Hayley Conyer would have to be informed of the detective’s visit, and it was better that Morland be the one to do it rather than Pastor Warraner. Who knew what poisons Warraner would pour into Hayley’s ear? It was the pastor who had shouted loudest for the killing of the one named Jude, even as Morland tried to divert the board from a course of action that had now brought a dangerous man down upon them.
For the detective was dangerous, of that Morland had no doubt. The chief had not been busy when the detective arrived at the Town Office, and could have seen him immediately, but he had taken time to compose himself, to run through the possible reasons for the man’s visit. Morland had been surprised when the detective mentioned Jude’s name, but had hidden it well. He had struggled harder to retain his composure when the detective wanted to visit the chapel, but he shouldn’t have: it was a perfectly understandable request to make, given the unusual nature of the building, although Morland had offered the detective an opening by mentioning that Jude had been arrested on church grounds. As for Warraner, he regularly received letters and emails from interested parties asking for permission to view the building, even if he was careful to limit such visits to those whose reasons were entirely without ulterior motive.
But Morland believed that the detective did nothing without an ulterior motive. He wasn’t the kind of man to go sightseeing at an old church simply because he had time on his hands. He was looking for connections. Morland could only hope that he had left Prosperous without making any. The chief ran over the details of their conversation again and again, adding what he’d heard of the detective’s discussion with Warraner. Morland tried to see the situation through the detective’s eyes, and by the time the thermos was empty he had decided that there was nothing about the day’s business that could have added to any half-formed suspicions the detective might have brought with him. It had been a fishing expedition, nothing more, and the hook had come back bare. Still, Morland hadn’t liked the way the detective watched Warraner as the pastor departed, or his suggestion that the girl’s disappearance might not be the sole purpose of his visit. The detective’s first hook might not have caught on anything, but he had left others trailing.
Morland climbed from the car and went into the bushes to take a leak. It was dark now, but the moon shone silver on the small body of water known as Lady’s Pond. This was where the women of Prosperous would go to congregate and bathe, undisturbed by their menfolk, in the early decades of the township. Morland wondered how many of them knew of the town’s true nature, even then. Probably only a handful, he thought. More of the townsfolk understood Prosperous now, but far from all. Some chose to be blind to it, and others were deliberately kept in the dark. It was strange, thought Morland, how generations of Prosperous families had never been entrusted with the truth, yet still had reaped its benefits. It was stranger still that the town’s secret had remained undiscovered by outsiders over the centuries, even allowing for the killings that had occurred in order to silence those who were ready to betray it. Perhaps it was a circular argument: the town was always at risk because it required murder to survive, but by spilling blood it accrued the blessings that enabled it to keep that risk to a minimum, and assure the town’s continued prosperity. Put that way, it sounded simple, logical.
Morland wondered if, like his father and his grandfather before him, he had become such a monster that he almost failed to notice his own moral and spiritual deformity anymore.
The issue of betrayal brought him back to the Dixons. It had been Morland’s decision to place Luke Joblin’s son with them. He hoped that Bryan Joblin’s presence would keep the Dixons in line and force them to act according to the board’s wishes, but he had his doubts. If the Dixons actually managed to produce a girl to replace Annie Broyer, Morland would give up coffee for a year.
But there was a part of the chief that hoped Harry Dixon was right—that the fact of the girl’s killing and the soaking of her blood into the soil of Prosperous might be enough. The town was hurting, but not as much as the rest of the state. People were getting by. Morland imagined a situation where Pastor Warraner informed the board that all was now well and the chapel remained quiet, so no further action was required. But Warraner was both fanatical and weak, and Morland had not yet decided whether the latter quality was useful or dangerous. It depended upon the circumstances, he supposed, but it meant that Warraner had a habit of attacking from behind when it came to disputes. He was no honest broker. Morland wished that Warraner’s father were still alive and in charge of the chapel. Old Watkyn Warraner had been a cautious man by all accounts, but he steered the congregation for more than half a century without blood being spilt more than once. It was the longest such period of contentment the town had known.
Well, we’re paying for it now, thought Morland. Two bodies—one here and one in Portland—and it appeared that they were not enough. Now a detective was asking questions, a strange man with a reputation for excavating long-buried secrets and annihilating his enemies. Under the circumstances, Warraner could argue that the spilling of blood was more necessary than ever, for only by blood would the town be saved, and the selectmen might well be inclined to agree. They were all old, and fearful—even Hayley Conyer, but she just hid her fear better than most. Younger people were needed on the board, but most of the town’s youths weren’t ready to take on the burden of protecting Prosperous. It took decades for the town to seep into one’s soul, for the recognition of one’s obligations to it to form. It was a kind of corruption, a pollution passed down through the generations, and only the oldest were corrupt and polluted enough to be able to make the tough decisions required to keep the town alive.
Morland used a bottle of water to wash his hands before drying them on the legs of his trousers. It was time to talk with Hayley Conyer. He called his wife and told her that he would be home late. No, he wasn’t sure when. He knew only that a long evening stretched ahead.
Morland drove to the Conyer house and parked outside. The drapes were drawn on all the windows, but a sliver of light was visible from Hayley’s mausoleum of a living room. He wasn’t surprised to find her home. Unless she was out on board business, Hayley was always home. Morland couldn’t remember the last time she’d left town for more than a couple of hours. She was afraid the place would collapse into the ground without her. That was part of the problem, of course.
“Bitch,” he said softly, as he stepped from the car. The wind whipped the word away, and he found his right hand twitching involuntarily, as if it were hoping to catch the insult before it reached the ear of Hayley Conyer.
He rang the doorbell, and Hayley answered.
“I’m sorry to disturb you—” Morland began to say, but Hayley held up a hand to interrupt him.
“It’s quite all right,” she said. “I’ve been expecting you.”
She invited him to step inside, then led him to the living room, where Pastor Warraner had already made himself at home in an armchair.
Shit, thought Morland.
CHAPTER
XXV
The woman on desk duty at the Tender House in Bangor was named Molly Bow, and she looked as if she should have been fixed to the prow of a ship. She was big and weathered, but attractive in a matronly way, and at one point I had to take a couple of steps back to avoid being crushed by her breasts as she passed me to get to a filing cabinet in her office.
“Comin’ through,” she said as I flattened my back against a wall. She gestured toward her bosom. “I was born large. Backache apart, it’s been useful in life. People make an effort to get out of my way.”
Once again, I had an image of a schooner or, better still, a man-of-war cleaving a path through the waves, but I kept my eyes fixed on a neutral spot on the opposite wall, well above chest height.
The Tender House had no signs outside to mark its presence. It was housed in a pair of adjoining clapboard buildings surrounded by a white picket fen
ce that was only slightly higher than those of its neighbors. Two cars were parked in the drive, which was secured by an automatically operated steel gate, also painted white. Inside the front door of the main building was a waiting room containing toys, a library of self-help books, boxes of tissues, large containers of secondhand clothes organized according to type and size, from infant to adult, and, in a discreet corner, toothbrushes, toothpaste, and toiletries. Behind the reception desk was a small playroom.
The Tender House wasn’t a homeless shelter but, rather, a “crisis center” for women, where homelessness was only one of the problems it tackled. It catered to victims of domestic and sexual abuse, runaways, and women who simply needed a place to stay while they tried to improve their situation. Its staff liaised with the police and the courts, advising on everything from restraining orders to educational and job opportunities, but it generally steered the long-term homeless toward other agencies and centers.
“Got it,” said Bow, waving a file. She licked an index finger and flipped through some pages. “We had her for about eleven days, apart from the fifth night, when someone broke out a couple of half gallons of Ten High over by Cascade Park. We had some sore heads the next day, Annie’s among them.”
“Was she an alcoholic?”
“No, I don’t think so. She’d been a user, but she claimed to be clean by the time she arrived at our door. We made it clear to her that we had a zero-tolerance policy when it came to drugs. If she got high, she’d be back on the streets.”
“And alcohol?”
“Officially, we’re down on that too. Unofficially, we give some leeway. Nothing on the premises, and no intoxication. Actually, I was disappointed when Annie came back to us all raw from the Ten High. I had her pegged as a young woman who was genuinely trying to change her life. We sat her down and had a talk with her. Turned out her estranged father had come looking for her, and his presence in town had thrown her. She was offered a sip or two to steady herself, and it all got sort of blurry for her after that.”
“Did she say anything about her relationship with her father?”
Bow was clearly reluctant to share confidences. I could understand her reservations.
“Annie is missing, and her father is dead,” I said.
“I know that. He hanged himself in a basement down in Portland.”
I gave it a couple of seconds.
“He was found hanging in a basement in Portland,” I corrected her. It was minor, but it was important.
Molly sat behind her desk. She’d been standing until then. We both had. As she sat, so did I.
“Is that why you’re here—because you don’t think it was suicide?”
“So far I don’t have any proof that it wasn’t,” I said. “A couple of small details are just snagging like briars.”
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that he loved his daughter, and clearly wanted to reestablish contact with her. He had spoken of heading up here permanently to be closer to her. He’d also gone to a lot of trouble to pull together some money in the days before he died. He succeeded too. Those aren’t the actions of a suicidal man.”
“What was the money for?”
It struck me that I was on the wrong side of an interrogation: I should have been asking the questions, not her, but sometimes you had to retreat an inch to gain a foot.
“To support him as he tried to find his daughter. I think he was also hoping to hire me to help look for her.”
“So how much money did he manage to collect?”
“More than a hundred dollars.”
“Do you work that cheap?”
“Funny, you’re the second person who’s asked me that. I could have given him a couple of hours, or more if I took the time from some of my wealthier clients.”
“Isn’t that unethical?”
“Only if I don’t tell them I’m doing it. They pay by the hour, even if the job only takes five minutes. I don’t do fractions. Look, do you think I might get to ask a question at any point?”
Bow smiled. “You just did.”
Hell.
She leaned back in her chair, like a reigning champ who had dispensed with another challenger to her crown, then threw me a bone of consolation.
“I’m joshing with you,” she said. “You’d be surprised how many people I get in here asking questions about the women in our care. I have to be careful, for their sakes.”
“What kind of people?”
“Sometimes we have women who turn tricks when times are desperate, and a john will come looking for one of them just because he’s a creep, or he’s got a beef about the service he received, or he liked it so much he wants a second bite. We get husbands and boyfriends trying to take back their possessions, because the kind who come storming in here mostly regard women as chattel. Oh, they’ll do their best to dress it up as nicely as they can—they want to talk things over, to give the relationship another try, and they’re sorry for whatever it is that they’ve done, which usually involves a fist or a boot, often with a little domestic rape thrown in along the way—but I’ve developed a nose for the worst of them. It’s not hard. As soon as you put an obstacle in their way the threats start to emerge, but those ones are usually pretty dumb along with it. They mooch around in the hope that they’ll be able to snatch their woman off the street, but we have a good relationship with the Bangor PD, and they’ll get here before I’ve hung up the phone.
“But we’ve had men try to break in, or beat up volunteers. Last year, one even tried to burn us down by starting a fire at the back door. At the same time, we try to keep channels of communication open between women and their families. This is a place to which women—and their children—come when they’re desperate. It isn’t a long-term solution. We make that clear to them from the start, but I’ve been seeing some of the women who pass through these doors on and off for the past ten years. They just get older and more bruised. There are times when I wonder how far we’ve come as a society where women are concerned. Whenever I turn on the TV to hear some jackass in a blazer bleating about feminists I want to set him on fire, and don’t get me started on those dumb bitches who find themselves on the top of the pile only to reject the whole concept of feminism, as though their success wasn’t built on the struggles of generations of women. I defy them to spend one day here with a forty-year-old woman whose husband has been stubbing out cigarettes on her for so long that he has to search for a spot where it still hurts, or a nineteen-year-old girl who has to wear diapers because of what her stepfather did to her, and tell me that they’re not feminists.”
What was strange about Molly Bow’s speech was that, by the end of it, she was still leaning back in her chair and her voice hadn’t grown even slightly louder. It was as though she had seen too much to want to expend valuable energy on useless rage. Better to direct it into more productive channels.
“And where did Annie fit into all this?”
Molly’s fingers stroked the file, as if Annie Broyer were seated on the floor beside her and she was still capable of consoling her, of offering her some assurance that the world might be gentler with her in time.
“She was deserted by her father, and her mother died when she was a teenager. That doesn’t mean she had to become an addict, and find herself on the streets, but she did. She wasn’t weak, though. She had real strength to her. I don’t like to use the word ‘rescue,’ or make out like I’m on some kind of mission to turn round the life of every woman who passes through our doors. It’s just not possible, and we do what we can here, but there was something about Annie, something bright and untouched. It was why I let the drinking go, and the fact that she couldn’t keep curfew to save her life—”
She suddenly stopped talking as she became aware of the dual meaning of what she had just said. A spasm of pain convulsed her, and she looked away.
“B
ut that’s not what happened, is it?” I said. “She didn’t vanish from the streets in the night.”
“No,” she said, once she was certain that her voice wouldn’t break, although she still didn’t look at me. “She came in the sunlight, and she packed her bags and left. I wasn’t even here. She asked one of the other volunteers to thank me for what I’d done, but I hadn’t done anything, not really.”
She touched the file again.
“Do you think she’s dead?” she asked.
“Do you?”
“Yes. I hate to say it, but yes; I have a feeling of absence. I have no sense of her in the world. Do you think—?”
“What?”
“Is it possible that her father might have hurt her—killed her—and then taken his own life out of remorse?”
I thought about what I knew of Jude.
“No, I don’t believe so.”
“Call me a cynic,” she said, “but I had to ask. He wouldn’t have been the first.”
The office was very quiet for a time. The silence was disturbed by a young woman who appeared at the reception desk from somewhere upstairs. She wore a yellow T-shirt that extended to her thighs, and she was almost unbearably beautiful. She had hair so blond that it shone white, and her skin was without blemish. She held in her arms a girl of two or three who might have been her daughter or, given the youth of the woman who carried her, perhaps even her younger sister. The child had clearly been crying, but the sight of two adults silenced her. She laid her face against the young woman’s neck and watched me carefully.
“I’m sorry,” said the older girl. “She wants hot milk, but we finished our milk earlier. I was hoping—”
She proffered a plastic cup, the kind with a lid and a perforated mouthpiece.
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