The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  That Sunday, the day when my grandfather found the tree with the strange fruit, dawned crisp and bright, with birds in the trees and blossoms by the shining waters of Sebec Lake. He left his car by the lake at Packard’s Camps, showed his badge and joined a small party, made up of two brothers and a cousin from the same family, which was heading for the northern shore. The four men searched together for three hours, not talking much, until the family returned home for Sunday lunch. They asked my grandfather if he wanted to join them, but he had wrapped sourdough bread in a napkin with some fried chicken, and he had a thermos of coffee in his backpack, so he turned down their offer. He returned to Packard’s Camps and ate seated on a stone by the bank, the water lapping behind him, and watched rabbits skipping through the grass.

  When the other men didn’t return, he got in his car and began to drive. He took the road north till he came to a steel bridge that crossed the waters of the Little Wilson. Its roadway was a series of grilles through which could be seen the brown rushing torrent of the stream. Across the bridge the road sloped upwards before splitting in two, heading for Ontwa and Borestone Mountain along the Elliotsville Road to the west and Leighton to the east. On each side of the river, the trees grew thickly. A hermit thrush shot from a birch and looped across the water. Somewhere, a warbler called.

  My grandfather did not cross the bridge, but parked his car by the side of the road and followed a rough trail of stones and dirt down to the riverbank. The water was fast moving, and there were rocky outcrops and fallen branches to negotiate as he began to walk, so that he had to step into the flow at times to bypass them. Soon, there were no more houses on the slopes above him. The bank grew increasingly wild, and he was forced more and more often to take to the water in order to continue upriver.

  He had been walking for almost thirty minutes when he heard the flies.

  Ahead of him, a huge slab of rock rose up from the bank, its end almost tapering to a point. He climbed it, using its ridges and alcoves for footholds and handholds, until he reached the plateau. To his right was the river, to his left a space in the trees through which the buzzing sounded louder. He walked through the gap, over which the trees hung in an arch like the entry into a cathedral, until he reached a small clearing. The sight that met him made him stop short and caused his food to erupt from his gut in a rush.

  The girls hung from an oak, an old, mature tree with a thick, gnarled trunk and heavy extended branches like splayed fingers. They turned slowly, black against the sun, their bare feet pointing at the ground, their hands loose by their sides, heads lolling to one side. A fury of flies surrounded them, excited by the stench of decay. As he moved towards them, he could make out the colour of their hair, the twigs and leaves caught in the strands, the yellowing of their teeth, the eruptions on their skin, their mutilated bellies. Some were naked, while tattered dresses still clung to the others. They pirouetted in mid air, like the ghosts of five dancers no longer restricted by the pull of gravity. A heavy, rough rope around the neck of each anchored the girls to the branches above.

  There were only five. When the bodies were taken down and identified, Judith Mundy’s was not among them. And when she didn’t appear, when no trace was ever found of her, it was decided that whoever was responsible for the deaths of the five others had probably had nothing to do with the disappearance of the Mundy girl. It would be more than thirty years before that piece of reasoning was proved wrong.

  My grandfather told the police about the man in the bar and what he had said. The details were taken down and it was found that a man roughly fitting that description had been seen in Monson about the time of Judith Mundy’s disappearance. There were similar descriptions of a fellow in Skowhegan, although folks differed about his height, or the colour of his eyes, or the cut of his hair. This anonymous man was a suspect, for a time, until something broke in the case.

  Ruth Dickinson’s clothes, soiled with blood and grime, were found in a shed in Corinna owned by the family of Quintin Fletcher. Fletcher was twenty-eight and somewhat retarded: he made a little money by selling handicrafts he created from wood picked up in the forest, travelling around the state by Greyhound bus with his case of wooden dolls, toy trucks and candlesticks. Ruth Dickinson had complained to his family and, later, to the police, that Fletcher had followed her on occasion, leering and making lewd suggestions. After he tried to touch her breast at a county fair the police told his family that they would have him put away if he approached the Dickinson girl again. Fletcher’s name came up in the course of the investigation into the girls’ deaths. He was questioned, the house searched, and the discovery made. Fletcher started crying, claiming that he didn’t know where the clothing came from, that he hadn’t hurt anybody. He was remanded for trial and placed in a secure unit in Maine State Prison, for fear that someone might try to get to him if he was kept locally. He might still have been there now, making toys and nautical gifts for the store out on US 1 in York that sells prisoners’ crafts, but for the fact that a trusty, who was related distantly to Judy Giffen, attacked Fletcher when he was undergoing a checkup in the prison hospital and stabbed him three times in the neck and chest with a scalpel. Fletcher died twenty-four hours later, two days before his case was due to go to trial.

  And there it lay, for most people at least: the killings ended with Fletcher’s capture and subsequent death. But my grandfather couldn’t forget the man in the bar, and the glimmer in his eyes, and the reference to the Elliotsville Road. For months afterwards, he countered hostility and the desire to mourn and forget with quiet persistence and sensitivity. And what he got was a name, which folks had heard but couldn’t quite remember how, and sightings of the man from the bar in each town where a girl had been lost. He mounted a campaign of sorts, speaking to any newspaper or radio show that would listen, putting across his view that the man who had killed the five girls and used them to decorate a tree was still at large. He even convinced some people, for a time, until the family of Quintin Fletcher weighed in behind him and folks took a turn against the whole affair, even his old friend Sam Raines.

  In the end, the hostility and indifference proved too much even for him. Under some pressure, my grandfather left the force and took up construction and then woodworking to support his family, carving lamps and chairs and tables and selling them through the HOME service for cottage industries run by the Franciscan nuns in Orland. He carved each piece of work with the same care and sensitivity he had used to question the families of the girls who died. He only spoke of the affair once thereafter, that night in front of the fire with the smell of the wood on him and the dog sleeping at his feet. The discovery he had made on that warm day had blighted his life. It haunted him in his sleep, the possibility that the man who had killed those girls had somehow escaped justice.

  After he told me the tale, I knew that on those occasions when I found him sitting on the porch, his pipe cold between his lips, his eyes fixed somewhere beyond the sunset, he was thinking about what had taken place decades before. When he pushed away food almost untouched, after reading in the papers about some young girl who had strayed from home and not yet been found, he was back on the Elliotsville Road, his feet wet in his boots and the ghosts of dead girls whispering in his ear.

  And the name that he found all those years before had, by then, become a kind of talisman in towns in the north, although no one could figure out how that might have happened. It was used to scare bad children who wouldn’t do what they were told, who wouldn’t go to sleep quietly or who headed off into the woods with their friends without telling anyone where they were going. It was a name spoken at night, before the light was switched off and the hair tousled by a familiar hand, the soft scent of a mother’s perfume lingering after a final good night kiss: ‘Be good now and go to sleep. And no more trips into the forest, else Caleb will get you.’

  I can see my grandfather poking at the logs in the fire, letting them settle before he adds another, the sparks flying up the chimne
y like sprites, the melting snow sizzling in the flames.

  ‘Caleb Kyle, Caleb Kyle,’ he intones, repeating the words of the children’s rhyme, the fire casting shadows on his face. ‘If you see him, run a mile.’

  And the snow hisses, and the wood cracks, and the dog whimpers softly in its sleep.

  Chapter Fourteen

  St Martha’s stood on its own grounds, surrounded by a stone wall fifteen feet in height and guarded by wrought-iron gates from which black paint bubbled and flaked in preparation for a slow, fluttering fall to the earth and snow below. The ornamental pond was filled with leaves and trash, the lawn was overgrown and the trees had not been pruned for so long that the branches of some intertwined with those of their neighbours, creating a woven canopy beneath which the grass had probably died. The building itself was grimly institutional: four floors of grey stone with a gabled roof beneath which a carved cross betrayed its religious origins.

  I drove to the main entrance and parked in a space reserved for staff, then walked up the granite steps and into the home itself. To one side stood the security guard’s booth where the old woman had cold-cocked Judd before racing off to her death. Straight ahead was a reception desk where a female attendant in a white coat was busy rearranging some papers. Behind her, a door opened into an office lined with books and files. The attendant was a plain-faced woman with white, doughy cheeks and dark eye shadow that made her look like a Mardi Gras skeleton. She had no name tag on her lapel; close up, her coat was stained at the breast and white threads hung like cobwebs from the fraying collar. Willeford had been right: the place smelled of overboiled vegetables and human waste, unsuccessfully masked by disinfectant. All things considered, Emily Watts might have done the smart thing by making a break for the woods.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said the woman. Her face was neutral but her voice had the same tone as Meade Payne’s boy. It made ‘help’ sound like a dirty word. The way she said ‘you’ wasn’t much better.

  I gave her my name and told her that Chief Martel had called ahead to arrange for me to talk to someone about the death of Emily Watts.

  ‘I’m sorry, but Dr Ryley, the director, is at a meeting in Augusta until tomorrow.’ She sounded superficially pleasant, but her face told me that anyone asking about Emily Watts was about as welcome as Louis Farrakhan at a Klan dinner. ‘I told the chief, but you’d already left.’ Now her face matched her tone, with the addition of a look of malicious amusement at the trip I’d been forced to make unnecessarily.

  ‘Let me guess,’ I said. ‘You can’t let me talk to anyone without the director’s permission, the director isn’t here and you have no way of contacting him.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Happy to save you the trouble of saying it.’

  She bristled and gripped her pen tightly, as if in preparation for ramming it into my eye. From out of the security booth stepped a pudgy guy in a cheap, badly fitting uniform. He pulled on his hat as he walked towards me, but not quickly enough to hide the scars at the side of his head.

  ‘Everything all right here, Glad?’ he asked the woman behind the desk. Glad: some people were just like a big finger raised to the universe.

  ‘Now I am scared,’ I said. ‘Big security man and no old lady to protect me.’

  He blushed a deep red and sucked in his stomach a little.

  ‘I think you’d better leave. Like the lady said, there’s nobody here who can help you.’

  I nodded and pointed to his belt. ‘I see you got a new gun. Maybe you should get a lock and chain for it. A passing child might try to steal it.’

  I left them in the reception area and walked back into the grounds. I felt a little petty for picking on Judd but I was tired and antsy and the mention of the name Caleb Kyle after all those years had thrown me. I stood on the grass and looked up at the stained, unlovely façade of the home. Emily Watts’s room was at the western corner, top floor, according to Martel. The drapes were drawn and there were bird droppings on the window ledge. In the room beside it, a figure moved at the window and an elderly woman, her hair pulled back in a bun, watched me. I smiled at her but she didn’t respond. When I drove away, I could see her in the rear-view, still standing at the window, still watching.

  I had planned to stay another day in Dark Hollow, since I hadn’t yet spoken to Rand Jennings. The sight of his wife had stirred up feelings in me that had been submerged for a long time: anger, regret, the embers of some old desire. I remembered the humiliation of lying on the toilet floor as Jennings’s blows rained down on me, his fat friend snickering as he held the door closed. It surprised me, but part of me still wanted a confrontation with him after all that time.

  On my way back to the motel, I tried to call Angel using the cell phone but I seemed to be out of range. I called him instead from a gas station, listening to the newly installed telephone in the Scarborough house ring five times before he eventually picked up.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘It’s Bird. What’s happening?’

  ‘Lots, none of it good. While you’ve been doing your Perry Mason thing up north, Billy Purdue was spotted in a convenience store down here. He got away before the cops could pick him up but he’s still in the city, somewhere.’

  ‘He won’t be for long, now that he’s been seen. What about Tony Celli?’

  ‘Nothing, but the cops found the Coupe de Ville in an old barn out by Westbrook. Louis picked it up on the police band. Looks like the freak show ditched his wheels for something less showy.’

  I was about to tell him what little I had learned when he interrupted.

  ‘There’s something else. You got a visitor here, arrived this morning.’

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘Lee Cole.’

  I was surprised, given the deterioration of my friendship with her husband. Maybe she had hopes of rebuilding bridges between Walter and me.

  ‘Did she say what she wanted?’

  There was a hesitation in Angel’s voice, and I immediately felt my stomach turn. ‘Kinda. Bird, her daughter Ellen is missing.’

  I drove back immediately, doing a steady eighty as soon as I hit I-95. I was almost on the outskirts of Portland when the cell phone rang. I picked it up, half expecting it to be Angel again. It wasn’t.

  ‘Parker?’ I recognised the voice almost immediately.

  ‘Billy? Where are you?’

  Billy Purdue’s voice was panicky and scared. ‘I’m in trouble, man. My wife, she trusted you, and now I’m trusting you too. I didn’t kill them, Parker. I wouldn’t do that. I couldn’t kill her. I couldn’t kill my little boy.’

  ‘I know, Billy, I know.’ As we spoke, I kept repeating his name in an effort to calm him and develop whatever tentative trust he might have towards me. I tried to put Ellen Cole out of my mind, at least for the present. I would deal with that as soon as I could.

  ‘The cops are after me. They think I killed ’em. I loved ’em. I’d never have hurt ’em. I just wanted to keep ’em.’ His voice bubbled on the edge of hysteria.

  ‘Calm down, Billy,’ I said. ‘Look, tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you. We’ll take you somewhere safe and we can talk this thing through.’

  ‘There was an old guy at their place, Parker. I saw him watching it, that night the cops picked me up. I was trying to look out for them, but I couldn’t.’ I wasn’t even sure that he had heard my offer of help, but I let him talk as I drove past the Falmouth exit about three miles from the city.

  ‘Did you recognise him, Billy?’

  ‘No, I never seen him before, but I’d know him if I saw him again.’

  ‘Good, Billy. Now tell me where you are and I’ll come and get you.’

  ‘I’m at a phone box on Commercial, but I can’t stay here. There’s people, cars. I’ve been hiding out in the Portland Company complex at Fore Street, down by the locomotive museum. There’s a vacant building just inside the main entrance. You know it?’

  ‘Yeah, I know it. Go back inside. I
’ll be there as soon as I can.’

  I called Angel again and told him to meet me, with Louis, at the corner of India and Commercial. Lee Cole was to be left at Java Joe’s. I didn’t want her at the house in case Tony Celli, or anyone else, decided to pay a visit.

  There was no one else around when I arrived at the corner of India and Commercial. I pulled into the parking lot of the old India Street Terminal, the car nestling in the shadow of the old three-storey building. As I stepped from the car, the first drops of rain began to fall, a heavy, skin-soaking rain that exploded dramatically on the hood of the car and left splashes the size of quarters on the windshield. I walked round the terminal, past a picnic table and a single-storey office building, painted red, until I was on the harbour side, looking out over the dark waters. Thunder rumbled and, on Casco Bay, a ship was frozen in a flash of lightning. Ahead of me, on a restored stretch of line used to give tourists a taste of a narrow gauge railway, stood a flat-bed car with a storage tank on top, marking the start of the line. A row of locked cargo containers was ranged behind the car. To my right was the Casco Bay ferry terminal, the dinosaur body of a blue eighteen-ton crane standing above it on four spindly legs like a mutilated bug.

  I was about to turn back to my car when, from behind me, I heard a noise on the gravel and a familiar voice said: ‘Bad weather for birds. You should be curled up in your coop.’ The voice was accompanied by the cocking of a hammer on a pistol.

  I slowly raised my hands from my coat and turned to see Mifflin, Tony Celli’s harelipped enforcer, smiling crookedly at me. He held a Ruger Speed Six in his hand, the rounded butt gripped hard in his stubby fist.

  ‘It’s like déjà vu all over again,’ I said. ‘I’ll have to park someplace else in future.’

  ‘I think your parking problem is about to be solved. Permanently. How’s your head feel?’ The smile was still fixed in place.