The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  I nodded, but stayed silent as the words tumbled out of her like rats from a sack.

  ‘Then another man came to her town, and this man made love to her, and took her to his bed. She did not tell him about the sex, but, in the end, she told him about the beatings. And this man, he found her father in a bar and he beat him, and told him that he must never touch his daughter again.’ She emphasised each word with a wag of her finger, carefully spacing each syllable for maximum emphasis. ‘He told her father that if anything happened to his daughter, he would kill him. And because of this, Miss Emily fell in love with this man.

  ‘But there was something wrong with him, Mr Parker, in here –’ She touched her head ‘– and in here.’ Her finger moved to her heart. ‘She did not know where he lived, or where he came from. He found her when he wanted her. He went missing for days, sometimes weeks. He smelt of wood and sap and once, when he came back to her, there was blood on his clothes and under his nails. He told her that he hit a deer in his truck. Another time, he told her that he was hunting. Two different reasons he gave, and she started to feel afraid.

  ‘That was when the young girls began to disappear, Mr Parker: two girls. And once, when she was with him, she smelt something on him, the smell of another woman. His neck, it was scratched, torn, as if by a hand. They argued, and he told her that she was imagining things, that he had cut himself on a branch.

  ‘But she knew it was him, Mr Parker. She knew it was him who was taking the girls, but she could not tell why. And now, now she was pregnant by him, and he knew this. She had been so scared to tell him, but when he learned about it he was so pleased. He wanted a son, Mr Parker. This he told her: “I want a son”.

  ‘But she would not hand over a child to such a man, she told me. She grew more and more afraid. And he wanted the child, Mr Parker, he wanted it so badly. Always, always he was asking her about it, warning her against doing anything that might damage it. But there was no love in him or, if there was, it was a strange love, a bad love. She knew that he would take the child, if he could, and she would never see it again. She knew he was a bad man, worse even than her father.

  ‘One night, when she was with him, in his truck by her father’s house, she told him that she was in pain. In the toilet outside, she had a newspaper, and in the newspaper – was — ‘ She struggled for the words. ‘Guts, blood, waste. Again, you understand? And she cried and smeared the blood on herself and put it in the bowl and called for him and told him, told him that she had lost his baby.’

  Mrs Schneider stopped again, and took a blanket from her bed, which she wrapped round her shoulders to ward off the cold. ‘When she told him this,’ she continued, ‘she thought that he would kill her. He howled, Mr Parker, like an animal, and he raised her by the hair, and he hit her, again and again and again. He called her “weak” and “worthless”. He told her that she had killed his child. Then he turned and walked away and she heard him in the woodshed, moving among the tools her father kept there. And when she heard the sound of the blade, she ran away from the house and into the woods. But he followed her, and she could hear him coming through the trees. She stayed quiet, not even breathing, and he went past her, and he did not come back again, not ever.

  ‘Later, they found the girls hanging from the tree, and she knew that he had left them there. But she never saw him again and she went to the sisters here, at St Martha’s, and I think that perhaps she told them why she was afraid. They sheltered her until she had the boy, and then they took the child away from her. After that, she was never the same and she came back here, after many years, and the sisters, they took care of her. When the home was sold, she used what little money she had to stay here. It is not an expensive place, this, Mr Parker. This you can see.’ She raised her hand to show the dull little room. Her skin was thin as paper. Sunlight dripped like honey through her fingers.

  ‘Mrs Schneider, did Miss Emily tell you the name of the man, the man who fathered her child?’

  ‘I do not know,’ she replied.

  I sighed softly but, as I did so, I realised that I had not given her time to finish, that she had more to say.

  ‘I know only his first name,’ she continued. She moved her hand gently in the air before me, as if conjuring up the name from the past.

  ‘He was called Caleb.’

  Snow falling, inside and out; a blizzard of memories. Young girls turning in the breeze, my grandfather watching them, rage and grief welling up inside him, the smell of their decay wrapped around him like a rotting cloak. He looked at them, a father and husband himself, and he thought of all the young men they would not kiss, the lovers whose breath they would not feel against their cheeks in the dead of night and whom they would never comfort with the warmth of their bodies. He thought of the children they would never have, the potential within them for the creation of new life now stilled forever, the gaping holes at their bellies where their wombs had been torn apart inside them. Within each one, there had existed possibilities beyond imagining. With their deaths, an infinite number of existences had come to an end, potential universes lost forever, and the world shrank a little at their passing.

  I stood and walked to the window. The snowfall made the grounds look less forbidding, the trees less bare, but it was all an illusion. Things are what they are, and changes in nature can only hide their true essence for a time. And I thought of Caleb, moving into the comforting darkness of the forest as he raged at the death of his child unborn, betrayed by the too-thin, too-weak body of the woman he had protected and then inseminated. He took three after her in rapid succession, fuelling his fury until it was spent, then hung them like trimmings on a tree to be found by a man who was not like him, a man who was so far removed from him that he felt the deaths of each of these young women as a personal loss. For Caleb’s was a world in which things mutated into their opposites: creation into destruction, love into hate, life into death.

  Five deaths, but six girls missing; one remained unaccounted for. In my grandfather’s file, her name had been marked on a sheaf of pages, upon which her movements on the day she disappeared had been minutely reconstructed. A picture of her was stapled to the corner of the bundle: plump, homely Judith Mundy, a hardness to her passed down by generations of people who had worked thin, unforgiving soil to create a foothold and scratch a living from this land. Judith Mundy, lost and now forgotten, except by the parents who would always feel her absence like an abyss into which they shouted her name without even an echo in reply.

  ‘Why would this man do such a thing to these girls?’ I heard Mrs Schneider ask, but I had no answer for her. I had stared into the faces of people who had killed with impunity for decades, and still I did not know the reasons for what they did. I felt a pang of regret at the loss of Walter Cole as a colleague. This was what Walter could do: he could look inside himself and, secure in his sense of his own innate Tightness, he could create an image of that which was not right, a tiny tumour of viciousness and ill will, like the first cell colonised by a cancer from which he could construct the progress of the entire disease. He was like a mathematician who, when faced with a simple square on a page, plots its progress into other dimensions, other spheres of being beyond the plane of its current existence, while remaining ultimately detached from the problem at hand.

  This was his strength and also, I thought, his weakness. Ultimately, he did not look deeply enough because he was afraid of what he might find within himself: his own capacity for evil. He resisted the impulse to understand himself fully that he might understand others better. To understand is to come to terms with one’s potential for evil as well as good, and I did not think that Walter Cole wanted to believe himself capable, at whatever level, of doing acts of great wrong. When I had performed deeds that he found morally unacceptable, when I had hunted down those who had done wrong and, by doing so, had done wrong myself, Walter had cut me adrift, even though he had used me to find those individuals and knew what I would do when I found them. That
was why we were no longer friends: I recognised my culpability, the deep flaws within myself – the pain, the hurt, the anger, the guilt, the desire for revenge – and all of these things I took and used. Maybe I killed a little of myself each time I did so; maybe that was the price that had to be paid. But Walter was a good man and, like many good men, his flaw was that he believed himself to be a better one.

  Mrs Schneider spoke again. ‘It was the mother, I think,’ she said, softly.

  I leaned against the windowpane and waited for her to continue.

  ‘Once, when this man, this “Caleb”, was drunk, he told Miss Emily of his mother. She was a hard woman, Mr Parker. The father, he had left them out of fear of her, then died in the war. She beat her boy, beat him with sticks and chains, and she did worse things, too. At night, Mr Parker, she would come to him, to her own boy, and she would touch him, and take him inside her. And later, when she was done, she would hurt him. She would drag him by the legs, or the hair, and kick him until he coughed blood. She chained him outside, like a dog, naked, in rain, and snow. All this, he told Miss Emily.’

  ‘Did he tell her where this took place?’

  She shook her head. ‘Maybe south. I don’t know. I think . . .’

  I didn’t interrupt as her brow furrowed and the fingers of her right hand danced in the air before me.

  ‘ Medina,’ she said at last, her eyes ablaze in triumph. ‘He said something to Miss Emily about a Medina.’

  I noted down the name. ‘And what happened to his mother?’

  Mrs Schneider twisted in her chair to look at me. ‘He killed her,’ she said simply.

  Behind me, the door opened as a nurse brought in a pot of coffee and two cups, along with a tray of cookies, presumably at the instigation of Dr Ryley. Mrs Schneider looked a little surprised, then took on the role of hostess, pouring my coffee, offering sugar, creamer. She pressed cookies on me, which I refused, since I figured she might be grateful for them later. I was right. She took one for herself, carefully put the rest in two napkins from the tray and placed them in the bottom drawer of her dressing table. Then, as the snow clouds gathered once again in the skies above and the afternoon grew dark, she told me more about Emily Watts.

  ‘She was not a woman who talked very much, Mr Parker, only that one time,’ she said in her carefully-pronounced English which still carried traces of her roots in her ‘w’s – ‘vas’, ‘voman’ – and in some of her vowels. ‘She said “hello”, or “good-night”, or spoke of the weather, but no more. She never again talked of the boy. The others here, if you ask them, even if you step into their rooms for a moment, they will talk of their children, their grandchildren, their husbands, their wives.’ She smiled. ‘Just as I did to you, Mr Parker.’

  I was about to say something, to tell her that I didn’t mind, that it was interesting, the least I could do, something half meant and well intended, when she raised a hand to stop me. ‘Don’t even begin to tell me that you enjoyed it. I am not a young girl who needs to be humoured.’ The smile remained as she said it. There was something in her, some relic of old beauty, which told me that in her youth many men had humoured her, and had been glad to do so.

  ‘So she did not talk of such things,’ she went on. ‘There were no photographs in her room, no pictures and since I have been here, five years, all she has ever said to me is “Hello, Mrs Schneider”, “Gutt Morning, Mrs Schneider”, “Is a fine day, Mrs Schneider”. That was all, nothing else, except for that one time, and I think she was ashamed of it later, or perhaps afraid. She had no visitors, and never spoke of it again, until the young man came.’

  I leaned forward, and she imitated the movement, so that we were only inches apart. ‘He came some days after I made the call to Mr Willeford, after I saw his notice in the newspaper. The first we knew, there was shouting from downstairs and then the sound of running. A young man, a big man, with large, wild eyes, came past my door and burst into Miss Emily’s room. Well, I was afraid for her, and for me, but I took my stick –’ she pointed to a walking stick with a head carved into the shape of a bird and a metal tip at the end ‘– and I followed him.

  ‘When I came to the room, Miss Emily was sitting at her window, just as I am now, but her hands were like, ach, like this.’ Mrs Schneider put her hands flat on her cheeks and opened her mouth wide in an expression of shock. ‘And the young man, he looked at her and he said only one word. He said to her: “Momma?” Like that, like a question. But she only shook her head and said, “No, no, no,” again and again. The boy, he reached out for her, but already she was moving away from him, back, back, until she was in the corner of her room, down on the floor.

  ‘Then I heard from behind me the sound of the nurses. They came with the fat guard, the one Miss Emily hit on the night she ran off, and I was bundled out of the room while they took the boy away. I watched him as they took him, Mr Parker, and his face . . . Oh, his face was like he had seen someone die, someone he loved. He cried and called out again, “Momma, momma”,’ but she did not reply.

  ‘The police came, and they took the boy away. The nurse, she came to Miss Emily and she asked her if it was true, what the boy had said. And she told her “No”, that she does not know what he is talking about, that she has no son, no child.

  ‘But that night, I heard her crying for so long that I thought she would never stop. I went to her and held her. I told her that she should not be afraid, that she was safe, but she said only one thing.’

  She paused and I saw that her hands were shaking. I reached out and stilled them and she moved her right hand, slipping it over mine and holding it tightly, her eyes closed. And I think, for a moment, I became her son, her child, one of those who never visited and who had left her to die in the cold north as surely as if they had hauled her into the forests of Piscataquis or Aroostock and abandoned her there. Her eyes reopened and she released my hand. Her own hands were still once again when she did so.

  ‘Mrs Schneider,’ I said gently. ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said: “Now he will kill me”.’

  ‘Who did she mean? Billy, the young man who came to her?’ But I think I already knew the real answer.

  Mrs Schneider shook her head. ‘No, the other. The one she was always afraid would find her, and nobody could help her, or save her from him.

  ‘It was the one who came later,’ concluded the old woman. ‘He learned of what had happened, and he came.’

  I waited. Something brushed softly against the window and I watched a snowflake drift down the pane, melting as it went. ‘It was the night before she ran away. It was cold that night. I remember, I had to ask for an extra blanket, it was so cold. When I woke, it was dark, black, with no moon. And I heard a noise, a scraping from outside.

  ‘I climbed from my bed and the floor was so chilly that I – ah! I gasped. I went to the window and drew the curtain a little, but I could see nothing. Then the sound came again, and I looked straight down and . . .’

  She was terrified. I could feel it coming off her in waves, a deep abiding fear that had shaken her to her core.

  ‘There was a man, Mr Parker, and he was climbing up the pipe, hand over hand. His head was down, and turned away from me, so I could not see him. And, anyway, it was so dark that he was only a shadow. But the shadow reached the window of Miss Emily’s room and I could see him pushing at it with one hand, trying to force it up. I heard Miss Emily scream, and I screamed too, and ran into the hallway calling for a nurse. And all the time, I can hear Miss Emily screaming and screaming. But when they came, the man was gone and they could find no trace of him in the grounds.’

  ‘What kind of man was he, Mrs Schneider? Tall? Short? Big? Small?’

  ‘I told you: it was dark. I could not see clearly.’ She shook her head in distress as she tried to remember.

  ‘Could it have been Billy?’

  ‘No.’ She was definite about that. ‘It was the wrong shape. It was not as big as him.’ She lifted her hands in imitati
on of Billy’s large shoulders. ‘When I told the nurse about the man, I think she believed that I was imagining things, that we were two old women frightening each other. But we were not. Mr Parker, I could not see this man clearly, but I could feel him. He was no thief come to steal from old women. He wanted something else. He wanted to hurt Miss Emily, to punish her for something she did long ago. The boy Billy, the boy who called her “Momma”, he started something by coming here. Perhaps, Mr Parker, I started it, by calling this man Willeford. Perhaps it is all my fault.’

  ‘No, Mrs Schneider,’ I said. ‘Whatever happened to cause this started a long time ago.’

  She looked at me then with a kind of tenderness before she reached out and laid a hand softly on my knee to emphasise what she said next. ‘She was afraid, Mr Parker,’ she whispered. ‘She was so afraid that she wanted to die.’

  I left her, alone with her memories and her guilt. Winter, the thief of daylight, caused lights to twinkle in the distance as Martel and I walked to our cars.

  ‘Did you learn anything?’ he asked.

  I didn’t reply immediately. Instead, I looked north, to the forest, to the wilderness. ‘Could a man survive out there?’ I asked.

  Martel’s brow furrowed. ‘Depends on how long he’s out there, what kind of clothing and supplies—’

  ‘That’s not what I mean,’ I interrupted. ‘Could he survive for a long time, for years, maybe?’

  Martel thought for a moment. When he spoke, he didn’t mock the question but answered it seriously, and he rose in my estimation by doing so. ‘I don’t see why not. People have been surviving out there since the country was settled. There are still the remains of farmhouses to prove it. It wouldn’t be an easy existence, and I guess he’d have to go back to civilisation once in a while, but it could be done.’