‘If you’re asking, then you already know.’
‘You trying to take her away from me again?’
I almost felt pity for him. ‘I’m not here to take anyone away from anyone else. If she leaves you, she does so for her own reasons, not because a man from her past bundles her off against her will. You got a problem with your wife, you deal with it. I’m not your marriage counsellor.’
He shifted himself off the desk and his hands went to his sides, forming fists as they did so. ‘Don’t talk smart to me, boy. I’ll . . .’
I rose and moved forwards, so that we were face-to-face. Even if he tried to hit me now, there would be no space for him to give the swing momentum. I spoke softly and distinctly. ‘You won’t do anything. You get in my way here and I’ll take you down. As for Lorna, it’s probably best that we don’t even talk about her, because, like as not, it’ll get ugly and one of us will get hurt. Years ago, that was me taking your kicks on a piss-covered floor while your buddy looked on. But I’ve killed men since then, and I’ll take you down if you cross my path. You got any more questions, chief, or you want to charge me, you know where to find me.’
I left him, collected my gun from the desk, and walked out to the Mustang. I felt raw and filthy, my feet still cold and damp in my shoes. I thought of Stritch, writhing and struggling against the tree, raised up on his toes in a vain, futile effort to survive. And I thought of the strength it had taken to force him onto the stump. Stritch had been a squat, powerful man, with a low centre of gravity. People like that are hard to move. The collar of his raincoat had been torn where his killer had gripped him, using his own body weight against him, building up the momentum necessary to impale him on the tree. We were looking for someone strong and fast, someone who perceived Stritch as a threat to himself.
Or to someone else.
A cold wind rippled the main street of Dark Hollow and sprinkled the car with snow as the motel drew into view. I walked to my room, put my key in the lock and turned it, but the door was already unlocked. I stepped to the right, unholstered my gun, and gently eased the door fully open.
Lorna Jennings sat on my bed, her shoes off and her knees pulled up to her chin, the main illumination in the room coming from the lamp by the bedside. Her hands were clasped around her shins, the fingers intertwined. The television was on, tuned to a talk show, but the volume was down to near zero.
She looked at me with something that was almost love, and nearly hate. The world that she had created for herself there – a cocoon of indifference surrounding buried feelings and the dying heart of a poor marriage – was falling apart around her. She shook her head, her eyes still fixed on me, and seemed on the verge of tears. Then she turned away, towards the window that would soon be shedding bleak winter light into the room.
‘Who was he?’ she said.
‘His name was Stritch.’
Near her bare feet, her thumb and index finger pushed her wedding ring almost to the end of her finger and spun it there, back and forth, before it eventually slipped off, to be held instead between her fingertips. I didn’t think it was a good sign.
‘He was going to kill me, wasn’t he?’ Her voice was matter-of-fact, but something trembled beneath it.
‘Yes.’
‘Why? I’d never seen him before. What had I ever done to him?’ She rested her left cheek on her knee, waiting for my response. There were tears running down her face.
‘He wanted to kill you because he thought you meant something to me. He was looking for revenge, and he saw his chance to take it.’
‘And do I mean something to you?’ Her voice was almost a whisper now.
‘I loved you once,’ I said simply.
‘And now?’
‘I still care enough about you not to let anyone hurt you.’
She shook her head, lifted it from her knees and put the heel of her right hand to her face. She was crying openly now.
‘Did you kill him?’
‘No. Someone else got to him first.’
‘But you would have killed him, wouldn’t you?’
‘Yes.’
Her mouth was curled down in pain and misery, tears falling from her face and gently sprinkling the sheets. I took a tissue from the box on the dresser and handed it to her, then sat beside her on the edge of the bed.
‘Jesus, why did you have to come here?’ she said. Her body was racked by sobs. They came from so deep inside her that they interrupted the flow of her words, like little caesuras of hurt. ‘Sometimes, whole weeks went by when I didn’t think about you. When I heard you got married, I burned inside, but I thought that it might help, that it might cauterise the wound. And it did, Bird, it really did. But now . . .’
I reached out to her and touched her shoulder, but she pulled away. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, don’t.’ But I didn’t listen. I moved fully onto the bed, kneeling beside her now, and drew her to me. She struggled, and slapped me open-handed on my body, my face, my arms. And then her face was against my chest, and the struggling eased. She wrapped her arms around me, her cheek hard against me, and a sound came through her gritted teeth that was almost a howl. I moved my hands across her back, my fingertips brushing the strap of her bra beneath her sweater. It rose up slightly at the end, exposing a moon-sliver of skin above her jeans and the lace decoration of her underwear beneath the blue denim.
Her head moved slightly beneath my chin, her cheek rubbing against the skin on my neck and progressing upwards, never losing contact, until it was against my own cheek. I felt a surge of lust. My hands were shaking, as much a delayed reaction from the pursuit of Stritch as her closeness to me. It would have been so easy to go with the moment, to re-create, however briefly, a memory of my youth.
I kissed her softly on the temple, then drew away.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. I stood and moved to the window. Behind me, I heard her move to the bathroom and the door closing, the hiss of the faucets. For a brief instant I had been a young man again, consumed with desire for something I had no right to have. But that young man was gone, and the one who had taken his place no longer had the same intensity of feeling for Lorna Jennings. Outside, the snow fell like years, blanketing the past with the unblemished whiteness of possibilities untold.
I heard the bathroom door reopen. When I turned around, Lorna was standing naked before me.
I looked at her for a moment before I spoke. ‘I think you left something in the bathroom,’ I said. I made no move towards her.
‘Don’t you want to be with me?’ she asked.
‘I can’t, Lorna. If I did, it would be for the wrong reasons and, frankly, I’m not sure I could deal with the consequences.’
‘No, it’s not that,’ she said. A tear trickled down her cheek. ‘I’ve grown old. I’m not like I was when you knew me first.’
It was true: she was not as I remembered her. There were dimples on her upper thighs and buttocks, and small folds of fat at her belly. Her breasts were less firm and there was soft flesh beginning to hang on her upper arm. The faint trace of a varicose vein wormed its way across the upper part of her left leg. On her face, there were fine wrinkles around the mouth and a triad of lines snaked away from the corner of each eye.
And yet, while the years had transformed her, were changing her even now, they had not made her any less beautiful. Instead, as she grew older, her femininity, the sense of her as a woman, seemed to have been enhanced. The fragile beauty of her youth had withstood the harsh winters of the north and the difficulties of her marriage by adapting, not fading, and that strength had found expression in her face, in her body, lending her looks a dignity and maturity that had been buried before, that had only occasionally displayed itself in her features. As I looked into her eyes and her gaze met mine, I knew that the woman I had loved, for whom I still felt something that was almost love, remained untouched within.
‘You’re still beautiful,’ I said. She watched me carefully, trying to be certain that I was not trying to
blind her with kind lies. When she saw that I was telling the truth, her eyes closed softly as if she had just been touched deep inside but could not tell whether she felt pain or pleasure.
She covered her face with her hands and shook her head. ‘This is kind of embarrassing.’
‘Kind of,’ I agreed.
She nodded and went back into the bathroom. When she emerged, she walked straight to the door. I followed her, reaching it as she touched the handle. She turned before opening it, and rested her hand against my cheek. ‘I don’t know, Bird,’ she said, her forehead resting gently against my shoulder for a moment. ‘I just don’t know.’
Then she slipped out of the room and into the morning light.
I slept for a time, then showered and dressed. I looked at my watch as I strapped it to my wrist, and a pain lanced through my stomach unlike anything I had felt in months. I curled up, dropped to the floor and softly began to cry, my arms wrapped around me, my body still racked by huge slashes of agony. In all that had happened – the hunt for traces of Caleb Kyle, the encounter with Rachel, the death of Stritch – I had lost track of the days.
It was December eleventh. The anniversary was one day away.
It was past three when I ate dry toast and coffee at the diner, and thought of Susan, and the rage I felt at the world for allowing her and my daughter to be taken from me. And I wondered how, with all of this pain and grief coiled inside me, I could ever begin again.
But I wanted Rachel, I knew, and the depth of my need for her surprised me. I had felt it as I sat opposite her in Harvard Square, listening to her voice and watching the movements of her hands. How many times had we been together? Twice? Yet, with her, I had felt a peace that had been denied me for so long.
I wondered too at what I might bring upon her, and upon myself, if the relationship was allowed to develop. I was a man moon-haunted by the ghost of his wife. I had mourned for her, and I still mourned for her. I felt guilt at my feelings for Rachel, at what we had done together. Was it a betrayal of Susan’s memory to want to start over? So many feelings, so many emotions, so many acts of revenge, of attempted recompense, had been concentrated into the last twelve months. I felt drained by them, and tormented by the images that crept unbidden into my dreams, and into my waking moments. I had seen Donald Purdue in the bar. I had seen him as clearly as I had seen Lorna naked before me, as clearly as I had seen Stritch impaled on a tree.
I wanted to start again, but I didn’t know how. All I knew was that I was moving closer and closer to the edge, and that I had to find some way to anchor myself before I fell.
I left the diner then drove down to Greenville. The Mercury was parked at the back of the motel beneath a copse of trees, making it almost invisible from the road. I didn’t think Rand would come after Angel and Louis, not as long as he had me, but it didn’t hurt to take precautions. As I parked, Angel opened the door to room six, moved aside to let me in, then closed the door behind him.
‘Well, look at you,’ he said, a wide grin on his face.
Louis lay on one of the room’s two double beds, reading the latest issue of Time. ‘He right, Bird,’ he said. ‘You the man. Pretty soon, you and Michael Douglas both be in one o’ them sex clinics and we be reading about you in People magazine.’
‘We saw her arriving as we left,’ said Angel. ‘She was in kind of a state. I didn’t see there was anything else I could do but let her in.’ He sat alongside Louis. ‘Now I just know you’re going to tell us that you and the chief sat down and talked this thing out and he said, “Sure, you can sleep with my wife, because she really loves you, not me”. Because, if you didn’t, then, pretty soon, you’re going to be even less welcome there than you are already. And, frankly, you’re currently about as welcome as a dead man’s feet in summertime.’
‘I didn’t sleep with her,’ I said.
‘She come on to you?’
‘You ever hear of sensitivity?’
‘It’s overrated, but I’ll take that as a “yes” and assume that you didn’t respond. Jeez, Bird, you got the self-restraint of a saint.’
‘Let it go, Angel. Please.’
I sat on the edge of the second bed, and put my head in my hands. I breathed deeply and closed my eyes tightly. When I looked up again, Angel was almost beside me. I lifted my hand to let him know that I was OK. I went to the bathroom and soaked my face with cold water before returning to them.
‘As for the chief, I haven’t been run out of town yet,’ I said, picking up the conversation where we had left off. ‘I’m a witness-cum-suspect in the unsolved murder of an unidentified man in the Maine woods. Jennings asked me to stick around, shoot the breeze. He did tell me something else as well: the ME hasn’t officially delivered his report yet, but it’s likely to confirm that Chute was beaten badly before he was killed. From the marks on his wrists, it looked like someone hung him from a tree to do it.’ Added to the death of Stritch, it meant that Dark Hollow was likely to be crawling with media and even more cops by the following morning.
‘Louis made some calls, touched base with a few of his associates,’ said Angel. ‘He found out that Al Z and a contingent of Palermo irregulars flew into Bangor last night. Seems like Tony Celli just ran out of time.’
So they were closing in. There was a reckoning coming. I could feel it. I went to the door and looked out on the quietness of the India Hill Mall, with its gun shop and tourist information office, its deserted parking lot. Louis came over and stood beside me.
‘You called that boy’s name in the bar last night, just before you saw Stritch,’ he said.
I nodded. ‘I saw something, but I don’t even know what it was.’ I opened the door and stepped outside. He didn’t pursue the subject.
‘So what now?’ said Louis. ‘You dressed up like you ready for an Arctic adventure.’
‘I’m still going after the old man to find out how he came to sell Ricky’s boots to Stuckey.’
‘You want us to tag along?’
‘No. I don’t want to spook him any more than I have to, and it’s better if you stay out of Dark Hollow for a while. After I’ve spoken to him, maybe then we can decide how to progress. I can handle this one on my own.’
I was wrong.
Part Three
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray from the straight path and woke to find myself in a dark wood.
Dante, Inferno
Chapter Twenty Seven
As I drove to the house of the old man known as John Barley, the image of Stritch impaled on a tree returned to me. He couldn’t have known about Caleb Kyle, couldn’t have suspected that he was being hunted on two sides. He had reckoned on killing Louis and me, avenging his partner while simultaneously ending the contract on his life, but he had no inkling of Caleb.
It seemed certain to me that Caleb had killed Stritch, although how he had learned of his existence I didn’t know; I guessed that he might have encountered Stritch when both of them were closing in on Billy Purdue. In the end, maybe it came down to the fact that Caleb Kyle was a predator, and predators are attuned not only to the nature of their prey but also to the nature of those who might prey upon them in turn. Caleb hadn’t survived for over three decades without a highly developed ability to sense impending danger. In this case, Stritch had posed a potentially lethal threat to Billy Purdue, and Caleb had sniffed him out. Billy was the key to Caleb Kyle, the only one who had seen him and survived, the only one left who could describe what he looked like. But as I approached the road to John Barley’s shack, I knew that Billy’s description might prove unnecessary. When I stepped from the car, my gun was already in my hand.
It was already dark when I reached the old man’s house. There was a light burning in one of the windows as I ascended the hill which sloped gently upwards to his yard. I came from the west, against the wind, keeping the house between me and the dog in its makeshift automobile kennel. I was almost at the door when a sharp yelp came from the car and a blur moved fast acro
ss the snow as the dog at last caught my scent and tried to intercept me. Immediately, the door of the house swung open and the barrel of a shotgun appeared. I grabbed the gun and yanked the old man through the gap. Beside me, the dog became frenzied, alternately leaping at my face and nipping at the cuffs of my pants. The old man lay on the ground, winded by his fall, his hand still on the gun. I lashed out at the dog and put my gun to the old man’s ear.
‘Ease off the shotgun, or I swear to God I’ll kill you where you he,’ I said. His finger lifted from the trigger guard and his hand moved slowly from the stock of the shotgun. He whistled softly and said: ‘Easy, Jess, easy. Good boy.’ The dog whined a little then moved away a distance, contenting itself with circling us repeatedly and growling as I hauled the old man to his feet. I gestured at a chair on the porch and he sat down heavily, rubbing his left elbow where he had barked it painfully as he landed.
‘What do you want?’ asked John Barley. He didn’t look at me, but kept his gaze on the dog. It moved cautiously over to its master, giving me a low growl as it did so, before sitting down beside him where he could rub it gently behind the ear.
I had my Timberland pack over my shoulder and I threw it at him. He caught it and looked dumbly at me for the first time.
‘Open it,’ I said.
He waited a moment, then unzipped the pack and peered in.
‘You recognise them?’
He shook his head. ‘No, I don’t believe I do.’
I cocked the pistol. The dog’s growling rose an octave.
‘Old man, this is personal. You don’t want to cross me on this thing. I know you sold the boots to Stuckey over in Bangor. He gave you thirty dollars for them. Now you want to tell me how you came by them?’
He shrugged. ‘Found ‘em, I guess.’
I moved forward and the dog rose up, the hairs on its neck high and tight. It bared its teeth at me. I kept the gun on the old man then, slowly, moved it down to his dog.
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