The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  ‘I recall her.’

  ‘She’s dead. She was murdered along with three members of her family. I’m not sure how long ago; certainly only a few days. If there’s a connection to Billy Purdue, then you could be in danger.’

  The old man shook his head gently. He pinched his lips with his fingers and said nothing for a time. Then: ‘I appreciate you taking the time to come up here, Mr Parker, but, like I said, I ain’t heard from Billy and, if I do, I’ll have to think long and hard about what to do next. As for being in danger, I can handle a gun and I’ve got the boy with me.’

  ‘Your son?’

  ‘Caspar. Cas, to them what knows him. We can look out for each other and I don’t fear no man, Mr Parker.’

  There didn’t seem to be anything more I could say. I gave Meade Payne the number of my cell phone and he stuffed it into one of the pockets of his dungarees. He shook my hand and walked slowly, stiffly, back to the door, humming softly to himself. It was an old song, I thought. I seemed to recall it from somewhere but couldn’t place it, something about tender ladies and a handsome gambler and memories haunting the mind. I found myself whistling a little of it as, through the rear-view, I saw Caspar help the old man into the house. Neither of them looked back as I drove away.

  Chapter Twelve

  Back in Dark Hollow, I stopped off at the diner and went through the phone book. I got Rand Jennings’s address and the chef gave me directions to his house. Rand and Lorna lived about two miles out of town, in a two-storey house painted yellow and black with a neat garden and a black fence at its boundary. Smoke rose from the chimney. Behind the house, a river ran from the lakes to the west of town. I slowed as I drove by, but didn’t stop. I wasn’t even sure why I was there: old memories stirred up, I supposed. I still felt something for her, I knew, although it wasn’t love. I think, and I had no reason to feel it, that it was a kind of sorrow for her. Then I turned back to head south for Greenville.

  I found the Greenville Police Department at the town’s Municipal Building on Minden Street, where it occupied an unattractive tan-sided office with green shutters and Christmas wreaths on the windows in an effort to make it look prettier. There was a fire department office close by, and a police car and a green Department of Conservation forest ranger truck in the lot.

  Inside, I gave my name to a pair of cheerful secretaries, then took a seat on a bench across from the door. After twenty minutes, a stocky man with dark hair and a moustache and brown, watchful eyes came out of an office down the hall, his blue uniform neatly pressed, and extended his hand in greeting.

  ‘Sorry for keeping you waiting,’ he said. ‘We have a contract for policing Beaver Cove. I’ve been out there most of the day. My name’s Dave Martel. I’m chief of police.’

  At Martel’s instigation, we left the police building and walked past the Union Evangelical Church to the Hard Drive café at Sanders Store. There were a couple of cars in the parking lot across the street, the white hull of the steamboat Katahdin looming behind them. A mist hung over the lake and created a white wall at the end of the street through which cars occasionally burst. Inside the é, we ordered French vanilla coffee and took a seat close by one of the computer terminals that folks used to pick up their e-mail.

  ‘I knew your granddaddy,’ said Martel, as we waited for the coffee to arrive. Sometimes it was easy to forget how tightly knit the ties still were in parts of the state. ‘Knew Bob Warren from back in Portland, when I was a boy. He was a good man.’

  ‘You been here long?’

  ‘Ten years now.’

  ‘Like it?’

  ‘Sure. This is an unusual place. You got a lot of people in this part of the country who don’t care much for the law, who’ve come up here because they don’t like being regulated. Funny thing is, here they’ve got me, they’ve got the game wardens, they’ve got the county sheriff and the Highway Patrol all keeping an eye on ’em. Mostly we get along just fine, but we got crime here so it’s not like I’m not kept busy.’

  ‘Anything serious?’

  Martel smiled. ‘Serious is shooting a moose out of season, if you talk to the wardens.’

  I winced. Grouse, pheasant, rabbit, maybe even squirrel I could – understand at least squirrels moved fast enough to constitute a challenge – but not moose. The moose population in the state had risen from about three thousand in the thirties to its present level of thirty thousand, and moose hunting was now allowed for one week in October. It brought a lot of revenue to places like Greenville at a time when there weren’t too many tourists around, but it also brought in its share of assholes. That year, about one hundred thousand people had applied for maybe two thousand permits, every one of them trying to put a moose head above the fireplace.

  It’s not difficult to kill a moose. In fact, the only thing easier to hit than a moose is a dead moose. Their sight is poor, although their sense of smell and hearing are good, and they don’t move unless they have to. Most hunters get their moose on their first or second day out, and boast about it to all the other assholes. Then, after all the hunters have gone with their fat bikes and their orange caps, you can head out and look at the animals that have survived, the glory of them as they come down to lick salt from the rocks by the side of the road, put there to melt the snow and instead used by the moose to supplement their diet.

  ‘Still,’ continued Martel, ‘if you’re asking what’s current, there’s a timber company man, a freelance surveyor name of Gary Chute, who hasn’t delivered his report yet.’

  I recalled the PBS news programme, although I hadn’t noticed any sense of urgency in its discussion of the situation. ‘I heard them talking about it on the radio,’ I said. ‘How bad is it?’

  ‘Hard to say. Seems his wife hasn’t seen him in a while, although that’s not unusual. He had a couple of projects to work on, and was set to spend some time away from home. Plus rumour has it he keeps some sweet stuff stashed over in Troy, Vermont. Add to that his fondness for the bottle, and you got a guy who maybe isn’t the most reliable. He doesn’t turn up in the next twenty-four hours, there may have to be a search organised. It’ll probably be down to the wardens and the Piscataquis sheriff, but could be we’ll all have to lend a hand. Talking of serious, I hear you want to know about Emily Watts?’

  I nodded. I figured that it would be easier to talk to Martel first and then try to deal with Rand Jennings than to try to find out what I wanted to know by talking to Jennings alone. I thought I might slip it past Martel without him noticing, but he was too good for that.

  ‘Can I ask why you’re not talking to Rand Jennings up in Dark Hollow about this?’ There was a smile on his face, but his eyes were still and watchful.

  ‘Rand and I have some history,’ I replied. ‘You get on with him?’ Something in the way that Martel asked the question told me that I wasn’t the only one with a little history behind him.

  ‘Have to try,’ said Martel diplomatically. ‘He’s not the most sympathetic of men, but he’s conscientious in his way. His sergeant, Ressler, now he’s another matter. Ressler’s so full of shit his eyeballs are brown. Haven’t seen too much of him lately, which is fine by me. They’ve been kept busy, what with the trouble over Emily Watts dying and all.’

  Outside, a car crawled sluggishly up the street, heading north, but there didn’t appear to be anybody walking around. Beyond, I could see the shapes of pine-covered islands out on the lake, but they were little more than dark patches in the mist.

  The coffee arrived and Martel told me about what took place the night Emily Watts died, the same night that Billy Purdue took some two million dollars for which a lot more people had died. It was a strange death, out there in the woods. She would have died anyway from the cold, if they hadn’t tracked her down, but to kill herself out in the woods at the age of sixty . . .

  ‘It was a mess,’ said Martel. ‘But these things, they happen sometimes and there’s no way to call them before they go down. Maybe if the security guard hadn’
t been packing, and the nurse on the old woman’s floor had been watching less TV, and the doors had been locked more securely, and a dozen other things hadn’t been out-of-sync that night, then things might have been different. You want to tell me what your interest is in all this?’

  ‘Billy Purdue.’

  ‘Billy Purdue. Now there’s a name to warm your heart on a winter’s night.’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Sure I know him. His ass was rousted not so long ago. Ten days, maybe. He was out at St Martha’s, kicking and screaming with an ass pocket of whiskey. Said he wanted to speak to his momma, but no one knew him from Cain himself. He was hauled in, allowed to cool off in one of Jennings’s cells, then packed off home. They told him that, if he came back, he’d be charged with trespassing and disturbing the peace. He even made the local papers. From what I hear, the last few days haven’t made him a reformed character.’

  It looked like Billy Purdue had followed up on the information supplied by Willeford. ‘You know his wife and child were killed?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah, I know. Never figured him for a killer, though.’ He gave me a thoughtful look. ‘My guess is, you don’t either.’

  ‘I don’t know. You think he could have been looking for the woman who shot herself?’

  ‘Why would you think that?’

  ‘I’m not overfond of coincidences. They’re God’s way of telling you that you’re not seeing the big picture.’ Plus, I knew that Willeford, for good or bad, had given Emily Watts’s name to Billy.

  ‘Well, you see that picture, you let me know, because I sure as hell don’t know why that old woman did what she did. Could be it was her nightmares that drove her to it.’

  ‘Nightmares?’

  ‘Yeah, she told the nurses that she saw the figure of a man watching her window and that someone tried to break into her room.’

  ‘Any sign of an attempt at forced entry?’

  ‘Nothing. Shit, the woman was on the fourth floor. Anyone trying to get in would have had to climb up the drainpipe. There might have been someone in the grounds earlier in the week, but that happens sometimes. Could have been a drunk taking a leak, or kids fooling around. In the end, I think the old lady was just starting to lose it, because there’s no other way to explain it, or the name she called when she died.’

  I leaned forward. ‘What name did she call?’

  ‘She called the bogeyman,’ said Martel with a smile. ‘She called the guy that mothers use to scare their children into bed, the hobgoblin.’

  ‘What was the name?’ I repeated, and something like fear crept into my voice.

  Martel’s smile gave way to a look of puzzlement as he said it.

  ‘Caleb,’ he said. ‘She called on Caleb Kyle.’

  Part Two

  For the thing which

  I greatly feared is come upon me,

  and that which I was afraid of

  Is come unto me.

  Job

  Chapter Thirteen

  The years tumble by like leaves driven before the breeze, intricate and veined, fading from the green of recent memory to the gold autumnal shades of the distant past. I see myself as a child, as a young man, as a lover, a husband, a father, a mourner. I see old men around me in their old men pants and their old men shirts; old men dancing, their feet moving delicately, following a pattern lost to those younger than them; old men telling tales, their liver-spotted hands moving before the fire, their skin like crumpled paper, their voices soft as the rustle of empty corn husks.

  An old man walks through the lush August grass with wood in his arms, brushing away loose bark with a gloved hand; an old man, tall and unbowed, with a halo of white hair like an ancient angel, a dog stepping slowly beside him, older, in its way, than the man himself, its grey-beard muzzle flecked with foam, its tongue lolling, its tail swinging gently through the warm evening air. The first patches of red are showing in the trees, and the clamour of the insects has begun to subside. The ash trees, the last to unfurl their leaves in spring, are now the first to let them fall to the ground. Pine needles decay on the forest floor and the blackberries are ripe and dense as the old man passes by, at one with the rhythms of the world around him.

  These are the things he does, open-coated, firm footsteps leaving the clear imprint of his passing as he goes: the woodcutting, savouring the weight of the axe in his hands, the perfection of the swing, the fresh crack as the blade splits the sugar maple log, the sweep of the head to clear the two halves, the careful positioning of the next log, the heft of the axe, the feel of his old man muscles moving, stretching, beneath his old man shirt. Then the piling, wood on wood, fitting one to the other, shifting, turning, forming the pile so that it remains steady, so that none will fall, so that not even one will be lost. Finally, he stretches the sheeting, a brick at each corner to hold it in place – always the same bricks for he is, and has ever been, a methodical man. And when the time comes in winter to set the fire, he will return to his pile and bend down, the buckle of the belt on his old man pants digging into the softness of his belly, and he will remember that it was firm once, when he was a young man, when the belt held a gun and a nightstick and cuffs, and his badge shone like a silver sun.

  I will be old too, and I will be this man, if I am spared. I will find a kind of happiness in repeating his motions, in the aptness of the action as I feel the circle closing, as I become him, as he made her, who made me. And in doing what he once did, in front of that same house, with the same trees moving in the wind, the same axe in my hand cleaving the wood beneath its blade, I will create an act of remembrance more powerful than a thousand prayers. And my grandfather will live in me, and the ghost of a dog will taste the air with its tongue, and bark at the joy of it.

  Now it is his hands that I see moving before the fire, his voice that tells the tale, about Caleb Kyle and the tree with the strange fruit at the edge of the wilderness. He has never told me the tale before and he will never tell me how it ends, because it has no end, not for him. It will be I who will finish the tale for him, and I who will complete the arc.

  Judy Giffen was the first to disappear, in Bangor in 1965. She was a slim girl, nineteen, with a mane of dark hair and soft red lips with which she tasted men, savouring them like berries. She worked in a hat shop and went missing on a warm April evening redolent with the promise of summer. They searched and they searched, but they didn’t find her. Her face looked out from ten thousand newspapers, frozen in her years as surely as if she had been trapped in amber.

  Ruth Dickinson from Corinna, another thin beauty, with long blonde hair that hung to her waist, was next to go, in late May when she was just short of her twenty-first birthday. To their names would be added Louise Moore from East Corinth, Laurel Trulock from Skowhegan and Sarah Raines from Portland, all disappearing within a period of not more than a few days in September. Sarah Raines was a schoolteacher and, at twenty-two, the eldest of the women to disappear. Her father, Samuel Raines, had been to school with Bob Warren, my grandfather, and Sarah was Bob’s goddaughter. The last to go missing was an eighteen-year-old student named Judith Mundy, who disappeared after a party in Monson in the first week of October. Unlike the others, she was a chubby, plain girl, but by then people had figured out that there was something very wrong and the break in the pattern didn’t seem so important. A search was organised for the Mundy girl to the north and a lot of folks helped out, some, like my grandfather, from as far south as Portland. He drove up on a Saturday morning but, by then, all hope was pretty much gone. My grandfather joined a small party out by Sebec Lake, a few miles east of Monson. There were only three men, then two, then just my grandfather.

  That evening, he got himself a room in Sebec and had dinner in a bar outside town. It was bustling, what with all the people who had been out looking for Judith Mundy, and the newspapermen and the police. He sat drinking a beer at the counter when a voice beside him said:

  ‘You know what all this fuss is about?’
>
  He turned and saw a tall, dark-haired man with a knife slash for a mouth and hard, unloving eyes. There was a trace of the south in his voice, he thought. He wore tan corduroy pants and a dark sweater pitted with holes, through which patches of a dirty yellow shirt were visible. A brown slicker hung to his calves, and the toes of heavy black boots peered from under the too-long cuffs of his pants.

  ‘They’re looking for the girl who’s gone missing,’ replied my grandfather. The man made him uneasy. There was something in his voice, he recalled, something sour-sweet, like syrup laced with arsenic. He smelt of earth and sap and something else, something he couldn’t quite place.

  ‘You think they’re gonna find her?’ A light flickered in the man’s eyes, and my grandfather thought that it might have been amusement.

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘They ain’t found the others.’

  He was watching my grandfather now, his face solemn but the strange glimmer still in his eyes.

  ‘No, they haven’t.’

  ‘You a cop?’

  My grandfather nodded. There was no point in denying it. Some people just knew.

  ‘You’re not from around here, though?’

  ‘No. I’m from Portland.’

  ‘Portland?’ said the man. He seemed impressed. ‘And where you been searching?’

  ‘Out by Sebec Lake, the south shore.’

  ‘Sebec Lake’s nice. Me, I prefer the Little Wilson Stream, up there by the Elliotsville Road. It’s pretty, worth a look if a man had the time. Lot of coverage on the banks.’ He gestured for a whiskey, tossed some coins on the bar, then drained the glass in a single mouthful. ‘You going back out there again tomorrow?’

  ‘I guess.’

  He nodded, wiping the back of his right hand across his mouth. My grandfather saw scarring on the palm, and dirt beneath the fingernails. ‘Well, maybe you’ll have better luck than them other fellas, seeing as how you’re from Portland and all. Sometimes it takes new eyes to see an old trick.’ Then he left.