The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  ‘Or they pick the pet they most resemble,’ answered Doug.

  ‘You’ve seen him, then.’

  He nodded. ‘He came out here once, along with the woman. They parked over by the chicken coops and waited for us to come out. As soon as we did, Pudd threw a sack from the car, then backed up and drove away. We never saw them again.’

  ‘Do I want to know what was in the sack?’

  Amy answered. ‘Rabbits.’ She was looking at the floor so I couldn’t see the expression on her face.

  ‘Yours?’

  ‘We used to keep them in a hutch out by the coops. One morning we came out and they were just gone. There was no blood, no fur, nothing to suggest that they’d been taken by a predator. Then, two days later, Pudd came and dumped the sack. When we opened it, it was filled with the remains of the rabbits. Something had bitten them. They were covered in gray-brown lesions, and the flesh had begun to rot. We took one to the local vet, and he told us they were recluse bites. That’s how we discovered the significance of the name Pudd for him.

  ‘He was warning us to stay out of his business. We had been making inquiries about the Fellowship. We stopped after the visit.’

  She raised her face and there was no indication of how she felt, apart from a slight tension around her mouth.

  ‘Is there anything more that you can tell me?’

  ‘Rumors, that’s all,’ said Doug, raising the water bottle to his lips.

  ‘Rumors about a book?’

  The bottle paused, and Amy’s grip tightened on his hand.

  ‘They’re recording names, aren’t they?’ I continued. ‘Is that what Mr. Pudd is – some kind of infernal recording angel, writing down the names of the damned in a big black book?’

  They didn’t reply, and the silence was suddenly broken by the sound of the men filing into the house for their midmorning break. Doug and Amy both stood, then Doug shook my hand once again and left to make arrangements for the meal. Amy guided me away from the dining room and walked me to my car.

  ‘As Doug said, the book is just a rumor,’ she told me, ‘and the truth about the Fellowship still remains largely hidden. Nobody has yet managed to link its public face with its other activities.’

  Amy took a deep breath, steeling herself for what she had to say next.

  ‘There is something else I should tell you,’ she began. ‘You’re not the first to have come here asking about the Fellowship. Some years ago, another man came, from New York. We didn’t know as much about the Fellowship then, and we told him less than we knew, but it still provoked the warning. He moved on, and we never saw or heard of him again . . . until two years ago.’

  The world around me faded into shadow, and the sun disappeared. When I looked up, I saw black shapes in the sky, descending in spirals, the beating of their wings filling the morning air and blocking out the light. Amy’s hand reached out to take mine but all of my attention was focused on the sky, where the dark angels now hovered. Then one of them drew closer and his features, which had previously only been a chiaroscuro of light and shade, grew clear.

  And I knew his face.

  ‘It was him,’ whispered Amy, and the dark angel smiled at me from above, his teeth filed to points, his huge wings feathered with night. A father, a husband, killer of men, women, and children now transformed by his passage into the next world.

  ‘It was the Traveling Man.’

  I sat on the hood of my car until the sickness had passed. I recalled a conversation in New Orleans some months after Susan and Jennifer had died, a voice telling me of its belief that somehow, the worst killers could find one another and sometimes connect, that they were sensitized to the presence of their own kind.

  They sniff each other out.

  He would have found them. His nature, and his background in law enforcement, would have ensured it. If he came hunting for the Fellowship, then he would have tracked them down.

  And he would have let them live, because they were his own kind. I remembered again his obscure biblical references, his interest in the Apocrypha, his belief that he was some kind of fallen angel sent to judge humanity, all of whom he found wanting.

  Yes, he had found them, and they had helped to fan his own flame into being.

  Amy reached out and took both of my hands in her own.

  ‘It was seven or eight years ago,’ she said. ‘It didn’t seem important, until now.’

  I nodded.

  ‘You’re going to continue looking for these people?’

  ‘I have to, especially now.’

  ‘Can I say something to you, something you may not want to hear?’

  Her face was grave. I nodded.

  ‘In all that you have done, in all that you have told me, it seems that you have been intent on helping the dead as much as the living. But our first duty is to the living, Charlie, to ourselves and those around us. The dead don’t need your help.’

  I paused before replying. ‘I’m not sure I believe that, Amy.’

  For the first time, I saw doubt appear in her face. ‘You can’t live in both worlds,’ she said, and her voice was hesitant. ‘You must choose. Do you still feel the deaths of Susan and Jennifer pulling you back?’

  ‘Sometimes, but not just them.’

  And I think that she saw something in my face, or caught something in my tone, and for a brief moment, she was in me, seeing what I saw, hearing what I heard, feeling what I felt. I closed my eyes and felt shapes move around me, voices whispering in my ears, small hands clutching at mine.

  We’ve all been waiting for you.

  A small boy with an exit wound for an eye, a woman in a summer dress that shimmered in the darkness, figures that hovered at the periphery of my vision – all of them, each and every one, told me that it wasn’t true, that somebody had to act for those who could no longer act for themselves, that some measure of justice had to be achieved for the lost and the fallen. For an instant, as she held my hands, Amy Greaves had some inkling of this, some fleeting perception of what waited in the depths of the honeycomb world.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she said.

  And then her hands released mine and I heard her move away and disappear into the house. When I opened my eyes I was alone in the summer sunshine, the smell of rotting pine carrying to me on the wind. Through the trees a blue jay flew, heading north.

  And I followed.

  The Search for Sanctuary

  Extract from the postgraduate thesis of Grace Peltier

  Letter from Elizabeth Jessop to her sister, Lena Myers, dated December 11,1963 (used by kind permission of the estate of Lena Myers)

  Dearest Lena,

  This has been the worst week I can ever recall. The truth about Lyall and me is out and now we are both being shunned. The Preacher has not been seen for two days. He is asking the Lord to guide him in his judgment upon us.

  It was the boy that found us, the Preacher’s son. I think he had been watching us for a long time. We were in the woods together, Lyall and I, and I saw Leonard in the bushes. I think I screamed when I saw him but when we went to find him he was already gone.

  The Preacher was waiting for us at supper. We were refused food and told to go back to our houses while the others ate. When Frank returned that night he beat me and left me to sleep on the floor. Now Lyall and me are kept apart. The girl Muriel watches over him, while Leonard is like my shadow. Yesterday he threw a stone at me and drew blood from my head. He told me that was how the Bible said whores should be punished and that his father would deal with me the same way. The Cornishes saw what he did and Ethan Cornish struck him before he could throw a second stone. The boy pulled a knife on Ethan and cut his arm. The families have all argued for forgiveness for the sake of the community, but Lyall’s wife will not look at me and one of his children spat on me when I passed her.

  Last night there were voices raised in the Preacher’s house. The families were putting their case to the Preacher but he was unmoved. There is bitterness among us n
ow – at me and Lyall, but more at the Preacher and his ways. He has been asked to account for the money he holds in trust for us, but he has refused. I fear that Lyall and I will be forced from the community or that the Preacher will make us all leave and start again in another place. I have asked the Lord to forgive us our trespass against him and have prayed for help but part of me would not be sorry to leave if Lyall was beside me. But I cannot abandon my children and I feel sadness and shame for what I have done to Frank.

  Ethan Cornish told me one more thing. He says that the Preacher’s wife asked him to deal mercifully with us and he has refused to speak with her since. There is talk that he will scatter us to the four winds, where each family will make up for the sins of the community by spreading the word of God to new towns and cities. Tomorrow, the men, the women, and the children are to be divided into separate groups and each group will pray alone for guidance and forgiveness.

  I have asked Ethan Cornish to place this note in the usual place and pray that you receive it in good health.

  I am your sister,

  Elizabeth

  Chapter Eighteen

  When I was fourteen years old, my father took me on my first airplane trip. He got a good deal from a man he knew at American Airlines, a neighbor of ours whom my father had helped out when one of his sons got picked up for possession of some stolen radios. We flew from New York to Denver and from Denver to Billings, Montana, where we hired a car and spent a night in a motel before driving east early the following morning. The sun shone on the hills, burnishing the green and beige with touches of silver before melting into the waters of the Little Bighorn River. We crossed the river at the Crow Agency and drove in silence to the entrance to the Little Bighorn Battlefield. It was Memorial Day and a platform had been erected at the cemetery, before which a small crowd occupied rows of lawn chairs while the few who could not find seats stood amid the small gravestones and listened to the words of the service. Above them, the Stars and Stripes flapped in the morning breeze, but we did not stay to listen. Instead, fragments came to us as we climbed toward the monument, words like ‘youth,’ ‘fallen,’ ‘honor,’ and ‘death’ fading and then growing once again in volume, echoing across the shifting grass as if they were being spoken both in the present and in the distant past.

  This was where Custer’s five cavalry troops, young men mostly, were annihilated by the combined forces of the Lakota and Cheyenne. The battle took place over the space of one hour, but the soldiers probably couldn’t even see the enemy for much of that time; they lay hidden in the grass and picked off the cavalrymen one by one, biding their time.

  I looked out over the hills and thought that the Little Bighorn was a bleak place to die, surrounded by low hills of green and yellow and brown fading to blue and purple in the distance. From any patch of raised ground, you could see for miles. The men who died here would have known without question that no one was coming to rescue them, that these were their final moments on earth. They died terrible, lonely deaths far from home, their bodies subsequently mutilated and left to lie scattered on the battlefield for three days before finally receiving burial in a mass grave atop a small ridge in eastern Montana, their names carved on a granite monument above them.

  In that place, I closed my eyes and imagined that I felt their ghosts crowding around me. I seemed to hear them: the horses neighing, the gunshots, the grass breaking beneath their feet, the cries of pain, of fury, of fear.

  And for an instant I was there with them, and I understood.

  There are places where years have no meaning, where only a hairsbreadth of history separates the present from the past. Standing there on that bleak hillside, a young man in a place where other young men had died, it was possible to feel a connection to that past, a sense that in some place further back on the stream of time these young men were still fighting, and still dying, that they would always be fighting this battle, in this place, over and over again, with ever the same end.

  It was my first glimpse of the honeycomb world, my first inkling that the past never truly dies but is strangely, beautifully alive in the present. There is an interconnectedness to all things, a link between what lies buried and what lives above, a capacity for mutability that allows a good act committed in the present to rectify an imbalance in times gone by. That, in the end, is the nature of justice: not to undo the past but, by acting further down the line of time, to restore some measure of harmony, some possibility of equilibrium, so that lives may continue with their burden eased and the dead may find peace in a world beyond this one.

  Now, as I headed north, I thought again of that day on the battlefield, my father standing silently beside me as the wind tousled our hair, a day of remembrance for the dead. This would be another pilgrimage, another acknowledgment of the debt owed by the living to the dead. Only by standing where the families had once stood, only by placing myself amid the memories of their final moments and listening for the echoes, could I hope to understand.

  This is a honeycomb world. At St. Froid Lake, its interior lay exposed.

  As I drove, I called in a long-standing favor. In New York, a woman’s voice asked me my name, there was a pause, and I was put through to the office of Special Agent in Charge Hal Ross. Ross had recently been promoted and was now one of three SACs in the FBI’s New York field office, operating under an assistant director. Ross and I had crossed swords the first time we met, but in the aftermath of the Traveling Man’s death our relationship had gradually become more congenial. The FBI was now reviewing all cases with which the Traveling Man had been involved as part of its ongoing investigation into his crimes, and a room at Quantico had been devoted to relevant material from law enforcement agencies around the country. The investigation had been given the codename ‘Charon’, after the ferryman in Greek mythology who carried lost souls to Hades, and all references to the Traveling Man carried that name. It was a long process and one that was still far from complete.

  ‘It’s Charlie Parker,’ I said, when Ross came on the line.

  ‘Hey, how you doing? Social call?’

  ‘Have I ever paid you a social call?’

  ‘Not that I can remember, but there’s always a first time.’

  ‘This isn’t it. You remember that favor you promised me?’

  There was a long pause. ‘You sure cut to the chase. Go ahead.’

  ‘It’s Charon. Seven or eight years ago he came up to Maine to investigate an organization called the Fellowship. Can you find out where he went and the names of anyone to whom he might have spoken?’

  ‘Can I ask why?’

  ‘The Fellowship may be connected to a case I’m investigating; the death of a young woman. Any information you can give me about them would help.’

  ‘That’s quite a favor, Parker. We don’t usually hand over records.’

  Impatience and anger crept into my voice and I had to struggle against shouting. ‘I’m not asking for the records, just some idea of where he might have gone. This is important, Hal.’

  He sighed. ‘When do you need it?’

  ‘Soon. As soon as you can.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do. You just used up your ninth life. I hope you realize that.’

  I gave a mental shrug. ‘I wasn’t doing a whole lot with it anyway.’

  I drove through avenues of trees, their branches green with new growth, to this place of failed hopes and violent death, and sunlight dappled my car as I went. I stayed on I-95 all the way to Houlton, then took U.S. 1 north to Presque Isle and from there drove through Ashland, Portage, and Winterville, until at last I came to the edge of the town of Eagle Lake. I drove by a WCSH truck and gave my name to the state trooper who was checking traffic along the road. He waved me through.

  Ellis had called me back with the name of a detective from the state trooper barracks at Houlton. His name was John Brouchard, and I found him waist deep in a muddy hole beneath the big tarp erected to protect the remains, digging with a spade in a steady, unhur
ried rhythm. That was how it worked up here; everybody played his or her part. State police, wardens, sheriff’s deputies, ME’s staff, all of them rolled up their sleeves and got their hands dirty. If nothing else it was overtime, and when you’ve got kids going to college, or alimony payments to meet, then time and a half is always welcome, whatever way it has to be earned.

  I stayed behind the crime scene line and called his name. He waved a hand in acknowledgment and climbed from the hole, unfolding a frame that was at least six-six or six-seven in height. He towered over me, his head blocking out the sun. His nails were black with mud, and beneath his coveralls his shirt was drenched in sweat. Damp earth clung to his work boots, and dirt streaked his forehead and cheeks.

  ‘Ellis Howard tells me you’re assisting them in an investigation,’ he said, after we had shaken hands. ‘You want to tell me why you’re up here if your investigation is centred on Portland?’

  ‘You ask Ellis that?’

  ‘He told me to ask you. He said you had all the answers.’

  ‘He’s being optimistic. Curtis Peltier, the man who was murdered in Portland at the weekend, was related to Elizabeth Jessop. I think her remains were among those found here. Curtis’s daughter was Grace Peltier. CID III is looking into the circumstances of her death. She was doing post-graduate work on the people buried in that hole.’

  Brouchard eyeballed me for a good ten seconds, then led me to the mobile crime scene unit, where I was allowed to view the video tour of the crime scene on a portable TV borrowed for the duration of the field recovery. He seemed grateful for the excuse to rest, and poured us both coffee while I sat and watched the tape: mud, bones, and trees; glimpses of damaged skulls and scattered fingers; dark water; a rib cage shattered and splintered by the impact of a shotgun blast; a child’s skeleton, curled in foetuslike upon itself.

  When the tape had concluded I followed him across the road to the edge of the grave.