The Charlie Parker Collection 1

by John Connolly

  She picked up her bag and stood expectantly.

  ‘We’re going to put you somewhere safe. You can call your parents and let them know you’re okay first.’

  She nodded. I went outside and called the Colony on the cell phone. Amy answered.

  ‘It’s Charlie Parker,’ I said. ‘I need your help. I have a woman here. I need to stow her out of sight.’

  There was silence on the other end of the phone. ‘What kind of trouble are we talking about?’

  But I think she knew.

  ‘I’m close to him, Amy. I can bring this to an end.’

  When she answered, I could hear the resignation in her voice. ‘She can stay in the house.’ Women, with the obvious exception of Amy herself, were not usually admitted to the Colony, but there were spare bedrooms in the main house that were sometimes used under exceptional circumstances.

  ‘Thank you. There will be a man with her. He’ll be armed.’

  ‘You know how we feel about guns here, Charlie.’

  ‘I know, but this is Pudd we’re dealing with. I want you to let my friend stay with Marcy until this is over. It’ll be a day or two at most.’

  I asked her to take Rachel in as well. She agreed, and I hung up. Marcy made a short call to her mother and then we drove away from the house and into Boothbay. There, we parted. Louis and Rachel would drive south to Scarborough, where Angel would take Marcy Becker and a reluctant Rachel to the Colony. Louis would rejoin me once Marcy and Rachel were in Angel’s care. I kept the book, concealing it carefully beneath the passenger seat of the Mustang.

  I drove north as far as Bangor, where I picked up a copy of Thompson’s Maine Lighthouses at Betts Bookstore on Main Street. There were seven lighthouses in the Bold Coast area around Machias, the town in which Marcy Becker had been left while Grace went about her business: Whitlock’s Mill in Calais; East Quoddy at Campobello Island; and farther south, Mulholland Light, West Quoddy, Lubec Channel, Little River, and Machias Seal Island. Machias Seal was too far out to sea to be relevant, which left six.

  I called Ross in New York, hoping to light a fire under him, but got only his secretary. I was twenty miles outside Bangor when he called me back.

  ‘I’ve seen Charon’s reports from Maine,’ he began. ‘This part of the investigation was minor stuff, pure legwork. A gay rights activist was killed in the Village in nineteen ninety-one, shot to death in the toilet of a bar on Bleecker; MO matched a similar shooting in Miami. The perp was apprehended but his phone records showed that he made seven calls to the Fellowship in the days preceding the killing. A woman called Torrance told Charon that the guy was a freak and she reported the calls to the local police. A detective named Lutz confirmed that.’

  So, if the killer had been working for the Fellowship, they had a cover story. They had reported him to the police before the murder, and Lutz, already their pet policeman, had confirmed it.

  ‘What happened to the killer?’

  ‘His name was Lusky, Barrett Lusky. He made bail and was found dead two days later in a Dumpster in Queens. Gunshot wound to the head.

  ‘Now, according to Charon’s report, he went no farther north than Waterville during his enquiries. But there’s an anomaly; his expenses show a claim for gas purchased in a place called Lubec, about a hundred and fifty miles farther north of Waterville. It’s on the coast.’

  ‘Lubec,’ I echoed. It made sense.

  ‘What’s in Lubec?’ asked Ross.

  ‘Lighthouses,’ I answered. ‘And a bridge.’

  Lubec had three lighthouses. It was also the easternmost town in the United States. From there, the FDR Memorial Bridge stretched across the water to Canada. Lubec was a good choice of location if you needed an escape route left permanently open, because there was a whole new country only minutes away by car or boat. They were in Lubec. I was certain of it, and the Traveling Man had found them there. The gas receipt was careless, but only in the context of what came later and the murders he himself committed, using a strange justification based on human frailty and inconsequence that mirrored some of Faulkner’s own beliefs.

  But I had underestimated Faulkner, and I had underestimated Pudd. While I closed in on them, they had already taken the most vulnerable one among us, the only one left alone.

  They took Angel.

  Chapter Twenty-six

  There was blood on the porch, and blood on the front door. In the kitchen, cracks radiated through the plaster from a bullet hole in the wall. There was more blood in the hallway, a curving snake trail like the pattern of a sidewinder. The kitchen door had been almost torn off its hinges, and the kitchen window had been shattered by more gunfire.

  There were no bodies inside.

  Taking Angel was partly a precaution in case we found Marcy Becker first, but also an act of revenge against me personally. They had probably come to finish us off, and when they found only Angel, they took him instead. I thought of Mr. Pudd and the mute with their hands on him, his blood on their clothes and skin as they dragged him from the house. We should never have left him alone. None of us should ever have been alone.

  They would never let him live, of course. In the end they would never let any of us live. If they escaped and disappeared from our sight I knew that one day they would reemerge and find us. We could hunt them, but the honeycomb world is deep and intricate and rich with darkness. There are too many places to hide. And so there would be weeks, months, perhaps years of pain and fear, waking from uneasy sleep to each new dawn with the thought that this, at last, might be the day on which they came.

  Because, finally, we would want them to come, so that the waiting might be brought to an end.

  I could hear the sound of a car engine in the background as Rachel told me all that she had seen. She was driving Marcy Becker to the Colony in her own car; now that they had Angel, she was safe for a time. Louis was on his way north and would call me within minutes.

  ‘He’s not dead,’ said Rachel evenly.

  ‘I know,’ I replied. ‘If he was dead they’d have left him for us to find.’

  I wondered how quickly Lutz had talked and if the Golem had reached them yet. If he had, all of this might be immaterial.

  ‘Is Marcy okay?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s asleep on the seat beside me. I don’t think she’s slept much since Grace died. She wanted to know why you were willing to risk your life for this: Angel, Louis, me, but you especially. She said it wasn’t your fight.’

  ‘What did you tell her?’

  ‘It was Louis who told her. He said that everything was your fight. I think he was smiling. It’s kind of hard to tell with him.’

  ‘I know where they are, Rachel. They’re in Lubec.’

  Her voice had tightened a notch when she spoke again. ‘Then you take care.’

  ‘I always take care,’ I replied.

  ‘No, you don’t.’

  ‘OK, you’re right, but I mean it this time.’

  I was just beyond Bangor. Lubec was about another 120 miles away along U.S. 1. I could do it in less than two hours, assuming no eagle-eyed lawman decided to haul me over for speeding. I put my foot on the gas and felt the Mustang surge forward.

  Louis called when I was passing Ellsworth Falls, heading down 1A to the coast.

  ‘I’m in Waterville,’ he said.

  ‘I think they’re in Lubec,’ I replied. ‘It’s on the northern coast, close to New Brunswick. You’ve a ways to go yet.’

  ‘They call you?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Wait for me at the town limits,’ he replied. His tone was neutral. He could have been advising me not to forget to pick up milk.

  At Milbridge, maybe eighty miles from Lubec, the cell phone rang for the third time. This time I noticed that the ID of the caller was concealed as I pressed the answer button.

  ‘Mr. Parker,’ said Pudd’s voice.

  ‘Is he alive?’

  ‘Barely. I’d say hopes for his recovery are fading fast. He se
riously injured my associate.’

  ‘Good for him, Leonard.’

  ‘I couldn’t let it go unpunished. He bled quite a lot. In fact, he’s still bleeding quite a lot.’ He snickered unpleasantly. ‘So you’ve worked out our little family tree. It’s not pretty, is it?’

  ‘Not particularly.’

  ‘You have the book?’

  He knew that Lutz had failed. I wondered if he knew why and if the shadow of the Golem was already almost upon him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Augusta,’ I said.

  I could have cried with relief when he seemed to believe me.

  ‘There’s a private road off Route nine, where it crosses the Machias River,’ said Pudd. ‘It leads to Lake Machias. Be at the lakeshore in ninety minutes, alone and with the book. I’ll give you whatever is left of your friend. If you’re late, or if I smell police, I’ll skewer him from his anus to his mouth like a spit pig.’ He hung up.

  I wondered how Pudd planned to kill me when I reached the lake. He couldn’t let me live, not after all that had taken place. And ninety minutes wasn’t enough time to reach Machias from Augusta, not on these roads. He had no intention of bringing Angel there alive.

  I called Louis. It was a test of trust, and I wasn’t certain how he would respond. I was closest to Lubec; there was no way that Louis could get there before Pudd’s deadline ran out. If I was wrong about Lubec, then somebody would have to be at the rendezvous point to meet him. It would have to be Louis.

  The pause before he agreed was barely detectable.

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Three wooden lighthouses decorated the sign at the outskirts of the town of Lubec: the white-and-red Mulholland Light across the Lubec Channel in New Brunswick; the white Lubec Channel Light, a sparkplug-style cast iron structure out on the Lubec Channel; and the red-and-white striped West Quoddy Light at Quoddy Head State Park. They were symbols of stability and certainty, a promise of safety and salvation now potentially corrupted by the stain of the Faulkners’ presence.

  After a brief stop at the edge of the town, I drove on, past the boarded-up frame of the old Hillside Restaurant and the white American Legion building, until I came to Lubec itself. It was a town filled with churches; the White Ridge Baptists, the First Assembly of God, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Congregational Christians, and the Christian Temple Disciples had all converged on this place, burying their dead in the nearby town cemetery or erecting memorials to those lost at sea. Grace Peltier had been right, I thought; I had only glanced at the thesis notes Marcy had given me, but I had noted Grace’s use of the term ‘frontier’ to describe the state of Maine. Here, at the easternmost point of the state and the country, surrounded by churches and the bones of the dead, it was possible to feel that this was the very end of things.

  On the waterfront, seabirds sat on the dilapidated pier, its walkway sealed off with Private Property notices. There was a stone breakwater to the left, and to the right, a congregation of buildings, among them the old McMurdy’s Smokehouse, which was in the process of being restored. Across the water, the Mulholland Light was visible, the FDR Memorial Bridge extending toward it across the water of the Lubec Narrows.

  It was already growing dark as I drove up Pleasant Street, the waterfront on my left, to a dirt lot beside the town’s wastewater treatment facility. From there, a small trail led down to the shore. I followed it, stepping over seaweed and rocks, discarded beer cans and cigarette packs, until I stood on the beach. It was mainly stones and marram grass, with some gray sand exposed. Beyond, the Lubec Channel Light ripped through the encroaching darkness.

  Maybe half a mile to my right, a stone causeway reached into the sea. At the end was a small island covered in trees, their branches like the black spires of churches set against the lighter tones of the evening sky. A dull green light shone between the trees in places, and I could see the brighter white lights of an outbuilding close to the northern side of the island.

  There were three lighthouses on Lubec’s sign, for only three lighthouses were still in existence. But there had once been another: a stone structure built on the northern shore of the Quoddy Narrows by a local Baptist minister as a symbol of God’s light as well as a warning to mariners. It was a flawed, imperfect structure, and had collapsed during a heavy gale in 1804, killing the minister’s son who was acting as lighthouse keeper. Two years later, concerned citizens nominated West Quoddy Head, farther down the coast, as a more suitable position, and in 1806 Thomas Jefferson had ordered the construction of a rubblestone lighthouse on the spot. The Northern Light was largely forgotten, and now the island on which it lay was in private ownership.

  All of this I learned from a woman in McFadden’s variety store and gas station on the way into town. She said the people on the island kept themselves pretty much to themselves, but they were believed to be religious folk. There was an old man who took ill sometimes and had to be treated by the doctor in town, and two younger people, a man and a woman. The younger man shopped in the store sometimes, but always paid with cash.

  She knew his name, though.

  He was called Monker.

  Ed Monker.

  It had begun to rain, a harbinger of the coastal storm that was set to sweep northern Maine that night, and heavy drops hammered on me as I stood watching the causeway. I got back in the car and took the road to Quoddy Head Park until I saw a small, unmarked private drive heading down to the coast. I killed my lights and followed the trail until it petered out among thick trees. I left the car and walked through the grass, using the trees for cover, until the trail ended. Ahead of me was a barred gate with high fencing on either side and a camera mounted on the gatepost. The fence was electrified. Beyond it was a small locked shack in the middle of a copse of pines. Through the branches, the Lubec Channel Light was visible. I could guess at what was in the shack: an old iron bath with a toilet beside it and the corpses of spiders decaying in the drain.

  I took my flashlight from the glove compartment and, shielding the light with my hand, shadowed the fence. I spotted two motion sensors within fifty feet, the grass cropped low around them. I figured there were probably more among the trees themselves. As the rain soaked my hair and skin, I stayed with the fence until I found myself at the top of a steep incline leading back down to the shore. The tide was rolling in and the base of the causeway was now covered in water. The only way to get to the island without getting drenched, or maybe even washed away, was through those gates and along the causeway, but to take that route would be to alert those on the island to my approach.

  Grace Peltier must have stood here, weeks earlier, before she scaled the gates and walked onto the causeway. She must have waited until they were gone, until she was certain that the island was unoccupied and that nobody would be returning for some time, and then crossed over. Except she had activated the sensors, alerting them to an intruder, and the system would have informed Pudd or his sister, automatically calling a pager or his cell phone. When they returned, closing off the causeway, Grace had taken to the sea. That was why her clothes had been soaked with seawater. She was a strong swimmer. She knew she could make it. But they had seen her face on the camera’s tapes, maybe even spotted her car. Lutz and Voisine had been alerted, and the trap was closed on Grace.

  I looked out on the dark waves, glowing whitely as they broke, and decided to take my chances with the sea. I unloaded the spare .38 at my ankle, ziplocked the bullets, then checked the safety on the Smith & Wesson beneath my arm. Something tightened in my belly, and the old feeling came over me again. The sea before me was a dark pool, the hidden place on which I had drawn time and time before, and I was about to plunge into it once more.

  I waded through the water, teeth chattering as I approached the causeway. Waves rocked me and once or twice I was almost pushed back to the shore by their force. The stones and rocks that made up the causeway were slick and spotted with green algae, and the tide was alrea
dy splashing almost to the level of my waist. I tried to wedge my boots into the cracks and hollows, but the rocks had been bound with cement, and after only two awkward sideways movements, my feet slid from under me and I lost my grip. I slid quickly back into the sea, the water drenching me to my chin. As I recovered from the shock, a line of white emerged to my left and I barely had time to take a breath before a huge wave lifted me off my feet and pushed me back at least five yards, salt water filling my mouth as the rain fell and seaweed twisted around me.

  When the wave had passed, I began to wade again along the edge of the rocks, trying to find a point at which I could pull myself back onto the road. It took me about ten minutes and two more dousings to find a hollow where one of the stones had fallen from the concrete. Awkwardly, I placed a wet boot into the alcove, then barked my knee painfully as it slipped out. Digging my fingers around one of the highest stones, I tried again and managed to haul myself onto the road. I lay there for a moment, catching my breath and shivering. My cell phone, I discovered, was now at the bottom of the sea. I stood, let the water run out of the barrel of the Smith & Wesson, reloaded the .38, and continued on down the causeway at a crouch until I reached the island.

  Thick green firs grew on either side of the road as it made its way to the remains of the lighthouse, where the road became part of a gravel courtyard that touched on the entrance to each of the island’s structures. There should have been nothing more than a pile of old stones where the original lighthouse had once stood, but instead I found an edifice about thirty feet high, with an open gallery at the top surrounded by a chain-link fence, offering a clear view of the causeway and the coast itself. It was a lighthouse without a light, except for a faint illumination in one of the windows at the highest enclosed level.

  To the right of the new lighthouse stood a long wooden single-story building with four square windows covered with wire frame, two on either side of the heavy door. A greenish glow emanated from it, as if the light inside was struggling to penetrate water or the leaves of plants. In front of the lighthouse, blocking my view of its entrance, was what I took to be a garage. Farther back, almost at the eastern edge of the island, was a second similar structure, possibly a boathouse. I leaned against the back of the garage and listened, but I could hear nothing except the steady falling of the rain. Staying on the grass and using the building as a shield, I began to make my way toward the lighthouse.