The Wolf in Winter

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The Wolf in Winter Page 19

by Connolly, John


  “Are there others like you?” I asked.

  “Wackjobs? Paranoiacs? Fantasists?”

  “How about ‘dissenters’?”

  He smiled at the co-opting of the word. “Some. Enough. They keep quieter about it than I do, though. It doesn’t pay to cross the folk up in Prosperous. It starts with small things—a dog going missing, damage to your car, maybe a call to the IRS to say that you’re taking in a little work on the side to cover your bar tab—but then it escalates. It’s not only the economy that has led to businesses closing around here, and families leaving.”

  “But you’ve stayed.”

  He picked up his fountain pen and unscrewed the cap, ready to return to his papers. I glimpsed the name on the pen: Tibaldi. I looked it up later. They started at about four hundred dollars and went up to forty thousand. The one that Euclid Danes used had a lot of gold on it.

  “I look like the crazy old coot who lives in a run-down house with more dogs than bugs and a sister who can only cook meat loaf,” he said. “But my brother was a justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, my nephews and nieces are lawyers and bankers, and there’s nothing anyone can teach me about playing the markets. I have money, and a degree of influence. I think that’s why they hate me so much: because, except for an accident of birth, I could have been one of them. Even though I’m not, they still feel that I should side with wealth and privilege, because I’m wealthy and privileged myself.

  “So Prosperous can’t move against me, and it can’t frighten me. All it can do is wait for me to die, and even then those bastards will find that I’ve tied so much legal ribbon around my land that humanity itself will be extinct before they find a way to build on it. It’s been good talking with you, Mr. Parker. I wish you luck with whatever it is that you’re investigating.”

  He lowered his head and began writing again. I was reminded of the end of Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory, when Gene Wilder dismisses Charlie and tries to lose himself in his papers until the boy returns the Everlasting Gobstopper as a token of recompense. I hadn’t shared all that I knew with Euclid, because I was cautious. I had underestimated and misjudged him, although I thought Euclid might have done the same with me.

  “A homeless man named Jude hanged himself down in Portland not long ago,” I said. “He was looking for his daughter before he died. Her name was Annie Broyer. He was convinced that she’d gone to Prosperous. There’s still no trace of her. I think she’s dead, and I’m not alone in believing it. I also think that she may have met her end in Prosperous.”

  Euclid stopped writing. The cap went back on the pen. He straightened his tie and reached for his coat.

  “Mr. Parker, why don’t you and I take a ride?”

  IT WAS ALREADY DARK. I had followed Euclid Danes to the northwestern limit of the town of Dearden. His fence marked the boundary. Beyond it lay woodland: part of the township of Prosperous.

  “Why haven’t they built here?” I asked. “The land’s suitable. It would just be a matter of knocking down some trees.”

  Euclid took a small flashlight from his pocket and shined it on the ground. There was a hole in the earth, perhaps eighteen inches in diameter, or a little more. It was partly obscured by undergrowth and tree roots.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I’ve found three of them over the years, but there may be more. I know for sure that there are a couple around that old church of theirs. I haven’t seen them myself for some time—as you can imagine, I’m persona non grata in Prosperous—but I have it on good authority from others who’ve been there.”

  “You think the ground is unstable?”

  “Might be. I’m no expert.”

  I was no expert either, but this wasn’t karst terrain, not as far as I was aware. I hadn’t heard of any Florida-style sinkholes appearing in the area. The hole was curious, unsettling even, but that might have been a vague atavastic dread of small, enclosed places beneath the earth, and the fear of collapse they brought with them. I wasn’t claustrophobic, but then I’d never been trapped in a hole below the ground.

  “What made it?”

  Euclid killed the flashlight.

  “Ah, that’s the interesting question, isn’t it?” he said. “I’ll leave that one with you. All I know is that I have meat loaf waiting, with a side of indigestion to follow. I’d ask you to join me, but I like you.”

  He began to walk back to his car. I stayed by the fence. I could still make out the hole, a deeper blackness against the encroaching dark. I felt an itching on my scalp, as though bugs were crawling through my hair.

  Euclid called back a final piece of advice when he reached his car. He was driving a beautiful old ’57 Chevy Bel Air in red. “I like them to know I’m coming,” he had told me. Now he stood beside its open door, a chill breeze toying with his wispy hair and his wide tie.

  “Good luck with those people up there,” he said. “Just watch where you put your feet.”

  He turned on the ignition and kept the Chevy’s lights trained on the ground in front of me until I was safely back at my own car. I followed him as far as his house, then continued south, and home.

  ON THE OUTSKIRTS OF Prosperous, Lucas Morland and Harry Dixon were staring at another hole in the ground. At first Harry had been struck by the absurd yet terrible thought that the girl had actually dug herself out, just as he had dreamed, and what had crawled from that grave was something much worse than a wounded young woman who could name names. But then their flashlights had picked out the big paw prints on the scattered earth, and the broken bones, and the teeth marks on them. They found the head under an old oak, most of the face gnawed away.

  “I told you,” said Harry to Morland. “I told you I saw a wolf.”

  Morland said nothing, but began gathering up what he could retrieve of the remains. Harry joined him. They couldn’t find all of the girl. The wolf, or some other scavenger, had carried parts of her away. There was an arm missing, and most of one leg.

  Evidence, thought Morland. It’s evidence. It would have to be found. For now, all he could do was put what they collected of the girl into more of the plastic sheeting, dump it in the car, and refill the grave. Nothing like this, nothing so terrible, so unlucky, had happened in Prosperous for generations. If the girl hadn’t run . . . If Dixon and his bitch wife hadn’t let her escape . . .

  Morland wanted to punch Harry. He wanted to kill him. It was the Dixons’ fault, all of it. Even if Harry and Erin located a suitable girl, Morland would find a way to make them pay. Hell, if Erin herself wasn’t so fucking old and worn they could have used her. But no, the town didn’t feed on its own. It never had. Those from within who transgressed had always been dealt with in a different way. There were rules.

  They taped up the plastic, forming three packages of body parts. After that they drove north for an hour, far beyond Prosperous, and reburied what was left of the girl. The stench of her stayed with them both all the way to town. Later, back in their own homes, both men scrubbed and showered, but still they could smell her.

  Erin Dixon knocked at the bathroom door fifteen minutes after the shower had stopped running, and her husband had still not emerged. Bryan Joblin had fallen asleep in the armchair by the fireplace. She had thought about killing him. She was thinking about killing a lot lately.

  “Harry?” she called. “Are you okay?”

  From inside the bathroom she heard the sound of weeping. She tried the door. It was unlocked.

  Her husband was sitting on the edge of the tub, a towel wrapped around his waist and his face buried in his hands. She sat beside him and held him to her.

  “Can you smell it?” he asked her.

  She sniffed him, inhaling the scent of his hair and his skin. She ­detected only soap.

  “You smell fine,” she said. “You want to tell me what happened?”

 
“No.”

  She went to the bathroom doorway and listened. She could still hear the sound of Joblin snoring. She closed the door and returned to her husband, but she kept her voice to a whisper, just in case.

  “Marie Nesbit called me earlier on my cell phone, while that asshole was snoring his head off,” she said.

  Marie was Erin’s closest friend. She worked as a secretary at the Town Office, and was from one of the founding families, just like the Dixons. Her husband, Art, was an alcoholic, but gentle and sad, for the most part, rather than violent. Erin had long provided her with a sympathetic ear.

  “She told me that a detective came to town asking about the girl.”

  Harry had stopped weeping.

  “Police?”

  “No, a private investigator, like on TV.”

  “Did she say who had hired him?”

  “No. She only overheard the start of what he had to say. She didn’t want to be seen spying.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Parker. Charlie Parker. I googled him on my phone, then erased the history. He’s been in the newspapers.”

  So that’s why Morland wanted the girl’s body moved. The detective had come, and Morland had gotten scared. No, not just Morland. He might have been chief, but Morland did what he was told to do by the board. The order to dig up the corpse had probably come from Hayley Conyer herself, but a wolf had reached it first. First the girl, then the detective, now the wolf. The town was starting to unravel.

  “Harry,” said Erin. “I’ve decided: I’m not going to find them another girl.”

  He nodded. How could they, after setting the last one free? How could a couple who had wished for, but never been given, their own daughter collude in the killing of someone else’s child?

  “They’ll be monitoring the detective,” said Harry. “That’s how they work. We can’t contact him, not yet. Maybe not ever.”

  “So what will we do?”

  “It’s like I said. We’ll leave, and soon. After that, we’ll decide.”

  Erin gripped his hand. He squeezed hers in return.

  “When?”

  “A couple of days. No more than that.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise.”

  She kissed him. His mouth opened beneath hers, but before they could go any further they were disturbed by a knock on the door and Bryan Joblin said, “Hey, are you two in there?”

  Erin went to the door and unlocked it. Joblin stood bleary-eyed before her, smelling of his cheap beer. He took in Erin, and Harry standing behind her, his towel around his waist, his body angled to hide his now diminishing hard-on.

  “Havin’ some fun?” said Joblin. “Shit, you got a bedroom. We all got to use this room, and I need to take a piss.”

  CHAPTER

  XXVIII

  Chief Morland rarely dreamed. He was curious about this fact. He understood that everybody dreamed, even if they didn’t always remember their dreams when they woke, but they could retain details of some of them at least. His wife dreamed a lot, and she had a recall of her dreams that bordered on the exhaustive. Morland could bring to mind only a handful of occasions on which he had awakened with some memory of his dreams. He couldn’t associate them with any particularly difficult or traumatic periods in his life. It wasn’t as though his father died, and that night he dreamed, or he was plagued by nightmares, following the time he nearly sent his car into a ditch at high speed after skidding on black ice, and was certain that his moment had come. He couldn’t pinpoint that kind of cause and effect.

  But he dreamed on the night that he and Harry Dixon found the girl’s scattered remains. He’d gone to bed late because he’d been thinking about the wolf. He should have believed Dixon on that first night, when he claimed to have seen an animal on the road. He should have connected the sighting with the reports that had come to him of garbage bags torn apart, and Elspeth Ramsay’s missing dog, but his mind was on other matters, like a girl with a hole in her chest, and the Dixons and their tales of bolts and wood splinters, and the slow decline in the fortunes of his town that had to be arrested.

  And it had been decades since a wolf was last seen in the state. The St. Lawrence formed a natural barrier, keeping them in Canada, and that suited Morland just fine. He was aware that some in Maine were in favor of the reintroduction of wolves, arguing that they’d been an important part of the ecosystem until they were slaughtered out of existence. You could make the same argument for dinosaurs and saber-toothed cats, as far as Morland was concerned, but that wasn’t a reason to bring them back. What might happen to a kid who got lost in the woods, maybe separated from parents who were hiking the trails? What about an adult stumbling and breaking a leg, and suddenly finding himself surrounded by a wolf pack—what would happen then? The same thing that happened to Elspeth Ramsay’s pet, perhaps, or the same thing that happened to the girl, except that at least she was dead when the wolf started to gnaw on her. The world was full of do-gooders, but it was left to men like Morland to clean up their mess.

  He poured himself a finger of bourbon. Just as he rarely dreamed, so too he only occasionally consumed hard liquor. He wondered if the two might not be connected. Didn’t matter. Tonight was different. Tonight he’d gone to dig up a body and found that a wolf had done it for him, forcing him to scrabble in the dirt for bone, and rotting meat, and scraps of plastic and cloth. He’d seen dead bodies before—­suicides, accidental shootings, traffic collisions, and the regular actions of mortality that called for the local cops to break a window or kick in a door because someone had been selfish enough to pass away without giving prior notice to his friends, relatives, and neighbors. Morland had never killed anyone himself, unlike his old man, but Daniel Morland had prepared his son well for the responsibility that would eventually pass to him when he became chief of police, and Morland had been surprised at how dispassionately he’d viewed the girl’s body following the shooting. It reminded him of the sense of passing sadness he felt upon looking down at a deer felled during the course of a hunt.

  He took a mouthful of bourbon—not a sip, a mouthful. This wasn’t a night for sipping. He closed his eyes and briefly tried to pretend that he was chief of police in a normal town, but it didn’t take. A “normal town”—his own words made him laugh aloud, and he covered his mouth like a child who feared being caught doing something naughty. The only thing normal about Prosperous was the way it proved that, over time, individuals could habituate themselves to the most appalling behavior. So many of the townsfolk, even the ones most closely involved in its secrets, regarded themselves as “good” people, and not without reason. They looked after their families, and they abided, for the most part, by the law. Politically, Prosperous was the most liberal town in this part of Maine: Proposition 1, to allow same-sex marriage in the state, had passed by as much of a majority in Prosperous as it had in Portland, and the town leaned slightly Democrat or liberal independent in elections. But the older citizens of Prosperous understood that the town was built on a lie, or a truth too terrible to be named. Some of them preferred to pretend not to know, and nobody begrudged them their show of ignorance. They weren’t suited to leadership. In the end, it always came down to the original families, to the founders. They looked after the town for all.

  Morland finished his drink. He should have called Hayley Conyer to tell her about the wolf and the turmoil at the grave site, but he didn’t. He’d had his fill of Hayley. The call could wait until morning. Tomorrow he would see about putting together a hunting party, and they’d find the wolf and kill it quietly. Thomas Souleby had an old hound that might be useful in picking up the wolf’s scent. Morland didn’t know much about hunting wolves, apart from what he’d learned that evening from Google, but opinion seemed to be divided on the usefulness of packs of dogs in a hunt. Some said that a wolf would run from them, but in Wisconsin a couple of hundred dead hunting
dogs said otherwise. Elspeth Ramsay’s missing mongrel suggested that this wolf wasn’t above taking down a domestic animal if it had the chance. No matter; Prosperous wasn’t overflowing with the kinds of dogs that might be useful in a confrontation with a wolf anyway, not unless he had missed a news flash about the hidden strength of labradoodles. Trapping seemed the most effective way to deal with the animal, but they might be lucky enough to get it under their guns first, although right now luck was in short supply.

  He went to bed. He kissed his wife. She mumbled something in her sleep.

  He dreamed.

  In his dream, Prosperous was burning.

  THE HEADLINES IN THE newspapers in the days that followed were all very similar: “Triple Tragedy Strikes Small Town,” “Maine Town Mourns Its Dead,” “Trouble Comes in Threes for Close-Knit Community”. . . .

  In Afghanistan, a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter carrying four U.S. “military advisers” and crew went down in Kandahar. Three of the men survived the crash, which was caused by a mechanical failure, but they didn’t survive the firefight with the Taliban that followed. In the shadowy corners of the Internet, a photograph circulated of three severed heads placed in a line on the sand. Two of them were identified as Captain Mark Tabart and Staff Sergeant Jeremy Cutter, both natives of Prosperous, Maine.

  On the same day that the two soldiers died, a woman named Valerie Gillson rounded a bend between Dearden and Prosperous and saw a wounded fawn lying in the middle of the road. The animal appeared to have been struck by a vehicle, for its back legs were twisted and broken. It scrabbled at the road with its front hooves and thrashed its head in agony. Valerie stepped from her car. She couldn’t leave the animal in distress, and she couldn’t run it over to put it out of its agony: she’d never be able to drive her car again. She took out her cell phone and called the police department in Prosperous. Chief Morland would know what to do. The number rang, and Marie Nesbit, who was on dispatch duty that day, picked up the call.

 

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