel a huge surge of anger welling up inside me. ‘Don’t even imply that.’
‘Take it easy, Bird. Don’t cry before you’re hurt. You know I have to ask. May as well get it done now as have to go through it later.’
He waited.
‘I was here during the afternoon,’ I said through gritted teeth. ‘I went into Portland yesterday evening, worked out, bought some books, had a coffee, dropped by Rita’s apartment . . .’
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