I stepped back instinctively, my hand still clutching the doll, and, with a flash of shock and fear, I felt my feet slide from beneath me on the tiles at the bottom of the pool. I fell backwards into the leaves, my feet shooting out ahead of me and impacting on something soft and wet and yielding. There were leaves in my mouth and the odour of decay was in my nostrils as the child rose, forced upwards by my struggling legs and my sustained grip on the doll. I saw damp hair and grey skin and eyes like milk as I slid down, my feet still struggling to find purchase. In my fear I released my grip on the doll and instinctively pushed the child’s body away, my hand heavy with the smell of her as she slid back into the mould. And then my slide was stopped by a heavier form, there were dead fingers against my calf and I knew that they were all there beneath the rotting leaves, decay on decay, and that, if I sank farther beneath those leaves, I would see them and I might never rise again.
A hand gripped my own right hand and I heard Angel shout: ‘Bird, easy. Easy!’ I looked up and found that I was almost at the right-hand side of the pool. With Angel’s help, I got a grip on the rim and pulled myself up. I crawled away from the pool edge and lay on the cold, damp grass as I rubbed my hands on the blades, again and again and again, in a vain and terrible effort to remove the smell of that poor, lost girl from my fingers.
‘They’re down there,’ I said. ‘They’re all down there.’
Angel called Louis, then I called the Bangor police. Angel left before they arrived; with his record, his presence would only complicate matters. I told him to take a cab, check into the Days Inn by the huge Bangor Mall out of town and wait for me there. And then I stood by the side of the pool, the young girl’s hair and blouse now clearly visible amid the wind-danced leaves, and waited for the police to come.
I met Angel back in the Days Inn four hours later. I had told the cops everything, including the fact that I had made a search of the house. They were none too pleased but Ellis Howard reluctantly vouched for me from back in Portland, then asked for me to be put on the line.
‘So you weren’t holding anything back?’ The receiver almost vibrated with the depth of the anger in his voice. ‘I should have let them lock you up for interfering with a crime scene.’
There was no point in apologising, so I didn’t. ‘Willeford told me about her. She arranged Billy Purdue’s adoption. She was with Rita Ferris a couple of nights before Rita and Donald were killed.’
‘First his wife and child, now this adoption woman. Looks like Billy Purdue has a grudge against the world.’
‘You don’t believe that, Ellis.’
‘Fuck do you know what I believe? You want to be a bleeding heart, go bleed somewhere else. We’re all full up here.’ He was so annoyed it took him three noisy tries to hang up. I gave the Bangor cops my cell phone number and told them I’d help in any way I could.
There were four bodies in the pool. Cheryl Lansing was at the bottom of the deep end, beneath the body of her daughter-in-law Louise. Her two granddaughters, Sophie and Sarah, were farther away, both of them in their nightgowns. The leaves had been heaped on them from all around the yard, and topped off with a pile of mulch from behind the toolshed.
The throats of all four had been cut, left to right. Cheryl Lansing’s jaw had also been broken by a blow to the left side of her face and her mouth gaped strangely as her head was revealed by the medics working in the empty pool. And as she lay beneath the body of her daughter-in-law, mouth wide, it became clear that her killer had visited one final indignity on her body.
Before she died, Cheryl Lansing’s tongue had been ripped out.
If Cheryl Lansing was dead, then someone Billy Purdue, Abel and his partner Stritch, or an individual as yet unrevealed – was tracing a path through Billy’s life, a path that appeared now to be related to the abortive investigation into his roots carried out by Willeford. I decided then to continue north. Angel offered to come with me but I told him instead to catch a commuter flight back to Portland the next morning, while I used the Mustang to move on.
‘Bird?’ he asked, as I started the car. ‘You’ve told me about Billy Purdue, about his wife and his kid. What I don’t get is: how did she end up with a guy like that?’
I shrugged. She came from a dysfunctional family, I guessed, and she seemed to be repeating the cycle by starting her own dysfunctional family with Billy Purdue. But there was more to it than that: Rita Ferris had something good inside her, something that had remained untouched and uncorrupted despite all that had happened to her. Maybe, just maybe, she believed that she saw something similar in Billy and thought that if she could find the place where it was, and touch him there, she could save him, that she could make him need her as much as she needed him, because she thought that love and need were the same. A host of abused wives and beaten lovers, bruised women and unhappy children, could have told her that she was wrong, that there is a wilful blindness in believing that one person can somehow redeem another. People have to redeem themselves, but some of them just don’t want redemption, or don’t recognise it when it shines its light upon them.
‘She loved him,’ I said, at last. ‘In the end, it was all she had to give, and she needed to give it.’
‘It’s not much of an answer.’
‘I don’t have the answers, Angel, just different ways of phrasing the questions.’ Then I pulled out of the parking lot and headed north to the junction of I-95 and 15, towards Dover-Foxcroft, and Greenville, and Dark Hollow. Looking back, it was the first step on a journey that would force me to confront not only my own past, but also my grandfather’s; that would disturb old ghosts long believed to have been laid to rest; and that would lead me at last to face what had waited for so long in the darkness of the Great North Woods.
Chapter Eleven
For much of its history, Maine was little more than a series of fishing settlements clinging to the Atlantic coastline. Beneath the sea off that coast lay the remains of another world, a world that had ceased to exist when the waters rose. Maine has a drowned coastline: its islands were once mountains, and forgotten fields lie on the bed of the ocean. Its past lies submerged, fathoms deep, beyond the reach of the sunlight.
And so the present came into existence at the very precipice of the past, and the people clung to the coast of the region. Few ventured into the wilderness at its heart, apart from French missionaries seeking to bring Christianity to the tribes – which never numbered much more than three thousand to begin with, and most of them also lived along the coast – or trappers trying to make a living from the fur trade. The soil that covered the bedrock of the coast was good and fertile and the Indians farmed it using rotting fish as fertilizer, the smell of it mixing with the scents of wild roses and sea lavender. Later came the saltwater farms, the digging for clams in the flats, and the huge icehouses where Maine ice was stored before being exported to the farthest reaches of the globe.
But as the possibilities offered by the forests came to be realised, settlers pushed deeper and deeper north and west. On the king’s orders, they harvested those white pines which measured over twenty-four inches in diameter one foot from the ground for use as masts on his ships. The masts of Admiral Nelson’s ship HMS Victory, which fought Napoleon’s forces at the Battle of Trafalgar, were grown in Maine.
But it was not until the early nineteenth century, when the financial opportunities represented by Maine’s forests were recognised, that the interior was fully explored and surveyed, leading the way into the Great North Woods. Mills were built in the wilderness to produce paper, pulp and two-by-fours. Schooners sailed up the Penobscot to load pine and spruce timber that had been brought downstream from the farthest reaches of the north. Sawmills lined the river’s banks and those of the Merrimack, the Kennebec, the Saint Croix, the Machias. Lives were ended in the struggle to break jams or hold a million board feet of logs together, until the era of the industrial river drives came to an end in 1978. The land was remodelled to meet the demands of the timber b
arons: the paths of rivers were altered, lakes raised, dams built. Fires ravaged the dry slash left behind by the loggers and entire streams were denuded of life by the discarded sawdust waste. The first growth of pine has been gone for two centuries; the hardwood second growth of birch, maple and oak followed.
Now, much of the north country is industrial forest owned by the timber companies and lumber trucks make their way along the roads carrying stacks of freshly-cut trees. The companies cut swaths through acres of forest in the winter, removing every tree in their path and piling them during March and April. Wood is the state’s wealth, and even my grandfather, like many on the coast, used to grow spruce and fir for sale as Christmas trees, harvesting and selling them from early November to mid-December.
But there are still a few places where the mature forest remains untouched, with animal trails and moose droppings leading to secluded watering holes fed by waterfalls that tumble over rocks and stones and fallen trees. This was one of the last regions to have wolves and mountain lions and caribou. There are still ten million uninhabited acres in Maine and the state is greener now than it was one hundred years ago, when the exhaustion of the thin soil caused agriculture to decline and the forest reclaimed the land, as is its way, and walls that had once sheltered families now guarded only hemlock and pine.
A man could lose himself in that wilderness, if he chose.
Dark Hollow lay about five miles north of Greenville, close by the eastern shore of Moosehead Lake and the two hundred thousand acres of protected wilderness in Baxter State Park, where Mount Katahdin dominates the skyline at the northern end of the Appalachian Trail. I had half considered stopping off in Greenville the road was dark and the evening cold but I knew that finding Meade Payne was more important. People who had been close to Billy Purdue his wife, his child, the woman who had organised his adoption were dying, and dying badly. Payne had to be warned.
Greenville was the gateway to the north woods, and wood had long been the wealth of this town and the surrounding area. There had even been a lumber mill in the town providing jobs for the people of Greenville and its surrounds, until it closed in the mid-seventies, when the economic situation made it unprofitable to operate. A lot of people left the area then and those who remained tried to make new lives in tourism, fishing and hunting, but Greenville and the smaller towns scattered farther north Beaver Cove, Kokadjo, and Dark Hollow, where the power lines ended and the wilderness truly began were still poor. When the golf club at Greenville had raised its fees from ten dollars to twelve dollars per round, there had been uproar.
I drove up Lily Bay Road, for many years the winter road used for hauling heavy supplies to the logging camps, snow piled high on each side, the woods stretching beyond, until I came to Dark Hollow. It was a small town, barely more than two blocks at its centre, with a police department at the farthest limit of the northern end. Dark Hollow got some of the tourism and hunting overflow from Greenville, but not much. There was no view of the lake from its streets, only the mountains and the trees. There was one motel, the Tamara Motor Inn, which looked like a relic from the fifties, with a high arched frontage across which its name glowed in red and green neon. There were one or two handicraft shops selling scented candles and the kind of furniture that left pieces of bark on your pants if you sat on it. A bookstore-cum-coffee shop, a diner and a drugstore made up a considerable part of the town’s commercial area, where piles of icy snow still lay in the gutters and in the shadows of the buildings.
Only the diner was still open. It had been painted in cute psychedelic colours outside, making it look like the kind of place the Scooby Doo crew might have opened when the Mystery Machine eventually broke down, like those air-cooled Volkswagens that burned out in Santa Fe when their hippie owners tried to drive them cross-country during the sixties.
Inside, there were reproductions of old concert posters and landscapes by what I took to be local artists. In one corner there was a framed photo of a kid in an army uniform beside an older man, some faded red, white and blue ribbon around the picture, but I didn’t look too closely. A couple of old folks sat in a booth drinking coffee and shooting the breeze and four young guys tried to look cool and vaguely menacing without bursting their pimples when they sneered.
I ordered a club sandwich and a mug of coffee. It was good and almost made me forget, for a moment, what had happened back in Bangor. I asked the waitress, whose name was Annie, for directions to the Payne place and she gave them to me with a smile, although she told me that there was frost and maybe more snow expected and that the road was poor at the best of times.
‘You a friend of Meade’s?’ she asked. Annie seemed keen to talk, more keen than I was. She had red hair and red lipstick, and dark blue makeup around her eyes. Combined with her naturally pale features, the total effect was of an unfinished drawing, like something abandoned by a distracted child.
‘No,’ I replied. ‘I just want to talk to him about something.’
Her smile faltered a little. ‘It’s nothing bad, is it? Because that old man has had his share of bad times.’
‘No,’ I lied. ‘It’s nothing bad. I’m sorry to hear that things haven’t been going well for Meade.’
She shrugged, and the smile regained some of its vigour. ‘He lost his wife a couple of years back, then his nephew died in the Gulf during Desert Storm. He’s kept himself pretty much to himself since then. We don’t see him around too often these days.’
Annie leaned over, her breasts brushing my arm as she took away the remains of my sandwich. ‘You want anything else?’ she asked brightly, bringing an end to the Meade Payne conversation. I wasn’t sure if there was a subtext to the question. I decided that there wasn’t. Life tended to be simpler that way.
‘No, thanks.’
She tore the check from her pad with a flourish. ‘Then I’ll just leave you with this.’ She flashed me another smile as she slipped the check beneath the bowl of creamers. ‘You take care now, sugar,’ she said, as she sashayed away.
‘I will,’ I replied. I felt kind of relieved when she was gone.
Meade Payne didn’t have a phone, or at least his name wasn’t in the book. Reluctantly, I decided not to talk to him until the morning. I got a room at the Tamara for twenty-eight dollars and slept in an old bed with a high, thick mattress and a carved wood bedstead. I woke once during the night, when the smell of rotting leaves and the sound of heavy decaying things moving beneath them became unbearable.
The waitress had been right: a heavy frost covered the ground when I left the Tamara the next morning and the blades of grass on the motel’s narrow strip of lawn were like carved crystal as I walked. In the bright morning sunlight, cars passed slowly down the main street and folks in coats and gloves puffed their way along like steam engines. I left the car at the Tamara and made my way on foot to the diner. From outside, I could see that most of the booths were already full and there was a welcoming air of community, of belonging, among those seated inside. Waitresses – Annie didn’t seem to be among them flitted from table to table like butterflies and a fat, bearded man in an apron chatted with patrons beside the register. I was almost at the door when a voice behind me said – gently, softly, familiarly – ‘Charlie?’ and I turned around and the past and the present collided in the memory of a kiss.
Lorna Jennings was six years older than I was and lived a mile from my grandfather’s house. She was small and lithe, no taller than five-two and certainly no more than one hundred and ten pounds, with short, dark hair cut in a bob and a mouth that always seemed to be entering into, or emerging from, a kiss. Her eyes were blue-green and her skin was porcelain white.
Her husband’s name was Randall, but his friends called him Rand. He was tall and had been a hockey hopeful once. Rand was a cop, still in uniform but angling for a transfer to the detective bureau. He had never hit his wife, never hurt her physically and she believed that their marriage was sound until he told her about his first and, he said, his on
ly affair. That was before I knew her, before we became lovers.
It was my first summer out of the University of Maine, where I had majored – barely – in English. I was twenty-three. I had worked some after I finished high school, lousy jobs mainly, then taken some time out to travel to the West Coast before taking up a place at college. Now I had returned to Scarborough for what would be my final summer there. I had already applied to the NYPD, using what few contacts remained with those who had some fond memories of my father. Maybe I had some idealistic notion that I could remove the stain from his name by my presence there. Instead, I think I just stirred up old memories for some people, like mud disturbed from the bottom of a pond.
My grandfather got me a job in an insurance firm, where I worked as an office boy, a runner. I made the coffee and swept the floors and answered the phones and polished the desks and learned enough about the insurance business to know that anybody who believed what they were told by an insurance salesman was either naive or desperate.
Lorna Jennings was the personal assistant to the office manager. She was never less than polite to me but we spoke little in the beginning, although once or twice I found her looking at me in a kind of amused way before she went back to studying her papers or typing her letters. I spoke to her properly for the first time during a retirement party for one of the secretaries, a tall woman with blue-rinsed hair who was committed a year later after she killed one of her dogs with an axe. Laura strolled up to me as I sat at the bar, drinking a beer and trying to pretend that the insurance business and I were not even remotely acquainted.
‘Hi,’ she said. ‘You look kind of lonesome. You trying to keep your distance from us?’
‘Hi,’ I replied, twisting the glass. ‘No, not really.’
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