‘“Don’t burn me”, he said. He wasn’t asking them to spare him, or not to hang him. He wasn’t afraid of that. But he didn’t want to burn. Then I guess maybe he looked up into their eyes and saw that what was to be would be, and he bowed his head and he started to pray.
‘Well, they tightened the rope around his neck and they pulled it so that Errol was balancing on the tips of his toes on the roof of the car, and then the car started and Errol hung in the air, twisting and thrashing. And someone came forward with a burning torch in his hand and they burned Errol Rich as he hung, and those people, they listened to him scream until his lungs burned and he couldn’t scream no more. And then he died.
‘That was at ten after nine, on a July night, maybe three miles away from our house, right on the other side of town. And at ten after nine, my Grandma Lucy, she rose from her chair by the radio. I was sittin’ at her feet. The others, they was in the kitchen or in bed asleep, but I was still with her. Grandma Lucy, she walked to the door and stepped out into the night, wearin’ nothin’ but her nightdress and a shawl, and she looked out into the woods. I followed her, and I said: “Miss Lucy, what’s the matter?” but she didn’t say nothin’, just kept on walkin’ until she was about ten feet away from the edge of the trees, and there she stopped.
‘And out in the darkness, among the trees, there was a light. It didn’t look like no more than a patch of moonlight but, when I tried to find it, there was no moon, and the rest of the woods was dark.
‘I turned to Grandma Lucy and I looked at her eyes.’ Louis stopped, and his own eyes flickered closed briefly, like a man recalling a pain that has been forgotten for a long time. ‘Her eyes were on fire. In her pupils, right in the blackness at the centre, I could see flames. I could see a man burning, like he was standing before us, sheltered by the trees. But when I looked into the darkness, there was only that patch of light, nothin’ more.
‘And Lucy, she said: “You poor boy, you poor, poor boy”, and she started to cry. When she cried, it was like her grief put out the flames, because the burning man in her eyes started to fade until, in the end, he was gone, and the patch of light in the woods, that was gone too.
‘She never spoke about what happened to nobody else, and she told me not to tell either. But I think my momma knew. Least, she knew that her momma had some kind of gift that nobody else had. She could find the dark places, the places nobody else could find, the places where nobody else would look. And the things that moved through the shadows, the folks passing on their way, she saw them too.’
He stopped. ‘Is that what you see, Bird?’ he asked softly. ‘The shades?’
I felt cold at my fingertips and in my toes. ‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
‘Because I recall what happened back in Louisiana, Bird,’ he continued. ‘You saw things back there that nobody else saw. I know that. I could sense it from you, and it scared you.’
I shook my head slowly. I couldn’t admit to what I didn’t want to believe myself. I sometimes thought – maybe even hoped – that I had been unhinged by grief, that the loss of my wife and child had made me mentally ill, emotionally and psychologically disturbed, so troubled by guilt that I was haunted by images of the dead conjured up by my sick mind. Yet I had seen Jennifer and Susan first of all, after meeting Tante Marie Aguillard in Louisiana, after she had told me what had happened to them when she could not possibly have known. The others came later, and they spoke to me in my dreams.
Now, as I saw Rita and Donald, my own Jennifer, felt my Susan’s hand upon me, I half hoped that it was the fact that the anniversary was almost on me, that remembered grief had wormed its way into the recesses of my mind and had started to unhinge me again. Or maybe it was a product of guilt, the guilt I felt at wanting Rachel Wolfe, the guilt I felt at wanting the chance to start over again.
There is a form of narcolepsy in which sufferers literally daydream, the dreams of REM sleep coming upon them in the course of their daily lives, so that the real and the imagined become one and the worlds of sleeping and waking collide. For a time, I thought I might have been a victim of something similar but I knew, deep down inside, that this was not the case. Two worlds came together for me, but they were not the worlds of sleeping and waking. No one slept in these worlds, and no one rested.
I told some of this to Louis, as he watched me quietly from a chair in the corner. I now felt a little ashamed at my outburst, at bringing him in here to listen to my ravings. ‘Maybe I just have bad dreams, that’s all. But I’ll be okay, Louis. I think I’ll be okay. Thank you.’
He looked me hard in the eyes, then stood and walked to the door. ‘Anytime.’ He opened the lock, then paused.
‘I’m not the superstitious kind, Bird. Don’t go makin’ that mistake about me. But I know what happened that night. I could smell burning, Bird. I could smell the leaves on fire.’
And with that he returned to his room.
Still the snow fell, the crystals turning to ice on my window. I watched them form, and thought of Cheryl Lansing’s granddaughters, and Rita Ferris, and Gary Chute. I didn’t want Ellen Cole to join them, or Billy Purdue either. I wanted to save those who remained.
In an effort to distract myself, I tried to read. I had just about finished a biography of the Earl of Rochester, an English dandy who had boozed and whored his way to an early grave in the time of Charles II, writing some great poetry while he did so. I read the final pages lying on my bed beneath the yellow light from the wall lamp, warm air humming into the room. It seemed that in 1676, Rochester had been involved in the slaying of a constable and had gone into hiding, disguising himself as a quack physician named Dr Alexander Bendo who sold medicines made out of clay, soot, soap and pieces of old wall to the suckers of London, none of whom ever guessed the true identity of the man they trusted with their most intimate secrets, and with the most private parts of their wives’ bodies.
Old Saul Mann would have liked Rochester, I thought. He would have appreciated the element of disguise, the possibility of one man taking on the identity of another in order to protect himself, then conning the very people who were searching for him. I fell asleep to the soft patter of snow on glass and dreamed of Saul Mann, wrapped in a cloak of moons and stars, his cards spread on a table before him, waiting quietly for the great game to begin.
Chapter Nineteen
The snows that came that night were the first heavy falls of the winter. They fell on Dark Hollow and Beaver Cove, on Moosehead Lake and Rockwood and Tarratine. They sugar-coated Big Squaw Mountain and Mount Kineo, Baker Mountain and Elephant Mountain. They turned the Longfellows into a white scar that ran across the back of Piscataquis. Some of the smaller ponds froze, creating a layer of ice as thin and treacherous as a traitor’s blade. The snow sat heavy on the evergreens and the ground below lay silent and undisturbed, save for the sound of branches giving way reluctantly beneath the weight they carried, the compressed flakes falling heavily to the drifts below as snow welcomed back snow. In my disordered, disturbed sleep, I felt the snow falling, sensed the change in the atmosphere as the world was shrouded in white and the night waited for the exquisite perfection of winter’s work to be revealed in the slow dawning light of day.
Quite early, I heard a snowplough moving down the main street of the town and the slow, careful progress of the first cars, their chains making a distinctive noise on the road. The room was so cold that beads of moisture turned the windows to shattered glass, miraculously restored by the sweep of a hand. I looked out on the world, at the tracks of the cars, at the first people walking on the streets, their hands deep in their pockets or by their sides, the bulk of their layers of sweaters and shirts, thermals and scarves, forcing them to move with a comical unfamiliarity, like children thrust into new clothes.
I approached the bathroom with unease, but all was quiet and clean within. I showered, keeping the water as hot and powerful as I could stand, then dried myself quickly, my teeth already chattering as the temperature c
ooled the drops on my body. I pulled on jeans, boots, a thick cotton shirt and a dark wool sweater, added a coat and gloves, and stepped out into the crisp, cold morning air. Beneath my feet, the snow crunched and shifted, my progress marked by the impressions of my footsteps behind me. I knocked twice, sharply, on the door of the next room down.
‘Go away,’ said Angel’s voice, the force of his words undiminished by the fact that they came through about four layers of blankets. I felt a moment of guilt at having woken them the night before, and tried to keep my mind off the conversation I had had with Louis.
‘It’s Bird,’ I replied.
‘I know. Go away.’
‘I’m heading over to the diner. I’ll see you there.’
‘I’ll see you in hell first. It’s cold outside.’
‘It’s colder in there.’
‘I’ll take my chances.’
‘Twenty minutes.’
‘Whatever. Just go away.’
I was about to head for the diner when something about my car distracted me. From the window of my room it had seemed that its red lines were only partially obscured by the snow, for flashes of colour showed through as if a hand had wiped away some of the snowfall. But that wasn’t why the snow on my car was streaked with red.
There was blood on the windshield. There was blood also on the hood, and a long line of it ran from the front of the car, across the driver’s door and the rear window, before pooling below the trunk. I walked through the snow, feeling it crunch beneath my feet. At the back of the car, beside the right rear wheel, lay a pile of mangled brown fur. The cat’s mouth was open, and its tongue hung over its small white teeth. A red wound ran across its belly, but most of its blood seemed to be on my car.
To my left, I heard the office door slam and watched as the manager walked over to me. Her eyes were red from crying.
‘I already called the police,’ she said. ‘I thought, when I saw her first, that you’d hit her with your car, but then I saw the blood and realised that couldn’t be. Who’d do something like that to an animal? What kind of a person could take pleasure in hurting it so?’ She began to cry again.
‘I don’t know,’ I said.
But I did know.
It took me three knocks to get Angel to the door. He stood shivering as I told him about the cat, Louis behind him listening silently.
‘He’s here,’ said Louis, finally.
‘We don’t know that for sure,’ I replied, but I knew he was right. Somewhere close by, Stritch was waiting.
I left them and walked across to the diner. It was ten after eight, and the diner was already almost full, warm air circulating with the smell of fresh coffee and bacon, voices raised at the counter and in the kitchen. For the first time, I noticed the Christmas decorations, the Coca-Cola Father Christmas, the tinsel and the stars. It would be my second season without them. I felt almost grateful for Billy Purdue, maybe even for Ellen Cole, for giving me something on which to concentrate my mind. All of the energy I might have poured into grieving, into anger and guilt, into fearing the anniversary, I now put into the search for these two people. But that gratitude was a brief, passing thing, an ugly betrayal of the people involved, and I quickly felt disgusted with myself for using someone else’s sufferings to alleviate my own.
I took a booth and watched the people passing by. When the waitress came, I ordered only coffee. The sight of the cat and the thought of Stritch trailing us had ruined my appetite. I found myself closely examining the faces of the people in the diner, as if Stritch might somehow have mutated himself, or stolen their form. There were a couple of timber company men across from me, eating plates of ham and eggs and already talking about Gary Chute.
I listened and learned, for the world of the northern wilderness was on the verge of change. An area of almost one hundred thousand acres of forest, owned by a European paper company, was about to be harvested. The area had last been logged in the thirties and forties and now it had matured again. For the last decade, the company had been restoring roads and bridges in preparation for the big lumber trucks with their claw-shaped hydraulic lifts that would move into the wilderness, enabling the transportation of the pine, spruce and fir, the oak, maple and birch, to begin. Chute, a graduate of the University of Maine at Orono, was one of those responsible for checking the roads, the tree growth and the likely boundaries for the logging.
The laws relating to forestry had changed since the last cutting. Then, the companies had cleared all of the land, causing silting that killed fish, displaced animals and led to serious erosion. Now they were obliged to cut in a checker-board pattern, leaving half the forest for another twenty to thirty years so that the habitats could grow again. Already there were signs of early cuts, where the deer and moose would feed on the raspberries, willow and alders that sprang up to fight for the new light. And so the days of the undisturbed northern wilderness were now numbered, and soon men and machines would be making their way into its vastness. Gary Chute had been the first of many, and it struck me that his job must have taken him into areas where few people had set foot in decades.
Across the street, Lorna Jennings stepped from her green Nissan, wearing a white padded jacket buttoned and tied over black denims and black, calf-length boots. I wondered how long she had been there: there were no exhaust fumes around the car and, despite the fact that there was little traffic on the street, the tracks of her tyres had been crossed by a number of other vehicles.
She stood at the curb, her hands in the pockets of her jacket, and looked over at the diner. Her eyes moved along the windows until they came to where I sat, a mug of coffee in my hand. She seemed to consider me for a moment, then walked across the road, entered the diner and took a seat opposite me, unbuttoning her jacket as she sat. Beneath it, she wore a red, turtleneck sweater that tightly followed the sweep of her breasts. One or two people looked over at her as she sat, and words were exchanged.
‘You’re attracting attention,’ I said.
She blushed slightly. ‘The hell with them,’ she said. She wore a trace of pink lipstick and her hair hung loose to the nape of her neck, strands falling gently near her left eye like dark feathers from a bird’s wing. ‘Some of them know you were out there last night, when they found the body. People have been asking why you’re here.’
She ordered, and a waitress brought her coffee and a bagel, with some thin slices of bacon on a separate plate, then gave each of us a sly look before stepping away. Lorna ate the bagel unbuttered, holding it in her left hand while her right picked up pieces of bacon that she nibbled at daintily.
‘And what answer have they got?’
‘They’ve heard that you’re looking for a girl. Now they’re trying to figure out if you had any reason to be interested in the disappearance of the timber company man.’ She stopped and took a sip of coffee. ‘Well, have you?’
‘Is that you asking, or Rand?’
She grimaced. ‘You know that’s a low blow,’ she said quietly. ‘Rand can ask his own questions.’
I shrugged. ‘I don’t think Chute’s death was accidental, but that’s for the ME to confirm. I don’t see any connection between him and Ellen Cole.’ That wasn’t completely true. They were connected by Dark Hollow and the dark line of a road drawn through the wilderness upon which Chute’s death hung like a single red bead.
‘But there have been other deaths as well, some of them tied up with a guy called Billy Purdue. He was one of Meade Payne’s boys, once upon a time.’
‘You think he might be here?’
‘I think he might try to get to Payne. There are people after him, bad people. He took money that didn’t belong to him and now he’s running scared. I think Meade Payne is one of the only people left whom he can trust.’
‘And where do you fit in?’
‘I was doing some work for his wife. Ex-wife. Her name was Rita Ferris. She had a son.’
Lorna’s brow furrowed and then her eyes closed briefly and she nodded
as she remembered the name. ‘The woman and child who died in Portland, that was them, wasn’t it? And this Billy Purdue, he was her ex-husband?’
‘Uh-huh, that’s them.’
‘They say he killed his own family.’
‘They say wrong.’
She was silent for a time, then said: ‘You seem very sure of that.’
‘He wasn’t the kind.’
‘And do you know “the kind”?’ She was watching me carefully now. There were conflicting emotions in her eyes. I could sense them coming from her, just as I had sensed the snow falling softly in the night. There was curiosity, and pity, and something else, too, something that had lain dormant for many years, a feeling repressed and now gradually being exposed. It made me want to draw back from her. Some things were best left in the past.
‘Yes, I do. I know the kind.’
‘You know, because you’ve killed them.’
I waited a heartbeat before I answered. ‘Yes.’
‘Is that what you do now?’
I smiled emptily. ‘It seems to be part of it.’
‘Did they deserve to die?’
‘They didn’t deserve to live.’
‘That’s not the same thing.’
‘I know that.’
‘Rand knows all about you,’ she said, pushing away the remains of her food. ‘He spoke about you last night. Actually, he shouted about you, and I shouted back.’ She sipped her coffee. ‘I think he’s afraid of you.’ She looked out on to the street, refusing to look directly at me and instead staring at my reflection in the glass. ‘I know what he did to you, in that men’s room. I always knew. I’m sorry.’
‘I was young. I healed.’
She turned back to me. ‘I didn’t,’ she said. ‘But I couldn’t leave him, not then. I still loved him, or thought I did. And I was young enough to believe that we had a chance together. We tried to have children. We thought it might make things better. I lost two, Bird, the last one three years ago. I don’t think I can carry to term. I was so useless, I couldn’t even give him a child.’ She tensed her lips, and brushed her hair back from her forehead. There was a deadness about her eyes.
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