The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  I tried to concentrate on my workout but found myself distracted by the events of the past days. Thoughts of Lutz and Voisine and the Beckers flashed through my mind, and I was conscious of the Smith & Wesson, in its Milt Sparks Summer Special holster, which now lay in my locker. I was also acutely aware that Al Z was taking an interest in my affairs, which, on the ‘Good Things That Can Happen to a Person’ scale, registered somewhere between contracting leprosy and having the IRS move into your house.

  Al Z had arrived in Boston in the early nineties, following some fairly successful FBI moves against the New England mob involving video and tape surveillance and a small army of informants. While Action Jackson Salemme and Baby Shanks Manocchio (of whom it was once said that if there were any flies on him, they were paying rent) ostensibly jostled for control of the outfit, each dogged by surveillance and whispered rumors that one or both of them could be informing for the feds, Al Z tried to restore stability behind the scenes, dispensing advice and impartial discipline in roughly equal measures. His formal position in the hierarchy was kind of nebulous, but according to those with more than a passing interest in organized crime, Al Z was the head of the New England operation in everything but name. Our paths had crossed once before, with violent repercussions; since then I’d been very careful where I walked.

  After I left the gym I headed up Congress to the library of the Maine Historical Society, where I spent an hour going through whatever they had on Faulkner and the Aroostook Baptists. The file was close at hand and still warm from the latest round of media photocopying, but it contained little more than sketchy details and yellowed newspaper clippings. The only article of any note came from an edition of Down East magazine, published in 1997. The author was credited only as ‘G.P.’ A call to Down East’s office confirmed that the contributor had been Grace Peltier.

  In what was probably a dry run for her thesis, Grace had gathered together details of the four families and a brief history of Faulkner’s life and beliefs, most of it accumulated from unpublished sermons he had given and the recollections of those who had heard him preach.

  To begin with, Faulkner was not a real minister; instead, he appeared to have been “ordained” by his flock. He was not a premillenarianist, one of those who believe that chaos on earth is an indication of the imminence of the Second Coming and that the faithful should therefore do nothing to stand in its way. Throughout his preaching, Faulkner had shown an acute awareness of earthly affairs and encouraged his followers to stand against divorce, homosexuality, liberalism, and just about anything else the sixties were likely to throw up. In this he showed the influence of the early Protestant thinker John Knox, but Faulkner was also a student of Calvin. He was a believer in predestination: God had chosen those who were saved before they were even born, and it was therefore impossible for people to save themselves, no matter what good deeds they did on earth. Faith alone led to salvation; in this case, faith in the Reverend Faulkner, which was seen to be a natural consequence of faith in God. If you followed Faulkner, you were one of the saved. If you rejected him, then you were one of the damned. It all seemed pretty straightforward.

  He adhered to the Augustinian view, popular among some fundamentalists, that God intended his followers to build a ‘City on the Hill’, a community dedicated to his worship and greater glory. Eagle Lake became the site of his great project: a town of only six hundred souls that had never recovered from the exodus provoked by World War II, when those who came back from the war opted to remain in the cities instead of returning to the small communities in the north; a place with one or two decent roads and no electricity in most of the houses that didn’t come from private generators; a community where the meat store and dry goods store had closed in the fifties, where the town’s main employer, the Eagle Lake Lumber Mill, which manufactured hardwood bowling pins, had gone bankrupt in 1956 after only five years in operation, only to stagger on in various guises until finally closing forever in 1977; a hamlet of mostly French Catholics, who regarded the newcomers as an oddity and left them to their own devices, grateful for whatever small sums they spent on seeds and supplies. This was the place Faulkner chose, and this was the place in which his people died.

  And if it seems strange that twenty people could just arrive somewhere in 1963 and be gone less than a year later, never to be seen again, then it was worth remembering that this is a big state, with 1 million or so people scattered over its 33,000 square miles, most of it forest. Whole New England towns had been swallowed up by the woods, simply ceasing to exist. They were once places with streets and houses, mills and schools, where men and women worked, worshiped, and were buried, but they were now gone, and the only signs that they had ever existed were the remnants of old stone walls and unusual patterns of tree growth along the lines of what were formerly roads. Communities came and went in this part of the world; it was the way of things.

  There was a strangeness to this state that was sometimes forgotten, a product of its history and the wars fought upon the land, of the woods and their elemental nature, of the sea and the strangers it had washed up on its shores. There were cemeteries with only one date on each headstone, in communities founded by Gypsies, who had never officially been born yet died as surely as the rest. There were small graves set apart from family plots, where illegitimate children lay, the manner of their passing never questioned too deeply. And there were empty graves, the stones above them monuments to the lost, to those who had drowned at sea or gone astray in the woods and whose bones now lay beneath sand and water, under earth and snow, in places that would never be marked by men.

  My fingers smelled musty from turning the yellowed clippings, and I found myself rubbing my hands on my trousers in an attempt to rid myself of the odor. Faulkner’s world didn’t sound like any that I wanted to live in, I thought as I returned the file to the librarian. It was a world in which salvation was taken out of our hands, in which there was no possibility of atonement; a world peopled by the ranks of the damned, from whom the handful to be saved stood aloof. And if they were damned, then they didn’t matter to anyone; whatever happened to them, however awful, was no more or less than they deserved.

  As I headed back to my house, a UPS truck shadowed me from the highway and pulled up behind me as I entered the drive. The deliveryman handed me a special delivery parcel from the lawyer Arthur Franklin, while casting a wary glance at the blackened mailbox.

  ‘You got a grudge against the mailman?’ he asked.

  ‘Junk mail,’ I explained.

  He nodded without looking at me as I signed for the package. ‘It’s a bitch,’ he agreed, before hurrying into his truck and driving quickly onto the road.

  Arthur Franklin’s package contained a videotape. I went back to the house and put the tape in my VCR. After a few seconds some cheesy easy-listening music began to play and the words Crushem Productions presents appeared on the screen, followed by the title, A Bug’s Death, and a director’s credit for one Rarvey Hagle. Let the Orange County prosecutor’s office chew on that little conundrum for a while.

  For the next thirty minutes I watched as women in various stages of undress squashed an assortment of spiders, roaches, mantids and small rodents beneath their high-heeled shoes. In most cases, the bugs and mice seemed to have been glued or stapled to a board and they struggled a lot before they died. I fast-forwarded through the rest, then ejected the tape and considered burning it. Instead I decided to give it right back to Arthur Franklin when I met him, preferably by jamming it into his mouth, but I still couldn’t understand why Al Z had put Franklin and his client in touch with me in the first place, unless he thought my sex life might be getting a little staid.

  I was still wondering while I made a pot of coffee, poured a cup, and took it outside to drink at the tree stump that my grandfather, years before, had converted into a table by adding a cross section of an oak to it. I had an hour or so to kill before I was due to meet with Franklin and I found that sitting at the ta
ble, where my grandfather and I used to sit together, sometimes helped me to relax and think. The Portland Press Herald and the New York Times lay beside me, the pages gently rustling in the breeze.

  My grandfather’s hands had been steady when he made this rude table, planing the oak until it was perfectly flat, then adding a coat of wood protector to it so that it shined in the sun. Later, those hands were not so still and he had trouble writing. His memory began to fail him. A sheriffs deputy, the son of one of his old comrades on the force, brought him back to the house one evening after he found him wandering down by the Black Point cemetery on Old County Road, searching fruitlessly for the grave of his wife, so I hired a nurse for him.

  He was still strong in body; each morning he would do push-ups and bench presses. Sometimes he would do laps around the yard, running gently but consistently until the back of his T-shirt was soaked in sweat. He would be a little more lucid for a time after that, the nurse would tell us, before his brain clouded once again and the cells continued to blink out of existence like the lights of a great city as the long night draws on. More than my own father and mother, that old man had guided me and tried to shape me into a good man. I wondered if he would have been disappointed at the man I had become.

  My thoughts were disturbed by the sound of a car pulling into my drive. Seconds later a black Cirrus drew up at the edge of the grass. There were two people inside, a man driving and a woman sitting in the passenger seat. The man killed the engine and stepped from the car, but the woman remained seated. His back was to the sun so he was almost a silhouette at first, thin and dark like a sheathed blade. The Smith & Wesson lay beneath the arts section of the Times, its butt visible only to me. I watched him carefully as he approached, my hand resting casually inches from the gun. The approaching stranger made me uneasy. Maybe it was his manner, his apparent familiarity with my property; or it could have been the woman, who stared at me through the windshield, straggly gray-brown hair hanging to her shoulders.

  Or perhaps it was because I recalled this man eating an ice cream on a cool morning, his lips sucking busily away like a spider draining a fly, watching me as I drove down Portland Street.

  He stopped ten feet from me, the fingers of his right hand unwrapping something held in the palm of his left, until two cubes of sugar were revealed. He popped them into his mouth and began to suck, then folded the wrapper carefully and placed it in the pocket of his jacket. He wore brown polyester trousers held up with a cheap leather belt, a once-bright yellow shirt that had now faded to the color of a jaundice victim’s face, a vile brown-and-yellow tie, and a brown check polyester jacket. A brown hat shaded his face, and now, as he paused, he removed it and held it loosely in his left hand, patting it against his thigh in a slow, deliberate rhythm.

  He was of medium height, five-ten or so, and almost emaciated, his clothes hanging loosely on his body. He walked slowly and carefully, as if he were so fragile that a misstep might cause his leg to snap. His hair was wiry, a combination of red and gray through which patches of pink skin showed. His eyebrows were also red, as were the lashes. Dark brown eyes that were far too small for his face peered out from beneath strange hoods of flesh, as if the skin had been pulled down from his forehead and up from his cheeks, then stitched in place by the corners of his eyes. Blue-red bags swelled up from below, so that his vision appeared to be entirely dependent on two narrow triangles of white and brown by the bridge of his nose. That nose was long and elongated at the tip, hanging almost to his upper lip. His mouth was very thin and his chin was slightly cleft. He was probably in his fifties, I thought, but I sensed that his apparent fragility was deceptive. His eyes were not those of a man who fears for his safety with every footstep.

  ‘Warm today,’ he said, the hat still slapping softly against his leg.

  I nodded but didn’t reply.

  He inclined his head back in the direction of the road. ‘I see you had an accident with your mailbox.’ He smiled, revealing uneven yellow teeth with a pronounced gap at the front, and I knew immediately that he had been responsible for the recluses.

  ‘Spiders,’ I replied. ‘I burnt them all.’

  The smile died. ‘That’s unfortunate.’

  ‘You seem to be taking it kind of personally.’

  His mouth worked at the sugar lumps while his eyes locked on mine. ‘I like spiders,’ he said.

  ‘They certainly burn well,’ I agreed. ‘Now, can I help you?’

  ‘I do hope so,’ he said. ‘Or perhaps I can help you. Yes sir, I feel certain that I can help you.’

  His voice had an odd nasal quality that flattened his vowels and made his accent difficult to place, a task complicated further by the formal locutions of his speech. The smile gradually reappeared but those hooded eyes failed to alter in response. Instead, they maintained a watchful, vaguely malevolent quality, as if something else had taken over the body of this odd, dated-looking man, hollowing out his form and controlling his progress by looking through the empty sockets in his head.

  ‘I don’t think I need your help.’

  He waggled a finger at me in disagreement, and for the first time, I got a good look at his hands. They were thin, absurdly so, and there was something insectlike about them as they emerged from the sleeves of his jacket. The middle finger seemed to be about five inches long and, in common with the rest of his digits, tapered to a point at the tip: not only the nail but the entire finger appeared to grow narrower and narrower. The fingernails themselves looked to be a quarter of an inch at their widest point and were stained a kind of yellow-black. There were patches of short red hair below each of the knuckles, gradually expanding to cover most of the back of his hand and disappearing in tufts beneath his sleeve. They gave him a strange, feral quality.

  ‘Now, now, sir,’ he said, his fingers waving the way an arachnid will sometimes raise its legs when it finds itself cornered. Their movements appeared to be unrelated to his words or to the language of the rest of the body. They were like separate creatures that had somehow managed to attach themselves to a host, constantly probing gently at the world around them.

  ‘Don’t be hasty,’ he continued. ‘I admire independence as much as the next man, indeed I do. It is a laudable attribute in a man, sir, a laudable attribute, make no mistake about that, but it can lead him to do reckless things. Worse, sir, worse; it can cause him to interfere with the rights of those around him, sometimes without him even knowing.’ His voice assumed a tone of awe at the ways of such men, and he shook his head slowly. ‘There you are, living your own life as you see fit, and you are causing pain and embarrassment to others by doing so. It’s a sin, sir, that’s what it is, a sin.’

  He folded his slim fingers across his stomach, still smiling, and waited for a response.

  ‘Who are you?’ I said. There was an element of awe in my own voice as well. He was both comical yet sinister, like a bad clown.

  ‘Permit me to introduce myself,’ he said. ‘My name is Pudd, Mr. Pudd. At your service, sir.’ He extended his right hand in greeting, but I didn’t reach out to take it. I couldn’t. It revolted me. A friend of my grandfather’s had once kept a wolf spider in a glass case and one day, on a dare from the man’s son, I had touched its leg. The spider had shot away almost instantly, but not before I had felt the hairy, jointed nature of the thing. It was not an experience I wanted to repeat.

  The hand hung in midair for a moment, and once again the smile faltered briefly. Then Mr. Pudd took back his hand, and his fingers scuttled inside his jacket. I eased my right hand a few inches to the left and took hold of the gun beneath the newspapers, my thumb flicking the safety off. Mr. Pudd didn’t appear to notice the movement. At least, he gave no indication that he had, but I felt something change in his attitude toward me, like a black widow that believes it has cornered a beetle only to find itself staring into the eyes of a wasp. His jacket tightened around him as his hand searched and I saw the telltale bulge of his gun.

  ‘I think I’
d prefer it if you left,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Sadly, Mr. Parker, personal preference has nothing to do with this.’ The smile faded, and Mr. Pudd’s mouth assumed an expression of exaggerated sorrow. ‘If the truth be known, sir, I would prefer not to be here at all. This is an unpleasant duty, but one that I am afraid you have brought upon yourself by your inconsiderate actions.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘I am talking about your harassment of Mr. Carter Paragon, your disregard for the work of the organization that he represents, and your insistence on attempting to connect the unfortunate death of a young woman with that same organization. The Fellowship is a religious body, Mr. Parker, with the rights accruing to such bodies under our fine Constitution. You are aware of the Constitution, are you not, Mr. Parker? You have heard of the First Amendment, have you not?’

  Throughout this speech Mr. Pudd’s tone did not vary from one of quiet reasonableness. He spoke to me the way a parent speaks to an errant child. I made a note to add ‘patronizing’ to ‘creepy’ and ‘insectlike’ where Mr. Pudd was concerned.

  ‘That, and the Second Amendment,’ I said. ‘It seems like you’ve heard of that one too.’ I removed my hand from beneath the newspaper and pointed the gun at him. I was glad to see that my hand didn’t shake.

  ‘This is most unfortunate, Mr. Parker,’ he said in an aggrieved tone.

  ‘I agree, Mr. Pudd. I don’t like people coming onto my property carrying guns, or watching me while I conduct my business. It’s bad manners, and it makes me nervous.’

  Mr. Pudd swallowed, took his hand from inside his jacket, and moved both hands away from his body. ‘I meant you no offense, sir, but the servants of the Lord are afflicted with enemies on all sides.’