The Wolf in Winter

by Connolly, John

  Which was where things got really interesting: Prosperous’s church, which was stone-built and barely large enough to hold more than twenty people, had been transported to Maine in its entirety from the county of Northumberland, in England, at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Each stone of the church had been carefully marked and its position in the structure recorded, then all were carried as ­ballast on the ships that brought the original congregation to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1703. From there, these pilgrims journeyed north to Maine and, over a period of decades, eventually founded the town of Prosperous and rebuilt their church, which had been placed in storage for the duration.

  The reason they left England, and took their church building with them, came down to religious persecution. The Congregation, as it became known, was an offshoot of the Family of Love, or the Familists, a religious sect that emerged in sixteenth-century Europe. The Family of Love was secretive, and reputedly hostile to outsiders to the point of homicide, although that may just have been anti-Familist propaganda. Marriage and remarriage were kept within the sect, as was the precise nature of its followers’ beliefs. As far as I could make out, the Familists believed that hell and heaven existed on earth, and that there was a time preceding Adam and Eve. In the seventeenth century, the majority of Familists became part of the Quaker movement, with the exception of a small group of Northumbrian members who rejected a formal rapport with the Quakers or anyone else, and continued to worship in their own way, despite efforts by King Charles II to crack down on nonconformist churches in England. All officials in towns were required to be members of the Church of England, all clergy had to use the Book of Common Prayer, and unauthorized religious gatherings of more than five people were forbidden unless all were members of the same family. The Familists were among those persecuted in this way.

  But the sect proved hard to suppress. The Familists learned to hide themselves by joining established churches while continuing to conduct their own services in secret, and they maintained that charade during the worst years of the crackdown on nonconformism. Also, as intermarriage between families was common, they could easily circumvent the rule about religious gatherings.

  In 1689, Parliament passed the Toleration Act, which gave nonconformists the right to their own teachers, preachers, and places of worship, but it seemed that some Familists had already made the decision to abandon the shores of England entirely. They may simply have grown weary of hiding, and had lost faith in their government. The only hint of a deeper discontent lay in the footnotes of an essay that I found titled “The Flight West: Nonconformist Churches and the Goodness of God in Early New England Settlements,” in which the author suggested that the Familists who formed the Congregation had been forced out of England because they were so nonconformist as to be almost pagan.

  This corresponded to a couple of paragraphs in Jude’s book on church architecture, which stated that the Congregation’s church was notable for its carved figurines, including numerous “foliate heads,” part of a tradition of carving ancient fertility symbols and nature spirits on Christian buildings. Such decorations were routinely tolerated, even encouraged, on older houses of worship. They were a kind of tacit ­recognition by the early church fathers of the link between the people and the land in agrarian communities. In the case of the building that eventually found its way to Maine, though, the general consensus among the sect’s opponents was that the heads were more than merely decorative: they were the object of Familist worship, and it was the Christian symbols that were incidental. As I parked just off Main Street, it struck me as odd that a congregation with a history of concealment should have placed enough value on an old church building to transport it across the Atlantic Ocean. This might be a church worth seeing.

  The interior of the Town Office, housed in a nineteenth-century brownstone with a modern extension to the rear, was bright and clean. When I asked to see the chief of police, I was directed to a comfortable chair and offered coffee while a call was put through to his office. The coffee came with a cookie on a napkin. If I stayed long enough, someone would probably have offered me a pillow and a blanket. Instead, I passed the minutes looking at the images of Prosperous through the years that decorated the walls. It hadn’t changed much over the centuries. The names on the storefronts remained mostly the same, and only the cars on the streets, and the fashions of the men and women in the photographs, gave any clues to the passage of time.

  A door opened to my right, and a man in uniform appeared. He was taller than me and broader in the back and shoulders, and his neatly pressed dark-blue shirt was open at the neck to reveal a startlingly white T-shirt beneath. His hair was dark brown. He wore rimless bifocal spectacles, and a SIG as a sidearm. All things considered, he looked like an accountant who worked out most evenings. Only his eyes spoiled the effect. They were a pale gray, the color of a winter sky presaging snow.

  “Lucas Morland,” he said, as he shook my hand. “I’m chief of police here.”

  “Charlie Parker.”

  “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. Parker,” he said, and he appeared to mean it. “I’ve read a lot about you. I see you’ve already been given coffee. You need a top-off?”

  I told him I was fine with what I had, and he invited me to step into his office. It was hard to tell what color the walls might be, as they were covered with enough certificates and awards to render paint pretty much superfluous. On his desk were various photographs of a dark-haired woman and two dark-haired boys. Chief Morland wasn’t in any of them. I wondered if he was separated. Then again, he may just have been the one taking the photographs. I was in danger of ­becoming a “glass half empty” kind of guy. Or a “glass emptier” guy.

  Or maybe a “What glass?” guy.

  “You have a nice town,” I said.

  “It’s not mine. I just look out for it. We all do, in our way. You considering moving here?”

  “I don’t think I could afford the taxes.”

  “Try doing it on a cop’s salary.”

  “That’s probably how Communism started. You’d better keep your voice down, or they’ll start looking for another chief.”

  He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands across his stomach. I noticed that he had a small belly. That was the problem with quiet towns: there wasn’t much that one could do in them to burn calories.

  “Oh, we have all kinds here,” said Morland. “Did you notice the motto on the sign as you came into town?”

  “I can’t say that I did.”

  “It’s easy to miss, I guess. It’s just one word: ‘tolerance.’”

  “Pithy.”

  He looked out the window and watched a stream of elementary school kids waddle by, each with one hand clinging tightly to a pink rope. It was a clear day, but cold, and they were wrapped in so many layers that it was impossible to see their faces. Once the kids had disappeared from view, and he was content that nothing had befallen them, or was likely to, he returned his attention to me.

  “So how can I help you, Mr. Parker?”

  I handed him a copy of a photograph of Jude that I’d found at the Portland Help Center. It had been taken at a Christmas lunch the previous year, and Jude, wearing a tan suit and a white shirt accessorized with a piece of tinsel in place of a tie, was smiling. A pedant would have pointed out that the suit was too close to cream for the time of year, but Jude wouldn’t have cared.

  “I was wondering if you’d seen this man around Prosperous recently, or if he’d had any contact with your department,” I said.

  Morland wrinkled his nose and peered at the photograph through the lower part of his bifocals.

  “Yes, I recall him. He came in here asking about his daughter. His name was . . .”

  Morland tapped his fingers on his desk as he sought the name.

  “Jude,” he said finally. “That was it: Jude. When I asked him if that was his first or
last name, he told me it was both. Is he in trouble, or did he hire you? To be honest, he didn’t seem like the kind of fella who had money to be hiring private detectives.”

  “No, he didn’t hire me, and his troubles, whatever they were, are over now.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “He was found hanged in a basement in Portland about a week ago.”

  Morland nodded.

  “I think I recall reading something about that now.”

  The discovery of Jude had merited a paragraph in the Press Herald, followed by a slightly longer feature in the Maine Sunday Telegram about the pressures faced by the city’s homeless.

  “You say that he was asking about his daughter?”

  “That’s right,” said Morland. “Annie Broyer. He claimed that someone at a women’s shelter in Bangor told him that she was headed up this way. Apparently she’d been offered a job here by an older couple, or that was the story he’d heard. He wanted to know if we’d seen her. He had a photograph of her, but it was old. He described her well, though, or well enough for me to be able to tell him that no young woman of that description had found her way into this town—or none that I knew of, and I know them all.”

  “And was he happy with that?”

  Morland’s face bore an expression I’d seen a thousand times. I’d probably worn it myself, on occasion. It was the face of a public servant who just wasn’t paid enough to deal with the unhappiness of those for whom the reality of a situation wasn’t satisfactory.

  “No, Mr. Parker, he was not. He wanted me to take him to every house in Prosperous that might be occupied by an older couple and have me show them the photograph of his daughter. In fact, he went so far as to suggest that we ought to search the houses of everyone over sixty, just in case they had her locked up in their home.”

  “I take it that wasn’t an option.”

  Morland spread his hands helplessly.

  “He hadn’t reported his daughter missing. He didn’t even know if she was missing. He just had a feeling in his bones that something was wrong. But the more we got into it the more apparent it became that he didn’t really know his daughter at all. That was when I discovered that she’d been living in a women’s shelter, and he was homeless, and they were estranged. It all got messy from there.”

  “What did you do in the end?”

  “I made a copy of the photograph, put together a description of his daughter to go with it, and told him I’d ask around. But I also tried to explain to him that this wasn’t the kind of town where people took in street women they didn’t know and offered them beds in their homes. To be honest, I don’t know a whole lot of towns where anyone would behave in that way. The story just didn’t ring true. He gave me a couple of numbers for shelters and soup kitchens where a message could be left for him, and then I gave him a ride to Medway so he could catch the bus back to Bangor.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “The offer of a ride to Medway wasn’t one that he could refuse.”

  Morland gave me the long-suffering public servant expression again.

  “Look, it was a last resort. He said he was going to get a cup of coffee, and next thing I knew he was stopping folks on the streets to show them the picture of his daughter, and taping crappy photocopies to streetlights. I’d told him that I’d do what I could to help him, and I meant it, but I wasn’t going to have a bum—even a well-dressed bum—harassing citizens and defacing public property. I like my job, Mr. Parker, and I want to keep it. Most of the time it’s easy, and even when it’s hard it’s still kind of easy. I like this town too. I grew up here. My father was chief of police before me, and his father before him. It’s our family business, and we do it well.”

  It was quite a speech. I’d have voted for him if he ran for office.

  “So you drove Jude to Medway”—I resisted suggesting that Jude had literally been given the bum’s rush—“but I’ll venture that he didn’t take the hint.”

  Morland puffed his cheeks.

  “He started calling my office two or three times a day, asking if there had been any progress, but there was none. Nobody here had seen his daughter. He’d been given bad information. But he wouldn’t accept that, so he came back. This time, he didn’t pay me the courtesy of a visit, just went from house to house, knocking on doors and peering in windows. Naturally, I started getting telephone calls from panicked residents, because it was getting dark. He was lucky he didn’t get himself shot. I picked him up and kept him in a cell overnight. I told him I could have him charged with criminal trespass. Hell, he even ended up in the cemetery more than half an hour after sunset, like that fella in Dickens.”

  “Magwitch,” I said.

  “That’s the one.”

  “What was he doing in the cemetery?”

  “Trying to get into the church. Don’t ask me why; we keep it locked, and visits are only by appointment. We’ve had incidents of vandalism in the past. Do you know about our church?”

  I told him that I did, and that I’d be curious to see it before I left, if that was possible. Morland perked up slightly at the prospect of my leaving town. He was tiring of talking about the problems of dead bums and their daughters.

  “In conclusion, the next morning I drove him back to Medway—again—and told him that if he showed his face in Prosperous one more time he would be arrested and charged, and he’d be no help to his daughter from a jail cell. That seemed to get through to him, and, apart from a phone call or ten, that was pretty much the last I saw or heard of him, until now.”

  “And nobody in town knew anything about his daughter?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But why would his daughter have said that she was going to Prosperous if someone hadn’t given her reason to do so? It sounds like an odd story to make up.”

  “She might have been trying to impress the other street people. Worst case, she spoke to someone in Bangor who told her they were from Prosperous when they weren’t. It may be that this Jude was right, and something did happen to her, but if so, it didn’t happen to her here.”

  Morland returned the photo of Jude and got to his feet. We were done.

  “So you want to see the church before you go?”

  “If it’s not too much trouble,” I said. “At least you won’t have to drive me to Medway after.”

  Morland managed a thin smile, but said nothing. As I stood, I let my arm brush one of the photographs on the desk. I caught it before it hit the floor, and returned it to its place.

  “Your family?” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Good-looking boys. No girls?”

  Morland gave me a peculiar look, as though I had intimated something unpleasant about him and the nature of his familial relations.

  “No, no girls,” he said. “I’m happy about that, I got to say. My friends with daughters tell me they’re more trouble than boys. Girls will break your heart.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Jude’s daughter certainly broke his.”

  Morland took the photograph from me and restored it to its place on his desk.

  “You had a daughter, didn’t you?”

  “Yes,” I said. “She died,” I added, preempting whatever might have followed. I was used to it by now.

  “I know,” said Morland. “I’m sorry. You have another little girl now, don’t you?”

  I looked at him curiously, but he appeared nothing but sincere.

  “Did you read that somewhere too?” I asked.

  “You think there’s anyone in Maine law enforcement who doesn’t know your history? This is a small-town state. Word gets around.”

  That was true, but Morland still had a remarkable memory for the family histories of men he had never met before.

  “That’s right, I have another little girl,” I conceded.

  Morland seemed on the verge of sayi
ng something, then reconsidered, contenting himself with, “Maybe if this man Jude hadn’t walked out on his family his daughter might not have ended up the way she did.”

  Morland had a point—Jude, had he still been alive, might even have agreed with him—but I wasn’t about to point the finger at Jude’s failings as a husband and a father. I had my own guilt to bear in that regard.

  “He tried to make up for it at the end,” I said. “He was just doing what any father would have done when he came looking for her in Prosperous.”

  “Is that a criticism of how he was treated by my department?”

  Morland didn’t bristle, but he wasn’t far off it. “My department,” I noted, not “me.”

  “No,” I said. “You just did what any chief of police would have done.”

  That wasn’t quite the truth, but it was true enough. Maybe if Morland had a daughter of his own he would have behaved more compassionately; and if Jude hadn’t been a bum, and his daughter a homeless ex-junkie, Morland would have tried a little harder—just a little, but sometimes that’s all it takes. I didn’t say any of this aloud, though. It wouldn’t have helped, and I couldn’t guarantee that, in his position, and with his background, I would have behaved any differently.

  We walked from his office. Morland told the receptionist that he was heading out to the chapel. She looked surprised, but said nothing.

  “This woman, Annie Broyer, you think she’s dead?” asked Morland as we stepped outside.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hope not.”

  “So you’re going to keep looking for her?”

  “Probably.”